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MODERN ART

being able to tell the real water-colour from the printed semblance, and another had that experience with the strange It Is Written, by Marc Chagall. Lower Manhattan, a water-colour by Marin must have presented unheard of difficulties to these engravers, yet they rose to them conqueringly. It is simply an explosion of emotion with almost none of the usual passages that are met with in ordinary water-colours, yet all the disdainful audacities of the style are faithfully rendered. It is possible not to like it, but it is not possible to deny it is a Marin.

With this duplication the Marin dispute and indeed most of the other disputes connected with contemporary work may be indefinitely extended, for all of the hotly discussed artists are illustrated in this folio of Living Art. Discussions about art and even disputes about art are very necessary in live and fully developed communities and in fact the term "live" may not be applied to communities where they do not occur. And "live" artists, profoundly in earnest over their work, never worry over these discussions—it is only the sluggish and the political who fear the public and try to hush it up. The edition in itself is not an indefinite extension, as it is limited to five hundred copies, but it is easy to believe that each of these copies will be much scanned if the public libraries and museums that now dot the land see their duty. It is a handicap that art labours under that its great masterpieces gravitate to the big cities and vast sections of the populace in great countries like this, where distances are magnificent, are obliged to get along without it.

The thirty plates in the folio are not all facsimiles, ten carefully reproduced photographs of sculpture being included as well as two renderings of oil-paintings. The artists are these; Paul Signac, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, André de Segonzac, Marie Laurencin, and Aristide Maillol, from France; Pablo Picasso, from Spain; Wilhelm Lehmbruck, from Germany; Wyndham Lewis, Duncan Grant, and Frank Dobson, from England; Marc Chagall and Alexander Archipenko, from Russia; Ernesto de Fiori, from Italy; Constantin Brancusi, from Roumania; Jules Pascin, from Bulgaria; Edvard Munch, from Norway; Boardman Robinson, Charles Demuth, John Marin, Gaston Lachaise, and Alfeo Faggi, from the United States.