IS THE REAL THE ACTUAL?
THE preoccupation to-day is with the actual. The work therefore of Alfeo Faggi, exhibited last year and with important additions this year at the Bourgeois Gallery, is especially for the thinker, presenting as it does solidly and in variety, a complete contrast to the fifty-fathom deep materialism of the hour.
Spiritual imagination as is apparent, is especially potent in interpreting subjects which are spiritual, seeming to derive feeling from the subject rather than to have to bring feeling to it as in the theme which is palpable and easily comprehensible; therefore as could be expected, in the recent exhibition, the more purely philosophic and intellectual concepts—the Ka and the Dante—make the most powerful impression; and although one would not naturally classify the Robert Jones with the Dante, it is entirely congruous that the same mind that could reach the heights and depths of spirituality which would produce the Dante, could marginally produce that which is so highly aesthetic as the Jones; a thing so illusory in its effect of poetic distillation as the mask of Noguchi; a portrait so distinguished as that of Robert Frost; so pliant as the Eve with its early-in-the-morning atmosphere, recalling Spenser's swans:
"even the gentle streame, the which them bare,
Seem'd foule to them, and bade his billows spare
To wet their silken feathers."
The astutely chosen medium in which each study is executed, bears out what one feels, in the sensitive development of the subject in hand—the smooth dark surface of the Tagore like a ripe olive, the bone-white, weathered aspect of the Frost, the misty waxlike bloom on the Eve as on bayberries or iris stalks, the tarnish and glint of fire of the Dante. However great the range of subject, there is a creative unity; complementary curves and repeated motive of lines
