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Schnakenberg (born 1892) is a figure of prominence in contemporary art, more as an educator than as a creator. He is president of the Art Students' League. As a painter he is an individualist with a peculiarly personal sense of design. His figures, landscape scenes, and decorative studies are thoughtfully observed and imaginatively rendered. "My idea of the artist (and I speak of the real artist) is that his work must be a mission religious in the truest sense of the word," he says. "The artist who is important is an artist who, both because of innate sensitiveness and because of intensive training, sees with greater vision the actual world, or creates an actual world of visions. This is the necessary function of the real artist, but he must build a technical equipment on this foundation that will adequately convey to others his deepest thought and clearest seeing." Speaking as an educator, he says that the young artist, though a nonconformist, has more chance than ever before. "This may be right or wrong, I don't know. It certainly encourages a deluge of charlatanism." Henry Varnum Poor is a New York State neighbor of George Biddle. They live on opposite sides of the Hudson River. They have exhibited together on occasion. They have in common a thoroughly contemporary approach and a style that is modern without being post-Impressionist, and that has no traceable influences from any traditional source. The peculiar power of Poor's work, and its greatest charm, is in the color. The still-life fruit piece in the Metropolitan Museum is an example. The Pink Table Cloth is another. His figure painting is interesting and vital, as the Self-portrait shows, and he has executed notable ceramic sculptures, some of which suggest very ancient Eastern inspiration in their design. This artist is a member of the independent company of painters who have matured, and come to public recognition, slowly, guided by their own sensibility, their awareness of the life about them, and their absolute sincerity, at a time when all values have been confused and even chaotic. A good traditionalist is familiar with historic art influences as they developed in Europe from Masaccio to Rembrandt and as they prevailed in official art to the time of Renoir. He has the craftsmanship to draw consistently upon those influences and the judgment and taste to make them authoritative as the vehicle for his own contemporary expression. To paint within the authority of the Renaissance tradition means the following of definite procedures in drawing and composition, in the planning of color harmonies, in the relating of the subjects or figures in a rhythmic arrangement, and in giving the whole a three-dimensional environment through use of atmospheric perspective. The modernists mentioned in this chapter, like earlier painters of American subjects, Earl, Chester Harding, and others, defer to the authority of historical painting, but they find no usable precedent in the Renaissance Old Masters. They depend upon taste, sensibility, and conviction for giving their work a contemporary authority. Large numbers of well-known Americans are painting in a revised traditionalism into which have been assimilated gains from new twentieth-century art--bolder forms, more direct juxtapositions of colors, simpler designs. Leon Kroll, winner of many medals at national and international exhibitions, is one of them. Edward Bruce, director of the Treasury Department's art acquisition enterprise, is another. Alexander Brook, Robert Brackman, Luigi Lucioni, and Jon Corbino are among younger men who might be included. None of these artists is an eclectic. They are individualists in their procedures of assimilating and reconciling established painting methods with contemporary conceptions, of continuing a historic precedent or of producing a new tradition without revolutionary departure from the old one. The eclectics of the twentieth century as of the nineteenth delight in making demonstrations of their ability to reproduce elegant effects in painting without the content of personal experience or the aesthetic merit that appears in the work of true creators. We have reminiscences of Tintoretto, Rubens, Tiepolo, and Goya, and also of Picasso, Braque, Gleizes, and all the modern innovators in painting that do not live up to the requirements of any art tradition, established or formative, as may be seen at almost any exhibition. Large numbers of American women are contributors to the painting of our transitional era. No one has, so far, developed the individuality and scope, or shown the devotion to the cause of international art, of the nineteenth-century expatriate, Mary Cassatt. No one but Georgia O'Keeffe has displayed the power of continuous concentration upon the task of expressing individual aesthetic sensibility in terms of paint. There are, however, much talent and originality, and there is challenging opportunity for the organization of a national exhibition of women painters in which quality alone determines the entries without regard for stylistic, cultural, regional, racial, temperamental, or other variations. Anne Goldthwaite has been an outstanding contributor to American paintings over a period of years. She was born in Montgomery, Alabama, of an old Southern family; and, after studying at the National Academy of Design, went to Paris, where she worked under the direction of Othon Friesz and other Frenchmen during the revolutionary years of French modernism and was identified with the Académie moderne. She was also an active figure in the international social and art life of Paris and was president of the American Women's Association there for a number of years. Her painting is simple in design and is developed in bright, clear color. In directness and in freedom from extraneous detail, it is of today; but it shows little modern technical influence and is rather the expression of a welleducated independent. This artist has been a faculty member at the Art Students' League for a number of years. Her work is represented in a number of museum, including the Metropolitan and the Art Institute of Chicago. Dorothy Varian, Lucile Blanch, and Georgina Klitgaard are all painters who have done much of their work in and around Woodstock and who have contributed to a new romantic realism of a mature and unsentimental sort. Dorothy Varian paints intimately appealing figure studies which owe as much to the integrity of the design as to the human charm of the sitters or the painter's powers with her brush. Lucile Blanch (now teaching and painting in California) appears to best advantage as an artist in intimate landscapes developed with the forthrightness and vigor of an early American realist. Georgina Klitgaard is also a landscape painter, who often achieves a Flemish breadth of scene. Her rather simple, broad views are less masculine in treatment than those of Lucile Blanch and more objective than the painting of Dorothy Varian. Doris Lee, who also has recently been associated with Woodstock artists, achieved national prominence through her contribution to the scenes of American backwoods life--as in Thanksgiving Dinner, which won the Logan prize at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1935 and created a widespread controversy. Her fertile inventions, the boldness of her pictorial conceptions, and the satire and the fantasy with which they are developed have often caused the solid merits of her painting to be overlooked. Minna Citron, Marion Greenwood, Elizabeth Sparhawk Jones, Beulah Stevenson; Isabel Bishop, Katherine Schmidt, Jane Berlandina, Julia Kelly; Elsie Driggs, Agnes Weinrich; Frances Foy and Julia Thecla; Ann Brockman, Rifka Angel (who uses the ancient encaustic process with original effect), and NURA, whose art is produced in interpretation of childhood, should be mentioned in addition to those whose work is represented elsewhere. Though no woman has won a place of outstanding importance in any contemporary creative art field (unless account be taken of Peggy Bacon's leadership as a social satirist in the graphic field, which is outside the scope of the present work), the contribution of women to twentiethcentury American painting is everywhere conspicuous.