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Everyone must choose his own terms and take the consequences. The pages which follow define some of the terms that are used in this book, as they are understood by the author to have become generalized in the process by which post-Impressionist theory has merged into contemporary practice in the New World and given its particular character to American modern art. According to the dictionary, design is the adaptation of means to end. "Design," says Professor De Witt Parker of the University of Michigan, "is not something to be appreciated by mere intellectual analysis, but a very definite and positive feeling of wholeness and belonging-togetherness." Design is generally accepted by modern painters and sculptors as representing the formal arrangement of line, plane, volume, color, and texture--of all the elements that are at the artist's disposal for his particular kind of art production. The process of design consists in the artist's abstracting the expressive components of his subject, as he observes or imagines it, and of devising for these a new construction that is organic and abstract. The result of successful design is communication: the artist provides an apprehensible plastic character for an image from his world of inner realities. Design in modern painting or sculpture implies fixed principles of abstract order, as in architecture or music. Beauty is one of its effortless effects if, as the British writer Eric Newton says, "Beauty is a kind of inevitable and surprising accident that always occurs whenever the artist's experience is sufficiently profound, and when he manages to communicate it." Changing conceptions of form, color, and space would appear to account to an important extent for the new character that is widely apparent in twentieth-century art. Form is thought of as the total unity of tangible and intangible constituents of a work of art. "Abstract form," Sheldon Cheney has written, "whether narrowed to a summary of the plastic elements, or expressive of the synthesis of instrumental and emotional values, is understood as the basic excellence and test." Throughout the twentieth century, experimental artists (basing their studies upon technical innovations made by Cézanne and using special powers of perception developed in an age of scientific and engineering advance) have been noting the wide prevalence of an underlying geometrical structure in natural forms and a principle of geometrical order in the growth and articulation of these forms. They have, variously, sought a mathematical basis for picture building and for sculptural construction as a result of their observations. Abstract artists especially have sought analogies for the elements and the principles of geometrical order, in the realm of aesthetic order. The reason that so much "geometrical art" is the subject of popular skepticism is that it is constructed to formula and remains a matter of arrangements and patterns, without the element of fresh creation and aesthetic significance entering in. Color in modern art owes more to the findings of modern science than to traditional painting. Color is a vital energy capable of operating directly upon the visual mechanism of the observer and not a matter of pleasing tones and values, as it was to the eighteenthcentury Watteau and the nineteenth-century Greuze. Colors advance to the forefront of attention or recede into remote distance; they attract and repel one another in potentially unlimited complexities of group arrangement. Space, in traditional art of the recent past, was the empty part of the composition, or the gaps between the objects. To the modern artist, space is at least as important as color. It is the atmosphere in which his plastic entities exist and through which they act and react upon each other. Shallow space is thought of as lending to a decorative effect in painting or sculpture; deep space, to a profounder effect. Post-Impressionism, the term invented by Roger Fry, the English critic, to cover twentieth-century art movements as they have arisen more or less directly from discoveries made by Cézanne, is the only generic term that has been widely applied to modern art. The term Cubism, without accurate application to any art of today, is said to have been first applied to so-called geometrical art by Henri Matisse as an expression of scorn; but it is also attributed to a member of the Hanging Committee of the Salon des Indépendents of 1908, who is supposed to have exclaimed when he saw a painting by Braque, "Encore des cubes! Assez de cubisme!" It was applied especially to the work of artists who abandoned descriptive painting and geometrized essential natural forms, reorganizing them into pattern-pictures aesthetically pleasing. "Cubism differs in no way from all the other schools of art. The same elements and the same principles reign in all. . . . Cubism is neither the grain nor the germination of a new art: it represents a stage of development of original pictorial forms," Picasso wrote in 1926. "Cubism pursues its plastic ends which are self sufficing. We may define them as a means for expressing all that our reason and our eyes perceive within the limits of the possibilities allowed by design and color." (From a letter published in Russia and reprinted in translation in Creative Art, June, 1930.) German expressionism represents a development of more than thirty years of modern art in terms of a national temperament and more or less resolutely in opposition to modern French art. It is predominantly psychological and emotional in character and has been defined in some of its significant phases as "a vision of the inner subjective world of the individual mind." The use of the word expressionism has been urged variously as a broad term for all modern art, whether psychological, abstract, or nonrepresentative; for all that goes beyond impressionism and the conceptions of realism and naturalism of art's recent historical pasts. Expressionism is conceived as capable of giving plastic reality to the artist's intuitive perceptions of things--intuitive perception being understood as belonging to a deeper and more profound range of experience than intellectual perception. The formal abstract structure of a painting or a sculpture conforms with the principles of a basic order that underlies all natural forms, and it is universal in operation, whereas the meaning and the feeling have to do with a subjective reality underlying all consciousness.