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This would not have been possible without the militancy of Robert Henri, John Sloan, and other professional painters and illustrators of the earlier years of the century. From the Armory Show onward, however, for a decade or more, the influence of these realists was submerged by succeeding waves of post-Impressionist influence; and post-Impressionist influence gave its character to American painting and sculpture in the war years and the decade that followed. Alfred Stieglitz, in his now famous "291" gallery on Fifth Avenue, continued until 1917 to provide a center where young American moderns could find a public, and where, perhaps, the most consistent demonstration was given of the aesthetic significance of the developing international art. Arthur Carles, the Philadelphian, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Alfred Maurer, Max Weber, Abraham Walkowitz, Oscar Bluemner, Elie Nadelman, S. MacDonald Wright, and Georgia O'Keeffe were among the contributors to post-Impressionism in America whose work was brought to the attention of a growing public at "291." At the same time that he was showing their work, Stieglitz was exhibiting painting and sculpture by Brancusi, Picasso, Picabia, Braque, and Gino Severini, the Italian Futurist. The international aspects of the new art had been kept foremost here since the earliest days when a few Americans --Marin, Weber, Hartley among them--came and went between New York and the Paris of the young Picasso, where Leo and Gertrude Stein, also Americans, had their salon. Other Americans, meantime, came to prominence for their painting and sculpture influenced conspicuously by French post-Impressionism, most notably by the abstractionists. Our modern art of the time was largely abstract art, though the term was not precisely defined and was full of confusions. The standard dictionary gives two meanings for "abstraction": (1) a summary of something fully set forth in some other place; and (2) something unreal, opposed to reality. Cézanne's pictures were responsible for the term's earliest significance to modern art. His landscapes were "powerful understatements of the earth's architecture," and gave the spectator a more vivid sense of the scene than could be gained from the multiplication of realistic detail. His portrait of Madame Cézanne, or his Card Players, conveys the essence of profound and penetrating observation. From work of this order modern painting gains its affinity with the art of the great portrait traditions of the past, which is nonnaturalistic in intention. "The new style aim at something like an abstract of realism in which the subject is represented in its essential aspects . . . free from the accidental circumstances of any particular appearance," the late Bryson Burroughs, curator of painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, wrote in explanation of early post-Impressionism. "Our age is tired of robust and accustomed forms and craves a new expression in their distortion." An art satisfying the second clause of the definition was arrived at only gradually by the Cubists as they developed the conception of an expression based upon artist materials (color, texture, area-organization, line, etc.) and the sensibility of an artist alone, an art of pure form and color. The pioneers of American post-Impressionism drew freely from both sources. They also followed the lead of the Europeans who had been impelled to restudy the sources of tradition in an attempt to regain the qualities of solidity and vitality, as variously envisaged by Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso. The record of early American post-Impressionism is most clearly to be read in the careers of a few outstanding individuals who had the sensitiveness and the originality to make their own consistent expressions on the basis of European practice. Foremost among these as we see them today is John Marin (born 1870), who excels in the use of the water-color medium, and in the use of this medium to ends that are new in art. A stern Yankee will has held him to his unique course until he has achieved his own kind of "concentric vision" and a personal plastic language for communicating it to his now extensive public. Cézanne used pure color and gradations of the tones of that color, building with them the stability and the monumentality of his creation, recalling the peculiar, sculptural vitality in the painting of Michelangelo. Marin lays a few swift strokes side by side, strokes that are incisive under the compulsion of the moment's emotional impulse, working always to minimize the number of the strokes and to increase the expressive power of each light line. The first appearance of a typical Marin landscape in the water-color medium is of a complete abstraction, beautiful in its own right with the beauty of thin, exquisite color and sensitive calligraphic line which turns here and there to blurred and washed effects. But under the observant eye, what at first seemed an incomprehensible expression of personal aesthetic feeling suddenly disappears, and in its place leaves a compact reality of land, sky, and sea; or of little sailing boats berthed inshore close to village streets, houses, and trees. Marin achieves the power of his all but magical syntheses by the same kind of drastic elision and elimination that Henri Matisse realized on the basis of analyzing arts of the Near East back to their bare aesthetic meaning. Marin has developed independently, however, and his style is essentially personal and intuitive. Prolonged study of it serves to reveal its deep affinity with certain arts of the Far East and to show more in common with Chinese landscapists than with any modern. "The Sung painters have done hundreds of scrolls that reveal the hysterical tremolo of leaves in the wind, of fog flying over eerie mountains, and if you are careful in your observations, you win find a lot of the same surety of observation and of surety of brushstroke in this conspicuous American," Marsden Hartley wrote in the catalogue of a Marin exposition held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York some time ago. Marin's landscapes and seascapes have more than that in common with the Chinese paintings of the great periods. There is the same self-subordination by the artist to the subject; the same willed concentration upon an inner significance in nature. He has referred to "the great seeing, the piercing seeing" which enables the artist to produce painted forms equivalent to those in nature-the big, elemental forms--sky, sea, mountains, and those things pertaining thereto--which have been almost exclusively his subjects over long periods. He has emphasized also the artist's necessity to live with these great forms, which have everything, and to be part of them in sympathy. He once wrote in an article in Creative Art that the Greeks--and he might also have added, the men of the Renaissance--went soft because they thought individual likenesses of things more important than "concepted creation." John Marin went around in Italy in his youth wrapped in what the critic Henry McBride has called "an apartness," dreaming his way through, we may conclude, to a procedure beyond what he had seen in Whistler and the Impressionists. The individual character of his art was already manifest in the ten works shown at the Armory Exhibition. He had been painting in this country since 1910, and has not left it since. There is a quality of independence in him akin to that of Ryder, and he might at times appear as remote from the objective realities of twentieth-century American life as was Ryder in his later years. But Marin was one of the first Americans to give plastic "equivalence" and an aesthetic expression to the experience of a strictly twentieth-century urban environment. His drawings and paintings of downtown New York skyscrapers, made over a number of years after 1912, are a record of the actual visual interplay of volumes, the stresses and the tensions, as they warp and distort each other in their immemorial way, but now dramatically, in their sheer, machine-age magnitude. "I see great forces at work," said Marin, seeing them as subjects for a series of nearly abstract studies, "great movement; the large buildings and the small buildings; the warring of the great and the small; influences of one mass on another greater or smaller mass. . . . the bigger asserting themselves strongly, the smaller not so much but still they assert themselves, and though hidden, they strive to be seen and so doing, change their bent and direction while these powers are at work, pulling, pushing, sideways, downward, upward. I can hear the sound of their strife, and there is great music being played." Ryder, to resort again to contrast, adumbrated his vision with a minimum of reliance on accurate visual symbols; he groped for his effects in paint as an inspirational modeler in clay might do. Marin relates his few indispensable elements in a unity as complete and organic, in his conception, as a Maine boat or a steel construction. Marsden Hartley, Andrew Dasburg, and Henry Lee McFee had all studied in Paris and established themselves as post-Impressionists before 1910. They were all meticulous in their avoidance of naturalism, and all were concerned with the problems of expressive form and with phases of experimental Cubism. Hartley and Dasburg were important pioneers in the regionalism which begins to appear to some critics to hold the key to an art that is genuinely expressive of American life. They were instrumental in establishing the practice of modernism in the Southwest; and while Hartley, who was there from 1916, was, nearly a quarter of a century afterwards, to return to an early romanticism formed under Ryder's influence and to scenes of his New England youth, Dasburg, continuing as teacher and painter in New Mexico, has exercised an acknowledged authority over promising men of newer generations. The intention of Dasburg's own work has been "to give form to those lyrical and dramatic visual experiences which are best expressed through the painter's medium and are essentially part of it." Andrew Dasburg was born in France in 1887; and it is the French gifts of style and taste which distinguish his work rather than an ardent imagination. In his earlier post-Impressionist enthusiasm, he influenced Henry Lee McFee in the choice and direction of a career, as he has influenced artists ever since. Henry Lee McFee (born 1886) has lived in Woodstock, New York, since 1912. He is a highly intelligent, scholarly artist, selfeducated in modernism after early conventional art school training. Berenson, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Willard Huntington Wright, Kandinsky, Picasso, Cézanne contributed to his progress towards a style that has remained severely disciplined and nonnaturalistic. Like Dasburg, he developed a simple, consistent personal expression through post-Impressionist means and has continued that expression into maturity with considerable indifference to public acceptance. Max Weber and Maurice Sterne are among the most widely accepted Americans of the international modernist world. Both work with a maturity that might well give prominence to their painting in any exhibition. Each has been given a large retrospective showing by the Museum of Modern Art within the recent past, and this has provided an exceptional opportunity to a general public to evaluate the total mature product in each case and to note similarities and differences in two distinguished styles. Both are Russian born and of Jewish origin, and both came to America in childhood. (This is true of a dozen artists of the era, all born within one decade, a fact interesting to note because of the tendencies which distinguish their product as a whole and come down as a recognizable influence on younger men. These tendencies are towards a keen, rational understanding of the meanings of modernist experiments and a rich and expressive use of color. An almost Orientally sensuous use of color appears in work by Walkowitz, Benn, Baylinson, and Maurice Becker, who are of this group.)