mated Holbein and Duerer. Young Germany, however, has other
plans. To learn of them the reader is referred to Meier-Graefe's
comprehensive and stimulating volume on modern art. The only
representation of the painters of the immediate present given in the
American exhibition was confined to the Scholle School, which, however,
indicates clearly the creative impulse that is stirring in the younger
painters. "A warlike state," Blake wrote, "never can produce Art. It
will Rob and Plunder and accumulate into one place and Translate and
Copy and Buy and Sell and Criticize, but not Make." This has been true
of the Germans, but the present generation is bent upon making and it is
natural that the strongest impulse toward originality should come to the
Munich painters rather than to the cosmopolitan Berlin men.

The Scholle is a Munich association consisting of a group of young men
who, taking the humble and fecund earth as their symbol, as the title of
the society implies, seek to get into their painting the vigor and
intensity of life and force which devotion to the healthy joys provided
by our mother Earth is supposed to engender.

They are like the giant Antaeus whose strength was invincible so long as
he remained in contact with the earth, but who easily was strangled when
lifted into the upper air. Their strength also melts into helplessness
when confronted by problems of atmosphere and the delicate veils of tone
which enwrap the material world for the American painter.

But the energy of these young Germans in their own field is something at
which to wonder. They remind one of their critics of a band of lusty
peasant boys journeying in rank from their University to the nearest
beer garden, singing loud songs by the way. Leo Putz, Adolf Muenzer,
Fritz Erler, are the leaders of the group, although Alex Salzmann and
Ferdinand Spiegel were Erler's collaborators in the famous Wiesbaden
frescoes which offended the taste of the Kaiser. These young men are
entirely capable of offending a less conventional taste than the
Kaiser's, but they all are doing something which has not been done in
Germany for many a long year; they are busying themselves with the
visible world and painting frankly what they see. It does not matter in
the least that in their decorative work they give rein to their fancy
and produce such symbolism as we find in Erler's "Pestilence," or that
in the illustrations for Jugend they tell a story with keen appreci