t to The Hague the View of Delft may
teach you that Vermeer was an Impressionist long before the French
Impressionists; also that he painted clear light as it never before
was painted, nor since. As for Rembrandt, the last word will never be
said. He is the eternal Sphinx of art, whether as portraitist,
landscape painter, etcher, or revealer of the night side of life, of
its bestiality, madness, cruelty, and terrific visions. But Velasquez
and Vermeer are more sane.

Anything I may write of Kubin, Munch, and Gauguin should be read in
the light of my artistic credo. These three names do not swim in main
currents, rather are they to be found in some morbid morass at the
equivocal twilight hour, not the hour exquisite, but that
indeterminate moment when the imagination recoils upon itself and
creates shadows that flit, or, more depressing, that sit; the mood of
exasperated melancholy when all action seems futile, and life a via
crucis. Nor is this mood the exclusive possession of perverse poets;
it is an authentic one, and your greengrocer around the corner may
suffer from its presence; but he calls it the blues and resorts to
alcohol, while the artist, ever conscious of the "values" of such a
psychic state of soul, resorts to ink or colour or tone (not always
despising wine).

This Alfred Kubin has done; with his etching-needle he has aroused
images from the plate that alternately shock and exalt; occasionally
he opens the valves of laughter for he can be both witty and humorous.
His Slavic blood keeps off the encroaching danger of himself taking
his own work too seriously. I wish his German contemporaries boasted
such gifts of irony. Kubin is a Bohemian, born in 1877, the son of an
Austrian Army officer. His boyhood was given over to caprice, and he
appears to have passed through the various stages familiar in the
career of romantic pathological temperaments. Disillusionment
succeeded disillusionment; he even contemplated Werther's end.

He found himself in Munich at the beginning of this century with a
slender baggage of ideals, much scorn of life, and a determination to
express his tortured and complicated personality in art. No matter
what comical old women professors (in trousers) tell you of "objective
art" and the superior advantage of drawing from plaster casts, that is
the ultimate aim of an artist (naturally I don't refer to fashionable
face painters, who make a lucrative trade of their slippery paint).
Neve