Van Gogh "plundered" in his youth
it was not because he feared "paralysis." He merely practised his
scales in private before attempting public performance. Remember that
none of these revolutionary artists jumped overboard in the beginning
without swimming-bladders. They were all, and are all, men who have
served their technical apprenticeship before rebellion and complete
self-expression.

The gods of Van Gogh were Rembrandt, Delacroix, Daumier, Monticelli,
and Millet. The latter was a veritable passion with him. He said of
him, and the remark was a sign-post for his own future: "Rembrandt and
Delacroix painted the person of Jesus, Millet his teaching." This
preoccupation with moral ideas lent a marked intensity to his narrow
temperament. Ill-balanced he was; there was madness in the family;
both his brother and himself committed suicide. His adoration of
Monticelli and his jewelled style led him to Impressionism. But colour
for colour's sake or optical illusion did not long hold him. The
overloaded paint in his earlier works soon gave way to flat
modelling. His effects are achieved by sweeping contours instead of a
series of planes. There are weight, sharp silhouettes, and cruel
analysis. His colour harmonies are brilliant, dissociated from our
notions of the normal. He is a genuine realist as opposed to the
decorative classicism of Gauguin. His work was not much affected by
Gauguin, though he has been classed in the same school. Cezanne openly
repudiated both men. "A sun in his head and a hurricane in his heart,"
was said of him, as it was first said of Delacroix by a critical
contemporary. Vincent Van Gogh is, to my way of thinking, the greatest
genius of the trio under discussion. After them followed the Uglicists
and the passionate patterns and emotional curves of the Cubists.

Henri Matisse has science, he is responsive to all the inflections of
the human form, and has at his finger-tips all the nuances of colour.
He is one of those lucky men for whom the simplest elements suffice to
create a living art. With a few touches a flower, a woman, grow before
your eyes. He is a magician, and when his taste for experimenting with
deformations changes we may expect a gallery of masterpieces. At
present, pushed by friends and foes, he can't resist the temptation to
explode fire-crackers on the front stoop of the Institute. But a
master of line, of decoration, of alluring rhythms. Whistler went to
Japan on an artistic ad