another angle of light on the poetic world around
us, another unsuspected facet of the bright surface of the world.
Surfaces were for him, too, something to be "deepened" with a fresh
vividness. He had the irresistible impulse to decorate and to decorate
consistently. His sense of decoration was fluid and had no hint of the
rhetorical in it. He felt everything joined together, shape to shape,
by the harmonic insistence in life and in nature. A flower held a
face, and a face held a flowery substance for him. Bodies were young
trees in bloom, and trees were lines of human loveliness. The body of
the man, the body of the woman, beautiful male and female bodies, the
ideal forms of everyone and everything he encountered, he understood
and made his own. They were all living radiances against the dropped
curtain of the world. He loved the light on flesh, and the shadows on
strong arms, legs, and breasts. He avoided theory, either philosophic
or esthetic. He had traveled through the ages of culture in his
imagination, and was convinced that nothing was new and nothing was
old. It was all living and eternal when it was genuine. He stepped out
of the world of visible realities but seldom, and so it was, books and
methods of interpretation held little for him. He didn't need them,
for he held the whole world in his arms through the power of dream and
vision. He touched life everywhere, touched it with himself.

Rex Slinkard went away into a celestial calm October 18, 1918, in St.
Vincent's Hospital, New York City. It is the few among those of us who
knew him as poet and visionary and man, who wish earnestly that Rex
might have remained. He gave much that many wanted, or would have
wanted if they had had the opportunity of knowing him. The pictures
and drawings that remain are the testimony of his splendid poetic
talents. He was a lyrical painter of the first order. He is something
that we miss mightily, and shall miss for long.

SOME AMERICAN WATER-COLORISTS

With the arrival of Cezanne into the field of water-color painting,
this medium suffers a new and drastic instance for comparison. It is
not technical audacity alone, of course, that confronts us in these
brilliantly achieved performances, so rich in form as well as radiant
with light. It is not the kind of virility for its own sake that is
typical of our own American artists so gifted in this special medium,
like Whistler, Sargent, Winslow Homer, Dodge Macknight, J