uality that you wish always for more and more
of it. It is the light breath of the Luxembourg gardens and the
gardens of the Tuilleries coming over you once more and the same
grace in child-life as existed in the costly games at Versailles among
the grown-ups depicted so superbly by Watteau and his most worthy
followers, Lancret and Pater, in whom touch is more breath than
movement. It is a sensitive and gracefully aristocratic creation Marie
Laurencin produces for us, one that makes the eye avid of more
experience and the mind of more of its subtlety. It is an essentially
beautiful and satisfying contribution to modern painting, this
nacreous cubism of Marie Laurencin.

GEORGIA O'KEEFFE[1]

With Georgia O'Keeffe one takes a far jump into volcanic crateral
ethers, and sees the world of a woman turned inside out and gaping
with deep open eyes and fixed mouth at the rather trivial world of
living people. "I wish people were all trees and I think I could enjoy
them then," says Georgia O'Keeffe. Georgia O'Keeffe has had her feet
scorched in the laval effusiveness of terrible experience; she has
walked on fire and listened to the hissing of vapors round her person.
The pictures of O'Keeffe, the name by which she is mostly known, are
probably as living and shameless private documents as exist, in
painting certainly, and probably in any other art. By shamelessness I
mean unqualified nakedness of statement. Her pictures are essential
abstractions as all her sensations have been tempered to abstraction
by the too vicarious experience with actual life. She had seen hell,
one might say, and is the Sphynxian sniffer at the value of a secret.
She looks as if she had ridden the millions of miles of her every
known imaginary horizon, and has left all her horses lying dead in
their tracks. All in quest of greater knowledge and the greater sense
of truth. What these quests for truth are worth no one can precisely
say, but the tendency would be to say at least by one who has gone far
to find them out that they are not worthy of the earth or sky they are
written on. Truth has soiled many an avenue, it has left many a
drawing room window open. It has left the confession box filled with
bones. However, Georgia O'Keeffe pictures are essays in experience
that neither Rops nor Moreau nor Baudelaire could have smiled away.

[Footnote 1: American.--Ed.]

She is far nearer to St. Theresa's version of life as experience than
she could ever