calized idea of modernism,
just as in modern poetry there is a grouping of poets in America who
are adding new values to the English language, as well as assisting in
the realization of a freshly evolved localized personality in modern
poetics.

Art in America is like a patent medicine, or a vacuum cleaner. It can
hope for no success until ninety million people know what it is. The
spread of art as "culture" in America is from all appearances having
little or no success because stupidity in such matters is so national.
There is a very vague consideration of modern art among the directors
of museums and among art dealers, but the comprehension is as vague as
the interest. Outside of a Van Gogh exhibition, a few Matisses, now
and then a Cezanne exhibited with great feeling of condescension,
there is little to show the American public that art is as much a
necessity as a substantial array of food is to an empty stomach. The
public hunger cannot groan for what it does not recognize as real
nourishment. There is no reason in the world why America does not have
as many chances to see modern art as Europe has, save for minor
matters of distance. The peoples of the world are alike, sensibilities
are of the same nature everywhere among the so-called civilized, and
it must be remembered always that the so-called primitive races
invented for their own racial salvation what was not to be found ready
made for them. Modern art is just as much of a necessity to us as art
was to the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Greeks. Those peoples have
the advantage of us only because they were in a higher state of
culture as a racial unit. They have no more of a monopoly upon the
idea of rhythm and organization than we have, because that which was
typical of the human consciousness then, is typical of it now. As a
result of the war, there has been, it must be said, a heightening of
national consciousness in all countries, because creative minds that
were allowed to survive were sent home to struggle with the problem of
their own soil.

There is no reason whatever for believing that America cannot have as
many good artists as any other country. It simply does not have them
because the integrity of the artist is trifled with by the intriguing
agencies of materialism. Painters find the struggle too keen and it is
easy to become the advertising designer, or the merchant in painting,
which is what many of our respectable artists have become. The lust