The life! That was the magic that Europe held for our visitors. They might return to the big enterprises, the big problems here, and feel that America was home because they had a share in its growth, but their nostalgia for the old countries continued to grow in the measure that they came to appreciate the wisdom with which life was ordered there--as they realized how the stable institutions, the old religions, festivals, traditions, all the things that flower into art, had resisted the terrific change that the industrial revolution had brought into the 19th century. Behind all questions of the coming of objects of art into this country or the appearance of new artists or new schools here, lies this most pivotal matter of the elements of art in American life. They need not be, they cannot be the same as those in European life, but it is futile to think of having an art here if we deny ourselves the ideas and feelings of which art has been made--the joy and awe of life that the Greek responded to in his marbles, the Italian in his frescoes, the Spaniard, the Fleming, the Dutchman, and the Frenchman in his canvases. Copying the externals of their work without again living their lives can result only in academism--bad sculpture and bad pictures. It was not as a protest against bad art, local or foreign, that the International Exhibition of 1913 was organized, and it is very solidly to the credit of our public that it did not regard the event in that negative fashion--but as a positive thing, a revelation of the later schools of European painting of which it had been kept in ignorance by the will of the academies here and abroad. The “Armory Show,” as it was called, drew forth a storm of ridicule, but it also attracted such hundreds of thousands of visitors as no current exhibition had ever gathered in this country before. The first contact of our public with the arts that have succeeded Impressionism--with the painting of Cézanne, Redon, Gauguin, van Gogh, Matisse, the Cubists, and others--was made at this epoch-marking show. With the jeers that it received there were not a few hosannas, and even the vast majority of visitors--doubtful as to the exact value of the various exhibits, knew that qualities existed in the new schools that had never been seen here and that were needed. Some three hundred works went from the walls of the Armory to form a vanguard for the far more important purchases of modern art that have since been building up our collections; so that at the moment of this writing an exhibition can be opened at the Metropolitan Museum which, while representing a mere fraction of the wealth of such pictures in American possession, gives a superb idea of the great schools of the later 19th century and the 20th century in France. It is worthy of note that in its response to the great show of 1913 and to the smaller ones that followed, America was only giving, in a stronger form, the measure of a power of appreciation it had shown before.