We talk of this and that “period” in the work of a painter, a poet, a sculptor. Often the changes in mood and technic are marked and the transitions sharply defined. For the most part they are the turning from the imagination to observation and _vice versa_. The brain is not unlike a factory; when filled to overflowing with raw material it must close its doors and work up its stock; when it has exhausted its store of impressions it must open its five senses to receive new. * * * * * According to Hegel, the great German philosopher, there are three movements of the historical pendulum; for example, we have an age of materialism followed by an age whose sole interest is in psychical phenomena; this followed by an age which extracts the truth from both of these opposite hypotheses, the golden mean. Thus, in art, we have the classical spirit for the thesis, the modern art movement, its antithesis, and we may confidently expect and hope for an age which shall select the bold, fresh spirit of the modern movement and infuse it into the proportion of classical art, which shall be the great synthesis of the artistic future. Thus the extravagant and apparently insane movement of the Futurist and Cubist will be of the greatest value in reviving art, putting red blood into art again.[8] [Illustration: KANDINSKY Village Street ] A man can understand what is going on about him only by a knowledge of what has happened in the past--the wider his knowledge of past events, the clearer his understanding of present. Space does not permit the printing in detail the ridicule that greeted Turner, Millet, Corot, Courbet, but it is important to open the eyes of the reader to the _fact_ that men whose pictures are considered masterpieces today, and command fabulous sums, were met with the _same_ scorn and derision that the new men of today meet. History repeats itself--we accept as fine what our fathers laughed at; our sons will accept as fine what we laugh at, and so on to the end of time. You readers and especially you museums, who are paying tens of thousands for pictures by Manet, Monet, Renoir and a host of other innovators, take to heart what follows. * * * * * In 1874 the Impressionists held their first exhibition in a room rented from a photographer, 35 Boulevard des Capucines, Paris. They called themselves, _Société anonyme, des Artistes, Peintres, Sculpteurs et Graveurs_. There were about thirty exhibitors in all; among them, Pissarro, Monet, Sisley, Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Cézanne, Guillaumin, who might be called the extremists; Degas, Bracquemond de Nittis, Brandon, Boudin, Cals, Gustave Collin, Labouche, Lépine, Rouart, and others were invited to take the edge off the novelties of the first named.[9]