* * * * * The very high aesthetic value of drawing and painting in planes, and with small regard to the so-called laws of perspective, is illustrated in the rare beauty of Chinese and Japanese paintings. From the point of view of their greatest painters, we carry perspective and imitation to extremes that destroy art. One value of the Cubist movement lies in arousing a sense of the strength possessed by the simple and elemental. In oriental art, in archaic art, in primitive Italian art, in not a little modern decorative work, we have long recognized the beauty of drawing in planes and of the use of color arbitrarily. The Cubists are showing us--perhaps too violently and imperfectly--that it is possible to paint pictures and portraits in planes and masses without imitation. That it is possible we know, for the orientals have done it for two thousand years; nevertheless, we stubbornly resist the attempt in western art. We acknowledge the singular beauty of the Italian primitives, yet we demand that portraits and paintings of today shall be carefully modelled in the vain effort to accurately and mechanically copy nature. * * * * * In some of Sargent’s best portraits not only the lights and shadows but character and personality are indicated by brush-strokes as arbitrary in line and color as those of a Cubist--strokes that follow neither the lines nor the colors of the original, but which convey with tremendous power the _character_. Again, we all know how insipid are most of the portraits that are faithfully rounded and modelled to reproduce every curve of the sitters’ features. The truth is there is more of Cubism in great painting than we dream, and the extravagances of the Cubists may serve to open our eyes to beauties we have always felt without quite understanding. Take, for instance, the strongest things by Winslow Homer; the strength lies in the big, elemental manner in which the artist rendered his impressions in lines and masses which departed widely from photographic reproductions of scenes and people. Rodin’s bronzes exhibit these same elemental qualities, qualities which are pushed to violent extremes in Cubist sculpture. But may it not be profoundly true that these very extremes, these very extravagances, by causing us to blink and rub our eyes, end in a finer understanding and appreciation of such work as Rodin’s? His Balzac is, in a profound sense, his most colossal work, and at the same time his most elemental. In its simplicity, in its use of planes and masses, it is--one might say, solely for purposes of illustration--Cubist, with none of the extravagances of Cubism. It is _purely_ Post-Impressionistic.