Twenty or twenty-five years ago painters who used a broad technic, and especially those who used the palette knife to lay the pigment in flat sweeps, were looked upon as charlatans and sensationalists. Today their pictures are accepted in the most conservative exhibitions and the public passes with scarcely a comment. This broad technic is simply painting in planes--in a sense, simply modified Cubism. To illustrate: The surface of an orange may be so carefully painted or modelled in clay that the effect is a perfect sphere with no straight lines; or it may be painted or modelled in minute planes and no curved lines; or the use of planes may be carried so far the orange is represented by angles so sharp the shape is almost cubical--it is all a question of the _extent_ to which the artist carries the use of _plane surfaces_. The _fewer_ the planes used and the _larger_ their size, the nearer the _substance_ and more obvious the representation of _mass_. The _smaller_ the planes and the _larger_ their number, the nearer the _surface_--the more superficial the representation. * * * * * The division of planes can be carried--geometrically--to such an extent that the unaided eye can no longer distinguish the minute flat surfaces, and the effect is a perfect sphere. What is true concerning the painting or modelling of an orange is true of the painting or modelling of all objects. * * * * * “It has been charged that the new men are too much given to the geometrical. But geometrical figures are the essential elements of drawing. Geometry, the science which deals with extension, its measure and its relations, has ever been the basis of painting. [Illustration: SEVERINI The Milliner] “Up to the present time the three dimensions of Euclid have sufficed to express the problems that infinity gives rise to in the souls of great artists. “Geometry is to the plastic arts what grammar is to the art of the writer. “Today philosophers do not confine their speculations to the three dimensions of Euclid. Painters, by intention, so to speak, have cause naturally to preoccupy themselves with these new lines of extension which, in the language of modern studios, are classed under the term, _fourth_ dimension.”[38] * * * * * Speaking of Cézanne, it is said: To him a sphere was not always round, a cube always square, or an ellipse always elliptical. Thus the traditional oval of the conventional face disappeared in his portraits, the generally accepted round surfaces of a vase or bowl was represented as flat and dented in spots and the horizontal stability of the horizon was rendered elliptical whenever it so appeared to him.