In other words, what right have _we_ to say to the poet, “If you don’t write things we understand you are no poet,” or to the painter, “If you don’t paint things we understand you are no painter?” The only difference between poet and painter is that one uses a _pen_, the other a _brush_ to express _himself_. * * * * * Without employing any allegorical or symbolical literary artifice, merely by inflections of lines and colors, a painter can show, _in the same picture_, a Chinese city, a French town, together with mountains, oceans, fauna, and flora, and nations with their histories and their desires--all that separates them in external reality. Distance or time, concrete fact, or pure conception, nothing refuses to be uttered in the language of the painter, as in that of the poet, the musician, or the scientist. Here is a most significant statement of a _truth_ and an assertion of _freedom_. We all know how the poet in a dozen lines may give us glimpses of the universe; he may leap from flower to star, from city to city, nation to nation, age to age; nothing confines him, he knows no restraint. In one short poem he may give us glimpses of the four quarters of the globe--of Athens, London, Chicago, Pekin. His imagination knows no bounds, his art is unlimited. For the first time in the history of painting painters are systematically claiming the same independence, the same right to _express themselves freely_ in each canvas, to paint in the one picture _if they see fit_ glimpses of different countries, cities, scenes, different times as well as places; to use them and suggest them as freely as the poet does to _express a mood_--and why not? But the painter must be sure of his mood, and be doubly sure that what he is trying to say _requires_ a wealth of illustration, otherwise his painting will be but a fantastic jumble, [Illustration: MARC The Steer] [Illustration: KANDINSKY Landscape With Two Poplars] just as many poems lose themselves in not a _wealth_ but a _confused mass_ of irrelevant illustrations. * * * * * The _assertion_ of freedom is one thing, the _exercise_ of it is quite another. The point is that, fundamentally, there is no reason why a painter should not show in one canvas things and events unrelated in either space or time, leaving the observer to work out the more or less hidden meaning of it all. There is no reason why he should be tied down to the realistic painting of an apple or an apple tree if he prefers to paint some flight of the imagination into which apple and apple tree enter together with strange glimpses of temples and pyramids, playing children and armed battalions, weeping women and fighting men.