A. Bloch is a young American, living in Munich, who has allied himself with the Blue Knights and made an impression by his very personal expressions. He was given a one-man exhibition in Berlin in December last, and his pictures were highly praised in a well-written article in the Berlin _Borsen-Courier_. Absolute and unswerving fidelity to one’s ideals is the only sure road to success, and this sort of sincerity is manifest in the work of Bloch. Franz Marc is in a class by himself. He is the animal painter of the Blue Knights, and his pictures have a fairly steady sale notwithstanding they are extreme in conception and execution. Animal forms and their phases of composition seem to appeal to him, but he often uses the forms as arbitrarily as Matisse uses his nudes to secure an effect of life or grace. His color is always delightful, and there is a flow, a rhythm to his pictures that is fascinating. In an article in “Der Blaue Reiter” he says: It is remarkable how _spiritual_ acquisitions are valued so differently by men as compared with _material_. If someone conquers a new colony for his country everybody applauds; if, however, someone has the _inspiration_ to give to mankind a new and purely spiritual value, it is rejected with scorn and indignation, the gift is suspected, and the people try to suppress and crush it. Is not this a frightful condition? And speaking of the new movement in art, which he considers a _spiritual_ offering to the public, he says: The public is against us, with scorn and abuse it refuses our pictures; but we may be right. They may not want our gifts, but perhaps they cannot help accepting them. We have the consciousness that our world of ideas is no card house with which we play, but it contains the vital elements of a _movement_ the vibrations of which are felt today _the world_ over. In the orthodox sense these men may or may not be religious--I do not know--but one thing is certain, there is an immense amount of religious power in their propaganda. * * * * * The most extreme man not only of Munich but of the entire modern art movement is Wassily Kandinsky, also a Russian. There was one of his Improvisations in the International Exhibition.[47] It did not hang with the Cubists, not even in the large room with Matisse and other radical men. Evidently those in charge of the hanging did not know what to make of it or what to do with it, so they side-tracked it on a wall that was partly in shadow. Visitors who paused to look at it dismissed it as meaningless splotches of paint, and passed on. There is this to be said for the public, that with no word of explanation one of Kandinsky’s Improvisations does seem--_at first glance_--the last word in extravagance; on fourth or fifth glance it appears to have a charm of color that is fascinating; on _study_ it begins to _sound_ like color music.