Once when I was taking lunch with Walter Arensberg at a small place on 63rd St. I asked him if he could state what the more modern painters were about, those roughly classed at that time as “cubists”: Gleisze, Man Ray, Demuth, Du Champs—all of whom were then in the city. He replied by saying that the only way man differed from every other creature was in his ability to improvise novelty and, since the pictorial artist was under discussion, anything in paint that is truly new, truly a fresh creation is good art. Thus according to Du Champs, who was Arensberg’s champion at the time, a stained glass window that had fallen out and lay more or less together on the ground was of far greater interest than the thing conventionally composed _in situ_. We returned to Arensberg’s sumptuous studio where he gave further point to his remarks by showing me what appeared to be the original of Du Champs’ famous, Nude Descending a Staircase. But this, he went on to say, is a full-sized photographic print of the first picture with many new touches by Du Champs himself and so by the technique of its manufacture as by other means it is a novelty! Led on by these enthusiasms Arensberg has been an indefatigable worker for the yearly salon of the Society of Independent Artists, Inc. I remember the warmth of his description of a pilgrimage to the home of that old Boston hermit who watched over by a forbidding landlady (evidently in his pay) paints the cigar-box-cover-like nudes upon whose fingers he presses actual rings with glass jewels from the five and ten cent store. I wish Arensberg had my opportunity for prying into jaded households where the paintings of Mama’s and Papa’s flowertime still hang on the walls. I propose that Arensberg be commissioned by the Independent Artists to scour the country for the abortive paintings of those men and women who without master or method have evolved perhaps two or three unusual creations in their early years. I would start the collection with a painting I have by a little English woman, A. E. Kerr, 1906, that in its unearthly gaiety of flowers and sobriety of design possesses exactly that strange freshness a spring day approaches without attaining, an expansion of April, a thing this poor woman found too costly for her possession—she could not swallow it as the niggers do diamonds in the mines. Carefully selected these queer products might be housed to good effect in some unpretentious exhibition chamber across the city from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the anteroom could be hung perhaps photographs of prehistoric rock-paintings and etchings on horn: galloping bisons and stags, the hind feet of which have been caught by the artist in such a position that from that time until the invention of the camera obscura, a matter of 6000 years or more, no one on earth had again depicted that most delicate and expressive posture of running.