After Gauguin's death, his art rapidly became almost forgotten in France. He remarked himself towards the end of his life that there were not fifty of his pictures in that country. Even the few there are, hang in scattered private collections, each containing one or at most three or four. The great bulk of his work is in Germany, Scandinavia and Russia. It proved impossible even in 1911 to raise sufficient money to buy _L'Esprit Veille_ for the Louvre. It is greatly to be regretted that no museum or collection has been able to assemble a considerable quantity of his work. Gauguin was, above all things, a decorator, and half a dozen of his pictures make a greater effect than one. One does not judge Puvis de Chavannes, another decorator, solely by his easel pictures, but by the great decorative schemes in Paris, at Amiens and in Boston. This remark applies equally to other decorators, such as Raphael, Michelangelo, Tintoretto and Veronese. A room hung with twenty Gauguins would produce an immense effect of monumental power. That such a room exists in Moscow can be small consolation to Western Europeans at present. His pupils and followers either plodded along unimaginatively, like Sérusier, or drifted off into academicism, like Bernard, or watered down their technique into the tasteless picture-book and stage-costume decoration of Maurice Denis. None of them seized Gauguin's secret of remaining simple, direct and savage. Aristide Maillol is an honorable exception. A sculptor and tapestry designer, he was able to work upon the indications that Gauguin had left for the guidance of these branches and to show us, in part at least, how they might be realized. The main stream of French art simply ignored Gauguin. Instead of making with him a bold leap backwards to the origins of all tradition, it went forward to even more scientific and unemotional essays in painting. The Neo-Impressionists with their spots of complementary colors were followed by disciples of Cézanne, who sought to reduce all forms to certain geometrical primaries, basing their doctrine on certain words which the master of Aix had let fall concerning the simplification of form. Out of these emerged Matisse, whose art became, through a more and more ruthless elimination of modeling, through a more and more arbitrary placing of colors, an abstraction, an utterly unemotional series of hieroglyphs. Then Picasso came upon the scene, eliminated color altogether and began to paint the abstract geometry of form. The Cubists followed Picasso. The Futurists in their turn started another kind of abstract painting, the painting of mechanical energy, the dynamism latent in form.