Matisse at his best is certainly as good a painter as any working in Paris to-day. He possesses more vitality than Picasso; and he appears to have more stability--as a result possibly of that. I am not concerned in this pamphlet with recapitulating the phases of the modern movement, so much as analysing a late development of it, and only giving so much general matter again as is necessary to remind a non-specialist public of the rough points of the position up to date. Matisse has had far less influence than Picasso, and is in every way a different mentality. Dérain, similarly, beyond influencing Picasso at a certain period, does not come within the scope of my immediate purpose. He is a great artist of impeccable taste. If I enlarge this treatise to book form, I shall devote sections to these artists. Of the names of artists working in Paris well known to us here, most are those of foreigners, not Frenchmen. Matisse, Picasso, Gris, Modigliani are Belgian, Spanish, Italian. But outside of the large groups of artists working in Paris there are other European artists, some of equal note, and of equal importance in the history of this movement. Kandinsky among them, was, I believe, the first painter to make pictures of purely non-representative forms and colours. And Kandinsky, with his Expressionism, is probably the most logical of the artists directing their attention to abstract experiment. He is not obsessed by Natures Mortes; nor does one find in him the rather obvious obsession with common objects simply because they are common (which is a similarly limiting mode of the mind to the predilection for important and obviously significant objects). He differs from the Paris group in his interest for the disembodied world and the importance he attaches to this new avenue of research and inspiration. Actually his pictures possess too much of the vagueness and the effect of a drunken tracery that all spirit drawings have. The painters working in England find no place in this pamphlet, but not because I do not esteem them. Nothing but a stupid parochial snobbism could make a half-dozen English names I can think of, seem any less weighty than any half-dozen French ones producible at this moment. As to the Jewish painters, they are evidently of the same race and talent everywhere. And there are at least as many here as in Paris.