“My dear madam,” he returned, “don’t you wish you had?” —C. A. Z. Book Discussion A Brilliant Enemy _Modern Painting, by Willard Huntington Wright. New York: John Lane Company._ It is a hard book. None of Clive Bell’s sunny cynicism, none of Kandinsky’s colorful musicalness; surely nothing in common with the watery ecstacies of our official Chicago modernist, Arthur Jerome Eddy. While reading the voluminous book I experienced an uneasy, an uncertain feeling in regard to the author: to hate him, or just to dislike him? Let me confess that when I turned over the last page I lowered my head in respect for a brilliant enemy. It is a hard book, brothers-dilettanti. It gives us a merciless thrashing, we who love without being able to state why and wherefore. We are ordered to go to school, children, to study chemistry and color, to approach a work of art as scientifically equipped as a surgeon venturing to operate on a human body. As a reward we are promised the bliss of unadulterated aesthetic emotion. Ah, that aesthetic emotion! For a time we believed that it was possible to grasp that slippery “blue bird” by following Clive Bell’s maxim on the significance of form. Alas, this theory is obsolete. Color itself should become form, proclaims Mr. Wright, and he quotes the manifesto of his beloved Synchromists: “In our painting color becomes the generating function. Painting being the art of color, any quality of a picture not expressed by color is not painting!” With a sigh of relief we reach the chapter on Synchromism. All art up to the year 1912 has been nothing but preliminary experimentation. In Rubens were consummated the aims of the old painters (beginning with the fifteenth century; the Primitives are dismissed as not deserving consideration)—organization and composition. The new cycle opens in the nineteenth century with Turner, Constable, and Delacroix, who experiment in naturalism. Manet introduces thematic freedom—not more. The Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists close the second, naturalistic, cycle, having enriched art with laborious investigations into the secrets of color in relation to light. All these have been but precursors forging weapons for the third and _last_ (!) cycle—the final purification of painting. Synchromism, of course. Of this last cycle Cezanne was—hear, Messieurs and Mesdames Questioners—the primitive! Still Cezanne and Matisse and Picasso ignored color as a generator of form, until two Americans, MacDonald-Wright and Russell, rent asunder the ultimate veil from purity and truth, and the new and final deity emanated from their canvasses, the unsurpassable Synchromism.