No Master Here

Georges Desvallieres, famous French painter, here to serve on the jury of the Carnegie International Exhibition, does not believe that America has yet found a "master artist." Says he: "The works of Americans that I have seen . . . in your museums . . . seem to have been done to please the amateur. The soul [of America] is not yet expressed."

The proportion of expatriates among our great artists would partially explain this. Whistler (quarrelsome cosmopolite), Mary Cassatt (grande dame in Paris), John Sargent (brilliant and fashionable London portrait painter) are three of our greatest figures--but hardly expressive of America.

Fortunately the situation has been changing. Many critics, here and abroad, point out signs of a genuine "American school." Hope is placed in the younger painters, particularly Sheeler, Demuth, Marin. John Marin, modernistic interpreter of the sea, is thought by the more radical to be the most considerable force in American painting today. He owes little to foreign influences.

Desvallieres is a religious patriot. His finest recent work is a Crucifixion. During the war he served as major with the picked Chasseurs Alpins, though he was 50 years old. He thinks "some great crisis" which evokes religious feeling in its broadest sense will be necessary to call forth in stone or paint the "spirit of your people."

His words are true to this extent: none of our great painters (even those who stay at home) have done for America what Rembrandt did for Holland; Da Vinci, for Italy; Hiroshige, for Japan; Duerer, for Germany.