ABSTRACT
This year the Autumn Salon is more than ever one for the initiated. `Art for Art’s sake’ must now be written ‘Art for the Artist’s sake.’ For while this Salon teems with interest for the artist and the amateur, it is caviare or something worse to the general. The Paris newspaper critics, as usual nowadays, have had to choose between the bad form of not laughing at all and the probability of having to recognise a few years hence that they have laughed on the wrong side of their faces. Once again have the stouter ones disinterred that spectral word `bariolage,’ which one had rashly thought to be lying forgotten and at peace in the critical tomb of Paul Mantz. There is, of course, the frankly philistine point of view of the frequenters of the Magic City or of Luna Park. Next year perhaps the poster of the Salon will bear the words: `Visitez la Salle Post-Cubiste: on y rit follement!’ But we have not yet come to that. Certainly I found many ‘horrors’ in the Grand Palais. But these were not the so-called extreme works, but the many `œuvres calmes, saines et harmonieuses — gracieuses et savantes’ applauded by the Matin. Of all the modern work it was the cubist that I found most interesting. Over most of the other pictures Impressionism, or Post-Impressionism, lay like a wet cloth. Not the freshly kindled Impressionism of a Manet or a Berthe Morisot; not the fiery imaginings of a Cézanne or a Van Gogh, but the windingsheet of a decadent school.
