The Cubists are also equally quick to demonstrate the logical connection between their works and those of the old masters, tracing the connection through Courbet, El Greco, and so on.
The truth, of course, is that everything modern is a development of something ancient, that nothing exists unrelated.
Art is as continuous as everything else in life and nature.
One thing flows inevitably out of another.
Sorolla and Zoloaga are the children of Velasquez. Puvis de Chavannes may seem nearer Raphael and the Italian Primitives than Degas and Manet, but he is simply the fruition of one collateral line, while Degas is the fruition of another, and Manet of another—they are all painters, and the art of painting admits endless variations in theory and technic.
It is, therefore, true that every modern experiment, however strange, may trace its genealogy to the Old Masters and through them to the Primitives, and through them to the Cave Painters.
So that when a Munich artist argues that the strange heads of Jawlensky and the still stranger compositions of Kandinsky are based upon the best there is in Italian art, the proposition in its broad significance may be conceded and plenty of room be still left for startling differences between the art of Venice in the sixteenth century and that of Munich in the twentieth.