Many of the pictures are brutal and most of them are crude, but while the first impression may be one of ugliness it is more, it is one of exceeding vitality.
There is nothing musty about the moderns, their canvases are so alive they scream.
As compared with the subdued tones of an academic exhibition a modern seems like a babel of discordant sounds, but the confusion is more apparent than real. By going day after day one gets accustomed to the newness, the freshness, the strangeness of it all and begins to understand and appreciate the one big, dominant note—vitality.
Then, too, when we say the first—and last for most people—impression is one of ugliness, we must not forget
DERAIN
Forest at Martigues
that our appreciations are primarily the result of environment and habit, and only secondarily, and with comparatively few, the result of intelligent discipline.