As to going further and explaining what I felt, that would be quite as stupid as to play on an instrument before deaf persons. The deaf person is simply not sensitive to sound and cannot appreciate; and a person who is not sensitive to form and color as such would be quite as helpless.
The majority of people seem to be in the position of deaf persons. They see others listening intently, and apparently enjoying something, and because they fail to hear, they at once draw the false conclusion that the trouble is with the instrument or the performers.
In November last a group of young Americans held an exhibition of very modern work in The MacDowell Club in New York. The exhibitors were Oliver Chaffee, Konrad Cramer, Andrew Dasburg, Grace Johnson, Arthur Lee, Henry L. McFee, Paul Rohland, William Zorach.
IV
A FUTILE PROTEST
THE Cubist pictures in the Salon d’Automne, 1912, was the occasion of the following letter from M. Lempué, painter and doyen du Conseil municipal de la Ville de Paris, addressed M. Bérard, Sous-Secrétaire d’Etat des Beaux-Arts.[32]
If the voice of a municipal counsellor could reach you, I would beg you, would pray you to go and take a turn around the Autumn Salon.
Go there, sir, and although you are a minister, I trust that you will come away as much disgusted as are many people whom I know, and I hope, also, that you will say to yourself in an undertone: “Have I indeed the right to loan a public building to a lot of malefactors who conduct themselves in the world of art as do the apaches in ordinary life?”
You will ask yourself, Mr. Minister, in leaving the place, if nature and the human form have ever before suffered such outrages; you will admit with regret that in this Salon the most trivial uglinesses and vulgarities that can be imagined are there displayed and accumulated; and you will again ask yourself, Mr. Minister, if the dignity of the Government of which you form part is not injured, inasmuch as it appears to take under its protection such a scandal by sheltering horrors like these in a national building.
The Government of the Republic, as it seems to me, ought to be more careful and more respectful of the artistic dignity of France.
A year ago, and for another reason, I wrote to your predecessor, who, by the way, took no notice of my letter; but what is astonishing—does he not let everybody think that he is a meridional, whereas he was born nowhere else than at Montmartre?