And thus the exhibit of twenty-five paintings at the Art Institute takes on a broader and more beautiful air. It becomes human and alive even though the noise from the studios is confusing.
Paul Manship also has a room at the Art Institute: Greek, Assyrian, Japanese, Chinese, Egyptian, Italian, Roman, Gothic, and what not; but where, oh where, is Paul Manship—“foremost American sculptor”? The incongruous and nerve-racking thing about the collection is that besides merely exactly reproducing all the above mentioned periods and styles he goes so far as to use two or three in one piece of work. The Infant Herakles: fountain and bowl is a terror of complications, with gothic gargoyles as the high points of one’s discontent. The American Indian (with the African animal skin and the Egyptian hair and Roman face) and pronghorn antelope (Egyptian bronze of Alpine antelope) is the property of the Art Institute, having been purchased by the “friends of American Art”.... The conventionalized Roman busts with the Greek lettering were so top-heavy in appearance that I grew quite dizzy....
I found relief in the sculptor of the Ancient Greeks,—peace in the simplicity of a strange inspired beauty that intricate handling which draws on past glories can never produce.
C. A. Z.
Fairy-Tale Mysticism
Jerusalem, a Novel by Selma Lagerlöf (Doubleday, Page & Co., New York).
Those Scandinavians! I have often wondered at the combination of grim strength with childlike imaginativeness that we find in the artists of those pale cold lands. In the winter, at twilight, I like to sit with closed eyes and to relive old and new Norse sagas, the unbelievable wonders told or sung or painted with the perfect earnestness of absorbed children; I like to dream then to the accompaniment of the not-smiling music of the sad child, Edward Grieg.
Jerusalem is not a novel, not according to the terminology accepted heretofore. For—may I reveal a secret en passant?—we are on the eve of the publication of a novel by a Chicagoan who will revolutionize the prevailing literary classifications. Another thing which is not! Selma Lagerlöf is not a mystic, some of her friends want us to believe; not in the Maeterlinckian sense. The book is a series of tapestries to be hung in an ideal children’s-room; a web of fairy-tales told in the Scandinavian, unsmiling, earnest way. Mystic? Yes, as much as all fairy-tales are mystic, as much as all not “clever” and “wonderful” children are mystic. A mysticism which instead of lifting us up to the clouds brings the clouds down to us; instead of lending us wings and making us soar in imperceptible intangible regions, anthropomorphosizes gods and spirits and drags them down to terra firma. So convincing! We actually see the dead Ingmarssons gathered in a large farm house up in heaven; we see their ruddy hard faces, sandy hair, white eyes; we hear their slow, heavy, laconic talk. We are not surprised at meeting Christ among the pines in the glow of the autumnal sunset. The opening of heaven on a winter night before the eyes of the two Ingomars appears as ordinary reality. We are in a world where everything is simple, believable, possible. And you cannot smile; you are in an earnest childlike atmosphere.
Those Scandinavians!