The Golden Tickseed (verse)

...Religious painting in America has been so neglected, with such rare exceptions as the distinguished and beautiful work of Augustus Tack, that Bellows's Crucifixionuthe climax of his art--is a matter for gratitude and hope to those who would gladly see a flowering of religious art, and an awaken- ing devotion to the supreme themes of the Christian faith in the studios of painters throughout the country...

...His art constantly elucidates the human drama, whether in that stark and colorful transcript of the slums, The Cliff Dwellers, or in the haunted painting of Gramercy Park, in which Bellows has established the perfect balance of the forces focus- sed in that little refuge...

...Detail gives place to broad sweep and fullness of line, its spirit conveyed less by particularities than by what is generous and general in the mood of locality...

...Here, expressed through shadowy images and half-lights and extraordinary, thrilling color is the very mood of a picnic, its relaxation, its brief, dreamy joy...

...Summer is past...

...France has her Monet, her C~zanne, her Redon Dthat painter of spiritual portents behind the "accidents" of matter--but in the United States the inter- pretation of the new order is still in the experimental stage, with such brilliant exceptions, among others, as Bellows, Albert Ryder and .Arthur Davies...

...Bellows fully comprehended the decorative value of the human form, and in Riverfront, the swarming figures of the bathers are all, in a sense, the salients of the pictureu the black wharf, the tug, the sail-boat being merely background to joyous humanity, factors of support or contrast...

...The Golden Tic'seed Now does the golden tickseed bloom its last...

...The unclothed human form long neglected by American painters in its adaptability to design~is again understood, to some degree at least, as the old masters understood it~the nude not so much as a depiction of flesh as a revelation of spirit, of which the Botticelli Venus is a supreme example...

...as much by the preoccupied figures under the trees, as by the strange, affecting play of light *and shade...

...But he can move from the starkest realism to such unearthly beauty as suffuses The Picnic with its strange pale clouds over the broad, horizontal masses of the dark blue mountains, rising above the two enchanting little hills, reflected, solid for solid, in the deep water...

...GUSTAV DAVIDSON...

...for generations of chil- dren have played under its old trees...

...He has employed them to heighten the tragedy of Edith Cavell, and to deepen the wild charm of the marine Evening Swells...

...October 28, I925 THE COMMONWEAL 6xS of life very welcome in American art, too long under the sway of the pretty and the pictorialDthe mere story-telling element in painting...

...Deeply reverent and sur-charged with dramatic feeling, it is also filled with such a poignant sense of sinning and suffering human- ity, drawn to the suffering God, that the amazed and terrified forms seem to embody the turbulent history of the world, forever circling about the figure of Christ on the Cross...

...And I who love you, shall as quietly go Out of your heart forever, whether we cry "Not yet !" and whether we will it or no...

...Even a rose must die...

...To pass from this picture to the prize-ring paint- ings, the Dempsey-Firpo Fight, Sharkey's, Both Mem- bers of This Club, Ringside Seats, is to realize the sweep of the painter's sympathies, the broadness of his human outlook, as well as his amazing technique in the pres- entation of crowds around the saw-dust of the prize~ ring--his mastery not only of human figures in spir- ited, excited attitudes, but of those problems of high light and deep shadow which would be the despair of a lesser artist...

...Bellows's employment of the nude is a significant element in his art...

...The tempo of Rain on the River, Warships on the Hudson, and that en-chanting landscape Easter Snow, is lively and vigorous...

...In The Sand-Team, the rounded heavy hills, broadly placed in light and shadow, convey the essense of the subject, as perfectly as the powerful team of horses in the foreground...

...Now do the glad petunias, row on row, Falter and fail, while to the ground they cast Memorial petals--richly dying so...

...The August days are done...

...The sweet alyssum, in their overthrow, Breathe forth a final sweetness ere the blast Of Autumn sounds and ere the firstling snow...

...How else, then, shall another spring come by Or other blooms attain the sun, and blow...

...The child in the white dress in the foreground is the pivotal point of the composi- tion, illustrating the feature of the little park which is most vivid in the memory...

...Bellows is at once a dramatist and a dreamer, and in his range of sympathies touches extreme poles of artistic expression...

...The lithograph, The Dance in the Madhouse, the black and white rendering of a Stag at Sharkey's, are violent transcriptions of violent facts, magnificently rendered, but Amour, Punchinello in the House of Death, The Christ of the Wheel, are more than masterpieces of drawing...

...Bellows is essentially of the modern spirit in the art-world, long since mani- festing itself in the studios of Paris, but regarded somewhat with suspicion in this country, timid and distrustful of pioneer work both in art and letters, under the blighting puritan tradition, still active among us...

...Ryder thus understood it in his Lancelot and Elaine, and Davies in many of his magical works...

...Summer is past...

...The mystical quality in Bellows's genius is shown in what is perhaps his greatest work, and one of his last--The Crucifixion...

...Here the artist passes into a world of symbolism and proves his under- standing of spiritual realities...

...The emphasis, the intensity, is, by a paradox, diffused through all these bodies in attitudes of activity or rela~:ation...

...He is essentially modern in his employment of color and in his preoccupation with the effects of light on form and volume...