At Communion (verse)

...It will not be the Metropolitan's rival, since it will exist to supplement the Metropolitan's work, as the modern museums in Paris, London and Berlin supplement the collections of the Louvre, the National Gallery and the Kaiser Friedrich Museum...

...Cezanne, who uses color and solidity of contour to weld his conical and spherical planes together, is an austere designer, and the way in which he has interlaced the tree-top branches of his Road in Provence is pleasing and original...

...You will see that this painter at least had a definitely religious spirit in his Pieta (after a drawing by Delacroix) and in his First Steps (after Millet) where he gives an ardent representation of pious feeling that is totally absent from The Yellow Christ, by Gauguin, whose spirit, a curious admixture of Gothic debased by Egyptian archaism and pagan primitivism, portrays for us a ginger-cooky Crucifixion with no feeling at all...

...and Van Gogh, a madman, whose paintings, whether portraits or landscapes, demonstrate, as not since Tintoretto or El Greco, life seen through a temperament, and some of whose still lifes are ineffably lovely...

...On November 8 the galleries of the new Museum of Modern Art were opened in the Heckscher Building in New York...

...Cezanne is a different proposition...

...All of these men, whose subjects are often so lack-lustre in appeal if not in technique, had a talent for rhythmic decoration, so that you feel in several of their veriest pieces the accent of position, the suggestion of tones, and other harmonies...

...The opening exhibition I, for one, who am not thoroughly in sympathy with modern painting, found amazingly interesting...

...And why should not painting which has always employed such qualities make this modernistic selection of them, if only to be truer to the times...

...As a decorator, nevertheless, Gauguin is not insignificant, and his brightly colored and exotic works, in which broad, flat surfaces of pure undiluted paint vie with others of contrasting tones, are perhaps more suited to the two-dimensional properties of a wall or rug than to canvas...

...The others ape them, with prudent variations, and generally are nothing but hyper-intellectualized or inane derivations of the masters upon whom they find convenient material for testing their teeth...

...one civilized student, a composer of mathematically arranged and naturalistically colored landscapes...

...It will attempt many things, for not only will it have eventually a permanent collection of the precursors of the modern movement, some of whom are still not "accepted," but it will also present the most important living masters...

...and two men of a certain religious feeling, one, dour and silent, and the other, in the manner of aged pietists, ardent and out-giving...

...There are a few leaders or "pioneers" in modern painting, such as the four men in this exhibition, but very, very few...

...Thus we discover that, in this collection of four of the most diverse and tendential modern painters, we have one unconventional pagan, more or less serene...

...The idea that modern art is endeavoring to do something new is in great part false...

...Seurat, the master of stippling, whose charming if too pacific canvases have a magic of lighting and a magic of reasoned effect from this most consistent of theorizers...

...In this sense they are dependent upon the older traditions: Cezanne upon the scientific discoveries made by the Impressionists, including Turner and Constable, about light and color, Seurat upon Delacroix, Gauguin upon the tapestry art of Persia, the stone sculpture of Egypt and Gothic Brittany, the paper art of Japan, and Van Gogh, although his technique was individual, upon Millet, Delacroix, Monticelli and Daumier painters in whom he found, respectively, religious intensity, juicy color, flame-like strokes, and a humanitarian agitation...

...You might say that the best and most important "moderns" were here: Cezanne, a composer in terms of deep space, as one critic defines him...

...Do not our skyscrapers themselves, good and bad, show similar qualities in their architecture...

...The new museum is to be congratulated.gratulated...

...Gauguin, whose bright reds and greens mingling with velvety plums produce an all-over Persian rug pattern, compensating for his insignificant, Egyptianly wooden and at times degrading subjects...

...While certainly such an approach to painting is nothing new, since the leading spirits of French Impressionism early in the nineteenth century possessed it, we are coming to realize only now that this newer method of visualizing (which is not in disaccord with modern urbanized existence) has definite points of contact with art in the great tradition...

...Many of the other Van Goghs also will repay your attention...

...This new museum is to be America's Luxembourg...

...Go to this new museum and see the prototypes for yourself...

...It can no more faire du neuf in the sense of pioneering than can the Church, or at any rate, if it does, it becomes like Protestantism a grafting of momentarily new and unconventional, if not heretical, thought upon an old brain, the brain remaining and developing after the thought has passed its prime...

...His Pigeon Tower, with its restricted palette again in evidence, is simplification to essentials, and yet, such is his knowledge of the recession of planes, has great depth and indirect lighting...

...No fear need be aroused that this new undertaking will flood its galleries with the banal and the meretricious...

...A view from a skyscraper window today will impress upon one the importance of mass, planes, perspective, order and form, and the relative unimportance of finish, color, anatomical accuracy and detail...

...Accordingly, for the first year the Museum announces exhibits of paintings by contemporary American masters and by the outstanding French painters of today, of paintings by Americans of the last fifty years, such as Ryder, Winslow Homer and Eakins, of works by Daumier, of modern Mexican art, and of American, French and German sculpture surely a diverse and admirable project...

...His landscapes and his still lifes are not another return to the primitive, as in Gauguin, but they are based, as much as was possible to an artist who hated the "horrid resemblance" of most conventional art to its object, upon the absolute composition of traditional painting from the Primitifs to Rubens and the scientific theories for imitating nature of the Impressionists...

...Intelligent people of catholic tastes are the trustees of the museum and the donors of bequests and loans, and although mistakes may be made in the new galleries, the Museum will afford the best nucleus in this part of the country for seeing what is already half tried and true in modern art...

...The best things are the Seurat hangings, the Van Gogh Fruit, and Irises, his La Mousme, and the Self Portrait in a Straw Hat...