[Footnote F:  Salon d’automne, 1921:  It has again made a big stride forward.  Segonzac is now amongst the best painters in France.]

“Sa peinture a une petite cote vicieuse qui est adorable”—­I have heard the phrase so often that I can but repeat it.  Marie Laurencin’s painting is adorable; we can never like her enough for liking her own femininity so well, and for showing all her charming talent instead of smothering it in an effort to paint like a man; but she is not a great artist—­she is not even the best woman painter alive.  She is barely as good as Dufy (a contemporary of Picasso unless I mistake, but for many years known rather as a decorator and illustrator than a painter in oils) who, while he confined himself to designing for the upholsterers and making “images,” was very good indeed.  His oil-paintings are another matter.  Dufy has a formula for making pictures; he has a cliche for a tree, a house, a chimney, even for the smoke coming out of a chimney.  In this way he can be sure of producing a pretty article, and, what is more, an article the public likes.

Very different is the art of Kisling.  Rarely does he produce one of those pictures so appetizing that one fancies they must be good to eat.  What you will find in his work, besides much good painting, is a serious preoccupation with the problem of externalizing in form an aesthetic experience.  And as, after all, that is the proper end of art his work is treated with respect by all the best painters and most understanding critics, though it has not yet scored a popular success.  “Kisling ne triche pas,” says Andre Salmon.

The war did not kill the movement:  none but a fool could have supposed that it would.  Nevertheless, it had one ghastly effect on contemporary painting.  When I returned to Paris in the autumn of 1919 I found the painters whom I had known before the war developing, more or less normally, and producing work which fell nowise short of what one had come to expect.  I saw all that there was to be seen; I admired; and then I asked one who had already, before the war, established a style and a reputation—­I asked Friesz, I think—­“Et les jeunes?” “Nous sommes les jeunes” was the reply.  Those young French painters who should have been emerging from the ruck of students between 1914 and 1919 had either been killed, or deflected from their career, or gravely retarded.  Only now is la jeunesse beginning to give signs of vitality; only now is a new crop coming to the surface; so now I will take the foolhardy risk of pronouncing the names of a few who seem to me to have given proof of undeniable talent—­Gabriel-Fournier, Favory, Lotiron, Soutine, Corneau, Durey, Monzain, Richard, Guindet, Togores, Gromaire, Alix, Halicka.  I must not be taken to assert that all of these are under thirty, or that none was known to discerning amateurs before the war, or in its first years at any rate.  Certainly, the work of Gabriel-Fournier,