an active colony of Scandinavians the most interesting of whom is probably Per Krohg.  The career of Krohg, by the way, is worth considering for a moment and watching for the future.  Finely gifted in many ways, he started work under three crippling disabilities—­a literary imagination, natural facility, and inherited science.  The results were at first precisely what might have been expected.  Now, however, he is getting the upper hand of his unlucky equipment; and his genuine talent and personal taste, beginning to assert themselves, have made it impossible for criticism any longer to treat him merely as an amiable member of a respectable group.  What is true of Spain and Scandinavia is even truer of Poland and what remains of Russia.  Goncharova and Larionoff—­the former a typically temperamental artist, the latter an extravagantly doctrinaire one—­Soudeikine, Grigorieff, Zadkine live permanently in Paris; while Kisling, whom I take to be the best of the Poles, has become so completely identified with the country in which he lives, and for which he fought, that he is often taken by English critics for a Frenchman.  Survage (with his eccentric but sure sense of colour), Soutine (with his delicious paint), and Marcoussis (a cubist of great merit) each, in his own way, working in Paris, adds to the artistic reputation of his native country.  In the rue La Boetie you can see the work of painters and sculptors from every country in Europe almost, and from a good many in Africa.  The Italian Futurists have often made exhibitions there.  While the work of Severini—­their most creditable representative—­is always to be found chez Leonce Rosenberg, hard by in the rue de la Baume.

[Footnote A:  For this word, which I think very happily suggests Picasso’s role in contemporary painting, I am indebted to my friend M. Andre Salmon.]

However, most of the Futurists have retired to their own country, where we will leave them.  On the other hand, the most gifted Italian painter who has appeared this century, Modigliani, was bred on the Boulevard Montparnasse.  In the movement he occupies an intermediate position, being neither of the pioneers nor yet of the post-war generation.  He was not much heard of before the war, [B] and he died less than a year after peace was signed.  In my mind, therefore, his name is associated with the war—­then, at any rate, was the hour of his glory; he dominated the cosmopolitan groups of his quarter at a time when most of the French painters, masters and disciples, were in the trenches.  Modigliani owed something to Cezanne and a great deal to Picasso:  he was no doctrinaire:  towards the end he became the slave of a formula of his own devising—­but that is another matter.  Modigliani had an intense but narrow sensibility, his music is all on one string:  he had a characteristically Italian gift for drawing beautifully with ease:  and I think he had not much else.  I feel sure that those who would place