those who about the year 1910 were modifying natural forms in obedience
to Cubist theory, has since gone all lengths in the direction of pure
abstraction: his art is none the better for it. Valloton, so far as I
can remember, was much where Herbin was. Now apparently he aims at the
grand tragic; an aim which rarely fails to lead its votaries by way of
the grand academic. Perhaps such aspirations can express themselves only
in the consecrated formulæ of traditional rhetoric; at all events, the
last I saw of Valloton was furiously classical. [D] And for all that he
remains, what he was in the beginning, an Illustrator.

[Footnote D: His exhibits in the _salon d'automne_ of 1921, however,
suggest that he has come off his high horse.]

To me these artists all seem to be of the first generation of Cézanne's
descendants. About the dates of one or two, however, I may well be
mistaken; and so may I be when I suppose half a dozen more of whose
existence I became aware rather later--only a year or two before the
war, in fact--to be of a slightly later brood. For instance, it must
have been at the end of 1912, or the beginning of 1913, that I first
heard of Modigliani, Utrillo, Segonzac, Marie Laurencin, Luc-Albert
Moreau and Kisling, though doubtless all were known earlier to
wide-awake men on the spot. None of them can fairly be described
as doctrinaire: by that time an artist with a pronounced taste for
abstractions betook himself to Cubism almost as a matter of course. All
owe much to Cézanne--Utrillo least; Modigliani and Marie Laurencin owe
a good deal to Picasso's blue period; while Luc-Albert Moreau owes
something to Segonzac. Of the two first Modigliani is dead and Utrillo
so ill that he is unlikely ever to paint again. [E] A strange artist,
Utrillo, personal enough, just as Modigliani was handsome enough, to
satisfy the exigences of the most romantic melodrama, with a touch of