artist than an Englishman.

Already the Chelsea show of African and Oceanian sculpture is sending
the cultivated public to the ethnographical collections in the British
Museum, just as, last autumn, the show organized in Paris by M. Paul
Guillaume filled the Trocadero. [O] Fine ladies, young painters, and
exquisite amateurs are now to be seen in those long dreary rooms that
once were abandoned to missionaries, anthropologists, and colonial
soldiers, enhancing their prestige by pointing out to stay-at-home
cousins the relics of a civilization they helped to destroy. For my part
I like the change. I congratulate the galleries and admire the visitors,
though the young painters, I cannot help thinking, have been a little
slow.

[Footnote O: 1919]

Negro art was discovered--its real merit was first recognized, I
mean--some fifteen years ago, in Paris, by the painters there. Picasso,
Derain, Matisse, and Vlaminck began picking up such pieces as they
could find in old curiosity and pawn shops; with Guillaume Apollinaire,
literary apostle, following apostolically at their heels. Thus a demand
was created which M. Paul Guillaume was there to meet and stimulate.
But, indeed, the part played by that enterprising dealer is highly
commendable; for the Trocadero collections being, unlike the British,
mediocre both in quantity and quality, it was he who put the most
sensitive public in Europe--a little cosmopolitan group of artists,
critics, and amateurs--in the way of seeing a number of first-rate
things.

Because, in the past, Negro art has been treated with absurd contempt,