harmonies. [Footnote: Cf. "Colour Music," by A. Wallace
Rimington. Hutchinson. 6s. net.] Also music has been interpreted
in colour. But I do not know of any previous attempt to paint,
without any reference to music, compositions which shall have on
the spectator an effect wholly divorced from representative
association. Kandinsky refers to attempts to paint in colour-
counterpoint. But that is a different matter, in that it is the
borrowing from one art by another of purely technical methods,
without a previous impulse from spiritual sympathy.

One is faced then with the conflicting claims of Picasso and
Kandinsky to the position of true leader of non-representative
art. Picasso's admirers hail him, just as this Introduction hails
Kandinsky, as a visual musician. The methods and ideas of each
rival are so different that the title cannot be accorded to both.
In his book, Kandinsky states his opinion of Cubism and its fatal
weakness, and history goes to support his contention. The origin
of Cubism in Cezanne, in a structural art that owes its very
existence to matter, makes its claim to pure emotionalism seem
untenable. Emotions are not composed of strata and conflicting
pressures. Once abandon reality and the geometrical vision
becomes abstract mathematics. It seems to me that Picasso shares
a Futurist error when he endeavours to harmonize one item of
reality--a number, a button, a few capital letters--with a
surrounding aura of angular projections. There must be a conflict
of impressions, which differ essentially in quality. One trend of
modern music is towards realism of sound. Children cry, dogs
bark, plates are broken. Picasso approaches the same goal from
the opposite direction. It is as though he were trying to work
from realism to music. The waste of time is, to my mind, equally