born of the unknown which is recognized by the spirit. If the artist has a principle which lies outside of his point of view, he represents the principle but not the form. This is the fatal point after the turn of the Century which renders the revolutionary struggle epoch-making. In art the artists have really lost their heads. As Frobenius says, "we then recognize that, in the spheres of music, painting, and literary compo- sition, the power of composition has disappeared and that a constant movement in forms has set in". That is especially the case with painting which was, from the start, the art of representing something seen, and hence, essentially that of composition. In it the idea and the principle now overrun the pictorial, and frequently so obtrusively as to excite laughter or annoyance. Most of the unsuccessful stylists either wish to be more than painters, like Marc, or eise they are specialists, that is to say, like Cezanne, they see and stress the colour, mainly details of their art which they then give undue prominence. Franz Marc is perhaps the most tragic example of aberration. He could be a great painter, and has come to grief on the whole over the method and the uninspired idea. This ardent seeker for the "spiritual form" and "original type" of the animal is not only simultan- eously planning a "design for a new cosmic System". According to him, the new art is also to be "the incarnation of our scientific convictions. It is our religion, our centre of gravity and our truth". The power of vision must certainly always fade when confronted by such unreal fancies, for it can but seldom succeed in giving pictorial form to its ex- periences. Nearly all of them are obsessed and ruined by misunderstood knowledge, paralyzed by their scepticism in face of the visible manifestation. Kandinsky came from Russia and painted the first "abstract" picture in 1907, exaggerating the "prin ciple of internal necessity", without regard to the outside world and without noticing the absurdity of the conception. Finally Picasso, most talented among them, became, in a fatal double sense, certainly one of the best representative of this period without style, for all its ideological and artistic ideas and all its mannerisms are to be found in his work in which he is successively neo-classical, naturalistic, expressionist, cubist, and dadaist. An excellent quick-change artist! His versatility has no connections, and is therefore incomprehensible, the expression in his pictures and sketches being sacrificed impulsively to the impressions of his feelings and mood. Picasso has astonishing ability, but no style. He shows merely things seen by accident and retained in an Occidental way. He can get into touch everywhere, but nowhere does he emerge personaily. He produces forms without a real soul, offen artistically delightful, while others are incredibly masterly, like slogans, literary, attract- ive and repellent, yet not stirring. No one can recognize that a collection of his sketches and pictures are all the work of the same painter. In any case Picasso is a perfect master of his craft. While for most of his contemporaries, who reject "any control of natural correctness", even a merely approximate reproduction is obviously too much trouble, he can retain the forms and even animated movement perfectly easily with a stroke of his pencil. The object causes him no difficulties. He feels no compulsion, just as little as Cezanne and van Gogh who play dangerous games with things. This freedom distinguishes them from all those who have less skill than a predisposition to art, who take no account of Nature, the object and reality, and who analyze the form on the basis of a fixed idea without mastering it, in short, from the weaklings who must combine in order to be of any importance, and who borrow from each other or unite. If a gifted artist is successful in his own way, he soon has followers. The language of his brush becomes a model for all the ineffective who wishes to realize their ambitions, for all those without talent of their own who suddenly see with eyes, and for all the futile who exploit the success of his style. Cezanne, Rodin, and van Gogh are the prototypes of the ex- pressionists, cubists, and all the others who copy and outbid them. Among these "stylists" in painting, the naive are more the victims of Suggestion, and the conscious more of vanity than of art. Their zeal remains fruitless, and their work in vain. Exagger- ation is intended to conceal the lack of talent, but exposes it. After all, not one of these "isms" is more than a slogan for an untalented misconception. What Matisse once described as "cubism" is really "an exaggerated Cezanne manner", as was rightly remarked by Ozenfant who writes, with a great sense of humour: "Cezanne took tremendous liberties with Nature, and the cubists did the same thing with Cezanne". It is a worthless attempt in painting really to overcome the plain surface, to see Nature and man architecturally, and to build them up as objects with three dimensions. The rigid cubist form and lineal geometry supplant the power of imagination and life. As an artistic intention, it is the reverse of style, a grotesque mannerism, an involuntary farce in the sphere of imagination of the materialist mechanized spirit of the times which no longer sees form and character but only machines for practical purposes, and which regards huge artificial structures as Creative achievements. For the further development of a style the same kind of manner is necessary, forotherwise it degenerates. It is only equally talented and allied minds that can develop a style creatively. While in the case of the cubists the form is materialistically degenerate and the figure soulless, the expressionists exaggerate the contrary, and abandon the form for the sake of the soul. The expressionist is a "soul-seeker". As Adolf Behne says in one of the "Sturm" books "Zur neuen Kunst", "he penetrates into the innermost being of Nature, and it is only when he has truly realized her soul that he begins to produce Creative work . Thus he paints the soul as he experienced it "from the inside", without regard to the external appearance which, after all, suggested and provided the experience. In doing so he goes so far that he can use colours and lines "as symbols only". The result is that the spiritual state and external manifestation remain unrecognizable. After all, they merely paint moods of the soul which no observer 60