Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/79

 religion. It was the Word, the liberating Word of accompanying manifestoes hurling barrages of language whirling with cones and spheres and "pure painting" which mesmerized him. Until the Armory Show he had been unfamiliar with the new forms, believing the old religion of art up to the impressionists sacrosanct. A camp follower, he had gone unquestioningly along with the orderly New York school of painting which, considering itself the modern movement, still was adjusting itself to the revolution of the late 19th century masters. This adjustment took the form of dividing among themselves by the local masters of ghostly Carrière, vitriolic disillusioned Forain, "pure painter" Manet, and voluptuous Renoir. Unlike Clem Brush some of the painters of the contemporary New York school already had seen examples of the cubistic paintings by the Parisian nuts. They had jeered openly the few examples straggling past baffled customs inspectors, exhibited as far back as 1909 in Alfred Stieglitz's small "291" (Fifth Avenue) Gallery. The urgent black lines of the European newcomers still infuriated most of the local New York masters when they visited the Armory Show.

Some of them however, Clem following, began the msh up the cubist-futurist staircase down which Marcel Duchamp's nude descended to newspaper fame. But the impetus of the Armory Show which carried Clem to France proved to be a boomerang, returning him to his native Nebraska worn and sore from buffeting on puzzling cubist points and edges, and dizzy from the gyrating vortex of futurist whorls.

During his seven years in Europe, with nine months out for service in the war to end war and the wound which released him from it, Clem had acquired and dropped theories of painting as often as there are normal changes of French Cabinets. He glued newsprint and nailed buttons and bits of wood to panels, and was a tiny cog in the dadaist periphery as he tried to be automatic, letting his hand go where it would in drawing a line; slanting heads after Modigliani; rushing to the circus after Picasso had extracted cubist form from it but also, bewilderingly, painted quite recognizable, even academically representative Harlequin figures. Picasso wouldn't stay put. And Clem puzzled over Matisse's cubism which seemed to be impressionist as well—hadn't modern art abandoned impressionism?

He remained a camp follower; though welcome (he had an income from home) somehow always an outsider in all coteries. But he could see he was as competent, more competent often, than some whose works received coterie acclaim merely because they had Rh