Page:The Dial (Volume 76).djvu/141

Rh all I'm up to at present is a little advertising—but foreign advertising. As long as our students continue to go abroad for atmosphere and instruction I do not see how our patriots can sleep easily. What I desire instead is that European young people shall come here for study. California was not obliged, it may be argued, to coax for students in '49, and good wine needs no bush. There are plenty of proverbs on the other side. But just the same a reputation starts somehow, somewhere. I'm for starting ours abroad. I was delighted when London called our Boardman Robinson. That was a step in the right direction. The recent attempt of Paul Manship on Paris was not so successful. In fact, to be frank, it was a flat failure. Paris simply wouldn't see him as a sculptor. But shall we be discouraged? On the contrary I'm all for trying again, and at once. I want to try Robert W. Chanler upon them. I think he would certainly square the unpleasant Manship episode. He is showing in the Wanamaker Gallery a new screen that is amazing. Amazing, but beautiful. All of "Sheriff" Chanler's screens are amazing, but freshly at Wanamaker's came over me the wish to astonish our European cousins with his art. It would surely bowl them over. It provides something they haven't got, something jazzy. It is untutored, care-free, audacious, boastful—lots of Walt Whitmanish adjectives fit it very well—and besides that it is outlandish, shocking, and attractive. They say he gets most of his decorative matter from the library books, that his motifs are slapped raw, in an undigested state, into his compositions. They say much else besides, but not so much is said about the mysterious suggestion there is in his work, the undoubted rhythm, and the gigantic reach. He may get his porcupines out of a book instead of out his head, but he does bang them on to the panel with a force no other decorator equals. There is something mad about it, too The screen at Wanamaker's is a vast arrangement in vivid vermillion lacquers, dull Picasso-blue, and gold. It is a memorial, I'm told, to the late Charles Cary Rumsey, and in deference to Mr Rumsey's passion for horses, concerns itself by way of subject with episodes in legend or history in which horses figure. These incidents are portrayed in panels scattered in haphazard style over the panels of the screen, held together by the long lines of fantastic birds. The drawing of the figures and weird birds is not the drawing of Ingres, be it noted, nor even the drawing of an average Academician, yet it