11 
I have seen canvases entitled: Solitude, where there were 
several people, just as there are Mr. Stouts who are very thin, and 
Mr. Blonds who are very dark. 
In the cases in question, the artists even condescend occasion 
ally to make use of vaguely explicative words, such as portrait, 
landscape, still life; many, however, of the young artists use 
only the general term, painting. 
These painters, even if they still observe nature, no longer 
imitate her, and they carefully avoid the representation of 
natural scenes studiously observed and reconstructed. 
Actual resemblance no longer has any importance because 
everything is sacrificed by the artist to the verities, to the neces 
sities of a superior nature which he presupposes without expos 
ing. The subject no longer counts, or if it counts at all, counts 
for very little. 
Generally speaking, modern art repudiates most of the means 
of pleasing which were used by the great artists of past times. 
Today, as formerly, the aim of painting is still the pleasure of 
the eye, but the demand henceforward made upon the amateur 
is to find a pleasure other than the one which the spectacle of 
natural things could just as well provide. 
Thus one travels towards an entirely new art, which compared 
to painting as it has been looked upon heretofore, shall be what 
music is to literature. 
It will be the essence of painting, just as music is the essence of 
literature. 
The amateur of music experiences, in listening to a concert, 
joy of a different order from the joy he feels in listening to 
natural sounds, like the murmur of a stream, the roar of a tor 
rent, the whistling of the wind in a forest, or the harmonies of 
human language founded on reason and not on aesthetics. 
In the same way, the new painters will provide their admirers 
with artistic sensations due solely to the harmony of odd lights.