far back as 1916. It was a little daring to reveal all the ugliness of early beginnings, but no doubt the result was justified. There on the walls was the actual development of each young artist for all the world to see. Feuerstein exhibited fourteen holiday studies of France, Spain, and the Pyrenees; all bright cubistic paintings bearing no special mark of individuality. It was a thousand pities that be did not show his beautiful stage designs for the National Theatre productions of Marlowe's Edward the Second and Molière's Le Malade Imaginaire, which clearly showed the bent of his imagination and his joyous delight in colour. František Muzika showed a dozen paintings composed with the same formula of bright cheerful primary colours arranged on a dry harsh flat surface: in their primitive quality they reminded me very forcibly of some excellent scenes I have seen painted on the walls of a Buddhist temple in India. Some conventionally cubistic drawings were sent by Joseph Šima, now a student in Paris. The two most mature artists among this group are Ladislav Süss and Alois Wachsman. Süss is only twenty-two and full of Lebensfreudigkeit which shines through all his work. His landscapes were not all equally good, but when they did come off they expressed the direct vision of an artist sure of himself. There were two pictures that were as good as anything seen in London: an exceptional nude of a woman and a beautiful composition in blue, white, and grey of a young girl and pigeon. Wachsman, a young man studying architecture, has been through all the "isms" and exhibited thirty pictures representing his evolution from the age of nineteen when he was painting ugly portraits up to his latest phase which may be described as the New Classicism. Four pictures stand out in my memory: a Girls Bathing; a Virgin and Child; a Three Graces; a Venus; revealing a wonderful feeling for form. Wachsman seems to have left all the ugly tendencies of early youth behind him and has emerged into a direct expression of pure beauty. He is the most significant young artist from this group. Much of the other work was immature, but on the whole it was an interesting exhibition of young Czech tendencies.
New Groups
There are two groups of young literary people here in Czecho-Slovakia: "Devětsil" in Prague and the "Literary Group" of Brno (the Manchester of Czecho-Slovakia).
