a Chinese stone-cutter, who knew how to handle rock-crystal and amethyst—as becoming as a Charvet cravat. There is a difference between the audacity of such searches and the patented processes of the professional stylists. In the web of a Klee a spiritual impetus spins for itself its curious cocoons, not to invent an architecture, but to shelter the spirit somehow. The housing problem is great. A puppet can become articulate, a cipher puppet from Borneo, or some scrawled junk of negro origin. And any one of the hundreds and thousands of forms which impress themselves upon the retina of the musically sensitive can join in fashioning the cocoons; also the wish to avoid making a bourgeois gold-brick; also the exaggerated hatred for all patents and repetitions; also the facile smile at the nonsense which is shattering Europe; also the caricature from the children's primer. In his book on Klee, Hausenstein describes the psyche of his hero thus: "How good that nothing exists, for now everything can be invented." This is genuine Berlin. Nowhere so much as in Germany does art have the right to hunt for beginnings. It is only as an end that Cubism is a shameless imposition. Its memento mori cannot be overlooked. It is the second or third invasion of exact speculation into art. In Germany we have experienced in our midst the invasion of the engineer into architecture, and the fear was not far off that the same locality might favour an operation on painting and the plastic arts. If the amputation leaves the sound parts intact, if it confines itself to organs which to-day, at least with us, can no longer be nourished, the invasion can be of use. We do not lack artists who are defending themselves against too extensive amputations. First of all they want to do their own cutting, and not allow themselves to undergo vivisection by some academic postulate. These voluntary surgeons—Karl Hofer and Max Beckmann, besides Kokoschka—are standing to-day in the foreground. Beckmann has gone through his Berlin. Here before the war, at the time of Berlin's most vigorous flourishing, he made sensational hits with large ingeniously painted pictures, evidences of the little chastened requirements of that Germanicism. The war turned him into a bitter singer. He had already made use of the social motifs of the demagogue. Now the rhetoric vanished, and the question of mechanization was gone into. Tormented mankind found its symbol. Nothing which painted with hand-me-down gestures the monumental sorrow of defeat: no
