Life — April 17, 1913 — page 14: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

“LUPE E « Ballad of Dead Masters AT THE INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION HERE are the Masters we used to know— Titian and Rembrandt and Raphael? Holbein and Michael Angelo? Luini, Da Vinci, Van Dyck as well? Were we blinded beneath their spell, That we thought they had come to stay— Titian and Rembrandt and Raphael? Where is the Art of Yesterday? * Mystery" “ What is that to the Cubist’s view?” Mystery dwells with us still, God wot! To Duchamp’s canvases where's the clue? Form they may have, and may be not. What is that to the Cubist’s view? Beauty? Color and line? Go to! Does Picabia paint that way? False ideals with which we're through! Where is the Art of Yesterday? Could Velasquez a Matisse paint? Rubens, a fair Picasso dame? Where is the della Robbia saint “ Archipanko now wears the bay " Brancusi’s Pogany would not shame? Donatello is lost to fame; Archipanko now wears the bay; Somehow nothing is quite the same— Where is the Art of Yesterday? Nay, disturb not the Ancients’ Swoon! Slumber is sweet to such as they. Oh, that our dreams were like theirs, immune— Safe from Art as it is To-day! "As it is today" M. M. Lyall. * A fair Picasso dame” The Cabaret P to recent times the ordinary metropolitan res- taurant during the evening afforded but a lim- ited opportunity for extensive noise, there being only the clatter of plates, the refined and intellectual conversation of the guests and the tintinnabulations of the union orchestra. It was felt that something ought to be done about this. So the police were called in, and doubtless at their sug- gestion the cabaret was installed. The idea of the cabaret is perfectly simple. When you are tired of your simple home life, and of repeating family prayers and reading aloud to the little ones from the when- to-tell-the-parents column of the Ladies’ Home Journal, you gather your little brood together and, leaving them to the care of the paid nurse who presides over your destinies, you steal forth softly into the night and enter the cabaret zone. Seating yourself nonchalantly at a table, just as if you had been in the habit of looking at the world all your life through the small end of a telescope, you order about eighty dollars’ worth of wine, incidentally including a small amount of food, , and wait for developments. These begin to come in the shape of several professional ladies and gentlemen, who walk about the aisles in a singularly familiar manner, singing to themselves, turning somersaults, and doing other things that would seem strange in your own home, but which you accept with complacency coming from total strangers. There is by this time so much noise that if your wife telephoned for you you couldn't hear her. The cabaret show was not designed for amusement, but to add to the noise, and to increase the difficulty of using your mind. It has come in with the turkey trot, and will Probably go out with the advent of some new and hitherto undiscovered noise that will drown it out. comicbooks.com