John Quinn: The New York ‘Stein’

I do not think that the Change is so much in the Pictures as in the Opinions of the Public.
—William Blake¹

NOW THAT THE TERM “avant-garde” in relation to current art has almost as much impact as the word “natural” on a box of corn flakes, one must look with a certain knowing nostalgia to the period from 1900 to the Depression, when in regard to art it still had something of its original military and political connotations. At that time a very small group of American collectors, through a combination of taste, foresight and buying power, gave their patronage to a small group of artists working

print May 1978

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska: The Process of Discovery

I have heard Brancusi: la sculpture n’est pas pour les jeunes hommes. Brancusi also said that Gaudier was a young chap who had an enormous amount of talent, and might have done something had he lived.
Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur¹

Brancusi was giving up the facile success of representative sculpture about the time Gaudier was giving up his baby bottle; . . . he has had time to make statues, where Gaudier had time only to make sketches; Gaudier had purged himself of every kind of rhetoric he had noticed; Brancusi has detected more kinds of rhetoric and continued the process of purgation.
Ezra