VICTOR 
MINDELEFF’S 
PAINTINGS 
BY 
LEILA 
MECHLIN 
HERE is in Mr. Victor 
Mindeleff’s paintings a 
marked individuality which 
sets them apart from the mass 
of current productions and 
makes them worthy of special 
consideration. They are at 
the same time pictorial and 
decorative; naturalistic and 
conventional; broad in treat¬ 
ment and fine in finish. Oc¬ 
cupying a middle ground 
between the ancient art of the 
East and the modern art of 
the West, they possess dis¬ 
tinctly positive qualities and 
will be found to sacrifice 
neither force nor freshness to 
neutrality. 
We have many acceptable 
painters to-day, but exceed¬ 
ingly few with a new mes¬ 
sage. There are brilliant 
technicians and clever inter¬ 
preters, but almost no inno¬ 
vators. The unrest of the 
present century is continually 
demanding something novel, but originality eludes 
deliberate intention and, becoming studied, must 
cease to exist. 
We have “Im¬ 
pressionists ” 
and “ Realists,” 
not because cer¬ 
tain painters 
have striven to 
reproduce pic¬ 
tures unlike 
those of their 
colleagues, but 
rather because 
they possessed 
diverse visions 
and looked 
upon the world 
with dissimilar 
sight. Tech¬ 
nique and com¬ 
position are 
within each in¬ 
terpreter’s con¬ 
trol, but the 
individuality which separates 
one man’s work from another’s 
is as inherent and spontane¬ 
ous as the bodily functions. 
To be worthy a work must be 
genuine; and this it can only 
be through an expression of 
inward truth. 
“I see precisely what your 
aim has been,” a fellow 
painter said to Mr. Mindel- 
eff not long ago. “You have 
striven for Japanesque sim¬ 
plicity, while subordinating 
naturalistic treatment to deco¬ 
rative effect.” And to some 
extent he was right; but so 
involuntary and spontaneous 
had been the process of rea¬ 
soning that the immediate 
reply was, “No, I am afraid 
that I simply painted what I 
saw, in the way I felt it should 
be, thinking that I was tran¬ 
scribing facts. ” It is this that 
makes Mr. Mindeleff’s work 
both potent and significant. 
Because the work is primarily spontaneous is not 
to say, however, that it is altogether unstudied. 
Though one 
may arrive at a 
correct conclu¬ 
sion without a 
knowledge of 
the mental pro¬ 
cess it is not 
needful to per¬ 
sist in intellec¬ 
tual ignorance. 
The advice 
given by a fa¬ 
mous teacher to 
his pupils was, 
“Learn all the 
academic rules 
you can and 
forget them;” 
but it is equally 
true that intui¬ 
tive perception 
can only be 
pe rmanently 
PETUNIAS 
A CHRISTMAS MOTIF 
9 
