But having one’s portrait merely _painted_ isn’t being done any more. The thing to do now is to lease a sculptor, and have him do a simple little portrait in marble, and call it “Mrs. ...--a Mood.” Prospective sitters for modernist busts should remember never to show surprise at the finished product. Never behave like the lady in the sketch; remember that only novices faint on seeing the completed masterpiece. The thing to do is to clasp the hands, gaze yearningly at the ceiling and murmur in passionate undertones, “It is wonderful--but wonderful! The feeling, the soul, the ego--how could you know?”
If you want to go that far, you can have your portrait done by one of the cubist sculptors, who are causing such a furor--among themselves. Just ask the first sculptor you meet at dinner if he won’t do a bust of you; he is sure to be a cubist. He will only be too glad to oblige with a charming trifle, looking rather like an egg after a hard Easter, and to name it “Arrangement: Mrs. B.”
But the sculpture of the young Roumanian refugee artiste, now so plentifully in our midst, is the very farthest one can get in modern portraiture. The gifted sculptress specializes in soul portraits. Naturally, every woman loves to have a little statue of her soul, somewhere around the house. The completed statue, always in the nude, bears the title “My Soul, in Passing: Nocturne.”
In case you haven’t decided just which school you want to employ in creating your portrait, here is a cross-section of our artistic Bohemia. It is a most representative group of sculptors at their recent notable dinner. The noble spirit, at the extreme right is Henri Pryzmytioff, the Post-Futurist Sculptor delivering a long and most impassioned talk on “The Sculpture of Day After To-morrow--and Why.”
Everyone has a pet superstition, and pretty Madeleine Templeton’s is that if a girl sleeps on her love-letters she is sure to dream of him who is to be her true, true love. Unfortunately, Madeleine has so many tender missives from so many true loves that she is positively uncomfortable and can not sleep at all. She has tried counting her fingers, counting her sheep and counting her admirers, but all is in vain. She is now desperately wondering if she ought to try the modern society method of marrying her true loves, one by one, until the right husband finally turns up.