Modern Painting, Its Tendency and Meaning
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Title: Modern Painting, Its Tendency and Meaning
Author: Willard Huntington Wright
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Language: English
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[Illustration: _Courtesy Worcester Art Museum_
FEMME ACCROUPIE by GAUGUIN]
_Modern Painting_
_Its Tendency and Meaning_
_By_
_Willard Huntington Wright_
_New York
Dodd, Mead and Company
1922_
COPYRIGHT, 1915
BY JOHN LANE COMPANY
THE PLIMPTON PRESS . NORWOOD . MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
FOREWORD
That beneath all great art there has been a definite animating purpose,
a single and profound desire to reach a specific goal, has been but
vaguely sensed by the general public and by the great majority of
critics. And there are, I believe, but very few persons not directly and
seriously concerned with the production of pictures, who realise that
this animating purpose has for its aim the solution of the profoundest
problems of the creative will, that it is rooted deeply in the aesthetic
consciousness, and that its evolution marks one of the most complex
phases of human psychology. The habit of approaching a work of art from
the naif standpoint of one's personal temperament or taste and of
judging it haphazardly by its individual appeal, irrespective of its
inherent aesthetic merit, is so strongly implanted in the average
spectator, that any attempt to define the principles of form and
organisation underlying the eternal values of art is looked upon as an
act of gratuitous pedantry. But such principles exist, and if we are to
judge works of art accurately and consistently these principles must be
mastered. Otherwise we are without a standard, and all our opinions are
but the outgrowth of the chaos of our moods.
Any attempt to democratise art results only in the lowering of the
artistic standard. Art cannot be taught; and a true appreciation of it
cannot grow up without a complete understanding of the aesthetic laws
governing it. Those qualities in painting by which it is ordinarily
judged are for the most part irrelevancies from the standpoint of pure
aesthetics. They have as little to do with a picture's infixed greatness
as the punctuation in Faust or the words of the Hymn to Joy in the Ninth
Symphony. Small wonder that modern art has become a copious
fountain-head of abuse and laughter; for modern art tends toward the
elimination of all those accretions so beloved by the
general--literature, drama, sentiment, symbolism, anecdote, prettiness
and photographic realism.
This book inquires first into the function and psychology of all great
art, and endeavours to define those elements which make for genuine
worth in painting. Next it attempts to explain both the basic and
superficial differences between "ancient" and "modern" art and to point
out, as minutely as space will permit, the superiority of the new
methods over the old. By this exposition an effort is made to indicate
the _raison d'etre_ of the modern procedure. After that, modern painters
are taken up in the order of their importance to the evolution of
painting during the last hundred years. I have tried to answer the
following questions: What men and movements mark the milestones in the
development of the new idea? What have been the motivating forces of
each of these schools? To what extent are their innovations significant:
what ones touch organically on the vital problems of aesthetics; and what
was their influence on the men who came later? Out of what did the
individual men spring; what forces and circumstances came together to
make their existence possible? What were their aims, and what were their
actual achievements? What relation did they bear to one another, and in
what way did they advance on one another? Where has modern art led, and
what inspirational possibilities lie before it?
Before setting out to solve these problems, all of which have their
roots in the very organisms of the science of aesthetics, I have posed a
definite _rationale_ of valuation. My principles are based on the
quickening ideals of all great art, and, if properly understood, I
believe, they will answer every question which arises in the intelligent
spectator when he stands before a piece of visual art, be it a Byzantine
mosaic, a complicated organisation by Rubens, a linear arrangement by
Picasso or an utterly worthless anecdote in paint by an English
academician. Necessarily preoccupied with the application of my critical
standard, I have had but little time and space to devote to its
elucidation. Yet I have striven in this indirect process of statement to
make my fundamental postulate sufficiently clear to enable the reader to
recognise its truth and unity. Two years ago when I crowded my
hypothesis into 7000 words in the _Forum_, and early last winter when I
stated it in even briefer space in the _New Age_, I found that, although
it took a new and difficult stand, there were many who grasped its
essentials. Therefore I feel myself entitled to hope that in its present
form it will be comprehensible even to those whose minds are not
trained in the complexities of aesthetic research.
In stripping art of its intriguing charm and its soothing vagueness it
is not my intention to do away with its power to delight. To the
contrary, I believe that only by relieving painting of its dead cargo of
literature, archaeology and illustration can it be made to function
freely. Painting should be as pure an art as music, and the struggles of
all great painters have been toward that goal. Its medium--colour--is as
elemental as sound, and when properly presented (with the same
scientific exactness as the harmonies of the tone-gamut) it is fully as
capable of engendering aesthetic emotion as is music. Our delight in
music, no matter how primitive, is not dependent on an imitation of
natural sounds. Music's pleasurable significance is primarily
intellectual. So can painting, by its power to create emotion and not
mere sensation, provoke deep aesthetic feeling of a far greater intensity
than the delight derived from transcription and drama. Modern painting
strives toward the heightening of emotional ecstasy; and my _esthetique_
is intended to pave the way for an appreciation of art which will make
possible the reception of that ecstasy. With this object ever in view I
have weighed the painting of the last century, and have judged it solely
by its ability or inability to call forth a profound aesthetic emotion.
Almost any art can arouse pleasing sentiments. Only great art can give
us intellectual rapture.
W. H. W.
Paris, 1915
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. ANCIENT AND MODERN ART 17
II. PRECURSORS OF THE NEW ERA 34
III. EDOUARD MANET 64
IV. THE EARLY IMPRESSIONISTS 83
V. AUGUSTE RENOIR 107
VI. PAUL CEZANNE 129
VII. THE NEO-IMPRESSIONISTS 164
VIII. GAUGUIN AND THE PONT-AVEN SCHOOL 187
IX. DEGAS AND HIS CIRCLE 207
X. HENRI-MATISSE 222
XI. PICASSO AND CUBISM 237
XII. FUTURISM 263
XIII. SYNCHROMISM 277
XIV. THE LESSER MODERNS 305
XV. CONCLUSION 327
INDEX 343
REPRODUCTIONS
Femme Accroupie (Gauguin) _Frontispiece_
Les Femmes d'Alger dans Leur Appartement (Delacroix) _Facing page_ 38
L'Enterrement a Ornans (Courbet) 54
Le Bain (Daumier) 60
Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe (Manet) 78
Waterloo Bridge (Monet) 98
Paysage (Guillaumin) 104
Le Dejeuner des Canotiers (Renoir) 114
Baigneuses, 1885 (Renoir) 126
Baigneuses, 1902 (Renoir) 126
Baigneuses (Cezanne) 138
Pommes sur une Table (Cezanne) 156
Les Tours Vertes a la Rochelle (Signac) 174
Un Dimanche a la Grande-Jatte (Seurat) 180
Portrait de l'Artiste (Van Gogh) 184
Deux Tahitiens (Gauguin) 204
Danseuses a Leur Toilette (Degas) 212
Baigneuses (Henri-Matisse) 226
Portrait de Famille (Henri-Matisse) 234
Femme a la Mandoline (Picasso) 246
Fumeur et Paysage (Leger) 256
Dynamisme d'une Auto (Russolo) 268
Hieroglyphe Dynamique du Bal Tabarin (Severini) 274
Synchromie Cosmique (Morgan Russell) 294
Composition No. 2 (Kandinsky) 310
Le Jardin (Bonnard) 318
_Modern Painting_
I
ANCIENT AND MODERN ART
Throughout the entire history of the fine arts, no period of aesthetic
innovation and endeavour has suffered from public malignity, ridicule
and ignorance as has painting during the last century. The reasons for
this are many and, to the serious student of art history, obvious. The
change between the old and the new order came swiftly and precipitously,
like a cataclysm in the serenity of a summer night. The classic painters
of the first half of the nineteenth century, such as David, Ingres, Gros
and Gerard, were busy with their rehabilitation of ancient traditions,
when without warning, save for the pale heresies of Constable, a new and
rigorous regime was ushered in. It was Turner, Delacroix, Courbet and
Daumier who entered the sacred temple, tore down the pillars which had
supported it for centuries, and brought the entire structure of
established values crashing down about them. They survived the
_debacle_, and when eventually they laid aside their brushes for all
time it was with the unassailable knowledge that they had accomplished
the greatest and most significant metamorphosis in the history of any
art.
But even these hardy anarchists of the new order little dreamed of the
extremes to which their heresies would lead. So precipitous and complex
has been the evolution of modern painting that most of the most
revolutionary moderns have failed to keep mental step with its
developments and divagations. During the past few years new modes and
manners in art have sprung up with fungus-like rapidity. "Movements" and
"schools" have followed one another with astounding pertinacity, each
claiming that finality of expression which is the aim of all seekers for
truth. And, with but few exceptions, the men who have instigated these
innovations have been animated by a serious purpose--that of mastering
the problem of aesthetic organisation and of circumscribing the one means
for obtaining ultimate and indestructible results. But the problems of
art, like those of life itself, are in the main unsolvable, and art must
ever be an infinite search for the intractable. Form in painting, like
the eternal readjustments and equilibria of life, is but an
approximation to stability. The forces in all art are the forces of
life, co-ordinated and organised. No plastic form can exist without
rhythm: not rhythm in the superficial harmonic sense, but the rhythm
which underlies the great fluctuating and equalising forces of material
existence. Such rhythm is symmetry in movement. On it all form, both in
art and life, is founded.
Form in its artistic sense has four interpretations. First, it exhibits
itself as shallow imitation of the surface aspects of nature, as in the
work of such men as Sargent, Sorolla and Simon. Secondly, it contains
qualities of solidity and competent construction such are as found in
the paintings of Velazquez, Hogarth and Degas. Thirdly, it is a
consummate portrayal of objects into which arbitrary arrangement has
been introduced for the accentuation of volume. Raphael, Poussin and
Goya exemplify this expression of it. Last, form reveals itself, not as
an objective thing, but as an abstract phenomenon capable of giving the
sensation of palpability. All great art falls under this final
interpretation. But form, to express itself aesthetically, must be
composed; and here we touch the controlling basis of all
art:--organisation. Organisation is the use put to form for the
production of rhythm. The first step in this process is the construction
of line, line being the direction taken by one or more forms. In purely
decorative rhythm the lines flow harmoniously from side to side and from
top to bottom on a given surface. In the greatest art the lines are bent
forward and backward as well as laterally so that, by their orientation
in depth, an impression of profundity is added to that of height and
breadth. Thus the simple image of decoration is destroyed, and a
microcosmos is created in its place. Rhythm then becomes the
inevitable adjustment of approaching and receding lines, so that they
will reproduce the placements and displacements to be found in the human
body when in motion.
To understand, and hence fully to appreciate, a painting, we must be
able to recognise its inherent qualities by the process of intellectual
reasoning. By this is not implied mechanical or scientific observation.
Were this necessary, art would resolve itself into a provable theory and
would produce in us only such mental pleasure as we feel before a
perfect piece of intricate machinery. But once we comprehend those
constitutional qualities which pervade all great works of art, plastic
and graphic, the sensuous emotion will follow so rapidly as to give the
effect of spontaneity. This process of conscious observation in time
becomes automatic and exerts itself on every work of art we inspect.
Once adjusted to an assimilation of the rhythmic compositions of El
Greco and Rubens, we have become susceptible to the tactile sensation of
form in all painting. And this subjective emotion is keener than the
superficial sensation aroused by the prettiness of design, the narrative
of subject-matter, or the quasi-realities of transcription. More and
more as we proximate to a true understanding of the principles of art,
shall we react to those deeper and larger qualities in a painting which
are not to be found in its documentary and technical side. Also our
concern with the transient sentiments engendered by a picture's external
aspects will become less and less significant. Technique, dramatic
feeling, subject, and even accuracy of drawing, will be relegated to the
subsidiary and comparatively unimportant position they hold in relation
to a painting's _aesthetic purpose_.
The lack of comprehension--and consequently the ridicule--which has met
the efforts of modern painters, is attributable not alone to a
misunderstanding of their seemingly for extravagant and eccentric
mannerisms, but to an ignorance of the basic postulates of all great art
both ancient and modern. Proof of this is afforded by the constant
statements of preference for the least effectual of older painters over
the greatest of the moderns. These preferences, if they are symptomatic
of aught save the mere habit of a mind immersed in tradition, indicate
an immaturity of artistic judgment which places prettiness above beauty,
and sentimentality and documentary interest above subjectivity of
emotion. The fallacies of such judgment can best be indicated by a
parallel consideration of painters widely separated as to merit, but in
whom these different qualities are found. For instance, the prettiness
of Reynolds, Greuze and Murillo is as marked as the prettiness of
Titian, Giorgione and Renoir. The latter are by far the greater artists;
yet, had we no other critical standard save that of charm, the
difference between them and the others would be indistinguishable.
Zuloaga, Whistler, Botticelli and Boecklin are as inspirational of
sentiment as Tintoretto, Corot, Raphael and Poussin; but by no authentic
criterion are they as great painters. Again, were drama and simple
narrative aesthetic considerations, Regnault, Brangwyn, and Antonino
Molineri would rank with Valerio Castello, Rubens and Ribera.
In one's failure to distinguish between the apparent and the organic
purposes of art lies the greatest obstacle to an appreciation of what
has come to be called modern painting. The truths of modern art are no
different from those of ancient art. A Cezanne landscape is not
dissimilar in aim to an El Greco. The one is merely more advanced as to
methods than the other. Nor do the canvases of the most ultra-modern
schools strive toward an aesthetic manifestation radically unlike that
aspired to in Michelangelo's Slaves. Serious modern art, despite its
often formidable and bizarre appearance, is only a striving to
rehabilitate the natural and unalterable principles of rhythmic form to
be found in the old masters, and to translate them into relative and
more comprehensive terms. We have the same animating ideal in the
pictures of Giotto and Matisse, Rembrandt and Renoir, Botticelli and
Gauguin, Watteau and Picasso, Poussin and Friesz, Raphael and Severini.
The later men differ from their antecedents in that they apply new and
more vital methods to their work. Modern art is the logical and natural
outgrowth of ancient art; it is the art of yesterday heightened and
intensified as the result of systematic and painstaking experimentation
in the media of expression.
The search for composition--that is, for perfectly poised form in three
dimensions--has been the impelling dictate of all great art. Giotto, El
Greco, Masaccio, Tintoretto and Rubens, the greatest of all the old
painters, strove continually to attain form as an abstract emotional
force. With them the organisation of volumes came first. The picture was
composed as to line. Out of this grew the subject-matter--a demonstration
_a posteriori_. The human figure and the recognisable natural object
were only auxiliaries, never the sought-for result. In all this they
were inherently modern, as that word should be understood; for the new
conception of art strives more and more for the emotion rather than the
appearance of reality. The objects, whether arbitrary or photographic,
which an artist uses in a picture are only the material through which
plastic form finds expression. They are the means, not the end. If in
the works of truly significant art there is a dramatic, narrative or
illustrative interest, it will be found to be the incidental and not the
important concomitant of the picture.
Therefore it is not remarkable that, with the introduction of new
methods, the illustrative side of painting should tend toward
minimisation. The elimination of all the superfluities from art is but a
part of the striving toward defecation. Since the true test of painting
lies in its subjective power, modern artists have sought to divorce
their work from all considerations other than those directly allied to
its primary function. This process of separation advanced hand in hand
with the evolution of new methods. First it took the form of the
distortion of natural objects. The accidental shape of trees, hills,
houses and even human figures was altered in order to draw them into the
exact form demanded by the picture's composition. Gradually, by the
constant practice of this falsification, objects became almost
unrecognisable. In the end the illustrative obstacle was entirely done
away with. This was the logical outcome of the sterilising modern
process. To judge a picture competently, one must not consider it as a
mere depiction of life or as an anecdote: one must bring to it an
intelligence capable of grasping a complicated counterpoint. The
attitude of even such men as Celesti, Zanchi, Padovanino and Bononi is
never that of an illustrator, in no matter how sublimated a sense, but
of a composer whose aim is to create a polymorphic conception with the
recognisable materials at hand.
Were art to be judged from the pictorial and realistic viewpoint we
might find many meticulous craftsmen of as high an objective efficiency
as were the men who stood at the apex of genuine artistic worth--that is,
craftsmen who arrived at as close and exact a transcription of nature,
who interpreted current moods and mental aspects as accurately, and who
set forth superficial emotions as dramatically. Velazquez's Philip IV,
Titian's Emperor Charles V, Holbein's The Ambassadors, Guardi's The
Grand Canal--Venice, Mantegna's The Dead Christ and Duerer's Four Naked
Women reproduce their subjects with as much painstaking exactitude as do
El Greco's The Resurrection of Christ, Giotto's Descent from the Cross,
Masaccio's Saint Peter Baptising the Pagans, Tintoretto's The Miracle of
Saint Mark, Michelangelo's Creation of the Sun and Moon, and Rubens's
The Earl and Countess of Arundel. But these latter pictures are
important for other than pictorial reasons. Primarily they are
organisations, and as such they are of aesthetic value. Only secondarily
are they to be appraised as representations of natural objects. In the
pictures of the former list there is no synthetic co-ordination of
tactile forms. Such paintings represent merely "subject-matter" treated
capably and effectively. As sheer painting from the artisan's standpoint
they are among the finest examples of technical dexterity in art
history. But as contributions to the development of a pure art form they
are valueless.
In stating that the moderns have changed the quality and not the nature
of art, there is no implication that in many instances the great men of
the past, even with limited means, have not surpassed in artistic
achievement the men of today who have at hand more extensive means.
Great organisers of plastic form have, because of their tremendous
power, done with small means more masterly work than lesser men with
large means. For instance, Goya as an artist surpasses Manet, and
Rembrandt transcends Daumier. This principle holds true in all the arts.
Balzac, ignorant of modern literary methods, is greater than George
Moore, a master of modern means. And Beethoven still remains the
colossal figure in music, despite the vastly increased modern scope of
Richard Strauss's methods. Methods are useless without the creative
will. But granting this point (which unconsciously is the stumbling
block of nearly all modern art critics), new and fuller means, even in
the hands of inferior men, are not the proper subject for ridicule.
It must not be forgotten that the division between old and modern art is
not an equal one. Modern art began with Delacroix less than a hundred
years ago, while art up to that time had many centuries in which to
perfect the possibilities of its resources. The new methods are so young
that painters have not had time to acquire that mastery of material
without which the highest achievement is impossible. Even in the most
praiseworthy modern art we are conscious of that intellectual striving
in the handling of new tools which is the appanage of immaturity.
Renoir, the greatest exponent of Impressionistic means, found his
artistic stride only in his old age, after a long and arduous life of
study and experimenting. His canvases since 1905 are the first in which
we feel the fluency and power which come only after a slow and sedulous
process of osmosis. Compare, for instance, his early and popular Le
Moulin de la Galette with his later portraits, such as Madame T. et Son
Fils and La Fillette a l'Orange, and his growth is at once apparent.
The evolution of means is answerable to the same laws as the
_progressus_ in any other line of human endeavour. The greatest artists
are always culminations of long lines of experimentations. In this they
are eclectic. The organisation of observation is in itself too absorbing
a labour to permit of a free exercise of the will to power. The blinding
burst of genius at the time of the Renaissance was the breaking forth of
the accrued power of generations. Modern art, having no tradition of
means, has sapped and dispersed the vitality of its exponents by
imposing upon them the necessity for empirical research. It is for this
reason that we have no men in modern art who approximate as closely to
perfection as did many of the older painters. But had Rubens, with his
colossal vision, had access to modern methods his work would have been
more powerful in its intensity and more far-reaching in its scope.
However, in the brief period of modern art two decided epochs have been
brought to a close through this accumulation and eruption of
experimental activities in individuals. Cezanne brought to a focus the
divergent rays of his predecessors and incorporated into his canvases
both the aspirations and achievements of the art which had preceded
him. This would have been impossible had he been born--even with an
equally great talent--fifty years before. And a more recent school of
art, by making use of the achievements of both Cezanne and Michelangelo,
and by adding to them new discoveries in the dynamics of colour, has
opened up a new vista of possibilities in the expressing of form. This
step also would have been impossible without Cezanne and the men who
came before and after him. Once these new modes, which are indicative of
modern art, become understood and pass into the common property of the
younger men, we shall have achievement which will be as complete as the
masterpieces of old, and which will, in addition, be more poignant.
Although the methods of the older painters were more restricted than
those of the moderns, the actual materials at their disposal were fully
as extended as ours of today. But knowledge concerning them was
incomplete. As a consequence, all artists antecedent to Delacroix found
expression only in those qualities which are susceptible of reproduction
in black and white. In many cases the sacrifice of colour enhances the
intrinsic merit of such reproductions, for often the characteristics of
the different colours oppose the purposes of a picture's planes. Today
we know that certain colours are opaque, others transparent; some
approach the eye, others recede. But the ancients were ignorant of these
things, and their canvases contained many contradictions: there was a
continuous warring between linear composition and colour values. They
painted solids violet, and transpicuous planes yellow--thereby
unconsciously defeating their own ends, for violet is limpid, and yellow
tangible. In one-tone reproductions such inconsistencies are eliminated,
and the signification of the picture thereby clarified. It was Rubens
who embodied the defined attributes of ancient art in their highest
degree of pliability, and who carried the impulse toward creation to a
point of complexity unattained by any other of the older men. In him we
see the culmination of the evolution of linear development of light and
dark. From his time to the accession of the moderns the ability to
organise was on the decrease. There was a weakening of perception, a
decline of the aesthetic faculty. The chaotic condition of this period
was like the darkness which always broods over the world before some
cleansing force sweeps it clean and ushers in a new and greater cycle.
The period of advancement of these old methods extends from prehistoric
times to the beginning of the nineteenth century. On the walls of the
caverns in Altamira and the Dordogne are drawings of mammoths, horses
and bison in which, despite the absence of details, the actual approach
to nature is at times more sure and masterly than in the paintings of
such highly cultured men as Botticelli and Pisanello. The action in some
of them is pronounced; and the vision, while simple, is that of men
conscious of a need for compactness and balance. Here the art is simply
one of outline, heavy and prominent at times, light and almost
indistinguishable at others; but this grading of line was the result of
a deeper cause than a tool slipping or refusing to mark. It was the
consequence of a need for rhythm which could be obtained only by the
accentuation of parts. The drawings were generally single figures, and
rarely were more than two conceived as an inseparable design. Later, the
early primitives used symmetrical groupings for the same purpose of
interior decorating. Then came simple balance, the shifting and disguise
of symmetry, and with it a nearer approach to the _imprevu_ of nature.
This style was employed for many generations until the great step was
taken which brought about the Renaissance. The sequential aspect of line
appeared, permitting of rhythm and demanding organisation. Cimabue and
Giotto were the most prominent exponents of this advance. From that time
forward the emotion derived from actual form was looked upon by artists
as a necessary adjunct to a picture. With this attitude came the
aristocracy of vision and the abrogation of painting as mere exalted
craftsmanship.
After that the evolution of art was rapid. In the contemplation of
solidly and justly painted figures the artist began to extend his mind
into space and to use rhythm of line that he might express himself in
depth as well as surfacely. Thus he preconised organisation in three
dimensions, and by so doing opened the door on an infinity of aesthetic
ramifications. From the beginning, tone balance--that is, the agreeable
distribution of blacks, whites and greys--had gone forward with the
development of line, so that at the advent of depth in painting the
arrangement of tones became the medium through which all the other
qualities were made manifest.
In the strict sense, the art of painting up to a hundred years ago had
been only drawing. Colour was used only for ornamental or dramatic
purposes. After the first simple copying of nature's tints in a wholly
restricted manner, the use of colour advanced but little. It progressed
toward harmony, but its dramatic possibilities were only dimly felt.
Consequently its primitive employment for the enhancement of the
decorative side of painting was adhered to. This was not because the
older painters were without the necessary pigments. Their colours in
many instances were brighter and more permanent than ours. But they were
satisfied with the effects obtained from black and white expression.
They looked upon colour as a delicacy, an accessory, something to be
taken as the gourmet takes dessert. Its true significance was thus
obscured beneath the artists' complacency. As great an artist as
Giorgione considered it from the conventional viewpoint, and never
attempted to deviate toward its profounder meanings. The old masters
filled their canvases with shadows and light without suspecting that
light itself is simply another name for colour.
The history of modern art is broadly the history of the development of
form by the means of colour--that is to say, modern art tends toward the
purification of painting. Colour is capable of producing all the effects
possible to black and white, and in addition of exciting an emotion more
acute. It was only with the advent of Delacroix, the first great modern,
that the dramatic qualities of colour were intelligently sensed. But
even with him the conception was so slight that the effects he attained
were but meagrely effective. After Delacroix further experiments in
colour led to the realistic translation of certain phases of nature. The
old static system of copying trees in green, shadows in black and skies
in blue did not, as was commonly believed, produce realism. While
superficially nature appeared in the colours indicated, a close
observation later revealed the fact that a green tree in any light
comprises a diversity of colours, that all sunlit skies have a residue
of yellow, and hence that shadows are violet rather than black. This
newly unearthed realism of light became the battle cry of the younger
men in the late decades of the nineteenth century, and reached
parturition in the movement erroneously called Impressionism, a word
philologically opposed to the thing it wished to elucidate. The ancients
had painted landscape as it appeared broadly at a first glance. The
Impressionists, being interested in nature as a manifestation in which
light plays the all-important part, transferred it bodily onto canvas
from that point of view.
Cezanne, looking into their habits more coolly, saw their restrictions.
While achieving all their atmospheric aims, he went deeper into the
mechanics of colour, and with this knowledge achieved form as well as
light. This was another step forward in the development of modern
methods. With him colour began to near its true and ultimate
significance as a functioning element. Later, with the aid of the
scientists, Chevreul, Bourgeois, Helmholtz and Rood, other artists made
various departures into the field of colour, but their enterprises were
failures. Then came Matisse who made improvements on the harmonic side
of colour. But because he ignored the profounder lessons of Cezanne he
succeeded only in the fabrication of a highly organised decorative art.
Not until the advent of the Synchromists, whose first public exhibition
took place in Munich in 1913, were any further crucial advances made.
These artists completed Cezanne in that they rationalised his dimly
foreshadowed precepts.
To understand the basic significance of painting it is necessary to
revise our method of judgment. As yet no aesthetician has recorded a
_rationale_ for art valuation. Taine put forth many illuminating
suggestions regarding the fundamentals of form, but the critics have
paid scant heed. Prejudice, personal taste, metaphysics and even the
predilections of sentiment, still govern the world's judgments and
appreciations. We are slaves to accuracy of delineation, to prettiness
of design, to the whole suite of material considerations which are
deputies to the organic and intellectual qualities of a work of art. It
is the common thing to find criticisms--ever from the highest
sources--which praise or condemn a picture according to the nearness of
its approach to the reality of its subject. Such observations are
confusing and irrelevant. Were realism the object of art, painting would
always be infinitely inferior to life--a mere simulacrum of our daily
existence, ever inadequate in its illusion. The moment we attach other
than purely aesthetic values to paintings--either ancient or modern--we are
confronted by so extensive and differentiated a set of tests that chaos
or error is unavoidable. In the end we shall find that our conclusions
have their premises, not in the work of art itself, but in personal and
extraneous considerations. A picture to be a great work of art need not
contain any recognisable objects. Provided it gives the sensation of
rhythmically balanced form in three dimensions, it will have
accomplished all that the greatest masters of art have ever striven for.
Once we divest ourselves of traditional integuments, modern painting
will straightway lose its mystery. Despite the many charlatans who
clothe their aberrations with its name, it is a sincere reaching forth
of the creative will to find a medium by which the highest emotions may
most perfectly be expressed. We have become too complex to enjoy the
simple theatre any longer. Our minds call for a more forceful emotion
than the simple imitation of life can give. We require problems,
inspirations, incentives to thought. The simple melody of many of the
old masters can no longer interest us because of its very simplicity. As
the complicated and organised forces of life become comprehensible to
us, we shall demand more and more that our analytic intelligences be
mirrored in our enjoyments.
II
PRECURSORS OF THE NEW ERA
The nineteenth century opened with French art in a precarious and
decadent condition. To appreciate the prodigious strides made by
Gericault and Delacroix, even by Gerard and Gros, one must consider the
rabid antagonism of the public toward all ornament and richness in
painting and toward all subject-matter which did not inspire thoughts of
inflexible simplicity. This attitude was attributable to the social
reaction against the excesses of the voluptuous Louis XV. Vien it was
who, suppressing the eroticism of Boucher, instigated the so-called
classic revival founded on Graeco-Roman ideals. The public became so
vehement in its praise of this hypocritical and austere art, that
Fragonard, that delicious painter of boudoirs, was dismissed as
indecent. Even the demure Greuze, who tried to rehabilitate himself by
making his art a vehicle for a series of parental sermons, died a
pauper. He too lacked the aridity requisite for popular taste. Chardin,
the Le Nains and Fouquet were set aside: they were considered too
trivial, too insufficiently archaeological. Watteau's canvases were
stoned by Regnault, Girodet and the other pupils of David. Lancret,
Pater, Debucourt, Olivier, Gravelot, La Tour, Nattier and others met
similar fates at the hands of the new classicists.
Such men as these could not find approbation in a public which demanded
only allegorical, political and economic art. But David met all its
requirements. He represented the antithesis of the sound freedom of the
French temperament; and forthwith became the Elija of the new
degeneracy. He apotheosised all that is false and decadent in art. But
the adulation of him was short-lived. The French imagination is too
fecund for only thorns. Ingres superseded him. This new idol, going to
the Greeks for inspiration, made David fluent and charming. He studied
the Italian primitives and simplified them with Byzantine and Raphaelic
addenda. He had a genuine instinct for silhouette entirely lacking in
his forerunner, and soon struck the first blow which marked the
disintegration of David's cult.
Gerard and Gros took a further step by loosening slightly Ingres's
drawing; and Gericault and Guerin completed the disruption of the David
tradition. Gericault's Radeau de la Meduse brought its young and highly
talented creator immediately into the public gaze, not only because of
its implied blasphemy in deviating from the _methode David_, but because
the tragedy of its subject was still fresh in the national mind. Was
this a clever device on the part of the painter to circumvent hostile
criticism by clothing his innovations with a sympathetic theme? Perhaps;
but the picture's value to us lies in that it foreshadowed the new idea
in art. It forced the gate which made easier Delacroix's entrance
several years later.
In retrospect the reaction against an established order appears simple,
but the world's innovators have required for their task an intellectual
courage amounting to rare heroism. Heretics are regarded as dangerous
madmen, and generally their only reward is the pleasure of revolt. The
credit for greatness falls on those later men who avail themselves of
the principles of past reactionary enterprise. So much of the energy of
pioneers is spent in combating hostile criticism and indifference, that
their fund of creative force is depleted. This was true in the case of
Delacroix. Like all the greater painters he was self-taught. The essence
of knowledge is untransmittable. True, he occasionally visited the
studio of Guerin, but his real education came from the Louvre where he
copied Veronese, Titian and Rubens. His insight was keen but not deep,
and at first he did little more than absorb the surface aspects of
others, though he did this with intelligence. Later, by devious steps
both forward and back, he became the bridge from the eighteenth century
to Impressionism, just as Cezanne became the stepping stone from
Impressionism to art's latest manifestations.
In 1822 Delacroix exposed his first canvas, Dante et Virgile aux Enfers,
one of the finest debut pictures ever recorded. Superficially it is his
most obvious influence of Rubens whom he deeply respected; and in it are
also discoverable the exaggerations and disproportions of Michelangelo.
Thiers lauded it, and so great was its popularity that the government
bought it for 2,000 francs. Rubens still held him firmly two years later
in the Massacre de Scio, although there were in the picture indubitable
indications of the advent of Venice. This picture was to be hung in the
famous _Salon_ of 1824, where Lawrence, Bonington, Fielding, and
Constable (who were to have such a great influence on his later work)
exposed. The Massacre de Scio was ready for shipment when, just before
the _vernissage_, Delacroix saw a canvas by Constable done in the
divisionistic method. At once he felt the necessity for colour
expression, and going home he entirely repainted his picture.
This was the turning-point in his art. He had admired the green in
Constable's landscape, and had spoken of it to the other. Constable
explained that the superiority of the green in his prairies was due to
the fact that he had composed it with a multitude of different greens.
Here Delacroix's keen perception got to work. In his Journal he wrote:
"What Constable says of the green of his prairies can be applied to all
the other tones as well." By this method, primitive as it seems today,
he beheld a way of augmenting the dramatic significance of his
conceptions. The next year, 1825, he went to London to study the English
painters at closer range. There he learned much from Bonington, as he
did from Constable, and in one of his letters he wrote: "Grey is the
enemy of all painting.... Let us banish from our palette all earth
colours." And later he forecasted the Impressionistic methods by
writing: "It is good not to let each brush stroke melt into the others;
they will appear uniform at a certain distance by the sympathetic law
which associates them. Colour obtained thus has more energy and
freshness. The more opposition in colour, the more brilliance."
Delacroix's intelligence, reconnoitring along these lines, formulated
other principles. Among many observations concerning colour, he wrote:
"If to a composition, interesting in its choice of subject, you add a
disposition of lines, which augments the impression, a chiaroscuro which
seizes the imagination, and a colour which is adapted to the characters,
it is then a harmony, and its combinations are so adapted that they
produce a unique song.... A conception, having become a composition,
must move in the _milieu_ of a colour peculiar to it. There seems to be
a particular tone belonging to some part of every picture which is a key
that governs all the other tones.... The art of the colourist seems to
be related in certain ways to mathematics and music." That he believed
in the exact science of colour is further attested to by the fact that
he made a dial on which noon represented red, six o'clock green, one
o'clock blue, seven o'clock orange--and so on through the hours with the
opposition of complementaries.
Evidences of these experimentations are dimly discerned in a number of
his minor canvases done between 1827 and the Revolution. In 1832, after
he had painted the admirable La Liberte Guidant le Peuple sur les
Barricades, he visited Morocco. Before this event his work had contained
many of the elements of sumptuousness and sensuality; but in this
eastern land his colour reached maturity. Studying the productions of
the native crafts in their relation to colour, he dreamed of making
pictures as variegated as rugs and vases. In this he was trespassing on
the precincts of Veronese who had made pictorial use of the products
of the Orient and of Africa. On his return he painted Les Femmes d'Alger
dans Leur Appartement. This picture, one of his best, embodies most of
his colour theories. In it we find cold shadows opposed to hot lights,
and the contiguous placing of complementaries.
[Illustration: LES FEMMES D'ALGER DANS LEUR APPARTEMENT by DELACROIX]
Delacroix looked upon himself as a colourist. But while his theories
were in the main sound they did not go far enough. They were important
only as a starting point. His colour is hardly noticeable today, and in
no wise does it sum up his artistic interest for us. Gauguin once said
that we get Delacroix's full significance in black-and-white
reproduction. This comes perilously near being true. Today his pictures
appear as devoid of brilliancy as those of the Venetians. Yet, when he
first exhibited, he was reproached for his raucous tones. The critics
called his Massacre de Scio the "massacre of painting," and added, "_il
court sur les toits_." His men and women, the shadows of whose flesh
were coloured with blues and greens, were stigmatised "corpses," and he
was accused of having used the morgue for his studio.
All this mattered little. Delacroix's real significance as an artist lay
in his drawing which was his greatest asset. What raised him above the
general run of painters, baroque and otherwise, was his slight talent
for composition. Often in his Journal he speaks of the "balance of
lines." He knew that with the masters of the Renaissance it was common
property, and that modern painting had lost it; and he strove to
reintroduce it into art. But he never got beyond the simplest synthesis
of the least compounded of Rubens's figure pieces. For instance, in the
Bataille de Taillebourg--an excellent example of his dramatic method--it
will be noted that the canvas opens at the bottom-centre to form a
triangle of struggling forms, and that in the breach thus made the
rearing charger looms white. The identical composition can be found in
La Justice, La Liberte, the Janissaires a l'Attaque, La Lutte de Jacob
avec l'Ange, the Enlevement de Rebecca and the Entree des Croises a
Jerusalem. In this last canvas, his most masterful, the triangle is
complicated by a curved line running inward from the centre. This
picture recalls, almost to every detail, Rubens's The Adoration of the
Wise Men of the East, in the Antwerp Museum. However, it marks a great
progress from the symmetricality of his _toile de debut_, and though in
it Rubens is consciously imitated--if not indeed plagiarised, Delacroix
gets nearer to the spirit of Veronese than to that of the Flemish
master.
Among the paintings wherein the simple, three-sided composition does not
appear, the most notable are his animal pictures (in which he
substituted the S design) and those canvases in which his momentary
admiration for others (as for Veronese in the Retour de Christophe
Colomb, and for the Dutch in Cromwell au Chateau de Windsor) made him
forget himself. Even this primitive comprehension of linear balance had
passed out of French painting with the death of Poussin, and its
reapparition in Delacroix is analogous to the impetus toward rhythm
which was given to the stiff Byzantine painting of Venice by Nicolo di
Pietro and Giovanni da Bologna in the fourteenth century.
In Rubens we find turbulent movement, as great as in life itself,
organised in such a way that all the emotions, exalted, depressive,
dramatic, are expressed. But in Delacroix there is merely co-ordinated
action. And this action, even in the busiest centres of his canvases, is
more suggestive of unrest than of movement. However, the real cause for
his failure to express a spirit as modern as Rubens's lay in his
inability to understand the opposition in rhythmic line-balance of three
dimensions which is to be found in even the slightest of Rubens's
canvases. His details are always interesting, but he never succeeded in
welding them into a sequacious and interrelated whole. His high gift of
invention was inadequate equipment for so difficult a feat. Compare
Rembrandt's exquisite bathing girl in the London National Gallery and
Delacroix's La Grece Expirant sur les Ruines de Missolonghi. In
technical treatment these two paintings are not unlike, but the
scattered feeling and lack of plastic concentration in the latter
emphasises the superior force of the Dutchman.
Delacroix's work fell between flat decoration and deep painting.
Although in his small drawings and details he exhibits a genuine feeling
for volume, as his Lion Dechirant un Cadavre shows, his constant
refinements of reasoning nearly always resulted in his form being
flattened out until it sometimes became commonplace. Simple balance of
line defined the limits of his ability for organisation. If he had
carried out in other pictures the compositional elements of his Pieta,
which had distinct movement, his work would have taken a higher place in
the history of art. In many canvases his seeming fullness of form is
only a richness of line--a richness, however, which had seldom been found
in painting since Masaccio. This voluptuousness in Delacroix (analogous
to Wagner's music) results from the balance of large dark and light
masses--the fullness of chiaroscuro. It is particularly appreciable in La
Justice de Trajan, La Captivite de Babylone, Repos (reminiscent of
Goya's La Maja Desnuda) and his animal compositions.
Delacroix's greatest deficiency lay in his inability to recognise the
difference between the inventive intelligence and the imaginative
instinct. Had he understood this he could have seen that his limitless
ambition was incommensurate with his comparatively small capabilities.
But his mind was not sufficiently open. In fact his viewpoint at times
was a petty one. Even his patriotism was chauvinistic. He was rabidly
anti-Teutonic and attempted to compress all the great masters of art
into the French mould. He inveighed against style in painting because
France had always been barren of it. He pretended to detest Wagner, his
musical prototype, and ignoring the latter's dramatic undulations,
criticised him severely for his methods. Beethoven was too long for
Delacroix, and Il Trovatore too complicated. However, he had a profound
admiration for Titian and Mozart; and in these preferences we have the
man's psychology. Both were great classicists, but both lacked that
genuine and magistral fullness which was the _propre_ of Beethoven and
Michelangelo.
Delacroix's thoughts were on deep things rather than deep in themselves.
Among the romanticists he was at home: all his life Byron and Walter
Scott provided him with themes. And though he had sufficient foresight
to see the hopeless trend of the painting of his day, and combated it,
he did not advance. His muse was the corpse of Venetian art. He was the
brake which put an end to the reactionary tendencies of art. His
discoveries did not reach fruition until Impressionism, twenty years
after his death.
In all his struggles destiny seemed to conspire to bring about his fame.
In 1824, the very year he brought colour into his painting, Gericault,
who gave promise of outstripping him, died. Constable and Turner came
forward with their achievements. David's influence had died out, and the
painter himself was an exile in Brussels. Fromentin tells us that
Gericault helped paint Delacroix's first canvas. Certain it is that
several of the great Englishmen painted some of his second. This, no
doubt, taught Delacroix much. In 1827 the government ordered Justinien
Composant les Institutes. All France rallied round his standard. He was
decorated by Louis Philippe; and at the age of thirty he was proclaimed
a great master by one of the leading critics of the day.
From the first he had had the backing of men respected as authorities.
But though they helped make his position tenable, they obfuscated his
true significance by their purely literary appreciations. Gautier,
Dumas, Baudelaire, Stendhal and Merimee--there was none whose temperament
was not either romantic or idealistic. They could not see that, though
he strove with them for modernity of expression, his language was
unmodern. However, Ernest Chesneau, Theophile Silvestre, Eugene Veron
and C. P. Landon have all given us side-lights on his methods, and, in
this, their expositions are of value.
But, though the men of letters did not understand him thoroughly,
several of his fellow painters recognised his eclecticism. Among them
was Thomas Couture who, in his highly instructive booklet, Methodes et
Entretiens d'Atelier, had the audacity to point out the painter's
selective habits. In the main his charge was just. Delacroix's first
canvas contains influences of both Rubens and Michelangelo. His second
picture echoes Rubens, the Venetians and Goya. Later came more prominent
evidences of Titian and Veronese. Delacroix was museum-bred. He absorbed
impressions avidly, and did his best work only after he had undergone an
intellectual experience. Had his art been truly expressive of all that
was within him, he would have been in turn--diluted, to be sure--a Giotto,
a Caravaggio, a Rubens, a Rembrandt. He felt the call of these men, but
instead of halting at appreciation, he tried to use them. But the old
masters, like the lords of the earth, are not amenable to high-handed
demands.
The diversity of his pursuits, which sprang from a desire to compete
with Leonardo da Vinci, smacks of the dilettante. His great mistake was
that he did not separate his capabilities from his desires. Had he done
so he would have produced small figure pieces of gem-like richness and
voluminous composition. Enthusiasm is not the proper equipment for
extended labour. It burns out too soon, and is kept alive only by quick
and brilliant results. For this reason his pictures are viewed to better
effect framed and in galleries than as mural decorations. In trying to
paint monumental subjects on extensive canvases he lost that spirit of
organisation which would have been his on more limited surfaces. One of
his finest expositions of colour, La Lutte de Jacob avec l'Ange, in a
chapel at Saint Sulpice, is ineffective because its surface is too large
for his treatment of the theme. Delacroix in reality was a painter of
still-life in the broad meaning of the term, just as Rembrandt and
Cezanne were still-life painters. He failed in the accomplishment of his
larger programme because his vision was too restricted to permit him to
weld his details into great ensembles, as Rubens did. His ambition
outstripped his power, and strive as he might, he could not make up the
discrepancy by reasoning. Undoubtedly he sensed his own weakness, for
all his days he was in continual pursuit of system. System was to him
what law was to the old masters. Herein he was reflecting the
rationalistic philosophers of his day who substituted theory for
observation.
Were all Delacroix's paintings destroyed and his Journal and drawings
saved, his _apport_ to art would be but imperceptibly decreased. We
should still possess his linear compositions and his colour theories--his
two significant gifts to modern art. Without the liberation of
draughtsmanship expressed in the former, Courbet's struggle would have
been more difficult, and rhythm in drawing would have had to wait for
another resuscitator. Without his colour theories Impressionism would
have been postponed for half a century; Van Gogh could not have done his
best pictures; and the Pointillists, with their system of
complementaries, might never have existed. Delacroix was the first to
speak of simultaneity in painting, on which phrase has recently been
founded a school; and he sketched a dictionary of art terms and
definitions which even now, after fifty years, is far more intelligent
than present-day academic precepts.
Let us regard Delacroix as a great pioneer who fought against the
zymotic formalism of his day and by so doing opened up a new era of
expression. He is the link in the chain which holds the brilliant gems
of painting. If he himself fell short of genius, he nevertheless
fulfilled a destiny which intrinsically is in many ways more fine: he
made genius possible for those who were to come after him.
The other man who contributed vitally to modern colour theories was J.
M. W. Turner, born in 1775, one year before Constable. Like Delacroix he
had ardent and influential defenders; and the coincidence is emphasised
by the fact that between these two great colour innovators there existed
a striking thematic similarity. Ruskin took care that Turner should
taste those beneficent honours which the world generally withholds from
a painter during his lifetime. He accomplished this feat by praise which
was largely enthusiasm and by criticism which spelled partiality. But a
panegyric not founded on accuracy and authenticity defeats its own
object in the end. Turner himself remarked that Ruskin discovered
recondite points in his painting of which he, as the artist, was
ignorant. This might have been true, or it might have been sarcasm. But
whether Ruskin or Turner knew more about the latter's art, the fact
remains that the author of Modern Painters overestimated the painter for
a reason totally inapposite to aesthetic consideration:--the almost
photographic perfection of his canvases. Later, when the _spirituel_
Whistler tarnished this English didactician's reputation for
infallibility, the latter's pronunciamentos were questioned, in some
quarters ridiculed. And Turner, accepted because of Ruskin's assurances,
became suspect.
But no amount of effulgent literary criticism can obscure the authentic
accomplishments of this poor barber's son. Turner's contributions to the
colour methods of the eighties were too large, and his imitators too
bold, for the fact to be longer ignored. In his Ulysses Deriding
Polyphemus, The Fighting Temeraire and especially in Rain, Steam and
Speed, he had begun to divide the surfaces of his objects into minute
_touches_ of different colours--not, perhaps, for the purpose of
heightening the emotional qualities of the paintings as a whole, but for
the primitive reason that the device gave accuracy to them as
representations of nature. These pictures Monet and Pissarro studied
closely during the Franco-Prussian War, and there is no doubt that the
result of this study determined the direction taken by the
Impressionists. Turner's earlier pictures had been too sombre to meet
the demand for brilliancy in that first great modern school, and the
canvases in which his vision of sunlight began to take form had not yet
been painted. These later pictures, with their light tonality and their
full use of misty blue and gold, had a further influence on the
Impressionists' conception of colour.
When Monet and Pissarro went to London in 1871 they had been habituated
to the use of broad flat tones, and were astonished at Turner's
extraordinary snow and ice effects which were obtained by juxtaposing
little spots of diverse colour and by the gradating of tones. On their
return to France they both made use of this striking artifice, and
developed it, in conjunction with Delacroix's theories, into what later
an unknown humorist of the _Charivari_ named Impressionism. This process
was given further impetus by another Frenchman, Jongkind, called the
European Hiroshige. There is more than a superficial analogy between
Jongkind and Turner; and the Impressionists, first under the influence
of Corot and Courbet, found the effects they sought by using the purity
of Turner with the _facture_ of Jongkind. It was thus they were brought
back to the theories of Delacroix which they had partially abandoned.
This return had a profound _raison d'etre_, for between the last phase
of Delacroix and the later sketches of Turner there is a similarity
which was apparent even to their contemporaries. But though the
resemblance was as pronounced as that between Turner and the
Impressionists, the eulogists of that movement chose to ignore and, in
some cases, to deny it.
This new method of using colour did not constitute the only debt the
Impressionists owed Turner. They also found in him an added inspiration
toward freedom of arrangement and unconventionality of design. The
landscape painters before Turner's day conceived their out-of-door
pictures in more or less definite moulds. A tree in one man's canvas,
being an idealistic conception, was difficult of differentiation from a
tree in another's. All their pictures were permeated by the same motif.
But Turner, along with Constable and Bonington, began putting character
into landscapes. As a consequence their pictures exuded a new freedom of
arrangement.
To appreciate Turner fully we must overlook his astonishing ability for
transcription--a heritage from his architectural days--and consider him as
a man who loved nature so ardently that it was impossible for him to
approach it intellectually. His sketches, both in water-colour and oil,
were, unlike those of the Impressionists, rarely done in the open. He
conceived them in pencil, wrote upon his clouds, trees and stones the
colours he saw in them, and later, in the solitude of his studio,
"worked them up." Had the Impressionists, after their frenzied _seances_
before models, taken their canvases home, organised and modified them,
they would no doubt have produced greater net results artistically.
Organisation, in its finest sense, comes only through contemplation and
reflection; and while Turner did not possess the genius for rhythm in
any of its manifestations, he nevertheless realised that mere truth does
not make a picture. The Sun of Venice Going to Sea is as excellent as
anything Monet or Sisley has ever done. In Turner there is a feeling
for the grandiose such as few moderns possess. Did this gift come from
Claude whom he delighted in imitating? Even Constable spoke of a Turner
canvas as the most complete work of genius he ever saw. But this was the
_beau geste_ of a contemporary who wished to appear broad-minded. The
truth lay further down the slope. Turner undoubtedly showed genius in
his competent copying of even the most insignificant of nature's
accidents. The composition of The Devil's Bridge is the foundation on
which are built many of Monet's pictures; and the Rain, Steam and Speed
canvas can hang beside La Gare St. Lazare without loss to either.
Delacroix re-established an Italian mode of expression and tried to make
of it a modern language. Turner, in a new language, spoke of ancient
things. But Courbet ignored all method, and withal became the father of
latter-day art. In him was the embryo of that distinctly modern spirit
which demands visible proof before believing. Like William of Orange, he
arose triumphant above every opposition. His art stemmed temperamentally
from the Dutch and Spaniards, for while he imitated no one, he was
unconsciously influenced by many. So complete was his assimilation of
great men that in his expression they all had a place. He himself says
that he studied antiquity as a swimmer crosses a river. The academicians
were drowned there. So was Delacroix. Courbet learned in his passage
that in adaptation is the confession of sterility. But though he avoided
paraphrasing and copying the old masters, we find throughout his life
recurring traces of Van Dyke, Zurbaran, Delacroix, Rembrandt, El Greco,
Gericault, Ribera, Velazquez and that little known Valencian master,
Juan de Juanes.
Courbet was considered an ignorant, vulgar and brutal peasant. But this
judgment was the outgrowth of public miscomprehension rather than of any
authentic evidence in the man himself. Courbet was the epitome of that
unstudied naturalism which is antipodal to the hypocrisies of society.
France, during his day, was governed by the dictates of theatricalism.
Its ideals were those of Renaissance Italy, and its artistic attitude
reflected a refinement of vision approaching decadence. Courbet's
deportmental crudities alone were a source of antagonism, and when to
these were added scorn and indifference the hostility against him became
violent. But temperamentally he was aristocratic. The peasant mind is
fundamentally traditional: Courbet was violently revolutionary. Nor did
he lack fineness of mind. His early portraits embodied the subtleties of
modelling in Rembrandt as well as the extraordinary niceties of
characterisation in El Greco. The compositions of his pictures alone
belie any coarseness of fibre in the man. They are founded on a weakened
S which, since the decay of Byzantine art, had done valiant service for
the most exalted painters such as Rubens and Tintoretto. This
compositional figure appears, either exact or varied, in his Le Combat
de Cerfs, Le Retour de la Conference, Chien et Lievres, and
L'Enterrement a Ornans.
Courbet's reputation for vulgarity was derived more from his lack of
facile fluency, so common in the French tradition, than from a basic
understanding of the structural synthesis of his work. And this
misconception of him was aggravated by his being the first painter
unwilling to accept praise as the public chose to dole it out. He was a
self-advertiser, and such men as George Bernard Shaw are but echoes of
his methods. He pushed his way to the front unceasingly, and continually
theorised as a means of silencing his adversaries. He regarded all
public demonstration as _blague_, and later in life carried this
attitude into politics. Whistler, his pupil, was quick to sense the
advantage of his teacher's methods; and it is the irony of fate that
this ineffectual American was believed and respected while Courbet was
abused and ridiculed and forced to die in exile. He had carried his
assaults too far. "To be not only a painter but a man," he wrote at one
time. "To create a living art--this is my aim." It is a masterly
statement of his real ambitions. He was intensely interested in life, as
were Rubens and Cellini. "You want me to paint a goddess?" he exclaimed.
"Show me one!" In this _mot_ he summed up the very spirit of modern
times. It expressed the new realism found in such widely separated men
as Dostoievsky, Zola, George Moore, Conrad, Andreiev, Theodore Dreiser,
Gerhart Hauptmann, Richard Strauss, Debussy, Korngold, Sibelius, Manet,
Renoir, Sorolla and Zorn.
It is strange how Courbet, so far removed from the French temperament,
should, at the crucial period of his life, have reverted to a French
gesture by refusing the cross of the Legion of Honor. But in that famous
letter of rejection, written in a cafe and mailed with a grandiloquent
toss in the presence of Fantin-Latour, he summed up aptly the man of
genius who, though avid for honour, throws it away at the moment of
attainment. Not even Napoleon was more concerned with the thoughts of
posterity than Courbet, and some of the artist's letters are not
dissimilar in tone to the bombastic _manifestos_ of certain ultra-modern
schools. At the time of his first exhibition he wrote to Bruyas: "I
stupefy the entire world. I am triumphant not only over the moderns but
the ancients as well. Here is the Louvre gallery. The Champs Elysees
does not exist, nor the Luxembourg. There is no more Champs de Mars. I
have thrown consternation into the world of art." This spirit of
monumental self-confidence, so startling to a generation whose taste was
measured by the decadent poetry of Beaudelaire, brought frantic sarcasm
hurtling about his head. This troubled Courbet little. He valued
friendships only in so far as they were useful. It was Meissonier who
said in a Paris _salon_, when standing before the famous Femme de Munich
which Courbet had painted in a few hours for Baron Remberg: "It is no
longer a question of art, but of dignity. From now on Courbet must be as
one dead to us."
Charles Beaudelaire, who helped fight the battle for Wagner, Poe,
Delacroix, Manet and Monet, tentatively praised him at first, but later
allied himself with the public and became his bitterest assailant. It
was not surprising. A poet so superficial as to call Delacroix "a
haunted lake of blood" could not be expected to appreciate the _terre a
terre_ qualities of this master of Ornans. And Courbet was so little
French that he was incomprehensible to his national contemporaries. He
disclaimed all tradition, swore he had no forerunners, and struck
blindly into the unknown. For a man without genius this would have been
fatal, but, after all, only a genius would attempt such things.
Courbet was disgusted with the allegory and romance of his time. His
nature cried aloud for a pose that was natural, for a landscape that
resembled the out-of-doors, for objects in which life was discernible.
Consequently the critics and painters of his day put him aside either
indifferently or insolently. They could not understand a work of art
which did not delineate a literary episode or in which the postures were
not taken direct from the theatre. Courbet needed no literature to paint
great pictures. He went straight to nature, and his compositions grew
out of his sheer enjoyment in visible objects, whether they were
dramatic or not. To the public his pictures appeared ugly, even
repellent. Here was a man who painted a funeral realistically--_Dieu m'en
garde!_ With only the example of canvases filled with familiar gods and
goddesses and melting nudes in golden pink, he dared set forth, in a
sacred theme, peasants' faces and peasants' shoes, cloudy skies, and
holes in the brown earth. To those who had come to look upon art as
something ethereal and evanescent, L'Enterrement a Ornans was more than
blasphemy. It was this picture, falling like a bomb into the midst of
the vagaries of his time, that sounded the death knell of romanticism.
It was the last spade of earth on the graves of the classicists. The
mere picture was sensation enough, but Courbet was not content to let
the matter rest there. At the time of his exhibition in 1855, held in a
barrack of his own building on the Rond Point de l'Alma, he wrote a
defensive and provocative preface to his catalogue. In it he proclaimed
himself not only the first realist, but realism itself.
[Illustration: L'ENTERREMENT A ORNANS by COURBET]
Gericault's Radeau de la Meduse and Delacroix's Dante et Virgile aux
Enfers were acceptable to the public, the one because of its dramatic
interest, the other because of its literature. But L'Enterrement a
Ornans entirely lacked the popular qualities of these two other
pictures. It was full of rugged and hardy precision. Its insolent
ugliness of subject-matter and its implied indifference to all
tradition, seemed to express the quintessence of artistic degradation
and sordidness. At first view the picture appears to have been inspired
by El Greco's Obsequies of the Count of Orgaz, but it is more likely
that these peasants of Ornans, each a notable of the town, with their
indifferent expressions and awkward gestures, were attributable to The
Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew of Ribera and La Folle of Gericault,
rather than to the master of Toledo. But that the Spanish helped paint
it is evident: some parts of the landscape are taken bodily from their
canvases. Meier-Graefe states that this funeral picture, like most of
the representative pictures of the nineteenth century, is not
representative of the artist himself. But did Meier-Graefe understand
more profoundly the synthesis of composition found in individual
painters, he would have seen that here was the famous S composition
which was used throughout the painter's life. Instead of being set on
end, as was the practice of the Italians, it is used laterally and
extends from left to right in depth.
In colour also this picture is representative of Courbet, for it shows
his limitations in that medium. Delacroix brought a new palette to
painting, but could not use it. Courbet contented himself with a palette
as meagre as that of Caravaggio and Guercino. And yet, though colour has
come latterly to mean tactile form in its highest sense, this black
canvas, when placed beside either an Ingres, a David, a Delacroix or a
Gerard, appears less flat and inconsequential than the latter. The form
is even suggestive of Rembrandt, Giotto, Cezanne and Renoir.
Champfleury was the only friend of Courbet who dared defend him.
Delacroix was set against him, and the critics, without understanding
him, obscured the true importance of his art by talking of his want of
transcendentalism and sentiment. Especially were his landscapes the butt
of their ridicule, for painters up to that time had made use of
conventional arrangements of dainty trees copied for their drawing and
tone. In Courbet all this was changed. He organised landscapes as he did
still-lives and nudes. Objects, as such, meant nothing to him. In this
he struck a new and modern note which the good people of his day
considered not only bad art but a slur upon the spiritual meanings of
nature. Even in Les Baigneuses, where the figures are unimportant, the
trees are superb. In La Grotte he went further, for here the figure was
part of the whole. His paintings of the hills about Ornans had a
movement which gave off a sensation of weight entirely new in painting.
In Les Grands Chataigniers he reached his apogee in landscape painting.
This picture is greater than those of any of the Englishmen.
Though many critics have written that Millet influenced Courbet, the
reverse is the truth. The former's life work was largely a repetition of
the lights and darks found in Courbet's earlier pictures. Les Casseurs
de Pierres is far greater than anything Millet has ever done, despite
the vast popularity of such purely sentimental pictures as The Angelus
and The Man with the Hoe. Courbet could never have been satisfied with
the angularity and absence of rhythm in the other's work. In Millet's
best canvases one finds at most only a parallelism of lines, and in his
lesser pictures even this amateurish attempt at organisation is lacking.
But in Les Casseurs de Pierres the arrangement is one which recalls the
competency of linear balance and development in Tintoretto's Minerva
Expelling Mars.
When Courbet entered painting, he had neither prejudices nor a _parti
pris_. He tested his ability before engaging his full complement of
resources. Though untutored, he had that cast of intelligence which no
amount of study can produce and no amount of adverse criticism
influence. Delacroix, on the other hand, was the archetype of the highly
cultured and educated man. He foresaw the necessity for radical reform,
but was unable to bring it about significantly. Courbet instinctively
projected himself into that void at the brink of which tradition halts
and the unknown begins. And because he was a man of genius he did not
return empty-handed.
The art of Courbet was too aristocratic to be appreciated. Not
aristocratic in the Delacroix sense, but isolated and superior.
Rejecting the colour discoveries of his day, he created his own
materials. Delacroix foreshadowed the medium which was to serve as a
vehicle for the achievement of future generations, but it was Courbet
who brought to art a new mental attitude without which there would be no
excuse for modern painting. By turning men's thoughts from ancient Italy
to the actualities of their own day, and by expelling the literary
canvas from art, he left those who came after him free to evolve a
medium which would translate the new vision. Delacroix's heritage to art
was intellectual, Courbet's dynamic. And though objectively the work of
Courbet is the uglier and less gracious, in it there is more of the
sublime. But both men are indispensable, and have a just claim to the
eternal respect of posterity.
The construction of form as voluminous phenomena--that integer of modern
painting which was lacking in Delacroix, Turner and Courbet, but which
has become one of the leading preoccupations of present-day artists--was
introduced by Honore Daumier. This painter who, unlike his three great
contemporaries, fought for the pure love of the fight, was celebrated as
a caricaturist at twenty-five. Such fame was warranted, for he was
unquestionably the greatest and most trenchant caricaturist the world
has ever produced. From 1835 to 1848 he made capital of all those many
catastrophes which overtook France. Only the curtailing of the freedom
of the press on December 2, 1848, put an end to his career as
publicist. This culmination of his editorial activities was a beneficial
thing for both Daumier and the world, for it permitted him freedom to
devote himself wholly to the development of the larger side of his
genius. He endeavoured to interest his friends in his painting; but too
long had he been known as a critic of current topics for them to look
with serious eyes upon his more solid endeavours.
But though neglected by his friends, Daumier holds a position of
tremendous importance in relation to the moderns. His work developed
along lines unthought-of by either Delacroix or Courbet. Even his
cartoons were more than clever pictorial comments on national events.
Intrinsically they were great pieces of rugged flesh which had all the
appearance of having been chiselled out of a solid medium with a dull
tool. The richness of his line is as complete as in Rembrandt's
etchings; and his economy of means reached a point to which painters had
not yet attained. His significance, however, lies more especially in his
new method of obtaining volume than in the flexibility of his line
drawings. He built his pictures in tone first. The drawing came
afterward as a direct result of the tonal volumes. This new manner of
painting permitted him a greater subtlety and fluency than Courbet
possessed. In fact, Daumier's comprehension of form in the subjective
sense was greater than that of any Frenchman up to his time. Compare,
for instance, Daumier's canvas, Les Lutteurs, with Courbet's picture of
the same name. The massiveness of the one is monumental. One feels the
weight of the two struggling men, heavy and shifting, clinging and
panting. They are modelled by a craftsman who can juggle deftly with his
means. In Courbet's picture the figures are seen carefully copied in a
strained pose by one who has not the complete mastery of his tools. In
Daumier's picture we also sense that elusive but vital quality called
mental attitude. Superficially it is almost indistinguishable from its
negation, but to those who know its significance, it is of permeating
importance.
Contour and shading to his forerunners had meant two separated and
distinct steps in the construction of form. Daumier created both
qualities simultaneously as one emotion. Depth with other painters was
obtained by carrying their figures into the background by the means of
line and perspective. With Daumier it meant a plastic building up of
volume from the background forward. The feeling we have before his
canvases that we are looking at form itself and not merely an excellent
representation of it, is as strong as it is in a greater way when we
stand before a Leonardo da Vinci. In this he gave proof that he was a
draughtsman in the most vital sense. Unless he had felt form uniquely,
Le Repos des Saltimbanques and Le Bain would have been impossible of
creation. This last picture sums up what Carriere aspired to but failed
to attain.
[Illustration: LE BAIN by DAUMIER]
Recalling the great masters of form we instinctively visualise
Michelangelo first. For this reason perhaps Michelangelo is regarded the
major influence in Daumier. "_Il avait du Michel Ange dans la peau_,"
say the French: and certain it is that Daumier's colossal simplicity and
feeling for tactility were derived from the Renaissance master. But
only in one picture, a composition called La Republique--1848, do we find
any direct and conscious influence. Frankly this is but a modernisation
of one of the sibyls on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The truth is
Daumier is more akin to Rembrandt than to Michelangelo. But there is in
him none of the conscious copying of Rembrandt that we find, for
instance, in Joshua Reynolds. The latter, admiring Rembrandt, essayed to
equal his power by imitating his externals with academic processes.
Daumier, temperamentally affiliated with his master, went deeper.
Putting aside the results of Rembrandt's final brush strokes, he studied
the very functioning procedure of his art. Both used the human figure as
a _terrain_ for the unceasing struggle of light against dark. In the
process of painting the infinite play and by-play of opposed values on a
given theatre, they produced form as an inevitable result.
A critic has stated of Daumier: "He left hardly anything but sketches,
splashes of colour that resolve themselves into faces...." It is said
without attempt at profundity. Nevertheless the remark unsuspectingly
touches the crucial point of Daumier's significance. The very resolution
of those "splashes of colour" into faces is the prefiguration of the
modern conception of form. In this particular Daumier, even more than
Rembrandt, was the avant-courier of Cezanne. This latter artist, through
his concern with the play of one colour on another, gave birth to form
more intensely than did either of the older men. Too much stress cannot
be laid on Daumier's contribution to modern painting. By regarding the
two drawings, La Vierge a l'Ecuelle and Renaude et Angelique--the one by
Correggio in chalk, the other by Delacroix in water-colour--we perceive
the attainment of form by less profound methods. But neither possesses
the significance of Daumier's work.
Of Daumier's colour little need be said. At times it emerges from its
sombreness and blossoms forth in all the hot softness of now the
Venetians, of again the Spaniards; but compared with the artist's genius
for plastic form it is of subsidiary importance.
Although the inception of Daumier's greatness can be traced to
Rembrandt, he reacted to many influences. Suggestions of Monnier and
Granville are to be found in his work. Decamps's Sonneurs de Cloches was
studied by him and emulated. His simplifications stemmed from Ingres,
and his caricature of Guizot had the same qualities as that master's
portraits. Delacroix also had some trifling influence on him in such
paintings as Don Quichotte. But Daumier's influence on others is more
direct and far-reaching than his own garnerings of inspiration. He
foreshadowed the formal abbreviations of Toulouse-Lautrec, Forain and
Steinlen, and he affected, more than is commonly admitted, the works of
Manet, Degas, and Van Gogh. In his sculptured pieces, Ratapoil and Les
Emigrants, he paved the way for Meunier and Rodin. Even such minor men
as Max Beerbohm learned much from him without understanding him. And
apart from the vital new methods he brought to painting, the originality
of his subject-matter led modern men to copy him thematically. Le Drame
fathered a whole series of Degas's paintings.
Daumier is only beginning to receive the intelligent appreciation which
in time may engulf his eminent contemporary, Courbet. For if choice
there is between the intrinsically artistic achievements of the painter
of L'Enterrement a Ornans and the creator of Silene, the preference
rests with Daumier.
The forces underlying the development of genius, working in conjunction
with the right circumstances, produce the fertilising methods which
nature uses to bring about a final flowering of a long period of intense
germination. Before the greatest eras of all art the battles have been
fought and won. The descendants of the pioneers become the introspective
and creative souls who open, free from the stain of combat, to the sun
of achievement. Delacroix, Turner, Courbet, Daumier--these are the men
who cleared the ground and thereby made possible a new age of aesthetic
creation. To Delacroix belongs the credit for giving an impetus to the
vitalisation of colour, and for freeing drawing from the formalisms of
the past. Turner raised the tonality of colour, and introduced a new
method for its application. Courbet heightened uniformly the
signification of objects in painting, and handed down a mental attitude
of untraditional relativity. And Daumier conceived a new vision of
formal construction. These men were the pillars of modern painting.
III
EDOUARD MANET
The purely pictorial has always been relished by the public. The
patterns of the mosaicists and very early primitives, the figured stuffs
of the East and South, the vases of China and Persia, the frescoes on
the walls of Pompeii, the drawings and prints of old Japan--all are
examples of utilitarian art during epochs when the public took delight
in the contemplation of images. Even the delicate designs on Greek
pottery, the rigid and ponderous arts of architectural Egypt and the
drawings and adorned totem poles of the North American Indians are
relics of times when the demand for art was created by the masses. For
the most part all these early crafts were limited to simple designs,
wholly obvious to the most rudimentary mind. The ancients were content
with a representation of a natural object, the likeness of a familiar
animal, the symmetry of an ornamental border, an effigy of a god in
which their abstract conceptions were given concrete form. At that time
the artist was only a craftsman--a man with a communistic mind, content
to follow the people's dictates and to reflect their taste. Art was then
democratic, understood and admired by all. It did not raise its head
about the mean level; it was abecedary, and consequently
comprehensible.
When the Greek ideal of fluent movement took birth in art and became
disseminated, drawing, painting and sculpture began to grow more
rhythmic and individual. Slowly at first and then more and more swiftly,
art became insulated. The popular joy in the native crafts, despite the
impetus of centuries behind it, decreased steadily. The antagonism of
the masses to the artist sprang up simultaneously with the disgust of
the artist for the masses. It was the inevitable result of the artist's
mind developing beyond them. He could not understand why they were no
longer in accord with him; and they, finding him in turn unfathomable,
considered him either irrational or given over to fantastic buffoonery.
So long had they been the dictator of his vision that his emancipation
from their prescriptions left them astounded and angered at his
audacity. The nobles then, feeling it incumbent upon them to defend this
new luxury of art, stepped into the breach, and for a time the people
blindly patterned their attitude on that of their superiors. Later came
the disintegration of the nobility; its caste being lost, the people no
more imitated it. From that time on, although there were a few
connoisseurs, the large majority was hostile to the artist, and made it
as difficult as possible for him to live. He was looked upon as a
madman who threatened the entire social fabric. His isolation was
severe and complete; and while many painters strove to effect a
reinstatement in public favour, art for 300 years forced its way through
a splendid evolution in the face of neglect, suspicion and ridicule.
For so many generations had the public looked upon art as the
manifestation of a disordered and dangerous brain that they found it
difficult to recognise a man in whose work was the very pictorial
essence they had originally admired. This man was Edouard Manet. Instead
of being welcomed for his reversion to decoration, strangely enough he
was considered as dangerous as his contemporary heretics, Delacroix and
Courbet. Courbet was at the zenith of his unpopularity when Manet
terminated his apprenticeship under Couture. The young painter had had
numerous clashes with his academic master, and the latter had prophesied
for him a career as reprehensible as Daumier's. Spurred on by such
incompetent rebukes, Manet determined to launch himself single-handed
into the vortex of the aesthetic struggle. This was in 1857. For two
years thereafter he put in his time to good purpose. He travelled in
Holland, Germany and Italy, and copied Rembrandt, Velazquez, Titian and
Tintoretto. These youthful preferences give us the key to his later
developments. In 1859 he painted his Le Buveur d'Absinthe, a canvas
which showed all the ear-marks of the romantic studio, and which
exemplified the propensities of the student for simplification. It was a
superficial, if enthusiastic, piece of work, and the _Salon_ of that
year was fully justified in rejecting it. Two years later Manet had
another opportunity to expose. In the meantime he had painted his La
Nymphe Surprise which, though one of his best canvases, contained all
the influence of a hurriedly digested Rembrandt and a Dutch Titian.
In 1861 these influences were still at work, but the _Salon_ not only
accepted his Le Guitarrero but, for some unaccountable reason, awarded
it with an honourable mention. In this picture, Manet's first Spanish
adaptation, are also traces of other men. Goya and even Murillo are
here--the greys of Velazquez and Courbet's modern attitude toward
realism. In this canvas one sees for the first time evidences of its
creator's technical dexterity, a characteristic which later he was to
develop to so astonishing a degree. But this picture, while
conspicuously able, is, like L'Enfant a l'Epee and also Les Parents de
l'Artiste, the issue of immaturity. Such paintings are little more than
the adroit studies of a highly talented pupil inspired by the one-figure
arrangements of Velazquez, Mazo and Carreno. Where Manet improved on the
average student was in his realistic methods. While he did not present
the aspect of nature in full, after the manner of Daubigny and Troyon,
he stated its generalisations by painting it as seen through half-closed
eyes, its parts accentuated by the blending of details into clusters of
light and shadow. This method of visualisation gives a more forceful
impression as an image than can a mere accurate transcription. As slight
an innovation as was this form of painting, it represented Manet's one
point of departure from tradition, although it was in truth but a
modification of the traditional manner of copying nature. The public,
however, saw in it something basically heretical, and derided it as a
novelty. The habit of ridicule toward any deviation from artistic
precedent had become thoroughly fixed, ever since Delacroix's
heterodoxy.
It was not until 1862 that Manet, as the independent and professional
painter, was felt. Up to this time his talent and capabilities had
outstripped his powers of ideation. But with the appearance of Lola de
Valence the man's solidarity was evident. This picture was exposed with
thirteen other works at Martinet's the year following. It was hung
beside the accepted and familiar Fontaineleau painters, Corot, Rousseau
and Diaz; and almost precipitated a riot because of its informalities.
In these fourteen early Manets are discoverable the artist's first
tendencies towards simplification for other than academic reasons. Here
the abbreviations and economies, unlike those in Le Buveur d'Absinthe,
constitute a genuine inclination toward emphasising the spontaneity of
vision. By presenting a picture, free from the stress of confusing
items, the eye is not seduced into the by-ways of detail, but permitted
to receive the image as an ensemble. This impulse toward simplification
was prefigured in his Angelina now hanging in the Luxembourg Gallery.
Here he modelled with broad, flat planes of sooty black and chalky
white, between which there were no transitional tones. While in this
Manet was imitating the externals of Daumier, he failed to approach that
master's form. Consequently he never achieved the plasticity of volume
which Daumier, alone among the modern men, had possessed. However,
despite Manet's failure to attain pliability, these early paintings are,
in every way, sincere efforts toward the creation of an individual
style. It was only later, after his first intoxicating taste of
notoriety, that the _arriviste_ spirit took possession of him and led
him to that questionable and unenviable terminus, popularity. One can
imagine him, drunk with eulogy, reading some immodest declaration of
Courbet's in which was set forth that great man's egoistic confidence,
and saying to himself: "_Tiens! Il faut que j'aille plus loin._"
The famous _Salon des Refuses_, called by some critics of the day the
_Salon des Reprouves_, gave Manet his chance to state in striking
fashion his beliefs in relation to aesthetics. For whereas mere realism
could no longer excite the animosity of the official _Salon_ jury, as it
had done twenty years before, immorality--or, as Manet chose to put it,
_franchise_--could. Therefore Manet was barred from the company of the
Barbizon school and the other favourites of the day. In the _Salon des
Refuses_, which must be held to the credit of Napoleon III, those
painters who had suffered at the hands of the academic judges were
allowed a hearing. Whistler, Jongkind, Pissarro and Manet here made
history. Manet sent Le Bain, which, through the insistence of the
public, has come to be called Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe. But despite the
precedent of Giorgione's Rural Concert (the Concert Champetre in the
Louvre), it was looked upon only as the latest manifestation of
degeneracy in a man who gave every promise of becoming a moral pariah.
The nude, contrasted as it was with attired figures, was too suggestive
of sheer nakedness. Had the nude stood alone, as in Ingres's La Source,
or among other nudes, as in Ingres's Le Bain Turc, the picture would
have caused no comment. Its departures in method were not extravagant.
The scene is laid out of doors, yet it bears all the evidences of the
studio conception; and those lights and reflections which later were
brought to such perfection in the pictures of the Impressionists and
Renoir, are wholly absent. But in one corner is a beautifully painted
still-life of fruits, a basket and woman's attire, which alone should
have made the picture acceptable. This branch of painting Manet was to
develop to its highest textural possibilities.
From this time on Manet no longer used the conventional chiaroscuro of
the academicians. Instead he let his lights sift and dispel themselves
evenly over the whole of his groupings. This mode of procedure was
undoubtedly an influence of the Barbizon painters who had done away with
the brown sauce of the _soi-disant_ classicists. In his rejection of
details and his discovery of a means whereby effects could be obtained
by broad planes, Manet was forced by necessity to take the step toward
this simplification of light. Were colour to be used consistently in
conjunction with his technique, it must be spread on in large flat
surfaces. By diffusing his light the opportunity was made. He might have
omitted the element of colour from his work and contented himself with
black and white, as in the case of Courbet; but he was too sensitive to
its possibilities. He had observed it in the Venetians and Franz Hals,
as well as in nature; and in its breadth and brilliance he had
recognised its utility in enhancing a picture's decorative beauty. Even
the colour of Velazquez was at times sumptuous. Manet, because his
simplicity of manner permitted a liberal application of colour, was able
to augment its ornamental power. It is true that today his large and
irregular patches of tints appear grey, but, to his contemporaries,
their very extension made them seem blatant and bold.
Courbet remained in great part the slave to the common vision of
reality. In his efforts to attain results he sacrificed little. This, in
itself, delimited his accomplishments. Nature to him appeared nearly
perfect, and he painted with all the wonderment of a child opening its
eyes on the world for the first time. On the other hand, Manet realised
that nature's forces become objective only through an intellectual
process. This attitude marked a decided step in advance of Courbet.
Manet painted single figures and simple images devoid of all anecdotal
significance, out of his pure love of his medium and his sheer delight
in tone and contour. In other words, he represented the modern spirit
which repudiates objects conducive to reminiscence, and cares only for
"qualities" in art. His intentions were those of Courbet pushed to
greater freedom. Unlike his master he was a virtuoso of the brush. His
very facility perhaps accounts for his satisfaction with flat
decoration, for it concentrated his interest on the actual _pate_ and
thereby precluded a deeper research into the psychology of aesthetic
emotion. But in his insistence on the aesthetic rather than the
illustrative side of painting he carried forward the ideals which were
to epitomise modern methods.
In this lay the impetus he gave to painting. Even with Rubens the
necessities of the day forced him, in his choice of themes, to adopt a
circumscribed repertoire, the subjects of which he repeated constantly.
In him we have mastery of composition with the substance as an
after-thought. Delacroix conceived his canvases in the romantic mould,
and adapted his compositions so as to bring out the salient
characteristics of his chosen theme. This was illustration with the
_arriere pensee_ of organisation. Daumier struck the average between
these two and conceived his subject in the form he was to use. Courbet
minimised the importance of objects as such by raising them all to the
same level of adaptability: but he invariably chose, as with an _idee
fixe_, his subjects from the life about him. Manet cared nothing for any
subject whether traditional or novel. That he generally chose modern
themes was indicative of that new mental attitude which recognises the
unimportance of subject-matter and urges the painter to abandon thematic
research and utilise the things at hand. He made his art out of the
materials nearest him, irrespective of their intrinsic topical value.
This was certainly an important step in the liberating of art from
convention. It proclaimed the right of the artist to paint what he
liked. Courbet would have painted goddesses if he had seen them. Manet
would have painted them without having seen them, provided he had
thought the result warranted the effort. Courbet, the father of
naturalism, extended the scope of subject-matter, while Manet tore away
the last tie which bound it to any tradition, whether Courbet's or
Titian's. After him there was nothing new to paint. It is therefore
small wonder that artists should now have become interested in the
forces of nature rather than in nature's mien. Manet, by his
consummation of theme, foreshadowed the concern with abstractions which
has now swept over the world of aesthetics. Zola, like him in other ways,
never equalled him in this. L'Assommoir and Fecondite portrayed only the
extremes of realism. Manet painted all things with equal pleasure. Here
again is evident the continuation of that mental attitude which Courbet
introduced into painting. The qualities in Manet which inclined toward
abstraction have secured him the reputation for being a greater
generaliser than Courbet whose brutal naturalism could not be
dissociated in the public mind from concrete and strict materialism. For
this contention there is substantiation of a superficial nature. But a
mere tendency toward generalisation, with no other qualifications, does
not indicate greatness. In fact, were this purely literal truth
concerning Manet conclusive, it would tend to disqualify him in his
claim to an importance greater than Courbet's. Carriere is an example of
a painter who is general and nothing more. Manet had other titles to
consideration.
What Manet's enduring contributions to painting were have never been
surmised by the public. His recognition, coming as it did years after
his most significant works had been accomplished and set aside, was due
to a reversion of the public's mind to its aboriginal admirations. Manet
is popular today for the same reason that the lesser works of Hokusai
and Hiroshige are popular, namely: they present an instantaneous image
which is at once flat and motionless. As in the days of the mosaicists
and early primitives, the appreciation of such works demands no
intellectual operation. Their recognisable subjects only set in motion a
simple process of memory. The Olympia, Manet's most popular painting,
illustrates the type of picture which appeals strongly to minds innocent
of aesthetic depth. Its mere imagery is alluring. As pure decoration it
ranks with Puvis de Chavannes. But in it are all the mistakes of the
later Impressionists. Manet consciously attempted the limning of light,
but brilliance alone resulted. He did not realise that, in order for one
to be conscious of illumination, shadow is necessary. This latter
element, with its complementary, produces in us the sensation of volume.
True, there is in the Olympia violent contrast between the nude body,
the bed and the flowers, on the one hand, and the background, the
negress and the cat, on the other; but it is only the contrast of
dissimilar atmospheres. The level appearance of the picture is not
relieved.
The cardinal shortcoming in a painting of this kind is that it fails to
create an impression of either the aspects or the forces of nature. Such
pictures are only flat representations of nature's minor
characteristics. The most resilient imagination cannot endow them with
form: the intelligence is balked at every essay to penetrate beyond
their surface. In contemplating them one is irritated by the emptiness,
or rather the solidity, of the _neant_ which lies behind. Courbet called
the Olympia "the queen of spades coming from her bath." Titian, had he
lived today, would have styled it a photograph. Goya (who is as much to
blame for it as either Courbet or Titian) would have considered its
shallowness an inexcusable vulgarity. In painting it undoubtedly Manet's
intention was to modernise Titian's Venus Reclining now hanging in the
Uffizi; just as later it was Gauguin's intention, in his La Femme aux
Mangos, to endow the Olympia with a South Sea Island setting. Such
adaptations are indefensible provided they do not improve upon their
originals. There is no improvement in Gauguin's Venus; and Manet's
picture, while it advances on Titian in attitude, is a decided
retrogression viewed from the standpoint of form.
In such pictures as the Olympia, Nana and La Jarretiere we recognise
Manet's effort to obtain notoriety. He was not an aristocrat as was
Courbet or Goya or Titian. It was not a need for freer expression that
induced him to paint pictures which shocked by their unconventionality,
but a desire to _abasourdir les bourgeois_. In choosing his
subject-matter he always had a definite end in view in relation to the
public; but his conceptions were spontaneous and were recorded without
deliberation. He painted with but little thought as to his method. This
fact is no doubt felt by the public and held in his favour by those who
believe in the involuntary inspiration of the artist. But art cannot be
judged by such childish criteria. Can one imagine Giotto, Michelangelo
or, to come nearer our day, Cezanne painting without giving the closest
and most self-conscious study to his procedure? Credence in the
theopneusty of the painter, the poet and the musician, should have
passed out with the advent of Delacroix; but the seeming mystery of art
is so deeply rooted in public ignorance that many generations must pass
before it can be eradicated.
The truth is that Manet himself had no precise idea of what he really
wished to accomplish. Up to the last year of his life he groped
tentatively toward a goal, the outlines of which were never quite
distinct. We today, looking back upon his efforts, can judge his
motivating influences with some degree of surety. In bringing about the
paradox of staticising Courbet, Manet feminised him. He turned Courbet's
blacks and greys into pretty colours, and thereby turned his modelling
into silhouette and flattened his volumes. Thus was Courbet not only
made effeminate but popularised. Compare the superficially similar
pictures, Le Hamac of Courbet and Manet's Le Repos. In the former the
movement in composition accords with the landscape and is carried out in
the pose of the woman's arms and in the disposition of the legs. The
figure in the latter picture is little more than an ornament--a
symmetrical articulation. Manet has here translated the rhythm of depth
into linear balance. In this levelling process all those qualities which
raise painting above simple mosaics are lost. A picture thus treated
becomes a pattern, incapable of embodying any emotional significance.
Manet's paintings are remembered because they are so instantaneous a
vision of their subjects. For this same reason Goya is remembered; but
beneath the Spaniard's broad oppositions of tone is a limpid depth in
which the intelligence darts like a fish in an aquarium. In Manet the
impassable barrier of externals shuts out that world which exists on
the further side of a picture's surface.
In Manet we have the summing up of the pictorial expression of all time.
His love for decoration never left him long enough for him to experiment
with the profounder phases of painting. In many of his canvases he was
little more than an exalted poster-maker. His Rendez-vous de Chats was
frankly a primitive arrangement of flat drawing, as flat as a print by
Mitsuoki. Even details and texture were eliminated from it. It was a
statement of his theories reduced to their bare elements. Yet, though
exaggerated, the picture was representative of his aims. A pattern to
him was form. Courbet's ability to model an eye was the cause of Manet's
repudiating the painter of L'Enterrement a Ornans. The two men were
antithetical; and in that antithesis we have Manet's aspirations fully
elucidated. Even later in life when he took the figure out of doors he
was unable to shake off the influence of the silhouette. But the
silhouette cannot exist _en plain air_. Light volatilises design. This
knowledge accounts for Renoir's early sunlight effects. Manet never
advanced so far.
The limitations and achievements of Manet are summed up in his painting,
Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe. This picture is undoubtedly interesting in its
black-and-white values and in its freedom from the conventions of
traditional composition. At first view its theme may impress one as an
attempt at piquancy, but on closer inspection the actual subject
diminishes so much in importance that it might have been with equal
effect a simple landscape or a still-life. There is no attempt at
composition in the classic sense. Even surface rhythm is entirely
missing: the tonal masses decidedly overweigh on the left. But the
picture nevertheless embodies the distinguishing features of all Manet's
arrangements. It is built on the rigid pyramidal plan. From the lower
left-hand corner a line, now light, now dark, reaches almost to the
upper frame at a point directly above the smaller nude; and another
line, which begins in the lower right-hand corner at the reclining man's
elbow, runs upward to his cap, and is then carried out in the shadow and
light of the foliage so that it meets the line ascending from the other
side. The base of these two converging lines is formed by another line
which runs from the man's elbow along his extended leg. This is the
picture's important triangle. But a secondary one is formed by a line
which begins at the juncture of the tree and shadow in the lower
right-hand corner, extends along the cane and the second man's sleeve to
his head, and then drops, by way of the large nude's head and shoulder,
to the basket of fruit at the bottom. This angularity of design is seen
in the work of all primitive-minded peoples, and is notably conspicuous
in the early Egyptians, the archaic Greeks and the Assyrians of the
eighth century B.C. It is invariably the product of the static
intelligence into which the comprehension of aesthetic movement has never
entered. It is the result of a desire to plant objects solidly and
immovably in the ground. Those artists who express themselves through it
are men whose minds are incapable of grasping the rhythmic attributes of
profound composition. Manet repeats this triangular design in the
Olympia where the two adjoining pyramids of contour are so obvious that
it is unnecessary to describe them. The figures in canvases such as La
Chanteuse des Rues, La Femme au Perroquet, Eva Gonzales and Emile Zola
are constructed similarly; and in groups like En Bateau and Les Anges au
Tombeau (the latter of which recalls, by its arrangement and lighting,
the Thetis et Jupiter of Ingres) is expressed the mental immobility
which characterised Conegliano, Rondinelli, Robusti and their
seventeenth-century exemplars, de La Fosse, Le Moyne and Rigaud.
[Illustration: LE DEJEUNER SUR L'HERBE by MANET]
If, however, Manet failed in the larger tests, he excelled in his
ability to beautify the surfaces of his models. His painting of texture
is perhaps the most competent that has ever been achieved. In his flesh,
fruits and stuffs, the sensation of hard, soft, rough or velvety
exteriors reaches its highest degree of pictorial attainment. These many
and varied textures are reunited in his Le Dejeuner--a canvas which must
not be confused with Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe. Here we have a plant, a
vase, four different materials in the boy's clothing, a straw hat, a
brass jug with all its reflections, a table cloth, a wall, an old sword,
glassware, fruit and liquid. It is an orgy of textures, and Manet must
have gloried in it. One critic of the day wondered why oysters and a cut
lemon lay on the breakfast table. But we wonder why a cat with fluffy
fur is not there also. Castagnary suggested that Manet, feeling himself
to be the master of still-life, brought every possible texture into a
single canvas for purposes of contrast and because he delighted in the
material quality of objects. But the reason goes deeper. Manet was a
superlatively conscious technician, and that _sacree commodite de la
brosse_, so displeasing to Delacroix, was his greatest intoxication.
Hals also was seduced by it. Later, when the new vision of light was
communicated to Manet by the Impressionists, his obsession for the
purely technical diminished in intensity. In that topical bid for
popularity, the Combat du Kerseage et de l'Alabama, we detect his
interest in a new economy of means which would facilitate his search for
broader illumination. This method took a step forward in Le Port de
Bordeaux, and later reached maturity in his canvases painted in 1882, of
which Le Jardin de Bellevue is a good example. But despite his heroic
efforts, these last pictures, painted a year before he died when
paralysis had already claimed him and he was devoting his time almost
entirely to still-life, were without fulgency, and never approached the
richness of even so slight a colourist as Monet.
Repose is a word used overmuch by modern critics to designate the
dominant quality of Manet's painting. From an entirely pictorial point
of view the word is applicable, but in the precise aesthetic sense it is
a misnomer. The illusion of repose in Manet is accounted for by his even
use of greys, as in Le Chemin de Fer, Le Port de Bordeaux, the Execution
de Maximilien and the Course de Taureaux. Even in Les Bulles de Savon,
the Rendez-vous de Chats, Le Clair de Lune and Le Bar des
Folies-Bergere--canvases in which is exhibited Manet's greatest
opposition of tones--the ensemble is expressive of monotony. Real
repose, however, is something much more recondite than uniformity or
tedium. It is created by a complete harmonious organisation, not by an
avoidance of movement. Giotto's Death of Saint Francis and El Greco's
Annunciation have a simultaneity of presentation as unique as in Manet;
but, because their compositions are so rhythmically co-ordinated, they
present an absolute finality of movement and thus engender an emotional
as well as an ocular repose.
Manet's actual innovations are small, smaller even than Courbet's.
However, many critics credit him with grotesque novelties. There are
very few books dealing with modern painting which do not assert that he
was the first to note that flesh in the light is dazzlingly bright and
of a cream-and-rose colour. But in this particular there is no
improvement in Manet on the pictures of Rubens. He may have unearthed
this illustrative point; certain it is he did not originate it. Yet no
matter how slight his departures, we enjoy his pictures for their
inherent aesthetic qualities, and not for their approximation to nature.
Manet made many mistakes, but this was natural when we remember that in
the whirlpool of new ambitions one is prone to forget the lessons of the
past. Only by profiting by them can one go on toward the ever advancing
goal of achievement. We must not forget that this new spirit of
endeavour is only an impulse towards something greater, a rebellion
against arbitrarily imposed obstacles. If men like Manet lost track of
the fundamentals of the great art which had preceded them, it was only
that their vision was clouded by new experiments.
The actual achievements of Manet epitomise the secondary in art. His
attempt to combine artistic worth with popularity restricted him. That
he was misunderstood at first was his own fault in continually changing
his style. But acceptance or rejection by popular opinion does not
indicate the measure of a painter's significance. And Manet is to be
judged by his contributions to the new idea. His importance lay in that
he took the second step of the three which were to exhaust the
possibilities of realism. In art every genuine method is consummated
before a new one can take its place. Michelangelo brought architecture
to its highest point of development; Rubens, linear painting; the
Impressionists, the study of light; Beethoven, the classic ideal in
music; Swinburne, the rhymed lyric. In fact, only after the _epuisement_
of a certain line of endeavour, is felt the necessity to seek for a new
and more adequate means of expression. Manet helped bring to a close a
certain phase of art, thus hastening the advent of other and greater
men. His accomplishments now stand for all that is academic and
student-like; and although his interest as an innovator passed out with
the appearance of Pissarro and Monet, men go on imitating his externals
and using his brushing. In the same sense that Velazquez is a great
painter, so is Manet. His influence has served the purpose of helping
turn aside the academicians from their emulation of Italian painting.
IV
THE EARLY IMPRESSIONISTS
Courbet was the first painter to turn his attention to naturalism. Manet
carried forward Courbet's standard. Impressionism took the last step,
and brought to a close the objectively realistic conception in painting.
By this final development of naturalistic means unlimited opportunities
for achievement were offered. Impressionistic methods are now employed
by a vast army of painters in all parts of the world, and the number of
canvases which owe their existence to these discoveries is countless.
Specifically Impressionism is ocular realism. It represents that side of
actuality which has to do with light expressed by colour; and deals with
a manner of approaching natural valuations whereby the painter is
permitted to transfer a scene or subject to his canvas in such a way
that it will give the spectator the sensation of dazzling light, broad
atmosphere and truthful colours. To accomplish this Impressionism
confines itself to the play of a light from a given source--its
reflections and distributions on an object or a landscape. Therefore, it
is the restricted study of the disappearance of the local colour in a
model, and of the luminosity and divergencies of tones to be found in
shadow. It approximates to a nature which becomes, for the moment, a
theatre of chromatic light sensations. Subject-matter gave the
Impressionists no concern. They advanced materially on the spirit in
Manet which led him to paint any object at hand because of its
susceptibility to artistic treatment. The Impressionists painted
anything, not alone for aesthetic reasons, but because all objects make
themselves visible by means of light and shadow. This manner of painting
was the ultimate divorce of the picture from any convention, whether of
arrangement, of drawing or of a fixed palette. Herein it was an elastic
process _par excellence_, with no defined limitations.
Impressionism, though analytic and self-conscious, was not based on
science. One may look in vain for parallels between its theories and
those of Dove, Thomas Young and Chevreul. It was the imitation, pure and
simple, of the disintegrations of colour in nature's broad planes. And
this achievement of _diversity in simplicity_ was brought about by the
only method possible:--the juxtaposition of myriad tints. In other words,
Impressionism was a statement that vision is the result of colour forces
coming into contact with the retina. However, the men of the movement
did not see nature as an agglomeration of coloured spots, but as a
series of planes made vibrant by light. To reproduce this vibration they
were necessitated to use nature's methods: they broke up surfaces into
sensitive parts, each one of which was a separate tint. There are no
broad planes of unified colour in nature. In each natural atom are
absorption and reflection; and the preponderance of either of these two
attributes results in a specific colour. Before the advent of this new
school painters had made warm or cold green by combining green with
yellow ochre or raw sienna, or by the admixture of blues and purples.
But the Impressionists laid on these colours, pure or modified, side by
side, and let the eye do the work of blending. They discovered not only
that in green the shadow is tinged with blue, but that blue is the
direct result of the yellow-orange of light. Every one nowadays has
noticed that, in looking fixedly at a green, it appears now bluish, now
yellowish; just as in listening to an orchestra we can, by focusing our
attention, hear predominantly the bass or the treble. So the
Impressionists observed that in the most luminous colour there is a
proportion of absorption, and that in the darkest shadow there exists
some reflection. The association of these molecular properties is what
produces vibration in nature. By the application of these observations
the Impressionists generated a feeling of _grouillement_;--the movement
by contrast in the smallest parts.
In attempting to explain their canvases many commentators have credited
them with systems of complementaries which resulted in grey, and with
other exorbitant theories of oppositions. But one may look in vain in
their work for any synthesis of scientific discoveries. Colour, not
neutrality, was their aim; and, as they themselves admitted, they
painted _comme l'oiseau chante_. Birds are not conscious of the metallic
dissonance of diminished fifths; and the Impressionists were equally
unaware of the harshness of red with green, blue with orange, yellow
with violet. They only substituted a balance of cold and warm colours
for the balance of lines which the older painters had used. They copied
the tints they found in nature after analysing nature's processes, in
order to arrive closer to its visual effect. In one way they almost
achieved colour photography, for their study, in its narrow character,
was deep, and their vision was highly realistic. But whereas they
depicted nature, they could call it up only in its instantaneous
aspects. In this ephemerality alone were they impressionists; indeed,
their methods were the most exact and probing of any painters of that
time. Each hour of the day raises or lowers the colour values in nature;
and he who would copy nature's form as a permanent interpretation must
ignore the exactitude of its reflections and approximate only to its
local colours. This latter method is more truly impressionism than the
theories of the Impressionists. They repudiated local colours as being
too illusory, holding that the most highly coloured object modifies its
tint under the influence of the least variation of light. The point is
technically true, but it is an observation in objective research, and
the word Impressionism must not be accepted as explanatory of the
methods of the school it designates.
By decomposing the parts of a surface, in order to represent objects in
their atmospheric materiality, the Impressionists were impelled by a
force stronger than a mere desire for superficial accuracy: they felt
the need for complete and minute organisation in a work of art. In
landscape, where the many accidentals appeared to lack cohesion, the
Impressionists achieved co-ordination by a unity of light which welded
all the objects into an interdependent group. Plasticity of form had
resulted from the efforts of preceding painters, but here for the first
time was a plasticity of method which moulded itself like putty with the
slightest change of illumination. Preoccupation in this new
compositional element made its users forget, for the time being, the
older precepts for obtaining composition. This forgetfulness however was
not due entirely to exuberance over a novel procedure. The painters
antecedent to Delacroix had used landscape as unimportant backgrounds
for figures, and there was no precedent for its adaptation to
organisation. Courbet had composed landscape by the linear balance of
black and white volumes. The Barbizon artists had brought out-of-door
painting into more general notice; but their greys were insufficient to
give it more than a factitious and purely conventional unity. The
Impressionists, feeling the urgency for a more virile expression in
landscape work, saw a solution to their problem in the depiction of
light through colour. Thus their conceptions took birth.
Their technique, like Manet's, was wholly consistent with their
objective. To the Impressionists this objective seemed possessed of the
merit of finality. Since Corot had carried painting out of doors and
Manet had portrayed studio light from every vantage point, what indeed
was left for this new group of men? They might have organised Manet or
Corot, but even the most competent of such modifications would have
presented an appearance like that of a Rubens or a Tiepolo. They were
too avid for genuine novelty to content themselves with slight
innovation; and they were too modern to derive satisfaction from the
stereotyped teachings of an antiquity whose tones were unemotional and
whose themes were hackneyed. The spirit of servility which is willing to
learn second-hand lessons and adopt indoor conceptions spelled decadence
to them. Their attitude was a healthy and correct one, for the cup of
linear tone-composition had been drained. They were wrong in that they
threw aside the cup: they should have filled it with more powerful
concepts. Their attitude was indicative of immaturity. The
Impressionists in truth were the adolescents of the modern art which was
born with Delacroix and Turner, and which only recently has become a
concrete engine for the projection of inspiration into an infinity of
possibilities.
Impressionism was more important than any preceding departure, for it
turned the thoughts of artists from mere results to motivating forces,
from the ripples on the surface to the power which causes the tides. It
foreshadowed the philosophical idea in art which concerns itself with
causes rather than effects, and thereby brought about a fundamental
reform which made of painting, not a mere vision, but an idea. The
Impressionists, it is true, worked from the surface down, but they had
the depths ever in mind; and the posing of their problem set in motion
in all serious painters that intellectual process which eventually would
begin with foundations and build upward. Impressionism was the
undeniable implication that the possibilities of the older art methods
had been exhausted, and that a substitution of a new method, however
fragmentary, was of greater importance than the sycophantic imitations
of an unapproachable past. Beneath this attitude we feel the broadness
of mind which, when a mistake has been made, does not ignore causes but
attaches to them different interpretations in an effort to arrive at the
truth. The Impressionists kept their palette intact; but they employed
its parts in a way that made new combinations possible. By doing this
they unconsciously reacted against the mere dexterity of brushing with
which so many painters, like Hals, Velazquez and Raeburn, became
obsessed and, as a consequence, failed to heed the deeper demands of
aesthetic research. By thus facilitating technique they not only reduced
the difficulties attached to the production of a picture, but made the
thing expressed of greater relative significance.
Pissarro, Monet, Sisley and Guillaumin who, with Bazille, composed the
original group of Impressionists, had all been influenced in youth by
the revolutionary doctrines of Corot and Courbet, and to a great extent
had adopted the palette of these two men. Landscape painting at that
time was almost a new development, and these four readily succumbed to
its inspiration. There is little of the strictly picturesque and still
less of the grandiose in the French landscape. Consequently a school
which worked along the line of old conventions could not have existed in
France. But when Rousseau and Diaz, striking out in a new direction,
poetised the charm of the hills and forests about Fontainebleau, the
painting of the out-of-doors was liberated both as to purpose and to
freedom of arrangement. The object of Turner's work had been to
astonish and charm the spectator with nature's vastness and complexity.
But, with the men of 1830, landscape art took on softness,
introspection, stillness, solemnity. In fine, it became more intimate.
Each tree and stone hid a nymph; each stream and hill, a mystery. With
the Impressionists all this was changed. They had seen and admired the
work of Manet. They applauded his reactions against studio lighting, and
later became his personal friends. Manet was then the cynosure of all
eyes in the art world of Paris, and it was only natural that he should
have been the dominating figure in a sort of _cenacle_ held in the Cafe
Guerbois in the quarter of the Batignolles. Here the revolutionists of
the day forgathered, and, by their uncompromising spirit, inspired one
another to practical protestations against the routine of the academies.
Manet's eloquence argued away the older idea of lighting as a type; and
the younger men, using this negotiation as a starting point, gave birth
to the methods which congealed into Impressionism.
Although Monet and Pissarro were the first to profit by Manet's
teachings, there is no definite history to tell who was the first of the
group to blossom into colour. However, there is little doubt that
Pissarro was the man. He was a Jew with a philosophic turn of mind, and
possessed more genuine intelligence than his confreres. Monet was the
cleverest and the most enthusiastic, and when the new process was
outlined it was he who first developed it to its ultimate consequences.
Pissarro, compared with Monet, was conservative, and his practicality
did not permit him so great an _elan_. His canvases beside those of
Monet's appear almost tentative, and the greys he had adopted from Corot
never entirely forsook him. Both these painters went to London during
the Franco-Prussian War, and we may take it for granted that the works
of Turner had an enormous influence on them. They had already seen
Jongkind who, despite his adherence to the sombre greys of the older
men, had, five years previous, more than foreshadowed the later
divisionistic technique. But in Turner they discovered not only all that
Jongkind had to offer, but the additional quality of joyous and dazzling
colour. After their return their palettes became rapidly cleaner.
In 1874, in an effort to bestir the public, the Impressionists held an
exhibition. The excitement was all they could have desired, but it led
rather to obloquy than to sales. Again and again they exposed in the
hope of obtaining recognition, but not until 1888 were they successful.
The average spectator did not recognise nature in their canvases. The
vision was an unusual one, and bore but slight resemblance to what had
gone before. But gradually things underwent a change. Friends of the
Impressionists launched a campaign of proselytising. Now and then a
picture was sold to a collector; formerly restaurant keepers and
bricklayers had been the only buyers of their work. The popular press
softened its criticisms and in many instances went so far as to defend
their pictures. As a result of these numerous indications of a growing
approval among connoisseurs, the public, that almost immovable mass of
reactionary impulses, began to look with favour on the new works it had
so recently ridiculed. The great majority of people had cared only for
such canvases as those in which the intellect might jump from one
familiar object to another, recognising it wholly, comprehending its
uses, but without giving thought to its meaning. Being thus interested
primarily in a picture's conventionally painted details, they were
opposed to any innovations which tended to obscure the actualities of
delineation. Later their attitude, influenced by acts of authoritative
sanction, relaxed. Instead of seeing, as formerly, only a series of
raucously coloured spots in these new pictures, the public began to
sense the deep reverence for nature that emanated from them. Thus has it
always been the case with art: appreciation for anything newly vital
lags far behind the achievement.
The true significance of Impressionism, however--like the true
significance of all emotion-provoking art--remained undiscovered to the
general. When the mean intelligence of mankind brings itself to bear on
a work of art, it applies itself through the channels of literature,
archaeology, photography, botany, mineralogy and physiology. To be a
popular artist a painter must be something of a professor in all these
sciences. With all other considerations--such as psychology and
aesthetics--he need not trouble himself. The public, even after centuries
of rigorous training and constant association with art, is no nearer a
comprehension of rhythmic ensembles--perfectly synthesised form in three
dimensions--than it was during the Renaissance. The two major requisites
to an understanding of the formal relations in momentous art are a
highly developed sensitivity and an active intelligence. An eye and a
nervous system are not enough. Society as a whole may, after a long
course of training and sedulous study, reach that perceptive point where
it can grasp the simple aesthetic hypothesis founded on two dimensions.
But such a hypothesis is but a beginning. It embraces only the
rudimentary aesthetic organisations that are found in Japanese art, the
works of the Byzantine masters, the primitives of France and the
pictures of Botticelli, Manet and Gauguin. The form in art of this kind
is, strictly speaking, not form at all. It is balance, harmonious
rhythm, linear adjustment, parallelism, co-ordinated silhouette,
sensitive arrangement, outline melody--in fact, whatever is possible in
two dimensions. Significant form must move in depth--backward and
forward, as well as from side to side. Furthermore it must imply an
infinity of depth. This third (and sometimes fourth) dimension informs
all truly great art.
While the Impressionists did not attain to depth in the aesthetic
connotation of the word, they nevertheless went beyond mere linear
balance, for by the means of a higher emotional element--light--they
organised, in a superficial manner, all the objects in their canvases.
There were no dissevered objects, unrelated backgrounds, no concessions
to the hagiographa or other literature. What chance, therefore, had they
of being understood? Their subject-matter was too abstract; their
effects were too general. No line was accentuated above another. There
were no modifications to achieve vastness or splendour. Impressionism
was the unadulterated reproduction of atmosphere, the smile or frown of
a mood in nature. It is small wonder that the unaesthetic found it
obscure: in it there was too much rapture, too much frankness, too much
exultation in mere living, and too little restraint. It was the false
dawn in the great modern Renaissance of colour--the most ecstatically
joyful style of painting the world has ever seen. It was feminine in
that it was a reflection, and its hysteria may also be attributed to
this fact. The Impressionists seated themselves, free from all trammels,
before the face of nature. Nature dictated: they transcribed. Nature
smiled; and they, completely blent with it, smiled also. This very
enthusiasm is what kept them young and held them to their initial path.
To paint as they did was an intoxication, subtler and stronger than a
drug and more elating than young love.
The vital history of the individual men who formed this group reduces
itself to a record of their temperamental tastes in subject selection
and to a statement of the degree to which each developed the new method.
The individualities of the units of an experimental school are always
unimportant. Temperament can dictate to the artist only two phases of
variation: what he is to use in his composition, and those
transcendental qualities, such as joy and sorrow, drama and comedy,
which reflect the timbre of his predispositions. Rhythm, form, balance,
organisation, drawing--all these aesthetic considerations spring from
deeper matrices in a man's nature than do his temperamental
predilections. Whether one man is intrigued by sunlight or another by
mist, mankind is, after all, so similar in externals, that one
individual's slight departure from a predecessor, or his trifling
deviation from a contemporary, is of little moment. The true key to a
man's genius lies in his ability to organise as well as, or better than,
others. The compositional figure on which he builds will alone give us
the substance of his character. We are all capable of receiving
sensations: we have our personal likes and dislikes for subjects, even
for actions and smells. But these choices are the outgrowths of our
instincts, mere habits of association. In nowise are they fundamental.
They are the physiological recognition of pleasant or unpleasant
impressions. Their importance is limited to the individual who
experiences them. Being the results of receptivity, they have no more to
do basically with the aesthetic expression of an artist whose work is
pure creation, than phonograph disks with the sounds they receive. By
the intelligence alone can a man be judged. Here there is order,
extensive in artists like Michelangelo, partially restricted in such
painters as El Greco and Giorgione, and severely limited as in the case
of the Impressionists. However, it must not be implied that the
intelligence alone can create. Such a contention would be preposterous;
but it is true that impressions must first be consciously organised
before they can be given concrete expression.
The intelligence of Pissarro was synthetic to a small extent, but not
once did it exhibit signs of extended apperception. He thought clearly
up to a certain point beyond which his art never went. His temperament
was not an uncommon one among Hebrews. He viewed life as a social
reformer who regards the world as a sad place, but one susceptible of
improvement. From this psychological standpoint he painted. His pictures
depict ubiquitous greys, occasionally brightened by a stream of lurid
light; sombre scenes in which the impression is one of late afternoon;
peasants who seem wearied of their unceasing and thankless labours;
gaunt trees which epitomise the decay of the year. His technique is not
dissimilar to that of Jongkind, and his drawing is allied to the
construction found in the Dutch landscapists of the early nineteenth
century rather than in those of his own group. That he was the
transition from Jongkind to Monet is a plausible contention; in him are
found qualities of both these other painters. But he was too
conscientious ever to attain to the technical heights Monet reached. If
one aspires to innovation of means, graphic traits have to be
sacrificed: steps must be taken in the dark. Those who cling with one
hand to the old while groping toward the new can never reach their
desires. Pissarro's lack of constructive genius was too evident, his
timidity too great, his intelligence too literal for him ever to
effectuate new plastic forms. His instincts were those of a teacher, and
he displayed indubitable traits of an exalted doctrinaire. But his art,
with these limitations, was able and complete. Cezanne says he learned
all he knew of colour from him. This is not wholly true; but it is
certain that Guillaumin and Sisley are greatly indebted to his clarity
of reason.
Although Pissarro is the greater artist, Monet is the finer craftsman.
He is widely credited with the invention of divisionistic methods; but
in this conclusion an inaccurate syllogism has played havoc with the
facts. None of the Impressionists invented the _procede de la tache_;
and not having invented it detracts nothing from their achievement.
Liszt did not invent the pianoforte, yet he was its greatest master. The
practice of crediting Frenchmen with the invention and development of
methods has scant authority with which to justify itself. Poussin was an
offshoot, and a weak one, of the great Titian. Watteau and Boucher come
to us direct out of the corners of Rubens's pictures. Daumier and
Courbet, temperamentally unrelated to the French tradition, stem from
the Dutch and the Spaniards. Cezanne emanated from the Dutch and the
Italians _via_ Impressionism. Matisse's procedure is little more than a
modification of that of the Persians and the early Italians. Cubism was
imported from Spain by a Spaniard. Futurism is strictly Italian: there
is not a French name among its originators. Synchromism was brought into
the world by Americans. And Impressionism, which, like all these other
departures, has come to be looked upon as French, is incontrovertibly of
English parentage. True, there is small credit due the inventor. The man
capable of employing new discoveries (as Marconi employed the principles
of wireless telegraphy) is the truly important figure. But we should not
confuse discovery with employment. Since Monet was French, France has a
perfect right to claim the results of colour division. The honours
attaching to its discovery are Turner's and Constable's.
Monet, like many great men, had little schooling. He went direct to
nature, impelled by the new impetus toward landscape. His first pictures
in the Impressionist manner resemble Manet's except for trivial
innovations in the differentiation of shadows; but in this difference we
divine the later Monet. Viewed cursorily these paintings appear to be
conventional figure pieces. But they are more than that. The figures
have no other significance than that which attaches to a vase or a
landscape. "Facial expression," "sympathetic gestures," the "appeal"--all
are absent from them. In these pictures the costume plays the hero's
part. La Japonaise is representative of that treatment of subject
wherein the figure is only an excuse for a pattern of colour. The modern
attitude toward theme which Manet handed down is again in evidence in
Monet. Its _reductio ad absurdum_ was the late epidemic of illustrative
pictures by such men as Whistler, Shannon, Sargent, Zuloaga and
Alexander, the titles of which were derived from the flowers held in the
hands of the principals, a bowl of goldfish in the background, or the
colour of a lace shawl.
Monet, however, soon tired of figure pieces. His true penchant lay
toward landscape. In this field he found an infinity of colour
possibilities, innumerable subtleties of light gradation, and
ready-to-paint arrangements as appealing as the ones he had formerly had
to pose in his interiors. At first his technique was broad and radiant,
much like a dispersed Manet. The large flat planes of unified colour
which later were to disintegrate into a thousand touches, were laid on
silhouetted forms. His boat pieces in the Caillebotte collection in
the Luxembourg gallery, appear, in their simplicity and breadth of
treatment, like the unfinished underpainting of a Turner or a Rembrandt.
Much of the bare canvas is visible; and in them one feels the presence
of the experimenter. At this time the war drove Monet to London, and his
exile proved a salutary one. On his return his pictures bloomed with a
new brilliance, and his flat surfaces became fragmentised. Racial
characteristics no doubt establish a bond between Sisley and the English
landscapists, but nothing less than an active influence could have made
so typical a Frenchman as Monet paint a canvas like L'Eglise a
Varengeville in which Turner is so much in evidence. Turner is also
unmistakably present in Pissarro at times, as witness Sydenham Road, but
never to any great extent.
[Illustration: WATERLOO BRIDGE by MONET]
Despite his great debt to Turner, Manet and Pissarro, Monet owed even
more to the Japanese. They influenced his style and his selection of
subjects. From them he lifted the idea of painting a single object many
times in its varied atmospheric manifestations. But where the Japanese
shifted their vantage-ground with each successive picture, Monet's
observation point remained stationary. His composition too, superficial
as it is, is frankly Japanese. It is generally represented by a straight
line which runs near the lower frame from one side to the other of the
canvas, and which supports the principal objects of the work. This line
slants, now up to the left, now up to the right; but seldom is it curved
as in the more advanced drawings of Hiroshige or Hokusai. His kinship
to the Japanese is, after all, a natural one, for the temperaments of
France and Japan are as similar as is possible between east and west.
The Japanese artists presented atmospheric conditions by means of
gradating large colour planes into white or dark. The consequent effects
of rain, snow, wind and sun are as vivid as Monet's, but they differ
from the Frenchman's in that they are concerned principally with
nature's decorative possibilities. Monet adheres to graphic
transcription for the purpose of presenting the dynamics of a
mood-producing phase of nature. But though differing as to aims, they
both reach very similar visual results. Compare, for instance, Monet's
suite of Les Peupliers with Hiroshige's series of the Tokaido or with
Hokusai's Views of Fuji. Many of the pictures are alike in composition
and choice of subject; but the European has achieved a living light,
while the Oriental has presented a more lucid and intensive vision.
These differences of purposes and similarities of appearance are again
discernible in Monet's Coins de Riviere and Shiubun's Setting Sun. A
further proof of this Impressionist's affinities with the Japanese will
be found by collating Monet's figure pieces with those of Utamaro.
There is one important point of divergence, however, between the arts of
Japan and Monet's canvases. Whereas the Japanese ignored texture, Monet
at all times devoted himself more or less sedulously to its portrayal.
The Falaise a Etretat and The Houses of Parliament--London are examples
of his freedom from a rigid system of scientific application. In both
pictures the sky is drawn with broad intersecting strokes in order to
achieve transparency and vastness. The water, in the former, is painted
with long curved strippings to give the wave effect, as in Courbet's La
Vague; and, in the latter, ripples are formed by minute touches. Monet's
architecture is often built up with colour-spots as a man lays bricks;
and the cliffs in the Falaise a Etretat are corrugated in exactly the
same way the strata lie in nature. Later this preciosity of style
disappeared, except in his treatment of slightly ruffled water. His
brushing became irregular and elongated, and he applied his stroke so
that it would merge into the other innumerable touches of diverse
colour. His eyesight was highly trained, and after years of labour in
the conscious analysis of colour planes, he was able to divide these
planes unconsciously.
Monet was artistic in that he felt deeply what was before him. Henri
Martin, on the other hand, who painted with independent touches in the
hope of obtaining flickering sunlight, and who knew his palette fully as
well as Monet, laboured mechanically. His work is more optical than
emotional. He is a realist in the same sense that Roll is a realist; but
both these men present only the husk of reality. Monet, to the contrary,
experienced and expressed nature's ecstasy. He is like a string which
vibrates to any harmony: Martin is little more than an eye. Both
finished their work in the open; and both stippled. But here the
parallelism ends, for where Monet completed the effects of the Japanese,
Martin only took light into the academies. Perhaps this is why Martin
was at once acclaimed by the public, and why Monet, during those first
dark years of struggle and poverty, was compelled to sell his canvases
for practically nothing. Duret confesses to having obtained one for
eighty francs. Martin was early accorded academic honours, and received
numerous government orders.
Monet found himself at home wherever there was light and water. His
canvases describe scenes from all over Europe. But his most famous
pictures are his two series, Les Meules and Les Nympheas. In the first,
a single haystack is set forth in a diversity of illuminations and
seasons; and the second repeats a small pond of water-lilies, in shade
and in sun, ruffled and calm. His La Cathedrale, Venice and London
series are also widely known. These represent acute observation and an
implacable inspiration to work, for they had to be finished
simultaneously. Their accomplishment was a stupendous _tour de force_.
At sunrise Monet would go forth with twenty blank canvases so that the
changes of sunlight and mist might be caught from hour to hour. They
seem infantile to us today--these imitations of the subtleties of light,
these meteorological histories of haystacks and lilies, these
atmospheric personalities of cathedrals and canals. Yet it is by just
such self-burials in data that one exhausts the aesthetic possibilities
of nature's actualities. And not until this probing to the bottom has
been accomplished does the artist possess that complete knowledge which
impels him to push forward to something newer and more vital.
Sisley was the last of the original five to adopt Impressionistic
methods. He had long had an admiration for the exploits of the more
revolutionary painters, but a comfortable income had acted as a
sedative on his ambitions. He did not feel the necessity for difficult
endeavour. But when, at the death of his father, he found himself
penniless and with a family to care for, he joined the ranks of
Pissarro, Monet, Guillaumin and Bazille. He had talent and an accurate
eye, and his earlier academic work, done in the sixties, served as a
practical foundation. After he had adopted the more modern technique of
Pissarro and Monet, he was prepared for the achievement of new art. If
we had no other proof that Impressionism at its inception was a shallow
craft, Sisley's immediate mastery of it would be conclusive, for his
appropriation of its means was not an aesthetic impulse but a financial
expedient. But more extensive corroboration can be found in a score of
academies where Impressionism is taught and taught conclusively.
There is no more or less actual composition in Sisley than in other of
the Impressionists. He supplied no innovations, and he differed from his
fellows only in so far as his temperament indicated variation. In Monet
and Guillaumin there is a concentration and precision which the
Englishman fell short of. His nature was less akin to these
Impressionists than to the Turner of wide and open skies, of the
softness and dreaminess of summer, of that perfect satisfaction which is
content with inaction. Sisley's very colour preference for which the
public reproached him--light lilac--indicates his penchant for prettiness
and repose. His choice of theme was invariably dictated by a poetical
and sentimental need for the intimate.
In Guillaumin we have a man who gave promise of good work but who, up to
the last, failed in its fulfilment. Indubitably talented, he never
succeeded in reaching that point where talent is only a means to an end.
But nevertheless there was in him a solidity of modelling, a real
feeling for the ponderous hardness of hills and plains. He was a friend
of Cezanne, and undoubtedly learned much from that master of form. At
first he had painted in sombre tones, but later, after meeting Cezanne
and Pissarro in the _Academie Suisse_, he adopted their lighter and more
joyous colour schemes. There is a canvas in the Caillebotte Collection
in the Luxembourg which, in its broadness of treatment and extensive
planes, suggests Gauguin both as to gamut and conception. Guillaumin was
the most masculine talent of the early Impressionist group. He cared
less for the transient views of nature than for its eternal aspect. His
colour, by its liberality of application, counts more forcibly than that
of Pissarro, Monet or Sisley. His contributions to the new idea,
however, were comparatively small. He was not an explorer, but followed
diligently in the path others had marked out. Only after he had won a
fortune in a lottery did he break away from his environment. But this
release came to him too late. His formative period of development had
passed, and his work, from that time on, did not alter in technique.
Only in his picturesque and bizarre subject-matter is noticeable any
deviation from his habitual routine.
[Illustration: PAYSAGE by GUILLAUMIN]
The individual achievements of the Impressionists, however, no matter
how competent, are of minor importance. Impressionism was a new weapon
in the hands of art's anarchists. It has come to be regarded as a
faultless faith whose devotees can do no wrong. There has been little or
no adequate literature devoted to its exposition, its causes and
influence; and the exaggeration of its attainments are as grotesque as
the calumny with which it was at first received. It was not an ultimate
and isolated movement, but a simple and wholly natural offshoot in the
evolution of new means. The artists who fathered it were, except in one
instance, men whose enthusiasm outstripped their abilities as composers.
Their greatest good lay in that they turned the thoughts of painters
toward colour, and outlined, summarily to be sure, the uses to which
this new and highly intense element might be put. They expressed just
what their desires permitted them:--nature in all its visible changes.
Those exquisite moments of full sunlight on land and water, of cloud
shadows over the hills, of the warm brilliancy of a blue sky on the
upturned faces of flowers; the stillness of summer amid the woods; the
cold serenity of snow-clad fields--all were seen and captured and
immortalised by these men. They were the greatest painters of effects
the world has ever known. They never strove to evoke the sensation of
weight in the objects they painted; and that organisation of parts,
which is a replica of the cosmos, they were too busy to attempt. Their
very deficiencies were what permitted them so complete a vision of the
only side of realism which still remained for painting to investigate.
The Impressionists did not embody concretely the teachings of their
forerunners, but used them all in the abstract. Delacroix had
sacrificed photographic truth in drawing in order to present a more
intense impression of truth. Daumier had built form as nature builds it,
colour aside. Courbet had turned painters from the poetic contemplation
of a great past to the life about them. Manet had made images of
whatever was at hand for the pure love of painting. The Impressionists
turned to the things nearest them, paid scant heed to scholastic
drawing, translated Daumier's doctrine of form into light, and like
Manet painted for the joy of the work. As experimenters they were
valuable; but their pictures, to those unsentimental persons whose
appreciations of art are wholly aesthetic, mean little more than records
of how a cabbage patch appears at sunrise, a lily pond at midday, or a
country lane at twilight. The Impressionists did not amalgamate and
express the dreams of their forerunners. They were one of those
transitional generations whose vitality is spent in a stupendous
endeavour to conceive before the time is ripe. The need for a great
birth had not yet made itself felt; for only when the period of embryo
is complete can great art be born. Renoir brought forth that issue; and
with him evolution seems to halt a moment before plunging onward. The
meagre aesthetics of the early Impressionists could not lead to the
highest artistic results. Indeed, their animating aims had to be
abandoned before Renoir could attain to true significance.
V
AUGUSTE RENOIR
The entire past progress of painting is condensed and expressed in each
of its great men. The creation of new art cannot be accomplished
overnight, any more than that of a new organism; it must stem from first
impulses and be formed on the differentiations of the past. Those men
who declare themselves primitives and seek to acquire the eyes and minds
of the Phoenicians or Aztecs are as conscious of their inability to
create new art forms as are those visionaries who live in a mythical
future and try to prophesy the forms that are to come. No man is born
too soon or too late. There are those who strive toward classic
intellectual ideals, toward Utopian economic states, toward new orders
of society: but such reformers are only the malcontents. The truly great
and practical men quickly assimilate the impulses of their own epochs
and push the frontiers of the mind's possibilities further into the
unknown. These latter comprise the maligned vanguard of heroic thinkers
who fight the battles for their weaker followers. Often, however, these
followers rise to great heights, for in the world of endeavour two
conspicuous types exist--the man who experiments and the man who
achieves. Delacroix, Manet and the Impressionists belong to the first;
Courbet and Renoir are of the second.
In Renoir's life story, as in that of Titian, Rubens and Rembrandt, we
see in miniature the evolution of all the painting that preceded him--the
bitter struggles with the chimeras of convention, and each slow change
that came over drawing, style, colour and composition. In the end, after
a life full of near defeats, strife, yearning and anxiety, we behold the
great man emerge triumphantly from his broken fetters and take his place
beside the masters of the past. Some painters have more arduous fights
than others, for the odds against them are greater. Rubens and Delacroix
seemed the pampered favourites of a high destiny: Courbet and Renoir had
to cleave and chisel each step of the way through the adamant of public
suspicion. The world appears incapable of recognising either an
intensification or a modification of an old and accepted formula. Hence
Courtois and Puget were preferred to Delacroix; Ribera and Rembrandt to
Courbet; the Avignon painters to Manet; Corot, Diaz and Rousseau to the
Impressionists; and Rubens and Ingres to Renoir. In all of these
parallelisms, the latter had their roots in the former. They were
complications and variations of their forerunners--dissimilar only in
method and manner.
Renoir began to paint at an early age. The poverty of his family
necessitated him to make his own living, and at the age of thirteen he
was in a factory painting porcelains. Five years later he applied for
work at a place given over to the decoration of transparent screens.
Here his unusual facility permitted him to paint ten times as fast as
his fellow decorators, and since he was paid by the piece, he soon saved
enough money to give himself an education in the art which had now
become with him a conscious instinct--painting. From his earliest youth
he had evinced a discontent with the slow-moving minds about him, and it
was natural that he should first look upon art through the eyes of his
great revolutionary contemporary, Courbet. His earliest work, of which
Le Cabaret de la Mere Anthony and Diane Chasseresse are the best-known
examples, reflected Courbet in both palette and conception. Even later,
when Manet claimed him, he clung to his first influence. For while his
work now reached out toward the substance of light to be found in La
Musique aux Tuileries, it revealed at the same time all the form of the
Ornans master. Le Menage Sisley and Lise strikingly combine these two
early influences.
Since humanity has emerged from the darkness of unconsciousness and the
individual from the darkness of the womb, it is consistent with nature
that in a man's creative development--the route of which lies between
dark and dark--the use of black should be his first instinct. Renoir,
like all painters of great promise, started with this negation of
colour. But wherein his intellectual distinction manifested itself was
his innate proclivity for the rhythm of surface lines which he alone of
all his contemporaries recognised in Courbet. In Lise, painted in 1867,
a year after his Diane Chasseresse, both of these early penchants are
evident. Black is the keynote of his sunlight; and while in conception
the canvas is akin to Manet, it is a Manet made dexterous and masterly.
It contains a balance and a linear rhythm of which that painter was
ignorant. Lise is one of the few Renoirs into which the influence of
Velazquez and Goya can be imagined. Even in its pyramidal form, which
when used by most painters becomes a static figure, there is a movement
at its apex which opens into a shape like a lily. This is brought about
by the tilt of the sunshade and the continuation of the line of the sash
outward in the tree trunk. By just such obvious and simple signs as
these in early works, can we foretell an artist's later developments.
The next year, 1868, Renoir's work is more net, more able in its
balance, more sure in its effect. Le Menage Sisley is one of his finest
early examples of how this rhythmic continuity of line obsesses a mind
avid for form, colour, vitality. At first glance we see only an
irregular pyramid formed by the outline of the two figures; but after a
minute's study we notice that on the right the line of the skirt curves
gracefully inward to the waist-line, sweeps up to the woman's neck, then
begins an outward flexure, and finally disperses itself amid the tree's
slanting branches in the right-hand upper corner. On the left, the
outline of the man's right leg and arm and hair forms another curve
which bends back the line of the opposing curve of the woman's dress,
and completes the figure of the pyramid. But the first curve, the force
of which is seemingly ended at the woman's waist, is continued in the
outline of the light tonality which begins at the man's right elbow,
curves outward to the frame, then inward, and ends on the upper frame a
little to the left of the man's head. Furthermore, the volume made by
the light tonality in the upper left-hand corner serves as a balance to
the form of the woman's tunic. This composition is, in all essentials,
the same as in Lise, and embraces that rhythm in two dimensions which
Manet did not know, and that balance of tonal form of which Manet was
never capable. Manet's mind was that of the lesser Dutch and Spaniards.
Renoir's was the plastic and flowing mind of the Latin races, never
satisfied with angularity and immobility, but needful of the smooth
progression of sequence and movement.
The recognition of the artistic necessity for linear rhythm led Renoir
to search for it in others than Courbet. Among the painters by whom he
might profit, Delacroix stood nearest his own time. To him Renoir
turned; and it was out of him that Renoir's greatness was to grow.
Delacroix's organisations appealed to him--especially the triangular one
which opens at the top. His admiration for this artist's talent led him
to paint in 1872 a canvas called Parisiennes Habillees en Algeriennes,
an ambitious essay to compete with Les Femmes d'Alger dans Leur
Appartement. Intrinsically the picture was a failure, but it taught its
creator more than he had heretofore learned concerning colour and
drawing. In it are discernible indications of the formal
unconventionalities and the chromatic brilliancies which later were to
be such dominant qualities in Renoir's work. Although for two years he
had used Impressionistic methods, it was through this picture that
Delacroix introduced him to the Impressionists' colour. Manet had
already introduced him to Ingres: and these two incidents went far
toward laying the foundation for his greatness. On neither the
Impressionists nor Ingres did he build a style; but from both he
learned something of far more value:--freedom from the dictates of style.
Here again Delacroix had a hand, for by studying this artist's uses of
Ingres's simplifications, Renoir was able to make these simplifications
plastic.
Renoir's colour up to this time had been restrained by the dictates of
his epoch. But with the inspiration and encouragement given him by Les
Femmes d'Alger dans Leur Appartement, it burst forth with all the force
of long-imprisoned energy, and drove him out of doors. In this picture
he found excuse to carry colour to any extreme he desired. At once the
instincts of the porcelain painter, ever latent in him, came uppermost.
Delacroix, in giving him the Impressionists' freedom of colour, had
brought him back to those rich and full little designs he had painted on
china between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. In this early training
alone lies the explanation of his later _matiere_ which has for so long
puzzled the critics. Many attribute his colour effects to Watteau. But
Renoir had developed his technique before he knew the older master.
Years previous he had been intensely interested in the very material of
his models. In Le Menage Sisley, La Baigneuse au Griffon and La Femme a
la Perruche is evinced the love of the connoisseur for rare and rich
stuffs. Furthermore he had begun to turn his eyes toward Impressionist
methods two years before he painted Les Parisiennes Habillees en
Algeriennes. Up to that time his brushing had been broad like Manet's or
Courbet's; immediately afterward it tended toward spotting, and Monet
took the upper hand. Watteau's manner of application served only to
substantiate Renoir in his choice of method.
The years from 1865 to 1876 constitute a period of Renoir's life rich in
its promise of splendid things. His keen admirations and high
enthusiasms made of him throughout this time a disciple. But his
achievements, small as they were, were more sumptuous and effectual than
either Manet's or Monet's. Their true significance, though, lay in their
assurance of what was to come after he had completed that unlearning
process through which all great men must pass. Only by sitting at a
master's feet can one acquire the knowledge that informs one which
influences should be utilised and which cast aside. One cannot learn
from experience the total lessons of many men, each one of whom has
given a lifetime to the study of a different side of a subject. If these
men are to be surpassed their life work must be used as a starting
point. Renoir began thus. He had fallen under the sway of Courbet,
Manet, Delacroix and Monet; but after eleven years he had exhausted his
creative interest in both their theories and their attainments. These
men had expressed all that was in them. For Renoir to cling to them was
to stand still. If he was to go down in history as a constructive genius
and not merely as an able imitator, it was time for him to strike out
alone.
He did not hesitate. The portrait of Mlle. Durand-Ruel, done in 1876,
marks his transformation. In it he achieved the scintillation of light
which is not linked with colour or painting, but which seems to arise,
by some mysterious alchemy, from the surface of the canvas. In this
picture, and also in the Moulin de la Galette, finished in the same
year, he consummated the fondest ambition of the Impressionists, namely:
to make the spectator feel a picture, not as a depiction of nature's
light, but as a medium from which emanates the very force of light
itself. But Renoir did not stop here: to this achievement he added form
and rhythm--two attributes which the Impressionists, preoccupied with
objectivity, were too busy to attempt. And in addition he displayed a
technique so perfect in its adaptability to any expression, that its
mannerisms were completely submerged in the picture's total effect.
These were the qualities which Renoir was to develop to so superlative a
degree. He had begun to express form in 1870 in his Portrait de Dame.
Two years later in his Delacroix adaptation he had branched out into
colour. And in his very first canvases there was rhythmic balance of
lines. In 1876 all these tendencies coalesced. In consequence Renoir
blossomed forth free from aggressive influences, knowing his own
limitations and possibilities. This cannot be said even of those
excellent works, La Loge, La Danseuse and La Fillette Attentive, done
the two preceding years. It is only by contemplating such pictures as
the portrait of Mlle. Durand-Ruel, La Chevelure and La Source that we
can perceive the path along which his development was to take place. For
these canvases, though far more significant than the works of Pissarro
and Monet, are almost negligible beside his later work. He was a man
never satisfied with results, no matter how exalted. His every new
achievement was only a higher elevation from which his horizon ever
receded.
[Illustration: LE DEJEUNER DES CANOTIERS by RENOIR]
One of Renoir's important advances in method is his liberation from the
circumscribed use of black. Although in some of his work of 1876 there
are still traces of that tone used organically, they are so slight that
they may be disregarded. Black was the very keynote of the paintings of
his day. It was looked upon as a necessity in the creation of volumes.
Courbet did little without it, and Manet brightened it only with
occasional flashes of colour. Today we know that it is not a technical
necessity, that pure colours, in fact, when properly used, can produce
the most solid forms. But whereas we have been able to profit by the
teachings of Cezanne and the Synchromists, Renoir had to learn this fact
by bitter experiments in a new element. In La Balancoire, done in the
same year as the Moulin de la Galette and now hanging with that picture
in the Luxembourg, black is entirely absent. This little canvas was
probably an experiment actuated by Monet, for never afterward did he on
principle lay black aside. While he realised its unimportance as a
fundamental for constructing volume, he nevertheless felt its need as a
complement to colour--the need of the static and the dead to accentuate
the plastic and alive.
It is during this period that critics are prone to see Gainsborough in
Renoir. But their reasons for such a comparison are superficial, and go
no further than the fact that both painters dealt with feminine themes
in a similarly intimate manner. No genuinely artistic likeness can be
found between Mrs. Siddons, for instance, and the Ingenue. The one is
merely a spirited portrait without composition or tactility: the other
is an exquisite bit of form and colour, which we feel would be as solid
to the touch as it appears to the eye. If we are to compare Renoir to
English painters at all, let us designate Hogarth and Romney, although
any such comparative method of criticism is apt to lead at once to
misunderstanding. However, even these two men are distinctly inadequate
as measures for Renoir. In the graphic arts Englishmen exhibit no
feeling for rhythm. Indeed, it may correctly be said they possess no
graphic arts. Rhythm is a factor which has made itself felt only in
their poetry, and here it can hardly be called more than a division of
interval, or tempo. Rossetti in his paintings is seemingly more
conscious of its power than any other Englishman, and occasionally
attempted to produce it by the primitive device of curved lines. But,
after all, Rossetti was Italian. On the whole Renoir and the English
artists are two fundamentally dissimilar to be estimated relatively. The
finest qualities of Renoir's art grew out of his instinct for fluent
movement, for intense undulations, for hot gorgeous colour, for freedom
from all traditional prescriptions.
The evolution of these instincts was by no means a mechanical one. After
he had amalgamated the leading qualities of his art, his interest would
often reveal itself more strongly in one direction than another. Thus
many of his canvases show a retrogression toward emphasis of light;
others toward form; still others toward linear rhythm. Yet no matter
which one of these qualities predominated, the others also remained
intact. More importance, however, attached to his preoccupation with the
treatment of light. His experiments and consequent development in this
field are of initial significance in judging his later work. In 1878 he
had evidently foreseen the cul-de-sac into which the natural
distribution of light would lead. The very volatility and translucency
of illumination and its matter-dispelling qualities, constituted the
greatest drawback to its use in the creation of form. In other words its
sheer beauty nullified the deeper aims of painting. In two decorative
Panneaux of reclining nudes, done in the same year, Renoir makes his
first attempt to escape from the naturalism of light. The use of light
is here restricted to a colour force which serves only to bring form
into relief. From that time on, although he had many struggles with its
power over him, he had conquered its insidious influence. It became his
servant, whereas before it had been his master. In his earlier canvases,
wherein sunlight had played a leading part, he had placed the sun
patches, gleaming and vibrant, wherever they naturally fell. After 1878
he began placing them arbitrarily on points where formal projection was
needed.
The subtle manner in which he constructed and posed these patches
precluded any discovery of his reasons for altering their natural
location. But Renoir was not fully satisfied, and soon abandoned this
phase of _pleinairisme_. Later the spots of sunlight appeared on cheeks,
shoulders, knees, or any other salients which called for powerful
relief, thereby losing their flat and detached appearance. This
moulding of them into intense aggregations had much to do with Renoir's
fullness of form. His long experience had given him a complete knowledge
of their naturalistic effect. He knew it was impossible to make them
remain on the same plane with the surrounding shadow, and he understood
the reasons for this phenomenon. It was not therefore remarkable that,
in his later method of applying them, he was sure of his results. As
soon as he realised that sunlight dispersed matter by obscuring some
points and accentuating others, he knew that by an intelligent
employment of this factor of luminosity he could at will accentuate
certain parts of his canvas and obscure others. This knowledge led him
naturally to create his own light, irrespective of how it actually
existed. This was an important step toward its complete abrogation, and
brought arbitrary means in painting just so much nearer. He had already
distorted volumes for purposes of organisation in the same manner that
he now distorted light. Indeed every great painter has taken this
liberty with form; but each one has to learn the device anew in its
relation to his own separate vision.
There are few shadows, as such, in Renoir. We find darks and lights in
scintillating succession, but we may search in vain, even in his
canvases of 1878 or 1879, for those shadowed outlines which are the
result of light. If light there is, it is only the light which springs
from our own eyes--light which seems to come from the direction of the
beholder, like the reflection of a light in water. Move as you will
before his pictures, it follows you, for it is the illumination of that
part of the picture nearest the eyes of the painter. Where a form is
full, there Renoir contrives to have a light fall. This artifice may
strike us today as childish, since we have outgrown our concern with
light; but let us remember that from the beginning the depiction of
lights and shadows had been a fixed practice, and that their tones had
formed the only basis for chiaroscuro. With the Impressionists light
became the _atout_ of painting. Renoir made of it a vital form-creating
element. Herein we have its evolution: first, a convention; next, an
obsession; last, a utility. So were the aesthetic possibilities of light
exhausted, just as the aesthetic possibilities of the human form were
exhausted by Michelangelo.
In this last step of liberating light from convention, Renoir approached
nearer to nature than any antecedent painter. After all, a human being
in the sunlight appears to us as a solid moving mass. Only those who
look upon nature as a flat pattern of shades and lights are misled by
sun patches. So, in Renoir's adapting the source of light for the
purpose of producing solidity of form, we are cognisant of the
palpability of his figures whether they are in light or shadow, or both.
Thus he created the actual impression of volume we all get before a
moving form. This arbitrary disposition of light and shadow also gave
fullness and intensity to his form, and accentuated the poise, so subtle
and unexpected, we feel in even his slightest works. But while this was
the secret of his attainment of volume, the compositional use to which
he put this volume requires another explanation--one which has its roots
in the very depths of the man's genius. There had never been such form
in the French school as that which Renoir gave it in 1880. The Tete de
Jeune Fille and Les Enfants en Rose et Bleu, done about this time, must
have been the despair of even the sculptors of his day. And these were
but the beginning. Many phases of his art were yet to be emphasised and
developed before the Renoir we know today was to be perfected.
It was in 1884 that he began to "_apprendre le dessin_." For four years
he continued this self-training in the precision of draughtsmanship. As
a boy he had begun his painting in a manner more competent than the most
advanced style of the average artist, as is evidenced by the able use of
colour as design in his early porcelains. And although he was driven to
this work by necessity, the incident was a salutary one. It turned his
thoughts toward those abstract organisations of colour which always
afterward haunted him. Later he learned all the tricks of the day in the
school of the realists, and succeeded in surpassing his masters. Next he
studied the Impressionists and went beyond them also. Then he
co-ordinated his knowledge and established his individual greatness.
This period of his development gave France much of its finest painting,
and his Baigneuse done at this time is an undoubted masterpiece. His
reversion to the rudiments of drawing was the result of a burning desire
to develop rhythm and form. His technical difficulties had been
conquered at an early date: he needed only dexterity in drawing to
achieve his end. Not only did Renoir attain to his objective, but, by
comprehending the principle of the placements and displacements of
volumes, he learned the advantages of line accentuation in obtaining
movement.
We now come to those pictures which show Renoir's intimate relation to
Rubens through Boucher and Watteau: to his alfresco bathing figures.
Some one has pointed out that his Baigneuses of 1885, one year after he
had devoted himself to drawing, was inspired by Girardon's lead-reliefs
in the gardens at Versailles. The commentary is undoubtedly true; but
even so, of what significance is it? Aside from the superficial fact
that in the works of both appear bathing women in more or less abandoned
poses, Renoir had nothing in common with the school of Largilliere,
Pater, Fragonard, Le Moyne, Santerre and Girardon. In all such
observations one senses the restriction of the critic's viewpoint to
illustration. An artist may find inspiration in any visual form, but
this form is of no more aesthetic importance to him than a photograph. In
Picasso's paintings of violin fragments we are scarcely permitted to
deduce an inspiration from Stradivarius. Grotesque as this analogy may
seem, it is applicable to the contention that Renoir stemmed from
Girardon. For there is nothing whatever in Renoir's bathing girls to
suggest a psychological parallel between them and the leaden frieze at
Versailles. If Renoir saw in that frieze an attractive pose, it was with
an eye to its adaptability to composition. In Girardon there is only a
pretty and sensual chaos. In Renoir we have a masterly organisation
wherein the actual positions of the young women are not even remarked.
Compare, for instance, Girardon's version of the figure of the girl
throwing water on her playmates, with the corresponding figure in
Renoir's drawing. The body of the former is without doubt a more
faithful replica of its model; in Renoir it has become impossibly
elongated and voluminous. Its head is too small; its back too long; its
hips are too large--and yet withal it is an exquisite bit of rich form
which has as concrete a tangibility as that of a real body. One cannot
judge it by its contour; one must bury oneself in its very weight.
Had Renoir advanced no further than his masterly Baigneuse of 1884, he
would nevertheless have gone down in history as a great artist. But
compared with the same subject done in 1888, it appears stiff. We feel
in it the rigidity of a master whose great qualities are without a
directing intelligence. In the later canvas, Renoir is less preoccupied
with details. As a result there is a greater plenitude of bulging form,
a purer rhythm. And there is also an added movement caused by the linear
harmony of the background, by the hair over the shoulder, and above all
by the turning of the head so that its weight is shifted over a hollow.
An apparently simple thing--this turning of a head. Yet Michelangelo's
genius, as well as that of all great artists, is dependent on the
knowledge of when a head should be turned or a limb advanced. This
knowledge is what transforms action into movement, tempo into rhythm,
the static into the plastic, the dead into the living. It is the final
penetration into composition; on it all aesthetic form is built. Renoir
acquired it in his period of so-called dry drawing. Its dawn came in La
Natte and Mere et Enfant. It was still developing in the Baigneuse; and
in La Baigneuse Brune and Nu a l'Etoffe Vert et Jaune, both done after
1900, this knowledge was becoming sure of itself. Between 1884 and 1892,
however, Renoir's new strength was not wholly mastered. There was
conscious effort in its employment. This is seen in La Fillette a la
Gerbe and Les Filles de Catulle Mendes and in that otherwise miraculous
canvas, Au Piano. In Le Croquet, 1892, he begins to exhibit, in his use
of new means, the same prodigious adroitness he displayed in his earlier
and slighter works. And in Les Deux Soeurs the effects of labour entirely
vanish, and he once more paints with magistral unconcern.
From that time forward Renoir's complete genius was but a matter of
evolution. And here let it be remembered that his transcendent
competency was the result of academic training, for of late we have
heard many objections to this kind of discipline. We have been invited
to behold the water-colour and crayon works of the untutored, assured
that they were as fine as Matisse's drawings. And we have been asked to
accept, as a corollary, the statement that all painters are better off
without the pernicious influence of schools. We have had modern
paintings pointed out to us as examples of what inspiration and freedom
from convention can do. We have heard the constantly reiterated
assertion that academies cramp genius, restrict vision and force all
expression into stipulated moulds. To concede to these extravagant
assertions would be to ignore the history of great painting, for during
all the significant epochs of art the school was at its zenith. Without
it there could be no genuine achievement. No amount of mere inspiration
has ever enabled an artist to paint an eminent canvas. No amount of
uncontrolled emotionalism has ever permitted one to make an aesthetically
moving work of art. No untrained man, no matter how high his natural
gifts, has yet been able to record adequately his feelings. All the
records of past accomplishment go to show that no person who has not
been profoundly educated in the purely objective (not utilitarian)
forms, and in the abstract qualities of painting, such as anatomy and
technique, has succeeded in conceiving an artistic organisation.
The school has never obscured or dwarfed genius, nor is it probable it
ever will. To the contrary it assists the truly great man in his
self-fulfilment and weeds out the mediocre man. It turns the student's
thoughts to methods rather than to inspiration. It directs the attention
of incompetent and merely talented persons, incapable of rising above
its teachings, into side issues. Thus it relegates their work to the
_soupentes_ of the world: whereas, if they had been permitted to labour
at random, they would only have choked the market of genuinely aesthetic
production. The school teaches discipline, precision, and the control of
wayward impulses, without all of which the greatest artist could only
incompletely express himself. These are the things which Renoir felt he
lacked; and in the midst of his career he halted long enough to acquire
them. It may be argued that his was intelligent training, while that of
the schools is unintelligent. But all discipline is beneficial to the
artist. Only slavish minds, hopeless from the first, succumb to it. The
fact that a man capitulates to academic training attests to an
incompetency so great that, under no circumstances, however favorable,
could it have arisen to a point capable of producing great art. Giotto,
El Greco and Rubens passed through rigid training and rose above it. And
the apprenticeship demanded of the old Egyptian, Chinese and Greek
artists was longer and more tedious than any of our school courses
today.
Renoir's scholastic training was his salvation. With the advent of the
twentieth century he struck his pace. All his qualities converged toward
the construction of rhythm. In 1900 he painted a large and ambitious
canvas of an attired maid combing a nude's hair, La Toilette de la
Baigneuse, which is more extended and conclusive than any of his
previous works. The forms lean in opposition and complete each other. In
them is a perfect poise which subjectively evokes an emotion of
movement. Even the lights and darks are separated so as to give the
strongest effect. The very hat and tree trunk are integral parts of the
whole, and there is not a line in the picture which does not develop
logically to a harmonic completion. The luscious plenitude of form is
equalled only by the finality of the rhythm.
Another picture of the same period is the Baigneuses in the Vollard
collection, a duplicate of his Baigneuses of fifteen years before. Now
all the hardness is gone from the contours. The differentiation of
texture between the flesh and water and foliage is absent. The lines are
less angular and true, and both the distant nudes' attitudes are
changed. The first canvas recalled Ingres; but the second brings up
Cezanne, for it is pure composition with every nugatory quality
eliminated. It demonstrates the possibility of creating abstract unity
in three dimensions with the objective reality at hand. The picture
contains movement in the vital sense, and possesses a tactility as great
as a Giorgione done with modern means. In fact, comparison of these two
Baigneuses will straightway divulge the advantages that lie in modern
methods. The first is extremely able, and has the unfinished foundation
of a great composition. The second, because of what Renoir had learned
of freedom, is as intense as a Rubens in that painter's own manner; and
in addition it has an emotional element to which the Antwerp master
never attained.
Two years later this obsession to create form as an impregnable block,
no matter in how many integers it might be divided, made him turn his
attention to Daumier; and in Le Jardin d'Essoyes and his heads of Coco
he surpasses even this master of organisation. Having assimilated this
new influence Renoir added it to his own store of knowledge, and four
years later painted his greatest picture, Le Petit Peintre. After this
there was little more to be done in Renoir's style unless he extended
his vision to greater surfaces. This he has not done. But he has added
other masterpieces to the ones already mentioned. His Ode aux Fleurs
(d'apres Anacreon), the two decorative Panneaux of the tambourine player
and the dancer, Coco et les Deux Servantes, La Rose dans les Cheveux
and La Femme au Miroir are all worthy of a place beside the greatest
pictures of all time. In these last paintings nature's form is
transcribed in a purely arbitrary manner. Many of the parts are
exaggerated to create greater projection or more perfect proportion in
relation to the whole. Texture has developed into a unified surface, and
simple linear balance has become poise in depth. The colouring has grown
so subtle that it is impossible in many places to tell just what it is,
for in it is a whole spectrum that makes it living.
[Illustration: BAIGNEUSES, 1885 by RENOIR]
[Illustration: BAIGNEUSES, 1902 by RENOIR]
Renoir was a man who fundamentally was not revolutionary, an artist who
was shown the way by others, a genius who culminated a great and febrile
epoch. His beginnings were imitative of the painters of his day. He
climbed the ladder from dark to light, from the stiff to the mobile. His
first works under Courbet and Manet were no better than those of
Hankwan. Later his pictures began to flow rhythmically in simple lines
as in the Head of a Chinese Lady by Ririomin. Then they began to extend
into depth, and as early as 1881 they surpassed Titian. From then on
they approached steadily to the completeness of a modernised Rubens.
That Renoir never reached that master's greatness is due, not to his
lack of acute and complete vision, but to his restriction of it to small
works. A composer who writes a symphony in which each minute part is an
intimate factor of the whole, is greater than he who writes only an
overture whose entirety is no greater than one of the symphony's
movements. Renoir, in so far as he went, was as great as the greatest.
One cannot think of a Renoir canvas merely as a painting. It is a new
and visually complete cosmos. In looking at his work the intelligence
enters a world in which every form has interest, every line completion,
every space a plasticity: in short, a world in which everything is
visibly interrelated. A host of influences have been read into Renoir,
and indeed there were many in his development. But they were only the
steps by which he mounted to high achievement. So unimportant are the
works of most of these other men when compared with Renoir's personal
accomplishments, that one may visualise this artist as a raindrop on a
window, which, as it flows downward, consumes and embodies all those in
its path. Courbet, Monet, Delacroix and Manet, had they no other claim
on posterity than as instructors of Renoir, would not have lived in
vain. The Chinese, the Greeks, the Renaissance, even that full Indian
sculpture in the Chaitya of Karli of the eleventh century B.C.--are all
within him. That they are temperamental affinities rather than direct
influences none can deny; but, strange as it may seem, he has traits
which directly recall each one of them. They all have the ineradicable
germ of genius in them; and that germ, being changeless and eternal,
lies at the root of all aesthetic creation. For this reason a great man
belongs to all time. He embraces all the results of the struggles which
have gone before. In the possession of Renoir we have no apologies to
make to antiquity, any more than in having produced Cezanne must we
abase ourselves before the artists who are yet to come.
VI
PAUL CEZANNE
The dilettante, avid for accounts of an artist's eccentricities, will
find abundant and varied material of this nature in half a hundred books
written by critics of almost every nationality on that astounding and
grotesque colossus, Cezanne. Perhaps no great artist in the world's
history has been so wantonly libelled, maligned and ridiculed as he. Nor
has there ever been a painter of such wide influence so grossly
misunderstood. Cezanne has been endowed with most fantastic powers,
dismissed with a _coup d'esprit_ for attributes he never possessed, and
canonised for qualities he would have repudiated. Like Michelangelo he
has been both the admiration and the mystery of critics. And he is at
once the idol and the incubus of present-day artists. His letters alone
have formed the technical basis of one great modern art school. A
fragmentary phrase of his mentioning geometrical figures was seized upon
by a Spaniard and made the foundation for another school. His mention of
Poussin drove a horde of Scandinavians, Austrians and Bohemians to a
contemplation of that artist. Cezanne's very limitations have been the
inspiration for an army of hardy imitators who believe it is more vital
to imitate modernity than to reconstruct the past. Indeed it may be
said that all art since Impressionism is divided into two groups, one
which endeavours to develop some quality or qualities in Cezanne, the
other which attempts the anachronism of resuscitating the primitive art
of a simple-minded antiquity. For even this latter group, Cezanne is in
part responsible. Did he not say that we must become classicists again
by way of nature? And did this not give reactionary and servile minds
ample excuse to cling with even greater passion to a dead and rigid
past? In his great sense of order his disciples saw only immobility;
their minds, redundant with parallels, harked back to the Egyptians.
Thus has he been emulated: but, among all these branches shot out from
the mother trunk, it can be stated incontestably that only one has
understood him, has penetrated beneath the surface of his canvases, has
realised his true gift to the art of the future. And this one, strangely
enough, is the furthest removed from imitation.
Cezanne's biography is of value to the art student, for it embodies in
concrete form the factors which motivated his aesthetic apperceptions. By
Cezanne's biography is meant, not the distorted interpretations of the
incidents of his life, now so well known, or the superficial conclusions
deduced by his biographers from hearsay; but those actions and
temperamental characteristics which are impartially set down at first
hand by Emile Bernard. To this chronicler we are indebted for
practically all the authentic personal anecdotes of the artist. He had
always admired Cezanne, and in 1904 a personal friendship was
established between them, which endured until the latter's death. After
Cezanne had overcome parental objections and had definitely decided on
an artist's career, he spent much of his time in Paris. Many influences
entered into his early life. He had met Zola at school and had been
intimate with him. Through him he had become acquainted with Manet, and
while he appreciated Manet's friendliness, he could never understand
that artist's great popularity. He preferred Courbet as a painter, and
studied him sedulously. His great influence, however, came from
Pissarro. For that persuasive Jew's memory he always harboured a deep
respect.
Cezanne's youth, if one may call forty years a youth, was, as he himself
put it, filled mostly with "literature and laziness." Not until his
final renunciation of city life and his return to the south did his best
work begin. At first he made friends timidly. He was a man who could not
brook opposition, who was extremely sensitive to rebuffs; and those good
people of provincial France were brusquely aggressive in all their
beliefs and traditions. At every thought he expressed they sneered. He
clashed violently and disastrously with the local celebrities who had
the sanction of the established schools. In Paris he had been a frank
and even garrulous companion; but at each contact with the narrow,
self-centered and righteous community of Aix, he withdrew into himself.
His natural spontaneity and good-fellowship turned inward, became
restrained and pent-up. He grew sensitive and wary, and in later life
this defensive attitude developed into abnormal irritability. To those
who could understand, however, he unburdened himself on all subjects,
and his opinions were always the result of profound thought. But he
never entirely divulged his methods. If questions became too pertinent,
he consciously led his interrogators astray. "They think I've got a
trick," he would cry, "and they want to steal it. But nobody will ever
put his hooks on me (_pas un ne me mettra le grappin dessus_)." He had
already suffered enough at the hands of self-seekers. He had been
extravagantly ridiculed by his boyhood friends. He had been robbed and
bullied by his hired architect; and having money he had been considered
prey by the village widows. He permitted himself to be browbeaten
because of his antipathy to any kind of friction. It is small wonder he
became misanthropic.
The popular opinion of Aix was that he was crazy, and his chroniclers,
almost without exception, have echoed this belief. But, to the contrary,
his was the highest type of the creative mind, always in search for
something better, never satisfied with present results; the type of mind
which gives no thought to the acquisition or retention of property. His
joy lay in his creations of the moment, but his desires were far ahead.
Some one who showed him one of his early treasured canvases was
ridiculed for liking "such things." Every day Cezanne watched his
evolution: to him this progress was the essential thing. He left his
unfinished works in the meadows, in studio corners, in the nursery. They
have been found in the most out-of-the-way places. He had given large
numbers of them to chance friends on the impulse of the moment. His son
cut out the windows of his masterpieces for amusement, and his servant
and his wife used his canvases for stove cleaners. He saw his work put
to these uses tranquilly, knowing that later he would do better, that he
would "realise" more fully. His mind was too exalted to be impatient
with the pettinesses of life. His great aversion was politics, and
unlike Delacroix, he was above nationality. During the Franco-Prussian
War he hid with a relative that he might pursue his own ideal rather
than sacrifice himself for the protection of his tormentors. What did he
care for France when his whole admiration was for Italy and Holland?
Painting, not the preservation of nationality, was his innermost
concern. In evading conscription he called down upon him the public
abuse which such actions evoke. But it passed him by: he was too
absorbed in his work to heed, just as later he was too engrossed to
follow his mother's hearse to the funeral or to seek a market for his
pictures. At every step he paused to study the rapports of line, of
light, of shadow, of colour. At table, in conversation or at church, he
never for a moment lost sight of his desire. One can find a parallel for
this intellectually ascetic creature only in the old martyrs. He was the
type that renounces all the benefits and usufructs of life in order to
follow the face of a dream.
With such self-confidence no adversity could daunt him, no logic draw
from him a compromise, no flourish of enthusiasm distract him from his
course. Zola says of him: "He is made in one piece, stiff and hard under
the hand; nothing bends him; nothing can wrench from him a concession."
This quality of character was a thing which Zola, the slave of words,
could not understand. Cezanne, through much contact with letters, saw
the danger of literature to the painter. "Literature," he wrote,
"expresses itself through abstractions, while painting, by means of
drawing and colour, makes concrete the artist's sensations and
perceptions." Zola libelled him at great length in L'OEuvre. Cezanne's
reply was simply that Zola had a "mediocre intelligence" and was a
"detestable friend." In their youth Cezanne took the ascendency over
Zola in Latin and French verse; even in his old age he could recite long
passages from Virgil, Lucretius and Horace. He knew literature and was
able to judge it. His criticisms of Zola are as penetrating as any that
realist has called forth. His reputation for barbarism, vulgarity and
ignorance has little foundation in fact. To be sure, he did not desert
his work for social activities: he despised the polished and shallow wit
of men like Whistler: and he bitterly attacked those painters who strove
for _salon_ popularity. It is therefore not incredible that the
accusations against him were but the world's retaliation for having been
ignored by him.
Cezanne's work from the first contained the undeniable elements of
greatness. In his first, almost black-and-white still-lives, executed
under the influence of Courbet (it is not tenable that they were done
under Manet, as is commonly believed: they are too solidly formed for
that), there is exhibit
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