eventually to obscure the main idea and disturb the large sense of
design on which so much of the imaginative appeal of a work of art
depends. The large amount of new visual knowledge that the naturalistic
movements of the nineteenth century brought to light is particularly
liable at this time to obscure the simpler and more primitive qualities
on which all good art is built. At the height of that movement line
drawing went out of fashion, and charcoal, and an awful thing called a
stump, took the place of the point in the schools. Charcoal is a
beautiful medium in a dexterous hand, but is more adaptable to mass than
to line drawing. The less said about the stump the better, although I
believe it still lingers on in some schools.
Line drawing is happily reviving, and nothing is so calculated to put
new life and strength into the vagaries of naturalistic painting and get
back into art a fine sense of design.
This obscuring of the direct appeal of art by the accumulation of too
much naturalistic detail, and the loss of power it entails, is the cause
of artists having occasionally gone back to a more primitive
convention. There was the Archaistic movement in Greece, and men like
Rossetti and Burne-Jones found a better means of expressing the things
that moved them in the technique of the fourteenth century. And it was
no doubt a feeling of the weakening influence on art, as an expressive
force, of the elaborate realisations of the modern school, that prompted
Puvis de Chavannes to invent for himself his large primitive manner. It
will be noticed that in these instances it is chiefly the insistence
upon outline that distinguishes these artists from their contemporaries.
Art, like life, is apt to languish if it gets too far away from
primitive conditions. But, like life also, it is a poor thing and a very
uncouth affair if it has nothing but primitive conditions to recommend
it. Because there is a decadent art about, one need not make a hero of
the pavement artist. But without going to the extreme of flouting the
centuries of culture that art inherits, as it is now fashionable in many
places to do, students will do well to study at first the early rather
than the late work of the different schools, so as to get in touch with
the simple conditions of design on which good work is built. It is
easier to study these essential qualities when they are not overlaid by
so much knowledge of visual realisation. The skeleton of the picture is
more apparent in the earlier than the later work of any school.
The finest example of the union of the primitive with the most refined
and cultured art the world has ever seen is probably the Parthenon at
Athens, a building that has been the wonder of the artistic world for
over two thousand years. Not only are the fragments of its sculptures
in the British Museum amazing, but the beauty and proportions of its
architecture are of a refinement that is, I think, never even attempted
in these days. What architect now thinks of correcting the poorness of
hard, straight lines by very slightly curving them? Or of slightly
sloping inwards the columns of his facade to add to the strength of its
appearance? The amount of these variations is of the very slightest and
bears witness to the pitch of refinement attempted. And yet, with it
all, how simple! There is something of the primitive strength of
Stonehenge in that solemn row of columns rising firmly from the steps
#without any base#. With all its magnificence, it still retains the
simplicity of the hut from which it was evolved.
Something of the same combination of primitive grandeur and strength
with exquisite refinement of visualisation is seen in the art of Michael
Angelo. His followers adopted the big, muscular type of their master,
but lost the primitive strength he expressed; and when this primitive
force was lost sight of, what a decadence set in!
This is the point at which art reaches its highest mark: when to the
primitive strength and simplicity of early art are added the infinite
refinements and graces of culture without destroying or weakening the
sublimity of the expression.
In painting, the refinement and graces of culture take the form of an
increasing truth to natural appearances, added bit by bit to the
primitive baldness of early work; until the point is reached, as it was
in the nineteenth century, when apparently the whole facts of visual
nature are incorporated. From this wealth of visual material, to which
must be added the knowledge we now have of the arts of the East, of
China, Japan, and India, the modern artist has to select those things
that appeal to him; has to select those elements that answer to his
inmost need of expressing himself as an artist. No wonder a period of
artistic dyspepsia is upon us, no wonder our exhibitions, particularly
those on the Continent, are full of strange, weird things. The problem
before the artist was never so complex, but also never so interesting.
New forms, new combinations, new simplifications are to be found. But
the steadying influence and discipline of line work were never more
necessary to the student.
The primitive force we are in danger of losing depends much on line, and
no work that aims at a sublime impression can dispense with the basis of
a carefully wrought and simple line scheme.
The study, therefore, of pure line drawing is of great importance to the
painter, and the numerous drawings that exist by the great masters in
this method show how much they understood its value.
And the revival of line drawing, and the desire there is to find a
simpler convention founded on this basis, are among the most hopeful
signs in the art of the moment.
V
MASS DRAWING
In the preceding chapter it has, I hope, been shown that outline drawing
is an instinct with Western artists and has been so from the earliest
times; that this instinct is due to the fact that the first mental idea
of an object is the sense of its form as a felt thing, not a thing seen;
and that an outline drawing satisfies and appeals directly to this
mental idea of objects.
But there is another basis of expression directly related to visual
appearances that in the fulness of time was evolved, and has had a very
great influence on modern art. This form of drawing is based on the
consideration of the flat appearances on the retina, with the knowledge
of the felt shapes of objects for the time being forgotten. In
opposition to line drawing, we may call this Mass Drawing.
The scientific truth of this point of view is obvious. If only the
accurate copying of the appearances of nature were the sole object of
art (an idea to be met with among students) the problem of painting
would be simpler than it is, and would be likely ere long to be solved
by the photographic camera.
This form of drawing is the natural means of expression when a brush
full of paint is in your hands. The reducing of a complicated appearance
to a few simple masses is the first necessity of the painter. But
this will be fully explained in a later chapter treating more
practically of the practice of mass drawing.
[Illustration: Plate X.
EXAMPLE OF FIFTEENTH-CENTURY CHINESE WORK BY LUI LIANG (BRITISH MUSEUM)
Showing how early Chinese masters had developed the mass-drawing point
of view.]
The art of China and Japan appears to have been more [influenced by this
view of natural appearances than that of the West has been, until quite
lately. The Eastern mind does not seem to be so obsessed by the
objectivity of things as is the Western mind. With us the practical
sense of touch is all powerful. "I know that is so, because I felt it
with my hands" would be a characteristic expression with us. Whereas I
do not think it would be an expression the Eastern mind would use. With
them the spiritual essence of the thing seen appears to be the more
real, judging from their art. And who is to say they may not be right?
This is certainly the impression one gets from their beautiful painting,
with its lightness of texture and avoidance of solidity. It is founded
on nature regarded as a flat vision, instead of a collection of solids
in space. Their use of line is also much more restrained than with us,
and it is seldom used to accentuate the solidity of things, but chiefly
to support the boundaries of masses and suggest detail. Light and shade,
which suggest solidity, are never used, a wide light where there is no
shadow pervades everything, their drawing being done with the brush in
masses.
When, as in the time of Titian, the art of the West had discovered light
and shade, linear perspective, aerial perspective, &c., and had begun by
fusing the edges of the masses to suspect the necessity of painting to a
widely diffused focus, they had got very near considering appearances
as a visual whole. But it was not until Velázquez that a picture was
painted that was founded entirely on visual appearances, in which a
basis of objective outlines was discarded and replaced by a structure of
tone masses.
When he took his own painting room with the little Infanta and her maids
as a subject, Velázquez seems to have considered it entirely as one flat
visual impression. The focal attention is centred on the Infanta, with
the figures on either side more or less out of focus, those on the
extreme right being quite blurred. The reproduction here given
unfortunately does not show these subtleties, and flattens the general
appearance very much. The focus is nowhere sharp, as this would disturb
the contemplation of the large visual impression. And there, I think,
for the first time, the whole gamut of natural vision, tone, colour,
form, light and shade, atmosphere, focus, &c., considered as one
impression, were put on canvas.
All sense of design is lost. The picture has no surface; it is all
atmosphere between the four edges of the frame, and the objects are
within. Placed as it is in the Prado, with the light coming from the
right as in the picture, there is no break between the real people
before it and the figures within, except the slight yellow veil due to
age.
But wonderful as this picture is, as a "tour de force," like his Venus
of the same period in the National Gallery, it is a painter's picture,
and makes but a cold impression on those not interested in the technique
of painting. With the cutting away of the primitive support of fine
outline design and the absence of those accents conveying a fine form
stimulus to the mind, art has lost much of its emotional
significance.
[Illustration: Plate XI.
LAS MENINAS. BY VELÁZQUEZ (PRADO)
Probably the first picture ever painted entirely from the visual or
impressionist standpoint.
_Photo Anderson_]
[Sidenote: The Impressionist Point of View.]
But art has gained a new point of view. With this subjective way of
considering appearances--this "impressionist vision," as it has been
called--many things that were too ugly, either from shape or
association, to yield material for the painter, were yet found, when
viewed as part of a scheme of colour sensations on the retina which the
artist considers emotionally and rhythmically, to lend themselves to new
and beautiful harmonies and "ensembles," undreamt of by the earlier
formulae. And further, many effects of light that were too hopelessly
complicated for painting, considered on the old light and shade
principles (for instance, sunlight through trees in a wood), were found
to be quite paintable, considered as an impression of various colour
masses. The early formula could never free itself from the object as a
solid thing, and had consequently to confine its attention to beautiful
ones. But from the new point of view, form consists of the shape and
qualities of masses of colour on the retina; and what objects happen to
be the outside cause of these shapes matters little to the
impressionist. Nothing is ugly when seen in a beautiful aspect of light,
and aspect is with them everything. This consideration of the visual
appearance in the first place necessitated an increased dependence on
the model. As he does not now draw from his mental perceptions the
artist has nothing to select the material of his picture from until it
has existed as a seen thing before him: until he has a visual impression
of it in his mind. With the older point of view (the representation by a
pictorial description, as it were, based on the mental idea of an
object), the model was not so necessary. In the case of the
Impressionist the mental perception is arrived at from the visual
impression, and in the older point of view the visual impression is the
result of the mental perception. Thus it happens that the Impressionist
movement has produced chiefly pictures inspired by the actual world of
visual phenomena around us, the older point of view producing most of
the pictures deriving their inspiration from the glories of the
imagination, the mental world in the mind of the artist. And although
interesting attempts are being made to produce imaginative works founded
on the impressionist point of view of light and air, the loss of
imaginative appeal consequent upon the destruction of contours by
scintillation, atmosphere, &c., and the loss of line rhythm it entails,
have so far prevented the production of any very satisfactory results.
But undoubtedly there is much new material brought to light by this
movement waiting to be used imaginatively; and it offers a new field for
the selection of expressive qualities.
This point of view, although continuing to some extent in the Spanish
school, did not come into general recognition until the last century in
France. The most extreme exponents of it are the body of artists who
grouped themselves round Claude Monet. This impressionist movement, as
the critics have labelled it, was the result of a fierce determination
to consider nature solely from the visual point of view, making no
concessions to any other associations connected with sight. The result
was an entirely new vision of nature, startling and repulsive to eyes
unaccustomed to observation from a purely visual point of view and used
only to seeing the "feel of things," as it were. The first results were
naturally rather crude. But a great amount of new visual facts were
brought to light, particularly those connected with the painting of
sunlight and half light effects. Indeed the whole painting of strong
light has been permanently affected by the work of this group of
painters. Emancipated from the objective world, they no longer dissected
the object to see what was inside it, but studied rather the anatomy of
the light refracted from it to their eyes. Finding this to be composed
of all the colours of the rainbow as seen in the solar spectrum, and
that all the effects nature produced are done with different proportions
of these colours, they took them, or the nearest pigments they could get
to them, for their palette, eliminating the earth colours and black. And
further, finding that nature's colours (the rays of coloured light) when
mixed produced different results than their corresponding pigments mixed
together, they determined to use their paints as pure as possible,
placing them one against the other to be mixed as they came to the eye,
the mixture being one of pure colour rays, not pigments, by this means.
But we are here only concerned with the movement as it affected form,
and must avoid the fascinating province of colour.
Those who had been brought up in the old school of outline form said
there was no drawing in these impressionist pictures, and from the point
of view of the mental idea of form discussed in the last chapter, there
was indeed little, although, had the impression been realised to a
sufficiently definite focus, the sense of touch and solidity would
probably have been satisfied. But the particular field of this new
point of view, the beauty of tone and colour relations considered as an
impression apart from objectivity, did not tempt them to carry their
work so far as this, or the insistence on these particular qualities
would have been lost.
But interesting and alluring as is the new world of visual music opened
up by this point of view, it is beginning to be realised that it has
failed somehow to satisfy. In the first place, the implied assumption
that one sees with the eye alone is wrong:
"In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it
what the eye brings means of seeing,"[2]
[Footnote 2: Goethe, quoted in Carlyle's _French Revolution_, chap. i.]
and it is the mind behind the eye that supplies this means of
perception: #one sees with the mind#. The ultimate effect of any
picture, be it impressionist, post, anti, or otherwise--is its power to
stimulate these mental perceptions within the mind.
But even from the point of view of the _true_ visual perception (if
there is such a thing) that modern art has heard so much talk of, the
copying of the retina picture is not so great a success. The impression
carried away from a scene that has moved us is not its complete visual
aspect. Only those things that are significant to the felt impression
have been retained by the mind; and if the picture is to be a true
representation of this, the significant facts must be sorted out from
the mass of irrelevant matter and presented in a lively manner. The
impressionist's habit of painting before nature entirely is not
calculated to do this. Going time after time to the same place, even if
similar weather conditions are waited for, although well enough for
studies, is against the production of a fine picture. Every time the
artist goes to the selected spot he receives a different impression, so
that he must either paint all over his picture each time, in which case
his work must be confined to a small scale and will be hurried in
execution, or he must paint a bit of today's impression alongside of
yesterday's, in which case his work will be dull and lacking in oneness
of conception.
And further, in decomposing the colour rays that come to the eye and
painting in pure colour, while great addition was made to the power of
expressing light, yet by destroying the definitions and enveloping
everything in a scintillating atmosphere, the power to design in a large
manner was lost with the wealth of significance that the music of line
can convey.
But impressionism has opened up a view from which much interesting
matter for art is to be gleaned. And everywhere painters are selecting
from this, and grafting it on to some of the more traditional schools of
design.
Our concern here is with the influence this point of view has had upon
draughtsmanship. The influence has been considerable, particularly with
those draughtsmen whose work deals with the rendering of modern life. It
consists in drawing from the observation of the silhouette occupied by
objects in the field of vision, observing the flat appearance of things
as they are on the retina. This is, of course, the only accurate way in
which to observe visual shapes. The difference between this and the
older point of view is its insistence on the observation of the flat
visual impression to the exclusion of the tactile or touch sense that by
the association of ideas we have come to expect in things seen. An
increased truth to the character of appearances has been the result,
with a corresponding loss of plastic form expression.
On pages 66 and 67 a reproduction of a drawing in the British Museum,
attributed to Michael Angelo, is contrasted with one in the Louvre by
Degas. The one is drawn from the line point of view and the other from
the mass. They both contain lines, but in the one case the lines are the
contours of felt forms and in the other the boundaries of visual masses.
In the Michael Angelo the silhouette is only the result of the
overlapping of rich forms considered in the round. Every muscle and bone
has been mentally realised as a concrete thing and the drawing made as
an expression of this idea. Note the line rhythm also; the sense of
energy and movement conveyed by the swinging curves; and compare with
what is said later (page 162 [Transcribers Note: Sidenote "Curved
Lines"]) about the rhythmic significance of swinging curves.
Then compare it with the Degas and observe the totally different
attitude of mind in which this drawing has been approached. Instead of
the outlines being the result of forms felt as concrete things, the
silhouette is everywhere considered first, the plastic sense (nowhere so
great as in the other) being arrived at from the accurate consideration
of the mass shapes.
Notice also the increased attention to individual character in the
Degas, observe the pathos of those underfed little arms, and the hand
holding the tired ankle--how individual it all is. What a different tale
this little figure tells from that given before the footlights! See with
what sympathy the contours have been searched for those accents
expressive of all this.
[Illustration: Plate XII.
STUDY ATTRIBUTED TO MICHAEL ANGELO (BRITISH MUSEUM)
Note the desire to express form as a felt solid thing, the contours
resulting from the overlapping forms. The visual appearance is arrived
at as a result of giving expression to the mental idea of a solid
object.]
[Illustration: Plate XIII.
STUDY BY DEGAS (LUXEMBOURG)
In contrast with Michael Angelo's drawing, note the preoccupation with
the silhouette the spaces occupied by the different masses in the field
of vision; how the appearance solid forms is the result of accurately
portraying this visual appearance.
_Photo Levi_]
How remote from individual character is the Michael Angelo in contrast
with this! Instead of an individual he gives us the expression of a
glowing mental conception of man as a type of physical strength and
power.
The rhythm is different also, in the one case being a line rhythm, and
in the other a consideration of the flat pattern of shapes or masses
with a play of lost-and-foundness on the edges (see later, pages 192
[Transcribers Note: Sidenote "Variety of Edges."] _et seq._, variety of
edges). It is this feeling for rhythm and the sympathetic searching for
and emphasis of those points expressive of character, that keep this
drawing from being the mechanical performance which so much concern with
scientific visual accuracy might well have made it, and which has made
mechanical many of the drawings of Degas's followers who unintelligently
copy his method.
VI
THE ACADEMIC AND CONVENTIONAL
The terms Academic and Conventional are much used in criticism and
greatly feared by the criticised, often without either party appearing
to have much idea of what is meant. New so-called schools of painting
seem to arrive annually with the spring fashions, and sooner or later
the one of last year gets called out of date, if not conventional and
academic. And as students, for fear of having their work called by one
or other of these dread terms, are inclined to rush into any new
extravagance that comes along, some inquiry as to their meaning will not
be out of place before we pass into the chapters dealing with academic
study.
It has been the cry for some time that Schools of Art turned out only
academic students. And one certainly associates a dead level of
respectable mediocrity with much school work. We can call to mind a lot
of dull, lifeless, highly-finished work, imperfectly perfect, that has
won the prize in many a school competition. Flaubert says "a form
deadens," and it does seem as if the necessary formality of a school
course had some deadening influence on students; and that there was some
important part of the artist's development which it has failed to
recognise and encourage.
The freer system of the French schools has been in many cases more
successful. But each school was presided over by an artist of
distinction, and this put the students in touch with real work and thus
introduced vitality. In England, until quite lately, artists were seldom
employed in teaching, which was left to men set aside for the purpose,
without any time to carry on original work of their own. The Royal
Academy Schools are an exception to this. There the students have the
advantage of teaching from some distinguished member or associate who
has charge of the upper school for a month at a time. But as the visitor
is constantly changed, the less experienced students are puzzled by the
different methods advocated, and flounder hopelessly for want of a
definite system to work on; although for a student already in possession
of a good grounding there is much to be said for the system, as contact
with the different masters widens their outlook.