these innumerable effects which his ready susceptibility led him to
record he found but a few which were capable of being reduced to that
logical and mathematical formula which he demanded before complete
realisation could be tolerated. In his drawings he composes sometimes
with strong diagonal lines, sometimes with free and unstable balance. In
his pictures he has recourse to a regular system of polarity, balancing
his masses carefully on either side of the centre, sometimes even
framing it in like a theatrical scene with two _repoussoirs_ pushed in
on either side. One must suppose, then, that he approached the
composition of his pictures with a certain timidity, that he felt that
safety when working on a large scale could only be secured by a certain
recognised type of structure, so that out of all the various moods of
nature to which his sensitive spirit answered only one lent itself to
complete expression. One wishes at times that he had tried more. There
is in the British Museum a half-effaced drawing on blue paper, an idea
for treating the _Noli me tangere_ which, had he worked it out, would
have added to his complete mastery of bucolic landscape a masterpiece of
what one may call tragic landscape. It is true that here, as elsewhere,
the figures are in themselves totally inadequate, but they suggested an
unusual and intense key to the landscape. On the outskirts of a dimly
suggested wood, the figures meet and hold converse; to the right the
mound of Calvary glimmers pale and ghost-like against the night sky,
while over the distant city the first pink flush of dawn begins. It is
an intensely poetical conception. Claude has here created a landscape in
harmony with deeper, more mystical aspirations than elsewhere, and, had
he given free rein to his sensibilities, we should look to him even more
than we do now as the greatest inventor of the motives of pure
landscape. As it is, the only ideas to which he gave complete though
constantly varied expression are those of pastoral repose.
Claude’s view of landscape is false to nature in that it is entirely
anthropocentric. His trees exist for pleasant shade; his peasants to
give us the illusion of pastoral life, not to toil for a living. His
world is not to be lived in, only to be looked at in a mood of pleasing
melancholy or suave reverie. It is, therefore, as true to one aspect of
human desire as it is false to the facts of life. It may be admitted
that this is not the finest kind of art--it is the art of a self-centred
and refined luxury which looks on nature as a garden to its own
pleasure-house--but few will deny its genial and moderating charm, and
few of us live so strenuously as never to feel a sense of nostalgia for
that Saturnian reign to which Virgil and Claude can waft us.
AUBREY BEARDSLEY’S DRAWINGS[47]
Messrs. Carfax have on view the most complete collection of Beardsley’s
drawings that has hitherto been shown. The development of his precocious
and eccentric genius can here be studied in typical examples. We have
the drawings of his childhood--drawings inspired by Dicky Doyle and
Robida, but in which is already apparent his proclivity to the
expression of moral depravity. We pass at a leap from these crude and
artistically feeble works to the astonishing “Siegfried,” in which he is
already a complete and assured master of an entirely personal style.
From this time onwards, for the remaining six years of his life,
Beardsley kept on producing with the fertility of those artists whom the
presage of an early death stimulates to a desperate activity. His style
was constantly changing in accidentals, but always the same in
essentials. He was a confirmed eclectic, borrowing from all ages and all
countries. And true eclectic and genuine artist as he was, he converted
all his borrowings to his own purposes. It mattered nothing what he fed
on; the strange and perverse economy of his nature converted the food
into a poison. His line is based upon that of Antonio Pollajuolo. Again
and again in his drawings of the nude we see how carefully he must have
copied that master of structural and nervous line. But he uses it for
something quite other than its original purpose; he converts it from a
line expressive of muscular tension and virile force into one expressive
of corruption and decay. Mantegna, too, was a favourite with Beardsley,
who seems to have had a kind of craving for the opposites to his own
predominant qualities; and from Mantegna, the most austere of Italians,
he derived again and again motives for his illustrations of depravity.
The eighteenth century, China, Japan, even the purest Greek art, were
all pressed into his service; the only thing he could do nothing with
was nature itself. Here he was entirely at a loss, and whenever he
yielded to the pressure of contemporary fashions and attempted to record
impressions of things seen, as in the topical illustrations of plays
which he contributed to the _Pall Mall Magazine_, he failed to be even
mediocre. Everything that was to be in the least expressive had to come
entirely from within, from the nightmares of his own imagination.
His amazing gift of hand is perhaps the quality which most obviously
attracts attention, the quality which endeared him most to publishers
and process-block makers. It was the one indisputable quality he
possessed, not to be denied by the most adverse critic, and yet in
itself it is no more than thousands of journeymen artists--engravers,
die-cutters, and such like--have always possessed. Nor, to be perfectly
frank, is the quality of his line of a very high order; its precision is
not unfrequently mechanical. Whistler called him the last of the
writing-masters, and there was a truth in this, if we may add that the
style of writing which he favoured was degenerate. His long, meandering
flourishes ending in sharp spikes and dots, however firm and precise the
line, are often mean in intention and poor in quality. What is deserving
of real admiration is the fertility of his invention, the skill with
which he finds the formula which corresponds, in his peculiar language,
with what he wants to describe. As an instance, one may take the garden
background to the “Platonic Lament” in the Salome series, where the rose
trellis and cut yew-tree behind are brilliant examples of this kind of
epitomised description. Still more important artistically, and closely
connected with this power of invention, is the real beauty of his
spacing, the admirable planning of masses of black and white. At times,
as in the “Dancer’s Reward,” he rises almost to the height of the great
Greek vase-painters in this respect, though, if we look even at this in
detail, the line has an intricacy, a _mesquinerie_, which is the very
opposite of the Greek ideal of draughtsmanship.
No less remarkable is his success in the decorative planning of three
tones, of black, white, and grey, and he divides these with such subtle
skill that for once it is not a mere false analogy to talk of the colour
effect of designs in black and white; for he so disposes the three
tones, getting the grey by an evenly distributed network of fine black
lines, that each tone produces the sensation of something as distinct
from the others as do flat washes of different tints. The “Frontispiece
to Salome” is an excellent example of this.
Beardsley had, then, in an extraordinary degree the decorative impulse,
the motive which made the mediæval scribe flourish his pen all over the
margins of his vellum page; and, spurred by this impulse, he had the
patience of an Indian craftsman, covering whole sheets with minute dots
and scarcely perceptible lines. This instinct in its purest form rarely
makes for the finest art; it is only when controlled by a larger, more
genial sentiment for architectural mass that it becomes ennobled, and
with Beardsley, in spite of the bold oppositions of his blacks and
whites, in spite of his occasional wilful simplification, this rarely
occurred. One might even argue that to some extent Beardsley’s moral
perversity actually prevented him, in spite of his extraordinary
specific talent for design, from ever becoming a great designer. It is
just that _mesquinerie_ of line, that littleness and intricacy of the
mere decorator, that love of elegance rather than beauty, which on
purely artistic grounds one finds to be his great failing, that he
cherished as a means of expressing his diabolism. But if Beardsley was
corrupt, he was certainly sincere in his corruption. There is no
suggestion in his work, as in that of some modern artists, like Señor
Zuloaga, that corruption is an affectation taken up in order to astonish
the _bourgeoisie_. Beardsley is never funny or amusing or witty; his
attempts in this direction are contemptible; still less is he voluptuous
or seductive; he is very serious, very much in earnest. There is even a
touch of hieratic austerity and pomp in his style, as becomes the
arch-priest of a Satanic cultus. He has, indeed, all the stigmata of the
religious artist--the love of pure decoration, the patient elaboration
and enrichment of surface, the predilection for flat tones and precision
of contour, the want of the sense of mass and relief, the extravagant
richness of invention. It is as the Fra Angelico of Satanism that his
work will always have an interest for those who are curious about this
recurrent phase of complex civilisations. But if we are right in our
analysis of his work, the finest qualities of design can never be
appropriated to the expression of such morbid and perverted ideals;
nobility and geniality of design are attained only by those who,
whatever their actual temperament, cherish these qualities in their
imagination.
THE FRENCH POST-IMPRESSIONISTS[48]
When the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition was held in these Galleries
two years ago the English public became for the first time fully aware
of the existence of a new movement in art, a movement which was the more
disconcerting in that it was no mere variation upon accepted themes but
implied a reconsideration of the very purpose and aim as well as the
methods of pictorial and plastic art. It was not surprising, therefore,
that a public which had come to admire above everything in a picture the
skill with which the artist produced illusion should have resented an
art in which such skill was completely subordinated to the direct
expression of feeling. Accusations of clumsiness and incapacity were
freely made, even against so singularly accomplished an artist as
Cézanne. Such darts, however, fall wide of the mark, since it is not the
object of these artists to exhibit their skill or proclaim their
knowledge, but only to attempt to express by pictorial and plastic form
certain spiritual experiences; and in conveying these, ostentation of
skill is likely to be even more fatal than downright incapacity.
Indeed, one may fairly admit that the accusation of want of skill and
knowledge, while ridiculous in the case of Cézanne is perfectly
justified as regards one artist represented (for the first time in
England) in the present Exhibition, namely, Rousseau. Rousseau was a
customhouse officer who painted without any training in the art. His
pretensions to paint made him the butt of a great deal of ironic wit,
but scarcely any one now would deny the authentic quality of his
inspiration or the certainty of his imaginative conviction. Here then is
one case where want of skill and knowledge do not completely obscure,
though they may mar, expression. And this is true of all perfectly naïve
and primitive art. But most of the art here seen is neither naïve nor
primitive. It is the work of highly civilised and modern men trying to
find a pictorial language appropriate to the sensibilities of the modern
outlook.
[Illustration:
Henri-Matisse. The Tea Party
Plate XVII.]
[Illustration:
Pablo Picasso. Still Life
Miss Stein
Plate XVIII.]
Another charge that is frequently made against these artists is that
they allow what is merely capricious, or even what is extravagant and
eccentric, in their work--that it is not serious, but an attempt to
impose on the good-natured tolerance of the public. This charge of
insincerity and extravagance is invariably made against any new
manifestation of creative art. It does not of course follow that it is
always wrong. The desire to impose by such means certainly occurs, and
is sometimes temporarily successful. But the feeling on the part of the
public may, and I think in this case does, arise from a simple
misunderstanding of what these artists set out to do. The difficulty
springs from a deep-rooted conviction, due to long-established custom,
that the aim of painting is the descriptive imitation of natural forms.
Now, these artists do not seek to give what can, after all, be but a
pale reflex of actual appearance, but to arouse the conviction of a new
and definite reality. They do not seek to imitate form, but to create
form; not to imitate life, but to find an equivalent for life. By that I
mean that they wish to make images which by the clearness of their
logical structure, and by their closely-knit unity of texture, shall
appeal to our disinterested and contemplative imagination with something
of the same vividness as the things of actual life appeal to our
practical activities. In fact, they aim not at illusion but at reality.
The logical extreme of such a method would undoubtedly be the attempt to
give up all resemblance to natural form, and to create a purely abstract
language of form--a visual music; and the later works of Picasso show
this clearly enough. They may or may not be successful in their attempt.
It is too early to be dogmatic on the point, which can only be decided
when our sensibilities to such abstract forms have been more practised
than they are at present. But I would suggest that there is nothing
ridiculous in the attempt to do this. Such a picture as Picasso’s “Head
of a Man” would undoubtedly be ridiculous if, having set out to make a
direct imitation of the actual model, he had been incapable of getting a
better likeness. But Picasso did nothing of the sort. He has shown in
his “Portrait of Mlle. L. B.” that he could do so at least as well as
any one if he wished, but he is here attempting to do something quite
different.
No such extreme abstraction marks the work of Matisse. The actual
objects which stimulated his creative invention are recognisable
enough. But here, too, it is an equivalence, not a likeness, of nature
that is sought. In opposition to Picasso, who is pre-eminently plastic,
Matisse aims at convincing us of the reality of his forms by the
continuity and flow of his rhythmic line, by the logic of his space
relations, and, above all, by an entirely new use of colour. In this, as
in his markedly rhythmic design, he approaches more than any other
European to the ideals of Chinese art. His work has to an extraordinary
degree that decorative unity of design which distinguishes all the
artists of this school.
Between these two extremes we may find ranged almost all the remaining
artists. On the whole the influence of Picasso on the younger men is
more evident than that of Matisse. With the exception of Braque none of
them push their attempts at abstraction of form so far as Picasso, but
simplification along these lines is apparent in the work of Derain,
Herbin, Marchand, and L’Hote. Other artists, such as Doucet and Asselin,
are content with the ideas of simplification of form as existing in the
general tradition of the Post-Impressionist movement, and instead of
feeling for new methods of expression devote themselves to expressing
what is most poignant and moving in contemporary life. But however
various the directions in which different groups are exploring the
newly-found regions of expressive form they all alike derive in some
measure from the great originator of the whole idea, Cézanne. And since
one must always refer to him to understand the origin of these ideas, it
has been thought well to include a few examples of his work in the
present Exhibition, although this year it is mainly the moderns, and not
the old masters, that are represented. To some extent, also, the absence
of the earlier masters in the exhibition itself is made up for by the
retrospective exhibition of Monsieur Druet’s admirable photographs. Here
Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh can be studied at least in the main
phases of their development.
Finally, I should like to call attention to a distinguishing
characteristic of the French artists seen here, namely, the markedly
Classic spirit of their work. This will be noted as distinguishing them
to some extent from the English, even more perhaps from the Russians,
and most of all from the great mass of modern painting in every country.
I do not mean by Classic, dull, pedantic, traditional,
[Illustration:
Georges Rouault. Profile Author’s Collection
Plate XIX.]
reserved, or any of those similar things which the word is often made to
imply. Still less do I mean by calling them Classic that they paint
“Visits to Æsculapius” or “Nero at the Colosseum.” I mean that they do
not rely for their effect upon associated ideas, as I believe Romantic
and Realistic artists invariably do.
All art depends upon cutting off the practical responses to sensations
of ordinary life, thereby setting free a pure and as it were disembodied
functioning of the spirit; but in so far as the artist relies on the
associated ideas of the objects which he represents, his work is not
completely free and pure, since romantic associations imply at least an
imagined practical activity. The disadvantage of such an art of
associated ideas is that its effect really depends on what we bring with
us: it adds no entirely new factor to our experience. Consequently, when
the first shock of wonder or delight is exhausted the work produces an
ever lessening reaction. Classic art, on the other hand, records a
positive and disinterestedly passionate state of mind. It communicates a
new and otherwise unattainable experience. Its effect, therefore, is
likely to increase with familiarity. Such a classic spirit is common to
the best French work of all periods from the twelfth century onwards,
and though no one could find direct reminiscences of a Nicholas Poussin
here, his spirit seems to revive in the work of artists like Derain. It
is natural enough that the intensity and singleness of aim with which
these artists yield themselves to certain experiences in the face of
nature may make their work appear odd to those who have not the habit of
contemplative vision, but it would be rash for us, who as a nation are
in the habit of treating our emotions, especially our æsthetic emotions,
with a certain levity, to accuse them of caprice or insincerity. It is
because of this classic concentration of feeling (which by no means
implies abandonment) that the French merit our serious attention. It is
this that makes their art so difficult on a first approach but gives it
its lasting hold on the imagination.
NOTE.--At least one French artist of great merit was un-represented
at the Post-Impressionist Exhibitions--Georges Rouault, a fellow
pupil with Matisse of Gustave Moreau. He stands alone in the
movement as being a visionary, though, unlike most visionaries, his
expression is based on a profound knowledge of natural appearances.
The profile here reproduced (see Plate) will give an idea of his
strangely individual and powerful style. (1920.)
DRAWINGS AT THE BURLINGTON FINE ARTS CLUB[49]
The Burlington Fine Arts Club have arranged a most interesting
collection of drawings by dead masters. Abandoning the club’s usual
method of taking a particular period or country, the committee have this
time allowed their choice to range over many periods and countries,
excluding only living artists, and admitting one so recently dead as
Degas. This variety of material naturally stimulates one to hazard some
general speculations on the nature of drawing as an art. “H. T.,” who
writes the preface to the catalogue, already points the way in this
direction by some _obiter dicta_. He points out that the essence of
drawing is not the line, but its content. He says:
A single line may mean nothing beyond a line; add another alongside
and both disappear, and we are aware only of the contents, and a
form is expressed. The beauty of a line is in its result in the
form which it helps to bring into being.
Here the author has undoubtedly pointed out the most essential quality
of good drawing. I should dispute, rather by way of excessive caution,
his first statement, “A single line may mean nothing beyond a line,”
since a line is always at its least the record of a gesture, indicating
a good deal about its maker’s personality, his tastes and even probably
the period when he lived; but I entirely agree that the main point is
always the effect of two lines to evoke the idea of a certain volume
having a certain form. When “H. T.” adds that “Draughtsmen know this,
but writers on art do not seem to,” he seems to be too sweeping. Even so
bad a writer on art as Pliny had picked up the idea from a Greek art
critic, for in describing the drawing of Parrhasios he says:[50]
By the admission of artists he was supreme in contour. This is the
last subtlety of painting; for to paint the main body and centres
of objects is indeed something of an achievement, but one in which
many have been famous, but to paint the edges of bodies and express
the disappearing planes is rare in the history of art. For the
contour must go round itself and so end that it promises other
things behind and shows that which it hides.
This is an admirable account, since it gives the clue to the distinction
between descriptive drawing and drawing in which the contour does not
arrest the form, but creates plastic relief of the whole enclosed
volume. Now, this plastic drawing can never be attained by a mere
_description_ of the edges of objects. Such a description, however
exact, can at the utmost do no more than recall vividly the original
object; it cannot enable the spectator to realise its plastic volume
more clearly than the original object would. Now, when we look at a
really good drawing we do get a much more vivid sense of a plastic
volume than we get from actual objects.
Unfortunately this is a very severe test to apply, and would, I think,
relegate to an inferior class the vast majority of drawings, even of
those in the present exhibition. The vast majority of drawings even by
the celebrated masters do appeal mainly by other more subsidiary
qualities, by the brightness of their descriptive power, and by the
elegance and facility of their execution. There is an undoubted pleasure
in the contemplation of mere skill, and there are few ways of
demonstrating sheer skill of hand more convincingly than the drawing of
a complex series of curves with perfect exactitude and great rapidity.
And when the curves thus brilliantly drawn describe vividly some object
in life towards which we have pleasing associations we get a complex
pleasure which is only too likely to be regarded as an æsthetic
experience when in fact it is nothing of the kind.
The author of the preface has quite clearly seen that this element of
brilliance in the execution of the line does frequently come into play,
and he considers this calligraphic quality to be always a sign of a
lowered æsthetic purpose, citing Tiepolo quite rightly as a great master
of such qualities. And he quite rightly points out that with the
deliberate pursuit of calligraphy there is always a tendency to
substitute type forms for individual forms. On the other hand, all good
drawing also tends to create types, since a type results from the
synthetic unity of the design. The real question here would seem to be
the fulness or emptiness of the type created, and it would be fair to
say that the calligraphic draughtsman accepted most readily an empty
type. For instance, one would have to admit that Ingres created a type,
and repeated it as much as Tiepolo, only Ingres continually generated
his type of form upon actual material, whereas Tiepolo tended merely to
repeat his without enriching it with fresh material.