many of his drawings as possible have been collected. Ingres has long
been accepted in the schools as _par excellence_ the great modern master
of drawing. His great saying, “_Le dessin c’est la probité de l’art_,”
has indeed become a watchword of the schools and an excuse for
indulgence in a great deal of gratuitous and misplaced moral feeling. It
has led to the display of all kinds of pedagogic folly. Art is a passion
or it is nothing. It is certainly a very bad moral gymnasium. It is
useless to try to make a kind of moral parallel bars out of the art of
drawing. You will certainly spoil the drawing, and it is doubtful if you
will get the morals. Drawing is a passion to the draughtsman just as
much as colour is to the colourist, and the draughtsman has no reason to
feel moral superiority because of the nature of his passion. He is
fortunate to have it, and there is an end of the matter. Ingres himself
had the passion for draughtsmanship very intensely, though perhaps one
would scarcely guess it from the specimens shown in this exhibition.
These unfortunately are, with few exceptions, taken from that large
class of drawings which he did as a young man in Rome. He was already
married, and was poor. He was engaged on some of his biggest and most
important compositions, on which he was determined to spare no pains or
labour; consequently he found himself forced to earn his living by doing
these brilliant and minutely accurate portraits of the aristocratic
tourists and their families, who happened to pass through Rome. These
drawings bear the unmistakable mark of their origins. They are
commissions, and they are done to satisfy the sitter. Anything like
serious research for form is out of the question; there is little here
but Ingres’s extreme facility and a certain negative good taste.
Probably the only drawing
[Illustration:
Ingres. Apotheosis of Napoleon Le Vicomte d’Arcy
Plate XX.]
here which shows Ingres’s more serious powers is the tight, elaborate
and rather repellent study for the “Apotheosis of Napoleon,” which is a
splendid discovery of composition within a round (see Plate). But the
real fact is, I believe, that Ingres’s power as a draughtsman hardly
ever comes out fully in his drawings; one must turn to his paintings to
see how great and sincere a researcher he was. In his drawings he was
too much pre-occupied with the perfect description of facts; when he
came to the painting he began that endless process of readjustment and
balance of contours which make him so great and original a designer. If
one places his drawings and studies from the nude for, say, his “Venus
Anadyomene” beside the photograph of the picture one gets some idea of
the tireless and passionate research for the exact correspondence of the
contours on either side of the figure which Ingres undertook. He throws
over one by one all the brilliant notations of natural form in the
studies, and arrives bit by bit at an intensely abstract and simplified
statement of the general relations. But though the new statement is
emptied of its factual content, it has now become far more compact, far
more intense in its plasticity. Here and there among Ingres’s
innumerable drawings one may find a nude study in which already this
process of elimination and balance has taken place, but the examples are
rare, and if one would understand why Ingres is one of the great masters
of design, one must face the slightly repellent quality of his oil
paintings rather than allow oneself to be seduced by the elegance and
ease of his drawings.
It would, I think, be possible to show that very few great designers
have attained to full expression in line. I suspect, indeed, that the
whole tradition of art in Europe, since about the end of the fifteenth
century, has been against such complete expression. If we compare the
great masterpieces of pure drawing such as the drawings of figures on
Persian pots of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the few
remaining examples of drawings by the Italian primitives of the
fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, with the vast mass of European
drawings subsequent to that date, we see, I think, the contrast of aims
and purpose of the two groups. Somewhere about the time of Filippino
Lippi there was formulated an idea of drawing which has more or less
held the field ever since in art schools.
As most drawing has centred in the human figure we may describe it in
relation to that, the more so that this view of drawing undoubtedly came
in with the study of anatomy. The general principle is that there are
certain cardinal facts about the figure, or points of cardinal
importance in the rendering of structure--the artist is trained to
observe these with special care, since they become the _points de
repère_ for his drawing. And since they are thus specially observed they
are noted with a special accent. When once the artist has learned to
grasp the relations of these _points de repère_ firmly he learns also to
pass from one to the other with great ease and rapidity, not to say with
a certain indifference as to what happens in the passage. By this method
the essentials of structure and movement of a figure are accurately
given and the whole statement can be made with that easy facility and
rapidity of line which gives a peculiar pleasure. Such drawing has the
merit of being at once structurally accurate and more or less
calligraphically pleasing. The most admired masters, such as Vandyke,
Watteau, even to some extent Rubens, all exhibit the characteristics of
such a conception. Now in the earlier kind of drawing there were no
recognised _points de repère_, no particular moments of emphasis; the
line was so drawn that at every point its relation to the opposed
contour was equally close, the tension so to speak was always across the
line and not along its direction. The essential thing was the position
of the line, not its quality, so that there was the less inclination to
aim at that easy rapidity which marks the later draughtsmanship.
Essentially, then, this earlier drawing was less descriptive and more
purely evocative of form. It may well be that the demands made upon the
artist by the closer study of nature brought in by the Renaissance
became an almost insuperable barrier to artists in the attempt to find
any such completely synthetic vision of form as lay to hand for their
predecessors. We see, for instance, in Albert Dürer’s “Beetle” an
example of purely descriptive and analytic drawing with no attempt at
inner coherence of form. On the other hand, of course, all the great
formalists made deliberate efforts to come through the complex of
phenomena to some abstract synthesis. Fra Bartolomeo and Raphael clearly
made such abstraction a matter of deliberate study,[51] but as I have
pointed out in the case of Ingres, the
[Illustration:
Corot. Pencil drawing J. P. Heseltine, Esq.
Plate XXI.]
obsession of fact has generally forced the artist to such a long series
of experiments towards the final synthetic form that it is only in the
finished picture that it emerges fully.
On the other hand, some modern masters have also found their way
through, more or less completely, and from this point of view few
drawings in the exhibition are as remarkable as the drawing of a seated
woman by Corot (see Plate). Here one supposes it may be a kind of
_naïveté_ of vision rather than the exhaustive process of an Ingres,
that has led Corot to this vividly realised plasticity of form. I find
the essentials of good drawing more completely realised here than in
almost any other drawing in the exhibition, and yet how little of a
professional draughtsman Corot was. It is hard to speak here of Degas’s
works as drawings. With one exception they are pastels and essentially
paintings, but they are of great beauty and show him victorious over his
own formidable cleverness, his unrivalled but dangerous power of witty
notation.
At the opposite pole to Corot’s drawing with its splendid revelation of
plastic significance we must put Menzel with his fussy preoccupation
with undigested fact. It is hard indeed to see quite how Menzel’s
drawings found their way into this good company, except perhaps as
drunken helots, for they are conspicuously devoid of any æsthetic
quality whatever. They are without any rhythmic unity, without any
glimmering of a sense of style, and style though it be as cheap as
Rowlandson’s is still victorious over sheer misinformed literalness.
Somewhere between Menzel and Corot we must place Charles Keane, and I
fear, in spite of the rather exaggerated claims made for him in the
preface, he is nearer to Menzel, though even so, how much better! The
early Millais drawing is of course an astounding attempt by a man of
prodigious gift and no sensibility to pretend that he had the latter. It
is a pity there are no Rossettis here to show the authentic inspiration
of which this is the echo.
I come now to the Rembrandts, of which there are several good examples.
Rembrandt always intrigues one by the multiplicity and diversity of his
gifts and the struggle between his profound imaginative insight and his
excessive talents. The fact is, I believe that Rembrandt was never a
linealist, that he never had the conception of contour clearly present
to him. He was too intensely and too inveterately a painter and a
chiaroscurist. The last thing he saw was a contour, and more than
anything else it eluded his vision. His vision was in fact so intensely
fixed on the interplay of planes, their modulation into one another, and
on the balance of directions, that with him the drawn line has a quite
peculiar and personal meaning. It is used first to indicate directions
of stress and movement, as, for instance, a straight line will be dashed
down to indicate, not the contour of a limb, but its direction, the line
along which stress of action takes place. He seems almost to dread the
contour, to prefer to make strokes either inside or outside of it, and
to trust to the imagination to discover its whereabouts, anything rather
than a final definite statement which would arrest the interplay of
planes. The line is also used to suggest very vaguely and tentatively
the division of planes; but almost always when he comes to use wash on
top of the line his washes go across the lines, so that here too one can
hardly say the line indicates the division so much as the approximate
position of a plane.
In conclusion I would suggest that, the art of pure contour is
comparatively rare in modern art. For what I should cite as great and
convincing examples of that art I would ask the reader to turn to the
“Morgan Byzantine Enamels” (_Burlington Magazine_, vol. xxi. pp. 3, 65,
127, 219, 290), the “Manafi-i-Heiwan” (_Burlington Magazine_, vol.
xxiii. pp. 224, 261), and to Vignier, “Persian Pottery” (_Burlington
Magazine_, vol. xxv. p. 211), while other examples might be found among
Byzantine and Carolingian miniaturists.
Now, this art depends upon a peculiarly synthetic vision and a peculiar
system of distortion, without which the outline would arrest the
movement of planes too definitely. There indeed is the whole crux of the
art of line drawing; the line generates a volume, but it also arrests
the planes too definitely: that is why in some great modern artists, as
we saw in the case of Rembrandt, there is a peculiar kind of dread of
the actual contour. It is felt by those who are sensitive to the
interplay and movement of planes that the line must in some way, by its
quality or its position, or by breaks or repetitions, avoid arresting
the imagination by too positive a statement. It was almost a peculiarity
of the early art that I have cited that it was able to express a form in
a quite complete, evenly drawn contour without this terrible negative
effect of the line. I say almost a peculiarity, because I think
[Illustration:
Henri-Matisse. Pen drawing
Plate XXII.]
a few quite modern artists, such as Matisse (see Plate) and perhaps
Modigliani, have recovered such a power, but in the great mass of post
Renaissance drawing the art of the pure contour in line has broken down,
and the essential qualities even of the great linealists are only to be
seen fully in their paintings; the drawn line itself has had to take on
other functions.
PAUL CÉZANNE[52]
In a society which is as indifferent to works of art as our modern
industrialism it seems paradoxical that artists of all kinds should loom
so large in the general consciousness of mankind--that they should be
remembered with reverence and boasted of as national assets when
statesmen, lawyers, and soldiers are forgotten. The great mass of modern
men could rub along happily enough without works of art or at least
without new ones, but society would be sensibly more bored if the artist
died out altogether. The fact is that every honest bourgeois, however
sedate and correct his life, keeps a hidden and scarce-admitted yearning
for that other life of complete individualism which hard necessity or
the desire for success has denied him. In contemplating the artist he
tastes vicariously these forbidden joys. He regards the artist as a
strange species, half idiot, half divine, but above all irresponsibly
and irredeemably himself. He seems equally strange in his outrageous
egoism and his superb devotion to an idea.
Also in a world where the individual is squeezed and moulded and
polished by the pressure of his fellow-men the artist remains
irreclaimably individual--in a world where every one else is being
perpetually educated the artist remains ineducable--where others are
shaped he grows. Cézanne realised the type of the artist in its purest
most unmitigated form, and M. Vollard has had the wit to write a book
about Cézanne and not about Cézanne’s pictures. The time may come when
we shall require a complete study of Cézanne’s work, a measured judgment
of his achievement and position--it would probably be rash to attempt it
as yet. Meanwhile we have M. Vollard’s portrait, at once documented and
captivating. Should the book ever become as well known as it deserves
there would be, one guesses,
[Illustration:
Cézanne. Portrait of the Artist Collection Pellerin
Plate XXIII.]
ten people fascinated by Cézanne for one who would walk down the street
to see his pictures.
The art historian may sometimes regret that Vasari did not give us more
of the æsthetics of his time; but Vasari knew his business, knew,
perhaps, that the æsthetics of an age are quickly superseded but that
the human document remains of perennial interest to mankind. M. Vollard
has played Vasari to Cézanne and done so with the same directness and
simplicity, the same narrative ease, the same insatiable delight in the
oddities and idiosyncrasies of his subject. And what a model he had to
paint! Every word and every gesture he records stick out with the rugged
relief of a character in which everything is due to the compulsion of
inner forces, in which nothing has been planed down or smoothed away by
external pressure--not that external pressure was absent but that the
inner compulsion--the inevitable bent of Cézanne’s temperament, was
irresistible. In one very important detail Cézanne was spared by
life--he always had enough to live on. The thought of a Cézanne having
to earn his living is altogether too tragic. But if life spared him in
this respect his temperament spared him nothing--for this rough
Provençal countryman had so exasperated a sensibility that the smallest
detail of daily life, the barking of a dog, the noise of a lift in a
neighbouring house, the dread of being touched even by his own son might
produce at any moment a nervous explosion. At such times his first
relief was in cursing and swearing, but if this failed the chances were
that his anger vented itself on his pictures--he would cut one to pieces
with his palette knife, or failing that roll it up and throw it into the
stove. M. Vollard describes with delightful humour the tortures he
endured in the innumerable sittings which he gave Cézanne for his
portrait--with what care he avoided any subject of conversation which
might lead to misunderstanding. But with all his adroitness there were
one or two crises in which the portrait was threatened with the dreaded
knife--fortunately Cézanne always found some other work on which to vent
his indignation, and the portrait survived, though after a hundred and
fifteen sittings, in which Cézanne exacted the immobility of an apple,
the portrait was left incomplete. “I am not displeased with the shirt
front,” was Cézanne’s characteristic appreciation.
Two phrases continually recur in Cézanne’s conversation which show his
curious idiosyncrasies. One the often-quoted one of his dread that any
one might “_lui jeter le grappin dessus_” and the other “_moi qui suis
faible dans la vie_.” They express his constant attitude of distrust of
his kind--for him all women were “_des veaux et des calculatrices_”--his
dread of any possible invasion of his personality, and his sense of
impotence in face of the forces of life.
None the less, though he pathetically exaggerated his weakness he never
seems to have had the least doubt about his supreme greatness as an
artist; what troubled and irritated him was his incapacity to express
his “sensation” in such terms as would make its meaning evident to the
world. It was for this reason that he struggled so obstinately and
hopelessly to get into the “Salon de M. Bougereau.” His attitude to
conventional art was a strange mixture of admiration at its skill and of
an overwhelming horror of its emptiness--of its so “horrible
resemblance.”
The fact is that Cézanne had accepted uncritically all the conventions
in the pathetic belief that it was the only way of safety for one “so
feeble in life.” So he continued to believe in the Catholic Church not
from any religious conviction but because “Rome was so strong”--so, too,
he believed in the power and importance of the “Salon de Bougereau”
which he hated as much as he feared. So, too, with what seems a
paradoxical humility he let it be known, when his fame had already been
established among the intelligent, that he would be glad to have the
Legion of Honour. But here, too, he was destined to fail. The weighty
influence and distinguished position of his friends could avail nothing
against the undisguised horror with which any official heard the dreaded
name of Cézanne. And it appeared that Cézanne was the only artist in
France for whom this distinction was inaccessible, even through
“influence.” Nothing is stranger in his life than the contrast between
the idea the public formed of Cézanne and the reality. He was one of
those men destined to give rise to a legend which completely
obscured the reality. He was spoken of as the most violent of
revolutionaries--Communard and Anarchist were the favourite
epithets--and all the time he was a timid little country gentleman of
immaculate respectability who subscribed whole-heartedly to any
reactionary opinion which could establish his “soundness.” He was a
timid man who really believed
[Illustration:
Cézanne. Gardanne
Plate XXIV.]
in only one thing, “his little sensation”; who laboured incessantly to
express this peculiar quality and who had not the faintest notion of
doing anything that could shock the feelings of any mortal man or woman.
No wonder then that when he looked up from his work and surveyed the
world with his troubled and imperfect intellectual vision he was amazed
and perturbed at the violent antagonism which he had all unconsciously
provoked. No wonder that he became a shy, distrustful misanthrope,
almost incapable of any association with his kind.
I have suggested that Cézanne was the perfect realisation of the type of
the artist--I doubt whether in the whole of Vasari’s great picture
gallery there is a more complete type of “original.” But in order to
accept this we must banish from our mind the conventional idea of the
artist as a man of flamboyant habits and calculated pose. Nothing is
less possible to the real artist than pose--he is less capable of it
than the ordinary man of business because more than any one else his
external activities are determined from within by needs and instincts
which he himself barely recognises.
On the other hand the imitation artist is a past master of pose, he
poses as the sport of natural inclinations whilst he is really
deliberately exploiting his caprices; and as he has a natural instinct
for the limelight this variety of the “Cabotin” generally manages to sit
for the portrait of the artist. Cézanne, then, though his external life
was that of the most irreproachable of country gentlemen, though he went
to mass every Sunday and never willingly left the intimacy of family
life, was none the less the purest and most unadulterated of artists,
the most narrowly confined to his single activity, the most purely
disinterested and the most frankly egoistic of men.
Cézanne had no intellectual independence. I doubt if he had the faintest
conception of intellectual truth, but this is not to deny that he had a
powerful mind. On the contrary he had a profound intelligence of
whatever came within his narrow outlook on life, and above all he had
the gift of expression, so that however fantastic, absurd, or naïve his
opinions may have been, they were always expressed in such racy and
picturesque language that they become interesting as revelations of a
very human and genuine personality.
One of the tragi-comedies of Cézanne’s life was the story of his early
friendship with Zola, followed in middle life by a gradual estrangement,
and at last a total separation. It is perhaps the only blot in M.
Vollard’s book that he has taken too absolutely Cézanne’s point of view,
and has hardly done justice to Zola’s goodness of heart. The cause of
friction, apart from Cézanne’s habitual testiness and ill-humour, was
that Zola’s feeling for art, which had led him in his youth to a heroic
championship of the younger men, faded away in middle life. His own
practice of literature led him further and further away from any concern
with pure art, and he failed to recognise that his own early prophecy of
Cézanne’s greatness had come true, simply because he himself had become
a popular author, and Cézanne had failed of any kind of success.
Unfortunately Zola, who had evidently lost all real æsthetic feeling,
continued to talk about art, and worse than that he had made the hero of
“L’Œuvre” a more or less recognisable portrait of his old friend.
Cézanne could not tolerate Zola’s gradual acquiescence in worldly ideals
and ways of life, and when the Dreyfusard question came up not only did
his natural reactionary bias make him a vehement anti-Dreyfusard but he
had no comprehension whatever of the heroism of Zola’s actions; he found
him merely ridiculous, and believed him to be engaged in an
ill-conceived scheme of self-advertisement. But for all his contempt of
Zola his affection remained deeper than he knew, and when he heard the
news of Zola’s death Cézanne shut himself alone up in his studio, and
was heard sobbing and groaning throughout the day.
Cézanne’s is not the only portrait in M. Vollard’s entertaining
book--there are sketches of many characters, among them the few strange
and sympathetic men who appreciated and encouraged Cézanne in his early
days. Of Cabaner the musician M. Vollard has collected some charming
notes. Cabaner was a “philosopher,” and singularly indifferent to the
chances of life. During the siege of Paris he met Coppée, and noticing
the shells which were falling he became curious. “Where do all these
bullets come from?” Coppée: “It would seem that it is the besiegers who
send them.” Cabaner, after a silence: “Is it always the Prussians?”
Coppée, impatiently: “Who on earth could it be?” Cabaner: “I don’t know
... other nations!” But the book is so full of good stories that I must
resist the temptation to quote.
[Illustration:
Cézanne. The Artist’s Wife
Plate XXV.]
Fortunately M. Vollard has collected also a large number of Cézanne’s
_obiter dicta_ on art. These have all Cézanne’s pregnant wisdom and racy
style. They often contain a whole system of æsthetics in a single
phrase, as, for instance: “What’s wanted is to do Poussin over again
from Nature.”