gradual modification as his understanding became more profound. What
comes out clearly, and it must never be forgotten in considering his
art, is that his point of departure was from Romanticism. Delacroix was
his god and Ingres, in his early days, his devil--a devil he learned
increasingly to respect, but never one imagines really to love, “_ce
Dominique est très fort mais il m’emm_----.” That Cézanne became a
supreme master of formal design every one would nowadays admit, but
there is some excuse for those contemporaries who complained of his want
of drawing. He was not a master of line in the sense in which Ingres
was. “The contour escapes me,” as he said. That is to say he arrived at
the contour by a study of the interior planes; he was always plastic
before he was linear. In his early works, such, for instance, as the
“Scène de plein air” (see Plate), he is evidently inspired by Delacroix;
he is almost a romanticist himself in such work, and his design is built
upon the contrasts of large and rather loosely drawn silhouettes of dark
and light. In fact it is the method of Tintoretto, Rubens, and
Delacroix.
In the “Bathers resting,” painted in 1877, there is already a great
change. It is rather by the exact placing of plastic units than by
continuous flowing silhouettes that the design holds. Giorgione,
perhaps, is behind this, but no longer Tintoretto, and, above all,
Poussin has intervened.
In later works, such as the portrait of “Mme. Cézanne in a greenhouse,”
the plasticity has become all-important, there is no longer any
suggestion of a romantic _decor_; all is reduced to the purest terms of
structural design.
These notes on Cézanne’s development are prompted by the illustrations
in M. Vollard’s book. These are numerous and excellent, and afford a
better opportunity for a general study of Cézanne’s _œuvre_ than any
other book. In fact, when the time comes for the complete appreciation
of Cézanne M. Vollard’s book will be the most important document
existing. It should, however, have a far wider appeal than that. I hope
that after the war M. Vollard will bring out a small cheap
edition[53]--it should become a classic biography. To say, as I would,
that M. Vollard’s book is a monument worthy of Cézanne himself is to
give it the highest praise.
[Illustration:
Cézanne. Le ruisseau
Plate XXVI.]
RENOIR
What a lover of the commonplace Renoir was! It is a rare quality among
artists. A theoretically pure artist exists no more than a Euclidean
point, but if such a being could exist, every possible actual sight
would be equally suitable as a point of departure for his artistic
vision. Everything would stir in him the impulse to creation. He would
have no predilections, no tastes for this or that kind of thing. In
practice every artist is set going by some particular kind of scene in
nature, and for the most part artists have to search out some unusual or
unexplored aspect of things. Gauguin, for instance, had to go as far as
Tahiti. When Renoir heard of this, he said, in a phrase which revealed
his own character: “Pourquoi? On peint si bien a Batignolles.” But there
are plenty of artists who paint more or less well at Batignolles or
Bloomsbury and yet are not lovers of the commonplace. Like Walter
Sickert, for instance, they find their Tahiti in Mornington Crescent.
Though they paint in commonplace surroundings, they generally contrive
to catch them at an unexpected angle. Something odd or exotic in their
taste for life seems to be normal to artists. The few artists or writers
who have shared the tastes of the average man have, as a rule, been like
Dickens--to take an obvious case--very imperfect and very impure
artists, however great their genius. Among great artists one thinks at
once of Rubens as the most remarkable example of a man of common tastes,
a lover of all that was rich, exuberant and even florid. Titian, too,
comes nearly up to the same standard, except that in youth his whole
trend of feeling was distorted by the overpowering influence of
Giorgione, whose tastes were recondite and strange. Renoir, in the
frankness of his colour harmonies, in his feeling for design and even in
the quality of his pigment, constantly reminds us of these two. Now it
is easier to see how an artist of the sixteenth or seventeenth century
could develop commonplace tastes than one of our own times. For with
the nineteenth century came in a gradual process of differentiation of
the artist from the average man. The modern artist finds himself so
little understood by the crowd, in his aims and methods, that he tends
to become distinct in his whole attitude to life.
What, then, is so peculiar about Renoir is that he has this perfectly
ordinary taste in things and yet remains so intensely, so purely, an
artist. The fact is perhaps that he was so much an artist that he never
had to go round the corner to get his inspiration; the immediate,
obvious, front view of everything was more than sufficient to start the
creative impulse. He enjoyed instinctively, almost animally, all the
common good things of life, and yet he always kept just enough
detachment to feel his delight æsthetically--he kept, as it were, just
out of reach of appetite.
More than any other great modern artist Renoir trusted implicitly to his
own sensibility; he imposed no barrier between his own delight in
certain things and the delight which he communicates. He liked
passionately the obviously good things of life, the young human animal,
sunshine, sky, trees, water, fruit; the things that every one likes;
only he liked them at just the right distance with just enough
detachment to replace appetite by emotion. He could rely on this
detachment so thoroughly that he could dare, what hardly any other
genuine modern has dared to say how much he liked even a pretty sight.
But what gives his art so immediate, so universal an appeal is that his
detachment went no further than was just necessary. His sensibility is
kept at the exact point where it is transmuted into emotion. And the
emotion, though it has of course the generalised æsthetic feeling, keeps
something of the fulness and immediacy of the simpler attitude. Not that
Renoir was either naïve or stupid. When he chose he showed that he was
capable of logical construction and vigorous design. But for his own
pleasure he would, as he himself said, have been satisfied to make
little isolated records of his delight in the detail of a flower or a
lock of hair. With the exception of “Les Parapluies” at the National
Gallery we have rarely seen his more deliberate compositions in England.
But in all his work alike Renoir remains the man who could trust
recklessly his instinctive reaction to life.
Let me confess that these characteristics--this way of keeping,
[Illustration:
Renoir. Judgement of Paris. Collection Halvossen
Plate XXVII.]
as it were, just out of reach of appetite--makes Renoir to me,
personally, a peculiarly difficult artist. My taste for exotic artists
such as Cosima Tura and his kin amounts at times to a vice.
Consequently, I am sometimes in danger of not doing Renoir justice,
because at the first approach to one of his pictures I miss the purely
accessory delight of an unexpected attitude. The first approach to one
of his pictures may indeed remind one of pictures that would be the
delight of the servants’ hall, so unaffectedly simple is his acceptance
of the charm of rosy-cheeked girls, of pretty posies and dappled
sunlight. And yet one knows well enough that Renoir was as “artful” as
one could wish. Though he had not the biting wit of a Degas, he had a
peculiar love of mischievous humour; he was anything but a harmless or
innocent character. All his simplicity is on the surface only. The
longer one looks, the deeper does Renoir retire behind veil after veil
of subtlety. And yet, compared with some modern artists, he was, after
all, easy and instinctively simple. Even his plastic unity was arrived
at by what seems a more natural method than, say, Cézanne’s. Whereas
Cézanne undertook his indefatigable research for the perspective of the
receding planes, Renoir seems to have accepted a very simple general
plastic formula. Whatever Cézanne may have meant by his celebrated
saying about cones and cylinders, Renoir seems to have thought the
sphere and cylinder sufficient for his purpose. The figure presents
itself to his eye as an arrangement of more or less hemispherical bosses
and cylinders, and he appears generally to arrange the light so that the
most prominent part of each boss receives the highest light. From this
the planes recede by insensible gradations towards the contour, which
generally remains the vaguest, least ascertained part of the modelling.
Whatever lies immediately behind the contour tends to become drawn into
its sphere of influence, to form an undefined recession enveloping and
receiving the receding planes. As the eye passes away from the contour,
new but less marked bosses form themselves and fill the background with
repetitions of the general theme. The picture tends thus to take the
form of a bas-relief in which the recessions are not into the profound
distances of pictorial space, but only back, as it were, to the block
out of which the bossed reliefs emerge, though, of course, by means of
atmospheric colour the eye may interpret these recessions as distance.
This is clearly in marked contrast to Cézanne’s method of suggesting
endless recessions of planes with the most complicated interwoven
texture.
Renoir’s drawing takes on the same fundamental simplicity. An Ingres
arrived at the simplified statement necessary for great design by a
process of gradual elimination of all the superfluous sinuosities which
his hand had recorded in the first drawing from nature. Renoir seems
never to have allowed his eye to accept more than the larger elements of
mass and direction. His full, rounded curves embrace the form in its
most general aspect. With advancing years and continually growing
science he was able, at last, to state this essential synthesis with
amazing breadth and ease. He continually increased the amplitude of his
forms until, in his latest nudes, the whole design is filled with a few
perfectly related bosses. Like Titian’s, Renoir’s power of design
increased visibly up to the very end of his life. True, he was capable
at all periods of conceiving large and finely co-ordinated compositions,
such as “Les Parapluies” and the “Charpentier family”; but at the end
even the smallest studies have structural completeness.
A POSSIBLE DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE[54]
Houses are either builders’ houses or architects’ houses. Not that
speculative builders do not employ architects, but they generally employ
architects who efface themselves behind the deadly conventionality and
bewildering fantasy of their façades. Architects’ houses are generally
built to the order of a gentleman who wishes his house to have some
distinctive character, to stand out from the common herd of houses,
either by its greater splendour or its greater discretion. The builder’s
house, like the dresses of the lower middle class, is generally an
imitation of the gentleman’s, only of a fashion that has just gone out
of date and imitated badly in cheaper materials. No one defends it. It
is made so because you must make a house somehow, and bought because it
is the usual and therefore inevitable thing. No one enjoys it, no one
admires it, it is accepted as part of the use and wont of ordinary life.
The gentleman’s and architect’s house is different. Here time and
thought, and perhaps great ingenuity and taste are employed in giving to
the house an individual character. Unfortunately this individual
character is generally terribly conscious of its social aspect, of how
the house will look, not to those who live in it so much as to those who
come to visit. We have no doubt outlived the more vulgar forms of this
social consciousness, those which led to the gross display of merely
expensive massiveness and profusion. Few modern houses would satisfy Mr.
Podsnap. But its subtler forms are still apparent. They generally make
themselves felt in the desire to be romantic. As it requires much too
much imagination to find romance in the present, one looks for it in the
past, and so a dive is made into some period of history, and its
monuments studied and copied, and finally “adapted” to the more
elaborate exigencies of modern life. But, alas, these divers into the
past seem never to have been able to find the pearl of romance, for,
ever since the craze began in the eighteenth century, they have been
diving now here, now there, now into Romanesque, now into Gothic, now
into Jacobean, now into Queen Anne. They have brought up innumerable
architectural “features” which have been duly copied by modern
machinery, and carefully glued on to the houses, and still the owners
and the architects, to do them justice, feel restless, and are in search
of some new old style to try. The search has flagged of late, people
know it is useless, and here and there architects have set to work
merely to build so well and with such a fine sense of the material
employed that the result should satisfy the desire for comeliness
without the use of any style. I am thinking of some of Mr. Blow’s
earlier works where a peculiar charm resulted from the unstinting care
with which every piece of material had been chosen and the whole fitted
together almost as though the stones had been precious stones instead of
flints or bricks.
But on the whole the problem appears to be still unsolved, and the
architects go on using styles of various kinds with greater or less
degrees of correctness. This they no longer do with the old zest and
hope of discovery, but rather with a languid indifference and with
evident marks of discouragement.
Now style is an admirable thing, it is the result of ease and coherence
of feeling, but unfortunately a borrowed style is an even stronger proof
of muddled and befogged emotions than the total absence of style. The
desire for a style at all costs, even a borrowed style, is part of that
exaggerated social consciousness which in other respects manifests
itself as snobbery. What if people were just to let their houses be the
direct outcome of their actual needs, and of their actual way of life,
and allow other people to think what they like. What if they behaved in
the matter of houses as all people wish to behave in society without any
undue or fussy self-consciousness. Wouldn’t such houses have really a
great deal more character, and therefore interest for others, than those
which are deliberately made to look like something or other. Instead of
looking like something, they would then be something.
The house which I planned and built for myself was the result of certain
particular needs and habits. I had originally no idea of building a
house: I had so often heard the proverb that “Fools build houses for
wise men to live in,” that I had come to believe it, but I required a
house of a certain size for my family within easy reach of London. I
looked at a great many houses and found that those which had a
sufficient number of rooms were all gentlemen’s establishments, with
lodge, stabling, and green-houses. Now it was characteristic of my purse
that I could not afford to keep up a gentleman’s establishment and of my
tastes that I could not endure to. I was a town dweller, and I wanted a
town house and a little garden in the country. As I could not find what
I wanted, the idea came into my head that I must build it or go without.
The means at my disposal were definitely limited; the question was
therefore whether I could build a house of the required size with that
sum. I made a plan containing the number of rooms of the sizes I
required, and got an estimate. It was largely in excess of the sum I
possessed for the purpose. I feared I must give up my scheme when I met
a friend who had experimented in building cheap cottages on his estate,
and learned from him that the secret of economy was concentration of
plan. I also discovered in discussing my first estimate that roofs were
cheaper than walls. I thereupon started on a quite different plan, in
which I arranged the rooms to form as nearly as possible a solid block,
and placed a number of the rooms in a hipped or Mansard roof. It will be
seen that, so far, the planning of the house was merely the discovery of
a possible equation between my needs and the sum at my disposal.
But in trying to establish this equation I had found it necessary to
make the rooms rather smaller than I should have liked, and having a
great liking for large and particularly high interiors--I hate
Elizabethan rooms with their low ceilings in spite of their prettiness,
and I love the interiors of the baroque palaces of Italy--I determined
to have one room of generous dimensions and particularly of great
height. This large room surrounded by small rooms was naturally made
into a general living-place, with arrangements by means of a lift to
enable it to be used as a dining hall if there were more in the house
than could be accommodated in the small breakfast room.
The estimate for this new concentrated plan, in spite of the large
dimensions of the living place, came to little more than half the
estimate for the former plan, and made my project feasible, provided
that I could calculate all details and did not run into extras.
So far then there has been no question of architecture; it has been
merely solving the problem of personal needs and habits, and of cost,
and if architecture there is to be, it should, I think, come directly
out of the solution of these problems. The size and disposition of the
plan having thus been fixed, the elevations are given in outline, and
the only question is how the rectangle of each elevation is to be
treated. Doors and windows are the elements of the design, and here
again something will already be determined by needs or tastes. There is
need of a certain amount of light, and my own taste is to have as much
as possible, so that the windows had to be large rectangles. But when
all these things are determined by need there is still a wide margin of
choice--the size of the panes in the windows, the depth of recess of the
windows within the wall, the flatness or relief of each element. All
these and many more are still matters of choice, and it is through the
artist’s sense of proportion and his feeling for the plastic relief of
the whole surface that a work of mere utility may become a work of art.
In the case of the main elevation of my house I found that when all the
windows, including the long windows of the high living-place, were duly
arranged, there was a want of unity owing to the nearly equal balance
between the horizontal and vertical members. I therefore underlined the
slight projection of the central part (a projection enforced by by-laws)
by varying the material, replacing at this point the plaster of the
walls by two bands of red brick. In this way the vertical effect of the
central part was made to dominate the whole façade. The artistic or
architectural part of this house was confined, then, merely to the
careful choice of proportions within certain fixed limits defined by
needs, and neither time, money, nor thought were expended on giving the
house the appearance of any particular style.
I have gone thus at length into the history of my own house merely as an
example of the way in which, I think, a genuine architecture, and in the
end, no doubt, an architectural style, might arise. It requires a
certain courage or indifference to public opinion on the part of the
owner. My own house is neighboured by houses of the most gentlemanly
picturesqueness, houses from which tiny gables with window slits jut out
at any unexpected angle, and naturally it is regarded as a monstrous
eyesore by their inhabitants. Indeed, when I first came here it was
supposed that the ugliness of my house was so apparent that I myself
could not be blind to it, and should not resent its being criticised in
my presence. They were quite right, I did not resent it; I was only very
much amused.
To arrive at such a genuine domestic architecture as I conceive,
requires, then, this social indifference to surrounding snobbishness on
the part of the owner, and it requires a nice sense of proportion and a
feeling for values of plastic relief on the part of the artist who
designs the house, but it does not require genius or even any
extraordinary talent to make a genuine and honest piece of domestic
architecture which will continue to look distinguished when the last
“style” but one having just become _démodé_ already stinks in the
nostrils of all cultured people.
JEAN MARCHAND[55]
There are some thirty pictures by M. Jean Marchand now on view at the
Carfax Gallery in Bury Street. This gives one an occasion for reviewing
the work of this comparatively young artist. M. Marchand belongs, of
course, to the revolutionary movement of this century in that he derives
the general principles of his art from Cézanne, but he is the most
traditional of revolutionaries. Not by the wildest stretch of the
imagination could one conceive of M. Marchand deliberately or
consciously doing anything to astonish the public. It is quite true that
no genuine artist ever did, but some artists have found an added
piquancy in the thought that inventions that occurred to them would in
point of fact have this adventitious charm. But with M. Marchand such
possibilities seem more remote than with most of his compeers. An
extreme simplicity and directness of outlook and a touching sincerity in
all he does are the most prominent characteristics of his work. Not that
he makes one suppose him to be too naïve to play tricks with his art; on
the contrary, one sees that he is highly self-conscious and
intellectual, but that he knows the utter futility of any deliberate
emphasis on the artist’s part. He knows that any effect of permanent
value must flow directly from the matter in hand; that it is useless to
make anything appear more interesting or impressive than it is; that,
whatever his vision is, it must be accepted literally, and without any
attempt to add to its importance or effectiveness.
In short, M. Marchand is a classic artist--one might almost in these
days say a French artist, and count it as synonymous, but that one
remembers that the French, too, have had their orgies of romantic
emphasis, and have always ready to hand a convention of coldly
exaggerated rhetoric. Moreover, if one thinks of a nearly allied
painter
[Illustration:
Marchand. Still Life Author’s Collection
Plate XXVIII.]
such as Derain, whose work is so terribly _interesting_, one sees that
to a quite peculiar degree M. Marchand exemplifies the sentimental
honesty of the French. I leave the question open whether this is a moral
trait, or is not rather the result of a clearer perception than we often
attain to of the extreme futility of lying where art is concerned.
Certainly one can imagine the temptations for a man of M. Marchand’s
great technical ability to choose some slightly wilful or fantastic
formula of vision and to exploit it for what it might bring out; for M.
Marchand was handicapped in any competition for notoriety by the very
normality and sanity of his vision. Compared to the descriptions of
sketches in “Jane Eyre,” his pictures would be judged to be entirely
lacking in imagination. He never tries to invent what he has not
actually seen. Almost any of the ordinary things of life suffice for his
theme--a loaf of bread or a hat left on the table, a rather vulgar
French château restored by Viollet-le-Duc with a prim garden and
decorous lake, a pot of aspidistra in a suburban window. These and the
like are the subjects of his pictures, and he paints the objects
themselves in all their vulgar everydayness. They do not become excuses
for abstract designs; they retain in his pictures all their bleak
commonplaceness.