work might think M. Marchand was a dull literalist, whose mere
accomplishment it is to render the similitude of objects. But such a
conclusion would be entirely wrong. However frankly M. Marchand accepts
the forms of objects, however little his normal vision distorts or
idealises them, however consciously and deliberately he chooses the
arrangement, he does build up by sheer method and artistic science a
unity which has a singularly impressive quality. I heard some one say,
in front of a still life which represented a white tablecloth, a glass
tumbler, an earthenware water-bottle and a loaf of bread, that it was
like Buddha. With such a description as I give of the picture the
appreciation sounds precious and absurd; before the picture it seems
perfectly just. For M. Marchand has attained the reward of his
inflexible honesty; his construction is so solid and unfaltering, he
builds up his designs with such massive and direct handling, that
without the slightest suggestion of emphasis, without any underlining,
the effect comes through; the material becomes expressive; he becomes a
creator, and not a mere adapter of form.
For the understanding of his personality it is interesting to consider
his Cubist period, since Marchand’s reaction to Cubism is typical of his
nature. Cubism, like S. Paul, has been all things to all men--at least
to almost all artists of the present generation. To some it has been a
doctrine and a revelation; to some it has been a convenient form of
artistic journalism; to some it has been a quick road to notoriety, to
some an aid to melodramatic effect. To M. Marchand it was just a useful
method and a gymnastic. He used it for just what it could give him as an
exercise in the organisation of form. It was to him like a system of
notation to a mathematician, a means of handling quantities which
without it would have been too elusive and too infinite to grasp. By
means of Cubism the infinity of a sphere could be reduced to half a
dozen planes, each of which he could learn to relate to all the other
planes in the picture; and the singular ease and directness of his
plastic construction seem to be due to his early practice of Cubist
methods. Having once learned by this process of willed and deliberate
analysis how to handle complex forms, he has been able to throw away the
scaffolding and to construct palpably related and completely unified
designs with something approaching the full complexity of natural forms,
though the lucid statement and the ease of handling which it actuates
testify to the effect of his apprenticeship in Cubism. Such a use of a
theory--as a method, not as a doctrine--seems to me typical of M.
Marchand’s balanced judgment, of his alert readiness to use any and
every means that could conduce to his slow and methodical development,
and hold out hopes of a continued growth.
M. Marchand, so assured, so settled an artist, is still young. In the
landscapes which he did in the South of France just before the war he
explored a peculiarly persuasive and harmonious scheme of colour, based
on warm ochres, earth reds, and dull blues. These pictures have the
envelopment and the sonorous harmony of some early Italian masters in
spite of the frank oppositions and the vigorous scaffolding of modern
design. In the later work done in the last year he shows a new sense of
colour, a new sharpness and almost an audacity, if one can imagine so
well-balanced a nature capable of audacity. He uses dull neutral
colours, the dirty white of a cloudy sky, harsh dull greens and blacks,
the obvious and unattractive colours that so frequently occur in nature;
but he uses them in such combinations, and with such accents of tone and
such subtly prepared accordances and oppositions, that these obvious
dull colours strike one as fascinating discoveries. This is the height
of artistic science, so to accept the obvious and commonplace that it
gives one the pleasant shock of paradox. It seems hardly rash to
foretell for him a solid and continually growing fame.
RETROSPECT[56]
The work of re-reading and selecting from the mass of my writings as an
art critic has inevitably brought me up against the question of its
consistency and coherence. Although I do not think that I have
republished here anything with which I entirely disagree, I cannot but
recognise that in many of these essays the emphasis lies in a different
place from where I should now put it. Fortunately I have never prided
myself upon my unchanging constancy of attitude, but unless I flatter
myself I think I can trace a certain trend of thought underlying very
different expressions of opinion. Now since that trend seems to me to be
symptomatic of modern æsthetic, and since it may perhaps explain much
that seems paradoxical in the actual situation of art, it may be
interesting to discuss its nature even at the cost of being
autobiographical.
In my work as a critic of art I have never been a pure Impressionist, a
mere recording instrument of certain sensations. I have always had some
kind of æsthetic. A certain scientific curiosity and a desire for
comprehension have impelled me at every stage to make generalisations,
to attempt some kind of logical co-ordination of my impressions. But, on
the other hand, I have never worked out for myself a complete system
such as the metaphysicians deduce from _a priori_ principles. I have
never believed that I knew what was the ultimate nature of art. My
æsthetic has been a purely practical one, a tentative expedient, an
attempt to reduce to some kind of order my æsthetic impressions up to
date. It has been held merely until such time as fresh experiences might
confirm or modify it. Moreover, I have always looked on my system with a
certain suspicion. I have recognised that if it ever formed too solid a
crust it might stop the inlets of fresh experience, and I can count
various occasions when my principles would have led me to condemn, and
when my sensibility has played the part of Balaam with the effect of
making temporary chaos of my system. That has, of course, always
rearranged itself to take in the new experience, but with each such
cataclysm it has suffered a loss of prestige. So that even in its latest
form I do not put forward my system as more than a provisional induction
from my own æsthetic experiences.
I have certainly tried to make my judgment as objective as possible, but
the critic must work with the only instrument he possesses--namely, his
own sensibility with all its personal equations. All that he can
consciously endeavour is to perfect that tool to its utmost by studying
the traditional verdicts of men of æsthetic sensibility in the past, and
by constant comparison of his own reactions with those of his
contemporaries who are specially gifted in this way. When he has done
all that he can in this direction--and I would allow him a slight bias
in favour of agreement with tradition--he is bound to accept the verdict
of his own feelings as honestly as he can. Even plain honesty in this
matter is more difficult to attain than would be admitted by those who
have never tried it. In so delicate a matter as the artistic judgment
one is liable to many accidental disturbing influences, one can scarcely
avoid temporary hypnotisms and hallucinations. One can only watch for
and try to discount these, taking every opportunity to catch one’s
sensibility unawares before it can take cover behind prejudices and
theories.
When the critic holds the result of his reaction to a work of art
clearly in view he has next to translate it into words. Here, too,
distortion is inevitable, and it is here that I have probably failed
most of accuracy, for language in the hands of one who lacks the mastery
of a poet has its own tricks, its perversities and habits. There are
things which it shies at and goes round, there are places where it runs
away and, leaving the reality which it professes to carry tumbled out at
the tail of the cart, arrives in a great pother, but without the goods.
But in spite of all these limitations and the errors they entail it
seems to me that the attempt to attain objective judgments has not
altogether failed, and that I seem to myself to have been always groping
my way towards some kind of a reasoned and practical æsthetic. Many
minds have been engaged alongside of mine in the same pursuit. I think
we may claim that partly as a result of our common efforts a rather
more intelligent attitude exists in the educated public of to-day than
obtained in the last century.
Art in England is sometimes insular, sometimes provincial. The
pre-Raphaelite movement was mainly an indigenous product. The dying
echoes of this remarkable explosion reverberated through the years of my
nonage, but when I first began to study art seriously the vital movement
was a provincial one. After the usual twenty years of delay, provincial
England had become aware of the Impressionist movement in France, and
the younger painters of promise were working under the influence of
Monet. Some of them even formulated theories of naturalism in its most
literal and extreme form. But at the same time Whistler, whose
Impressionism was of a very different stamp, had put forward the purely
decorative idea of art, and had tried in his “Ten o’clock,” perhaps too
cavalierly, to sweep away the web of ethical questions, distorted by
æsthetic prejudices, which Ruskin’s exuberant and ill-regulated mind had
spun for the British public.
The Naturalists made no attempt to explain why the exact and literal
imitation of nature should satisfy the human spirit, and the
“Decorators” failed to distinguish between agreeable sensations and
imaginative significance.
After a brief period during which I was interested in the new
possibilities opened up by the more scientific evaluation of colour
which the Impressionists practised, I came to feel more and more the
absence in their work of structural design. It was an innate desire for
this aspect of art which drove me to the study of the Old Masters and,
in particular, those of the Italian Renaissance, in the hope of
discovering from them the secret of that architectonic idea which I
missed so badly in the work of my contemporaries. I think now that a
certain amount of “cussedness” led me to exaggerate what was none the
less a genuine personal reaction. Finding myself out of touch with my
generation I took a certain pleasure in emphasising my isolation. I
always recognised fully that the only vital art of the day was that of
the Impressionists whose theories I disbelieved, and I was always able
to admit the greatness of Degas and Renoir. But many of my judgments of
modern art were too much affected by my attitude. I do not think I ever
praised Mr. Wilson Steer or Mr. Walter Sickert as much as they deserved,
and I looked with too
[Illustration:
Seurat. La Baignade
Plate XXIX.]
great indulgence on some would-be imitators of the Old Masters. But my
most serious lapse was the failure to discover the genius of Seurat (see
Plate), whose supreme merits as a designer I had every reason to
acclaim. I cannot even tell now whether I ever saw his work in the
exhibitions of the early nineties, but if I did his qualities were
hidden from me by the now transparent veil of pointillism--a
pseudo-scientific system of atmospheric colour notation in which I took
no interest.
I think I can claim that my study of the Old Masters was never much
tainted by archæological curiosity. I tried to study them in the same
spirit as I might study contemporary artists, and I always regretted
that there was no modern art capable of satisfying my predilections. I
say there was no modern art because none such was known to me, but all
the time there was one who had already worked out the problem which
seemed to me insoluble of how to use the modern vision with the
constructive design of the older masters. By some extraordinary ill luck
I managed to miss seeing Cézanne’s work till some considerable time
after his death. I had heard of him vaguely from time to time as a kind
of hidden oracle of ultra-impressionism, and, in consequence, I expected
to find myself entirely unreceptive to his art. To my intense surprise I
found myself deeply moved. I have discovered the article in which I
recorded this encounter, and though the praise I gave would sound
grudging and feeble to-day--for I was still obsessed by ideas about the
content of a work of art--I am glad to see that I was so ready to scrap
a long-cherished hypothesis in face of a new experience.
In the next few years I became increasingly interested in the art of
Cézanne and of those like Gauguin and van Goch who at that time
represented the first effects of his profound influence on modern art,
and I gradually recognised that what I had hoped for as a possible event
of some future century had already occurred, that art had begun to
recover once more the language of design and to explore its so long
neglected possibilities. Thus it happened that when at the end of 1911,
by a curious series of chances, I was in a position to organise an
exhibition at the Grafton Galleries, I seized the opportunity to bring
before the English public a selection of works conforming to the new
direction. For purposes of convenience it was necessary to give these
artists a name, and I chose, as being the vaguest and most
non-committal, the name of Post-Impressionist. This merely stated their
position in time relatively to the Impressionist movement. In conformity
with my own previous prejudices against Impressionism, I think I
underlined too much their divorce from the parent stock. I see now more
clearly their affiliation with it, but I was none the less right in
recognising their essential difference, a difference which the
subsequent development of Cubism has rendered more evident. Of late the
thesis of their fundamental opposition has been again enforced in the
writings of M. Lhote.
If I may judge by the discussions in the press to which this exhibition
gave rise, the general public failed to see that my position with regard
to this movement was capable of a logical explanation, as the result of
a consistent sensibility. I tried in vain to explain what appeared to me
so clear, that the modern movement was essentially a return to the ideas
of formal design which had been almost lost sight of in the fervid
pursuit of naturalistic representation. I found that the cultured public
which had welcomed my expositions of the works of the Italian
Renaissance now regarded me as either incredibly flippant or, for the
more charitable explanation was usually adopted, slightly insane. In
fact, I found among the cultured who had hitherto been my most eager
listeners the most inveterate and exasperated enemies of the new
movement. The accusation of anarchism was constantly made. From an
æsthetic point of view this was, of course, the exact opposite of the
truth, and I was for long puzzled to find the explanation of so
paradoxical an opinion and so violent an enmity. I now see that my crime
had been to strike at the vested emotional interests. These people felt
instinctively that their special culture was one of their social assets.
That to be able to speak glibly of Tang and Ming, of Amico di Sandro and
Baldovinetti, gave them a social standing and a distinctive cachet. This
showed me that we had all along been labouring under a mutual
misunderstanding, _i.e._ that we had admired the Italian primitives for
quite different reasons. It was felt that one could only appreciate
Amico di Sandro when one had acquired a certain considerable mass of
erudition and given a great deal of time and attention, but to admire a
Matisse required only a certain sensibility. One could feel fairly sure
that one’s maid could not rival one in the former case, but might by a
mere haphazard gift of Providence
[Illustration:
Derain. Still Life Author’s Collection
Plate XXX.]
surpass one in the second. So that the accusation of revolutionary
anarchism was due to a social rather than an æsthetic prejudice. In any
case the cultured public was determined to look upon Cézanne as an
incompetent bungler, and upon the whole movement as madly revolutionary.
Nothing I could say would induce people to look calmly enough at these
pictures to see how closely they followed tradition, or how great a
familiarity with the Italian primitives was displayed in their work. Now
that Matisse has become a safe investment for persons of taste, and that
Picasso and Derain have delighted the miscellaneous audience of the
London Music Halls with their designs for the Russian Ballet, it will be
difficult for people to believe in the vehemence of the indignation
which greeted the first sight of their works in England.
In contrast to its effect on the cultured public the Post-Impressionist
exhibition aroused a keen interest among a few of the younger English
artists and their friends. With them I began to discuss the problems of
æsthetic that the contemplation of these works forced upon us.
But before explaining the effects of these discussions upon my æsthetic
theory I must return to consider the generalisations which I had made
from my æsthetic experiences up to this point.
In my youth all speculations on æsthetic had revolved with wearisome
persistence around the question of the nature of beauty. Like our
predecessors we sought for the criteria of the beautiful, whether in art
or nature. And always this search led to a tangle of contradictions or
else to metaphysical ideas so vague as to be inapplicable to concrete
cases.
It was Tolstoy’s genius that delivered us from this _impasse_, and I
think that one may date from the appearance of “What is Art?” the
beginning of fruitful speculation in æsthetic. It was not indeed
Tolstoy’s preposterous valuation of works of art that counted for us,
but his luminous criticism of past æsthetic systems, above all, his
suggestions that art had no special or necessary concern with what is
beautiful in nature, that the fact that Greek sculpture had run
prematurely to decay through an extreme and non-æsthetic admiration of
beauty in the human figure afforded no reason why we should for ever
remain victims of their error.
It became clear that we had confused two distinct uses of the word
beautiful, that when we used beauty to describe a favourable æsthetic
judgment on a work of art we meant something quite different from our
praise of a woman, a sunset or a horse as beautiful. Tolstoy saw that
the essence of art was that it was a means of communication between
human beings. He conceived it to be _par excellence_ the language of
emotion. It was at this point that his moral bias led him to the strange
conclusion that the value of a work of art corresponded to the moral
value of the emotion expressed. Fortunately he showed by an application
of his theory to actual works of art to what absurdities it led. What
remained of immense importance was the idea that a work of art was not
the record of beauty already existent elsewhere, but the expression of
an emotion felt by the artist and conveyed to the spectator.
The next question was, Of what kind of emotions is art the expression?
Is love poetry the expression of the emotion of love, tragedy the
expression of pity and fear, and so forth? Clearly the expression in art
has some similarity to the expression of these emotions in actual life,
but it is never identical. It is evident that the artist feels these
emotions in a special manner, that he is not entirely under their
influence, but sufficiently withdrawn to contemplate and comprehend
them. My “Essay in Æsthetic” here reprinted, elaborates this point of
view, and in a course of unpublished lectures I endeavoured to divide
works of visual art according to the emotional point of view, adopting
the classification already existing in poetry into Epic, Dramatic,
Lyric, and Comedic.
I conceived the form of the work of art to be its most essential
quality, but I believed this form to be the direct outcome of an
apprehension of some emotion of actual life by the artist, although, no
doubt, that apprehension was of a special and peculiar kind and implied
a certain detachment. I also conceived that the spectator in
contemplating the form must inevitably travel in an opposite direction
along the same road which the artist had taken, and himself feel the
original emotion. I conceived the form and the emotion which it conveyed
as being inextricably bound together in the æsthetic whole.
About the time I had arrived at these conclusions the discussion of
æsthetic stimulated by the appearance of Post-Impressionism began. It
became evident through these discussions that some artists who were
peculiarly sensitive to the formal relations of works of art, and who
were deeply moved by them, had almost no sense of the emotions which I
had supposed them to convey. Since it was impossible in these cases to
doubt the genuineness of the æsthetic reaction it became evident that I
had not pushed the analysis of works of art far enough, had not
disentangled the purely æsthetic elements from certain accompanying
accessories.
It was, I think, the observation of these cases of reaction to pure form
that led Mr. Clive Bell in his book, “Art,” to put forward the
hypothesis that however much the emotions of life might appear to play a
part in the work of art, the artist was really not concerned with them,
but only with the expression of a special and unique kind of emotion,
the æsthetic emotion. A work of art had the peculiar property of
conveying the æsthetic emotion, and it did this in virtue of having
“significant form.” He also declared that representation of nature was
entirely irrelevant to this and that a picture might be completely
non-representative.
This last view seemed to me always to go too far since any, even the
slightest, suggestion of the third dimension in a picture must be due to
some element of representation. What I think has resulted from Mr. Clive
Bell’s book, and the discussions which it has aroused on this point is
that the artist is free to choose any degree of representational
accuracy which suits the expression of his feeling. That no single fact,
or set of facts, about nature can be held to be obligatory for artistic
form. Also one might add as an empirical observation that the greatest
art seems to concern itself most with the universal aspects of natural
form, to be the least pre-occupied with particulars. The greatest
artists appear to be most sensitive to those qualities of natural
objects which are the least obvious in ordinary life precisely because,
being common to all visible objects, they do not serve as marks of
distinction and recognition.
With regard to the expression of emotion in works of art I think that
Mr. Bell’s sharp challenge to the usually accepted view of art as
expressing the emotions of life has been of great value. It has led to
an attempt to isolate the purely æsthetic feeling from the whole complex
of feelings which may and generally do accompany the æsthetic feeling
when we regard a work of art.
Let us take as an example of what I mean Raphael’s “Transfiguration,”
which a hundred years ago was perhaps the most admired picture in the
world, and twenty years ago was one of the most neglected. It is at once
apparent that this picture makes a very complex appeal to the mind and
feelings. To those who are familiar with the Gospel story of Christ it
brings together in a single composition two different events which
occurred simultaneously at different places, the Transfiguration of
Christ and the unsuccessful attempt of the Disciples during His absence
to heal the lunatic boy. This at once arouses a number of complex ideas
about which the intellect and feelings may occupy themselves. Goethe’s
remark on the picture is instructive from this point of view. “It is
remarkable,” he says, “that any one has ever ventured to query the
essential unity of such a composition. How can the upper part be
separated from the lower? The two form one whole. Below the suffering
and the needy, above the powerful and helpful--mutually dependent,
mutually illustrative.”
It will be seen at once what an immense complex of feelings
interpenetrating and mutually affecting one another such a work sets up
in the mind of a Christian spectator, and all this merely by the content
of the picture, its subject, the dramatic story it tells.
Now if our Christian spectator has also a knowledge of human nature he
will be struck by the fact that these figures, especially in the lower
group, are all extremely incongruous with any idea he is likely to have
formed of the people who surrounded Christ in the Gospel narrative. And
according to his prepossessions he is likely to be shocked or pleased to
find instead of the poor and unsophisticated peasants and fisherfolk who
followed Christ, a number of noble, dignified, and academic gentlemen in
impossible garments and purely theatrical poses. Again the
representation merely as representation, will set up a number of
feelings and perhaps of critical thoughts dependent upon innumerable
associated ideas in the spectator’s mind.