organized by “Die Wilden” of Munich and that is now rampant; in ten or
twenty years _it_ will be absorbed in the main stream and a still
_newer_ secession challenge attention--and so on to the end of progress,
for progress depends upon new and newer and ever newer departures.
Already there is a division in the New Secession; the “Blue Riders” have
withdrawn.
* * * * *
Months after the above was written the London correspondent of the
“Chicago Tribune”--Nov. 2, 1913--wrote as follows about the
post-impressionist exhibition in the Grafton Galleries:
Many of the pictures which would have provoked happy laughter three
years ago now look quite ordinary. The public is inured to them as
much as it is inured to Whistler or Degas, and in a little time
some of them will be dealers’ pictures, just like the works of the
Barbizon school.
There is, for instance, nothing extraordinary about the “Interior
of a Café,” by VanGogh, except its quiet excellence. It is all seen
as justly and yea as newly as a character in one of Tolstoi’s
novels. One feels that any one could have painted it who had had
the luck to see it so.
The “Boats at Anchor,” also by VanGogh, is merely a sound but not
very interesting impressionist picture, and his flower piece is
even academic in a delightful way. Cézanne’s “Boys Bathing” is one
of those works on which the art of modern painters like M. Friesz
is based.
It looks like a representation of something seen instantaneously,
and yet at the same time it is all designed like a work of Nicholas
Poussin’s.
M. Matisse’s “Joaquina” is timidly skied, but it is not in the
least infuriating, like his famous gentleman in pajamas. Indeed,
his method here justifies itself at first sight, for by no other
means, one feels, could he have expressed the vitality of his
sitter so simply and intensely.
M. Friesz’s “Garden at Coimbra” is one of the pictures that would
have astonished us all three or four years ago, but which now looks
only pleasant and simple. So are the works of M. Marquet and M.
Doucet, and even M. Herbin no longer seems a bad joker. The “Polka”
and “Waltz” of Mr. Severini, the futurist, are quite agreeable to
the eye, if it refuses to allow itself to be puzzled by the mind;
but, if futurist paintings can be academic, they are a little
academic, or at least systematic. One feels that any one could be
taught to do them pretty well in a studio.
Among the water colors there are some pleasant works by M. Doucet
and some remarkable experiments by M. Pechstein. The color prints
of M. Manzana are more Chinese than Japanese in spirit, especially
the print of horses; and the lithographs of M. Matisse may help
some earnest beginners to see some merit in his painting. At any
rate, any one who looks at them must see that he can draw.
The exhibition contains a good deal of rubbish, but far less than
most exhibitions of what is considered orthodox art.
* * * * *
The Salon d’Independants tends to remain radical notwithstanding it was
founded so long ago as 1884 because it has but one article in its creed,
“_the suppression of juries of admission and permission to artists to
exhibit freely their works to the judgment of the public_.”
By paying five dollars any artist--real or supposed--is entitled to so
much space and can fill that space with such pictures as he pleases,
irrespective of their merit.
As a result, each exhibition contains original, revolutionary and
radical work mixed with an immense amount of painting and sculpture that
is hopelessly bad and some positively objectionable.
The continued vitality of the Independent Salon is due to the fact it
has no officials or committees to control its exhibitions and check the
appearance of radical work.
[Illustration: VAN GOGH
Café]
The three other Salons grow conservative in the natural ageing of their
management; they start with all the enthusiasm of youth but as both
members and officers get older they tend to monopolize much of the
available space for themselves and, naturally, they admit only those
newcomers whose work does not detract or distract from their own. That
is the history of the Royal Academy in London, of the National Academy
in New York, and of every organization _the management of which has the
right to hang their own and reject the works of others_.
* * * * *
In the development of art _all_ these exhibitions have their values.
They are not unlike an army in a campaign, with its scouts, its
skirmishers, its advance guard, and its more slowly moving main body--in
the end it is the main body that does the most work.
The _value_ of every _new_ movement lies in the possibility of its
ultimately _contributing_ something to the mass, _not_ in the
possibility of its _destroying_ what has been done.
* * * * *
One has but to recall that both Whistler and Manet--to mention no
others--were obliged to exhibit in the Salon des Refuses of their day to
realize that an _independent_ salon has its place in the art world quite
as important as an official; in fact, wherever there is an _official_
exhibition there should be an _un_-official, or independent, as a
natural complement, otherwise the opportunity of the public to see _for
itself_ is limited by official discretion.
* * * * *
For instance, it is the rule of the National Academy in New York that
every member and associate has _the right_ to hang a picture
irrespective of its merits. As the space is limited the chance for new
men is small indeed.
Furthermore it is the older men who pass upon the works of the newer and
naturally they feel an instinctive aversion to paintings that clash with
or distract attention from their own, hence the more radical, the more
novel, the more interesting the picture the less chance it has of being
accepted. This is both a fault and a virtue in the Academy--the fault
and the virtue of extreme conservatism.
To correct the fault other exhibitions, held under freer conditions, are
absolutely necessary not only to the progress of artists, young and old,
but to stimulate interest in the public, to make the public feel that
_it_ is something more than a passive spectator with nothing to say, but
on the contrary _its sympathetic cooperation_ and _final verdict_ of
approval are desired.
* * * * *
Nothing is more deadly to the art of a country than a single annual
official exhibition such, for instance, as that of the Royal Academy in
London, or the old Salon as it was thirty years ago in Paris.
The interest of the public is not aroused. The official selection is
accepted as a matter of course. What is in the exhibitions is supposed
to be good, what is not accepted is supposed to be bad.
As a result, the really good pictures in such exhibitions are not
appreciated at their true value, while the poor are bought simply
because they are there.
The truth is it requires the new salons, the independent exhibitions to
give vitality to the old, to teach the public to appreciate the good in
the old.
Good art, like everything else good, springs from controversy, _from the
assertion of the individual_, from the mighty struggle of every sincere
and enthusiastic man to convince the world that _he_ is right and that
_his_ works and ways are better than those of all other men.
* * * * *
That is just what the new men are striving to do now--each is trying to
convince the world _he_ is right, that _his_ methods, _his_ departures,
_his_ theories are true.
The Cubist does not admit much of value in the Futurist, while the
latter see nothing at all in Cubism. In short the “isms” are more at war
among themselves than with the older schools.
Out of the seething conflict of forces good is sure to come; the amount
of good depending directly upon the sharpness of the conflict.
V
WHAT IS CUBISM?
What is “Cubism?”
One more name added to the long roll of “movements” in art. Within the
memory of living men we have had “Classicists,” “Romanticists,”
“Idealists,” “Naturalists,” “Realists,” “Pre-Raphaelites,” and many
more.
Today we have the “Neo-Impressionists,” the “Pointilists,” the
“Luminists,” the “Futurists,” the “Orphists,” the “Sensationalists,” the
“Compositionalists,” the “Synchronists,” the “Cubists”--tomorrow?
New and ever new departures, experiments, achievements.
All of which goes to prove that art is living, for the sign of life is
flux.
* * * * *
The other day I saw three well-known American painters standing before a
cubist picture laughing; _painters of forty years ago_ would have
laughed quite as heartily _at the works of each of the three_.
The innovation of today is the conventional of tomorrow.
Because the names of Rembrandt and Hals are now household words in art
we are quick to assume their pictures were always considered great. Not
so.
Just now it is a fad of millionaires to own Rembrandts; consequently he
is over-appreciated and ridiculously overpriced.
* * * * *
The bare thought of the scorn that greeted Wagner’s operas, the poems of
Browning, and Whitman, sends a cold
[Illustration: METZINGER
The Taster]
[Illustration: LEGER
The Chimneys]
chill down our backs, makes us pause in our headlong criticism lest we,
too, pillory ourselves.
Violent judgments are good fun, but they often come back to plague us.
Of Wagner’s “Meistersinger” Ruskin said:
Of all the bête, clumsy, blundering, boggling, baboon-headed stuff
I ever saw on a human stage that thing last night--as far as the
story and acting went--and of all the affected, sapless, soul-less,
beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless, topsiturviest,
tuneless, scrannelpipiest, tongs and boniest doggerel of sounds I
ever endured the deadliness of, that eternity of nothing was the
deadliest as far as its sound went. I never was so relieved, so far
as I can remember, in my life by the stopping of any sound, not
excepting railroad whistles, as I was by the cessation of the
cobbler’s bellowing; even the serenader’s caricatured twangle was a
rest after. As for the great “Lied,” I never made out where it
began or where it ended except by the fellow’s coming off the horse
block.
From which the inference is not unwarranted that Wagner did not please
Ruskin!
* * * * *
Opposed to all movements in art and life is the _academic_ mind, fed on
learning, steeped in tradition, hence conservative.
The term is not here used in a reproachful sense; on the contrary, the
philosopher lays stress upon the value of the academic in progress; it
is the element that preserves; it is the mass upon which humanity rests;
it is the old and stable; it is the past upon which the future is built;
it is the essential groundwork of new thought and new effort.
* * * * *
The life of the individual passes from the enthusiasms, the radicalisms
of youth to the serene and self-satisfied outlook of old age which
instinctively opposes novelty and change--the academic attitude.
Youth makes friends with every chance acquaintance, age shuns the
strange.
We are all Impressionists and Futurists at some times in our lives, but
we tend to petrify. Sclerosis of the _arteries_ is bad, but nothing
compared with sclerosis of the _emotions_. We not only tend to become
petrified as we grow older, but even in our youth we have our petrified
sides, our hard spots.
However progressive we may be in certain directions we are sure to be
stubbornly conservative in others.
The man who laughs at a cubist picture may be a cubist--that is, an
innovator--in his profession or business.
The man who is a conservative in religion may be a radical in politics,
and _vice versa_. As a matter of fact most of the followers of Lloyd
George in England are the greatest sticklers for the inerrancy and the
literal interpretation of the Scriptures, while most of the hide-bound
conservatives are exceedingly tolerant toward “modernism” and “higher
criticism” in the church.
So it goes. The merchant or manufacturer, the doctor or lawyer who is up
to date in business or profession, who is keenly receptive toward the
latest and most revolutionary methods, inventions, discoveries, may
be--usually is--a hopeless reactionary toward other lines of human
endeavor, a hopeless conservative when it comes, for instance, to
looking at pictures.
* * * * *
Now and then one meets a man so sympathetically observant and receptive
that, like a good rubber ball, he is resilient at all points of contact.
But for the most part we are like defective balls, resilient only in
spots, and, like rubber, we become less and less resilient with age.
* * * * *
Happy the man or woman who retains until late in life the power to react
to new impressions and to experience new emotions.
The trouble with most of us is that even when we do react to new
impressions and experience new emotions we are afraid to admit it. If
any one of us, while alone in a museum, happened to run across a strange
painting or a strange piece of sculpture--say a Javanese or a cubist
production--we would not burst out laughing any more than we would laugh
at some of the archaic sculptures and primitive works that are found in
every great collection. On the contrary, we would probably study it with
good healthy curiosity. But when the crowd is about we are afraid to
express our curiosity, we are afraid to be honestly and genuinely
interested, so we take refuge in laughter, it is so much easier to mask
our ignorance with ridicule than confess it by frankly asking for
information.
The man who does not understand a play or a book always condemns it.
* * * * *
It would not be difficult to pick out among one’s business acquaintances
those who are conservative, that is, academic, and those who are
inventive, speculative, venturesome, and so on to the “wild
enthusiasts,” “crazy fellows,” who are always doing the unexpected;
failing often but sometimes succeeding so brilliantly the world follows
in their footsteps.
* * * * *
There is nothing strange about the Cubists--except their pictures. Their
pictures strike us as strange because we do not understand them, but if
they were simply trying to do what thousands of inventors are trying to
do the world over, namely, devise something new to meet the needs of
mankind we would laugh at them no more than--and just as much as--the
world laughed at the Wright brothers when they were working on the
flying machine.
There are romanticists, realists, impressionists, futurists, cubists, in
the theater.
The romantic play is an old, but still delightful story. We have had
realism on the stage so long it has become almost academic. Just now
there is coming from the Scandinavian countries and from Germany and
Russia a form of dramatic representation that is essentially Cubist,
Futurist, and Orphist in its expression.[33]
This ferment of new ideas is very disturbing to men who are afraid of
change, who favor things as they are, who like to go to bed at the same
hour and get up at the same hour, to do today what they did yesterday.
But the new ideas will not down; they are constantly breaking out in
unexpected places and while they may seem to be different ideas when
expressed in music, painting, sculpture, poetry, architecture, from
those expressed in science, religion, politics, social reform, and
business generally, they are not; they are all fundamentally the same,
namely, they are the ideas of a progress so rapid and radical it may be
revolutionary and in a measure destructive.
* * * * *
In the very nature of things it is not given to many men to be receptive
to new ideas in many lines, for that implies thinking for themselves in
many lines. The more intense and advanced a man is in one line of
thought, the more apt he is to accept ready made the ideas of others in
other subjects. It is a saving of time for the radical scientist to
accept his politics and religion ready made from those who devote their
time to those matters--the scientist does not always do so, but often
when he thinks he is asserting his independence by rejecting current
beliefs he is doing so without any real ideas and convictions of his
own.
[Illustration: DUCHAMP
Chess Players]
What has been said so far has been a plea for tolerance, for a sober
suppression of hasty judgment in the presence of the strange.
Few men seem able to control their resentments and risibilities in the
presence of paintings that seem to contradict all the teachings and
traditions of art; but because they do _seem_ to stand in opposition to
all we have been taught to believe, they are all the more worthy our
most serious consideration. It is the man who challenges and denies who
stirs other men to think _for themselves_. That is the chief value of
the cubist paintings--they compel us to _think for ourselves_, to take a
careful inventory of our stock of stereotyped notions; with the result
that while we may not accept the theories of the Cubists, we cannot fail
to readjust our own notions on a broader basis.
* * * * *
I would be very sorry if any reader should take up this volume under the
impression it is a plea for Cubism or any other “ism” in either art or
life. If it is a plea for anything, it is for _tolerance and intelligent
receptivity_, for an attitude of sympathetic appreciation toward
_everything that is new and strange and revolutionary in life_. Not that
we will necessarily end by accepting the new and the strange and the
revolutionary, but we cannot get the good there may be in them unless
our attitude is one of sympathetic as well as critical receptivity.
* * * * *
It is something more than a mere coincidence that the upheaval in the
art world has paralleled the upheaval in the political world. The
exhibitions of extreme modern pictures were first held in England just
when extreme radical theories were gaining the ascendency. The
International Exhibition in America followed hot in the footsteps of
the split in the Republican party and the triumph of the Democratic
along lines so progressive as to seem almost socialistic.
The artists who organized the exhibition did not realize it, but they
were animated by precisely the same motive that animated the organizers
of the Progressive party--an irresistible desire for a change.
* * * * *
Youth gazes curiously at the experiment--painting, poem, play--from
which age turns in anger.
Cubist paintings interest the young; they irritate the old.
Nothing keeps a man young so effectually as a vivid and sympathetic
interest in _every_ new and seemingly revolutionary movement.
* * * * *
People who looked at the cubist paintings and laughed did so through
ignorance; the sad part was that many frankly said they did not care to
understand; not a few insisted the paintings were quite without meaning,
utterly devoid of sense.
In other words, the public, day after day and week after week, struggled
and paid to see works that were _meaningless_!
Painters, sculptors, critics, argued and fought over canvases _devoid of
significance_! A paradox! For if _devoid of significance_, why should
the world of artists, critics, writers, argue, swear, and fight over
them?
The question answers itself; the trouble is the works _do_ possess a
significance, a significance far beyond the merits of any particular
one, far beyond the merits of cubism itself; they are significant of the
spirit of change that is within and about us, the spirit of unrest, of
the striving, of the searching for greater and more beautiful things.
Cubism will pass away, but the spirit of change will not pass away. One
enthusiasm will follow another enthusiasm so long as men possess
ambition.
Already there are signs that Cubism is passing. Some of the men are
calling themselves Neo-Cubists and Post-Cubists, and they are painting
in very different manner.
One has but to look at a series of Picasso’s work to see how often and
radically he has changed his style in these ten years from drawing and
painting with great facility and success in Impressionistic and
Neo-Impressionistic manner to the most abstract Cubism; what he will be
doing two years hence, no one can predict, save that, judging by the
past, he will not be painting Cubist pictures.
* * * * *
The name “Cubism” was given to the new school “in derision, in the
autumn of 1908, by Henri Matisse, who happened to see a picture of
buildings the cubical representation of which struck him forcibly.”[34]
That year Georges Braque exhibited a Cubist picture in the Salon des
Independents.
In 1910, Jean Metzinger exhibited a Cubist portrait in the Salle
d’Automne, and a number of pictures were hung in the Salon des
Independents.
The first collection was gathered together in room 41 at the Salon des
Independents in 1911. The same year the first exhibition outside of
Paris was held in Brussels, and there the names “Cubism” and “Cubistes”
were adopted.
In 1911 the exposition of the Cubists in the Salle d’Automne caused
considerable sensation. Gleizes, Metzinger, Leger, and, for the first
time, Marcel Duchamp and his brother, the sculptor-architect,
Duchamp-Villon, exhibited.
Other expositions were held in November, 1911, at the gallery d’Art
Contemporaine rue Tronchet; in 1912, at the Salon des Independents,
where Juan Gris first exhibited; in May of the same year, in Barcelona;
in June, at Rouen, where Picabia joined the new school.
The different tendencies of the movement are described as follows:[35]
1. _Cubism scientifique_ is the tendency toward pure cubism; it is the
painting with elements borrowed not from the realities of vision, but
the realities of knowledge. The geometrical lines, which so impressed
all who first saw their scientific works, resulted from the attempt to
paint the essential--rather than the visual--realities of things which
were rendered on canvas with an abstract purity, and in which objective
realities and story-telling qualities were eliminated.
Most of Picasso’s geometrical representations and Duchamp’s “King and
Queen” are good illustrations of _scientific_ or _pure_ Cubism.
2. _Cubism physique_ is painting compositions the elements of which are
borrowed for the most part from realities of vision. Inasmuch as
objective realities are more or less in evidence in these works, they
are not pure Cubism.
Picasso’s “Woman and the Pot of Mustard” is a very striking--and
indifferent--example of _Cubism physique_, which simply means cubist
paintings in which figures and objects are more or less apparent to the
casual observer. In Marcel Duchamp’s “Chess Players” the figures are
quite plain; in Picabia’s “Dance at the Spring” one figure is
distinguishable at first glance, the second is not so easily discerned,
while the spring is more obscure, though plain enough after a little
study.
It is under this head that some of the most interesting
[Illustration: PICABIA
Dance at the Spring]
and also some of the most exasperating cubist pictures will be found. To
the extent that figures and objects are blocked in in planes and masses
in a big, elemental way, the result may be both impressive and
beautiful--Derain’s “Forest at Martigues” is an example in point; but in
so far as the picture is a _puzzle_, clear only in part, the result is
exasperating; the observer, however sympathetic his attitude, is
diverted from enjoying the _art_ of the painter to the attempt to
discover the hidden objects.
To the foregoing two divisions are added two more, which are, in
reality, but subdivisions or refinements of _Cubism Scientifique_.
There are really but the two extremes--those who represent objects more
or less cubically, i.e., in planes and masses of line and color; and
those who compose harmonies of line and color that have no relation to
figures or objects.
In the paintings of the one, objects are more or less apparent; in those
of the other no object is discernible, because none is represented or
suggested.
3. _Cubism Orphique_ is created entirely by the artist; it takes nothing
from visual, objective realities, but is derived wholly from the
painter’s imagination; it is pure art.
4. _Cubism instinctive_ is described as the painting of compositions of
color, not based upon objective realities, but suggested by the instinct
and intentions of the artist. The artist who follows his instinct, his
fancy of the moment, though he may paint beautiful compositions, lacks
the clear comprehension of him who paints according to some well thought
out, artistic creed.
* * * * *
It is quite obvious that subdivisions three and four are based upon
temperamental rather than logical or scientific distinctions.