new forms, because from the idea of the representation of a being,
a new being is born, perhaps different from the first one, and this
becomes the represented being. Each one of his paintings is the
coefficient of the impressions that form has performed in his
spirit, and in these paintings the public must see the realization
of an artistic ideal, and must judge them by the abstract sensation
they produce, without trying to look for the factors that entered
into the composition of the final result.
“As it is not his purpose to perpetuate on canvas an aspect of the
external world, by which to produce an artistic impression, but to
represent with the brush the impression he has directly received
from nature, synthesized by his fantasy, he does not put on the
canvas the remembrance of a past sensation, but describes a present
sensation.... In his paintings perspective does not exist; in them
there are nothing but harmonies suggested by form, and registers
which succeed themselves, to compose a general harmony which fills
the rectangle that constitutes the picture.
“Following the same philosophical system in dealing with light, as
the one he follows in regard to form, to him color does not exist,
but only the effects of light. This produces in matter certain
vibrations, which produce in the individual certain impressions.
From this it results that Picasso’s paintings present to us the
evolution by which light and form have operated in developing
themselves in his brain to produce the idea, and his composition is
nothing but the synthetic expression of his emotion.”
Thus it will be seen that he tries to represent in essence what
seems to exist only in substance. And, inasmuch as his psychical
impressions inspire in him geometrical sensations, certain of these
exhibits are in the nature of geometrical abstractions that have
little or nothing in common with anything hitherto produced in art.
Its whole tendency would appear to be away from art into the realm
of metaphysics.
Here is a design, a pattern of triangles, ellipses and semi-circles
that at first glance appears to be little more than the incoherent
passage of a compass across the paper in the hands of some
absent-minded engineer. After a little attentive study, however,
these enigmatic lines resolve themselves into the semblance of a
human figure and one begins to discover a clearly defined intention
behind this apparent chaos of ideated sensations. There is evident
a method in his madness which, after all, may only be truth turned
inside out. And this is what should make one pause and investigate
the matter further.
The fact that one may get nothing out of it as yet in the way of
tangible or even vaguely experienced emotions is beside the point.
The interest in this whole matter rests on the fact that here is
revealed a new form of aesthetic expression as yet only tentative
and groping perhaps, but reaching out in new directions. And it
must not be forgotten that the pioneer is usually misunderstood; he
is so far in advance of current ideas as to be out of touch with
his fellow men who might appropriately be called follow-men, they
lag so far behind the progress of new ideas. Cézanne and
Picasso--they mark the parting of the ways: a fulfilment and a
promise. Quo Vadis?[43]
Not many years ago Picasso was painting under the influence of the
pointillists. Almost every year he changed his style, until he developed
the pure, the geometrical Cubism of the drawing shown herein. He had a
period of painting very uninteresting blue portraits, one of which was
shown at the exhibition.
His “Woman with the Mustard Pot” belongs with his sculpture, which is
interesting but, to most people, ugly.
He has such phenomenal powers of absorption and his technical facility
is such that he does anything he pleases
[Illustration: PICASSO
Drawing]
with ease, and what he does today is no sure indication of what he will
attempt tomorrow.
For the moment he seems absorbed in the _music of planes_, so to speak.
Take, for instance, a still life wherein there seem to be a pipe, a
wall, a musical instrument, a glass, something like a stairway, street
signs, etc. These may or may not have been the objects the painter had
before him, but whether they are or not it is quite clear that he was
not content with dealing with superficial planes, that is, with the
visible lines and surfaces of the objects, but he _lets the planes
project and intersect_ very much as if the objects were
semi-transparent.
To state the matter in other words--by using only the essential lines of
an object and treating the object as otherwise more or less transparent,
one readily understands why the essential lines of all objects in _the
rear show through_, and the result is a confused mass of planes with
here and there more conspicuous surface indications such as the pipe,
the signs, the glass, etc.
In much of Picasso’s later work he suppresses all such surface
indications, until only a few absolutely elemental lines remain.
The result is a picture so scientific, so abstract, it appeals to but
few and excites no emotion in anyone because it was not the result of
emotion in the artist.
In short, Picasso and a few followers have reached a degree of
abstraction in the suppression of the real and the particular that their
pictures represent about the same degree of emotion as the demonstration
of a difficult geometrical proposition.
Beyond the few lines they use there is the bare canvas; they have
reached the limit and they must turn in their tracks. The reaction is
bound to come, and come quickly.
Meanwhile the Cubists, who have been painting along emotional, as
distinguished from the coldly scientific lines, are still turning out
pictures that possess a charm in line and color irrespective of their
theoretical significance and much may still be done in this direction.
* * * * *
The Cubists are fond of quoting the following from Plato:
Socrates: What I am saying is not, indeed, directly obvious. I must
therefore try to make it clear. For I will endeavor to speak of the
beauty of figures, not as the majority of persons understand them
such as those of animals, and some paintings to the life; but as
reason says, I allude to something straight and round, and the
figures formed from them by the turner’s lathe, both superficial
and solid and those by the plumb-line and the angle-rule, if you
understand me. For these, I say, are not beautiful for a particular
purpose, as other things are; but are by nature ever beautiful by
themselves, and possess certain peculiar pleasures, not at all
similar to those from scratching; and colors possessing this
character are beautiful and have similar pleasures.--From
“Philebus.”
* * * * *
Every really great painter must have moments when, as he thinks of the
days and years spent painting _things_--just things for people to look
at and see--he asks himself, “Is it worth while to spend all one’s life
painting things one _sees_? Is it not possible to paint the things one
_feels_?”
* * * * *
Sargent is tired of portrait painting--why? Because he longs to do
something else. But what he is doing is simply another form of portrait
painting--and not so big. He has simply turned from men and women to
chairs and tables--so to speak; that is, from portraits of people to
pictures of things--all the same art. So far as any one knows he has not
tried to make compositions of line and color that would be beautiful in
themselves. In short, great painter as he is, he seems to lack the
ambition or the inspiration to try to do what Whistler for more than
forty years was trying to do--lift painting from the rut of reality to a
plane more nearly on a level with that occupied by the greatest masters
of China and Japan.
* * * * *
The following paragraphs from a little book on Cubism by two well known
Cubist painters throw some light on the subject:
We should be the first to blame those who, to hide their
incapacity, should attempt to fabricate puzzles. Systematic
obscurity betrays itself by its persistence. Instead of a veil
which the mind gradually draws aside as it adventures toward
progressive wealth, it is merely a curtain hiding a void.
It is not surprising that people ignorant of painting should not
spontaneously share our assurance; but nothing is more absurd than
that they should be irritated thereby. Must the painter, to please
them, turn back in his work, restore things to the commonplace
appearance from which it is his mission to deliver them?
From the fact that the object is truly transubstantiated, so that
the most accustomed eye has some difficulty in discovering it, a
great charm results. The picture which only surrenders itself
slowly seems always to wait until we interrogate it, as though it
reserved an infinity of replies to an infinity of questions.[44]
By way of comment on this paragraph:
Why should we deny to painting one of the greatest charms of
poetry--_elusiveness_?
Great poetry is _rarely_ superficially plain to the casual reader.
Great music is _never_ superficially plain to the casual hearer.
But the attitude of the public is that great painting shall always be
superficially plain to the casual observer.
A painter may paint things every one understands at a glance, but is it
not his _right_, if he wishes, to paint things no one understands but
himself?
In other words, what right have _we_ to say to the poet, “If you don’t
write things we understand you are no poet,” or to the painter, “If you
don’t paint things we understand you are no painter?”
The only difference between poet and painter is that one uses a _pen_,
the other a _brush_ to express _himself_.
* * * * *
Without employing any allegorical or symbolical literary artifice,
merely by inflections of lines and colors, a painter can show, _in
the same picture_, a Chinese city, a French town, together with
mountains, oceans, fauna, and flora, and nations with their
histories and their desires--all that separates them in external
reality. Distance or time, concrete fact, or pure conception,
nothing refuses to be uttered in the language of the painter, as in
that of the poet, the musician, or the scientist.
Here is a most significant statement of a _truth_ and an assertion of
_freedom_.
We all know how the poet in a dozen lines may give us glimpses of the
universe; he may leap from flower to star, from city to city, nation to
nation, age to age; nothing confines him, he knows no restraint.
In one short poem he may give us glimpses of the four quarters of the
globe--of Athens, London, Chicago, Pekin. His imagination knows no
bounds, his art is unlimited.
For the first time in the history of painting painters are
systematically claiming the same independence, the same right to
_express themselves freely_ in each canvas, to paint in the one picture
_if they see fit_ glimpses of different countries, cities, scenes,
different times as well as places; to use them and suggest them as
freely as the poet does to _express a mood_--and why not?
But the painter must be sure of his mood, and be doubly sure that what
he is trying to say _requires_ a wealth of illustration, otherwise his
painting will be but a fantastic jumble,
[Illustration: MARC
The Steer]
[Illustration: KANDINSKY
Landscape With Two Poplars]
just as many poems lose themselves in not a _wealth_ but a _confused
mass_ of irrelevant illustrations.
* * * * *
The _assertion_ of freedom is one thing, the _exercise_ of it is quite
another.
The point is that, fundamentally, there is no reason why a painter
should not show in one canvas things and events unrelated in either
space or time, leaving the observer to work out the more or less hidden
meaning of it all.
There is no reason why he should be tied down to the realistic painting
of an apple or an apple tree if he prefers to paint some flight of the
imagination into which apple and apple tree enter together with strange
glimpses of temples and pyramids, playing children and armed battalions,
weeping women and fighting men.
Read the foregoing lines once more. Eight objects are mentioned--apple,
apple tree, temples, pyramids, children, battalions, weeping women,
fighting men--by no possibility could these strangely diverse objects be
found grouped together in actual life, yet it is safe to say that _as
you read them_ no feeling of utter incongruity was experienced. On the
contrary your imagination unconsciously created a picture, vague and
indistinct because fleeting, which combined them all, possibly a
strange, poetic scene with orchards and playing children, temples and
pyramids in the distance, with armed battalions, weeping women and
fighting men passing by in clouds or fanciful shapes.
Thousands of such pictures are painted every year and they are mostly
rather poor works of the imagination.
There is, however, no reason why the same freedom, the same arbitrary
indifference to actualities, should not be exercised in the painting of
good pictures.
No reason why, for instance, painters should not _experiment freely
with all the so-called laws of art_, and that is what the Cubists and
others of the moderns are doing.
* * * * *
That the ultimate aim of painting is to touch the crowd we have
admitted; but painting must not address the crowd in the language
of the crowd; it must employ its own language, in order to move,
dominate, and direct the crowd, not in order to be understood. It
is so with religions and philosophies. The artist who concedes
nothing, who does not explain himself and relates nothing,
accumulates an internal strength whose radiance shines on every
hand.
It is in consummating ourselves within ourselves that we shall
purify humanity; it is by increasing our own riches that we shall
enrich others; it is by kindling the heart of the star for our own
pleasure that we shall exalt the universe.
* * * * *
To explain Cubism, or any attempt in art to suppress the objective, one
must fall back on music.
Grieg calls a certain composition “In the Hall of the Mountain King.”
Not for a moment did he attempt realistically to suggest a hall, a
mountain, a king or any object; to have done so would have been folly.
And if that particular composition were played for the first time before
a body of keen musicians, no title mentioned, and not a word said about
its being a part of the Peer Gynt suite, no two would agree as to what
the composer had in mind, though many might have very interesting
impressions regarding the _mood of the composer in writing it_.
But once understand it is part of the Peer Gynt suite and once told it
is “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” the weird and fascinating music
explains itself, it is recognized as a wonderfully successful attempt to
realize an impressive scene by a combination of sounds.
* * * * *
The veriest tyro in music feels the cheapness of imitative music, the
imitation of the nightingale, the ripple of notes to imitate a rippling
brook, the beating of a drum to imitate thunder, the tremolo of violins
to represent fright, etc., etc.
From such bald attempts at realism to the abstract beauty of a symphony
by Beethoven is a vast interval.
The severely logical composer will not name his symphony for fear of
suggesting ideas that will interfere with the pure enjoyment of his
abstract conception. There have been painters--like Whistler--who
preferred to call their works “Harmonies” or “Arrangements” or “Studies”
rather than subject their canvases to a clamoring horde of suggestions
by choosing names that must inevitably divert the observer.
However at times a name helps, it at least puts us on the right track,
it enables us to measure the piece of music or the picture by the
artist’s intention. If it is utterly impossible for the best and most
sympathetic minds after long study to find any suggestion of the title
in the work, it means either the artist has been unsuccessful in
conveying his idea in sound or in line and color, or--what often
happens--he has carelessly and arbitrarily chosen a title after his work
was finished, a title that imperfectly fits his original impulse.
* * * * *
It is most disappointing to hear a man go into raptures over what he
cannot explain.
The greatest enemies of the moderns are their friends. But there have
been published a number of books in German and French that are well
worth reading if approached with an open mind.
If read with preconceived notions and prejudices the result will be very
irritating. Several artists, notably Kandinsky, have taken the utmost
pains to explain in print what they believe and what they are trying to
do.
But it is often quite as difficult to understand some of the things the
painters write about their work as it is to understand their pictures;
but this is because some of the new men carry their theories so far it
is hard for the layman to follow, however earnest and sympathetic his
efforts.
But because we do not understand what a man says is no good reason for
calling him an ignoramus.
The trouble _may_ be with him, it is _probably_ with us. At all events
each re-reading, like each re-scrutiny of the pictures, yields clearer
results.
To a man _really and profoundly interested_ in art nothing has occurred
in many a generation so full of significance, so worthy one’s earnest
attention, as the present new movements--all the more interesting
because changing so rapidly and because some of them are certain to be
so fleeting.
The art institute which does not secure and preserve some examples
illustrative of the extraordinary upheaval in the art world is
derelict--as derelict as a natural history museum would be if it passed
over indifferently the evidence of some mysterious upheaval in nature.
* * * * *
When a man stands before a cubist painting or an improvisation by
Kandinsky and says he sees all sorts of things in it, do not take him
too seriously; he is like members of those extraordinary Browning Clubs
who destroy our enjoyment of the poetry by reading into each line things
the poet never dreamed.
* * * * *
The Cubists and most of the moderns are very young men, what they
_think_ is of far less interest than what they _do_.
What a young man does is often of vital importance, what he thinks may
be of no importance at all--save to himself.
Moved by the most naive theories and enthusiasms youth
[Illustration: CHABAUD
Cemetery Gates]
will do wonderful things, things the sober reflection of age would fear
to do.
One of the charms of the Cubists is their child-like faith in the
absolute supremacy of their art; this faith is interesting in them
because it leads them to produce works that cause us to stop and look
and think, but when their followers indulge the same blind faith in
print their utterances are mostly incoherent and boresome.
* * * * *
The violent partisan who sees all sorts of things in the modern painting
is at one extreme, the violent opponent who sees nothing at all is at
the other--let them fight it out.
The truth lies midway, that there is _something_ worth finding in even
the most extravagant attempts of the new movement no thoughtful man will
deny. The very fact the paintings attract such crowds and excite so much
controversy proves there is _something_ for serious investigation; the
something may not turn out to be of overwhelming importance, but it will
have its influence upon the future of art.
No one for a moment doubts that the exhibitions held in New York,
Chicago, and Boston are destined to have a very great effect upon
American art, especially upon the art of the men most bitterly opposed
to Cubism, and everything akin to Cubism. The academic has received a
severe but healthful jolt.
Whatever affects us has, at least, the merit of _affecting_ us, and
whatever moves us to do better work, whether in an old way or a new way,
has the merit of _affecting us for good_.
VII
THE NEW ART IN MUNICH
“WE cling more closely to the old masters; what we are doing is simply
the natural development of their principles and their methods,” said a
well-known painter of Munich while speaking of the Cubists and other
moderns of Paris, and the words had direct reference to the head of a
woman, by Jawlenski, reproduced herein in color.
It would be difficult to convince the casual observer that this head has
any relationship to portraits by Titian, _and yet_--
* * * * *
The Cubists are also equally quick to demonstrate the logical connection
between their works and those of the old masters, tracing the connection
through Courbet, El Greco, and so on.
The truth, of course, is that _everything_ modern is a development of
_something_ ancient, that _nothing_ exists _unrelated_.
Art is as _continuous_ as everything else in life and nature.
One thing flows inevitably out of another.
* * * * *
Sorolla and Zoloaga are the children of Velasquez. Puvis de Chavannes
may seem nearer Raphael and the Italian Primitives than Degas and Manet,
but he is simply the fruition of one collateral line, while Degas is the
fruition of another, and Manet of another--_they are all painters_, and
the art of painting admits endless variations in theory and technic.
* * * * *
It is, therefore, true that every modern experiment, however strange,
may trace its genealogy to the Old Masters and through them to the
Primitives, and through them to the Cave Painters.
So that when a Munich artist argues that the strange heads of Jawlensky
and the still stranger compositions of Kandinsky are based upon the best
there is in Italian art, the proposition in its broad significance may
be conceded and plenty of room be still left for startling differences
between the art of Venice in the sixteenth century and that of Munich in
the twentieth.
* * * * *
There is, however, some slight but tangible foundation for the assertion
that the work of the extreme men of Munich is closer to that of the Old
Masters than the work of the extreme men of Paris, in that most of the
former paint more _solidly_ and _substantially_, while most of the
latter paint more _lightly_ and _superficially_--just about the
difference that exists between the two cities, the two environments. The
worker in Munich cannot help being influenced by the _German_
atmosphere, the worker in Paris cannot help being influenced by the
_French_--in fact each is where he is because he finds the particular
atmosphere congenial.
* * * * *
“The New Artists’ Federation,” in Munich, was founded in January, 1909,
by Adolf Erbslöh, Alexej von Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky, Alexander
Kanoldt, Alfred Kubin, Gabriele Münter, Marianna von Werefkin, Heinrich
Schnabel, and Oskar Wittenstein. During the first year Paul Baum,
Wladimir von Bechtejeff, Erma Bossi, Karl Hofer, Moissey Koga, and
Albert Sacharoff joined. Paul Baum and Karl Hofer soon resigned their
membership. In 1910 the Frenchmen, Pierre Girieud and Le Fauconnier,
became members, and in 1911 Franz Marc and Otto Fischer, followed in
1912 by Alexander Mogilewsky.
The first exhibition was held in the winter of 1909 in the Modern
Gallery, Munich. Indignation and derisive laughter, and insults
from the press were the outward result. Still the seed scattered
was not lost. Similar exhibitions were held in many cities of
Germany and Switzerland. Everywhere they met with opposition, but
also made some friends at each place.
The second exhibition, held in the fall of the following year,
brought the members into contact with a large number of outside
artists, some of whom have become of great importance in the new
art, and most of whom were, up to that time, unknown in Germany.
These were the Germans, Hermann Haller, Bernhard Hoetger, Eugen
Kahler, Adolf Nieder; the Frenchmen, Georges Bracque, André Derain,
Kees Van Dongen, Francisco Durio, Pablo Picasso, Georges Rouault,
and Maurice de Vlaminck; finally, the Russians, Mogilewsky, David
and Wladimir Burljuk, and Seraphim Sudbinin. This was the first
exhibition at which it was possible to rightly estimate the
development and the international character of the new movement.