colour to describe situations and comment on life. There are no examples
of their work in this exhibition; but, as we shall see, the Futurists
are unconsciously harking back to their theories. The Impressionists,
in rebellion, used form and colour to register their visual impressions;
they belong to the age of science and state facts without comment. But
every romantic or impressionist painter who happened to be an artist
also used form and colour as means of expressing and provoking pure
aesthetic emotion. It was not his fault if he flew in the face of party
principles; he was an artist and he could not help it. Cezanne was not
only a very great artist; he was what is almost as rare, a thoughtful
one. So, in his later periods, he came to use form and colour solely as
means of expressing and provoking those extraordinary emotions that
arise from the contemplation of real or imagined form. His theory
quarrels with no vital school of art that has ever existed. He merely
sifted the grain from the chaff, the relevant from the irrelevant.
_The Lake_, by Cezanne, is therefore the most important aesthetic
document in this exhibition besides being the best picture. Cezanne set
modern art on the right road. The revolutionary doctrine he bequeathed
to Post-Impressionism is a truth as old as the Neolithic Age--the truth
that forms and colours are of themselves significant. The Italian
Futurists are at the opposite pole to Post-Impressionists because they
treat form and colour as vehicles for the transmission of facts and
ideas. _Polka_ and _Valse_ by Severini are, in intention, as descriptive
as _The Doctor_ by Sir Luke Fildes; only they are meant to describe
states of mind, whereas _The Doctor_ purports to describe a situation.
Whether, in fact, they succeed in describing anything, and, if so,
whether what they describe is of much consequence, are questions for the
psychologist. The critic of art has only to note that the forms and
colours are in themselves insignificant and in their relations
commonplace; they are also those much affected of late by the more
adventurous students at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
Futurism is a negligible accident: the discoveries of Cezanne are safe
in the hands of the French masters, with whose names the catalogue
bristles--Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Marchand, Derain,
Marquet, Friesz, Herbin, l'Hote. Unluckily, the big artists are, for the
most part, meagrely represented by rather unimportant works, of which,
by the way, a good many are already familiar to picture-goers. I think I
never met so many old faces in a modern exhibition. And though I shall
never complain of encountering a Matisse or a Marchand, though it be for
the third time in eighteen months, to be vexed by some mediocre remnant
from the summer exhibitions strikes me as an unnecessarily sharp tax on
the patience.
I do not grumble at the reappearance of Wyndham Lewis's _Kermesse_,
which has been altered and greatly improved since its last appearance at
the London Salon. Lewis promises to become that rare thing, a real
academic artist. He is academic in the good sense of the word--that is
to say, he uses a formula of which he is the master and not the slave.
He uses it as a means to vast organizations of form, designed, I
imagine, to have something of the austere and impressive unity of great
architecture. He succeeds to a surprising degree. The enemy that dogs
him in all his works is an excessive taste for life. He is inclined to
modify his forms in the interest of drama and psychology, to the
detriment of pure design. At times his simplifications and rhythms seem
to be determined by a literary rather than a plastic conception.
Probably this is not the kind of criticism which by now Wyndham Lewis
must have learnt to disregard. He is more accustomed, I suspect, to
hearing his work called "mechanical" and "lifeless," and, in a sense, it
is both. That is the price an artist must pay who sets himself to
achieve the end that Lewis has in view. He who is working by formula
towards the realization of a minutely definite intellectual plan must
be willing, on occasions, to sacrifice the really valuable qualities of
sensibility and handwriting as well as the adventitious charms that
spring from happy flukes. Besides, I am not sure that Lewis has been
blest with uncommon sensibility.
The peculiar merits of _Kermesse_ will become obvious to any one who,
after contemplating that picture, turns sharp round and glances at the
big canvas by Delaunay. Delaunay, according to Mr. Rutter, is "the
protagonist" of what is known in Paris as "Orfeism"; his picture, _The
Cardiff Football Team_, is what used to be known in Paris as _tres
artiste_. It is well made, but it is not made to wear. It is not what
Cezanne would have called "quelque chose de solide et de durable comme
l'art des musees." It is a brighter, gayer, more attractive thing than
_Kermesse_, but in construction it is less subtle and less solid: by
comparison, it looks like a poster, and a poster, I believe, is what it
is.
It would be tedious to write at length about the French masters,
considering how much has been written during the last twelve months in
praise or blame of finer and more characteristic examples of their art.
More profitably they may be used as a peg on which to hang a short
sermon to their English imitators. Amongst these I do not reckon the
painters of the Camden Town group, of whose work there is plenty in
this exhibition. Walter Sickert, the chief of that school, was in
possession of a style and a reputation when Picasso was still making
figures on a slate. Spencer Gore has taken from the new movement just so
much as was suited to his temperament, and, without submitting his
personal gift to any formula, has added immensely to the significance
and charm of his work. The majority, however, remain essentially what
they have always been--realistic impressionists. They have been very
conscientiously twisting their hurdy-gurdies while Rome was a-burning.
But, as this exhibition shows, there is a school of English
Post-Impressionists. It is not completely represented here; indeed, the
gaps are as conspicuous as they are unfortunate. Here we have only a
heterogeneous collection of young painters, diverse in talent and
temper, all of whom have this in common, that they have swallowed, more
or less whole, the formulas which French masters invented and which
French masters are now developing and modifying. Confronted by the
elaborate surprises of these rank-and-file men, the patriotic critic,
supposing such an anomaly to exist, will have to admit that English
painting remains where it has generally been--in a by-street. It is well
to admit this in time; for I can almost hear those queer people who can
appreciate what is vital in every age but their own, squealing
triumphantly--"We told you so." Yes; it is true. English
Post-Impressionism is becoming academic: but Post-Impressionism is not;
in France the movement is as vital as ever.
Too many of the English Post-Impressionists are coming to regard certain
simplifications, schematizations, and tricks of drawing, not as means of
expression and creation, but as ends in themselves, not as instruments,
but as party favours. The French masters are being treated by their
English disciples as Michael Angelo and Titian were treated by the minor
men of the seventeenth century. Their mannerisms are the revolutionary's
stock-in-trade. One is constantly confronted at the Dore Gallery by a
form or a colour that is doing no aesthetic work at all; it is too busy
making a profession of faith; it is shouting, "I am advanced--I am
advanced." I have no quarrel with advanced ideas or revolutionary
propaganda; I like them very well in their place, which I conceive to be
a tub in the park. But no man can be at once a protestant and an artist.
The painter's job is to create significant form, and not to bother about
whether it will please people or shock them. Ugliness is just as
irrelevant as prettiness, and the painter who goes out of his way to be
ugly is being as inartistic and silly as the man who makes his angels
simper. That is what is the matter with Hamilton's portrait in the big
room--to take an instance at random. Hamilton has plenty of talent, and
this picture is well enough, pleasant in colour and tastefully planned;
but his talent would be seen to greater advantage if it did not strut in
borrowed and inappropriate plumes. The simplifications and distortion of
the head perform, so far as I can see, no aesthetic function whatever;
they are not essential to the design, and are at odds with the general
rhythm of the picture. Had the painter scribbled across his canvas, "To
hell with everything," it seems to me he would have done what he wanted
to do, and done it better.
What gives even minor Frenchmen an advantage over the English is
artistic courage. They will be themselves at all costs, even at the risk
of pleasing old ladies from the country, or passing unnoticed. Asselin
goes farther than Nevinson with less ability. Yet Nevinson bears the
Briton's burden more lightly than his fellows; probably because he is
cleverer than most of them. He is clever enough to pick up some one
else's style with fatal ease; is he not clever enough to diagnose the
malady and discover a cure? If I were older, I would advise Nevinson and
the more intelligent of this company to shut themselves up for six
months, and paint pictures that no one was ever going to see. They might
catch themselves doing something more personal if less astonishing than
what they are showing at the Dore Galleries. Artistic courage, that is
what is wanted--courage to create the forms that express oneself instead
of imitating those that express the people for whom one would gladly be
mistaken.
III
AN EXPENSIVE "MASTERPIECE"
[Sidenote: _New Statesman July 1914_]
Because we all know stories of first-rate works of art having been
offered at ridiculously low prices to English galleries and museums and
refused by them on the ground that there was no money even for the
purchase of what was very good and very cheap, we are surprised and even
excited when we hear that a big price (some say as much as L5000) has
been paid for a Chinese pottery figure. And those of us who have the
fortune to belong to the privileged, and therefore well-behaved, sex
hurry off to see what Mr. Hobson describes in the May number of the
_Burlington Magazine_ as "a new Chinese masterpiece in the British
Museum."
Mr. Hobson is a sound archaeologist; consequently it is impossible to
read his careful and admirably frank article without surmising that he
himself feels some qualms of suspicion about the date, if not the
beauty, of his treasure. For us the first question to be asked is: "Is
this a fine work of art?" For Mr. Hobson I suppose the first care was
to decide whether or no the thing was T'ang. His is the sound, the
scientific, the archaeological method; and I feel sure he followed it
because it is the archaeological method, and because, had he followed the
unscientific, aesthetic method, and considered first the style and
artistic worth of this figure, he would have found that in answering our
question he had answered his own or made the asking of it superfluous.
Had Mr. Hobson been as sensitive as he is sound, we may be sure that he
would have seen this so-called T'ang Lohan in America or farther before
ever he advised the British Museum to bid a shilling for it.
The "new Chinese masterpiece in the British Museum" is a common,
pretentious thing, and that, if I must play the archaeologist, is a fair
reason for suspecting that it is not the product of a great age--and
T'ang art still seems great even after we have seen something of its
greater predecessors, Wei, Liang, Sui. This figure, though larger than
life-size, is nowise monumental; on the contrary, it is patently a
_bibelot agrandi_, reminding one oddly in this respect of Benvenuto
Cellini's _Perseus_. It is something that has been conceived on a small
scale and carried out on a large. This fact alone, had it been noted, as
it must have been by any one who looked at the figure aesthetically,
would have suggested that this was a product, not of the T'ang
dynasty--an age of monumental sculpture--but of the Ming dynasty--the
great age of choice chinoiseries and archaistic experiments.
This theory--that the figure is Ming--technical evidence supports at
least as strongly as it supports the T'ang attribution. Technique apart,
artistic consideration makes it clear that if the work is not T'ang it
must be as late as Ming. That this should be so may at first seem
strange to those who remember that the T'ang dynasty flourished between
A.D. 618 and 906, and the Ming between 1368 and 1643. Yet, in fact, it
is far easier to confuse T'ang with Ming than to confuse a work of the
intermediate Sung period (960-1279) with either. The mystery is not
profound. Throughout the T'ang and Sung periods Chinese art was
thoroughly alive; both T'ang and Sung are vital and original styles.
T'ang art expresses the inspiration of one age, Sung of another; Sung
follows and differs from T'ang as _quattrocento_ follows and differs
from Giottesque: they are different and characteristic modes of a
continuous stream of inspiration. But the Sung dynasty and the Chinese
inspiration collapsed within a hundred years or less of each other, and
for suggestion and direction the Ming artists looked, not so much into
their own hearts as to the past, and especially to the golden days of
T'ang. History is deaf to the doctrine of progressive evolution, and, if
we would understand the history of art, we must learn to think in styles
rather than in years; also we must become accustomed to remote
derivations. It is possible to confound Renaissance work of the
sixteenth century with Roman of the second; it is impossible to confuse
either with their neighbours, Gothic and Byzantine. Similarly, it would
be intolerable to mistake Ming for Sung, but excusable to mistake it for
T'ang, and that, I believe, is just what Mr. Hobson has done.
But, to be frank, I care very little when or where this figure was made;
what I care about is its aesthetic insignificance. Look at the modelling
of the hands: they are as insensitive and convictionless as lumps of
bread. Look at the tight, cheap realism of the head; the accents violent
without being impressive, the choice of relief common. The chest is the
best part of the thing, and that strikes me as being traditional rather
than felt. The view of the figure in profile is less unsatisfactory than
the view from in front: but look at those hands!
If this thing impresses any one, it must impress him by its dramatic and
not by its plastic qualities; and that is not the way in which a fine
T'ang figure impresses us. Here the design is petty and the forms, in
themselves, flaccid and poor; but the tight, realistic face is made to
gaze most melodramatically into eternity. It is melodrama, I fancy, that
has taken the town by storm. Compare this overgrown knick-knack with
some really fine T'ang piece or, better still, with one of those Wei
figures which the Museum had lately the chance of acquiring at a very
moderate price, and you will feel the difference between form that
impresses by sheer aesthetic rightness and form that reminds you of the
late Sir Henry Irving. With all its elaborate quietness, this
deep-contemplative Lohan is just a piece of rhetoric: put it beside
something first-rate and you will know what to think of it as surely as
you know what to think of
I have spread its folds o'er the dying, adrift in a hopeless sea;
I have hurled it swift on the slaver, and seen the slave set free,
when you put that beside
He all their ammunition
And feats of war defeats
With plain heroic magnitude of mind....
Why is it always in purchases of this sort the nation sinks the best
part of its miserable art fund? Well, in this case I think it is
possible to follow the workings of official taste. Officials know as
well as the rest of us that T'ang art is well thought of, and that
without some important example of it no Oriental collection is deemed
complete. But T'ang art, as a rule, is neither literary nor pretty nor
at all the sort of thing the collecting class cares for. What this class
really likes is the art of the eighteenth century and the art of the
high Renaissance. Miraculously comes to light an important figure
labelled T'ang yet rich in the dear, familiar qualities of Renaissance
sculpture. As usual, the officials have got it both ways. Surely
Providence had a hand in this, unless it was the dealers.
IV
MARCHAND
[Sidenote: _Preface. Carfax Exhibition, June 1915_]
Of the younger French artists Marchand seems to me the most interesting.
By "the younger" I mean those who, though they descend from Cezanne,
have been influenced, directly or indirectly, by Matisse or Picasso or
both. These form a just distinguishable group sandwiched between the
quasi-impressionists--Bonnard, Manguin, Vuillard--and the Cubists. To be
precise, it is of a battered sandwich that they are the core; the jam
oozes through on either side. It always does. That is why scholars and
historians have a hard time of it.
I dare say Marchand would deny that he had been influenced by any one;
for some strange reason artists like to suppose that, unlike all other
living things, they are unaffected by their environment. The matter is
of no consequence, but with the best will in the world I should find it
hard to believe that the _Femme couchee devant un paysage_ (No. 5)
would have been just what it is if Gauguin had never existed, or that
the scheme of the beautiful _Portrait de femme_ (No. 4) owes nothing to
Picasso. And isn't it pretty clear that Marchand would have painted in
an altogether different style if Cezanne had never existed?
Believing, as I do, in the influence of one artist on another, I regard
this exhibition as a piece of rare good fortune for British art.
Marchand is eminent in just those qualities that we most lack. Above all
things he is a painter. I am curious to hear what Mr. Sickert has got to
say about his pictures; and I shall be disappointed if they do not wring
from him what used to be the highest encomium on the lips of his old
friend Degas--_C'est de la peinture!_
No living painter is more purely concerned with the creation of form,
with the emotional significance of shapes and colours, than Marchand. To
him, evidently, the function of a painter is to paint; the discussion of
such interesting matters as Love, Life, Death, and "The grand for ever,"
he leaves to the literary gentlemen. He has nothing to say about Man's
place in the Universe, or even in Camden Town; it is in combinations of
lines and colours that he deals, and, as you may see, he has already
produced some of extraordinary subtlety and significance. Before such a
picture as No. 7 or No. 12 the most inveterate psychologist, should he
happen to possess a grain of sensibility, must be dumb; unless he murmur
respectfully the name of Chardin.
Marchand is neither a doctrinaire nor a timid Conservative. He is
familiar with the work of Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, and the whole
Cubist school; and if by simplification, distortion, or what men of
science would call "flat absurdity," he can in any way improve his
composition, he does not hesitate to simplify, distort, or fly in the
face of facts. He wants to create significant form, and all means to
that end he finds good. But he is no doctrinaire. He never distorts or
makes his pictures look queer on principle. He cares nothing for being
in the fashion, neither does he eschew a novel eccentricity lest the
nicest people should say that he is going a little too far. His work is
uncompromisingly sincere. He neither protests against tradition nor
respects it. He is an artist.
I shall not be surprised to hear that some critics consider Marchand dry
and intellectual. Certainly he is not lyrical or charming. No picture by
him has the ravishing loveliness of a Renoir or the delicious handling
of a Duncan Grant. I suspect he paints all his big things in the studio.
He makes sketches; and I shall be glad to hear what any one competently
acquainted with the drawings of the old masters has to say about No. 39.
But when he gets to work on his canvas I do not suppose he thinks of
anything beyond the complete realization of a definite and perfectly
elaborated scheme. There are no happy accidents or lucky flukes in his
painting. It is as stark and solid as the work of Ingres or Mantegna.
Some people call that sort of thing dry and intellectual; others call it
masterly.
If English amateurs take kindly to these pictures they will do
themselves great honour. They will prove that they can distinguish
between the easy juxtaposition of pretty patches of colour and the
profound and sensitive research of a true colourist; they will prove
that they can distinguish between obvious relations and subtle
harmonies; they will prove that they can recognize that quality which is
common to works of art of all schools and ages, and that, when they see
it, they like it. And those unlucky people who cannot, even in the
presence of a work of art, forget for a moment all about politics and
philanthropy, may like to remember that Marchand, too, has been unlucky.
After great hardships he had just won his way to a position of some
security when war broke out. He has lately been called up, not, I think,
for active, but for some sort of military service. His pay, I believe,
is one sou a day, and what happens to those who depend on him one does
not care to imagine.
Marchand was born at Paris in 1883. His work is not unknown in England.
Four of his pictures were shown at the Grafton Galleries in 1912; and
not long ago I saw an exquisite little "still life" by him--No. 12 in
this Exhibition, unless I mistake--at the New English Art Club. I wonder
how it got there.
V
THE MANSARD GALLERY[20]
[Sidenote: _Nov. 1917_]
The collection of modern pictures made by Mr. Fry, and shown, first in
Birmingham and then at the Mansard Gallery, is the most important we
have seen in London since the beginning of the war--since the Grosvenor
House show in the summer of 1914, to be exact. That the best exhibition
we have seen for so long should be held in the best gallery is a bit of
good luck which, in these unlucky days, seems extraordinary; but what
seems miraculous almost is that Messrs. Heal and Sons seem positively to
prefer good pictures to bad. I would, therefore, advise any one who
thinks my advice worth having to keep an eye on the Mansard Gallery.
In this exhibition the best of the younger English artists--I am sorry
there is nothing by Stanley Spenser, Wyndham Lewis, Bomberg or
Roberts--are confronted by a handful of their French contemporaries.
They are not confronted by the best of them: Mr. Fry has hung nothing by
Matisse, Bonnard or Picasso, for instance, though, had he pleased, he
could have shown a couple of pictures by the last-named, at any rate. He
chose well, I dare say; but it is mere justice to admit that the only
two French artists fairly represented are Marchand and de Vlaminck. For
the rest, the single picture by l'Hote is a characteristic work of that
engaging but not very formidable painter; the two small pictures by
Friesz, good as they are, hardly rank among his masterpieces; there is
in London at least one other work by Gris, and that, to my thinking, a
better; while the Derain is by no means worthy of that eminent artist.
I wish we could have been shown three or four capital works by Derain,
because there is no man in the modern movement more readily appreciated
by people who care for painting, but boggle at the unfamiliar. I
remember finding myself once in Kahnweiler's shop on the Boulevards with
an extremely intelligent official from South Kensington, and I remember
his admitting with excellent candour that, though the Picassos still
puzzled him, he was a thorough convert to Derain. Naturally: how should
a man of taste and erudition not appreciate the exquisite scholarship
of an artist who can use the masters of painting as a very fine man of
letters--Charles Lamb, for instance--uses the masters of literature? For
Derain is one who has gone to the root of the matter and can remind you
of the Siennese school or have a joke with Pinturicchio by a subtler
method than quotation. When such a one bases his art on Cezanne and the
_douanier_ Rousseau, treating them quite simply as masters, an
intelligent spectator is bound to unlock his most finished prejudices
and take another look at them.