three pictures by each, they are admirably hung, and the effect produced
by this pool of distinguished and beautifully ordered colour is
marvellous. One is brought to a stand by that indescribable sense that
has come to most of us on entering for the first time some well-arranged
room in an important continental gallery--a sense of being in the
presence of great art. Closer examination, without destroying the unity
of effect, proves these two men to be about as different as two very
good artists of the same school and country can be. On Marchand I said
my say two years ago when I wrote a preface for his show at Carfax: he
is pre-eminently solid and architectural, and obviously he is highly
sensitive--by which I mean that his reactions to what he sees are
intense and peculiar. But these reactions, one fancies, he likes to take
home, meditate, criticize, and reduce finally to a rigorously definite
conception. And this conception he has the power to translate into a
beautifully logical and harmonious form. Power he seems never to lack:
it would be almost impossible to paint better. I do not know which of
Marchand's three pictures is the best; but whichever it be, it is the
best picture in the gallery.
With de Vlaminck it is from a word to a blow, from a thrilling emotion
to a finished picture. If Marchand is like a minor Milton--the
comparison is not one to be pressed--de Vlaminck is like Keats. He is
the most lyrical of the younger Frenchmen; the flash and sparkle of his
pictures is the wonderfully close expression of a tremblingly delighted
sensibility. Yet there is nothing sketchy about them. Consider his
landscape (No. 65), and you will be astonished to find what a solid,
self-supporting design these delicately graded tones and lightly brushed
forms compose.
Only one Englishman holds his own with the French painters, and he, of
course, is Duncan Grant. The challenge to another very interesting young
Englishman is, however, more marked since the de Vlaminck of which I
have just spoken has as its rival on the wall, at right angles to it,
_The Mill_ (No. 32), by Mark Gertler. The comparison made, what first
strikes one is that the Gertler, for all its assertion of strength and
its emphatic, heavy accents, looks flimsy beside its lightly brushed and
airy neighbour. But _The Mill_ is not the piece by which Gertler should
be judged; let us look rather at his large and elaborate _Swing Boats_.
I have seen better Gertlers than this; the insistent repetition of not
very interesting forms makes it come perilously near what Mr. Fry calls
in his preface "merely ornamental pattern-making," but it is a picture
that enables one to see pretty clearly the strength and weakness of this
remarkable person.
With a greater artistic gift, Mark Gertler's conviction and conscience
would suffice to make him a painter of the first magnitude.
Unfortunately, his artistic gift, one inclines to suppose, is precisely
that irreducible minimum without which an artist cannot exist. That is
his weakness. His strength is that he exploits that minimum
uncompromisingly to its utmost possibility. Gertler is one who will
never say an idle word in paint, no matter how charming or interesting
or amusing it might be. In his pictures you will look in vain for a
single brush-stroke that does not serve his single purpose; he admits
no adventitious dainties, there is nothing to quote. Happy touches are
not in his way. Should he find some part of his picture empty he will
not fill it with nicely balancing daisies, clouds, or bric-a-brac; he
will begin it again. To him it will seem either that he has failed to
conceive his work as a whole or that he has failed to realize his
conception. Similarly, you will not easily discover a favourite passage;
for if he felt that he had succeeded beyond expectation in one passage,
that some note was sharper and truer than the rest, he would set himself
to key the rest to that note. In art, such a process means incredible
labour and agony; Gertler sweats blood and shows it. He labours
terribly, and his pictures are terribly laboured. He is not artist
enough to paint as a bird sings; he paints as a desperate soldier might
dig himself in.
What he has to express is not, it must be confessed, of the highest
quality, because his reactions are limited and rather undistinguished.
He has only two or three notes, and they are neither rich nor rare. For
an artist he is unimaginative, and often in their blank simplicity his
conceptions are all but commonplace. In actual expression, too, though a
first-rate craftsman who paints admirably, he lacks sensibility. In his
handwriting--his lines and dashes, smudges and contours, that is to
say--there is neither charm nor temperament. His colours do their work,
saying what they have to say, but are without beauty in themselves or in
their relations. There is something slightly depressing in the unlovely
sincerity of his execution that reminds me rather of Fra Bartolomeo, and
his imaginative limitations might be compared with those of Lesueur. I
am taking a high standard, you perceive. And any one who cannot respond
to the conviction and conscience with which he not only excludes
whatever is irrelevant or fortuitous or false, but does positively
realize his conceptions is, in my judgment, incapable of appreciating
visual art.
No art could be more different from the art of Gertler than that of
Duncan Grant. For him it seems impossible to scrabble a line or wipe his
brush on a bit of paper without giving delight. As the saying goes, he
is all over an artist. Men endowed with this prodigious sensibility,
facility, and sense of beauty are not uncommon in England. In my time
there have been four--Conder, Steer, John, and Duncan Grant. The danger
is, of course, that they will fall into a trick of flicking off bits of
empty prettiness to the huge contentment of a public that cannot bear
artists to develop or be serious. But Duncan Grant shows no bad
symptoms: from his early picture _Lemon Gatherers_ (No. 35) (justly and
almost universally admired for its great beauty and delightful
references to Piero della Francesca) to the little "still life" in the
north corner of the room, there is a vast progression; and beneath these
gay and delicious paintings--so delicious one could fancy them good to
eat--is a struggle with the problems of design and space-composition as
vital as anything here to be found, unless it be in the work of
Marchand. I noticed, by the way, that in _Lemon Gatherers_, a picture on
cardboard, something is going wrong with the colours, and of this I take
rather a serious view as the picture belongs to me. Duncan Grant is the
hope of patriotic amateurs: blessed with adorable gifts and a powerful
intellect, he should, if he has the strength to realize his conceptions
and the courage to disdain popularity, become what we have been awaiting
so long, an English painter in the front rank of European art.
Of the remaining British artists, the most interesting, to my mind, is
Vanessa Bell. The influence of Duncan Grant on her work is unmistakable,
and I hope, unlike most artists, who seem to suppose that for them the
laws of cause and effect and the influence of environment are
inoperative, she will not mind my saying so. Why, in artists so
original as Giotto, El Greco, and Cezanne, at least 50 per cent is
derivative! Vanessa Bell, like all artists, and especially women
artists, is impressionable, but as the effect on her work of familiarity
with one or two English painters and the modern French masters is
altogether for the good, I see no harm in that. At the same time, she
has very personal gifts. Besides a large simplicity of style, there is
about her drawing something oddly sympathetic, and what I should call,
for want of a better word, amusing; while a sense of the peculiar
significance to her of certain forms and relations of forms comes
through and gives to her work an air of intimacy that you will get from
nothing else in this exhibition. Any woman who can make her work count
in the art of her age deserves to be criticized very seriously. In
literature the authoress stands firm on her own feet; only quite
uneducated people--subaltern-poets and young Latin philosophers--believe
that women cannot write; but it is a mere truism to say that no
woman-painter, _pace_ Madame Vigee-Lebrun, has yet held her own with
contemporaries even. To-day there are at least three--Marie Laurencin,
Goncharova, and Vanessa Bell--whose claim to take rank amongst the best
of their generation will have to be answered very carefully by those
who wish to disallow it. Behind them press half a dozen less formidable
but still serious candidates, and I wish Mr. Fry would bring together a
small collection of their works. It would be interesting to see how and
how much they differ from the men; and, unless I mistake, it would
effectively give the lie to those who fancifully conclude that because
the Muses were women it is for women to inspire rather than create.
FOOTNOTE:
[20] This article was written for the _Nation_, but owing to a series of
misfortunes could not be published until the exhibition was over. It
then seemed best to reserve it for this collection.
CONTEMPORARY ART IN ENGLAND
[Sidenote: _Burlington Magazine July 1917_]
Only last summer, after going round the London galleries, a foreign
writer on art whose name is as well known in America as on the
Continent, remarked gloomily, and in private of course, that he quite
understood why British art was almost unknown outside Great Britain. The
early work of Englishmen, he admitted, showed talent and charming
sensibility often, but, somehow or other, said he, their gifts fail to
mature. They will not become artists, they prefer to remain British
painters. They are hopelessly provincial, he said; and so they are.
Of our elder living artists--those, that is to say, who had found
themselves and developed a style before the influence of Cezanne became
paramount on the Continent--Mr. Sickert is probably the only one whom a
continental amateur would dream of collecting; and he, be it noted,
escaped early from British provincialism and plunged into the main
stream of European art. On the other hand, the names of Mr. Steer, Mr.
John, Mr. Orpen and Mr. McEvoy, here only less familiar than those of
Cabinet Ministers or County Cricketers, abroad are as obscure. Mr.
Steer, to be sure, has his portrait in the Uffizi, but then, as likely
as not, the Poet Laureate has his birthday ode in the _Bibliotheque
Nationale_. If Mr. Steer and Sir Edward Poynter are treated civilly
abroad, that may be because England is an important country rather than
because they are important artists.
No wonder patriots are vexed to find English art esteemed on the
Continent and in America below the art of Germany or Scandinavia, seeing
that English artists seem to possess more native sensibility than either
Germans or Scandinavians and, perhaps, as much as Russians. Yet it is a
fact that their work, by reason of its inveterate suburbanity, so wholly
lacks significance and seriousness that an impartial historian, who
could not neglect the mediocre products of North and East Europe, would
probably dismiss English painting in a couple of paragraphs. For it is
not only poor; it is provincial: and provincial art, as the historian
well knows, never really counts.
It would be pleasant to fancy that England was working out, in
isolation, an interesting and independent art; but clearly she is doing
no such thing. There is no live tradition, nothing but fashions as stale
as last week's newspaper. All that is alive is a private schoolboy
rivalry, an ambition to be cock of the walk or to ape the cock, to be
_primus inter pares_ or _amico di primus_. There is no live English
tradition; and as English painters refuse obstinately to accept the
European, and as artists do not spring up unaccountably as groundsel and
dandelions appear to do, this is a rather serious misfortune. Art does
not happen, it grows--not necessarily in the right direction. The fact
that the development of art traced through schools and movements squares
pretty well with historical fact proves conclusively the existence of
"influences" in art. No one will deny that Botticelli was an original
and extremely personal artist or that he is the obvious successor of
Lippo Lippi. El Greco is called by some the most lonely figure in the
history of art--yet it needs no wizard to divine that Titian was his
master or that he was reared in the Byzantine tradition. Artists, though
they hate being told so, are, in fact, like other things, subject to the
law of cause and effect. Young artists, especially, are influenced by
their surroundings and by the past, particularly the immediate past, by
the men from five to thirty years older than themselves.
Art lives on tradition, of which contemporary culture is nothing but the
last development. But English artists, for the most part, ignore the
real tradition, and what passes for development here is no more, as a
rule, than a belated change of fashion. All that is vital in modern art
is being influenced by the French masters--Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh,
Matisse, Rousseau, Picasso, Bonnard, Maillol, who, in their turn, were
influenced by the Impressionists, and who all have been nourished by
that great French tradition which, of late, has been so surprisingly
affected by the influx of Oriental art. English painting, however, has
been left high and dry; and our younger men either imitate their
teachers, too often second-rate drawing masters, enjoying at best a dull
acquaintance with the Italian fifteenth and English eighteenth
centuries, or, in revolt, set up for themselves as independent, hedgerow
geniuses, ignorant, half-trained, and swollen by their prodigious
conceit to such monsters as vastly astonish all those who can remember
them as children.
It is worth noting, perhaps, that when men of talent make great men of
themselves, wrapping up in the cloak of genius and fronting the world
mysteriously, and when this attitude is tolerated by the public, there
is reason to suspect that art fares ill. Since every extension lecturer
knows that Raphael was part of a civilization greater than himself it
seems unnecessary to treat a fashionable portrait-painter as though he
were as inexplicable as an earthquake and as remote as the Matterhorn.
One of the things to be desired in England is more respect for art and
less reverence for artists.
English literature has a great tradition--the tradition of the greatest
literature in the world. I say that in ignorance, to be sure, of
Chinese, but not unmindful of Athenian. It would be inexact to describe
that tradition as part of the main continental tradition which, since
the middle of the seventeenth century, has been predominantly French,
coloured in the eighteenth century by English, in the early nineteenth
by German, and in the twentieth by Russian literature. Yet the English
tradition, rich and splendid as it is, has never allowed itself for long
to lose touch with the European current. The curious have only to turn
from the works of our young writers to those of Nietzsche, Dostoievsky,
Tchekov, Mallarme, Rimbaud, Laforgue, and Claudel to appreciate the
sensitiveness of English literature, which has never fallen into that
insularity on which our lean visual art seems to pride itself. At
moments--in mid-Victorian days, for instance--English literature may
have appeared provincial; it was never suburban.
The tendency of British visual art to sink into a feeble barbarism seems
to have existed always and to have asserted itself whenever we lost
touch with the centre. The earliest English art, early Saxon sculpture,
is good; it is a respectable part of that great Byzantine tradition
which from the middle of the eighth to the middle of the ninth century
appears to have been as vital in the north of England and in Ireland as
in any part of Western Europe. The Normans kept England close to the
centre and left us a little superb architecture; but from the beginning
of the thirteenth century English visual art--architecture, painting,
and sculpture--begins to take on that absurd air of being out of it
which has since become the unfailing characteristic of an exhibition of
home-made arts and crafts. In the seventeenth century we again got into
touch with the movement and the genius of Inigo Jones and Wren gave us
some admirable architecture. In the eighteenth we produced two painters
of note, Blake and Crome, both of whom suffered desperately from their
deplorable surroundings. What was interesting in Constable and Turner
was seized and made use of more quickly and far more intelligently by
French than by native artists. Here they were treated as isolated
geniuses; there they were absorbed into the tradition of painting.
A student of contemporary art who found himself in the company of
painters and amateurs in any great central city abroad--Paris,
Stockholm, Copenhagen, Moscow, Munich, Vienna, Geneva, Milan, or
Barcelona--would be able to discuss, and doubtless would discuss, the
contemporary movement. That movement, as every one outside England seems
to know, radiates from France. He would discuss, therefore, the
respective merits of Matisse, Picasso, Marquet, Marchand, Friesz,
Derain, Bonnard, de Vlaminck, Maillol, Laprade, Segonzac, Delaunay, etc.
etc.; and not only discuss and criticize their works, but the direction
in which each was moving, the influence of one on another, and the
influence of Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, or the _douanier_ Rousseau on
all. Such a company would know something about the development of the
movement in other countries; it would have something to say about
Kandinsky and the Munich painters, about Goncharova and Larionoff, about
the Barcelona school, and even about the Italian futurists. In a word,
it would be able to talk about contemporary European painting. Only in
an English studio would such conversation be hard to come by: there one
might learn that Mr. Smith was a greater genius than Miss Jones, that
Mrs. Robinson would never finish her picture in time for the New English
Exhibition, that Mr. John was the greatest painter in the world--though
Mr. Innes had once run him hard--and that the greatest sculptor was some
one whose name I cannot recall. Of contemporary French painting at most
a perfunctory word; yet to ignore it is to put oneself beyond the pale
of contemporary culture. And there, it seems, is just where we must look
for English art; in European civilization it has no place. It is out of
it; it is suburban.
Educated people, enjoying some knowledge of what has been happening
abroad during the last fifty years, can scarcely conceive the ignorance
and insularity of contemporary British painters. It was only the other
day that one of the best of them, fired by Mr. Roger Fry's article in
the _Burlington Magazine_, walked into the National Gallery and saw for
the first time a Renoir. He was duly impressed; and hurried off, I am
glad to say, to buy a book of reproductions. Another promising painter,
who was in Paris just before the war, not only never saw a Cezanne, a
Gauguin, a Matisse or a Picasso, but was equally neglectful of the
Impressionist masters, never taking the trouble to visit the Luxembourg
and inspect the Caillebotte bequest. Imagine a continental man of
science who in 1880 had never taken the trouble to read "The Origin of
Species" or investigate the theory of evolution!
The state of mind produced in most English painters by this outlandish
ignorance is calamitous. Unconscious of what is going on abroad, dimly,
at best, aware of what has been done in the past, and lacking effective,
well-informed criticism from writers in the newspapers and from their
fellow-artists, they work without standards, ideals or artistic
seriousness, and soon fall into that ghastly complacency in which a man
is content to satisfy the market with endless repetition of some popular
success. Modesty is a virtue hardly attainable by the prize student from
the Slade or the Academy who is persuaded that in a few years he will be
the prize painter of the world, and is, in a few years, by press and
public duly confirmed in his delusion. His first ambition will be to get
a picture accepted by the Royal Academy or the New English Art Club, his
next to wheedle the quidnuncs--i.e. the newspaper men--into giving him a
place amongst the local worthies, his last to discover a formula that
shall be the strong-box of his lucky hit. This accomplished, commissions
and paragraphs begin to roll in with comfortable regularity, and he
rests replete--a leading British artist. Is he ever plagued with
nightmares, I wonder, in which he dreams that outside England no
competent amateur could possibly take him seriously?
Some British artists, when they were young--and some of them must once
have been so--are said to have studied in Paris. Does it ever occur to
them that their proper rivals, the men whose rivalry is stimulating and
not merely disquieting, are not to be found in London? And does it occur
to them that, instead of hunting for tips in Bond Street and Burlington
House they might go for lessons to the National Gallery and South
Kensington? Whatever people may think of the art of Henri Matisse, his
fame is beyond cavil. Just before the war commissions and entreaties
were pouring in on him, not from France only, but from Russia, Germany,
Scandinavia, and America. He had--he has, for that matter--what no
English painter, with the possible exception of Constable, ever had--a
European reputation. Yet in the spring of 1914, looking with a friend at
a picture by Chardin, he is said to have remarked that if he could
believe that one day he would paint as good a thing as that he would be
extremely happy. If one of our famous portrait-painters would go for
once to the National Gallery and stand, not before a great master, but
before a Philippe de Champaigne or a Vivarini, I wonder what he would
say.
It is hard to conjecture; for our portrait-painters live in a world
which, though not insensitive to prettiness, and impressed by obvious
manifestations of ability, cares nothing for art or good painting. In
such a world an artist--who is, after all, little better than a human
being--can hardly be expected to develop his critical faculty. If some
of our gifted men were to take their talents to Paris, where is a press
and public that knows how to be serious about art, they would, one
fancies, begin to feel dissatisfied with their facile triumphs and
appetizing confections. They would feel, too, that they were surrounded
by people who could recognize and appreciate conviction and science even
though these were presented in forms too recondite for the mob. They
would find that in Paris a painter can have praise enough without
stooping for the applause of Mayfair. It is significant that, whereas
English painters once they have found a style that hits the public
taste, are not much inclined to change it, in Paris such an artist as
Picasso, who has taken the fancy of amateurs and dealers in at least
three different manners, goes on from experiment to experiment, leaving
the public to follow as best it can.
But this difference between the atmosphere of London and of Paris
brings up a question that had best be stated at once. What are the
causes of British provincialism? Though its existence is a fact that
runs right through the history of British art, it would be rash to
assume that the causes have always been the same. For instance, the
geographical isolation of England may at one time have been a cause;
that has been removed by railways and steamboats. It will be sensible to
speak in this article only of present causes of present ills.