The recent admirably arranged exhibition in New York made by the
Association of American Painters and Sculptors, and including a full
representation of the work of the Cubists and the Post-Impressionists,
has proved in one respect a veritable success, namely, in point of
attendance. If not, as one critic puts it, a _succès de scandale_, it
has been a _succès de curiosité_. It contained pieces of historic work
of great beauty by eminent painters of France and America--Ingres,
Daumier, Puvis de Chavannes, Childe Hassam, Alden Weir, and others,
but no great point was made of their inclusion and they were not the
attraction for the crowds. What drew the curious were certain widely
talked-of eccentricities, whimsicalities, distortions, crudities,
puerilities, and madnesses, by which, while a few were nonplussed, most
of the spectators were vastly amused.
At the spring exhibition of the National Academy of Design, which
followed, one unaccustomed visitor was heard to say to another, “Oh,
come on, Bill, there’s nothing to laugh at here.” It will be impossible
to repeat the Parisian sensation another season; and, happily, the
eccentricities have served to awaken a new interest in genuine types of
art, both in and out of their own exhibition, and have furnished that
element of contrast which is useful if not essential in the formation
of a robust taste.
Meanwhile, for the benefit of the young and unthinking, it is well
to keep on inculcating the fact that while art is not a formula,
nor even a school, it is subject, whether in painting, sculpture,
poetry, architecture, or music, to certain general principles tending
to harmony, clarity, beauty, and the stimulus of the imagination.
A fundamental error is that its laws are hampering, the fact being
that it is only as one learns them that he can acquire the freedom
of individual expression. The exploitation of a theory of discords,
puzzles, uglinesses, and clinical details, is to art what anarchy is
to society, and the practitioners need not so much a critic as an
alienist. It is said that a well-known Russian musician has begun a
new composition with (so to speak) a keynote of discord involving the
entire musical scale, as a child might lay his hand sidewise upon all
the notes of the piano it can cover. A counterpart of this could have
been found in more than one ward of the recent exhibition. One can
fancy the laughter over the absinthe in many a Latin Quarter café of
those who are not mentally awry, but are merely imitators, poseurs, or
charlatans, at learning that their monstrosities, which have exhausted
the interest of Paris, have been seriously considered by some American
observers. They have only been trying to see how far they could go in
fooling the public. But he laughs best who laughs last, and we believe
that Americans have too much sense of humor not to see the point of
this colossal joke of eccentricity, or to endure its repetition.