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[Illustration: _Courtesy Worcester Art Museum_
FEMME ACCROUPIE by GAUGUIN]
_Modern Painting_
_Its Tendency and Meaning_
_By_
_Willard Huntington Wright_
_New York
Dodd, Mead and Company
1922_
COPYRIGHT, 1915
BY JOHN LANE COMPANY
THE PLIMPTON PRESS . NORWOOD . MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
FOREWORD
That beneath all great art there has been a definite animating purpose,
a single and profound desire to reach a specific goal, has been but
vaguely sensed by the general public and by the great majority of
critics. And there are, I believe, but very few persons not directly and
seriously concerned with the production of pictures, who realise that
this animating purpose has for its aim the solution of the profoundest
problems of the creative will, that it is rooted deeply in the aesthetic
consciousness, and that its evolution marks one of the most complex
phases of human psychology. The habit of approaching a work of art from
the naif standpoint of one's personal temperament or taste and of
judging it haphazardly by its individual appeal, irrespective of its
inherent aesthetic merit, is so strongly implanted in the average
spectator, that any attempt to define the principles of form and
organisation underlying the eternal values of art is looked upon as an
act of gratuitous pedantry. But such principles exist, and if we are to
judge works of art accurately and consistently these principles must be
mastered. Otherwise we are without a standard, and all our opinions are
but the outgrowth of the chaos of our moods.
Any attempt to democratise art results only in the lowering of the
artistic standard. Art cannot be taught; and a true appreciation of it
cannot grow up without a complete understanding of the aesthetic laws
governing it. Those qualities in painting by which it is ordinarily
judged are for the most part irrelevancies from the standpoint of pure
aesthetics. They have as little to do with a picture's infixed greatness
as the punctuation in Faust or the words of the Hymn to Joy in the Ninth
Symphony. Small wonder that modern art has become a copious
fountain-head of abuse and laughter; for modern art tends toward the
elimination of all those accretions so beloved by the
general--literature, drama, sentiment, symbolism, anecdote, prettiness
and photographic realism.
This book inquires first into the function and psychology of all great
art, and endeavours to define those elements which make for genuine
worth in painting. Next it attempts to explain both the basic and
superficial differences between "ancient" and "modern" art and to point
out, as minutely as space will permit, the superiority of the new
methods over the old. By this exposition an effort is made to indicate
the _raison d'etre_ of the modern procedure. After that, modern painters
are taken up in the order of their importance to the evolution of
painting during the last hundred years. I have tried to answer the
following questions: What men and movements mark the milestones in the
development of the new idea? What have been the motivating forces of
each of these schools? To what extent are their innovations significant:
what ones touch organically on the vital problems of aesthetics; and what
was their influence on the men who came later? Out of what did the
individual men spring; what forces and circumstances came together to
make their existence possible? What were their aims, and what were their
actual achievements? What relation did they bear to one another, and in
what way did they advance on one another? Where has modern art led, and
what inspirational possibilities lie before it?
Before setting out to solve these problems, all of which have their
roots in the very organisms of the science of aesthetics, I have posed a
definite _rationale_ of valuation. My principles are based on the
quickening ideals of all great art, and, if properly understood, I
believe, they will answer every question which arises in the intelligent
spectator when he stands before a piece of visual art, be it a Byzantine
mosaic, a complicated organisation by Rubens, a linear arrangement by
Picasso or an utterly worthless anecdote in paint by an English
academician. Necessarily preoccupied with the application of my critical
standard, I have had but little time and space to devote to its
elucidation. Yet I have striven in this indirect process of statement to
make my fundamental postulate sufficiently clear to enable the reader to
recognise its truth and unity. Two years ago when I crowded my
hypothesis into 7000 words in the _Forum_, and early last winter when I
stated it in even briefer space in the _New Age_, I found that, although
it took a new and difficult stand, there were many who grasped its
essentials. Therefore I feel myself entitled to hope that in its present
form it will be comprehensible even to those whose minds are not
trained in the complexities of aesthetic research.
In stripping art of its intriguing charm and its soothing vagueness it
is not my intention to do away with its power to delight. To the
contrary, I believe that only by relieving painting of its dead cargo of
literature, archaeology and illustration can it be made to function
freely. Painting should be as pure an art as music, and the struggles of
all great painters have been toward that goal. Its medium--colour--is as
elemental as sound, and when properly presented (with the same
scientific exactness as the harmonies of the tone-gamut) it is fully as
capable of engendering aesthetic emotion as is music. Our delight in
music, no matter how primitive, is not dependent on an imitation of
natural sounds. Music's pleasurable significance is primarily
intellectual. So can painting, by its power to create emotion and not
mere sensation, provoke deep aesthetic feeling of a far greater intensity
than the delight derived from transcription and drama. Modern painting
strives toward the heightening of emotional ecstasy; and my _esthetique_
is intended to pave the way for an appreciation of art which will make
possible the reception of that ecstasy. With this object ever in view I
have weighed the painting of the last century, and have judged it solely
by its ability or inability to call forth a profound aesthetic emotion.
Almost any art can arouse pleasing sentiments. Only great art can give
us intellectual rapture.
W. H. W.
Paris, 1915
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. ANCIENT AND MODERN ART 17
II. PRECURSORS OF THE NEW ERA 34
III. EDOUARD MANET 64
IV. THE EARLY IMPRESSIONISTS 83
V. AUGUSTE RENOIR 107
VI. PAUL CEZANNE 129
VII. THE NEO-IMPRESSIONISTS 164
VIII. GAUGUIN AND THE PONT-AVEN SCHOOL 187
IX. DEGAS AND HIS CIRCLE 207
X. HENRI-MATISSE 222
XI. PICASSO AND CUBISM 237
XII. FUTURISM 263
XIII. SYNCHROMISM 277
XIV. THE LESSER MODERNS 305
XV. CONCLUSION 327
INDEX 343
REPRODUCTIONS
Femme Accroupie (Gauguin) _Frontispiece_
Les Femmes d'Alger dans Leur Appartement (Delacroix) _Facing page_ 38
L'Enterrement a Ornans (Courbet) 54
Le Bain (Daumier) 60
Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe (Manet) 78
Waterloo Bridge (Monet) 98
Paysage (Guillaumin) 104
Le Dejeuner des Canotiers (Renoir) 114
Baigneuses, 1885 (Renoir) 126
Baigneuses, 1902 (Renoir) 126
Baigneuses (Cezanne) 138
Pommes sur une Table (Cezanne) 156
Les Tours Vertes a la Rochelle (Signac) 174
Un Dimanche a la Grande-Jatte (Seurat) 180
Portrait de l'Artiste (Van Gogh) 184
Deux Tahitiens (Gauguin) 204
Danseuses a Leur Toilette (Degas) 212
Baigneuses (Henri-Matisse) 226
Portrait de Famille (Henri-Matisse) 234
Femme a la Mandoline (Picasso) 246
Fumeur et Paysage (Leger) 256
Dynamisme d'une Auto (Russolo) 268
Hieroglyphe Dynamique du Bal Tabarin (Severini) 274
Synchromie Cosmique (Morgan Russell) 294
Composition No. 2 (Kandinsky) 310
Le Jardin (Bonnard) 318
_Modern Painting_
I
ANCIENT AND MODERN ART
Throughout the entire history of the fine arts, no period of aesthetic
innovation and endeavour has suffered from public malignity, ridicule
and ignorance as has painting during the last century. The reasons for
this are many and, to the serious student of art history, obvious. The
change between the old and the new order came swiftly and precipitously,
like a cataclysm in the serenity of a summer night. The classic painters
of the first half of the nineteenth century, such as David, Ingres, Gros
and Gerard, were busy with their rehabilitation of ancient traditions,
when without warning, save for the pale heresies of Constable, a new and
rigorous regime was ushered in. It was Turner, Delacroix, Courbet and
Daumier who entered the sacred temple, tore down the pillars which had
supported it for centuries, and brought the entire structure of
established values crashing down about them. They survived the
_debacle_, and when eventually they laid aside their brushes for all
time it was with the unassailable knowledge that they had accomplished
the greatest and most significant metamorphosis in the history of any
art.
But even these hardy anarchists of the new order little dreamed of the
extremes to which their heresies would lead. So precipitous and complex
has been the evolution of modern painting that most of the most
revolutionary moderns have failed to keep mental step with its
developments and divagations. During the past few years new modes and
manners in art have sprung up with fungus-like rapidity. "Movements" and
"schools" have followed one another with astounding pertinacity, each
claiming that finality of expression which is the aim of all seekers for
truth. And, with but few exceptions, the men who have instigated these
innovations have been animated by a serious purpose--that of mastering
the problem of aesthetic organisation and of circumscribing the one means
for obtaining ultimate and indestructible results. But the problems of
art, like those of life itself, are in the main unsolvable, and art must
ever be an infinite search for the intractable. Form in painting, like
the eternal readjustments and equilibria of life, is but an
approximation to stability. The forces in all art are the forces of
life, co-ordinated and organised. No plastic form can exist without
rhythm: not rhythm in the superficial harmonic sense, but the rhythm
which underlies the great fluctuating and equalising forces of material
existence. Such rhythm is symmetry in movement. On it all form, both in
art and life, is founded.
Form in its artistic sense has four interpretations. First, it exhibits
itself as shallow imitation of the surface aspects of nature, as in the
work of such men as Sargent, Sorolla and Simon. Secondly, it contains
qualities of solidity and competent construction such are as found in
the paintings of Velazquez, Hogarth and Degas. Thirdly, it is a
consummate portrayal of objects into which arbitrary arrangement has
been introduced for the accentuation of volume. Raphael, Poussin and
Goya exemplify this expression of it. Last, form reveals itself, not as
an objective thing, but as an abstract phenomenon capable of giving the
sensation of palpability. All great art falls under this final
interpretation. But form, to express itself aesthetically, must be
composed; and here we touch the controlling basis of all
art:--organisation. Organisation is the use put to form for the
production of rhythm. The first step in this process is the construction
of line, line being the direction taken by one or more forms. In purely
decorative rhythm the lines flow harmoniously from side to side and from
top to bottom on a given surface. In the greatest art the lines are bent
forward and backward as well as laterally so that, by their orientation
in depth, an impression of profundity is added to that of height and
breadth. Thus the simple image of decoration is destroyed, and a
microcosmos is created in its place. Rhythm then becomes the
inevitable adjustment of approaching and receding lines, so that they
will reproduce the placements and displacements to be found in the human
body when in motion.
To understand, and hence fully to appreciate, a painting, we must be
able to recognise its inherent qualities by the process of intellectual
reasoning. By this is not implied mechanical or scientific observation.
Were this necessary, art would resolve itself into a provable theory and
would produce in us only such mental pleasure as we feel before a
perfect piece of intricate machinery. But once we comprehend those
constitutional qualities which pervade all great works of art, plastic
and graphic, the sensuous emotion will follow so rapidly as to give the
effect of spontaneity. This process of conscious observation in time
becomes automatic and exerts itself on every work of art we inspect.
Once adjusted to an assimilation of the rhythmic compositions of El
Greco and Rubens, we have become susceptible to the tactile sensation of
form in all painting. And this subjective emotion is keener than the
superficial sensation aroused by the prettiness of design, the narrative
of subject-matter, or the quasi-realities of transcription. More and
more as we proximate to a true understanding of the principles of art,
shall we react to those deeper and larger qualities in a painting which
are not to be found in its documentary and technical side. Also our
concern with the transient sentiments engendered by a picture's external
aspects will become less and less significant. Technique, dramatic
feeling, subject, and even accuracy of drawing, will be relegated to the
subsidiary and comparatively unimportant position they hold in relation
to a painting's _aesthetic purpose_.
The lack of comprehension--and consequently the ridicule--which has met
the efforts of modern painters, is attributable not alone to a
misunderstanding of their seemingly for extravagant and eccentric
mannerisms, but to an ignorance of the basic postulates of all great art
both ancient and modern. Proof of this is afforded by the constant
statements of preference for the least effectual of older painters over
the greatest of the moderns. These preferences, if they are symptomatic
of aught save the mere habit of a mind immersed in tradition, indicate
an immaturity of artistic judgment which places prettiness above beauty,
and sentimentality and documentary interest above subjectivity of
emotion. The fallacies of such judgment can best be indicated by a
parallel consideration of painters widely separated as to merit, but in
whom these different qualities are found. For instance, the prettiness
of Reynolds, Greuze and Murillo is as marked as the prettiness of
Titian, Giorgione and Renoir. The latter are by far the greater artists;
yet, had we no other critical standard save that of charm, the
difference between them and the others would be indistinguishable.
Zuloaga, Whistler, Botticelli and Boecklin are as inspirational of
sentiment as Tintoretto, Corot, Raphael and Poussin; but by no authentic
criterion are they as great painters. Again, were drama and simple
narrative aesthetic considerations, Regnault, Brangwyn, and Antonino
Molineri would rank with Valerio Castello, Rubens and Ribera.
In one's failure to distinguish between the apparent and the organic
purposes of art lies the greatest obstacle to an appreciation of what
has come to be called modern painting. The truths of modern art are no
different from those of ancient art. A Cezanne landscape is not
dissimilar in aim to an El Greco. The one is merely more advanced as to
methods than the other. Nor do the canvases of the most ultra-modern
schools strive toward an aesthetic manifestation radically unlike that
aspired to in Michelangelo's Slaves. Serious modern art, despite its
often formidable and bizarre appearance, is only a striving to
rehabilitate the natural and unalterable principles of rhythmic form to
be found in the old masters, and to translate them into relative and
more comprehensive terms. We have the same animating ideal in the
pictures of Giotto and Matisse, Rembrandt and Renoir, Botticelli and
Gauguin, Watteau and Picasso, Poussin and Friesz, Raphael and Severini.
The later men differ from their antecedents in that they apply new and
more vital methods to their work. Modern art is the logical and natural
outgrowth of ancient art; it is the art of yesterday heightened and
intensified as the result of systematic and painstaking experimentation
in the media of expression.
The search for composition--that is, for perfectly poised form in three
dimensions--has been the impelling dictate of all great art. Giotto, El
Greco, Masaccio, Tintoretto and Rubens, the greatest of all the old
painters, strove continually to attain form as an abstract emotional
force. With them the organisation of volumes came first. The picture was
composed as to line. Out of this grew the subject-matter--a demonstration
_a posteriori_. The human figure and the recognisable natural object
were only auxiliaries, never the sought-for result. In all this they
were inherently modern, as that word should be understood; for the new
conception of art strives more and more for the emotion rather than the
appearance of reality. The objects, whether arbitrary or photographic,
which an artist uses in a picture are only the material through which
plastic form finds expression. They are the means, not the end. If in
the works of truly significant art there is a dramatic, narrative or
illustrative interest, it will be found to be the incidental and not the
important concomitant of the picture.
Therefore it is not remarkable that, with the introduction of new
methods, the illustrative side of painting should tend toward
minimisation. The elimination of all the superfluities from art is but a
part of the striving toward defecation. Since the true test of painting
lies in its subjective power, modern artists have sought to divorce
their work from all considerations other than those directly allied to
its primary function. This process of separation advanced hand in hand
with the evolution of new methods. First it took the form of the
distortion of natural objects. The accidental shape of trees, hills,
houses and even human figures was altered in order to draw them into the
exact form demanded by the picture's composition. Gradually, by the
constant practice of this falsification, objects became almost
unrecognisable. In the end the illustrative obstacle was entirely done
away with. This was the logical outcome of the sterilising modern
process. To judge a picture competently, one must not consider it as a
mere depiction of life or as an anecdote: one must bring to it an
intelligence capable of grasping a complicated counterpoint. The
attitude of even such men as Celesti, Zanchi, Padovanino and Bononi is
never that of an illustrator, in no matter how sublimated a sense, but
of a composer whose aim is to create a polymorphic conception with the
recognisable materials at hand.
Were art to be judged from the pictorial and realistic viewpoint we
might find many meticulous craftsmen of as high an objective efficiency
as were the men who stood at the apex of genuine artistic worth--that is,
craftsmen who arrived at as close and exact a transcription of nature,
who interpreted current moods and mental aspects as accurately, and who
set forth superficial emotions as dramatically. Velazquez's Philip IV,
Titian's Emperor Charles V, Holbein's The Ambassadors, Guardi's The
Grand Canal--Venice, Mantegna's The Dead Christ and Duerer's Four Naked
Women reproduce their subjects with as much painstaking exactitude as do
El Greco's The Resurrection of Christ, Giotto's Descent from the Cross,
Masaccio's Saint Peter Baptising the Pagans, Tintoretto's The Miracle of
Saint Mark, Michelangelo's Creation of the Sun and Moon, and Rubens's
The Earl and Countess of Arundel. But these latter pictures are
important for other than pictorial reasons. Primarily they are
organisations, and as such they are of aesthetic value. Only secondarily
are they to be appraised as representations of natural objects. In the
pictures of the former list there is no synthetic co-ordination of
tactile forms. Such paintings represent merely "subject-matter" treated
capably and effectively. As sheer painting from the artisan's standpoint
they are among the finest examples of technical dexterity in art
history. But as contributions to the development of a pure art form they
are valueless.
In stating that the moderns have changed the quality and not the nature
of art, there is no implication that in many instances the great men of
the past, even with limited means, have not surpassed in artistic
achievement the men of today who have at hand more extensive means.
Great organisers of plastic form have, because of their tremendous
power, done with small means more masterly work than lesser men with
large means. For instance, Goya as an artist surpasses Manet, and
Rembrandt transcends Daumier. This principle holds true in all the arts.
Balzac, ignorant of modern literary methods, is greater than George
Moore, a master of modern means. And Beethoven still remains the
colossal figure in music, despite the vastly increased modern scope of
Richard Strauss's methods. Methods are useless without the creative
will. But granting this point (which unconsciously is the stumbling
block of nearly all modern art critics), new and fuller means, even in
the hands of inferior men, are not the proper subject for ridicule.
It must not be forgotten that the division between old and modern art is
not an equal one. Modern art began with Delacroix less than a hundred
years ago, while art up to that time had many centuries in which to
perfect the possibilities of its resources. The new methods are so young
that painters have not had time to acquire that mastery of material
without which the highest achievement is impossible. Even in the most
praiseworthy modern art we are conscious of that intellectual striving
in the handling of new tools which is the appanage of immaturity.
Renoir, the greatest exponent of Impressionistic means, found his
artistic stride only in his old age, after a long and arduous life of
study and experimenting. His canvases since 1905 are the first in which
we feel the fluency and power which come only after a slow and sedulous
process of osmosis. Compare, for instance, his early and popular Le
Moulin de la Galette with his later portraits, such as Madame T. et Son
Fils and La Fillette a l'Orange, and his growth is at once apparent.
The evolution of means is answerable to the same laws as the
_progressus_ in any other line of human endeavour. The greatest artists
are always culminations of long lines of experimentations. In this they
are eclectic. The organisation of observation is in itself too absorbing
a labour to permit of a free exercise of the will to power. The blinding
burst of genius at the time of the Renaissance was the breaking forth of
the accrued power of generations. Modern art, having no tradition of
means, has sapped and dispersed the vitality of its exponents by
imposing upon them the necessity for empirical research. It is for this
reason that we have no men in modern art who approximate as closely to
perfection as did many of the older painters. But had Rubens, with his
colossal vision, had access to modern methods his work would have been
more powerful in its intensity and more far-reaching in its scope.
However, in the brief period of modern art two decided epochs have been
brought to a close through this accumulation and eruption of
experimental activities in individuals. Cezanne brought to a focus the
divergent rays of his predecessors and incorporated into his canvases
both the aspirations and achievements of the art which had preceded
him. This would have been impossible had he been born--even with an
equally great talent--fifty years before. And a more recent school of
art, by making use of the achievements of both Cezanne and Michelangelo,
and by adding to them new discoveries in the dynamics of colour, has
opened up a new vista of possibilities in the expressing of form. This
step also would have been impossible without Cezanne and the men who
came before and after him. Once these new modes, which are indicative of
modern art, become understood and pass into the common property of the
younger men, we shall have achievement which will be as complete as the
masterpieces of old, and which will, in addition, be more poignant.
Although the methods of the older painters were more restricted than
those of the moderns, the actual materials at their disposal were fully
as extended as ours of today. But knowledge concerning them was
incomplete. As a consequence, all artists antecedent to Delacroix found
expression only in those qualities which are susceptible of reproduction
in black and white. In many cases the sacrifice of colour enhances the
intrinsic merit of such reproductions, for often the characteristics of
the different colours oppose the purposes of a picture's planes. Today
we know that certain colours are opaque, others transparent; some
approach the eye, others recede. But the ancients were ignorant of these
things, and their canvases contained many contradictions: there was a
continuous warring between linear composition and colour values. They
painted solids violet, and transpicuous planes yellow--thereby
unconsciously defeating their own ends, for violet is limpid, and yellow
tangible. In one-tone reproductions such inconsistencies are eliminated,
and the signification of the picture thereby clarified. It was Rubens
who embodied the defined attributes of ancient art in their highest
degree of pliability, and who carried the impulse toward creation to a
point of complexity unattained by any other of the older men. In him we
see the culmination of the evolution of linear development of light and
dark. From his time to the accession of the moderns the ability to
organise was on the decrease. There was a weakening of perception, a
decline of the aesthetic faculty. The chaotic condition of this period
was like the darkness which always broods over the world before some
cleansing force sweeps it clean and ushers in a new and greater cycle.
The period of advancement of these old methods extends from prehistoric
times to the beginning of the nineteenth century. On the walls of the
caverns in Altamira and the Dordogne are drawings of mammoths, horses
and bison in which, despite the absence of details, the actual approach
to nature is at times more sure and masterly than in the paintings of
such highly cultured men as Botticelli and Pisanello. The action in some
of them is pronounced; and the vision, while simple, is that of men
conscious of a need for compactness and balance. Here the art is simply
one of outline, heavy and prominent at times, light and almost
indistinguishable at others; but this grading of line was the result of
a deeper cause than a tool slipping or refusing to mark. It was the
consequence of a need for rhythm which could be obtained only by the
accentuation of parts. The drawings were generally single figures, and
rarely were more than two conceived as an inseparable design. Later, the
early primitives used symmetrical groupings for the same purpose of
interior decorating. Then came simple balance, the shifting and disguise
of symmetry, and with it a nearer approach to the _imprevu_ of nature.
This style was employed for many generations until the great step was
taken which brought about the Renaissance. The sequential aspect of line
appeared, permitting of rhythm and demanding organisation. Cimabue and
Giotto were the most prominent exponents of this advance. From that time
forward the emotion derived from actual form was looked upon by artists
as a necessary adjunct to a picture. With this attitude came the
aristocracy of vision and the abrogation of painting as mere exalted
craftsmanship.
After that the evolution of art was rapid. In the contemplation of
solidly and justly painted figures the artist began to extend his mind
into space and to use rhythm of line that he might express himself in
depth as well as surfacely. Thus he preconised organisation in three
dimensions, and by so doing opened the door on an infinity of aesthetic
ramifications. From the beginning, tone balance--that is, the agreeable
distribution of blacks, whites and greys--had gone forward with the
development of line, so that at the advent of depth in painting the
arrangement of tones became the medium through which all the other
qualities were made manifest.
In the strict sense, the art of painting up to a hundred years ago had
been only drawing. Colour was used only for ornamental or dramatic
purposes. After the first simple copying of nature's tints in a wholly
restricted manner, the use of colour advanced but little. It progressed
toward harmony, but its dramatic possibilities were only dimly felt.
Consequently its primitive employment for the enhancement of the
decorative side of painting was adhered to. This was not because the
older painters were without the necessary pigments. Their colours in
many instances were brighter and more permanent than ours. But they were
satisfied with the effects obtained from black and white expression.
They looked upon colour as a delicacy, an accessory, something to be
taken as the gourmet takes dessert. Its true significance was thus
obscured beneath the artists' complacency. As great an artist as
Giorgione considered it from the conventional viewpoint, and never
attempted to deviate toward its profounder meanings. The old masters
filled their canvases with shadows and light without suspecting that
light itself is simply another name for colour.
The history of modern art is broadly the history of the development of
form by the means of colour--that is to say, modern art tends toward the
purification of painting. Colour is capable of producing all the effects
possible to black and white, and in addition of exciting an emotion more
acute. It was only with the advent of Delacroix, the first great modern,
that the dramatic qualities of colour were intelligently sensed. But
even with him the conception was so slight that the effects he attained
were but meagrely effective. After Delacroix further experiments in
colour led to the realistic translation of certain phases of nature. The
old static system of copying trees in green, shadows in black and skies
in blue did not, as was commonly believed, produce realism. While
superficially nature appeared in the colours indicated, a close
observation later revealed the fact that a green tree in any light
comprises a diversity of colours, that all sunlit skies have a residue
of yellow, and hence that shadows are violet rather than black. This
newly unearthed realism of light became the battle cry of the younger
men in the late decades of the nineteenth century, and reached
parturition in the movement erroneously called Impressionism, a word
philologically opposed to the thing it wished to elucidate. The ancients
had painted landscape as it appeared broadly at a first glance. The
Impressionists, being interested in nature as a manifestation in which
light plays the all-important part, transferred it bodily onto canvas
from that point of view.
Cezanne, looking into their habits more coolly, saw their restrictions.
While achieving all their atmospheric aims, he went deeper into the
mechanics of colour, and with this knowledge achieved form as well as
light. This was another step forward in the development of modern
methods. With him colour began to near its true and ultimate
significance as a functioning element. Later, with the aid of the
scientists, Chevreul, Bourgeois, Helmholtz and Rood, other artists made
various departures into the field of colour, but their enterprises were
failures. Then came Matisse who made improvements on the harmonic side
of colour. But because he ignored the profounder lessons of Cezanne he
succeeded only in the fabrication of a highly organised decorative art.
Not until the advent of the Synchromists, whose first public exhibition
took place in Munich in 1913, were any further crucial advances made.
These artists completed Cezanne in that they rationalised his dimly
foreshadowed precepts.
To understand the basic significance of painting it is necessary to
revise our method of judgment. As yet no aesthetician has recorded a
_rationale_ for art valuation. Taine put forth many illuminating
suggestions regarding the fundamentals of form, but the critics have
paid scant heed. Prejudice, personal taste, metaphysics and even the
predilections of sentiment, still govern the world's judgments and
appreciations. We are slaves to accuracy of delineation, to prettiness
of design, to the whole suite of material considerations which are
deputies to the organic and intellectual qualities of a work of art. It
is the common thing to find criticisms--ever from the highest
sources--which praise or condemn a picture according to the nearness of
its approach to the reality of its subject. Such observations are
confusing and irrelevant. Were realism the object of art, painting would
always be infinitely inferior to life--a mere simulacrum of our daily
existence, ever inadequate in its illusion. The moment we attach other
than purely aesthetic values to paintings--either ancient or modern--we are
confronted by so extensive and differentiated a set of tests that chaos
or error is unavoidable. In the end we shall find that our conclusions
have their premises, not in the work of art itself, but in personal and
extraneous considerations. A picture to be a great work of art need not
contain any recognisable objects. Provided it gives the sensation of
rhythmically balanced form in three dimensions, it will have
accomplished all that the greatest masters of art have ever striven for.
Once we divest ourselves of traditional integuments, modern painting
will straightway lose its mystery. Despite the many charlatans who
clothe their aberrations with its name, it is a sincere reaching forth
of the creative will to find a medium by which the highest emotions may
most perfectly be expressed. We have become too complex to enjoy the
simple theatre any longer. Our minds call for a more forceful emotion
than the simple imitation of life can give. We require problems,
inspirations, incentives to thought. The simple melody of many of the
old masters can no longer interest us because of its very simplicity. As
the complicated and organised forces of life become comprehensible to
us, we shall demand more and more that our analytic intelligences be
mirrored in our enjoyments.
II
PRECURSORS OF THE NEW ERA
The nineteenth century opened with French art in a precarious and
decadent condition. To appreciate the prodigious strides made by
Gericault and Delacroix, even by Gerard and Gros, one must consider the
rabid antagonism of the public toward all ornament and richness in
painting and toward all subject-matter which did not inspire thoughts of
inflexible simplicity. This attitude was attributable to the social
reaction against the excesses of the voluptuous Louis XV. Vien it was
who, suppressing the eroticism of Boucher, instigated the so-called
classic revival founded on Graeco-Roman ideals. The public became so
vehement in its praise of this hypocritical and austere art, that
Fragonard, that delicious painter of boudoirs, was dismissed as
indecent. Even the demure Greuze, who tried to rehabilitate himself by
making his art a vehicle for a series of parental sermons, died a
pauper. He too lacked the aridity requisite for popular taste. Chardin,
the Le Nains and Fouquet were set aside: they were considered too
trivial, too insufficiently archaeological. Watteau's canvases were
stoned by Regnault, Girodet and the other pupils of David. Lancret,
Pater, Debucourt, Olivier, Gravelot, La Tour, Nattier and others met
similar fates at the hands of the new classicists.
Such men as these could not find approbation in a public which demanded
only allegorical, political and economic art. But David met all its
requirements. He represented the antithesis of the sound freedom of the
French temperament; and forthwith became the Elija of the new
degeneracy. He apotheosised all that is false and decadent in art. But
the adulation of him was short-lived. The French imagination is too
fecund for only thorns. Ingres superseded him. This new idol, going to
the Greeks for inspiration, made David fluent and charming. He studied
the Italian primitives and simplified them with Byzantine and Raphaelic
addenda. He had a genuine instinct for silhouette entirely lacking in
his forerunner, and soon struck the first blow which marked the
disintegration of David's cult.
Gerard and Gros took a further step by loosening slightly Ingres's
drawing; and Gericault and Guerin completed the disruption of the David
tradition. Gericault's Radeau de la Meduse brought its young and highly
talented creator immediately into the public gaze, not only because of
its implied blasphemy in deviating from the _methode David_, but because
the tragedy of its subject was still fresh in the national mind. Was
this a clever device on the part of the painter to circumvent hostile
criticism by clothing his innovations with a sympathetic theme? Perhaps;
but the picture's value to us lies in that it foreshadowed the new idea
in art. It forced the gate which made easier Delacroix's entrance
several years later.
In retrospect the reaction against an established order appears simple,
but the world's innovators have required for their task an intellectual
courage amounting to rare heroism. Heretics are regarded as dangerous
madmen, and generally their only reward is the pleasure of revolt. The
credit for greatness falls on those later men who avail themselves of
the principles of past reactionary enterprise. So much of the energy of
pioneers is spent in combating hostile criticism and indifference, that
their fund of creative force is depleted. This was true in the case of
Delacroix. Like all the greater painters he was self-taught. The essence
of knowledge is untransmittable. True, he occasionally visited the
studio of Guerin, but his real education came from the Louvre where he
copied Veronese, Titian and Rubens. His insight was keen but not deep,
and at first he did little more than absorb the surface aspects of
others, though he did this with intelligence. Later, by devious steps
both forward and back, he became the bridge from the eighteenth century
to Impressionism, just as Cezanne became the stepping stone from
Impressionism to art's latest manifestations.
In 1822 Delacroix exposed his first canvas, Dante et Virgile aux Enfers,
one of the finest debut pictures ever recorded. Superficially it is his
most obvious influence of Rubens whom he deeply respected; and in it are
also discoverable the exaggerations and disproportions of Michelangelo.
Thiers lauded it, and so great was its popularity that the government
bought it for 2,000 francs. Rubens still held him firmly two years later
in the Massacre de Scio, although there were in the picture indubitable
indications of the advent of Venice. This picture was to be hung in the
famous _Salon_ of 1824, where Lawrence, Bonington, Fielding, and
Constable (who were to have such a great influence on his later work)
exposed. The Massacre de Scio was ready for shipment when, just before
the _vernissage_, Delacroix saw a canvas by Constable done in the
divisionistic method. At once he felt the necessity for colour
expression, and going home he entirely repainted his picture.
This was the turning-point in his art. He had admired the green in
Constable's landscape, and had spoken of it to the other. Constable
explained that the superiority of the green in his prairies was due to
the fact that he had composed it with a multitude of different greens.
Here Delacroix's keen perception got to work. In his Journal he wrote:
"What Constable says of the green of his prairies can be applied to all
the other tones as well." By this method, primitive as it seems today,
he beheld a way of augmenting the dramatic significance of his
conceptions. The next year, 1825, he went to London to study the English
painters at closer range. There he learned much from Bonington, as he
did from Constable, and in one of his letters he wrote: "Grey is the
enemy of all painting.... Let us banish from our palette all earth
colours." And later he forecasted the Impressionistic methods by
writing: "It is good not to let each brush stroke melt into the others;
they will appear uniform at a certain distance by the sympathetic law
which associates them. Colour obtained thus has more energy and
freshness. The more opposition in colour, the more brilliance."
Delacroix's intelligence, reconnoitring along these lines, formulated
other principles. Among many observations concerning colour, he wrote:
"If to a composition, interesting in its choice of subject, you add a
disposition of lines, which augments the impression, a chiaroscuro which
seizes the imagination, and a colour which is adapted to the characters,
it is then a harmony, and its combinations are so adapted that they
produce a unique song.... A conception, having become a composition,
must move in the _milieu_ of a colour peculiar to it. There seems to be
a particular tone belonging to some part of every picture which is a key
that governs all the other tones.... The art of the colourist seems to
be related in certain ways to mathematics and music." That he believed
in the exact science of colour is further attested to by the fact that
he made a dial on which noon represented red, six o'clock green, one
o'clock blue, seven o'clock orange--and so on through the hours with the
opposition of complementaries.
Evidences of these experimentations are dimly discerned in a number of
his minor canvases done between 1827 and the Revolution. In 1832, after
he had painted the admirable La Liberte Guidant le Peuple sur les
Barricades, he visited Morocco. Before this event his work had contained
many of the elements of sumptuousness and sensuality; but in this
eastern land his colour reached maturity. Studying the productions of
the native crafts in their relation to colour, he dreamed of making
pictures as variegated as rugs and vases. In this he was trespassing on
the precincts of Veronese who had made pictorial use of the products
of the Orient and of Africa. On his return he painted Les Femmes d'Alger
dans Leur Appartement. This picture, one of his best, embodies most of
his colour theories. In it we find cold shadows opposed to hot lights,
and the contiguous placing of complementaries.
[Illustration: LES FEMMES D'ALGER DANS LEUR APPARTEMENT by DELACROIX]
Delacroix looked upon himself as a colourist. But while his theories
were in the main sound they did not go far enough. They were important
only as a starting point. His colour is hardly noticeable today, and in
no wise does it sum up his artistic interest for us. Gauguin once said
that we get Delacroix's full significance in black-and-white
reproduction. This comes perilously near being true. Today his pictures
appear as devoid of brilliancy as those of the Venetians. Yet, when he
first exhibited, he was reproached for his raucous tones. The critics
called his Massacre de Scio the "massacre of painting," and added, "_il
court sur les toits_." His men and women, the shadows of whose flesh
were coloured with blues and greens, were stigmatised "corpses," and he
was accused of having used the morgue for his studio.
All this mattered little. Delacroix's real significance as an artist lay
in his drawing which was his greatest asset. What raised him above the
general run of painters, baroque and otherwise, was his slight talent
for composition. Often in his Journal he speaks of the "balance of
lines." He knew that with the masters of the Renaissance it was common
property, and that modern painting had lost it; and he strove to
reintroduce it into art. But he never got beyond the simplest synthesis
of the least compounded of Rubens's figure pieces. For instance, in the
Bataille de Taillebourg--an excellent example of his dramatic method--it
will be noted that the canvas opens at the bottom-centre to form a
triangle of struggling forms, and that in the breach thus made the
rearing charger looms white. The identical composition can be found in
La Justice, La Liberte, the Janissaires a l'Attaque, La Lutte de Jacob
avec l'Ange, the Enlevement de Rebecca and the Entree des Croises a
Jerusalem. In this last canvas, his most masterful, the triangle is
complicated by a curved line running inward from the centre. This
picture recalls, almost to every detail, Rubens's The Adoration of the
Wise Men of the East, in the Antwerp Museum. However, it marks a great
progress from the symmetricality of his _toile de debut_, and though in
it Rubens is consciously imitated--if not indeed plagiarised, Delacroix
gets nearer to the spirit of Veronese than to that of the Flemish
master.
Among the paintings wherein the simple, three-sided composition does not
appear, the most notable are his animal pictures (in which he
substituted the S design) and those canvases in which his momentary
admiration for others (as for Veronese in the Retour de Christophe
Colomb, and for the Dutch in Cromwell au Chateau de Windsor) made him
forget himself. Even this primitive comprehension of linear balance had
passed out of French painting with the death of Poussin, and its
reapparition in Delacroix is analogous to the impetus toward rhythm
which was given to the stiff Byzantine painting of Venice by Nicolo di
Pietro and Giovanni da Bologna in the fourteenth century.
In Rubens we find turbulent movement, as great as in life itself,
organised in such a way that all the emotions, exalted, depressive,
dramatic, are expressed. But in Delacroix there is merely co-ordinated
action. And this action, even in the busiest centres of his canvases, is
more suggestive of unrest than of movement. However, the real cause for
his failure to express a spirit as modern as Rubens's lay in his
inability to understand the opposition in rhythmic line-balance of three
dimensions which is to be found in even the slightest of Rubens's
canvases. His details are always interesting, but he never succeeded in
welding them into a sequacious and interrelated whole. His high gift of
invention was inadequate equipment for so difficult a feat. Compare
Rembrandt's exquisite bathing girl in the London National Gallery and
Delacroix's La Grece Expirant sur les Ruines de Missolonghi. In
technical treatment these two paintings are not unlike, but the
scattered feeling and lack of plastic concentration in the latter
emphasises the superior force of the Dutchman.