Delacroix was set against him, and the critics, without understanding
him, obscured the true importance of his art by talking of his want of
transcendentalism and sentiment. Especially were his landscapes the butt
of their ridicule, for painters up to that time had made use of
conventional arrangements of dainty trees copied for their drawing and
tone. In Courbet all this was changed. He organised landscapes as he did
still-lives and nudes. Objects, as such, meant nothing to him. In this
he struck a new and modern note which the good people of his day
considered not only bad art but a slur upon the spiritual meanings of
nature. Even in Les Baigneuses, where the figures are unimportant, the
trees are superb. In La Grotte he went further, for here the figure was
part of the whole. His paintings of the hills about Ornans had a
movement which gave off a sensation of weight entirely new in painting.
In Les Grands Chataigniers he reached his apogee in landscape painting.
This picture is greater than those of any of the Englishmen.
Though many critics have written that Millet influenced Courbet, the
reverse is the truth. The former's life work was largely a repetition of
the lights and darks found in Courbet's earlier pictures. Les Casseurs
de Pierres is far greater than anything Millet has ever done, despite
the vast popularity of such purely sentimental pictures as The Angelus
and The Man with the Hoe. Courbet could never have been satisfied with
the angularity and absence of rhythm in the other's work. In Millet's
best canvases one finds at most only a parallelism of lines, and in his
lesser pictures even this amateurish attempt at organisation is lacking.
But in Les Casseurs de Pierres the arrangement is one which recalls the
competency of linear balance and development in Tintoretto's Minerva
Expelling Mars.
When Courbet entered painting, he had neither prejudices nor a _parti
pris_. He tested his ability before engaging his full complement of
resources. Though untutored, he had that cast of intelligence which no
amount of study can produce and no amount of adverse criticism
influence. Delacroix, on the other hand, was the archetype of the highly
cultured and educated man. He foresaw the necessity for radical reform,
but was unable to bring it about significantly. Courbet instinctively
projected himself into that void at the brink of which tradition halts
and the unknown begins. And because he was a man of genius he did not
return empty-handed.
The art of Courbet was too aristocratic to be appreciated. Not
aristocratic in the Delacroix sense, but isolated and superior.
Rejecting the colour discoveries of his day, he created his own
materials. Delacroix foreshadowed the medium which was to serve as a
vehicle for the achievement of future generations, but it was Courbet
who brought to art a new mental attitude without which there would be no
excuse for modern painting. By turning men's thoughts from ancient Italy
to the actualities of their own day, and by expelling the literary
canvas from art, he left those who came after him free to evolve a
medium which would translate the new vision. Delacroix's heritage to art
was intellectual, Courbet's dynamic. And though objectively the work of
Courbet is the uglier and less gracious, in it there is more of the
sublime. But both men are indispensable, and have a just claim to the
eternal respect of posterity.
The construction of form as voluminous phenomena--that integer of modern
painting which was lacking in Delacroix, Turner and Courbet, but which
has become one of the leading preoccupations of present-day artists--was
introduced by Honore Daumier. This painter who, unlike his three great
contemporaries, fought for the pure love of the fight, was celebrated as
a caricaturist at twenty-five. Such fame was warranted, for he was
unquestionably the greatest and most trenchant caricaturist the world
has ever produced. From 1835 to 1848 he made capital of all those many
catastrophes which overtook France. Only the curtailing of the freedom
of the press on December 2, 1848, put an end to his career as
publicist. This culmination of his editorial activities was a beneficial
thing for both Daumier and the world, for it permitted him freedom to
devote himself wholly to the development of the larger side of his
genius. He endeavoured to interest his friends in his painting; but too
long had he been known as a critic of current topics for them to look
with serious eyes upon his more solid endeavours.
But though neglected by his friends, Daumier holds a position of
tremendous importance in relation to the moderns. His work developed
along lines unthought-of by either Delacroix or Courbet. Even his
cartoons were more than clever pictorial comments on national events.
Intrinsically they were great pieces of rugged flesh which had all the
appearance of having been chiselled out of a solid medium with a dull
tool. The richness of his line is as complete as in Rembrandt's
etchings; and his economy of means reached a point to which painters had
not yet attained. His significance, however, lies more especially in his
new method of obtaining volume than in the flexibility of his line
drawings. He built his pictures in tone first. The drawing came
afterward as a direct result of the tonal volumes. This new manner of
painting permitted him a greater subtlety and fluency than Courbet
possessed. In fact, Daumier's comprehension of form in the subjective
sense was greater than that of any Frenchman up to his time. Compare,
for instance, Daumier's canvas, Les Lutteurs, with Courbet's picture of
the same name. The massiveness of the one is monumental. One feels the
weight of the two struggling men, heavy and shifting, clinging and
panting. They are modelled by a craftsman who can juggle deftly with his
means. In Courbet's picture the figures are seen carefully copied in a
strained pose by one who has not the complete mastery of his tools. In
Daumier's picture we also sense that elusive but vital quality called
mental attitude. Superficially it is almost indistinguishable from its
negation, but to those who know its significance, it is of permeating
importance.
Contour and shading to his forerunners had meant two separated and
distinct steps in the construction of form. Daumier created both
qualities simultaneously as one emotion. Depth with other painters was
obtained by carrying their figures into the background by the means of
line and perspective. With Daumier it meant a plastic building up of
volume from the background forward. The feeling we have before his
canvases that we are looking at form itself and not merely an excellent
representation of it, is as strong as it is in a greater way when we
stand before a Leonardo da Vinci. In this he gave proof that he was a
draughtsman in the most vital sense. Unless he had felt form uniquely,
Le Repos des Saltimbanques and Le Bain would have been impossible of
creation. This last picture sums up what Carriere aspired to but failed
to attain.
[Illustration: LE BAIN by DAUMIER]
Recalling the great masters of form we instinctively visualise
Michelangelo first. For this reason perhaps Michelangelo is regarded the
major influence in Daumier. "_Il avait du Michel Ange dans la peau_,"
say the French: and certain it is that Daumier's colossal simplicity and
feeling for tactility were derived from the Renaissance master. But
only in one picture, a composition called La Republique--1848, do we find
any direct and conscious influence. Frankly this is but a modernisation
of one of the sibyls on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The truth is
Daumier is more akin to Rembrandt than to Michelangelo. But there is in
him none of the conscious copying of Rembrandt that we find, for
instance, in Joshua Reynolds. The latter, admiring Rembrandt, essayed to
equal his power by imitating his externals with academic processes.
Daumier, temperamentally affiliated with his master, went deeper.
Putting aside the results of Rembrandt's final brush strokes, he studied
the very functioning procedure of his art. Both used the human figure as
a _terrain_ for the unceasing struggle of light against dark. In the
process of painting the infinite play and by-play of opposed values on a
given theatre, they produced form as an inevitable result.
A critic has stated of Daumier: "He left hardly anything but sketches,
splashes of colour that resolve themselves into faces...." It is said
without attempt at profundity. Nevertheless the remark unsuspectingly
touches the crucial point of Daumier's significance. The very resolution
of those "splashes of colour" into faces is the prefiguration of the
modern conception of form. In this particular Daumier, even more than
Rembrandt, was the avant-courier of Cezanne. This latter artist, through
his concern with the play of one colour on another, gave birth to form
more intensely than did either of the older men. Too much stress cannot
be laid on Daumier's contribution to modern painting. By regarding the
two drawings, La Vierge a l'Ecuelle and Renaude et Angelique--the one by
Correggio in chalk, the other by Delacroix in water-colour--we perceive
the attainment of form by less profound methods. But neither possesses
the significance of Daumier's work.
Of Daumier's colour little need be said. At times it emerges from its
sombreness and blossoms forth in all the hot softness of now the
Venetians, of again the Spaniards; but compared with the artist's genius
for plastic form it is of subsidiary importance.
Although the inception of Daumier's greatness can be traced to
Rembrandt, he reacted to many influences. Suggestions of Monnier and
Granville are to be found in his work. Decamps's Sonneurs de Cloches was
studied by him and emulated. His simplifications stemmed from Ingres,
and his caricature of Guizot had the same qualities as that master's
portraits. Delacroix also had some trifling influence on him in such
paintings as Don Quichotte. But Daumier's influence on others is more
direct and far-reaching than his own garnerings of inspiration. He
foreshadowed the formal abbreviations of Toulouse-Lautrec, Forain and
Steinlen, and he affected, more than is commonly admitted, the works of
Manet, Degas, and Van Gogh. In his sculptured pieces, Ratapoil and Les
Emigrants, he paved the way for Meunier and Rodin. Even such minor men
as Max Beerbohm learned much from him without understanding him. And
apart from the vital new methods he brought to painting, the originality
of his subject-matter led modern men to copy him thematically. Le Drame
fathered a whole series of Degas's paintings.
Daumier is only beginning to receive the intelligent appreciation which
in time may engulf his eminent contemporary, Courbet. For if choice
there is between the intrinsically artistic achievements of the painter
of L'Enterrement a Ornans and the creator of Silene, the preference
rests with Daumier.
The forces underlying the development of genius, working in conjunction
with the right circumstances, produce the fertilising methods which
nature uses to bring about a final flowering of a long period of intense
germination. Before the greatest eras of all art the battles have been
fought and won. The descendants of the pioneers become the introspective
and creative souls who open, free from the stain of combat, to the sun
of achievement. Delacroix, Turner, Courbet, Daumier--these are the men
who cleared the ground and thereby made possible a new age of aesthetic
creation. To Delacroix belongs the credit for giving an impetus to the
vitalisation of colour, and for freeing drawing from the formalisms of
the past. Turner raised the tonality of colour, and introduced a new
method for its application. Courbet heightened uniformly the
signification of objects in painting, and handed down a mental attitude
of untraditional relativity. And Daumier conceived a new vision of
formal construction. These men were the pillars of modern painting.
III
EDOUARD MANET
The purely pictorial has always been relished by the public. The
patterns of the mosaicists and very early primitives, the figured stuffs
of the East and South, the vases of China and Persia, the frescoes on
the walls of Pompeii, the drawings and prints of old Japan--all are
examples of utilitarian art during epochs when the public took delight
in the contemplation of images. Even the delicate designs on Greek
pottery, the rigid and ponderous arts of architectural Egypt and the
drawings and adorned totem poles of the North American Indians are
relics of times when the demand for art was created by the masses. For
the most part all these early crafts were limited to simple designs,
wholly obvious to the most rudimentary mind. The ancients were content
with a representation of a natural object, the likeness of a familiar
animal, the symmetry of an ornamental border, an effigy of a god in
which their abstract conceptions were given concrete form. At that time
the artist was only a craftsman--a man with a communistic mind, content
to follow the people's dictates and to reflect their taste. Art was then
democratic, understood and admired by all. It did not raise its head
about the mean level; it was abecedary, and consequently
comprehensible.
When the Greek ideal of fluent movement took birth in art and became
disseminated, drawing, painting and sculpture began to grow more
rhythmic and individual. Slowly at first and then more and more swiftly,
art became insulated. The popular joy in the native crafts, despite the
impetus of centuries behind it, decreased steadily. The antagonism of
the masses to the artist sprang up simultaneously with the disgust of
the artist for the masses. It was the inevitable result of the artist's
mind developing beyond them. He could not understand why they were no
longer in accord with him; and they, finding him in turn unfathomable,
considered him either irrational or given over to fantastic buffoonery.
So long had they been the dictator of his vision that his emancipation
from their prescriptions left them astounded and angered at his
audacity. The nobles then, feeling it incumbent upon them to defend this
new luxury of art, stepped into the breach, and for a time the people
blindly patterned their attitude on that of their superiors. Later came
the disintegration of the nobility; its caste being lost, the people no
more imitated it. From that time on, although there were a few
connoisseurs, the large majority was hostile to the artist, and made it
as difficult as possible for him to live. He was looked upon as a
madman who threatened the entire social fabric. His isolation was
severe and complete; and while many painters strove to effect a
reinstatement in public favour, art for 300 years forced its way through
a splendid evolution in the face of neglect, suspicion and ridicule.
For so many generations had the public looked upon art as the
manifestation of a disordered and dangerous brain that they found it
difficult to recognise a man in whose work was the very pictorial
essence they had originally admired. This man was Edouard Manet. Instead
of being welcomed for his reversion to decoration, strangely enough he
was considered as dangerous as his contemporary heretics, Delacroix and
Courbet. Courbet was at the zenith of his unpopularity when Manet
terminated his apprenticeship under Couture. The young painter had had
numerous clashes with his academic master, and the latter had prophesied
for him a career as reprehensible as Daumier's. Spurred on by such
incompetent rebukes, Manet determined to launch himself single-handed
into the vortex of the aesthetic struggle. This was in 1857. For two
years thereafter he put in his time to good purpose. He travelled in
Holland, Germany and Italy, and copied Rembrandt, Velazquez, Titian and
Tintoretto. These youthful preferences give us the key to his later
developments. In 1859 he painted his Le Buveur d'Absinthe, a canvas
which showed all the ear-marks of the romantic studio, and which
exemplified the propensities of the student for simplification. It was a
superficial, if enthusiastic, piece of work, and the _Salon_ of that
year was fully justified in rejecting it. Two years later Manet had
another opportunity to expose. In the meantime he had painted his La
Nymphe Surprise which, though one of his best canvases, contained all
the influence of a hurriedly digested Rembrandt and a Dutch Titian.
In 1861 these influences were still at work, but the _Salon_ not only
accepted his Le Guitarrero but, for some unaccountable reason, awarded
it with an honourable mention. In this picture, Manet's first Spanish
adaptation, are also traces of other men. Goya and even Murillo are
here--the greys of Velazquez and Courbet's modern attitude toward
realism. In this canvas one sees for the first time evidences of its
creator's technical dexterity, a characteristic which later he was to
develop to so astonishing a degree. But this picture, while
conspicuously able, is, like L'Enfant a l'Epee and also Les Parents de
l'Artiste, the issue of immaturity. Such paintings are little more than
the adroit studies of a highly talented pupil inspired by the one-figure
arrangements of Velazquez, Mazo and Carreno. Where Manet improved on the
average student was in his realistic methods. While he did not present
the aspect of nature in full, after the manner of Daubigny and Troyon,
he stated its generalisations by painting it as seen through half-closed
eyes, its parts accentuated by the blending of details into clusters of
light and shadow. This method of visualisation gives a more forceful
impression as an image than can a mere accurate transcription. As slight
an innovation as was this form of painting, it represented Manet's one
point of departure from tradition, although it was in truth but a
modification of the traditional manner of copying nature. The public,
however, saw in it something basically heretical, and derided it as a
novelty. The habit of ridicule toward any deviation from artistic
precedent had become thoroughly fixed, ever since Delacroix's
heterodoxy.
It was not until 1862 that Manet, as the independent and professional
painter, was felt. Up to this time his talent and capabilities had
outstripped his powers of ideation. But with the appearance of Lola de
Valence the man's solidarity was evident. This picture was exposed with
thirteen other works at Martinet's the year following. It was hung
beside the accepted and familiar Fontaineleau painters, Corot, Rousseau
and Diaz; and almost precipitated a riot because of its informalities.
In these fourteen early Manets are discoverable the artist's first
tendencies towards simplification for other than academic reasons. Here
the abbreviations and economies, unlike those in Le Buveur d'Absinthe,
constitute a genuine inclination toward emphasising the spontaneity of
vision. By presenting a picture, free from the stress of confusing
items, the eye is not seduced into the by-ways of detail, but permitted
to receive the image as an ensemble. This impulse toward simplification
was prefigured in his Angelina now hanging in the Luxembourg Gallery.
Here he modelled with broad, flat planes of sooty black and chalky
white, between which there were no transitional tones. While in this
Manet was imitating the externals of Daumier, he failed to approach that
master's form. Consequently he never achieved the plasticity of volume
which Daumier, alone among the modern men, had possessed. However,
despite Manet's failure to attain pliability, these early paintings are,
in every way, sincere efforts toward the creation of an individual
style. It was only later, after his first intoxicating taste of
notoriety, that the _arriviste_ spirit took possession of him and led
him to that questionable and unenviable terminus, popularity. One can
imagine him, drunk with eulogy, reading some immodest declaration of
Courbet's in which was set forth that great man's egoistic confidence,
and saying to himself: "_Tiens! Il faut que j'aille plus loin._"
The famous _Salon des Refuses_, called by some critics of the day the
_Salon des Reprouves_, gave Manet his chance to state in striking
fashion his beliefs in relation to aesthetics. For whereas mere realism
could no longer excite the animosity of the official _Salon_ jury, as it
had done twenty years before, immorality--or, as Manet chose to put it,
_franchise_--could. Therefore Manet was barred from the company of the
Barbizon school and the other favourites of the day. In the _Salon des
Refuses_, which must be held to the credit of Napoleon III, those
painters who had suffered at the hands of the academic judges were
allowed a hearing. Whistler, Jongkind, Pissarro and Manet here made
history. Manet sent Le Bain, which, through the insistence of the
public, has come to be called Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe. But despite the
precedent of Giorgione's Rural Concert (the Concert Champetre in the
Louvre), it was looked upon only as the latest manifestation of
degeneracy in a man who gave every promise of becoming a moral pariah.
The nude, contrasted as it was with attired figures, was too suggestive
of sheer nakedness. Had the nude stood alone, as in Ingres's La Source,
or among other nudes, as in Ingres's Le Bain Turc, the picture would
have caused no comment. Its departures in method were not extravagant.
The scene is laid out of doors, yet it bears all the evidences of the
studio conception; and those lights and reflections which later were
brought to such perfection in the pictures of the Impressionists and
Renoir, are wholly absent. But in one corner is a beautifully painted
still-life of fruits, a basket and woman's attire, which alone should
have made the picture acceptable. This branch of painting Manet was to
develop to its highest textural possibilities.
From this time on Manet no longer used the conventional chiaroscuro of
the academicians. Instead he let his lights sift and dispel themselves
evenly over the whole of his groupings. This mode of procedure was
undoubtedly an influence of the Barbizon painters who had done away with
the brown sauce of the _soi-disant_ classicists. In his rejection of
details and his discovery of a means whereby effects could be obtained
by broad planes, Manet was forced by necessity to take the step toward
this simplification of light. Were colour to be used consistently in
conjunction with his technique, it must be spread on in large flat
surfaces. By diffusing his light the opportunity was made. He might have
omitted the element of colour from his work and contented himself with
black and white, as in the case of Courbet; but he was too sensitive to
its possibilities. He had observed it in the Venetians and Franz Hals,
as well as in nature; and in its breadth and brilliance he had
recognised its utility in enhancing a picture's decorative beauty. Even
the colour of Velazquez was at times sumptuous. Manet, because his
simplicity of manner permitted a liberal application of colour, was able
to augment its ornamental power. It is true that today his large and
irregular patches of tints appear grey, but, to his contemporaries,
their very extension made them seem blatant and bold.
Courbet remained in great part the slave to the common vision of
reality. In his efforts to attain results he sacrificed little. This, in
itself, delimited his accomplishments. Nature to him appeared nearly
perfect, and he painted with all the wonderment of a child opening its
eyes on the world for the first time. On the other hand, Manet realised
that nature's forces become objective only through an intellectual
process. This attitude marked a decided step in advance of Courbet.
Manet painted single figures and simple images devoid of all anecdotal
significance, out of his pure love of his medium and his sheer delight
in tone and contour. In other words, he represented the modern spirit
which repudiates objects conducive to reminiscence, and cares only for
"qualities" in art. His intentions were those of Courbet pushed to
greater freedom. Unlike his master he was a virtuoso of the brush. His
very facility perhaps accounts for his satisfaction with flat
decoration, for it concentrated his interest on the actual _pate_ and
thereby precluded a deeper research into the psychology of aesthetic
emotion. But in his insistence on the aesthetic rather than the
illustrative side of painting he carried forward the ideals which were
to epitomise modern methods.