necessities of the day forced him, in his choice of themes, to adopt a
circumscribed repertoire, the subjects of which he repeated constantly.
In him we have mastery of composition with the substance as an
after-thought. Delacroix conceived his canvases in the romantic mould,
and adapted his compositions so as to bring out the salient
characteristics of his chosen theme. This was illustration with the
_arriere pensee_ of organisation. Daumier struck the average between
these two and conceived his subject in the form he was to use. Courbet
minimised the importance of objects as such by raising them all to the
same level of adaptability: but he invariably chose, as with an _idee
fixe_, his subjects from the life about him. Manet cared nothing for any
subject whether traditional or novel. That he generally chose modern
themes was indicative of that new mental attitude which recognises the
unimportance of subject-matter and urges the painter to abandon thematic
research and utilise the things at hand. He made his art out of the
materials nearest him, irrespective of their intrinsic topical value.
This was certainly an important step in the liberating of art from
convention. It proclaimed the right of the artist to paint what he
liked. Courbet would have painted goddesses if he had seen them. Manet
would have painted them without having seen them, provided he had
thought the result warranted the effort. Courbet, the father of
naturalism, extended the scope of subject-matter, while Manet tore away
the last tie which bound it to any tradition, whether Courbet's or
Titian's. After him there was nothing new to paint. It is therefore
small wonder that artists should now have become interested in the
forces of nature rather than in nature's mien. Manet, by his
consummation of theme, foreshadowed the concern with abstractions which
has now swept over the world of aesthetics. Zola, like him in other ways,
never equalled him in this. L'Assommoir and Fecondite portrayed only the
extremes of realism. Manet painted all things with equal pleasure. Here
again is evident the continuation of that mental attitude which Courbet
introduced into painting. The qualities in Manet which inclined toward
abstraction have secured him the reputation for being a greater
generaliser than Courbet whose brutal naturalism could not be
dissociated in the public mind from concrete and strict materialism. For
this contention there is substantiation of a superficial nature. But a
mere tendency toward generalisation, with no other qualifications, does
not indicate greatness. In fact, were this purely literal truth
concerning Manet conclusive, it would tend to disqualify him in his
claim to an importance greater than Courbet's. Carriere is an example of
a painter who is general and nothing more. Manet had other titles to
consideration.
What Manet's enduring contributions to painting were have never been
surmised by the public. His recognition, coming as it did years after
his most significant works had been accomplished and set aside, was due
to a reversion of the public's mind to its aboriginal admirations. Manet
is popular today for the same reason that the lesser works of Hokusai
and Hiroshige are popular, namely: they present an instantaneous image
which is at once flat and motionless. As in the days of the mosaicists
and early primitives, the appreciation of such works demands no
intellectual operation. Their recognisable subjects only set in motion a
simple process of memory. The Olympia, Manet's most popular painting,
illustrates the type of picture which appeals strongly to minds innocent
of aesthetic depth. Its mere imagery is alluring. As pure decoration it
ranks with Puvis de Chavannes. But in it are all the mistakes of the
later Impressionists. Manet consciously attempted the limning of light,
but brilliance alone resulted. He did not realise that, in order for one
to be conscious of illumination, shadow is necessary. This latter
element, with its complementary, produces in us the sensation of volume.
True, there is in the Olympia violent contrast between the nude body,
the bed and the flowers, on the one hand, and the background, the
negress and the cat, on the other; but it is only the contrast of
dissimilar atmospheres. The level appearance of the picture is not
relieved.
The cardinal shortcoming in a painting of this kind is that it fails to
create an impression of either the aspects or the forces of nature. Such
pictures are only flat representations of nature's minor
characteristics. The most resilient imagination cannot endow them with
form: the intelligence is balked at every essay to penetrate beyond
their surface. In contemplating them one is irritated by the emptiness,
or rather the solidity, of the _neant_ which lies behind. Courbet called
the Olympia "the queen of spades coming from her bath." Titian, had he
lived today, would have styled it a photograph. Goya (who is as much to
blame for it as either Courbet or Titian) would have considered its
shallowness an inexcusable vulgarity. In painting it undoubtedly Manet's
intention was to modernise Titian's Venus Reclining now hanging in the
Uffizi; just as later it was Gauguin's intention, in his La Femme aux
Mangos, to endow the Olympia with a South Sea Island setting. Such
adaptations are indefensible provided they do not improve upon their
originals. There is no improvement in Gauguin's Venus; and Manet's
picture, while it advances on Titian in attitude, is a decided
retrogression viewed from the standpoint of form.
In such pictures as the Olympia, Nana and La Jarretiere we recognise
Manet's effort to obtain notoriety. He was not an aristocrat as was
Courbet or Goya or Titian. It was not a need for freer expression that
induced him to paint pictures which shocked by their unconventionality,
but a desire to _abasourdir les bourgeois_. In choosing his
subject-matter he always had a definite end in view in relation to the
public; but his conceptions were spontaneous and were recorded without
deliberation. He painted with but little thought as to his method. This
fact is no doubt felt by the public and held in his favour by those who
believe in the involuntary inspiration of the artist. But art cannot be
judged by such childish criteria. Can one imagine Giotto, Michelangelo
or, to come nearer our day, Cezanne painting without giving the closest
and most self-conscious study to his procedure? Credence in the
theopneusty of the painter, the poet and the musician, should have
passed out with the advent of Delacroix; but the seeming mystery of art
is so deeply rooted in public ignorance that many generations must pass
before it can be eradicated.
The truth is that Manet himself had no precise idea of what he really
wished to accomplish. Up to the last year of his life he groped
tentatively toward a goal, the outlines of which were never quite
distinct. We today, looking back upon his efforts, can judge his
motivating influences with some degree of surety. In bringing about the
paradox of staticising Courbet, Manet feminised him. He turned Courbet's
blacks and greys into pretty colours, and thereby turned his modelling
into silhouette and flattened his volumes. Thus was Courbet not only
made effeminate but popularised. Compare the superficially similar
pictures, Le Hamac of Courbet and Manet's Le Repos. In the former the
movement in composition accords with the landscape and is carried out in
the pose of the woman's arms and in the disposition of the legs. The
figure in the latter picture is little more than an ornament--a
symmetrical articulation. Manet has here translated the rhythm of depth
into linear balance. In this levelling process all those qualities which
raise painting above simple mosaics are lost. A picture thus treated
becomes a pattern, incapable of embodying any emotional significance.
Manet's paintings are remembered because they are so instantaneous a
vision of their subjects. For this same reason Goya is remembered; but
beneath the Spaniard's broad oppositions of tone is a limpid depth in
which the intelligence darts like a fish in an aquarium. In Manet the
impassable barrier of externals shuts out that world which exists on
the further side of a picture's surface.
In Manet we have the summing up of the pictorial expression of all time.
His love for decoration never left him long enough for him to experiment
with the profounder phases of painting. In many of his canvases he was
little more than an exalted poster-maker. His Rendez-vous de Chats was
frankly a primitive arrangement of flat drawing, as flat as a print by
Mitsuoki. Even details and texture were eliminated from it. It was a
statement of his theories reduced to their bare elements. Yet, though
exaggerated, the picture was representative of his aims. A pattern to
him was form. Courbet's ability to model an eye was the cause of Manet's
repudiating the painter of L'Enterrement a Ornans. The two men were
antithetical; and in that antithesis we have Manet's aspirations fully
elucidated. Even later in life when he took the figure out of doors he
was unable to shake off the influence of the silhouette. But the
silhouette cannot exist _en plain air_. Light volatilises design. This
knowledge accounts for Renoir's early sunlight effects. Manet never
advanced so far.
The limitations and achievements of Manet are summed up in his painting,
Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe. This picture is undoubtedly interesting in its
black-and-white values and in its freedom from the conventions of
traditional composition. At first view its theme may impress one as an
attempt at piquancy, but on closer inspection the actual subject
diminishes so much in importance that it might have been with equal
effect a simple landscape or a still-life. There is no attempt at
composition in the classic sense. Even surface rhythm is entirely
missing: the tonal masses decidedly overweigh on the left. But the
picture nevertheless embodies the distinguishing features of all Manet's
arrangements. It is built on the rigid pyramidal plan. From the lower
left-hand corner a line, now light, now dark, reaches almost to the
upper frame at a point directly above the smaller nude; and another
line, which begins in the lower right-hand corner at the reclining man's
elbow, runs upward to his cap, and is then carried out in the shadow and
light of the foliage so that it meets the line ascending from the other
side. The base of these two converging lines is formed by another line
which runs from the man's elbow along his extended leg. This is the
picture's important triangle. But a secondary one is formed by a line
which begins at the juncture of the tree and shadow in the lower
right-hand corner, extends along the cane and the second man's sleeve to
his head, and then drops, by way of the large nude's head and shoulder,
to the basket of fruit at the bottom. This angularity of design is seen
in the work of all primitive-minded peoples, and is notably conspicuous
in the early Egyptians, the archaic Greeks and the Assyrians of the
eighth century B.C. It is invariably the product of the static
intelligence into which the comprehension of aesthetic movement has never
entered. It is the result of a desire to plant objects solidly and
immovably in the ground. Those artists who express themselves through it
are men whose minds are incapable of grasping the rhythmic attributes of
profound composition. Manet repeats this triangular design in the
Olympia where the two adjoining pyramids of contour are so obvious that
it is unnecessary to describe them. The figures in canvases such as La
Chanteuse des Rues, La Femme au Perroquet, Eva Gonzales and Emile Zola
are constructed similarly; and in groups like En Bateau and Les Anges au
Tombeau (the latter of which recalls, by its arrangement and lighting,
the Thetis et Jupiter of Ingres) is expressed the mental immobility
which characterised Conegliano, Rondinelli, Robusti and their
seventeenth-century exemplars, de La Fosse, Le Moyne and Rigaud.
[Illustration: LE DEJEUNER SUR L'HERBE by MANET]
If, however, Manet failed in the larger tests, he excelled in his
ability to beautify the surfaces of his models. His painting of texture
is perhaps the most competent that has ever been achieved. In his flesh,
fruits and stuffs, the sensation of hard, soft, rough or velvety
exteriors reaches its highest degree of pictorial attainment. These many
and varied textures are reunited in his Le Dejeuner--a canvas which must
not be confused with Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe. Here we have a plant, a
vase, four different materials in the boy's clothing, a straw hat, a
brass jug with all its reflections, a table cloth, a wall, an old sword,
glassware, fruit and liquid. It is an orgy of textures, and Manet must
have gloried in it. One critic of the day wondered why oysters and a cut
lemon lay on the breakfast table. But we wonder why a cat with fluffy
fur is not there also. Castagnary suggested that Manet, feeling himself
to be the master of still-life, brought every possible texture into a
single canvas for purposes of contrast and because he delighted in the
material quality of objects. But the reason goes deeper. Manet was a
superlatively conscious technician, and that _sacree commodite de la
brosse_, so displeasing to Delacroix, was his greatest intoxication.
Hals also was seduced by it. Later, when the new vision of light was
communicated to Manet by the Impressionists, his obsession for the
purely technical diminished in intensity. In that topical bid for
popularity, the Combat du Kerseage et de l'Alabama, we detect his
interest in a new economy of means which would facilitate his search for
broader illumination. This method took a step forward in Le Port de
Bordeaux, and later reached maturity in his canvases painted in 1882, of
which Le Jardin de Bellevue is a good example. But despite his heroic
efforts, these last pictures, painted a year before he died when
paralysis had already claimed him and he was devoting his time almost
entirely to still-life, were without fulgency, and never approached the
richness of even so slight a colourist as Monet.
Repose is a word used overmuch by modern critics to designate the
dominant quality of Manet's painting. From an entirely pictorial point
of view the word is applicable, but in the precise aesthetic sense it is
a misnomer. The illusion of repose in Manet is accounted for by his even
use of greys, as in Le Chemin de Fer, Le Port de Bordeaux, the Execution
de Maximilien and the Course de Taureaux. Even in Les Bulles de Savon,
the Rendez-vous de Chats, Le Clair de Lune and Le Bar des
Folies-Bergere--canvases in which is exhibited Manet's greatest
opposition of tones--the ensemble is expressive of monotony. Real
repose, however, is something much more recondite than uniformity or
tedium. It is created by a complete harmonious organisation, not by an
avoidance of movement. Giotto's Death of Saint Francis and El Greco's
Annunciation have a simultaneity of presentation as unique as in Manet;
but, because their compositions are so rhythmically co-ordinated, they
present an absolute finality of movement and thus engender an emotional
as well as an ocular repose.
Manet's actual innovations are small, smaller even than Courbet's.
However, many critics credit him with grotesque novelties. There are
very few books dealing with modern painting which do not assert that he
was the first to note that flesh in the light is dazzlingly bright and
of a cream-and-rose colour. But in this particular there is no
improvement in Manet on the pictures of Rubens. He may have unearthed
this illustrative point; certain it is he did not originate it. Yet no
matter how slight his departures, we enjoy his pictures for their
inherent aesthetic qualities, and not for their approximation to nature.
Manet made many mistakes, but this was natural when we remember that in
the whirlpool of new ambitions one is prone to forget the lessons of the
past. Only by profiting by them can one go on toward the ever advancing
goal of achievement. We must not forget that this new spirit of
endeavour is only an impulse towards something greater, a rebellion
against arbitrarily imposed obstacles. If men like Manet lost track of
the fundamentals of the great art which had preceded them, it was only
that their vision was clouded by new experiments.
The actual achievements of Manet epitomise the secondary in art. His
attempt to combine artistic worth with popularity restricted him. That
he was misunderstood at first was his own fault in continually changing
his style. But acceptance or rejection by popular opinion does not
indicate the measure of a painter's significance. And Manet is to be
judged by his contributions to the new idea. His importance lay in that
he took the second step of the three which were to exhaust the
possibilities of realism. In art every genuine method is consummated
before a new one can take its place. Michelangelo brought architecture
to its highest point of development; Rubens, linear painting; the
Impressionists, the study of light; Beethoven, the classic ideal in
music; Swinburne, the rhymed lyric. In fact, only after the _epuisement_
of a certain line of endeavour, is felt the necessity to seek for a new
and more adequate means of expression. Manet helped bring to a close a
certain phase of art, thus hastening the advent of other and greater
men. His accomplishments now stand for all that is academic and
student-like; and although his interest as an innovator passed out with
the appearance of Pissarro and Monet, men go on imitating his externals
and using his brushing. In the same sense that Velazquez is a great
painter, so is Manet. His influence has served the purpose of helping
turn aside the academicians from their emulation of Italian painting.
IV
THE EARLY IMPRESSIONISTS
Courbet was the first painter to turn his attention to naturalism. Manet
carried forward Courbet's standard. Impressionism took the last step,
and brought to a close the objectively realistic conception in painting.
By this final development of naturalistic means unlimited opportunities
for achievement were offered. Impressionistic methods are now employed
by a vast army of painters in all parts of the world, and the number of
canvases which owe their existence to these discoveries is countless.
Specifically Impressionism is ocular realism. It represents that side of
actuality which has to do with light expressed by colour; and deals with
a manner of approaching natural valuations whereby the painter is
permitted to transfer a scene or subject to his canvas in such a way
that it will give the spectator the sensation of dazzling light, broad
atmosphere and truthful colours. To accomplish this Impressionism
confines itself to the play of a light from a given source--its
reflections and distributions on an object or a landscape. Therefore, it
is the restricted study of the disappearance of the local colour in a
model, and of the luminosity and divergencies of tones to be found in
shadow. It approximates to a nature which becomes, for the moment, a
theatre of chromatic light sensations. Subject-matter gave the
Impressionists no concern. They advanced materially on the spirit in
Manet which led him to paint any object at hand because of its
susceptibility to artistic treatment. The Impressionists painted
anything, not alone for aesthetic reasons, but because all objects make
themselves visible by means of light and shadow. This manner of painting
was the ultimate divorce of the picture from any convention, whether of
arrangement, of drawing or of a fixed palette. Herein it was an elastic
process _par excellence_, with no defined limitations.
Impressionism, though analytic and self-conscious, was not based on
science. One may look in vain for parallels between its theories and
those of Dove, Thomas Young and Chevreul. It was the imitation, pure and
simple, of the disintegrations of colour in nature's broad planes. And
this achievement of _diversity in simplicity_ was brought about by the
only method possible:--the juxtaposition of myriad tints. In other words,
Impressionism was a statement that vision is the result of colour forces
coming into contact with the retina. However, the men of the movement
did not see nature as an agglomeration of coloured spots, but as a
series of planes made vibrant by light. To reproduce this vibration they
were necessitated to use nature's methods: they broke up surfaces into
sensitive parts, each one of which was a separate tint. There are no
broad planes of unified colour in nature. In each natural atom are
absorption and reflection; and the preponderance of either of these two
attributes results in a specific colour. Before the advent of this new
school painters had made warm or cold green by combining green with
yellow ochre or raw sienna, or by the admixture of blues and purples.
But the Impressionists laid on these colours, pure or modified, side by
side, and let the eye do the work of blending. They discovered not only
that in green the shadow is tinged with blue, but that blue is the
direct result of the yellow-orange of light. Every one nowadays has
noticed that, in looking fixedly at a green, it appears now bluish, now
yellowish; just as in listening to an orchestra we can, by focusing our
attention, hear predominantly the bass or the treble. So the
Impressionists observed that in the most luminous colour there is a
proportion of absorption, and that in the darkest shadow there exists
some reflection. The association of these molecular properties is what
produces vibration in nature. By the application of these observations
the Impressionists generated a feeling of _grouillement_;--the movement
by contrast in the smallest parts.
In attempting to explain their canvases many commentators have credited
them with systems of complementaries which resulted in grey, and with
other exorbitant theories of oppositions. But one may look in vain in
their work for any synthesis of scientific discoveries. Colour, not
neutrality, was their aim; and, as they themselves admitted, they
painted _comme l'oiseau chante_. Birds are not conscious of the metallic
dissonance of diminished fifths; and the Impressionists were equally
unaware of the harshness of red with green, blue with orange, yellow
with violet. They only substituted a balance of cold and warm colours
for the balance of lines which the older painters had used. They copied
the tints they found in nature after analysing nature's processes, in
order to arrive closer to its visual effect. In one way they almost
achieved colour photography, for their study, in its narrow character,
was deep, and their vision was highly realistic. But whereas they
depicted nature, they could call it up only in its instantaneous
aspects. In this ephemerality alone were they impressionists; indeed,
their methods were the most exact and probing of any painters of that
time. Each hour of the day raises or lowers the colour values in nature;
and he who would copy nature's form as a permanent interpretation must
ignore the exactitude of its reflections and approximate only to its
local colours. This latter method is more truly impressionism than the
theories of the Impressionists. They repudiated local colours as being
too illusory, holding that the most highly coloured object modifies its
tint under the influence of the least variation of light. The point is
technically true, but it is an observation in objective research, and
the word Impressionism must not be accepted as explanatory of the
methods of the school it designates.