these water-colours he did not attain his desire. He started too late in
life to acquire complete mastery over his enormous means. "One must be a
workman in one's art, must know one's method of realisation," he said.
"One must be a painter by the very qualities of painting, by making use
of the rough materials of art." He failed to gain that great facility by
which supreme realisation is achieved, because the span of life accorded
him was too short. He was old when his best work was begun, and like
Joseph Conrad, he had passed his youth before the great ambition fired
him. "Realising" to him meant the handling of his stupendous means as
easily as the academicians handled their puny ones. This he could never
do, and his age haunted him to the end. Many have taken him literally
when he said he desired to expose in Bouguereau's _Salon_, but though he
earnestly wished it, he desired to be received there as Bouguereau was:
as one who had mastered his expression. "The exterior appearance is
nothing," he explained. "The obstacle is that I don't realise
sufficiently." In other words, he did not have great enough fluency to
permit only the highest qualities of his art to be felt. In his gigantic
efforts to "realise," his pictures changed colour and form many times
before they were finished. His respect and admiration for inferior men
like Bouguereau and Couture was due to their enviable facility in
handling their means. He knew that the fundamental and unalterable laws
of organisation had been found and perfected by the old masters, and
that, so long as we were human, we must build on their discoveries.
"Only to realise like the Venetians!" he cried. And later: "We must
again become classicists by way of nature, that is to say, by
sensation.... I am old, and it is possible I shall die without having
attained this great end." A year before his death he said: "Yes, I am
too old; I have not realised, and I shall never realise now. I shall
remain the primitive of the way I have discovered."
The prediction proved true, but his destiny was none the less a glorious
one. Deprived of the phrenetic impulse which took him in all weathers
over country roads to the "motif" from six o'clock in the morning until
dark, he would never have achieved what he did. The fact of this great
modern genius going to work in a hired carriage, too weak to walk,
should be a lesson to those painters who are always awaiting the
combination of propitious circumstances which will provide them with a
perfect studio, a perfect model and a perfect desire. Cezanne, however,
knew his high place in art history. Once when Balzac's Le Chef-d'OEuvre
Inconnu was brought up in conversation and the name of its hero,
Frenhofer, was mentioned, he arose with tears in his eyes and indicated
himself with a single gesture. So sure was he of what he wanted to do
that when he failed he discarded his canvases. Many of them are only
half covered. He could never pad merely to fill out an arbitrary frame.
With Cezanne's death came his apotheosis. As he had predicted, thousands
rushed in and cleverly imitated his surfaces, his colour gamuts, his
distortions of line. His white wooden tables and ruddy apples and
twisted fruit-dishes have lately become the etiquette of sophistication.
But all this is not authentic eulogy. Derain, his most ardent imitator,
is as ignorant of him as Nadelmann is of the Greeks or Archipenko is of
Michelangelo. And the majority of those who have written books
concerning him merely echo the unintelligent commotion that goes on
about his name. Cezanne's significance lies in his gifts to the painters
of the future, to those in whom the creative instinct is a sacred and
exalted thing, to those serious and solitary men whose insatiability
makes of them explorers in new fields. To such artists Cezanne will
always be the primitive of the way that they themselves will take, for
there can be no genuine art of the future without his directing and
guiding hand. His postulates are too solidly founded on human organisms
ever to be ignored. He may be modified and developed: he can never be
set aside until the primal emotions of life are changed. Only today is
he beginning to be understood, and even now his claim to true greatness
is questioned. But Cezanne, judged either as a theorist or as an
achiever, is the preeminent figure in modern art. Renoir alone
approaches his stature. Purely as a painter he is the greatest the world
has produced. In the visual arts he is surpassed only by El Greco,
Michelangelo and Rubens.
VII
THE NEO-IMPRESSIONISTS
The Impressionists, although they turned their backs upon casual
selectivism and branched out into analytic research, had--contrary to the
generally accepted opinion--no precise and scientific method of colour
application. This came later with the advent of a group of painters who
have been called, in turn, Pointillists, Divisionists,
Chromo-luminarists and Neo-Impressionists, but who chose to regard
themselves only as the last of these four designations. And there is
perhaps more logic in this nomenclature, for it is not limited
technically; it contains no claim to achievement as does
Chromo-luminarism; and it suggests this new school's consanguinity with
the movement out of which it grew. With Delacroix's Journal, the
pictures of Claude Monet and Chevreul's pioneer treatise on colour, De
la Loi du Contraste Simultane des Couleurs, the Neo-Impressionists
evolved a coldly scientific method of technique. By carrying a simple
premise to its ultimate conclusion, regardless of everything save the
exacting demands of logic, they endeavoured to heighten the emotional
effect of the Impressionist vision. In this movement, as in other
similar ones, can be detected the spirit which animates the ardent
visionary when he contemplates a novel method--the spirit which invites
him to go to even greater extremes. In it there is as much enthusiasm as
serious purpose, as much of the essence of youth as of the _arriviste_.
In no instance has such a spirit led to significant results; and the
Neo-Impressionists prove no exception. In looking too fixedly at means,
they lost sight of their ends. Their debut took place at the last
concerted exhibition of the Impressionists in 1886 where the canvases of
Seurat and Signac were hung beside those of Cassatt, Bracquemond,
Morisot, Camille and Lucien Pissarro, Gauguin, Guillaumin, Redon,
Schuffenecker, Tillot, Degas, Forain and Vignon. Here was seen for the
first time the logical extension of the earlier methods of Monet and
Pissarro.
Georges Seurat had once been a good student at the Beaux-Arts, but his
quick, precise and questioning intelligence had saved him from falling
under the professorial injunctions. Most of his studying was done in the
art museums where he contemplated for long the old masters. Here he
discovered that "there are analogous laws which govern line, tone,
colour and composition, as much with Rubens as with Raphael, with
Michelangelo as with Delacroix: rhythm, measure and contrast." (By
rhythm, measure and contrast he meant curved lines, space and
opposition.) Still searching for the secrets of art he studied the works
of the Orient and the writings of Chevreul, Superville, Humbert, Blanc,
Rood and Helmholtz. Then, by analysing Delacroix, he found
substantiation for his discoveries. The result of this study was, as
Signac tells us, his "judicious and fertile theory of contrasts." From
1882 on he applied it to all his canvases. The theory in brief was to
use scientifically opposed spots of colour of more or less purity. This
method he might have learned direct from the first modern French master,
for in that artist's Journal are discussed at length colour division;
optical admixture; the dramatic unity of colour, line and subject; and
the juxtaposition of complementaries for brilliancy.
Paul Signac's evolution was different. He had first been under the
influence of Pissarro, Renoir, Monet and Guillaumin, and though being a
zealous pupil of their methods, he knew little of their motives. It was
only after he had observed the interplay and contrast of colours in
nature that he sought explanation in the works of his masters, the
Impressionists. Failing, he turned again to nature. In copying it, he
discovered that in the gradation from one colour to another, let us say
from blue to orange, the transition was always muddy and disagreeable
when mixed on the palette, although if distinct spots of these two
colours were juxtaposed in alternating ratio, the modulation would be
smooth and clean. This observation impelled him to seek a method whereby
this "passage" could be highly clarified. Consequently he completely
divided the Impressionists' spots so that each individual touch remained
pure and at the same time left patches of the white canvas showing for
purposes of brilliancy. His next step led him to Chevreul whose theory
of complementaries he committed to memory. His technical education he
now deemed complete.
Seurat and Signac first met at the _Salon des Artistes Independants_ in
1884, and their discoveries were at once mutually appropriated. Signac's
colour divisions, combined with Seurat's more scholarly equilibrium of
elements, formed the nucleus from which evolved the Neo-Impressionists
who later repudiated Impressionism, using it only as the point from
which they leapt off into a morass of set formulas. It was a laudable
desire on the part of these new men, especially of Seurat, to try to
snatch from a purely inspirational school its halo of mystery and to
place painting methods on a sound rationalistic basis. But while they
were right in believing a picture should be more than the visual
accompaniment to sentiments, they should have gone deeper than the mere
exterior of painting. For example, they should have tried to see in what
plastic way their colour theories could be used, instead of limiting
themselves to the synthetic unity of aesthetic illustration. And they
should have tried to make a form-producing faculty of their light
instead of introducing into it another poetic element in the shape of
dramatic line. But they were more concerned with the clothes in the
wardrobe of art than in its body. Their painting, as a result, was
without sustaining structure.
With the Impressionists, as with all significant art movements, the
desire for change and for higher emotional power came first: the method
came later. With the Neo-Impressionists this order was reversed. Their
canvases for this reason are less emotional than those of their
forerunners. By limiting their palettes to certain pure colours they
restricted their diversity of interest. Even their aim at a scientific
art has gone far of the mark because their science was in many instances
faulty. By conditioning their methods on the observations of inaccurate
writers they were able to progress only so far as these observations
went. Chevreul is far from authoritative today: in fact there is no
comprehensive scientific work on colour in existence. Tudor-Hart, the
greatest of all colour scientists, has blasted many of the older
accepted theories of such men as Helmholtz, Rood and Chevreul, and his
experiments have shown conclusively that many of their postulates are
unreliable. The Neo-Impressionists were unaware of Chevreul's errors,
and their minds were too literal to enable them to make new and more
advanced observations in the realm of colour. The meagre attention paid
them is not due to their novelty, but to the fact that they have done
nothing the Impressionists did not do better. They are like a cartridge
which, having all the combustible ingredients, fails to explode because
it is wet.
The Neo-Impressionists may, in refutation, point to music as a
scientific art. But it must be remembered that taste brought about the
construction of chords and that the mathematical explanation came later.
The primitive peoples who found an aesthetic pleasure in broken-up major
chords were ignorant of nodal points and the laws of vibration. The
early Assyrians had a pipe of three notes, C, E and G, perfectly
attuned, yet they were ignorant of the science of harmony. Taste in the
arts has always come first: science follows with its interpretations.
The Impressionists, through instinct, created their marvels of light
and atmosphere. Afterward the science of optics explained their efforts.
Personal taste was their only criterion, and no books could have taught
them their lesson, because their methods were so plastic that whatever
was to them artistically consistent was right. Had they been familiar
with science, it still would have remained to be applied: and it is only
by the superimposition of taste that knowledge in the artist becomes
pregnant. The Divisionists, by making a hard and fast code of science,
enslaved themselves to the demands of theories. The functioning of their
tastes was nullified. They therefore fell short of art.
In Signac's book, D'Eugene Delacroix au Neo-Impressionnisme, are
explained many points of divergence between this school and that of the
Impressionists. The difference of the two methods may be exemplified by
describing the manner in which each approached a landscape wherein the
grass and foliage were partly in shadow and partly in sunlight. In such
a landscape the artist's eye records a fleeting, dimly-felt impression
of red in that part of the green of the shadow which is nearest the
light region. The Impressionists, satisfied with having experienced this
sensation, hastened to put a touch of red on their canvas, while the
actual colour in nature might have been an orange, a vermilion, or even
a purple. In this haphazard choice of a red Signac detected
slovenliness. He says that the shadow of any colour is always lightly
tinted with the colour's complementary; that if the light is
yellow-green the shadow will be touched with violet; if orange, the
shadow will contain blue-green. Had the Impressionists known this fact
and cared to use it, says Signac, they could have made their pictures
scientifically correct by posing the exact complementary of light in
their shadow. And he adds that it is difficult to see in just what way
this process would have harmed their work.
It is, however, not so difficult as he imagines. If, in copying nature
by a strictly scientific vision as the Neo-Impressionists advocate, we
closely study the light, we will discover not only that a local colour
is modified by the colour of the sun's rays, but that an added suite of
colours is introduced by the absorption of some of the object's
particles, by the encompassing air, and by the circumjacent reflections.
We may have (1) the local colour which, let us say, is green, (2) the
colour of sunlight, (3) the colour caused by atmospheric conditions, (4)
the reflection of sky, and (5) the reflection of the ground.
Furthermore, if the object has any indentures their shadows will lower
to a limited degree the whole tone of the object. At the least
calculation then we have (1) green, (2) yellow-orange, (3) any colour in
the cold region of the spectrum, (4) blue or violet, and (5) green,
brown, Venetian red or any colour in the warm region of the
spectrum:--all of which colours change and shift unceasingly, dependent
on the density of the air which obscures, to a lesser or greater degree,
the sun's rays and hence changes the reflection from sky and ground,
thereby modifying the local colour. Thus it is impossible when copying
nature even to determine the colour of its lightened parts. And if a
colour premise cannot be established, it is obviously impossible to find
its exact complementary.
Suppose we admit that an approximate colour can be recorded for that
part of the landscape's green which is in the light, that is, the green
whose complement is to be placed on the outskirts of the shadow. Let us
say that this green is technically a yellow-green, since it is in the
sun. Now the complement of yellow-green is not, as the
Neo-Impressionists hold, violet, but red-violet or purple. But, were
red-violet used in the shadow, its effect would be false, because, in
order for yellow-green to call up its pure complementary, the light
itself must be an intense yellow-green--so intense in fact that the local
colour of the object (whatever it is) is entirely absorbed and unable to
influence the light. Then, and only then, would the shadow be pure
purple, for the local colour, being nullified, would not interfere with
the optical sensation of complementaries. But on an object which appears
yellow-green in the light, the yellow of which is the sun's rays and the
green the local colour, the shadow also is modified by the local colour
in the same proportion that the light is modified, only its modification
is in an opposite direction; that is, the yellow of the sun's rays, in
raising green to yellow-green, lowers the green of the shadow to
blue-green. Therefore the shadow is not the complementary of the light
colour. But in the darkest part of the shadow, which is the boundary
dividing it from the light, there is a sensation of red derived from
purple, purple being the complementary of the yellow-green. Thus in a
blue object, though the pure complementary of the lighted part would be
orange, the shadow in sunlight is merely dark blue with that fugitive
sensation of red through it. In the shadow on such an object Signac
calls for pure orange, claiming that a vermilion, a lake or a purple is
out of place. His colour science in the abstract may be unimpeachable,
but his physics is faulty. The _sensation_ caused by the complementary
of the lighted part is that of a reddish tint; and so long as the
painter introduces a colour into the shadow so as to give this
impression of red, he is at least empirically, though not
scientifically, correct. There is only a sensation of red, not a
definite spot where red can be placed; and for the canvas to be truthful
emotionally there must be only that sensation of red in the painted
shadow. And the only way to produce it without making a spot of orange,
which is a light colour and which in its pure state has no properties in
common with shadow, is to use a colour which is intimately connected
with shadow and which contains the elements of both light and shadow.
Thus in the cold bluish-orange shadow of a blue object there must be
placed a cold lake or a purple which partakes of both the light and
shadow and therefore does not offend the eye by its isolation. In the
bluish or blue-green shadow of a yellow-green object, a purple is too
aggressive and blatant, while a blue-violet or an attenuated violet is
doubly harmonious.
Indeed there is another reason why complementaries should not be used,
but merely their approximations set down. Perfect complementaries
neutralise each other and, when optically mixed or applied in such small
particles in a pure state that at a short distance the eye cannot
distinguish their limitations, produce a metallic and acid grey which is
to colour harmony what noise is to music. When C and G-flat are struck
together the sensitive ear revolts in the same way a sensitive eye
revolts at complementaries in colour. But while in music a minor, or
diminished, fifth is displeasing, by increasing or reducing the interval
a semitone, by making it, for instance, C--F or C--G, a pleasing effect
can be obtained. In colour also this principle holds good. The
complementary combination of red and green is harsh, but by placing red
with one of the spectrum tones on either side of green a pleasurable
harmony is at once established. The Impressionists through instinct
generally made use of colours which primitively or softly harmonised,
again proving the ascendency of taste over system, for if taste is
sensitive it will be verified by science. Science, however, cannot
create taste. When we consider the Neo-Impressionists' antagonistic and
neutralising complementaries, it is difficult to understand their
criticism of Impressionism. The Impressionists, they said, "put a little
of everything everywhere, and in the resulting polychromatic tumult
there were antagonistic elements: in neutralising each other, they
deadened the ensemble of the picture." Now in the entire range of colour
from violet to yellow there is hardly a possible dual combination which
cannot be made harmonious by the addition of one or two other colours.
In this process of complication lie the infinite harmonic possibilities
of sound as well as of colour. There are no two notes in music which,
though when struck together are jarring, cannot be drawn into a perfect
chord by the introduction of certain other notes. And any two lines, no
matter how inapposite, can be aesthetically related by other lines
properly placed. Even were the Neo-Impressionists, in their criticism,
referring to the placing of blue in light and of yellow in shadow, they
would still be open to refutation, for their predecessors, by placing on
their canvases the colours they had _felt_ in contemplating their
models, were once more emotionally right although not exactly right from
the standpoint of abstract science.
With all the brilliancy of their pure pigments the Neo-Impressionists
have yet to produce a canvas as brilliant or as harmonious as those of
the Impressionists. The reason is not far to seek. In an Impressionist
picture there is a certain amount of neutrality caused by mixing the
colour of light with that of blue shadow; and this mixture heightens the
scintillation of the ensemble. The Divisionists, on the other hand, went
so far as to abolish neutrality altogether. In raising all values to a
point of saturation, they diminished the brilliancy of the picture as a
whole. It is to be doubted seriously if even Signac is still of the
belief that the Pointillists' squares of colour blend optically.
Theoretically they should, but actually the impression we receive is not
one of vibrant light. We see only an extended series of spots which are
all about the same size--a size which was varied but little as the
dimensions of the canvas varied, as was the case with the
Impressionists. But these latter artists mixed their spots not only on
the palette but on the canvas as well, and blent them into neighbouring
spots. The result was a richly decorated surface whose minute parts do
not foist themselves upon our sight. But in Signac, Cross, Van
Rysselberghe, Dubois-Pillet, Luce, Petitjean, Van de Velde or
Augrand, who developed these means to their ultimate limits, these spots
are so displeasing and obtrusive that it is mentally impossible to lose
sight of them in the contemplation of the pictures. All of these artists
produce flat work, with the possible exception of Van Rysselberghe who
has merely superposed this technique on an obvious and insensitive
academism. He is to the Neo-Impressionists what Henri Martin is to
Monet.
[Illustration: LES TOURS VERTES A LA ROCHELLE by SIGNAC]