discovery of this stippling technique. As a matter of fact it is not
wholly original with them. Turner, Constable, Delacroix, Jongkind,
Fantin-Latour, Cezanne and the Impressionists were all interested in
breaking nature up into parts in order to arrive at a dynamic
representation of the whole. The process with them was commendable, but
the Chromo-luminarists carried it to such an extreme that they saw
nature only in order to break it into spots. They repudiate vehemently
the appellation of Pointillists, and the name that Emile Bernard gave
them--Pointists--has remained beneath their notice. They point out that
one may be a Pointillist without being a Divisionist, for Pointillism is
the using of colour in spots so as to avoid its flat application, while
"division" is the application of separated spots of pure pigment for the
purpose of bringing about an optical admixture. The idea of optical
admixture was born when some one placed several planes of different
colours on a disc and, by revolving it rapidly, caused them to blend
perfectly. Immediately the Neo-Impressionists jumped to the conclusion
that distance would accomplish the same result with any-sized spots.
This assumption was their initial error. There is a very definite limit
to the size of colour spots which at a distance will blend optically,
and the artists of this school, with the one exception of Seurat, made
their spots too large. Delacroix never juxtaposed large strips of
complementaries in one plane, but applied hachures of almost the same
tint. The effect would have been little different had he painted flatly,
except for the richer _matiere_ this method produced. The Impressionists
mixed their colours both on the palette and on the canvas, except when
they wished to reproduce a certain texture that called for small lights
and shadows placed side by side. And Cezanne modulated his colour spots
so that there were no jumps or hiatuses between them.
The Neo-Impressionistic methods have no such subtleties. In applying
their colour these painters keep each spot separated from its neighbour
by a tiny bit of white canvas which is intended to give added light to
each part. The spots are unmixed and are applied straight from the
palette in preponderating proportions to obtain certain general colour
impressions. They use only the seven colours of the prismatic spectrum,
and in thus restricting their palette they have limited their range of
greys. Since nature itself is a series of high-pitched greys in which
only occasionally does a pure colour appear, they were inadequately
equipped for reproducing it. If, by raising all tints to their purity,
they hoped to obtain the maximum of colouration and therefore the
maximum of luminosity, they overlooked the fact that to produce any
light whatever there must be negation or shadow. They failed to achieve
light because they equalised the brilliancy of all colours. Even to
produce colour there must be black or grey. Their equilibrium of
elements led to the cold grey aspect of their work and to the acid and
inharmonious effect of their colour.
The desire of the Neo-Impressionists to improve upon the Impressionistic
vision was a sincere one, and in their striving for dramatic means for
heightening the already intense emotional power of their forerunners'
work, they showed themselves to be animated by an ambition for change
and improvement without which no vital innovation can be made. Their
desire was commendable, but their science was inadequate. Their modern
spirit was best shown in their search for the significance of line in
its harmonic relation to colour and tone. The impetus to this search
emanated from Seurat who dictated to his biographer, Jules Christophe:
"Art is harmony; harmony is the analogy of contraries (contrasts), the
analogy of likes (gradated), of tone, of tint, of line;--tone, that is to
say, the light and dark; tint, that is to say, red and its complement
green, orange and blue, yellow and violet; line, that is to say,
horizontal directions.... The means of expression is the optical
admixture of tones and tints and of their reactions (shadows) following
fixed laws." Delacroix had already turned his eyes in the direction of
the harmony of lines and colours. It will be recalled that he wrote in
his Journal: "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.... 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."
The Neo-Impressionists, taking their cue from Seurat's observations,
state that the first consideration of a painter before a blank canvas
should be to determine what curves and what arabesques are going to
divide the surface, and what colours and tones cover it. Even in this
aim they went further than the Impressionists who neither ordered nor
synthesised their works formally. The Neo-Impressionists say they do not
commence a canvas until they have determined its complete arrangement.
Then, guided by tradition and science, they harmonise the composition
with their conception. That is to say, they adapt the lines, colours and
tones to an order which aesthetically expresses the character of emotion
their model calls up in them. They hold that horizontal lines give calm;
ascending lines, joy; descending lines, sorrow; and that the
intermediary lines represent the infinite variations of emotions that
lie outside these first three types. But they offer no explanation of
the analogies between these intermediate lines and the kinds of emotion
they are supposed to call up. They go on to explain that hot tints and
light tonalities should be applied to ascending lines, cold tints and
sombre tonalities to descending lines, and an equal amount of light and
dark to the horizontal lines. "Thus," they add, "the painter becomes a
creator and a poet."
All this theorising would be important for the dramatic illustrators
were it entirely true. But while a line placed horizontally may
represent calm, the same line made perpendicular or laid at an angle of
forty-five degrees will also produce calm. The straight line varies so
little in its significance, no matter at what angle it is placed, that
its direction is negligible from an emotional standpoint. The _degree of
curve_ in a line is its emotional element, and only when varying curves
come in contact is the highest formal emotion obtained. The straight
line is the lifeless, the static, the immobile. As such it can serve
only as a foil to the curved line, for it is the straight that makes the
curved of value. Their theory concerning hot colours and high tones is
sounder than their linear theory; but in copying a joyous landscape is
one not _forced_ to put on high tonalities and hot colours, since it is
in _seeing_ these high values that we experience the sensation of joy?
And is it not from the low values in nature that we receive our
sensation of sorrow? One may accentuate the colours and tones, but if
they are too strongly intensified they will approach the other extreme
and produce dead and mournful landscapes. This accentuation the
Neo-Impressionists carried to the limit permitted by their pigments.
Their ideas of line and of joyous and sombre colours are undoubtedly of
value if profoundly and extensively comprehended and properly applied.
But, in order to become significant, line must only delimit organisation
and become volume; and colour, instead of merely producing joy and
sorrow, must bring about form. Then again, there is that world lying on
the further side of flatness which must be explored.
With all their theorising and attempts to obtain brilliancy, the
Neo-Impressionists produce only grey work. From the first these artists
were too coldly intellectual, and it matters little whether their
science was right or wrong when we contemplate their pictures. Were
their science perfect they could never have created art which goes
beyond the arabesque and the poetry of arrangement, for they were not
fundamental even in their aims. They have all painted different subjects
in slightly varying manners, but, apart from Seurat's, all their
canvases have these things in common: a uniform range of colour, a set
method of technique, and the hard and "noisy" contrasts which in their
larger works produce a veritable din. Those of the Neo-Impressionists
who are still living claim to have completed Cezanne, Pissarro and
Delacroix, to have perfected a method, to have expanded logically the
Impressionists to something worth while, to be in accord with Rood and
Chevreul, to have brought great harmony into painting, to have taken
painting into the pure realms of poesy and symphonic musical
composition. Alas, that their claims have no substantiation in our
receptivities!
[Illustration: UN DIMANCHE A LA GRANDE-JATTE by SEURAT]
Seurat, the founder, was the only genuinely artistic man of the
movement, and an early death denied him his chance to develop. Though
seduced by too exacting a process, he has nevertheless given us some
sensitive and delicately beautiful canvases. Le Chahut, Le Cirque and Un
Dimanche a la Grande-Jatte are saturated with light, and in them is
an undeniable order of parallel lines. His colours were never as harsh
and acid as those of his confreres, and his pictures have a blond
tonality which the other men of the movement entirely lack. His crayon
drawings, from the standpoint of tonal experimentation, are interesting
and seem almost like paintings. He had a great talent, and had he lived
we might have expected great things from it. He was more vitally
interested in style than in technical methods, and in his conclusions
stemmed directly from Delacroix. His spottings were much smaller and
more effective than those of the other Pointillists. His desire was to
express an idea through the medium of nature, not to copy nature in
order to relate the sensation it gave the artist. His painting was
synthetic. All details and accidents of colour and silhouette he set
aside as useless. His is an art of parallels and analogies, of
sensitivity and analysis; in fact, it has all those qualities which,
were they present in greater strength, would produce significant
pictures. He was of one piece; and his development, once he had begun to
paint, was an even one toward a definite goal. In him, alone of the
members of the group, we find an artist and not an illustrator. Those
who liken him to Aubrey Beardsley have less reason for their comparison
than the ones who see parallels between Gainsborough and Renoir. Compare
the quoted remarks of Seurat concerning tone, line and colour with
Signac's summing up of his method, and the temperamental differences
between the artist and the scientist will at once be seen. Signac says
his method is "observation of the laws of colour, the exclusive use of
pure tints, the renunciation of all attenuated mixings, and the
methodical equilibrium of elements."
One of the most noted followers of the Neo-Impressionistic methods was
the Hollander, Vincent van Gogh. Although generally considered in
critical essays as an unrelated phenomenon in the art heavens, he is
closely allied to Signac and to Delacroix through Seurat. He adopted
painting, one is inclined to believe, because his verbal eloquence was
inadequate to bring the Belgian miners to repentance. He had studied for
the ministry, but like most men who, finding themselves strictly limited
in one vocation, essay another, he found himself equally limited in his
second. He drifted back to Holland and began to study painting in the
studio of Mauve, a relative of his by marriage. His ardent, even
flamboyant, desire to do good to everyone who crossed his path needed an
outlet, and he found an emotional substitute for pamphleteering in the
physical and mental exertion of painting. In this work he could preach
unchecked, secure from arrest. He loved Millet because Millet loved the
down-trodden. He loved Delacroix because of that artist's dramatic
inspiration. He loved Daumier because he imagined he saw in Daumier a
satire on the beast in man. He loved Monticelli because in that
Provencal he sensed a wild gypsy mind and a kindred unrestraint in the
use of colour. And he loved Diaz because Diaz was a poetic woodman.
Before coming to Paris Van Gogh had studied in the Antwerp Academy, and
while in the French capital he met and was influenced by Pissarro. Here
he also became acquainted with Bernard and Gauguin, adopting the
Divisionistic methods from Seurat. He used only pure colours on his
palette and mixed them only with white and black. Later he went to Arles
where in two years, from 1887 and 1889, he painted the great bulk of his
work, averaging four canvases a week through sickness, drink, insanity
and disease. In him we have a perfect example of just how little can be
done with pure enthusiasm unorganised by intellectual processes. His
pictures display an entire lack of order, whether it be of colour, line
or silhouette: there was never any form in them. His work is plainly the
labour of the fanatic who, in a fury of pent-up desire to express
himself, suddenly seizes a palette and brush and applies colours almost
at random. Indeed, some of his pictures were completed in a few minutes.
Even many of those in which the symbology had to be thought out at
length, were painted in an hour.
That Van Gogh was an illustrator is undeniable; but he was an
illustrator of the abstract gropings of an unbalanced mind avid for
dramatic emotions, rather than of exterior nature. His landscapes seem
to portend the calm before some great upheaval, or to express a
supernatural energy poised for an act of total annihilation. In them
there are frenzied lines running zigzag and at random, and rolling
clouds of purple and lurid yellow hanging over raucously bright roofs.
His portraits remain with us as memories of a feverish nightmare. They
are too hollow and immaterial to appear even as a depiction of form. His
colours carried out this feeling of dramatic terror, and because they
were not harmonised with either line or tone, they became all the more
chaotic. He never kept to the spots that Signac and Seurat had given
him. His impatience was too great; the fire burned too furiously. He
elongated them into strips like straw, and they give his work the
appearance of haystacks. He covered with one stroke more space than
Seurat covered with twenty strokes.
This has been called his own _apport_ to art. In Gauguin, however, the
same stroke is used, not so heavily loaded with pure colour, to be sure,
but just as long. But in Gauguin the strokes are less noticeable because
they all have an analogous direction. With Van Gogh they rush wildly
about, now one way, now another, sometimes covering the canvas entirely,
sometimes separated to let the white show through. This separating was
not done for the same reasons as in Signac, but because Van Gogh's
impatience was too great to permit him to go back and cover. His figures
are outlined in broad black or coloured lines, and colours are
juxtaposed with their complementaries. In a Portrait d'Homme, done in
1889, the background is laid in with a bright green over which are
superimposed polka-dots of pure vermilion surrounded by a darker green,
the whole striped with yellow and light vermilion flourishes. On this is
a yellowish face whose pompadour hair is made of black, vermilion and
light violet. The collar is light green, red and blue; the striped
cravat, red and white; the coat, violet and green; the shirt, pure green
outlined in pure lake, with orange buttons on it; and the picture's
inscription--Vincent, Arles, '89--is signed in vermilion. In this
painting is evidenced his impetuous method. He seemed to feel that
the greater the exertion, the greater the relief from that repressed
passion which egged him on to action.
[Illustration: PORTRAIT DE L'ARTISTE by VAN GOGH]
Landscapes he liked, and he took pleasure in doing copies of other men.
In such works there was no hard and set reality to follow as in
still-lives and portraiture. Here the colour could be splashed on almost
haphazardly. He himself said that still-life was a relaxation. He felt
this because to paint still-life his enthusiasm was restricted. Anything
served for a subject--an old boot, a single vase, a coffee-pot. One
imagines he tossed these models onto a table from the opposite side of
the room, and painted them in whatever position they fell. In this
carelessness the public sees "inspiration." And indeed his canvases were
inspired, but only in the same way a starving man is inspired to throw
himself upon a sumptuous meal. He painted because he was forced to, and
when painting is merely a physical necessity indulged in to express an
unordered religious mania, it ceases to interest the aesthetician who
searches for a complete cosmos bodied forth in subjective form.
As a decorator Van Gogh is too turbulent and forward; as a painter of
easel pictures he is too chaotic and unintelligible; but as a blast of
misdirected enthusiasm he is not without power. His symbolism, while not
being of the variety which presents Grecian figures as abstract virtues,
is nevertheless of the same order. He tells us that in painting a young
man he loved, he would make the head a golden yellow and orange, and the
background a rich and intense blue, as well as transcribing the
physical likeness to epitomise his love. Thus depicted the young man
would be "like a bright star in the boundless infinite taking on a
mysterious importance." Again he writes: "Had I had the strength to
continue, I would have done saints and holy women from nature, who would
have seemed to belong to another age. They would have been the bourgeois
of the present, having many parallels with the old primitive
Christians." We see what he was after.
Van Gogh possessed all the modern socialistic ideals. He held that
individuals could do nothing alone, but should work in communities, one
doing the colour, one the drawing, another the composition, etc. In his
desire for this democratic art factory is seen his absence of
self-confidence. It is not strange when we consider his adherence all
his life to so childish a technical programme as Divisionism. This
adherence marked the main difference between him and Gauguin. The latter
detested the Divisionistic method. He wanted to adapt nature's colour
and effect to decoration, while Van Gogh wanted to make only abstract
dramatic tapestries. They both succeeded; and though the canvases of
Gauguin have the peaceful utilitarian destiny of interior decoration
awaiting them, Van Gogh's work, once we are rid of the modern habit of
welcoming all disorganised and purely enthusiastic work as profound,
will be laid aside forever. He was psychiatric and expended the greater
part of his feverish energy through the channel of painting. But he did
little more than use a borrowed and inharmonious palette to express
ideas wholly outside the realm of art.
VIII
GAUGUIN AND THE PONT-AVEN SCHOOL
The descriptive in art has always seduced the eye of the superficial
majority. From this accidental and nugatory side of painting the public
has derived all its enjoyment. The moment a depicted object is
recognised, the general pleasure in the arts increases; and the moment
the accepted vision of the object is modified or distorted, this
pleasure decreases and in many instances ceases altogether. One school
which deals with a certain class of subjects has its own admirers; while
another school which treats of dissimilar subjects has a different
following. Furthermore, the manner in which subjects are
portrayed--realistically or impressionably, poetically or prosaically--has
its individual adherents. Persons whose temperamental tastes make them
antipodal to one method of transcription become enthusiastic over
another, irrespective of the fact that the aesthetic merits of the
different procedures are equal. Those whose criterion is prettiness are
naturally attracted to Whistlerian and Cubistic modes. Idealists lean
toward the symbolic and transcendental painters like Van Gogh and Redon.
Hardy persons who live largely on the physical plane prefer Ribera,
Franz Hals, Sorolla or Duerer. Simple sensualists admire Goya, Rubens,
Bronzino, the erotic prints of the Japanese, or the pictures of the
Little Dutchmen. Biblical students choose the primitives or the painters
of religious subjects. Architects like Guardi, Gentile Bellini and
Canaletto. Personal tastes in life dictate tastes in art; the reason
some have a wider taste than others is because their interests are
larger.
The average person forms his art attachments in the same way he chooses
friends. For this reason many art lovers are passionately attracted to
Gauguin, while others, obsessed with the theories of modernity, are
impervious to the inherent appeal he incontestably possesses. The
Impressionists were enamoured of nature. Their pictures have an almost
human physiognomy and are thoroughly joyous. In them one senses the
abstract love of beautiful country-sides, blue distances and
scintillating lights. They arouse an emotion in the popular mind because
of the familiarity of their themes. Gauguin was not content with the
landscapes of civilisation. He wanted something more elemental--scenes
where an unspoilt and untamed nature gave birth to a race of simple and
colourful character. He felt the need of harmonising his people with
their _milieu_. To him it seemed inconsistent to place a fully dressed
man or woman in a primitive forest or on the banks of a turbulent stream
innocent of commercial traffic. There was a positive immodesty in
combining a puny figure, whose body was too distorted by work to show
itself unclothed, with the majestic nakedness of a primeval landscape.
Millet's peasants in plowed fields and Raffaelli's clothed figures in
busy streets were not incongruous; but in most of the landscapes of
Gauguin's day cultivated moderns stalked where Corot had once put nymphs
and Titian, Antiopes.
Gauguin's sense of harmony in idea precluded any such irrelevancies and
anachronisms. His painting was perhaps the highest and most consistent
type of illustration the world has produced. Judged from this
standpoint, on which it was based consciously, his art was complete. And
inasmuch as he did not strive for profounder things, it is from this
standpoint that he must be approached. What impetus he gave to art came
out of his desire to view nature simply, like a child, at the same time
equipped with all the weapons of a modern intelligence. His art
consequently has not only the interest of historic reconstruction but an
added interest which, in spite of our veneer of cultivation and
education, we all feel at times for perfect lassitude and elemental
unrestraint. No man is so intellectual that he cannot enjoy occasional
recreation and a forgetfulness of mental activities. Indeed the greatest
minds react so completely at times that they demand the crudest
stimulants--melodrama, wild Arabian chants, romance and physical
intoxication. Gauguin, appearing in the midst of gigantic and
epoch-making aesthetic endeavours, embodied this spirit of reaction. It
was a grave and serious world in which he found himself--the world of
Cezanne, Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism. His nature was too timid
and simple for him to throw himself into the whirlpool. Instinctively he
sought a haven far removed from the strife about him.
In the contemplation of the canvases of this modern savage we enter
that side of the broad field of aesthetics where the whole world can
escape, as for a holiday, from the stress of intellectual research,
there to enjoy art simply and receptively, as one enjoys a dream of
strange lands. In Gauguin there is a power which impels our interest,
hunts out our instinct for the exotic and calls to the fore a romantic
love of adventure and a desire for far countries. In this appeal no
other painting succeeds like his--not even the Persian landscapes, the
Chinese pictorial visions of heaven, or the lurid images of Gustave
Moreau. In Gauguin's South Sea Island canvases are crystallised our
hopes for a Utopian peace, our vague memories of an untramelled
prehistoric age. Calm and sunlight, the sea and wild mountains--all are
here. And we find ourselves amid a peaceful, music-loving and simple
people who, we imagine, would welcome the tired traveller and gather
round him with offerings of fruit and flowers as he lands on their
golden beach.