That his ambition ran along a subpassage of aesthetic endeavour, as did
that of his three confreres, he would be the first to admit. As artists
these men cannot be judged either by the surface quality of their works
or by their penetration into life and character. Such considerations
have nothing to do with aesthetic emotion. No matter how much we may
eulogise such painters--for they must be judged by their own standard
rather than by a criterion set by a Rubens--our praise will never place
them in the rank of plastic creators. They will ever remain in the realm
of nearly perfect workmen with literary apperceptions. Toulouse-Lautrec,
because of his love of formal distortion for its own sake, probably
comes nearer the higher level: there is in his work a slight aesthetic
element. Degas will ever remain the piece of old velvet in a frame;
Louis Legrand, the illustrator of the bachelor clubs; Forain, the
expositor of life's pretensions.
It is these men who have given the greatest impetus to realistic
illustration in all countries. Viewed from this standpoint they were a
salutary, as well as a diverting, manifestation. By burrowing down into
the depths of material existence they made unimportant such poetic men
as Beardsley, Rossetti and Moreau. All good illustration after them took
on a deeper meaning. It ignored the mendacious surfaces of things and
strove to reproduce the undercurrents which lie at the bottom of human
actions and reactions. Its mere prettiness was supplanted by
subcutaneous characteristics. It sought for motives rather than
emotions, for causes rather than effects. It became critical where once
it had been only photographic. From Degas, Lautrec, Legrand and Forain
comes directly the best illustrative talent in both Europe and America.
Without these four men we would not possess the best work of Max
Beerbohm, Hermann Paul, Bellows, Maxime Dethomas, Roubille, Carlopez,
Carl Larson, Albert Engstroem, C. D. Gibson, E. M. Ashe, Boardman
Robinson, Cesare, Blumenschein and Wallace Morgan, the last of whom is
unquestionably the most artistic illustrator in either America or
England.
X
HENRI-MATISSE
While the bitter struggle against the narrow dictates of a retrospective
and so-called classic academy was in progress, and before the older
scholastic forces had finally been put to rout, the Impressionists
calmly arrogated to themselves the authority of their dumbfounded
predecessors. Their pictures, because more restricted and not based on
the fundamentals of art, soon became as familiar and commonplace as the
paintings of Gerome, Cabanel and Bouguereau, and in becoming familiar
settled into the groove of a new academism as immobile and
self-satisfied as the old. The Neo-Impressionists were the first to
react against them, and later Gauguin and his fellow synthesists openly
declared war. Cezanne at that time was little known and less understood.
Living apart and alone, he was counted out of the main struggle. The
decadents of the movement, Degas and his circle, continued their
popularising process: their eyes were so fixedly turned inward that they
saw little of what was going on about them. Gauguin, putting aside
imitation of nature for interpretation, began the great movement which
was to culminate in the most extreme reaction against
Impressionism--Cubism. And Matisse who, arousing public interest in the
new, is responsible for the popular Cezanne discussions of today, was
the next man to carry on Gauguin's work of pigeon-holing Monet and his
followers. But whereas the Impressionists had completely forgotten the
classics, Gauguin wished to recommence the entire cycle by reverting to
the forefathers of those very classics. He also had his decadent
followers, but there was no one to continue his methods and inspiration.
If it is difficult to perceive an analogy between him and a painter like
Jacopo dei Barbari, compare the works of these men with a later drawing
by Matisse. The similarity of the first two, by being contrasted with
the latter, will at once become apparent. Gauguin clung close to the
drawing of the primitive Christians; and the classic seed within him,
though it never flowered, was never dead.
While the form in Matisse at times has all the suavity of contour of a
Liombruno or a Romanelli, there is a more purely sensitive reason for it
than in the well-taught decadents of the later Renaissance. In the
classes of Bouguereau and Carriere at the Beaux-Arts he had seen to what
an impasse a too great love of antiquity would lead. Furthermore, with
his many copies in the Louvre, by command of the state, he began
gradually to realise that the classics had become a fetich, and that the
only salvation for a painter was to seek a different and less-known
inspiration. This course was not so difficult as it had once been, for
the younger men had already liberated themselves from popular mandates.
The freedom of the artist was now an assured thing, and while the
public still scoffed and offered suggestions, it no longer felt that a
man's expression was its personal concern. To be sure, popular rage
against things which appeared incomprehensible was still evident, but it
was the impotent rage which sneers because it can no longer strike. The
_Salon des Artistes Independants_ was in full swing, and the new artists
who had ideas rather than tricks and who were intent on discovering new
fields through devious experimentation, found therein a refuge where
they could expose as conspicuously as could the academicians. In this
healthful _Salon_ Matisse has exhibited regularly up to a few years ago,
and it was here and in the _Salon d'Automne_--another exhibition which at
first was animated by high ideals but which has lately fallen into the
hands of cliques and picture merchants--that his fame took birth.
With Matisse's advent we behold the paradox of an artist who is in full
reaction against the Impressionistic and classic doctrines and who at
the same time reveals a certain composition and makes colour of
paramount interest. The Matisse of exotic inspiration came from the
studio of Gustave Moreau who, by his intelligent toleration of the
virile enthusiasms of his pupils, facilitated the way toward complete
self-expression. There are Matisse drawings extant which are impeccable
from the academic standpoint--drawings in which is found all the cold
"right drawing" of the school. There are paintings in the
Neo-Impressionistic manner, except that they display a sensitive use of
harmonious colours, which should have shown Signac and Cross the error
of their rigid science. Also there are still-ives which recall Chardin,
one of Matisse's great admirations; and at least one study of a head,
done in Colorossi's old academy on the Rue de la Grande Chaumiere, in
which a love of Cezanne's form and colour mingles with a respect for
Manet's method of applying paint.
Gauguin too served as a provenance for the later colour vision of
Matisse. Indeed it is as much from Gauguin as from Cezanne that he
stems. The broad planes of rich tones and the decorative employment of
form in the former had as great an influence in Matisse's art as did the
perfect displacement of spaces in the canvases of the Provencal master.
Gauguin, while still leaning to the classic, desired a fresher impetus.
He therefore sought distortion in exotic inspiration; but the man who
was led to distortion through a pure love of unfamiliar form and to whom
Matisse owes the deciding influence toward a new body, was the Spaniard
Goya. The deformed, the grotesque and the monstrous were with Goya a
passion. In his Caprichos it is easily seen that he, too, was tired of
the established formulas regarding the human body, and strove to vary
and enrich it. By emphasising a characteristic trait, by shifting a
certain form, by exaggerating a certain proportion, he sought to obtain,
as did Matisse, the complete expression of what he felt to be essential
in his model. The deformations in Gauguin came as a result of an outline
which after the first drawing was left unchanged for the sake of its
naif effect. But in Goya and Matisse the deformations are the result of
a highly developed plastic sense which glories in new and unusual forms.
With them the human body is treated as the means through which an idea
is expressed--an idea of form, not of literature. Compare, for instance,
the drawing called Deux Tahitiens, one of Gauguin's best works, with
Matisse's Baigneuses, a canvas of three nudes one of which is playing
with a turtle. In the former the proportions are distorted as much as in
the latter, but these proportions are flat and are an end in themselves.
They have no intellectual destiny. In the Matisse picture the
exaggerations grow out of a desire to express more fully the form which
the artist has felt to be important and characteristic. In the seated
woman the torso and neck constitute a personal and original vision, and
the crouching woman's back has as much solidity as the Venus Accroupie
of the Louvre.
Matisse's simplified vision of form came, as did all synthetic modern
art, from Ingres and Daumier through Seurat, Degas and Gauguin. That
Ingres, the master of so classic a school, should have unconsciously
felt the need for modifying and simplifying an object is a significant
indication of the fatigue which is always produced by an adherence to a
set form. In his drawings the details are omitted merely because they do
not further the achievement of his own particular kind of beauty. In
Daumier they are absent because they detract from the spontaneous
emotion of the whole; in Degas and Manet, because they hinder the
fluency of action and obscure the complete and direct image; in Seurat,
because they interfere with the suavity of line itself; and in Gauguin,
because they preclude that naivete of appearance he wished to obtain. In
Matisse began the conscious process of making form arbitrary, of
bending it to the personal requirement of expression. In Cubism form
became even more abstract. In Ingres's drawings there is an entire lack
of suppleness: his figures appear like a first sketch in wood for a
German carving. In Gauguin this wooden look becomes a trifle more
fluent; the proportions are artistically improved. And in Matisse there
is no trace of the awkward or the stiff. While his form is more
simplified than that of the two other painters, the simplifications come
as a result of that artistic rightness of proportion which is an
outgrowth of the ultimate refinement of knowledge and taste.
[Illustration: BAIGNEUSES by HENRI-MATISSE]
The trick of drawing of a Louis Legrand has no parallel in Matisse. In
the work of the latter each figure or object, no matter how many times
he has already drawn it, has a distinctively novel construction and
presents a new vision. All familiar joints and hackneyed interpretations
are absent. We have seen, for instance, the deltoids drawn in every
conceivable pose of stress or calm. When one speaks of a nude we
immediately visualise it with the angular shoulders, with the accustomed
bulges over the upper arm which have been painted there in the same
manner since the early Renaissance. In the delineation of deltoids the
painter had become stagnant, accepting their conventional appearance as
an external truth and recording them without thought. Matisse revolted
against this fixed standard. Glance through his later nudes--and there
are many of them--and every shoulder will present a different appearance;
every arm will take on a novel form. We speak here of these particular
muscles because they seem to obtrude themselves upon the sensitive sight
more than any others. Matisse, seeking to overcome this structural
monotony, made each shoulder he drew a new form, a new adventure, by
expressing, not the actual bone and muscle of the clinic, but the
salient meaning of that shoulder in a given _milieu_. It is this same
desire to do away with the hackneyed forms of art that has driven the
modern poets away from classic metres and caused them to seek a more
plastic and adaptable medium in _vers libre_. Rondeaux, ballades,
quatrains, octaves and the like are today as intrinsically perfect forms
as they ever were, but the significance of their beauty has been lost
through overuse, through too great familiarity. Our minds pass over them
as over well-learned lessons committed to memory.
It is thus Matisse felt about the classic forms of his predecessors.
These forms had once been beautiful; intrinsically they were still
beautiful; but they had been habitualised by constant repetition; and
new ones were needed. In order to find them Matisse says that, when
before a model, he tried to forget that he had even seen a nude before
and to look upon it with the eyes of one who had never seen a picture.
By this he does not mean that his vision was naive, but that it was
innocent of set rules and preconceived ideas of how form should be
obtained. As a theory this attitude proved fruitful because, while he
did not succeed in setting aside memory, he was nevertheless led to a
conscious thrusting aside of his first impulses to depict form as he saw
it. All painters, even the greater artists of the past, had copied form
as it presents itself to the eye, but Matisse forced himself, through
painstaking analysis, to express form in a totally novel manner; and to
a certain extent he succeeded. One might well ask why, in modifying the
human body, he did not, for instance, omit a leg or a head, thus making
his expression at once purer and more abstract. The answer is that he
realised that the spectator, after the first shock at seeing the
unexpected form and the consequent mental readjustment to the new
vision, would nevertheless recognise the picture as a depiction of the
human figure. Therefore a complete recognisability must be maintained.
If the artist omitted an eye or a mouth, for example, the spectator
would experience physically the incompleteness of the vision. He would
feel, through personal association, the blindness or the suffocation as
suggested in the picture; and these shocks, being secondary
physiological sensations, would detract from the _aesthetic_ pleasure
provoked by the work. The point is an important one, for it demonstrates
the impossibility of appreciating art purely as abstract form so long as
recognisable objects are presented. As modern painting progressed the
illustrative gradually became relegated.
Much impetus for his abbreviations and accentuations of form came to him
with his personal discovery of the wood carvings of the African negroes,
the sculpture of natives of Polynesia and Java and of the Peruvian and
Mexican Indians. During the last five years we have heard much of these
unknown artists and of their superlative ability for organisation and
rhythm. But they have been a little too quickly and enthusiastically
accepted as criteria at the expense of those greater artists, the
Greeks, the Egyptians, the East Indians and the Chinese. Matisse found
in them an inspiration toward synthesis and also a substantiation for
his own desire to emphasise salient characteristics. They influenced his
motives in depicting only what was personally important and in doing
away with unnecessary details. After him there came a horde of imitators
who saw in negro sculpture the quintessence of artistic expression, who
looked upon it as a finality of organisation and rhythmic composing.
Such judgment, however, contains more of enthusiasm than of critical
acumen. Negro sculpture has an interest for us only in so far as it is
novel and untutored. Its organisation is of the most primitive kind,
symmetrical rather than rhythmic, architectonic rather than plastic. It
is the work of slightly synthetic artists who were without models and
whose visions encompassed only certain traits of form which, when
expressed, became not composed but balanced, not imitative but abstract.
The abstractness of negro sculpture, its bending of all human forms to
an ornament, its archaic rigidity which is the antithesis of fluent
movement--these are the qualities which have so gripped the imaginations
of minor modern artists. In reality the negro sculptors did not seek
these qualities consciously. Their lack of realistic observation was due
to their partial isolation from exterior influences such as the Greeks
and Egyptians, and to their desire to make an ornament of all images.
It was the Persians, however, who influenced Matisse more than did
negro sculpture. He found in these artists a practical lesson in the
application of his beliefs--a lesson which substantiated the tonic
division and formal improvisation of Goya and the decorative colour
application of Gauguin. Besides he learned from them a more direct
method of image making, a method which was at once more delicate and
more femininely sensitive. After seeing the pictures done by Matisse in
Algiers, and such paintings as La Glace sans Tain, and after looking at
the vistas through the open doors and windows in some of his large
interiors, one realises at once the great influence these exquisitely
delicate painters of ancient Persia had on him. The decorative
illustrations of the Mille et Une Nuits, published in Paris by
Fasquelle, are so similar to some of his pictures that one is inclined
to believe he studied this book before painting them. His superiority
lies in his liner comprehension of the human form and in the great
diversity he exhibited in the repetition of its component parts. Persia,
like other nations, had an academy, and while its yield was more
charming and less given to complex reproductions, it had no more
aesthetic importance than have the art schools of our own day. But unlike
ours it had not forgotten the necessity of formal distribution in the
making of artistic arrangements. This distribution in its flat sense
Matisse appropriated to his own ends, and by applying to it freer modern
means, made his art more aesthetically significant than that of the
Persians.
His modern means were the outgrowth of his understanding of colour in
its capacity to incite emotion. His first essays in this field were
greyish. Later, through divisionistic methods, they grew brighter; and
finally his colour became pure and was applied in large planes. His
works of this period shine as a source of light, and with his
development of exaggerated forms his colour interpretations also become
exaggerated. Where he saw a green in a shadow he painted it a pure
green; where he saw a yellow in light he made it a pure yellow; and so
on with the other colours. But in these interpretations there is more
than a mere desire to record hastily an optical vision. Each colour is
pondered at length in its relation to the others. It is changed a score
of times, modified and adjusted; and when it is finally posed it is
artistically "right." In other words, it fills harmoniously an important
part in a picture where understanding and taste are the creators. In the
work of Matisse _sensibilite_ plays the all-important role, and while
his results are satisfying as far as they go, there are times when we
could wish for a greater rhythmic sense, a more conscious knowledge of
the profundities of composition, and a less dominating desire to free
each form and line from classic dictates.
With his colour we can find no such fault. Though here his knowledge,
like that of all other artists before him, is limited, the perfect
harmony between tints, which in him reaches a more advanced stage than
in any preceding artist, is the result of a highly sensitive eye and an
impeccable taste. The beauty of his colour alone makes him of paramount
importance. Every one of his canvases is a complete colour gamut created
by taste and authenticated by science not only as to pure colour but
also as to greys and tone. In his still-lives he chooses objects alone
for their colour and form, and his sense of proportion is so developed
and his reduction of line is carried to so final an economy that, as
flat as these objects are, they seem to have a rich consistency and to
extend themselves into visual depth. As in the case of all men who
deviate from the narrow and well-worn path of monotonous tonality,
Matisse is accused of dealing in raucous and blatant colours which set
the head aching and the eyes smarting. But the accusation is true only
of his followers who display little sensitivity and even less artistry,
and who, in imitating the superficial aspects of his work, see only
grotesque distortions and pure colour. Matisse once had a school where
he endeavoured to develop the native talents of the Americans, Poles,
Russians and Germans; but when a Bohemian woman, in reply to his
question as to what she wished to do, answered, "_Je veux faire le
'neuf'_," he abandoned the enterprise and retired to Clamart. She
unwittingly summed up the desire of those meagre painters who, on seeing
something novel, immediately throw themselves into imitating it.
Matisse's followers approach his colour gamut, but they never bridge
that lacuna which separates a precise art from one which is _a peu
pres_. It is the last delicate refinement of perfect harmony which
Matisse possesses and which his imitators can not attain to, which
places him in the rank of greatness.
Matisse is called the _Chef des Fauves_, and his art has been catalogued
and labeled, turned into a "school" and has come to be known in many
quarters as Post-Impressionism, although that title, as well as the one
of Fauvism, was originally intended to designate all the art movements
after Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism and included such widely
dissimilar men as Cezanne, Van Gogh, Picasso, Kandinsky, Matisse and
Friesz. It stood for the new vitality in art, for the contemporary
animating spirit, and implied an epoch rather than a movement. It was
not sufficiently specific, however; and while modern art in the main is
a homogeneous development of new means, its forces are too diverse and
its evolution too complex to permit of its being described by a blanket
term. It was therefore natural that in an endeavour to understand the
underlying forces of modern painting a process of critical
differentiation should have been instituted. But labels are offensive
and impertinent when attached to serious aesthetic endeavours, and are
apt to lead to misunderstanding and errors of judgment. The canvases
themselves must be the final test of a movement's enduring vitality.
Matisse is himself the whole impetus of the movement he represents. With
the one exception of Cezanne, he is more remote from his followers than
any other modern leader. He repeats himself so little that his disciples
cannot make a fetich of his canons. Indeed, he does not work by rote or
law, except in so far as there is a law governing his personal
impressions and predilections.
[Illustration: PORTRAIT DE FAMILLE by HENRI-MATISSE]