not merely as expressive of light, but as synonymous with light, whereas
Cezanne, ignoring colour's dramatic possibilities, used it to express
and intensify the fundamentals of organisation, just as Giotto,
disregarding the dramatic possibilities of line, employed line as a
means to ordinate volume. Cezanne is related to Daumier and Rembrandt in
that while these men created their art (which was primarily one of tone)
by building up volume simultaneously with contour, he created his art
(which was primarily one of colour) by presenting his visions as nature
presents itself to our eyes and intelligences, that is, as forms in
which tone, contour and colour are inseparable. That he has been little
understood is due to the fact that his profoundly logical methods took
birth in an age of "inspirational" painting. Matisse who came later
made of Cezanne's still-lives a highly enjoyable decoration whose
destiny can rise no higher than that of tasteful and complete ornament.
Cezanne's art is dynamic, while Matisse's is exaltedly excitatory. The
former bears the same relation to the latter that a Beethoven symphonic
movement bears to a ballet by Delibes. One inspires thought: the other
incites to action, to spontaneous admiration and joy. Matisse loves and
knows colour in its harmonic relations. He and Gauguin, by the broad
beauty of their work, have given an impetus toward large planes of pure
pigment. In brief the evolution of colour is as follows: it was used
first for verity; secondly, for ornament; thirdly, for drama; fourthly,
for its inherent beauty as light; and last, for intensifying natural
form.
All this has to do only with the concrete side of art's progress. There
is also a progress of the mental attitude which is inseparable from
art's concrete development and without which its material evolution
could not have gone forward significantly. This mental progress resulted
in the emancipation of the artist from the intellectual limitations of
his public. Up to Gericault and Delacroix painting had idealised
contemporary life, had held itself to the interpretation of biblical
history, or had spoken in legend and allegory. It had expressed itself
in the Italian mode of drawing; it had followed set rules of balance and
chiaroscuro; and above all it had possessed a very definite finish.
Naturally the art historians expected this style of painting to continue
indefinitely. But with Delacroix it began to change. The hard contours
grew freer. The depiction of the human form halted at approximation.
Drawing became more arbitrary. Then came Courbet who insisted that there
was beauty in everything if one knew how to bring it forth. He turned to
the commonplace life about him for inspiration, repudiated the suavities
of David, the romance of Delacroix, the elegance of Velazquez and the
colour of Veronese; and began to order realistic nature. About his name
there grew up a tempest of adverse criticism; but no man so sure of his
own genius as was Courbet could be weakened by public condemnation; and
he made no compromise. Manet continued Courbet's freedom of selection
and painted _n'importe quoi_. The Impressionists also carried forward
this modern attitude. They sought for that which generally was
considered ugly, and made it artistically enjoyable by drenching it with
light and colour. Then came Cezanne, Matisse, the Cubists and the
Futurists, with each of whom subject-matter became more and more
emancipated. Natural objects gradually lost their importance and grew
more abstract. Form was considered for its own sake, and models were not
copied merely because they filled certain utilitarian destinies in the
spectator's mind. Objects were used by Cezanne to create abstract
ensembles. In Matisse the form itself became more purely aesthetic,
though with him there was a residue of objectivity for the sake of
illustrative consistency. With the Cubists natural form was an echo, a
memory of life, retained because they were not sure of how to turn their
minds away from it. Futurism attempted a rehabilitation of illustration,
but lately it has been converted into a purer vision by the Cubists.
To sum up: colour reached its highest development in Cezanne;
composition attained its highest intensity in Rubens; and the greatest
freedom in material form was represented by the Cubists. Thus the art of
painting stood in 1912. But at that time the development of modern means
had not reached its highest point. The purification of painting had not
been attained. The tendencies of the past century fell short of
realisation. As yet there had been no abstract coalition of colour, form
and composition. Colour had not been carried to its ultimate purity as a
functioning element. Form had become almost unrecognisable but had just
missed abstraction, its inevitable goal. And composition, the basis of
all great art, had been temporarily abjured in the feverish search for
new methods. The step from the condition of art in 1912 to its final
purity, in which would be embodied all the qualities necessary to the
greatest compositional painting, was not a long one, but until it was
taken the cycle must remain incomplete. The last advance in modern
methods was made by the Synchromists at _Der Neue Kunstsalon_ of Munich
in June, 1913. This movement was fathered by Morgan Russell and S.
Macdonald-Wright, both of whom, though native Americans, were partially
European in parentage and education. Russell is more than half French,
and Macdonald-Wright, whose family name is Van Vranken, is directly
descended from the Dutch.
Russell first studied in New York under Robert Henri, one of the most
sincere and intelligent products of American art. There he acquired a
sound and capable foundation for his later work both in clay and paint.
He then went to Paris, still feeling nature through the inspiration of
Manet, and like Manet fell under the sway of Monet. From the
Impressionists he was attracted to Matisse with whom he was personally
acquainted. He did many canvases attractive in colour and competent as
to form, as well as a number of synthetic and obviously disproportioned
statues which recall the modern "Fauve" to a marked degree. Later he
began to take an interest in Cezanne, and to his study of this master
and of Michelangelo is attributable his later development in colour and
composition. These men constituted his main influences; but in the
course of his development he had cast a glance at Picasso and even at
the Futurists; and it is a significant commentary on their methods that
they are more susceptible of understanding than either Renoir or
Matisse. Leo Stein, an astute and discerning connoisseur of the more
modern art movements and a man who can see with occasional flashes of
genius through the aspects of a canvas to its basic cause, no doubt had
much to do with Russell's rapid intellectual progress through the
discipleship of the student to the creation of individual endeavours.
Macdonald-Wright, to the contrary, had little art training in the
accepted sense of the word. Primarily interested in the purely technical
side of painting, as were Renoir, Cezanne and Courbet, he had been
influenced first by Hals, Rembrandt and Velazquez and later by their
successors, Manet and the Barbizon school. Hoping to find help in the
schools he studied at many academies, but after a brief period retired
to the seclusion of his studio. About this time he began, with the aid
of Chevreul, Helmholtz and Rood, to make experiments in colour in its
relation to luminosity. Quite naturally the influence of Monet followed,
and it was not until a year later that his enthusiasm for the
Impressionists disappeared. He then began the construction of form by
large and crude planes, building his figures with light and dark
chromatic blocks. It was this broader application, coupled with his love
of pure colour, that led him to an eager admiration for Gauguin. At this
period of his development he met Russell, his senior by three years, to
whom he has always admitted his debt for his early appreciation of
Michelangelo as well as of the modern masters. From then on, through
many struggles with light, he made rapid progress. When Futurism blinded
the eyes of the younger men he went straight ahead in the path he had
chosen.
Shortly after their meeting, Russell and Macdonald-Wright reached the
end of their appreciative and formative period of imitation. They were
both too intensely desirous of self-expression in its broadest and most
precise sense to vary an already well-learned precept or theory. They
were colourists, and had been even when passing through their most
sombre stage. Now both turned to colour as to a longed-for goal. The art
world at that time was being flooded with the mournful browns and whites
of Cubism; and Matisse was too slight an inspiration to attract them,
for they had consistently conceived form in three dimensions. Their
desire was to create canvases of richly harmonious colour; but the
difficulty lay in finding a new method of application. Neither of them
was content merely to place suites of pure hues on the canvas, as an end
in themselves. This would be to sacrifice organised volume for an
ephemeral pleasure. Colour must have a formal and compositional
significance, otherwise it would be but shallow decoration. The fact
that, like all painters of the day, they were still bound to the
depiction of natural objects, added difficulty to the solution of their
problem. Their individual interpretation of Cezanne, however, little by
little showed them the method by which they might eventually open the
door on their desires. Russell approached form through light, combining
both qualities in a simultaneous vision. Macdonald-Wright approached
light through form, regarding them as an inseparable and inevitable
unity. Both painters expressed their vision in the purest gamut of
colour which painting up to that time had seen. Colour with them became
the totality of art, the one element by which every quality of a canvas
was to be expressed. Even their lines were obtained by the
differentiation of colours in the same way that tempo delimits sound.
Russell began his Synchromism by extending and completing the methods of
the Impressionists who had observed that one always has an illusion of
violet in shadows when the sunlight is yellow, and who in their painting
represented the full force of light as yellow, and its opposite extreme
of shadow as violet. Russell, in observing that the strong force of
light gives us a sensation of yellow and that shadow produces its
complementary of violet, went further and discovered that quarter and
half tones also possess colours by which they can be interpreted. He
thus arrived at a complete colour interpretation of the degrees of light
forces or tones. This method he aptly called the orchestration of tones
from black to white. For it he made no hard and set rules. From the
first it was a highly plastic and arbitrary manner of depicting
objectivity. By modulating from light to dark (from yellow to violet)
not only was light conceived forcibly, but form resulted naturally and
inevitably. This was the principle by which Cezanne, although he did not
completely grasp its import, achieved his eternal light which brought
form into being. But the principle with him was subjugated to the
influence of local colours, varying _milieu_, reflections, etc. Russell
stated the principle frankly and applied it purely. Since his form at
that period resulted from a sensitive depiction of light values
expressed by colour, his canvases had much the same beauty of strongly
lighted natural objects seen through the three-sided prism by which the
transition from tone to colour is automatically brought about.
Macdonald-Wright approached his conception of Synchromism from the
opposite direction. He had always been dissatisfied with the endless
alternation of small shadows and lights which the Impressionists had
introduced into painting, and with the tiny planes and spots which
artists used for verisimilitude. He desired a method whereby the
elements of shadow and light could be differentiated and drawn together
in simple masses. He had studied pure colour more from the standpoint of
form than from that of light, and during 1912 began to take note of the
fluctuations of colours, their mobility when juxtaposed with other
colours, their densities and transparencies. In fine, he recorded their
inherent tendency to express degrees of material consistency. Thus with
him a yellow, instead of meaning an intense light, represented an
advancing plane, and a blue, while having all the sensation of shadow
about it, receded to an infinity of subjective depth. The relative
spacial extension of all the other colours was then determined, and a
series of colour scales was drawn up which gave not only the sensation
of light and dark but also the sensation of perspective. Thus it was
possible to obtain any degree of depth by the use of colour alone, for
all the intermediate steps from extreme projection to extreme recession
were expressible by means of certain tones and pure hues.
The first Synchromist canvas was exposed by Russell in the _Salon des
Independants_ early in the spring of 1913. It was called Synchromie en
Vert and recorded a large interior in which all the light forces were
treated in their purely emotional phases. The canvas lacked the complete
visualisation and the solid space-construction which characterise his
later work, and furthermore it revealed many traces of the academic
composition. However, had there been critics possessed of artistic
prescience they straightway would have sensed in it a new force in
painting. But the picture's defects obscured their recognition of its
potential vitality. This was due in part to the fact that the work lost
much of its effect by piece-painting, that is, by the minute treatment
of details each of which constituted an end in itself regardless of the
total. Russell counted on the line of the different bodies holding it
together; but he reckoned falsely, for if, in a work where colour is so
important a part of line, the colour and line are not in complete
harmony, the line alone is inadequate to effect the liaison of forms. In
this same _Salon_ Macdonald-Wright, not yet having arrived at a defined
conception, exposed two canvases in which his later developments were
but vaguely foreshadowed. Both pictures were formal compositions of nude
figures painted in three or four flat planes of pure colour, and
recalled Matisse and Cezanne more strongly than they presented a new
vision. From the standpoint of efficient visualisation all three
Synchromist works were failures, or at least they were indications of
incomplete progress. In Russell's canvas the diminutive breaking up of
colour negatived what otherwise would have been the picture's brilliant
effect; and Macdonald-Wright's large application of colour served only
to place him under the banner of an established school. But both men
realised that this was only a start, and set diligently to work on the
canvases for their first exhibition which was booked in Munich for June
of that year.
Between their first pictures and those of a few months later there was
to be noted an advance both in conception and in application. Russell's
small colour planes, applied wholly from the standpoint of light,
expanded and took on a new effectiveness. His form became more abstract,
and his colour more harmonious. Also his compositions were more compact,
though they were ordered rather than rhythmically organised.
Macdonald-Wright's progress was similar. In an interpretation of one of
Michelangelo's Slaves, used as the dominant form in an arrangement of
three figures, all the academism which had marked his earlier expression
had disappeared. His method had been liberated from the exactitudes of
static principles, and had become consistent, not with the new colour
knowledge, but within itself. The theory of defined colour gamuts, which
from the first had been applied by these two men, had now become a
scientific principle. Though the truth of it had always been vaguely
sensed by them, it had not become a definitely comprehended formula
until they had worked out the naturalistic laws governing colour. The
Synchromist pictures in which these laws were boldly applied were first
brought together at 13, Prannerstrasse, Munich, in June, 1913.
In November of the same year their work was again exposed, this time at
the Bernheim-Jeune galleries in Paris. The show in Munich, widely
advertised by coloured posters, had attracted considerable interest, but
in Paris the exhibition created a two-weeks' sensation. Though the more
discriminating critics saw its importance, there was considerable
adverse comment due largely to the Synchromists' spectacular and
over-enthusiastic methods of putting forward their views and
discoveries. In their two specifically worded prospectuses they devoted
much space to the shortcomings of Orphism, then in vogue; and although
their criticisms of that school, coupled with the statement of their own
tangible and logical aims, had much to do with Orphism's demise, the
impropriety of the attack created a feeling antagonistic to the new men.
The appearance of their pictures was entirely different from any
paintings hitherto exposed; and their conception, while being a normal
and direct outgrowth of Cezanne, marked a revolution in formal
construction. The inspiration of both these new artists was classic in
that they recognised the absolute need of organisation which, if it was
not melodiously and sequentially composed, should at least be rhythmic.
Both were striving to create a pure art--one which would express itself
with the means alone inherent in that art, as music expresses itself by
means of circumscribed sound.
There was no precedent for purely abstract form--that is, form which has
no antitype in nature--any more than there was a precedent for the
construction of painting solely by means of colour and line. This was
not due to an absence of desire in the artist for an abstract language
of form, but to a natural diffidence on his part to break once and for
all with centuries of tradition, and with one imperious gesture to cast
aside the accepted _raison d'etre_ of the visual arts. We have seen how
form from the first had been an imitation of natural objects, how it
de-developed into synthesis, then into pure composition, how it reached
a high degree of arbitrariness in Matisse, how it disintegrated in
Cubism, and how in Futurism and Orphism there was a valiant attempt to
convert it once more into pictorialism, to check its _elan_ toward
perfect freedom of creation. It is not therefore strange that the
Synchromist exhibition should have comprised, with the exception of one
canvas, figure pieces, studies of landscape and still-lives (some almost
archaic in their direct and simple statement), and not canvases which
abandoned all semblance to natural form. Russell and Macdonald-Wright
were still occupied tentatively in expressing the forms they knew best,
each by his own individual method. But despite this compromise with
tradition their exhibition presented a highly novel impression. There
were human figures distorted almost out of recognition for the
compositional needs of the canvas and painted in bars of pure colour;
still-lives which seemed to be afire with chromatic brilliance;
fantastic fruits; life-sized male figures in pure yellow-orange; and
mountains of intense reds and purples, warm greens and violets. All the
pictures, however, displayed decided organisational ability, and they
possessed a more complete harmony of colour and line than had been
achieved by any of the other younger painters.
But that quality of Synchromism which struck the discerning spectator
more than any other was the force of volume resulting from the
relationship of colours. For years painters had realised that certain
colours when applied to certain forms rebelled at the combination, that
they refused to remain passively on the planes assigned them. But this
phenomenon had never been given any penetrating study. The more
sensitive painters had merely changed their colours to more tractable
ones, and had thus avoided the inevitable conflict that followed the
fallacious commingling of two highly affirmative elements. Such
chromatic inconsistencies should have taught artists the necessity of
harmony for the sake of perfect order; but the matter was left to
personal instinct. The clash between colour and form, however, was not
due to any error or idiosyncrasy of taste, but to the absolute character
of each separate hue which demanded, for its formal affinity, a fixed
and unalterable spacial extension. At an early date artists had
recognised that blue and violet were cool and mournful colours, and that
yellow and orange were warm and joyful ones. They applied this primitive
discovery with the feeble results to be found in Neo-Impressionism. That
these colours had any further character they never suspected. Their
insight extended only to the emotional and associative characteristics
of the colours; the physical side was overlooked. Had the painters been
more scientifically minded they would have known that these
characteristics, which were the feminine traits, could not have existed
in isolation; and they would have searched for the colours' dominating
and directing properties which represented the masculine traits. Such a
search would have led them to the meaning of colours in relation to
volumes, that is, to colours' formal vibrations which alone are capable
of expressing plastic fullness.
This vibratory quality Macdonald-Wright found and applied. By it he
achieved light and shadow which resulted naturally by the juxtaposition
of warm and cold colours. Russell, working altogether from the
standpoint of light as revealed by form, attained practically the same
results so long as his light came from the direction of the spectator,
for in such a case the highest illumination was the most intense salient
and, as with Macdonald-Wright, had therefore to be painted with a warm
and highly opaque colour. But where the light came from a source at
right angles to the line of vision, the expression reverted to an
intensification of the Impressionistic method. Later this accident of
light disappeared from Russell's work, and consequently his treatment
became less restricted. This setting aside of light as the motif was a
necessary departure, for when Russell carried his work into the higher
elements of pure form, a realistic source of illumination would have
made his suites of abstract volumes appear, not poised and relatively
solid, but as paterae attached to an impenetrable substance. Under such
conditions painting would merely be another and perhaps more beautiful
way of making effective the ordonnances of surface form. But it would
have no more power to create in us an aesthetic emotion than an
exquisitely composed bas-relief.