feeling—self-forgetting maternal love, childhood’s gracious innocence,
pathetic tenderness of father, brothers, or sisters. He has never
worked from the peddling model who can be hired at five francs an hour,
and who poses only with the body, not the soul. His model is his own
family, with the whole range of idiosyncrasies which their existence by
night and day comprises. What the tender husband and father observed
with delighted eyes at all hours, that the painter has uniquely fixed
on canvas: the mother resting in bed with her baby at her breast; that
sweet, shapeless little lump of human flesh which is a wee boy that
the elder sister fondles; the children eating or being fed at table;
the washing and dressing of the little one, which the mother and elder
sister carry out as a pleasant game with a doll; the mother’s anxiety
as she cradles the fever-stricken child in her arms, and tries to quiet
it; dressing the eldest girl for her confirmation—a prelude to that
affecting moment when the mother, with trembling hands and streaming
tears, will place the bridal wreath on her head; the pride of the
parents when marshalling all their five children in a row; the gloomy
seriousness of the tiny school-girl puzzling at the work-table over her
first task. Carrière, when painting his family life, painted the life
of mankind. His large, epic style of feeling preserved him from falling
into _genre_. He remained monumental even when painting details.
He is as little sentimental as Goethe in “Hermann und Dorothea”;
nevertheless, tears rise when we gaze on his pictures. The incident
disappears, and we stand before the Eternal, which it comprises; before
Love, which keeps the world together.
The same feature is distinguishable also in his portraits; they ennoble
the model by spiritualising it. He gives only just enough of the
anatomy to reveal the soul. And when he sets himself greater and more
highly differentiated tasks (“The Gallery of the Belleville Theatre,”
the “Holy Women at the Foot of the Cross”), he accomplishes them by
bringing forth the feelings and thoughts which have brought together
the persons concerned, and determine their bearings and movements.
What individual works scattered in exhibitions and museums have not
proved to every one is made indisputably clear by the 150 reproductions
in the Piazza book, viz., that Carrière is one of the noblest,
chastest, most deeply-feeling artists of to-day, who has created for
himself a peculiar technique, particularly dangerous for imitators, but
natural to himself, and, therefore, in his hand, justified.
SOME OF CARRIÈRE’S PICTURES
“The Belleville Theatre.”—The light, mystic vapour which fills and
exhales through Carrière’s pictures, like delicate bluish-white clouds
of incense, does not, as a rule, exert a disturbing influence. In
this picture, quite one of his most important ones, his brush seems
to have betrayed him. He has grown more material than is usual with
him. The “Belleville Theatre” is so densely enveloped in smoke that
hardly anything can be distinguished amidst the clouds. Yet what
splendid discoveries are to be made if you make a violent effort to
penetrate the darkness, into which a venture may only be made with
a diver’s helmet and an air-pipe! We see—or, rather, we surmise—the
third and a part of the fourth gallery of the People’s Theatre. The
suburban audience that fills these rows, gives itself unrestrainedly
up to the magic of the spectacle. It lives not its own life, but that
of the heroes in the piece. To this audience Hecuba is everything. The
wide-opened eyes lost in reverie, the cheeks sunk sorrowfully in their
hands, the shoulders contracted by fear, the bodies almost helplessly
leaning on one another, betray the intensity with which these poor
people have fled out of themselves into illusion. What is truth, what
is deception, if a poetical word, and that, too, most likely the word
of a wretched melodrama, can snatch away small trades-people and
artisans—probably sore oppressed by the needs of existence and more
than full of their own troubles—so far from all their griefs that
they forget their misery and think they are vividly experiencing a
new lot? That would be the Buddha philosophy of this amazing picture
if we could but distinguish all it contains. Carrière has painted the
profound doctrine of Maia and Nirvana. It is a pity he has covered it
with so thick a veil that it remains impenetrable even to the eyes of
the initiated.
“Christ on the Cross” will give to those capable of feeling the
impression of a great, artistic experience. The mystical tragedy,
from which a world-religion draws its emotion, is presented with the
simplicity and suppressed pain with which a father reports to his son
the tragic death of the mother. All subsidiary work that might prove
distracting is avoided. No thieves, no Captain Longinus, no Roman
legionaries, no fanatical spectators; not one of the aids in men or
things with which the classics of painting are wont to complicate
the event of Calvary, with the object of making it more impressive.
Nothing save the life-sized figure of the Saviour, who has ended His
sufferings, and Mary, who leans against the Cross so as not to break
down altogether. On the face of the corpse the peace of consummation
has sunk; unutterable grief wastes that of the Mother. The form floats
in a soft, unearthly light; on the latter expressive shadows strive.
The repose of the dead Christ, which would appear painless and almost
cheerful were it not that a slight trait of suffering was fixed around
the mouth, dawns like a consolation over the dark despair which fills
the soul of the living mother. If she suffers humanly, as a mother,
so that she would fain die of woe, still redemption and exaltation
also arise for her from the act of salvation. If one has ever heard
Palestrina’s “Stabat Mater,” it re-echoes in his soul at the sight
of Carrière’s picture. It has issued from the same deep emotion
as the tear-soaked _terzine_ of Jacopone da Todi and Palestrina’s
sobbing hymn. Carrière abandons himself to his feelings with the same
earnestness as the Franciscan friar and the choirmaster of St Peter’s.
It is hard for me to admit that he shares their pious belief. I assume
that the Mother’s grief has, in the main, inspired him. This strong
feeling has, doubtless, made him susceptible of the sacredness of the
symbolism in the death on the Cross; through the human he will have
raised himself to an inkling of the superhuman. Let us not forget
that Carrière is the painter of that “Motherhood,” the gem of the
Luxembourg Museum, which depicts a young mother with a child on her lap
and another beside her, revelling in the sight of her little ones—her
treasures—with adorable tenderness in look and mien, in the pose of
her body and the movement of her arms. Carrière has a wonderfully
deep feeling for maternal love, in joy as in sorrow. Unconsciously
and involuntarily, he has conceived his subject not with the spirit
of a believing Christian, but with the broken heart of Mary. He might
confidently have called his “Christ on the Cross,” too, “Maternity,”
like his masterpiece in the Luxembourg; the one is a companion-picture
of the other; the tragedy of maternal love, according to its idyl.[4]
There were cases in which the employment of Carrière’s plan of the
delicate grey veil of enveloping mist was not successful. I have,
for instance, been obliged to make reservations in respect of his
“Theatre in Belleville.” In the “Christ on the Cross” it is organically
developed from the subject. The veil of mist shrouds the incident in
the weird twilight which is the prescribed atmosphere of miracle and
the mysteries of faith. Beyond the figures in the foreground of the
Crucified and the Blessed Virgin we divine, in the semi-dark distance,
a great city, at the back of which, on the horizon, a twinkling white
light, like the still uncertain brightness of a young dawning day,
arises. Our powers of imagination may fill with life the whole of this
profound space wherein dawn is at odds with night—with the life of a
whole townsfolk enjoying their revenge or weeping for woe, oppressed
with foreboding or hopefully confident.
Here is symbolism in that high sense in which every true work of
art is symbolic. The picture is at the same time intellectual and
transcendental; the rationalistic beholder, who neither seeks nor
wishes to find a mystery, has before him the humanly affecting drama
of the mother who bewails her son who has died unmistakably in a
noble task. He sees sights he can understand—the peace of death and a
mother’s deepest pain—presented with unsurpassable truth. He enjoys
the charm of perfect form, marvellous warmth of colour, produced with
the simple means of _gouache_ toning and a very faint heightening by
touches of red, and an extremely interesting distribution of soft
light glimmering from the dark background. The mystically minded
beholder sees all this, and he sees, besides, the divine element in the
Crucifixion and the sorrow-stricken Mother, the terribly threatening
subversion of the natural order in the darkness brooding over the city
and fields, and the promise in the light arising in the distance.
What the rationalist sees in the work of art is sufficient to arouse
his feeling and admiration. The mystic’s wonder and feeling will be
powerfully strengthened by religious emotion.
“Portrait of my Wife.”—He who is guilty of the error of confounding
gaudiness with coloration might find a guide in this work. A few bright
tones in the spiritualised, almost transparent face; a fur collar of a
warm, rich brown; a gay, red flower in the girdle, comprise all that
Carrière employs as colour media, in order to conjure up a harmony of
lulling melody and, at the same time, of all but hypnotising intensity.
That is precisely the whole mystery; it is not a question of the noise,
but of the harmony. Three colour values, chosen with exquisite taste,
placed on the right spot in the floating white and pearl-grey cloud
which constitutes Carrière’s manner, and the impression of the colour
mystery is produced with greater success and depth than by a palette
on which all the seven colours of the rainbow are keeping a witch’s
festival.
“The Kiss before Going to Sleep.”—A painting of marvellous range of
feeling. A mother with her daughters, from the grown-up one to the
suckling infant at her breast. The big girl bends over her mother’s
shoulder, as the latter is sitting, and takes her good-night kiss
from the lips of the head turned to her. The baby has fallen asleep
whilst feeding at the maternal bosom. The third, half-grown-up, has
likewise been overcome by sleep, as she leans helplessly, with her
whole weight, on her mother. The last twines her fondling fingers in
her mother’s hand outstretched to her. The mother is the central point
of the picture. From her gushes the force that penetrates, encompasses,
attracts, and holds together the rest of the figures. Love it is which
collects these beings and unites them in a marvellous circle. Thus they
become a symbol of the force that has built up the universe itself, and
keeps it in its eternal order. And this self-same love, which knits
these hands in each other, bends these bodies to each other, brings
these lips together, which is visibly the motive and attractive force,
in all these simple but incomparably eloquent lines of movement, has
also guided the magic brush capable of expressing so great a theme.
He who at the sight of this lofty work does not feel all the hardness
in him melting in joy stands outside humanity. Moreover, there is not
a trace of declamation, or purpose, or _tremolo_ in its execution; no
prettily pietistic rhetoric. Not a single adjective, but only neuter
substantives, as in Roman inscriptions. That is precisely the receipt,
which holds good in all times and in all places, for monumental works:
eternal feelings expressed in eternal forms.
“The Engaged Couple,” like “Maternity,” like his portraits of a
married couple, a young maiden, etc., etc., are unapproachable works.
His grasp of the essential in phenomena, his economy of form, are
of supreme craftsmanship. It is in this direction, I think, that
the future development of painting lies. It will soon be over with
mere transcription of nature, however clever; certainly, on the not
very distant day when colour photography will be handed over from
the experimental laboratory of the physicist, to professional use.
Then the individual standpoints of observation will alone hold good.
People will want views, not as the mechanically reproducing, dead
object-glass, but as the inspired eye of the artist sees them. Pictures
will have to be a selection, an interpretation, an emotional excavation
of the optic phenomenon; every picture an anthology of vision; and
the personality of the artist revealing himself in it, will be the
fascination of his work, its value and its beauty. Let no one say:
“These are trivialities. It has always been so since plastic art
existed.” The plastic artist was hitherto always in the first place
a depictor. His soul revealed itself only discreetly in his works.
Carrière goes far beyond what he sees: he paints souls; he paints
feelings. In his representation the inexpressible becomes an incident.
A fugitive movement, a pose, a line of head, neck, shoulders, or hand
in which unconsciousness is manifested, when self-control is relaxed
for a moment; these treacherous means of expressing mood, which the
will is not always able to influence—these are the elements with which
he works. He discloses the impulses, up to their most delicate moods,
which are the causes of movements and deportment. To such a spiritual
art must painting be developed. And this is why I call Carrière’s
pictures the art of the future.
X
PUVIS DE CHAVANNES
Puvis de Chavannes is dead, and his influence is dying; his School is
desolate, and I see now hardly any stragglers worrying themselves to
paint with his palette of pale moonlight. So it is no longer necessary
to attack him. It is enough to explain his spiritual transformation and
his successes.
When he attained the maturity of his powers, that Naturalism was the
trump-card in painting, of which Bastian Lepage’s abominable “Reaper,”
whose brutalised grimace grins at the visitor to the Luxembourg Museum,
was admired as the highest achievement. The young critic had eyes only
for this art. The multitude dared not question the fulsome praise
squandered on the works of the naturalists; but their inner voice was
not mute. They had qualms of conscience about their culpable cowardice,
and were quite well aware that naturalism, which was lauded to them
as Progress and the Future, was in reality the negation of all art.
Then Puvis de Chavannes stepped forward with his big wall-paintings,
which put symbolism, sacred legend, and history on the stage, on a
literary background, and reunited them to tradition, which had been
disowned or scoffed at by naturalism, out of barbaric ignorance or
vulgar arrogance. The multitude, whose inward feelings partisan
criticism outraged, turned forthwith to the painter who seemed to them
a deliverer and an avenger. He was a living protest against the art
of the vulgar, the hideous, and the commonplace; against the art of
the mechanically dull copying of a soulless reality. He took pains to
serve beauty. He showed unmistakably the object of his spiritualising
his figures and actions. Before his pictures one could once more
dream. After prose, after vulgar, slangy prose, it was verse. People
did not even ask if the verses were good; people were satisfied with
mediocre verses, provided they were verses. To Puvis de Chavannes his
fundamental, academic instincts had given the direction; but whilst
he followed his bent, he became, without intending it, and without
previously knowing it, the file-leader of the right-about turn, which
began in “the ’eighties” and has now long ended.
In a period of idealism he would have been one of the many. People
would not have noticed him or would have found in him much to take
exception to: the banality of his symbols, the impersonality,
smoothness, and polish of his draughtsmanship, the intentional
incoherence of his compositions. During the predominance of naturalism,
his academic banality itself seemed a courageous act, and seekers
after the ideal even accounted his most obvious faults and weaknesses
as excellencies in him.
He got his faded, spectral colours by imitating the fresco painters
of the Quattrocentro. His ideal of picturesque beauty united in
inseparable association the stateliness of the old monumental
wall-paintings with their fadedness; and when he wished to paint in
their style and produce their æsthetic effects, he at once gave his
pictures the faint coloration which had never been intended by the
Quattrocentists, but which their works have suffered through the
devastating force of five centuries. The obliterated, remote, ghostly
qualities of this faded type of painting came to meet a morbid mood
of the time. This mystic coloration harmonised with the prevalent
mysticism. The decadents were thankful to him for his moon-stricken
colouring; those athirst for beauty for his conversion to classical
tradition; and so he became a great man through the sins of the
naturalists and their critical heralds.
Puvis was the first academical and recognised master in France who
began to paint the morbid. His whim is chalk-wash. He covers, on
principle, his pictures with a white, semi-transparent broth that
extinguishes all the colours. His eye detests colour. His glance has
a sort of chloridising effect; it takes the colour out of everything
it ranges over. With him, however, morbidity is natural and not
an affectation. He has that horror of all that is loud, full, and
impressive, which marks the nervous man, whom every rough touch
pains. It is well with him only when nature whispers, when her looks
are veiled in a fine mist, when all life in her is motionless. In his
soul reigns a melancholy absence of sound, and he likes to carry this
into the outer world also. Moreover, the multiplicity of living forms
confuses and repels him; it is too full of motion and gaudiness. He
simplifies, therefore, all lines which thus lose their distinctive
individuality. He retains only what is typical of the phenomenon; he
infuses his style into all that his brush and pencil touch, and this
cold stylisation is then called by people his “idealism.”
Has Puvis laid himself open to the reproach that all his figures are
awkwardly typical because he cannot draw? We might almost think so.
It is only as a reply to such a reproach that we can understand his
exhibiting in 1896 several hundred drawings, preliminary studies
for all his chief works. After a minute inspection of these smaller
and greater sheets of sketches scarcely indicated or industriously
executed, of figures scarcely outlined or carefully shaded in
lead-pencil, Indian ink, red and other coloured chalks, we are bound
to feel every respect for his industry and conscientiousness. For
the originality of his talent, too? That to me is questionable. If
I gaze on the studies of Leonardo and Albrecht Dürer, I am, in a
very short time, over-mastered by an inexpressible emotion. A holy
of holies is revealed: the most secret feelings of an artist’s soul
which would fain become conscious of itself whilst seeking to give
shape to the emotion that is urging it. You can see the struggle with
the resistance of the material, the mustering of all his forces, in
the majority of cases the artist’s victory, ofttimes his despairing
confession of impotence. A feature of the phenomenon—a fugitive yet
expressive movement has made its impression on the artist. He hastens
to fix his conception. At first in a few hasty strokes, which are then
strengthened, deepened, emphasised, and developed. Five times, ten
times, till the artist desists disheartened, or till the vision is
overcome and fixed by a spell in its whole force and verity, in its
distinctive character that is never to be repeated. In Puvis I observed
with astonishment the contrary process. The first sketch has always
the greatest individuality, every later state of the figure shows
it less differentiated, and more reduced to an average type lacking
expression. He never ascends, he goes down. The artist’s emotion in
face of the phenomenon—the impulse to produce in the rapture of an
intuition is never traceable in him. None of the sheets is the arena
of that awful fight waged by talent against the hostile demon of the
material, which reminds me of the night-long struggle of Jacob with the
spectre at the ford Jabbok. The starting-point of the work is correct,
ice-cold _métier_. It progresses to simplifications that are just so
many evasions of difficulties, and it finally arrives at insignificant
puppets. “That was intentional,” cry the painter’s eulogists. So much
the worse if it was intentional. But was it really intentional? That is
the question. Often enough, as an afterthought, a person imagines he is
exercising volition, whilst, as a matter of fact, he is constrained.
For him who has learnt to see in all works documents bearing on their
creator’s psychology, the drawings of Puvis are proof positive that
this highly famous man never glanced at the world with an artist’s eye,
but that he was originally a cold, academical technician, who, later
on, by pure reason and without attaining the slightest fervour, has
subtilised a peculiarity: the imitation of faded frescoes in colour,
archaic indifferentiation in drawing, abstract literary symbolism in
his subjects.
In fact, what is unreal and dream-like about his vision is not only
determinative in regard to his archaically simple, almost poor drawing
and his pallid colour, but also the choice of his subject. He likes
best to portray allegories, in which the figures are reduced to the
_rôle_ of symbols. When he cannot be allegorical, in his famous
wall-paintings at the Pantheon, for instance, which tell the legend
of St Géneviève, he satisfies his craving for spectre painting by
spiritualising the given historical figures into fleshless, bloodless
denizens of the ballad of the land of Thule. In individual and very
rare instances, he finds a material organically suitable for his
moon-struck style of painting. In such cases, of course, he strives
after extraordinary effects; for instance, with his “Poor Fisherman”
in the Luxembourg Museum. This dreadfully poor, emaciated man—more
a shadow than a human being—who, sorrowfully but resigned, stands
in his old patched boat, drops his wretched net into the sluggish,
greyish-yellow water, and is surrounded and, as it were, fixed by the
dead lines of a flat melancholy landscape, breathes a disconsolateness
and abandonment that, at the sight of him, “humanity’s whole sorrow”
seizes the beholder.
Once again, in his last period, Puvis lighted on one of those rare
subjects which not only bear, but demand his peculiar methods of
execution, and out of this lucky encounter came forth a masterpiece,
viz., the fresco which concludes his Géneviève cycle.