convent and lets her glance roam over Paris. At her feet lies the
slumbering city; in the foreground surge the red-tiled roofs, between
which soar a few tree-tops in the luxuriant verdure of midsummer; in
the distance stretch the soft hill lines of a cheerful landscape, the
green of whose meadows is interrupted, here and there, by the white
mass of a convent or abbey. Slender lilies and _gladioli_ bloom in
noble vessels on the balcony. In the bare cell, the door of which is
wide open behind the saint, the smoking flame of a lamp of antique
pattern smoulders. At the summit, in a deep blue sky, hangs the full
moon, which softly illumines city and landscape, and casts an eerie
gleam on the curled leafage of the tree-tops. Immersed and bathed
in its soft radiance, the saint stands there, unearthly with her
thin, ascetic countenance and her white nun’s habit, which from her
headcloth to the trailing hem of her garment flows down in unbroken,
perpendicular lines, and seems to lift up her soul in a quiet, ecstatic
prayer for the slumbering town, whose peaceful prosperity is a work
of her solicitous love. Here Puvis’s peculiar method triumphs in
every feature. Here his temperament needed only to give itself its
natural scope to attain the highest artistic result. What elsewhere
is intolerable affectation becomes here the honest revelation of a
mood. The subdued harmony of violet and blue in different gradations
of intensity that blend softly into one another is legitimate in the
picture of a summer night, which takes its sole spectral light from
the moon and an oil-lamp. The paleness of the flesh is understandable
in the aging nun who mortifies herself by prayer, vigils, and fasting.
The simplicity of the drawing, which is reduced to a few straight and
slightly though expressively curved lines, finds its defence in the
dusk of the semi-transparent night which suppresses all individualities
of forms; and leaves only for us general, essential features, and
these rather surmised than clearly seen. Thus here a special subject
finds its special and fully adequate means of expression, and the work
becomes a model of what is termed style in the highest sense.
A rejuvenation seemed to come over Puvis when he seized once more
on the Géneviève theme which had occupied him from the days of his
youth. This theme was to him what the theme of Faust was to Goethe:
while the octogenarian was engrossed in it, something of the flame
that glowed in the young man of twenty fired him, and the last cry of
_Una pænitentium_[5] is still an after-thrill of Gretchen’s passion.
Puvis, too, appears to have thought or felt “_Ihr naht euch wieder,
schwankende Gestalten!_” when he set about painting this concluding
picture of the Géneviève cycle; and for the last strophe of his ballad,
which dies away so sadly, he found again some of the power and unction
which secures to its predecessors their glorious place in the century’s
Art.
If the brazen foreheads of the babblers who have the chief say in the
art criticism of the time were at all capable of a decent blush, they
would turn red with shame at his series of frescoes in the Pantheon.
People had the audacity to claim Puvis for some “modernity” or other,
in which certain moods of our time were said to be incorporated.
The only time when one can wholly surrender oneself to him, he is
absolutely of no time. What, in that instance, fascinates in him is
nothing relating to the present, and still less to the future, but the
past and the remote past, the atavistic. His life’s great work is a
legend of a saint, which he has treated after the manner of a legend
with the feelings of a primitive who, in the manner natural to him—the
manner of about the fourteenth century—tells a story that is to him
a living verity, in which he believes, as those souls believe it for
whose edification he presents it, and which moves and touches him as
it does the beholders who will fold their hands devoutly before his
work. Puvis cannot reckon on such a reception from his contemporaries,
for whom he designs his creation. To us the legend is strange; it is
a bit of learned literature which we look at critically, and in which
we cannot be expected to plunge believingly. If Puvis, nevertheless,
overcomes our opposition, and can suggest to us for moments the
child-like faith and all the emotions of dead and gone times that are
connected with that faith, he has achieved something more difficult
than the primitives, for whom the spirit of their time was no opponent,
but a confederate.
Blessed are the ignorant. Their lack of suspicion secures them,
whenever they glance at the world, the enthusiasm of discovery
and invention, and every phenomenon delights them as something
unprecedented. During the lifetime of Puvis de Chavannes his peculiar
style was particularly extolled by his eulogists. They exhibited him
as a God-sent foundling; as a Moses of painting, without ancestors,
himself an ancestor; as a great solitary wandering apart from the
multitude through the history of contemporary art. Such phrases can be
uttered only by one who rejoices in the most refreshing ignorance of
the historical continuity of things. Puvis is of a family. The expert
can name his forefathers and relations; he finds their lineaments
repeated—often coarsened and disfigured—in him.
Puvis, this great, original genius of his admirers, is an impoverished
descendant of Cornelius. He represents the worst aberration in art
that this century has seen, viz., thought-painting. Nowadays it is
no longer necessary to prove that abstraction is the negation and
abrogation of plastic art. This maxim, fortunately, has become an
æsthetic commonplace. Painting has to do only with sensuous phenomena;
abstraction distils from the sensuous one quality, which, since it is
common to many phenomena, is reminiscent of many phenomena, yet is
itself not phenomenon. He who feels the impulse to paint not views but
thoughts, proves that in his innermost soul he is not a painter, but a
rhetorician, and that he has deceived himself marvellously as to the
method of expression natural and organic to him. Cornelius’s painting
presented thoughts, religious, philosophical, and historical dogmas, in
a picture-language considerably less clearly than might have been done
in well-ordered words. It pleased all those whose soul was seven times
sealed against understanding what really constitutes painting. As long
as the Cornelius tendency was dominant in Germany, that country was
depressingly behind in the art life of the period. As soon as Cornelius
and his school were overthrown, a sound development of German painting
began. And now, at the close of the nineteenth century in France,
in the France which has produced, in landscape, Corot, Rousseau,
Diaz, Harpignies: in figure-painting, Millet, Courbet, Bonnat, Roll:
from which has come the return to nature and the renaissance of art,
the allegorical thought-painting of a Puvis has been praised as the
greatest advance, as the latest step in development! The snake biting
its own tail still remains the truest symbol of human activity that the
self-knowledge of the race has as yet discovered.
And how far, in his special direction, Puvis lags behind his obsolete
predecessors! A Cornelius, Kaulbach, and Stilke, displayed, after
all, in the invention of their symbols, a rich power of imagination
which might have been worthy of better things. Their two-legged
abstractions were so honestly drawn that they deceived with regard to
their phantom-like nature, and could give themselves out to be real
creatures of flesh and blood. Puvis’s invention, on the other hand,
is so poor that it whines pitifully for alms. The representations
which kindle his imagination seem derived solely from an illustrated
handbook of mythology for girls’ schools. For an example of this, one
has only to look at the wall-paintings for the Boston Library, which
are among the most important work that Puvis has done, at least so
far as their range and claims are concerned. The first represents
the inspiring Muses “greeting with acclamations light carrying the
Genius.” From a schematic landscape with sickly pale meadows, a sea of
ultramarine blue, and spanned by a sky the colour of autumn foliage,
nine female figures are flying to meet a delightfully insignificant
naked youth striding on clouds of wadding. This youth holds in each
hand a powerfully brilliant electrical lamp, evidently the Teslasch
alternating current light, as wires are nowhere visible. The least
fault of this picture is that the Muses are not aspiring in voluntary,
independent flight, but hang motionless in the air in a passive
attitude, like Giotto’s angels and saints, who have not yet learnt
to fly. Its mortal sin is that it wishes to represent in painting a
vulgar, rhetorical arrangement composed of a number of abstractions.
Beside this allegory, Puvis opens five windows on his world of dreams.
Naked shepherds observe, in a southern night, the course of the stars,
and are themselves observed by a young woman who is creeping out of a
lowly leafy hut. A man in a sort of Roman dress looks thoughtfully at
some bee-hives, whilst peasants in the distance are busy working in the
fields. A greybeard is sitting by the sea, from which a steep cliff
emerges. On its summit a man is chained almost in the attitude of the
Crucified. The shadow of an approaching vulture falls on him. Maidens
emerging from the sea hover round him with disconsolate gestures. We
must necessarily recognise Prometheus and the Oceanides in the scene.
Another old man, who is blind, receives laurel branches from two young
beauties. A haughty dame stretches her arm with magic gestures over a
mysterious abyss that has engulfed mighty marble buildings, pillars,
and woodwork. Behind the woman stands a youth with a torch and book
in his hand. I have described in brief what one actually sees. Puvis
means the star-gazers for Chaldæan shepherds; the Roman for Vergil;
the greybeard in front of the Prometheus-rocks for Æschylus; the blind
man for Homer receiving the laurels from the hands of the Iliad and
Odyssey personified; the enchantress for history conjuring up the past.
We are to read still more into it. The Chaldæans signify astronomy;
Vergil bucolic poetry, Æschylus dramatic, Homer epic; the conjurer up
of the dead and ruined, Clio. Thus we have before us five polished
planes of the prism of man’s spiritual activity, five domains of the
Muses—a fitting decoration for a library. These abstractions are
painted in an abstract style. The human beings are schematic drawings
as if taken from statues for illustrating an academic canon. They live
psychically only through their artificial gestures—not through their
mask—visages without mien of glance. The landscapes are geometrical
combinations of rocks which a Cyclopean stone-mason has hewn in ancient
style; of mountains whose ridge stretches in architectural lines; of
evenly-coloured masses of deep-blue sea, pale-green sky, and sap-green
grass country. The land is called Utopia, and is inhabited by Outis:
in English, Nowhere and Nobody. The indigo, emerald, and turquoise
tone is pleasant to the eye, especially as Puvis has here, contrary
to his murderous habit, not massacred the living colours. But nothing
except the harmony of colours appeals to me in these pictures. It is
not painting: it is writing. It does not presuppose in me any feeling
for art, but only a decent, classical education. It taps on my school
satchel. Before these five Puvis de Chavannes pictures, I think of a
highly-educated Japanese, learned in all the wisdom of his country,
with the most delicate feelings for line and harmony of colours; an
appreciator of Hokusai and the other great masters of Japan: he will
receive no impression at all from Puvis’s works; he will look upon the
figures as phantoms, the scenes as so much childishness; he will not
have an inkling what these forms, remotely resembling human beings,
are doing, or what they mean. For he is not acquainted with the Greek
and Latin classics, and without this hypothesis the works of Puvis are
dead symbols, incomprehensible to any one unprovided with the special
key, and without the natural constraining power of plain human truth
and beauty. The provoking over-estimation of his work by corybantic
critics justified every severity against Puvis de Chavannes in his
lifetime. Now his appreciation no longer requires polemical pricks,
and we can say that his Géneviève cycle secures him a permanent place
in the history of art; that his great allegorical frescoes are cold,
dead, sprawling, pretentious subtleties; and that neither his drawing
nor his colour sanctify him as a master and model. His importance
consists in this, _i.e._, that in his time the longing for beauty took
him as a cloak for a passionate confession. The Puvis cult was, in the
main, a reaction against Realism. By the exaggeration with which he
was honoured may be measured the greatness of the disgust which his
contemporaries felt for naturalistic art.
XI
BRIGHT AND DARK PAINTING
CHARLES COTTET
A generation ago opposition arose against gloomy painting. Down with
the twilight cellar painting! Down with the studio sauce! Hurrah
for the open air! Long live free light! With this war-song a brave,
hot-blooded band stormed art academies and studios of masters, and,
shouting for joy, planted their silver and violet banner on the posts
they had taken. For two whole decades the art exhibitions presented a
cheerful, festive aspect. It was always Sunday. The glow of a southern
noon rested over whole walls. From the hundreds and thousands of
canvases, big and little, streamed the gleaming sunlight in its full
glory. Men, beasts, things, landscapes—all swam in luminous splendour
which, at most, patches of violet shadow subdued timidly. Nature seemed
to know no other conditions of light than those of Capri in July.
About the turn of the century this suddenly began to change. In some
pictures the light went out. Certain painters again discovered the
darkness of evening, of leaden-clouded winter’s day, of thickets, of
rooms. On some palettes the eternal white and violet was replaced by
the old brown, black, and olive-green of our fathers. The phenomenon
became, year by year, more marked. To-day the change is accomplished.
Free light is thrown away after the old moons. Painting has grown sick
of noonday. There is an atmosphere of twilight in all the pictures. The
young painters—the victors of the day—use as much asphalt, mummy, and
umber, as did the old ones thirty years ago. Whole ranges of walls in
the Paris _salons_ lie as in deep shadow, and we may go through several
rooms before finding a creature represented as “breathing in rosy
light.”
What satires these _salons_ are on the consequential, high-stepping,
deep-thinking drivel of professorial and other chatterers, who, to hide
their dearth of thoughts, turn out new words, discover in our days a
particular “charm” in painting as in other arts, and prove by _a_ + _b_
the necessary, logically offered expression of new spiritual needs of
the present generation.
Now what has become of the “charm” that calculatingly demanded “free
light” and nothing else? And how is it, then, with the spiritual
needs of the present generation, to which free light and nothing
else corresponded? And how does it stand with the new way, in which
favoured artists have taught us to contemplate and to feel nature?
Was the “charm” four or five years ago inclined to brilliancy, and
is it changed during the night to an insatiable longing for gloom?
Did white and violet correspond five years ago to the spiritual needs
of the present generation, and does this generation now need black,
brown, or olive-green tones? Have we just as quickly again unlearnt to
contemplate and feel nature in sun-gold and violet, as favoured artists
have taught us to do?
Living art goes her way according to her own laws and impulses, and
leaves in the lurch the babbling empty heads, with their pretentious
threshing of phrases, who tramp after her, expounding and talking
wisely interpretations and clever chatter. Not by a particular
“incentive” of the period, not from its alleged spiritual needs and
currents of thought, are the changes of art creation to be explained,
but solely by the psychology of the artists, by their very human, very
weakly prosaic needs, by the material and moral conditions under which
they are nowadays condemned to work.
The _salons_, the art exhibitions, are in our time the annual marts
of success for painters. In these they have to seek fame and its
train-bearer—payment in cash. In these they must strive amongst a
thousand or two thousand competitors to astonish at any price. By
special beauty or special nobility? This means will be chosen by the
very fewest. Firstly, not one in a thousand has it in his power. In
the second place, even an artist not in the front rank has enough
Philistine contempt to be convinced that nobility and beauty are the
last things for which the crowd has a taste. His hunger for success—a
fitting form of his instinct for self-preservation—gives the artist
sense and understanding of the psychology of the multitude, whose
elementary law is that it is obtuse to that which is common and reacts
on what is uncommon. The artist who works with an eye to exhibiting
where his work will be one of two thousand, has only one endeavour,
viz., to be as different as possible from these, and by this means
possibly to make a striking impression amongst them. The contrary is
the greatest difference possible. That is the polar line, the angle of
180 degrees. Logic, which unconsciously proceeds geometrically, brings
the artist to this. He also looks sharply at what the others are doing;
puts himself to trouble to find out what they have in common, and in
what respect they resemble each other; and when he has discovered this,
or thinks he has done so, he proceeds to do the exact reverse.
If he has properly recognised the predominating element and has hit the
exact opposite, the victory is gained with a weight that overthrows all
before it. Professional associates, critics, and public stand in front
of something new. The novelty-hating majority feels the disturbance in
their lazy mental habits as an insult and discomfort, and sets up a
yell. The minority of unsatisfied gainsayers, morbid bread-hunters,
vain coxcombs, and enthusiasts longing for the glorious Unknown and
Unprecedented, passionately take side for the novelty. This serves as
an excuse for a conflict of those eternal conservative and radical
tendencies, whose battle may be seen throughout the whole history of
human development; and the artist who unchains these tempests sees
himself honoured as one of the embodiments of contemporary thought, as
a power in civilisation. Only quite exceptionally is a cool analyst
found to say with smiling tranquillity amidst the bluster of the war
of minds: “Dear children, don’t excite yourselves like that; the word
‘new’ is no verdict. To be different does not necessarily mean to be
better. An old tendency may contain beauty in itself; a new one may,
of course, do so too, but not necessarily. He who grows excited on
behalf of the old, simply because it is old, is commonplace. He who
grows excited for the sake of something new, merely because it is
new, is commonplace with a negative prefix. Only wait a little while.
In a short space of time the new will have become old, and you will
recognise that there was no grounds for raising a noise about it. The
man of the new thing, whom you hail as the bringer of a new salvation,
is no better than the ancients; but he is right, for he wishes to be
noticed, to inherit from the ancients, and that is wholly justified
from his selfish standpoint.”
The would-be aristocrats of intelligence—the “intellectuals”—would
find a speech like this intolerably homely. It is not in the least
“deep.” It is not at all applicable to the mystic inclinations of
vaporous brains. It discovers no single unsurmised and astounding
relation between phenomena that have nothing in common with each other;
but I believe it is literally true.
The “Impressionists” of the Caillebotte room in the Luxembourg painted
brightly when the _salon_ was correspondingly dark. The one light
picture among the dark paintings acted like a window that opens in
the gloomy wall to the sunny air. When the other painters saw that
the multitude flew towards this bright point, like moths after the
flame of a taper, they hastened to paint also in bright colours. “Free
light” was discovered. It corresponded to no mood of the period. Free
light is joyous and satisfied. The spirit of the age was, during
its predominance in painting, pessimistic and sick with longing as
it had hardly ever been in the past. Nor was it a new way of seeing
and feeling nature. Turner, Corot, Claude Lorrain, Ostade, Salvator
Rosa himself had seen and felt nature quite as brightly as Manet and
Monet had done. The truth is that the “Impressionists” were turbulent
young people who got angry at vegetating in obscurity whilst Gudin
and Schnetz, Signol and Müller, Pils, Cabanel, Dubufe, and Robert
Fleury had all the honours and successes; and that impelled by envious
loathing of these celebrities of that day, they found, as it were, in
a negative chemo-tropical way, the exact reverse of their dark style.
Five years ago the same incident was played off exactly in the opposite
direction. Everybody was painting in a bright style. The Schnetz and
Cabanel, Delaunay and Cogniet of the day were called Puvis de Chavannes
and Roll, Besnard and Cazin. Then, again, some young people got angry
about their being unknown and unheeded, and they entered, consciously
and of set purpose, into opposition against the celebrities of the day.
Charles Cottet exhibited a black picture which, in the middle of a
blinding white exhibition wall, struck just as glaringly as did, thirty
years ago, the bright picture in the middle of the black wall. Cottet
had hit the bull’s eye. He instantly created a school, and to-day
the _salons_ look once more as they did thirty years ago, to be once
more flooded with free light, probably, some twenty or thirty years
hence. It is an orbit without beginning or end, an eternal beginning
over again, and only posing fools seek, in this monotonous, periodical
return of the same effects under the influence of the same causes, to
ferret out connections with definite phenomena of the times.
Charles Cottet is developing into the undisputed leader of the young
race of painters. He deserves the recognition accorded to him, yet it
is a serious matter that he provokes to imitation; for what in him
is uncouth, though justifiable, independence, will become with the
imitators a manner that may rapidly pass into intolerable aberration.
Cottet loves dark harmonies of colour. He paints night, closed rooms
illumined by artificial light, candle and fire effects; unlike
Rembrandt, whose glooms are delicate and transparent, whose men and
things are particularly self-luminous in sunless space; and unlike his
pupil, Schalcken, who treats flames and their reflections roughly after
the manner of a blacksmith, without mystery or harmony. Cottet paints
it apparently more from joy in darkness than joy in light, for with him
darkness is generally the principal thing, and the sources of light are
there chiefly to call attention to the sinister stir and movement in
the unillumined dusk. His imitators do not see the intense life of his
shadows. They only see his black, brown, and dark-green palette, and
dimly brush away at it again as in the worst days before the dawn of
“free light.”
Painting goes out into the night, and will remain there a while. Then
once more a cheerful and free artist will come, and discover light for
an astonished and enraptured world, and he will be deified or damned
as a revolutionist just as Monet was thirty-five years ago when he did
the same, and as Cottet was five years ago when he did the reverse.
And thus it will ever be so long as in the human apparatus of thought
a change of impression will relax conscious feeling, and art creation
will have to serve, not only the utterance of strong impulses of
emotion and the relaxation of the nervous system, but also the ambition
or vanity of the artist, which means, I suppose, to the end of time.