can measure the whole emptiness of such concepts as “Realism” and
“Idealism.” Compare Frédéric with the Bastien Lepage of the Luxembourg.
Bastien Lepage passes for the most perfect didactic type of realistic
painting. His brutalised, ape-like, feeble-minded, staring Reaper is
supposed to be genuine, unrouged nature. Possibly the painter has, on
some occasion, seen a disgusting idiot of this sort. I do not know,
but I will believe it, for I should like to assume that he had not
discovered in his own imagination so perversely distorted an image of
the human form. But as such repulsively bestial young women are, in
any case, rare exceptions among the white races, Bastien Lepage has
unmistakably taken the trouble to choose out of thousands the most
hideous model he could hunt up, out of a base, corrupt delight in
ugliness, with the malicious intention of defaming nature. Frédéric
tells a story in his triptych, “The Ages of the Workman.” Who can deny
that he, too, has held with absolute accuracy to reality? On the right,
early childhood: workmen’s wives, young and fair mothers are suckling
their babies, sweet, fat little creatures with firm little limbs and
skins like rose leaves; little maidens, who can hardly stand on their
feet, take in tow and act the mother to still smaller brothers and
sisters; old grandmothers, who can no longer take part in the labours
of the household, keep an eye on the children crawling and swarming
about. In the middle, youth: neglected yet happy scapegraces are
playing cards in the street, sitting or squatting on the curb-stone;
undisciplined lads are venturing the experiment of their first
cigarette; grown-up youths go out with young girls of their class on
their arm; what they whisper in the ears of their blushing sweethearts
would scarcely delight severe guardians of morals; but, at that period
of life, in that human environment, their feelings are so natural and
healthy that, in spite of all crabbed affectation, they are felt to be
pleasant and touching. Finally, on the left, men in their prime are
at work: they are erecting toilsomely, with heavy pieces, a scaffold,
and a little youngster looks at them; what he has before his eyes is
his own future lot, but in his careless, boyish curiosity he notices
only the amusing side of the growth of a skilful and intricate work
of man, not the hard seriousness of the ill-paid, dangerous, and
severe exertion. Thus the life of the poor artisan lies exposed to
our gaze. Frédéric does not conceal from us either its hardships or
the scantiness of its material condition. He shows us how poorly the
people are clad, how ugly their streets and houses are, how narrow is
the circle that includes their petty joys and sorrows, and how serious,
now and then, is their pastime. But he makes us see also the sunshine
resting golden over their years of childhood and youth, and feel the
satisfactions with which their families also animate and delight their
monotonous existence. He brings these poor, humble people humanly
near us, and gives us a great lesson in brotherhood. Every feature
in his picture is true; but from this truth a noble and consoling
thought proceeds, revealing to us its full extent of beauty and moral
motives. Frédéric is a Realist quite as much as Bastien Lepage, so
far as he deals with the painfully exact reproduction of sights he
has actually observed. But in Frédéric’s presentment the commonplace
appears ennobled, and that a superficial æstheticism dubs Idealism.
The fact of the matter is that the words Realism and Idealism mean
simply nothing. There is no art, there is no artistic tendency, which
could be so designated. There are only artists’ temperaments, which are
themselves bilious, and, for that reason, dwell with malicious joy on
the unpleasant sides of reality, and others which delight in all that
is bright, and have a presentiment of a deeper redeeming meaning even
behind the unpleasing external. The Realism of a Bastien Lepage is
calumny; that of a Frédéric, a speech for the defence.
Jean Paul Laurens has reached all the heights of artistic success. He
is a professor, an Academician, and he receives the most honourable
commissions from the State and great cities. He has been graciously
permitted to satisfy his ambition as a monumental painter with enormous
wall- and ceiling-paintings, like those of the Capitol of Toulouse.
He was often more happy, often less happy, always powerful, always
pathetic, now and then, I will admit, declamatory. But he has also once
forsaken his visions of history and turned a glance at the present; and
what he saw there, he fixed in a great painting which he calls “Mining
Folk,” which stands above all his far-famed frescoes.
It is evening. Between a high, steep-sloping heap of coal and slack
and a low line of distant hills closing the horizon, a big town is
painted in a wide trough of country. Over the crowded roofs of this
town numerous chimneys rise up. No church towers or palace gables, only
chimneys which belch aggressively, one might say, white vapour or dense
black smoke in the face of the twilight sky. From the middle distance
a procession of weary, toil-worn men, whose legs drag and heads hang
down, is moving forward along a causeway. From the depths on both sides
of the causeway ascend clouds of sulphurous yellow and blue smoke.
Any one engrossed in the details may see how the workmen wandering
homewards are clad in the garb of the modern proletariat, and how a
manufacturing town of the present day with typical factory buildings
lies stretched before us. But the first rapid, comprehensive glance
conveys quite a different impression. The town looks like a Sodom
and Gomorrha in rebellion against God, and is on the point of being
chastised by fire from heaven. The procession of men appears to be a
band of the damned which a hidden, mysterious abyss of hell, behind
the bend in the road, has vomited. Near the causeway, uncanny depths
seem to yawn, from which tongues of hell-flames leap up. It is a
prophet’s vision, and the atmosphere of a saga. You fancy you have
an illustration of the Inferno before you, but also a note from the
formula according to which the painters and sculptors of the Middle
Ages were wont to depict the Last Judgment.
And the most remarkable thing is that this epic extension and
enhancement of so banal an incident as the exodus of a shift of pitmen
knocking off their work is by no means intended. The painter nowhere
consciously works with a view to melodrama. He keeps, in all details,
strictly to facts. It is only his perception that has made a canto of
Dante out of a true copy of an everyday incident. At the sight of the
flaming forges, smoking chimneys, and exhausted slaves working for
hire, there came to him an inkling of the mighty forces of nature and
society which are at work in the man- and horse-powers of a modern
wholesale business, which fixed the choice and arrangement of elements
in his picture, imprinted on it the demoniac feature, and rendered it a
profound symbol of the history of a part of humanity.
Jef Leempoels is one of the most interesting of contemporary Flemings
in whom the exquisite artistic qualities of their mediæval forefathers
and masters live again. Leempoels has the sturdy, homely truthfulness
of these ancestors, their profound feeling, and speculative mind,
which easily goes astray into the fantastic. He has their masterly
draughtsmanship, and he only lacks their delight in colour and their
gift of free, clear composition to rise entirely to their greatness.
He does not rely on his capability or right to distinguish between the
essential and the non-essential. He does not dominate his subject with
sovereignly subjective perception, but makes himself the humble slave
of the phenomena and all their most capricious and lowest details. He
does not span the world with the eye of a creative artist, but glances
at it as though he were a photographic apparatus for taking authentic
negatives. To this intellectual dependence is joined an insufficient
development of the sense of what is picturesque. Leempoels is dry in
his accuracy and sober in his colouring. He does not seem to think
it is his vocation to harmonise tones and to please the eye by a
well-arranged palette. And in spite of all this I can never forget his
chief pictures. He revealed his nature in _naïve_ little features. For
instance, on the wall of the room where the father and mother, old
and worn out by life, are sitting together, hang faded photographs
representing them, as a young married couple, in a strikingly comic
dress according to the latest fashion of five-and-twenty years ago,
yet young and full of joyous hope. This discreet contrast, which must
be sought for to be noticed, contains the whole melancholy poetry of
their life from blooming youth to withered age. And the pictures of his
sisters. The good girls are not particularly favoured by nature; they
are true daughters of the homely Flemish race, in whom beauty is rare.
When Leempoels painted them, there was a struggle in him between the
conscientiousness of a sworn witness to reality and brotherly love; but
the former gained the victory, and the latter was allowed to reveal
itself only in the delicate, almost caressing, perfection of their
hands, necks, hair, and clothes.
His picture “Friendship”—an old and somewhat younger man are sitting
boldly before us, hand in hand, with their honest, ugly faces turned
full towards us. They are figures from the people, the one wearing
a green, the other a dark red knitted waistcoat. They are evidently
neither rich nor educated, and no particularly developed intellectual
life speaks from their clear, reposeful eyes, or their heavy, vulgar
features. And yet they are noble creatures. It is their feeling
which ennobles them. Only lofty souls are capable of such loyalty
and attachment as these two workmen, who so affectionately clasp
each other’s hands and lean shoulder to shoulder—let come what come
may!—and he who comprehends character without declamation says to
himself involuntarily before this picture: “It is well for him who in
his path through life meets with such friendship.” Here Leempoels has
performed the highest mission of the artist—he has recognised and
indicated convincingly what is grand and beautiful in the insignificant
and commonplace. That is healthy idealism, for which it is my pride to
fight—a consoling and uplifting moral purport in an exact and true form.
I am less agreed in respect of another picture. Leempoels calls it
“Fate and Humanity,” and in this he has gone beyond his natural vocal
register. From the lower rim of the picture there grows a marvellous
flora of hands stretched forth on high, either folded in supplication
or clenched in threatening fists, embracing many symbols of faith
of various kinds, such as crosses, communion chalices, fetishes and
offerings; over them appears, in violet light and filling two-thirds
of the picture, a huge, bearded face that, indifferent and unmoved,
gazes forward without noticing the hands of supplication and blasphemy
raised towards it. It is plain enough what Leempoels wants to express;
but it is not apparent what the effect will be of this violet face as
inexorable destiny. Its feeble, vacant gaze and stiff nimbus infuse
no particular horror, and nothing else which might be imposing is
discernible in it. On the other hand, Leempoels imparts to the hands
the full measure of his amazing capacity. These hundreds of hands,
which are painted with a patience that is almost painful, have all
their individual physiognomy. They are all individual hands of men
and women, young and old, industrious and idle, Caucasian, Nubian,
and Indian. The hands of all races, callings, ages and temperaments
are so perfect in their characterisation that error is impossible. If
among the hands were to be found those of a friend, I should certainly
recognise them at the first glance. As a study of human hands, the
piece is a museum-picture which has not its peer in all the collections
with which I am acquainted. As a work of art it saddens through want of
taste. Leempoels would sin against himself if he strayed into unlimited
symbolism. His talent points him in the direction of the clearly
circumscribed. He need not trouble himself about being implicated
with Philistinism through his devotion to actuality. His sincerity of
feeling, too, in the treatment of Philistine subjects, will always
raise him above Philistinism.
Henri Martin has always aimed at lofty ends, but the paths he has
followed to gain them were crooked and wrong. He was, when he began,
and still is, in moments of relapse, a dabbing stumper, _i.e._, he
laid on a thick dab of colour the size of a hazel-nut and extended
it somewhat. With this method, his famous “Vibrations” was, indeed,
successful, especially at a certain distance; but he broke up all
form, and this allowed him to draw quite superficially. If any one
reproached him with not rendering a single outline with exactness and
certainty, he could use the excuse: “One cannot at the same time flood
a picture with flickering light and model precisely.” Stumping was
with Martin as with his imitators the cloak to cover up artistically
dishonest forms. His idealism—the main feature in his physiognomy as
an artist—was revealed, in his first period chiefly, by his feeble
figures being dressed in the garb peculiar to no time or country, the
garb in which the Primitives were wont to make their angels appear,
and by their moving in an artificial stage, which one can call neither
earth, nor air, nor heaven; for, as a rule, it was painted a single
iridescent, mixed colour, mostly a sort of pale lilac, into which some
darker, smooth tree trunks, placed regularly like a lattice, were
introduced.
Typical of his first period are his symbolical pictures “Towards the
Abyss,” and “Every One has his own Chimæra.” We are almost ashamed to
linger over describing this confused rubbish.
“Towards the Abyss.”—A hussy unclad after the fashion in vogue at
a Paris artists’ pot-house—her cunning nudity is emphasised by
ball-shoes, long black gloves, and by a black veil, thrown back at the
right place, but transparent throughout—is hurrying down the gentle
slope of a hill. Bats’ wings wide outspread sprout from her shoulders.
A crowd of people, in which men and women of all ages and ranks are
mixed up, rush after her with the attitudes and gestures of epidemic
madness. Some run, others drag themselves along on their knees, others,
again, on all fours, after her, and scuffle for flowers which she
strews in her wake. Every meaning can be imported into this picture,
but nothing can be gleaned from it, or, at most, that the frenzied
attitudes of the slaves and victims of this creature, wallowing in the
dust, kissing and licking the hussy’s footsteps, betray an unconscious
masochistic trait in Henri Martin’s soul.
“Every One has his own Chimæra” is even more futile than this perverse
illustration of the pious admonition: “Keep from sin, for the lust of
the flesh leads to destruction.” A number of daubed, shadowy figures
crawl painfully along in a clay-coloured mass; each is bent under a
burden which represents in bodily form his ruling passion. Thus the
sensualist carries a naked strumpet; the miser a sack full of gold; the
ambitious man laurels and the spoils of war, etc.—a lamentable attempt
to represent a literary commonplace in an artist’s vision, in a living
and concrete form.
Luckily, Henri Martin showed development. After his first period of
crudely affected stippling and streaking, of bold neglect of drawing,
amidst the shapeless daubing of coloured _confetti_, serpentines, and
pomposities, with a would-be profound yet absolutely vacant symbolism,
he returned to nature and life, treated warmly human subjects from
an ideal standpoint, and toned down the crudeness of his execution
without, I admit, giving it up altogether.
Commissioned by a rich banker, he painted for the Marseilles Savings
Bank a monumental triptych which he called “Labour.” He assigns
views of Marseilles—certainly treated with great freedom—to the three
backgrounds. The manifest meaning of the three panels is morning,
noon, and evening. In the first panel, the children are on their way
to school, reading their books; the women are going to market, the
labourers to their place of work. In the second, dockers, under the
glowing sun of Provence, are unloading a ship’s cargo, which consists
of baskets full of golden oranges. In the third, the waterside is
almost deserted; an old couple, with a child carrying a doll in its arm
walking in front of them, stroll in the cool of the day; some artisan
families are also enjoying some fresh air after leaving off work, and
_Jam majores cadunt altis a montibus umbrae._
But the times of day are, as I have said, only the plain meaning of the
picture. Beside or behind it, it has also a deeper, veiled meaning.
It would illustrate also an actual state of things in the future.
Valiantly take full advantage of school in the morning of life, learn
and prepare yourself by that means for working and daring later on.
Labour in your prime until your ribs crack: you can do so, and it is
lucrative. In return, in the evening of life you will be at ease, and,
as a comfortable man of means, enjoy refreshing leisure.
We must be allowed to laugh at this optimistic aspect of industrial
life. If Henri Martin has known a docker—of Marseilles or any other
place—who was able to end his life as a man of independent means, I
should like to ask him for that man’s photograph. Nevertheless, a
painter need not be a political economist, and the picture is, you
know, intended for a Savings Bank, and the people who will see it
there may actually find themselves on the way to the independency that
makes blessed, though hardly after noonday unloading of orange boats.
We might be able to pass lightly over the poverty of thought in the
work, if its artistic qualities were satisfactory. But there’s the rub.
It was indeed a questionable thought to put in juxtaposition three
pictures separated only by slender pillars, which had to exhibit three
absolutely different lights; for either the lights of morning, noon,
and evening were properly kept apart, and we had a discord in three
notes, or the tones were pitched in one key in order not to shriek at
each other, in which case they were untrue. Such is indeed the case.
There is a somewhat more silvery breath about “Morning,” a somewhat
redder one about “Noon,” a paler violet about “Evening”; but the lights
and shadows are about equally powerful, whatever be the position of the
sun. The forest of masts in the middle panel is of such exaggerated
density that the eye is confused in the maze of shrouds and yards. And
the entire picture is executed in the crudest stippling, with dabs of
colour thickly plastered on, so that it looks almost scaly. If Henri
Martin could give up his vagaries and lack of good taste, he would
be a monumental artist of lofty vocation; for, though the fairies
have refused him sundry things, they have given him one precious gift
when he was in his cradle, viz., that of light. There is sun in his
pictures, and they brighten up the space they occupy.
His best work up to now is a huge wall-painting for the Capitol of
Toulouse.
A landscape of big, restful lines with a background of dark-shadowed
mountain forests, against which all I have to object is that they
wall in the whole horizon. From this range of darkening blue heights
the country sinks in undulating tiers of hills to the plain of the
foreground. Here the idyll of the seasons and men’s lives is developed
in three pictures. First, amidst the laughing spring, a strapping
maiden, intoxicated with love, on the breast of the young lad who
is embracing her. Next, a number of stalwart country folk in the
summer work of haymaking, on whom, beyond the cut grass, their wives
and children at play are gazing. Lastly, under melancholy autumn
trees, a lonely old woman preoccupied with recollections. The people
are homely, of course, without crude realism, poetic without the
shepherd-insipidity of Gessner. The parallelism between the aging
of the men and women and the progress of the year is unforced; the
symbolism clear and free from morbid, perverse mysticism. Turf, trees,
and bushes are decorative in form, delicate, and at the same time
sufficient in colour, and the whole is flooded by a wonderfully joyous
sunshine, which is more reminiscent of the glories of May in Provence
than even Montenard’s symphonies of light. Henri Martin has, I admit,
here, too, indulged in stippling, but he has given his people and trees
strong, free outlines, and scarred only the outer skin very lightly
with pock-marks. He has not abandoned that ill habit, but he seems to
practise it with remorse. Perhaps he thinks gradual transition is due
to his conversion to better insight. In any case, this picture was
conceived and executed in a happy moment.
Henri Martin’s career teaches a moral. Let him who would honour an
artist continually bear in mind an appropriately modified reading of
Solon’s warning to Crœsus: “Do not pronounce on any artist before his
death.”
Jean Raffaelli.—Like Henri Martin, Sisley, and the other stipplers who
painted with little dots, Jean François Raffaelli at first painted with
thin, slightly serpentine strokes. And we have had to get accustomed
to this manner. Raffaelli has been able to succeed, because he long
favoured subjects for which his ripple lines were the suitable
style. He painted poor people in poor landscapes, emaciated bodies
in slatternly clothes under trees as dry as brooms. Like a raindrop
on a window-pane, and like a tear on a furrowed cheek, the slender
traces of colour flowed down these pitiable figures, arousing twilight
imaginations of weeping, plaintive trickling, and dissolving. Later
on he caught cheerful, coloured views of Paris streets—The Invalides,
Notre Dame, and the Place St Michel. In these his streaky way of
painting was somewhat inadequate; but his amazing feeling for a crowd
in the hurried, nervous movement which is peculiar to the Parisian
lower orders, saved him. I know no painter who feels as Raffaelli the
bustle of the world’s metropolis. I think that any one who suffers from
dread of the market-place, must get a feeling of fear at seeing his
pictures.
In a third period of his production, Raffaelli gave a rare example of
complete change in his maturity. He who had grown famous as a painter
of the poor and miserable, of vices and sicknesses, turned, at the
zenith of his success, from the aspects that he had hitherto cherished,
and opened his heart to the joys of existence. In his mind a process
occurred, such as the ninth symphony describes in eternal strains. In
his despair a voice suddenly cries out: “Brothers, let us sing other
strains,” and roars out exultingly: “Joy, fair brightness of the gods.”
Formerly, he knew only abandoned tramps, tattered beggars and thieves,
broken-down hospital brothers. His plant-world consisted of the leprous
turf in front of the Paris forts, decayed flowers, the half-withered,
suburban street trees, broomlike and leafless as in autumn. And he
painted this misery in miserable colours and in his own peculiar,
streaky manner, especially appropriate to the subject. Now he caresses
with a broad, full brush bloomingly beautiful maidens in white raiment,
sunny, ornamental gardens with rich _parterres_, fresh nosegays or
living flowers. He has also changed his style with his subject. It is
all renovated—palette, execution, and story. I have a feeling of a
secret happiness having blossomed in this artist’s soul, and I rejoice
in the cheerful unconcern with which, by his altered work, he makes all
men privy to his _Vita Nuova_.
Odilon Redon is a completed artist. His development is ended. It came
from Gustave Moreau, and it never deviated from him. He is a delightful
harmonist of colours, who handles the sharp and flat notes with equal
mastery, and if he condescends to paint flowers, fruits, unpretentious
still life, and landscapes every one can understand, he displays
naturalness, taste, and winning homeliness. But when he strives for
higher expression he gets beyond his master’s range of vision, and
becomes purely hallucinatory. Fabulous creatures, at once Pegasus and
Centaur, stagger about amongst rare flowers, which gape like bleeding
wounds or grin like vampires’ mouths. Monsters without recognisable
organic shape, bastard combinations of parts of dragons, beetles,
birds and Ashes hover or swim in an uncertain medium, which may be
water, air, or ether. Dreadful human heads, bound in clusters, grow
bushlike out of the ground. All this is in colour pleasing; in form,
enigmatical. Gustave Moreau is always intelligible; we know the myths
he clothes in forms of extrahuman and superhuman splendour. No one can
make head or tail of Odilon Redon. He himself does not think at all in
his unearthly representations, and they awaken no definite thoughts
either, but affect us like wild faces in a fever.