Naturalists. When we see that the same designation is applied to him
as, for example, to Cézanne, we can, as it were, clutch with our
hand the misuse of the words, and convince ourselves how senseless
classification in art is. Renoir is certainly no painter of prettiness.
He does not paint nature white and rosy, or stick beauty-patches on
her face. He does not go out of his way even for pronounced ugliness.
You have only to look at his two Megæras on the garden bench to be
convinced of this; but beside these witches he has so much refreshing,
individualised beauty, that one fails to understand how he could have
been classed with Cézanne and, what is more, the routine Naturalists.
His naked young woman with the mother-of-pearl flesh; his lady in a
cashmere dressing-gown on the tapestry sofa; his girl in blue with the
red cap, and the little sister in white; his two ladies with the roses,
are simply charming. And love speaks no less from his chrysanthemums
and his sunny meadows than from his men and women. He who has the same
feeling as Renoir for roses and children, is not only a great painter,
but also a good and noble man.
Alfred Roll is one of the most amiable figures in the art world of
to-day. No one has such feeling as he for the exquisitely delicate
silvery vapour of a May morning atmosphere, quivering with sunlight and
saturated with dew. No one knows how to model out with such creative
genius as he a human body from the daylight that flows around it in
gushing torrents. In his free-light painting one breathes free from all
oppression. Besides qualities which, in all ages, make a great artist,
he has the little trace of corruption which makes him a legitimate son
of our age. One of his masterpieces—the naked young woman who clings
caressingly to the bull—awakes Pasiphaistic ideas of old classic
aberration. To procure pardon for this picture, he had to do no less
than paint the splendidly healthy peasant girl with the brimming
milk-pail and the cow—certainly a worthy penance.
Roll is, to be sure, not always the charming, luminous painter of the
milk-maid and the girl with the bull. He very often strikes other
notes. Thus, for instance, in his picture inspired by socialism, which
he calls “The Martyr’s Road,” he shows an old tramp who, with his back
leaning against a tree, has collapsed by the wayside, has let his
wallet fall beside him, and appears to be about to give up the ghost.
The misery of his worn countenance already overshadowed by death, of
his emaciated figure and tattered clothes are convincing. On the other
hand, it is open to question whether it was good taste to paint the
dying man in front view, with bold foreshortening of the outstretched
legs, and with boot-soles of a terrific size, that rear up before
us, in the extreme foreground, like two præ-historic _menhirs_. Roll
intended to pay his homage to Maxim Gorki also. Was it from sincere
feeling, or to show that he is _dans le mouvement_, and is keeping step
with the most advanced of his time?
He has insisted on trying his hand at monumental decoration also. The
fruit of his effort is a gigantic picture which he entitles “Life’s
Joys.” He has evidently thought of Watteau, probably of the latter’s
“Embarcation to Cythera.” It is the same blissful landscape with roses,
trees, and water that seems, in the haze of the distance, to continue
interminably until it reaches Paradise. It is the same air which the
rain of blossom renders coloured and almost opaque. It is the same
spring sky which we might hail with shouts of joy. The men and women,
however, who give life to this Eden, are different to Watteau’s. In
Roll, everything is marvellously austere and hard. His women in the
foreground are naked, and partly lie in Michael Angelesque attitudes on
the grass, partly sit there overpoweringly monumental. Loving couples,
walking and dancing, behave as if they were possessed by wild, brutal
lust. Something like a tragic current is traceable amidst this idyll.
We exclaim in alarm: “Here, this very day, there will yet be murder or
manslaughter?” And with the object of destroying still more the ideal
note of May, Roll puts, in the midst of this fairy-tale splendour,
three realistic musicians, whose clothes were bought at _la Belle
Jardinière_, who will certainly, after every dance, go round with a
plate and collect from their audience. Where will the nude ladies take
money from to throw to them? How much more charmingly and wittily does
Watteau begin his theme! Only a marble statue of a woman renounces the
advantages of elegant toilettes. Winged Cupids flit about the young
couples, and translate, as it were, into lyrical, rhymed verses the
naturalistic prose of the gallantry exhibited. The men do not rage in
brutal eagerness, but pay delicate and discreet court to their ladies.
And above all things, Watteau’s infallible taste warns him against
telling his stories at excessive length. As brevity is the soul of wit,
so moderate compass is a great advantage in an Anacreontic scene. This
should be elegant and pleasant; but the monstrous excludes elegance
and pleasantness. Roll’s Titans and Cyclopses are not suitable for
masquerading as Arcadian shepherds.
Lucien Simon, a painter who has been an imitator of Cottet, puts
himself forward now, by an impetuous movement, into rank with him. “The
Evening Gossip” unites the family round the table lamp, which lights
up a number of richly animated faces with curious lights that play and
flicker. “Nuns Collecting”—one old and one young nun try by gentle
yet tenacious and irrefusable pressure to overcome the resistance
of a well-to-do and apparently somewhat niggardly country lady, and
to determine her to open her well-guarded purse. In a “Ball-room
in Brittany” peasant couples, in the dress of the Celtic province,
under smoking lamps emitting a yellow light, spin round, with heavy
stampings, to a bagpipe tune which drives the blood into the simple
dancers’ browned cheeks, and kindles sparks in their eyes. All this
is stumped in broadly and luxuriously without petty dwelling on the
less essential, yet with a sure feeling for what is characteristic in
appearance and movement, and in a harmony of dark colours, which is as
far remote from the bright tone of the style of painting in vogue the
day before yesterday as a Guido Reni is from a Franz Hals, but affirms
its own justification as self-consciously as the particular note struck
by a Hennar and Gustave Moreau among the moderns, of a Velasquez and
Rembrandt among the greatest ancients.
Up to now, his most important creation is his “Mass in Brittany,” a
work of an exquisite nature. The young and old peasants and seamen
who hear High Mass standing in the bare village church, are truly and
lovingly individualised head by head. Proudly renouncing pleasing
externals, L. Simon has made up his mind to produce his effects only
by the noblest means, viz., by characterising with accuracy these
manifold types, and by the depth and fulness of the spiritual life of
these pious folk here gathered together. Offence has been taken at the
broadness of his execution, which already bordered on superficiality,
and on the coarseness of his colour, which put one now and then in
mind of the bill-poster’s newer art. He has laboured conscientiously
on himself, and diminished the defects of his qualities without
weakening the latter. He still continues to paint with large strokes
in fresco style, but he pays attention to the solid building of his
figures. He is still pronounced and unaffected in his colouring, but
he avoids letting power degenerate into coarseness, and expressiveness
into shrillness. Thus Lucien Simon rises slowly and steadily, though
unerringly, to the lofty peaks of pre-eminence.
Jean Veber is quite a peculiar phenomenon which has not yet been
deservedly appreciated. On one characteristic ground: because he never
understood how to be solemn; because he seems not to take himself or
his art seriously. He began as a caricature draughtsman for Boulevard
papers, and only when his vocation for this peculiar province was well
established, did he exhibit oil-paintings. But he was already labelled,
and people continue to regard him merely as a comic draughtsman. The
public refuses to allow a double renown to a single talent. Its
admiration, you know, costs nothing, but it is, nevertheless, scanty
with it, as if it were bringing a sacrifice obtainable only with
difficulty. That is a royal trait in the sovereign mob. It is niggardly
with its distinctions in order to enhance their value. The splendid
Daumier also had to suffer from this coyness on the part of the public.
For a long time nothing was thought of his easel pictures, and it
was really the Universal Exhibition of 1900 that first revealed to
posterity the fact that Daumier of the “Charivari” was one of the most
important French painters of the nineteenth century. The caricaturist
of our days is, as it were, the journalist among plastic artists, and
we know that it is very hard for journalists to succeed with poetical
creations, however brilliant. The older humorists among the painters
fared better. The Dutch painters could make rough fun of the life of
the populace without injuring their reputation as artists by so doing.
Hogarth attained high recognition, although his clumsy, Philistine,
moralising painting ranks below the works of many caricaturists of
to-day. Cruikshank, however, whom I rank, without hesitation, above
Hogarth, occupies, in popular estimation, a lower rank, because he put
his pencil at the service of the Press.
Jean Veber is the descendant in the direct line of the younger David
Teniers, the Adriaen Brouwers, and the Höllen-Breughels. From them he
derives his full style of painting, his deep, rich colours, his great
sureness and luxuriance of execution, his clear composition and florid
imagination. He differs, however, from them in the quality of his
fancy which delights in symbols replete with philosophical references;
frequently in Saadic spectacles of cruelty and lust, and very often
in lubricities of the Félicien Rops kind. This is the effect of the
hundred and fifty to three hundred years which separate him from his
more innocent spiritual ancestors.
Of the pictures he has exhibited, some are unforgettable, when one
has seen them. The “Triumphal Procession” of a gigantic crowned
goose through the streets of a mighty city, amid the loud applause
of a populace raving mad with loyalty. The “Struggle for Gold” of
a number of awful cripples tearing each other to pieces in their
mad struggles for a few gold pieces that have fallen in the street;
the “Sight of Terror” of a man reeling home at night, apparently
after a long drinking-bout, in whose eyes the houses and monuments
take weird, living physiognomies, are most impressive utterances of
the misanthropic pessimism, the satiric bitterness, and the humour
of Veber, also, to be sure, of his predilection for the weird, the
ghostly, and the horrible.
These qualities are repeated in almost all his works up to now. The
greatest and most pretentious, “The Machine,” offends through the
daring symbolism by which he illustrates the murderous power of
woman over the sensual man. On the other hand, “Sunday Morning” is a
bit of life observed with exquisite humour: a barber’s shop in the
village, with a soaped victim under the nimble but not too considerate
hands of the beard-shaver’s wife, whilst some other customers, of
unspeakable comicality in looks, bearing, and dress, smoking, dreaming,
staring, or chattering, wait their turn on the bench by the wall.
“The Hermit and the Female Faun” is a scarcely orthodox, but keenly
witty modernisation of the old theme, the temptation of a saint, which
these square-toes of painters for the past five hundred years have
cherished with predilection, since it permits them to present quite
heathen sights with a hypocritically contrite air. “The Three Good
Friends” are of refreshing cheeriness. The ugliness of these contented
louts is touching. The painter, by way of exception, exhibits them
without malice, rather sympathetically, with a plea for extenuating
circumstances. But generally, his wit belongs, in the main, to the
species of evil-speaking. We laugh over the malice with which a
sharp-tongued observer characterises our fellow-creatures, but we
feel quite well that it is not the better man in us that laughs.
Jean Veber loves to mock at mankind in goblin fashion. He sees men
perpendicularly pushed together like a telescope, horizontally drawn
out as short, square gnomes with pumpkin faces, who, pleased with
themselves and unconscious of their grotesque ugliness, strut about
as if they were so many Apollos and Dianas. Thus Jaurès appears with
mouth agape and flourishing gestures on the rostrum of the Chamber,
at the foot of which breaks a flood of blustering deputies in stormy
session. So in a parody of Rubens’ “Kermes”—itself of the nature of a
parody—villagers resembling sacks amuse themselves with feasting and
drinking and amorous tendernesses which are calculated to disgust us
with love itself. A grandly rigged-out, inexpressibly laughing lady
in a low-cut dress between two greybeards paying their dreadful court
at an exquisitely appointed supper-table; a physician at the foot of
the bed gazing with devotion at the tongue, put out quite a yard, of a
rich, fat lady-patient; a short, stout woman in a fashionable tailor’s
_salon_, whom the slenderest of the show-room girls is trying, with
“cake-walk” movements, to fit with a dress like an umbrella-cover, are
amusing in their stupidity and ugliness. On the other hand, I cannot
follow Jean Veber further when, in “Family Joys,” he tries to make the
newborn child ridiculous—a shapeless bit of sprawling flesh, red as
a crab, which the midwife has brought from the bed of the exhausted
mother at the back of the room, and is exhibiting in triumph to the
gaping family. He should keep his sacrilegious hand off the sanctity of
this event.
The happy combination of a faultless dexterity with an arrogant,
creative humour, in which I would only like to see a trifle less
admixture of gall, renders Jean Veber’s an artistic physiognomy that is
far more interesting than many an idol to whom altars are raised.
Emile Wéry, a young and fortunate man of talent, began his career with
a great success. His view of an Amsterdam canal made a sensation, and
gained the great prize at the “Salon.” Perhaps a little stupefied by
this triumph, he kept for a while to the style of his prize picture, so
that there was reason to fear he would early stiffen into a manner. He
painted, for instance, an attractive triptych, which presents Venice
to us in her three characteristic decorations: the narrow _Calle_, the
slender _Rio_, and the splendid _Canal_. But what we cannot anyhow
fancy absent from a view of Venice—the southern sky, the gleaming
sun, and the warm tints of her old stones and tiles: these are here
altogether lacking. It is all grey, northern grey. It is the same tone
as in the prize picture of Amsterdam. As Faust found Helen in every
woman, so Wéry then found apparently Dutch water-towns in every town,
and Amsterdam herself in Venice. People think they are flattering the
city on the Amstel, when they call it the Venice of the North. Wéry
reversed the compliment: to him Venice was the Amsterdam of the South.
How true it is that we see not with the eyes but with the soul!
The South, combined with his youthful impulses to development, was
to save him from the danger of mannerism. Though he had seen Venice
with his Amsterdam eyes, and found in the azure and gold of the city
of lagunes the leaden waters and mist of the north, further south,
in the light, he bathed his eyes clean from the muddiness of higher
latitudes. In “Sicily” a girl’s brown head, with red cloth in the
midst of a cluster of dark green-leaved branches with ripe oranges,
flashes and glows the whole noon of the magic island, which this
vigorous woman—a golden fruit among golden fruits—is to personify.
But even after his return home he still remained drunk with the light
of Italy. In a new picture, “The Little Ones,” we are once more in a
harbour on the North Sea, at a place where Wéry’s talent takes its
root. Flaxen-haired youngsters are playing round a boat; one of these,
a little chap in wide, flapping trousers, is droll enough to eat.
Water, sky, and river-bank are wedded in silver sheen, and over the
whole reposes a happy sense of comfort, in which the artist’s cheerful
heart is disclosed. He has happily got over his first crisis. Now his
artistic career lies smooth and sunny before him.
Anders Zorn.—This Swede is a virtuoso of amazing skill. He delights in
marvellous effects of light, in surprises, in fixing fugitive views.
His pictures are snap-shots pitched on the canvas with an almost
mechanically smart brush. He is a concert painter possessing talent.
He is one of the great corruptors of young artists nowadays. It is so
fascinating, by a few wild, staggering, nimble strokes of the brush,
to conjure up a human figure or a scene. But this method leads to the
worst superficiality, and attracts most the lazy fellows who wish to
save themselves the trouble of learning properly the principles of
drawing and painting. Zorn did not make the thing easy for himself. He
honestly and industriously acquired a thorough mastery of technique
before turning to execute his dazzling little pieces. He may allow
himself to storm and rage over the canvas, for accuracy has become
automatic in him. In spite of this haste, every line is on the right
spot, and though people often regret that he only hints instead of
stopping and deepening, nevertheless it is continually said: “The man
knows how to build up a figure or a group.” His imitators, however,
have caught only his daubing, and with them superficiality is but a
bold excuse for ignorance of drawing.
Ignacio Zuloaga.—Spain can at the present time boast of a number of
painters who might call out to their greatest predecessors among their
countrymen the proud _anch’io_. What characterises them is a peculiar,
almost mad energy in drawing, which appears in all details, in the
living and the dead, not only in the mien and attitudes of men, but in
the sharp profile of every leaf and blade of grass, in the bold relief
of every stone, in the aggressive self-consciousness of every being as
of every thing. This energy is not to be learnt. One has it or one has
it not. There are foreign painters in plenty, whom Spain has bewitched,
and who their whole life long recount nothing but bull-fights and
processions, shepherds and gipsies, _cigarreras_ and _manolas_; but no
one who knows the genuine Spaniards will confuse these with the foreign
imitators. There is, for instance, the excellent Jules Worms. He has
been exhibiting Spanish scenes uninterruptedly for forty years. They
are always nicely painted, prettily conceived, and pleasantly executed.
As contributions to knowledge of the nation they are not without
value. They have gained him all official honours, and he passes for an
undisputed master of his particular province. And yet how un-Spanish is
this life-long Spanishness of Worms and all his rivals and imitators!
It is as smooth, licked, tricked up, entertaining, and banal as the
railway novel of an inquisitive but superficial globe-trotter. It is a
conventional comic-opera Spanishness, a theatre decoration for scenery,
with groups of costumes for living figures. It lacks the power, the
stern virility which distinguishes the Spanish painters, even those
of the second rank, and gives them a family likeness to their great
ancestors, Valdes, Velasquez, and Ribera.
The most typical of these modern Spaniards is Ignacio Zuloaga, and the
most typical, perhaps, of his pictures are the three sketches from
Spanish folk-life, which were exhibited a few years ago in the “Salon.”
An Andalusian, young, thin, and delicate, with a little crumpled
face of apish ugliness, with a supple body that seems to whirl,
stands in front of a poor mirror, and powders her face with coarse
rice-powder, as though she were sticking on a comic Pierrot-mask,
whilst her sparkling eyes testify that she wants to make herself
thoroughly beautiful for the bull-fight. Then we see her in loud,
bright ribbons, with the inimitably draped mantilla over her head and
shoulders, passing quickly through the street, greeted by two old
connoisseurs with highly-spiced endearment. On the third occasion
she or her sister goes with a diabolically piquant young gipsy girl,
whose insolent laugh discovers gleaming wolf’s teeth and turns up the
sharply-curved nose, rapidly over the ground, probably to keep a
Sabbath, from the expression of both grimaces. This is warm life such
as not often glows on painted canvas. Zuloaga has felt his Andalusian
wild creatures to his finger-tips, and renders them with all their
_garbo_ and _salero_—the German _Schneid_ and _Mumm_, and the French
_montant_ and _mousseux_ are weak translations of this expression. The
pictures seem to be painted, not with mineral colours and oil, but with
sulphuric acid and lunar-caustic. These ladies are young witches, of
whom you would imagine that by touch they must give an electric shock
like a torpedo-fish, that, if they open their mouths, red mice will
jump out, and that it must be more natural for them to ride through
the air on a broomstick than to make use of their legs in the usual
way. In the piquant ugliness of their faces, made up with a thick
layer of rice-powder, in the gorgeous Sunday array, in their attitudes
and movements, in the gipsy-girl’s bestially insolent grinning and
winking, in the lustful glances and laughter of the men, there is a
fulness of hot life, an insolent sensuality such as is only met with in
Brangwyn’s youthful works. One often heard the name of Goya pronounced
before these pictures. It is indeed the same temperament, but another
outlook on life, another art. Zuloaga has much of the cutting
virtuosity of his great countryman; but he is no embittered critic of
the world, rather a laughing Sunday’s child who enjoys life with all
his senses.
And, above all, his pictures are patterns of a domestic art which,
through its unreserved sincerity, is at the same time an universal art.
For it reaches so deeply that it penetrates beyond the special type to
humanity in general.
XIII
AUGUSTE RODIN
Rodin’s place in present-day art is a peculiar one. Auguste Rodin has
been raised to the dignity of a test for decadent ways of feeling. We
admittedly call “tests” or proof-objects the objects (for the most
part, the shell-armour of diatoms or the scales of butterflies’ wings)
on which the magnifying power and exactness of analysis of microscopes
is tested. By Rodin the fanatics and snobs of insane tendencies test
the genuineness and power of symbolico-mystic sentiment. What do you
think of Rodin? Do you admire him? Good: then you need further only
adore Besnard and rave about Félicien Rops, and you can claim to be
numbered with the newest, without respect to the colour of your hair or
opportunist baldness. You do not admire Rodin? Then sneak whimpering
from our league. You are no decadent. No beauty with her hair combed
in the Botticelli style will love you; Mallarmé will not write poems,
nor will Nietzsche philosophise for you. Nobody will invite you even
to a Black Mass. Go to the Philistines; you belong to the narrow-minded
community, which is a herd of ruminants.