that nobody knew him. And then they found out that Jean Carriès was a
finished artist, a man of thirty-seven, who lived in the provinces, and
had, up to that time, sought nothing but the satisfaction of himself.
He had not wasted the tiniest little spark of his Promethean strength
in the vulgar melodrama of fighting for success. His tragedies were the
great struggle with the resistance of material, and doubt of himself,
and they had been played in secret in his soul. And now was pressed
upon him that for which candidates strive convulsively, and how often
fruitlessly! The Champs de Mars Society elected him with acclamation
to full membership, and dispensed him from the probationary period
is associate. The State asked for specimens to serve as models for
its museums, and tied the red ribbon to the buttonhole of his blouse.
What was purchasable was bought up by the ladies of Arc de Triomphe
quarter during the first days of the “Salon.” A rich American lady,
Mrs Winnareta Singer, commissioned him to carry out the model of his
fantastic “door.” The artists fêted him by a banquet in his honour—a
homage which at that time was not lavished as was the case afterwards.
Mdlle. Luise Breslau painted his portrait, which is now exhibited in
his room in the midst of his works, and showed his admirers a still
youngish man of noble beauty, with a Lucius Verus head, the Cæsarean
nobility of which was not in the least injured by a careless slouched
hat. I do not know whether Mdlle. Breslau has flattered her model or
has been honest, for I never saw Carriès himself; but in the picture
he appears, as one would like to fancy him, every inch a gentleman,
on whom his careless working-dress has the effect of a disguise which
does not for a second deceive as to the rank of the wearer. A delicate,
slender figure; wonderfully active, inspired hands; deep, searching
eyes that seem to sight and fix a dream-picture hovering away; soft,
narrow cheeks, on which uneasy shadows play, under the short beard; a
thoughtful, white forehead over which an abundance of light brown curls
falls. How many women may have indulged in dreams before this likeness,
for it fascinates even men!
The homage received had no intoxicating effect on him; the activity
of the Press concerning him did not infect him with the smallest
beginnings of conceit. He withdrew from the curiosity of the world by
quietly returning to his provincial nest, where, day and night, he
stoked his flaming furnace, and mixed his acids and metallic salts;
suffered under frequent disappointments, and enjoyed rare delights in
the success of a firing or a coloured enamel. In the ensuing year one
looked in vain for him in the “Salon,” and not quite two years after
his unparalleled triumph that came like a bomb, men learnt that he had
died.
His life had ended artistically. Carriès disappeared ere his locks grew
scanty or grey. Beautifully and noiselessly, like another Euphorion,
he soared away from the admiration of his contemporaries in the full
lustre of his fame; and his works, through his early death, experienced
the enhanced value of the Sibylline books. We may call him happy, for
in this room we feel that he had given his best when he died. With a
longer life he might have gone astray, for there is no lack of short
openings to false paths. Very likely he would have repeated himself
many times, and that would have detracted from the dainty charm of
rarity which, besides their noble beauty, is peculiar to his works.
He unites in himself two different and equally perfect artists: the
sculptor and the art-potter. Each tilled a tiny field; but with what
intensity! And what harvests they conjured out of it! As sculptor,
curiously enough, the whole human figure in its Olympian nudity failed
to interest him. He has not on a single occasion sought to represent
the body’s Paradisaic beauty. He confines himself, apparently on
principle, to head and hands; but these are surpassed by nothing, and
equalled only by little, that all the centuries since the Renaissance
have produced. I pass respectfully, yet without deeper feeling, by his
busts of Velasquez and Franz Hals. They are merely exercises of his
hand, perhaps only pastimes. They seem theatrical by reason of the
accentuation of the costume. In their countenances the absence of the
model is too evident. But beside them the busts of Gustave Courbet, of
Jules Breton, especially of Carriès himself, operate with unequalled
authority. They live before us; they think, and they reveal themselves.
In looking at them we involuntarily call to mind the old stories of
the earthen statues which a magician filled with the breath of life in
order that they might serve him.
The same impression, only intensified and deepened, is felt before
the busts of the “Young Girl with the Drooping Head,” the “Dutch
Wife,” and the “Dutch Maiden.” This young Dutch girl is particularly
adorable. I do not consider I am exaggerating when I say she ranks as
a sister, though in a different technique, with the “Mona Lisa.” The
maiden’s innocent eyes, which have no presentiment of the passionate
secrets of Gioconda; the graceful, reposeful countenance, that seems
wondering blissfully over her own blooming youth and the loveliness
of the world, charm us like the miracle of a spring day. Similar joy
streams from his sleeping and waking little children. The softness of
this baby flesh, the delicate texture of this plump, warm, satin skin,
are unattainable. Carriès discovered a new technique for the life of
the outer skin, the results of which, in his hands, are amazing. He
gives a delicate, perpendicular creasing to the membrane of the lips,
and marks it off from the skin of the face in a discreet but firm line,
so that it imparts the illusion of seeing swelling lip-red framed in
mother-of-pearl. The mouths of his women are weirdly seductive. It
would really not surprise me if semi-fools and lunatics were to pounce
upon these ravishing lips with eager kisses.
Even when Carriès is not idealising, but is reproducing portraits true
to nature, he imparts to them an inwardness which seems unfathomable,
like that of a deep soul. For this let any one only look at the “Bust
of an Unknown Lady” and “Mother Callamand”—the former a cold, proud
patrician, perhaps the Clara Vere de Vere, in whom Tennyson admires
“that repose which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere”; the latter a
splendid old nun, probably an abbess, a sturdy, peasant woman who is
conscious of her high rank in the convent, and in whose broad face
goodness and severity, healthy power and enthusiastic spirituality,
are mingled. This gift of filling the subject with inward life is
the strongest element in Carriès’ genius. In a series of works which
were exhibited in the Champs de Mars Salon, and are, unfortunately,
not to be found in the room of the Little Palace, this cropped up
overpoweringly. There were fabulous animals, monsters, which a
luxuriant imagination had invented—toads, frogs, lizards of gigantic
size, in positions humanly conceived, the female reposing on the breast
of the male, whose eyes are closing in rapture, and delicately embraced
by his paws. One might think they would have a grotesque effect; by
no means. Their anthropomorphism brought them in danger of derision;
but the genius of Carriès was here directly revealed. The quasi-human,
emotional life manifested in their attitudes made them pathetic. The
toads’ legs were not seen; their mouths and goggle eyes were not seen.
People saw only the unmistakable trait of love, and were moved by this
exhibition of the primitive feeling—the same in man and beast—which
holds the world together.
Perhaps it is in accordance with this gift of spiritualisation that
Carriès never worked with marble, rarely with bronze, but, as a rule,
and preferably, with potter’s clay. Stone and metal, however painfully
correctly they render, with every stroke of the thumb and impression of
the finger, the clay model, seem to him too hard for the inexpressible
tenderness which he wants to express. Only one material satisfies
him—the one which possesses the softness of flesh and of nerve-plasm.
He can knead only clay so that it retains his lightest vibrations.
There is something about his busts of burnt clay that reminds me of
phonographic cylinders. There is soul-melody inscribed in them in
invisible lines, and, set in our mood, they again begin to give forth
sounds, and to repeat the mood of him who composed them.
The ability with trembling fingers to coax emotions into soft clay
and to render them plastic seems to be something divine. It did not
satisfy Carriès. Anybody else would have found the limits of his genius
enviably wide; to him they appeared narrow, and he tried to pass beyond
them. He wanted to create monumental pieces of sculpture, and he
constructed his “Martyrdom of St Fidelis” and his astounding “Gate.”
The “Martyrdom” is a group, composed of the kneeling martyr in monastic
habit and the executioner behind him, raising his armed fist to deal
the murderous blow. In the details the artist is here, too, distinctly
Carriès, _i.e._, the executioner is of superb cruelty—a fine specimen
of the family of brutalised legionaries or torturers who, in mediæval
_relievi_ of the Way of the Cross, scourge Christ at the pillar and
nail Him to the Cross. Taken as a whole, the master’s art is a failure;
the group has no line. The drama cannot be seen from any side, that
is, the gesture of the executioner, with its menace of death, and the
countenance of the martyr who is awaiting his last trial, cannot be
comprehended at once in a single glance.
If this group is weak, the “Gate” is a complete failure. He imagined
a gateway with a depressed keel-arch top, divided by an intervening
pillar into two gates. The pillars are covered with grotesque masks
and mythical animals from top to bottom. The arch of the gate is
formed by a dragon, in the gaping jaws of which stands a noble lady.
The separate masks and monsters scintillate with spirit, fancy, and
humour. In richness and variety of invention, and in depth of humour,
I unhesitatingly place these heads far above Germain Pilon’s Pont Neuf
masks. The contrast, too, between the fearless maiden standing in the
animal’s jaws, full of quiet self-confidence, and the hideous beast, is
of pregnant symbolism. The work is, nevertheless, an aberration, as a
whole. The masks and monsters have no organic connection with the gate,
either constructively, or in accordance with the meaning. They are
simply stuck on. And the gateway itself is an insoluble riddle. Where
should it lead to? To a lunatic asylum, a museum of caricatures, or a
carnival ballroom? Or should it mean “the abstract door,” the door
pure and simple, without the purpose of an entrance into a building?
The poor, great artist consecrated years of his life to this prodigy,
and never saw that he had wasted them.
The decorator amused himself in devising unheard-of enamels. He
modelled vessels of smooth, supple plant-forms—calabashes, melons,
cucumbers, mamillaria-cactuses, bulging or fallen in, smoothly
swelling, or warty and shrivelled, whimsically dinted like a thin
copper-plate, wantonly hammered, or lumpy and swollen. And over these
whimsicalities, which show an incredible mastery of the material,
he poured glazes which look so fat and moist that they seem to flow
still, viscous and languid. Many are purple, like half-curdled blood;
others white and rich, like fresh cream; and others like coloured
fruit juices; but many a time we think we see thick matter and brains
in frightful discharges; and on some vases the enamel imitates the
lichens which overrun the bark of trees in spots, grooves, and bands.
And when Carriès has done enough with these glazes, which remind us of
opalescent life-saps, he tries diversity in glazes of gold, silver,
coral, and precious stones, which change his stoneware phials into
splendid vessels from a treasury of the Thousand and One Nights.
As a sculptor in clay Jean Carriès stands as high as Della Robbia; in
details—in forming lips and cheeks—far higher than the latter; and, as
a decorator, no one can be compared with him, not even Bernhard de
Palissy—to mention a name by which his rank may be estimated. Carriès
is not a man of to-day, and fashion lies far below the height on which
he works. The wretched æsthetic-babbling coteries of the period cannot
get hold of him, or make use of him for the senseless but furiously
bellowed catchwords peculiar to the polemics of the day. He is not a
modernist, not a classic, not an impressionist; he is not this, he is
not that, but, he is, quite simply, himself. He works up what he has
learnt in his own person; he invents his own, and always gives himself.
He creates from his own soul, without looking to right or left. In him
there is no school, no tendency, and no straining, but only feeling,
personality, and the service of beauty. Yet it is through these great
artistic natures, which belong to no time, that the line of development
in art proceeds, and not through the pitiful _homunculi_, whom Faust
caricatures artificially engender in advertisement-retorts.
XVI
WORKS OF ART AND ART CRITICISMS
During the last years the relation of public opinion to works of art
has been repeatedly discussed, and on each occasion with great warmth.
The discussion, in the main, is concerned with two questions which are
independent even if they are connected with each other, viz.: Has the
public a right to judge a work of art, or must it renounce its own
opinion and simply bow before the verdict of specialists? Have not
all, or, at any rate, many, works of art that have subsequently gained
undisputed recognition by the world, been strongly opposed and rashly
rejected on their first appearance in public?
In 1899 intellectual Berlin was excited about a pertinent question.
Professor Franz Stuck, the Munich painter, had obtained a commission
for a wall-painting for the German House of Parliament. When the artist
sent in his sketch, there came a shriek of most unpleasant astonishment
from the judging committee of the Reichstag, and a member, Dr Lieber,
expressed in public session, in very strong language, his absolutely
unmixed feelings in respect of the work.
The Munich friends of the insulted artist, to their credit, made common
cause for him. They published an armour-clad protest, in which they
characterised the members as “laymen unable to judge,” and reproached
them with impertinence because they “thought they understood everything
better than learned specialists did.”
I expressed my views then in the _Deutsche Revue_ of this opposition
between specialists and laymen in plastic art, and I ask permission to
repeat here in brief the essential part of my arguments.
Who are the experts? From the general drift of the objection on the
part of the Munich artists it was to be concluded that they must be
the practising artists, the critics, perhaps also the professors of
art-history. Let him who does not belong to these three sacrosanct
categories steal weeping away from the confederation of experts. And
even among the critics there is probably a selection to be made. The
critic who praises the artist is to him undoubtedly an expert; the
critic who blames him shows himself incontestably as a _bourgeois_, and
in intelligence stands almost as low as a common University professor
who does not teach art-history.
All this is foolish talk. In matters of art, if, indeed, any one can,
only an individual—never a category—can lay claim to the rank of
expert. Is, perhaps, the practising artist the expert? He is not so
necessarily. There are people whose vocation in life, or, speaking more
correctly, whose usual occupation, is painting, but whose painting is
a continuous insult to art. One may be a professional painter, and yet
a pitiful dauber, and commit such impudent sins against good taste
that every non-expert must recognise this at the first glance, and be
provoked at it. Or is the critic the expert? It would be a good joke to
assert that.
Nearly every verdict on a work or an artist committed to paper by
a professional critic is opposed by another verdict, also by a
professional critic which says the exact contrary. Which of the two
critics is an expert? Which of the two has a right to demand that
people should bow before his verdict, because he habitually makes
phrases about works of art in public? What proof of capacity do the
papers as a rule demand of the _beaux esprits_ to whom they entrust
art criticism? He who has observed dozens of times how ambitious
young newspaper-writers, on their first report of an opening of an
Exhibition, or after forming a coffee-house acquaintance with an artist
thirsting for advertisement, suddenly discover in their minds a gift
for art criticism, and have subsequently cultivated this with brazen
self-consciousness; he will feel highly amused when people try to crack
up art-critics as experts, simply because they exercise this function.
Even professors of the history of art, even directors of museums, are
not, by reason of their office, experts in the sense of possessing very
profound understanding of art. The academic study of art-history lays
the chief stress on the facts belonging to the history of life and
morals, which need have nothing in common with the understanding of
art. One may make in archives the most beautiful discoveries for the
biography of Leonardo, and not feel a single one of his pictures. And
as regards superintendents of museums, it is possible to relate the
funniest anecdotes about their fallibility, and oppose to them simple
connoisseurs, also “non-experts,” who have formed splendid private
collections.
The truth is there are no experts in questions of art, as there are,
perhaps, in questions of technique. Expert knowledge presupposes the
existence of fixed rules, of a canon. There can be no talk of this in
the fine arts. The only element of painting that, at least to a certain
point—to the point where the individual conception and, with it, really
artistic interest first begins—is under objective rules, is drawing,
both from its figure as well as its perspective side. This element can
be taught, learnt, and faithfully measured, for nature furnishes the
scales. On the other hand, the colour element in painting is subject to
absolutely no canon, but at best to subjective feeling, at worst to a
fashion of the period. Every artificial colour is a convention; for, as
I have argued more particularly in my studies of Sisley and Pissarro,
none can truly reproduce the real colours of natural phenomena, and
it is wholly a consequence of education and habit, when the polychrome
of oil-painting or water-colour more easily excites in us the illusion
of colouristic truth than the monochrome of the two-colour or of
black and white art. One decade paints in dark, another in bright
colours. One school likes powerful, another subdued harmonies of
colour. Præ-Raphaelites imitate the tone of old frescoes and faded
Gobelins. Puvis de Chavannes took the colour out of his pictures by a
transparent white-wash, pale as the moon. Besnard, on the contrary,
discharges fireworks, without caring in the least if the mad tumults of
colour that he loved are possible or not in nature. Carrière envelops
his figures in a dense mist. Cottet has, very recently, brought into
fashion the black and dark shadings which go right back from Ribot
and Prudhon to Velasquez and Ribera. Who is right? Who is wrong? Here
everything is feeling, and consequently subjectivity. Of drawing, one
can in all cases say (and by photography irrefutably prove), it is
correct, or it is wrong. Colour does not admit of a similar verdict.
All that can be said of it is: “I like it,” or “I don’t like it.”
For beauty in art, in the present condition of the perception theory,
the physiology and psychology of pleasurable feelings, there is no
other standard than subjective feeling. This is dependent on the
greater or the less sensitiveness of the nervous system, on its
perceptivity of slight qualitative and quantitative differences in the
excitation of the senses, and, therefore, on an essentially congenital
constitution of the organism. The gift of receiving strong impressions
from works of art can be developed by practice, by the frequent and
attentive study of works of art of different kinds; but it cannot be
attained artificially by any effort or any amount of study.
What, then, mean the expressions expert and layman, when applied to
æsthetic verdicts? The classes of society, in which preponderating
occupation with intellectual problems, continued through several
generations, has refined the nervous system and rendered it more
sensitive, produce, as a rule, individuals with a feeling for art.
These live in large towns, in the centres of art life, they travel,
and visit numerous collections, and thus their feeling for art is
developed into a wide understanding of it, that studies works of art
from the historical standpoint. These are the real experts, so far
as there can be any talk of such in æsthetic questions. But these
classes of society, these individuals are only to the very smallest
extent painters or professional critics, _i.e._, critics writing for
the public. To wish to exclude them, on that account, from the expert
class is ludicrous presumption of certain persons who, by their own
authority, confer this title on themselves. The educated public—the
intellectual _élite_—has not the least reason for allowing their
opinion on works of art to be dictated to them by painters who may
well be daubers or crack-brained fools, or by critics who may be
ignorant phrase-mongers.
So much for the first question as to the fitness of the so-called
layman for criticising works of art.
The second question, as to the changes in public opinion about certain
works and their authors, is considerably more complex.
It is not to be gainsaid that such changes have occurred, but they are
much rarer than those would like to make us believe who, from instances
of pretended later conversions of originally rebellious taste on the
part of contemporaries, hope to succeed in proving that the ugly is
beautiful and the beautiful is ugly.
The names which were most often cited to prove the incompetency of
contemporary judgment on works of art of modern tendency are most
unfortunately chosen. Millet, Rousseau, and Corot were looked upon by
their contemporaries as smearers and daubers; Manet was laughed to
scorn, Böcklin pronounced a fool, his friends advised Hans Thoma to
change his name, etc., etc. In order not to go to too great length
I will now leave Thoma and Böcklin out of the discussion. But the
others! That Rousseau and, especially, Corot passed for smearers
and daubers among their contemporaries is simply not true; on the
contrary, justice was at once done to them for their technique. Even
their most unscrupulous opponents admitted that they were draughtsmen
and colourists. What they were reproached with was only the alleged
intellectual insignificance of their work. People remained under the
influence of classical landscape with ancient buildings or ruins, and
a decoration of ideal figures such as Poussin brought into fashion,
and Claude Lorrain cultivated. A landscape without nymphs or shepherds
in Arcadian dress, without temples or figures of Hermes, seemed empty,
insignificant, ignoble. The majority had as yet no taste for the
witchery of mood in wood and field. Why, Corot himself was not clear
about what was new and determinative in his own art, for in some of his
grandest pictures Dryads dance, beneath young-leaved trees immersed in
the mists of springtide, the most correct sham-classic square dance.
It was only in his last period that he renounced this ancient magic.
Rousseau had broken away from tradition more resolutely, and was on
that account less esteemed than Corot by contemporaries whose education
had been perverted by precedent. But the worst that was said against
the two did not go beyond the assertion that they were “vulgar.”