Whatever the painting of the future is to be, it is certain not to be
the painting of Monet. For the present, no doubt, Monet is the last word
in painting. To belittle him is not only whimsical, but ridiculous. He
has plainly worked a revolution in his art. He has taken it out of the
vicious circle of conformity to, departure from, and return to
abstractions and the so-called ideal. No one hereafter who attempts the
representation of nature--and for as far ahead as we can see with any
confidence, the representation of nature, the pantheistic ideal if one
chooses, will increasingly intrench itself as the painter's true aim--no
one who seriously attempts to realize this aim of now universal appeal
will be able to dispense with Monet's aid. He must perforce follow the
lines laid down for him by this astonishing naturalist. Any other course
must result in solecism, and if anything future is certain, it is
certain that the future will be not only inhospitable to, but absolutely
intolerant of, solecism. Henceforth the basis of things is bound to be
solid and not superficial, real and not fantastic. But--whether the
future is to commit itself wholly to prose, or is to preserve in new
conditions the essence of the poetry that, in one form or another, has
persisted since plastic art began--for the superstructure to be erected
on the sound basis of just values and true impressions it is justifiably
easy to predict a greater interest and a more real dignity than any such
preoccupation with the basis of technic as Monet's can possibly have.
And though, even as one says it, one has the feeling that the future is
pregnant with some genius who will out-Monet Monet, and that painting
will in some now inconceivable way have to submit hereafter to a still
more rigorous standard than it does at present--I have heard the claims
of binocular vision urged--at the same time the true "child of nature"
may console himself with the reflection that accuracy and competence are
but the accidents, at most the necessary phenomena, of what really and
essentially constitutes fine art of any kind--namely, the expression of
a personal conception of what is not only true but beautiful as well. In
France less than anywhere else is it likely that even such a powerful
force as modern realism will long dominate the constructive, the
architectonic faculty, which is part of the very fibre of the French
genius. The exposition and illustration of a theory believed in with a
fervency to be found only among a people with whom the intelligence is
the chief element and object of experiment and exercise, are a natural
concomitant of mental energy and activity. But no theory holds them long
in bondage. At the least, it speedily gives place to another formulation
of the mutinous freedom its very acceptance creates. And the conformity
that each of them in succession imposes on mediocrity is always varied
and relieved by the frequent incarnations in masterful personalities of
the natural national traits--of which, I think, the architectonic spirit
is one of the most conspicuous. Painting will again become creative,
constructive, personally expressive. Its basis having been established
as scientifically impeccable, its superstructure will exhibit the
taste, the elegance, the imaginative freedom, exhibited within the
limits of a cultivated sense of propriety, that are an integral part of
the French painter's patrimony.