l'Artiste, and Charles Morice has published another, Eugène Carrière.
The latter deals with the personality and ideas of one of the most
original thinkers among modern French painters. We have spoken of the
acerbity of Degas, of his wit, so often borrowed by Whistler and
Manet; we have read Eugène Fromentin's delightful, stimulating studies
of the old masters, but we doubt if Fromentin was as profound a
thinker as Carrière. Degas is not, though he deals in a more acid and
dangerous form of aphorism. It is one of the charms of the eulogy of
M. Morice to find embalmed therein so many phrases and speeches of the
dead painter. He was both poet and philosopher, let us call him a
seer, for his work fully bears out this appellation. A grand
visionary, he well deserves Jean Dolent's description of his pictures
as "realities having the magic of a dream."
Carrière's career was in no wise extraordinary. He fled to no exotic
climes as did Paul Gauguin. His only tragedy was the manner of his
death. For three years previous he suffered the agonies of a cancer.
His bravery was admirable. No one heard him complain. He worked to the
last, worked as he had worked his life long, untiringly. Morice gives
a "succinct biography" at the close of his study. From it we learn
that Eugène Carrière was born January 29, 1849, at Gournay
(Seine-Inférieure); that he made his first steps in art at the
Strasbourg Academy; in 1869 he entered the Beaux-Arts, in Cabanel's
class. Penniless, he earned a precarious existence in designing
industrial objects. In 1870 he was made prisoner by the Prussians,
with the garrison of Neuf-Brisach, and taken to Dresden, where he was
confined in prison. After peace had been declared he resumed his
studies at the Beaux-Arts. In 1877 he married--an important event in
his art; thenceforward Madame Carrière and the children born to them
were his continual models, both by preference and also by force of
circumstances--he was too poor in the beginning to hire professional
models. He spent six months in London, which may or may not account
for his brumous colour; and in 1879, when he was thirty years old, he
exposed in the Salon of that year his Young Mother, the first of a
long series of Maternities. He was violently attacked by the critics,
and as violently defended. During the same year he attempted to win
the "prix de Rome" and gained honours for his sketch. Luckily he did
not attain this prize; and, still more luck, he left the school.
In 1884 he received an honourable mention for a child's portrait; in
1885 a medal for his Sick Child, bought by the State; in 1886 Le
Premier voile was bought by the State and he was proposed for a medal
of honour and--singular dream of Frenchmen--he was decorated in 1889.
He died March 27, 1906. Not a long, but a full life, a happy one, and
at the last, glory--"_le soleil des morts_," as Balzac said--and a
competence for his dear ones. And it is to the honour of such writers
as Roger Marx, Anatole France, Hamel, Morice, Mauclair, Verhaeren,
Geffroy, that they recognised the genius of Carrière from the
beginning. In 1904 Carrière was made honorary president of the Autumn
Salon and was the chief guest of these young painters, who really
adored Paul Cézanne, and not the painter of an illusive psychology. I
wrote at that time: "Carrière, whose delicately clouded portraits, so
intimate in their revelation of the souls of his sitters, was not seen
at his best. He offered a large decorative panel for the Mairie of the
Thirteenth Arrondissement, entitled Les Fiancés, a sad-looking
betrothal party ... the landscape timid, the decorative scheme not
very effective... His tender notations of maternity, and his heads,
painted with the smoky enchantments of his pearly gray and soft
russet, are more credible than this _panneau_." Was Carrière a
decorative painter by nature--setting aside training? We doubt it,
though Morice does not hesitate to name him after Puvis de Chavannes
in this field. The trouble is that he did not make many excursions
into the larger forms. He painted a huge canvas, Les Théâtres
Populaires, in which the interest is more intimate than epical. He
also did some decorations for the Hotel de Ville, The Four Ages for a
Mairie, and the Christ at the Luxembourg and a view of Paris.
Nevertheless, it is his portraits that will live.
Carrière was, first and last, a symbolist. There he is related to the
Dutch Seer, Rembrandt; both men strove to seek for the eternal
correspondence of things material and spiritual; both sought to bring
into harmony the dissonance of flesh and the spirit. Both succeeded,
each in his own way--though we need not couple their efforts on the
technical side. Rembrandt was a prophet. There is more of the
reflective poet in Carrière. He is a mystic. His mothers, his
children, are dreams made real--the magic of which Dolent speaks is
always there. To disengage the personality of his sitter was his first
idea. Slowly he built up those volumes of colour, light, and shadow,
the solidity of which caused Rodin to exclaim: "Carrière is also a
sculptor!" Slowly and from the most unwilling sitter he extorted the
secret of a soul. We speak of John Sargent as the master psychologist
among portraitists, a superiority he himself has never assumed; but
that magnificent virtuoso, an aristocratic Frans Hals, never gives us
the indefinite sense of things mystic beneath the epidermis of poor,
struggling humanity as does Eugène Carrière. Sargent is too
magisterial a painter to dwell upon the infinite little soul-stigmata
of men and women. Who can tell the renunciations made by the Frenchman
in his endeavour to wrest the enigma of personality from its abysmal
depths?
As Canaille Mauclair says: "Carrière was first influenced by the
Spaniards, then by Ver Meer and Chardin ... formerly he coloured his
canvas with exquisite delicacy and with a distinction of harmonies
that came very near to Whistler's. Now he confines himself to bistre,
black and white, to evoke those dream pictures, true images of souls,
which make him inimitable in our epoch and go back to Rembrandt's
chiaroscuro." Colour went by the board at the last, and the painter
was dominated by expression alone. His gamut of tones became
contracted. "Physical magnetism" is exactly the phrase that
illuminates his later methods. Often cavernous in tone, sooty in his
blacks, he nevertheless contrives a fluid atmosphere, the shadows
floating, the figure floating, that arrests instant attention. He
became almost sculptural, handled his planes with imposing breadth,
his sense of values was strong, his gradations and degradation of
tones masterly; and he escaped the influences of the new men in their
researches after luminosity at all hazards. He considered
impressionism a transition; after purifying muddy palettes of the
academics, the division-of-tones painters must necessarily return to
lofty composition, to a poetic simplicity with nature, to a more
rarefied psychology.
Carrière, notwithstanding his nocturnal reveries, his sombre
colouring, was not a pessimist. Indeed, the reverse. His philosophy of
life was exalted--an exalted socialism. He was, to employ Nietzsche's
pithy phrase, a "Yes-Sayer"; he said "Yes" to the universe. A man of
vigorous affirmations, he worshipped nature, not for its pictorial
aspects, but for the god which is the leaf and rock and animal, for
the god that beats in our pulses and shines in the clear sunlight. Nor
was it vague, windy pantheism, this; he was a believer--a glance at
his Christ reveals his reverence for the Man of Sorrows--and his
religious love and pity for mankind was only excelled by his hatred of
wrong and oppression. He detested cruelty. His canvases of childhood,
in which he exposes the most evanescent gesture, exposes the
unconscious helplessness of babyhood, are so many tracts--if you
choose to see them after that fashion--in behalf of mercy to all
tender and living things. He is not, however, a sentimentalist. His
family groups prove the absence of theatrical pity. Because of his
subtle technical method, his manner of building up his heads in a
misty medium and then abstracting their physical non-essentials, his
portraits have a metaphysical meaning--they are a _Becoming_, not a
_Being_, tangible though they be. Their fluid rhythms lend to them
almost the quality of a perpetual rejuvenescence. This may be an
illusion, but it tells us of the primary intensity of the painter's
vision. Withal, there is no scene of the merely spectral, no optical
trickery. The waves of light are magnetic. The picture floats in
space, seemingly compelled by its frame into limits. Gustave Geffroy
once wrote that, in common with the great masters, Carrière, on his
canvas, gives a sense of volume and weight. Whatever he sacrificed, it
was not actuality. His draughtsmanship never falters, his touch is
never infirm.
I have seen his portraits of Verlaine, Daudet, Edmond de Goncourt,
Geffroy, of the artist himself and many others. The Verlaine is a
veritable evocation. It was painted at one _séance_ of several hours,
and the poet, it is said, did not sit still or keep silence for a
moment. He was hardly conscious that he was being painted. What a
head! Not that of the old faun and absinthe-sipping vagabond of the
Latin quarter, but the soul that lurked somewhere in Verlaine; the
dreamer, not the mystifier, the man crucified to the cross of
aspiration by his unhappy temperament. Musician and child, here is the
head of one of those pious, irresponsible mendicants who walked dusty
roads in the Middle Ages. It needed an unusual painter to interpret an
unusual poet.
The Daudet face is not alone full of surface character, but explains
the racial affinities of the romancer. Here he is David, not Daudet.
The head of De Goncourt gives in a few touches--Carrière is ever
master of the essential--the irritable pontiff of literary
impressionism. Carrière was fond of repeating: "For the artist the
forms evoke ideas, sensations, and sentiments; for the poet,
sensations, ideas, sentiments evoke forms." Never expansively lyrical
as was Monticelli, Carrière declared that a picture is the logical
development of light. And on the external side his art is a continual
variation with light as a theme. Morice contends that he was a
colourist; that the blond of Rubens and the russet of Carrière are not
monochromes; that polychromy is not the true way of seeing nature
coloured. Certainly Carrière does not sacrifice style, expression,
composition for splashing hues. Yet his illuminating strokes appear to
proceed from within, not from without. He interrogates nature, but her
answer is a sober, not a brilliant one. Let us rather say that his
colouring is adequate--he always asserted that a sense of proportion
was success in art. His tone is peculiarly personal; he paints
expressions, the fleeting shades that cross the face of a man, a
woman, a child. He patiently awaits the master trait of a soul and
never misses it, though never displaying it with the happy cruelty of
Sargent and always judging mercifully. Notwithstanding his humble
attitude in the presence of nature, he is the most self-revealing of
painters. Few before him ever interpreted maternity as he has done.
Carrière is not a virtuoso. He is an initiator--a man of rare
imagination. Above all, he escapes the rhetoric of the schools. His
apprehension of character is that of sympathetic genius. He divines
the emotions, especially in those souls made melancholy by sorrow;
uneasy, complex, feverish souls; them that hide their griefs, and
souls saturated with the ennuis of existence--to all he is interpreter
and consoler. He has pictured the _Weltschmerz_ of his age; and
without morbid self-enjoyment. A noble soul, an elevating example to
those artists who believe that art and life may be dissociated.
Carrière has left no school, though his spiritual influence has been
great. A self-contained artist, going his own way, meditating deeply
on art, on life, his canvases stand for his singleness and purity of
purpose. On the purely pictorial side he is, to quote M. Mauclair, "an
absolutely surprising painter of hands and glances."
In the sad and anxious rectitude of his attire the artistic interest
in modern man is concentrated upon his head and hands; and upon these
salient points Carrière focussed his art. Peaceful or disquieted, his
men and women belong to our century. Spiritually Eugène Carrière is
the lineal descendant of the Rembrandt school--but one who has read
Dostoïevsky.
VI. DEGAS
Let us suppose that gay old misogynist Arthur Schopenhauer persuaded
to cross the Styx and revisiting the earth. Apart from his disgust if
forced to listen to the music of his self-elected disciple Richard
Wagner, what painted work would be likely to attract him? Remember he
it was who named Woman the knock-kneed sex--since the new woman is
here it matters little if her figure conforms to old-fashioned,
stupid, masculine standards of beauty. But wouldn't the nudes of Degas
confirm the Frankfort philosopher in his theories regarding the
"long-haired, short-brained, unæsthetic sex," and also confirm his
hatred for the exaggerations of poet and painter when describing or
depicting her? We fear that Schopenhauer would smile his malicious
smile and exclaim: "At last the humble truth!" It is the presentation
of the humble truth that early snared the affections of Degas, who has
with a passionate calm pursued the evanescent appearances of things
his entire life. No doubt death will find him pencil in hand. You
think of Hokusai, the old man mad with paint, when the name of Degas
is mentioned. He was born in Paris July 19, 1834--his full name is
Hilaire Germain Edgard (or Edgar)--and there is one phrase that will
best describe his career: He painted. Like Flaubert, he never married,
but lived in companionship with his art. Such a mania could have been
described by Balzac. Yet no saner art ever issued from a Parisian
atelier; sane, clear, and beautiful.
Degas is a painter's painter. For him the subject is a peg upon which
to hang superb workmanship. In amazement the public asked: How could a
man in the possession of his powers shut himself up in a studio to
paint ballet girls, washerwomen, jockeys, drabs of Montmartre,
shopgirls, and horses? Even Zola, who should have known better, would
not admit that Degas was an artist fit to be compared with such men as
Flaubert and Goncourt; but Zola was never the realist that is Degas.
Now it is difficult to keep asunder the names of Goncourt and Degas.
To us they are too often unwisely bracketed. The style of the painter
has been judged as analogous to the novelist's; yet, apart from a
preference for the same subjects for the "modernity" of Paris, there
is not much in Degas that recalls Goncourt's staccato, febrile,
sparkling, "decomposed", impressionistic prose. Both men are
brilliant, though not in the same way. Pyrotechnics are abhorrent to
Degas. He has the serenity, sobriety, and impersonality of the great
classic painters. He is himself a classic.
His legend is slender. Possessing a private income, he never was
preoccupied with the anxieties of selling his work. He first entered
the atelier of Lamotte, but his stay was brief. In the studio of
Ingres he was, so George Moore declares, the student who carried out
the lifeless body of the painter when Ingres fell in his fatal fit.
There is something peculiarly interesting about this anecdote for the
tradition of Ingres has been carried on by Degas. The greatest master
of pure line, in his portraits and nudes--we have forgotten his chilly
_pastiches_ of Raphael--of the past century, Ingres has been and still
is for Degas a god on the peaks of Parnassus. Degas is an Ingres who
has studied the Japanese. Only such men as Pollajuolo and Botticelli
rank with Degas in the mastery of rhythmic line. He is not academic,
yet he stems from purest academic traditions. He is not of the
impressionists, at least not in his technical processes, but he
associated with them, exhibited with them (though rarely), and is as a
rule confused with them. He never exhibited in the Salons, he has no
disciples, yet it is doubtful if any painter's fashion of seeing
things has had such an influence on the generation following him. The
name of Degas, the pastels of Degas, the miraculous draughtsmanship of
Degas created an imponderable fluid which still permeates Paris.
Naturally, after the egg trick was discovered we encounter scores of
young Columbuses, who paint ballet girls' legs and the heads of
orchestral musicians and scenes from the racing paddock.
Degas had three painters who, if any, might truthfully call themselves
his pupils. These are Mary Cassatt, Alexis Rouart, and Forain. The
first has achieved solid fame. The last is a remarkable illustrator,
who "vulgarised" the austere methods of his master for popular
Parisian consumption. That Renoir, Raffaelli, and Toulouse-Lautrec owe
much to Degas is the secret of Polichinello. This patient student of
the Tuscan Primitives, of Holbein, Chardin, Delacroix, Ingres, and
Manet--the precepts of Manet taught him to sweeten the wiriness of his
modelling and modify his tendency to a certain hardness--was willing
to trust to time for the verdict of his rare art. He associated daily
with Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Whistler, Duranty, Fantin-Latour, and the
crowd that first went to the Café Guerbois in the Batignolles--hence
the derisive nickname, "The Batignolles School"; later to the Nouvelle
Athènes, finally to the Café de la Rochefoucauld. A hermit he was
during the dozen hours a day he toiled, but he was a sociable man,
nevertheless, a cultured man fond of music, possessing a tongue that
was feared as much as is the Russian knout. Mr. Moore has printed many
specimens of his caustic wit. Whistler actually kept silent in his
presence--possibly expecting a repetition of the _mot_: "My dear
friend, you conduct yourself in life just as if you had no talent at
all." Manet good-naturedly took a browbeating, but the Academic set
were outraged by the irreverence of Degas. What hard sayings were his!
Poor Bastien-Lepage, too, came in for a scoring. Barricaded in his
studio, it was a brave man who attempted to force an entrance. The
little, round-shouldered artist, generally good-tempered, would pour a
stream of verbal vitriol over the head of the unlucky impertinent.
In 1860 or thereabout he visited America, and in New Orleans he saw
the subject of his Interior of a Cotton Factory, which was shown as an
historical curiosity at the Paris exposition in 1900. While it is
implacably realistic there is little hint of the future Degas. The
name of the painter was in every French painter's mouth, and the
brilliant article of Huysmans concentrated his fame. Huysmans it was
who first saw that Degas had treated the nude as Rembrandt would if he
had been alive--making allowances for temperamental variations. Degas
knew that to grasp the true meaning of the nude it must be represented
in postures, movements which are natural, not studio attitudes. As
Monet exposed the fallacy of studio lighting, so Degas revealed the
inanity of its poses. Ibsen said the stage should be a room with the
fourth wall removed; Degas preferred the key-hole through which we
seem to peep upon the privacy of his ugly females bathing or combing
their hair or sleeping, lounging, yawning, quarrelling, and walking.
The simian and frog-like gestures and sprawling attitudes are far from
arousing amiable sensations. These poor, tired women, hard-working
laundresses, shopgirls, are not alluring, though they are not as
hideous as the women of Cézanne or Edvard Münch; but the veracity of
the "human document" (overworked phrase!) is there. Charles Morice has
said that to Cézanne a potato was as significant as a human
countenance. The pattern interested him in both. For Degas the beauty
of life lies in the moving line. He captures with ease the swift,
unconscious gesture. His models are never posed. They are nature
caught in the act. There is said to be a difference between the
epidermis of the professional model and the human who undresses only
to go to bed. Degas has recorded this difference. What an arraignment
of the corset are the creased backs and gooseflesh of his nudes! What
lurking cynicism there is in some of his interiors! _Voilà l'animale!_
he exclaims as he shows us the far from enchanting antics of some
girl. How Schopenhauer would laugh at the feminine "truths" of Degas!
Without the leer of Rops, Degas is thrice as unpleasant. He is a
douche for the romantic humbug painter, the painter of sleek bayadères
and of drawing-room portraiture.
Pity is deeply rooted in his nature. He is never tender, yet there is
veiled sympathy in the ballet-girl series. Behind the scenes, in the
waiting-rooms, at rehearsal, going home with the hawk-eyed mother, his
girls are all painfully real. No "glamour of the foot-lights,"
generally the prosaic side of their life. He has, however, painted the
glorification of the danseuse, of that lady grandiloquently described
as _prima donna assoluta_. What magic he evokes as he pictures her
floating down stage! The pastel in the Luxembourg, L'Etoile, is the
reincarnation of the precise moment when the aerial creature on one
foot lifts graceful arms and is transfigured in the glow of the
lights, while about her beats--you are sure--the noisy, insistent
music. It is in the pinning down of such climaxes of movement that
Degas stirs our admiration. He draws movement. He can paint rhythms.
His canvases are ever in modulation. His sense of tactile values is
profound. His is true atmospheric colour. A feeling of exhilaration
comes while contemplating one of his open-air scenes with jockeys,
race-horses, and the incidental bustle of a neighbouring concourse.
Unexcelled as a painter of horses, as a delineator of witching
horsemanship, of vivid landscapes--true integral decorations--and of
the casual movements and gestures of common folk, Degas is also a
psychologist, an ironical commentator on the pettiness and ugliness of
daily life, of its unheroic aspects, its comical snobberies and
shocking hypocrisies; and all expressed without a melodramatic
elevation of the voice, without the false sentimentalism of Zola or
the morbidities of Toulouse-Lautrec. There is much Baudelaire in
Degas, as there is also in Rodin. All three men despised academic
rhetoric; all three dealt with new material in a new manner.
It is the fashion to admire Degas, but it is doubtful if he will ever
gain the suffrage of the general. He does not retail anecdotes, though
to the imaginative every line of his nudes relates their history. His
irony is unremitting. It suffuses the ballet-girl series and the nude
sets. Irony is an illuminating mode, but it is seldom pleasant; the
public is always suspicious of an ironist, particularly of the Degas
variety. Careless of reputation, laughing at the vanity of his
contemporaries who were eager to arrive, contemptuous of critics and
criticism, of collectors who buy low to sell high (in the heart of
every picture collector there is a bargain counter), Degas has defied
the artistic world for a half-century. His genius compelled the
Mountain to come to Mahomet. The rhythmic articulations, the volume,
contours, and bounding supple line of Degas are the despair of
artists. Like the Japanese, he indulges in abridgments, deformations,
falsifications. His enormous faculty of attention has counted heavily
in his synthetical canvases. He joys in the representation of
artificial light; his theatres are flooded with it, and he is equally
successful in creating the illusion of cold, cheerless daylight in a
salle where rehearse the little "rats" and the older coryphées on
their wiry, muscular, ugly legs. His vast production is dominated by
his nervous, resilient vital line and by supremacy in the handling of
values.