THE ART OF OMISSION
A Blue-black night, broken by sparks of bursting skyrockets and weird
forms of light, in which two illuminated towers are vaguely indicated.
To the left a cluster of foliage and a crowd of people, felt rather than
seen. Such is the subject matter of this little 17 x 23 canvas which
probably excited more controversy and discussion than any other of
Whistler's pictures. It was scarcely noticed when it was first exhibited
at the Dudley Gallery in October. But in 1877 the storm broke loose, and
the famous libel suit against Ruskin, and the record of all details of
the trial in a brown-covered pamphlet, under the title "Whistler v.
Ruskin, Art and Art Critics" (in 1878), were the immediate results. And
the discussion con or pro has not ceased to this very day. Some call it
merely a clever sketch; others consider it one of the highest
expressions beauty is capable of.
What is there so remarkable and fascinating in this picture, that it can
exercise such an influence! Technically it is not perfect, the blacks
are rather opaque, and it does not possess the haunting charm of the
"Old Battersea Bridge" or even of the "Valparaiso Harbour."
Is it the subject matter? Fireworks were never painted before, or, at
least, did not constitute the sole motif of a picture. Yet this should
be no objection. Fireworks are one of the modern amusements that enjoy
great popularity. There should be no objection to their representation,
as little as to a baseball game, a prize fight or any realistic phase of
our personal life. The curious interest of this painting, or any of
Whistler's nocturnes, does not lie merely in the novelty of the subject
(i. e. novel to pictorial representation), nor that it depicts the
mystery of night in an unusual manner, as some artists and writers
claim.
Its significance lies much deeper. It actually represents the beginning
of a new way of painting, not merely of atmospheric conditions, but of
an art different in its _intentions_ from any previous form of
representation.
During the trial Whistler himself gave the following definition of a
nocturne:
"I have perhaps meant rather to indicate an artistic interest alone in
the work, divesting the picture of any sort of interest which might
have been otherwise attached to it. It is an arrangement of line, form
and colour first, and I make use of any incident which shall bring about
a symmetrical result. Among my works are some night pieces, and I have
chosen the word 'Nocturne' because it generalizes and simplifies the
whole set of them."
After Whistler had stated that he had worked two days on the "Falling
Rocket," the General Attorney said:
"The labour of two days, then, is that for what you ask two hundred
guineas?"
To which Whistler replied:
"No--I ask it for the knowledge of a life-time."
[Illustration: _Owned by Mrs. Samuel Untermyer_
NOCTURNE IN BLACK AND GOLD: THE FALLING ROCKET.]
This is hardly a satisfactory explanation. It merely informs us that the
consideration of line, form and colour is more important than the
incident depicted. Have not all painters worked in that way! The actual
manipulation of the pigment on the canvas is the supreme pleasure of
every genuine painter. But the source of inspiration after all lies in
the incident that is in the line, form and colour indicated by the
incident. Or does Whistler wish to convince us that he mentally invented
a colour scheme and then set out to find the incident? He might have
said to himself, "I want to paint a night scene, in blue and gold, and
I want such a silhouette to dominate the scene," but, after all, the
incident had to furnish, or rather suggest, the possibilities of the
mental vision. He, more than most painters, saw poetry in nature. His
wonderful description of a river scene at night in the "Ten O'clock"
vouches for that. Read these lines that are worthy of any poet:
"When the evening mist clothes the riverside with 'poetry' as with a
veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky and the tall
chimneys become campanile, and the warehouses are palaces in the night,
and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and the fairy land is before
us--then the wayfarer hastens home, the workman and the cultured one,
the wise and the one of pleasures cease to understand as they have
ceased to see, and nature, who for once has sung in tune, sings her
exquisite song to the artist alone, her son and her master; her son in
that he loves her, and her master in that he knows her."
A man who wrote like that surely received his inspirations from nature,
and was dependent on the incident as much as anybody else. No, the true
significance of his nocturne, as remarked before, lies in the original
intention, not in the final effect of the subject he wished to produce.
For conventionalist and impressionist alike, nature is the source of
symbols for their mood. With them the standpoint is remarkably different
from that of the superficial realists, who imagine that the mere copy of
a scene must give the emotion that the scene itself arouses; who forget
that the artist's emotion is as much a selective factor as his vision of
the objective signs needful for the communication of his feeling to his
public.
He probably wished to remain under cover, and not come out boldly and
say: "This is the Japanese way of doing things. I disengage the poetical
significance from an object or fact in Eastern fashion. I have learned
this from the Hiroshige prints."
Few artists are willing to lay bare the mechanism of their individual
way of interpretation. They would be misunderstood anyhow. Painters
would have rejoiced to call him a downright imitator. And that is just
the point where he differed from the average artist who followed the
Eastern trail of art. He succeeded in combining the two great art
elements of the world, those of the East and the West. In the sixties he
was interested merely in a phase of Japanese art, that of colour.
Hiroshige prints were hung on the wall or scattered on the floor of his
studio, as can be noted in several of his earlier paintings. The
Japanese artists were virtuosos of colour. They combined the most
contradictory colours into a harmony, nuances which for centuries had
escaped the appreciation of the European eye. After many experiments
Whistler realized that this refined sense of colour was only one of the
external accomplishments of Japanese art, that its true soul was
revealed in its suggestive quality.
The Japanese artists work without perspective, shadows and reflections,
and even when they apply them they do so in a purely decorative way.
They rely entirely on design, on line and the juxtaposition of flat
colour shapes. They do not care to produce an illusion, as if the frame
afforded a view on a scene of actual life. They are satisfied with
making a mere delineation, a suggestion of a beautiful gown or mountain
view.
In literature, or even in such a simple matter as the naming of things,
the Japanese invariably give play to the exercise of their imagination
to bring out a suggestive effect. The same tendency extends into their
fine arts. In treating objects of nature, however insignificant, the
Japanese artist strives to suggest or indicate some sentiment beyond
what is conveyed by the facts represented, just as the poet strives to
store up a mine of thought in the thirty-one syllables of an ordinary
verse, the Tanka, or in the still shorter Haikai of seventeen syllables.
In short, the Japanese artist exerts himself to produce more than beauty
of form or colour. This quality is less apparent in the coloured wood
print so popular with Westerners. An Outomaro is really lacking
suggestiveness. It runs too much into technical detail, and just for
that reason perhaps we more readily understand the European artists.
Take for instant a simple representation of summer plants, merely a few
stalks. The artist is not satisfied to show us the actual facts but
endeavours to indicate something beyond what is actually represented,
the delight of a flowery field in summer or the cool refreshing breeze
under which the plants are bending and swaying.
The Western artists hitherto entertained a different ideal and though
there were many schools, each advocating a different ideal, they all
agreed on one point: that they had to create an illusion, with
modelling, rotundity of form, light, shade and distance. Suggesting a
fact is subtler than actually representing a fact. A sketch has
something, a virility and freshness that a finished painting rarely has.
We prefer Courbet to Ingres, Israels to Leighton. There must be
something left to imagination, to our emotions and æsthetic
consciousness. The Japanese leave most to imagination. Their method
lacks strength but is capable of conveying finer poetic sentiments.
Their vision is clearer, more rapid and less disturbed by intellectual
preoccupations than ours. They are perhaps more perceptual than
conceptual. Not that they lack deep poignant expression, but that they
are deficient in intensity and depth of representation. The grandiose
unity of effect of a Titian, Tintoretto or Rubens is beyond the kakemono
and colour print. They succeeded in some instances in adumbrating in
lines of conventional severity and precision strange and mystical
intimations of spiritual existence. But we find it difficult to discern
these qualities as we need more than suggestion to arrive at such
conclusions.
Whistler tried and succeeded in translating this suggestiveness in such
a manner that the Western mind could understand and appreciate it. How
did he accomplish this task! He realized that he could not abandon
atmosphere, light and distance. He had to apply the Eastern principle
without deteriorating the Western technique. To proceed like the
Japanese would have resulted in a failure. His "Princess of the
Porcelain Land" must have taught him this. He strove for something else
than a mere resemblance. He adopted certain ideas of space arrangement,
certain forms of design and the elimination of detail. The underlying
composition reminds of the Japanese, but not the finish.
Hiroshige was the first designer of Japanese colour prints who devoted
himself largely to landscapes with figures, and with Eastern ingenuity
almost exhausted the subject. His "Hundred Views of Fusi-yama" contain
the most startling designs and problems of composition that have ever
been attempted, and they are treated with incomparable boldness, and
solved with astounding skill. The rarest aspects of nature are treated
with perfect balance. It is a play of curves and geometrical shapes that
bewilders the Western mind that has been content with comparatively few
formulæ.
The vista idea of representing a scene as if viewed through the frame of
a doorway, which Whistler so frequently used in his etchings as in "The
Lime Burner" and "The Garden," is strictly Japanese. One of his friends
said that Whistler never objected to any one trying to copy his way of
painting, but looked upon filching of ideas as grand larceny. This
proves how ignorant we all are about our conduct of life. If anybody
ever plagiarized ideas it was Whistler. The "T" shape of the "Old
Battersea Bridge," in his nocturne of blue and gold, is almost an exact
copy of a Hiroshige design. The same can be said of the branch of leaves
protruding like a silhouette from the margin of his "Ocean," and the
composition of several other nocturnes. But Whistler added something
which no Japanese print suggests. He added light, atmosphere, distance
and mystery.
[Illustration: _Tate Gallery, London_
NOCTURNE IN BLUE AND GOLD: OLD BATTERSEA BRIDGE.]
Hiroshige relied entirely upon design and line, and he was not a good
draughtsman at that, at least not in his figures. His human figures
frequently look like miniature caricatures or curious little insects.
His line lacks purity and sweep, but is more realistic and less
conventional than that of his predecessors. His colour is crude in
comparison with the older artists. His prints that were executed after
the introduction of European aniline colours in 1850, with their streaks
of vivid red and blue, are almost offensive to the eye. His earlier
ones, when he was content in working in pale colours, in pale blue and
black with just a suggestion of pink, are vastly superior. Later on he
tried to learn from the Europeans, and strove for atmospheric effects,
but always suggested it rather by design than colour. If he used colour
for that purpose it went never beyond a simple wash.
Whistler sacrificed line almost entirely. He worked in big masses,
shapes and silhouettes and made colour the principal attraction. The
simplicity of design he borrowed from the Japanese, but the intimate
charm of his colour he got from another art, the art of music. Many
paintings of the latter half of the nineteenth century show this musical
tendency. Chavannes, Cazin, our American landscape painter Tryon, even
the Impressionists, try to produce with colour something similar to the
effect of sound. It is either a resemblance of feeling in execution, or
the desire to deliver us over to a mood like music. Generally both
desires go hand in hand.
The painter, to accomplish this, must go back to the emotional elements
of things, to view objects with primitive enthusiasm and to disregard
all cumbersome detail. These qualities must dominate his conception, and
his treatment must be slightly decorative. He must see things flat, in
curious shapes, and then juxtapose and complement his colours in such
fashion that they produce instantaneously a pleasant retinal image. In
most paintings the subject matter attracts our attention first, and the
appreciation of its technique reaches our emotion through a mental
process. A Chavannes fresco and a Cazin landscape, on the other hand,
appeal directly to our emotions. Henner, Corot, Carrière are musical,
Leighton, Dagnan-Bouveret, Böcklin are not. Chavannes and Tryon
construct their compositions like a composer his score. By applying
parallelism of line and repetition of form and colour shapes with slight
variation, they attempt to transpose musical conditions to the sphere of
colour.
Cazin goes further than either. He comes nearest to Whistler. He
actually tries to make the colour _sing_, not a composition of
diversified interests, but a simple sweet melody that instantaneously
produces a distinct lyrical emotion. In his best pictures he reproduces
successfully the perfect harmony of a few fugitive tints, such as occur
so frequently in nature by a combination of the evening sky and a
shimmering surface of water, by a white cottage in moonlight, or
desolate marshes against a starlit sky. In this, Whistler excelled. He
advanced another step by using the smallest limit of colours possible,
without obliterating form and subject matter. Although Whistler
accentuated the breadth of vision, divided his space arrangement into as
few planes as possible, juxtaposed rarely more than two colours, and
made all objects appear shadowy and weird against a glimmering sky, it
is astonishing how vibrant he kept his colour; the more so as his
colours are laid on rather flatly, and, occasionally, so thinly that the
canvas shines through. This, of course, helps the vibrating quality, but
the colour tints contain so many subtle variations that they scarcely
become discernible to the eye but merely conscious as a vague shimmer,
like that of night and atmosphere themselves.
The colour combinations are frequently the same. Blue and silver, and
blue and gold appear most frequently. Then there is brown with gold or
silver, and a crepuscule in flesh colour and green, which was also the
theme of "On the Balcony."
His subjects were chosen with great discretion. Outside of the
"Valparaiso Harbour" picture, a "Southampton Water" and a "St. Marks,
Venice," most were devoted to London. There is a Chelsea embankment in
winter, a Chelsea in snow and ice, the Westminster Bridge, the Trafalgar
Square in snow, and the old Battersea reach and bridge in three
versions. Whistler never stopped work at a picture until it was as
perfect as he could make it. Many of the pictures that are now on the
market, mere scraps and fragments at ridiculous prices, he would not
have allowed to go out of his studio. He had the conscience of the true
artist, but he never went to the extreme. He knew when to stop, a
quality which is exceedingly rare. He would never have spoiled a canvas
as Maris and Ryder do. He worked very hard on most of his pictures, but
they do not show it. The difficulties and deliberate slowness of
execution are lost in the final result. "To say of a picture, as it is
often said in its praise, that it shows great and earnest labour, is to
say that it is incomplete and unfit for view." He followed this maxim
out to the letter. Industry was with him a necessity--not a virtue. Were
you to ask me to define the charm of his nocturnes, I should say, I
fancy that it lies in the delicious purity of their expression. The
emotions which Whistler wishes to excite are those of visional pleasure,
of subtle speculation and vague emotional joy. In him inspiration always
prevailed over caprice. The picture had first to express the arrangement
of colour entrusted to it, and was scarcely allowed any dash or
extravagance of brushwork or form, unless they would form a part of his
original plan and serve as a contrast or dissonance. He never added
anything in his repaintings, but cut out one passage after another; he
did not graft on, he pruned, for he meant nothing should remain but the
most essential. If there was ever a man tormented by the accursed
ambition to put the whole world into one picture, the whole picture into
one tonality, and the whole tonality into one colour note, it was
Whistler. It is difficult to understand why his work was ever criticized
as being unfinished. When Burne-Jones, in a spirit hostile to Whistler's
work, declared in the witness box at the Ruskin trial: "In my opinion
... a picture ought not to fall short of what has been for ages
considered as complete and finished," Whistler retorted effectively: "A
picture is completely finished when nothing more can be done to improve
it."
[Illustration: NOCTURNE IN GRAY AND GOLD: CHELSEA, SNOW.]
And for this finish he tried incessantly. There was never an artist who
was more conscientious and more ardently striving for perfection than
he. He sometimes tried experiments with different mediums in oil
painting. At one time he used benzine to thin the colours, another time
kerosene. He would cover a large canvas all over with the latter, in
order to bring out the dried tints, before he started to repaint or
overpaint. And he said to Clifford Adams, his last apprentice, "In the
morning we may not succeed in getting the direct relation of colour, but
at noon it may become more harmonious and at sundown we might strike
just the right thing." And so he worked, day after day and year after
year, on his pictures, until every trace of labour was obliterated and
the picture had become a masterpiece. "A masterpiece that would appear
"as a flower" to the painter--perfect in its bud as in its bloom--with
no reason to explain its presence, no mission to fulfil; a joy to the
artist, a delusion to the philanthropist--a puzzle to the botanist--an
accident of sentiment to the literary man."
This flatly contradicts the general idea rampant among painters that he
furnished his paintings _au premier coup_. His friends endorse the
denial. Mr. R. A. Canfield has seen not less than sixteen changes of
background to one portrait, "and heaven knows how many more that were
not counted." Whenever he was dissatisfied with a painting, he started a
new canvas until he finally realized the task he had attempted. In that
sense his colleagues are right, his pictures look as if they were
painted _au premier coup_ but it was a roundabout way. It is impossible
to advance any theory about his technique. All his pictures are painted
in varying thicknesses of paint, in varying degrees of liquidity of
paint, in varying smoothness and roughness, in few or many sittings, in
fact, in the varying technique which alone can correspond to moods of
so great a painter and the circumstances of each picture.
The only thing which has any semblance to a constant method is a
moderate adherence, in his portraits at least, to the old way of
painting from dark to light which, in the final painting, in overlapping
pieces of paint, as in the case of most oil paintings until recently,
results in the thickening of the paint towards the light.
There are scarcely more than sixteen finished nocturnes on record. Of
these, most are masterpieces, or would pass as belonging to the best of
his works. And as he worked at them ever since he returned from
Valparaiso in 1866 and held the first important exhibition of nocturnes
at the Dowdswell Gallery, and in Paris (in the Rue Sèze) not previous to
1883, when quite a number were still unfinished, we are astonished at
the small output. But masterpieces are scarce. And if a painter can be
credited with two or three every year he is a hero in his profession.
The importance of the nocturne in Whistler's own career, everybody must
realize who is familiar with his work. They add to his personality a
delicious flavour that even his lithographs and large paintings do not
grant in the same manner. It was to him an instrument that obeyed his
slightest wishes. It was art, at once aristocratic, delicate, of high
finish and moreover imbued with an individual rhythm and the poetry of
nature.
[Illustration: NOCTURNE IN BLUE AND SILVER.]
What wonderful rain and snow this man has painted! What vast expanses of
water as mystic as the night! And those vagrant mists, that envelop
everything and blot out the very existence of things! There has not been
anything in art since Turner that could be compared with it. There are
no banal sunsets, no glaring moonlights, only the more intricate moods
of nature, snowfall, mist, late evening and night. Also in the choice of
his subject he added a new note.
The art of a landscape painter is determined by a thousand influences
upon his mind other than those of nature. The essence of Monet's art is
one of an hour, but with such a painter as Daubigny or Rousseau it is
one of a place. There is the sense of the atmosphere of the moment given
by one school of landscape painters, of locality by another, poetry by a
third and of the historic associations of a place by yet another school.
These things are, of course, determined by temperament, and schools of
painting may be classified in this way more adequately than they are.
Human association creeps into landscapes in various degrees, and also
in other ways than the historical way which we feel,--as in F. E.
Church's pictures, for instance,--but landscape, generally subordinate
to the human interest, now sometimes tries to free itself from this
influence entirely. It has become like poetry, simply the record of an
emotion or mood remembered in colour. This is Whistler's peculiar
innovation.
And yet the final significance of the nocturne in the world of art is
still an open question. Time alone can decide its value. The rest is
mere hypothesis. Many--and I only talk of people who understand--argue
that despite its perfection, the nocturne represents a minor phase of
art. Of course, a nocturne, no matter how beautiful, cannot compete in
importance with the "Portrait of Carlyle," or "The Artist's Mother."
Size does not mean much, but it means something. A small painting can be
as exquisite in workmanship as a large one, but it can never rise to the
same dignity of expression. A frescoe by Chavannes would lose much if
executed in the size of the average easel picture.
But the nocturne stands for something in modern art which lends it
special importance, aside of all workmanship and beauty of pictorial
treatment. It represents a return to the art of painting for painting's
sake. Every art, may it be music, poetry, dancing, sculpture or
painting, has its own peculiar technique, which the technically ignorant
person cannot appreciate. Poetry which has no formal conventions is
inconceivable. And, in a similar manner, painting has the charm of
texture and brushwork, the charm of how the paint is actually put on and
displayed on the canvas. The æsthetic satisfaction derived from an art
is in exact proportion to one's knowledge of the art's technique.
This largely explains the general public's indifference to art. And the
everlasting fight between the artist and the public has been on these
lines. The plea of the modern experimentist that all poetry of painting
should be in the paint, which also Whistler advanced, is a just one if
not carried to extremes. Absolute paucity of idea is as unfavourable as
story-telling. The intrinsic beauty of a painting lies in the method of
painting, and the only guide for the painter is colour and the general
arrangement--not a method learned by rote, not an arrangement garroted
by a thousand rules which others have invented, but that personal style
or rhythm which is inveterately the painter's own. So Whistler's style
is beautiful because it is personal. His revolt was against
story-telling, against the genre pictures, which adulterated painting
with the skill of the novel writer. It is for future æsthetics to decide
whether the introduction of musical ideals is not just as dangerous as
the intermixture of any other art. There is no doubt, however, that the
new combination grants a higher pleasure to the connoisseur at present.
Music is the most fashionable and, perhaps, most widely understood art
to-day.
This be as it may, Whistler did a great service to modern art. By
realizing its limitations he bestowed upon it a new vitality and glow.
His art, far from being lawless, is the expression of a new law. Make
any kind of pictures you like, dear painters, provided they are
beautiful. For each age there is a different beauty. Old forms and old
perfections wither.
There has been too much story-telling. The David school, with its
pompous historical, allegorical and mythological representations, has
become intolerable to us. David, Vernet, etc., up to Ingres and
Delaroche all seem lifeless. Also the Romanticists, who were the
interpreters of poets, appear highstrung to more recent art ideas. The
reaction was inevitable. The Impressionists--and their merit lies
principally in that their work represents a technical reaction--went too
far, inasmuch as it allows scarcely any scope to intellectual
expansion. It is based on immediate vision, and occupies itself only
with the consideration of light and colour, and keen observation of
modern life. All the great painters met the public half way. The great
painters, we need only to recall Rembrandt, Velasquez or Leonardo, were
painters as much as they were poets, but each in equal measure. The
qualities balanced each other, and they did not, like the modern
painters, sacrifice one for the other.
Whistler has to be classified as an Impressionist, but he remained true
to the old tradition. He was as much a reactionist against classic and
romantic painting as any of them; but he had no use for the new
technique. Like Monet, he went back to Velasquez and Goya, Franz Hals,
Van Dyke and all the Old Masters who could paint. Like Courbet, he
reduced a scene to three or four broad tones, but he was more exact in
the grade of tones, and invariably endeavoured to explain the sentiment
inspired by them. His work was never _anti intellectual_. On the
contrary he was a true visionary.
He protested against literary elements, but emphasized the psychological
and symbolical qualities of painting. Nobody was further remote from
gross superficial realism. Like Flaubert and the Goncourts, he proved
that realism can go hand in hand with refined form and delicate
psychology. He was sane throughout. And that is why the æsthetic
revolution, produced by him, is not yet at an end.
The first principle for the painter is to acquire a personal mode of
feeling and thinking, and the second that he should find an adequate and
personal method of expressing himself. The painter must choose his
method. If he has only the old themes to paint the old forms will suit
him well enough--portraits and single figures, landscapes and marines,
cattle pictures and still life--but if he has anything special to say,
he must find for himself a special and unique form of expression. The
only criterion is beauty.