I can't agree with those who call Paul Cezanne the "Nietzsche of
painting," because Nietzsche is brilliant and original while the
fundamental qualities of Cezanne are sincerity, a dogged sincerity,
and also splendid colouring--the value of the pigment in and for
itself, the strength and harmony of colour. His training was in the
classics. He knew Manet and Monet, but his personal temperament did
not incline him to their forms of Impressionism. A sober, calculating
workman, not a heaven-storming genius, yet a painter whose procedure
has served as a point of departure for the younger tribe. Like Liszt,
Cezanne is the progenitor of a school, for Wagner founded no great
school as much as he influenced his contemporaries; he was too
complete in himself to leave artistic descendants, and Liszt, an
intermediate type, influenced not only Wagner but the Russians and the
Neo-Frenchman. The greatest disciples of Cezanne are Gauguin and Van
Gogh. Mr. Brownell once wrote: "We only care for facts when they
explain truths," and the facts of Cezanne have that merit. He is
truthful to the degree of eliminating many important artistic factors
from his canvases. But he realises the bulk and weight of objects; he
delineates their density and profile. His landscapes and his humans
are as real as Manet's; he seeks to paint the actual, not the
relative. There is strength if not beauty--the old canonic beauty--and
in the place of the latter may be found rich colour. A master of
values, Cezanne. After all, paint is thicker than academic culture.
I saw the first Paul Gauguin exhibition at Durand-Ruel's in Paris
years ago. I recall contemporary criticism. "The figures are outlined
in firm strokes and painted in broad, flat tints on canvas that has
the texture of tapestry. Many of these works are made repulsive by
their aspect of multicoloured crude and barbarous imagery. Yet one
cannot but acknowledge the fundamental qualities, the lovely values,
the ornamental taste, and the impression of primitive animalism."
Since that rather faint praise Gauguin is aloft with the Olympians.
His art is essentially classic. Again his new themes puzzled critics.
A decorative painter born, he is fit for the company of Baudry the
eclectic, Moreau the symbolist, Puvis de Chavannes, greatest of modern
mural painters, and the starlit Besnard. A rolling stone was Gauguin,
one that gathered no stale moss. He saw with eyes that at Tahiti
became "innocent." The novelty of the flora and fauna there should not
be overlooked in this artistic recrudescence. His natural inclination
toward decorative subjects rekindled in the presence of the tropical
wilderness; at every step he discovered new motives. The very
largeness of the forms about him, whether human, vegetable, or floral,
appealed to his bold brush, and I think that critics should take this
into consideration before declaring his southern pictures garish. They
often seem so, but then the sunset there is glaring, the shadows
ponderous and full of harsh complementary reflects, while humanity
wears another aspect in this southern island where distance is
annihilated by the clarity of the atmosphere. No, Paul Gauguin is
certainly not a plagiarist. Clive Bell has written: "Great artists
never look back." I believe the opposite; all great artists look back
and from the past create a new synthesis.
Wells has said: "Better plunder than paralysis," the obverse of
Gauguin's teaching, and if Vincent Van Gogh "plundered" in his youth
it was not because he feared "paralysis." He merely practised his
scales in private before attempting public performance. Remember that
none of these revolutionary artists jumped overboard in the beginning
without swimming-bladders. They were all, and are all, men who have
served their technical apprenticeship before rebellion and complete
self-expression.
The gods of Van Gogh were Rembrandt, Delacroix, Daumier, Monticelli,
and Millet. The latter was a veritable passion with him. He said of
him, and the remark was a sign-post for his own future: "Rembrandt and
Delacroix painted the person of Jesus, Millet his teaching." This
preoccupation with moral ideas lent a marked intensity to his narrow
temperament. Ill-balanced he was; there was madness in the family;
both his brother and himself committed suicide. His adoration of
Monticelli and his jewelled style led him to Impressionism. But colour
for colour's sake or optical illusion did not long hold him. The
overloaded paint in his earlier works soon gave way to flat
modelling. His effects are achieved by sweeping contours instead of a
series of planes. There are weight, sharp silhouettes, and cruel
analysis. His colour harmonies are brilliant, dissociated from our
notions of the normal. He is a genuine realist as opposed to the
decorative classicism of Gauguin. His work was not much affected by
Gauguin, though he has been classed in the same school. Cezanne openly
repudiated both men. "A sun in his head and a hurricane in his heart,"
was said of him, as it was first said of Delacroix by a critical
contemporary. Vincent Van Gogh is, to my way of thinking, the greatest
genius of the trio under discussion. After them followed the Uglicists
and the passionate patterns and emotional curves of the Cubists.
Henri Matisse has science, he is responsive to all the inflections of
the human form, and has at his finger-tips all the nuances of colour.
He is one of those lucky men for whom the simplest elements suffice to
create a living art. With a few touches a flower, a woman, grow before
your eyes. He is a magician, and when his taste for experimenting with
deformations changes we may expect a gallery of masterpieces. At
present, pushed by friends and foes, he can't resist the temptation to
explode fire-crackers on the front stoop of the Institute. But a
master of line, of decoration, of alluring rhythms. Whistler went to
Japan on an artistic adventure. Matisse has gone to China, where
rhythm, not imitation, is the chiefest quality in art.
Such men as Matisse, Augustus John, and Arthur B. Davies excel as
draughtsmen. The sketches of the first-named are those of a sculptor,
almost instantaneous notations of attitudes and gestures. The
movement, not the mass, is the goal sought for by all of them. The
usual crowd of charlatans, camp-followers, hangers-on may be found
loudly praising their own wares in this Neo-Impressionist school--if
school it be--but it is only fair to judge the most serious and gifted
painters and sculptors of the day. Already there are signs that the
extremists, contortionists, hysterical humbugs, Zonists, Futurists,
and fakers generally are disappearing. What is good will abide, as is
the case with Impressionism; light and atmosphere are its lessons; the
later men have other ideals: form and rhythm, and a more spiritual
interpretation of "facts."