The Comparative Exhibition in New York over ten years ago proved that
it is dangerous to mix disparate schools and aims and personalities.
And while the undertaking was laudable, seeking as it did to dissipate
our artistic provinciality, it but emphasised it--proved beyond the
peradventure of a doubt American dependence on foreign art.
Technically, to-day, the majority of our best painters stem from
France, as formerly they imitated English models or studied at
Duesseldorf and Munich. When the Barbizon group made their influence
felt our landscapists immediately betrayed the impact of the new
vision, the new technique. Our younger men are just as progressive as
were their fathers and grandfathers. Every fresh generation uses as a
spring-board for its achievements the previous generation. They have a
lot to put on canvas, new sights that only America can show. What
matter the tools if they have, these young chaps, individuality? Must
they continue to peer through the studio spectacles of their
grandfathers? They make mistakes, as did their predecessors. They
experiment; art is not a fixed quantity, but a ceaseless
experimenting. They are often raw, crude, harsh; but they deal in
character and actuality. They paint their environment--the only true
historic method--and they do this with a modern technique. Manet,
Goya, Renoir, Monet, Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Whistler, and
others may be noted in the technical schemes of nine out of ten
native-born American artists. The question at issue is whether our new
men have anything to say, and do they say it in a personal manner. I
think the answer is a decided affirmative. We can't compete with the
great names in art, but in the contemporary swim we fairly hold our
own.
Consider our recent Academy exhibitions--and I prefer to take this
stronghold of antiquated art and prejudices as a starting-point
rather than the work of the out-and-out insurgents--consider, I
repeat, the Academy, and then try to recall, say, ten years ago and
the pictures that then hung on the line. Decidedly, as Zola would say,
there has been a cleaning up of dirty old palettes, an inrush of fresh
air and sunshine. In landscape we excel, easily leading the English
painters. Of Germany I do not care to speak here: the sea of mud that
passes for colour, the clumsiness of handling, and the general heavy
self-satisfaction discourage the most ardent champion of the Teutonic
art. In England, Burlington House still sets the fashion. At one Royal
Academy I attended I found throngs before a melodramatic anecdote by
John Collier, entitled The Fallen Ideal. It had the rigidity of a
tinted photograph. But it hit the "gallery," which dearly loves a
story in paint. The two Sargent landscapes did not attract, yet they
killed every picture within optical range. Nor was Collier's the worst
offence in an enormous gathering of mediocre canvases. One must go,
nowadays, to the New English Art Club to see the fine flower of new
English art. There Augustus John reigns, but he is not to be confined
in parochial limits; he is a "European event," not merely Welsh. He
dominates the club as he dominates English art. What's one man's paint
may be another's poison. I never saw so many examples of his except in
Mr. John Quinn's collection--who has the largest gathering in America
of the work of this virile painter and draughtsman. His cartoon--The
Flute of Pan (the property of Mr. Quinn)--hanging in the winter show
of the English Art Club, reveals the artist's impulse toward large
decorative schemes. At first the composition seems huddled, but the
cross-rhythms and avoidance of facile pose are the reason for this
impression. The work is magisterial. It grows upon one, though it is
doubtful whether it will ever make the appeal popular. John's colour
spots are seductive. He usually takes a single model and plays with
the motive as varyingly as did Brahms in his variations on a theme by
Paganini. But with all his transcendental virtuosity the Welsh painter
is never academic; he is often rank in his expression of humanity,
human, all-too-human, as Nietzsche would have said. A great
personality (with greater potentialities) is that of Augustus John.
But aside from his powerful personality and remarkable craftsmanship,
who is there that can't be matched by our own men? There are no
landscapists like ours--is it necessary to count them off name by
name? Neither are our figure-painters excelled. I know comparisons are
not courteous, and I forbear particularising. John S. Sargent, our
greatest painter of surfaces, of the mundane scene, was not even born
here, though he is of American parentage. Nevertheless, we claim him.
Then there is Whistler, most elusive of our artists. Is he American?
That question has been answered. He is, even if he deals with foreign
subject-matter. Wonderfully wrought, magically coloured, rich and dim,
are his pictures, and one, to employ the phrase of an English critic,
is fain to believe that his brush was dipped in mist, not pigment.
Let us be catholic. Let us try to shift anew the focus of criticism
when a fresh personality swims into our ken. Let us study each man
according to his temperament and not insist that he should chime with
other men's music. The Beckmesser style of awarding good and bad marks
is obsolete. To miss modern art is to miss one of the few thrills that
life holds. Your true decadent copies the past and closes his eyes to
the insistent vibrations of his day. I know that it is not every one
who can enjoy Botticelli and Monet, Duerer and Manet, Rembrandt and
Matisse. Ready-made admiration is fatal to youthful minds;
nevertheless, we should, all of us, old as well as young--particularly
the academic elderly--cultivate a broader comprehension of the later
schools and personalities. Art is protean. But will, I ask myself,
posterity sit before the masterpieces of Matisse, Picasso, and Van
Dongen, and experience that nostalgia of the ideal of which I wrote at
the beginning of these desultory notes? Why not? There may be other
ideals in those remote times, ideals that may be found incarnate in
some new-fangled tremendous Gehenna. But nature will always remain
modern.