Although he has been dead since October 24, 1898, critical battles are
still fought over the artistic merits of Puvis de Chavannes. Whether
you agree with Huysmans and call this mural painter a pasticheur of
the Italian Primitives, or else the greatest artist in decoration
since Paolo Veronese, depends much on your critical temperament. There
are many to whom Henri Martin's gorgeous colour--really the methods of
Monet applied to vast spaces--or the blazing originality of Albert
Besnard make more intimate appeal than the pallid poetry, solemn
rhythms, and faded moonlit tonal gamut of Puvis. Because the names of
Gustave Moreau and Puvis were often associated, Huysmans, ab irato,
cries against the "obsequious heresy" of the conjunction, forgetting
that the two men were friends. Marius Vauchon, despite his excessive
admiration for Puvis has rendered a service to his memory in his
study, because he has shown us the real, not the legendary man. With
Vauchon, we are far from Huysmans, and his succinct, but disagreeable,
epigram: C'est un vieux rigaudon qui s'essaie dans le requiem. The
truth is, that some idealists were disappointed to find Puvis to be a
sane, healthy, solidly built man, a bon vivant in the best sense of
the phrase, without a suggestion of the morbid, vapouring pontiff or
haughty Olympian. Personally he was not in the least like his art, a
crime that sentimental persons seldom forgive. A Burgundian--born at
Lyons, December 14, 1824--he possessed all the characteristics of his
race. Asceticism was the last quality to seek in him. A good dinner
with old vintage, plenty of comrades, above all the society of his
beloved Princess Cantacuzene, whose love of her husband was the one
romance in his career; these, and twelve hours' toil a day in his
atelier made up the long life of this distinguished painter. He lived
for a half-century between his two ateliers, on the Place Pigalle, and
at Neuilly. Notwithstanding his arduous combat with the Institute and
public indifference, his cannot be called an unhappy existence. He had
his art, in the practice of which he was a veritable fanatic; he was
rich through inheritance, and he was happy in his love; affluence,
art, love, a triad to attain, for which most men yearn, came to Puvis.
Yet the gadfly of ambition was in his flesh. He was a visionary, even
a recluse, like his friend Moreau, but a fighter for his ideas; and
those ideas have shown not only French artists, but the entire world,
the path back to true mural tradition. It is not an exaggeration to
say that Puvis created modern decorative art.
His father was chief engineer of mines, a strong-willed, successful
man. Like father, like son, was true in this case, though the young De
Chavannes, after some opposition, elected painting as his profession.
He had fallen ill, and a trip to Italy was ordained. There he did not,
as has been asserted, linger over Pompeii, or in the Roman Catacombs,
but saved his time and enthusiasm for the Quattrocentisti. He admired
the old Umbrian and Tuscan masters, he was ravished by the basilica of
St. Francis at Assisi, and by Santa Maria Novella, Florence. Titian,
Tintoretto, finally Veronese, riveted his passion for what has been
falsely styled the "archaic." Returning to Paris he was conducted by
his friend Beauderon to the studio of Delacroix, whom he adored. He
remained just fifteen days, when the shop was closed. Delacroix, in a
rage because of the lack of talent and funds among his pupils, sent
them away. Puvis had been under the tuition of Henri, the brother of
Ary Scheffer, and for years spoke with reverence of that serious but
mediocre painter. He next sought the advice of Couture, and remained
with him three months, not, however, quarrelling with the master, as
did later another pupil, Edouard Manet. Puvis was tractable enough; he
had one failing--not always a sign of either talent or the reverse--he
refused to see or paint as he was told by his teachers, or, indeed,
like other pupils. Because of this stubbornness, his enemies, among
whom ranked the most powerful critics of Paris, declared that he had
never been grounded in the elements of his art, that he could not draw
or design, that his colour-sense only proved colour-blindness. To be
sure, he does not boast a fulgurant brush, and his line is often stiff
and awkward; but he had the fundamentals of decorative art well in
hand.
After his death thousands of sketches, designs, pencilled memoranda,
and cartoons were found, and then there was whistled another tune. His
draughtsmanship is that of a decorative artist, as the Rodin drawings
are those of a sculptor, not of a painter. Considering the rigid
standard by which the work of Puvis was judged, criticism was not
altogether wrong, as was claimed when the wave of reaction set in. His
easel pictures are not ingratiating. He does not show well in a
gallery. He needs huge spaces in which to swim about; there he makes
the compositions of other men seem pigmy. [It is the case of Wagner
repeated, though there is little likeness between the ideas of the
Frenchman and the German, except an epical bigness. Judged by the
classical concert-room formulas, Wagner must not be compared with the
miniaturist Mendelssohn. His form is the form of the music-drama, not
the symphonic form.] Puvis adhered to one principle: A wall is a wall,
and not an easel picture; it is flat, and that flatness must be
emphasised, not disguised; decoration is the desideratum. He contrived
a schematic painting that would harmonise with the flatness, with the
texture and the architectural surroundings, and, as George Moore has
happily said: "No other painter ever kept this end so strictly before
his eyes. For this end Chavannes reduced his palette almost to a
monochrome, for this end he models in two flat tints, for this end he
draws in huge undisciplined masses.... Mural decoration, if it form
part of the wall, should be a variant of the stonework." One might
take exception to the word "undisciplined"--Puvis was one of the most
calculating painters that ever used a brush, and one of the most
cerebral. His favourite aphorism was: "Beauty is character." His
figures have been called immobile, his palette impoverished; the
unfair sex abused his lean, lanky female creatures, and finally he was
named a painter for Lent--for fast-days. Even the hieratic figures of
Moreau were pronounced opulent in comparison with the pale moonlighted
spectres of the Puvis landscapes. Courbet, in Paris, was known as the
"furious madman"; Puvis, as the "tranquil lunatic." Nine of his
pictures were refused at the Salon, though in 1859 he exhibited there
his Return from Hunting, and, in 1861, even received a second-class
medal. His fecundity was enormous. His principal work comprises the
Life of Ste. Genevieve (the saint is a portrait of his princess), at
the Pantheon; Summer and Winter at the Hotel de Ville, the decorations
for the amphitheatre of the Sorbonne, the decorations at Rouen, Inter
Artes et Naturam; at Rouen, The Sacred Wood, Vision Antique, The
Rhone, The Saone; the decorations at Amiens, War, Peace, Rest, Labour,
Ave Picardia Nutrix, and two smaller grisailles, Vigilance and Fancy;
at Marseilles, the Marseilles, Porte d' Orient, and Marseilles, the
Greek Colony; the decorations for the Boston Public Library, and his
easel picture, The Poor Fisherman, now in the Luxembourg. As to this
latter, the painter explained that he had found the model in the
person of a wretchedly poor fisherman at the estuary of the Seine; the
young girl is a sister, and the landscape is that of the surroundings,
though, as is the case with Puvis, greatly generalised. The above is
but a slender list. New York has at the Metropolitan Museum at least
one of his works, and in the collection here of John Quinn, Esq.,
there is the brilliant masterpiece, The Beheading of John the Baptist,
and two large mural decorations, The River and The Vintage. They were
painted in 1866. They are magnificent museum pictures.
All his frescoes are applied canvases. He didn't worry much over
antique methods, nor can it be said that his work is an attempt to
rehabilitate the Italian Primitives. On the contrary, Puvis is
distinctly modern, and that is his chief offence in the eyes of
official French art; while the fact that his "modernity" was
transposed to decorative purposes, and appeared in so strange a
guise, caused the younger men to eye him suspiciously. (Just as some
recalcitrant music-critics refuse to recognise in certain compositions
of Johannes Brahms the temperamental romantic.) Thus in the estimation
of rival camps Puvis fell between two stools. He has been styled a
latter-day Domenico Ghirlandajo, but this attribution rings more
literary than literal.
Mr. Brownell with his accustomed sense of critical values has to our
notion definitely summed up the question: "His classicism is
absolutely unacademic, his romanticism unreal beyond the verge of
mysticism and so preoccupied with visions that he may almost be called
a man for whom the actual world does not exist--in the converse of
Gautier's phrase. His distinction is wholly personal. He lives
evidently on a high plane, dwells habitually in the delectable
highlands of the intellect. The fact that his work is almost wholly
decorative is not at all accidental. His talent, his genius, if one
chooses, requires large spaces, vast dimensions. There has been a good
deal of profitless discussion as to whether he expressly imitates the
Primitives or reproduces them sympathetically; but really he does
neither, he deals with their subjects occasionally, but always in a
completely modern as well as a thoroughly personal way. His colour is
as original as his general treatment and composition."
His men and women are not precisely pagan, nor are they biblical. But
they reveal traits of both strained through a drastic "modern"
intellect. They are not abstractions; the men are virile, the women
maternal. There is the spirit of humanity, not of decadence. Puvis,
like Moreau, did not turn his back to the rising sun. He admired
Degas, Manet, Monet. At first he patterned after his friend
Chasseriau, a fine and too-little-known painter, and at one time a
mural decorator before he became immersed in Oriental themes. The
lenten landscapes of Puvis are not merely scenic backgrounds, but
integral parts of the general decorative web, and they are not
conceived in No Man's Land, but selected from the vicinity of Paris.
Puvis is by no means a virtuoso. His pace is usually andante; but he
knows how to evoke a mood, summon the solemn music of mural spaces.
His is a theme with variations. The wall or ceiling is ever the theme.
His crabbed fugues soon melt into the larger austere music of the
wall. His choral walls are true epopees. He is a master harmonist. He
sounds oftener the symphonic than the lyric note. He gains his most
moving effects without setting in motion the creaking allegorical
machinery of the academy. He shows the simple attitudes of life
transfigured without rhetoric. He avoids frigid allegory, yet employs
symbols. His tonal attenuations, elliptical and syncopated rhythms,
his atmosphere of the remote, the mysterious--all these give the
spectator the sense of serenity, momentary freedom from the
feverishness of every-day life, and suggest the lofty wisdom of the
classic poets. But the serpent of futile melancholy, of the brief
cadence of mortal dreams, and of the vanishing seconds that defile
down the corridor of time, has stolen into this Garden of the
Hesperides. Puvis de Chavannes, no more than Gustave Moreau, could
escape the inquietude of his times. He is occasionally Parisian and
often pessimist.
The inability of his contemporaries to understand his profound
decorative genius, his tact in the handling of the great problem of
lighting--the key is always higher because of the different or softer
light of public buildings and the gloom of churches--and his feeling
for the wall, purely as wall, a flat space, not to be confounded with
the pseudo art that would make the picture like an open window in the
wall, but based on the flatness of the material and the aerial magic
of his spacing, sorely troubled him for half a century. Doubtless it
was his refusal to visit Boston and study there the architectural
conditions of the Public Library that resulted in the hang-fire of his
decorations, though they are of an exalted order. One at least served
as a spring-board for the decorative impulse of Besnard, as may be
noted in his frescoes on the ceiling at the Hotel de Ville, Paris.
That Puvis de Chavannes was not an unfeeling Bonze of art, but a man
of tender heart and warm affections was proved after the death of his
much-loved Princess Marie Cantacuzene. Two months later sorrow over
her loss killed him. He had painted the thousand and one expressive
moments in the life of our species as a hymn to humanity, and their
contours are eternal. Eternal? A vain phrase; but eternal till the
canvas fades and the walls decay, that is nearer the truth. Art is
long and appreciation sometimes a chilly consolation. Let us stick to
the eternal verities. As D'Annunzio has it: Quella musica silenziosa
delle linee immobili era cosi possente che creava il fantasma quasi
visibile di una vita piu ricca e piu bella.