the art of Germany to-day. Essentially German in manner of thought and
feeling, he has brought into the stiff formality of early nineteenth
century German painting and sculpture a plasticity of mind and an
elevation of purpose and idea that suggest (as most that is excellent in
Germany does suggest) the influence of Goethe. In his restless
interrogation of all the forms of representative art, his work in the
mass shows a curious mingling of fantasy, imagination, brusque realism,
antique austerity, and modern science. The enhancing of the sense of
life is, however, always the first thought with him, and lies at the
root of his method of introducing color into sculpture, not by the means
of a deadening pigment but by the use of marbles of deep tints and
positive hues, and of translucent stones. As an artist, his chief
distinction is this unremitting intention to convey in one way or
another the sense of the vitalizing principle in animate objects. We may
say of him that his drawing is sometimes poor, that his imagination may
be clumsy and infelicitous, that his treatment of a subject is
frequently coarse and even crude, but we cannot deny that out of his
etchings and paintings, and out of his great strange sculptured figures
looks the spirit of life, more often defiant than noble, more often
capricious than beautiful, but not to be mistaken, and the rarest
phenomenon in the art product of his native country. He unites, too, a
profound respect for the art of antiquity with a stout modern sentiment,
a union that gives to his better work both dignity and force. What he
seems to lack is the one impalpable, delicate, elusive quality that
makes for our enjoyment of so many imperfect productions, and the lack
of which does so much to blind us to excellence in other directions--the
quality of charm, which in the main depends upon the possession by the
artist of taste.
Max Klinger was born in Leipzig on the eighteenth of February, 1857. His
father was a man of artistic predilections, and in easy circumstances,
so that the choice of a bread-winning profession for the son was not of
first importance. As Klinger's talent showed itself at a very early age,
it was promptly decided that he should be an artist. He left school at
the age of sixteen, and went to Karlsruhe, where Gussow was beginning to
gather about him a large number of pupils. In 1875 he followed Gussow
to Berlin, where he came also under the influence of Menzel. Gussow's
teaching was all in the line of individualism and naturalism. He led his
pupils straight to nature for their model, and encouraged them to paint
only what they themselves saw and felt. For this grounding in the
representation of plain facts Klinger has been grateful in his maturer
years, and looks back to his first master with admiration and respect as
having early armed him against his tendency toward fantasy and idealism.
His early style in the innumerable drawings of his youth is thin and
weak, without a sign of the bold originality characterizing his recent
work, and he obviously needed all the support he could get from frank
and sustained observation of nature. His first oil-painting, exhibited
in Berlin in 1878, showed the result of Gussow's influence in its
solidity and practical directness of appeal, but a number of etchings,
executed that year and the next--forerunners of the important later
series--indicate the natural bent of the young artist's mind toward
symbolic forms and unhackneyed subjects.
[Illustration: BEETHOVEN
_From a statue in colored marble by Max Klinger_]
About the art of drawing as distinguished from that of painting he has
his own opinions, expressed with emphasis in an essay called _Malerei
und Zeichnung_. Drawing, etching, lithography and wood-engraving he
considers preeminently adapted to convey purely imaginative thoughts
such as would lose a part of their evanescent suggestiveness by
translation into the more definite medium of oil-color, and he holds
_Griffelkunst_, or the art of the point in as high estimation as any
other art for the interpretation of ideas appropriate to it, an opinion
not now as unusual as when he first announced it to his countrymen. For
about five years after the close of his student period, he occupied
himself chiefly with etchings, turning out between 1879 and 1883 no
fewer than nine of the elaborate "cycles" which are so expressive of his
method of thought, and of the best qualities of his workmanship. In
these cycles he delights in following a development not unlike that of a
musical theme, beginning with a prelude and carrying the idea through
manifold variations to its final expression. His curious history of the
finding of a glove which passes through different symbolic forms of
individuality in the dreams of a lover, is a fair example of his
eccentric and somewhat lumbering humor in the use of a symbol in his
earlier years. His etchings for Ovid's _Metamorphoses_ show the same
violent grasp of the lighter side of his subject, but in his landscape
etchings of 1881 we have ample opportunity to see what he could do with
a conventionally charming subject treated with conventional sentiment
and without symbolic intention. The moonlight scene which he calls
_Mondnacht_, has all the subtle exquisite feeling for harmony and tone
to be gained from a Whistler nocturne. The dim light on the buildings,
the soft sweep of the clouds across the dark sky, the impalpable
rendering, the grave and deep beauty of the scene combine to express the
essence of night and its mystery. The oil-painting _Abend_, of 1882,
also bears eloquent testimony to Klinger's power to evoke purely
pictorial images of great loveliness.
In 1882, after about a year of study in Munich, he painted the important
frescoes for the Steglitz Villa, in which the influence of Boecklin
played freely. It was in Paris, however, where he studied between 1883
and 1885, that Klinger received his strongest and most definite impulse
toward painting. His _Judgment of Paris_ revealed the fact that the
young painter had come into possession of himself, and could be depended
upon for qualities demanding constraint and a measure of severity. In
choosing a legend of antiquity for the subject of his picture, he may
have felt a psychological obligation to obey the greater influences of
the antique tradition. At all events he rather suddenly developed a
style of great maturity and firmness. From Paris he went back to Berlin,
but in 1889 he started for Rome, where he spent four profitable years.
The fruit of this Roman period has continued to ripen up to the present
time, although since 1893 Klinger has made his home in Leipzig, his
_wanderjahre_ apparently over and done with. He not only painted in
Rome a _Pieta_, a _Crucifixion_, and a number of pictures in which
problems of open-air painting are attacked, but he conceived there the
powerful series of etchings on the subject of death, and there he made
his first attempts in colored sculpture. From his earliest years, the
image of death had often solicited him, and some of his interpretations
are filled with dignity and pathos. In the slender, rigid figure on a
white draped bed, from the etching cycle entitled _Eine Liebe_, there is
the suggestion of a classic tomb, severe and impressive in outline,
while nothing could be more poignant than the emotional appeal of the
_Mutter und Kind_ in the second death series. To turn from these to the
two religious paintings executed in Rome, is to realize that eccentric
as Klinger often is, both in choice of subject and treatment, his
attitude toward the mysteries and problems of man's existence is that of
a serious thinker with a strong artistic talent, but a still stronger
intelligence. It is not, however, until we reach the period which he
devotes to sculpture, that we find in his art the quality of nobility, a
certain breadth, which in spite of innovations in execution and almost
trivial symbolic detail, impresses upon his conceptions the classic
mark.
He began his studies for his great polychromatic statue of Beethoven as
early as 1886, fifteen years before its completion. In 1892 it was
reported in Rome that he had turned to sculpture as a new field in
which to prove himself a master, and his first exhibited figure placed
him above the rank of the amateur. He threw himself into his new work
with his usual energy, making himself familiar with the technicalities
of marble cutting in order to follow the execution with intelligence at
every stage. He sought for his material with unwearying zest, taking
long journeys into Italy, Greece and the Pyrenees to procure marble with
the soft, worn, rich quality produced by exposure to the weather; with
this he combined onyx and brilliant stones, bronze, ivory and gold,
always with the intention of creating an impression of life in addition
to producing a decorative result. His strong decorative instinct comes
to his aid, however, in avoiding the incoherence that would seem
inevitable from the mixture of so many and such diverse materials, and
the equally strong intellectual motive always obvious in his work also
tends to hold it together in a more or less dignified unity. The
_Cassandra_, his second colored statue, finished in Leipzig in 1895, and
now in possession of the Leipzig Museum, is especially free from
eccentricity and caprice. The beautiful Greek head, with its deep-set
eyes and delicate mouth, is expressive of intense but normal feeling.
The flesh is represented by warm-toned marble, the hair is brownish-red,
the garment is of alabaster, yellowish-red with violet tones, and the
figure stands on a pedestal of Pyranean marble. In color effect,
however, the _Beethoven_ is the most striking. In _Les Maitres
Contemporains_, M. Paul Mongre thus describes it:
"The pedestal, half rock, half cloud, which supports the throne of the
Olympian master, is of Pyranean marble of a dark violet-brown; the eagle
is of black marble, veined with white, its eyes are of amber. The nude
bust of Beethoven is of white Syrian marble, with light yellowish
reflections, the drapery, hanging in supple folds, is of Tyrolean onyx
with yellow-brown streaks in it. The throne of bronze is of a dull brown
tone, except in the curved arms, which are brilliantly gilded. Five
angel heads in ivory are placed like a crown on the inside of the back
of the throne; their wings are studded with multi-colored gems and with
antique fluorspar; the back of the throne is laid with blue Hungarian
opals." All these different elements, the French critic maintains, are
held together in reciprocal cohesion, and are kept subordinated to the
bold conception of Beethoven as the Jupiter of music--"the godlike power
accumulated and concentrated, on the point of breaking forth in
lightnings; the eagle in waiting, ready to take flight, as the visible
thought of Jupiter, before whom will spring up a whole world, or the
musical image of a world: that is what is manifested by this close
alliance of idea and form."
[Illustration: CASSANDRA
_From a statue in colored marble by Max Klinger_]
This monument to Beethoven is a performance designed to express not
merely the artistic interest of the subject for Klinger, but the
abounding enthusiasm of the latter for the great musician's genius.
Immediately after leaving Rome, Klinger also brought to completion a
series of etchings called _Brahms-phantasie_, and intended to illustrate
the emotions aroused by the compositions of Brahms. In 1901 he made a
portrait bust of Liszt, and his drawings for the _Metamorphoses_ were
dedicated to Schumann. In the autumn of 1906 his Brahms memorial was
placed in the new Music Hall in Hamburg. This memorial monument has the
form of a powerful Hermes with the head of Brahms. The Muse of tone is
apparently whispering secrets of art into the ears of the master. His
debt, therefore, to the masters of music may be considered as fully and
promptly paid, and the impression of hero-worship conveyed by these
ardent tributes is a reminder that the artist is young in temperament,
Teutonic in origin, and untouched by the modern spirit of indifference
to persons. Unlike many German artists of the present day, he did not
find in Paris the atmosphere that suited him. In spite of his years
there and in Rome, he has remained undisturbed by any anti-German
influence. His compatriots speak with pride of the intensely national
character of his mind, and have early recognized his importance, as
perhaps could hardly have failed to be the case with powers so far from
humble, and a method so far from patient. France also has paid him more
than one tribute of appreciation, and the general feeling toward him
seems now to be that expressed by one of his German admirers in America:
"Why criticize him? He is so overwhelming, so overpowering
intellectually that the best we can do is to try to understand him."
ALFRED STEVENS
IV
ALFRED STEVENS
An exhibition of the paintings of Alfred Stevens was held in April and
May, 1907, at the city of Brussels, and later in May and in June at the
city of Antwerp. The collection comprised examples from the museums at
Brussels, Antwerp, Paris and Marseilles, and from the galleries of many
private owners. It was representative in the fullest sense of the word,
showing the literal tendencies of the artist's youth in such pictures as
_Les Chasseurs de Vincennes_ (1855) tightly painted, conscientiously
modeled, with only the deep, resonant red of a woman's cape to indicate
the magnificent color-sense soon to be revealed; or _Le Convalescent_,
in which the two sympathetic women hovering over the languid young man
in a Paris drawing-room are photographically true to the life of the
time, without, however, conveying its spiritual or intellectual
expression; showing also the rich and grave middle period in which
beauty of face and form and the charm of elegant accessories are
rendered with singular intensity and perfect sincerity; as in _Les
Visiteuses_, _Desesperee_, etc.; and, finally, showing the psychological
synthesis of the later years, which reveals itself in such works as _Un
Sphinx Parisien_, baffling in its fixed introspective gaze, and executed
with an impeccable technique.
Many of the early pictures have a joyousness of frank workmanship, a
directness of attack and a simplicity of arrangement that appeal to the
world at large more freely than the subtler blonde harmonies of the
later years. The _Profil de Femme_ (1855) in which M. Lambotte discerns
the influence of Rembrandt, is more suggestive to the present writer of
familiarity with Courbet's bold, heavy impasto and sharp transitions
from light to shadow. The _Reverie_ of the preceding year has also its
suggestions of Courbet, in spite of the delicately painted flowers in
the Japanese vase; but in the pictures of the next few years, the robust
freshness of the painter's Flemish vision finds expression in
color-schemes that resemble nothing so much as the gardens of Belgium in
springtime, filled with hardy blossoms and tended by skillful hands; _La
Consolation_ of 1857, for example, in which the two black-robed women
form the heavy note of dead color against which are relieved the pink
and white of their companion's gown, the pale yellow of the wall, the
blue of the floor and the low, softly brilliant tones of the beautiful
tapestry curtain. Another painting of about the same time has almost
the charm of Fantin-Latour's early renderings of serious women bending
over their books or their sewing. In _La Liseuse_ the girl's face is
absorbed and thoughtful, the color harmony is quiet, the white dress,
the dull red of the chair, the blue and yellow and green wools on the
table, forming a pattern of closely related tones as various in its
unity as the motley border of an old-fashioned dooryard. In other
examples we have reminiscences of that time of excitement and esthetic
riot when the silks and porcelains and enamels of the Far East came into
the Paris of artists and artisans and formed at once a part of the
baggage of the Parisian atelier. _L'Inde a Paris_ is a particularly
delightful reflection of this period of "Chinoiseries." It depicts a
young woman in a black gown of the type that Millais loved, leaning
forward with both hands on a table covered with an Indian drapery. On
the table stands the miniature figure of an elephant. The background is
of the strong green so often used by Manet and the varied pattern of the
table cover gives opportunity for assembling a number of rich and vivid
yet quiet hues in an intricate and interesting color composition.
_La Parisienne Japonaise_ is a subject of the kind that enlisted
Whistler's interest during the sixties--a handsome girl in a blue silk
kimono embroidered with white and yellow flowers, and a green sash,
looks into a mirror that reflects a yellow background and a vase of
flowers. The colors are said to have faded and changed, to the complete
demoralization of the color-scheme, but it is still a picture of winning
charm, less reserved and dignified than Whistler's _Lange Leizen_ of
1864, but with passages of subtle color and a just relation of values
that have survived the encroachments of time.
From a very early period Stevens adopted the camel's-hair shawl with its
multi-colored border as the model for his palette and the chief
decoration of his picture. It is easier, says one of his French critics,
to enumerate the paintings in which such a shawl does not appear than
those in which it does. It slips from the shoulders of the _Desesperee_
and forms a wonderful contrast to the smooth fair neck and arm relieved
against it; it is the magnificent background of the voluminous gauzy
robe in _Une Douloureuse Certitude_; it falls over the chair in which
the young mother sits nursing her baby in _Tous les Bonheurs_; it hangs
in the corners of studios, it is gracefully worn by fashionable visitors
in fashionable drawing-rooms; its foundation color is cream or red or a
deep and tender yellow as soft as that of a tea-rose; it determines the
harmony of the colored silks and bric-a-brac which are in its vicinity,
it rules its surroundings with a truly oriental splendor, and it gives
to the work in which it plays so prominent a part an individuality
supplementary to the artist's own. It is as important as the rugs in the
pictures of Vermeer of Delft or Gerard Terborch.
[Illustration: L'ATELIER
_From a painting by Alfred Stevens_]
The silks and muslins of gowns and scarves are also important
accessories in these pictures which have a modernity not unlike that of
the pictures of Velasquez, in which the ugliness of contemporary
fashions turns to beauty under the learned rendering of textures and
surfaces. Bibelots and furnishings, wall-hangings, pictures, rugs,
polished floors, glass and silver and china and jewels are all likewise
pressed into the service of an art that used what lay nearest to it, not
for the purposes of realism but for the enchantment of the vision. M.
Lambotte has pointed out that Stevens introduced mirrors, crystals and
porcelains into his canvasses with the same intention as that of the
landscape-painter who makes choice of a subject with a river, lake or
pond, knowing that clear reflections and smooth surface aid in giving
the effect of distance and intervening atmosphere. The same writer has
told us that so far from reproducing the ordinary costumes of his period
Stevens took pains to seek exclusive and elegant examples, _chefs
d'oeuvres_ of the dressmaker's art, and that such were put at his
service by the great ladies of the second empire. The beautiful muslin
over-dress of the _Dame en Rose_ is perhaps the one that most taxed his
flexible brush. It is diaphanous in texture, elaborately cut and
trimmed with delicate laces and embroideries, and the rose of the
under-robe, the snowy white of the muslin, the silver ornaments and the
pale blonde hair of the wearer make the lightest and daintiest of
harmonies accentuated by the black of the lacquer cabinet with its
brilliant polychromatic insets.
Unlike Whistler, Stevens never abandoned the rich and complicated color
arrangements of his youth for an austere and restricted palette. He
nevertheless was at his best when his picture was dominated by a single
color, as in the wonderful _Fedora_ of 1882 or _La Tricoteuse_. In the
former the warmly tinted hair and deep yellow fan are the vibrant notes,
the creamy dress, the white flowers, the silver bracelet, and the white
butterfly making an _ensemble_ like a golden wheatfield swept by pale
lights. The piquant note of contrast is given by the blue insolent eyes
and the hardly deeper blue blossoms of the love-in-a-mist held in the
languid hands.
In _La Tricoteuse_ the composition of colors is much the same--a creamy
white dress with gray shadows, reddish yellow hair, and a bit of blue
knitting with the addition of a sharp line of red made by the signature.
There is no austerity in these vaporous glowing arrangements of a single
color. They are as near to the portraiture of full sunlight as pigment
has been able to approach and if it can be said that Whistler has
"painted the soul of color," it certainly can be said that Stevens here
has painted its embodied life. For the most part we have, however, to
think of Alfred Stevens as a portraitist of the ponderable world; a
Flemish lover of brilliant appearances, a scrupulous translator of the
language of visible things into the idiom of art. In the picture
entitled _L'Atelier_, which we reproduce, is a more or less significant
instance of his artistic veracity. On the crowded wall, forming the
background against which is seen the model's charming profile, is a
picture which obviously is a copy of the painting of _La Fuite en
Egypte_ by Breughel. Two versions of the same subject, one, the original
by Breughel the elder, the other, a copy by his son, now hang in the
Brussels Museum, alike in composition but differing in tone, the son's
copy having apparently been left in an unfinished condition with the
brown underpainting visible throughout. That this, and not the elder
Breughel's, is the original of the picture in Steven's _L'Atelier_ is
clear at the first glance, the warm tonality having been accurately
reproduced and even the drawing of the tree branches, which differs much
in the two museum pictures having conformed precisely to that in the
copy by the younger Breughel. It is by this accuracy of touch, this
respect for differences of texture and material, this recognition of the
part played in the ensemble by insignificant detail, this artistic
conscience, in a word, that Stevens demonstrates his descent from the
great line of Flemish painters and makes good their tradition in modern
life. Many of his sayings are expressive of his personal attitude toward
art. For example:
"It is first of all necessary to be a painter. No one is wholly an
artist who is not a perfect workman."
"When your right hand becomes too facile--more facile than the thought
that guides it, use the left hand."
"Do not put into a picture too many things which attract attention. When
every one speaks at once no one is heard."
Concerning technique, he says to his pupils: "Paint quantities of
flowers. It is excellent practice. Use the palette knife to unite and
smooth the color, efface with the knife the traces of the brush. When
one paints with a brush the touches seen through a magnifying glass are
streaked with light and shade because of the hairs of the brush. The use
of the palette knife renders these strokes as smooth as marble, the
shadows have disappeared. The material brought together renders the tone
more beautiful. Marble has never an ugly tone."
"One may use impasto, but not everywhere. Your brush should be handled
with reference to the character of what you are copying ... do not
forget that an apple is smooth. I should like to see you model a
billiard ball. Train yourself to have a true eye."
These are precepts that might be given by any good painter, but few of
the moderns could more justly claim to have practiced all that they
preached.
As a creative artist Stevens had his limitations. His lineal
arrangements are seldom entirely fortunate and his compositions, despite
the skill with which the given space is filled, lack except in rare
instances the serenity of less crowded canvasses. He invariably strove
to gain atmosphere by his choice and treatment of accessories but he
rarely used the delicate device of elimination. Nevertheless he was a
great painter and a great Belgian, untrammeled by foreign influences. He
not only drank from his own glass but he drank from it the rich old
wines of his native country.
A SKETCH IN OUTLINE OF JACQUES CALLOT
V
A SKETCH IN OUTLINE OF JACQUES CALLOT