emotionless as a machine, but his accomplishment is not mechanical. It
is, on the contrary, the record of a busy, highly individualized,
accurate mind. A Berlin man, he had the alertness, the clear-cut
effectiveness, the energy, and the coldness typical of a cosmopolitan
product. If we compare his "Ball Supper" in which the glare of lights,
the elaboration of costume, the rapacity and shallow glittering
superficiality of a Court festivity are presented almost as though in
hackneyed phrases, so devoid is the picture of any meaning beyond the
obvious, with the "Steel Foundry" in which the unsentimental acceptance
of labor as a necessary factor in civilization is conspicuous, it is
clear that his mind was free from dreams and visions whichever side of
society he looked upon. In this respect his influence is salutary. It is
like a cool and wholesome breeze blowing away all miasmic vapors, and
there is a positively exhilarating quality in his firm assumption of the
power of the human being over his material. His workmen are men of
strong muscle and prompt brain. In the "Steel Foundry" we see their
efficient handling of the great bars of metal with admiration as we
should in life, and we note what in modern times is not always present
for notation, the intelligence and interest in their faces. In one
corner of the room, behind a screen or partition, a little group is
devouring luncheon. Here we strike once more the note of the ballroom
supper in the munching eagerness of the eaters, but seen in
juxtaposition with the physical force and effort of the workers it
ceases to be revolting, and seems to symbolize the lusty joy of living
with a sympathetic zest of realization.
In all of Menzel's work we have this sense of physical and mental
competency. It shows nothing of the abnormal or decadent, and it must
also be admitted that only in a few instances does it show anything of
esthetic beauty. He was able to paint crowds of people and he managed to
get a remarkable unity of effect in spite of his devotion to detail, but
his masses of light and shade are not held in that noble harmonious
relation achieved by the peasant Millet who was Menzel's contemporary,
his lines have no rhythmic flow, his color, though often charming, is
seldom held together in a unified tone. Some one has called him "the
conscience of German painting," but he is more than that. He is both
conscience and brain. It is always possible to obtain an intellectual
satisfaction from his point of view. What is lacking is emotion.
We feel this lack in other Berlin masters. Professor Max Liebermann is
one of the most distinguished of the modern group, and his large, cool,
definite art is innocent of the moving quality. He was represented in
the exhibition by a portrait of Dr. Bode, a vigorous little composition
called "The Polo-players," the "Flax Barn at Laren," and "The Lace
Maker." The last two were especially typical of his steady detachment
from his subject. The old lace maker, bending over her bobbins, suggests
only absorption in her task. There is no ennobling of her form, no
idealizing of her features, no enveloping of her occupation with
sentiment, nothing but the direct statement of her personality which is
neither subtle nor complex and the description of what she is doing. But
she is intensely real, more real, even, than Menzel's closely observed
individuals. Liebermann, born in 1847, was the leader of the new
tendency characterizing the Germany of the seventies, the tendency
toward constant reference to nature as opposed to the old-fashioned
conventionalism and Academic methods. There could have been no safer
leader for a band of rebels since he was the sanest of thinkers and
worked out a style in which the classic qualities of nobility in the
disposition of lines and spaces and remarkable purity of form played a
prominent part.
[Illustration: Courtesy of Berlin Photographic Company.
PEASANT WOMEN OF DACHAUER
_From a painting by Leibl_]
Observing his "_Flax Barn_," in comparison with the work of his
compatriots, its fine freedom from triviality of detail was apparent,
and the beauty of its cool light, spread over large spaces and diffused
throughout the interior of the low shed, made itself felt. One noted
also, as elements of the picture's peculiarly dignified appeal, the
severe arrangement of the figures with the long row of workers under the
windows, the long threads of flax passing over their heads to the women
in the foreground, and the almost straight line formed in turn by these
women. The composition, quite geometrical in its precision, gave a sense
of deep repose in spite of the vitality of the individual figures and
the impression they made of being able to turn and move at will, an
impression nearly always missed by Leibl, Liebermann's great forerunner
in the painting of humble life. We get much the same austere effect from
the almshouse pictures of old men and women on benches in the open
square, always arranged in a geometrical design, and always calm in
gesture and mild in type, which appear from time to time in the foreign
exhibitions of Liebermann's work.
Liebermann has done for the Germans something of what Millet did for the
French. He has built his art upon the daily life of the poor, but while,
like Millet, he has introduced a monumental element into his work, it is
clearer, more closely reasoned, more firmly knit than Millet's art, and
at the same time less emotional. Liebermann's hospitality to purely
technical ideas, his interest in problems of light and air, his diligent
analysis of motion, his ability to translate a scene from the life of
the laboring class without sentimentality, without prettiness or
eloquence or any of the attributes that catch the multitude, give to his
art a touch of coldness that is not without its charm for those who care
for a highly developed orderly product of the mind.
Most of the Berlin men who are in any degree notable share somewhat in
this attribute. Arthur Kampf, although he has less than Liebermann of
cool detachment, has both elegance and gravity. He could hardly have had
a better representation by any one or two canvases than by the "Charity"
and the "Two Sisters" of the American exhibition. In the first he
depicts a street scene with its contrasts of poverty and wealth. A man
and woman in evening dress, returning from their evening's pleasure, are
besought by poor people clustering around a soup stall and drop coin
into the insistent hands. The smoking caldron of soup in the center and
the circle of sharply differentiated faces form an admirable
composition, the apparently accidental lines of which play into a
dignified linear scheme. The "Two Sisters" reveals the influence of
Velasquez in its flat modeling and subtle characterization, and in its
atmospheric grays enlivened with geranium reds. Both of these pictures
indicate a modern temper of mind in the fluency of their technique and
the realism of their treatment together with the attention paid to the
tonal quality and to the character of the space composition. Kampf,
however, although a young man--he was born in 1864--has passed through
many phases of development which are recorded in his many-sided art. His
subjects range from the historical themes of his wall decorations at
Magdeburg and Aachen through portraiture in which he grasps characters
essentially diverse and suggests with unerring instinct the dominant
quality, scenes of labor as in his "Bridge-Building," scenes of
brutality and excitement as in his "Bull-fight," scenes from the drama
of the Biblical story, scenes of domestic life as in his delicately
humorous picture of the absorbed reader eating his breakfast with the
morning paper propped up in front of him, and scenes of peaceful
holiday-making among the poor as in his idyllic "Sunday Afternoon" which
shows a peasant boy playing his harmonicum under the trees, with his
old father and mother sitting by in placid enjoyment. Various as these
pictures are and closely as the manner has in each case been adapted to
the special subject, we nowhere miss the note of individuality, although
in such a portrait as that of the Kaiser, which was shown in America, it
unquestionably is subdued. Neither do we miss the note of locality. Born
at Aachen, Kampf is a true Rheinlander and one of his German critics
notes that we must look to this fact for the explanation of his special
qualities, declaring that without the Rheinlander's cheerfulness and
energetic temperament, and without the background of the ancient Rhenish
culture, he would be inconceivable. On the other hand his turning to
drama and romance for his inspiration speaks of his Duesseldorfian
training and his realism of representation allies him to Menzel. At
forty-two he was made president of the Royal Academy of Art in Berlin,
and it is probable that the wholesome Rhenish energy of which his critic
speaks will save him from sinking into the formalism of the academic
tradition.
In his art, however, as in that of his compatriots, it is apparent that
the world of ideas is the world in which he lives, and he works to
express his mind rather than his soul, his thoughts rather than his
emotions, if we follow the indefinite and arbitrary division between
thought and feeling that does service as a symbol of a meaning difficult
to express clearly.
There were other interesting painters represented in the Berlin group at
the American Exhibition, Otto Engel, Fritz Berger, Hans Hartig--and of
all it is more or less true that the idea in their work is more
important than the feeling. It is true also that the tradition of the
peasant Leibl, a great painter, but invariably cold, rests upon most of
them. His wonderful manipulation of pigment is equaled by none of them,
but his accurate, detached observation, his balanced rendering, the
firmness of his method, have entered more or less into their scheme of
art. And it is to be noted that his ideas and theirs are ideas
appropriate to the painter's medium. Menzel's literary bent is not
shared by them, his predilection for a story to illustrate almost never
appears among the younger Berlin painters, and he cannot in any real
sense be considered their prototype.
When we turn to the older members of the modern Munich school we find
the influence of Boecklin dominant. Arnold Boecklin, a Swiss by birth,
and possessed of the Swiss ingenuity of mind, has been the subject of
endless discussion among the Germans of the present day. He exhausted
his very great talent in painting a symbolic world, and by his
appreciation of the value of coherence he made his paintings
impressive. They are each a perfectly coherent arrangement of parts,
making a whole which has the appearance of simplicity, however numerous
the elements composing it may be. By a combined generalization and
intensity he turned the actual world which he studied closely enough,
into his own unreality. Thus, in his Italian landscapes, he reveals the
architectonic structure of his scene stripped of all incidental
ornament, the upright and horizontal lines left severe and
uncompromised, and the blue of the heavens and the sea, and the dark
green of the cypresses, pushed to an almost incredible depth. Everything
is more significant than in nature, yet nature has provided the elements
of significance. It is in his ability to see things whole and to
co-ordinate the selected details that Boecklin is most an artist. This
largeness of generalization gives him power over the imagination, and
is, perhaps the only, certainly the chief source of his power. His color
by its very intensity overdoes the intended effect. The imagination
instead of being stimulated is sated, and his obvious symbolism fails to
pique the curiosity. Moreover, his handling of paint lacks
sensitiveness. He has something of the disregard shown by the English
painter Watts for the beauty inherent in his material which might as
well be clay or textile as pigment in his hands. But his appreciation of
the effect upon the mind of noble arrangements of space and mass
raises him to a much higher place as an artist than he can be said to
occupy as a painter.
[Illustration: FIDDLING DEATH
_From a portrait by Arnold Boecklin_]
Franz von Stuck is Boecklin's most distinguished follower. When we turn
from the examples of Boecklin's work, by no means the most impressive
examples, exhibited in America, to Stuck's "Inferno" we perceive both
the influence of Boecklin and the powerful individuality that mingles
with it.
There is Boecklin's insistence upon the symbol, and upon the bodying
forth of things unseen, there is the solid violence of color, there is
the pompous statement of the half-discerned truths which more sensitive
artists are content to whisper. But there is also a splendid arabesque
of line and a deeper reading of the spiritual content of the subject.
If we compare Stuck with William Blake whose fancy also was haunted by
Dantesque conceptions, we see how much more impressive Blake's visions
of the unreal world are and we find the reason in their swift energy of
conception and in the artist's tenacity in holding his conception. With
both Boecklin and Stuck we feel that the manner of rendering the
conception becomes more important than the initial conception, and this
seldom, if ever, is true of Blake. In spite of Boecklin's superb
restraint in the disposition of his masses, when it comes to color he is
at the mercy of the material pigment and permits it to obliterate where
it should enhance and reveal. His forms, also, and even more than
Stuck's, lose vitality under the weight of significance forced upon
them, while Blake's emerge from the blank panel clean and strong and
unencumbered. We feel that Blake, with all his struggle to utter truth
by means of symbol, never allows his mind to lose the idea that "Living
form is eternal existence," but in Boecklin's pictures "living form" is
often buried beneath his colored clays.
Thus we see that it cannot truly be said of him and his followers that
the idea is of first importance to them. It is their material that is of
first importance, otherwise they would learn so to subordinate their
material as to support and disclose their idea. This is the more obvious
that their idea is emotional and therefore perfectly suited to
expression through the medium of art. Liebermann's ideas although they
are intellectual are not of a kind that cannot appropriately be
translated into pictures, and his respect for them leads him to fit his
manner of expression closely to their requirements. Like Leibl he is a
painter and a thinker in one, and the faculties of the two work in
complete coordination.
Painters of Boecklin's type, on the other hand, wish to produce in the
observer a strong emotion, but they become slaves to their medium
because their own emotion is not sufficiently powerful to conquer their
minds, which become diverted by the colors and forms they produce. One
of Blake's swift upward soaring lines has more power to carry the
imagination heavenward than all the versions of Boecklin's "Island of
Death."
Against Boecklin's followers, whose minds are more or less befogged by
their lack of appreciation of paint as a means to an end, we must place
Wilhelm Truebner who is a clear thinker and a great painter, with more
warmth than Liebermann and with a reticent color sense, a feeling for
expressive form, a love of reality, and no apparent desire to re-invent
the grotesque. His elegance of line in itself sets him apart from most
of his compatriots, and his knowledge of how to extract from his color
scheme its essential beauty is greater than that of most modern
painters, whatever their nationality. His blacks have the depth and
luster without unctiousness characteristic of black as the great
colorists use it, and in his touches of pale refined color enlivening a
black and white composition, we have the delightful effect so often
given by Manet, as of a bunch of bright flowers thrown into a shadowy
corner.
If young Germany were content to follow in Truebner's footsteps we
should soon have a revival of the ancient craftsmanship and conscience
that animated Holbein and Duerer. Young Germany, however, has other
plans. To learn of them the reader is referred to Meier-Graefe's
comprehensive and stimulating volume on modern art. The only
representation of the painters of the immediate present given in the
American exhibition was confined to the Scholle School, which, however,
indicates clearly the creative impulse that is stirring in the younger
painters. "A warlike state," Blake wrote, "never can produce Art. It
will Rob and Plunder and accumulate into one place and Translate and
Copy and Buy and Sell and Criticize, but not Make." This has been true
of the Germans, but the present generation is bent upon making and it is
natural that the strongest impulse toward originality should come to the
Munich painters rather than to the cosmopolitan Berlin men.
The Scholle is a Munich association consisting of a group of young men
who, taking the humble and fecund earth as their symbol, as the title of
the society implies, seek to get into their painting the vigor and
intensity of life and force which devotion to the healthy joys provided
by our mother Earth is supposed to engender.
They are like the giant Antaeus whose strength was invincible so long as
he remained in contact with the earth, but who easily was strangled when
lifted into the upper air. Their strength also melts into helplessness
when confronted by problems of atmosphere and the delicate veils of tone
which enwrap the material world for the American painter.
But the energy of these young Germans in their own field is something at
which to wonder. They remind one of their critics of a band of lusty
peasant boys journeying in rank from their University to the nearest
beer garden, singing loud songs by the way. Leo Putz, Adolf Muenzer,
Fritz Erler, are the leaders of the group, although Alex Salzmann and
Ferdinand Spiegel were Erler's collaborators in the famous Wiesbaden
frescoes which offended the taste of the Kaiser. These young men are
entirely capable of offending a less conventional taste than the
Kaiser's, but they all are doing something which has not been done in
Germany for many a long year; they are busying themselves with the
visible world and painting frankly what they see. It does not matter in
the least that in their decorative work they give rein to their fancy
and produce such symbolism as we find in Erler's "Pestilence," or that
in the illustrations for Jugend they tell a story with keen appreciation
of its literary significance. Their eyes are open upon the aspect of
material things and they paint flesh that is palpitating with life,
forms that live and move, and color that vibrates.
Here again as with Liebermann and Truebner the idea and the execution
are in harmony, but with the Scholle painters the idea is apt to be a
very simple one, depending upon straightforward representation for its
impressiveness. Above all it reflects the national temper of mind, for
all these individualists are German to the core and not to be mistaken
for any other race.
One characteristic of this national temper is directness. Not
necessarily simplicity, of course, since the German painter as well as
the German writer has frequently complex thoughts to express and uses
corresponding elaborations of expression. But he does not often say one
thing while seeming to say another; he does not often give double and
contradictory meanings to the same subject. He does not present for your
contemplation the disheartening spectacle of sophistication masquerading
as innocence, or duplicity masquerading as frankness. To that extent he
is an optimist, however deep his native pessimism may go in other
directions.
There is, for example, a picture by the French artist Jacques Blanche,
entitled "Louise of Montmartre," and known to many Americans, in which
the girl to whom Paris irresistibly calls is shown in her boyish blouse
and collar, her youthful hat and plainly dressed hair, in a nonchalant
attitude, pretty and plebeian, with honest eyes, yet revealing in every
line of her frank and fresh young face the potentiality of response to
all the appeals made by the ruthless spirit of the city. It is
impossible to discern at what points the artist has betrayed that
artless physiognomy in order to reveal the secrets of temperament, but
the thing is done.
It is not what the German is interested in doing. His imagination works
subjectively, giving form to his own conceptions, rather than
objectively or as an interpreter of others. Hence the downright, and, in
a sense, confiding aspect of so much of this brave art. Hence, also, its
affinity with the American spirit, for the American still bends a rather
unsuspecting gaze upon life and accepts character and temperament as
they choose to present themselves. The German, however, is articulate
and ratiocinating where we are more purely instinctive. We are not
inclined to reason about our moods and we seldom are able to express
them in our literature. In our art, on the other hand, especially in our
landscape art, we manage to translate our subtlest emotion. We are able
to suggest what is too delicate for analysis, and in this we stand
almost alone in the painting of the present day.
TWO SPANISH PAINTERS
XII
TWO SPANISH PAINTERS
Modern art, particularly American art, owes much to Velasquez and
something to Goya, and modern painters have been prompt to acknowledge
their indebtedness. But there has been a prevailing impression that with
Goya's rich and unique achievement Spanish art stopped in its own
country so completely as to be incapable of revival. The impression was
disturbed in this country by the appearance in the galleries of the
Hispanic Museum in New York, and also in Buffalo and in Boston, of the
work of two modern Spaniards, one a painter who demonstrated by his
methods and choice of subjects that the old Spanish traditions and
ideals had not been forgotten, the other a singularly isolated
individual who illumined for us a side of Spanish life which art
previously had ignored. Both spoke a racy idiom and conveyed a sense of
quickened vitality by freedom of gesture, unhackneyed arrangement,
intensity of color, reality of type, yet in their influence upon the
public they were as far as might be asunder.
Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida was born at Valencia, Spain, in 1863, and
began seriously to study art at the age of fifteen. He studied at the
Academy of his birthplace for several years and won there a scholarship
entitling him to a period of study in Italy. He visited Paris also,
where he was profoundly impressed, it is said, by two exhibitions in the
French capital, one of the work of Bastien LePage, the other of the work
of the German Menzel. The modern note is clearly felt in all his later
painting, but certainly not the influence of either Bastien LePage or
Menzel. The painter to whom he bears the most marked resemblance is
Botticelli. The spiritual languor, the melancholy sentiment, the
mystical tendency, the curiosity and interest in the unseen which are
important characteristics of the Florentine who read his Dante to such
good purpose do not appear in the work of this frank and lusty
Valencian, but where else in modern painting do we find the gracile
forms, the supple muscles, the buoyancy of carriage, the light
impetuosity of movement, and the draperies blown into the shapes of
wings and sails, which meet us here as in the pagan compositions of
Botticelli?
[Illustration: In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
THE SWIMMERS
_From a painting by Sorolla_]
If we glance at Sorolla's young girls and young boys racing along the
hot beach, or his bathers exulting in their "water joy," we recall at
the same moment the "Primavera" with its swift-stepping nymphs, the
wind gods in the "Birth of Venus," or the "Judith" with her maid
moving rapidly along a flower-strewn path. This joy of motion and this
continual suggestion of youth and vitality form the link that binds
together the so dissimilar ideals of the old and the modern master.
Sorolla's inspiration is by far the simpler. His art reflects the
brilliant sunshine of the Mediterranean coast, the tonic quality of the
fresh air, and the unconventionality of life by the sea. All his people
use natural gestures and express in their activity the untrammeled
energy of primitive life. In looking at these children, and there is
hardly a figure that has not the naivete of childhood, we think less of
the individuals portrayed than of the outdoor freshness of which they
are a part. They are much more spirits of nature than the dryads and
nereids and mermaids conceived by the Germans to express in symbol the
natural forces. Nothing suggests the use of models, all has the look of
spontaneity as though the artist had made his notes in passing, without
the slightest regard to producing a picture, with only the idea of
reproducing life. Life, however, appears in his canvases in a
sufficiently decorative form, although not in the carefully considered
patterns of those artists with whom the decorative instinct is supreme.