With anyone who concludes that this preliminary essay is merely to
justify the rather appetizing title of my book I shall be at no pains to
quarrel. If privately I think it does more, publicly I shall not avow
it. Historically and critically, I admit, the thing is as slight as a
sketch contained in five-and-thirty pages must be, and certainly it adds
nothing to what I have said, in the essays to which it stands preface,
on æsthetic theory. The function it is meant to perform--no very
considerable one perhaps--is to justify not so much the title as the
shape of my book, giving, in the process, a rough sketch of the period
with certain aspects of which I am to deal. That the shape needs
justification is attributable to the fact that though all, or nearly
all, the component articles were written with a view to making one
volume, I was conscious, while I wrote them, of dealing with two
subjects. Sometimes I was discussing current ideas, and questions
arising out of a theory of art; at others I was trying to give some
account of the leading painters of the contemporary movement. Sometimes
I was writing of Theory, sometimes of Practice. By means of this preface
I hope to show why, at the moment, these two, far from being distinct,
are inseparable.
To understand thoroughly the contemporary movement--that movement in
every turn and twist of which the influence of Cézanne is traceable--the
movement which may be said to have come into existence contemporaneously
almost with the century, and still holds the field--it is necessary to
know something of the æsthetic theories which agitated it. One of the
many unpremeditated effects of Cézanne's life and work was to set
artists thinking, and even arguing. His practice challenged so sharply
all current notions of what painting should be that a new generation,
taking him for master, found itself often, much to its dismay, obliged
to ask and answer such questions as "What am I doing?" "Why am I doing
it?" Now such questions lead inevitably to an immense query--"What is
Art?" The painters began talking, and from words sprang deeds. Thus it
comes about that in the sixteen or seventeen years which have elapsed
since the influence of Cézanne became paramount theory has played a part
which no critic or historian can overlook. It is because to-day that
part appears to be dwindling, because the influence of theory is growing
less, that the moment is perhaps not inopportune for a little book such
as this is meant to be. It comes, if I am right, just when the movement
is passing out of its first into the second phase.
During this first phase theory has been much to the fore. But it has
been theory, you must remember, working on a generation of direct and
intensely personal artists. In so curious an alliance you will expect
to find as much stress as harmony; also, you must remember, its
headquarters were at Paris where flourishes the strongest and most vital
tradition of painting extant. In this great tradition some of the more
personal artists, struggling against the intolerable exactions of
doctrine, have found powerful support; indeed, only with its aid have
they succeeded at last in securing their positions as masters who,
though not disdaining to pay homage for what they hold from the new
theories, are as independent as feudal princes. But the more I consider
the period the more this strange and restless alliance of doctrine
with temperament appears to be of its essence; wherefore, I shall not
hesitate to make of it a light wherewith to take a hasty look about me.
Here are two labels ready to hand--"temperamental" and "doctrinaire."
I am under no illusion as to the inadequacy and fallibility of both;
neither shall I imagine that, once applied, they are bound to stick.
On the contrary, you will see, in a later chapter, how, having dubbed
Matisse "temperamental" and Picasso "theorist," I come, on examination,
to find in the art of Matisse so much science and in that of Picasso
such extraordinary sensibility that in the end I am much inclined to
pull off the labels and change them about. But though, for purposes
of criticism coarse and sometimes treacherous, this pair of
opposites--which are really quite compatible--may prove two useful
hacks. As such I accept them; and by them borne along I now propose to
make a short tour of inspection, one object of which will be to indicate
broadly the lie of the land, another to call attention to a number of
interesting artists whose names happen not to have come my way in any
other part of this book.
I said, and I suppose no one will deny it, that Paris was the centre
of the movement: from Paris, therefore, I set out. There the movement
originated, there it thrives and develops, and there it can best be seen
and understood. Ever since the end of the seventeenth century France has
taken the lead in the visual arts, and ever since the early part of
the nineteenth Paris has been the artistic capital of Europe. Thither
painters of all foreign nations have looked; there many have worked, and
many more have made a point of showing their works. Anyone, therefore,
who makes a habit of visiting Paris, seeing the big exhibitions, and
frequenting dealers and studios, can get a pretty complete idea of what
is going on in Europe. There he will find Picasso--the animator [A] of
the movement--and some of the best of his compatriots, Juan Gris and
Marie Blanchard for instance, to say nothing of such fashionable figures
as MM. Zuloaga _et_ Sert. There he will find better Dutchmen than Van
Dongen, and an active colony of Scandinavians the most interesting of
whom is probably Per Krohg. The career of Krohg, by the way, is worth
considering for a moment and watching for the future. Finely gifted
in many ways, he started work under three crippling disabilities--a
literary imagination, natural facility, and inherited science. The
results were at first precisely what might have been expected. Now,
however, he is getting the upper hand of his unlucky equipment; and his
genuine talent and personal taste, beginning to assert themselves, have
made it impossible for criticism any longer to treat him merely as
an amiable member of a respectable group. What is true of Spain and
Scandinavia is even truer of Poland and what remains of Russia.
Goncharova and Larionoff--the former a typically temperamental artist,
the latter an extravagantly doctrinaire one--Soudeikine, Grigorieff,
Zadkine live permanently in Paris; while Kisling, whom I take to be the
best of the Poles, has become so completely identified with the country
in which he lives, and for which he fought, that he is often taken by
English critics for a Frenchman. Survage (with his eccentric but sure
sense of colour), Soutine (with his delicious paint), and Marcoussis (a
cubist of great merit) each, in his own way, working in Paris, adds to
the artistic reputation of his native country. In the rue La Boëtie you
can see the work of painters and sculptors from every country in Europe
almost, and from a good many in Africa. The Italian Futurists have
often made exhibitions there. While the work of Severini--their
most creditable representative--is always to be found _chez_ Léonce
Rosenberg, hard by in the rue de la Baume.
[Footnote A: For this word, which I think very happily suggests
Picasso's role in contemporary painting, I am indebted to my friend M.
André Salmon.]
However, most of the Futurists have retired to their own country, where
we will leave them. On the other hand, the most gifted Italian painter
who has appeared this century, Modigliani, was bred on the Boulevard
Montparnasse. In the movement he occupies an intermediate position,
being neither of the pioneers nor yet of the post-war generation. He was
not much heard of before the war, [B] and he died less than a year after
peace was signed. In my mind, therefore, his name is associated with
the war--then, at any rate, was the hour of his glory; he dominated the
cosmopolitan groups of his quarter at a time when most of the French
painters, masters and disciples, were in the trenches. Modigliani owed
something to Cézanne and a great deal to Picasso: he was no doctrinaire:
towards the end he became the slave of a formula of his own
devising--but that is another matter. Modigliani had an intense
but narrow sensibility, his music is all on one string: he had a
characteristically Italian gift for drawing beautifully with ease: and I
think he had not much else. I feel sure that those who would place him
amongst the masters of the movement--Matisse, Picasso, Derain, Bonnard,
and Friesz--mistake; for, with all his charm and originality, he was too
thoughtless and superficial to achieve greatly. He invented something
which he went on repeating; and he could always fascinate simply by
his way of handling a brush or a pencil. His pictures, delightful and
surprising at first sight, are apt to grow stale and, in the end, some
of them, unbearably thin. A minor artist, surely.
[Footnote B: He was at work, however, by 1906--perhaps earlier.]
Though Paris is unquestionably the centre of the movement, no one who
sees only what comes thither and to London--and that is all I see--can
have much idea of what is going on in Germany and America. Germany has
not yet recommenced sending her art in quantities that make judgement
possible, while it is pretty clear that the American art which reaches
Europe is by no means the best that America can do. From both come
magazines with photographs which excite our curiosity, but on such
evidence it would be mere impertinence to form an opinion. Of
contemporary art in Germany and America I shall say nothing. And what
shall I say of the home-grown article? Having taken Paris for my point
of view, I am excused from saying much. Not much of English art is seen
from Paris. We have but one living painter whose work is at all well
known to the serious amateurs of that city, and he is Sickert. [C] The
name, however, of Augustus John is often pronounced, ill--for they
_will_ call him Augustin--and that of Steer is occasionally murmured.
Through the _salon d'automne_ Roger Fry is becoming known; and there is
a good deal of curiosity about the work of Duncan Grant, and some about
that of Mark Gertler and Vanessa Bell. Now, of these, Sickert and Steer
are essentially, and in no bad sense, provincial masters. They are
belated impressionists of considerable merit working in a thoroughly
fresh and personal way on the problems of a bygone age. In the remoter
parts of Europe as late as the beginning of the seventeenth century
were to be found genuine and interesting artists working in the Gothic
tradition: the existence of Sickert and Steer made us realize how far
from the centre is London still. On the Continent such conservatism
would almost certainly be the outcome of stupidity or prejudice; but
both Sickert and Steer have still something of their own to say about
the world seen through an impressionist temperament. The prodigious
reputation enjoyed by Augustus John is another sign of our isolation.
His splendid talent when, as a young man, he took it near enough the
central warmth to make it expand (besides the influence of Puvis,
remember, it underwent that of Picasso) began to bear flowers of
delicious promise. Had he kept it there John might never have tasted the
sweets of insular renown: he would have had his place in the history of
painting, however. The French know enough of Vorticism to know that it
is a provincial and utterly insignificant contrivance which has borrowed
what it could from Cubism and Futurism and added nothing to either. They
like to fancy that the English tradition is that of Gainsborough and
Constable, quite failing to realize what havoc has been made of
this admirable plastic tradition by that puerile gospel of literary
pretentiousness called Pre-Raphaelism. Towards these mournful quags and
quicksands, with their dead-sea flora of anecdote and allegory, the best
part of the little talent we produce seems irresistibly to be drawn: by
these at last it is sucked down. That, at any rate, is the way that most
of those English artists who ten or a dozen years ago gave such good
promise have gone. Let us hope better of the new generation--recent
exhibitions afford some excuse--a generation which, if reactionarily
inclined, can always take Steer for a model, or, if disposed to keep
abreast of the times and share in the heritage of Cézanne as well as
that of Constable, can draw courage from the fact that there is, after
all, one English painter--Duncan Grant--who takes honourable rank beside
the best of his contemporaries.
[Footnote C: The Irish painter O'Conor, and the Canadian Morrice, are
both known and respected in Paris; but because they have lived their
lives there and known none but French influences they are rarely thought
of as British. In a less degree the same might be said of that admirable
painter George Barne.]
It is fifteen years since Cézanne died, and only now is it becoming
possible to criticize him. That shows how overwhelming his influence
was. The fact that at last his admirers and disciples, no longer under
any spell or distorting sense of loyalty, recognize that there are in
painting plenty of things worth doing which he never did is all to the
good. It is now possible to criticize him seriously; and when all his
insufficiencies have been fairly shown he remains one of the very
greatest painters that ever lived. The serious criticism of Cézanne is
a landmark in the history of the movement, and still something of a
novelty; for, naturally, I reckon the vulgar vituperation with which his
work was greeted, and the faint praise with which it was subsequently
damned, as no criticism at all. The hacks and pedagogues and
middle-class metaphysicians who abused him, and only when it dawned on
them that they were making themselves silly, in the eyes of their
own flock even, took to patronizing, are forgot. They babble in the
Burlington Fine Arts Club--where nobody marks them--and have their
reward in professorships and the direction of public galleries. The
criticism that matters, of which we are beginning to hear something,
comes mostly from painters, his ardent admirers, who realize that
Cézanne attempted things which he failed to achieve and deliberately
shunned others worth achieving. Also, they realize that there is always
a danger of one good custom corrupting the world.
Cézanne is the full-stop between impressionism and the contemporary
movement. Of course there is really no such thing as a full-stop in art
any more than there is in nature. Movement grows out of movement, and
every artist is attached to the past by a thousand binders springing
from a thousand places in the great stem of tradition. But it is true
that there is hardly one modern artist of importance to whom Cézanne is
not father or grandfather, and that no other influence is comparable
with his. To be sure there is Seurat, of whom we shall hear more in the
next ten years. Although he died as long ago as 1891 his importance
has not yet been fully realized, his discoveries have not been fully
exploited, not yet has his extraordinary genius received adequate
recognition. Seurat may be the Giorgione of the movement. Working in
isolation and dying young, he is known to us only by a few pictures
which reveal unmistakeable and mysterious genius; but I should not be
surprised if from the next generation he were to receive honours equal
almost to those paid Cézanne.
The brave _douanier_ was hardly master enough to have great and enduring
influence; nevertheless, the sincerity of his vision and directness of
his method reinforced and even added to one part of the lesson taught
by Cézanne: also, it was he who--by his pictures, not by doctrine of
course--sent the pick of the young generation to look at the primitives.
Such as it was, his influence was a genuinely plastic one, which is
more, I think, than can be said for that of Gauguin or of Van Gogh. The
former seemed wildly exciting for a moment, partly because he flattened
out his forms, designed in two dimensions, and painted without
chiaroscuro in pure colours, but even more because he had very much the
air of a rebel. "Il nous faut les barbares," said André Gide; "il nous
faut les barbares," said we all. Well, here was someone who had gone
to live with them, and sent home thrilling, and often very beautiful,
pictures which could, if one chose, be taken as challenges to European
civilization. To a considerable extent the influence of Gauguin was
literary, and therefore in the long run negligible. It is a mistake on
that account to suppose--as many seem inclined to do--that Gauguin was
not a fine painter.
Van Gogh was a fine painter, too; but his influence, like that of
Gauguin, has proved nugatory--a fact which detracts nothing from the
merit of his work. He was fitted by his admirers into current social
and political tendencies, and coupled with Charles-Louis Philippe as an
apostle of sentimental anarchy. Sentimental portraits of washerwomen and
artisans were compared with Marie Donadieu and Bubu de Montparnasse;
and by indiscreet enthusiasm the artist was degraded to the level of a
preacher. Nor was this degradation inexcusable: Van Gogh was a preacher,
and too often his delicious and sensitive works of art are smeared over,
to their detriment, with tendencious propaganda. At his best, however,
he is a very great impressionist--a neo-impressionist, or expressionist
if you like--but I should say an impressionist much influenced and much
to the good, as was Gauguin, by acquaintance with Cézanne in his last
and most instructive phase. Indeed, it is clear that Gauguin and Van
Gogh would not have come near achieving what they did achieve--achieved,
mind you, as genuine painters--had they not been amongst the first to
realize and make use of that bewildering revelation which is the art of
Cézanne.
Of that art I am not here to speak; I am concerned only with its
influence. Taking the thing at its roughest and simplest, one may say
that the influence of Cézanne during the last seventeen years has
manifested itself most obviously in two characteristics--Directness and
what is called Distortion. Cézanne was direct because he set himself a
task which admitted of no adscititious flourishes--the creation of form
which should be entirely self-supporting and intrinsically significant,
_la possession de la forme_ as his descendants call it now. To this
great end all means were good: all that was not a means to this end was
superfluous. To achieve it he was prepared to play the oddest tricks
with natural forms--to distort. All great artists have distorted;
Cézanne was peculiar only in doing so more consciously and thoroughly
than most. What is important in his art is, of course, the beauty of his
conceptions and his power in pursuit: indifference to verisimilitude is
but the outward and visible sign of this inward and spiritual grace. For
some, however, though not for most of his followers his distortion had
an importance of its own.
To the young painters of 1904, or thereabouts, Cézanne came as the
liberator: he it was who had freed painting from a mass of conventions
which, useful once, had grown old and stiff and were now no more than so
many impediments to expression. To most of them his chief importance--as
an influence, of course--was that he had removed all unnecessary
barriers between what they felt and its realization in form. It was
his directness that was thrilling. But to an important minority the
distortions and simplifications--the reduction of natural forms to
spheres, cylinders, cones, etc.--which Cézanne had used as means were
held to be in themselves of consequence because capable of fruitful
development. From them it was found possible to deduce a theory of
art--a complete æsthetic even. Put on a fresh track by Cézanne's
practice, a group of gifted and thoughtful painters began to speculate
on the nature of form and its appeal to the æsthetic sense, and not to
speculate only, but to materialize their speculations. The greatest
of them, Picasso, invented Cubism. If I call these artists who forged
themselves a theory of form and used it as a means of expression
Doctrinaires it is because to me that name bears no disparaging
implication and seems to indicate well enough what I take to be their
one common characteristic: if I call those who, without giving outward
sign (they may well have had their private speculations and systems) of
an abstract theory, appeared to use distortion when, where, and as their
immediate sensibility dictated, Fauves, that is because the word has
passed into three languages, is admirably colourless--for all its
signifying a colour--and implies the existence of a group without
specifying a peculiarity. Into Doctrinaires--Theorists if you like the
word better--and Fauves the first generation of Cézanne's descendants
could, I feel sure, be divided; whether such a division would serve any
useful purpose is another matter. What I am sure of is that to have two
such labels, to be applied when occasion requires and cancelled without
much compunction, will excellently serve mine, which may, or may not, be
useful.
I would not insist too strongly on the division; certainly at first
it was not felt to be sharp. Plenty of Fauves did their whack of
theorizing, while some of the theorists are amongst the most sensitive
and personal of the age. What I do insist on--because it explains and
excuses the character of my book--is that in this age theory has played
so prominent a part, hardly one artist of importance quite escaping its
influence, that no critic who proposes to give some account of painting
since Cézanne can be expected to overlook it: some, to be sure, may
be thought to have stared indecently. The division between Fauves and
Theorists, I was saying, in the beginning was not sharp; nevertheless,
because it was real, already in the first generation of Cézanne's
descendants the seeds of two schools were sown. Already by 1910 two
tendencies are visibly distinct; but up to 1914, though there is
divergence, there is, I think, no antipathy between them--of antipathies
between individuals I say nothing. Solidarity was imposed on the young
generation by the virulent and not over scrupulous hostility of the old;
it was _l'union sacrée_ in face of the enemy. And just as political
allies are apt to become fully alive to the divergence of their aims and
ambitions only after they have secured their position by victory, so
it was not until the new movement had been recognized by all educated
people as representative and dominant that the Fauves felt inclined to
give vent to their inevitable dislike of Doctrinaires.
Taken as a whole, the first fourteen years of the century, which my
malicious friend Jean Cocteau sometimes calls _l'époque héroïque_,
possessed most of the virtues and vices that such an epoch should
possess. It was rich in fine artists; and these artists were finely
prolific. It was experimental, and passionate in its experiments. It was
admirably disinterested. Partly from the pressure of opposition, partly
because the family characteristics of the Cézannides are conspicuous,
it acquired a rather deceptive air of homogeneity. It was inclined to
accept recruits without scrutinizing over closely their credentials,
though it is to be remembered that it kept its critical faculty
sufficiently sharp to reject the Futurists while welcoming the Cubists.
I cannot deny, however, that in that moment of enthusiasm and loyalty
we were rather disposed to find extraordinary merits in commonplace
painters. We knew well enough that a feeble and incompetent disciple of
Cézanne was just as worthless as a feeble and incompetent disciple of
anyone else--but, then, was our particular postulant so feeble after
all? Also, we were fond of arguing that the liberating influence of
Cézanne had made it possible for a mediocre artist to express a little
store of recondite virtue which under another dispensation must have
lain hid for ever. I doubt we exaggerated. We were much too kind, I
fancy, to a number of perfectly commonplace young people, and said a
number of foolish things about them. What was worse, we were unjust
to the past. That was inevitable. The intemperate ferocity of the
opposition drove us into Protestantism, and Protestantism is unjust
always. It made us narrow, unwilling to give credit to outsiders of
merit, and grossly indulgent to insiders of little or none. Certainly we
appreciated the Orientals, the Primitives, and savage art as they
had never been appreciated before; but we underrated the art of the
Renaissance and of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Also,
because we set great store by our theories and sought their implications
everywhere, we claimed kinship with a literary movement with which,
in fact, we had nothing in common. Charles-Louis Philippe and the
Unanimistes should never have been compared with the descendants
of Cézanne. Happily, when it came to dragging in Tolstoyism, and
Dostoievskyism even, and making of the movement something moral and
political almost, the connection was seen to be ridiculous and was duly
cut.
The protagonists of the heroic epoch (1904--1914 shall we say?) were
Matisse and Picasso. In modern European painting Picasso remains the
paramount influence; of modern French, however, Derain is the chief;
while Matisse, who may still be the best painter alive, has hardly any
influence at all. In these early days Derain, considerably younger than
Matisse and less precocious than Picasso, was less conspicuous than
either; yet he always held a peculiar and eminent position, with an
intellect apt for theoretical conundrums and sensibility to match that
of any Fauve and his personal genius brooding over both. About the
best known of Matisse's companions--for they were in no sense his
disciples--were, I should say, Friesz, Vlaminck, Laprade, Chabaud,
Marquet, Manguin, Puy, Delaunay, Rouault, Girieud, Flandrin. I think I
am justified in describing all these, with the exception, perhaps, of
Girieud and Flandrin, as Fauves; assuredly I have heard them all so
described. In very early days Maurice Denis was by some reckoned a
chief, the equal almost of Matisse; but through sloppy sentiment he fell
into mere futility, and by now has quite dropped out. Friesz, on the
other hand, has gone ahead, and is to-day one of the half-dozen leaders:
I shall have a good deal to say about him in a later part of this book.
Vlaminck a few years ago had the misfortune to learn a recipe for
making attractive and sparkling pictures; he is now, I understand, in
retirement trying to unlearn it. Rouault is a very interesting artist of
whom we see little; from what I have seen I should be inclined to fear
that a taste for romance and drama is too often suffered to smother
his remarkable gift for painting. Marquet, with gifts equal to almost
anything, is content, it seems, to remain a brilliant but superficial
impressionist. Puy is a thoroughly sound artist, and so in a smaller way
is Manguin. What has become of Chabaud, who was a bit too clever, and
a little vulgar even? And what of Delaunay? And of Flandrin--what has
become of him? Something sufficiently interesting, at any rate, to give
pause even to a critic in a hurry. His name must not go by unmarked.
Flandrin was amongst the first to rebel against Impressionism--against
that impressionism, I mean, which remained implicit in
post-impressionism. Resolutely he set his face against the prevailing
habit of expressing an aspect of things, and tried hard to make a
picture. So far he has succeeded imperfectly: but he is still trying.
Of one artist who is certainly no Doctrinaire, nor yet, I think, a
Fauve, but who has been influenced by Cézanne, I shall here do myself
the honour of pronouncing the name. Aristide Maillol is so obviously
the best sculptor alive that to people familiar with his work there
is something comic about those discussions in which are canvassed the
claims of Mestrovic and Epstein, Archipenko and Bourdelle. These have
their merits; but Maillol is a great artist. He works in the classical
tradition, modified by Cézanne, thanks largely to whom, I imagine, he
has freed himself from the impressionism--the tiresome agitation and
emphasis--of Rodin. He has founded no school; but one pupil of his,
Gimon--a very young sculptor--deserves watching. From the doctrine a
small but interesting school of sculpture has come: Laurens, an artist
of sensibility and some power, and Lipsitz are its most admired
representatives. At home we have Epstein and Dobson; both have been
through the stern school of abstract construction, and Epstein has
emerged the most brilliant _pasticheur_ alive. Brancuzi (a Bohemian) is,
I should say, by temperament more Fauve than Doctrinaire. Older than
most of Cézanne's descendants, he has nevertheless been profoundly
influenced by the master; but the delicacy of his touch, which gives
sometimes to his modelling almost the quality of Wei sculpture, he
learnt from no one--such things not being taught. Gaudier Brzcska, a
young French sculptor of considerable promise, was killed in the early
months of the war. He had been living in England, where his work,
probably on account of its manifest superiority to most of what was seen
near it, gained an exaggerated reputation. The promise was indisputable;
but, after seeing the Leicester Gallery exhibition, I came to the
conclusion that there was not much else. Indeed, his drawings often
betrayed so superficial a facility, such a turn for calligraphic
dexterities, that one began to wonder whether even in expecting much
one had not been over sanguine. The extravagant reputation enjoyed
by Gaudier in this country will perhaps cross the mind of anyone who
happens to read my essay on Wilcoxism: native, or even resident, geese
look uncommonly like swans on home waters: to see them as they are you
should see them abroad.
Bonnard and Vuillard, unlike Aristide Maillol, though being sensitive
and intelligent artists who make the most of whatever serves their turn
they have taken what they wanted from the atmosphere in which they work,
are hardly to be counted of Cézanne's descendants. Rather are they
children of the great impressionists who, unlike the majority of their
surviving brothers and sisters, instead of swallowing the impressionist
doctrine whole, just as official painters do the academic, have modified
it charmingly to suit their peculiar temperaments. Not having swallowed
the poker, they have none of those stiff and static habits which
characterize the later generations of their family. They are free and
various; and Bonnard is one of the greatest painters alive. Mistakenly,
he is supposed to have influenced Duncan Grant; but Duncan Grant, at
the time when he was painting pictures which appear to have certain
affinities with those of Bonnard, was wholly unacquainted with the work
of that master. On the other hand, it does seem possible that Vuillard
has influenced another English painter, Miss Ethel Sands: only, in
making attributions of influence one cannot be too careful. About
direct affiliations especially, as this case shows, one should never
be positive. It is as probable that Miss Sands has been influenced by
Sickert, who has much in common with Vuillard, as by Vuillard himself;
and most probable of all, perhaps, that the three have inherited from
a common ancestor something which each has developed and cultivated as
seemed to him or her best. _La recherche de la paternité_ was ever an
exciting but hazardous pastime: if Bonnard and Vuillard, in their turn,
are claimed, as they sometimes are, for descendants of Renoir, with
equal propriety Sickert may be claimed for Degas. And it is worth
noting, perhaps, as a curious fact, that in the matter of influence this
is about as much as at the moment can be claimed for either of these
masters. Both Renoir and Degas lived well on into the period of which I
am writing; but though both were admired, the former immensely, neither
up to the present has had much direct influence on contemporary
painting.
From 1908--I choose that year to avoid all risk of ante-dating--there
existed side by side, and apparently in alliance, with the Fauves a
school of theoretical painters. Of Cubism I have said my say elsewhere:
if I have some doubts as to whether, as a complete theory of painting,
it has a future, I have none that what it has already achieved is
remarkable. Also, I recognize its importance as a school of experiments,
some of which are sure to bear fruit and leave a mark on history. Of
the merits of many of its professors I say nothing, because they are
manifest and admitted. Picasso stands apart: he is the inventor and most
eminent exponent, yet I refuse to call him Cubist because he is so many
other things. Braque, who at present confines himself to abstractions,
and to taste and sensibility adds creative power, is to my mind the
best of the bunch: while Léger, Gris, Gleizes, and Metzinger are four
painters who, if they did not limit themselves to a means of expression
which to most people is still perplexing, if not disagreeable, would be
universally acclaimed for what they are--four exceptionally inventive
artists, each possessing his own peculiar and precious sense of colour
and design.
But besides these pure doctrinaires there were a good many painters who,
without reducing their forms to geometrical abstractions, by modifying
them in accordance with Cubist theory gave a new and impressive
coherence to their compositions. Of them the best known, in England at
all events, is Jean Marchand, whose admirable work has been admired here
ever since the Grafton Galleries exhibition of 1912. Lately he has moved
away from Cubism, but has not become less doctrinaire for that. Indeed,
if I have a fault to find with his grave and masterly art it is that
sometimes it is a little wanting in sensibility and inspiration.
Marchand is so determined to paint logically and well that he seems a
little to forget that in the greatest art there is more than logic and
good painting. It is odd to remember that Lhote, who since the war has
been saluted by a band of young painters (not French for the most part,
I believe) as chief of a new and profoundly doctrinaire school which is
to reconcile Cubism with the great tradition, stood at the time of which
I am writing pretty much where Marchand stood. His undeniable gifts,
which have not failed him since, were then devoted to combining the
amusing qualities of the _imagiers_ (popular print-makers) with the new
discoveries. The results were consistently pleasing; and I will here
confess that, however little I may like some of his later preaching and
however little he may like mine, what Lhote produces in paint never
fails to arrest me and very seldom to charm. Herbin, who was another of
those who about the year 1910 were modifying natural forms in obedience
to Cubist theory, has since gone all lengths in the direction of pure
abstraction: his art is none the better for it. Valloton, so far as I
can remember, was much where Herbin was. Now apparently he aims at the
grand tragic; an aim which rarely fails to lead its votaries by way of
the grand academic. Perhaps such aspirations can express themselves only
in the consecrated formulæ of traditional rhetoric; at all events, the
last I saw of Valloton was furiously classical. [D] And for all that he
remains, what he was in the beginning, an Illustrator.
[Footnote D: His exhibits in the _salon d'automne_ of 1921, however,
suggest that he has come off his high horse.]
To me these artists all seem to be of the first generation of Cézanne's
descendants. About the dates of one or two, however, I may well be
mistaken; and so may I be when I suppose half a dozen more of whose
existence I became aware rather later--only a year or two before the
war, in fact--to be of a slightly later brood. For instance, it must
have been at the end of 1912, or the beginning of 1913, that I first
heard of Modigliani, Utrillo, Segonzac, Marie Laurencin, Luc-Albert
Moreau and Kisling, though doubtless all were known earlier to
wide-awake men on the spot. None of them can fairly be described
as doctrinaire: by that time an artist with a pronounced taste for
abstractions betook himself to Cubism almost as a matter of course. All
owe much to Cézanne--Utrillo least; Modigliani and Marie Laurencin owe
a good deal to Picasso's blue period; while Luc-Albert Moreau owes
something to Segonzac. Of the two first Modigliani is dead and Utrillo
so ill that he is unlikely ever to paint again. [E] A strange artist,
Utrillo, personal enough, just as Modigliani was handsome enough, to
satisfy the exigences of the most romantic melodrama, with a touch of
madness and an odd nostalgic passion--expressing itself in an inimitable
white--for the dank and dirty whitewash and cheap cast-iron of the
Parisian suburbs. Towards the end, when he was already very ill, he
began to concoct a formula for dealing with these melancholy scenes
which might have been his undoing. His career was of a few years only,
but those years were prolific; beginning in a rather old-fashioned,
impressionistic style, he soon found his way into the one he has made
famous. To judge his art as a whole is difficult: partly because his
early productions are not only unequal to, but positively unlike, what
he achieved later; partly because many of the Utrillos with which Paris
is overstocked were painted by someone else.
[Footnote E: With great pleasure I contradict this. According to latest
reports Utrillo is so far recovered that before long he may be painting
again.]
Perhaps the most interesting, though neither the most startling nor
seductive, of this batch is Segonzac. Like all the best things in
nature, he matures slowly and gets a little riper every day; so, as he
is already a thoroughly good painter, like the nigger of Saint-Cyr he
has but to continue. Before nature, or rather cultivation, with its
chocolate ploughed fields and bright green trees, as before the
sumptuous splendours of a naked body, his reaction is manifestly,
flatteringly, lyrical. He might have been a bucolic rhapsodist had not
his sensibility been well under the control of as sound a head as you
would expect to find on the shoulders of a gentleman of Gascony. His
emotions are kept severely in their place by rigorous concentration on
the art of painting. Nevertheless, there are critics who complain
that his compositions still tend to lack organization and his forms
definition. And perhaps they do sometimes: only in these, as in other
respects, his art improves steadily. [F]
[Footnote F: _Salon d'automne_, 1921: It has again made a big stride
forward. Segonzac is now amongst the best painters in France.]
"Sa peinture a une petite côté vicieuse qui est adorable"--I have heard
the phrase so often that I can but repeat it. Marie Laurencin's painting
is adorable; we can never like her enough for liking her own femininity
so well, and for showing all her charming talent instead of smothering
it in an effort to paint like a man; but she is not a great artist--she
is not even the best woman painter alive. She is barely as good as Dufy
(a contemporary of Picasso unless I mistake, but for many years known
rather as a decorator and illustrator than a painter in oils) who,
while he confined himself to designing for the upholsterers and making
"images," was very good indeed. His oil-paintings are another matter.
Dufy has a formula for making pictures; he has a _cliché_ for a tree, a
house, a chimney, even for the smoke coming out of a chimney. In this
way he can be sure of producing a pretty article, and, what is more, an
article the public likes.
Very different is the art of Kisling. Rarely does he produce one of
those pictures so appetizing that one fancies they must be good to eat.
What you will find in his work, besides much good painting, is a serious
preoccupation with the problem of externalizing in form an æsthetic
experience. And as, after all, that is the proper end of art his work
is treated with respect by all the best painters and most understanding
critics, though it has not yet scored a popular success. "Kisling ne
triche pas," says André Salmon.
The war did not kill the movement: none but a fool could have supposed
that it would. Nevertheless, it had one ghastly effect on contemporary
painting. When I returned to Paris in the autumn of 1919 I found the
painters whom I had known before the war developing, more or less
normally, and producing work which fell nowise short of what one had
come to expect. I saw all that there was to be seen; I admired; and then
I asked one who had already, before the war, established a style and a
reputation--I asked Friesz, I think--"Et les jeunes?" "Nous sommes les
jeunes" was the reply. Those young French painters who should have been
emerging from the ruck of students between 1914 and 1919 had either been
killed, or deflected from their career, or gravely retarded. Only now
is _la jeunesse_ beginning to give signs of vitality; only now is a new
crop coming to the surface; so now I will take the foolhardy risk of
pronouncing the names of a few who seem to me to have given proof of
undeniable talent--Gabriel-Fournier, Favory, Lotiron, Soutine, Corneau,
Durey, Monzain, Richard, Guindet, Togores, Gromaire, Alix, Halicka. I
must not be taken to assert that all of these are under thirty, or that
none was known to discerning amateurs before the war, or in its first
years at any rate. Certainly, the work of Gabriel-Fournier, Favory,
Soutine, and I think of Corneau, was known to me even, through
photographs, before the Armistice was signed. As certainly I think it
is true that all are of a later crop than Segonzac, Marie Laurencin,
Luc-Albert Moreau, etc., while Monzain, Richard, Togores, Gromaire,
Alix, Guindet, and Halicka are very young indeed. So here are a dozen
painters--most of them little known at present outside a smallish circle
of artists, critics, and inquisitive amateurs--who appear to give
promise of excellence: amongst them I should be inclined to look for the
masters of a coming age. [G]
[Footnote G: Twelve years ago I made a list of young or youngish
painters--the men of thirty or thereabouts--from whom it seemed to me
reasonable to expect great things. It included such names as Derain,
Picasso, Vlaminck, Marchand, Friesz, Maillol, Duncan Grant: one need not
be _laudator temporis acti_ to feel that the men of the new generation
are on a smaller scale. This merely confirms my often expressed notion
that the decade 1875-85 produced a prodigious quantity of greatly gifted
babies. On the other hand, if by comparison with the _salon d'automne_
of 1911 that of '2l seems unexciting, we must not fail to do justice to
the extraordinarily high level of painting that has now been attained.
And this confirms another of my pet theories--that we live in an age
comparable (so far as painting goes) with the _quattro cento_. The works
of even the smallest artists of that age enchant us now, because in that
age any man of any talent could make a picture; but doubtless at the
time critics and amateurs sighed for the first thrilling years of the
movement--for the discoveries of Masaccio and Donatello--and were quite
ready to welcome the novelties of the high renaissance when they came.
The world moves faster nowadays; already we look regretfully back to the
days when Matisse and Picasso were launching the movement, and another
high renaissance may be nearer than we suppose.]
To this list I would add, in no spirit of paradox, two names which, at
first sight, must appear singularly out of place--Camoin and Guérin.
Both were at work before the contemporary movement--the Cézanne
movement--was born or, at any rate, launched; both for a long time
seemed to be, if anything, opposed to it; both for some years lay
dormant in a chrysalis-like state to emerge recently a pair of very
interesting painters. The Camoin and the Guérin with whom I am concerned
appeared since the war; they may, of course, relapse into their former
condition: time will show. Apparently it was only three or four years
ago that Camoin realized that Matisse--his contemporary--was the master
from whom he could draw that nourishment which one good artist may very
legitimately draw from another. So nourished, he seems to have made a
fresh start; at any rate his work has now a freshness and vivacity which
in his younger days he could never impart. The case of Guérin is odder
still. A passionate admirer of Watteau, he would seem to have locked
himself up in a rather sterile devotion to the eighteenth century
master. One must suppose that there was something dead in his
appreciation, something recognized but unfelt, and therefore not really
understood. This deadness came through into his work. Lacking genuine
inspiration, struggling in consequence to impart life by tricks and
conventions, he occasionally allowed himself to tumble into downright
vulgarity. Suddenly, and without renouncing any ancient loyalty, he has
come to life. It is Watteau that inspires him still; but the essential
Watteau--Watteau the painter--not that superficies which is more or
less familiar to every hack, be he limner or penman, who dabbles in the
eighteenth century. How amusing to fancy that the just admiration now
felt for the genius of Watteau by those descendants of Cézanne who
formerly misesteemed it has somehow put Guérin himself in the way of
becoming intimate with an art he had formerly worshipped at a distance!
Though the war did not kill or even cripple the movement, since the war
there has been a change, or, at any rate, a change has become apparent.
To begin with, Picasso has, in a sense, retired from public life--from
the life of the _cafés_ and studios I mean--and in isolation works out
those problems that are for ever presenting themselves to his restless
brain. The splendid fruit of his solitude we saw last summer _chez_ Paul
Rosenberg. From time to time Picasso still paints a Cubist picture--to
keep his mind in--but he is hardly to be reckoned a Cubist, and
certainly not a pure one. Of that school, which still flourishes
(exhibiting at _la Section d'Or_ or rue de la Baume the work of Braque,
Gleizes, Léger, Metzinger, Gris, Laurens, Lipsitz, Marcoussis, Henry
Hayden, and the brilliant Irène Lagut), Picasso is the inspiration,
perhaps, but not the chief. His influence in the western world and on
foreign painters in Paris is as great as ever; but the French, slightly
vexed, maybe, at having accepted so long the leadership of a Spaniard,
show signs of turning back towards their national tradition. So, though
Picasso remains the animator of the doctrinaire school or schools,
Lhote may become the master. It is the fashion, I know, not to take his
influence seriously. No matter how clever a man he may be, Lhote--they
say--is not a big enough painter to be a chief. It may be so--I suspect
it is--yet we should not forget that, besides being intelligent and
capable of drawing more or less plausible inferences from premises of
his own choosing, Lhote can point to a practice by no means despicable.
For the rest, he is the apostle of logic and discipline, and so finds
plenty to approve in the Cubist doctrine and the French tradition from
Poussin to David. I do not know whether Bissière is to be ranked amongst
his disciples--I should think not--but Bissière, a most attractive
artist, is perhaps significant of the new tendency in that he has chosen
to express a whimsical temperament in terms of prim science. About the
science of picture-making, as the director of the National Gallery
calls it, he has little to learn. He knows the masters, the Primitives
especially, and has a way, at once logical and fantastic, of playing on
their _motifs_ which gives sometimes the happiest results. Bissière is
too fanciful and odd ever to be a _chef d'école_ or representative even;
but the very fact that, being what he is, he has chosen such means of
expression is symptomatic.
So the doctrinaire side of the movement persists, animated by Picasso,
and schooled to some extent by Lhote. The main current, however, has
found another channel; and, unless I mistake, we are already in the
second phase of the movement--a phase in which the revelations of
Cézanne and Seurat and the elaborations of their immediate descendants
will be modified and revitalized by the pressure and spirit of the great
tradition. The leader has already been chosen. Derain is the chief
of the new French school--a school destined manifestly to be less
cosmopolitan than its predecessor. The tendency towards nationalism
everywhere is unmistakeable--a consequence of the war, I suppose. It is
useless to deplore the fact or exult in it: one can but accept it as one
accepts the weather. Even England has not escaped; and it is to be noted
that our best painter, Duncan Grant, a descendant of Cézanne who has run
the whole gamut of abstract experiment, is settling down, without of
course for a moment denying his master, to exploit the French heritage,
with feet planted firmly in the English tradition--the tradition of
Gainsborough and Constable. In France, where tradition is so much
richer, its weight will confine more closely and drive more intensely
the new spirit. One new tendency--that which insists more passionately
than ever on order and organization--merely continues the impetus given
by Cézanne and received by all his followers; but another, more vague,
towards something which I had rather call humanism than humanity, does
imply, I think, a definite breach with Cubism and the tenets of the
austerer doctrinaires. It is not drama or anecdote or sentiment or
symbolism that this would bring back to the plastic arts, but rather
that mysterious yet recognizable quality in which the art of Raffael
excels--a calm, disinterested, and professional concern with the
significance of life as revealed directly in form, a faint desire,
perhaps, to touch by a picture, a building, or a simple object of use
some curious over-tone of our aesthetic sense. Deep in their quest of
that borderland beauty which is common to life and art French painters
are once again deeply concerned with life: to borrow an idea from my
next essay, they have chosen a new artistic problem. To them,
however, "life" does not mean what it means to the sentimentalists or
melodramatists, nor even precisely what it meant to the Impressionists.
Contemporary French painting has no taste for contemporary actualities.
By "life" it understands, not what is going on in the street, but--what
to be sure does go on there because it goes on everywhere--the thing
that poets used to call "the animating spark." About life, in that
sense, the painters of the new generation will, I fancy, have something
to say. They will come at it, not by drama or anecdote or symbol, but,
as all genuine artists have always come at whatever possessed their
imaginations, by plastic expression, or--if you like old-fashioned
phrases--by creating significant form. They will seek the vital
principle in all sorts of objects and translate it into forms of every
kind. That humane beauty after which Derain strives is to be found, I
said, in Raffael: it is to be found also in the Parthenon.
I think this preliminary essay should close, as it began, on a note
of humility and with an explanation. Twenty years ago, when I was an
undergraduate, I remember reading just after it was published M. Camille
Mauclair's little book on the Impressionists. Long ago I ceased much
to admire M. Mauclair's writing: his theorizing and pseudo-science now
strike me as silly, and his judgements seem lacking in perspicacity. But
whatever I may think of it now I shall not forget what I owe that book.
Even at Cambridge the spirit of the age, which is said to pervade the
air like a pestilence, had infected me; and I set out on my first
visit to Paris full of curiosity about what was then the contemporary
movement--at its last gasp. My guide was M. Mauclair; his book it was
that put me in the right way. For by bringing me acquainted with
current theories and reputations, and by throwing me into a fever of
expectation, he brought my æsthetic sensibilities to that state in which
they reacted swiftly and generously to the pictures themselves. This, as
I shall explain in another essay, is, to my mind, the proper function
of criticism. I shall never forget my first visits to the Caillebotte
collection; and in the unforgettable thrill of those first visits M.
Mauclair's bad science and erratic judgement counted for something--much
perhaps. They put me into a mood of sympathetic expectation; and such
a mood is, even for highly sensitive people, often an indispensable
preliminary to æsthetic appreciation. There are those who have got to
be made to feel something before they can begin to feel for
themselves--believe me, they are not the least sensitive or genuine of
amateurs: they are only the most honest. I should like very much to do
for even one of them what M. Mauclair did for me. It would be delightful
to believe that by putting him in the way of the best modern painting
and the theories concerning or connected with it--theories which, it
seems, for some make it more intelligible--I was giving his sensibility
a serviceable jog. Everyone, I know, must see with his own eyes and
feel through his own nerves; none can lend another eyes or emotions:
nevertheless, one can point and gesticulate and in so doing excite. If I
have done that I am content. Twenty years hence, it is to be presumed,
those who now read my writings will be saying of them what I was saying
of M. Mauclair's. The prospect does not distress me. I am not author
enough to be pained by the certainty that in ten years' time this book
will be obsolete. Like M. Mauclair's, it will have served its turn; and
I make no doubt there will be someone at hand to write another, the same
in purpose, and in execution let us hope rather neater.
We all agree now--by "we" I mean intelligent people under sixty--that a
work of art is like a rose. A rose is not beautiful because it is like
something else. Neither is a work of art. Roses and works of art are
beautiful in themselves. Unluckily, the matter does not end there: a
rose is the visible result of an infinitude of complicated goings on in
the bosom of the earth and in the air above, and similarly a work of art
is the product of strange activities in the human mind. In so far as we
are mere spectators and connoisseurs we need not bother about these;
all we are concerned with is the finished product, the work of art. To
produce the best eggs it may be that hens should be fed on hot meal
mash. That is a question for the farmer. For us what matters is the
quality of the eggs, since it is them and not hot meal mash that we
propose to eat for breakfast. Few, however, can take quite so lordly
an attitude towards art. We contemplate the object, we experience
the appropriate emotion, and then we begin asking "Why?" and "How?"
Personally, I am so conscious of these insistent questions that, at the
risk of some misunderstanding, I habitually describe works of art as
"significant" rather than "beautiful" forms. For works of art, unlike
roses, are the creations and expressions of conscious minds. I beg that
no theological red herring may here be drawn across the scent.
A work of art is an object beautiful, or significant, in itself, nowise
dependent for its value on the outside world, capable by itself of
provoking in us that emotion which we call æsthetic. Agreed. But men do
not create such things unconsciously and without effort, as they breathe
in their sleep. On the contrary, for their production are required
special energies and a peculiar state of mind. A work of art, like a
rose, is the result of a string of causes: and some of us are so vain
as to take more interest in the operations of the human mind than in
fertilizers and watering-pots.
In the pre-natal history of a work of art I seem to detect at any rate
three factors--a state of peculiar and intense sensibility, the creative
impulse, and the artistic problem. An artist, I imagine, is one who
often and easily is thrown into that state of acute and sympathetic
agitation which most of us, once or twice in our lives, have had the
happiness of experiencing. And have you noticed that many men and most
boys, when genuinely in love, find themselves, the moment the object of
their emotion is withdrawn, driven by their feelings into scribbling
verses? An artist, I imagine, is always falling in love with everything.
Always he is being thrown into a "state of mind." The sight of a tree
or an omnibus, the screaming of whistles or the whistling of birds, the
smell of roast pig, a gesture, a look, any trivial event may provoke a
crisis, filling him with an intolerable desire to express himself. The
artist cannot embrace the object of his emotion. He does not even wish
to. Once, perhaps, that was his desire; if so, like the pointer and
the setter, he has converted the barbarous pouncing instinct into the
civilized pleasure of tremulous contemplation. Be that as it may, the
contemplative moment is short. Simultaneously almost with the emotion
arises the longing to express, to create a form that shall match the
feeling, that shall commemorate the moment of ecstasy.
This moment of passionate apprehension is, unless I mistake, the source
of the creative impulse; indeed, the latter seems to follow so promptly
on the former that one is often tempted to regard them as a single
movement. The next step is longer. The creative impulse is one thing;
creation another. If the artist's form is to be the equivalent of an
experience, if it is to be significant in fact, every scrap of it has
got to be fused and fashioned in the white heat of his emotion. And how
is his emotion to be kept at white heat through the long, cold days of
formal construction? Emotions seem to grow cold and set like glue. The
intense power and energy called forth by the first thrilling vision grow
slack for want of incentive. What engine is to generate the heat and
make taut the energies by which alone significant form can be created?
That is where the artistic problem comes in.
The artistic problem is the problem of making a match between an
emotional experience and a form that has been conceived but not created.
Evidently the conception of some sort of form accompanies, or closely
follows, the creative impulse. The artist says, or rather feels, to
himself: I should like to express that in words, or in lines and
colours, or in notes. But to make anything out of his impulse he will
need something more than this vague desire to express or to create. He
will need a definite, fully conceived form into which his experience can
be made to fit. And this fitting, this matching of his experience with
his form, will be his problem. It will serve the double purpose of
concentrating his energies and stimulating his intellect. It will be at
once a canal and a goad. And his energy and intellect between them will
have to keep warm his emotion. Shakespeare kept tense the muscle of
his mind and boiling and racing his blood by struggling to confine his
turbulent spirit within the trim mould of the sonnet. Pindar, the
most passionate of poets, drove and pressed his feelings through the
convolutions of the ode. Bach wrote fugues. The master of St. Vitale
found an equivalent for his disquieting ecstasies in severely stylistic
portraits wrought in an intractable medium. Giotto expressed himself
through a series of pictured legends. El Greco seems to have achieved
his stupendous designs by labouring to make significant the fustian of
theatrical piety.
There is apparently nothing that an artist cannot vivify. He can create
a work of art out of some riddle in engineering or harmonics, an
anecdote, or the frank representation of a natural object. Only, to be
satisfactory, the problem must be for him who employs it a goad and a
limitation. A goad that calls forth all his energies; a limitation that
focuses them on some object far more precise and comprehensible than the
expression of a vague sensibility, or, to say the same thing in another
way, the creation of indefinite beauty. However much an artist may have
felt, he cannot just sit down and express it; he cannot create form
in the vague. He must sit down to write a play or a poem, to paint a
portrait or a still life.
Almost everyone has had his moment of ecstasy, and the creative impulse
is not uncommon; but those only who have a pretty strong sense of art
understand the necessity for the artistic problem. What is known of
it by the public is not much liked; it has a bad name and is reckoned
unsympathetic. For the artistic problem, which limits the artist's
freedom, fixes his attention on a point, and drives his emotion through
narrow tubes, is what imports the conventional element into art. It
seems to come between the spontaneous thrill of the artist and the
receptive enthusiasm of his public with an air of artificiality. Thus,
a generation brought up on Wordsworth could hardly believe in the
genuineness of Racine. Our fathers and grandfathers felt, and felt
rightly, that art was something that came from and spoke to the depths
of the human soul. But how, said they, should deep call to deep in
Alexandrines and a pseudo-classical convention, to say nothing of
full-bottomed wigs? They forgot to reckon with the artistic problem,
and made the mistake that people make who fancy that nothing looking so
unlike a Raphael or a Titian as a Matisse or a Picasso can be a work of
art. They thought that because the stuff of art comes from the depths of
human nature it can be expressed only in terms of naturalism. They
did not realize that the creating of an equivalent for an æsthetic
experience out of natural speech or the common forms of nature is only
one amongst an infinite number of possible problems. There are still
ladies who feel sure that had they been in Laura's shoes Petrarch might
have experienced something more vivid than what comes through his
mellifluous but elaborate _rime_. To them he would have expressed
himself otherwise. Possibly: but whatever he experienced could not have
become art--significant form--till it had been withdrawn from the world
of experience and converted into poetry by some such exacting problem.
One problem in itself is as good as another, just as one kind of nib
is as good as another, since problems are valuable only as means. That
problem is best for any particular artist that serves that particular
artist best. The ideal problem will be the one that raises his power
most while limiting his fancy least. The incessant recourse of European
writers to dramatic form suggests that here is a problem which to them
is peculiarly favourable. Its conventions, I suppose, are sufficiently
strict to compel the artist to exert himself to the utmost, yet not so
strict as to present those appalling technical difficulties--the sort
presented by a sestina or a chant royal--that make self-expression
impossible to any but a consummate master. The novel, on the other
hand, as we are just beginning to suspect, affords for most writers an
unsatisfactory, because insufficiently rigorous, problem. Each age has
its favourites. Indeed, the history of art is very much the history of
the problem. The stuff of art is always the same, and always it must be
converted into form before it can become art; it is in their choice of
converting-machines that the ages differ conspicuously.
Two tasks that painters and writers sometimes set themselves are often
mistaken for artistic problems, but are, in fact, nothing of the sort.
One is literal representation: the other the supply of genius direct
from the cask. To match a realistic form with an æsthetic experience is
a problem that has served well many great artists: Chardin and Tolstoi
will do as examples. To make a realistic form and match it with nothing
is no problem at all. Though to say just what the camera would say is
beyond the skill and science of most of us, it is a task that will never
raise an artist's temperature above boiling-point. A painter may go into
the woods, get his thrill, go home and fetch his panel-box, and proceed
to set down in cold blood what he finds before him. No good can come of
it, as the gloomy walls of any official exhibition will show. Realistic
novels fail for the same reason: with all their gifts, neither Zola, nor
Edmond de Goncourt, nor Mr. Arnold Bennett ever produced a work of art.
Also, a thorough anarchist will never be an artist, though many artists
have believed that they were thorough anarchists. One man cannot pour an
æsthetic experience straight into another, leaving out the problem. He
cannot exude form: he must set himself to create a particular form.
Automatic writing will never be poetry, nor automatic scrabbling design.
The artist must submit his creative impulse to the conditions of a
problem. Often great artists set their own problems; always they are
bound by them. That would be a shallow critic who supposed that Mallarmé
wrote down what words he chose in what order he pleased, unbound by any
sense of a definite form to be created and a most definite conception to
be realized. Mallarmé was as severely bound by his problem as was
Racine by his. It was as definite--for all that it was unformulated--as
absolute, and as necessary. The same may be said of Picasso in his most
abstract works: but not of all his followers, nor of all Mallarmé's
either.
Was he really a great painter? A new generation is beginning to ask the
question that we answered, once and for all as we thought, ten years
ago. Yes, of course, the _douanier_ was--a remarkable painter. The man
who influenced Derain, and to some extent Picasso, is not likely to have
been less. But a great painter? For the present, at any rate, let us
avoid great words.
In 1903, when first I lived in Paris, Rousseau appeared to be very much
"in the movement." That was because by nature he was what thoughtful
and highly trained artists were making themselves by an effort: he
was direct. To us it seemed, in those days, that a mass of scientific
irrelevancies and intellectual complications had come between the artist
and his vision, and, again, between the vision and its expression. In a
desperately practical and well-organized age, which recognized objects
by their labels and never dreamed of going beneath these to discover the
things themselves, artists, we thought, were in danger of losing the
very stuff of which visual art is made--the direct, emotional reaction
to the visible universe. People had grown so familiar with the idea of a
cup, with that purely intellectual label "cup," that they never
looked at a particular cup and felt its emotional significance. Also,
professional painters had provided themselves with a marvellous
scientific apparatus for describing "the idea of a cup" in line and
colour: they had at their fingers' ends a plastic notation that
corresponded with the labels by which things are intellectually
recognized. They neither felt things nor expressed their feelings. For
even when an artist was capable of a direct, personal reaction it was
almost impossible for him not to lose it in the cogs and chains of that
elaborate machinery of scientific representation to which he had been
apprenticed. A determination to free artists from utilitarian vision and
the disastrous science of representation was the theoretic basis of that
movement which is associated with the name of Cézanne.
From the latter, at any rate, the _douanier_ needed no freeing. Such
science as he acquired in the course of his life was a means to
expressing himself and not to picture-making. As for his vision, that
was as direct and first-hand as the vision of a Primitive or a child;
and to a Primitive his admirers were in the habit of likening him, to a
child his detractors. His admirers were right: his art is not childish.
Primitives, because they are artists, have to grapple with the artistic
problem. They have, that is, to create form that will express an
emotional conception; they have to express their sense of something they
have seen and felt. A child may well have an artistic vision; for all
that, a child is never, or hardly ever, an artist. It wrestles with
no problem because it does not try to express anything. It is a mere
symbolist who uses a notation not to express what it feels but to convey
information. A child's drawing of a horse is not an expression of its
sense of a horse, but a symbol by which other people can recognize that
what occupies a certain position in its figured story is a horse. The
child is not an artist, but an illustrator who uses symbolism. When,
using Mr. Bertrand Russell's new symbolism, I say that L^c3nI--C^ct =
the Almighty, clearly I am not expressing my feeling for infinite and
omnipotent goodness. Neither does the child who teases you to look at
its charming coloured diagram of the farmyard expect you to share an
emotional experience. Doubtless the vanity of the craftsman demands
satisfaction; but chiefly the child wishes to assure itself that some
impartial judge can interpret its notation. One definitely artistic
gift, however, many children do possess, and that is a sense of the
decorative possibilities of their medium. This gift they have in
common with the Primitives; and this the _douanier_ possessed in an
extraordinary degree.
Of Rousseau's sense of the decorative possibilities of paint it is,
I suppose, unnecessary to say anything. Gauguin called his black
"inimitable." But, indeed, we all agree now that, if the term
"decorative" is to be used in this limited and rather injurious sense,
Rousseau, as a decorator, takes rank with the very greatest. More
important is it to realize that Rousseau had his problem; and that he
approached it in the spirit of a Primitive. His reactions were as simple
and genuine as those of any child; he experienced them with that passion
which alone provokes to creation; his problem was to express them
sincerely and simply in the medium of which he could make such exquisite
use. His vision was as unsophisticated as that of Orcagna, and in
translating it he was as conscientious; but he was a smaller artist
because he was less of an artist.
It has been said that Rousseau came short of greatness for want of
science. That I do not believe. Can it be supposed that any man who has
applied himself intelligently to any art for forty years will not have
acquired science enough to state clearly what is clear, intense, and
clamoring for expression in his mind? I see no reason for supposing that
Rousseau ever failed from lack of science to express himself completely.
The fault was in what he had to express. Rousseau was inferior to the
great Primitives because he lacked their taste, or, to put the matter
more forcibly, because he was less of an artist. An artist's conception
should be like a perfectly cooked pudding--cooked all through and in
every part. His problem is to create an expressive form that shall fit
exactly an artistic conception. His subject may be what he pleases. But
unless that subject has been carried to the high regions of art, and
there, in a dry æsthetic atmosphere, sealed up in a purely æsthetic
conception it can never be externalized in pure form. That is what the
great Primitives did, and what the _douanier_ could not do always. In
his pudding there are doughy patches. He is sentimental; and he is not
sentimental as Raphael and El Greco are.
With a race of genteel, but strangely obtuse, critics it was formerly
the fashion to depreciate Raphael and El Greco on the ground that they
were sentimental. Sentimental they are, in a sense. Their subjects
are sentimental; and the religiosity of some of Greco's is downright
disgusting. But of these subjects every scrap has been passed through
the blazing furnace of conception and fused into artistic form. It is as
though a potter, working with dirty hands, had left a stain burnt by the
fire into his gloriously fashioned clay. The blemish is superficial;
the form is untouched. With Rousseau it is otherwise: lumps of unfused
matter break through his conception and into his design; his pudding is
not thoroughly baked. Take that well-known picture of his, _Le Présent
et le Passé_, which used to be in the Jastrebzoff collection, and of
which photographs are familiar to everyone: the two silly, detached
heads in the sky, stuck in for sentiment's sake, are, as the saying
goes, "out of the picture" and yet play the devil with it. They
injure the design. What is more, in themselves they are as feeble and
commonplace as the drawing of a pavement artist, which, in fact, they
resemble. They are unfelt, that is the explanation--unfelt æsthetically.
They have not been through the oven. They are artistically insincere.
Sentimentality makes strange bedfellows. Rousseau has slipped into
the very hole wherein Mr. Frank Dixie and Sir Luke Fildes disport
themselves; only, by betraying his vice in a picture that is, for the
most part, so exquisitely sure in its simple, delicate expression of
a frank and charming vision he gives us an impressive example of the
danger, even to a good artist, of bad taste.
And there is another fault in Rousseau that springs from this lack of
complete artistic integrity. He is something plebeian: he suffers a
slightly self-complacent good-fellowship to creep into his pictures.
Occasionally there grins through his design, and ever so little
disfigures it, a touch of fatuity. He cannot help being glad that he is
so simple and so good, nor quite resist telling us about it. Look at
that portrait of himself--and I impose a most agreeable task, for it
is charming--that portrait dated 1890, and belonging also to M.
Jastrebzoff; do you not feel that the author is a little too well
pleased with himself? Do you not fancy that he will soon be regaling his
sitter with a good, round platitude from the exterior boulevards or a
morsel from some regimental ditty in which he once excelled, that, in
another moment, he will be tapping him on the back, and that he has gone
a little out of his way to tell you these things? The Primitives tell
us nothing of that sort; they stick to their business of creating
significant form. Whatever of their personalities may reach us has
passed through the transmuting fires of art: they never prattle. The
Primitives are always distinguished; whereas occasionally the _douanier_
is as much the reverse as the more successful painters to the British
aristocracy are always.
Yet I daresay it was this jovial and unaffected good-fellowship, quite
as much as his unquestionable genius, that won the brave _douanier_ his
place in the hearts of those brilliant people who frequented what he
used to call his "soirées toutes familiales et artistiques." The artists
and intellectuals of my generation--the generation that received and
went down before the terrific impact of Dostoievskyism--pursued the
simple and unsophisticated at least as earnestly as any follower of an
earlier Rousseau. Whatever the real differences between a noble savage
and an unspoilt artisan may be, the difference between the ideas of them
with which a jaded society diverts itself is negligible. "Il nous faut
les barbares," said Gide. Well, we have got them. [H] And, maybe, the
next generation but one will make as much fuss about a new Matthew
Arnold as we made about Marguerite Audoux.
[Footnote H: This essay was written a few weeks after the signing of the
Armistice.]
Meanwhile the _douanier_ came at the right moment. His "soirées toutes
familiales et artistiques" were crowded with admirers--Picasso,
Delaunay, Duhamel, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jules Romain, Max Jacob, René
Arcos, Braque, André Salmon, Soffici, Blanche Albane, Marie Laurencin,
elegant and eminent people from North and South America, Russia,
Germany, and Scandinavia, to say nothing of his pupils (he professed
both painting and music) and "les demoiselles de son quartier." The
entertainment consisted, if I may trust an ear-witness, of a little bad
music worse played, a little declamation, a glass of wine, and democracy
untainted with the least suspicion of snobbery. There was a delicious
absence of culture, on the one hand, and of romantic squalor on
the other. The whole thing was solidly and sympathetically lower
middle-class. The "soirée tant familiale qu'artistique" closed with a
performance of the Marseillaise; and the intelligentsia retired to bed
feeling that life was full of beauty and significance.
[Illustration: MATISSE (_Photo: E. Druet_)]