Much to its embarrassment, the National Gallery finds itself possessed
of that superb picture _Les Parapluies_; and as the director at last
feels obliged to exhume those masterpieces which, for so many happy
months, he and his colleagues have had, albeit in the dark, to
themselves, we can now see Renoir amongst his peers. He is perfectly at
home there. Renoir takes his place quite simply in the great tradition;
and when Cézanne, who is still too cheap to be within the reach of a
national collection, has attained a price that guarantees respectability
he, too, will be seen to fit neatly into that tradition of which he is
as much a part as Ingres or Poussin, Raphael or Piero della Francesca.
That Cézanne was a master, just as Poussin and Piero were, and that he,
like them, is part of the tradition, is what all sensitive people know
and the wiser keep to themselves. For by stating the plain fact that
Renoir, Cézanne, and, for that matter, Matisse are all in the great
tradition of painting one seems to suggest that the tradition is
something altogether different from what most people would wish it
to be. If one is right it follows that it is not simply the
counter-movement to the contemporary movement; indeed, it follows that
it is not a movement at all. This is intolerable. An artist, seen as the
protagonist of a movement, the exponent of a theory, and the clue to an
age, has a certain interest for all active-minded people; whereas, seen
merely as an artist, which is how he must be seen if he is to be seen
in the tradition, he is of interest only to those who care for art.
The significant characteristics of an artist, considered as the
representative of a movement, are those in which he differs most
from other artists; set him in the traditions and his one important
characteristic is the one he shares with all--his being an artist.
In the tradition a work of art loses its value as a means. We must
contemplate it as an end--as a direct means to æsthetic emotion
rather--or let it be. Tradition, in fact, has to do with art alone;
while with movements can be mixed up history, archæology, philosophy,
politics, geography, fashions, religion, and crime. So, by insisting on
the fact that Matisse, Cézanne, Poussin, Piero, and Giotto are all in
the tradition we insist on the fact that they are all artists. We rob
them of their amusing but adscititious qualities; we make them utterly
uninteresting to precisely 99.99 per cent. of our fellow-creatures; and
ourselves we make unpopular.
The tradition of art begins with the first artist that ever lived, and
will end with the last. Always it is being enriched or modified--never
is it exhausted. The earliest artists are driven to creation by an
irresistible desire to express themselves. Their over-bubbling minds
supply abundance of matter; difficulties begin when they try to express
it. Then it is they find themselves confronted by those terrible
limitations of the human mind, and by other limitations, only less
terrible, imposed by the medium in which they work. Every genuine
artist--every artist, that is, with something of his own to say--is
faced afresh by the problem, and must solve it for himself.
Nevertheless, each one who succeeds in creating an appropriate form for
his peculiar experience leaves in that form a record, and from the sum
of these records is deduced something, less definite far than a code,
by no means a pattern or recipe, which is yet a sign and a source of
half-conscious suggestion to those that follow. No artist can escape the
tradition of art except by refusing to grapple with the problem; which
is how most do escape it. The academic humbug uses the old language to
say nothing, the bombastic charlatan devises a new one for the same
purpose; but once a man has something to express, and the passion to
express it, he will find himself attacking the eternal problem and
leaning on the inevitable tradition. Let anyone who doubts this mention
quickly the name of some artist who owes nothing to his predecessors.
Often, however, owing either to some change in circumstances or to his
innate peculiarity, a man of uncommon force and imagination will find
himself with something to say for which the traditional instrument is,
or at first seems to be, inadequate. What shall he do? Why, what Giotto
did, what Masaccio did, what Ronsard and the poets of the Pléiade did,
what Wordsworth did, and what Cézanne has done. All these great artists
struck new veins, and to work them were obliged to overhaul the
tool-chest. Of the traditional instruments some they reshaped and
resharpened, some they twisted out of recognition, a few they discarded,
many they retained. Above all, they travelled back along the tradition,
tapping it and drawing inspiration from it, nearer to its source. Very
rarely does the pioneer himself work out his seam: he leaves it to
successors along with his technical discoveries. These they develop,
themselves making experiments as they go forward, till of the heritage
to which they succeeded they have left nothing--nothing but a fashion to
be flouted by the next great original genius who shall rise. Such is
the shape of a movement. A master, whose sole business it is to express
himself, founds it incidentally, just as incidentally he enriches
the tradition from which he borrows; successors exploit it; pious
great-grand-nephews mummify and adore it. Movements are nothing but the
stuff of which tradition is made. At any given moment tradition ends in
the contemporary movement; the capital works of any age are almost sure
to be capital examples of that movement; but a hundred years later, when
these are clear-set in the tradition, the movement will have become dust
and ashes--the daily bread of historians and archæologists.
Though lecturers still hold up the Renaissance as an example of the
happy and stagnant state of the arts in a golden age when rebels were
unknown, their pupils are aware that Giotto, the father of Renaissance
painting, broke with the _maniera greca_ at least as sharply as Cézanne
did with the nineteenth-century convention; that in the art of the
fifteenth century we have a revolt against Giottesque which must
grievously have wounded many pious souls; and that Raphael himself
stood, in his day, for a new movement. But distance gives a sense of
proportion. We see the art of the Italian Renaissance whole, growing out
of Byzantine and into French. The continuity is patent; and, what is
much to my purpose, it is Giotto and his successors rather than the
artists of the Palaeologie who seem to us to carry on the Byzantine
tradition, while the heirs of the Renaissance are not Salvator Rosa and
Carlo Dolci, but Claude and Poussin. The great artists stand out and
join hands: the contests that clashed around them, the little men that
aped them, the littler that abused, have fallen into one ruin. The odd
thing is that, as often as not, the big men themselves have believed
that it was the tradition, and not the stupid insensibility of their
fellows, that thwarted them. They have made the mistake their enemies
made infallibly: they have taken a dead movement for a live tradition.
For movements die; that is one of the respects in which they differ most
significantly from the tradition. The movement is a vein which is worked
out; the tradition a live thing that changes, grows, and persists. The
artist with a new vision comes on the tradition at its near end, and
finds its implements lying in a heap mixed with the fashions of the
moribund movement. He chooses; he changes; what happens next will depend
a good deal on the state of public opinion. Should the artist have
the luck to be born in a sensitive age and an intelligent country his
innovations may be accepted without undue hubbub. In that case he will
realize that artists can no more dispense with the tradition than
tradition can exist without artists, and will probably come to feel an
almost exaggerated reverence for the monuments of the past. But should
the public be dull and brutish, and hardening the dust of dead movements
into what it is pleased to call "tradition," pelt with that word the
thing which above all others is to dull brutes disquieting--I mean
passionate conviction--the artist, finding himself assailed in the
name of tradition, will probably reply, "Damn the tradition." He will
protest. And, for an artist, to become a protestant is even worse than
using bad language.
Only in France, so far as I know, are the men who are working out the
heritage of Cézanne allowed to be artists and expected to be nothing
more. Elsewhere, the public by its uncritical attitude seems to
encourage them to pose as supermen or to become rebels. Assuredly I am
not advocating that slightly fatuous open-mindedness which led some
Germans to seize on the movement before it was well grown and deal with
it as they have dealt with so many others, collecting its artists as
though they were beetles, bottling them, setting them, cataloguing them,
making no mistake about them, and arranging them neatly in museums for
the dust to settle on. Organized alertness of that sort is only less
depressing than the smartness of those Italians who pounced so promptly
on the journalistic possibilities of the movement as a means of
self-advertisement. All I ask for in the public is a little more
intelligence and sensibility, and a more critical attitude. Surely,
by now, it should be impossible to hear what I heard only the other
day--Mr. Charles Shannon being extolled, to humiliate some enterprising
student, as a "traditional artist." Why, it would be as sensible to call
the man who makes nest-eggs a traditional Buff Orpington! And ought it
still to be possible for a cultivated dealer, because I had refused to
admire a stale old crust by some young New English painter, who, to be
in the movement, had misshaped a few conventionally drawn objects and
put black lines round others--for a dealer, I say, who dabbles in
culture to exclaim indignantly, as one did to me not long ago, "I can't
think why you don't like it: it's Post-Impressionist, isn't it?"
If we cannot lose this habit of calling artists names, at least let us
know exactly what we mean by them. By associating artists with movements
and counter-movements we encourage the superstition that in art there is
some important distinction besides the distinction between good art and
bad. There is not. Such distinctions as can be drawn between the
genuine artists of one age and another, between traditional artists and
eccentrics, though serviceable to historians and archæologists, are
pitfalls for critics and amateurs. To him who can help us better to
appreciate works of art let us be duly grateful: to him who, from their
extraneous qualities, can deduce amusing theories or pleasant fancies
we will listen when we have time: but to him who would persuade us that
their value can in any way depend on some non-æsthetic quality we must
be positively rude. Now, if we are to get rid of those misleading labels
from which works of art are supposed to derive a value over and above
their æsthetic value, the first to go should be those arch-deceivers,
"traditional" and "revolutionary." Let us understand that tradition is
nothing but the essence, congealed and preserved for us by the masters
in their works, of innumerable movements; and that movements are mere
phases of the tradition from which they spring and in which they are
swallowed up. We shall then be armed, on the one hand, against the
solemn bore who requires us to admire his imitation of an old master
because it is in the tradition; on the other, against the portentous
"Ist," whose parthenogenetic masterpiece we are not in a state to relish
till we have sucked down the pseudo-philosophic bolus that embodies his
eponymous "Ism." To each we shall make the same reply: "Be so good as to
remove your irrelevant label and we will endeavour to judge your work on
its merits."
[Illustration: PICASSO (_Collection Paul Rosenberg_)]
The names go together, as do those of Shelley and Keats or Fortnum and
Mason. Even to people who seldom or never look seriously at a picture
they have stood, these ten years, as symbols of modernity. They are
pre-eminent; and for this there is reason. Matisse and Picasso are the
two immediate heirs to Cézanne. They are in the direct line; and through
one of them a great part of the younger generation comes at its share of
the patrimony. To their contemporaries they owe nothing: they came into
the legacy and had to make what they could of it. They are the elder
brothers of the movement, a fact which the movement occasionally resents
by treating them as though they were its elder sisters.
Even to each other they owe nothing. Matisse, to be sure, swept for one
moment out of his course by the overwhelming significance of Picasso's
early abstract work, himself made a move in that direction. But this
adventure he quickly, and wisely, abandoned; the problems of Cubism
could have helped him nothing to materialize his peculiar sensibility.
And this sensibility--this peculiar emotional reaction to what he
sees--is his great gift. No one ever felt for the visible universe just
what Matisse feels; or, if one did, he could not create an equivalent.
Because, in addition to this magic power of creation, Matisse has been
blest with extraordinary sensibility both of reaction and touch, he is
a great artist; because he trusts to it entirely he is not what for a
moment apparently he wished to be--a _chef d'école_.
Picasso, on the other hand, who never tried to be anything of the sort,
is the paramount influence in modern painting--subject, of course, to
the supreme influence of Cézanne. All the world over are students and
young painters to whom his mere name is thrilling; to whom Picasso
is the liberator. His influence is ubiquitous: even in England it is
immense. Not only those who, for all their denials--denials that spring
rather from ignorance than bad faith--owe almost all they have to the
inventor of Cubism, but artists who float so far out of the main stream
as the Spensers and the Nashes, Mr. Lamb and Mr. John, would all have
painted differently had Picasso never existed.
Picasso is a born _chef d'école_. His is one of the most inventive minds
in Europe. Invention is as clearly his supreme gift as sensibility is
that of Matisse. His career has been a series of discoveries, each of
which he has rapidly developed. A highly original and extremely happy
conception enters his head, suggested, probably, by some odd thing he
has seen. Forthwith he sets himself to analyze it and disentangle those
principles that account for its peculiar happiness. He proceeds by
experiment, applying his hypothesis in the most unlikely places. The
significant elements of negro sculpture are found to repeat their
success in the drawing of a lemon. Before long he has established what
looks like an infallible method for producing an effect of which, a few
months earlier, no one had so much as dreamed. This is one reason why
Picasso is a born _chef d'école_. And this is why of each new phase
in his art the earlier examples are apt to be the more vital and
well-nourished. At the end he is approaching that formula towards
which his intellectual effort tends inevitably. It is time for a new
discovery.
Meanwhile a pack of hungry followers has been eyeing the young master as
he made clearer and ever clearer the nature of his last. To this pack
he throws hint after hint. And still the wolves pursue. You see them in
knots and clusters all along the road he has travelled, gnawing, tugging
at some unpicked idea. Worry! worry! worry! Here is a crowd of old
laggards still lingering and snuffling over "the blue period." A vaster
concourse is scattered about the spot where the nigger's head fell, and
of these the strongest have carried off scraps for themselves, which
they assimilate at leisure, lying apart; while round the trunk of Cubism
is a veritable sea of swaying, struggling, ravenous creatures. The
howling is terrific. But Picasso himself is already far away elaborating
an idea that came to him one day as he contemplated a drawing by Ingres.
And, besides being extraordinarily inventive, Picasso is what they call
"an intellectual artist." Those who suppose that an intellectual artist
is one who spends his time on his head mistake. Milton and Mantegna were
intellectual artists: it may be doubted whether Caravaggio and Rostand
were artists at all. An intellectual artist is one who feels first--a
peculiar state of emotion being the point of departure for all works of
art--and goes on to think. Obviously Picasso has a passionate sense of
the significance of form; also, he can stand away from his passion and
consider it; apparently in this detached mood it is that he works. In
art the motive power is heat always; some drive their engines by means
of boiling emotion, others by the incandescence of intellectual passion.
These go forward by intense concentration on the problem; those swing
with breathless precision from feeling to feeling. Sophocles, Masaccio,
and Bach are intellectuals in this sense, while Shakespeare, Correggio,
and Mozart trust their sensibility almost as a bird trusts its instinct.
It never entered the head of a swallow to criticize its own methods;
and if Mozart could not write a tune wrong, that was not because he had
first tested his idea at every point, but because he was Mozart. Yet
no one ever thought of going to a swallow for lessons in aviation; or,
rather, Dædalus did, and we all know what came of it.
That is my point. I do not presume to judge between one method of
creation and another; I shall not judge between Matisse and Picasso; but
I do say that, as a rule, it is the intellectual artist who becomes, in
spite of himself, schoolmaster to the rest. And there is a reason
for this. By expressing themselves intellectual artists appeal to us
æsthetically; but, in addition, by making, or seeming to make, some
statement about the nature of the artistic problem they set us thinking.
We feel sure they have something to say about the very stuff of art
which we, clumsily enough, can grasp intellectually. With purely
æsthetic qualities the intellect can do nothing: but here, it seems, is
something the brain can get hold of. Therefore we study them and they
become our leaders; which does not make them our greatest artists.
Matisse may yet be a better painter than Picasso.
Be that as it may, from Matisse there is little or nothing to be
learned, since Matisse relies on his peculiar sensibility to bring him
through. If you want to paint like him, feel what he feels, conduct it
to the tips of your fingers, thence on to your canvas, and there you
are. The counsel is not encouraging. These airy creatures try us too
high. Indeed, it sometimes strikes me that even to appreciate them
you must have a touch of their sensibility. A critic who is apt to
be sensible was complaining the other day that Matisse had only one
instrument in his orchestra. There are orchestras in which fifty
instruments sound as one. Only it takes a musician to appreciate them.
Also, one hears the others talking about "the pretty, tinkley stuff"
of Mozart. Those who call the art of Matisse slight must either be
insensitive or know little of it. Certainly Matisse is capable of
recording, with an exquisite gesture and not much more, just the smell
of something that looked as though it would be good to eat. These are
notes. Notes are often slight--I make the critics a present of that.
Also of this: it takes a more intense effort of the creative imagination
to leave out what Tchehov leaves out of his short stories than to say
what Meredith put into his long ones.
In the Plutarchian method there was ever a snare, and I have come near
treading in it. The difference between Matisse and Picasso is not to be
stated in those sharp antitheses that every journalist loves. Nothing
could be more obtuse than to represent one as all feeling and the other
all thought. The art of Picasso, as a matter of fact, is perhaps more
personal even than that of Matisse, just because his sensibility is
perhaps even more curious. Look at a Cubist picture by him amongst other
Cubists. Here, if anywhere, amongst these abstractions you would have
supposed that there was small room for idiosyncrasy. Yet at M. Léonce
Rosenberg's gallery no amateur fails to spot the Picassos. His choice
of colours, the appropriateness of his most astonishing audacities, the
disconcerting yet delightful perfection of his taste, the unlooked-for
yet positive beauty of his harmonies make Picasso one of the most
personal artists alive.
And if Picasso is anything but a dry doctrinaire, Matisse is no singing
bird with one little jet of spontaneous melody. I wish his sculpture
were better known in England, for it disposes finely of the ridiculous
notion that Matisse is a temperament without a head. Amongst his bronze
and plaster figures you will find sometimes a series consisting
of several versions of the same subject, in which the original
superabundant conception has been reduced to bare essentials by a
process which implies the severest intellectual effort. Nothing that
Matisse has done gives a stronger sense of his genius, and, at the same
time, makes one so sharply aware of a brilliant intelligence and of
erudition even.
Amongst the hundred differences between Matisse and Picasso perhaps,
after all, there is but one on which a critic can usefully insist. Even
about that he can say little that is definite. Only, it does appear to
be true that whereas Matisse is a pure artist, Picasso is an artist and
something more--an involuntary preacher if you like. Neither, of course,
falls into the habit of puffing out his pictures with literary stuff,
though Picasso has, on occasions, allowed to filter into his art a, to
me, most distasteful dash of sentimentality. That is not the point,
however. The point is that whereas both create without commenting on
life, Picasso, by some inexplicable quality in his statement, does
unmistakably comment on art. That is why he, and not Matisse, is master
of the modern movement.