Friesz is a painter who has "come on" visibly since the war. He has
drawn right away from "the field" to join those leaders--Matisse,
Picasso, Derain, Bonnard, shall we say, with one or two more in close
attendance--a cursory glance at whom, as they flash by, provokes this
not unprofitable exclamation: "How different they are!" Apparently,
amongst the chiefs, that famous movement no longer counts for much. Look
at them; to an eye at all practised these artists are as unlike each
other as are hounds to the eye of a huntsman. Certainly, they all owe
something to Cézanne: but what other important characteristic have they
in common which they do not share with the best of the last hundred
years? It was ever thus: the best, who are all alike in some ways, in
others are, from the first, the most sharply differentiated simply
because they are the most personal. Also, as they mature they become
more and more peculiar because they tend to rely less and less on
anything but themselves and the grand tradition. Each creates and
inhabits a world of his own, which, by the way, he is apt to mistake for
the world of everyone who is not maliciously prejudiced against him. And
Friesz, whose character and intelligence are utterly unlike those of his
compeers, is now, naturally enough, producing work which has little in
common with that even of Matisse--
[Illustration: OTHON FRIESZ]
Matisse, to whom, not fifteen years ago, I saw a picture of his
attributed by a competent amateur who was the friend of both.
Friesz has an air of being more professional than any other artist of
this first rank--for Marchand, I think, is not quite of it. Indeed,
for a moment, Friesz may appear alarmingly professional. Certainly, he
leaves nothing to chance: all is planned, and planned not in haste and
agitation, fingers itching to be at it, but with the deliberation, the
critical thoroughness, of an engineer or an architect. There is so much
of the painstaking craftsman in his method that for a moment you may
overlook the sensitive artist who conceives and executes. But, in fact,
the effective alliance of practical intelligence with fine sensibility
is the secret of his strength, as I realized one day, when I had the
privilege of studying a large decoration (a sketch for a fragment of
which is to be seen in this exhibition) [V] which Friesz had just carried
out. Since then I have not doubted that he was the man who might give
this age that of which the age talks much and gets little--monumental
decoration.
[Footnote V: At the Independent Gallery, 1921.]
Large decorative schemes--when they are not, what most are, mere wastes
of tumid pomposity--are apt to fail for one of two reasons: either they
are too much like pictures or too little like works of art. Because very
few artists are capable by taking thought of adapting their means to an
unfamiliar end, it will happen that a sensitive and gifted painter sets
about a decoration as though he were beginning an easel picture. He has
his sense of the importance of richness, of filling a picture to the
brim; he has a technique adequate to his conception; but he has neither
the practical readiness nor the intellectual robustness which would
enable him to adjust these to a new problem. He endeavours, therefore,
to key every part of his scheme up to the highest pitch of intensity
that line and colour can bear. He is attempting the impossible; his
conception is inappropriate; and, in any case, his technique is unequal
to so vast an undertaking. He produces something which may be delicious
in detail but is pretty sure to be unsatisfactory as a whole. He fails
to fill his space. His work has the vice of Sidney's _Arcadia_ and the
_Religio Medici_: it is good to dip into. You cannot write an epic as
though it were a sonnet.
On the other hand, you must not write an epic as though you were telling
a tale in the bar-parlour, lest you should create another _Earthly
Paradise_, leaving quite untouched the subtler and more energetic chords
in your listener's appreciative faculty. The craftsman decorator, though
he may know how to fill vast spaces, will never fill them with lively
images. His plan may be cleverly devised to surmount difficulties of
structure and material; it will not be inspired. Incapable of keying
his instrument too high, he will be satisfied with a slack string and
abominable flatness. His forms will be conventional; his handling
impersonal; ten to one he will give us a row of insipid Gothic figures
or something in the pseudo-Veronese taste.
Almost everyone would admit that, considered as pictures, those great
decorations in the Doges' Palace were a little empty; no one can deny
that as parts of a vast scheme they are superbly adequate. Very much the
same might be said of the decorations I have in mind. It is clear that
Friesz plotted and reasoned with himself until he had contrived a method
of matching means with ends. By constructing it out of forms less
charged, more fluent, and more in the nature of arabesques than those
he habitually employs he gave to his scheme continuity and easy
comprehensibility: but never did he allow those forms to subside into
mere coloured spaces, or the lines to become mere flourishes: always
every detail was doing something, and so the whole was significant and
alive. The scheme which was planned with caution was carried through
with passion.
Now, obviously, a painter capable of performing this feat must possess a
rare, at this moment possibly unique, gift. Friesz is one who can bring
the whole weight of his intellect to bear on his sensibility. That
sensibility let no one underrate. Before his vision of the external
world, especially before what we are pleased to call Nature, Friesz has
a reaction as delicate and enthusiastic as that of an English poet.
Only, unlike most English painters, he would never dream of jotting it
down and leaving it at that. Such hit-or-miss frivolity is not in his
way. He is no amateur. He takes his impressions home and elaborates
them; he brings his intellect to bear on them; and, as this exhibition
shows, without robbing them of their bloom, makes of them something
solid and satisfying. To realize what a power this is we may, I hope
without indiscretion, glance for an instant at another handsomely
endowed French painter. That M. Lhote does not want for sensibility is
shown by his sketches and water-colours, that his intellect is sharp
enough is proved by his writings; but the devitalized rectitude of his
more ambitious pieces shows how appallingly difficult it is to bring
intellect to bear on sensibility without crushing it. The failure of M.
Lhote is the measure of M. Friesz's achievement.
If I am right, it is only natural that pictures by Friesz should improve
on acquaintance. The studied logic of the composition may for a time
absorb the spectator's attention and blind him to more endearing
qualities; but, sooner or later, he will begin to perceive not only that
a scrupulously honest vision has been converted into a well-knit design,
but that the stitches are lovely. In every part he will be discovering
subtle and seductive harmonies and balances of which the delicacy dawns
on him as he gazes. The more he looks the more will he get of that
curiously gratifying thrill which comes of the recognition of
unostentatious rightness.
But, though he offers the sensitive amateur an unusually generous
allowance of the amateur's most delicate pleasure, Friesz is, above all,
a painters' painter. He has been called a theorist. And, because he is a
painter of exceptionally good understanding, who thinks logically about
his art and can find words for what he thinks, I suppose the appellation
is admissible. But, remember, he never dreams of trying to convert his
theories of art into theories of life. His are not of the kind that can
be so converted; I said he was a painters', not a journalists', painter.
Also, unlike the theories of the mere craftsman, his are based always
on the assumption that there is such a thing as art--something that
is created by and appeals to peculiar faculties, something rare and
personal, something not to be had simply by taking thought and pains,
something as utterly unlike honest craftsmanship as it is unlike the
cryptic mutterings of boozy mountebanks: subject, however, to this
assumption, his theories are severely practical. They have to do solely
with the art of painting; they are born of his own experience; and
he makes visible use of them. That is why I call Friesz a painters'
painter. I wonder whether the Italian Primitives, with that
disquietingly unself-conscious inspiration of theirs, directed with such
amazing confidence along well devised, practical channels, were not a
little like him.
The exhibition is fairly representative of Friesz's later work; and if
it cannot be said quite to summarize a stage of his career, at least it
is a milestone. Friesz has arrived: that is to say, what he has already
achieved suffices to affirm the existence of a distinct, personal talent
entitled to its place in the republic of painting. At that point we
leave him. But we may be sure that, with his remarkable gift and
even more remarkable power of turning it to account, his energy, his
patience, and his manifest ambition, he will soon have gone beyond it.