all of them, and a fine feeling for the poetic shades of existence.
They were intensely serious men, and I think from their isolation in
various ways, not popular in their time. Neither are they popular now.
They will only be admired by artists of perception, and by laymen of
keen sensibility. Whether their enforced isolations taught them to
brood, or whether they were brooders by nature, it is difficult to
say. I think they were all easterners, and this would explain away
certain characteristic shynesses of temper and of expression in them.
Ryder, as we know, was the typical recluse, Fuller in all likelihood
also. Martin I know little of privately, but his portrait shows him to
be a strong elemental nature, with little feeling for, or interest in,
the superficialities either of life or of art. Of Blakelock I can say
but little, for I do not know him beyond a few stylish canvases which
seem to have more of Diaz and Rousseau in them than contributes to
real originality, and he was one of the painters of repetition also. A
single good Blakelock is beautiful, and I think he must be included
among the American imaginatives, but I do not personally feel the
force of him in several canvases together.
All of these artists are singularly individual, dreamers like Mathew
Maris and Marées of Europe. They all have something of Coleridge about
them, something of Poe, something of the "Ancient Mariner" and the
"Haunted Palace", sailors in the same ship, sleepers in the same
house. All of these men were struggling at the same time, the painters
I mean, the same hour it might be said, in the midst of conventions
of a severer type of rigidity than now, to preserve themselves from
commonplace utterance. They were not affected by fashions. They had
the one idea in mind, to express themselves in terms of themselves,
and they were singularly successful in this despite the various
difficulties of circumstance and of temper that attended them. They
understood what this was better than anyone, and the results in
varying degrees of genius attest to the quality of the American
imagination at its best.
I should like, for purposes of reference, to see a worthy exhibition
of all of these men in one place. It would I am sure prove my
statement that the eastern genius is naturally a tragic one, for all
of these men have hardly once ventured into the clear sunlight of the
world of every day. It would offset highly also, the superficial
attitude that there is no imagination in American painting. We should
not find so much of form or of colour in them in the stricter meaning
of these ideas, as of mood. They might have set themselves to be
disciples of William Blake's significant preachment, "put off
intellect and put on imagination, the imagination is the man"; the
intellect being the cultivated man, and the imagination being the
natural man. There is imagination which by reason of its power and
brilliance exceeds all intellectual effort, and effort at
intellectualism is worse than a fine ignorance by far. Men who are
highly imaginative, create by feeling what they do not or cannot
know. It is the sixth sense of the creator.
These artists were men alone, touched with the pristine significance
of nature. It was pioneering of a difficult nature, precarious as all
individual investigation of a spiritual or esthetic character is sure
to be. Its first requisite is isolation, its last requisite is
appreciation. All of these painters are gone over into that place they
were so eager to investigate, illusion or reality. Their pictures are
witness here to their seriousness. They testify to the bright
everlastingness of beauty. If they have not swayed the world, they
have left a dignified record in the art of a given time. Their
contemporary value is at least inestimable. They are among the very
first in the development of esthetics in America in point of merit.
They made no compromise, and their record is clear.
If one looks over the record of American art up to the period of
ultra-modernism, it will be found that these men are the true
originals among American painters. We shall find outside of them and a
very few others, so much of sameness, a certain academic convention
which, however pronounced or meagre the personalities are, leave those
personalities in the category of "safe" painters. They do not disturb
by an excessively intimate point of view toward art or toward nature.
They come up to gallery requirements by their "pleasantness" or the
inoffensiveness of their style. They offer little in the way of
interpretive power or synthetic understanding. It is the tendency to
keep on the comfortable side in American art. Doubtless it is more
practical as any innovator or investigator has learned for himself.
Artists like Ryder and Martin and Fuller had nothing in common with
market appreciations. They had ideas to express, and were sincere to
the last in expressing them.
You will find little trace of commercialism in these men, even when,
as in the case of Martin and Ryder and I do not know whom else, they
did panels for somebody-or-other's leather screen, of which
"Smuggler's Cove" and the other long panel of Ryder's in the
Metropolitan Museum are doubtless two. They were not successful in
their time because they could not repeat their performances. We know
the efforts that were once made to make Ryder comfortable in a
conventional studio, which he is supposed to have looked into once;
and then he disappeared, as it was altogether foreign to him. Each
picture was a new event in the lives of these men, and had to be
pondered over devoutly, and for long periods often, as in the case of
Ryder. Work was for him nine-tenths reflection and meditation and
poetic brooding, and he put down his sensations on canvas with great
difficulty in the manner of a labourer. It seems obvious that his
first drafts were always vivid with the life intended for them, but no
one could possibly have suffered with the idea of how to complete a
picture more than he. His lack of facility held him from spontaneity,
as it is likewise somewhat evident in Martin, and still more in
Fuller.
They were artists in timidity, and had not the courage of physical
force in painting. With them it was wholly a mental process. But we
shall count them great for their purity of vision as well as for the
sincerity and conviction that possessed them. Artistry of this sort
will be welcomed anywhere, if only that we may take men seriously who
profess seriousness. There is nothing really antiquated about
sincerity, though I think conventional painters are not sure of that.
It is not easy to think that men consent to repeat themselves from
choice, and yet the passing exhibitions are proof of that. Martin and
Ryder and Fuller refresh us with a poetic and artistic validity which
places them out of association among men of their time or of today, in
the field of objective and illustrative painters. We turn to them with
pleasure after a journey through the museums, for their reticence let
us say, and for the refinement of their vision, their beautiful gift
of restraint. They emphasize the commonness of much that surrounds
them, much that blatantly would obscure them if they were not
pronouncedly superior. They would not be discounted to any
considerable degree if they were placed among the known masters of
landscape painters of all modern time. They would hold their own by
the verity of feeling that is in them, and what they might lose in
technical excellence, would be compensated for in uniqueness of
personality. I should like well to see them placed beside artists like
Maris and Marées, and even Courbet. It would surprise the casual
appreciator much, I believe.
OUR IMPRESSIONISTS
I have for purely personal reasons chosen the two painters who
formulate for me the conviction that there have been and are but two
consistently convincing American impressionists. These gentlemen are
John H. Twachtman and Theodore Robinson. I cannot say precisely in
what year Twachtman died but for purposes intended here this data is
of no paramount consequence, save that it is always a matter of query
as to just how long an artist must live, or have been dead, to be
discovered in what is really his own time.
John H. Twachtman as artist is difficult to know even by artists; for
his work is made difficult to see either by its scarcity as determined
for himself or by the exclusiveness of the owners of his pictures. It
requires, however, but two or three of them to convince one that
Twachtman has a something "plus" to contribute to his excursions into
impressionism. One feels that after a Duesseldorf blackness which
permeates his earlier work his conversion to impressionism was as
fortunate as it was sincere. Twachtman knew, as is evidenced
everywhere in his work, what he wished to essay and he proceeded with
poetic reticence to give it forth. With a lyricism that is as
convincing as it is authentic, you feel that there is a certain
underlying spirit of resignation. He surely knew that a love of
sunlight would save any man from pondering on the inflated importance
of world issues.
Having seen Twachtman but once my memory of his face recalls this
admixture of emotion. He cared too much for the essential beauties to
involve them with analyses extraneous to the meaning of beauty. That
the Japanese did more for him than any other Orientals of whom he
might have been thinking, is evident. For all that, his own personal
lyricism surmounts his interest in outer interpretations of light and
movement, and he leaves you with his own notion of a private and
distinguished appreciation of nature. In this sense he leads one to
Renoir's way of considering nature which was the pleasure in nature
for itself. It was all too fine an adventure to quibble about.
Twachtman's natural reticence and, I could also believe, natural
skepticism kept him from swinging wildly over to the then new
theories, a gesture typical of less intelligent natures. He had the
good sense to feel out for himself just where the new theories related
to himself and set about producing flat simplicity of planes of color
to produce a very distinguished notion of light. He dispensed with the
photographic attitude toward objectivity and yet at the same time held
to the pleasing rhythmical shapes in nature. He did not resort to
divisionalism or to ultra-violence of relationship. The pictures that
I have seen such as "February", for instance, in the Boston Museum,
present for me the sensation of a man of great private spiritual and
intellectual means, having the wish to express tactfully and
convincingly his personal conclusions and reactions, leaning always
toward the side of iridescent illusiveness rather than emotional
blatancy and irrelevant extravagance. His nuances are perhaps too
finely adjusted to give forth the sense of overwhelming magic either
in intention or of execution. It is lyrical idea with Twachtman with
seldom or never a dramatic gesture. He is as illusive as a phrase of
Mallarmé and it will be remembered that he is of the period more or
less of the rose and the lily and the lost idea in poetry. He does
recall in essence at least the quality of pastels in prose, though the
art intention is a sturdier one. It is enough that Twachtman did find
his relationship to impressionism, and that he did not evolve a system
of repetition which marks the failure of all influence.
Twachtman remains an artist of super-fine sensibility and distinction,
and whatever he may have poured into the ears of students as an
instructor left no visible haggard traces on his own production other
than perhaps limiting that production. But we know that while the
quality is valuable in respect of power it has no other precise value.
We remember that Giorgione perished likewise with an uncertain product
to his credit, as to numbers, but he did leave his immemorial
impression. So it is with John H. Twachtman. He leaves his indelible
influence among Americans as a fine artist, and he may be said to be
among the few artists who, having taken up the impressionistic
principle, found a way to express his personal ideas with a true
degree of personal force. He is a beautifully sincere product and that
is going far. Those pictures I have seen contain no taint of the
market or clamoring for praise even. They were done because their
author had an unobtrusive yet very aristocratic word to say, and the
word was spoken with authority. John H. Twachtman must be counted as
one of the genuine American artists, as well as among the most genuine
artists of the world. If his pictures do not torment one with
problematic intellectualism, they do hold one with their inherent
refinement of taste and a degree of aristocratic approach which his
true intelligence implies.
With the work of Theodore Robinson, there comes a wide divergence of
feeling that is perhaps a greater comprehension of the principles of
impressionism as applied to the realities involved in the academic
principle. One is reminded of Bastien Le Page and Léon L'Hermitte, in
the paintings of Robinson, as to their type of subject and the
conception of them also. That he lived not far from Giverney is
likewise evident. Being of New England yankee extraction, a Vermonter
I believe, he must have essayed always a sense of economy in emotion.
No one could have gone so far as the then incredible Monet, whose
pictures wear us to indifference with vapid and unprofitable
thinking. What Monet did was to encourage a new type of audacity and a
brand-new type in truth, when no one had up to then attempted to see
nature as prismatical under the direct influence of the solar rays.
All this has since been worked out with greater exactitude by the
later theorists in modernism.
While Van Gogh was slowly perishing of a mad ecstasy for light,
covering up a natural Dutch realism with fierce attempts at prismatic
relationship, always with the rhythms in a state of ecstatic
ascendency; and Seurat had come upon the more satisfying pointillism
as developed by himself; somewhere in amid all these extravagances men
like Robinson were trying to combine orthodoxy of heritage and
radicalist conversion with the new and very noble idea of
impressionism. That Robinson succeeded in a not startling but
nevertheless honorable and respectable fashion, must be conceded him.
I sometimes think that Vignon, a seemingly obscure associate of the
impressionists, with a similar impassioned feeling of realism, outdid
him and approached closer to the principles as understood by Pissarro:
probably better by a great deal than Monet himself, who is accredited
with the honor of setting the theme moving in a modern line of that
day. And Pissarro must have been a man to have so impressed all the
men young and old of his time. After seeing a great number of Monet's
one turns to any simple Pissarro for relief. And then there was also
Sisley.
But the talk is of Theodore Robinson. He holds his place as a realist
with hardly more than a realist's conception, subjoined to a really
pleasing appreciation of the principles of impressionism as imbibed by
him from the source direct. Here are, then, the two true American
impressionists, who, as far as I am aware, never slipped into the
banalities of reiteration and marketable self-copy. They seem to have
far more interest in private intellectual success than in a practical
public one. It is this which helped them both, as it helps all serious
artists, to keep their ideas clean of outward taint. This is one of
the most important factors, which gives a man a place in the art he
essays to achieve. When the day of his work is at an end it will be
seen by everyone precisely what the influences were that prompted his
effort toward deliverance through creation. It is for the sake of this
alone that sincere artists keep to certain principles, and with
genuine sacrifice often, as was certainly the case with Twachtman. And
after all, how can a real artist be concerned as to just how salable
his product is to be? Certainly not while he is working, if he be
decent toward himself. This is of course heresy, with Wall Street so
near.
ARTHUR B. DAVIES
If Arthur B. Davies had found it necessary, as in the modern time it
has been found necessary to separate literature from painting, we
should doubtless have had a very delicate and sensitive lyric poetry
in book form. Titles for pictures like "Mirrored Dreaming,"
"Sicily-Flowering Isle," "Shell of Gold," "A Portal of the Night,"
"Mystic Dalliance," are all of them creations of an essentially poetic
and literary mind. They are all splendid titles for a real book of
legendary experience. The poet will be first to feel the accuracy of
lyrical emotion in these titles. The paintings lead one away entirely
into the land of legend, into the iridescent splendor of reflection.
They take one out of a world of didactic monotone, as to their
artistic significance. They are essentially pictures created for the
purpose of transportation.
From the earlier days in that underground gallery on Fifth Avenue near
Twenty-seventh Street to the present time, there has been a constantly
flowing production of lyrical simplicity and purification. One can
never think of Davies as one thinks of Courbet and of Cézanne, where
the intention is first and last a technically esthetic one; especially
in Cézanne, whose object was the removal of all significance from
painting other than that of painting for itself. With Cézanne it was
problem. One might even say it was the removal of personality. With
Davies you are aware that it is an entirely intimate personal life he
is presenting; a life entirely away from discussion, from all sense of
problem; they are not problematic at all, his pictures; they have
lyrical serenity as a basis, chiefly. Often you have the sensation of
looking through a Renaissance window upon a Greek world--a world of
Platonic verities in calm relation with each other. It is essentially
an art created from the principle of the harmonic law in nature,
things in juxtaposition, cooperating with the sole idea of a poetic
existence. The titles cover the subjects, as I have suggested. Arthur
B. Davies is a lyric poet with a decidedly Celtic tendency. It is the
smile of a radiant twilight in his brain. It is a country of green
moon whispers and of shadowed movement. Imagination illuminating the
moment of fancy with rhythmic persuasiveness. It is the Pandaean
mystery unfolded with symphonic accompaniment. You have in these
pictures the romances of the human mind made irresistible with melodic
certainty. They are _chansons sans paroles_, sung to the syrinx in
Sicilian glades.
I feel that it is our own romantic land transposed into terms of
classical metre. The color is mostly Greek, and the line is Greek. You
could just as well hear Glück as Keats; you could just as well see the
world by the light of the virgin lamp, and watch the smoke of old
altars coiling among the cypress boughs. The redwoods of the West
become columns of Doric eloquence and simplicity. The mountains and
lakes of the West have become settings for the reading of the
"Centaur" of Maurice de Guerin. You see the reason for the titles
chosen because you feel that the poetry of line and the harmonic
accompaniment of color is the primal essential. They are not so
dynamic as suggestive in their quality of finality. The way is left
open, in other words, for you yourself to wander, if you will, and
possess the requisite instincts for poetry.
The presence of Arthur B. Davies, and conversation with him convince
one that poetry and art are in no sense a diversion or a delusion
even. They are an occupation, a real business for intelligent men and
women. He is occupied with the essential qualities of poetry and
painting. He is eclectic by instinct. Spiritually he arrives at his
conviction through these unquestionable states of lyrical existence.
He is there when they happen. That is authenticity sufficient. They
are not wandering moods. They are organized conditions and attitudes,
intellectually appreciated and understood. He is a mystic only in the
sense that perhaps all lyrical poetry is mystic, since it strives for
union with the universal soul in things.
It is perfectly autobiographical, the work of Arthur B. Davies, and
that is so with all genuine expression. You find this gift for
conviction in powerful painter types, like Courbet and Delacroix, who
are almost propagandic in their fiercely defined insistence upon the
chosen esthetic principle. Whatever emanation, illusion, or "aura,"
dreadful word that it is, springing from the work of Davies, is only
typical of what comes from all magical intentions, the magic of the
world of not-being, made real through the operation of true fancy.
Davies' pictures are works of fancy, then, in contradistinction to the
essays of the imagination such as those of William Blake. Poets like
Davies are lookers-in. Poets like Blake are the austere residents of
the country they wander in. The lookers-in are no less genuine. They
merely "make" their world. It might be said they make the prosaic
world over again, transform it by a system of prescribed magic. This
work, then, becomes states of fancy dramatized in lyric metre. Davies
feels the visionary life of facts as a scientist would feel them
actually. He has the wish for absolute order and consistency. There is
nothing vague or disconcerting in his work, no lapses of rhetoric. It
is, in its way, complete, one may say, since it is the intelligently
contrived purpose of this poet to arrive at a scheme of absolute
spiritual harmony.
He is first of all the poet-painter in the sense that Albert Ryder is
a painter for those with a fine comprehension of the imagination.
Precisely as Redon is an artist for artists, though not always their
artist in convincing esthetics, he too, satisfies the instinct for
legend, for transformation. Painters like Davies, Redon, Rops, Moreau,
and the other mystical natures, give us rather the spiritual trend of
their own lives. In Redon and in Davies the vision is untouched by the
foul breath of the world around them. In Rops and Moreau you feel the
imagination hurrying to the arms and breasts of vice for their sense
of home. The pathos of deliverance is urgent in them. In the work of
Davies, and of Redon, there is the splendid silence of a world created
by themselves, a world for the reflection of self. There is even a
kind of narcissian arrogance, the enchantment of the illumined fact.
Beauty recognizing herself with satisfaction--that seems to be the
purpose of the work of Arthur B. Davies. It is so much outside the
realm of scientific esthetics as hardly to have been more than
overheard. These pictures are efficiently exemplary of the axiom that
"all art aspires to the condition of music." I could almost hear
Davies saying that, as if Pater had never so much as thought of it.
They literally soothe with a rare poetry painted for the eye. They are
illuminations for the manuscripts of the ascetic soul. They are
windows for houses in which men and women may withdraw, and be
reconciled to the doom of isolation.
With the arrival of Cubism into the modern esthetic scene, there
appeared a change in the manner of creation, though the same methods
of invention remained chiefly without change. The result seems more
in the nature of kaleidoscopic variance, a perhaps more acutely
realized sense of opposites, than in the former mode. They register
less completely, it seems to me, because the departure is too sudden
in the rhythmus of the artist. The art of Davies is the art of a
melodious curved line. Therefore the sudden angularity is abrupt to an
appreciative eye.