appreciation. He has the almost impeccable gift for lyrical truth, and
the music of motion is crystallized in his imagination to a masterful
degree. He is the highly sensitized illustrator appointed by the
states of his soul to picture forth the pauses of the journey through
the realm of fancy. It has in it the passion of violet and silver
dreaming, the hue of an endless dawn before the day descends upon the
world. You expect the lute to regain its jaded tune there. You expect
the harp to reverberate once again with the old fervors. You expect
the syrinx to unfold the story of the reed in light song. It contains
the history of all the hushed horizons that can be found over the
edges of a world of materiality. It holds in it always the warm soul
of every digit of the moon. Human passion is for once removed, unless
it be that the mere humanism of motion excites the sense of passion.
You are made to feel the non-essentiality of the stress of the flesh
in the true places of spiritual existence. The life of moments is
carried over and made permanent in fancy, and they endure by the
purity of their presence alone. There is no violence in the work of
Davies. It is the appreciable relation of harmony and counterpoint in
the human heart and mind. It is the logic of rhythmical equation felt
there, almost exclusively. It is the condition of music that art in
the lyrical state has seemed to suggest.
The artistic versatility of Davies is too familiar to comment upon. He
has no distress with mediums. His exceptional sensitivity to substance
and texture gives him the requisite rapport with all species of
mediums to which the artist has access. One might be inclined to think
of him as a virtuoso in pastel possibly, and his paintings in the
medium of oil suggest this sort of richness. He is nevertheless at
home in all ways. All these are issues waved away to my mind, in view
of his acute leaning to the poet that leads the artist away from
problems other than that of Greek rhythmical perfection. It is
essentially a Platonic expression, the desire of the perfect union of
one thing with another. That is its final consummation, so it seems to
me.
REX SLINKARD
"_I doubt not that the passionately wept deaths of young men
are provided for._"--WALT WHITMAN.
We have had our time for regretting the loss of men of genius during
the war. We know the significance of the names of Rupert Brooke,
Edward Thomas, Elroy Flecker on the other side of the sea, to the hope
of England. And on this side of the sea the names of Joyce Kilmer,
Alan Seeger and Victor Chapman have been called out to us for the
poetic spell they cast upon America. All of them in their manful,
poetic way. They were all of them poets in words; all but Victor
Chapman were professional poets, and he, even if he himself was not
aware, gave us some rare bits of loveliness in his letters. There are
others almost nameless among soldier-hero people who gave us likewise
real bits of unsuspected beauty in their unpretentious letters.
Rex Slinkard was a soldier, poet-painter by inclination, and ranchman
as to specific occupation. Rex has gone from us, too. How many are
there who know, or could have known, the magic of this unassuming
visionary person. Only a few of us who understand the meaning of magic
and the meaning of everlasting silences. It is the fortune of America
that there remain with us numbers of highly indicative drawings and a
group of rare canvases, the quality of which painters will at once
acclaim, and poets will at once verify the lyric perfection of,
paintings and drawings among the loveliest we have in point of purity
of conception and feeling for the subtle shades of existence, those
rare states of life which, when they arrive, are called perfect
moments in the poetic experience of men and women.
There will be no argument to offer or to maintain regarding the work
of Rex Slinkard. It is what it is, the perfect evidence that one of
the finest lyric talents to be found among the young creators of
America has been deprived of its chance to bloom as it would like to
have done, as it so eagerly and surely was already doing. Rex Slinkard
was a genius of first quality. The word genius may be used these days
without fear of the little banalities, since anyone who has evolved
for himself a clear vision of life may be said to possess the quality
of genius.
"The day's work done and the supper past. I walk through the horse-lot
and to my shack. Inside I light the lantern, and then the fire, and
sitting, I think of the inhabitants of the earth, and of the world, my
home."
These sentences, out of a letter to a near friend, and the marginalia
written upon the edges of many of his drawings, show the varying
degrees of delicacy Rex was eager to register and make permanent for
his own realization. His thought was once and for all upon the
realities, that is, those substances that are or can be realities
only to the artist, the poet, and the true dreamer, and Rex Slinkard
was all of these. His observation of himself, and his understanding of
himself, were uncommonly genuine in this young and so poetic painter.
He had learned early for so young a man what were his special
idealistic fervors. He had the true romanticist's gift for
refinements, and was working continually toward the rarer states of
being out from the emotional into the intellectual, through spiritual
application into the proper and requisite calm. He lived in a
thoroughly ordered world of specified experience which is typified in
his predilection for the superiority of Chinese notions of beauty over
the more sentimental rhythms of the Greeks. He had found the proper
shade of intellectuality he cared for in this type of Oriental
expression. It was the Buddhistic feeling of reality that gave him
more than the platonic. He was searching for a majesty beyond
sensuousness, by which sensuous experience is transformed into greater
and more enduring shades of beauty. He wanted the very life of beauty
to take the place of sensuous suggestion. Realities in place of
semblances, then, he was eager for, but the true visionary realities
as far finer than the materialistic reality.
He had learned early that he was not, and never would be, the
fantasist that some of his earlier canvases indicate. Even his essays
in portraiture, verging on the realistic, leaned nevertheless more
toward the imaginative reality always. He knew, also, with clarity,
the fine line of decision between imagination and vision, between the
dramatic and the lyric, and had realized completely the supremacy of
the lyric in himself. He was a young boy of light walking on a man's
strong feet upon real earth over which there was no shadow for him. He
walked straightforwardly toward the elysium of his own very personal
organized fancies. His irrigation ditches were "young rivers" for him,
rivers of being, across which white youths upon white horses, and
white fawns were gliding to the measure of their own delights. He had,
this young boy of light, the perfect measure of poetic accuracy
coupled with a man's fine simplicity in him. He had the priceless calm
for the understanding of his own poetic ecstasies. They acted upon him
gently with their own bright pressure. He let them thrive according to
their own relationships to himself. Nothing was forced in the mind and
soul of Rex Slinkard. He was in quest of the modern rapture for
permanent things such as is to be found in "L'après midi d'un Faun" of
Mallarmé and Debussy for instance, in quest of those rare, whiter
proportions of experience. It was radiance and simplicity immingled in
his sense of things.
He would have served his country well as one of its clearest and best
citizens, far more impressively by the growth and expansion of his
soul in his own manly vision, than by the questionable value of his
labors in the military service. He did what he could, gladly and
heroically, but he had become too weakened by the siege of physical
reverses that pursued his otherwise strong body to endure the strain
of labor he performed, or wanted to accomplish. He knew long before he
entered service the significance of discipline from very profound
experience with life from childhood onward. Life had come to him
voluminously because he was one who attracted life to him,
electrically. He did not "whine" or "postpone," for he was in all of
his hours at least mentally and spiritually equal to the world in all
of its aspects. He was physically not there for the thing he
volunteered to do, despite the appearance of manly strength in him, or
thought he would be able to do. He hoped strongly to serve. None knew
his secret so well as himself, and he kept his own secret royally and
amicably.
Exceptional maturity of understanding of life, of nature, and all the
little mysteries that are the shape of human moments, was
conspicuously evidenced for as long as his intimates remember. The
extraordinary measure of calm contained in his last pictures and in so
many of the drawings done in moments of rest in camp is evidence of
all this. He had a boy's brightness and certainty of the fairness of
things, joined with a man's mastery of the simple problem. He was a
true executive in material affairs and his vision was another part of
the business of existence.
As I have said, Rex Slinkard had the priceless poise of the true lyric
poet, and it was the ordered system in his vision that proved him. He
knew the value of his attitudes and he was certain that perfection is
imperishable, and strove with a poet's calm intensity toward that. He
had found his Egypt, his Assyria, his Greece, and his own specific
Nirvana at his feet everywhere.
As he stood attending to the duties of irrigation and the ripening of
the alfalfa crops, he spent the moments otherwise lost in carving
pebbles he found about him with rare gestures and profiles, either of
his own face or body which he knew well, or the grace of other bodies
and faces he had seen. He was always the young eye on things, an avid
eye sure of the wonder about to escape from every living thing where
light or shadow fell upon them gently. He was a sure, unquestionable,
and in this sense a perfect poet, and possessed the undeniable
painter's gift for presentation.
He was of the company of Odilon Redon, of whom he had never heard, in
his feeling for the almost occult presence emanating from everything
he encountered everywhere, and his simple letters to his friends hold
touches of the same beauty his drawings and paintings and carvings on
pebbles contain.
A born mystic and visionary as to the state of his soul, a boy of
light in quest of the real wisdom that is necessary for the lyrical
embodiment, this was Rex Slinkard, the western ranchman and
poet-painter. "I think of the inhabitants of the earth and of the
world, my home." This might have been a marginal note from the Book of
Thel, or it might have been a line from some new songs of innocence
and experience. It might have been spoken from out of one of the oaks
of William Blake. It must have been heard from among the live oaks of
Saugus. It was the simple speech of a ranchman of California, a real
boy-man who loved everything with a poet's love because everything
that lived, lived for him.
Such were the qualities of Rex Slinkard, who would like to have
remained in the presence of his friends, the inhabitants of the earth,
to have lived long in the world, his home.
It is all a fine clear testimony to the certainty of youth, perhaps
the only certainty there can be. He was the calm declaimer of the life
of everlasting beauty. He saw with a glad eye the "something" that is
everywhere at all times, and in all places, for the poet's and the
visionary's eye at least. He was sure of what he saw; his paintings
and drawings are a firm conviction of that. Like all who express
themselves clearly, he wanted to say all he had to say. At thirty he
had achieved expression remarkably. He had found the way out, and the
way out was toward and into the light. He was clear, and entirely
unshadowed.
This is Rex Slinkard, ranchman, poet-painter, and man of the living
world. Since he could not remain, he has left us a carte visite of
rarest clarity and beauty. We who care, among the few, for things in
relation to essences, are glad Rex Slinkard lived and laughed and
wondered, and remained the little while. The new silence is but a
phase of the same living one he covered all things with. He was glad
he was here. He was another angle of light on the poetic world around
us, another unsuspected facet of the bright surface of the world.
Surfaces were for him, too, something to be "deepened" with a fresh
vividness. He had the irresistible impulse to decorate and to decorate
consistently. His sense of decoration was fluid and had no hint of the
rhetorical in it. He felt everything joined together, shape to shape,
by the harmonic insistence in life and in nature. A flower held a
face, and a face held a flowery substance for him. Bodies were young
trees in bloom, and trees were lines of human loveliness. The body of
the man, the body of the woman, beautiful male and female bodies, the
ideal forms of everyone and everything he encountered, he understood
and made his own. They were all living radiances against the dropped
curtain of the world. He loved the light on flesh, and the shadows on
strong arms, legs, and breasts. He avoided theory, either philosophic
or esthetic. He had traveled through the ages of culture in his
imagination, and was convinced that nothing was new and nothing was
old. It was all living and eternal when it was genuine. He stepped out
of the world of visible realities but seldom, and so it was, books and
methods of interpretation held little for him. He didn't need them,
for he held the whole world in his arms through the power of dream and
vision. He touched life everywhere, touched it with himself.
Rex Slinkard went away into a celestial calm October 18, 1918, in St.
Vincent's Hospital, New York City. It is the few among those of us who
knew him as poet and visionary and man, who wish earnestly that Rex
might have remained. He gave much that many wanted, or would have
wanted if they had had the opportunity of knowing him. The pictures
and drawings that remain are the testimony of his splendid poetic
talents. He was a lyrical painter of the first order. He is something
that we miss mightily, and shall miss for long.
SOME AMERICAN WATER-COLORISTS
With the arrival of Cézanne into the field of water-color painting,
this medium suffers a new and drastic instance for comparison. It is
not technical audacity alone, of course, that confronts us in these
brilliantly achieved performances, so rich in form as well as radiant
with light. It is not the kind of virility for its own sake that is
typical of our own American artists so gifted in this special medium,
like Whistler, Sargent, Winslow Homer, Dodge Macknight, John Marin,
and Charles Demuth. With Cézanne it was merely a new instrument to
employ for the realization of finer plastic relations. The medium of
water-color has been ably employed by the English and the Dutch
painters, but it seems as if the artists of both these countries
succeeded in removing all the brilliance and charm as well as the
freshness which is peculiar to it; few outside of Cézanne have, I
think, done more with water-color than the above named American
artists, none who have kept more closely and consistently within the
confines and peculiarities of this medium.
In the consideration of the American water-color artists it will be
found that Sargent and Homer tend always toward the graphic aspect of
a pictorial idea, yet it is Homer who relieves his pictures of this
obsession by a brilliant appreciation of the medium for its own sake.
Homer steps out of the dry conventionalism of the English style of
painting, which Sargent does not do. Much of that metallic harshness
which is found in the oil pictures of Homer is relieved in the
water-colors and there is added to this their extreme virtuosity, and
a great distinction to be discovered in their sense of light and life,
the sense of the object illumined with a wealth of vibrancy that is
peculiar to its environment, particularly noticeable in the Florida
series.
Dodge Macknight has seen with a keen eye the importance of this
virility of technique to be found in Homer, and has added to this a
passion for impressionistic veracity which heightens his own work to a
point distinctly above that of Sargent, and one might almost say above
Winslow Homer. Macknight really did authenticate for himself the
efficacy of impression with almost incredible feats of visual bravery.
There is no array of pigment sufficient to satisfy him as for what
heat and cold do to his sensibility, as experienced by the opposite
poles of a New England winter and a tropical Mexican landscape. He is
always in search of the highest height in contrasts, all this joined
by what his sense of fierceness of light could bring to the fantastic
dune stretches of Cape Cod in fiery autumn. His work in water-color
has the convincing charm of almost fanaticism for itself; and we find
this medium progressing still further with the fearlessness of John
Marin in the absolute at-home-ness which he displays on all occasions
in his audacious water-color pictures.
Marin brings you to the feeling that digression is for him imperative
only as affording him relief from the tradition of his medium. John
Marin employs all the restrictions of water-color with the wisdom that
is necessary in the case. He says that paper plus water, plus emotion
will give a result in themselves and proceeds with the idea at hand in
what may without the least temerity be called a masterly fashion; he
has run the gamut of experience with his materials from the earliest
Turner tonalities, through Whisterian vagaries on to American
definiteness, and has incidentally noted that the Chinese have been
probably the only supreme masters of the wash in the history of
water-color painting. I can say for myself that Marin produces the
liveliest, handsomest wash that is producible or that has ever been
accomplished in the field of water-color painting. Perhaps many of the
pictures of John Marin were not always satisfying in the tactile sense
because many of them are taken up with an inevitable passion for
technical virtuosity, which is no mean distinction in itself but we
are not satisfied as once we were with this passion for audacity and
virtuosity. We have learned that spatial existence and spatial
relationships are the important essentials in any work of art. The
precise ratio of thought accompanied by exactitude of emotion for the
given idea is a matter of serious consideration with the modern
artists of today. That is the special value of modern painting to the
development of art.
The Chinese really knew just what a wash was capable of, and confined
themselves to the majesty of the limitations at hand. John Marin has
been wise in this also though he is not precisely fanatical, which may
be his chief defect, and it is probably true that the greatest
experimenters have shown fanatical tendency, which is only the
accentuated spirit of obsession for an idea. How else does one hold a
vision? It is the only way for an artist to produce plastic exactitude
between two planes of sensation or thought. The parts must be as
perfect as the whole and in the best art this is so. There must be the
sense of "existence" everywhere and it might even be said that the
cool hue of the intellect is the first premise in a true work of art.
Virtuosity is a state of expression but it is not the final state. One
must search for as well as find the sequential quality which is
necessitated for the safe arrival of a work of art into the sphere of
esthetic existence.
The water-colors of John Marin are restless with energy, which is in
its way a real virtue. They do, I think, require, at times at least,
more of the calm of research and less of the excitement of it. All
true artistry is self-contained and never relies upon outer physical
stimulus or inward extravagance of phantasy, or of idiosyncrasy. A
work of art is never peculiar, it is always a natural thing. In this
sense John Marin approaches real art because he is probably the most
natural water-colorist in existence.
With Charles Demuth water-color painting steps up into the true
condition of ideas followed by experience. He has joined with
modernism most consistently, having arrived at this state of
progression by the process of investigation. The tradition of
water-color painting takes a jump into the new field of modernism, and
Demuth has given us his knowledge of the difference between
illustration, depiction, and the plastic realization of fact. Probably
no young artist has accomplished a finer degree of artistic finesse in
illustration than has Charles Demuth in his series of illustrations
for "The Two Magics" of Henry James, or more explicitly to say "The
Turn of the Screw". These pictures are to the true observer all that
could be hoped for in imaginative sincerity as well as in technical
elusiveness. Demuth has since that time stepped out of the confinement
of water-color pure, over into the field of tempera, which brings it
nearer to the sturdier mediums employed in the making of pictures
evolving a greater severity of form and a commendable rigidity of
line. He has learned like so many moderns that the ruled line offers
greater advantages in pictorial structure. You shall find his approach
to the spirit of Christopher Wren is as clear and direct as his
feeling for the vastiness of New England speechlessness. He has come
up beyond the dramatisation of emotion to the point of expression for
its own sake. But he is nevertheless to be included among the arrived
water-colorists, because his gifts for expression have been evolved
almost entirely through this medium. There is then a fine American
achievement in the art of water-color painting which may safely be
called at this time a localized tradition. It has become an American
realization.
THE APPEAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Photography is an undeniable esthetic problem upon our modern artistic
horizon. The idea of photography as an art has been discussed no doubt
ever since the invention of the pinhole. In the main, I have always
said for myself that the kodak offers me the best substitute for the
picture of life, that I have found. I find the snapshot, almost
without exception, holding my interest for what it contains of simple
registration of and adherence to facts for themselves. I have had a
very definite and plausible aversion to the "artistic" photograph, and
we have had more than a surfeit of this sort of production for the
past ten or fifteen years. I have referred frequently in my mind to
the convincing portraits by David Octavius Hill as being among the
first examples of photographic portraiture to hold my own private
interest as clear and unmanipulated expressions of reality; and it is
a definite as well as irresistible quality that pervades these
mechanical productions, the charm of the object for its own sake.
It was the irrelevant "artistic" period in photography that did so
much to destroy the vital significance of photography as a type of
expression which may be classed as among the real arts of today. And
it was a movement that failed because it added nothing to the idea
save a distressing superficiality. It introduced a fog on the brain,
that was as senseless as it was embarrassing to the eye caring
intensely for precision of form and accuracy of presentation.
Photography was in this sense unfortunate in that it fell into the
hands of adepts at the brush who sought to introduce technical
variations which had nothing in reality to do with it and with which
it never could have anything in common. All this sort of thing was
produced in the age of the famous men and women, the period of
eighteen ninety-five to nineteen hundred and ten say, for it was the
age when the smart young photographer was frantic to produce famous
sitters like Shaw and Rodin. We do not care anything about such things
in our time because we now know that anybody well photographed
according to the scope as well as the restrictions of the medium at
hand could be, as has been proven, an interesting subject.