_Paris_
_Section_ 1. _French Realism._
” 2. _The Uses of Fashion._
” 3. _Cézanne._
” 4. _The General Tendency in Paris._
” 5. _Matisse and Dérain._
” 6. _Picasso._
_French Realism_
The French talent is neither quite happy nor satisfactory in its
“Classic,” its “Romantic,” or its “Scientific” manifestations. As a
great “classic” or traditional artist you get Ingres. About him at
present a considerable cult is in progress of springing up: whether
it is a dealer’s manœuvre or a piece of French (and Allied) sentiment
it is difficult to say. Probably it is both. But in the teeth of
any fashion it should be easy to discern that Ingres, with all his
dreary theatrical costume pieces of “classical” subjects is not as
satisfactory an artist as Giotto, let us say, nor for that matter, as
Raphael. His malicious and meticulous portraits give him a permanent
and peculiar place. But it is not the place, nor quite the kind of
place, that is being prepared for him. To admire Racine or Corneille,
similarly, is an amusing game, but not a scientifically or emotionally
exact proceeding. If it is true, for instance, that Racine should be
praised for his psychological insight, I prefer to find that without
going into such a barren region to look for it. As a “Romantic,”
again, the Frenchman is a failure compared to the better equipped
romantics of more romantic nations. Delacroix and Géricault are not as
satisfactorily romantic as Turner; Victor Hugo’s novels are not as good
romances as Hoffman’s or Dostoievsky’s. Dostoievsky is nearer the real
and permanent romance of life. Turner is a delightful dreamer, nearer
to the reality of romance than an equivalent Frenchman.
When he becomes scientific in a reaction against Romance or
Traditionalism, as in the case of the Impressionists, or Pointillistes,
in painting, the Frenchman becomes _too_ scientific, in that likewise,
to be quite real. The next thing you notice, having come to these
conclusions, is that a variety of Frenchmen, Stendhal, Flaubert,
Villon, Cézanne, Pascal, a big list--who form such a group, if stuck
together, as to be more numerous than all the specific successes of
another country put together--do not fit into the French national
cadre. They are less local than the successes of other modern European
countries. Dostoievsky, the most intoxicated of his worshippers must
concede, has the blemish of being sometimes altogether too “Russian” to
be bearable; too epileptic and heavy-souled. Turner had too much of the
national prettiness of the “dreamy” Englishman.
French Realism means, if it has a meaning, what these best Frenchmen
had: they were almost realler than anything in the modern world. They
have made France the true leader-country. But it is not what people
generally mean, in this land or elsewhere, when they talk about the
“realism of the French.” Reality is what you want, and not “realism.”
And to find that, you must watch for some happy blending of the
vitality of “Romance,” the coldness of “science,” and the moderation
and cohesion of a “classical” mind.
_The Uses of Fashion_
How are we to regard the movement in painting that has succeeded the
Impressionist movement? As the revenge of Raphael, a pilgrimage to
Poussin, a reawakening of austerity, a barbarous or a civilised event?
Creative Line once more asserted itself; the rather formless naturalism
of the Impressionist evolved into what were once more synthetic and
constructed works. The tenets of catching the Moment on the hop, of
photographing that Moment of Nature with the eye, and so forth, gave
way before the onslaught of Invention, recuperated, and come out of
its disgrace, dating from the time of its supposed liaison with the
Romantics. Impressionism was really a period of decay itself, or one
of humdrum activity; a scavenging the ground after the riots and too
popular festivities of the Romantics.
But then what you will base your views of these movements on will
really depend on what latitude you give, in your mind, to human
enterprise: how closely you consider the possibilities of any short
individual life: and whether fanciful claims of Progress excite you
or not. Three or four human types--about as many as there are large
sub-divisions of the human race--Yellow, White, Negritic--wrangle and
wrestle about with each other, rise, flourish and decay, then once more
ascend.
The only flaw in this parallel is that the Black race may die out, the
Yellow predominate, or all races mingle in a resultant grey-yellow
mixture for some time. But the types of mind are likelier stubbornly
to persist and maintain their struggle for mastery. There are
different kinds of Romantics, different sorts of Classics, and so
forth, but in any movement you may be sure that one of these great
warring sub-divisions is at the bottom of the disturbance. It may be
a composite movement. A movement at once Scientific and Classic is
possible for instance. And all individuals are very mixed. Cézanne,
considering himself probably an Impressionist, as he nominally
was, only with, he would tell himself, a way of his own of doing
Impressionism, has turned out to be something like a pure Classic.
Dérain, one of the two or three most conspicuous figures in French
painting to-day, is almost a pure Romantic, in feeling, and capable of
every sentimentality. This is natural in a man for so long a disciple
of Gauguin, and the pasticheur of Rousseau the Douanier, as we find
him in his ballet, “La Boutique Fantasque.” Picasso has dealt, in
earlier periods of his work, in every sentimental and romantic flavour.
Most men with energy and illusion enough in them to do anything have
something of the complete, composite character that I have in the
preceding section attributed to the chosen, most universal Frenchman.
But a perfectly balanced, divinely composite _movement_ is an
impossibility. Anything so intelligent or so good as that is out of
the question. For in the first place that class is such a small one
that the rare existence of such individuals is quite independent of
movements. And, in the second place, were there numbers of such men
co-existing their aggregate of work would not be a movement. It would
be the reverse of that. Any movement of such an obvious sort as we are
considering would bring them away from their centre. And for that they
are disinclined.
So any movement is largely either a Romantic invasion or reaction: a
Classical or a Scientific one. It usually will have the character of
these limiting sub-divisions. It is the swing of the pendulum from side
to side: it is the superficial corrective and fashionable play of the
general sea of men. So all men must wear black in one generation, green
in the next, then white, then black again: for that uniformity is a law
of regulated life that cannot be contradicted. Fashion is the sort of
useful substitute for conviction. At present it is the substitute for
religion.
So you get the cry against tradition, the cry against emotion, or
against superstition, or against science. Men’s consciousness can
only grasp one of these ideas at a time: they can only do any useful
work under the spell of Fashion; that is, the one limited conformity
prescribed for their generation.
The work of any artist living under this spell of fashion, unable to
function without this stimulus, and to see beyond this convention,
dates very quickly and is seldom remembered after his death, except
through some prank of the erudite, or some accident of history. But
this slavery to fashion is a different thing from the acceptance of the
form, the data, and atmosphere of a time. Rowlandson could evidently
have existed, from the testimony of his work, in no other time than the
eighteenth century. He _used_ the spirit, the form-content, the dress,
the impressionability of his time with an uncanny completeness. But
evidently had he been a dependent on fashion he could have done nothing
of the sort. For he would have been far too afraid of what he handled,
and far too obliged to it, to develop it in that bold and personal way.
I would apply this analysis of the general character of movements to
present events in the art of painting in the following way.
To a good painter, with some good work to do in this world, the only
point of the new movement, or whatever you like to call it, was simply
that it changed the outlook and pre-occupation of the living section
of art from one mode to another. To look for anything more than the
swing of the pendulum would be an absurdity. That _more_ is supplied
at the moment of every movement by the individual. And the painter who
is at the same time an individual and the possessor of that “more,”
is not likely to try and find in a movement what he has in himself.
Still, the individual, although ideally independent of and superior to
the flux and reflux, is beholden to conditions and to the society in
which he finds himself for the possibility of the full development of
his gifts. So the “movement” in art, like the attitude of the community
to art, is not a thing to be superior about, though it is a thing you
may be superior to. And really it is the same type of man who displays
a sceptical aloofness and superiority as regards any activity directed
to _improve_ the conditions around us (_i.e._, our own condition) who
shows himself the most unimaginative and cringingly fashionable in
respect of what he produces in the art he follows: the most assiduously
up-to-date, the most afraid of opinion.
So this movement in painting really looked as though it were going to
be the goods from the point of view of its uses for the best talents.
Opportunities, through the successful even victorious progress
with which the campaign began, seemed to be indicated for the full
inventiveness of the human mind to get once more into painting, and its
right to be there sure of a general recognition. This was at least a
refreshing prospect, after the Impressionist years, during which this
full inventiveness could show itself in painting only in some ingenious
disguise, or risk denunciation: or else pretend that it had really come
to look at the gas-meter, to grind colours, or to scrub the floor.
All this seemed for the best: very much for the best! But naturally
the ragtag and bobtail of the “movement” would not look at it in that
light. For them it would be Le Mouvement, as who should say the Social
Revolution or La Carmagnole, presided over by God Fashion, who is
another form of Dame Liberty.
So, has the worst happened? As far as Paris is concerned, has the
revolution turned into a joke, as it is always liable to do in a Latin
city? Or into some crafty bourgeois reaction?
Let us recapitulate the possibilities: the reason that would induce
an individual painter to support this movement, engage in it, and
use it as a material optimistically. The creative line, structure,
Imagination, untrammelled by any pedantry of form or of naturalist
taboo, a more vigorous and permanent shaping of the work undertaken:
these were the inducements and the prizes. The movement also developed
a cult of experiment which allowed of any combinations and inventive
phantasies. All the scientific notions as they came along of any
useful application could be used without a foolish outcry. But this
liberty and these opportunities also begot a necessity for moderation
or rather _concentration_ which would have been a vice in any age of
repression and academic tyranny. The painters have been thankful for
this disembarrassing of the ground for them, and have been delighted
at these splendid opportunities. They do not want to _lose_ what has
been won by an infatuation for some effete mode that there is no rhyme
or reason to succumb to, apart from the megalomania of an individual
artist, or the commercial promptings of some tortuous and sordid game.
They do not wish to be involved in the mere acrobatics of freedom.
Freedom bristles with unexpected tyrannies. It would not have been easy
for Cézanne, the laborious innovator and giver of this freedom, to do
so; but any very able and at the same time resourceful artist could
invent you a new mode _every week_ without any difficulty; some new
stylistic twist; some new adaptation of a scientific notion. This is
not, however, what is needed. If he can do nothing _else_ than that, he
must be allowed to go his way, and his chief praise be a pæan to his
agility.
How we _need_ and can _use_ this freedom that we have is to invent
a mode that will answer to the great mass sensibility of our time.
We want to construct hardily and profoundly without a hard-dying
autocratic convention to dog us and interfere with our proceedings. But
we want _one_ mode, for there _is_ only one mode for any one time, and
all the other modes are for other times. Except as objects of technical
interest and indirect stimulus, they have nothing to do with us. And it
is not on the sensibility of the amateur, which is always corrupted,
weak, and at the mercy of any wind that blows, that the painter should
wish to build. It is on the block sensibility, the profoundest and most
personal foundations of his particular time.
Fashion is not always the exact physiognomy of a time. And every
physiognomy in any case is made to be changed.
What we really require are a few men who will _use_ Fashion, the ruler
of any age, the avenue through which alone that age can be approached
to get something out of it, to build something in Fashion’s atmosphere
which can best flourish there, and which is the best thing that therein
could flourish.
Picasso and the men associated with him seem to have taken their
liberty at once too seriously and not seriously enough. They have taken
Fashion, too, too seriously on the one hand, and on the other they have
not used it as they might, or done with it what they could. I do not
see amongst them all, except possibly in Matisse, a man who is above
Fashion, or one unimpressed by it.
_Cézanne_
When this very useful process of corrective reaction occurred in the
art centres of Europe twenty years ago, the Impressionists came in
for the customary heavy reversal of opinion. But the root theories of
the Impressionists remained in the consciousness of the new men, and
completely as they might imagine they had discarded Impressionism,
Naturalism, and the rest of that movement, Impressionist compunctions
and fetishes could be found at every turn in the new painting. There
was nothing wrong with this, for the Impressionists did much good
work, and their experience was a useful one to inherit. This would
no doubt not be apparent to the benighted body of the movement, but
must have been to the leaders. And it was these leaders who cast round
and went through their immediate heritage once more before finally
discarding it. Here in turn the familiar faces of Dégas, Manet, Renoir
came up for inspection; also Cézanne. Cézanne came up rather crabbed
and reluctant, a little aloof, and with something in his eye liable to
awake suspicion. And sure enough suspicion awoke. In fact, what the
journalist would describe as a “shrewd” suspicion grew up that this
till then thought to be second-class artist, rather incompetent, though
well-meaning old fellow, had something very useful and new in him; and
was probably more a portion of the new sensibility, and possibly of
more intrinsic importance altogether, than any of his Impressionist
contemporaries.
This suspicion grew into a furious conviction that a very great artist
had been unearthed. He became the most fashionable art figure in the
world. So much so that it is impossible to write three lines about
painting to-day without mentioning his name. Matisse has not much to do
with Cézanne. But the whole cubist movement comes out of him. Picasso
is described by Lhote, the new apostle of David, as the Interpreter of
Cézanne. More apples have been painted during the last fifteen years
than have been eaten by painters in as many centuries. And all is for
the best in the best of all possible worlds. But---- Once more, it
is a pity that this figure is so solitary (which means so much under
present-day conditions of individual exaltation). The only advantage is
that at least there you have a condition favourable to homogeneity and
concentration of effort. This one, very narrow personality, enamoured
of bulk, of simplicity, of constructive vision, sombre and plain as
could be found, should be a boulder against a diffusion of the inroad
of anything like a dilettante, indiscriminating sensibility. But
possibly the weakness inherent in this first condition, of a lonely
source, has left a loophole for the irresponsible, disintegrating
passage of the second. I do not feel that Cézanne would have agreed to
Ingres, much less to David. But he would be asked to-day to agree to
Everything, five minutes devoted to each.
_The General Tendency in Paris_
In Paris to-day there is a mass of “advanced” work being done, in
the art of Painting and Design, which can roughly be classified as
follows, not necessarily chronologically. For inevitably the degree
in which a painting at present is “modern” is decided simply by its
relative “abstractness.” This is an unavoidable result of the startling
innovation resulting from the progressive experimentation all over
Europe during the last twenty years in painting. Whereas formerly it
was a question whether you should paint a naked lady refined to some
Greek type of the “beautiful” animal, or should choose her coarse, and
give the Public a bit of the “real stuff,” some lumpy Flemish frame
squatting on the edge of a dingy soapy bath (approximating to the
undraped Saskia, to Dégas or the facile Japanese realists); and whereas
over periods of fifty years these opposing females were bandied about,
and hurled at the head of the opposing faction; and it took half a
century for the “Modern Art” of the time reluctantly to espouse one
beauty, having laboriously divorced the last; to-day it has been found
possible and expedient, within the trivial space of ten years, entirely
to eliminate from the face of the earth the naked, clothed or other
lady--every vestige or tatter even of a human being at all, from the
horizon of the purest, of the latest, art. This is how the Public views
this matter. And the Public, the ruffled, shaken, gasping but rather
pleased, though not very helpful public, influences in his turn the
Artist; and so back again.
Among the few hundred painters who form the façade of the temple of
Fashion in Art, according to this rough and obvious classification,
Kandinsky is the most advanced artist in Europe; Matisse, I suppose,
of the same elect _avantgarde_, is the most leisurely, or the least
furibundly outstripping. His “funniness” consists of distortion, of
a simplicity akin to the facile images of French caricature, and a
certain vivacity of tint, often, in his pictures.
To proceed with the classification of the modes of the new movement in
Paris. Cézannism is by far the most widespread mode. As Cézanne may
also be said to be at the bottom of “Cubism,” he has really effected
by the tremendous sincerity and certainty of his work a revolution
in painting, and has made new eyes for a crowd of men. In the French
show being held at Heal’s Gallery in the Tottenham Court Road (August
7, 1919), fifty per cent. of the work is monotonously Cézannesque.
In the best represented painter there, Modigliani, the heads of his
sitters incline to this side or that because Mrs. Cézanne during
the interminable sittings she must have undergone, drooped her head
stoically and brutally in that way. She is, as it were, the leader of
a Chorus of, from the standpoint of the theatre queue, very plain
and even preposterous females. Similarly, that the hands meet and
are crossed in the lap is a trick or habit in the search for the
compact and simple that was Cézanne’s occupation. Is there any lack of
apples on tables? Do jugs abound? Are rigid napkins and tablecloths
in evidence? Yes, they are everywhere in this exhibition, as in
every other modern exhibition of the last eight years. Most of these
things are a little more garishly coloured than Cézanne’s still-lifes
were, and side currents arrive in the midst of the bed of apples and
crockery, from Vuillard, or from Matisse or Van Gogh. But Cézanne is at
the bottom of it, and will be for many a day.
The Futurists, and their French followers, have as the basis of
their esthetic the Impressionists generally. They are simply a
rather abstruse and complex form of the 1880 French Impressionists.
Their dogma is a brutal rhetorical Zolaism, on its creative side,
saturated with the voyou respect and gush about Science, the romance
of machinery engraven on their florid banner. On the technical side
the Futurist paintings are again in their creative essence purely
1880 Impressionism, worked on by the same dogged logic, carried much
further, and tinctured with Braquism and a score more odds and ends.
_Matisse and Dérain_
Matisse at his best is certainly as good a painter as any working
in Paris to-day. He possesses more vitality than Picasso; and he
appears to have more stability--as a result possibly of that. I am
not concerned in this pamphlet with recapitulating the phases of the
modern movement, so much as analysing a late development of it, and
only giving so much general matter again as is necessary to remind a
non-specialist public of the rough points of the position up to date.
Matisse has had far less influence than Picasso, and is in every way a
different mentality. Dérain, similarly, beyond influencing Picasso at a
certain period, does not come within the scope of my immediate purpose.
He is a great artist of impeccable taste. If I enlarge this treatise to
book form, I shall devote sections to these artists.
Of the names of artists working in Paris well known to us here, most
are those of foreigners, not Frenchmen. Matisse, Picasso, Gris,
Modigliani are Belgian, Spanish, Italian. But outside of the large
groups of artists working in Paris there are other European artists,
some of equal note, and of equal importance in the history of this
movement. Kandinsky among them, was, I believe, the first painter to
make pictures of purely non-representative forms and colours. And
Kandinsky, with his Expressionism, is probably the most logical of the
artists directing their attention to abstract experiment. He is not
obsessed by Natures Mortes; nor does one find in him the rather obvious
obsession with common objects simply because they are common (which is
a similarly limiting mode of the mind to the predilection for important
and obviously significant objects). He differs from the Paris group in
his interest for the disembodied world and the importance he attaches
to this new avenue of research and inspiration. Actually his pictures
possess too much of the vagueness and the effect of a drunken tracery
that all spirit drawings have.
The painters working in England find no place in this pamphlet, but not
because I do not esteem them. Nothing but a stupid parochial snobbism
could make a half-dozen English names I can think of, seem any less
weighty than any half-dozen French ones producible at this moment. As
to the Jewish painters, they are evidently of the same race and talent
everywhere. And there are at least as many here as in Paris.
First, this is not a review of painting in Europe. It is primarily
an indication of what I consider is the only line that the painting
of to-day can take if it is to justify itself, and not fizzle out
in a fireworks of ingenious pseudo-scientific stunts, and ringing
of stylistic changes on this mode and that. And the extra-studio
preoccupations, the effort towards construction that I recommend,
conflict with the spirit that appears to be guiding the cubist
movement in Paris. The emotional impulse of the latest phases of
that movement looks to me contradictory to any creative impulse in
painting. And more clearly, it seems to preclude the development of
any sensibility but that of an exasperated egotism. The eye becomes a
little gluttonous instrument of enjoyment; or watches from the centre
of its brain web for more flies and yet more flies. It would eventually
become as mechanical and stupid as a spider, if it is not so already.
An effete and hysterical mechanism certainly threatens every art.
A sorrowful Eastern fatigue wedded to a diabolical energy for
materialistic reactions; a showy and desiccated scepticism, wedded to
a tearful sentimentality as sweet and heavy as molasses. What is to be
done about that? But that is a problem for another day.
Well, then, what I propose is that as much attention might be given--it
would end by being as concrete--to the masses and entire form-content
of life as has been given by the Nature-morte school to the objects on
a table. If architecture and every related--as we say, applied--art
were affected and woken up, the same thing would be accomplished on a
big scale as is at present attempted on a small scale. All the energies
of art would not be centred and congested in a few exasperated spots of
energy, it is true, or in a few individuals. But the individual, even,
would lose nothing by it, with respect to the quality of his pictures.
And a nobility and cohesion would be attained that under present
conditions it is difficult to visualise. Most people grasping at such a
notion have stopped short at some fantastic Utopian picture.
But to enable you to arrive at a fair estimate of my conclusions, I
must give you the analysis through which I come by them in detail. And
I cannot avoid some investigation of the record and evident moyens, a
critical survey, of Picasso.
_Picasso_
Pablo Picasso is one of the ablest living painters. It would be
impossible to display more ability. In addition to this, he is
extremely resourceful and inventive. The back of his talent is too
broad to suffer from even an avalanche of criticism. It is the
consciousness of this that makes it more easy for me to state plainly
his case as I see it.
This is, put pretty directly, what I feel about him.
With remarkable power he has refertilised many extinct modes, and
authenticated interesting new and specifically scientific notions.
He has given El Greco a new bit of life on the Catalan hills in his
painting of Spanish shepherds, oxherds and vagrants. He has revivified
a great artist’s line there, another’s colour combinations here, and
has played the skilfulest variations. Since every great creative
painter must at the same time have great executive ability--the
more dexterity he can command the better--it is always difficult
to decide where this hand-training does or should leave off, and
where imaginative invention, apart from the delights and triumphs of
execution, may or does begin.
Briefly, Picasso’s periods are as follows. His earliest work contained
a variety of experiments: women sitting in cafés in reds; Daumier-like
scenes, but more fragile and rather definitely sentimentalised; then
a painting of a poor family standing by the side of a languid and
mournful bit of sea, their bones appearing through their clothes,
their faces romantically haggard and delicate, and a general air of
Maeterlinck or some modern German “poet-painter” all over it, has been
widely reproduced. (Title: “Pauvres au bord de la Mer.”) Then came a
period during which Dérain’s Gauguinism appealed to him. El Greco was
a still more prolonged infatuation and source of study. Then Cézanne
arrived in his painting. The portraits of Miss Stein and of Monsieur
Sagot are of that time.
African carvings supplied the next step, in conjunction with the
Marquesas Islands and André Dérain. These solid and static models,
African, Polynesian, Aix, drove out the Grecos, Maeterlincks and
Puvises. Braque appears to have been the innovator in Cubism; and
obviously in Braquism--the brown brand of mandoline, man’s eye and
bottle; lately, through Picasso’s gayer agency, taking on brighter and
purer colours. Futurism once more gave this Wandering Jew from not far
from the Sierras a further marching order. Off his talent leapt into
little gimcrack contrivances--_natures mortes_, in fact, come out of
the canvas; little pieces of _nature-morte_ sculpture, nature as the
artist sees her, in fact; the bottle, mandoline and copy of _La Presse_
reappearing out of art transfigured, after passing first through the
artist’s eye, spending a bit of time in the busy workshop of his brain,
and so abiding for a year or so, into the flat world of the artist’s
canvas. After this series of hairbreadth adventures it is natural that
this docile collection of objects should no longer remind the casual
observer of any category of objects known to him.
In considering the future of painting, Picasso is the most useful
figure on which to fix your attention. This is partly in his favour
inasmuch as it recognises his activity; but it is the uncertain and
mercurial quality of his genius, also, that makes him the symptomatic
object for your study and watchfulness. Everything comes out in him
perfectly defined. Every influence in his sensitive intelligence
burns up and shows itself to good advantage. There is nothing, as I
have said, with regard to technical achievement, that he cannot do.
He appears to me to have a genius similar to Charlie Chaplin’s; a
gnome-like child. His clock stopped at fifteen summers (and he has seen
more winters than Charles, although Charles is not averse to a Dickens
scene of the Poor Orphan in the Snow), with all the shallowness of a
very apt, facile, and fanciful child, and the miraculous skill you
might expect in an exquisitely trained Bambino. These cases of arrested
growth are very common in his race. You merely have to consider what
sort of a child you have to deal with, what moves him most; whether
this mercurial vitality, so adaptive as to be flesh-creeping, is
preferable to a vertical source of power, like the sour and volcanic
old _crétin_, Cézanne. It is which manner of life you most prize,
admire really. You have your critical flight; and I am ready for the
moment to suspend you, glide you, spin you, plunge you, or stand you on
your head, according to your fancy.
Now, if you are not used to critical flights, and you turn to me as
one accustomed to banking, looping and splitarsing, and ask me what
I advise, or, to put it in another way, what is _my_ fancy, I should
answer as follows:--“I consider Pablo Picasso as a very serious and
beautiful performer in oil-paint, Italian chalk, Antoine ink, pastel,
wax, cardboard, bread--anything, in fact. But he appears to me to be
definitely in the category of executants, like Paganini, or to-day,
Pachmann, or Moiseivitch; where Cézanne is clearly a brother of Bach,
and the Douanier was a cousin of Chardin.”
That his more immediate and unwavering friends are dimly acquainted
with this fact is proved by a statement I have just read, in the
current (September 26) number of the _Athenæum_, by the French painter,
M. André Lhote:
“Cézanne embodies, through the romanticism with which he was
impregnated, the avenging voice of Greece and Raphael. He constitutes
the first recall to classical order. It was necessary, in order that
the lesson he gave us might be understood, that an _interpreter_ should
appear. This was Picasso.
“The young Spanish painter deciphered the multiple enigma, translated
the mysterious language, spelt out, word by word, the stiff phrases.
Picasso illuminates in the sunshine of his imagination the thousand
facets of Cézanne’s rich and restrained personality.”
What a performer on a pianoforte does in his concerts is to give you a
selection of the works of a variety of musical composers. Now, apart
from giving us very complete interpretations of Cézanne, Daumier,
El Greco, Puvis, as Picasso has done, there are other ways, and far
more convincing ones, in which a painter can betray the distinctively
interpretative character of his gift. What do all these phases and
very serious flutterings of Picasso’s imply? To dash uneasily from one
seemingly personal mode to another may be a diagnostic of the same
highly sensitive but non-centralized talent as you would think that
a playing first in the mode of El Greco and then of David probably
implied. These are difficult things to decide since painters _are_,
through the nature of their art, at the same time composers and
executants. And you must usually get at this by consideration of, and
sense for, the man’s work as a whole.
What has happened in this volatile and many-phased career of Picasso’s?
Has he got bored with a thing the moment it was within his grasp? And
he certainly has arrived on occasion at the possessive stage. If it
is boredom, associated with so much power, one is compelled to wonder
whether this power does not mechanically spring from a vitiated and
tired source. He does not perhaps _believe_ in what he has made. Is
that it? And yet he is tirelessly compelled to go on achieving these
images, immediately to be discarded.
But when we consider one by one, and with a detailed scrutiny, the best
types of work representing his various periods, we must admit that he
had certain reason in abandoning them. However good a pastiche of El
Greco may be, it is not worth prolonging indefinitely this exercise.
The same applies to his Daumieresque period. Splendid paintings as the
Miss Stein and Monsieur Sagot undoubtedly are, they are still pure
Cézanne. And although many artists, among his dilettante admirers
or his lesser brethren, would give their heads to produce such pure
and almost first-hand Cézannes, once you _can_ do this as easily as
Picasso, it can hardly seem worth while to continue to do it. Very
likely, at the present moment, his Ingres or David paintings will
induce the same sensations of boredom in him (I can imagine David
inducing _very_ dismal feeling in an interpreter), and have a similar
fate. All that remain to be considered are the less easily deciphered
works of his more abstract periods. I think his effort of initiation
and obstinacy in this brand of work showed a different temper to the
other set of things that we have been considering. But they, again, are
open to question. They reduce themselves to three principal phases. The
first, or Cubist, phase, really a dogmatic and savage development of
Cézanne’s idiosyncrasy (example: “Dame jouant de la mandoline”) is in
a way the most satisfactory. But I am not convinced that Cézanne gains
anything by what is a very interesting interpretation of his vision.
But, on the other hand, the Lady with the Mandolin appears to me as
interesting as a typical Cézanne portrait, and it is a powerful and
inventive variation on Cézanne. About the next step--fourth dimensional
preoccupations and new syntheses added to the earlier ones (“Dame
assise”) and the first Braque-like contrivances--you wonder if they
are not more important as experiments, and important because of their
daring and new nature, than as final works. But the whole character of
these things: the noble structural and ascetic quality, the feeling
that he must have had, and that he imparted to them, that he was doing
something at last worth while, and in fitting relation to his superb
painter’s gift--this makes them a more serious contribution to painting
than anything else done by him. All the admiration that you feel for
the really great artist in Picasso finds its most substantial footing
in the extraordinary series of works beginning with the paintings of
the time of the Miss Stein portrait, and finishing somewhere in the
beginning of his Braque period.
That, put as clearly and vividly as I am able, is my account of
Picasso up to, I suppose, about 1913 or 1912. It must be remembered,
however, that I have been analysing this work according to the highest
standards that it is possible to apply to a painter. And in the light
of the subsequent work, with which I entirely disagree, and for the
purposes of combating the tendencies that must inevitably result from
its influence, I have underlined those things in Picasso that would
be liable to result in the mechanical eclecticism that I describe in
the next section of this pamphlet (The Studio Game). It has been a
critical, and, in intention, destructive analysis.