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PUBLIC LIBRARY

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Modern Painting

Its Tendency and Meaning

B v
in I lard Huntington Jl r rigkt

With four stt/>jt'<:fs in colour
and twenty-four reproductions

New r$r6: John Lane Company

Lvnetm; John Lane, The Bodley Head

MCMXr

FOREWORD

THAT beneath all great art there has
been a definite animating purpose, a
single and profound desire to reach a
specific goal, has been but vaguely
sensed by the general public and by the great
majority of critics. And there are,, I believe,
but very few persons not directly and seriously
concerned with the production of pictures, who
realise that this animating purpose has for its
aim the solution of the profoundest problems of
the creative will, that it is rooted deeply In the
aesthetic consciousness, and that its evolution
marks one of the most complex phases of human
psychology. The habit of approaching a work
of art from the naif standpoint of one's personal
temperament or taste and of judging it hap-
hazardly by its individual appeal, irrespective
of its inherent esthetic merit, is so strongly
implanted in the average spectator, that any at-
tempt to define the principles of form and
organisation underlying the eternal values of
art is looked upon as an ad of gratuitous ped-
antry. But such principles exist, and if we are
to judge works of art accurately and consist-
ently these principles must be mastered. Other-
wise we are without a standard, and all our
opinions are but the outgrowth of the chaos
of our moods*

Any attempt to democratise art results only
in the lowering of the artistic standard. Art
canoot be taught; and a true appreciation of

8

It cannot grow up without a complete under-
standing of the aesthetic laws governing it,
Those qualities in painting by which it is ordi-
narily judged are for the most part irrelevant
cies from the standpoint of pure aesthetics.
They have as little to do with a picture's infixed
greatness as the punctuation in Faust or the
words of the Hymn to Joy in the Ninth Sym-
phony. Small wonder that modern art # has
become a copious fountain-head of abuse and
laughter; for modern art tends toward the
elimination of all those accretions so beloved by
the general literature, drama, sentiment, sym-
bolism, anecdote, prettiness and photographic
realism.

This book inquires first into the function and
psychology of all great art, and endeavours to
define those elements which make for genuine
worth in painting. Next it attempts to explain
both the basic and superficial differences between
"ancient" and "modern" art and to point out,
as minutely as space will permit, the superiority
of the new methods over the old. By this
exposition an effort is made to indicate the
raison d'etre of the modern procedure. After that,
modern painters are taken up in the order of
their importance to the evolution of painting
during the last hundred years, 1 have tried to
answer the following questions: What men and
movements mark the milestones in the develop-
ment of the new idea? What have been the
motivating forces of each of these schools? To
what extent are their innovations significant;
what ones touch organically on the vital prob-
lems of aesthetics; and what was their influence

9

on the men who came later? Out of what did
the Individual men spring; what forces and
circumstances came together to make their exist-
ence possible? What were their aims, and what
were their adhial achievements? What relation
did they bear to one another,, and in what way
did they advance on one another? Where has
modern art led, and what inspirational possi-
bilities lie before it?

Before setting out to solve these problems,
all of which have their roots in the very organ-
isms of the science of aesthetics, I have posed
a definite rationale of valuation. My principles
are based on the quickening ideals of all great
art, and, if properly understood, I believe, they
will answer every question which arises in the
intelligent spectator when he stands before a
piece of visual art, be it a Byzantine mosaic, a
complicated organisation by Rubens, a linear
arrangement by Picasso- pr an utterly worthless
anecdote in paint by an English academician.
Necessarily preoccupied with the application of
my critical standard, I have had but little time
and space to devote to its elucidation. Yet I
have striven in this indirect process of state-
ment to make my fundamental postulate suffi-
ciently clear to enable the reader to recognise
its truth and unity. Two years ago when I
crowded my hypothesis into 7000 words in the
Forum, and early last winter when I stated it
in even briefer space in the New Age, I found
that, although it took a new and difficult stand,
there were many who grasped its essentials.
Therefore I feel myself entitled to hope that in
its present form it will be comprehensible even

io FOREWORD

to those whose rnlnds are not trained in the
complexities of aesthetic research.

In stripping art of its intriguing charm and
its soothing vagueness it is not my intention
to do away with its power to delight. To the
contrary,, I believe that only by relieving paint-
ing of its dead cargo of literature, archaeology
and illustration can it be made to fundlion
freely. Painting should be as pure an art as
music, and the struggles of all great painters
have been toward that goal Its medium-
colour is as elemental as sound, and when
properly presented (with the same scientific
exactness as the harmonies of the tone-gamut)
it is fully as capable of engendering aesthetic
emotion as is music. Our delight in music,
no matter how primitive, is not dependent on
an imitation of natural sounds. Music's pleas-
urable significance is primarily intellectual. So
can painting, by its power to create emotion
and not mere sensation, provoke deep aesthetic
feeling of a far greater intensity than the delight
derived from transcription and drama. Modern
painting strives toward the heightening of emo-
tional ecstasy; and my esthetique is intended to
pave the way for an appreciation of art which
will make possible the reception of that ecstasy.
With this objed ever in view I have weighed
the painting of the last century, and have
judged it solely by its ability or inability to
call forth a profound aesthetic emotion* Almost
any art can arouse pleasing sentiments. Only
great art can give us intellectual rapture,

W. H. W*
Paris, 1915

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I ANCIENT AND MODERN ART 17

II. PRECURSORS OF THE NEW ERA 34

III. EDOUARD MANET 64

IV./THE EARLY IMPRESSIONISTS 83

V. AUGUSTE RENOIR. 107

VI. PAUL CEZANNE 129

VII. THE NEO-IMPRESSIONISTS 164

VIII. GAUGUIN AND THE PONT-AVEN SCHOOL ... 187
IX. DEGAS AND His CIRCLE 207

X, HENRI-MATISSE 222

XL PICASSO AND CUBISM 237

XII. FUTURISM 263

XIIL SYNCHROMISM 277

XIV, THE LESSER MODERNS . . 305

XV. CONCLUSION 327

INDEX 343

REPRODUCTIONS

La Montagne Victoire (Cezanne) \joloui^ . . . Frontispiece
Les Femmes d'AIger dans Leur Appartement (Delacroix)

Facing page 3 8

L'Enterrement a Ornans (Courbet) 54

Le Bain (Daumier) 60

Le Dejeuner sur FHerbe (Manet) 78

Waterloo Bridge (Monet) 98

Paysage (Guillaumin) 104

La Femme au Miroir (Renoir) ^colour} 108

Le Dejeuner des Canotiers (Renoir) 114

Baigneuses, 1885 (Renoir) 126

Baigneuses, 1902 (Renoir) 126

Baigneuses (Cezanne) 138

Pommes sur une Table (Cezanne) 156

Les Tours Vertes a la Rochelle (Signac) 174

Un Dimanche a la Grande-Jatte (Seurat) 180

Portrait de 1" Artiste (Van Gogh) 184

Le Gue (Gauguin) [colour^ 194

Deux Tahitiens (Gauguin) ......... 204

Danseuses a Leur Toilette (Degas) 212

Baigneuses (Henri-Matisse) 226

Portrait de Famille (Henri-Matisse) 234

Femme a la Mandoline (Picasso) . 246

Fumeur et Paysage (Leger) 256

Dynamisme d'une Auto (Russolo) 268

Hieroglyphe Dynamique du Bal Tabarin (Severini) . , 274

Synchromie Cosmique (Morgan Russell) 294

Arm Organisation in Blue-Green (Macdonald -Wright)

^colour] 3

Composition No, 2 (Kandinsky) 3*

Le Jardin (Bonnard) 3* 8

Modem Painting

ANCIENT AND MODERN ART

THROUGHOUT the entire history of the
fine arts, no period of aesthetic inno-
vation and endeavour has "suffered from
public malignity, ridicule and Ignorance
as has painting during the last century/; The
reasons for this are many and, to the serious
student of art history, obvious. The change
between the old and the new order came swiftly
and precipitously, like a cataclysm In the serenity
of a summer night. The classic painters of the
first half of the nineteenth century, such as
David, Ingres, Gros and Gerard, were busy with
their rehabilitation of ancient traditions, when
without warning, save for the pale heresies of
Constable, a new and rigorous regime was ushered
In. It was Turner, Delacroix, Courbet and
Daumler who entered the sacred temple, tore
down the pillars which had supported it for cen-
turies, and brought the entire structure of estab-
lished values crashing down about them. They
survived the debacle, and when eventually they
laid aside their brushes for all time it was with
the unassailable knowledge that they had accom-
plished the greatest and most significant meta-
morphosis In the history of any art.

But even these hardy anarchists of the new
order little dreamed of the extremes to which

1 8 MODERN PAINTING

their heresies would lead. So precipitous and
complex has been the evolution of modern paint-
ing that most of the most revolutionary moderns
have failed to keep mental step with its develop-
ments and divagations. During the past few
years new modes and manners in art have sprung
up with fungus-like rapidity. "Movements" and
"schools" have followed one another with as-
tounding pertinacity, each claiming that finality
of expression which is the aim of all seekers for
truth. And, with but few exceptions, the men
who have instigated these innovations have been
animated by a serious purpose that of master-
ing the problem of aesthetic organisation and
of circumscribing the one means for obtaining
ultimate and indestructible results* But the
problems of art, like those of life itself, are in
the main unsolvable, and art must ever be an
infinite search for the intractable. : Form in paint-
ing, like the eternal readjustments and equilib-
ria of life, is but an approximation to stability.
The forces in all art are the forces of life, co-
ordinated and organised* No plastic form can
exist without rhythm: not rhythm in the super-
ficial harmonic sense, but the rhythm which
underlies the great fluctuating and equalising
forces of material existence. Such rhythm is
symmetry in movement. On it all form, both in
art^and life, is founded.

iForm in its artistic sense has four interpreta-
tions. First, it exhibits itself as shallow imita-
tion of the surface aspects of nature, as in the
work of such men as Sargent, Sorolla and Simon.
Secondly, it contains qualities of solidity and com-
petent construction such are as found in the

ANCIENT AND ART 19

paintings of Velazquez, Hogarth and Degas.
Thirdly, it is a consummate portrayal of objects
into which arbitrary arrangement has been intro-
duced for the accentuation of volume. Raphael,
Poussin and Goya exemplify this expression of
it. Last 3 form reveals itself, not as an object-
tive thing, but as an abstract phenomenon cap-
able of giving the sensation of palpability. All
great art falls under this final interpretation,
But form, to express itself aesthetically, must be
composed; and here we touch the controlling
basis of all art; organisation. Organisation is
the use put to form for the production of rhythm,
The first step in this process is the construction
of line,, line being the direction taken by one or
more forms. In purely decorative rhythm the
lines flow harmoniously from side to side and from
top to bottom on a given surface. In the greatest
art the lines are bent forward and backward as
well as laterally so that, by their orientation in
depth, an impression of profundity is added to
that of height and breadth. Thus the simple
image of decoration is destroyed, and a micro-
cosmos is created in its place- Rhythm then be-
comes the inevitable adjustment of approaching
and receding lines, so that they will reproduce
the placements and displacements to be found in
the, human body when in motion,

tTo understand, and hence fully to appreciate,
a painting, we must be able to recognise its in-
herent qualities by the process of intellectual
reasoning. By this is not implied mechanical
or scientific observation. Were this necessary,
art would resolve itself into a provable theory
and would produce in us only such mental pleas*

20 MODERN PJLVffXG

lire as we feel before a perfect piece of intricate
machinery- But once we comprehend those con-
stitutional qualities which pervade all great works
of art, plastic and graphic, the sensuous emotion
will follow so rapidly as to give the effect of
spontaneity. This process of conscious ohserva*
tion in time becomes automatic and exerts itself
on every work of art we inspect, Once adjusted
to an assimilation of the rhythmic compositions
of El Greco and Rubens, we have become sus-
ceptible to the tactile sensation of form in all
painting. And this subjective emotion is keener
than the superficial sensation aroused by the
prcttiness of design, the narrative of subject -matter,
or the quasi-realities of transcription- More and
more as we proximate to a true understanding
of the principles of art, shall we react to those
deeper and larger qualities in a painting which are
not to be found in its documentary and technical
side. Also our concern with the transient senti-
ments engendered by a picture's external aspects
will become less and less significant. Technique,
dramatic feeling, subject, and even accuracy of
drawing, will be relegated to the subsidiary and
comparatively unimportant position they hold in
relation to a painting's esthetic purpose,

'.The lack of comprehension and consequently
the ridicule which has met the efforts of mod-
ern painters, is attributable not alone to a mis-
understanding of their seemingly extragavatit
and eccentric mannerisms, but to an ignorance of
the basic postulates of all great art both ancient
and modem. Proof of this is afforded by the
constant statements of preference for the least
effectual of older painters over the greatest of

JNCIENT MODERN ART 21

the moderns. These preferences. If they are
symptomatic of aught save the mere habit of a
mind immersed in tradition, indicate an imma-
turity of artistic judgment which places prettiness
above beauty,, and sentimentality and documen-
tary interest above subjectivity of emotion. The
fallacies of such judgment can best be indicated
by a parallel consideration of painters widely
separated as to merit, but in whom these different
qualities are found. For instance, the prettiness
of Reynolds, Greuze and Murillo is as marked as
the prettiness of Titian, Giorgione and Renoir.
The latter are by far the greater artists; yet,
had we no other critical standard save that of
charm, the difference between them and the
others would be indistinguishable. Zuloaga,
Whistler, Botticelli and Bocklin are as inspira-
tional of sentiment as Tintoretto, Corot, Raphael
and Poussin; but by no authentic criterion are
they as great painters. Again, were drama and
simple narrative aesthetic considerations, Reg-
nault, Brangwyn, and Antonino Molineri would
rank with Valeric Castello, Rubens and Ribera.

In one's failure to distinguish between the
apparent and the organic purposes of art lies
the greatest obstacle to an appreciation of what
has come to be called modern painting. J The
truths of modem art are no different from those
of ancient art. A Cezanne landscape is not dis-
similar in aim to an El Greco. The one is merely
more advanced as to methods than the other.
Nor do the canvases of the most ultra-modern
schools strive toward an aesthetic manifestation
radically unlike that aspired to in Michelangelo's
Slaves, Serious modem art, despite its often

22 PAINTING

formidable and bizarre appearance, Is only a
striving to rehabilitate the natural and unalter-
able principles of rhythmic form to be found
in the old masters, and to translate them into
relative and more comprehensive terms. We
have the same animating ideal in the pufhires
of Giotto and Matisse, Rembrandt and Renoir,
Botticelli and Gauguin, Watteau and Picasso,
Poussin and Friesz, Raphael and Sevcrini. The
later men differ from their antedecents in that
they apply new and more vital methods to their
work. Modern art is the logical and natural
outgrowth of ancient art; it is the art of yester-
day heightened and intensified as the result of
systematic and painstaking experimentation in
the media of expression.

The search for composition that is, for per-
fectly poised form in three dimensions has
been the impelling dictate of all great art. Giotto,
El Greco, Masaccio, Tintoretto and Rubens, the
greatest of all the old painters, strove continually
to attain form as an abstract emotional force,
With them the organisation of volumes came
first, The pi&ure was composed as to line. Out
of this grew the subjed-matter a demonstra-
tion a posteriori. The human figure and the
recognisable natural objed were only auxiliaries,
never the sought-for result. In all this they were
inherently modern, as that word should be under-
stood; for the new conception of art strives more
and more for the emotion rather than the appear-
ance of reality. The objeds, whether arbitrary
or photographic, which an artist uses in a picture
are only the material through which plastic form
finds expression. They are the means, not the

JND MODERN ART 23

end. If In the works of truly significant art
there Is a dramatic, narrative or illustrative In-
terest,, It will be found to be the Incidental and
not the important concomitant of the picture.

Therefore It is not remarkable that, with the
introduction of new methods, the illustrative side
of painting should tend toward minimisation.
The elimination of all the superfluities from art is
but a part of the striving toward defecation.
Since the true test of painting lies in its sub-
jecftive power, modem artists have sought to
divorce their work from all considerations other
than those diredlly allied to Its primary function.
This process of separation advanced hand in
hand with the evolution of new methods. First
It took the form of the distortion of natural
objects. The accidental shape of trees, hills,
houses and even human figures was altered in
order to draw them into the exad form demanded
by the picture's composition. Gradually, by the
constant pradice of this falsification, objecfls be-
came almost unrecognisable. In the end the
illustrative obstacle was entirely done away
with. This was the logical outcome of the ster-
ilising modern process. To judge a picture com-
petently, one must not consider it as a mere
depidion of life or as an anecdote: one must
bring to it an Intelligence capable of grasping a
complicated counterpoint. The attitude of even
such men as Celesti, Zanchi, Padovanino and
Bononi Is never that of an illustrator, in no
matter how sublimated a sense, but of a com-
poser whose aim is to create a polymorphic
conception with the recognisable materials at
hand.

24 MODERN POINTING

Were art to be judged from the pidlorial and
realistic viewpoint we might find many metic-
ulous craftsmen of as high an obje&ive efficiency
as were the men who stood at the apex of genuine
artistic worth that is, craftsmen who arrived
at as close and exadt a transcription of nature,
who interpreted current moods and mental as-
peds as accurately, and who set forth superficial
emotions as dramatically. Velazquez's Philip IV,
Titian's Emperor Charles V 3 Holbein's The Am-
bassadors, Guardfs The Grand Canal Venice,
Mantegna's The Dead Christ and Diirer's^ Four
Naked Women reproduce their subjcds with as
much painstaking exactitude as do El Greco's
The Resurrection of Christ, Giotto's Descent from
the Cross, Masaccio's Saint Peter Baptising the
Pagans, Tintoretto's The Miracle of Saint Mark,
Michelangelo's Creation of the Sun and Moon,
and Rubens's The Earl and Countess of ArundcL
But these latter pidlures are important for other
than pidorial reasons. Primarily they are or-
ganisations, and as such they are of aesthetic
value. Only secondarily are they to be appraised
as representations of natural objects. In the
pictures of the former list there is no synthetic
co-ordination of tactile forms. Such paintings
represent merely "subjeA-matter" treated capably
and effectively. As sheer painting from the
artisan's standpoint they are among the finest
examples of technical dexterity in art history. But
as contributions to the development of a pure art
form they are valueless. ?

In stating that the moderns have changed the
quality and not the nature of art, there is no
implication that in many instances the great

ANCIENT AND MODERN ART 25

men of the past, even with limited means, have
not surpassed in artistic achievement the men of
today who have at hand more extensive means,
Great organisers of plastic form have, because
of their tremendous power, done with small
means more masterly work than lesser men with
large means. For instance, Goya as an artist
surpasses Manet, and Rembrandt transcends
Daumier, This principle holds true in all the
arts, Balzac, ignorant of modern literary meth-
ods, is greater than George Moore, a master of
modern means. And Beethoven still remains
the colossal figure in music, despite the vastly
increased modern scope of Richard Strauss* s
methods. Methods are useless without the cre-
ative will. But granting this point (which un-
consciously is the stumbling block of nearly all
modern art critics), new and fuller means, even
in the hands of inferior men, are not the proper
subjed for ridicule.

| It must not be forgotten that the division
between old and modern art is not an equal one.
Modern art began with Delacroix less than a
hundred years ago, while art up to that time had
many centuries in which to perfed the possi-
bilities of its resources. The new methods are
so young that painters have not had time to
acquire that mastery of material without which
the highest achievement is impossible. Even in
the most praiseworthy modern art we are con-
scious of that intellectual striving in the handling
of new tools which is the appanage of immaturity.
Renoir, the greatest exponent of Impressionistic
means, found his artistic stride only in his old age,
after a long and arduous life of study and exper-

2 6 MODERN PAINTING

imenting. His canvases since 1905 are the first
in which we feel the fluency and power which
come only after a slow and sedulous process of
osmosis. Compare, for instance, his early and
popular "Le Moulin de la Galette with his later
portraits, such as Madame T. et Son Fils and La
Fillette a 1'Orange, and his growth is at once
apparent.

The evolution of means is answerable to the
same laws as the progressus in any other line of
human endeavour. The greatest artists are always
culminations of long lines of experimentations.
In this they are eclectic. The organisation of
observation is in itself too absorbing a labour to
permit of a free exercise of the will to power.
The blinding burst of genius at the time of the
Renaissance was the breaking forth of the accrued
power of generations. Modern art, having no
tradition of means, has sapped and dispersed the
vitality of its exponents by imposing upon them
the necessity for empirical research. It is for
this reason that we have no men in modern art
who approximate as closely to perfection as did
many of the older painters. But had Rubens,
with his colossal vision, had access to modern
methods his work would have been more power-
ful in its intensity and more far-reaching in its
scope.

However, in the brief period of modern art
two decided epochs have been brought to a close
through this accumulation and eruption of exper-
imental activities in individuals. Cezanne brought
to a focus the divergent rays of his predecessors
and incorporated into his canvases both the as-
pirations and achievements of the art which had

ANCIENT AND MODERN ART 27

preceded him. This would have been impossible
had he been born even with an equally great
talent fifty years before. And a more recent
school of art, by making use of the achievements
of both Cezanne and Michelangelo, and by add-
ing to them new discoveries in the dynamics
of colour, has opened up a new vista of possibil-
ities in the expressing of form. This step also
would have been impossible without Cezanne and
the men who came before and after him. Once
these new modes, which are indicative of modern
art, become understood and pass into the common
property of the younger men, we shall have
achievement which will be as complete as the
masterpieces of old, and which will, in addition,
be more poignant.

Although the methods of the older painters
were more restricted than those of the moderns,
the actual materials at their disposal were fully
as extended as ours of today* But knowledge
concerning them was incomplete. As a conse-
quence, all artists antecedent to Delacroix found
expression only in those qualitites which are
susceptible of reproduction in black and white.
In many cases the sacrifice of colour enhances the
intrinsic merit of such reproductions, for often
the characteristics of the different colours oppose
the purposes of a picture's planes. Today we
know that certain colours are opaque, others
transparent; some approach the eye, others
recede* But the ancients were ignorant of these
things, and their canvases contained many con-
tradictions: there was a continuous warring
between linear composition and colour values.
They painted solids violet,, and transpicuous

28 MODERN POINTING

planes yellow thereby unconsciously defeating
their own ends, for violet is limpid, and yellow
tangible. In one-tone reproductions such in-
consistencies are eliminated, and the signification
of the pidure thereby clarified. It was Rubens
who embodied the defined attributes of ancient
art in their highest degree of pliability, and who
carried the impulse toward creation to a point
of complexity unattained by any other of the
older men. In him we see the culmination of
the evolution of linear development of light and
dark. From his time to the accession of the
moderns the ability to organise was on the de-
crease. There was a weakening of perception,
a decline of the aesthetic faculty. The chaotic
condition of this period was like the darkness
which always broods over the world before some
cleansing force sweeps it clean and ushers in a
new and greater cycle.

The period of advancement of these old
methods extends from prehistoric times to the
beginning of the nineteenth century. On the
walls of the caverns in Altamira and the Dor-
dogne are drawings of mammoths, horses and
bison in which, despite the absence of details,
the adual approach to nature is at times more
sure and masterly than in the paintings of such
highly cultured men as Botticelli and Pisancllo.
The adlion in some of them is pronounced; and
the vision, while simple, is that of men conscious
of a need for compactness and balance. Here
the art is simply one of outline, heavy and prom-
inent at times, light and almost indistinguishable
at others; but this grading of line was the result
of a deeper cause than a tool slipping or refusing

JNC1ENT AND MODERN ART 29

to mark. It was the consequence of a need for
rhythm which could be obtained only by the
accentuation of parts. The drawings were gen-
erally single figures, and rarely were more than
two conceived as an inseparable design. Later,
the early primitives used symmetrical groupings
for the same purpose of interior decorating. Then
came simple balance,, the shifting and disguise
of symmetry, and with it a nearer approach to
the imprevu of nature. This style was employed
for many generations until the great step was
taken which brought about the Renaissance.
The sequential aspeA of line appeared, permitting
of rhythm and demanding organisation. Cima-
bue and Giotto were the most prominent expon-
ents of this advance. From that time forward
the emotion derived from acftual form was looked
upon by artists as a necessary adjund: to a pidt-
ure. With this attitude came the aristocracy
of vision and the abrogation of painting as mere
exalted craftsmanship.

After that the evolution of art was rapid. In
the contemplation of solidly and justly painted
figures the artist began to extend his mind into
space and to use rhythm of line that he might
express himself in depth as well as surfacely.
Thus he preconised organisation in three dimen-
sions, and by so doing opened the door on an
infinity of aesthetic ramifications. From the be-
ginning, tone balance that is, the agreeable
distribution of blacks, whites and greys had
gone forward with the development of line, so
that at the advent of depth in painting the
arrangement of tones became the medium through
which all the other qualities were made manifest.

3 o MODERN POINTING

In the strlA sense ? the art of painting up to
a hundred years ago had been only drawing,
Colour was used only for ornamental or dramatic
purposes. After the first simple copying of
nature's tints in a wholly restricted manner, the
use of colour advanced hut little. It progressed
toward harmony, but its dramatic possibilities
were only dimly felt. Consequently its primitive
employment for the enhancement of the decora-
tive side of painting was adhered to. This was
not because the older painters were without the
necessary pigments. Their colours in many in-
stances were brighter and more permanent than
ours. But they were satisfied with the efTeds
obtained from black and white expression. They
looked upon colour as a delicacy, an accessory,
something to be taken as the gourmet takes
dessert. Its true significance was thus obscured
beneath the artists' complacency. As great an
artist as Giorgione considered it from the con-
ventional viewpoint, and never attempted to
deviate toward its profounder meanings. The
old masters filled their canvases with shadows
and light without suspecting that light itself is
simply another name for colour.

l ;The history of modern art is broadly the his-
tory of the development of form by the means
of colour that is to say, modem art tends
toward the purification of painting. Colour Is
capable of producing all the elleds possible to
black and white, and in addition of exciting an
emotion more acute. It was only with the advent
of Delacroix, the first great modern, that the
dramatic qualities of colour were intelligently
sensed. But even with him the conception was

JNCIENT AND MODERN ART 31

so slight that the effeds he attained were but
meagrely effedive. After Delacroix further ex-
periments in colour led to the realistic translation
of certain phases of nature. The old static
system of copying trees in green, shadows in
black and skies in blue did not, as was commonly
believed, produce realism. While superficially
nature appeared in the colours indicated, a close
observation later revealed the fad that a green
tree in any light comprises a diversity of colours,
that all sunlit skies have a residue of yellow,
and hence that shadows are violet rather than
black. This newly unearthed realism of light
became the battle cry of the younger men in the
late decades of the nineteenth century, and
reached parturition in the movement erroneously
called Impressionism, a word philologically op-
posed to the thing it wished to elucidate. The
ancients had painted landscape as it appeared
broadly at a first glance. The Impressionists,
being interested in nature as a manifestation in
which light plays the all-important part, trans-
ferred it bodily onto canvas from that point of
view.

Cezanne, looking into their habits more coolly,
saw their restrictions. While achieving all their
atmospheric aims, he went deeper into the me-
chanics of colour, and with this knowledge
achieved form as well as light. This was another
step foxward- in the development of modern
methods^ ',With him colour began to near its
true and ultimate significance as a functioning
element* Later, with the aid of the scientists,
Chevreul, Bourgeois, Helmholtz and Rood, other
artists made various departures into the field

32 MODERN POINTING

of colour, but their enterprises were failures.
Then came Matisse who made improvements!
on the harmonic side of colour. But because he
ignored the profounder lessons of Cezanne he
succeeded only in the fabrication ^ of a highly
organised decorative art. Not until the advent
of the Synchromists, whose first public exhibition
took place in Munich in 1913. were any further
crucial advances made. These artists completed
Cezanne in that they rationalised his dimly fore-
shadowed precepts.

To understand the basic significance of paint-
ing it Is necessary to revise our method of judg-
ment. As yet no aesthetician has recorded a
rationale for art valuation. Taine put forth
many illuminating suggestions regarding the fun-
damentals of form, but the critics have paid
scant heed, j Prejudice, personal taste, meta-
physics and even the predilections of sentiment,
still govern the world's judgments and apprecia-
tions. We are slaves to accuracy of delineation,
to prettiness of design, to the whole suite of ma-
terial considerations which are deputies to the
organic and intellectual qualities of a work of
art. It is the common thing to find criticisms
ever from the highest sources which praise
or condemn a picture according to the nearness
of its approach to the reality of its subject. Such
observations are confusing and irrelevant* Were
realism the object of art, painting would always
be infinitely inferior to life a mere simulacrum
of our daily existence, ever inadequate in its
illusion. The moment we attach other than
purely aesthetic values to paintings cither an-
cient or modem we are confronted by so exten-

ANCIENT AND MODERN ART 33

sive and differentiated a set of tests that chaos
or error is unavoidable. In the end we shall find
that our conclusions have their premises,, not in
the work of art itself, but in personal and ex-
traneous considerations. A picture to be a great
work of art need not contain any recognisable
objects. Provided it gives the sensation of rhyth-
mically balanced form in three dimensions, it
will have accomplished all that the greatest
masters of art have ever striven for,'

Once we divest ourselves of traditional integu-
ments, modern painting will straightway lose its
mystery. Despite the many charlatans who clothe
their aberrations with its name, it is a sincere
reaching forth of the creative will to find a me-
dium by which the highest emotions may most
perfectly be expressed. We have become too
complex to enjoy the simple theatre any longer.
Our minds call for a more forceful emotion than
the simple imitation of life can give. We require
problems, inspirations, incentives to thought.
The simple melody of many of the old masters
can no longer interest us because of its very
simplicity. As the complicated and organised
forces of life become comprehensible to us, we
shall demand more and more that our analytic
intelligences be mirrored in our enjoyments.

II

PRECURSORS OF THE NEW ERA

THE nineteenth century opened with
French art in a precarious and de-
cadent condition. To appreciate the
prodigious strides made by Gericault
and Delacroix^ even by Gerard and Gros, one
must consider the rabid antagonism of the public
toward all ornament and richness in painting and
toward all $ubjec5t~matter which did not inspire
thoughts of inflexible simplicity. This attitude
was attributable to the social reaction against
the excesses of the voluptuous Louis XVI. Vicn
it was who, suppressing the eroticism of Boucher,
instigated the so-called classic revival founded on
Graeco-Roman ideals. The public became so vehe-
ment in its praise of this hypocritical and austere
art, that Pragonard, that delicious painter of
boudoirs, was dismissed as indecent. Even the
demure Greuze, who tried to rehabilitate' himself
by making his art a vehicle for a series of parental
sermons, died a pauper. He too lacked the arid-
ity requisite for popular taste. Chardin, the Le
Nains and Fouquet were set aside; they were
considered too trivial, too insufficiently archae-
ological. Watteau's canvases were stoned by Reg-
nault, Girodet and the other pupils of David*
Lancret, Pater, Debucourt, Olivier, Gravelot,
La Tour, Nattier and others met similar fates
at the hands of the new classicists*

PRECURSORS OF THE NEW ERA 35

Such men as these could not find approbation
in a public which demanded only allegorical,
political and economic art. But David met all
its requirements. He represented the antithesis
of the sound freedom of the French tempera-
ment; and forthwith became the Elija of the
new degeneracy. He apotheosised all that is
false and decadent in art. But the adulation
of him was short-lived. The French imagina-
tion is too fecund for only thorns. Ingres super-
ceded him. This new idol, going to the Greeks
for inspiration, made David fluent and charming.
He studied the Italian primitives and simplified
them with Byzantine and Raphaelic addenda.
He had a genuine instin6t for silhouette entirely
lacking in his forerunner, and soon struck the
first blow which marked the disintegration of
David's cult.

Gerard and Gros took a further step by loos-
ening slightly Ingre's drawing; and Gericault
and Guerin completed the disruption of the
David tradition. Gericault's Radeau de la
Meduse brought its young and highly talented
creator immediately into the public gaze, not
only because of its implied blasphemy in deviat-
ing from the methods David, but because the
tragedy of its subject was still fresh in the na-
tional mind. Was this a clever device on the
part of the painter to circumvent hostile criti-
cism by clothing his innovations with* a sympa-
thetic theme? Perhaps; but the picture's value
to us lies in that it foreshadowed the new idea
in art. It forced the gate which made easier
Delacroix's entrance several years later.

In retrospect the reaction against an established

36 MODERN PAINTING

order appears simple, but the world's innovators
have required for their task an intellectual cour-
age amounting to rare heroism. Heretics are
regarded as dangerous madmen, and generally
their only reward is the pleasure of revolt. The
credit for greatness falls on those later men who
avail themselves of the principles of past reac-
tionary enterprise. So much of the energy of
pioneers is spent in combating hostile criticism
and indifference, that their fund of creative force
is depleted. This was true in the case of Dela-
croix. Like all the greater painters he was self-
taught. The essence of knowledge is untrans-
mittable. True, he occasionally visited the studio
of Guerin, but his real education came from the
Louvre where he copied Veronese, Titian and
Rubens. His insight was keen but not deep,
and at first he did little more than absorb the
surface aspeds of others, though he did this
with intelligence. Later, by devious steps both
forward and back, he became the bridge from
the eighteenth century to Impressionism, just
as Cezanne became the stepping stone from. Im-
pressionism to art's latest manifestations. ,

In 1822 Delacroix exposed his first canvas,
Dante et Virgile aux Enfers, one of the finest
debut pictures ever recorded. Superficially it
is his most obvious influence of Rubens whom
he deeply respeded; and in it are also discov-
erable the exaggerations and disproportions of
Michelangelo. Thiers lauded it, and so great
was its popularity that the government bought
it for 2,000 francs. Rubens still held him firmly
two years later in the Massacre de Scio, although
there were in the pidure indubitable indications

PRECURSORS OF THE NEW ERA 37

of the advent of Venice. This picture was to
be hung in the famous Salon of 1824, where
Lawrence, Bonington, Fielding, and Constable
(who were to have such a great influence on his
later work) exposed. The Massacre de Scio was
ready for shipment when, just before the vernis-
sage y Delacroix saw a canvas by Constable done
in the^ divisionistic method. At once he felt the
necessity for colour expression, and going home
he entirely' repainted his pidlure.

This was the turning-point in his art. He had
admired the green in Constable's landscape, and
had spoken of it to the other. Constable ex-
plained that the superiority of the green in his
prairies was due to the fad that he had composed
it with a multitude of different greens. Here
Delacroix's keen perception got to work. In
his Journal he wrote: "What Constable says
of the green of his prairies can be applied to all
the other tones as well" By this method, prim-
itive as it seems today, he beheld a way of
augmenting the dramatic significance of his con-
ceptions. The next year, 1825, he went to Lon-
don to study the English painters at closer range.
There he learned much from Bonington, as he
did from Constable, and in one of his letters
he wrote: "Grey is the enemy of all painting.
. . . Let us banish from our palette all earth
colours/" And later he forecasted the Impres-
sionistic methods by writing: "It is good not to
let each brush stroke melt into the others; they
will appear uniform at a certain distance by the
sympathetic law which associates them. Colour
obtained thus has more energy and freshness.
The more opposition in colour, the more brilliance/*

3 8 MODERN

Delacroix's Intelligence, reconnoitring along
these lines, formulated other principles. Among
many observations concerning colour, he wrote:
"If to a composition,, interesting in its choice
of subject, you add a disposition of lines, which
augments the impression, a chiaroscuro which
seizes the imagination, and a colour which is
adapted to the charaders, it is then a harmony,
and its combinations are so adapted ^ that they
produce a unique song. ... A conception, haying
become a composition, must move in the milieu
of a colour peculiar to it. There seems to be a
particular tone belonging to some part of every
pidure which is a key that governs all the other
tones. . . . The art of the colourist seems to
be related in certain ways to mathematics and
music/' That he believed in the exacft science
of colour is further attested to by the fad: that
he made a dial on which noon represented red,
six o'clock green, one o'clock blue, seven o'clock
orange and so on through the hours with the
opposition of complementaries.

Evidences of these experimentations are dimly
discerned in a number of his minor canvases
done between 1827 and the Revolution. 111^1832,
after he had painted the admirable La Liberte
Guidant le Peuple sur les Barricades, he visited
Morocco. Before this event his work had con-
tained many of the elements of sumptuousncss
and sensuality; but in this eastern land his
colour reached maturity. Studying the produc-
tions of the native crafts in their relation to
colour, he dreamed of making pidtures as varie-
gated as rugs and vases* In this he was tres-
passing on the precincts of Veronese who had

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PRECURSORS OF THE ERA 39

made pidorial use of the produces of the Orient
and of Africa. On his return he painted Les
Femmes d'Alger dans Leur Appartement. This
pldure, one of his best, embodies most of his
colour theories. In it we find cold shadows
opposed to hot lights, and the contiguous placing
of complementaries.

Delacroix looked upon himself as a colourist.
But while his theories were in the main sound
they did not go far enough. They were impor-
tant only as a starting point. His colour is hardly
noticeable today, and in no wise does it sum up
his artistic interest for us, Gauguin once said
that we get Delacroix's full significance in black-
and-white reproduction. This comes perilously
near being true. Today his pictures appear as
devoid of brilliancy as those of the Venetians.
Yet, when he first exhibited, he was reproached
for his raucous tones. The critics called his
Massacre de Scio the "massacre of painting/ 5
and added, "il court sur les toits." His men and
women, the shadows of whose flesh were Coloured
with blues and greens, were stigmatised
" corpses," and he was accused of having used the
morgue for his studio.

All this mattered little. Delacroix's real sig-
nificance as an artist lay in his drawing which
was his greatest asset. What raised him above
the general run of painters, baroque and other-
wise, was his slight talent for composition. Often
in his Journal he speaks of the "balance of
lines/ 5 He knew that with the masters of the
Renaissance it was common property, and that
modern painting had lost it; and he strove to
reintroduce it into art. But he never got beyond

40 MODERN POINTING

the simplest synthesis of the least compounded
of Rubens's figure pieces. For instance, in the
Bataille de Taillebourg an excellent example
of his dramatic method it will be noted
that the canvas opens at the bottom-centre
to form a triangle of struggling forms, and
that in the breach thus made the rearing
charger looms white. The identical composition
can be found in La Justice, La Liberte, the
Janissaires a FAttaque, La Lutte de Jacob avec
1'Ange, the Enlevement de Rebecca and the
Entree des Croises a Jerusalem. In this last
canvas, his most masterful, the triangle is com-
plicated by a curved line running inward from the
centre. This pidure recalls, almost to every
detail, Rubens's The Adoration of the Wise Men
of the East, in the Antwerp Museum, However,
it marks a great progress from the symmetricality
of his toile de debut, and though in it Rubens is
consciously imitated if not indeed plagiarised,
Delacroix gets nearer to the spirit of Veronese
than to that of the Flemish master.

Among the paintings wherein the simple, three-
sided composition does not appear, the most
notable are his animal pictures (in which he sub-
stituted the S design) and those canvases in which
his momentary admiration for others (as for
Veronese in the Retour de Christophe Colomb, and
for the Dutch in Cromwell au Chateau de Wind-
sor) made him forget himself. Even this primitive
comprehension of linear balance had passed out
of French painting with the death of Poussin,
and its reapparition in Delacroix is analogous
to the impetus toward rhythm, which was given
to the stiff Byzantine painting of Venice by

PRECURSORS OF THE NEW ERA 41

Nicolo di Pietro and Giovanni da Bologna in the
fourteenth century.

In Rubens we find turbulent movement* as
great as in life itself, organised in such a way
that all the emotions, exalted, depressive, dra-
matic, are expressed. But in Delacroix there
is merely co-ordinated adion. And this adion,
even in the busiest centres of his canvases, is
more suggestive of unrest than of movement.
However, the real cause for his failure to express
a spirit as modern as Rubens's lay in his inability
to understand the opposition in rhythmic line-
balance of three dimensions which is to be found
in even the slightest of Rubens's canvases. His
details are always interesting, but he never suc-
ceeded in welding them into a sequacious and
interrelated whole. His high gift of invention
was inadequate equipment for so difficult a feat.
Compare Rembrandt's exquisite bathing girl in
the London National Gallery and Delacroix's
La Grece Expirant sur les Ruines de Missolonghi.
In technical treatment these two paintings are
not unlike, but the scattered feeling and lack of
plastic concentration in the latter emphasises the
superior force of the Dutchman.

Delacroix's work fell between flat decoration
and deep painting. Although in his small draw-
ings and details he exhibits a genuine feeling for
volume, as his Lion Dechirant un Cadavre shows,
his constant refinements of reasoning nearly
always resulted in his form being flattened out
until it sometimes became commonplace. Simple
balance of line defined .the limits of his ability
for organisation. If he had carried out in other
pidures the compositional elements of his Pieta,

42 MODERN POINTING

which had dlstind movement, his ^ work would
have taken a higher place in the history of art.
In many canvases his seeming fullness of form
is only a richness of line a richness, however,
which had seldom been found in painting since
Masaccio. This voluptuousness in Delacroix
(analogous to Wagner's music) results from the
balance of large dark and light masses the
fullness of chiaroscuro. It is particularly appre-
ciable in La Justice de Trajan, La Captivite de
Babylone, Repos (reminiscent of Goya's La Maja
Desnuda) and his animal compositions^

Delacroix's greatest deficiency lay in his in-
ability to recognise the difference between the
inventive intelligence and the imaginative in-
stindt. Had he understood this he could have
seen that his limitless ambition was incom-
mensurate with his comparatively small capa-
bilities. But this mind was not sufficiently open.
IE fad his viewpoint at times was a petty one.
Even his patriotism was chauvinistic. He was
rabidly anti-Teutonic and attempted to compress
all the great masters of art into the French mould.
He inveighed against style in painting because
France had always been barren of it. He pre-
tended to detest Wagner, his musical prototype,
and ignoring the hitter's dramatic undulations,
criticised him severely for his methods. Beet-
hoven was too long for Delacroix, and II Trova-
tore too complicated. However* he had a pro-
found admiration for Titian and Mozart; and
in these preferences we have the man's psychol-
ogy. Both were great classicists, but both lacked
that genuine and magistral fullness which was
the prapre, of Beethoven and Michelangelo.

PRECURSORS OF THE NEW ERA 43

Delacroix's thoughts were on deep things
rather than deep in themselves. Among the
romanticists he was at home: all his life Byron
and Walter Scott provided him with themes. And
though he had sufficient foresight to see the hope-
less trend of the painting of his day, and com-
bated it, he did not advance. His muse was the
corpse of Venetian art. He was the brake which
put an end to the reactionary tendencies of art.
His discoveries did not reach fruition until Im-
pressionism, twenty years after his death.

In all his struggles destiny seemed to con-
spire to bring about his fame. In 1824, the very
year he brought colour into his painting, Gen-
cault, who gave promise of outstripping him,
died. Constable and Turner came forward with
their achievements. David's influence had died
out, and the painter himself was an exile in
Brussels. Fromentin tells us that Gericault
helped paint Delacroix's first canvas. Certain
it is that several of the great Englishmen painted
some of his second. This, no doubt, taught
Delacroix much. In 1827 the government ordered
Justinien Composant les Institutes. All France
rallied round his standard. He was decorated
by Louis Philippe; and at the age of thirty he
was proclaimed a , great master by one of the
leading critics of the day.

From the first he had had the backing of men
respeded as authorities. But though they
helped make his position tenable, they obfus-
cated his true significance by their purely liter-
ary appreciations. Gautier, Dumas, Baudelaire,
Stendhal and Merimee there was none whose
temperament was not either romantic or ideal-

44 PAINTING

istic. They could not see that, though he strove
with them for modernity of expression, his lan-
guage was unmodern. However, Ernest Ches-
neau 5 Theophile Silvestre, Eugene Veron and
C. P- Laadon have all given us side-lights on his
methods, and, in this, their expositions are of

value.

But, though the men of letters did not under-
stand him thoroughly, several of his fellow
painters recognised his eclecticism. Among them
was Thomas Couture who, in his highly instruct-
ive booklet, Methodes et Entretiens ^d'Atelier,
had the audacity to point out the painter's se-
lective habits. In the main his charge was just,
Delacroix's first canvas contains influences of
both Rubens and Michelangelo. His second
pidlure echoes Rubens, the Venetians and Goya,
Later came more prominent evidences of Titian
and Veronese, Delacroix was museum-bred. He
absorbed impressions avidly, and did his best
work only after he had undergone an intelledual
experience. Had his art been truly expressive of
all that was within him, he would have been in
turn diluted, to be sure a Giotto, a Car-
avaggio, a Rubens, a Rembrandt. He felt the
call of these men, but instead of halting at appre-
ciation, he tried to use them. But the old
masters, like the lords of the earth, are not amen-
able to high-handed demands.

The diversity of his pursuits, which sprang
from a desire to compete with Leonardo da
Vinci, smacks of the dilettante. His great mis-
take was that he did not separate his capabil-
ities from his desires. Had he done so he would
have produced small figure pieces of gem-like

PRECURSORS OF THE NEW ERA 45

richness and voluminous composition. Enthu-
siasm is not the proper equipment for extended
labour. It burns out too soon, and is kept alive
only by quick and brilliant results. For this
reason his pidures are viewed to better effedl
framed and in galleries than as mural decorations.
In trying to paint monumental subjects on exten-
sive canvases he lost that spirit of organisation
which would have been his on more limited sur-
faces. One of his finest expositions of colour,
La Lutte de Jacob avec PAnge, in a chapel at
Saint Sulpice, is ineffective because its surface is
too large for his treatment of the theme. Dela-
croix in reality was a painter of still-life in the
broad meaning of the term, just as Rembrandt
and Cezanne were still-life painters. He failed
in the accomplishment of his larger programme
because his vision was too restricted to permit
him to weld his details into great ensembles, as
Rubens did. His ambition outstripped his power,
and strive as he might, he could not make up
the discrepancy by reasoning. Undoubtedly he
sensed his own weakness, for all his days he was
in continual pursuit of system. System was to him
what law was to the old masters. Herein he was
reflecting the rationalistic philosophers of his day
who substituted theory for observation.

Were all Delacroix's paintings destroyed "and
his Journal and drawings saved, his apport to art
would be but imperceptibly decreased. We should
still possess his linear compositions and his colour
theories his two significant gifts to modern
art. Without the liberation of draughtsmanship
expressed in 'the former, Courbet's struggle would
have been more difficult, and rhythm in drawing

46 MODERN POINTING

would have had to wait for another resuscitator.

Without his colour theories Impressionism would
have been postponed for half a century; Van
Gogh could not have done his best pi&ures; and
the Pointillists, with their system of coniple-
mentaries, might never have existed. Delacroix
was the first to speak of simultaneity in painting,
on which phrase has recently been founded a
school; and he sketched a dictionary of art terms
and definitions which even now, after fifty years,
is far more intelligent than present-day academic
precepts-
Let us regard Delacroix as a great pioneer who
fought against the zymotic formalism of his day
and by so doing opened up a new era of expres-
sion. He is the link in the chain which holds
the brilliant gems of painting. If he himself fell
short of genius 5 he nevertheless fulfilled a destiny
which intrinsically is in many ways more fine: he
made genius possible for those who were to come
after him.

The other man who contributed vitally to
modern colour theories was J. M. W, Turner,
born in 1775, one year before Constable. Like
Delacroix he had ardent and influential defenders;
and the coincidence is emphasised by the fad
that between these two great colour innovators
there existed a striking thematic similarity.
Ruskin took care that Turner should taste those
beneficent honours which the world generally
withholds from a painter during his lifetime. He
accomplished this feat by praise which was largely
enthusiasm and by criticism which spelled par-
tiality. But a panegyric not founded on accuracy
and authenticity defeats its OWE objed in the

PRECURSORS OF THE NEW ERA 47

end. Turner himself remarked that Ruskln dis-
covered recondite points in his painting of which
he, as the artist, was ignorant. This might have
been true, or it might have been sarcasm. But
whether Ruskin or Turner knew more about the
latter's art, the fad remains that the author of
Modern Painters overestimated the painter for a
reason totally inapposite to aesthetic considera-
tion: the almost photographic perfection of his
canvases. Later, when the spirituel Whistler
tarnished this English didaftician's reputation for
infallibility, the latter* s pronunciamentos were
questioned, in some quarters ridiculed. And
Turner, accepted because of Ruskin* s assurances,
became suspedL

But no amount of effulgent literary criticism
can obscure the authentic accomplishments of
this poor barber's son. Turner's contributions
to the colour methods of the eighties were too
large, and his imitators too bold, for the fadt to
be longer ignored. In his Ulysses Deriding Poly-
phemus, The Fighting Temeraire and especially
in Rain, Steam and Speed, he had begun to divide
the surfaces of his objects into minute touches of
different colours not, perhaps, for the purpose
of heightening the emotional qualities of the
paintings as a whole, but for the primitive reason
that the device gave accuracy to them as repre-
sentations of nature. These pictures Monet and
Pissarro studied closely during the Franco-Prus-
sian War, and there is no doubt that the result of
this study determined the direction taken by the
Impressionists. Turner's earlier pictures had been
too sombre to meet the demand for brilliancy
in that first great modern school, and the can-

48 MODERN POINTING

vases in which his vision of sunlight began to take
form had not yet been painted. These later
pictures, with their light tonality and their full
use of misty blue and gold,, had a further influ-
ence on the Impressionists' conception of colour.

When Monet and Pissarro went to London in
1871 they had been habituated to the use of
broad flat tones, and were astonished at Turner's
extraordinary snow and ice effedls which were
obtained by juxtaposing little spots of diverse
colour and by the gradating of tones. On their
return to France they both made use of this
striking artifice,, and developed it, in conjunction
with Delacroix's theories, into what later an
unknown humorist of the Charivari named Im-
pressionism. This process was given further
impetus by another Frenchman, Jongkind, called
the European Hiroshige, There is more than a
superficial analogy between Jongkind and Turner;
and the Impressionists, first under the influence
of Corot and Courbet, found the effeds they
sought by uring the purity of Turner with the
failure of Jongkind, It was thus they were
brought back to the theories of Delacroix which
they had partially abandoned* This return had
a profound raison d'etre, for between the last
phase of Delacroix and the later sketches of
Turner there is a similarity which was apparent
even to their contemporaries- But though the
resemblance was as pronounced as that between
Turner and the Impressionists, the eulogists of
that movement chose to ignore and^ in some cases,,
to deny it.

This new method of using colour did not con-
stitute the only debt the Impressionists owed

PRECURSORS OF THE NEW ERA 49

Tomer. They also found in him an added in-
spiration toward freedom of arrangement and
unconventionality of design. The landscape
painters before Turner's day conceived their out-
of-door pidhires in more or less definite moulds.
A tree in one man's canvas, being an idealistic
conception, was difficult of differentiation from
a tree in another's. All their pictures were per-
meated by the same motif. But Turner, along
with Constable and Bonington, began putting
character into landscapes. As a consequence
their pictures exuded a new freedom of arrange-
ment.

To appreciate Turner fully we must overlook
his astonishing ability for transcription a heri-
tage from his architectural days and consider
him as a man who loved nature so ardently that
it was impossible for him to approach it intel-
lectually. His sketches, both in water-colour and
oil, were, unlike those of the Impressionists, rarely
done in the open. He conceived them in pencil,
wrote upon his clouds, trees and stones the
colours he saw in them, and later, in the solitude
of his studio, " worked them up/' Had the
Impressionists, after their frenzied seances before
models, taken their canvases home, organised and
modified them, they would no doubt have pro-
duced greater net results artistically. Organisa-
tion, in its finest sense, comes only through
contemplation and reflection; and while Turner
did not possess the genius for rhythm in any of
its manifestations, he nevertheless realised that
mere truth does not make a pidure. The Sun of
Venice Going to Sea is as excellent as anything
Monet or Sisley has ever done. In Turner there

S o MODERN PAINTING

is a feeling for the grandiose such as few moderns
possess. Did this gift come from Claude whom
he delighted in imitating? Even Constable spoke
of a Turner canvas as the most complete work of
genius he ever saw. But this was the beau geste
of a contemporary who wished to appear broad-
minded. The truth lay further down the slope.
Turner undoubtedly showed genius in his com-
petent copying of even the most insignificant^ of
of nature's accidents. The composition of The
Devil's Bridge is the foundation on which are
built many of Monet's pidures; and the Rain,
Steam and Speed canvas can hang beside La
Gare St. Lazare without loss to either.

Delacroix re-established an Italian mode of
expression and tried to make of it a modern, lan-
guage. Turner, in a new language, spoke of
ancient things. But Courbet ignored all method,
and withal became the father of latter-day art.
In him was the embryo of that distinftly modern
spirit which demands visible proof before believ-
ing. Like William of Orange, he arose trium-
phant above every opposition. His art stemmed
temperamentally from the Dutch and Spaniards,
for while he imitated no one, he was uncon-
sciously influenced by many. So complete was
his assimilation of great men that in his expres-
sion they all had a place. He himself says that
he studied antiquity as a swimmer crosses a river.
The academicians were drowned there. So was
Delacroix. Courbet learned in his passage that
in adaptation is the confession of sterility. But
though he avoided paraphrasing and copying the
old masters, we find throughout his life recur-
ring traces of Van Dyke, Zurbaran, Delacroix,

PRECURSORS OF THE NEW ERA 51

Rembrandt, El Greco, Gericault, Ribera, Velaz-
quez; and that little known Valenclan master,
Juan de Juanes,

Courbet was considered an ignorant, vulgar
and brutal peasant. But this judgment was the
outgrowth of public miscomprehension rather
than of any authentic evidence in the man him-
self. Courbet was the epitome of that unstudied
naturalism which is antipodal to the hypocrisies
of society. France, during his day, was governed
by the dictates of theatricalism. Its ideals were
those of Renaissance Italy, and its artistic atti-
tude reflected a refinement of vision approaching
decadence. Courbet's deportmental crudities
alone were a source of antagonism, and when to
these were added scorn and indifference the hos-
tility against him became violent. But tem-
peramentally he was aristocratic. The peasant
mind is fundamentally traditional: Courbet was
violently revolutionary. Nor did he lack fineness
of mind. His early portraits embodied the sub-
tleties of modelling in Rembrandt as well as the
extraordinary niceties of characterisation in El
Greco. The compositions of his pidures alone
belie any coarseness of fibre in the man. They
are founded on a weakened S which, since the
decay of Byzantine art, had done valiant service
for the most exalted painters such as Rubens and
Tinteretto. This compositional figure appears,
either exacft or varied, in his Le Combat de
Cerfs, Le Retour de la Conference, Chien et
Lievres, and 1/Enterrement a Ornans.

Courbef s reputation for vulgarity was derived
more from his lack of facile fluency, so common in
the French tradition, than from a basic under-

52 MODERN PAINTING

standing of the structural synthesis of his work.
And this misconception of him was aggravated by
his being the first painter unwilling to accept
praise as the public chose to dole it out. He
was a self-advertiser, and such men as George
Bernard Shaw are but echoes of his methods. He
pushed his way to the front unceasingly, and
continually theorised as a means of silencing his
adversaries. He regarded all public demonstra-
tion as blague, and later in life carried this atti-
tude into politics. Whistler, his pupil, was quick
to sense the advantage of his teacher's methods;
and it is the irony of fate that this ineffectual
American was believed and respeded while Cour-
bet was abused and ridiculed and forced to die
in exile. He had carried his assaults too far.
"To be not only a painter but a man/" he wrote
at one time. "To create a living art this is
my aim/" It is a masterly statement of his real
ambitions. He was intensely interested in life,
as were Rubens and Cellini. "You want me to
paint a goddess?" he exclaimed. "Show me
one!" In this mot he summed up the very spirit
of modern times. It expressed the new realism
found in such widely separated men as Dos-
toievsky, Zola, George Moore, Conrad, Andreiev,
Theodore Dreiser, Gerhart Hauptmann, Richard
Strauss, Debussy, Korngold, Sibelius, Manet, Re-
noir, Sorolla and Zorn,

It is strange how Courbet^ so far removed
from the French temperament, should, at the
crucial period of his life, have reverted to a
French gesture by refusing the cross of the Legion
of Honor. But in that famous letter of rejection,
written in a cafe and mailed with a grandiloquent

PRECURSORS OF THE NEW ERA 53

toss in the presence of Fantin-Latour, he summed
up aptly the man of genius who, though avid
for honour, throws it away at the moment of
attainment. Not even Napoleon was more
concerned with the thoughts of posterity than
Courbet, and some of the artist's letters are not
dissimilar in tone to the bombastic manifestos of
certain ultra-modern schools. At the time of his
first exhibition he wrote to Bruyas: "I stupefy
the entire world. I am triumphant not only
over the moderns but the ancients as well. Here
is the Louvre gallery. The Champs Elysees does
not exist, nor the Luxembourg. There is no
more Champs de Mars. I have thrown con-
sternation into the world of art." This spirit
of monumental self-confidence, so startling to a
generation whose taste was measured by the
decadent poetry of Baudelaire, brought frantic
sarcasm hurtling about his head. This troubled
Courbet little. He valued friendships only in
so far as they were useful. It was Meissonier who
said in a Paris salon, when standing before the
famous Femme de Munich which Courbet had
painted in a few hours for Baron Remberg: "It
is no longer a question of art, but of dignity.
From now on Courbet must be as one dead to us."
Charles Baudeliare, who helped fight the battle
for Wagner, Poe, Delacroix, Manet and Monet,
tentatively praised him at first, but later allied
himself with the public and became his bitterest
assailant. It was not surprising. A poet so
superficial as to call Delacroix "a haunted lake
of blood" could not be expeded to appreciate
the terre a terre qualities of this master of Ornans.
And Courbet was so little French that he was

54 MODERN PAINTING

Incomprehensible to his national contemporaries.
He disclaimed all tradition, swore he had no
forerunners,, and struck blindly Into the unknown.
For a man without genius this would have been
fatal, but, after all, only a genius would attempt
such things.

Courbet was disgusted with the allegory and
romance of his time. His nature cried aloud for
a pose that was natural, for a landscape that re-
sembled the out-of-doors, for objeds in which
life was discernible. Consequently the critics
and painters of his day put him aside either
Indifferently or insolently. They could not under-
stand a work of art which did not delineate a
literary episode or in which the postures were
not taken dired from the theatre. Courbet
needed no literature to paint great pi&ures^ ^He
went straight to nature, and his compositions
grew out of his sheer enjoyment In visible objects,
whether they were dramatic or not. To the
public his pictures appeared ugly, even repellent.
Here was a man who painted a funeral realistic-
ally Dieu m'en garde 1 With only the example
of canvases filled with familiar gods and goddesses
and melting nudes In golden pink, he dared set
forth, in a sacred theme, peasants" faces and
peasants' shoes, cloudy skies, and holes in the
brown earth. To those who had come to look
upon art as something ethereal and evanescent,
I/Enterrement a Ornans was more than blas-
phemy* It was this pidure, falling like a bomb
Into the midst of the vagaries of his time, that
sounded the death knell of romanticism. It was
the last spade of earth on the graves of the clas-
sicists. The mere pidure was sensation enough^

o

PRECURSORS OF THE NEW ERA 55

but Courbet was not content to let the matter
rest there. At the time of his exhibition in 1855,
held in a barrack of his own building on the
Rond Point de FAlma, he wrote a defensive and
provocative preface to his catalogue. In it he
proclaimed himself not only the first realist, but
realism itself.

Gericault's Radeau de la Meduse and Dela-
croix's Dante et Virgile aux Enfers were accept-
able to the public, the one because of its dramatic
interest, the other because of its literature. But
I/Enterrement a Ornans entirely lacked the pop-
ular qualities of these two other pictures. It was
full of rugged and hardy precision. Its insolent
ugliness of subjed-matter and its implied indif-
ference to all tradition, seemed to express the
quintessence of artistic degradation and sordid-
ness. At first view the pidhire appears to have
been inspired by El Greco's Obsequies of the
Count of Orgaz, but it is more likely that these
peasants of Oraans, each a notable of the town,
with their indifferent expressions and awkward
gestures, were attributable to The Martyrdom of
Saint Bartholomew of Ribera and La Folle of
Gericault, rather than to the master of Toledo.
But that the Spanish helped paint it is evident:
some parts of the landscape are taken bodily
from their canvases. Meier-Graefe states that
this funeral pidure, like most of the representa-
tive pictures of the nineteenth century, is not
representative of the artist himself. But did
Meier-Graefe understand more profoundly the
synthesis of composition found in individual
painters, he would have seen that here was the
famous S composition which was used throughout

S 6 MODERN PAINTING

the painter's life. Instead of being set on
as was the practice of the Italians,, it Is used later-
ally and extends from left to right In depth.

In colour also this pi&ure is representative of
Courbet, for it shows his limitations in that
medium. Delacroix brought a new palette to
painting, but could not use it. Courbet con-
tented himself with a palette as meagre as that
of Caravaggio and Guercino. And yet, though
colour has come latterly to mean tactile form in
its highest sense, this black canvas, when placed
beside either an Ingres, a David, a Delacroix or
a Gerard, appears less flat and inconsequential
than the latter. The form is even suggestive of
Rembrandt, Giotto, Cezanne and Renoir.

Champfleury was the only friend of Courbet
who dared defend him. Delacroix was set against
him, and the critics, without undertsanding him,
obscured the true importance of his art by talking
of his want of transcendentalism and sentiment,
Especially were his landscapes t the butt of their
ridicule, for painters up to that time had ma<je
use of conventional arrangements of dainty trees
copied for their drawing and tone. In Courbet
all this was changed. He organised landscapes
as he did still-lives and nudes. Objeds, as such,
meant nothing to him. In this he struck a new
and modern note which the good people of his
day considered not only bad art but a slur upon
the spiritual meanings of nature. Even in Les
Baigneuses, where the figures are unimportant,
the trees are superb. In La Grotte he went
further, for here the figure was part of the whole,
His paintings of the hills about Ornans had a
movement which gave off a sensation of weight

PRECURSORS OF THE ERA 57

entirely new in painting. In Les Grands Cha-
taigniers he reached his apogee in landscape
painting. This pidure is greater than those of
any of the Englishmen.

Though many critics have written that Mil-
let influenced Courbet, the reverse is the truth.
The former's life work was largely a repetition
of the lights and darks found in Courbet's earlier
pictures. Les Casseurs de Pierres is far greater
than anything Millet has ever done, despite the
vast popularity of such purely sentimental pict-
ures as The Angelus and The Man with the Hoe.
Courbet could never have been satisfied with
the angularity and absence of rhythm in the
other's work. In Millet's best canvases one
finds at most only a parallelism of lines, and in
his lesser pidures even this amateurish attempt
at organisation is lacking. But in Les Casseurs
de Pierres the arrangement is one which recalls
the competency of linear balance and develop-
ment in Tintoretto's Minerva Expelling Mars.

When Courbet entered painting, he had neither
prejudices nor a parti pris. He tested his ability
before engaging his full complement of resources.
Though untutored, he had that cast of intel-
ligence which no amount of study can produce
and no amount of adverse criticism influence.
Delacroix, on the other hand, was the archetype of
the highly cultured and educated man. He fore-
saw the necessity for radical reform, but was
unable to bring it about significantly. Courbet
instinctively projected himself into that void at
the brink of which tradition halts and the un-
known begins. And because he was a man of
genius he did not return empty-handed.

58 MODERN PAINTING

The art of Courbet was too aristocratic to be
appreciated. Not aristocratic in the Delacroix
sense, but isolated and superior. Rejecting the
colour discoveries of his day, he created his own
materials. Delacroix foreshadowed the medium
which was to serve as a vehicle for the achieve-
ment of future generations, but it was Courbet
who brought to art a new metal attitude without
which there would be no excuse for modern
painting. By turning men's thoughts from
ancient Italy to the actualities of their own day,
and by expelling the literary canvas from art,
he left those who came after him free to evolve
a medium which would translate the new vision.
Delacroix's heritage to art was intellectual, Cour-
bet's dynamic. And though objectively the
work of Courbet is the uglier and less gracious,
in it there is more of the sublime. But both men
are indispensable, and have a just claim to the
eternal respedl of posterity.

The construction of form as voluminous phe-
nomena that integer of modern painting which
was lacking in Delacroix, Turner and Courbet,
but which has become one of the leading pre-
occupations of present-day artists was intro-
duced by Honore Daumier. This painter who,
unlike his three great contemporaries, fought for
the pure love of the fight, was celebrated as a
caricaturist at twenty-five. Such fame was war-
ranted, for he was unquestionably the greatest
and most trenchant caricaturist the world has
ever produced. From 1835 to 1848 he made
capital of all those many catastrophes which
overtook France. Only the curtailing of the
freedom of the press on December 2, 1848, put an

PRECURSORS OF THE NEW ERA 59

end to his career as publicist. This culmination
of his editorial activities was a beneficial thing
for both Daumier and the world, for it permitted
him freedom to devote himself wholly to the
development of the larger side of his genius. He
endeavoured to Interest his friends in his painting;
but too long had he been known as a critic of
current topics for them to look with serious eyes
upon his more solid endeavours,

But though neglected by his friends, Daumier
holds a position of tremendous importance in
relation to the moderns. His work developed
along lines unthought-of by either Delacroix or
Courbet. Even his cartoons were more than
clever pidorial comments on national events.
Intrinsically they were great pieces of rugged
flesh which had all the appearance of having been
chiselled out of a solid medium with a dull tool.
The richness of his line is as complete as In
Rembrandt's etchings; and his economy of means
reached a point to which painters had not yet
attained. His significance, however, lies more
especially in his new method of obtaining volume
than in the flexibility of his line drawings. He
built his pictures in tone first. The drawing
came afterward as a direct result of the tonal
volumes. This new manner of painting permitted
him a greater subtlety and fluency than Courbet
possessed. In fad:, Daumier' s comprehension of
form in the subjective sense was greater than that
of any Frenchman up to his time. Compare,
for instance, Daumier' s canvas, Les Lutteurs,
with Courbet's pidure of the same name. The
massiveness of the one Is monumental One feels
the weight of the two struggling men, heavy and

60 MODERN PAINTING

shifting, clinging and panting. They are mod-
elled by a craftsman who can juggle deftly with
his means. In Courbet's picfture the figures are
seen carefully copied in a strained pose by one
who has not the complete mastery of his tools.
In Daumier's pidure we also sense that elusive
but vital quality called mental attitude. Su-
perficially it is almost indistinguishable from
it negation, but to those who know its significance,
it is of permeating importance.

Contour and shading to his forerunners had
meant two separated and distinct steps in the
construction of form. Daumier created both
qualities simultaneously as one emotion. Depth
with other painters was obtained by carrying
their figures into the background by the means
of line and perspective. With Daumier it meant
a plastic building up of volume from the back-
ground forward. The feeling we have before his
canvases that we are looking at form itself and
not merely an excellent representation of it, is as
strong as it is in a greater way when we stand
before a Leonardo da Vinci. In this he gave
proof that he was a draughtsman in the most
vital sense. Unless he had felt form uniquely,
Le Repos des Saltimbanques and Le Bain would
have been impossible of creation. This last
picture sums up what Carriere aspired to but
failed to attain.

Recalling the great masters of form we instinc-
tively visualise Michelangelo first. For this rea-
son perhaps Michelangelo is regarded the major
influence in Daumier. "// avait du Michel Ange
dans la peau" say the French: and certain it
is that Daumier* s colossal simplicity and feeling

K

M

s

p

PRECURSORS OF THE NEW ERA 61

for tadillty were derived from the Renaissance
master. But only in one pidhire, a composition
called La Republique 1848, do we find any
dired: and conscious influence. Frankly this Is
but a modernisation of one of the sibyls on the
ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The truth is
Daumler is more akin to Rembrandt than to
Michelangelo. But there Is in him none of the
conscious copying of Rembrandt that we find,
for Instance, in Joshua Reynolds. The latter,
admiring Rembrandt, essayed to equal his power
by imitating his externals with academic pro-
cesses. Daumler, temperamentally affiliated with
his master, went deeper. Putting aside the
results of Rembrandt's final brush strokes, he
studied the very functioning -procedure of his
art. Both used the human figure as a terrain
for the unceasing struggle of light against dark.
In the process of painting the Infinite play and
by-play of opposed values on a given theatre,
they produced form as an inevitable result.

A critic has stated of Daumier: "He left
hardly anything but sketches, splashes of colour
that resolve themselves into faces. . . . " It is
said without attempt at profundity. Neverthe-
less the remark unsuspectingly touches the crucial
point of Daumier's significance. The very reso-
lution of those "splashes of colour" into faces is
the prefiguration of the modern conception of
form. In this particular Daumier, even more
than Rembrandt, was the avant-courier of
Cezanne. This latter artist, through his concern
with the play of one colour on another, gave
birth to form more intensely than did either
of the older men. Too much stress cannot be

62 MODERN PAINTING

laid on Daumier's contribution to modern paint-
ing. f By regarding the two drawings, La Vierge
a rEcuellc and Renaude et Angelique the one
by Correggio in chalk, the other by ^ Delacroix
in water-colour we perceive the attainment of
form by less profound methods. But neither
possesses the significance of Daumier's work.

Of Daumier's colour little need be said. At
times it emerges from its sombreness and blossoms
forth in all the hot softness of now the Venetians,
of again the Spainards; but compared with ^ the
artist's genius for plastic form it is of subsidiary
importance.

Although the inception of Daumler's greatness
can be traced to Rembrandt, he readied to many
influences. Suggestions of Monnier and Gran-
ville are to be found in his work. Decamps's
Sonneurs de Cloches was studied by him and
emulated. His simplifications stemmed from
Ingres, and his caricature of Guizot had the same
qualities as that master's portraits. Delacroix
also had some trifling influence on him in such
paintings as Don Quichotte. But Daumier's
influence on others is more direct and far-reaching
than his own garnerings of inspiration. He fore-
shadowed the formal abbreviations of Toulouse-
Lautrec, Forain and Steinlen, and he affeded,
more than is commonly admitted, the works of
Manet, Degas, and Van Goglj. In his sculptured
pieces, Ratapoil and Les Emigrants, he paved
the way for Meunier and Rodin. Even such
minor men as Max Beerbohm learned much from
him without understanding him. And apart from
the vital new methods he brought to painting,
the originality of his subject-matter led modern

PRECURSORS OF THE NEW ERA 63

men to copy him thematically. Le Drame fath-
ered a whole series of Degas's paintings.

Daumier is only beginning to receive the intel-
ligent appreciation which in time may engulf
his eminent contemporary, Courbet. For if
choice there is between the intrinsically artistic
achievements of the painter of I/Enterrement a
Ornans and the creator of Silene, the preference
rests with Daumier.

The forces underlying the development of
genius, working in conjunction with the right
circumstances, produce the fertilising methods
which nature uses to bring about a final flower-
ing of a long period of intense germination.
Before the greatest eras of all art the battles
have been fought and won. The descendants
of the pioneers become the introspective and
creative souls who open, free from the stain of
combat, to the sun of achievement. Delacroix,
Turner, Courbet, Daumier these are the men
who cleared the ground and thereby made pos-
sible a new age of aesthetic creation. To Dela-
croix belongs the credit for giving an impetus to
the vitalisation of colour, and for freeing drawing
from the formalisms of the past. Turner raised
the tonality of colour, and introduced a new
method for its application. Courbet _ heightened
uniformly the signification of objects in painting,
and handed down a mental attitude of untra-
ditional relativity. And Daumier conceived a
new vision of formal construction. These men
were the pillars of modern painting.

Ill

EDOUARD MANET

THE purely pictorial has always been rel-
ished by the public. The patterns of
the mosaicists and very early primitives,
the figured stuffs of the East and
South, the vases of China and Persia, the
frescos on the walls of Pompeii, the drawings
and prints of old Japan all are examples of
utilitarian art during epochs when the public
took delight in the contemplation of images.
Even the delicate designs on Greek pottery, the
rigid and ponderous arts of architectural Egypt
and the drawings and adorned totem poles of
the North American Indians are relics of times
when the demand for art was created by the
masses. For the most part all these early crafts
were limited to simple designs, wholly obvious
to the most rudimentary mind. The ancients
were content with a representation of a natural
object, the likeness of a familiar animal, the
symmetry of an ornamental border, an effigy of
a god in which their abstract conceptions were
given concrete form. At that time the artist
was only a craftsman a man with a commun-
istic mind, content to follow the people's dictates
and to reflect their taste- Art was then demo-
cratic, understood and admired by all. It did
not raise its head about the mean level; it was
abecedary, and consequently comprehensible.

EDOUARD MANET 65

When the Greek Ideal of fluent movement took
birth In art and became disseminated, drawing,
painting and sculpture began to grow more
rhythmic and individual Slowly at first and
then more and more swiftly, art became Insulated.
The popular joy in the native crafts, despite the
impetus of centuries behind it, decreased steadily.
The antagonism of the masses to the artist sprang
up simultaneously with the disgust of the artist
for the masses. It was the inevitable result of
the artist's mind developing beyond them. He
could not understand why they were no longer
In accord with him; and they, finding him in
turn unfathomable, considered him either irra-
tional or given over to fantastic buffoonery. So
long had they been the dictator of his vision that
his emancipation from their prescriptions left
them astounded and angered at his audacity.
The nobles then, feeling it incumbent upon them
to defend this new luxury of art, stepped into the
breach, and for a time the people blindly pat-
terned their attitude on that of their superiors.
Later came the disintegration of the nobility;
its caste being lost, the people no more imitated
it. From that time on, although there were a
few connoisseurs, the large majority was hostile
to the artist, and made it as difficult as possible
for him to live. He was looked upon as a mad-
man who threatened the entire social fabric.
His isolation was severe and complete; and while
many, painters strove to effect a reinstatement in
public favour, art for 300 years forced its way
through a splendid evolution in the face of neg-
lect, suspicion and ridicule.

For so many generations had the public looked

66 MODERN POINTING

upon art as the manifestation of a disordered
and dangerous brain that they found it difficult
to recognise a man in whose work was the very
pictorial essense they had originally admired.
This man was Edouard Manet. Instead of
being welcomed for his reversion to decoration,
strangely enough he was considered as dangerous
as his contemporary heretics, Delacroix and
Courbet. Courbet was at the zenith of his un-
popularity when Manet terminated his appren-
ticeship under Couture. The young painter
had had numerous clashes with his academic
master, and the latter had prophesied for him a
career as reprehensible as Daumier's. Spurred on
by such incompetent rebukes, Manet determined
to launch himself single-handed into the vortex
of the aesthetic struggle. This was in 1857. For
two years thereafter he put in his time to good
purpose. He travelled in Holland, Germany
and Italy, and copied Rembrandt, Velazquez,
Titian and Tintoretto. These youthful prefer-
ences give us the key to his later developments.
In 1859 he painted his Le Buveur d'Absinthe,
a canvas which showed all the ear-marks of the
romantic studio, and which exemplified the pro-
pensities of the student for simplification. It was
a superficial, if enthusiastic, piece _ of _work, and
the Salon of that year was fully justified in re-
jecting it. Two years later Manet had another
opportunity to expose. In the meantime he had
painted his La Nymphe Surprise which, though
one of his best canvases, contained all the influ-
ence of a hurriedly digested Rembrandt and a
Dutch Titian.
In 1 86 1 these influences were still at work,

EDOUARD MANET 67

but the Salon not only accepted his Le Guitarrero
but, for some unaccountable reason, awarded It
with an honourable mention. In this picture,
Manet's first Spanish adaptation, are also traces
of other men. Goya and even Murillo are here
the greys of Velazquez and Courbet's modern
attitude toward realism. In this canvas one sees
for the first time evidences of its creator's tech-
nical dexterity, a characteristic which later he
was to develop to so astonishing a degree. But
this picture, while conspicuously able, is, like
L'Enfant a FEpee and also Les Parents de r Ar-
tiste, the issue of immaturity. Such paintings
are little more than the adroit studies of a highly
talented pupil inspired by the one-figure arrange-
ments of Velazquez, Mazo and Carreno. Where
Manet Improved on the average student was in his
realistic methods. While he did not present the
aspecft of nature in full, after the manner of
Daubigny and Troyon, he stated its generalisa-
tions by painting it as seen through half-closed
eyes, its parts accentuated by the blending of
details into clusters of light and shadow. This
method of visualisation gives a more forceful
impression as an image than can a mere accurate
transcription. As slight an innovation as was
this form of painting, it represented Manet's one
point of departure from tradition, although it
was in truth but a modification of the traditional
manner of copying nature. The public, however,
saw in it something basically heretical, and
derided it as a novelty. The habit of ridicule
toward any deviation from artistic precedent had
become thoroughly fixed, ever since Delacroix's
heterodoxy.

68 MODERN PAINTING

It was not until 1862 that Manet, as the In-
dependent and professional painter, was felt. Up
to this time his talent and capabilities had out-
stripped his powers of ideation. But with the
appearance of Lola de Valence the man's solidar-
ity was evident. This pidiure was exposed with
thirteen other works at Martinet's the year follow-
ing. It was hung beside the accepted and fam-
iliar Fontainbleau painters, Corot, Rousseau and
Diaz; and almost precipitated a riot because of
its informalities. In these fourteen early Manets
are discoverable the artist's first tendencies
towards simplification for other than academic
reasons. Here the abbreviations and economies,
unlike those in Le Buveur d' Absinthe, constitute
a genuine inclination toward emphasising the
spontaneity of vision. By presenting a picture,
free from the stress of confusing items, the eye
is not seduced into the by-ways of detail, but
permitted to receive the image as an ensemble.
This impulse toward simplification was prefigured
in his Angelina now hanging in the Luxembourg
Gallery. Here he modelled with broad, fiat
planes of sooty black and chalky white, between
which there were no transitional tones. While
in this Manet was imitating the externals of
Daumier, he failed to approach that master's
form. Consequently he never achieved the plas-
ticity of volume which Daumier, alone among the
modern men, had possessed. However, despite
Manet's failure to attain pliability, these early
paintings are, in every way, sincere efforts toward
the creation of an individual style. It was only
later, after his first intoxicating taste of notoriety,
that the arriviste spirit took possession of him and

EDOUARD MANET 69

led him to that questionable and unenviable
terminus, popularity. One can imagine him,
drunk with eulogy, reading some immodest dec-
laration of Courbet's in which was set forth that
great man's egoistic confidence, and saying to
himself: " Tiensl II faut que faille plus loin."

The famous Salon des Refuses, called by some
critics of the day the Salon des Reprouves, gave
Manet his chance to state in striking fashion his
beliefs in relation to aesthetics. For whereas
mere realism could no longer excite the animosity
of the official Salon jury, as it had done twenty
years before, immorality or, as Manet chose
to put it, franchise could. Therefore Manet
was barred from the company of the Barbizon
school and the other favourites of the day. In the
Salon des Refuses, which must be held to the
credit of Napoleon III, those painters who had
suffered at the hands of the academic judges
were allowed a hearing. Whistler, Jongkind,
Pissarro and Manet here made history. Manet
sent Le Bain, which, through the insistence of
the public, has come to be called Le Dejeuner
sur FHerbe. But despite the precedent of Gior-
gione's Rural Concert (the Concert Champetre
in the Louvre), it was looked upon only as the
latest manifestation of degeneracy in a man who
gave every promise of becoming a moral pariah.
The nude, contrasted as it was with attired fig-
ures, was too suggestive of sheer nakedness. Had
the nude stood alone, as in Ingres's La Source,
or among other nudes, as in Ingres's Le Bain
Turc, the pidure would have caused no com-
ment. Its departures in method were not extrav-
agant. The scene is laid out of doors, yet it

70 MODERN POINTING

bears all the evidences of the studio conception;
and those lights and reflections which later were
brought to such perfection in the pictures of the
Impressionists and Renoir, are wholly absent.
But in one corner is a beautifully painted still-
life of fruits, a basket and woman's attire, which
alone should have made the picture acceptable.
This branch of painting Manet was to develop
to its highest textural possibilities.

From this time on Manet no longer used the
conventional chiaroscuro of the academicians.
Instead he let his lights sift and dispel themselves
evenly over the whole of his groupings. This
mode of procedure was undoubtedly an influence
of the Barbizon painters who had done away
with the brown sauce of the soi-disant classicists.
In his rejection of details and his discovery of a
means whereby effeds could be obtained by broad
planes, Manet was forced by necessity to take
the step toward this simplification of light. Were
colour to be used consistently in conjunction with
his technique, it must be spread on in large flat
surfaces. By diffusing his light the opportunity
was made. He might have omitted the element
of colour from his work and contented himself
with black and white, as in the case of Courbet;
but he was too sensitive to its possibilities. He
had observed it in the Venetians and Franz
Hals, as well as in nature; and in its breadth
and brilliance he had recognised its utility in
enhancing a picture's decorative beauty. Even
the colour of Velazquez was at times sumptuous.
Manet, because his simplicity of manner per-
mitted a liberal application of colour, was able
to augment its ornamental power. It is true

EDOUARD MANET 71

that today his large and Irregular patches of
tints appear grey, but, to his contemporaries, their
very extension made them seem blatant and
bold.

Courbet remained in great part the slave to
the common vision of reality. In his efforts to
attain results he sacrificed little. This, in itself,
delimited his accomplishments. Nature to him
appeared nearly perfect, and he painted with
all the wonderment of a child opening its eyes
on the world for the first time. On the other
hand, Manet realised that nature's forces become
objective only through an intellectual process.
This attitude marked a decided step in advance
of Courbet. Manet painted single figures and
simple images devoid of all anecdotal significance,
out of his pure love of his medium and his sheer
delight in tone and contour. In other words, he
represented the modern spirit which repudiates
objects conducive to reminiscence, and cares
only for " qualities " in art. His intentions were
those of Courbet pushed to greater freedom.
Unlike his master he was a virtuoso of the brush.
His very facility perhaps accounts for his satisfac-
tion with flat decoration, for it concentrated his
interest on the actual pate and thereby precluded
a deeper research into the psychology of aesthetic
emotion. But in his insistence on the aesthetic
rather than the illustrative side of painting he
carried forward the ideals which were to epitomise
modern methods.

In this lay the impetus he gave to painting.
Even with Rubens the necessities of the day
forced him, in his choice of themes, to adopt
a circumscribed repertoire, the subjects of which

72 MODERN POINTING

he repeated constantly. In him we have mastery
of composition with the substance as an after-
thought. Delacroix conceived his canvases in
the romantic mould, and adapted his composi-
tions so as to bring out the salient characteristics
of his chosen theme. This was illustration with
the arriere pensee of organisation. Daumier
struck the average between these two and con-
ceived his subjed in the form he was to use.
Courbet minimised the importance of objects as
such by raising them all to the same level of
adaptability: but he invariably chose, as with an
idee fixe, his subjeds from the life about him.
Manet cared nothing for any subjed whether
traditional or novel. That he generally chose
modern themes was indicative of that new mental
attitude which recognises the unimportance of
subjed-matter and urges the painter to abandon
thematic research and utilise the things at hand.
He made his art out of the materials nearest him,
irrespedive of their intrinsic topical value.

This was certainly an important step in the
liberating of art from convention. It proclaimed
the right of the artist to paint what he liked,
Courbet would have painted goddesses if he had
seen them. Manet would have painted them
without having seen them, provided he had
thought the result warranted the effort, Courbet,
the father of naturalism, extended the scope of
subjed-matter, while Manet tore away the last
tie which bound it to any tradition, whether
Courbet's or Titian's. After him there was
nothing new to paint. It is therefore small
wonder that artists should now have become
interested in the forces of nature rather than in

EDOUARD MANET 73

nature's mien. Manet, by his consummation of
theme, foreshadowed the concern with abstrac-
tions which has now swept over the world of
aesthetics. Zola, like him in other ways, never
equalled him in this. I/Assommoir and Fecon-
dite portrayed only the extremes of realism.
Manet painted all things with equal pleasure.
Here again is evident the continuation of that
mental attitude which Courbet introduced into
painting. The qualities in Manet which inclined
toward abstraction have secured him the reputa-
tion for being a greater generaliser than Courbet
whose brutal naturalism could not be disso-
ciated in the public mind from concrete and
stridl materialism. For this contention there is
substantiation of a superficial nature. But a
mere tendency toward generalisation, with no
other qualifications, does not indicate greatness.
In fa6l, were this purely literal truth concerning
Manet conclusive, it would tend to disqualify him
in his claim to an importance greater than Cour-
bet's. Carriere is an example of a painter who
is general and nothing more. Manet had other
titles to consideration.

What Manet's enduring contributions to paint-
ing were have never been surmised by the public.
His recognition, coming as it did years after his
most significant works had been accomplished
and set aside, was due to a reversion of the pub-
lic's mind to its aboriginal admirations. Manet
is popular today for the same reason that the
lesser works of Hokusai and Hiroshige are popu-
lar, namely: they present an instantaneous image
which is at once flat and motionless. As in the
days of the mosaicists and early primitives, the

74 MODERN PAINTING

appreciation of such works demands no intel-
lectual operation. Their recognisable subjects
only set in motion a simple process of memory.
The Olympia, Manet's most popular painting,
illustrates the type of picture which appeals
strongly to minds innocent of aesthetic depth.
Its mere imagery is alluring. As pure decoration
it ranks with Puvis de Chavannes, But in it
are all the mistakes of the later Impressionists.
Manet consciously attempted the limning of
light, but brilliance alone resulted. He did not
realise that, in order for one to be conscious of
illumination, shadow is necessary. This latter
element, with its complementary, produces in
us the sensation of volume. True, there is in
the Olympia violent contrast between the nude
body, the bed and the flowers, on the one hand,
and the background, the negress and the cat, on
the other; but it is only the contrast of dis-
similar atmospheres. The level appearance of
the pidure is not relieved.

The cardinal shortcoming in a painting of
this kind is that it fails to create an impression
of either the aspedls or the forces of nature.
Such piAures are only flat representations of
nature's minor characteristics. The most resilient
imagination cannot endow them with form: the
intelligence is balked at every essay to penetrate
beyond their surface. In contemplating them
one is irritated by the emptiness, or rather the
solidity, of the neant which lies behind. Courbet
called the Olympia "the queen of spades coming
from her bath/' Titian, had he lived today,
would have styled it a phogotraph. Goya (who
is as much to blame for it as either Courbet or

EDOUARB MANET 75

Titian) would have considered Its shallowness an
inexcusable vulgarity. In painting it undoubt-
edly Manet's intention was to modernise Titian's
Venus Reclining now hanging In the Uffizi; just
as later it was Gauguin's intention, in his La
Femme aux Mangos, to endow the Olyrnpia with
a South Sea Island setting. Such adaptations are
indefensible provided they do not improve upon
their originals. There is no improvement In
Gauguin's Venus; and Manet's pidure, while it
advances on Titian in attitude, Is a decided
retrogression viewed from the standpoint of
form.

In such pidures as the Olympia, Nana and La
Jarretiere we recognise Manet's effort to obtain
notoriety. He was not an aristocrat as was
Courbet or Goya or Titian. It was not a need
for freer expression that induced him to paint
pictures which shocked by their unconvention-
ality, but a desire to abasourdir les bourgeois. In
choosing his subject-matter he always had a
definite end In view In relation to the public;
but his conceptions were spontaneous and were
recorded without deliberation. He painted with
but little thought as to his method. This fad:
is no doubt felt by the public and held In his
favour by those who believe in the involuntary
inspiration of the artist. But art cannot be
judged by such childish criteria. Can one ima-
gine Giotto, Michelangelo or, to come nearer
our day, Cezanne painting without giving the
closest and most self-conscious study to his
procedure? Credence in the theopneusty of the
painter, the poet and the musician, should have
passed out with the advent of Delacroix; but

76 MODERN PAINTING

the seeming mystery of art is so deeply rooted
in public ignorance that many generations must
pass before it can be eradicated.

The truth is that Manet himself had no precise
idea of what he really wished to accomplish.
Up t6 the last year of his life he groped tenta-
tively toward a goal, the outlines of which were
never quite distinct. We today, looking back
upon his efforts, can judge his motivating influ-
ences with some degree of surety. In bringing
about the paradox of staticising Courbet, Manet
feminised him. He turned Courbet's blacks and
greys into pretty colours, and thereby turned his
modelling into silhouette and flattened his
volumes. Thus was Courbet not only made
effeminate but popularised. Compare the super-
ficially similar pictures, Le Hamac of Courbet
and Manet's Le Repos, In the former the move-
ment in composition accords with the landscape
and is carried out in the pose of the woman's arms
and in the disposition of the legs. The figure
in the latter pidiure is little more than an orna-
menta symmetrical articulation. Manet has
here translated the rhythm of depth into linear
balance. In this levelling process all those quali-
ties which raise painting above simple mosaics
are lost. A picture thus treated becomes a pat-
tern, incapable of embodying any emotional
significance. Manet's paintings are remembered
because they are so instantaneous a vision of
their subjeds. For this same reason Goya is
remembered; but beneath the Spaniard's broad
oppositions of tone is a limpid depth in which
the intelligence darts like a fish in an aquarium*
In Manet the impassable barrier of externals

EDOUARD MANET 77

shuts out that world which exists on the further
side of a picture's surface.

In Manet we have the summing up of the
piftorial expression of all time. His love for
decoration never left him long enough for him
to experiment with the profounder phases of
painting. In many of his canvases he was little
more than an exalted poster-maker. His Rendez-
vous de Chats was frankly a primitive arrange-
ment of flat drawing, as flat as a print by Mit-
suoki. Even details and texture were eliminated
from it. It was a statement of his theories re-
duced to their bare elements. Yet, though exag-
gerated, the picture was representative of his
aims. A pattern to him was form. Courbet's
ability to model an eye was the cause of Manet's
repudiating the painter of L'Enterrement a Ornans.
The two men were antithetical; and in that
antithesis we have Manet's aspirations fully
elucidated. Even later in life when he took the
figure out of doors he was unable to shake off
the influence of the silhouette. But the silhouette
cannot exist en plein air. Light volatilises design.
This knowledge accounts for Renoir's early sun-
light effeds. Manet never advanced so far.

The limitations and achievements of Manet
are summed up in his painting, Le Dejeuner sur
PHerbe. This pidure is undoubtedly interest-
ing in its black-and-white values and in its free-
dom from the conventions of traditional composi-
tion. At first view its theme may impress one
as an attempt at piquancy, but on closer inspec-
tion the adual subjedl diminishes so much in
importance that it might have been with equal
effedl a simple landscape or a still-life. There

78 MODERN PAINTING

Is no attempt at composition in the classic sense.
Even surface rhythm is entirely missing: the
tonal masses decidedly overweigh on the left.
But the picture nevertheless embodies the dis-
tinguishing features of all Manet's arrangements.
It is built on the rigid pyramidal plan. From
the lower left-hand corner a line, now light, now
dark, reaches almost to the upper frame at a
point diredtly above the smaller nude; and an-
other line, which begins In the lower right-hand
corner at the reclining man's elbow, runs upward
to his cap, and is then carried out In the shadow
and light of the foliage so that it meets the line
ascending from the other side. The base of these
two converging lines Is formed by another line
which runs from the man's elbow along his ex-
tended leg. This is the picture's Important tri-
angle. But a secondary one is formed by a line
which begins at the jundiure of the tree and
shadow in the lower right-hand corner, extends
along the cane and the second man's sleeve to
his head, and then drops, by way of the large
nude's head and shoulder, to the basket of fruit
at the bottom. This angularity of design is
seen in the work of all primitive-minded peoples,
and is notably conspicuous In the early Egyptians,
the archaic Greeks and the Assyrians of the eighth
century B.C. It is invariably the produd of the
static intelligence into which the comprehension
of aesthetic movement has never entered. It Is
the result of a desire to plant objedts solidly and
immovably in the ground. Those artists who
express themselves through it are men whose
minds are incapable of grasping the rhythmic
attributes of profound composition. Majntet re-

EDOUARD MANET 79

peats this triangular design In the Olmypia where
the two adjoining pyramids of contour are so
obvious that it is unnecessary to describe them.
The figures in canvases such as La Chanteuse
des Rues, , La Femme au Perroquet, Eva Gon-
zales and Emile Zola are constructed similarly;
and in groups like En Bateau and Les Anges au
Tombeau (the latter of which recalls, by its
arrangement and lighting, the Thetis et Jupiter
of Ingres) is expressed the mental immobility
which characterised Conegliano, Rondinelli, Ro-
busti and their seventeenth-century exemplars, de
La Fosse, Le Moyne and Rigaud.

If, however, Manet failed in the larger tests,
he excelled in his ability to beautify the surfaces
of his models. His painting of texture is perhaps
the most competent that has ever been achieved.
In his flesh, fruits and stuffs, the sensation of
hard, soft, rough or velvety exteriors reaches its
highest degree of pictorial attainment. These
many and varied textures are reunited in his
Le Dejeuner a canvas which must not be con-
fused with Le Dejeuner sur FHerbe. Here we
have a plant, a vase, four different materials in
the boy's clothing, a straw hat, a brass jug with
all its reflections, a table cloth, a wall, an old
sword, glassware, fruit and liquid It is an orgy
of textures, and Manet must have gloried in it.
One critic of the day wondered why oysters and
a cut lemon lay on the breakfast table. But we
wonder why a cat with fluffy fur is not there
also. Castagnary suggested that Manet, feeling
himself to be the master of still-life, brought
every possible texture into a single canvas for
purposes of contrast and because he delighted

80 MODERN POINTING

in the material quality of objeds. But the reason
goes deeper. Manet was a superlatively con-
scious technician, and that sacre commodite de la
brosse, so displeasing to Delacroix, was his great-
est intoxication. Hals also was seduced by it.
Later, when the new vision of light was com-
municated to Manet by the Impressionists, his
obsession for the purely technical diminished in
intensity. In that topical bid for popularity,
the Combat du Kerseage et de F Alabama, we
deted his Interest in a new economy of means
which would facilitate his search for broader
illumination. This method took a step forward
in Le Port de Bordeaux, and later reached matur-
ity in his canvases painted in 1882, of which Le
Jardin de Bellevue is a good example. But
despite his heroic efforts, these last pictures,
painted a year before he died when paralysis
had already claimed him and he was devoting
his time almost entirely to still-life, were without
fulgency, and never approached the richness of.
even so slight a colourist as Monet.

Repose is a word used overmuch by modern
critics to designate the dominant quality of
Manet's painting. From an entirely pictorial
point of view the word is applicable, but in the
precise aesthetic sense it is a misnomer. The
illusion of repose in Manet Is accounted for by
his even use of greys, as in Le Chemin de Fer,
Le Port de Bordeaux, the Execution de Maxl-
milien and the Course de Taureaux. Even in Les
Bulles de Savon, the Rendez-vous de Chats, Le
Clair de Lune and Le Bar des Folies-Bergere
canvases in which is exhibited Manet's great-
est opposition of tones the ensemble is expres-

EDOUARD MANET 81

sive of monotony. Real repose, however, Is
something much more recondite than uniformity
or tedium. It is created by a complete harmon-
ious organisation, not by an avoidance of move-
ment. Giotto's Death of Saint Francis and El
Greco's Annunciation have a simultaneity of pre-
sentation as unique as In Manet; but, because their
compositions are so rhythmically co-ordinated, they
present an absolute finality of movement and thus
engender an emotional as well as an occular repose.
Manet's acfhial Innovations are small, smaller
even than Courbet's. However, many critics
credit him with grotesque novelties. There are
very few books dealing with modern painting
which do not assert that he was the first to
note that flesh in the light is dazzllngly bright
and of a cream-and-rose colour. But in this
particular there is no improvement In Manet on
the pictures of Rubens. He may have unearthed
this illustrative point; certain it is he did not
originate It. Yet no matter how slight his depar-
tures, we enjoy his pidures for their inherent
aesthetic qualities, and not for their approximation
to nature. Manet made many mistakes, but this
was natural when we remember that in the whirl-
pool of new ambitions one is prone to forget the
lessons of the past. Only by profiting by them
can one go on toward the ever advancing goal
of achievement. We must not forget that this
new spirit of endeavour is only an impulse towards
something greater, a rebellion against arbitrarily
imposed obstacles. If men like Manet lost track
of the fundamentals of the great art which had
preceded them, It was only that their vision was
clouded by new experiments.

82 MODERN PAINTING

The adlual achievements of Manet epitomise
the secondary in art. His attempt to combine
artistic worth with popularity restricted him.
That he was misunderstood at first was his own
fault in continually changing his style. But
acceptance or rejection by popular opinion does
not indicate the measure of a painter's signifi-
cance. And Manet is to be judged by his contri-
butions to the new idea. His importance lay in
that he took the second step of the three which
were to exhaust the possibilities of realism. In
art every genuine jinethod is consummated before
a new one can take its place. Michelangelo
brought architecture to its highest point of de-
velopment; Rubens, linear painting; the Impres-
sionists, the study of light; Beethoven, the classic
ideal in music; Swinburne, the rhymed lyric.
In facft, only after the epuisement of a certain
line of endeavour, is felt the necessity to seek for a
new and more adequate means of expression.
Manet helped bring to a close a certain phase of
art, thus hastening the advent of other and
greater men. His accomplishments now stand
for all that is academic and student-like; and
although his interest as an innovator passed out
with the appearance of Pissarro and Monet,
men go on imitating his externals and using his
brushing. In the same sense that Velazquez is
a great painter, so is Manet. His influence has
served the purpose of helping turn aside the
academicians from their emulation of Italian
painting.

IV
THE EARLY IMPRESSIONISTS

COURBET was the first painter to turn
his attention to naturalism. Manet
carried forward Courbet's standard. Im-
pressionism took the last step, and
brought to a close the objectively realistic con-
ception in painting. By this final development
of naturalistic means unlimited opportunities
for achievement were offered. Impressionistic
methods are now employed by a vast army of
painters in all parts of the world, and the num-
ber of canvases which owe their existence to these
discoveries is countless. Specifically Impression-
ism is occular realism. It represents that side of
actuality which has to do with light expressed
by colour; and deals with a manner of approach-
Ing natural valuations whereby the painter is
permitted to transfer a scene or subject to his
canvas in such a way that it will give the
spectator the sensation of dazzling light, broad at-
mosphere and truthful colours. To accomplish
this Impressionism confines itself to the play of
a light from a given source its reflections and
distributions on an object or a landscape. There-
fore, It is the restri&ed study of the disappearance
of the local colour in a model, and of the lumin-
osity and divergencies of tones to be found in
shadow. It approximates to a nature which be-
comes, for the moment, a theatre of chromatic light

84 MODERN POINTING

sensations. Subjed-matter gave the Impression-
ists no concern. They advanced materially on
the spirit in Manet which led him to paint any
objed at hand because of its susceptibility to
artistic treatment. The Impressionists painted
anything, not alone for aesthetic reasons, but
because all objeds make themselves visible by
means of light and shadow. This manner of
painting was the ultimate divorce of the pidure
from any convention, whether of arrangement, of
drawing or of a fixed palette. Herein it was an
elastic process par excellence, with no defined
limitations.

Impressionism, though analytic and self-con-
scious, was not based on science. One may look
in vain for parallels between its theories and those
of Dove, Thomas Young and ChevreuL ^ It was
the imitation, pure and simple, of the disintegra-
tions of colour in nature's broad planes. And this
achievement of diversity in simplicity was brought
about by the only method possible: the juxta-
position of myriad tints. In other words, Im-
pressionism was a statement that vision is
the result of colour forces coming into contad
with the retina. However, the men of the move-
ment did not see nature as an agglomeration of
coloured spots, but as a series of planes made
vibrant by light. To reproduce this vibration
they were necessitated to use nature's methods:
they broke up surfaces into sensitive parts, each
one of which was a separate tint. There are
no broad planes of unified colour in nature. In
each natural atom are absorption and reflection;
and the preponderance of either of these two
attributes results in a specific colour. Before

THE EARLY IMPRESSIONISTS 85

the advent of this new school painters had made
warm or cold green by combining green with
yellow ochre or raw sienna, or by the admixture
of blues and purples. But the Impressionists
laid on these colours, pure or modified, side by
side, and let the eye do the work of blending,
They discovered not only that In green the
shadow is tinged with blue, but that blue is the
direct result of the yellow-orange of light. Every
one nowadays has noticed that, in looking fixedly
at a green, it appears now bluish, now yellowish;
just as in listening to an orchestra we can, by
focusing our attention, hear predominantly the
bass or the treble. So the Impressionists ob-
served that in the most luminous colour there is
a proportion of absorption, and that in the
darkest shadow there exists some reflection. The
association of these molecular properties is what
produces vibration in nature. By the application
of these observations the Impressionists generated
a feeling of grouillement; the movement by
contrast in the smallest parts.

In attempting to explain their canvases many
commentators have credited them with systems
of complementaries which resulted in grey, and
with other exorbitant theories of oppositions. But
one may look in vain in their work for any
synthesis of scientific discoveries. Colour, not
neutrality, was their aim; and, as they themselves
admitted, they painted comme toiseau chante.
Birds are not conscious of the metallic dissonance
of diminished fifths; and the Impressionists were
equally unaware of the harshness of red with
green, blue with orange, yellow with violet. They
only substituted a balance of cold and warm

86 MODERN PAINTING

colours for the balance of lines which the older
painters had used. They copied the tints they
found in nature after analysing nature's processes,
in order to arrive closer to its visual effed. In
one way they almost achieved colour photography,
for their study, in its narrow character, was deep,
and their vision was highly realistic. But whereas
they depided nature, they could call it up only
in its Instantaneous aspects. In this ephemerality
alone were they impressionists; indeed, their
methods were the most exad and probing of any
painters of that time. Each hour of the day
raises or lowers the colour values in nature; and
he who would copy nature's form as a permanent
interpretation must ignore the exactitude of its
reflections and approximate only to its local
colours. This latter method is more truly im-
pressionism than the theories of the Impressionists.
They repudiated local colours as being too
illusory, holding that the most highly coloured
objed modifies its tint under the influence of the
least variation of light. The point is technically
true, but it is an observation in objective re-
search, and the word Impressionism must not
be accepted as explanatory of the methods of
the school it designates.

By decomposing the parts of a surface, in order
to represent objeds in their atmospheric material-
ity, the Impressionists were impelled by a force
stronger than a mere desire for superficial accu-
racy: they felt the need for complete and minute
organisation in a work of art. , In landscape,
where the many accidentals appeared to lack
cohesion, the Impressionists achieved co-ordina-
tion by a unity of light which welded all the

THE EARLY IMPRESSIONISTS 87

objects into an interdependent group. Plasticity
of form had resulted from the efforts of preceding
painters, but here for the first time was a plastic-
ity of method which moulded itself like putty
with the slightest change of illumination. Pre-
occupation in this new compositional element
made its users forget, for the time being, the
older precepts for obtaining composition. This
forgetfulness however was not due entirely to
exuberance over a novel procedure. The painters
antecedent to Delacroix had used landscape as
unimportant backgrounds for figures, and there was
no precedent for its adaptation to organisation.
Courbet had composed landscape by the linear
balance of black and white volumes. The Barbi-
zon artists had brought out-of-door painting into
more general notice; but their greys were in-
sufficient to give it more than a factitious and
purely conventional unity. The Impressionists,
feeling the urgency for a more virile expression
in landscape work, saw a solution to their problem
in the depiction of light through colour. Thus
their conceptions took birth.

Their technique, like Manet's, was wholly con-
sistent with their objective. To the Impression-
ists this objective seemed possessed of the merit
of finality. Since Corot had carried painting
out of doors and Manet had portrayed studio
light from every vantage point, what indeed
was left for this new group of men? They might
have organised Manet or Corot, but even the
most competent of such modifications would have
presented an appearance like that of a Rubens or
a Tiepolo, They were too avid for genuine
novelty to content themselves with slight innova-

88 MODERN PAINTING

tion; and they were too modern to derive satis-
faction from the stereotyped teachings of an
antiquity whose tones were unemotional and
whose themes were hackneyed. The spirit of
servility which is willing to learn second-hand
lessons and adopt indoor conceptions spelled
decadence to them. Their attitude was a healthy
and corred one, for the cup of linear tone-
composition had been drained. They were wrong
in that they threw aside the cup: they should
have filled it with more powerful concepts. Their
attitude was indicative of immaturity. The Im-
pressionists in truth were the adolescents of the
modern art which was bora with Delacroix and
Turner, and which only recently has become a
concrete engine for the projection of inspiration
into an infinity of possibilities.

Impressionism was more important than any
preceding departure, for it turned the thoughts
of artists from mere results to motivating forces,
from the ripples on the surface to the power which
causes the tides. It foreshadowed the philosoph-
ical idea in art which concerns itself with causes
rather than effeds, and thereby brought about a
fundamental reform which made of painting, not
a mere vision, but an idea. The Impressionists,
it is true, worked from the surface down, but they
had the depths ever in mind; and the posing
of their problem set in motion in all serious
painters that intellectual process which eventually
would begin with foundations and build upward*
Impressionism was the undeniable implication
that the possibilities of the older art methods
had been exhausted, and that a substitution of a
new method, however fragmentary, was of greater

THE EARLY IMPRESSIONISTS 89

importance than the sycophantic imitations of
an unapproachable past. Beneath this attitude
we feel the broadness of mind which, when a
mistake has been made, does not ignore causes
but attaches to them different interpretations in
an effort to arrive at the truth. The Impression-
ists kept their palette intadl; but they employed
its parts in a way that made new combinations
possible. By doing this they unconsciously re-
adied against the mere dexterity of brushing with
which so many painters, like Hals, Velazquez
and Raeburn, became obsessed and, as a con-
sequence, failed to heed the deeper demands of
aesthetic research. By thus facilitating technique
they not only reduced the difficulties attached
to the production of a picture, but made the thing
expressed of greater relative significance.

Pissarro, Monet, Sisley and Guillaumin who,
with Bazille, composed the original group of
Impressionists, had all been influenced in youth
by the revolutionary doctrines of Corot and
Courbet, and to a great extent had adopted the
palette of these two men. Landscape painting
at that time was almost a new development, and
these four readily succumbed to its inspiration.
There is little of the stridly picturesque and still
less of the grandiose in the French landscape.
Consequently a school which worked along the
line of old conventions could not have existed
in France. But when Rousseau and Diaz, strik-
ing out in a new direction, poetised the charm
of the hills and forests about Fontainbleau, the
painting of the out-of-doors was liberated both
as to purpose and to freedom of arrangement.
The objedt of Turner's work had been to astonish

9 o MODERN POINTING

and charm the spectator with nature's vastness
and complexity. But, with the men of 1830,
landscape art took on softness, introspection,
stillness, solemnity. In fine, it became more
intimate. Each tree and stone hid a nymph;
each stream and hill, a mystery. With the
Impressionists all this was changed. They had
seen and admired the work of Manet .^ They
applauded his readions against studio lighting,
and later became his personal friends. Manet
was then the cynosure of all eyes in the art world
of Paris, and it was only natural that he should
have been the dominating figure in a sort of
ctnacle held in the Cafe Guerbois in the quarter
of the Batignolles. Here the revolutionists of
the day forgathered, and, by their uncompromis-
ing spirit, inspired one another to practical pro-
testations against the routine of the academies.
Manet's eloquence argued away the older idea
of lighting as a type; and the younger men, using
this negotiation as a starting point, gave birth to
the methods which congealed into Impressionism.
Although Monet and Pissarro were the first
to profit by Manet's teachings, there is no definite
history to tell who was the first of the group to
blossom into colour. However, there is little
doubt that Pissarro was the man. He was a Jew
with a philosophic turn of mind, and possessed
more genuine intelligence than his confreres.
Monet was the cleverest and the most enthusi-
astic, and when the new process was outlined it
was he who first developed it to its ultimate
consequences. Pissarro, compared with Monet,
was conservative, and his practicality did not
permit him so great an elan. His canvases beside

THE EARLY IMPRESSIONISTS 91

those of Monet's appear almost tentative, and
the greys he had adopted from Corot never
entirely forsook him. Both these painters went
to London during the Franco-Prussian War, and
we may take it for granted that the works of
Turner had an enormous influence on them.
They had already seen Jongkind who, despite his
adherence to the sombre greys of the older men,
had, five years previous, more than foreshadowed
the later divisionistic technique. But in Turner
they discovered not only all that Jongkind had
to offer, but the additional quality of joyous and
dazzling colour. After their return their palettes
became rapidly cleaner,

In 1874, in an effort to bestir the public, the
Impressionists held an exhibition. The excite-
ment was all they could have desired, but it
led rather to obloquy than to sales. Again and
again they exposed in the hope of obtaining
recognition, but not until 1888 were they success-
ful The average spectator did not recognise
nature in their canvases. The vision was an
unusual one, and bore but slight resemblance
to what had gone before. But gradually things
underwent a change. Friends of the Impression-
ists launched a campaign of proselytising. Now
and then a picture was sold to a collector; form-
erly restaurant keepers and bricklayers had been
the only buyers of their work. The popular
press softened its criticisms and in many instances
went so far as to defend their pictures. As a
result of these numerous indications of a growing
approval among connoisseurs, the public, that
almost immovable mass of reactionary impulses,
began to look with favour on the new works it

92 MODERN POINTING

had so recently ridiculed. The great majority
of people had cared only for such canvases as
those in which the intelled might jump^from one
familiar objed: to another, recognising it wholly,
comprehending its uses, but without giving
thought to its meaning. Being thus interested
primarily in a pi&ure's conventionally painted
details, they were opposed to any^ innovations
which tended to obscure the actualities of deline-
ation. Later their attitude, influenced by ads
of authoritative sanction, relaxed. Instead of
seeing, as formerly, only a series of raucously
coloured spots in these new pictures, the public
began to sense the deep reverence for nature
that emanated from them. Thus has it always
been the case with art: appreciation for anything
newly vital lags far behind the achievement.

The true significance of Impressionism, however
like the true significance of all emotion-pro-
voking art remained undiscovered to the gen-
eral When the mean intelligence of mankind
brings itself to bear on a work of art, it applies
itself through the channels of literature, arche-
ology, photography, botany, mineralogy and
physiology. To be a popular artist a painter
must be something of a professor in all these
sciences. With all other considerations such
as psychology and aesthetics he need not
trouble himself. The public, even after centuries
of rigorous training and constant association
with art, is no nearer a comprehension of rhythmic
ensembles perfectly synthesised form in three
dimensions than it was during the Renaissance.
The two major requisites to an understanding
of the formal relations in momentous art are a

THE EARLY IMPRESSIONISTS 93

highly developed sensitivity and an adive in-
telligence. An eye and a nervous system are
not enough* Society as a whole may, after a
long course of training and sedulous study, reach
that perceptive point where It can grasp the
simple aesthetic hypothesis founded on two dimen-
sions. But such a hypothesis is but a beginning.
It embraces only the rudimentary aesthetic or-
ganisations that are found in Japanese art,
the works of the Byzantine masters, the primi-
tives of France and the pictures of Botticelli,
Manet and Gauguin. The form in art of this
kind is, stridly speaking, not form at all. It is
balance, harmonious rhythm, linear adjustment,
parallelism, co-ordinated silhouette, sensitive ar-
rangement, outline melody in fad:, whatever
is possible in two dimensions. Significant form
must move In depth backward and forward,
as well as from side to side. Furthermore It
must imply an Infinity of depth. This third
(and sometimes fourth) dimension informs all
truly great art.

While the Impressionists did not attain to
depth in the aesthetic connotation of the word,
they nevertheless went beyond mere linear
balance, for by the means of a higher emotional
element light they organised, In a superficial
manner, all the objects in their canvases. There
were no dissevered objeds, unrelated backgrounds,
no concessions to the hagiographa or other
literature. What chance, therefore, had they of
being understood? Their subjed-matter was
too abstrad; their effeds were too general. No
line was accentuated above another. There were
no modifications to achieve vastness or splendour.

94 MODERN POINTING

Impressionism was the unadulterated reproduction
of atmosphere, the smile or frown of a mood in
nature. It is small wonder that the unaesthetic
found it obscure: in it there was too much rap-
ture, too much frankness, too much exultation
in mere living, and too little restraint. It was
the false dawn in the great modern Renaissance
of colour the most ecstatically joyful style of
painting the world has ever seen. It was fem-
inine in that it was a reflection, and its hysteria
may also be attributed to this fad. The Im-
pressionists seated themselves, free from all tram-
mels, before the face of nature. Nature dictated:
they transcribed. Nature smiled; and they,
completely blent with it, smiled also. This very
enthusiasm is what kept them young and held
them to their initial path. To paint as they did
was an intoxication, subtler and stronger than
a drug and more elating than young love.

The vital history of the individual men who
formed this group reduces itself to a record of
their temperamental tastes in subject selection
and to a statement of the degree to which each
developed the new method. The individualities
of the units of an experimental school are always
unimportant. Temperament can dictate to the
artist only two phases of variation: what he is
to use in his composition, and those tran-
scendental qualities, such as joy and sorrow,
drama and comedy, which reflect the timbre of
his predispositions. Rhythm, form, balance,
organisation, drawing all these aesthetic con-
siderations spring from deeper matrices in a
man's nature than do his temperamental
predilections. Whether one man is intrigued

THE EARLT IMPRESSIONISTS 95

by sunlight or another by mist, mankind is, after
all, so similar in externals, that one individual's
slight departure from a predecessor, or his trifling
deviation from a contemporary, is of little mo-
ment. The true key to a man's genius lies in
his ability to organise as well as, or better than,
others. The compositional figure on which he
builds will alone give us the substance of his
character. We are all capable of receiving
sensations: we have our personal likes and
dislikes for subjeds, even for actions and smells.
But these choices are the outgrowths of our
instincts, mere habits of association. In nowise
are they fundamental They are the physio-
logical recognition of pleasant or unpleasant
impressions. Their importance is limited to the
individual who experiences them. Being the
results of receptivity, they have no more to
do basically with the aesthetic expression of an
artist whose work is pure creation, than phono-
graph disks with the sounds they receive. By
the intelligence alone can a man be judged. Here
there is order, extensive in artists like Michelangelo,
partially restricted in such painters as El Greco
and Giorgione, and severely limited as in the case
of the Impressionists. However, it must not be
implied that the intelligence alone can create. Such
a contention would be preposterous; but it is true
that impressions must first be consciously organ-
ised before they can be given concrete expression.
The intelligence of Pissarro was synthetic to a
small extent, but not once did it exhibit signs of
extended apperception. He thought clearly up
to a certain point beyond which his art never
went. His temperament was not an uncommon

96 MODERN PAINTING

one among Hebrews. He viewed life as a social
reformer who regards the world as a sad place,
but one susceptible of improvement. From this
psychological standpoint he painted. His^pidures
depid ubiquitous greys, occasionally brightened
by a stream of lurid light ; sombre scenes in which
the impression is one of . re afternoon; peasants
who seem wearied of their unceasing and thankless
labours; gaunt trees which epitomise the ^ decay
of the year. His technique is not dissimilar to
that of Jongkind, and his drawing is allied to the
construction found in the Dutch landscapists of
the early nineteenth century rather than in those
of his own group. That he was the transition
from Jongkind to Monet is a plausible conten-
tion; in him are found qualities of both these
other painters. But he was too conscientious
ever to attain to the technical heights Monet
reached. If one aspires to innovation of means,
graphic traits have to be sacrificed: steps must
be taken .in the dark. Those who cling with
one hand to the old while groping toward the
new can never reach their desires. Pissarro's
lack of constructive genius was too evident, his
timidity too great, his intelligence too literal
for him ever to effeduate new plastic forms. His
instinds were those of a teacher, and he displayed
indubitable traits of an exalted doctrinaire. But
his art, with these limitations, was able and
complete. Cezanne says he learned all he knew
of colour from him. This is not wholly true;
but it is certain that Guillaumin and Sisley are
greatly indebted to his clarity of reason,

Although Pissarro is the greater artist, Monet
is the finer craftsman. He is widely credited

THE EJRLT IMPRESSIONISTS 97

with the invention of divisionistic methods; but
in this conclusion an inaccurate syllogism has
played havoc with the fads. None of the
Impressionists invented the precede de la tdche;
and not having invented it detrads nothing
from their achievement. Liszt did not invent
the pianoforte, yet he was its greatest master.
The practice of crediting Frenchmen with the
invention and development of methods has scant
authority with which to justify itself. Poussin
was an offshoot, and a weak one, of the great
Titian. Watteau and Boucher come to us dired
out of the corners of Rubens's pictures. Daumier
and Courbet, temperamentally unrelated to the
French tradition, stem from the Dutch and the
Spaniards. Cezanne emanated from the Dutch
and the Italians via Impressionism. Matisse's
procedure Is little more than a modification of
that of the Persians and the early Italians.
Cubism was imported from Spain by a Spaniard.
Futurism Is stridly Italian: there is not a French
name among its originators. Synchromism was
brought into the world by Americans. And
Impressionism, which, like all these other
departures, has come to be looked upon as
French, is incontrovertibly of English parentage.
True, there is small credit due the inventor.
The man capable of employing new discoveries
(as Marconi employed the principles of wireless
telegraphy) is the truly important figure. But we
should not confuse discovery with employment.
Since Monet was French, France has a perfed
right to claim the results of colour division. The
honours attaching to its discovery are Turner's
and Constable's.

9 8 MODERN POINTING

Monet, like many great men, had little school-
ing He went dired to nature, impelled by the
new impetus toward landscape. His first pidures
in the Impressionist manner resemble Manet s
except for trivial innovations in the differentiation
of shadows; but in this difference we divine the
later Monet. Viewed cursorily these paintings
appear to be conventional figure pieces. But they
are more than that. The figures have no other
significance than that which attaches to^ a vase
or a landscape. "Facial expression," "sympa-
thetic gestures," the "appeal" all are absent
from them. In these pictures the costume plays
the hero's part. La Japonaise is representative
of that treatment of subjed wherein the figure is
only an excuse for a pattern of colour. The
modern attitude toward theme which Manet
handed down is again in evidence in Monet.
Its reduftio ad absurdum was the late epidemic
of illustrative pidures by such men as Whistler,
Shannon, Sargent, Zuloaga and Alexander, the
titles of which were derived from the flowers held
in the hands of the principals, a bowl of goldfish
in the background, or the colour of a lace shawl.

Monet, however, soon tired of figure pieces.
His true penchant lay toward landscape. ^ In this
field he found an infinity of colour possibilities,
innumerable subtleties of light gradation, and
ready-to-paint arrangements as appealing as the
ones he had formerly had to pose in his interiors.
At first his technique was broad and radiant,
much like a dispersed Manet. The large flat
planes of unified colour which later were to
disintegrate into a thousand touches, were laid on
silhouetted forms. His boat pieces in the Cail-

THE EARLT IMPRESSIONISTS 99

lebotte collection In the Luxembourg gallery,
appear, In their simplicity and breadth of treat-
ment, like the unfinished underpainting of a
Turner or a Rembrandt. Much of the bare
canvas is visible; and in them one feels the
presence of the experimenter. At this time the
war drove Monet to London, and his exile proved
a salutary one. On his return his pictures
bloomed with a new brilliance, and his flat
surfaces became fragmentised. Racial character-
istics no doubt establish a bond between Sisley
and the English landscapists, but nothing less
than an active influence could have made so
typical ja Frenchman as Monet paint a canvas
like L* Eglise a Varengeville in which Turner is so
much in evidence. Turner is also unmistakably
present in Pissarro at times, as witness Sydenham
Road, but never to any great extent.

Despite his great debt to Turner, Manet and
Pissarro, Monet owed even more to the Japanese.
They influenced his style and his seledion of
subjects. From them he Mfted the idea of paint-
ing a single object many times in its varied
atmospheric manifestations. But where the Jap-
anese shifted their vantage-ground with each
successive pidure, Monet's observation point
remained stationary. His composition too,
superficial as it is, is frankly Japanese. It^ is
generally represented by a straight line which
runs near the lower frame from one side to the
other of the canvas, and which supports the
principal objeds of the work. This line slants,
now up to the left, now up to the right; but
seldom is it curved as in the more advanced
drawings of Hiroshige or HokusaL His kinship

ioo MODERN PAINTING

to the Japanese is, after all, a natural one, for
the temperaments of France and Japan are as
similar as is possible between east and west. The
Japanese artists presented atmospheric conditions
by means of gradating large colour planes into
white or dark. The consequent effects of rain,
snow, wind and sun are as vivid as Monet's,
but they differ from the Frenchman's in that
they are concerned principally with nature's dec-
orative possibilities. Monet adheres to graphic
transcription for the purpose of presenting the
dynamics of a mood-producing phase of nature.
But though differing as to aims, they both reach
very similar visual results. Compare, for instance,
Monet's suite of Les Peupliers with Hiroshige's
series of the Tokaido or with Hokusai's Views of
Fuji. Many of the pictures are alike in composi-
tion and choice of subjed; but the European has
achieved a living light, while the Oriental has
presented a more lucid and intensive vision.
These differences of purposes and similarities of
appearance are again discernible in Monet's
Coins de Riviere and Shiubun's Setting Sun. A
further proof of this Impressionist's affinities with
the Japanese will be found by collating Monet's
figure pieces with those of Utamaro.

There is one important point of divergence,
however, between the arts of Japan and Monet's
canvases. Whereas the Japanese ignored texture,
Monet at all times devoted himself more or less
sedulously to its portrayal The Falaise a Etretat
and The Houses of Parliament London are
examples of his freedom from a rigid system of
scientific application. In both pictures the sky
is drawn with broad intersecting strokes in order

THE EARLT IMPRESSIONISTS 101

to achieve transparency and vastness. The water,
in the former, is painted with long curved strip-
pings to give the wave effed, as in Courbet's
La Vague; and, in the latter, ripples are formed
by minute touches, Monet's architecture is often
built up with colour-spots as a man lays bricks;
and the cliffs in the Falaise a Etretat are cor-
rugated in exactly the same way the strata lie
in nature. Later this preciosity of style disap-
peared, except in his treatment of slightly ruffled
water. His brushing became irregular and
elongated, and he applied his stroke so that it
would merge into the other innumerable touches
of diverse colour. His eyesight was highly
trained, and after years of labour in the conscious
analysis of colour planes, he was able to divide
these planes unconsciously.

Monet was artistic in that he felt deeply what
was before him. Henri Martin, on the other
hand, who painted with independent touches
in the hope of obtaining flickering sunlight, and
who knew his palette fully as well as Monet,
laboured mechanically. His work is more optical
than emotional He is a realist in the same sense
that Roll is a realist; but both these men present
only the husk of reality. Monet, to the contrary,
experienced and expressed nature's ecstasy. He
is like a string which vibrates to any harmony:
Martin is little more than an eye. Both finished
their work in the open; and both stippled. But
here the parallelism ends, for where Monet com-
pleted the effects of the Japanese, Martin only
took light into the academies. Perhaps this
is why Martin was at once acclaimed by the
public, and why Monet, during those first dark

102 MODERN PAINTING

years of struggle and poverty, was compelled
to sell his canvases for pradically nothing. Duret
confesses to having obtained one for eighty francs.
Martin was early accorded academic honours, and
received numerous government orders.

Monet found himself at home wherever there
was light and water. His canvases describe
scenes from all over Europe. But his most
famous pictures are his two series, Les Meules
and Les Nympheas. In the first, a single hay-
stack is set forth in a diversity of illuminations
and seasons; and the second repeats a small pond
of water- lilies, in shade and in sun, ruffled and
calm. His La Cathedrale, Venice and London
series are also widely known. These represent
acute observation and an implacable inspiration
to work, for they had to be finished simultane-
ously. Their accomplishment was a stupendous
tour de force. At sunrise Monet would go forth
with twenty blank canvases so that the changes
of sunlight and mist might be caught from hour
to hour. They seem infantile to us today
these imitations of the subtleties of light, these
meteorological histories of haystacks and lilies,
these atmospheric personalities of cathedrals and
canals. Yet it is by just such self-burials in
data that one exhausts the aesthetic possibilities
of nature's actualities. And not until this probing
to the bottom has been accomplished does the
artist possess that complete knowledge which
impels him to push forward to something newer
and more vital.

Sisley was the last of the original five to adopt
Impressionistic methods. He had long had an
admiration for the exploits of the more revolu-

THE EARLT IMPRESSIONISTS 103

tionary painters, but a comfortable income had
aded as a sedative on his ambitions. He did
not feel the necessity for difficult endeavour. But
when, at the death of his father, he found himself
penniless and with a family to care for, he joined
the ranks of Pissarro, Monet, Guillaumin and
Bazille. He had talent and an accurate eye,
and his earlier academic work, done in the sixties,
served as a practical foundation. After he had
adopted the more modern technique of Pissarro
and Monet, he was prepared for the achievement
of new art. If we had no other proof that
Impressionism at its inception was a shallow
craft, Sisley's immediate mastery of it would be
conclusive, for his appropriation of its means was
not an aesthetic impulse but a financial expedient.
But more extensive corroboration can be found
in a score of academies where Impressionism is
taught and taught conclusively.

There is no more or less actual composition in
Sisley than in other of the Impressionists. He
supplied no innovations, and he differed from his
fellows only in so far as his temperament indicated
variation. In Monet and Guillaumin there is a
concentration and precision which the English-
man fell short of. His nature was less akin to
these Impressionists than to the Turner of wide
and open skies, of the softness and dreaminess of
summer, of that perfect satisfaction which is
content with inaction. Sisley's very colour pref-
erence for which the public reproached him
light lilac indicates his penchant for prettiness
and repose. His choice of theme was invariably
dictated by a poetical and sentimental need for
the intimate.

104 MODERN POINTING

In Guillaumin we have a man who gave
promise of good work but who, up to the last,
failed in its fulfilment. Indubitably talented, he
never succeeded in reaching that point where
talent is only a means to an end. But neverthe-
less there was in him a solidity of modelling, a
real feeling for the ponderous hardness of hills
and plains. He was a friend of Cezanne, and
undoubtedly learned much from that master of
form. At first he had painted in sombre tones,
but later, after meeting Cezanne and Pissarro in
the Academic Suisse, he adopted their lighter and
more joyous colour schemes. There is a canvas
in the Caillebotte Collection in the Luxembourg
which, in its broadness of treatment and extensive
planes, suggests Gauguin both as to gamut and
conception. Guillaumin was the most masculine
talent of the early Impressionist group. He cared
less for the transient views of nature than for its
eternal aspect. His colour, by its liberality of
application, counts more forcibly than that of
Pissarro, Monet or Sisley. His contributions to
the new idea, however, were comparatively small.
He was not an explorer, but followed diligently
in the path others had marked out. Only after
he had won a fortune in a lottery did he break
away from his environment. But this release
came to him too late. His formative period of
development had passed, and his work, from that
time on, did not alter in technique. Only in his
picturesque and bizarre subje6l-matter is notice-
able any deviation from his habitual routine.

The individual achievements of the Impression-
ists, however, no matter how competent, are of minor
importance. Impressionism was a new weapon in

2
t>

THE EARLY IMPRESSIONISTS 105

the hands of art's anarchists. It has come to be
regarded as a faultless faith whose devotees can do
no wrong. There has been little or no adequate
literature devoted to its exposition,, its causes and
influence; and the exaggeration of its attainments
are as grotesque as the calumny with which it was
at first received. It was not an ultimate and
isolated movement, but a simple and wholly
natural offshoot in the evolution of new means.
The artists who fathered it were, except in one
instance, men whose enthusiasm outstripped their
abilities as composers. Their greatest good lay
in that they turned the thoughts of painters
toward colour, and outlined, summarily to be
sure, the uses to which this new and highly
intense element might be put. They expressed
just what their desires permitted them: nature
in all its visible changes. Those exquisite mo-
ments of full sunlight on land and water, of cloud
shadows over the hills, of the warm brilliancy of
a blue sky on the upturned faces of flowers; the
stillness of summer amid the woods; the cold
serenity of snow-clad fields all were seen and
captured and immortalised by these men. They
were the greatest painters of effedls the world
has ever known. They never strove to evoke
the sensation of weight in the objeds they
painted; and that organisation of parts, which
is a replica of the cosmos, they were too busy to
attempt. Their very deficiencies were what per-
mitted them so complete a vision of the only side
of realism which still remained for painting to
investigate.

The Impressionists did not embody concretely
the teachings of their forerunners, but used M thern

106 MODERN PAINTING

all in the abstract. Delacroix had sacrificed
photographic truth in drawing in order to present
a more intense impression of truth. Daumier
had built form as nature builds it, colour aside.
Courbet had turned painters from the poetic
contemplation of a great past to the life about
them. Manet had made images of whatever
was at hand for the pure love of painting. The
Impressionists turned to the things nearest them,
paid scant heed to scholastic drawing, translated
Daumier's doctrine of form into light, and like
Manet painted for the joy of the work. As
experimenters they were valuable; but their
pictures, to those unsentimental persons whose
appreciations of art are wholly aesthetic, mean
little more than records of how a cabbage patch
appears at sunrise, a lily pond at midday, or^a
country lane at twilight. The Impressionists did
not amalgamate and express the dreams of their
forerunners. They were one of those transitional
generations whose vitality is spent in a stupendous
endeavour to conceive before the time is ripe.
The need for a great birth had not yet made
itself felt; for only when the period of embryo
is complete can great art be born. Renoir
brought forth that issue; and with him evolution
seems to halt a moment before plunging onward.
The meagre aesthetics of the early Impressionists
could not lead to the highest artistic results.
Indeed, their animating aims had to be abandoned
before Renoir could attain to true significance.

V

AUGUSTE RENOIR

THE entire past progress of painting is
condensed and expressed in each of its
great men. The creation of new art
cannot be accomplished overnight, any
more than that of a new organism; it must
stem from first impulses and be formed on the
differentiations of the past. Those men who
declare themselves primitives and seek to acquire
the eyes and minds of the Phoenicians or Aztecs
are as conscious of their inability to create new
art forms as are those visionaries who live in a
mythical future and try to prophesy the forms
that are to come. No man is born too soon or too
late. There are those who strive toward classic
intellectual ideals, toward Utopian economic states,
toward new orders of society: but such reformers
are only the malcontents. The truly great and
practical men quickly assimilate the impulses of
their own epochs and push the frontiers of the
mind's possibilities further into the unknown.
These latter comprise the maligned vanguard of
heroic thinkers who fight the battles for their
weaker followers. Often, however, these followers
rise to great heights, for in the world of endeavour
two conspicuous types exist the man who
experiments and the man who achieves. Dela-
croix, Manet and the Impressionists belong to
the first; Courbet and Renoir are of the second.

io8 MODERN PAINTING

In Renoir's life story, as In that of Titian,
Rubens and Rembrandt, we see in miniature the
evolution of all the painting that preceded him
the bitter struggles with the chimeras of con-
vention, and each slow change that came over
drawing, style, colour and composition. In the
end, after a life full of near defeats, strife, yearn-
ing and anxiety, we behold the great man emerge
triumphantly from his broken fetters and take his
place beside the masters of the past. Some
painters have more arduous fights than others,
for the odds against them are greater. Rubens
and Delacroix seemed the pampered favourites of
a high destiny: Courbet and Renoir had to cleave
and chisel each step of the way through the
adamant of public suspicion. The world appears
incapable of recognising either an intensification
or a modification of an old and accepted formula.
Hence Courtois and Puget were preferred to
Delacroix; Ribera and Rembrandt to Courbet;
the Avignon painters to Manet; Corot, Diaz
and Rousseau to the Impressionists; and Rubens
and Ingres to Renoir. In all of these parallelisms,
the latter had their roots in the former. They
were complications and variations of their fore-
runners dissimilar only in method and manner.

Renoir began to paint at an early age. The
poverty of his family necessitated him to make
his own living, and at the age of thirteen he was
in a factory painting porcelains. Five years later
he applied for work at a place given over to the
decoration of transparent screens. Here his un-
usual facility permitted him to paint ten times
as fast as his fellow decorators, and since he was
paid by the piece, he soon saved enough money

JUGUSTE RENOIR 109

to give himself an education in the art which
had now become with him a conscious instind:
painting. From his earliest youth he had evinced
a discontent with the slow-moving minds about
him, and it was natural that he should first look
upon art through the eyes of his great revolution-
ary contemporary, Courbet. His earliest work,
of which Le Cabaret de la Mere Anthony and
Diane Chasseresse are the best-known examples,
reflected Courbet in both palette and conception.
Even later, when Manet claimed him, he clung
to his first influence. For while his work now
reached out toward the substance of light to be
found in La Musique aux Tuileries, it revealed
at the same time all the form of the Ornans
master. Le Menage Sisley and Lise strikingly
combine these two early influences.

Since humanity has emerged from the darkness
of unconsciousness and the individual from the
darkness of the womb, it is consistent with nature
that in a man's creative development the
route of which lies between dark and dark the
use of black should be his first instind:. Renoir,
like all painters of great promise, started with
this negation of colour. But wherein his intel-
iedual distinction manifested itself was his innate
proclivity for the rhythm of surface lines which
he alone of all his, contemporaries recognised in
Courbet. In Lise, painted in 1867, a year after
his Diane Chasseresse, both of these early pen-
chants are evident. Black is the keynote of his
sunlight; and while in conception the canvas is
akin to Manet, it is a Manet made dexterous and
masterly. It contains a balance and a linear
rhythm of which that painter was ignorant. Lise

no MODERN PAINTING

is one of the few Renoirs Into which the Influence
of Velazquez and Goya can be imagined. Even
in its pyramidal form, which when used by most
painters becomes a static figure, there is a move-
ment at its apex which opens into a shape like a
lily. This is brought about by the tilt of the
sunshade and the continuation of the line of the
sash outward in the tree trunk. By just such
obvious and simple signs as these in early works,
can we foretell an artist's later developments.

The next year, 1868, Renoir's work is ^more
net, more able in its balance, more sure in its
effed Le Menage Sisley is one of his ^finest
early examples of how this rhythmic continuity
of line obsesses a mind avid for form,^ colour,
vitality. At first glance we see only an irregular
pyramid formed by the outline of the two figures;
but after a minute's study we notice that on the
right the line of the skirt curves gracefully inward
to the waist-line, sweeps up to the woman's neck,
then begins an outward flexure, and finally dis-
perses itself amid the tree's slanting branches in
the right-hand upper corner. On the left, the
outline of the man's right leg and arm and hair
forms another curve which bends back the line
of the opposing curve of the woman's dress, and
completes the figure of the pyramid. But the
first curve, the force of which is seemingly ended
at the woman's waist, is continued in the outline
of the light tonality which begins at the man's right
elbow, curves outward to the frame, then inward,
and ends on the upper frame a little to the left of
the man's head. Furthermore, the volume made
by the light tonality in the upper left-hand corner
serves as a balance to the form of the woman's

AUGUSTE RENOIR in

tunic. This composition is, in all essentials, the
same as in Lise, and embraces that rhythm in
two dimensions which Manet did not know, and
that balance of tonal form of which Manet was
never capable. Manet's mind was that of the
lesser Dutch and Spaniards. Renoir's was the
plastic and flowing mind of the Latin races, never
satisfied with angularity and immobility, but need-
ful of the smooth progression of sequence and
movement.

The recognition of the artistic necessity for
linear rhythm led: Renoir to search for it in others
than Courbet. Among the painters by whom he
might profit, Delacroix stood nearest his own
time. To him Renoir turned; and it was out of
him that Renoir's greatness was to grow. Dela-
croix's organisations appealed to him especially
the triangular one which opens at the top. His
admiration for this artist's talent led him to paint
in 1872 a canvas called Parisiennes Habillees en
Algeriennes, an ambitious essay to compete with
Les Femmes d'Alger dans Leur Appartement, In-
trinsically the picture was a failure, but it taught
its creator more than he had heretofore learned
concerning colour and drawing. In it are dis-
cernible indications of the formal unconvention-
alities and the chromatic brilliancies which later
were to be such dominant qualities in Renoir's
work. Although for two years he had used
Impressionistic methods, it was through this
picture that Delacroix introduced him to the
Impressionists' colour. Manet had already in-
troduced him to Ingres: and these two incidents
went far toward laying the foundation for his
greatness. On neither the Impressionists nor

H2 MODERN PAINTING

Ingres did he build a style; but from both he
learned something of far more value: freedom
from the dictates of style. Here again Delacroix
had a hand, for by studying this artist's uses of
Ingres's simplifications, Renoir was able to make
these simplifications plastic.

Renoir's colour up to this time had been re-
strained by the didates of his epoch. But with
the inspiration and encouragement given him by
Les Femmes d'Alger dans Leur Appartement, it
burst forth with all the force of long-imprisoned
energy, and drove him out of doors. In this
pidure he found excuse to carry colour, to any
extreme he desired. At once the instinds of
the porcelain painter, ever latent in him, came
uppermost. Delacroix, in giving him the Impres-
sionists' freedom of colour, had brought him back
to those rich and full little designs he had painted
on china between the ages of thirteen and eighteen.
In this early training alone lies the explanation
of his later matiere which has for so long puzzled
the critics. Many attribute his colour effeds to
Watteau. But Renoir had developed his tech-
nique before he knew the older master. Years
previous he had been intensely interested in the
very material of his models. In Le Menage
Sisley, La Baigneuse au Griffon and La Femme a
la Perruche is evinced the love of the connoisseur
for rare and rich stuffs. Furthermore he had
begun to turn his eyes toward Impressionist
methods two years before he painted Les
Parislennes Habillees en Algeriennes. Up to that
time his brushing had been broad like Manet's
or Courbet's; Immediately afterward it tended
toward spotting, and Monet took the upper hand.

AUGUSTS RENOIR 113

Watteau's manner of application served only to
substantiate Renoir in his choice of method.

The years from 1865 to 1876 constitute a period
of Renoir's life rich in its promise of splendid
things. His keen admirations and high enthusi-
asms made of him throughout this time a disciple.
But his achievements, small as they were, were
more sumptuous and effectual than either Manet's
or Monet's. Their true significance, though, lay
in their assurance of what was to come after he
had completed that unlearning process through
which all great men must pass. Only by sitting
at a master's feet can one acquire the knowledge
that informs one which influences should be
utilised and which cast aside. One cannot learn
from experience the total lessons of many men,
each one of whom has given a lifetime to the
study of a different side of a subjed. If these
men are to be surpassed their life work must be
used as a starting point. Renoir began thus.
He had fallen under the sway of Courbet, Manet,
Delacroix and Monet; but after eleven years he
had exhausted his creative interest in both their
theories and their attainments. These men had
expressed all that was in them. For Renoir to
cling to them was to stand still. If he was to
go down in history as a constructive genius and
not merely as an able imitator, it was time for
him to strike out alone.

He did not hesitate. The portrait of Mile.
Durand-Ruel, done in 1876, marks his transfor-
mation. In it he achieved the scintillation^ of
light which is not linked with colour or painting,
but which seems to arise, by some mysterious
alchemy, from the surface of the canvas. In

n 4 MODERN PAINTING

this pidure, and also in the Moulin de la Galette,
finished in the same year, he consummated the
fondest ambition of the Impressionists,, namely:
to make the spedator feel a pidure, not as a
depidion of nature's light, but as a medium from.
which emanates the very force of light itself.
But Renoir did not stop here: to this achieve-
ment he added form and rhythm two attributes
which the Impressionists, preoccupied with ob~
jedivity, were too busy to attempt. And in
addition he displayed a technique so perfed in
its adaptability to any expression, that its
mannerisms were completely submerged in the
pidure's total effed. These were the qualities
which Renoir was to develop to so superlative
a degree. He had begun to express form in
1870 in his Portrait de Dame. Two years later
in his Delacroix adaptation he had branched out
into colour. And in his very first canvases there
was rhythmic balance of lines. In 1876 all these
tendencies coalesced. In consequence Renoir
blossomed forth free from aggressive influences,
knowing his own limitations and possibilities*
This cannot be said even of those excellent works,,
La Loge, La Danseuse and La Fillette Attentive,
done the two preceding years. It is only by
contemplating such pidures as the portrait of
Mile. Durand-Ruel, La Chevelure and La Source
that we can perceive the path along which his
development was to take place. For these can-
vases, though far more significant than the
works of Pissarro and Monet, are almost negli-
gible beside his later work. He was a man
never satisfied with results, no matter how
exalted. His every new achievement was only

^UGUSTE RENOIR 115

a higher elevation from which his horizon ever
receded.

One of Renoir's important advances in method
is his liberation from the circumscribed use of
black. Although in some of his work of 1876
there are still traces of that tone used organically,
they are so slight that they may be disregarded.
Black was the very keynote of the paintings of
his day. It was looked upon as a necessity in
the creation of volumes. Courbet did little with-
out it, and Manet brightened it only with
occasional flashes of colour. Today we know
that it is not a technical necessity, that pure
colours, in fact, when properly used, can produce
the most solid forms. But whereas we have been
able to profit by the teachings of Cezanne and
the Synchromists, Renoir had to learn this fad:
by bitter experiments in a new element. In La
Balanfoire, done in the same year as the Moulin
de la Galette and now hanging with that picture
in the Luxembourg, black is entirely absent.
This little canvas was probably an experiment
actuated by Monet, for never afterward did he
on principle lay black aside. While he realised
its unimportance as a fundamental for constru6l-
ing volume, he nevertheless felt its need as a
complement to colour the need of the static
and the dead to accentuate the plastic and alive.

It is during this period that critics are prone
to see Gainsborough in Renoir. But their rea-
sons for such a comparison are superficial, and
go no further than the fad that both painters
dealt with feminine themes in a similarly intimate
manner. No genuinely artistic likeness can be
found between Mrs, Siddons, for instance, and

n6 MODERN PAINTING

the Ingenue. The one is merely a spirited por-
trait without composition or tadiiity: the other
is an exquisite bit of form and colour, ^which we
feel would be as solid to the touch as it appears
to the eye. If we are to compare Renoir to
English painters at all, let us designate Hogarth
and Romney, both of whom are better artists
and more deserving of respedful consideration
than Gainsborough, However, even these two
men are distinctly inadequate as measures for
Renoir. In the graphic arts Englishmen exhibit
no feeling for rhythm. Indeed, it may corredly
be said they possess no graphic arts. Rhythm is
a fador which has made itself felt only in their
poetry, and here it can hardly be called more than
a division of interval, or tempo. Rossetti m
his paintings is seemingly more conscious of its
power than any other Englishman, and occasion-
ally attempted to produce it by the primitive
device of curved lines. But, after all, Rossetti
was Italian. On the whole Renoir and the
English artists are too fundamentally dissimilar to
be estimated relatively. The finest qualities of
Renoir's art grew out of his instind for fluent
movement, for intense undulations, for hot ^ gor-
geous colour, for freedom from all traditional
prescriptions.

The evolution of these instinds was by no
means a mechanical one. After he had amal-
gamated the leading qualities of his art, his
interest would often reveal itself more strongly
in one diredion than another. Thus many of
his canvases show a retrogression toward emphasis
of light; others toward form; still others toward
linear rhythm. Yet no matter which one of these

JUGUSTE RENOIR 117

qualities predominated, the others also remained
intad:. More importance, however, attached to
his preoccupation with the treatment of light.
His experiments and consequent development in
this field are of initial significance in judging
his later work. In 1878 he had evidently fore-
seen the cul-de-sac into which the natural dis-
tribution of light would lead. The very volatility
and translucency of illumination and its matter-
dispelling qualities, constituted the greatest draw-
back to its use in the creation of form. In other
words its sheer beauty nullified the deeper aims
of painting. In two decorative Panneaux of
reclining nudes, done in the same year, Renoir
makes his first attempt to escape from the
naturalism of light. The use of light is here
restricted to a colour force which serves only to
bring form into relief. From that time on,
although he had many struggles with its power
over him, he had conquered its insidious influ-
ence. It became his servant, whereas before it
had been his master. In his earlier canvases,
wherein sunlight had played a leading part, he
had placed the sun patches, gleaming and vibrant,
wherever they naturally fell. After 1878 he
began placing them arbitrarily on points where
formal projection was needed.

The subtle manner in which he constructed
and posed these patches precluded any discovery
of his reasons for altering their natural location.
But Renoir was not fully satisfied, and soon
abandoned this phase of pleinairisme. Later the
spots of sunlight appeared on cheeks, shoulders,
knees, or any other salients which called for
powerful relief, thereby losing their flat and de-

n8 MODERN PAINTING

tached appearance. This moulding of them Into
Intense aggregations had much to do with Renoir's
fullness of form. His long experience had given
him a complete knowledge of their naturalistic
effedl. He knew it was impossible to make them
remain on the same plane with the surrounding
shadow, and he understood the reasons for this
phenomenon. It was not therefore remarkable
that, in his later method of applying them^ he
was sure of his results. As soon as he realised
that sunlight dispersed matter by obscuring some
points and accentuating others, he knew that by
an intelligent employment of this fa&or of lumi-
nosity he could at will accentuate certain parts
of his canvas and obscure others. This knowl-
edge led him naturally to create his own Alight,
irrespective of how it actually existed. This was
an important step toward its complete abroga-
tion, and brought arbitrary means in painting
just so much nearer. He had already distorted
volumes for purposes of organisation in the same
manner that he now distorted light. Indeed
every great painter has taken this liberty with
form; but each one has to learn the device anew
in its relation to his own separate vision.

There are few shadows, as such, in Renoir.
We find darks and lights in scintillating succes-
sion, but we may search in vain, even in his
canvases of 1878 or 1879, for those shadowed out-
lines which are the result of light. If light there
is, it is only the light which springs from our own
eyes light which seems to come from the
direction of the beholder, like the reflection of a
light in water. Move as you will before his
pictures, it follows you, for it is the illumination

AUGUSTS RENOIR 119

of that part of the pidure nearest the eyes of the
painter. Where a form is full, there Renoir con-
trives to have a light fall. This artifice may
strike us today as childish, since we have out-
grown our concern with light; but let us remem-
ber that from the beginning the depiction of
lights and shadows had been a fixed practice,
and that their tones had formed the only basis
for chiaroscuro. With the Impressionists light
became the atout of painting. Renoir made of it
a vital form-creating element. Herein we have
its evolution: first, a convention; next, an
obsession; last, a utility. So were the aesthetic
possibilities of light exhausted, just as the aes-
thetic possibilities of the human form were
exhausted by Michelangelo.

In this last step of liberating light from con-
vention, Renoir approached nearer to nature than
any antecedent painter. After all, a human
being in the sunlight appears to us as a solid
moving mass. Only those who look upon nature
as a flat pattern of shades and lights are misled
by sun patches. So, in Renoir's adapting the
source of light for the purpose of producing
solidity of form, we are cognisant of the palpa-
bility of his figures whether they are in light or
shadow, or both. Thus he created the adtuai
impression of volume we all get before a moving
form. This arbitrary disposition of light and
shadow also gave fullness and intensity to his
form, and accentuated the poise, so subtle and
unexpected, we feel in even his slightest works.
But while this was the secret of his attainment
of volume, the compositional use to which he put
this volume requires another explanation one

120 MODERN PAINTING

which has its roots in the very depths of the
man's genius. There had never been such form
in the French school as that which Renoir gave
it in 1880. The Tete de Jeune Fille and Les
Enfants en Rose et Bleu, done about this time,
must have been the despair of even the sculptors
of his day. And these were but the beginning.
Many phases of his art were yet to be emphasised
and developed before the Renoir we know today
was to be perfected.

It was in 1884 that he began to "apprendre
le dessin" For four years he continued this
self-training in the precision of draughtsmanship.
As a boy he had begun his painting in a manner
more competent than the most advanced style of
the average artist, as is evidenced by the able
use of colour as design in his early porcelains.
And although he was driven to this work by
necessity, the incident was a salutary one. It
turned his thoughts toward those abstrad organi-
sations of colour which always afterward haunted
him. Later he learned all the tricks of the day
in the school of the realists, and succeeded in
surpassing his masters. Next he studied the
Impressionists and went beyond them also. Then
he co-ordinated his knowledge and established his
individual greatness. This period of his develop-
ment gave France much of its finest painting, and
his Baigneuse done at this time is an undoubted
masterpiece. His reversion to the rudiments of
drawing was the result of a burning desire to
develop rhythm and form. His technical diffi-
culties had been conquered at an early date:
he needed only dexterity in drawing to achieve his
end- Not only did Renoir attain to his objective,

JUGUSTE RENOIR 121

but, by comprehending the principle of the place-
ments and displacements of volumes, he learned
the advantages of line accentuation in obtaining
movement.

We now come to those pictures which show
Renoir's intimate relation to Rubens through
Boucher and Watteau: to his alfresco bathing
figures. Some one has pointed out that his
Baigneuses of 1885, one year after he had devoted
himself to drawing, was inspired by Girardon' s
lead-reliefs in the gardens at Versailles. The
commentary is undoubtedly true; but even so,
of what significance is it ? Aside from the super-
ficial fad: that in the works of both appear
bathing women in more or less abandoned poses,
Renoir had nothing in common with the school
of Largilliere, Pater, Fragonard, Le Moyne,
Santerre and Girardon. In all such observations
one senses the restriction of the critic's viewpoint
to illustration. An artist may find inspiration in
any visual form, but this form is of no more
aesthetic importance to him than a photograph.
In Picasso's paintings of violin fragments we are
scarcely permitted to deduce an inspiration from
Stradivarius. Grotesque as this analogy may
seem, it is applicable to the contention that
Renoir stemmed from Girardon. For there is
nothing whatever in Renoir's bathing girls to
suggest a psychological parallel between them and
the leaden frieze at Versailles. If Renoir saw in
that frieze an attractive pose, it was with an eye
to its adaptability to composition. In Girardon
there is only a pretty and sensual chaos. In
Renoir we have a masterly organisation wherein
the a&ual positions of the young women are not

122 MODERN PAINTING

even remarked. Compare, for instance, Glrar-
don's version of the figure of the girl throwing
water on her playmates, with the corresponding
figure in Renoir's drawing. The body of the
former is without doubt a more faithful replica
of its model; in Renoir it has become impossibly
elongated and voluminous. Its head is too small;
its back too long; its hips are too large and
yet withal it is an exquisite bit of rich form which
has as concrete a tangibility as that of a real
body. One cannot judge it by its contour; one
must bury oneself in its very weight.

Had Renoir advanced no further than his mas-
terly Baigneuse of 1884, he would nevertheless
have gone down in history as a great artist. But
compared with the same subject done in 1888, it
appears stiff. We feel in it the rigidity of a
master whose great qualities are without a direct-
ing intelligence. In the later canvas, Renoir is
less preoccupied with details. As a result there
is a greater plenitude of bulging form, a purer
rhythm. And there is also an added movement
caused by the linear harmony of the background,
by the hair over the shoulder, and above all by
the turning of the head so that its weight is
shifted over a hollow. An apparently simple
thing this turning of a head. Yet Michel-
angelo's genius, as well as that of all great
artists, is dependent on the knowledge of when
a head should be turned or a limb advanced.
This knowledge is what transforms adion into
movement, tempo into rhythm, the static into
the plastic, the dead into the living. It is the
final penetration into composition; on it all
aesthetic form is built. Renoir acquired it in his

AUGUSTE RENOIR 123

period of so-called dry drawing. Its dawn came
in La Natte and Mere et Enfant. It was still
developing in the Baigneuse; and in La Baigneuse
Brune and Nu a FEtoffe Vert et Jaime, both
done after 1900, this knowledge was becoming
sure of itself. Between 1884 and 1892, however,
Renoir's new strength was not wholly mastered.
There was conscious effort in its employment.
This is seen in La Fillette a la Gerbe and Les
Filles de Catulle Mendes and in that otherwise
miraculous canvas, Au Piano. In Le Croquet,
1892, he begins to exhibit, in his use of new
means, the same prodigious adroitness he displayed
in his earlier and slighter works. And in Les
Deux Soeurs the effects of labour entirely vanish,
and he once more paints with magistral unconcern.
From that time forward Renoir's complete gen-
ius was but a matter of evolution. And here let
it be remembered that his transcendent compe-
tency was the result of academic training, for of
late we have heard many objections to this kind
of discipline. We have been invited to behold
the water-colour and crayon works of the untu-
tored, assured that they were as fine as Matisse's
drawings. And we have been asked to accept,
as a corollary, the statement that all painters are
better off without the pernicious influence of
schools. We have had modern paintings pointed
out to us as examples of what inspiration and
freedom from convention can do. We have heard
the constantly reiterated assertion that academies
cramp genius, restrict vision and force all expres-
sion into stipulated moulds. To concede to these
extravagant assertions would be to ignore the
history of great painting, for during all the

124 MODERN PAINTING

significant epochs of art the school was at its
zenith, Without it there could be no genuine
achievement. No amount of mere inspiration
has ever enabled an artist to paint an eminent
canvas. No amount of uncontrolled emotion-
alism has ever permitted one to make an aestheti-
cally moving work of art. No untrained man,
no matter how high his natural gifts, has yet
been able to record adequately his feelings. All
the records of past accomplishment go to show
that no person who has not been profoundly
educated in the purely objective (not utilitarian)
forms, and in the abstract qualities of painting,
such as anatomy and technique, has succeeded
in conceiving an artistic organisation.

The school has never obscured or dwarfed
genius, nor is it probable it ever will. To the
contrary it assists the truly great man in his
self-fulfilment and weeds out the mediocre man.
It turns the student's thoughts to methods rather
than to inspiration. It direds the attention of
incompetent and merely talented persons, incapa-
ble of rising above its teachings, into side issues.
Thus it relegates their work to the soupentes of
the world: whereas, if they had been permitted
to labour at random, they would only have choked
the market of genuinely aesthetic production.
The school teaches discipline, precision, and the
control of wayward impulses, without all of
which the greatest artist could only incompletely
express himself. These are the things which
Renoir felt he lacked; and in the midst of his
career he halted long enough to acquire them.
It may be argued that his was intelligent train-
ing, while that of the schools is unintelligent.

AUGUSTS RENOIR 125

But all discipline Is beneficial to the artist.
Only slavish minds, hopeless from the first,
succumb to it. The fadl that a man capitulates
to academic training attests to an incornpetency
so great that, under no circumstances, however
favorable, could it have arisen to a point capable
of producing great art. Giotto, El Greco and
Rubens passed through rigid training and rose
above it. And the apprenticeship demanded of
the old Egyptian, Chinese and Greek artists was
longer and more tedious than any of our school
courses today.

Renoir's scholastic training was his salvation.
With the advent of the twentieth century he
struck his pace. All his qualities converged
toward the construction of rhythm. In 1900 he
painted a large and ambitious canvas of an attired
maid combing a nude's hair, La Toilette de la
Baigneuse, which is more extended and conclusive
than any of his previous works. The forms lean
in opposition and complete each other. In
them is a perfed: poise which subjectively evokes
an emotion of movement. Even the lights and
darks are separated so as to give the strongest
effedt. The very hat and tree trunk are integral
parts of the whole, and there is not a line in the
picture which does not develop logically to a
harmonic completion. The luscious plenitude of
form is equalled only by the finality of the rhythm.

Another picture of the same period is the
Baigneuses in the Vollard collection, a duplicate
of his Baigneuses of fifteen years before. Now
all the hardness is gone from the contours. The
differentiation of texture between the flesh and
water and foliage is absent. The lines are less

126 MODERN PAINTING

angular and true, and both the distant nudes'
attitudes are changed. The first canvas recalled
Ingres; but the second brings up Cezanne, for
it is pure composition with every nugatory
quality eliminated. It demonstrates the possi-
bility of creating abstrad unity in three dimen-
sions with the objective reality at hand. The
pidure contains movement in the vital sense,
and possesses a tadility as great as a Giorgione
done with modern means. In fad, comparison
of these two Baigneuses will straightway divulge
the advantages that lie in modern methods.
The first is extremely able, and has the unfinished
foundation of a great composition. The second,
because of what Renoir had learned of freedom,
is as intense as a Rubens in that painter's own
manner; and in addition it has an emotional
element to which the Antwerp master never
attained.

Two years later this obsession to create form
as an impregnable block, no matter in how many
integers it might be divided, made him turn his
attention to Daumier; and in Le Jardin d'Essoyes
and his heads of Coco he surpasses even this
master of organisation. Having assimilated this
new influence Renoir added it to his own store of
knowledge, and four years later painted his
greatest pidure, Le Petit Peintre. After this
there was little more to be done in Renoir's style
unless he extended his vision to greater surfaces.
This he has not done. But he has added other
masterpieces to the ones already mentioned.
His Ode aux Fleurs (d'apres Anacreon), the two
decorative Panneaux of the tambourine player
and the dancer, Coco et les Deux Servantes, La

AUGUSTS RENOIR "7

Rose dans les Cheveux and La Femme ail Miroir
are all worthy of a place beside the greatest
pictures of all time. In these last paintings
nature's form Is transcribed in a purely arbitrary
manner. Many of the parts are exaggerated to
create greater projection or more perfedt propor-
tion In relation to the whole. Texture has
developed into a unified surface, and simple
linear balance has become poise In depth. The
colouring has grown so subtle that it is impossible
in many places to tell just what it is, for in it Is
a whole spedrum that makes It living.

Renoir was a man who fundamentally was not
revolutionary, an artist who was shown the way
by others, a genius who culminated a great and
febrile epoch. His beginnings were Imitative of
the painters of his day. He climbed the ladder
from dark to light, from the stiff to the mobile.
His first works under Courbet and Manet were no
better than those of Hankwan. Later his pictures
began to flow rhythmically in simple lines as in
the Head of a Chinese Lady by Ririomin. Then
they began to extend into depth, and as early as
1 88 1 they surpassed Titian. From then on they
approached steadily to the completeness of a
modernised Rubens. That Renoir never reached
that master's greatness is due, not to his lack of
acute and complete vision, but to his restriction
of It to small works. A composer who writes a
symphony in which each minute part Is an inti-
mate fador of the whole, is greater than he who
writes only an overture whose entirety is no
greater than one of the symphony's movements.
Renoir, in so far as he went, was as great as the
greatest,

128 MODERN PAINTING

One cannot think of a Renoir canvas merely
as a painting. It is a new and visually complete
cosmos. In looking at his work the intelligence
enters a world in which every form has interest,,
every line completion, every space a plasticity:
in short, a world in which everything is visibly
interrelated. A host of influences have been
read into Renoir, and indeed there were many in
his development. But they were only the steps
by which he mounted to high achievement. So
unimportant are the works of most of these other
men when compared with Renoir's personal ac-
complishments, that one may visualise this artist
as a raindrop on a window, which, as it flows
downward, consumes and embodies all those in
its path. Courbet, Monet, Delacroix and Manet,
had they no other claim on posterity than as
Instructors of Renoir, would not have lived in
vain. The Chinese, the Greeks, the Renaissance,
even that full Indian sculpture in the Chaitya of
Karli of the eleventh century B. c. are all
within him. That they are temperamental
affinities rather than direct influences none can
deny; but, strange as it may seem, he has traits
which directly recall each one of them. They all
have the ineradicable germ of genius in them;
and that germ, being changeless and eternal, lies
at the root of all aesthetic creation. For this
reason a great man belongs to all time. He
embraces all the results of the struggles which
have gone before. In the possession of Renoir
we have no apologies to make to antiquity, any
more than in having produced Cezanne must we
abase ourselves before the artists who are yet to
come.

VI

PAUL CEZANNE

THE dilettante, avid for accounts of an
artist's eccentricities, will find abundant
and varied material of this nature in
half a hundred books written by critics
of almost every nationality on that astound-
ing and grotesque colossus, Cezanne. Perhaps
no great artist In the world's history has been
so wantonly libelled, maligned and ridiculed as
he. Nor has there ever been a painter of such
wide influence so grossly misunderstood. Cezanne
has been endowed with most fantastic powers, dis-
missed with a coup d* esprit for attributes he never
possessed, and canonised for qualities he would
have repudiated. Like Michelangelo he has
been both the admiration and the mystery of
critics. And he Is at once the Idol and the
incubus of present-day artists. His letters alone
have formed the technical basis of one great
modern art school. A fragmentary phrase of
his mentioning geometrical figures was seized
upon by a Spaniard and made the foundation for
another school. His mention of Poussin drove a
horde of Scandinavians, Austrians and Bohemians
to a contemplation of that artist. Cezanne's
very limitations have been the inspiration for
an army of hardy imitators who believe it is
more vital to imitate modernity than to recon-

I 3 o MODERN PAINTING

strud the past. Indeed it may be said that all
art since Impressionism is divided into two
groups, one which endeavours to develop some
quality or qualities in Cezanne, the other which
attempts the anachronism of resuscitating the
primitive art of a simple-minded antiquity. For
even this latter group, Cezanne is in part responsi-
ble. Did he not say that we must become
classicists again by way of nature? And did
this not give reactionary and servile minds ample
excuse to cling with even greater passion to a
dead and rigid past? In his great sense of order
his disciples saw only immobility; their minds,
redundant with parallels, harked back to the
Egyptians. Thus has he been emulated: but,
among all these branches shot out from the
mother trunk, it can be stated incontestably that
only one has understood him, has penetrated
beneath the surface of his canvases, has realised
his true gift to the art of the future. And this
one, strangely enough, is the furthest removed
from Imitation.

Cezanne's biography is of value to the art
student, for it embodies in concrete form the
fadtors which motivated his aesthetic appercep-
tions. By Cezanne's biography is meant, not
the distorted interpretations of the incidents of
his life, now so well known, or the superficial
conclusions deduced by his biographers from
hearsay; but those acftions and temperamental
characteristics which are impartially set down at
first hand by Emile Bernard. To this chronicler
we are indebted for pradHcally all the authentic
personal anecdotes of the artist. He had always
admired Cezanne, and in 1904 a personal friend-

PAUL CEZANNE 131

ship was established between them, which endured
until the latter' s death. After Cezanne had
overcome parental objections and had definitely
decided on an artist's career, he spent much of
his time in Paris. Many influences entered into
his early life. He had met Zola at school and
had been intimate with him. Through him he
had become acquainted with Manet, and while
he appreciated Manet's friendliness, he could
never understand that artist's great popularity,
He preferred Courbet as a painter, and studied
him sedulously. His great influence, however,
came from Pissarro. For that persuasive Jew's
memory he always harboured a deep respect.

Cezanne's youth, if one may call forty years a
youth, was, as he himself put it, filled mostly
with " literature and laziness/' Not until his
final renunciation of city life and his return to
the south did his best work begin. At first he
made friends timidly. He was a man who could
not brook opposition, who was extremely sensi-
tive to rebuffs; and those good people of pro-
vincial France were brusquely aggressive in all
their beliefs and traditions. At every thought he
expressed they sneered. He clashed violently and
disastrously with the local celebrities who had
the sanction of the established schools. In Paris
he had been a frank and even garrulous com-
panion; but at each contact with the narrow,
self-centered and righteous community of Aix,
he withdrew into himself. His natural spontane-
ity and good-fellowship turned inward, became
restrained and pent-up. He grew sensitive and
wary, and in later life this defensive attitude
developed into abnormal irritability. To those

1 32 MODERN PAINTING

who could understand, however, he unburdened
himself oa all subjeds, and his opinions were
always the result of profound thought. But he
never entirely divulged his methods, If questions
became too pertinent, he consciously led his
interrogators astray. "They think I've got a
trick/' he would cry, "and they want to steal
it. But nobody will ever put his hooks on me
(pas un ne me mettra le grappln dessus)" He
had already suffered enough at the hands of self-
seekers. He had been extravagantly ridiculed
by his boyhood friends. He had been robbed
and bullied by his hired archited; and having
money he had been considered prey by the village
widows, He permitted himself to be browbeaten
because of his antipathy to any kind of fridion.
It Is small wonder he became misanthropic.

The popular opinion of Aix was that he was
crazy, and his chroniclers, almost without excep-
tion, have echoed this belief. But, to the con-
trary, his was the highest type of the creative
mind, always in search for something better,
never satisfied with present results; the type of
mind which gives no thought to the acquisition
or retention of property. His joy^ lay in his
creations of the moment, but his desires were far
ahead. Some one who showed him one of his
early treasured canvases was ridiculed for liking
"such things/ 5 Every day Cezanne watched his
evolution: to him this progress was the essential
thing. He left his unfinished works in the
meadows, in studio corners, in the nursery.
They have been found in the most out-of-the-
way places. He had given large numbers of
them to chance friends on the impulse of the

PAUL CEZANNE 133

moment. His son cut out the windows of his
masterpieces for amusement, and his servant and
his wife used his canvases for stove cleaners.
He saw his work: put to these uses tranquilly,
knowing that later he would do better, that he
would "realise" more fully. His mind was too
exalted to be impatient with the pettinesses of
life. His great aversion was politics, and unlike
Delacroix, he was above nationality. During
the Franco-Prussian War he hid with a relative
that he might pursue his own ideal rather than
sacrifice himself for the protection of his tor-
mentors. What did he care for France when his
whole admiration was for Italy and Holland?
Painting, not the preservation of nationality, was
his innermost concern. In evading conscription
he called down upon him the public abuse which
such adions evoke. But it passed him by: he
was too absorbed in his work to heed, just as
later he was too engrossed to follow his mother's
hearse to the funeral or to seek a market for his
pictures. At every step he paused to study the
rapports of line, of light, of shadow, of colour.
At table, in conversation or at church, he never
for a moment lost sight of his desire. One can
find a parallel for this intellectually ascetic
creature only in the old martyrs. He was the
type that renounces all the benefits and usufruds
of life in order to follow the face of a dream.

With such self-confidence no adversity could
daunt him, no logic draw from him a compromise,
no flourish' of enthusiasm distract him from his
course. Zola says of him: "He is made in one
piece, stiff and hard under the hand; nothing
bends him; nothing can wrench from him a

I3 4 MODERN PAINTING

concession/' This quality of charader was a
thing which Zola, the slave of words, could not
understand, Cezanne, through much contad
with letters, saw the danger of literature to the
painter. " Literature/' he wrote, "expresses it-
self through abstractions, while painting, by
means of drawing and colour, makes concrete
the artist's sensations and perceptions/' Zola
libelled him at great length in L'CEuvre, Ce-
zanne's reply was simply that Zola had a
"mediocre intelligence" and was a "detestable
friend/' In their youth Cezanne took the as-
cendency over Zola in Latin and French verse;
even in his old age he could recite long passages
from Virgil, Lucretius and Horace. He knew
literature and was able to judge it. His criti-
cisms of Zola are as penetrating as any that
realist has called forth. His reputation for bar-
barism, vulgarity and ignorance has little
foundation in fad. To be sure, he did not desert
his work for social adivities: he despised the
polished and shallow wit of men like Whistler;
and he bitterly attacked those painters who
strove for salon popularity. It is therefore not
Incredible that the accusations against him were
but the world's retaliation for having been ignored
by him.

Cezanne's work from the first contained the
undeniable elements of greatness. In his first,
almost black-and-white still-lives, executed under
the influence of Courbet (it is not tenable that
they were done under Manet, as is commonly
believed: they are too solidly formed for that),
there is exhibited a passionate admiration for
volume and for full and rich chiaroscuro. We

PAUL CEZANNE 135

are conscious of the artist's gropings for those
fundamentals he was finally to discover in the
seclusion of his rugged country of the south.
Even his early figure pieces carry this sensual
delight in objectivity to a greater height than
did Delacroix by whom they were inspired.
And they attest to a freedom from academic
principles which was not surpassed by the Im-
pressionists, These paintings are classic in the
best sense; in them is an orderliness which
Manet and the Impressionists never possessed.
Yet, withal, they are only the results of the
literary influences from Delacroix and of his
admirations for other painters. They are not
purely creative, but the qualities of creation are
there. To those who can read the signs, they
unmistakably indicate the beginnings of a full
and masterly growth.

His potentialities began to adualise with his
comprehension of El Greco and the Venetians.
From that period on his power for organisation
steadily developed, and it was still advancing at
the time of his death. But organisation touched
only the compositional side of his work: it was
the resultant element. His inspiration toward
colour which emanated from Pissarro was what
precipitated him irrevocably into painting.
Colour, by presenting so many problems, claimed
him entirely. To that Impressionist he owes
much, not to that artist's adual achievement,
but to the incentive he furnished. During his
intimacy with Pissarro, Cezanne completed his
assimilation of all the traits in others which were
relative to himself. His beliefs and intransi-
gencies became crystallised. The road opened

136 MODERN PAINTING

into fields where that new element of colour,
which had taken on so vital a significance, led to
an infinitude of emotional possibilities. Though
Cezanne never completely became a defender of
Pissarro's theories, he always looked upon the
Impressionists as innovators whose importance
as such could not be overestimated. He realised
that without them he himself would not have
existed, and that they had sketched out a preface
to all the great art which was to come. Without
them there undoubtedly would have been great
artists, but he knew that a painter with the means
of a Renoir is greater than one who, though
equally competent in organisation, is limited in
the mechanics of method. Restricted means per-
mit only of restrided expression. The Impres-
sionists, having made an advance in aesthetic
procedure, facilitated the experimentations of
Cezanne. But he in turn recognised the restric-
tions of the Impressionists' methods: indeed, he
saw that their theories could apply only to a
very circumscribed aesthetic field; and he was
not content with them. He studied assiduously
in the Louvre and absorbed the myriad impulses
which had impelled the great masters of the
past. The Louvre and Pissarro constituted his
primer. From the one he got his impetus toward
voluminous organisation; from the other, his
impetus toward colour. From their fragmentary
teachings he went on to greater achievements.

There is little or no documentary history of
Cezanne's early years. Consequently his youth-
ful admirations are not recorded in detail. But
we know enough to gauge his early tastes. He
travelled in Holland and Belgium, and though

PAUL CEZANNE 137

he never went to Italy, he greatly admired
Tintoretto and Veronese. He had a high esteem
for that master of style, Luca Signorelli, who,
had he not gone Into architecture, might have
become one of the world's great painters. In
his studio Cezanne kept a water-colour by Dela-
croix hung face to the wall that it might
not fade, and beside it a lithograph by Daumier
whom he regarded highly. We may be sure he
fully understood the limitations of these men
aside from their ambitions. To him they were
points of departure rather than goals to aspire
to. Both of them he surpassed early in his
career, Cezanne admired also the Dutch and
Flemish masters. He had an old and dilapidated
book of their reproductions full of bad lithographs
done by inferior craftsmen. But he overlooked
all their defects in his remembrance of the
originals. Here, as elsewhere, he ignored those
details which to another would have militated
against enjoyment. His mind was too compre-
hensive and analytic to be led astray by the
flaws on an otherwise perfed: work: it penetrated
to the essentials first and remained there.

Thus it was in his work. The exadt reproduc-
tion of nature in any of its manifestations never
held him for a moment. He saw its eternal
asped: aside from its accidental visages caused by
fluctuating lights. In this he was diametrically
opposed to the Impressionists who recorded only
nature's temporary phases. They captured and
set down its atmosphere and were satisfied.
Cezanne, regarding its atmosphere as an ephem-
erality, portrayed the lasting 'force of light.
"One is the master of one's model and above all

138 MODERN PAINTING

of one's means of expression/ 5 he wrote. " Pene-
trate what is before you, and persevere in ex-
pressing yourself as logically as possible/ 5 It is
this penetration which separates Cezanne by an
impassable gulf from those purely sensitive artists
who are content with the merely physiological
effeds of an emotion. In the process of pene-
trating he became familiar with those under-
currents of causation from which has sprung the
greatest art of all ages.

In a Cezanne of the later years not only is the
form poised in three dimensions, but the very
light also is poised. We feel in Cezanne the
same completion we experience before a Rubens
that emotion of finality caused by the forms
moving, swelling and grinding in an eternal order;
and added to this completion of form, heightening
its emotive power, is the same final organisation
of illumination. The light suggests no particular
time of day or night; it is not appropriated from
morning or afternoon, sunlight or shadow. So
delicate and perfectly balanced is this light that,
with the raising or the lowering of the curtain in
the room where the picture hangs, it will darken
or brighten perfectly, logically, proportionately
with the outer light. It lives because it is
painted with the logic of nature. Whether the
picture be hung in a bright sunlight or in half
gloom, it is a creature of its environment. Its
planes, like those of nature, advance and recede,
swell and shrink. In short, they are dynamic.

If this feat of Cezanne's seems to border on
metaphysics, the reason is that there has been no
precedent for it in history. It was, in facft, a
purely technical accomplishment based wholly

PAUL CEZANNE 139

on the most stringently empirical research. The
manner in which he arrived at this achievement
may not be entirely insusceptible of explanation.
It has been pointed out how the Impressionists
broke up surfaces into minute sensitive parts,
some of which reflected or absorbed more than
others. That which gives us our sensation of
colour is the atomic preponderance of one of
these attributes. Thus if an atom or combination
of atoms refleds highly it translates itself through
the retina into our brains as a high force, namely,
as a yellow. If an atom absorbs more than it
refleds, it takes and retains the reflective force
of light, and, in discharging this limited power,
produces in us the sensation of blue. Now, that
point on a round object where the light is
strongest is the point nearest the light. As the
planes of the objed curve away from the light
they diminish in brilliancy. The further the
plane from the point nearest the illumination,
the less light it has to refled. Consequently it
will appear bluish. The Impressionists were
satisfied with recording this blue of shadow
merely as the complement of the light which was
yellow. But Cezanne studied each degradation
of tone from yellow to blue. In this study he
discovered that light always graduates from
warm to cold in precisely the same way; and,
that, provided the model is white, each step
down the tonic scale is the same on no matter
what objed. But this discovery was little more
than a premise. He was now necessitated to
solve the problem of just how much the local
colour of an objed modifies the natural colours
of the light and shadow which reveal that objed.

140 MODERN PAINTING

In all coloured objects the modifications are
different, according to the laws of colour com
plementaries and admixtures. By keeping these
laws always in mind, and by applying his dis-
covery of the consistent gradations of the colours
of light, he was able to paint in such a way that,
no matter how much or how little outside light
of a uniform quality fell on his canvas, the
colours he had applied would, as they retreated
from the most highly illuminated point on the
pidure, absorb a graduatingly smaller quantity
of adual light, and would thus create emotional
form in the same manner that nature creates
visual form. Hence, the planes in a Cezanne
canvas advance or recede en masse, retaining
their relativity, as the eye excludes or receives
a greater or a lesser quantity of light; and since
the light never remains the same for any period
of time, the planes bulge toward the spectator
and retrad from him with each minute variation
of illumination.

In all painting prior to Cezanne, the natural
variations of light distorted the objects of a
pidure : that is to say, the colours of external
light changed the character of the applied colours,
making some advance and others retreat; and
because these applied colours were not put on
with the exad logic of natural gradations, the
proportions between them could not be main-
tained. Thus in one light certain objeds ad-
vanced more than others, and in another light
certain objeds receded more than others. Their
relativity was lost. Hence, not only was the
pidure's composition and balance altered, but
the appearance of its objeds belied the adiual

PAUL CEZANNE 141

measurements. These variations were so small
that .the untrained eye might not have seen
them, any more than an untrained ear may not
detect the slight variations of pitch in music.
But to the man whose eye is trained, even to the
degree that a good musician's ear is trained,
pidures appear "off" in the same way that a
poorly tuned piano sounds "off" to the sensitive
musician. Cezanne, had he never achieved any
intrinsically great art, would still be a colossal
figure in painting because of this basic and
momentous discovery. The Impressionists had
been content with the mere discovery of light.
Their theory was, not that one can enjoy the
natural light of out-of-doors more than the
abstract light in a canvas, but that, since every
one of nature's moods is the result of degrees of
illumination, these moods can only be recorded
by the depiction of natural light; and therefore
out-of-door light is an aesthetic means. Cezanne
recognised the limitations of this theory, but
considered it an admirable opening for higher
achievement. He thereupon stripped the Im-
pressionists 5 means of their ephemeral plasticity,
and, by using the principles, and not the results,
of nature's method, gave them an eternal plas-
ticity which no great art of the future can afford
to ignore, and which in time, no doubt, will lead
to the creation of an entirely new art.

Although Cezanne had many times given out
broad hints of his methods, his friends and
critics were too busy trying to discover other less
concise qualities in his work to appreciate the
full significance of his occasional words. Herein
lies the main reason why an untechnical onlooker

142 MODERN POINTING

and admirer can never sound the depths of art.
He is too detached, for, not having followed its
logical evolution from the simplest forms to the
most complex, he is unable to understand the
complicated mechanism on which it Is built.
Critics for the most part are writers whose
admiration for art has been born in front of the
completed works of the great masters. Unable
to comprehend them fully, they turn to a con-
templation of the simple and nai'f. Their process
of valuation is thus reversed. Great art is as
a rule too compounded for their analytical powers,
and they end by imagining that the primitives
and the mosaicists represent the highest and most
conscious type of the creative will. What to
them is incomprehensible appears of little value;
and here we find the explanation for the popular
theory that the test of great art is its simplicity,
its humanitas, its obviousness. Persons who
would not pretend to grasp without study the
principles of modern science, still demand that
art be sufficiently lucid to be comprehended at
once by the untutored mind. A physician may
tell them of profundities in medical experimenta-
tion, and they will accept his views as those of
an expert in a science of which they are ignorant.
But when an artist tells them of recondite
principles in aesthetics they accuse him of an
endeavour to befuddle them. The isolation of
bacilli and the application of serums and anti-
toxins are mysteries which call for respedl. The
equally scientific and obscure principles of colour
and form are absurd imaginings. And yet with-
out a scientific basis art is merely an artifice
the New Thought in aesthetics. Readily com-

PAUL CEZANNE 143

prehensible painting Is- no further advanced than
readily comprehensible therapeutics.

Emile Bernard was little different from the
average critic. In attributing to Cezanne his
own limitations, he restricted what he might
otherwise have learned. But the literalness with
which he recorded the artist's sayings makes his
book of paramount interest. We read for in-
stance that Cezanne once remarked: "Here is
something incontestable; I am most affirmative
on this point: An optical sensation is produced
in our visual organ by what we class as light,
half tone or quarter tone, each plane being repre-
sented by colour sensations. Therefore light as
such does not exist for the painter/' By this
he broadly hinted at an absolute relativity be-
tween the degrees of light forces a relativity
which translates itself to us as colour gradations.
Again Cezanne said: "One should not say model
but modulate. . . . Drawing and colour are not
distinct; as one paints one draws. The more
the colours harmonise [namely: follow nature's
logical sequences], the more precise is the draw-
ing." Precision in drawing to Cezanne meant
among other things the ability to produce volume.
Again: "When colour is richest, form is at its
plenitude. In the contrasts and rapports of
tones lies the secret of drawing and of modelling."
In a letter he wrote: "Lines parallel to the
horizon create vastness (donnent I'etendue), whether
it be a section of nature, or if you choose, of the
spectacle that the Pater omnipotens teternus Deus
spreads before our eyes. Lines perpendicular to
this horizon give depth. And since nature for us
human beings exists in depth rather than sur-

144 MODERN PAINTING

facely, the painter Is necessitated to introduce
Into light vibrations, represented by reds and
yellows, a sufficient amount of blue to make the
air felt/'

These observations are of paramount interest
because they touch on the essential principles of
his esthetique. They are at once an explanation
and a measure of his significance. Like all great
truths they appear simple after we know them,
or rather after we have experienced them. Dau-
mier might have stated with certitude the same
principles in relation to tone, for he always
practised them qualifiedly. Though his means
were limited, he employed those means as fully
as his materials permitted. Cezanne, because he
possessed the greater element colour, con-
structed his canvases as nature presents its ob
jefts to the sight, as a unique whole. With all
of the older painters drawing came first, chiaro-
scuro second and colour third three distinct
steps, each one conceived separately. Daumler
was the first painter to approach simultaneity In
execution. Ignorant of colour, he conceived his
drawing and chiaroscuro together. Cezanne went
a step beyond, and conceived his drawing, form
and colour as one and the same, in the exad:
manner that these qualities, united In each
natural objeft, present themselves to the eye.
His method was the same as the mechanism of
human vision. Compared with Cezanne, Monet
was only fragmentary. Not only in methods did
they differ but in objective as well. The Im-
pressionists* aim was to reproduce nature's exter-
nals: Cezanne's desire was to reproduce its
solidity. Both achieved their ends. Cezanne's

PAUL CEZANNE 145

pictures are as Impenetrable as sculpture. Every
objed seems hewn out of marble.

Solidity alone, however, though a high and
necessary virtue of painting, is a limited quality.
Unless it is made mobile it gives off the impres-
sion of rigidity. It is to painting what the
rough clay is to sculpture the dead material of
art. In order for it to engender esthetic em-
pathy it must be organised, that is, it must be
harmonised and poised in three dimensions in
such a way that, should we translate our bodies
into its spacial forms, we should experience its
dynamism. This Cezanne did, and therein lay
his claim to greatness. In his best canvases there
seems no way of veering a plane, of imagining
one plane changing places with another, unless
every plane in the picture is shifted simultane-
ously. Cezanne's solidity is organised like the
volumes in Michelangelo's best sculpture. Move
an arm of any one of these statues, and every
other part of the figure, down to the smallest
muscle, must change position. Their plasticity,
like Cezanne's, is perfect. There is a complete
ordonnance between every minute part, and
between every group of parts. Nothing can be
added or taken away without changing the
entire structure in all its finest details. Cezanne
once said to Ambroise Vollard, a picture mer-
chant, who had called attention to a small
uncovered spot on a canvas which the artist had
pronounced finished: "You will understand that
if I were to put something there haphazardly, I
should have to start the whole picture over from
that point/'

The individual solidity of Cezanne's colour

146 MODERN PAINTING

planes is due to the eternalism and absolutism
of his light. But it was the other qualities which
entered into Ms art which brought about the
interdependence of the parts and evoked the
sensation of unity we feel before them. One of
these qualities was a perfed rapport of lines.
Cezanne, better than any other painter up to his
day, understood how one slanting line modifies
its diredion when coming in contact with another
line moving from a different direction. When
colour was first investigated realistically, artists
saw that two pure complementary tints, when
juxtaposed, tended to draw away from each
other and to differentiate themselves. Therefore
they set about to study the influence that one
colour has upon another, assuming that lines
were more static and absolute and consequently
did not change at contad with other lines.
Cezanne recognised the fallacy of this assumption,
and wrote: "I see the planes criss-crossing and
overlapping, and sometimes the lines seem to
fall." He realised that the laws governing the
opposition of line are most important in the
produdion of the emotion of movement. In all
the old painters this emotion was engendered by
just such devices, but with them the laws were
only dimly suspeded instinds rather than
applied science. In contemplating their work
we seem torn by some physical impulse to follow
one line, but cannot, because the lure of the
other line is equally great.

To the man of sensitive and trained eyesight
this physical emotion is incited also by nature,
only nature is more complex than art and is
without aesthetic finality. Thus in regarding the

PAUL CEZANNE 147

rapports of two lines in nature, one leaning to
the right and one to the left, the highly sensitive
person feels unrest and strife, and subconsciously
produces order and calm by imagining a third
line which harmonises the original two. Cezanne
looked upon nature with perhaps the most deli-
cate and perceptive eye a painter has ever
possessed, and his vision became a theatre for
the violent struggles of some one line against
terrible odds, for the warring clashes of inhar-
monious colours. He saw in objective nature a
chaos of disorganised movement, and he set
himself the task of putting it in order. In
studying the variations and qualifications of
linear directions in his model, he discovered
another method of accentuating the feeling of
dynamism in his canvases. He stated lines, not
in their static character, but in their average of
fluctuation. We know that all straight lines are
influenced by their surroundings, that they appear
bent or curved when related to other lines. The
extent to which a line is thus optically bent is its
extreme of fluduability. Cezanne determined this
extreme in all of his lines, and by transcribing
them midway between their adual and optical
states, achieved at once their normality and
their extreme abnormality. The charader, direc-
tion and curve of all lines in a canvas change
with every shifting of the point of visual contad.
Since the unity of a pidure is different from every
focus, all the lines consequently assume a slightly
different diredion every time our eye shifts
from one spot to another. Cezanne, by recording
the mean of linear changeability, facilitated and
hastened this vicissitude of mutation.

148 MODERN POINTING

Another contribution he made to painting was
his application of the stereoscopic function of the
eye to all models by means of colour. From the
earliest art to Cezanne, objeds have been por-
trayed as if conceived in vacua, with absolute and
delimited contours. Such portrayals are diredly
opposed to our normal vision, for whenever we
focus our sight on any natural object ^ whatever,
each eye records a different perspective repre-
sentation of that objed; there is a distind binocu-
lar parallax. Certain parts are seen by one eye
which are invisible to the other. But these two
visual impressions are perceived simultaneously,
combined in one image; that is to say: the optic
axes converge at such an angle that both the
right and left monocular impressions are superim-
posed. The single impression thus produced is
one of perspective and relief. This is a rudi-
mentary law of optics, but on it our accuracy of
vision has always depended. In the lenticular
stereoscope the eye-glasses are marginal portions
of the same convex lens, which, when set edge to
edge, defied the rays from the pidure so as to
strike the eyes as if coming from an intermediate
point. By this bending of the rays the two
pidures become one impression, and present the
appearance of solid forms as in nature. The
problem of how to transcribe on a flat surface in
a single pidure the effed later produced by a
stereoscope with two pidures, has confronted
painters for hundreds of years. Leonardo da
Vinci in his Trattato della Pittura recorded the
fad that our vision encompasses to a slight
degree everything that passes before it; that we
see around all objeds; and that this encircling

PAUL CEZANNE 149

sight gives us the sensation of rotundity. But
neither he, nor any artist up to Cezanne, was
able to make aesthetic use of the fa6i The
vision of ail older painting (although by the use
of line and composition it became plastic because
used as a detail) was the vision of the man with
one eye, for a one-eyed man sees nature as a
flat plane: only by association of the relative
size of objects is he capable of judging depth.
Cezanne saw the impossibility of producing a
double vision by geometric rules, and approached
the problem from another direction. By under-
standing the functioning elements of colour in their
relation to texture and space, he was able to
paint forms in such a way that each colour he
applied took its relative position in space and
held each part of an objedt stationary at any
required distance from the eye. As a result of
his method we can judge the depth and sense the
solidity of his pictures the same as we do in
nature.

Cezanne was ever attempting to solve the
problem of the dynamics of vision. An analysis
of his pictures often reveals a uniform leaning
of lines a tendency of all the objects to pre-
cipitate themselves upon a certain spot, like the
minute flotsam on a surface of water being sucked
through a drain-hole. We find an explanation
for this convergence in one of his letters. He
says: "In studying nature closely, you will
observe that it becomes concentric, I mean that
on an orange, an apple, a ball or a head there is
a culminating point; and this point, despite the
strong effeds of light and shadow which are
cclour sensations, is always the nearest to our

1 5 o MODERN PAINTING

eye. The edges of objects retreat toward a
centre which is situated on our horizon/ 5 It is
small wonder that Cezanne, obsessed with ^ the
idea of form and depth, should have had little
admiration for his contemporaries,, Van Gogh
and Gauguin, both of whom were workmen in
the flat. He let pass no opportunity of express-
ing himself on these artists who of late years
have become so popular. Van Gogh was to him
only another Pointillist; and he called Gauguin's
work "des images Chinoises" adding, "I will
never accept his entire lack of modelling and
gradation/' Does not this explain his aversion
to the primitives in whom he saw but the rudi-
ments of art? How could Cezanne, preoccupied
with the most momentous problems of aesthetics,
take an interest in enlarged book illuminations,
when the most superficial corner of his slightest
canvas had more organisation and incited a
greater aesthetic emotion than all the mosaics in
S. Vitale at Ravenna?

Cezanne was never attracted by the facial
expressions, the manual attitudes, or the graceful
poses of his models. The characteristics of ma-
teriality meant nothing to him. He was per-
petually searching for something more profound,
and began his art where the average painter
leaves off. Realistic attributes are interesting
only as decoration; they are indicative of the
simplicity of man's mind; they are unable to
conduce to an extended aesthetic experience. Van
Gogh and Gauguin said well what they had to
say, but" it was so slight that it is of little interest
to us today. We demand a greater stimulus
than an art of two dimensions can give; our

PAUL CEZANNE 151

minds instinctively extend themselves into space.
So it was with Cezanne. He left no device
untried which would give his work a greater
depth, a more veritable solidity. He experi-
mented in colour from this standpoint,, then in
line, then in optics. With the results of this
research he became possessed of all the necessary
fadlors of colossal organisation. He knew that,
were these factors rightly applied, they would
produce a greater sensation of weight, of force
and of movement than any artist before him had
succeeded in attaining.

Their application presented to Cezanne his
most difficult problem. He must use his dis-
coveries in these three fields in such a way that
the very disposition of weights would produce
that perfect balance of stress and repose, out of
which emanates all aesthetic movement. The
simplest manifestation of this balance is found
in the opposition of line; but in order to complete
this linear adjustment there must be an opposi-
tion of colours which, while they must function
as volumes, must also accord with the character
of the natural objed: portrayed. In short, there
must be an opposition of countering weights, not
perfectly balanced so as to create a dead equality,
but rhythmically related so that the effedt is one
of swaying poise. Obviously this could not be
accomplished on a flat surface, for the emotion
of depth is a necessity to the recognition of
equilibrium. Cezanne finally achieved this poise
by a plastic distribution of volumes over and
beside spacial vacancies. He mastered this basic
principle of the hollow and the bump only after
long and trying struggles and tedious experi-

i S 2 MODERN PAINTING

mentations. He translated it into terms of his
own intelledion: to the extent that there was
order within him so was he able to put order
into his pictures. This vision of his was intel-
lectual rather than optical; and M. Bernard
unnecessarily tells us that, so sure was Cezanne
of his justification, he placed his colours on
canvas with the same absolutism he used in
expressing himself verbally. His art was _his
thought given concrete form through the medium
of nature. His painting was the result of a
mental process an intellectual conclusion after
it had been weighed, added to, substradted from,
modified by exterior considerations, and at last
brought forth purged and clarified and as nearly
complete as was his development at the time.

For this reason Cezanne resented the presence
of people while he worked. To attain his_ ends
his mind had to be concentrated on its ultimate
ambition. It could support no disturbing factors.
Even though he had no trick which might be
copied, he once said to a friend: "1 have never
permitted anyone to watch me while I work.
I refuse to do anything before anyone." Had he
allowed spectators to stand over him he probably
would have fatigued them, for his work pro-
gressed by single strokes interspersed by long
periods of reflection and analysis. M. Bernard
would hear him descend to the garden a score
of times during the day's work, sit a moment
and rush back to the studio as if some solution
had presented itself to him suddenly. At other
times he would walk back and forth before his
pidure awaiting the answer to a problem before
him. It is such deliberateness in great artists

PAUL CEZANNE 153

that has, curiously enough, acquired for them
a reputation for esotericism. Their moments of
deep contemplation and their sudden plunges into
labour have been interpreted as periods of intel-
lectual coma shot through occasionally by "divine
flashes of inspiration" coming from an outside
agent. The reverse is true, however. An artist
retains his sentiency at all times. He necessarily
works consciously, with the same intellectual
labours as a scientist. A painter can no more
produce a great pidhire unwittingly than an
inventor can construct an intricate machine
unwittingly. They are both labourers in the
most plebeian sense.

Cezanne's hatred for facile and thoughtless
workmen who continually entertain amateurs,,
was monumental. To him they were pupils who,
by learning a few rules, were able to paint con-
ventional pieces after the manner of thousands
who had preceded him. They represented the
academicians with whom every country is over-
run the suave and satisfied craftsmen who
epitomise mediocrity, whose appeal is to minds
steeped in pedantry and conservatism. In France
they come out of the government-run Beaux-
Arts school to which the incompetents of both
America and England flock. Cezanne harboured
a particular enmity for that school; anyone who
had passed through it aroused his scorn. "With
a little temperament anyone can be an academic
painter/' he said. "One can make pidures with-
out being a harmonist or a colourist. It is
enough to have an art sense and even this
art sense is without doubt the horror of the
bourgeois. Thus the institutes, the pensions and

i 54 MODERN PAINTING

the honours are only made for cretins,, farceurs
and drolls/*

In writing of Cezanne one Is led to make a
comparison between him and his great com-
patriot, Renoir, for it is almost unbelievable that
one century could have produced two such radi-
cally different geniuses. Renoir, first of all, was
not an innovator: he was the consummation of
Impressionistic means. In Cezanne, to the con-
trary, we see a man dissatisfied with the greatest
results of others, ever tortured by the search for
something more final, more potent. "Let us not
be satisfied with the formulas of our wonderful
antecedents/ 3 he said many times, and he might
have added, "and of our wonderful contempo-
raries." Renoir was the apex of an art era, while
Cezanne was the first segment of a greater and
vaster cycle. Renoir, by mastering his means at
an early date, acquired a technical facility to
which Cezanne, ever on the hunt for deeper con-
ceptions, never attained. Renoir's gen*us was for
linear rhythm. In the acquisition of this there
entered, in varying degree, form, colour and light;
but the line itself was his preoccupation. Cezanne's
genius was for plastic volume out of which the
rhythmic line resulted. That is: the one con-
structed his creations out of colour and made
colour appear like form; while in the other's
creations, which are the result of colour, the
colour is felt to le form. In Renoir is recognised
the solidity and depth of form, while in Cezanne
the colour is a functional element whose dyna-
mism gives birth to form which is felt subjectively.
Renoir synthesises nature's forms, by grouping
them in such a way that the lines move and are

PAUL CEZANNE 155

harmonious. Cezanne looks for the synthesis in
each subjed he sits before, and instead of group-
ing his forms arbitrarily, he penetrates to their
inherent synthesis. This is why almost every one
of his pidures is built on a different synthetic
form. His penetration gave him at each essay a
different vision of the organisms of a particular
subjed:, a vision which varied as the subjed
varied. In Renoir movement is attained by
relating the lines: Cezanne has produced harmony
by accentuating their differences. In the former
the lines lead smoothly and fluently into others,
until they all culminate in a line which carries
the movement to a finality; while in the latter
we feel little of that suavity of sequence : the lines
are formed by the spaces between his volumes
rather than by linear continuation. Cezanne,
if less pleasing, is the more powerful; and with
all his lack of suavity he is the more complex
and less monotonous. The extraordinary imprevu
of his formal developments and his unique man-
ner of stating parallels recall the symphonic works
of Beethoven. The ensembles of both are made
up of an infinitude of smaller forms, and both
display a colossal power of absoluteness in set-
ting forth each smallest form. Renoir's work is
more on the lines of Haydn.

After Michelangelo there was no longer any
new inspiration for sculpture. After Cezanne
there was no longer any excuse for it. He has
made us see that painting can present a more
solid vision than that of any stone image. Against
modern statues we can only bump our heads: in
the contemplation of modern painting we can
exhaust our intelligences. Cezanne is as much a

1 56 MODERN PAINTING

reproach to sculptors as Renoir is to those who
continue to use Impressionist methods. He is the
great prophet of future art, as well as the con-
summator of the realistic vision of his time. Both
men deformed nature's objeds Renoir slightly
to meet the demands of consistency in his pre-
conceived compositions; Cezanne to a greater
extent in order to make form voluminous. Some
of his deformations resulted from extraneous line
forces which, when coming in contact with an
objed's contour, made it lean to the right or left,
or in some other way take on an abnormal
appearance as of convexity or concavity.

M. Bernard thinks these irregularities in Cezanne
the result of defective eyesight. But such an
explanation is untenable. There is abundant
evidence to* show that, ' to the contrary, they are
the result of a highly sensitised sight a sight
which simultaneously calls up the complementary
of the thing viewed, whether it be a line, a colour
or a tone. This double vision is only a depen-
dency of the plastic mind which, instead of ap-
proaching a problem from the nearest side, throws
itself automatically to the opposite side, and, by
thus obtaining a double approach, arrives at a
fuller comprehension. While slanting his line
and distorting his volumes Cezanne was uncon-
sciously moulding the parts to echo the organisa-
tion of the whole. In turning his pictures into
block-manifestations, he strove for a result which
would conduce to a profounder aesthetic pleasure
than did the linear movements of Renoir. After
we have enjoyed Renoir's rhythms we can lay
them aside for the time as we can a very beauti-
ful but simple melody. The force of Cezanne

POMMES SUR UNE TABLE

CEZANNE

PAUL CEZANNE 157

strikes us like that of a vast bulk or a mountain.
Contemplating his work is like coming suddenly
face to face with an ordered elemental force. At
first we are conscious only of a shock, but when
our wonder has abated, we find ourselves studying
the smaller forms which go into the pidure's
making. In the 1902 Baigneuses of Renoir each
separate figure is a beautiful and complete form
which fits into and becomes part of the general
rhythm. In Cezanne the importance of parts is
entirely submerged in the effed of the whole.
Here is the main difference between these two
great men: we enjoy each part of Renoir and are
conduded by line to a completion; in Cezanne
we are struck simultaneously by each interrelated
part. Viewing a canvas of the latter is like
going out into the blazing sunlight from the cool
sombreness of a house. At first we are aware
only of the force of the light, but as we gradually
become accustomed to the glare, we begin to per-
ceive separately objeds which before had been
only a part of the general impression. The fad
that Cezanne invariably spoke of the " motif "
should have given his friends a clue to his con-
ception of composition. Before him composition
had been to a great extent the formation of a
simple melody of line in three dimensions, con-
struded by the forms of objeds. It corresponded
to the purely melodious in music, the opening of
the theme, its sequence of phrasing and the
finale. Cezanne chose a motif, and in each move-
ment of his pidure it is to be found, varied,
elaborated, reversed and developed. Each part
of his canvas is a beginning, yet each part, though
distind as a form, is perfedly united both with

I 5 8 MODERN POINTING

the opening motif and with every variation

of it.

In this little-understood side of Cezanne s gen-
ius lies an infinitude of possibilities. Without
an ability to organise, all his knowledge is worth-
less to the painter. He himself could apply ^it,
and his understanding of the exad adaptability
of a form to a hollow permitted him to express
his knowledge with a force his followers lack.
His sensitiveness to spaces and the characters of
his forms recall at times the works of Mokkei
who used protuberances and hollows (namely:
accidents of portraiture and landscape) to enrich
and diversify form. Nature to Cezanne was not
simple, and he never depided it thus. Even in
his bathing pieces, whose disproportions are de-
plored by many, the composition^ is minutely
conceived, not on a simple harmonic figure, but'
on complicated oppositional planes. Not only
are the surface forms perfectly adapted to a given
space, but the directions taken by these forms are
as solidly indicated and the vacancies made by them
are as solidly filled in, as in a Rubens. Indeed
these canvases, as block-manifestations, are nearly
as perfed as the pidures of El Greco who was
the greatest master of this kind of composition. ^

Cezanne should be numbered among the experi-
menters in art. With him, as with the Impres-
sionists, the desire was to learn rather than to
utilise discoveries. The painters from Courbet
to Cezanne were the first to usher in an authen-
tically realistic art mode, and they were also the
first who sensed the possibilities of inanimate
reality for aesthetic organisation. Others before
them had regarded nature stridly en amateur^ using

PAUL CEZANNE 159

only the human body for abstract purposes. Even
Michelangelo said that aside from it there was
nothing worth while. These modern innovators
refuted his assertion by proving the contrary,
namely: by introducing order into chaotic nature.
Their simple arrangements, however, would not
have satisfied Michelangelo who, like all men who
come at a florescence when the lessons have
been learned and it remains only to apply them,
demanded an arbitrary organisation which should
be not only ordered but composed. Cezanne did
little composing in the melodic sense of the word.
He stopped at the gate of great composition which,
after pointing the future way, he left for his
successors to enter. His synthetic interest was
limited to the eternal fugue qualities of nature.
He undoubtedly saw the futility of creating poly-
phonic composition from lemons and napkins,
but he had not found a menstruum in which the
qualities of his materials would disappear. The
old masters had done all that was possible with
the recognisable human body; Cezanne's desires
for the purification of painting kept him from
attempting to improve on their medium.

Among a great scope of oil subjects one cannot
say through which of them Cezanne has exerted
the strongest influence. His landscapes have
made as many disciples as his portraits, and his
figure pieces and still-lives are universally copied.
But his greatest work, his water-colours, has
almost no following. In these he found his most
facile and fluent expression. His method of work-
ing in oil had always been the posing of small,
slightly oblong touches of colour which gave his
canvases the appearance of perfect mosaics. In

160 MODERN POINTING

his water-colour pictures these touches are placed
side by side with little or no thought of their
ultimate objective importance, and they become
larger planes of unmixed tints juxtaposed in such
a way that voluminous form results. His work
in this most difficult medium has an abstract
significance, for in it even the objective colouring
of natural objeds is unnoticeable. The colours
stand by themselves; and while the asped of
Cezanne's pidures in this medium is flat and al-
most transparent, the subjedive emotion we
feel before them is greater than in his oil work.
In these pidures there was no going back to re-
touch. They had to be visualised as a whole
before they could be commenced. Each brush
stroke had to be a definite and irretrievable step
toward the completion of the ensemble. As we
study them a slow shifting of the planes is felt:
an emotional reconstrudion takes place,, and at
length the volumes begin their turning, advancing
and retreating as in his oil paintings, only here
the purely aesthetic quality is unadulterated by
objedive reality. In these water-colours, more
than in any of his other work, has he posed the
question of aesthetic beauty itself. When we
contemplate them, we are more than ever con-
vinced that Cezanne was the first painter, that is,
the first man to express himself entirely in the
medium of his art, colour. Unfortunately these
pidures are difficult of access. Only occasionally
are they exposed in a group. Bernheim-Jeune
has a magnificent colledion of them, and it is to
be hoped they will soon find their way into public
museums. Eventually, when a true comprehen-
sion of this great man comes, they will supplant

PAUL CEZANNE 161

his other efforts. His desires for a pure art are
here expressed most intensely.

Cezanne, however, is not always able to
"realise/' as he put it. Even in these water-
colours he did not attain his desire. He started
too late in life to acquire complete mastery over
his enormous means. "One must be a workman
in one's art, must know one's method of realisa-
tion/ 5 he said. "One must be a painter by the
very qualities of painting, by making use of the
rough materials of art/' He failed to gain that
great facility by which supreme realisation is
achieved, because the span of life accorded him
was too short. He was old when his best work
was begun, and like Joseph Conrad, he had
passed his youth before the great ambition fired
him. "Realising" to him meant the handling of
his stupendous means as easily as the academicians
handled their puny ones. This he could never do,
and his age haunted him to the end. Many have
taken him literally when he said he desired to
expose in Bouguereau's Salon, but though he
earnestly wished it, he desired to be received there
as Bouguereau was: as one who had mastered
his expression, "The exterior appearance is
nothing," he explained. "The obstacle is that I
don't realise sufficiently." In other words, he
did not have great enough fluency to permit only
the highest qualities of his art to be felt. In his
gigantic efforts to "realise," his pictures changed
colour and form many times before they were
finished. His resped and admiration for inferior
men like Bouguereau and Couture was due to
their enviable facility in handling their means.
He knew that the fundamental and unalterable

162 MODERN PAINTING

laws of organisation had been found and perfected
by the old masters, and that, so long as we were
human, we must build on their discoveries.
"Only to realise like the Venetians! 5 ' he cried.
And later: "We must again become classicists
by way of nature, that is to say, by sensation.
... I am old, and it is possible I shall die with-
out having attained this great end." A year
before his death he said: "Yes, I am too old; I
have not realised, and I shall never realise now.
I shall remain the primitive of the way I have
discovered/'

The prediction proved true, but his destiny was
none the less a glorious one. Deprived of the
phrenetic impulse which took him in all weathers
over country roads to the " motif " from six
o'clock in the morning until dark, he would
never have achieved what he did. The fa<5l of
this great modern genius going to work in a hired
carriage, too weak to walk, should be a lesson to
those painters who are always awaiting the com-
bination of propitious circumstances which will
provide them with a perfed studio, a perfed
model and a perfedl desire. Cezanne, however,
knew his high place in art history. Once when
Balzac's Le Chef-d'CEuvre Inconnu was brought
up in conversation and the name of its hero,
Frenhofer, was mentioned, he arose with tears in
his eyes and indicated himself with a single
gesture. So sure was he of what he wanted to do
that when he failed he discarded his canvases.
Many of them are only half covered. He could
never pad merely to fill out an arbitrary frame.

With Cezanne's death came his apotheosis.
As he had predicted, thousands rushed in and

PAUL CEZANNE 163

cleverly Imitated his surfaces, his colour gamuts,
his distortions of line. His white wooden tables
and ruddy apples and twisted fruit-dishes have
lately become the etiquette of sophistication.
But all this is not authentic eulogy. Derain,
his most ardent Imitator,, Is as Ignorant of him as
Nadelmann is of the Greeks or Archipenko Is of
Michelangelo. And the majority of those who
have written books concerning him merely echo
the unintelligent commotion that goes on about
his name. Cezanne's significance lies in his gifts
to the painters of the future, to those in whom
the creative instind: is a sacred and exalted thing,
to those serious and solitary men whose Insati-
ability makes of them explorers In new fields.
To such artists Cezanne will always be the primi-
tive of the way that they themselves will take, for
there can be no genuine art of the future without
his directing and guiding hand. His postulates
are too solidly founded on human organisms ever
to be ignored. He may be modified and developed:
he can never be set aside until the primal emotions
of life are changed. Only today is he beginning
to be understood, and even now his claim to true
greatness is questioned. But Cezanne, judged
either as a theorist or as an achiever, Is the pre-
eminent figure in modern art. Renoir alone
approaches his stature. Purely as a painter he is
the greatest the world has produced. In the
visual arts he Is surpassed only by El Greco,
Michelangelo and Rubens.

VII
THE NEO-IMPRESSIONISTS

THE Impressionists, although they turned
their backs upon casual sele&ivism and
branched out into analytic research, had
contrary to the generally accepted
opinion no precise and scientific method of
colour application. This came later with the
advent of a group of painters who have been
called, in turn, Pointillists, Divisionists, Chromo-
luminarists and Neolmpressionists, but who
chose to regard themselves only as the last of
these four designations. And there is perhaps
more logic in this nomenclature, for it is not
limited technically; it contains no claim to achieve-
ment as does Chromo-luminarism ; and it suggests
this new school's consanguinity with the move-
ment out of which it grew. With Delacroix's
Journal, the pictures of Claude Monet and Chev-
reuFs pioneer treatise on colour, De la Loi du
Contraste Simultane des Couleurs, the Neo-
Impressionists evolved a coldly scientific method
of technique. By carrying a simple premise to
its ultimate conclusion, regardless of everything
save the exacting demands of logic, they endeav-
oured to heighten the emotional effed: of the
Impressionist vision. In this movement, as in
other similar ones, can be detected the spirit

THE NEO-IMPRSSIONISTS 165

which animates the ardent visionary when he
contemplates a novel method the spirit which
Invites him to go to even greater extremes. In
it there Is as much enthusiasm as serious purpose,
as much of the essence of youth as of the arri-
viste. In no instance has such a spirit led to
significant results; and the Neo-Impressionists
prove no exception. In looking too fixedly at
means, they lost sight of their ends. Their debut
took place at the last concerted exhibition of the
Impressionists In 1886 where the canvases of
Seurat and Signac were hung beside those of
Cassatt, Bracquemond, Morisot, Camille and
Lucien Pissarro, Gauguin, Guillaumin, Redon,
Schuffenecker, Tillot, Degas, Forain and Vignon.
Here was seen for the first time the logical exten-
sion of the earlier methods of Monet and Pissarro.
Georges Seurat had once been a good student at
the Beaux-Arts, but his quick, precise and ques-
tioning intelligence had saved him from falling
under the professorial injunctions. Most of his
studying was done in the art museums where he
contemplated for long the old masters. Here he
discovered that "there are analogous laws which
govern line, tone, colour and composition, as
much with Rubens as with Raphael, with Michel-
angelo as with Delacroix: rhythm, measure and
contrast/' (By rhythm, measure and contrast
he meant curved lines, space and opposition.)
Still searching for the secrets of art he studied the
works of the Orient and the writings of Chevreul,
Superville, Humbert, Blanc, Rood and Helmholtz.
Then, by analysing Delacroix, he found substan-
tiation for his discoveries. The result of this
study was, as Signac tells us, his "judicious and

166 MODERN PAINTING

fertile theory of contrasts/' From 1882 on lie
applied It to all his canvases. The theory in
brief was to use scientifically opposed spots of
colour of more or less purity. This method he
might have learned dired from the first modern
French master, for in that artist's Journal are
discussed at length colour division; optical admix-
ture; the dramatic unity of colour, line and sub-
ject; and the juxtaposition of complementaries
for brilliancy.

Paul Signals evolution was different. He had
first been under the influence of Pissarro, Renoir,
Monet and Guillaumin, and though being a
zealous pupil of their methods, he knew little of
their motives. It was only after he had observed
the interplay and contrast of colours in nature
that he sought explanation in the works of his
masters, the Impressionists. Failing, he turned
again to nature. In copying it, he discovered
that in the gradation from one colour to another,
let us say from blue to orange, the transition was
always muddy and disagreeable when mixed on
the palette, although if distind spots of these
two colours were juxtaposed in alternating ratio,
the modulation would be smooth and clean.
This observation impelled him to seek a method
whereby this " passage " could be highly clarified.
Consequently he completely divided the Impres-
sionists' spots so that each individual touch
remained pure and at the same time left patches
of the white canvas showing for purposes of
brilliancy. His next step led him to Chevreul
whose theory of complementaries he committed
to memory. His technical education he now
deemed complete.

THE NEO-IMPRESSIONISTS 167

Seurat and Signac first met at the Salon des
Artistes Independants in 1884, and their dis-
coveries were at once mutually appropriated.
Signac's colour divisions, combined with Seurat's
more scholarly equilibrium of elements, formed
the nucleus from which evolved the Neo-Impres-
sionists who later repudiated Impressionism, using
it only as the point from which they leapt off
into a morass of set formulas. It was a laudable
desire on the part of these new men, especially of
Seurat, to try to snatch from a purely inspirational
school its halo of mystery and to place painting
methods on a sound rationalistic basis. But
while they were right in believing a pidlure should
be more than the visual accompaniment to senti-
ments, they should have gone deeper than the
mere exterior of painting. For example, they
should have tried to see in what plastic way their
colour theories could be used, instead of limiting
themselves to the synthetic unity of aesthetic
illustration. And they should have tried to make
a form-producing faculty of their light instead of
introducing into it another poetic element in the
shape of dramatic line. But they were more
concerned with the clothes in the wardrobe of art
than in its body. Their painting, as a result, was
without sustaining structure.

With the Impressionists, as with all significant
art movements, the desire for change and for
higher emotional power came first: the method
came later. With the Neo-Impressionists this
order was reversed. Their canvases for this
reason are less emotional than those of their
forerunners. By limiting their palettes to certain
pure colours they restricted their diversity of

168 MODERN POINTING

interest. Even their aim at a scientific art has
gone far of the mark because their science was in
many instances faulty. By conditioning their
methods on the observations of inaccurate writers
they were able to progress only so far as these
observations went. Chevreul is far from authori-
tative today: in fact there is no comprehensive
scientific work on colour in existence. Tudor-Hart,
the greatest of all colour scientists, has blasted
many of the older accepted theories of such men
as Helmholtz, Rood and Chevreul, and his
experiments have shown conclusively that many
of their postulates are unreliable. The Neo-
Impressionists were unaware of Chevreul' s errors,
and their minds were too literal to enable them to
make new and more advanced observations in the
realm of colour. The meagre attention paid
them is not due to their novelty, but to the fad
that they have done nothing the Impressionists
did not do better. They are like a cartridge
which, having all the combustible Ingredients,
fails to explode because it is wet.

The Neo-Impressionists may, in refutation,
point to music as a scientific art. But it must be
remembered that taste brought about the con-
struction of chords and that the mathematical
explanation came later. The primitive peoples
who found an aesthetic pleasure in broken-up
major chords were ignorant of nodal points and
the laws of vibration. The early Assyrians had
a pipe of three notes, C, E and G, perfedly
attuned, yet they were ignorant of the science of
harmony. Taste in the arts has always come
first: science follows with its interpretations.
The Impressionists, through instind:, created their

THE NEO-IMPRESSIONISTS 169

marvels of light and atmosphere. Afterward the
science of optics explained their efforts. Personal
taste was their only criterion, and no books could
have taught them their lesson, because their
methods were so plastic that whatever was to
them artistically consistent was right. Had they
been familiar with science, it still would have
remained to be applied: and it is only by the
superimposition of taste that knowledge in the
artist becomes pregnant. The Divisionists, by
making a hard and fast code of science, enslaved
themselves to the demands of theories. The
functioning of their tastes was nullified. They
therefore fell short of art.

In Signac's book, D* Eugene Delacroix an Neo-
Impressionnisme, are explained many points of
divergence between this school and that of the
Impressionists, The difference of the two methods
may be exemplified by describing the manner in
which each approached a landscape wherein the
grass and foliage were partly in shadow and partly
in sunlight. In such a landscape the artist's eye
records a fleeting, dimly-felt impression of red in
that part of the green of the shadow which is
nearest the light region. The Impressionists,
satisfied with having experienced this sensation,
hastened to put a touch of red on their canvas,
while the adual colour in nature might have been
an orange, a vermilion, or even a purple. In this
haphazard choice of a red Signac deteded sloven-
liness. He says that the shadow of any colour
is always lightly tinted with the colour's comple-
mentary; that if the light is yellow-green the
shadow will be touched with violet; if orange, the
shadow will contain blue-green. Had the Impres-

i 7 o MODERN POINTING

slonists known this fad: and cared to use it, says
Signac, they could have made their pidures
scientifically corred by posing the exad comple-
mentary of light in their shadow. And he adds
that it is difficult to see in just what way this
process would have harmed their work.

It is, however, not so difficult as^he imagines.
If, in copying nature by a stridly scientific vision
as the Neo-Impressionists advocate, we closely
study the light, we will discover not only that a
local colour is modified by the colour of the ^sun's
rays, but that an added suite of colours is intro-
duced by the absorption of some ^ of the objed's
particles, by the encompassing air, and by the
circumjacent reflections. We may have (i) the
local colour which, let us say, is green, (2) the
colour of sunlight, (3) the colour caused by
atmospheric conditions, (4) the reflection of sky,
and (5) the refledion of the ground. Further-
more, if the objed has any indentures their
shadows will lower to a limited degree the whole
tone of the objed. At the least calculation then
we have (i) green, (2) yellow-orange, (3') any
colour in the cold region of the spedrum, (4)
blue or violet, and (5) green, brown, Venetian red
or any colour in the warm region of the spedrum:
all of which colours change and shift unceasingly,
dependent on the density of the air which obscures,
to a lesser or greater degree, the sun's rays and
hence changes the refledion from sky and ground,
thereby modifying the local colour. Thus it is
impossible when copying nature even to determine
the colour of its lightened parts. And if a colour
premise cannot be established, it is obviously
impossible to find its exad complementary.

THE NEO-IMPRESSIONISTS 171

Suppose we admit that an approximate colour
can be recorded for that part of the landscape's
green which is in the light, that is, the green
whose complement is to be placed on the out-
skirts of the shadow. Let us say that this green
is technically a yellow-green, since it is in the sun.
Now the complement of yellow-green is not, as
the Neo-Impressionlsts hold, violet, but red-violet
or purple. But, were red-violet used in the
shadow, its effed would be false, because, in order
for yellow-green to call up its pure complementary,
the light itself must be an intense yellow-green
so intense in fad: that the local colour of the
objecft (whatever it is) is entirely absorbed and
unable to influence the light. Then, and only
then, would the shadow be pure purple, for the
local colour, being nullified, would not interfere
with the optical sensation of complementaries.
But on an objed: which appears yellow-green in
the light, the yellow of which is the sun's rays and
the green the local colour, the shadow also is
modified by the local colour in the same propor-
tion that the light is modified, only its modifica-
tion is in an opposite direction; that is, the yellow
of the sun's rays, in raising green to yellow-green,,
lowers the green of the shadow to blue-green*
Therefore the shadow is not the complementary
of the light colour. But in the darkest part of
the shadow, which is the boundary dividing It
from the light, there is a sensation of red derived
from purple, purple being the complementary of
the yellow-green. Thus in a blue objed:, though
the pure complementary of the lighted part would
be orange, the shadow in sunlight Is merely dark
blue with that fugitive sensation of red through it*

172 MODERN PAINTING

In the shadow on such an objed Signac calls for
pure orange, claiming that a vermilion, a lake or
a purple is out of place. His colour science in
the abstrad may be unimpeachable,, but his
physics is faulty. The sensation caused by the
complementary of the lighted part is that of a
reddish tint; and so long as the painter introduces
a colour into the shadow so as to give this impres-
sion of red, he is at least empirically, though not
scientifically, correct. There is only a sensation
of red, not a definite spot where red can be placed ;
and for the canvas to be truthful emotionally
there must be only that sensation of red in the
painted shadow. And the only way to produce it
without making a spot of orange, which is a light
colour and which in its pure state has no prop-
erties in common with shadow, is to use a colour
which is intimately conneded with shadow and
which contains the elements of both light and
shadow. Thus in the cold bluish-orange shadow
of a blue objed there must be placed a cold lake
or a purple which partakes of both the light and
shadow and therefore does not offend the eye by
its isolation. In the bluish or blue-green shadow
of a yellow-green objed, a purple is too aggres-
sive and blatant, while a blue-violet or an atten-
uated violet is doubly harmonious.

Indeed there is another reason why comple-
mentaries should not be used, but merely their
approximations set down. Perfed compiemen-
taries neutralise each other and, when optically
mixed or applied in such small particles in a pure
state that at a short distance the eye cannot dis-
tinguish their limitations, produce a metallic and
acid grey which is to colour harmony what noise

THE NEO-IMPRESSIONISTS 173

is to music. When C and G b are struck together
the sensitive ear revolts in the same way a sensi-
tive eye revolts at complementaries in colour.
But while in music a minor, or diminished, fifth
is displeasing, by increasing or reducing the in-
terval a semitone, by making it, for instance,
C F or C G, a pleasing effect can be obtained.
In colour also this principle holds good. The
complementary combination of red and green is
harsh, but by placing red with one of the spec-
trum tones on either side of green a pleasurable
harmony is at once established. The Impres-
sionists through instind: generally made use of
colours which primitively or softly harmonised,
again proving the ascendency of taste over sys-
tem, for if taste is sensitive it will be verified by
science. Science, however, cannot create taste.
When we consider the Neo-Impressionists* antag-
onistic and neutralising complementaries, it is
difficult to understand their criticism of Impres-
sionism. The Impressionists, they said, "put a
little of everything everywhere, and in the result-
ing polychromatic tumult there were antagonistic
elements: in neutralising each other, they deadened
the ensemble of the pidhire." Now in the entire
range of colour from violet to yellow there is
hardly a possible dual combination which cannot
be made harmonious by the addition of one or
two other colours. In this process of compli-
cation lie the infinite harmonic possibilities of
sound as well as of colour. There are no two
notes in music which, though when struck to-
gether are jarring, cannot be drawn into a perfect
chord by the introduction of certain other notes*
And any two lines, no matter how inapposite, can

I 74 MODERN POINTING

be aesthetically related by other lines properly
placed. Even were the Neo-Impressionists, in
their criticism, referring to the placing of blue in
light and of yellow In shadow, they would still
be open to refutation, for their predecessors, by
placing on their canvases the colours they had
felt in contemplating their models, were once more
emotionally right although not exadly right from
the standpoint of abstract science.

With all the brilliancy of their pure pigments
the Neo-Impressionists have yet to produce a
canvas as brilliant or as harmonious as those of
the Impressionists. The reason is not far to seek.
In an Impressionist pidure there ^ is a certain
amount of neutrality caused by mixing the^ colour
of light with that of blue shadow; and this mix-
ture heightens the scintillation of the ensemble.
The Divlsionists, on the other hand, went ^so far
as to abolish neutrality altogether. In raising all
values to a point of saturation, they diminished
the brilliancy of the pidure as a whole. It is to
be doubted seriously if even Signac Is still of the
belief that the Pointillists' squares of colour blend
optically. Theoretically they should, but actually
the Impression we receive is not one of vibrant
light. We see only an extended series of spots
which are all about the same size a size which
was varied but little as the dimensions of the
canvas varied, as was the case with the Impres-
sionists. But these latter artists mixed their
spots not only on the palette but on the canvas
as well, and blent them into neighbouring spots.
The result was a richly decorated surface whose
minute parts do not foist themselves upon our
sight. But in Signac, Cross, Van Rysselberghe,

CO

W

THE NEO-IMPRESSIONISTS 175

Dubois-Pillet, Luce, Petit jean, Van de Veide or
Augrand, who developed these means to their
ultimate limits, these spots are so displeasing and
obtrusive that it is mentally impossible to lose
sight of them in the contemplation of the pictures.
All of these artists produce flat work, with the
possible exception of Van Rysselberghe who has
merely superposed this technique on an obvious
and insensitive academism. He is to the Neo-
Impressionists what Henri Martin is to Monet.

There has been too much credit taken by the
Neo-Impressionists for the discovery of this
stippling technique. As a matter of fad: it is not
wholly original with them. Turner, Constable,
Delacroix, Jongkind, Fantin-Latour, Cezanne and
the Impressionists were all interested in breaking
nature up into parts in order to arrive at a
dynamic representation of the whole. The process
with them was commendable, but the Chromo-
luminarists carried it to such an extreme that they
saw nature only in order to break it into spots.
They repudiate vehemently the ^appellation of
Pointillists, and the name that Emile Bernard
gave them Pointists has remained beneath
their notice. They point out that one may be a
Pointillist without being a Divisiomst, for Point-
illism is the using of colour in spots so as to avoid
its flat application, while " division " is the appli-
cation of separated spots of pure pigment for the
purpose of bringing about an optical admixture.
The idea of optical admixture was born when
some one placed several planes of different colours
on a disc and, by revolving It rapidly, caused
them to blend perfedly. Immediately the Neo-
Impressionists jumped to the conclusion that

i 7 6 MODERN PAINTING

distance would accomplish the same result with
any-sized spots. This assumption was their
initial error. There is a very definite limit to
the size of colour spots which at a distance will
blend optically, and the artists of this school, with
the one exception of Seurat, made their spots too
large. Delacroix never juxtaposed large strips
of complementaries in one plane, but applied
hachures of almost the same tint. The effecft
would have been little different had he painted
flatly, except for the richer matiere this method
produced. The Impressionists mixed their colours
both on the palette and on the canvas, except
when they wished to reproduce a certain texture
that called for small lights and shadows placed side
by side. And Cezanne modulated his colour spots so
that there were no jumps or hiatuses between them.
The Neo-Impressionistic methods have no such
subtleties. In applying their colour these painters
keep each spot separated from its neighbour by
a tiny bit of white canvas which is intended to
give added light to each part. The spots are
u'nmixed and are applied straight from the palette
in preponderating proportions to obtain certain
general colour impressions. They use only the
seven colours of the prismatic spedxum, and in
thus restricting their palette they have limited
their range of greys. Since nature itself is a
series of high-pitched greys in which only occa-
sionally does a pure colour appear, they were
inadequately equipped for reproducing it. If, by
raising all tints to their purity, they hoped to
obtain the maximum of colouration and therefore
the maximum of luminosity, they overlooked the
fad: that to produce any light whatever there must

THE NEO-IMPRESSIONISTS 177

be negation or shadow. They failed to achieve
light because they equalised the brilliancy of all
colours. Even to produce colour there must be
black or grey. Their equilibrium of elements led
to the cold grey asped of their work and to the
acid and inharmonious effect of their colour.

The desire of the Neo-Impressionists to improve
upon the Impressionistic vision was a sincere one,
and in their striving for dramatic means for
heightening the already intense emotional power
of their forerunners 5 work, they showed themselves
to be animated by an ambition for change and
improvement without which no vital innovation
can be made v Their desire was commendable,
but their science was inadequate. Their modern
spirit was best shown in their search for the
significance of line in its harmonic relation to
colour and tone. The impetus to this search
emanated from Seurat who didated to his biog-
rapher, Jules Christophe: "Art is harmony;
harmony is the analogy of contraries (contrasts),
the analogy of likes (gradated), of tone, of tint,
of line; tone, that is to say, the light and dark;
tint, that is to say, red and its complement green,
orange and blue, yellow and violet ; line, that is to
to say, horizonal directions. . . . The means of
expression is the optical admixture of tones and
tints and of their reactions (shadows) following
fixed laws/ 5 Delacroix had already turned his
eyes in the direction of the harmony of lines and
colours. It will be recalled that he wrote in his
Journal: "If to a composition, interesting in its
choice of subjed, you add a disposition of lines,
which augments the impression, a chiaroscuro
which seizes the imagination, and a colour which

178 MODERN PAINTING

is adapted to the characters, it is then a harmony,
and its combinations are so adapted that they
produce a unique song. ... It is good not to let
each brush stroke melt into the others; they will
appear uniform at a certain distance by the
sympathetic law which associates them."

The Neo-Impressionists, taking their cue from
Seurat's observations, state that the first consider-
ation of a painter before a blank canvas should be
to determine what curves and what arabesques
are going to divide the surface, and what colours
and tones cover it. Even in this aim they went
further than the Impressionists who neither
ordered nor synthesised their works formally.
The Neo-Impressionists say they do not com-
mence a canvas until they have determined its
complete arrangement. Then, guided by tradi-
tion and science, they harmonise the composition
with their conception. That is to say, they adapt
the lines, colours and tones to an order which
aisthetically expresses the character of emotion
their model calls up in them. They hold that
horizontal lines give calm; ascending lines, joy;
descending lines, sorrow; and that the interme-
diary lines represent the infinite variations of
emotions that lie outside these first three types.
But they offer no explanation of the analogies
between these intermediate lines and the kinds
of emotion they are supposed to call up. They go
on to explain that hot tints and light tonalities
should be applied to ascending lines, cold tints
and sombre tonalities to descending lines, and an
equal amount of light and dark to the horizontal
lines. "Thus," they add, "the painter becomes
a creator and a poet/ 5

THE NED-IMPRESSIONISTS 179

All this theorising would be important for the
dramatic illustrators were it entirely true. But
while a line placed horizontally may represent
calm, the same line made perpendicular or laid
at an angle of forty-five degrees will also produce
calm. The straight line varies so little in its
significance, no matter at what angle it is placed,
that its direction is negligible from an emotional
standpoint. The degree of curve in a line is its
emotional element, and only when varying curves
come In contact Is the highest formal emotion
obtained. The straight line is the lifeless, the
static, the immobile. As such it can serve only
as a foil to the curved line, for it Is the straight
that makes the curved of value. Their theory
concerning hot colours and high tones Is sounder
than their linear theory; but In copying a joyous
landscape Is one not forced to put on high tonal-
ities and hot colours, since it Is in seeing these
high values that we experience the sensation of
joy? And Is It not from the low values in nature
that we receive our sensation of sorrow? One
may accentuate the colours and tones, but if
they are too strongly intensified they will ap-
proach the other extreme and produce dead and
mournful landscapes. This accentuation the Neo-
Impressionists carried to the limit permitted by
their pigments. Their ideas of line and of joyous
and sombre colours are undoubtedly of value If
profoundly and extensively comprehended and
properly applied. But, in order to become signifi-
cant, line must only delimit organisation and
become volume; and colour, instead of merely
producing joy and sorrow, must bring about
form. Then again, there is that world lying

180 MODERN PAINTING

on the further side of flatness which must be
explored.

With all their theorising and attempts to obtain
brilliancy, the Neo-Irnpressionists produce only
grey work. From the first these artists were too
coldly intelleduai, and it matters little whether
their science was right or wrong when we con-
template their pictures. Were their science per-
fedfc they could never have created art which goes
beyond the arabesque and the poetry of arrange-
ment, for they were not fundamental even in
their aims. They have ail painted different
subjeds in slightly varying manners, but, apart
from Seurat's, all their canvases have these
things in common: a uniform range of colour,
a set method of technique, and the hard and
" noisy 3 " contrasts which in their larger works
produce a veritable din. Those of the Neo-
Irnpressionists who are still living claim to have
completed Cezanne, Pissarro and Delacroix, to
have perfected a method, to have expanded
logically the Impressionists to something worth
while, to be in accord with Rood and Chevreul,
to have brought great harmony into painting,
to have taken painting into the pure realms of
poesy and symphonic musical composition. Alas,
that their claims have no substantiation in our
receptivities!

Seurat, the founder, was the only genuinely
artistic man of the movement, and an early death
denied him his chance to develop. Though
seduced by too exading a process, he has never-
theless given us some sensitive and delicately
beautiful canvases. Le Chahut, Le Cirque and
Un Dimanche a la Grande-Jatte are saturated

THE NEO-IMPRESSIONISTS 181

with light, and in them is an undeniable order
of parallel lines. His colours were never as harsh
and acid as those of his confreres, and his pictures
have a blond tonality which the other men of
the movement entirely lack. His crayon draw-
ings, from the standpoint of tonal experimentation,
are interesting and seem almost like paintings. He
had a great talent, and had he lived we might have
expected great things from it. He was more vitally
interested in style than in technical methods, and in
his conclusions stemmed diredlly from Delacroix.
His spottings were much smaller and more effective
than those of the other Pointillists. His desire was
to express an idea through the medium of nature,
not to copy nature in order to relate the sensation
it gave the artist. His painting was synthetic.
All details and accidents of colour and silhouette
he set aside as useless. His is an art of parallels
and analogies, of sensitivity and analysis; in
facft, it has all those qualities which, were they
present in greater strength, would produce signifi-
cant pictures. He was of one piece; and his
development, once he had begun to paint, was
an even one toward a definite goal. In him,
alone of the members of the group, we find an
artist and not an illustrator. Those who liken
him to Aubrey Beardsley have less reason for
their comparison than the ones who see parallels
between Gainsborough and Renoir. Compare the
quoted remarks of Seurat concerning tone, line
and colour with Signac's summing up of his
method, and the temperamental differences be-
tween the artist and the scientist will at once be
seen. Signac says his method is " observation of
the laws of colour, the exclusive use of pure tints,

x8z MODERN PAINTING

the renunciation of ail attenuated mixings, and
the methodical equilibrium of elements/'

One of the most noted followers of the Neo-
Impressionistic methods was the Hollander, Vin-
cent van Gogh. Although generally considered
in critical essays as an unrelated phenomenon in
the art heavens, he is closely allied to Signac and
to Delacroix through Seurat. He adopted paint-
Ing, one is inclined to believe, because his verbal
eloquence was inadequate to bring the Belgian
miners to repentance. He had studied for the
ministry, but like most men who, finding them-
selves striAly limited in one vocation, ^ essay
another, he found himself equally limited in his
second. He drifted back to Holland and began
to study painting in the studio of Mauve, a
relative of his by marriage. His ardent, even
flamboyant, desire to do good to everyone who
crossed his path needed an outlet, and ^ he found
an emotional substitute for pamphleteering in the
physical and mental exertion of painting. In this
work he could preach unchecked, secure from
arrest. He loved Millet because Millet loved the
down-trodden. He loved Delacroix because of
that artist's dramatic inspiration. He loved
Daumier because he imagined he saw in Daumier
a satire on the beast in man. He loved Monti-
celli because in that Provencal he sensed a wild
gypsy mind and a kindred unrestraint in the use
of colour. And he loved Diaz because Diaz was
a poetic woodman.

Before coming to Paris Van Gogh had studied
in the Antwerp Academy, and while in the French
capital he met and was influenced by Pissarro.
Here he also became acquainted with Bernard

THE NEO-IMPRESSIONISTS 183

and Gauguin, adopting the Divisionistic methods
from Seurat. He used only pure colours on his
palette and mixed them only with white and
black. Later he went to Aries where in two
years, from 1887 and 1889, he painted the great
bulk of his work, averaging four canvases a week
through sickness, drink, insanity and disease.
In him we have a perfect example of just how
little can be done with pure enthusiasm unor-
ganised by intellectual processes. His pictures
display an entire lack of order, whether it be of
colour, line or silhouette: there was never any
form in them. His work is plainly the labour of
the fanatic who, in a fury of pent-up desire to
express himself, suddenly seizes a palette and
brush and applies colours almost at random.
Indeed, some of his pictures were completed in a
few minutes. Even many of those in which the
symbology had to be thought out at length, were
painted in an hour.

That Van Gogh was an illustrator is undenia-
ble; but he was an illustrator of the abstract
gropings of an unbalanced mind avid for dramatic
emotions, rather than of exterior nature. His
landscapes seem to portend the calm before
some great upheaval, or to express a supernatural
energy poised for an a6t of total annihilation.
In them there are frenzied lines running zigzag
and at random, and rolling clouds of purple and
lurid yellow hanging over raucously bright roofs.
His portraits remain with us as memories of a
feverish nightmare. They are too hollow and
immaterial to appear even as a depiction of form.
His colours carried out this feeling of dramatic
terror, and because they were not harmonised

i84 MODERN PAINTING

with either line or tone, they became ail the more
chaotic. He never kept to the spots that Signac
and Seurat had given him. His impatience was
too great; the fire burned too furiously. He
elongated them into strips like straw, and they
give his work the appearance of haystacks. He
covered with one stroke more space than Seurat
covered with twenty strokes.

This has been called his own appprt to art.
In Gauguin, however, the same stroke is used, not
so heavily loaded with pure colour, to be sure,
but just as long. But in Gauguin the strokes
are less noticeable because they all have an
analogous diredion. With Van Gogh they rush
wildly about, now one way, now another, some-
times covering the canvas entirely, sometimes
separated to let the white show through. This
separating was not done for the same reasons as
in Signac, but because Van Gogh's impatience
was too great to permit him to go back and
cover. His figures are outlined in broad black or
coloured lines, and colours are juxtaposed with
their complementaries. In a Portrait d'Homme,
done in 1889, the background is laid in with a
bright green over which are superimposed polka-
dots of pure vermilion surrounded by a darker
green, the whole striped with yellow and light
vermilion flourishes. On this is a yellowish face
whose pompadour hair is made of black, vermil-
ion and light violet. The collar is light green,
red and blue; the striped cravat, red and white;
the coat, violet and green; the shirt, pure green
outlined in pure lake, with orange buttons on it;
and the picture's inscription Vincent, Aries,
'89 is signed in vermilion. In this painting

PORTRAIT DE I/ ARTISTE

VAN GOGH

THE NEO-IMPRESSIONISTS 185

Is evidenced his Impetuous method. He seemed
to feel that the greater the exertion, the greater
the relief from that repressed passion which egged
him on to adion.

Landscapes he liked, and he took pleasure In
doing copies of other men. In such works there
was no hard and set reality to follow as in still-
lives and portraiture. Here the colour could be
splashed on almost haphazardly. He himself said
that still-life was a relaxation. He felt this
because to paint still-life his enthusiasm was
restricted. Anything served for a subjed an
old boot, a single vase, a coffee-pot. One im-
agines he tossed these models onto a table from
the opposite side of the room, and painted them
In whatever position they fell. In this careless-
ness the public sees "inspiration/ 5 And indeed
his canvases were inspired, but only in the same
way a starving man is Inspired to throw himself
upon a sumptuous meal. He painted because he
was forced to, and when painting is merely a
physical necessity indulged in to express an
unordered religious mania, it ceases to interest
the aesthetician who searches for a complete
cosmos bodied forth in subjective form.

As a decorator Van Gogh is too turbulent and
forward; as a painter of easel pidures he is too
chaotic and unintelligible; but as a blast of
misdireded enthusiasm he is not without power.
His symbolism, while not being of the variety
which presents Grecian figures as abstrad virtues,
is nevertheless of the same order. He tells us
that in painting a young man he loved, he would
make the head a golden yellow and orange, and
the background a rich and intense blue, as well

i86 MODERN POINTING

as transcribing the physical likeness to epitomise
his love. Thus depided the young man^would^be
"like a bright star in the boundless infinite taking
on a mysterious importance/' Again he writes:
"Had I had the strength to continue, I would
have done saints and holy women from nature,
who would have seemed to belong to ^ another
age. They would have been the bourgeois of the
present, having many parallels with the old
primitive Christians/ 3 We see what he was after.
Van Gogh possessed all the modern socialistic
ideals. He held that individuals could do nothing
alone, but should work in communities, one doing
the colour, one the drawing, another the com-
position, etc. In his desire for this democratic
art factory is seen his absence of self-confidence.
It is not strange when we consider his adherence
all his life to so childish a technical programme as
Divisionism. This adherence marked the main
difference between him and Gauguin. The latter
detested the Divisionistic method. He wanted
to adapt nature's colour and effedt to decoration,
while Van Gogh wanted to make only abstract
dramatic tapestries. They both succeeded; and
though the canvases of Gauguin have the peaceful
utilitarian destiny of Interior decoration awaiting
them, Van Gogh's work, once we are rid of the
modern habit of welcoming all disorganised and
purely enthusiastic work as profound, will be laid
aside forever. He was psychiatric and expended
the greater part of his feverish energy through
the channel of painting. But he did little more
than use a borrowed and inharmonious palette to
express ideas wholly outside the realm of art.

VIII
GAUGUIN AND THE PONT-AVEN SCHOOL

THE descriptive In art has always se-
duced the eye of the superficial majority.
From this accidental and nugatory side
of painting the public has derived all
its enjoyment. The moment a depicted objedt
is recognised, the general pleasure in^/the arts
increases; and the moment the accepted "vtsiori
of the object is modified or distorted, this pleasure
decreases and in many instances ceases altogether.
One school which deals with a certain class of
subjects has its own admirers; while another
school which treats of dissimilar subjects has a
different following. Furthermore, the manner in
which subjects are portrayed realistically or
impressionably, poetically or prosaically has its
individual adherents. Persons whose tempera-
mental tastes make them antipodal to one method
of transcription become enthusiastic over another,
irrespective of the faft that the aesthetic merits of
the different procedures are equal. Those whose
criterion is prettiness are naturally attracted to
Whistlerian and Cubistic modes. Idealists lean
toward the symbolic and transcendental painters
like Van Gogh and Redon. Hardy persons who
live largely on the physical plane prefer Ribera,
Franz Hals, Sorolla or Diirer. Simple sensualists
admire Goya, Rubens, Bronzino, the erotic prints

i88 MODERN PAINTING

of the Japanese, or the pictures of the Little
Dutchmen. Biblical students choose the primi-
tives or the painters of religious subjects. Archi-
tects like Guardi, Gentile Bellini and Canaletto.
Personal tastes in life dictate tastes in art; the
reason some have a wider taste than others is
because their interests are larger.

The average person forms his art attachments
in the same way he chooses friends. For this
reason many art lovers are passionately attracted
to Gauguin, while others, obsessed with the
theories of modernity, are impervious to the in-
herent appeal he incontestably possesses. The
Impressionists were enamoured of nature. Their
pictures have an almost human physiognomy and
are thoroughly joyous. In them one senses the
abstrad love of beautiful country-sides, blue
distances and scintillating lights. They arouse an
emotion In the popular mind because of the
familiarity of their themes, Gauguin was not
content with the landscapes of civilisation. He
wanted something more elemental scenes where
an unspoilt and untamed nature gave birth to a
race of simple and colourful character. He felt
the need of harmonising his people with their
milieu. To him it seemed inconsistent to place a
fully dressed man or woman in a primitive forest
or on the banks of a turbulent stream innocent of
commercial traffic. There was a positive im-
modesty in combining a puny figure, whose body
was too distorted by work to show itself un-
clothed, with the majestic nakedness of a primeval
landscape. Millet's peasants in plowed fields and
Raffaellfs clothed figures in busy streets were
not incongruous; but in most of the landscapes

THE PONT-AFEN SCHOOL 189

of Gauguin's day cultivated moderns stalked
where Corot had once put nymphs and Titian,
Antiopes.

Gauguin's sense of harmony in idea precluded
any such irrelevancies and anachronisms. His
painting was perhaps the highest and most con-
sistent type of illustration the world has produced.
Judged from this standpoint,, on which it was
based consciously, his art was complete. i . And
inasmuch as he did not strive for profounder
things, it is from this standpoint that he must be
approached. What impetus he gave to art came
out of his desire to view nature simply, like a
child, at the same time equipped with all the
weapons of a modern intelligence. His art conse-
quently has not only the interest of historic
reconstruction but an added interest which, in
spite of our veneer of cultivation and education,
we all feel at times for perfect lassitude and
elemental unrestraint. No man is so intellectual
that he cannot enjoy occasional recreation and a
forgetfulness of mental activities. Indeed the
greatest minds read so completely at times that
they demand the crudest stimulants melo-
drama, wild Arabian chants, romance and physi-
cal intoxication. Gauguin, appearing in the midst
of gigantic and epoch-making aesthetic endeavours,
embodied this spirit of reaction. It was a grave
and serious world in which he found himself
the world of Cezanne, Impressionism and Neo-
Impressionism, His nature was too timid and
simple for him to throw himself into the whirl-
pool. Instinctively he sought a haven far re-
moved from the strife about him.

In the contemplation of the canvases of this

I 9 o MODERN PAINTING

modem savage we enter that side of the broad
field of aesthetics where the whole world can
escape, as for a holiday, from the stress of in-
tellectual research, there to enjoy art simply and
receptively, as one enjoys a dream of strange
lands. In Gauguin there is a ^ power which
impels our interest, hunts out our instind for the
exotic and calls to the fore a romantic love of
adventure and a desire for far countries. ^ In this
appeal no other painting succeeds like his^ not
even the Persian landscapes, the Chinese pidorial
visions of heaven, or the lurid images of Gustave
Moreau. In Gauguin's South Sea Island can-
vases are crystallised our hopes for a Utopian
peace, our vague memories of an untramelled
prehistoric age. Calm and sunlight, the sea and
wild mountains all are here. And we ^ find
ourselves amid a peaceful, music-loving and simple
people who, we imagine, would welcome the tired
traveller and gather round him with offerings of
fruit and flowers as he lands on their golden
beach.

Gauguin is purely an image-maker. So ab~
strad a painter is he that his pidures are merely
the point of departure from which our thoughts
leap into an unlimited world of pleasurable
visualising. They move us emotionally, even
mentally, but never aesthetically. We feel before
them exadly what we feel when reading that
extraordinary and unique book of his, Noa Noa.
Indeed he was more literary than artistic, and
to appreciate him fully one should read first his
biography written by Jean de Rotonchamp,
then Noa Noa, After that his pidures will take
on a new meaning. He makes his dreams so

THE PONT-AVEN SCHOOL 191

forceful that we, too start to dream before them.
His art Is of the same calibre as that of Altichiero,
Michelino da Bosozzo, Ortoiano, the Borassa
school, Manet and Degas. All these men are
illustrators of a high order; all are impelled by
the complete sincerity of their visions; and all
are interesting because of their freedom of expres-
sion. It is a new adventure each time we see
one of their works, for adventure is merely
contad with the unexpected. In Gauguin this
imprevu is not restricted to unconventionality of
balance and the extraordinary arrangement of
objects; but expresses itself in the adual subjed-
matter as welL His savages, ready to kill or love
with equal unconcern, bring up to us our child-
hood enthusiasms for the tales of Swift, Defoe and
Pierre Loti. His pidures epitomise the call of
the natural, the delight in perfed freedom, the
ideal of an unclothed age.

But though his work is calm and outside the
world of strife and endeavour, his life was turbu-
lent, and tortured by reiterated disappointments.
Toward the end he wrote to a friend that he fell
over-often, and arose only to fall again. As with
the sailor new horizons ever stretched before him,
and their promise of better things was never
consummated. His energy was drained by a
continual struggle against the forces of civilisation
just as the sailor's is weakened by unceasing
battles against the elements. The spot where at
last he found refuge was far from his ideal. But
in this ideal world he always imagined himself
living, and his painting took on its colour and
atmosphere. Just as he advised his followers to
draw a curtain in front of their models, so he

192 MODERN PAINTING

drew the veil of imagination before his eyes and
saw only what he wished to see. In this almost
fanatic idealism he was undoubtedly actuated by
fear of life's gross realities, for he was not content
merely to live apart: he was forever attempting
to ameliorate the trying conditions which arose
from French misrule in the Marquesas. For his
pains he was condemned to gaol and later was
made an outcast. This fri&ion with the estab-
lished order, however, had to do only with Gau-
guin the man. Gauguin the artist remained to
the end a contented and passionate dreamer.

To understand his art and its actuating im-
pulses it is necessary to know something of his
colourful and adventuresome life. Of all modern
painters, he, more than any other, was reflected
in his work. As a youth he had gone to sea and
served a six-year apprenticeship before the mast.
He next became a successful banker and to all
outward appearances was satisfied with the status
of a wealthy citizen. But all the time the love
of change and the nostalgia for strange lands were
at work within him, and though spending six
days a week in an office he painted every Sunday.
It was Pissarro, admired by Gauguin from the
first, who persuaded him to forgo everything
save his art. This he did in 1883. From that
time on he became a derelid: who had to seek
support from his friends. Although at times he
was forced to work in offices, edit papers and
grow fruit, the donations from those he knew
were the backbone of his resources. He had
met Van Gogh in Paris in 1886, and two years
later accepted the latter' s invitation to visit him
on the bounty of Van Gogh's brother Theodore

THE PONT-APEN SCHOOL 193

at Aries in the south of France. Here, where he
had expected to find conditions conducive to
work, his life was, according to his own accounts,
in constant danger. The Dutchman, he says,
attacked him often, and sometimes Gauguin,
awaking with a start, would see Van Gogh steal-
ing across the room to him with a knife. Such a
life was impossible, and after a regrettable inci-
dent in which he was blamed for the amputation
of Van Gogh's ear, he returned to Paris. The
year before this he had made a short trip to
Martinique, and while in Europe had lived at
Pouldu, Copenhagen, Rouen, Pont-Aven, Con-
carneau and Paris. Again he went to Brittany.
He wanted quiet and was ever ill at ease among
the superficialities of a hypocritical civilisation.
But there, while protecting a negress, he was
attacked by some sailors, and his injuries forced
him to return once more to Paris. The negress
had preceded him, and when he arrived he
discovered that she had robbed him of his entire
studio equipment.

At this time, Verlaine, Moreas, Aurier, Julien
Leclerc and Stuart Merril, who called themselves
the symbolist poets, saw in him a comrade. In
1891 they gave a benefit performance in the
Vaudeville for him and Verlaine. Maeterlinck's
L'lntruse was staged for the first time, and Gau-
guin's share of the proceeds was enough to pay
his passage to his longed-for tropics. Two years
later found him back again with many canvases
and a strange and grotesque costume, heavy
rings on every finger, wooden shoes and a cane
of his own carving. He was impatient for praise
and admiration and large sales; but none of

I 94 MODERN PAINTING

these came to him. At a sale of his work in ^
Hotel Drouot in 1895 so small a sum was^ realised
that his friends again took pity on him, and
Carriere secured him a cheap passage back to his
beloved islands. His adventures in the tropics
make poetic and romantic reading. His prema-
ture death, at which only one old ^ cannibal was
present, was a fitting climax to a life given over
to a hopeless search for the ideal

While still in a banker's office, and before he
had met Pissarro, Gauguin had painted as an
amateur; and as early as 1873 he had exposed
a landscape. But when he became personally
acquainted with Pissarro, who had a way of
inflaming the minds of the younger and naturally
revolutionary men of his day, his impulses toward
art became overpowering. His early training
under this violent heretic was so thorough that
he never made a concession to the public or
retrogressed toward scholastic formulas. Being
a born painter, he quickly absorbed the ideas of
the Impressionists, and exposed with them in the
Rue des Pyramides in 1880 and 1881. His first
canvases were wholly Impressionistic and much
like Guillaumin's. Even as late as 1887, after ^he
had known Cezanne and had become imbued with
the blazing brilliancy of Martinique, Gauguin still
clung to his earlier technique. His Paysage de la
Martinique is one of his best-ordered works and
also one of his most fluent. However, he had
become dissatisfied with Impressionist precepts
and had gone to Brittany to get closer to a more
natural people, to a cruder and more rugged
landscape. There he had seen and admired the
Gothic statues, the simplicity of which appealed

THE PONr-A7EN SCHOOL 195

to him intensely. On his return from the South
Seas these statues, dired, stiff and archaic, com-
bined with his late vision of scintillant light and
hot, luscious colour, became adive influences in
his work.

Gauguin had a considerable amount of Peruvian
Indian blood in him, and his desire for the South
was not a superficial one. Rather was it an ata-
vistic necessity for the wild that made him
intolerant of cities and culture and highly com-
plex modes of living. This same instind, mani-
festing itself through his art, drove him toward a
simple and dired statement of a vision, toward an
unrestraint which no civilised community would
permit him. He wanted something naive some-
thing expressed by broad planes and rich colours.
He had imitated the Impressionists, copied
Manet's Olympia and seen Giottos; and by reduc-
ing these varied influences to their simplest terms
he made his art. Emile Bernard, an indifferent
painter and writer, who temperamentally was not
unlike Gauguin, claims priority for this manner
of painting; but even if it were true, it would
mean nothing. Gauguin's canvases of 1888 give
undeniable promise of what he would eventually
do, and in 1889 his Jeunes Bretonnes fully reveals
the trend of all his later endeavours. Bernard was
at best but a clever imitator, and his canvases in
Gauguin's style appear inferior and superficial
when compared with such pieces as Tahi'tiennes
and Ruperupe.

The Impressionists went toward descriptive
beauty, but Gauguin searched for and found an
emotional interpretation of nature adapted to
large decoration. It is problematical whether or

i 9 6 MODERN PAINTING

not he is artistically indebted to Van Gogh, for
one can attribute the fad that he painted his
best European pictures immediately after ^ his
return from Aries either to Van Gogh's teachings
or to the effects of southern colour and atmos-
phere. The question though is of little impor-
tance. Every man, no matter how great or small,
goes through a formative period in which _ he
receives numerous influences. At any rate, Just
before Van Gogh died he called Gauguin "maitre."
During their final periods, however, we know
that the two men differed totally; and in 1891
Gauguin showed that he was under no man's
influence. In the Femmes Assises a 1'Ombre des
Palmiers and Va'iraoumati Tei Oa, he was already
the Gauguin we know so well. The first is a
sunlit landscape with the hills and palm-trees
broadly and flatly painted. The women who are
seated in the great pool of cool shade have all the
sagely childish drawing that we find later in his
more complete pictures. In the second, the
flowered stuffs, the heavy limbs and the per-
pendicularity of design, which appear so frequently
later on, are more than suggested; and the colour
has all the beauty of his best efforts.

It was after Gauguin's first sojourn to the Is-
lands that he came back to France a barbarian,
eager to stupefy the world of arts not only by
his pictures but by his very attire. In this he
failed. The public had barely recovered from its
Impressionist shock, and Gauguin went to Brit-
tany. Here he gathered about him. many of the
painters he had known before, as well as some
new ones, and formed a group of young men who
were ready to react against the pettiness of the

THE PONT-AFBN SCHOOL 197

Neo-Impressionistic methods and to establish a
new art school They called themselves Syn-
thesists, afterward Cloisonnists, and some of them
later became Classicists* Here forgathered Seru-
sier, Maurice Denis, Filiger, De Hahn, Seguin,
Verkade, Anquetin, Laval, Louis Ray, Chamail-
lard, Fauche, Bernard and Schuffenecker, few of
whom are discoverable today* Among these
painters the slightest tendency toward division-
istic methods was looked upon as heresy; and
religious picflures were in the ascendant, especially
with Verkade. The enthusiasm of these young
men for their simple and " synthetic" retrogres-
sion to the elemental led them to decorate tavern
walls and ceilings, to paint windows and barn
doors, and to proclaim themselves on all occasions
as the only authoritative and vital artists of the
day. They had forgotten Renoir and Cezanne
because they detested all intellectual and scientific
accuracy. And they had not known the latter
with sufficient intimacy to be diredliy influenced
by his work. Under the sway of Gauguin's
unsophisticated aesthetics and Bernard's rhetorical
eloquence they went far afield in their search for
a simple and elemental synthesis. Zeal was not
wanting. They argued, caroused and fought
continually. This last activity was the cause of
Gauguin's lameness all the rest of his life. Little
or nothing of lasting merit came out of this group
which, though it moved from Pont-Aven to
Pouldu, has come to be known as the Pont-Aven
School. Most of its members are dead or have
been swallowed up in the commercial currents of
today. A few, like Bernard, Fauche and Schuf-
fenecker, are doing indifferent art. They con-

I 9 8 MODERN PAINTING

tributed nothing to the modern Idea outside of
the Impetus they gave to the anti-academic spirit.
There was among them more enthusiasm than
talent, more polemical energy than genius.

Gauguin, though he talked as loudly as the
others, painted also. At length their conversa-
tions lost their novelty for him. He felt once
more the call of his Islands. He was still after
an ideal, a congenial setting. These things
France could not give him. Again, the necessity
of accepting charity from his friends was too
humiliating a trial for a nature so timid. His
high-handed attitude was only a mask to hide his
desire to shrink away. He was always uneasy in
cities and unhappy among people who did not
try to understand him. He detested the artifi-
cialities of Parisian women. His robust sensuality
craved a more solid and artless Eve. In France
his nature, so responsive to the glow of colour
and the primitive lure of archaic forms, saw only
chill tints and inutile complications. To him the
South meant the richness and heat of romantic
emotions, the satiety of the senses. It appealed
to his deep love of chaotic and untrammelled
nature. He had tasted it before in his seafaring,
and he turned to it now as to an only salvation.
It was at this time that Carriere arranged the
passage. Gauguin was never to see Europe
again.

The Impressionists had made infinitesimal spots
of colour in order to imitate as exactly as possible
the colour effect of nature and to increase the
dynamic power of a canvas by making it give off
a light of its own. By this technique they had
incorporated both air and sunlight into their art.

THE PON<r-AVEN SCHOOL 199

The Neo-Impressionists made mathematical the
Impressionists 5 haphazard stippling and had
turned the spots into almost symmetrical squares.
The squares were slightly separated, and the bare
canvas was permitted to show between them in
order to achieve a greater brilliance and a more
vivid light. Van Gogh later elongated these
squares into threads until his piAures resembled
tapestries. There was no longer the technical
unconcern in painting which Pissarro and Monet
had prescribed. Paradoxically enough, while art
was growing more scientific it was also becoming
less significant. With the men of Pont-Aven the
reaction against a too technically self-conscious
painting began to set in. Their ardent advocacy
of primitive conception and method was the re-
bound from the pseudo-scientific verbiage which,
in the " advanced " studios, took the place of good
painting. Consequently they favoured the broad
arrangement of surfaces; classic, if the artist
leaned temperamentally in that direction; bar-
baric, if his tastes so inclined him; Gothic,
Chinese, Japanese or primitive all according
to which his inclination led him. But all work
had to be completed during the first fury of in-
spiration, conceived imaginatively, and executed
from the decorative standpoint. Gauguin, by his
quick wit and youthful impetuosity, easily domi-
nated the circle and developed, through the
constant interchange of opinions, his vague ideas
concerning a " synthetic" art. On his third and
last voyage to the Islands his greatest work was
done. Here he carried out those ideas which had
had their inception at Aries and which had
become crystallised at Pont-Aven. He made his

200 MODERN PAINTING '

art entirely out of colour, but Instead of profiting
by the teachings of Daumler and Cezanne whose
visions were the most simultaneous In the history
of art, he chose rather to emulate the early and
ingenuous schools of plastic expression. In this
his painting was retrogressive.

But there was another and more Important side
to Gauguin. He at least strove for a larger and
more purely emotional interpretation of ^nature
than had been attempted before: and our Interest
in him Is due largely to the broad and peaceful
vision he gives us, Monet put many greens in
one tree. Gauguin saw the tree as green, but by
depidlng it In broad planes of pure pigment, he
made it a more intense green than Monet could
ever have done, "A metre of green Is greener
than a centimetre of green/' said Gauguin; and
this principle he applied to all his work. Instead
of portraying light by colour as the Impressionists
did, he interested himself only in the colour which
resulted from light. Thus he was able to raise
his paintings to the highest possible pitch of
purity s while still being preoccupied with nature.
In painting a landscape where a woman with a
cerulean blue dress was seated among green trees
on an ochre beach with purple hills In the rear,
and where the yellow sunlight shone on the tree
trunks and In the woman's hair 5 Gauguin would
first of all draw apart the blues as much as
possible. The woman's dress would be painted
almost blue-green, and in order to contrast this
colour with the other blue in his subject, he would
paint the sky blue-violet-violet. Thus he would
produce a greater range of emotional colour than
if the two blues had been pale and similar in

THE PONr-AfEN SCHOOL 201

tint. Furthermore, he would make the sunlight a
yellow-orange-orange and the sand a spectrum
yellow. The trees would then be recorded as
yellow-green and the hills as red-red-purple. By
this process all the parts of the picture were
differentiated, with the result that the canvas
had a strong carrying power. This power was
further increased by the figures being sharply
outlined.

Gauguin's composition has little importance.
It takes the form of perpendicularities, and
rarely is any rhythmic order discernible. It is of
a piece with the Romanesque painting in Saint-
Savin near Poitiers. All his objects are personi-
fications of calm, and are rooted in their environ-
ment as well as in the earth. They do not seem
merely to pose there: Gauguin's work is not
superficial to this extent, but they grow
naturally out of their matrix like flowers or trees,
unconscious but immovable. The passivity which
pervades them is not the calm of completion or
of the perfect rest which "Comes after mental
exercise, but rather the calm of the lethargic
mind which avoids thought, dislikes addon and is
content to dream. Technically this feeling is
caused by lines at right angles to the horizon, by
big simple planes on which the eye can rest free
from the disturbance of line opposition, by large
flat patterns of dark tonality conducive to peace
and introspection. Even the contoured volumes
have a greater extent of base than of apex and
thus add to the picture's asped of immobility.
Gauguin's drawing is interesting in that it por-
trays a race highly susceptible of pidturisation.
His models are impelling because it is an adven-

202 MODERN PAINTING

ture to explore their parts, their joints, their
distortions and disproportions. Their beauty is
heavy and cumbersome, like that of the stone
images of the Aztecs.

That which interests us most in Gauguin how-
ever is his colour. In this medium he arrived
at a sumptuousness unsurpassed ^ by ^ preceding
painters. His art was a new application of the
old principle of wall decoration. Many had
made use of broad planes of colour before his
advent, but none had heightened the significance
of these planes sufficiently to express nature. He
was the first realist in decoration, and from him
come, by dired: descent, Matisse and a horde of
lesser men like Fritz Erler, Leo Putz, R. M.
Eichler, Adolf Miinzer, Rodolphe Fornerod, Alcide
Le Beau and Gustave Jaulmes. The aesthetic
import of a Puvis de Chavannes is almost equal
to that of Gauguin, but the former's greys and
grey-blues appear washed-out and dead, while
Gauguin's pidures vibrate with the heat of tropi-
cal sunlight and the richness of tropical colour.
Gauguin, however, could get no orders. His work
was too sensuous. Interior decoration would
have had to be far more joyous than it was at
that time for his exotic creations to find a place
on walls and ceilings.

Gauguin's animating desire was to synthesise
his pictures to make each part of them relative
to all the other parts, to order them as to colour,
line and tone in such a way that they would give
forth the impression of a simple vision, a perfed
ensemble. This desire was in the air of the day.
The Impressionists had unconsciously approached
synthesis by using light and air as a solvent.

THE PONT-AFEN SCHOOL 203

Cezanne had gone much deeper and ordered form
by means of colour. In Seurat Gauguin saw
almost completely set forth an expression which
by its simplicity satisfied him. Some assert that
he was also influenced by Degas. But whether
this is so or not, certain it is that there is more
of Ingres in him than of Giotto, With Seurat as
a starting-point that is, the linear Seurat of
La Baignade and Un Dimanche a la Grande-
Jatte Gauguin quickly abolished the tiny and
labourious spotting which Impressionism and
Pointillism had taught him, and branched out
into simpler design and greater chromatic bril-
liancy. By these departures he achieved his
synthesis. But this triumph must not be over-
estimated. There are degrees of synthesis.
Rubens, Giotto, Degas, Ingres, Bocklin, Botti-
celli all are synthetic, but all are by no means
of equal importance. While synthesis is necessary
to art, it is not the ear-mark of great art alone.
The order which is obtained by three harmonious
lines is not so extended an order as that found in
the multilinear drawings of Pollaiuolo: and this
complication of aesthetic ordonnance is what
makes a Donatello more significant than a piece
of negro sculpture, a Scarsellino greater than a
Matisse, and an El Greco more puissant than a
Mazzola-BedolL Furthermore, when this com-
plete surface order extends itself into three dimen-
sions it becomes an infinitely greater moving
power. When from simple straight lines on a
flat surface the artist carries his creation into
opposition, development and finality, he is push-
ing the frontiers of his painting to art's extreme
limits.

204 MODERN POINTING

Gauguin's temperament was simple In the
extreme. He had fallen under the sway of
Manet: he had gone to a rugged country of
primitive instinds where singular costumes were
a part of the landscape: he had studied the stone
and wooden figures In the old churches and cross-
roads of Brittany, and had found the elemental to
his liking. Consequently in synthesising his art
he used simple forms, straight lines and large
planes of shadow and light, all of which were
presented on a flat surface, so that all the paral-
lelisms and elementary curves of the pidure
would deliver themselves to the average spectator
at first glance- His method of filling or balancing
a canvas was little more than primitive, and the
curved lines of light and shadow, which are in-
tended to entice the eye, are so isolated that when
we at length arrive at their end we discover they
are without rhythmic Intention. Nor Is there a
generating line out of which the others grow.

Gauguin's linear harmony Is no greater, if a
trifle more diverse, than in the Byzantine mosaic
decorations In S. Vitale. Indeed the emotion we
experience before each of them Is to all purposes
the same. The richness of medium in the mosaics
is amply compensated for by Gauguin*s richness
of foliage forms and floral designs. The decora-
tive colours in both are equally effective. As
moderns we might get more enjoyment out of
Gauguin's heat and brilliance and the diversity
of his silhouette, but at the same time there Is a
greater archaeological attraction and a more spirit-
ual interest for us in the ancient work. Intrinsi-
cally one Is as great as the other. Those seeking
for calm will find it in equal degree in both, for

THE PONr-AFEN SCHOOL 205

in each It Is produced by the same method: by
the static representation of form rather than by
a sequence of movement. Gauguin's sculpture
has the same qualities as his paintings, and
resembles the religious effigies of some barbaric
tribe* The figures are upright and rigid, their
backs against a straight support, as in Egyptian
architectural art.

Gauguin said many times that when a painter
was before his easel he must not be the slave
either of nature or the past. This is true, but
as a principle it is too limited. Although he
himself lived up to it, he did not go far enough
beyond it to do truly significant work. He
arrived at the brilliancy of nature by a method
distindlly different from nature's; and while
refusing to be dominated by the past, his tempera-
ment was such that he fabricated an art much
closer to antiquity than that of the Zaks and the
Rousseaus who servilely imitated it. He accom-
plished what he set out to accomplish. His
failure to give birth to great art was due to the
intellectual limitations of his ambitions. His
place in modern painting, however, is secure.

That great cycle of aesthetic endeavour which
was set in motion by the discovery of oil paint-
ing found its termination in Rubens. The cycle
which Delacroix and Turner ushered in was less
extended. Being more concrete in its aims, it
took only five decades to reach completion in the
works of Renoir. The first cycle, born with
fixed materials, was based on an absolute and
physiological law of composition which can never
radically change, and therefore permitted of an
extensive development and variation. Decadence

206 MODERN PAINTING

naturally set In after Its means had lost their
ability to inspire artists. The second cycle was
one of research, and during it artists were so
narrowly focused on nature that they lost sight
of the foundation laid down during the first
cycle. Had their concentration not been rudely
disturbed their data hunting would have carried
them hopelessly afield. Gauguin exposed the
futility of the meticulous imitation of nature's
effe<fts> and by so doing took a step forward
toward liberty of method. For this reason he is
of importance. Painters were rapidly becoming
scientists. By turning men's minds away from
nature to broadly natural pictures Gauguin in-
vited them once more to become artists. He
was the link which joined experimental research
to pure creation. The first cycle gave us an
absolute composition: the second furnished a
scientific hypothesis for art: the third 3 of which
Cezanne was the primitive, combined the first
two and thus opened the door on an infinity
of achievement. Gauguin prevented the second
from running into decadence by showing its
uselessness as an isolated procedure.

IX

DEGAS AND HIS CIRCLE

THE development of art itself is no more
mechanical than the artistic development
of the individual: in both there are ir-
regularities, retrogressions, forward spurts,
divagations. Renoir first appeared with a rhyth-
mic line-balance which first grew luminous, then
voluminous, until it blossomed forth into his full
form and line and colour. Sometimes he leapt
ahead in one quality and deterioriated in another,
abandoned one for the glory of the other, and
sacrificed continually until by experience he knew
his limitations. Then consciously, with all the
reins in hand, he progressed steadily to his highest
point of efficiency. Art in general also advances
sporadically. Delacroix gave a new freedom to
subject and drawing, resuscitated composition and
found a new use for colour. He was the em-
bryonic statement of the ends of modern art.
Courbet, ignoring colour, totally divorced subjeA-
matter from antiquity and liberated drawing from
the accepted style. He carried art forward, but
not in a dired line. Daumier gave us a new con-
ception of form, but contented himself with
Spanish colour: his art, though fragmentary, was
another step toward a unique vision. Then came
Manet who, forgetting composition, exalted the
documentary freedom of Courbet and began the

208 MODERN PAINTING

study of light. He, also, was a continuation
of the modern art impulse, but in his struggle
for the new he forgot the foundations. The
Impressionists accepted passively all that had
come before. They raised colour to an^ im-
portant place in painting and brought it to
the consideration of all artists by showing ^ its
potency in the production of intense emotion.
Renoir used their inspiration; reverted to the
past through Delacroix, Courbet and Daumier;
combined all that had preceded him; and
in an incomparable flourish closed up the possi-
bilities of his experimental forerunners. In him
was a consummation. But there had to be a
transition also, unless art was to stand still.
Gauguin, though he went so far back that he
passed to a time when composition did not
exist, interpreted, but did not imitate, ^ nature.
The Neo-Impressionists continued the impetus
of Pissarro. Cezanne unearthed secrets from
nature which linked him to Impressionism, and
by applying them arbitrarily to classic organisa-
tions, became an interpreter of the past as well
as of the future.

At each step of this broad and prolific advance
there were those painters who, profiting by the
teachings of the great, set themselves to imitate
and ornament the exteriors of their faintly-under-
stood masters and to emphasise the qualities of
texture, mature and prettiness. So rapid was the
evolution of modern endeavour that nearly every
painter overlapped his seemingly remote prede-
cessor. Edgar Degas was born more than twenty
years before the death of Delacroix. He was one
of those painters who, content to remain stagnant.

DEGAS AND HIS CIRCLE 209

employ the qualities which have been handed
down to them and breathe into old inspirations
the flame of individual idiosyncrasy. He was a
man who impressed everyone by the strength of
his personality and by the power of his caustic
wit. In his youth he travelled in Italy and
America and went to school, not for artistic
training, but merely as a concession to the
conventions of the day. He copied Holbein and
Lawrence. In his earlier portraits there are
undeniable traces of the German master: the
Lawrence influence exhibited itself in his feminin-
ity more than in adual technical innovations.
He was an enthusiastic visitor to the Cafe
Guerbois on the Avenue de Clichy where, from
1865 until the w,ar, Manet was the dominating
figure, and where the Impressionists and such
men as Lhermitte, Cazin, Legros, Whistler and
Stevens came to discuss esthetics.

Although never radically opposed to scholasti-
cism, as were these other men, Degas was never-
theless persuaded to share in a joint exhibition In
1867 with his revolutionary companions. But
the ridicule of the public disgusted him so
thoroughly that he never exposed again. He
shut himself up in his studio, and there, isolated
from his fellow painters and the vulgar populace,
worked out his own salvation. He instinctively
hated the brummagem show of popularity and put
into his every subject this disgust with life's
hypocrisies. Even in his prancing ballet figures,
though they are in full light and amid joyous
settings, one senses the satire which led to the
depiction of their apparent sans-souci. One reads
in them the sordid misery of their home life, the

210 MODERN POINTING

long trying hours of muscular strain,, and the
deceit of their simulated smiles. His synthetic
figures synthetic in that they were without
details and accidents of contour which would
detrad from the vision of the whole came to
him diredl and with little variation from Ingres
not the Ingres of Stratonice but the Ingres of
the drawings in the Musee Ingres at Montauban.
His study of this master gave hini a greater
insight into the academic construction of the
human figure than any school could have done,
It permitted him to set forth a firmly drawn
body in any pose with equal ease. This facile
mastery of action is one of his greatest claims to
popularity,

Gauguin held that nothing should be moving
in a canvas, that all the figures should be static,
arrested in their pose, and calm. Degas repre-
sented Gauguin's antithesis. He strove to catch
his model in flight. He immobilised their elan,
and registered those characteristics of a model
which express adion at its intensest dynamic
instant. In all his racecourse pictures the very
horses have that delicate balance of mincing
tread that we first feel when we look at their
prototypes in life that dainty and slight re-
siliency as of weight on springs. Monet, on the
one hand, caught the ephemeral effect of light on
nature: Degas, on the other, recorded the fleeting
movement of objects, that is, the physical poise
of a granted image, not the esthetic poise which
transmits itself to our subjectivities. He surprised
the adional segment which epitomises the entire
cycle of movement. Everything he touches be-
comes as charming and interesting as a well-

DEGAS AND HIS CIRCLE 211

staged scene. His sympathies with the Im-
pressionist colour methods and his manner of
handling his material add to this charm and
make pleasurable, fresh and adventuresome what
would otherwise be banal and sometimes even
ugly and devoid of interest. He paints the
racehorse, which Gericault first introduced into
French art, and, by surrounding it with a vernal
spring atmosphere, violet hills and green and
ochre stubble, and by catching its instantaneous
adlion, makes of it a picture with a rich and
colourful surface a surface beside which a
Gericault, judged from the same illustrative
standpoint, appears stiff and black.

Degas, in short, paints the kind of pictures
which the general public calls " artistic " a
word which, though loosely used, has come to
have a distind: connotation when applied to arts
and crafts. Vases, plaques, panels, screens, deco-
rations, posters and book-plates are all " artistic "
provided they fulfil certain simple requirements.
The bizarre exteriors of German art have given
great impetus to this qualitative adjedrtive. The
word is used indeterminately, and its popular
meaning has not been defined. But in Degas
we find it exemplified; and by studying him we
may discover its exacft limitations. "Artistic"
commonly refers to paintings in which the exadi-
tude of drawing is lost in a nonchalant sensibility,
and in which the matiere takes on a seductive
interest merely as a stuff or a substance, the love
of which,, lies deep in the most intellectual of
men. The tactile sense will be found at the roots
of the average person's idea of an " artistic 5 *
work. This desire for superficial and material

212 MODERN PAINTING

beauty, as of a rare porcelain or of scintillating
old silk, is a part of the same physical sensuality
which makes some men choose rough-grained
canvas, others the stone of the lithographer,
others the fluid brushing of a Whistler or a
Velazquez. The desire for texture is what led
Degas to pastels. ' His pidures have something
more than an illustrative value; they are highly
attractive as oljets d'art as well But while this
attradiveness heightened the popular value of his
work, it indicated the inherent decadence of his
aims.

Nor was it the only sign of his retrogression.

There is not even pidorial finality in his work.

He never painted subjects as such, but used them

only as bases for arabesques. Surface-covering

was his forte, and it is not remarkable that one

so sensitive to objective adion should have been

such a master of balance. He could never have

achieved such perfed balance had he not realised

that a work of art must be done coldly and

consciously and without passion for the model,

and that all enthusiasm should come only from

the progressing work itself. His arrangements

are wholly natural ones, and we feel that no

studio posing has gone into their making. In

this naturalistic attitude he was continuing the

modern spirit of arbitrary subjed seledion found

in Courbet, Manet and Pissarro. But where

these men painted with colour, Degas only tinted

his drawings. Consequently his colour, as well

as composition, was a reversion to a sterile past.

Although we may admire his Apres le Bain, La

Toilette, the Trois Danseuses, Femme au Tub,

La Sortie du Bain, Torse de Femme S'Essuyant,

DEGAS AND HIS CIRCLE 213

Musicians a FOrchestre for their verisimilitude
and lightness of treatment, their imprevu of
arrangement and balance and their charm of
colour, we can never credit their creator with
even a slight genius, for all his pidures lack the
rich volumes of a Daumier and the order of a
Renoir.

Degas was neither academic nor revolutionary.
He struck a middle course in which the scholastic
and the heretical blent, and in blending neutral-
ised each other's characteristics. In his canvases
he tells inherently commonplace stories, but he
does it with the force and the graceful ease of
one on whom all the visions of the world have
made a powerful impression. Life meant to him
a pageant, neither moral nor immoral, but real,
and as such interesting. If in what he tells us
there seems a bit of the cynical indifference of a
mind too fully disillusioned, it never obtrudes
itself. He himself might have been surfeited and
bitter, but his work contains only the barest hint
of his temperamental retrospection. His com-
prehension of life's tragedies did not spoil his
enjoyment in depicting them. Louis Legrand
reveals the metropolitan lust of mankind; Forain,
its bestiality; Toulouse-Lautrec, its viciousness.
Each was prejudiced in some direction. Degas
merely goes behind the scenes and by stripping
his characters of their pretences shows them to
us as they are, intimately and unsentimentally.

The other men in this circle of illustrators of
which Degas was the dominant figure had
distinctly individual traits. In no sense were
they followers of one leader. Their preoccupa-
tion with illustration alone held them together.

MODEM PAINTING

Degas has given us well-balanced patterns with
fragileiy lovely surfaces. He was little interested
in the traits of his models: he cared more for the
pidure than for individual character. With Henri
de Toulouse-Lautrec this mental attitude was
reversed. In his work are specific members of
the demi-monde, marionettes who have all the
accentuated vices, vulgarities, fatigues and pre-
tensions of their trade. In their faces, moulded
by unrestrained indulgences, joys and sorrows,
we can read their innermost hopes and aspira-
tions. We can reconstruct their entire day's
activities. In order to study his characters
Lautrec went to the milieu where gaiety was
unchecked, where the denizens of the under-
world those unreal beings who live like fantas-
tic flowers nourished by artificial light and
colour come to work and play. He saw and
set down the principals in the Bohemian music
halls, the cafes-concerts and the cirques, and those
daylight moralists who corne to relax viciously at
night with all the laisstr-aller of violent reaction.
His search was for character; and in these
establishments character did not masquerade in
the hypocritical garb of pride and dignity.
Passions were aired frankly, even proudly.

Lautrec had personal as well as artistic reasons
for choosing this sphere. He had an ardent,
almost febrile, desire to live fully and furiously.
He was deformed; he had a man's head and body
on a child's legs the result of incompetent
bone-setting in his youth. His family was a very
old and noble one: his father was a sportsman,
a lover of horses, a sculptor in his leisure moments.
All the pride of race and dignity of class tumbled

DEGAS AND HIS CIRCLE 215

from its pedestal in this young artist. He had
worked in the schools of Bonnat and Coraion,
had met and admired Forain, and had finally
been revealed to himself by Degas who led him
to the theatre. He drank much, one suspects, to
forget his deformity, just as Van Gogh drank to
forget disease. He sought solace in the ephem-
eral, visionary life of the cafes; and no addon,
no type, no expression escaped his probing
notice. He had many friends to whom he
confided. "I am only half a bottle/ 3 he would
say. He adored women impersonally and roman-
tically, but in his own station of life they looked
upon him askance. Consequently he lived where
money would always buy attention and where
good-fellowship was repaid with good-fellowship.

Lautrec was an indefatigable worker, but his
pictures possess little of the surface beauty of a
Degas. Rather do they attest to a love of
exaggerated and uncommon form, as do Chinese
paintings. But in him is more order than in
Degas. Compare Une Table au Moulin-Rouge
with Degas's Cafe-Concert. In the first the
character in the physiques of the principals
harmonises with the character of the faces; and
the female figure's hair, hat and fur-trimmed coat
indicate the artist's love for grotesque and
beautiful abstract form. There is more than
balance here: there is the rudiment of an instinc-
tive composition which Degas never had. Beside
this picture the Cafe-Concert seems flat silhouette,
sprightly and entertaining, but far from profound.
The nucleus of composition can be found in all of
Lautrec's best canvases, especially those he
painted after his return from Spain. Toward the

2 i6 MODERN PAINTING

end of his life he worked, for the most part, with
a full brush and rich colours. Before this, how-
ever, pencil, chalk, lithographs and water-colours
had claimed him. His greatest fluency was _ in
the use of- separated hachures of ^rich greyish
colour on neutral backgrounds. This method of
application* permitted him line as well as colour;
and with his lines, summary and economical
though they were, he caught the animality of his
subjeds with as sure a hand as Monet caught the
light and Degas the action.

Lautrec, with Cheret, revolutionised the poster
art. There are few men today in this field who
do not owe much to him. His ^love of the
eccentricities of his model was an ideal gift for
the poster-maker, and he had himself sufficiently
in hand not to be led into the grotesque. He
was a caricaturist in that he exaggerated char-
acteristic traits, just as Matisse did in his sculp-
ture. He always noted fully the uncommon, and
his love of every manifestation of life gave him
a wide range of inspiration. Life was his great
adventure; his art was merely his diary. He is
a historian of the theatre of his time and has
left salient portraits of Loie Fuller, Polaire,
Sarah Bernhardt, Mounet-Sully, Yahne and Anna
Held. His types of the raptorial woman of the
past the kind that today is found in the
hidden corners of Les Halles, at the fortifications
and about the "Rue de la Joie" are as real as
the female characters of Balzac, Daudet, Augier
and Prevost. They live in his pictures because
one feels that they once were realities: his
caricaturisations of them, as of his clowns and
dancers, only intensify their intimate humanity.

DEGAS AND HIS CIRCLE 217

To some It may seem strange that Lautrec should
have liked Massys and Hemline. But in the
first he found trenchant characterisation, espe-
cially in such things as Head of an Old Man,
The Courtesan and Portrait of a Canon. And he
was temperamentally akin to Memlinc in such
arrangements as the latter' s The Casting of the
Lots (a detail of Calvary) and Our Lord's Passion,
at the Museum in Turin.

That the illustrators of this group were deca-
dent is borne out in their subje6lmatter as well
as in their methods. Since the earliest recorded
antiquity artists have been attracted to the
moving, the glittering, the brilliant; and the
human occupation which embodies these three
qualities most obviously is dancing. The men
who are in love with life and not art and who
paint and draw pictures merely to record their
impressions, have always been hypnotised by the
colour, the grace, the fluent movement and the
rhythmic shiftings of dancers. These men, unable
to analyse their emotions, have dreamed only of
depiding objectively their photographic impres-
sions of the dance. The artists who penetrated
to the fundamental causes of rhythm used the
dance only arbitrarily, whereas the superficial
painters of the past saw in it merely the mosaic,
the pattern, the arabesque. They thought that
in portraying the dance literally they would
arrive at its motive significance. But in this
they failed. Had they done their figures in clay
or stone they would have approached nearer
their desire. But even this more masculine
medium has, with few exceptions, resulted in
failure. The dancing girls in the Grottoes of

zi8 MODERN PAINTING

Mahavelipore were used only by those puissant
masters of form as friezes or shapes to fill in and
ornament a vacant space. The Tanagra figurines
are a purely decorative endeavour. In Greece
it was not the men of Praxiteles's calibre, but the
smaller talents like the potters who used the
dance in their designs. Even a man as slight as
Hokusai leaves it to a Toba Sojo to make his
models caper. But the feminine talent of Degas
finds in the dance absolute and unordered expres-
sion; and Lautrec and Legrand, both more robust
than Degas, though minor and ornamentally
illustrative artists, are seduced into portraying it
often.

Louis Legrand was more of the "maker' of
pictures than were his two contemporaries. His
nature leaned toward the heavy and boisterous
Sodorna rather than toward the Latin ideal of
Tiepolo. This almost Teutonic racial penchant
in him explains why the bestiality of his subject-
matter is so often done in the manner of Goya,
with broad black and white masses, not with the
suggested line and the attractive mature of his
master, Degas. There is much Teutonic blood
in Spain, and Goya, while being far the greater
artist even in his slightest etchings, is the nearest
approach to Legrand in the treatment of themes.
Goya paints moral decay with disgust and genius,
whereas Legrand, with his slight gropings after
order of a surface variety, glories in it as in a
pursuit, and paints it with a leer. The Spaniard
uses it as a temperamental means. The French-
man, whose whole talent lies in a formula of
draughtsmanship, works toward its creation as an
end. His shallowness is at once apparent when

DEGAS AND HIS CIRCLE 219

we compare his Maitresse or his Illustrations for
Edgar Allan Poe's tales with etchings like Donde
Va Mama or Buen Viaje. Psychologically he is
intimately related to the fin de such movement
in England; and, although a better and more
healthy workman, he has a temperament singu-
larly akin to that ineffectual Vidorian academi-
cian, Walter Sickert.

In J.-L. Forain we have a man of different
stamp, one who, knowing his ability for certain
things, clings to them and does not attempt to
thrust himself into the rank of artist. By
developing his small potentialities to their highest
actuality he has achieved as much as his con-
freres have by extraneous tricks and appearances.
And there is no doubt that he comprehends art
much better than they. His iconoclastic and
acidulous cynicism, his ability to wrench from
behind the veil of mundane hypocrisy the real
motivation of an action, and his probing analysis
which cannot be imposed upon by pretence, have
touched on many sides of contemporary life
politics, extortion, courts, merchants, the beau
monde, prostitution, religion, the theatre and
the tawdry Bohemianism of Montparnasse. With
a few straight and fluent strokes of the pencil he
builds up a type of the blustering parvenu Jew,
the mercenary pidure dealer, the childish and
vain a6lor who is avid for praise and obsessed
with his vocation. Forain calls the adlor a
" M 9 as-tu-vu?" and depids him as with that
phrase ever on his lips. Baudelaire Chez les
Mufles is one of the world's greatest monuments
to human hypocrisy. A chlorotic bourgeoise is
standing in the centre of a small gathering

22O

MODERN PAINTING

reciting Baudelaire's verses. Around her aie
grouped types of self-satisfied and vicious mascu-
linity, all pretending, like the speaker herself,
to be feeling deeply the hidden spirituality of the
poem. Some of the men have their heads raised
high, others bowed low, for purposes of con-
centration. The whole pidure is rough-hewn as
though done with an axe in a square of clay.
With the simplest means the artist gives us the
impression of rugged stone and, at the same
time, completion. The titles to his drawings
are in the exacl: spirit of the pictures themselves,
succindt, brutal and penetrating. Forain is the
second greatest caricaturist the world has pro-
duced. He was not the artist that Daumier was,
but as a serious creator of types and as a highly
intelligent critic of contemporary shams, he is a
master, even as Daumier was a master of a realm
far above him.

Forain perfected what he set out to do, and
for this praise is due him. That his ambition
ran along a subpassage of aesthetic endeavour, as
did that of his three confreres, he would be the
first to admit. As artists these men cannot be
judged either by the surface^ quality of their
works or by their penetration into life and char-
ader. Such considerations have nothing to do
with aesthetic emotion. No matter how much we
may eulogise such painters for they must be
judged by their own standard rather than by a
criterion set by a Rubens our praise will never
place them in the rank of plastic creators. They
will ever remain in the realm of nearly perfect
workmen with literary apperceptions. Toulouse-
Lautrec, because of his love of formal distortion

DECAS AND HIS CIRCLE 221

for its own sake, probably comes nearer the
higher level: there is in his work a slight aesthetic
element. Degas will ever remain the piece of old
velvet in a frame; Louis Legrand, the illustrator
of the bachelor clubs; Forain, the expositor of
life's pretensions.

It is these men who have given the greatest
impetus to realistic illustration in all countries.
Viewed from this standpoint they were a salutary,
as well as a diverting, manifestation. By burrow-
ing down into the depths of material existence
they made unimportant such poetic men as
Beardsley, Rossetti and Moreau. All good illus-
tration after them took on a deeper meaning,
It ignored the mendacious surfaces of things and
strove to reproduce the undercurrents which lie
at the bottom of human adions and reactions.
Its mere prettiness was supplanted by subcutane-
ous characteristics. It sought for motives rather
than emotions, for causes rather than eifeds.
It became critical where once it had been only
photographic. From Degas, Lautrec, Legrand
and Forain comes diredly the best illustrative
talent in both Europe and America, Without
these four men we would not possess the beet
work of Max Beerbohm, Hermann Paul, Bellows,
Maxime Dethomas, Roubille, Carlopez, Carl Lar-
son, Albert Engstrom, C. D. Gibson, E. M. Ashe,
Boardman Robinson, Cesare, Blumenschein and
Wallace Morgan, the last of whom is unques-
tionably the most artistic illustrator in either
America or England.

X

HENRI-MATISSE

WHILE the bitter struggle against the
narrow dictates of a retrospective
and so-called classic academy was
in progress, and before the older
scholastic forces had finally been put to rout,
the Impressionists calmly arrogated to them-
selves the authority of their dumbfounded
predecessors. Their pidures, because more re-
stricted and not based on the fundamentals of
art, soon became as familiar and commonplace
as the paintings of Gerome, Cabanel and Bougue-
reau, and in becoming familiar settled into the
groove of a new academism as immobile and
self-satisfied as the old. The Neo-Impressionists
were the first to read against them, and later
Gauguin and his fellow synthesists openly de-
clared war. Cezanne at that time was little
known and less understood. Living apart and
alone, he was counted out of the main struggle.
The decadents of the movement, Degas and his
circle, continued their popularising process: their
eyes were so fixedly turned inward that they saw
little of what was going on about them. Gau-
guin, putting aside imitation of nature for inter-
pretation, began the great movement which was
to culminate in the most extreme reaction against
Impressionism Cubism. And Matisse who, arous-

HENRI-MJTISSE 223

Ing public interest In the new. Is responsible
for the popular Cezanne discussions of today,
was the next man to carry on Gauguin's work of
pigeon-holing Monet and his followers. But where-
as the Impressionists had completely forgotten
the classics, Gauguin wished to recommence the
entire cycle by reverting to the forefathers of
those very classics. He also had his decadent
followers, but there was no one to continue his
methods and inspiration. If it is difficult to
perceive an analogy between him and a painter
like Jacopo dei Barbari, compare the works of
these men with a later drawing by Matisse.
The similarity of the first two, by being con-
trasted with the latter, will at once become
apparent. Gauguin clung close to the drawing
of the primitive Christians; and the classic seed
within him, though it never flowered, was never
dead.

While the form In Matisse at times has all the
suavity of contour of a Liombruno or a Roma-
nelli, there is a more purely sensitive reason for it
than in the well-taught decadents of the later
Renaissance. In the classes of Bouguereau and
Carriere at the Beaux-Arts he had seen to what
an impasse a too great love of antiquity would
lead. Furthermore, with his many copies In the
Louvre, by command of the state, he began
gradually to realise that the classics had become
a fetich, and that the only salvation for a painter
was to seek a different and less-known Inspiration.
This course was not so difficult as it had once
been, for the younger men had already liberated
themselves from popular mandates. The freedom
of the artist was now an assured thing, and while

224 MODERN PAINTING

the public still scoffed and offered suggestions^ it
no longer felt that a man's expression was its
personal concern. To be sure, popular rage
against things which appeared incomprehensible
was still evident, but it was the impotent rage
which sneers because it can no longer strike.
The Salon des Artistes Independants ^was in full
swing, and the new artists who had ideas rather
than tricks and who were intent on discovering
new fields through devious experimentation, found
therein a refuge where they could expose as
conspicuously as could the academicians. In this
healthful Salon Matisse has exhibited regularly
up to a few years ago, and it was here and ^ in
the Salon d'Automne another exhibition which
at first was animated by high ideals but which
has lately fallen into the hands of cliques and
pidure merchants that his fame took birth.

With Matisse's advent we behold the paradox
of an artist who is in full readion against the
Impressionistic and classic dodlrines and who
at the same time reveals a certain composition
and makes colour of paramount interest. The
Matisse of exotic inspiration came from the
studio of Gustave Moreau who, by his intelligent
toleration of the virile enthusiasms of his pupils,
facilitated the way toward complete self-expres-
sion. There are Matisse drawings extant which
are impeccable from the academic standpoint
drawings in which is found all the cold "right
drawing" of the school. There are paintings
in the NeoImpressionistic manner, except that
they display a sensitive use of harmonious colours,
which should have shown Signac and Cross the
error of their rigid science. Also there are still-

HENRI-MATISSE 225

lives which recall Chardin, one of Matisse's great
admirations; and at least one study of a head,
done in Colorossi's old academy on the Rue de la
Grande Chaumiere^ in which a love of Cezanne's
form and colour mingles with a respedl for
Manet's method of applying paint.

Gauguin too served as a provenance for the
later colour vision of Matisse. Indeed it is as
much from Gauguin as from Cezanne that he
stems. The broad planes of rich tones and the
decorative employment of form in the former
had as great an influence in Matisse's art as did
the perfed displacement of spaces in the canvases
of the Provencal master. Gauguin, while still
leaning to the classic, desired a fresher impetus.
He therefore sought distortion in exotic inspira-
tion; but the man who was led to distortion
through a pure love of unfamiliar form and to
whom Matisse owes the deciding influence toward
a new body, was the Spaniard Goya. The
deformed, the grotesque and the monstrous were
with Goya a passion. In his Caprichos it is easily
seen that he, too, was tired of the established
formulas regarding the human body, and strove
to vary and enrich it. By emphasising a char-
acteristic trait, by shifting a certain form, by
exaggerating a certain proportion, he sought to
obtain, as did Matisse, the complete expression
of what he felt to be essential in his model.
The deformations in Gauguin came as a result
of an outline which after the first drawing was
left unchanged for the sake of its nai'f effed.
But in Goya and Matisse the deformations are
the result of a highly developed plastic sense
which glories in new and unusual forms. With

226 MODEM POINTING

them the human body is treated as the ^ means
through which an idea is expressed an idea of
form, not of literature. Compare, for instance,
the drawing called Deux Tahitiens, one of Gau-
guin's best works, with Matisse's ^Baigneuses, a
canvas of three nudes one of which is Claying
with a turtle. In the former the proportions are
distorted as much as in the latter, but these
proportions are flat and are an end in them-
selves. They have no intellectual destiny. In
the Matisse pidure the exaggerations grow out
of a desire to express more fully the form which
the artist has felt to be important and character-
istic. In the seated woman the torso and neck
constitute a personal and original vision, and the
crouching woman's back has as much solidity as
the Venus Accroupie of the Louvre.

Matisse's simplified vision of form came, as did
all synthetic modern art, from Ingres and Dau-
mier through Seurat, Degas and Gauguin. That
Ingres, the master of so classic a school, should
have unconsciously felt the need for modifying
and simplifying an objed is a significant indica-
tion of the fatigue which is always produced by
an adherence to a set form. In his drawings the
details are omitted merely because they do not
further the achievement of his own particular
kind of beauty. In Daumier they are absent
because they detrad from the spontaneous emo-
tion of the whole; in Degas and Manet, because
they hinder the fluency of adion and obscure the
complete and dired image; in Seurat, because
they interfere with the suavity of line itself; and
In Gauguin, because they preclude that naivete
of appearance he wished to obtain. In Matisse

HENRI-MATISSE 227

began the conscious process of making form
arbitrary, of bending it to the personal require-
ment of expression. In Cubism form became
even more abstrad* In Ingres's drawings there
is an entire lack of suppleness: his figures appear
like a first sketch in wood for a German carving.
In Gauguin this wooden look becomes a trifle
more fluent; the proportions are artistically
improved. And in Matisse there is no trace of
the awkward or the* stiff. While his form is more
simplified than that of the two other painters,
the simplifications come as a result of that
artistic Tightness of proportion which is an out-
growth of the ultimate refinement of knowledge
and taste.

The trick of drawing of a Louis Legrand has
no parallel in Matisse. In the work of the latter
each figure or objecft, no matter how many times
he has already drawn it, has a distinctively novel
construction and presents a new vision. All
familiar joints and hackneyed interpretations are
absent. We have seen, for instance, the deltoids
drawn in every conceivable pose of stress or calm.
When one speaks of a nude we immediately
visualise it with the angular shoulders, with the
accustomed bulges over the upper arm which
have been painted there in the same manner since
the early Renaissance. In the delineation of
deltoids the painter had become stagnant, accept-
ing their conventional appearance as an external
truth and recording them without thought.
Matisse revolted against this fixed standard.
Glance through his later nudes and there are
many of them and every shoulder will present
a different appearance; every arm will take on a

228 MODERN PAINTING

novel form. We speak here of these particular
muscles because they seem to obtrude themselves
upon the sensitive sight more than any others.
Matisse, seeking to overcome this structural
monotony, made each shoulder he drew a new
form, a new adventure, by expressing, not the
acftual bone and muscle of the clinic, but the
salient meaning of that shoulder in a given
milieu. It is this same desire to do away with
the hackneyed forms of art that has driven the
modern poets away from classic metres and
caused them to seek a more plastic and adaptable
medium in vers libre. Rondeaux, ballades, quat-
rains, odaves and the like are today as intrinsi-
cally perfed forms as they ever were, but the
significance of their beauty has been lost through
overuse, through too great familiarity. Our
minds pass over them as over well-learned lesso^
committed to memory. ds

It is thus Matisse felt about the classic fo-
of his predecessors. These forms had once F ms
beautiful; intrinsically they were still beauf^ en
but they had been habitualised by constant - 1 * u *>
tition; and new ones were needed. In or re P e ~
find them Matisse says that, when before a^ er to
he tried to forget that he had even seer- mo ^el,
before and to look upon it with the ey 1 a nuc le
who had never seen a picture. By tl( es , one
not mean that his vision was naive,/?- 18 he does
was innocent of set rules and precc 1 ' ^ ut that lt:
of how form should be obtained/- )nceived ideas
this attitude proved fruitful be** ^ s a ^heory
did not succeed in setting asid/ ;cause > w ^b he
nevertheless led to a conscioip memo] T, he was
Ms first impulses to depidt fo* thrusting aside of

as he saw it. All

HENRI-MATISSE 229

painters, even the greater artists of the past, had
copied form as it presents itself to the eye, but
Matisse forced himself, through ' painstaking
analysis, to express form in a totally novel man-
ner; and to a certain extent he succeeded. One
might well ask why, in modifying the human
body, he did not, for instance, omit a leg or a
head, thus making his expression at once purer
and more abstract. The answer is that he real-
ised that the spectator, after the first shock at
seeing the unexpected form and the consequent
mental readjustment to the new vision, would
nevertheless recognise the picture as a depletion
of the human figure. Therefore a complete
recognisability must be maintained. If the ar-
tist omitted an eye or a mouth, for example, the
spectator would experience physically the incom-
pleteness of the vision. He would feel, through
personal association, the blindness or the suffo-
cation as suggested in the picture; and these
shocks, being secondary physiological sensations,
would detract from the esthetic pleasure provoked
by the work. The point is an important one, for
it demonstrates the impossibility of appreciating
art purely as abstract form so long as recognisable
objects are presented. As modern painting pro-
gressed the illustrative gradually became relegated*
Much impetus for his abbreviations and accen-
tuations of form came to him with his personal
discovery of the wood carvings of the African
negroes, the sculpture of natives of Polynesia
and Java and of the Peruvian and Mexican
Indians. During the last five years we have
heard much of these unknown artists and of their
superlative ability for organisation and rhythm.

230 MODERN PAINTING

But they have been a little too quickly and
enthusiastically accepted as criteria at the expense
of those greater artists, the Greeks, the Egyptians,
the East Indians and the Chinese. Matisse
found in them an inspiration toward synthesis
and also a substantiation for his own desire to
emphasise salient characteristics. They influ-
enced his motives in depicting only what was
personally important and in doing away with
unnecessary details. After him there came a
horde of imitators who saw in negro sculpture the
quintessence of artistic expression, who looked
upon it as a finality of organisation and rhythmic
composing. Such judgment, however, contains
more of enthusiasm than of critical acumen-
Negro sculpture has an interest for us only in so
far as it is novel and untutored. Its organisation
is of the most primitive kind, symmetrical rather
than rhythmic, architectonic rather than plastic.
It is the work of slightly synthetic artists who
were without models and whose visions encom-
passed only certain traits of form which, when
expressed, became not composed but balanced,
not imitative but abstract. The abstraAness of
negro sculpture, its bending of all human forms to
an ornament, its archaic rigidity which is the
antithesis of fluent movement these are the
qualities which have so gripped the imaginations
of minor modern artists. In reality the negro
sculptors did not seek these qualities consciously.
Their lack of realistic observation was due to
their partial isolation from exterior influences such
as the Greeks and Egyptians, and to their desire
to make an ornament of all images.
It was the Persians, however, who influenced

NENRI-M^TISSE 231

Matisse more than did negro sculpture. He
found in these artists a practical lesson in the
application of his beliefs a lesson which sub-
stantiated the tonic division and formal im-
provisation of Goya and the decorative colour
application of Gauguin. Besides he learned from
them a more diredl method of image making,, a
method which was at once more delicate and more
femininely sensitive. After seeing the pictures
done by Matisse in Algiers, and such paintings
as La Glace sans Tain, and after looking at the
vistas through the open doors and windows in
some of his large interiors,, one realises at once
the great influence these exquisitely delicate
painters of ancient Persia had on him. The
decorative illustrations of the Mille et Une Nuits,
published in Paris by Fasquelle, are so similar
to some of his pictures that one is inclined to
believe he studied this book before painting them.
His superiority lies in his finer comprehension of
the human form and in the great diversity he
exhibited in the repetition of its component parts.
Persia, like other nations, had an academy, and
while its yield was more charming and less given
to complex reproductions, it had no more aesthetic
importance than have the art schools of our own
day. But unlike ours it had not forgotten the neces-
sity of formal distribution in the making of artistic
arrangements. This distribution in its flat sense
Matisse appropriated to his own ends, and by
applying to it freer modern means, made his art
more aesthetically significant than that of the
Persians.

His modern means were the outgrowth of his
understanding of colour in its capacity to incite

232 MODERN POINTING

emotion. His first essays in this^ field were
greyish. Later, through divisionistic methods,
they grew brighter; and finally his colour became
pure and was applied in large planes. His works
of this period shine as a source of light, and with
his development of exaggerated forms his colour
interpretations also become exaggerated Where
he saw a green in a shadow he painted it a pure
green; where he saw a yellow in light he made it
a pure yellow; and so on with the other colours.
But in these interpretations there is more than a
mere desire to record hastily an optical vision.
Each colour is pondered at length in its relation
to the others. It is changed a score of times,
modified and adjusted; and when it is finally
posed it is artistically "right." In other words,
it fills harmoniously an important part in a
pidure where understanding and taste are the
creators. In the work of Matisse sensibilite plays
the all-important role, and while his results are
satisfying as far as they go, there are times when
we could wish for a greater rhythmic sense, g
more conscious knowledge of the profundities of
composition, and a less dominating desire to free
each form and line from classic dictates.

With his colour we can find no such fault.
Though here his knowledge, like that of all other
artists before him, is limited, the perfed harmony
between tints, which in him reaches a more
advanced stage than in any preceding artist, is
the result of a highly sensitive eye and an impec-
cable taste. The beauty of his colour alone
makes him of paramount importance. Every one
of his canvases is a complete colour gamut created
by taste and authenticated by science not only as

HENRI-MJTISSE 23 3

to pure colour but also as to greys and tone. In
his still-lives he chooses objects alone for their
colour and form, and his sense of proportion Is so
developed and his reduction of line is carried to
so final an economy that, as flat as these objects
are, they seem to have a rich consistency and to
extend themselves into visual depth. As in the
case of all men who deviate from the narrow and
well-worn path of monotonous tonality, Matisse
is accused of dealing in raucous and blatant
colours which set the head aching and the eyes
smarting. But the accusation is true only of his
followers who display little sensitivity and even
less artistry, and who, in imitating the superficial
aspeds of his work, see only grotesque distortions
and pure colour. Matisse once had a school
where he endeavoured to develop the native talents
of the Americans, Poles, Russians and Germans;
but when a Bohemian woman, in reply to his
question as to what she wished to do, answered,
"Je veux faire le f neuf," he abandoned the enter-
prise and retired to Clamart. She unwittingly
summed up the desire of those meagre painters
who, on seeing something novel, immediately
throw themselves Into Imitating it. Matisse's
followers approach his colour gamut, but they
never bridge that lacuna which separates a pre-
cise art from one which is a pen pres. It is the
last delicate refinement of perfect harmony which
Matisse possesses and which his imitators can
not attain to, which places him in the rank of
greatness.

Matisse is called the Chef des Fauves, and his
art has been catalogued and labeled, turned into
a "school" and has come to be known in many

234 MODEM PAINTING

quarters as Post-1 mpresslonism, although that
title, as well as the one of Fauvism, was originally
intended to designate all the art movements after
Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism and in-
cluded such widely dissimilar men as Cezanne,
Van Gogh, Picasso, Kandinsky, Matisse and
Friesz. It stood for the new vitality in art, for
the contemporary animating spirit, and implied
an epoch rather than a movement. It was not
sufficiently specific, however; and while modern
art in the main is a homogeneous development
of new means, its forces are too diverse and its
evolution too complex to permit of its being
described by a blanket term. It was therefore
natural that in an endeavour to understand the
underlying forces of modern painting a process of
critical differentiation should have been insti-
tuted. But labels are offensive and impertinent
when attached to serious aesthetic endeavours,
and are apt to lead to misunderstanding and
errors of judgment. The canvases themselves
must be the final test of a movement's enduring
vitality: Matisse is himself the whole impetus
of the movement he represents. With the one
exception of Cezanne, he is more remote from his
followers than any other modern leader. He
repeats himself so little that his disciples cannot
make a fetich of his canons. Indeed, he does not
work by rote or law, except in so far as there is
a law governing his personal impressions and
prediled: ons.

Although Matisse's greatest impetus to modern
art, after his carrying form nearer to an abstract
conception, is the harmonising of colour, his
finest canvases are those in which the form pre-

HENRI-MATISSE 235

dominates, as for Instance the Jeu de Balles,
La Muslque esquisse, La Musique (panneau
decoratif] and Baigneuses. In these pictures,
however, there is an entire absence of rhythm in
the Renoir sense, but they possess a perfect
disposition of forms to fill a given space, a har-
mony of subject with its frame, a dazzling succes-
sion of uncommon and beautifully proportioned
spaces and an amazing feeling for two-dimensioned
form. Where with Matisse the distind parti pris
of reverting to a primitive inspiration was excus-
able, such an attitude was worse than folly
for those who came after him. With him it was
a manifestation of the disgust of an impatient
and experimental mind for stereotyped expression:
with his followers it was only an imitation of his
motives, and hence it was decadent. If Matisse
partially understood Giotto and Michelangelo,
the understanding contributed little to his art.
His greatest claim to consideration is that he
gave painting its final impulse toward abstraction.
But his canvases, while being aesthetically just,
are not aesthetically satisfying, because in compo-
sition he never penetrated further than the
surface. And even on the surface he did not
attain to a greater fluency than that permitted by
parallelisms and simple oppositions, although
there has never been an artist who more perfectly
adapted his expression to the shape and size of
his canvas.

That all great artists worked like him from the
standpoint of creating recognisable form by ab-
strad thought, does not detrad from his fine
destiny. Where other artists failed to drag art
from the quicksands . of literary instantaneity,

236 MODERN PAINTING

Matisse succeeded. His evolution was diredt
and logical, as a close study of his work will show;
and those who see in him an arriviste may with
equal justice bring the same charge against
Michelangelo. His aesthetic sources and admira-
tions, of which so much has been written,, are
important in understanding the genealogical foun-
dations of art, but they are of little moment in
the adlual enjoyment of his pictures. Looking
impartially at his classic influences on the one
hand and his Persian and negro influences on the
other, it is difficult to see just where the benefits
of the latter lie. Matisse merely shifted his
inspiration from the greatest masters of form to
the slighter masters from a well-known and
great antiquity to a little-known and less sig-
nificant one. However, if negro sculpture can
help produce a man like Picasso, and the Persian
stuffs and enamels one like Matisse, they serve
after all a high purpose.

XI
PICASSO AND CUBISM

CUBISM first and foremost Is an attempt
to make art more arbitrary in its se-
ledtion of compositional forms. In all
ancient painting only the human figure
was used as a basis for organisation. Later
landscape widened the scope of the painter's
material possibilities; but even the introduction
of this new element merely extended the boundary
of subjed>matter. The' essence of art remained
the same. Landscape permitted new forms to be
interwoven with the old ones, without making
the old more plastic. The elasticising process was
what the painter had always desiderated, but his
literalness was such that he never went beyond
primary distortions of the human body distor-
tions so small that they were almost unnoticeabie.
With the Greeks and Chinese these deformations
were practised in order to beautify the body's
relative proportions; with the East Indians and
Michelangelo, to accentuate the emotion of force-
ful movement; with Renoir, to express form fully
in its relation to the generating line of each
picture; and with Matisse the distortions were the
the result, first, of a reaction against a hackneyed
classic system, and later, of a desire to divorce
aesthetic pleasure from mental association, in
other words, to make form abstract rather than

238 MODERN PAINTING

personal. In him there Is no rhythmic composi-
tion, and while, as in the case of Renoir, his
pictures are great as ensembles, each part of them
is a separate item which does not depend, for
appreciation, on its rapport to the whole. His is
an art of colour, of sensitive and inspiring form
in two dimensions a decorative art of a high
order. As such it is at once a derivation of
Impressionism and a development of Impression-
istic colour through the channels of taste.

Cubism is a far more arbitrary art than
Matisse's. In its extreme expression it depends,
not so much on the artist's adroitness at inter-
preting nature, as on his ability to express pure
aesthetic emotion in its relation to form form
being used here in its extended sense to connote
the solidity of the entire pidure and the block
relation of each part to the other parts. Compo-
sition prior to the Cubists had been the rhythmic
organisation of a picture's integral parts by line,
volume, chiaroscuro and colour. A totally unre-
lated set of objective figures or forms was drawn
together into an ensemble by these abstract
aesthetic means. Cubism retained the older
methods of form and conception, and added to
them the illustrative device of disorganising and
rearranging objectivity so that the separated parts
would intersect, overlap and partly obscure the
image. Thus was presented a pidiure replete
with all aspects of the model, that is, a picture
in which the expression presented not only the
vision of reality as it discloses itself to our eyes,
but the vision which delivers itself to our intelli-
gences, with its adions and rea&ions, its many
and changing miens, its linear and voluminous

P1CJSSO AND CUBISM 239

struggles,, its solidity and its transparency. In
Cubism the details of this ubiquitous and omni-
farious vision are subjugated to arbitrary order
and expressed in tones of warm and cold.

At the outset Cubism was a Dionysian reaction
against the flowing and soft decoration of the
schools of Bouguereau and the Impressionists.
The precise and masculine minds of a new cycle
could not rest satisfied with the single melody
of their immediate predecessors, Courbet, the
Cubists* prototype on the side of painting which
dealt entirely with objectivity, readed against
corresponding feminine tendencies in the schools
of David and Ingres; and the decisive blow he
struck in 1850 with his I/Enterrement a Ornans
had a psychological parallel in the Cubists*
exhibit in 1911. While Manet seemed to continue
Courbet he in reality retrogressed to a classic
prettiness. His achievements may be compared
to those of the Orphists who, while seeming to
carry on the principles of Cubism, nullified the
effedt of that school by the misapplication of
colour. Cubism itself ignored colour and curved
lines. It was a further step toward a more
intellectual type of painting. The modern artist's
mind, in becoming more self-conscious, was
consequently growing more precise in its expres-
sion. And since the Cubists were the primitives
of a new era, it was natural that this precision
should express itself in straight lines and angulai
forms. The inconsistency of these artists lay in
the fad that, while their first desire was to make
their art arbitrary, they were so preoccupied with
the dynamism of objectivity that the main objed:
of their work was deputised. In the canvases of

240 MODERN PAINTING

Picasso's followers naturalism Is the first consider-
ation. As a result the organisation of emotion-
Impelling form is obscured. It was from Cezanne
that the Cubists garnered the greater part of their
theories, and even the appearance of their work
is not unlike his. Cezanne realised that a mere
imitation of reality, no matter how interesting,
could never set in motion the wheels of aesthetic
ecstasy; and so he translated nature into a sub-
jedive impression of reality by expressing It in a
complete order which was itself dynamic. The
Cubists, profiting by his discoveries of linear and
tonal modification, essayed to found a school on
certain of his better-known and more easily
grasped practices. The spirit of precision, the
need for a renovation, and the example of Picasso
who at one period copied the angularities of negro
sculpture all gave momentum to the movement.
Later were introduced the philosophical reasonings
and scientific explanations of which there has
recently been so much discussion*

The total absence of colour in the Cubists is
ascribable to the same revolt against prettiness
and ambiguity that made them alter their line
and form. They felt the subjective solidity of
Cezanne without understanding that it was
brought about by the use of colour whose emo-
tional possibilities he had profoundly penetrated.
In fad his art was composed entirely of minute
chromatic planes which, by their complete adapt-
ability to a given position in space, produced the
intensest form. The Cubists* planes are based,
not on colour, but on objective form itself, and
are expressed by tone. In this resped Cubism
is diametrically opposed to the conception of

PICASSO AND CUBISM 241

Cezanne, With him form was a result of the
plastic employment of colour. With the Cubists
even tone is subjugated to formal planes. In
them we do not experience the subjectivity of
emotion which can be produced alone by colour.
Their pictures represent a recognisable solidity
which, by an image, expresses subjedive processes,
Cezanne's simultaneous vision of reality had to do
purely with the most mobile element of art; the
Cubists attempted to express psychological phe-
nomena by the limited methods of the early primi-
tives. Their inability to sound (not in theory but
actually) the possibilities of colour in the creation
of aesthetic form, has caused them to diverge from
the direcft path in the development of means, and
has restricted permanently their initial desire for
concentrated composition. The Impressionists ex-
perimented in a highly dynamic element; but
the Cubists have only dabbled in mental processes
which, even should they become perfected, could
give us only the sequential vision of a human
action. The Cubist doctrine embraces no more
than a side issue in an art which primarily has to
do with the organisation of form; In the effort
of the Cubists to create a pure art they merely
disguise objectivity by abstract thought. This is
by no means the same as creating abstract form
that is, form which is not reminiscent of a
particular natural objed; and by failing in this
they let pass the great opportunity of taking the
final step from Matisse to purity. They took
only a half step, for in their exultation they forgot
the preceding advances in composition.

In such forgetfulness there was nothing unusual.
Every new movement in the progress of art has

MODERN PAINTING

about it a certain isolation of ambition. The first
innovators push out the boundary on one side;
their followers, on another; and the final expo-
nents of a method, having fully assimilated what
has preceded them, combine the endeavours and
accomplishments of their forerunners and go
forward to new achievements. Cezanne had rec-
ognised that he could never round out his own
cycle. No stridure can attach to his incomplete-
ness: his life was too short for realisation. That
the Cubists did not altogether achieve their desire
does not detract from the importance of ^their
departure from established precedent. Their re-
adion was a salutary event in the evolution of
modern painting. v The field of art ^was being
overrun by the decadents of Impressionism and
Cezanne, by the imitators of Toulouse-Lautrec
and Degas, by those academicians who follow
in the wake of every movement long after its
methods have been accepted as vital. These
scholastic men were incorporating spots and bright
colours into their school-room drawings when
Cubism came forward. By its unequivocal ^ ex-
pression of opinions and by its neat delimitations
of planes it has revealed the futility and petti-
ness of academic alterations. ^Besides their purely
psychological innovations the Cubists have
achieved all the ambitions of the academies in a
way so net, so sure, so precise, that they have
reduced the school, if not to silence, at least to
ineffe&ualness. No longer can the admirers of
scholastic art stand before a canvas exclaiming
on the feeling, the atmosphere or the spirituality
of the work. One must now use concrete terms
and speak of those qualities which have to do

PICASSO AND CUBISM 243

with profound order; for although the theories of
Cubism state one thing, the application of them
has taken another and definite aesthetic form. In
the Cubists' work lies their greatest importance!
We may without loss lay aside their explanations,
their manifestos and the reports of their lectures.

'"The idea of synthesis in painting had been so
thoroughly assimilated through familiarity with
successive movements that, with the advent of
Cubism, it was an accepted and unquestioned law
of painting. -'^Synthesis had in fadt become an
almost unconscious knowledge. Ingres, Daumier,
Manet, Seurat and Matisse had, in quick succes-
sion, proclaimed its value in eliminatirj^ the
unimportant and unessential from models. v/1 With
Cubism, as with Matisse and Gauguin, synthesis
was the supreme ambition synthesis which had
for its goal the artistic consistency of all the
picture's qualities. Subjed-matter, colour and
the method of expression were all harmonised in
Gauguin: with him the synthesis was illustrative.
In Matisse it manifested itself in the reduction of
form and colour to their simplest and most per-
sonal expression, and was therefore a step toward
a pure art. With Picasso synthesis went still
further. It became almost basic. We know that
the curved line stands for life, colour and move-
ment; that the straight line represents the dead,
the sombre and the static. A solid dark is con-
ducive to peace, while quickly succeeding light
and dark promote liveliness. Bearing these funda-
mental postulates in mind we can easily analyse
Picasso's quality of synthesis. The straight line
which predominates in Cubism repudiates colour:
the Cubists were not colourists. The curved

244 MODERN PAINTING

line, when profoundly comprehended, expresses
movement and fluidity; when used haphazardly
mere prettiness results. There are seldom any
curves in Cubism, and then only for relieving the
monotony, for the sake of ornament. In the
Cubists 5 scintillating succession of darks and
lights, like a photographic negative of a Cezanne
or an early Renoir, there is an unescapable femi-
nine prettiness in which the twinkling of tone
serves the same purpose as pretty colour. By
their straight lines, subfuse tones and rigid forms,
on the one hand, they achieve immobility. By
their lights and darks, their curves and their
dependence on nature, on the other hand, they
reveal their emotional kinship to the illustrative
schools of Whistler, Fragonard and Tiepolo.
Now when we combine properly these two widely
separated aspects of art the one almost Egyptian
and the other almost English we obtain a com-
bination of temperamental characteristics capable
of the greatest achievements, for we have brought
about the coalition of the purely masculine and
the purely feminine. In Cubism, however, these
two aspects are mingled disproportionately. The
static predominates. The pretty is merely super-
imposed because of temperamental dilation:
instead of functioning, it only attracts. But
though in Cubism we do not find the perfed
fusion of these creative sex impulses, the simul-
taneous presence of the two elements produces
nevertheless a fundamental synthesis,?"

In order to bring about the greatest art, the
form and order (which constitute the masculine
side) must be all-pervading. Objective ornament
and external beauty (which constitute the femi-

PICASSO AND CUBISM 245

nine side) must be only the Inspiration to creation.
This is an Important principle, for all art, like all
life, falls into either the masculine or the feminine
category. All personal preferences for certain
forms of art are imputable to the predomina-
tion of the male or the female in the individual.
Necessarily all creation Is to a certain extent
masculine in it there has to be order; and by
the predomination of the male or female Is meant
simply the accentuation of one of these qualities
In their relative combination in each of the sexes.
For instance, should the feminine " predominate"
in a man, the fadt would merely indicate that the
percentage of femininity in his bisexuality had over-
balanced the normal ratio. Decoration, which is
an ornamental art, is feminine, and It will appeal
to men who have a subnormal amount of the creator
In them. The colossally ordered art of a Rubens
will be understood and enjoyed only by one highly
capable of creation, for In the contemplation and
comprehension of a profound work of art the
spectator reconstructs the artist's mind after his
own formula, and thus recreates the work for
himself. That side of art which is the recording
of some emotion the artist has experienced so
intensely that It demands concrete expression, is
feminine. It is merely an overflow of receptivity
into objectivity. To the contrary, when great
art is produced It is not dependent on a specific
exterior Impulse. It grows abstractly out of a col-
lection of assimilated impressions. When the will
dominates the expression, these impressions must
take plastic form. The desire to create is in itself
feminine. The constructive ability Is masculine.
The first desire always is to decorate and beautify,

246 MODERN PAINTING

but the masculine will (Mates and rules the ex-
pression. In feminine art the will to co-ordinate
is absent. Consequently the expression is only
the direcT: result of the reception. The Cubists
realise that the will must play a large part m paint-
ing, but they exert their will on the analysis of
thought rather than on their adual productions.
The result is that, while their expression is highly
restrained and reasoned, the will is exercised only
on the emotion of the received impression, and is
not manifested on their canvases' surface. In all
their work they are decorators first and significant
artists afterward. They belong distinctly to the
lighter side of artistic tradition. They are the
lyric poets of the plastic.

-''This is markedly true of Picasso who instigated
the movement. When he first came to Paris
he threw himself into a style of painting which
recalled Steinlen at his best. From Steinlen he
went to Toulouse-Lautrec and Impressionistic
colour. Next he did carefully drawn portraits
which proclaimed him a greater Gauguin. Later
he become infatuated with the rhythm and skele-
ton-like creations of El Greco. It was at this
period that he began to do his significant work.
His pictures for the most part were painted in
blue. They were sensitive to a high degree, and
were, in the sculptural sense, sometimes ordered
into a solid block form. Then, adopting a reddish
colour gamut, he began to create full figures of
nudes, portraits and animal studies. At this
time he commenced his research in precise form.
He organised copies of negro sculpture of which
he had heard much from Matisse, and it was a
result of his studying these rigid figures that

FEMME A LA MANDOLINE

PICASSO

PICASSO AND CUBISM 247

angularities began to creep into his art. Other
artists set to work along the same lines, and from
the fridtion of ideas which followed the theory
of Cubism was evolved. Picasso's still-lives then
became more precise, more hard-cut, more per-
sonal, more completely ordered. It is from this
period we receive some of his greatest work.

Shortly after came the Cubist theory of simul-
taneity. The authorship of this theory is in
doubt. There has been much controversy as to
whether it originated with Picasso or with one of
his followers. But it was straightway adopted by
the entire group and made one of the dominating
principles of the movement. Simultaneity to
these painters meant the combined presentation
of a number of aspects of the same objed: from
many different angles. In the visualisation of an
object In nature during the absence of that objed:,
we conceive it, not only as a silhouette or as a
form with three dimensions, but as a congeries
of silhouettes which, when imagined simultane-
ously, constitute the appearance of the object
from every known angle. In short, our minds
envelop it and all its attributes at the same in-
stant. Such a vision is the result of collected and
concentrated memory. In a desire to disarm
criticism the Cubists offered as a theory the
pidurisation of this multilateral vision; but in
reality it was little more than an excuse to make
the utilisation of natural forms more arbitrary
than in the case of Matisse, Cezanne and Gauguin
and also to rid themselves entirely of the illus-
trative obstacleX Their ingrained weakness lay
in that they did not possess sufficient genius to
alienate themselves entirely from document and

24 8 MODERN PAINTING

to create new abstract compositions. Nor did
their instind permit them to throw document
aside when they sensed their inability to replace
it with something more vital. Their spirit ^ of
revolution worked on the form which illustration
would take, rather than on the discontinuance of
illustration. But even in this attitude they
marked a decided progress, for while in^ the paint-
ings of their predecessors the disposition of line
and form had made a unity of many separated
figures, these figures, even to a mind unusually
free from the taint of anecdote and objectivity
in art, presented themselves separately as integers
of a whole. The Cubists, by breaking up a
model into parts which separately bore little
resemblance to nature, proved that they not only
recognised the demands of pure organisation but
that they knew those demands could never be
met so long as there were recognisable objects in
a painting.,-

The presentation of a nude or a landscape from
many different viewpoints was in itself no more
important than the methods of the Impressionists.
Indeed the pleasure derived from so constructing
a pidlure is similar to the pleasure derived from
copying light. It represents the nearest approach
of the enthusiastic painter of form to the enthusi-
astic painter of light. They are both interested
in recording a rather puzzling and interesting
phenomenon: the one is after that which creates
the impressions of form; the other, that which
creates the impressions of colour. Both, in the
broad sense, derive the same enjoyment in deci-
phering the work after it is finished. The one re-
cords only broad waves of scintillating colours

PICASSO AND CUBISM 249

with no demarcation of silhouettes; and these
colours gradually resolve themselves into a sunny
and ambiguous landscape. The other makes a
number of broad planes of brown and white which,
when diligently studied in their parts, become the
angular representation of water, ships, sky-lines
which run into and through houses, trees which
obscure near-by objects, and houses which melt
into distant skies. Both schools of painting are
impressionistic; each treats of exadly what the
other negleds. No artist as yet has seen the
distinct advantage of uniting the two methods.
Cezanne might be suggested as having approached
this alliance, but his means were too profound for
him to be led into portraying by concrete symbols
his impressions of a model.

In painting the enveloping mental vision of a
model, however, the Cubists adually failed in the
synchronism for which they strove. In reality
they extended the effed of tl^ir , pidures into
time more than ever before.* 'To grasp their
illustrative import, long and arduous search must
be made. While their canvases present a simul-
taneous vision, each pidure as a ^ole is incapable
of creating a unified impressionrA Cubist paint-
ing is, let us say, like the momentary blare of a
hundred musical instruments all of which play
consecutive bars/" By approaching each performer
in order and studying his particular notes, until
every musical detail is learned, we might intel-
lectually construd from our memory an impression
of a related musical composition. But should the
blare be repeated, even after our research, the
music's meaning would be no clearer than before.
On the other hand, if, having first heard the com-

2 S o MODERN PAINTING

position In its natural development, we had
studied its parts and motifs and then heard it
repeated sequentially, a greater enjoyment and
comprehension would result. In breaking up
nature, either for the sake of extending the
aesthetic appreciation into time like music, or for
simultaneity of presentation, all the parts must
answer to an organisation; in the first case, so
that, after the spectator's first fleeting vision of
the whole, his eye will be carried from one part
to another by the rhythmic balance of volume,
linear opposition and harmony of colour; and in
the second case, so that the canvas will be an
interdependent block-manifestation.

In constructing formal planes with definite tones
whose values are mechanical and absolute, the
Cubists have missed that possible subjectivity
of movement which, in its highest degree,, colour
alone can give. They have constructed only
primitively ordered bas-reliefs each plane and
line of which has a distind direction. And this di-
rection, no matter what is added to or subtracted
from the work, will remain the same. The planes
are consequently static and absolute. In the
great art of Cezanne there is only a relative abso-
lutism. By any alteration in one of his pictures,
the entirety is shattered: the direction of each
plane and line is changed to concur with the needs
of a different order. This is because Cezanne's
work possesses the poise which is demanded in
the highest art. And this poise is what Cubism,
with its rigid lines and planes, has entirely missed.
Illustratively the Cubists 5 conception was new,
compositionally it was old; and an art cannot
be significantly renovated save from the bottom

PICJSSO AND CUBISM 251

upward. The foundation of all art is composition,
and the only means which can be accepted as
vital are those which increase the artist's power
to express that which is more inherent in painting
than in any of the other arts, namely: rhythmic
form in three dimensions. That the Cubists
failed to develop such means may be perceived
by comparing the compositions of Picasso's "red'*
period, which were but slightly cubic and which
contain a certain amount of arbitrary form, with
his late and wholly cubic black-and-white draw-
ings and paintings such as are seen at Kahn-
weiler's back of the Madeleine. The latter are
almost wholly flat. His Femme a la Mandoline
marks the transition from the early period to the
late one. In all his pictures one finds a charming
rhythm of lights and darks and a slight compre-
hension of surface form. But he never goes very
deep. Even in his sculptured heads, while there
is order, there is no form in the compositional

sense.

To ascribe Picasso's Cubism to so childish an
impulse as a desire to square an academic draw-
ing is both untrue and unjust. Some have
pointed to Diirer as his artistic forbear merely
because Diirer once described a number of curves
which he said could be made into a human body
and drew a block-diagram of box-like forms which
he said was the basis for the body's construction.
But no relationship exists between these two
artists. Cubism's first consideration was to coyer
the surfaces of its canvases with form, thus doing
away with the empty spaces so prevalent in all
art works, spaces which Cezanne left blank. ^ To
accomplish this logically it was necessary either

25 2 MODERN PAINTING

to introduce superfluous figures, or to stretch the
ones already present into impossible distortions.
Since the elimination of all unessential was the
keynote of the day, Picasso decided to make
multiplex his essentials. Herewith was horn the
Cubist conception of breaking up the model for
the attainment of a more complete work and one
in which there would be no dead planes. At farst
an extensive linear diredion, which started at
the lower frame, was carried up into the back-
ground by the demarcation of a shadow or an
objed, for the purpose of holding tightly together
two or more forms. Later, in order to facilitate
this procedure of multiplying their models, the
Cubists began to walk round them. This pro-
cess unchained them from the slavery to a single
model and from the given contour of an absolute
subjed. At the same time it permitted them a
fantastically arbitrary composition, and made
their expression more dependent on the personal-
ity of the artist, and less contingent on precon-
ceived ideas, than ever before.

Cubism expressed a laudable tendency toward
an aristocratic vision as opposed to the popular
vision of reality. Its pictures therefore became
doubly complex, for in the contemplation of the
pidurisation of our mental process, another pro-
cess is started which is far more complicated than
the first. Herein we have an explanation for the
fad that Cubism is incomprehensible to the
untutored person who regards art as an imitation
of nature. The very word "form" is aestheti-
cally meaningless to the average spectator. In
order to experience its meaning, aside from
organisation, one's attention has to be given over

PICJSSO AND CUBISM 253

to the objects weight^ its force, its circum-
ferential volume. A form in a picture cannot be
considered merely as to its employment and its
utilitarian destiny, or from the standpoint of
one's experience with it. To the great artist an
objedt exists as a volume with which to fill a
given space. He completely forgets its raison
d'etre in life, and views it only as a means for
tightening a picture's order. To this extreme of
pure artistic conception the Cubists never at-
tained. And while Cezanne advanced from Cour-
bet's surface realism to the realism of causes,
the Cubists were unable to progress along similar
lines, They simply translated abstraction into
terms of concrete expression. The profound
reasons for dynamism in art were left untouched
by them. They endeavoured to portray objec-
tively an abstrad process, expeding its mere
portrayal to be dynamic.

The dynamic, however, cannot be rendered by
imitation. It is as impossible of attainment by
this method as in the dancing-girl canvases of
Degas. Behind the emotional power of nature
there is a great abstract force; and the effed of
dynamism can be got only when this force is
expressed. Then the result is a natural outgrowth
of a cause. Otherwise we have only a detached
effed which does not lead us back into the
undercurrents of causation. When a Cubist pic-
ture is interesting it will at most make us puzzle
over the application of its theories; it can never
move us aesthetically by the sheer power of its
methods. The one dynamic element which the
Cubists have in common with Cezanne namely :
the modification of lines and forms through

254 MODERN PAINTING

contadl with other lines and forms they have
nullified by constructing with rigid tones the
planes which the lines delimit, thereby making
their planes frozen and immovable. Because
ignorant of the functionality of colour the Cubists
were unable to present, at one and the same time,
perfed: mobility, planar solidity and indefinite
depth. As a result of too much study of ^Ce-
zanne's and El Greco's composition and too little
study of Michelangelo and Rubens, they failed
to achieve, even with the great arbitrariness and
convenience of their means, a profound composi-
tion which is a rhythmic order of volume, as
distinguished from a simple organisation of parts.
Their accomplishments do not realise the promises
of their programme because their theories were
too inflexible. Cubism was too tightly bound
by rigid systems and methods to produce plasti-
cally significant results.

The Cubists' greatest apport to art (not in
theory but in achievement) is their almost total
abolition of the painter's slavery to nature. It
was but a step from Matisse to the complete
elimination of recognisable objeds, and though
Cubism did not cover the entire distance, it
nevertheless made an advance toward that pure
expression which Cezanne saw was inevitable.
Even today the followers of this school are
beginning to realise their early mistakes and to
throw off their self-imposed restrictions. They
are launching forth into colour and are seeking
expression in purely arbitrary form. But these
new developments have not yet been productive
of a new artistic worth. Indeed, it is doubtful
if they will lead to important results so long as

PICJSSO AND CUBISM 255

the geometrical phase of Cubism is adhered to,
and so long as the Cubists ignore the dynamic
possibilities of colour. In its present status
Cubism can only continue striving toward a style
that goes deeper than tonal prettiness and lyric
immobility. Already Picasso has passed out of
painting altogether. An artist with his extraordi-
nary gift to do anything superficially well could
not remain anchored to an idea after- the novelty
of its method had worn off. He is not a man
who is the slave of thought, but rather an obsti-
nate artist with a spark of genius who has passed
through many different stages with a rapidity
born of astounding dexterity and cleverness.
Many of his early female heads rival in sheer
classic beauty the best of the Renaissance
painters. Some of his pen-and-ink drawings are
the most sensitive of modern times. There are
caricatures done by him which closely approach
the fantasy of a Goya. Indeed it may be justly
said that he is as great an illustrator as Raphael.
And in this analogy lie both his glory and
his limitation. Like Raphael he lacks that pro-
found penetration of exteriors which would per-
mit him a comprehension of his greater influences
of El Greco, for instance. But, with a glance,
he can sound the depths of a Toulouse-Lautrec,
a Steinlen or a piece of negro sculpture.

Picasso's inability to conceive two elements at
once and to construct a complicated development
of composition, is exemplified in his earlier work,
first, by his adherence to certain single colours
at different stages of his career, secondly, by the
extreme simplicity of his circus folk, and thirdly,
by his figure compositions which, though they

256 MODERN PAINTING

are never tedious or dull and possess an almost
nervous sensibilite, are limited to one or two
human forms. Again Picasso's limitation of com-
positional conception is attested to by his stub-
born use of brown and white in his latest Cubist
pidures, by his employment of line alone in the
drawings of his architedural-plan stage, and by
his application of objects at hand to the clay
blocks which mark his latest metamorphosis,
But no matter what his medium or style, he
remains essentially unchanged. In all his work
is felt the superficial lightness of one who con-
ceives order only as an ornament to decoration
and who is interested in three-dimensional form
merely as an after-thought. His sculpture is but
his painting in a solider medium. It is broken
up into planes and organised as to each contour
in exactly the same manner as is his work in
oils, The difference between Picasso, the sculp-
tor, and Matisse, the sculptor, is the difference
between a man who has a slight genius for
rhythm and a block order, and one who has a
slight genius for characterisation and a perfect
ensemble. The art of Picasso, having to do with
form as decoration, is admirably adapted to
sculpture. The art of Matisse, being flat and
dealing with colour as decoration, is inexpressible
in clay.

Fernand Leger, with the exception of Picasso,
is the most genuinely talented artist of the
Cubist movement. His work at first was much
less radical than that of his confreres and gave
greater evidence of depth because it had never
completely shaken off perspective. His canvases,
Les Toits and Maisons et Fumees, represent

FUMEUR ET PAYSAGE

LEGER

PICASSO AND CUBISM 257

little more than a highly artistic angularisation
of a subject, which, being angular in itself, lends
itself admirably to Cubistic treatment. Leger's
method is to place in the foreground large planes
which serve as a frame for the a&ual picture
which is seen between them as through a tunnel
By this device he creates a diversity of form and
with it a recognisable depth. His paint at first
was light in tone, but is now taking on colour.
Since his first Cubist exhibits he has made a
logical progress in rhythmic conception, and if
his past development can be assumed as a
criterion of the future it is safe to prophesy that
eventually he will be the most significant man of
the original group. Albert Gleizes, Jean Met-
zinger, Marcel Duchamp, Georges Braque and
Francis Picabia are all prominent figures in the
Cubist movement. Gleizes manifested his first
Cubist tendencies by giving form a solid angu-
larity, thereby making it precise. His canvases
are devoid of interest because so slightly creative.
His well-known I/Homme au Balcon appears to
us today almost Futuristic in conception. In
fad:, it was exposed at the Salon d'Automne in
1912 one year after the Futurist show; and
when we compare it with his early and less
significant Les Baigneuses, with which it was
hung, it gives the impression of having been the
result of a sudden and enthusiastic inspiration
from the newer men. Later his work grew
broader and simpler, but in it there is little or no
composition. Even the order is that of the
straight line. Metzinger is a better artist. In
him is a greater order, although, as in Gleizes, it
is produced by the straight line- During his

2S 8 MODERN POINTING

artistic beginnings he was under the sway of
negro sculpture and painted in small planes of
light and dark. Later, turning from the influence
of negro antiquity, he direded his talent on
nature and began to interpret form Into angu-
larities. His La Femme au Cheval, done in
1912, was a distind step, both as to form and
composition, In advance of the naturalistic vision;
and his Le Port is one of the finest examples^ of
the Cubist theory of synchronous pi&urisatlon
and interpenetrating lines and masses. Duchamp,
a slighter talent than either Leger or Gleizes,
Is the Whistler of the movement. In his pictures
are less form, less composition and less comprehen-
sion of volume than in any other Cubist work
except that of Juan Gris whose lethargic canvases
have not even the interest of an Aime Morot.
Braque has added nothing to Cubism. He fol-
lowed Picasso closely, and his whole creative
impetus seems derived from the latter' s canvases.
PIcabia, despite his popularity, is but a second-
rate Cubist. He was quick to grasp the facft
that the Cubists were working away from illus-
tration, and attempted to step beyond them.
Where they had endeavoured to bring about the
precise stylisatlon of form, he merely dealt in
ribbon-like patches of colour which were without
contour, shape, proportion or volume. His" can-
vases wherein many of these strange amorphous
hachures are grouped, have a highly bizarre
appearance but are only remotely intelligible.
He used almost monochromatic schemes, as did
his master Picasso, and continued this style of
work until his fellow Cubists, by diligent research
and serious study, had approached the abstract

PICASSO AND CUBISM 259

appearance of his surfaces. Picabia then found
a new impetus in the works of the Futurists
an impetus toward movement expressed, not by
bodies, but by line. This Futurist influence
resulted in his making flat pidures of many
sharply defined silhouettes tinted red, green, blue
and grey. His lines serve only to accentuate
the chaos of his ensemble, for in his work there
is no definite conception of the whole.

Cubism's possibilities as a dynamic illustrative
art have never been adequately exhausted, and,
since the angular mode is rapidly disappearing as
a result of newer and more vital visions, they
probably never will Picasso was its high priest
up to two years ago, at which time colour, coming
back on the wave of a counter-revolution, threw
most of the Cubists into its application. Robert
Delaunay was responsible for this readion.
Early in 1912 he came forward with a very
large canvas entitled Ville de Paris, whose surface
was broken up into many angular planes after
the Cubist fashion. But instead of depiding
forms and formal relations, the pidure was
painted in greys and high colours solely as a
means of surface filling. Its contours recalled
El Greco despite their being disguised by triangu-
lar dislocations. The pidure represented three
mamtooth Graces standing before a distant Paris
landscape, and so transparent and ethereal was
it that it seemed as though a breath could have
dispersed it into mist. It possessed the delicate
loveliness of a butterfly, and the eye, in running
over its glittering and pretty array of colours,
was fascinated as in the contemplation of a
kaleidoscope. But the canvas, while provoking a

260 MODERN PAINTING

distind visual pleasure, failed to arouse any
aesthetic enjoyment.

Delaunay's L'Equipe de Cardiff the following
year was equally unemotional. Fundamentally
this picfture was the same as his Ville de Paris,
though treated differently as to surface. The
same up-shooting type of svelte beauty as for-
merly bodied forth in his three Graces was here
repeated in the bodies of the athletes, but there
was in addition a very slight surface rhythm;
and the colour, because its application was
broader, had a greater fascination. In his Ville
de Paris, not daring to paint a naturally drawn
nude with the colours his sense of prettiness and
ornament dictated, he fragmentised the surface
by luxating the lines. Thus, while the sensitive
contour was retained, the picture appeared as if
viewed through a polygonal prism. In the second
canvas this artifice for the sake of charm was
discarded. The players were dressed in solid
colours of bright pigment; the sky was blue-
violet; the Eiffel tower, eminently appreciable,
stood to the right; down the centre of the canvas
was a large affiche in yellow; and overhead soared
an aeroplane. The transition from a hackneyed
theme to a modern one was the result of the
artist's desire to pass beyond the methods of the
day to more vigorous ones.

Before Delaunay's decisive work was done he
had been influenced by the Neo~Impressionists,
Cezanne, the Cubists and, in his two mentioned
early works, by the Impressionists. Indeed these
pictures are the expression of Impressionist
methods broadened and extended to suit the
dimensions of his canvases. His cityscapes with

PICASSO AND CUBISM 261

the Eiffel tower as the principal objed are in-
teresting though not profound, and such canvases
as the Route de Laon and Les Tours are so
dainty they seem breathed onto the canvas.
He is essentially a decorator in that he works
always in two dimensions. This surface quality
enters into all art, but in itself it is never signifi-
cant. Only when it is a result of ordered plastic-
ity does it have power to move us. In Delaunay,
however, there exists no fundamental order. Con-
sequently his power is stridly limited. His desire
Is to make decoration which will be profound, in-
stead of profound composition which will result in
decoration. By thus reversing the natural order,
effects are considered before causes; and only by
the dynamism of causes can we be made to feel
beauty. Beauty such as his is merely prettiness:
it is only the objective mask of beauty, and is
of no more aesthetic importance than a view
of nature. The true beauty of a work of art
is subjective; it is the effed: of one's having
sensed the accumulated and sequential aspeds
of co-ordinated expression. Herein lies the dif-
ference between aesthetic emotion and the pleasure
aroused by a sunset, a stage setting or a dramatic
story. When one is able to penetrate finally into
art, neither dolour nor depression results, but
always a feeling of exultation and joy, for by
one's intellectual comprehension one has been
physically aroused by a dynamic force, not
merely moved by a scene or story which sets in
motion the associative processes.

To the inadequate comprehension of this psy-
chological truth is attributable the failure of the
Cubists and of Delaunay. The latter strove to

262 MODERN PAINTING

preserve the individuality of his work under the
name of Orphism, and later under the designation
of Simultaneism. But his temperamental kinship
to Picasso and the Cubists Is too obvious to be
denied by nomenclature. Even his latest work,
while more abstract and more luminous, is at
most secessionlstlc. His canvas hung in the
Salon des Independants in 1914 was Cubism
translated Into light colours and twisted into
curves and circles. Delaunay's wife, Madame
Delaunay-Terk, follows him closely In inspira-
tion and application, but her pi&ures are less
ordered than his. The American, Bruce, once
an imitator of Matisse and later of Cezanne, has
joined the Simultaneist ranks; and Frost, another
American, Is an ardent disciple of Delaunay.
The orthodox Cubists had passed colour by, but
Its reappearance In the Orphlsts-SImultaneists
was a significant augury. Though It was not
understood by them as an element capable of
organic functioning, Its mere presence was an
inspiration and a call to all genuine artists to
penetrate its meaning In relation to the intensifi-
cation of form.

XII
FUTURISM

THE dramatic enhancement of painting
by line so well understood by the
ancients, and the literary intensifica-
tion of subject-matter by colour fore-
shadowed by the primitives and made more
conscious by Delacroix, reached their highest
development in the theories of Kandinsky and
the Futurists. With Delacroix's comments con-
cerning the harmonising of line and colour with
subjed: and Seurat's and Signac's subsequent
addenda to these comments, began scientific
observation in painting. So long as these theories
remained secondary to the great truths of com-
position they were admissible, because they had
to do only with the unimportant ornamentation
of an aesthetic organisation. But when, as in
Kandinsky and the Futurists, they became the
all in all of the artist's ambitions, they ceased to
produce painting, and gave birth only to bad
music, as in the Russian, and to bad poetry, as
in the Italians. But while the Futurists' work
had little to commend it to the discriminating
spectator, their ideas were interesting and in-
spiring, and it is from their manifestos that has
come what little influence they have exerted.
Their pictures are neither pretty nor agreeable,
while Kandinsky's, to the contrary, possess dainty

264 MODERN PAINTING

and pleasing traits. In both cases the pictures
are puzzles to be deciphered at length: they are
expressions of moods brought about by half
veiling reality and by making symbolically con-
crete an abstrad force or cause.

In music where the form is an abstrad result
of concrete causes and in literature where the
form is wholly abstract and represented by
symbols, moods can be easily expressed, for they
are the natural outgrowth of the media of these
two arts. But in painting and sculpture, which
are the visual arts wherein the form itself is
concrete, emotion can be provoked only by a
plastic poise of subjedive weights. The balance
and opposition of such weights or volumes when
rhythmically organised give rise to complete
aesthetic satisfaction and engender a feeling of
finality which encompasses both line and colour.
The Futurists, as did Delacroix and Seurat,
count on cs force-lines" to express an emotion,
thereby branding themselves two-dimensional
artists. And their desire to represent an emotion
of objectivity on canvas places them at once in
the ranks of illustrators. The highest art has
nothing to do with objective reality whether as
a spectacle or as a means to sensation.. It is
true that painting, in becoming pure, will even-
tually incorporate the associative emotions, but
these emotions will be the psychological results
of abstract form, not memorial experiences pro-
duced by cognitive objects. And the line, of
which we have heard so much, will then become
a direction and equality of pure form; it will no
longer be simply an indication on a flat surface
by means of a mark. The Futurists did not

FUTURISM 265

strive for purity. Rather did they emphasise an
irrelevant side of painting. They declared them-
selves the renovators of subjed-matter. Their
whole ambition worked toward that end; and
it is from that standpoint they must be judged.

In arriving at their conclusions many necessities
of aesthetic emotion were sensed. Their most
important statement, and one which, because of
the dearth of significant art criticism, had not
previously been set down, is that the person who
contemplates a picture should not feel himself a
mere observer of the events taking place in the
painted work, but one of the principal adors in
the canvas. In illustration such empathy is
impossible unless the work is wholly and ulti-
mately synthesised as to volume, colour, line,
diredion, size and subjed. No such work has
ever been produced because all the dramatic
uses of these elements have never been under-
stood by one man. That there are hundreds of
canvases which entrain us into their ramifications
is indisputable, but the aesthetic emotion we feel
in them has to do with formal line alone, not
with the perfed concord of line, form and subjed,
Marinetti and his group have striven earnestly
to accomplish this difficult feat, but in every
Instance have failed. The explanation of their
theories has far more to do with the emotion
their pidures arouse In us, than has the adual
application of these theories to canvas. They
state that perpendicular, undulating and worn-out
lines attached to hollow bodies express languor
and discouragement ; that confused, somersaulting
lines, straight or curved, confounded into sug-
gested gestures of appeal or haste, express the

266 MODERN PAINTING

chaotic agitation of sentiments; that horizontal,
jerky lines which brutally cut into semi-obscured
faces, and bits of broken, irregular landscape give
us the sensation of one departing on a journey.
But while all this may be true, it has nothing to
do with the aesthetic emotion which in painting
grows entirely out of the dynamic use of the
elements inherent in that art.

The desire of many modern painters and theo-
rists to introduce into their own art emotions
derived from the other arts results, first, from
the modern ambition to intensify each of the
arts, and secondly, from certain observations in
aesthetic fundamentals, which have led artists
little by little toward a vague realisation that the
basis of all the arts is identical But in this
synthesis of the arts there is nothing new- The
Futurists, in attempting to fuse poetry and paint-
ing, are many decades too late to lay claim to
originality. Numerous attempts all of them
failures have been made along similar lines.
Wagner's was the most conspicuous. Then there
were Sadikichi Hartmann, Madame Mary Hal-
lock, Rene de Ghil, Arthur Rimbaud and recently
Alexander Scriabine, all of whom commingled the
different arts in an attempt to produce intensity.
Commendable as these efforts for a hybrid expres-
sion may be, they are a futile expenditure of
energy until the arts have been more precisely
understood; and it is worth noting that those
who have tried to coalesce them have been, in
nearly every instance, the ones who understand
none of them profoundly. The Futurists prove
no exception. Their misapprehension of paint-
ing is analogous to that of Degas who, in picturing

FUTURISM 267

the dance. Imagined that the spectator, by
contemplating its static representations, would
experience its rhythm.

The emotion of movement which the Futurists
wish to call up can never be produced by dis-
ordered and tumbling lines. The effect is chaos.
Movement grows out of the placement and
displacement of volumes. It is a result of
rhythmic organisation. We are conscious of
movement in a human body when a position or
pose is shifted, and we are conscious of it only
during the process of shifting. Should we look at
a body in one position, close our eyes during its
change of attitude, and then behold it completely
altered, we should not experience a sensation of
acftion at all. But if the static points of move-
ment present themselves to us with sufficient
rapidity they produce the effed: of continuous
movement, as in the simulacra of the kinemato-
graph. Otherwise we record merely the result
of the change of position not the ad: of chang-
ing itself. In a Michelangelo statue we see at
first glance only a solid rigid mass; but the mo-
ment we begin mentally to reconstruct the form,
we sense the opposition of volume-diredlion and
the delicate poise of weights which overhang
hollows and which are proportionally exaggerated
in order to give a greater emotion of struggling
forces. Then, our will guiding our eye, the
mind translates to us physically the statue's
expansion and contraction, the withheld com-
pletion of absolute balance, the approximation to
equilibrium: and it is only after we have passed
through discords and straggles and complicated
developments in other words, after we have

268 MODERN PAINTING

striven for physical completion that the finality
comes as a satisfying consummation, like the
knowledge of a tremendous task, long laboured
over, brought to perfed and final accomplishment.
Is not the desire for an emotion,, so completely
refledive of the very undercurrents of life's
forces, worthier of an artist's aim than the
desire for the momentary sensation that someone
is going away or that one is looking on at a
dance? The emotional depidions of such episodes
are at best but remote reflexes of reality. Our
participation in a dance, for instance, is infinitely
more intense than the Futurists' kinematic repre-
sentation of it. In the adual experience one not
only sees chaos but can touch the swirling forms,
blink at the lights, smell the perfumes and hear
the noise and music. In other words, one is
moved to sensation or feeling by the physical
forces themselves. To the true artist these physi-
cal forces are only his weapons, never his ends.
And it is only through their intelligent use in
the production of form that aesthetic emotion
results. The superficial portrayal of effeds,
whether mental or physical, can never lead us
inward to their causes. Any result is simply
the dead end of a force, like the sea-weed a
submarine volcano has thrown to the surface of
the ocean. Art, being the causative force itself,
should bring about the upheaval whose final
manifestation is complete and satisfying. In
great painting the spectator is led through every
step of kinetic energy from chaos to order.
When he emerges he has undergone a colossal
dynamic experience. After all, energy is the
ultimate physical reality.

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FUTURISM 269

The Futurists, it is true, strove sedulously for
dynamism. Several of the titles of their later
canvases contain the word. But their consistent
misinterpretation of Leibniz's do&rine led them
into the most superficial statements of the laws of
force. By confusing action with movement and
tempo with rhythm, and by constantly juggling
causes and effects, they never arrived at a basic
exposition of energy. In contemplating their
pictures we experience only visual confusion.
There is no movement because there is no static
foil, no consummation. There is no dynamism
because there is no suggestion of the inherent
force which all substance involves. Let us
assume the hypothesis that it is possible to
photograph a kinematic force in movement.
The Futurists* pictures wherein the representation
of dynamism is attempted, as in Dynamisme
d'une Auto, there is a series of these hypotheti-
cal photographs each of which has caught a
segment of immobility, as any snap-shot catches
some static pose of a moving objed:. By super-
imposing each of these images successively on
the other the Futurists imagine that a state of
action is created. But even were this the case
the picture would be innocent of dynamism.
Again, Futurism claims not to paint maladies
but their symptoms and results. Admittedly
therefore it works against its own gropings for
dynamism, for symptoms and results are the
outgrowth of causes, and as such can have only
an objective interest. Would the Futurists main-
tain, for instance, that, by portraying a head
from many viewpoints on the same canvas, they
can give us the emotion of a head turning?

270 MODERN PAINTING

Even were it possible thus to extend the con-
templation of pidures into time, the effed of a
series of dissimilar profiles would be no more
convincing than that obtained by a slowly
moving cinematograph film. Should we grant
that by such a device the effed of movement
resulted, it would depend entirely upon which
end of the movement the eye alighted first
whether the head moved one way or the other.
And if the pidure was a perfed organisation the
change of direction would throw every part of
the canvas out of gear.

Considering Futurism purely from the stand-
point of illustration we still are unable to justify
its aims. In painting a pidure of a person
setting forth upon a journey from a railway
station,, the Futurist represents the departure
by means of horizontal, fleeting and jerky lines,
half-hidden profiles,, the station's interior, the
engine, etc. Then by introducing into the canvas
bits of landscape and other incidentals which
depid the thoughts of the person about to
depart, the artist endeavours to call up the same
mental state in the spedator of the canvas.
The associative process of the human mind,
however, makes such a proceeding unnecessary,
because in beholding a simple, even an academi-
cally pidured, scene of someone entering a train
amid the confusion and haste of passengers and
guards, the spedator involuntarily calls up the
landscape running past, the telegraph poles jerk-
ing by, the clanging of the bell, the shouts of
attendants, the shuffling of many feet and the
hiss of steam. In setting these things down the
Futurists succeed only in limiting a highly

FUTURISM 271

Imaginative person's thoughts by restricted visions
of objedivity, just as in the theatre a producer,
by placing many papier mache trees and rocks
and fibre grass about the stage, circumscribes
the onlooker's imagination. The Greeks, whose
theatrical presentations were sufficiently intense
to evoke an imaginative milieu, did not need
factitious properties: but the theatrical Belascos
must necessarily make their settings absolute and
meticulously realistic. A Tintoretto needs no
such tricks to strengthen its emotive power; but
the Futurists, unable to move us by dynamic
canvases, need recourse to dramatic tricks. At
most their pictures could be significant only as
auxiliaries to literary texts.

The Futurists 5 contention that all modern art
should have as a point of departure an entirely
modern sensation is wholly tenable, but they
mistake the fad: that a modern sensation is merely
the sensation which pertains specially to the
contemporary man. It has nothing to do
innately with the delineation of an automobile or
an aeroplane. The modern aesthetic spirit goes
deeper. It implies the expression of aniemotion
by use of the latest refinements and researches
in the medium of an art. In painting it is not
limited to the illustrative portrayal of a novelty.
Were this the case any painter who confined
himself to the pidurisatlon of the latest dread-
naughts and the highest skyscrapers would be
the pioneer of a new expression. In order to
express himself In a modern manner, an artist
needs only to have divested himself of all predi-
ledions for antiquity, to have subdued all con-
scious desire to will himself into the bodies of

272 MODERN PAINTING

an ancient people, and to have seen the error of
the childish maxim that there is nothing ^ new
under the sun. Any painter free from tradition,
with a comprehension of aesthetic movement and
an ability to apply it, will produce canvases
which, though they have no radical theory behind
them, will be as distinctly modern as those ^ of
the Futurists. Modernity has to do with
methods and mental attitude. It is in no wise
related to subjed-matter.

Consider, for instance, the famous Futurist
statement that "a running horse has not four
legs, but twenty/' Then contemplate Balla's
pidure, Dog and Person in Movement, to which
this theory is applied. Neither the dog nor the
person seems to move at all. They are static
figures with blurred triangles resembling lace
where their legs should be. Such a juvenile
artifice to give the effedt of movement is certainly
not modern or even novel. Long prior to the
Futurists, caricaturists and comic journalistic
draughtsmen sought to express adion by placing
circular lines round the wagging tails of dogs
or by drawing long sweeping lines behind a
swiftly moving figure to indicate from what
diredion it had come and the rapidity of locomo-
tion. Such inventions are outside the field of
aesthetics. They have to do only with slow
optical adion. But the modification of objeds
in contad with others, of which Cezanne wrote,
is a profound postulate of organisation. It
creates a poise of volume which causes us to
experience an emotion of movement. The Fu-
turists' contrivance of endowing a horse with
twenty legs precludes any possibility of their

FUTURISM 273

calling up forcibly a running horse, for only the
legs seem to move, as of a horse in a treadmill.
Save for the pictorial side of a picture so pre-
sented there is nothing in it of interest to us:
and our memory of an adual horse clashes with
the vision of a multipedalian one.

The Futurists' statement, however, that a
pidure's lines should subjectively drag the specta-
tor into the centre of the canvas, where he will
personally experience the rhythmic interplay of
forms, is not only pertinent but expresses an
absolute aesthetic necessity. Pidures which do
not so affed the beholder have failed as great
art. But though the Futurists were the first to
give succind utterance to this shibboleth, the
pradice of constituting a work of art so that the
spedator was transposed into Its stress and
strain, had been going on ever since great com-
position came into painting. One cannot study
a Michelangelo or a Rubens without feeling, even
to the point of physical fatigue, the struggle of
their finally harmonised volumes. This does not
hold true of the Futurists' work. In studying
their pidures our eyes alone become tired; and,
though we succeed in unravelling the Involutions
of their pidures, there is for us no recompense of
emotional satisfadion. Adion In itself has little
charm for us, and adion is what the paintings of
Futurism, in their ultimate expression, are
founded on. But while adion may attrad us
when expressed by an Interesting and sympathetic
personality, as in the paintings of Henri and in
the sculpture of Rude, there is in Futurism no
adional sensation or explicit element of deep
enjoyment that we cannot obtain in greater

274 MODERN PAINTING

intensity by gazing upon a busy thoroughfare,
or by watching the landscape from a swiftly
moving train, or by attending a dance. Even the
chaos of a Futurist painting does not present
the interest of the Flight Turning a Corner from
Keion's panoramic roll of the Hogen Heiji war,
or the prints of Moronobu, or even The Heavenly
Host by the primitive Guariento. All these
works, while they represent adion, are also
ordered. And order, which the Futurists lack,
is more than an arbitrary ingredient in art.
Just as the eternal desire in life is for something
positive and absolute, so the attempt at order
in painting is an outgrowth of the desire to make
a pidure complete and satisfying.

There is no doubt that the Futurists exerted
much good in imbuing the artists of the day with
a greater consciosity and in showing them, by an
elaborate critical prospedus, the error of their
ways. Futurism quieted the animadversions the
modernist painters were hurling at Monet and^his
school, by pointing out that, to read against
Impressionism by adopting pidorial laws, which
antedated it, was futile, and that the only way
to combat it seriously was to surpass it. The
Futurists, however, were unable to fulfil their
proposition. They were, in fad, the abstrad
perpetuators of Impressionism through the Cubists
who represented its formal side. The man who
surpassed Impressionism was Cezanne. Further-
more, the Futurists chided the Cubists for paint-
ing from models, whether in squares, cubes or
circles; and thus turned the light of analysis on
the adual achievements, and away from the theo-
ries, of Picasso and his followers. The conse-

HIEROGLYPHS DYNAMIQUE DU BAL TABARIN SEVERINI

FUTURISM 275

quence was that for a short time the Cubists
became somewhat Futuristic. Then, the strong
impetus slowly ebbing out, the two schools grad-
ually approached each other. Futurism has taken
on a somewhat Cubistic mien; and the Cubists,
having profited by the Futurists 5 teachings and
having partially divorced themselves from the
model, have begun to seek expression in Orphism
and Synchronism. The work of Boccioni and
Carra has assumed a wholly abstract appearance,
and is much more interesting than formerly.

The methods of Futurism have their pro-
venience in many preceding art movements. One
finds in this school's canvases cubes, spots, divi-
sionistic technique and wholly academic drawing;
some of the pictures are monotonously brown and
grey, while others possess the acid colouring of
Neo-Impressionism. But aside from their work
the Futurists proved a salutary event in modern
art. The painting of the day needed just such
a cataclysm to turn its eyes from the contempla-
tion of partial traits to a more encompassing
vision. Their motto might be the saying of
Mallarme: "To name is to destroy, but to sug-
gest is to create/' Their art is largely one of
suggestion. Their initial mistake was in suppos-
ing that the depidlion of mental states would
recall the causes of those states. Life would
indeed be monotonous if in it there was no
struggle. We could never appreciate its consum-
mations were we ignorant of the travail which
brought them about. The Futurists present, as-
it were, the conclusion of an oration in which
has been developed a colossal thought, and ask us
to applaud. This we cannot do, for not having

276 MODERN PAINTING

followed the struggle of the new idea against
opposing forces, we are unable to appreciate the
import of the results.

Notwithstanding their many failures the futu-
rists have greatly widened the field of illustration;
by a word they have given birth to a school,
Simultaneism; and they have forever^ turned
Cubism from its narrow formalism. But in them-
selves they were not significant. They were too
stringently literary, and in attempting to advance
their own theories at the expense of profounder
doctrines, they have succeeded only in assisting
other painters toward a greater purity of expres-
tion, despite the fa& that they advocated a retro-
gressive objectivity. Marinetti, a poet, is the
spiritual (and monetary) father of Futurism; and
the names signed to the original manifesto ^ were
Umberto Boccioni, a sculptor as well as a painter;
Carlo D. Carra, the most genuine artist of the
group; Luigi Russolo, its most orthodox exponent;
Gino Severing its illustrator par excellence; and
Giacomo Balla, its high priest of prettiness. In
an attempt to preclude all censure, they closed
their manifest with these words: "There will be
those who will accuse our art of being cerebrally
distorted and decadent. But we will answer
simply that we are, to the contrary, the primitives
of a new and centuple sensitivity, and that our
art is drunk with spontaneity and power/' With
the slight change of "theory" for "art" we would
heartily agree with them.

XIII
SYNCHROMISM

IN order to understand the last step in the
evolution of present-day art methods. It is
necessary to be thoroughly cognizant not
only of what has taken place before but of the
chronological development of all the qualities of
modern painting, for Synchronism embraces
every aesthetic aspiration from Delacroix and
Turner to Cezanne and the Cubists. At the
same time it reverts to the compositions of
Rubens, complicating them further to satisfy the
needs of the modern mind. Delacroix took the
first decided step toward making colour an organic
factor in art a fadior which would help present
a more homogeneous emotion of the picture as a
whole,, and which would be intimately connected
with the picture's vital expression. He was a
decided advance on those painters to whom
colour was as arbitrary a means of adorning a
good work as the gilt frame they placed about it.
Colour with them was dictated by the demands of
an age of voluptuousness and unrestrained living.
The great art nations of Spain, Italy and Flanders
were then passing through a sensuous epoch, and
the painters reflected in their work the tone of the
national temperament. The primitives of these
countries and of Germany had used colour be-
cause the religious qualities in their pictures

278 MODERN PAINTING

became more realistic when nature's general tints
were employed. By making their work more
dramatic they were able to set forth more forcibly
the lesson they strove to teach. The art ^of the
primitives was primarily dogmatic. ^ In it was
none of those subtleties of composition ^ which
come only with the conscious artist's delight in
bringing order out of chaos; it contained only
that simple and instinctive order which is the
avoidance of chaos. That which the primitives
had to say was so rudimentary and well-learned
that it took a definite visional form in their
minds. When dogmatism began to lose its charm
for the painter his forms gradually became more
suave, and his colour likewise grew gracious and
ornamental. The lessons were forgotten, and com-
position as an element of first importance, dressed
in a robe of rich and varied hue, supplanted them.
Such was the employment of colour at the
advent of Delacroix whose probing mind sensed
not only its importance as drama, but also its
potentialities for brilliance. With him, however,
it remained an adjund to drawing something
to be applied when the rest of the pidure had
been laid in, an element with which to intensify
the importance of subjed. He gave a great and
necessary impetus to its study, but he outlined
no diredions for its significant application: indeed,
by following out his original concepts one is led
into the impasse of Neo-Impressionism. But
at so early a stage the impetus is the important
thing, and to Delacroix belongs the credit for
having set in motion the wheels of colour inquisi-
tion. It was Daumier, however, who, apparently
ignoring it, brought its exclusive use appreciably

SYNCHRONISM 279

nearer. By conceiving contour and form as one,
he disposed, as it were, of these two elements
which, in the scale of pictorial importance, had
always been placed before colour. Had each
successive painter profited by all the apports and
qualities of his dired predecessor's art, the
progress of painting might have been more rapid,
but it would never have been so perfect. Each
painter would have inherited both the short-
comings and the merits of his forerunner. Thus
one side of his art would have developed out of
all proportion to the other. Daumier, going
back to tone, discovered a wholly natural method
for the achievement of intense form. His pictures
present themselves as great bulks of flesh and
matter, crude but vital, which have about them
a force of adlual weight. In nowise was he a
colourist. He lived in a time when prettiness
was the keynote of the day, and his whole life
was a revolt against it. His reaction was so
extreme that he disregarded the capabilities of
colour.

The Impressionists, on the other hand, over-
emphasised its objective uses. They held that
the colour seen in nature is ail-important for
picture making, and proceeded to copy it. As
a result their work is highly emotional, but only
in the same way that a sunny landscape is emo-
tional. These artists were the slaves of nature,
doing its bidding; Gauguin bent everything into
the mould of his own personality: and it is only
when these two types of creative impulse combine
and modify each other that great naturalistic art
is possible. The Impressionists, being receptive,
believed all that nature openly proclaimed. They

280 MODERN POINTING

unearthed none of Its formal secrets; they probed
none of Its causes. Theirs was only the joy of
the discoverer. But their insistence upon the
discovery was important, because it helped give
birth to Cezanne. He was a dlred outgrowth of
Impressionism, but he was also an outgrowth of
art's entire history. Superficially he may seem
more closely akin to Pissarro's school than to
the older painters, since it was from PIssarro he
learned his first colour lessons; but in^ reality he
was more intimately related to a Giotto or a
Rembrandt, because his knowledge of colour was
used only to heighten the emotion of volume; and
this volume, which Monet or Sisley would not
have understood, was the chief concern of the old
masters.

With the Impressionists colour was an end In
Itself, They looked upon It not merely as expres-
sive of light, but as synonymous with light,
whereas Cezanne, Ignoring colour's dramatic possi-
bilities, used It to express and intensify the funda-
mentals of organisation, just as Giotto, disregard-
ing the dramatic possibilities of line, employed
line as a means to ordinate volume. Cezanne is
related to Daumler and Rembrandt In that while
these men created their art (which was primarily
one of tone) by building up volume simultaneously
with contour, he created his art (which was pri-
marily one of colour) by presenting his visions as
nature presents itself to our eyes and intelligences,
that Is, as forms in which tone, contour and colour
are Inseparable. That he has been little under-
stood is due to the fad that his profoundly
logical methods took birth in an age of " inspira-
tional" painting. Matisse who came later made

SYNCHRONISM 281

of Cezanne* s still-lives a highly enjoyable decora-
tion whose destiny can rise no higher than that
of tasteful and complete ornament. Cezanne's art
Is dynamic, while Matisse's Is exaltedly excitatory.
The former bears the same relation to the latter
that a Beethoven symphonic movement bears to
a ballet by Delibes. One inspires thought: the
other incites to addon, to spontaneous admiration
and joy, Matisse loves and knows colour In Its
harmonic relations. He and Gauguin, by the
broad beauty of their work, have given an impetus
toward large planes of pure pigment. In brief
the evolution of colour Is as follows: It was used
first for verity; secondly, for ornament; thirdly,
for drama; fourthly, for its Inherent beauty as
light; and last, for Intensifying natural form.

All this has to do only with the concrete side
of art's progress. There is also a progress of the
mental attitude which is inseparable from art's
concrete development and without which its
material evolution could not have gone forward
significantly. This mental progress resulted In
the emancipation of the artist from the intellectual
limitations of his public. Up to Gericault and
Delacroix painting had idealised contemporary
life, had held itself to the interpretation of biblical
history, or had spoken In legend and allegory. It
had expressed itself in the Italian mode of draw-
ing; It had followed set rules of balance and
chiaroscuro; and above all it had possessed a very
definite finish. Naturally the art historians ex-
pected this style of painting to continue indefi-
nitely. But with Delacroix it began to change.
The hard contours grew freer. The depidtion
of the human form halted at approximation.

282 MODERN PAINriNG

Drawing became more arbitrary. Then came
Courbet who insisted that there was beauty in
everything if one knew how to bring it ^forth.
He turned to the commonplace life about him for
inspiration, repudiated the suavities of David, the
romance of Delacroix, the elegance of Velazquez
and the colour of Veronese; and began to order
realistic nature. About his ^ name there grew up
a tempest of adverse criticism; but no man so
sure of his own genius as was Courbet could be
weakened by public condemnation; and he made
no compromise. Manet continued Courbet's free-
dom of selection and painted n'importe quoL
The Impressionists also carried forward this
modern attitude. They sought for that which
generally was considered ugly, and made it artis-
tically enjoyable by drenching it with light and
colour. Then came Cezanne, Matisse, the Cubists
and the Futurists, with each of whom subjeA-
matter became more and more emancipated.
Natural objects gradually lost their importance
and grew more abstract. Form was considered
for its own sake, and models were not copied
merely because they filled certain utilitarian
destinies in the spectator's mind. Objecfls were
used by Cezanne to create abstract ensembles.
In Matisse the form itself became more purely
aesthetic, though with him there was a residue of
objectivity for the sake of illustrative consistency.
With the Cubists natural form was an echo, a
memory of life, retained because they were not
sure of how to turn their minds away from it.
Futurism attempted a rehabilitation of illustra-
tion, but lately it has been converted into a purer
vision by the Cubists,

STNCHROMISM 283

To sum up: colour reached Its highest develop-
ment in Cezanne; composition attained its highest
intensity in Rubens; and the greatest freedom in
material form was represented by the Cubists.
Thus the art of painting stood in 1912. But at
that time the development of modern means had
not reached its highest point. The purification of
painting had not been attained. The tendencies
of the past century fell short of realisation. As
yet there had been no abstract coalition of colour,
form and composition. Colour had not been
carried to its ultimate purity as a functioning
element. Form had became almost unrecog-
nisable but had just missed abstraction, its inevi-
table goal. And composition, the basis of all
great art, had been temporarily abjured in the
feverish search for new methods. The step from
the condition of art in 1912 to its final purity,
in which would be embodied all the qualities
necessary to the greatest compositional painting,
was not a long one, but until it was taken the
cycle must remain incomplete. The last advance
in modern methods was made by the Synchro-
mists at Der Neue Kunstsalon of Munich in.
June, 1913. This movement was fathered by
Morgan Russell and S. Macdonald-Wright, both
of whom, though native Americans, were partially
European in parentage and education. Russell
is more than half French, and Macdonald- Wright,
whose family name is Van Vranken, is diredly
descended from the Dutch.

Russell first studied in New York under Robert
Henri, one of the most sincere and intelligent
produces, of American art. There he acquired a
sound and capable foundation for his later work

284 MODERN PAINTING

both in clay and paint He then went to Paris, still
feeling nature through the inspiration of Manet ?
and like Manet fell under the sway of Monet.
From the Impressionists he was attracted to
Matisse with whom he was personally acquainted.
He did many canvases attractive in colour
and competent as to form, as well as a number
of synthetic and obviously disproportioned statues
which recall the modern a Fauve" to a marked
degree. Later he began to take an interest in
Cezanne, and to his study of this master and of
Michelangelo is attributable his later development
in colour and composition. These men consti-
tuted his main influences; but in the course of
his development he had cast a glance at Picasso
and even at the Futurists; and it is a significant
commentary on their methods that they are more
susceptible of understanding than either Renoir
or Matisse. Leo Stein, an astute and discerning
connoisseur of the more modern art movements
and a man who can see with occasional flashes of
genius through the aspects of a canvas to its basic
cause, no doubt had much to do with Russell's
rapid intellectual progress through the discipleship
of the student to the creation of individual
endeavours.

Macdonald- Wright, to the contrary, had little
art training in the accepted sense of the word.
Primarily interested in the purely technical side
of painting, as were Renoir, Cezanne and Courbet,
he had been influenced first by Hals, Rembrandt
and Velazquez and later by their successors,
Manet and the Barbizon school. Hoping to find
help in the schools he studied at many academies,
but after a brief period retired to the seclusion of

STNCHROMISM 285

Ms studio. About this time he began> with the
aid of Chevreui, Helmholtz and Rood, to make
experiments in colour in its relation to luminosity.
Quite naturally the influence of Monet followed,
and it was not until a year later that his enthu-
siasm for the Impressionists disappeared. He
then began the construction of form by large and
crude planes, building his figures with light and
dark chromatic blocks. It was this broader
application, coupled with his love of pure colour^
that led him to an eager admiration for Gauguin.
At this period of his development he met Russell,
his senior by three years, to whom he has always
admitted his debt for his early appreciation of
Michelangelo as well as of the modern masters,
From then on, through many struggles with light,
he made rapid progress. When Futurism blinded
the eyes of the younger men he went straight
ahead in the path he had chosen.

Shortly after their meeting, Russell and
Macdonald- Wright reached the end of their
appreciative and formative period of imitation.
They were both too intensely desirous of self-
expression in its broadest and most precise sense
to vary an already well-learned precept or theory.
They were colourists, and had been even when
passing through their most sombre stage. Now
both turned to colour as to a longed-for goal.
The art world at that time was being flooded with
the mournful browns and whites of Cubism; and
Matisse was too slight an inspiration to attrad:
them, for they had consistently conceived form
in three dimensions. Their desire was to create
canvases of richly harmonious colour; but the
difficulty lay in finding a new method of applica-

286 MODERN PAINTING

tion. Neither of them was content merely to
place suites of pure hues on the canvas, as an end
in themselves. This would be to sacrifice organised
volume for an ephemeral pleasure. Colour must
have a formal and compositional significance, other-
wise it would be but shallow decoration. The
fad that, like all painters of the day, they were
still bound to the depidion of natural objeds,
added difficulty to the solution of their problem.
Their individual interpretation of Cezanne, how-
ever, little by little showed them the method by
which they might eventually open the door on
their desires, Russell approached form through
light, combining both qualities in a simultane-
ous vision. Macdonald- Wright approached light
through form, regarding them as an inseparable
and inevitable unity. Both painters expressed
their vision in the purest gamut of colour which
painting up to that time had seen. Colour with
them became the totality of art, the one element
by which every quality of a canvas was to be
expressed. Even their lines were obtained by the
differentiation of colours in the same way that
tempo delimits sound.

Russell began his Synchromism by extending
and completing the methods of the Impressionists
who had observed that one always has an illusion
of violet in shadows when the sunlight is yellow,
and who in their painting represented the full
force of light as yellow, and its opposite extreme
of shadow as violet. Russell, in observing that
the strong force of light gives us a sensation of
yellow and that shadow produces its complemen-
tary of violet, went further and discovered that
quarter and half tones also possess colours by

STNCHROMISM 287

which they can be interpreted. He thus arrived
at a complete colour interpretation of the degrees
of light forces or tones. This method he aptly
called the orchestration of tones from black to
white. For it he made no hard and set rules.
From the first it was a highly plastic and arbi-
trary manner of depicting objectivity. By modu-
lating from light to dark (from yellow to violet)
not only was light conceived forcibly, but form
resulted naturally and inevitably. This was the
principle by which Cezanne, although he did not
completely grasp its import, achieved his eternal
light which brought form into being. But the
principle with him was subjugated to the influence
of local colours, varying milieu, reflections, etc.
Russell stated the principle frankly and applied
it purely. Since his form at that period resulted
from a sensitive depiction of light values expressed
by colour, his canvases had much the same beauty
of strongly lighted natural obje<5ts seen through
the three-sided prism by which the transition
from tone to colour is automatically brought
about.

Macdonald-Wright approached his conception
of Synchromism from the opposite direction. He
had always been dissatisfied with the endless
alternation of small shadows and lights which the
Impressionists had introduced into painting, and
with the tiny planes and spots which artists used
for verisimilitude. He desired a method whereby
the elements of shadow and light could be differ-
entiated and drawn together in simple masses.
He had studied pure colour more from the stand-
point of form than from that of light, and during
1912 began to take note of the fluctuations of

288 MODERN PAINTING

colours, their mobility when juxtaposed with other
colours, their densities and transparencies. In
fine, he recorded their inherent tendency to ex-
press degrees of material consistency^ Thus with
him a yellow, instead of meaning an intense light,
represented an advancing plane, and a blue, while
having all the sensation of shadow about it,
receded to an infinity of subjective depth. The
relative spacial extension of all the other colours
was then determined, and a series of colour scales
was drawn up which gave not only the sensation
of light and dark but also the sensation of per-
spective. Thus it was possible to obtain any
degree of depth by the use of colour alone, for
all the intermediate steps from extreme projection
to extreme recession were expressible by means
of certain tones and pure hues.

The first Synchromist canvas was exposed by
Russell in the Salon des Independants early in
the spring of 1913. It was called Synchromie en
Vert and recorded a large interior in which all the
light forces were treated in their purely emotional
phases. The canvas lacked the complete visuali-
sation and the solid space-construdion which
characterise his later work, and furthermore it
revealed many traces of the academic composi-
tion. However, had there been critics possessed
of artistic prescience they straightway would have
sensed in it a new force in painting. But the
picture's defeds obscured their recognition of its
potential vitality. This was due in part to the
fad: that the work lost much of its effed by piece-
painting, that is, by the minute treatment of
details each of which constituted an end in itself
regardless of the total. Russell counted on the

STNCHROMISM 289

line of the different bodies holding it together;
but he reckoned falsely, for if, in a work where
colour is so important a part of line, the colour
and line are not in complete harmony, the line
alone is inadequate to effedt the liaison of forms.
In this same Salon Macdonald-Wright, not yet
having arrived at a defined conception, exposed
two canvases in which his later developments
were but vaguely foreshadowed. Both pictures
were formal compositions of nude figures painted
in three or four flat planes of pure colour, and
recalled Matisse and Cezanne more strongly than
they presented a new vision. From the stand-
point of efficient visualisation all three Syn-
chromist works were failures, or at least they
were indications of incomplete progress. In
Russell's canvas the diminutive breaking up of
colour negatived what otherwise would have been
the picture's brilliant effect; and Macdonald-
Wright's large application of colour served only
to place him under the banner of an established
school. But both men realised that this was only
a start, and set diligently to work on the canvases
for their first exhibition which was booked in
Munich for June of that year.

Between their first pictures and those of a few
months later there was to be noted an advance
both in conception and in application. Russell's
small colour planes, applied wholly from the
standpoint of light, expanded and took on a new
effectiveness. His form became more abstrad,
and his colour more harmonious. Also his com-
positions were more compact, though they were
ordered rather than rhythmically organised.
Macdonald- Wright's progress was similar. Irs. an

290 MODERN POINTING

interpretation of one of Michelangelo's Slaves,
used as the dominant form in an arrangement of
three figures, all the academism which had marked
his earlier expression had disappeared. His
method had been liberated from the exactitudes
of static principles, and had become consistent,
not with the new colour knowledge, but within
itself. The theory of defined colour gamuts,
which from the first had been applied by these
two men, had now become a scientific principle.
Though the truth of it had always been vaguely
sensed by them, it had not become a definitely
comprehended formula until they had worked
out the naturalistic laws governing colour. The
Synchromist pidures in which these laws were
boldly applied were first brought together at 13,
Prannerstrasse, Munich, in June, 1913.

In November of the same year their work was
again exposed, this time at the Bernheim-Jeune
galleries in Paris. The show in Munich, widely
advertised by coloured posters, had attracted
considerable interest, but in Paris the exhibition
created a two-weeks' sensation. Though the
more discriminating critics saw its importance,
there was considerable adverse comment due
largely to the Synchromists* spectacular and
over-enthusiastic methods of putting forward
their views and discoveries. In their two speci-
fically worded prospectuses they devoted much
space to the shortcomings of Orphism, then in
vogue; and although their criticisms of that school,
coupled with the statement of their own tangible
and logical aims, had much to do with Orphism's
demise, the impropriety of the attack created a
feeling antagonistic to the new men. The appear-

STNCHROMISM 291

ance of their pictures was entirely different from
any paintings hitherto exposed; and their concep-
tion, while being a normal and dired: outgrowth
of Cezanne, marked a revolution in formal con-
struction. The inspiration of both these new
artists was classic in that they recognised the
absolute need of organisation which, if it was not
melodiously and sequentially composed, should
at least be rhythmic. Both were striving to
create a pure art one which would express
itself with the means alone inherent in that art,
as music expresses itself by means of circumscribed
sound.

There was no precedent for purely abstrad
form that is, form which has no antitype in
nature any more than there was a precedent
for the construction of painting solely by means
of colour and line. This was not due to an
absence of desire in the artist for an abstract
language of form, but to a natural diffidence on
his part to break once and for all with centuries
of tradition, and with one imperious gesture to
cast aside the accepted raison d'etre of the visual
arts. We have seen how form from the first had
been an imitation of natural objeds, how it de-
developed into synthesis, then into pure composi-
tion, how it reached a high degree of arbitrariness
in Matisse, how it disintegrated in Cubism, and
how in Futurism and Orphism there was a valiant
attempt to convert it once more into pidorialism,
to check its elan toward perfed freedom of crea-
tion. It is not therefore strange that the Syn-
chromist exhibition should have comprised, with
the exception of one canvas, figure pieces, studies
of landscape and still-lives (some almost archaic

292 MODERN PAINTING

in their diredt and simple statement), and not
canvases which abandoned all semblance to natural
form. Russell and Macdonald-Wright were still
occupied tentatively in expressing the forms they
knew best, each by his own individual ^ method.
But despite this compromise with tradition their
exhibition presented a highly novel impression.
There were human figures distorted almost out
of recognition for the compositional needs of the
canvas and painted in bars of pure colour; still-
lives which seemed to be afire with chromatic bril-
liance; fantastic fruits; life-sized male figures in
pure yellow-orange; and mountains of intense reds
and purples, warm greens and violets. All the
pidures, however, displayed decided organisa-
tional ability, and they possessed a more complete
harmony of colour and line than had been achieved
by any of the other younger painters.

But that quality of Synchronism which struck
the discerning spectator more than any other was
the force of volume resulting from the relation-
ship of colours. For years painters had realised
that certain colours when applied to certain forms
rebelled at the combination, that they refused
to remain passively on the planes assigned them.
But this phenomenon had never been given any
penetrating study. The more sensitive painters
had merely changed their colours to more trad-
able ones, and had thus avoided the inevitable
conflict that followed the fallacious commingling
of two highly affipjative elements. Such chro-
matic inconsistencies should have taught artis^
the necessity of harmony for the sake of perfect
order; but the matter was left to personal instind*
The clash between colour and form, however, was

STNCHROMISM 293

not due to any error or idiosyncrasy of taste, but
to the absolute character of each separate hue
which demanded, for its formal affinity, a fixed
and unalterable spacial extension. At an early
date artists had recognised that blue and violet
were cool and mournful colours, and that yellow
and orange were warm and joyful ones. They
applied this primitive discovery with the feeble
results to be found in Neo-Impressionism. That
these colours had any further character they
never suspeded. Their insight extended only to
the emotional and associative characteristics of
the colours; the physical side was overlooked.
Had the painters been more scientifically minded
they would have known that these characteristics,
which were the feminine traits, could not have
existed in isolation ; and they would have searched
for the colours' dominating and directing prop-
erties which represented the masculine traits.
Such a search would have led them to the mean-
ing of colours in relation to volumes, that is, to
colours' formal vibrations which alone are capable
of expressing plastic fullness.

This vibratory quality Macdonald-Wright found
and applied. By it he achieved light and shadow
which resulted naturally by the juxtaposition of
warm and cold colours, Russell, working alto-
gether from the standpoint of light as revealed
by form, attained practically the same results so
long as his light came from the direction of the
spectator, for in such a case the highest illumina-
tion was the most intense salient and, as with
Macdonald-Wright, had therefore to be painted
with a warm and highly opaque colour. But
where the light came from a source at right angles

294 MODERN POINTING

to the line of vision, the expression reverted to an
intensification of the Impressionistic method,
Later this accident of light disappeared from
Russell's work, and consequently his treatment
became less restricted. This setting aside of light
as the motif was a necessary departure,, for when
Russell carried his work into the higher elements
of pure form, a realistic source of illumination
would have made his suites of abstrad volumes
appear, not poised and relatively solid, but as
paterae attached to an impenetrable substance,
Under such conditions painting would merely be
another and perhaps more beautiful way of making
effective the ordonnances of ,surface form. But it
would have no more power to create in us an
aesthetic emotion than an exquisitely composed
bas-relief.

The ambitions of the Synchromists went deeper.
They desired to express, by means of Colour, form
which would be as complete and as simple as a
Michelangelo drawing, and which would give
subjectively the same emotion of form that
the Renaissance master gives objectively. They
wished to create images of such logical structure
that the imagination would experience their
unrecognisable reality in the same way our eyes
experience the recognisable realities of life. They
strove to bring about a new and hitherto unper-
ceived reality which would be as definite and
moving as the commonplace realities of every day,
in short, to find an abstract statement for life
itself by the use of forms which had no definable
aspects. The Synchromists* chief technical method
of obtaining this abstract equivalent for material-
ity was to make use of the inherent and absolute

SYNCH ROM IE COSMIQUE

MORGAN RUSSELL

STNCHROMISM 295

movement of colours toward and away from the
spectator, by placing colours on forms in exaCt
accord with the propensities of those colours to
approach or recede from the eye. The Futurists
had spoken of drawing the spectator into the
centre of the picture, there to struggle with the
principals of the work. They failed in this ambi-
tion because their canvases lacked the intense
tadlility of volume. The Synchromists, by mak-
ing the enjoyment of form purely subjective, and
by expressing form both by objectivity of line
and the subjectivity of colour,, achieved the
ambition of both the Futurists and Cezanne. The
latter's desire was ever toward a pure and sub-
jecftive art. Although his colour viewed objectively
is much like the Impressionists', the pleasure of
the Impressionistic vision disappears when the
eye is satisfied, whereas our emotions begin to
work on a Cezanne only after the visual enjoy-
ment has run its course.

Where Cezanne obtained a block solidity by
the intelligent addition of local colour to light
and by the subtraction of light from local colour,
the Synchromists rejed all local colour and paint
only with hues which express the desired form.
The position of a given volume in space dictates
to them the colour with which it is to be painted.
Consequently a receding volume whose position
is behind the other volumes is never painted a
pure yellow, for that colour advances toward the
spectator's eye; and a solid volume which projects
further than the others is never painted violet,
for violet expresses not solidity but a quality of
space, something intangible and translucent. All
colours and tones and admixtures are answerable

296 PAINTING

to the law of natural placement. This law Is not
absolute; it does not anchor each colour at a
specific and unchangeable distance from the eye,
but it determines the relative position of colours
in space according to the influence of environ-
mental colours, thereby making their position
both dependent and directing but none the less
inevitable. The perfeding of this principle by
the Synchromists introduced an added element of
poise and a new emotion in painting poise,
because, by changing a line or a colour, the
formal solid construded by interdependent hues
would shift and adopt another position answering
to the needs of the new order: a new emotion,
because colour in ail painting before Cezanne had
been used for ornament or for the dramatic
reinforcement of the drawing or subject, and in
Cezanne colour had been employed to express
subjectively the emotions of volumes found in

nature.

In Synchronism, which was first inspired^ by
natural forms, all considerations other than light
forces (as with Russell) and form (as with
Macdonald-Wright) and composition (as used
by both) were abolished. Colour was made a
functioning element out of which grew all the
qualities of the pictures. At first, adverse criti-
cisms were aimed at the Synchromists 5 polychro-
matic nudes, still-lives and landscapes. The press
remarked that the nudes appeared as if adorned
in Harlequin suits; the landscapes, as if they were
intended for theatre drops; and the still-lives,
as if painted through a prism- The Synchromists
answered that, in order to achieve a strong
emotion of force and weight, they would u will-

STNCHROMISM 297

ingly sacrifice the lovely tints of the flesh and the
joy of searching for coloured pots in the shops of
the second-hand merchants/' But, despite all
they could say, there was justice in the public's
criticism. So long as there was a natural form in
a pidure, the spedator would unconsciously judge
it from a naturalistic standpoint. To be sure,
there were canvases in the Munich exhibition
which were almost unrecognisable as nature;
but, before the aims of this new movement could
be fully attained, a style of arbitrary and pure
form was necessary. In the Bernheim-Jeune
show Russell exposed one wholly abstract canvas.
As an indication of a defledion toward pure
composition, it was important, but the pidure
itself was as manifestly an artistic failure as had
been his first large Synchromie en Vert hung in
the Salon des Independants of that year. It was
not the only failure exposed, however. From the
point of view of complete and organised concep-
tion all the early Synchromist pidures were to
a certain extent fragmentary and tentative. The
large canvas -by Macdonald-Wright, Synchromie
en Bleu, was a flagrant example of a totally new
vision unsuccessfully struggling with the objectively
classic inspiration of a defund antiquity. The
group of three males in its foreground, while
competently and intelligently built, had the
appearance of allegorical figures struggling against
a toppling world. Although their position and
organisation were didated by the needs of an al-
most El Greco-like composition, one was too con-
scious of natural objeds to accept, with a clear
aesthetic conscience, the seeming chaos of the
elements.

298 MODERN PAINTING

In bringing together in a unified emotion all
the impressions of form, the Synchromists at first
overlooked the fad that purity of expression, in
order to be highly potent, must embody a pure
conception. Their early canvases demonstrated
many new formal possibilities, but, while they
were composed more compadly than those of the
other moderns, the forms themselves were ob-
viously naturalistic. Herein the Synchromists at
their debut failed to take the step from Cezanne
to abstraction. Cezanne conceived all^ nature's
qualities form, colour and tone simultane-
ously. He was the first great realist, because
nature dictated to him the colour he was to use.
The Synchromists, on the other ^ hand, used
natural obje&s to create organisations of pure
colour, thus making formal expression a wholly
subjective performance. This method contained
greater emotional potentialities than Cezanne's,
because where the latter* s palette was necessarily
much subdued in order to approximate to the
attenuated gamut found in nature, the Syn-
chromists' palette was keyed to its highest pitch
of saturation. Cezanne's choice of colour was
never absolute in the harmonic sense, because he
depended for accuracy entirely on taste and
sensitivity. With Macdonald-Wright and Russell
the palette was completely and scientifically
rationalised so that one could strike a chord upon
it as surely and as swiftly as on the keyboard of
a piano: the element of hazard in harmony was
eliminated. This knowledge of colour gamuts
was not employed for ornamental niceties, but
was converted into a method of creating an
aesthetic finality other than that of form and line*

STNCHROMISM 299

If, in a complete balance of line and volume, the

colour overweights at any point into warm or
cold, the poise of the whole is jeopardised and
the finality obscured. The perfect poise of all
the elements of a painting, expressed by the
single element of colour, is the final technical aim
of Synchronism.

In the first arbitrary formal composition by
Russell the desire "was to carry out the continua-
tions of form from one chosen generating colour
and at the same time to create linear development
as well. His compositional theory was that,
through the inevitable evolution of line from an
arbitrarily chosen centre, the artist would nat-
urally and consciously create form which would
definitely approximate to the human body. In
his Synchromie en Bleu Violace the composition
was very similar to that of the famous Michel-
angelo Slave whose left arm is raised above the
head and whose right hand rests on the breast.
The picture contained the same movement as
the statue, and had a simpler ordonnance of
linear directions; but, save in a general way, it
bore no resemblance to the human form. The
sketch for this canvas was a greater success than
the final presentation, for its realisation was more
complete, its order more contracted and intense.
In both there was but one very simple rhythm
with two movements; and the size of the large
picture, which was twelve feet high, was incom-
mensurate with the slightness of the expression.

His second large Synchromie, exposed in the
Salon des I nde pendants in March 1914, was more
complicated and more sensitively organised, both
as to movement and to colour, than his first.

300 POINTING

By his colour rhythms he strove to incorporate
into his painting the quality of duration: that is,
he sought to have his pidure develop into time
like music. The ambition was commendable
although he wrongly asserted that older painting
extends itself stridly into space. A Rubens,
while presenting itself to the spectator at one
glance, is nevertheless more than a block-mani-
festation of forms, for it never reveals itself fully
until after many periods of study. In the old
painters there is a definite formal foundation on
which the canvas is rhythmically built, and as a
rule this formal figure is repeated in miniature
many times throughout the canvas, ^ These form-
echoes are defined and complete linear orders,
and into them rhythm is introduced. In Russell
the process is reversed: with him the rhythm
brings about the order. In Rubens there is a
distinct and conscious development of line, but
no development of form. Russell, in his later
canvases, sets down a central form which dictates
both the continuity of the picture and its formal
complications. His generating centre is not like
a motif whose character imprints itself on all its
developments, but rather like a seed out of which
the different forms grow -a directing centre
which inspires and orders its environment. In
fine, the surrounding forms are not a development
of the central one, but a result of it. This type
of composition corresponds to the melodic com-
position in music.

In the later works of Macdonald-Wright the
motif form of composition is achieved. In Ce-
zanne there are forms whose parallels are repeated
in varied development throughout the work and

STNCHROMISM 301

are rhythmically ordered into blocks. But while
these forms resemble motif repetition, they are
not generated by rhythm but united by it. In
Macdonald- Wright's canvases the rhythmic con-
tinua of a central form constitute the move-
ment of the picture as well as the final character
of it. In his Arm Organisation in Blue-Green
one can discern near the centre a small and
arbitrary Interpretation of the constructional form
of the human arm. The movement of these
forms throws off other lines and forms which,
through many variations and counter-statements,
reconstruct the arm in a larger way. Again these
lines of the larger arm, In conjunction with the
lines of the smaller one, evoke a further set of
forms which break Into parts each of which is a
continuation or a restatement of the original arm
motif, varied and developed,

Macdonald- Wright Tiolds that the forms which
we have experienced in our contad: with nature
are more expressive and diverse than those which
are born of the inventive Intelligence. But, while
It is true that every realisation of esthetic move-
ment or of the rhythm of form is based on the
movement' of the human body, It Is not true that
the human body Is a necessary foundation for
form alone. However, Macdonald- Wright, in in-
terpreting the human form, makes use merely
of the direction and counterpoise of volume ; he
does not Indulge in the depletion of limbs and
torso: the body is only his inspiration to abstrac-
tion. He changes and shifts its forms out of any
superficial resemblance to nature. In his desire
to cling to a solid and immutable foundation we
recognise an artist who realises how meagre Is

302 MODERN PAINTING

the incentive to create abstract compositions,
With centuries of tradition urging him to a
realistic rendering of the life about him, he finds
it difficult to break entirely with realism and to
create without referring to materiality. Perhaps
some day he will even forgo the inspiration
found in the combined forms in nature. His
work is tending toward that ultimate freedom,,
as also is Russell's.

Such a development, however, cannot be defi-
nitely predicted, but one can say, without dog-
matism, that in the future their work will become
surer, their compositions of a higher and more
complete order. With their knowledge of the
fundamentals of rhythmic organisation, which is
well in advance of that of the other painters of
today, their progress seems assured. Their postu-
lates are too definite to permit of the introduction
of literary or musical transcendentalism; and
their apports are too significant to permit of any
retrogression toward metaphysics or drama.
Their palette has become co-ordinated and ra-
tionalised. Their composition is founded on the
human body in movement. And their colour, in
its plastic sense, takes into consideration space ?
light and form. These factors represent their
technical assets. With these painters comes into
being an art divorced from all the entanglements
of photography, of piecemeal creation, of inhar-
monic gropings, of literature and of data hunting.
But they must not be regarded merely as
inventors of new pidorial methods, for their
discoveries have already taken significant aesthetic
form. As Renoir completed the first cycle of
modern art which was ushered in by Turner and

STNCHROMISM 303

Delacroix, so have the Synchromists completed
the cycle of which Cezanne is the archaic father.
They have discovered the concrete means where-
with to bring about his desires. It remains now
for the painters of today and of the future to
realise more fully the dreams of a higher art
history. With the Synchromists there is no
system or method other than a purely personal
one. The word Synchromism, adopted by them
to avoid obnoxious classification under a foreign
banner,, means simply "with colour/' It does not
explain a mannerism or indicate a special trait, as
do Cubism, Futurism and Neo-Impressionism.
It is as open as the term musician. As a school
it can never exist. Indeed it is the first graphic
art the application of whose principles cannot
be learned by a course of instruction. Artists
employing its means must depend entirely on
their own ability to create. In Synchromist
pictures the good or bad results cannot be ob-
scured by the introduction of foreign elements, as
in the case of pictures wherein nature is copied.
Russell and Macdonald- Wright have already re-
pudiated the appellation of Synchromist and call
themselves merely " painters/ 5 for, since Cezanne,
painting means, not the art of tinting drawing
or of corredly imitating natural objeds, but the
art which expresses itself only with the medium
inherent in it colour.

All significant painting to come must neces-
sarily make use of Synchromist means, although
form and composition that is, the creative
expression may be as arbitrary or personal as
the artist desires. In the Synchromists' latest
prospedus are to be found the following com-

304 MODERN PAINTING

merits: ("In our painting colour becomes the
generating function. Painting being the art of
colour, any quality of a picture not expressed by
colour is not painting. An art whose ambition
it is to be pure should express itself only with
means inherent in that art. The relation of
spacial emotions and of the emotions of density
and transparency which we wish to express,
dictates to us the colours most capable of trans-
mitting these sensations to the spectator. In
thus creating the subjective emotion of depth
and rhythm we achieve the dreams of painters
who talk of drawing the spectator into the centre
of the picture; but instead of his being drawn
there merely by intellectual processes he is en-
yeloped in the picture by tactile sensation. We
limit ourselves to the expression of plastic emo-
tions. We can no longer conceive of the stupid
juxtapositions of colours devoid of any rhythmic
interlinking as art organisations/ 5 yThe Synchro-
mists do not pretend to have invented new
qualities for art but to have brought to painting
a new vision which permits them to express the
old qualities with a greater potency than formerly.

XIV

THE LESSER MODERNS

DECADENCE Is simply the Inability to
create new tissue. In painting it man-
ifests itself in two ways: either in
the endeavour of an artist to turn the
attention from new and precise procedures to
antiquated and irrelevant ones; or in the artist's
desire to base his inspiration on the great work of
an immediate forerunner rather than on the
foundation of all vitality, nature. In neither case
is new material being added to the sum of art.
Decadence usually takes the form of a facile
imitation of the surface asped: of a master, not
infrequently making that master's results prettier,
more fluent and more attractive. This is a
natural and inevitable consequence of copying
the objective side of a great work which originally
was the outgrowth of a profound aesthetic philoso-
phy. Decadents, as a general rule, are suffi-
ciently analytic to sense their own paucity of
constructive genius. In recognising that nature
can never inspire them to significant co-ordina-
tions, they are content to accept, with slight
modifications, the artistic standards of their
predecessors. They vary the art that has gone
before to meet the needs of their own tempera-
ments. In many cases highly meritorious work
results.

3 o6 MODERN PAINTING

The word decadent is not wholly deprecatory.
Often the decadent is a competent composer in
the abstrad. By presenting in an attractive
way his own personal tastes, he sometimes makes
his art both interesting and beautiful. His _ deca-
dence lies in his retrogression from the point to
which the art of his day has arrived and in his
inability to introduce a new element to com-
pensate for this retrogression. No amount of
individuality can bridge this gap. Many painters,
like Gauguin, have readed against achievement
but have possessed a tangential vitality which in
itself has been a new contribution to aesthetic
endeavour. Other painters, like Renoir, while
introducing no innovations, have, by talented
and comprehensive efforts, duplicated and im-
proved upon the art of the latest creative masters
and thereby pushed forward the highest stand-
ards. They are not decadents, for their work
exhibits no deterioration. Even decadents may
be excellent artists. Gaspar de Crayer was
undoubtedly a great artist though an offshoot of
Rubens; and Giampietrino and Cesare da Sesto
were both solid and intelligent painters, though
they did not rival their master, Leonardo da
Vinci. There has undoubtedly been great sculp-
ture since the Renaissance; but Michelangelo
closed up for all time the plastic possibilities of
clay and marble, and consequently, there being
no new functioning element to be introduced into
it, all sculpture since his day has been in the
broad sense decadent.

Modern painting has had its decadents also
men who have attempted to revert to a sterile
past or who have followed in the paths blazed

THE LESSER MODERNS 307

by others without approaching the achievements
of the painters imitated. This latter class has its
usages, for it tends to lend impetus to the move-
ment it follows. The men composing it are
popularly called exponents, and the appellation is
just. There are painters in all countries today
who adhere to Impressionist methods, and thereby
keep ever before us one of the great steps in the
development of modern painting. Cezanne has
undoubtedly been- given greater consideration
because of the many artists who follow his
precepts. And the numerous imitators of Cubism
have done much to focus on that movement the
consideration it deserves. In a general way all
the lesser modern painters, by their feverish
activities, expositions and pamphleteering, have,
despite their inherent lack of genuine importance,
kept the world conscious of the fad: that it is
in the midst of a great aesthetic upheaval, that
new forces are at work, that the older order is
being supplanted.

Today nearly every country has a group of
men striving toward the new vision. They can-
not all be innovators of new methods. They
cannot all carry forward the evolution of modern
painting. But they can at least give momentum
to the current ideals and turn out work which
bears so much personal merit that it becomes
deserving of more or less serious consideration.
Degas and his circle are of this class, as are the
Futurists who, though at bottom decadent, inas-
much as they turn their art back to illustration,
are a force which cannot be ignored. In Dresden,
Munich and Berlin are groups of modern men
who have repudiated the academies and struck

3 o8 MODERN PAINTING

out into new fields. Russia has ^ contributed

many young artists to the present ideal. Eng-
land has not been altogether impervious to the
modern dodrines. America is represented by
fully a score of artists animated by the new
vitality. And in France there are a hundred
painters at work tearing down the older Mok
While few of these men can lay claim to ^intro-
ducing any intrinsically new and significant
methods or forms into modern painting, their
work in many instances, while being decadent in
the strid sense, is nevertheless commendable.
They are not great artists even in the sense that
Monet, Manet, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso
are great; but many of them are at least genuine
artists.

One of the most conspicuous figures among
the decadents is Wassily Kandinsky. In an age
when all art was being arraigned before the
tribunal of biology, physiology, and psychology,
he came forward and attempted to drag it back
into the murky medium of metaphysics. The
generating forces of modern painting, however,
rest on no metaphysical hypothesis. To attempt
to define form by transcendental terms, or even
to credit form with esoteric significance, reveals
an ignorance of the principles of aesthetic emotion,
Form in the art sense is a demonstrable proposi-
tion; it is answerable to physical laws, Michel-
angelo, El Greco, Giotto, Rubens, Cezanne and
Renoir based composition on natural causes, and
as each successive artist has approached intensity
in organisation, he has come nearer and nearer
to the rhythm which animates and controls
corporeal existence. ^Esthetic form, in order to

THE LESSER MODERNS 309

become emotion-producing, must reflect the form
which is most intimately associated with our
sensitivities. It must primarily be physical.
There is nothing mysterious about aesthetic
rhythm, and any attempt to " spiritualise " the
harmonies of art carries art so much further from
the truth. The modern tendency to make objects
abstract and to divest subjed-matter of all its
mimetic qualities, has led some critics and
painters to the false conclusion that form itself
is unrelated to recognisable phenomena. But
even in the most abstract of the great painters,
the form is concrete. In a broad sense it is
susceptible of geometrical demonstration; and
its intensity is in direct ratio to its proximation to
human organisms. In fad, there are no moving
forms in an aesthetic organisation which do not
have their prototypes in the human body in
action. Were this not true empathy would be
impossible, and without empathy an artistic
emotion is purely intellectual and associative.
The greatest painters, past and present, have
recognised this principle; and art which does not
adhere to it is decadent both in the aesthetic and
the intellectual sense.

Kandinsky exemplifies this kind of decadence.
While the innovators up to Matisse had tried to
discover in nature secrets which would aid them
in plastic expression, Kandinsky has tried, by
numerous articles and at least one complete book,
to turn back the minds of painters to the sup-
posedly mystical elements of form and colour.
But although this artist is to be commended
on his effort to make colour significant in a day
when angular forms of brown and black were the

3 io MODERN PAINTING

keynote, his study of colour should have begun
where Cezanne left off and not with the writings
of Maeterlinck and the symbolist poets._ ^Kan-
dinsky recognises that colour has _ possibilities,
but he ignores the fad: that colour is one of the
physical sciences, as definite as those of the
quadrivium, that its indudive qualities ^ have
become classified and that its functioning is
precise and answerable to natural laws. Conse-
quently he cannot co-ordinate its governing
principles, and in an attempt to rationalise it he
has sought refuge in music, an art which presents
to him the same mystical difficulties. So long
as he was under the healthy influence of Matisse
his symbology was less evident; but when he
adopted a metaphysical programme it all came
to the surface.

Kandinsky's early "impressions" are heavy
and insensitive "Fauve" pictures. His "com-
positions" for the most part are general state-
ments of some rural scene in Matisse's manner;
and his "improvisations" represent semi-abstract
lines delimiting scientifically meaningless colours.
In his book, The Art of Spiritual Harmony,
he presents an elaborate explanation of the
metaphysical basis for colour, but he fails to
contribute any ideas not to be found in Dela-
croix and Seurat. And the pictures with which
he complements the text have been surpassed,
in their own manner, by the Chinese. There are
isolated comments on colour theories which are
separately sound, and there are explanatory
generalisations; but a diligent search fails to
reveal any statement which is precise and at the
same time new. The book refers constantly to

fc

h

CO

PH

U

THE LESSER MODERNS 311

music, and there are undeniable evidences of
literary thought; but nowhere is there an ex-
planation of the plastic significance of colour,
Kandinsky is a painter of moods,, and as such
encroaches upon the domain of music. He is a
painter of the vision of an action without its
objective integument, and as such he enters the
realm of poetry. He is essentially pretty, and
despite his idealistic nomenclature, he is at
bottom illustrative and decorative. What he
designates the "soul" is only associative memory,
and his conception of composition is the breaking
up of a flat surface into irregular compartments
by lines and more or less pure colour. Like
Scriabine he has overlooked the formal possi-
bilities of colour and consequently has failed in
any aesthetically emotional expression.

Kandinsky's attempts to create moods are
largely failures because of the inherent limitations
of his art medium. The arts may be synthesised
when a profounder understanding of them has
come about, but their functionality can never be
interchanged. The art of literature will always
be able to tell a story better than the greatest
sculpture; and even a primitive song is more
capable of producing a mood than the most
highly organised painting. Kandinsky, for in-
stance, fails to achieve what the Marseillaise
achieves in music, namely: the dramatic presenta-
tion of an exortation to action. Separate, for
instance, the phrases of the original version.
The first verse opens with a rousing appeal which
culminates on "patrie," a word always welcome
to the ear and heart of a Frenchman. Then the
song acclaims the glory of the occasion and

3 i2 MODERN PAINTING

repeats dramatically the cause of the struggle
"Centre nous de la tyrannie Fetendard sanglant
est leve!* Then It recounts the tragedies ;whlch
are befalling relatives and friends at the hands
of the growling soldiers of the ^ enemy; and
suddenly, In an unexpected voice It calls, " Aux
armes, citoyens!" ending In a patriotic and deci-
sive flourish. The musk throughout Is subtly
harmonised with the words: lively during the
opening call; abated during the first ^ statement
of the cause; animated with its repetition; minor
when the tragic words occur; vibrant and imita-
tive of bugles during the call to arms; and
highest in pitch at the end. This is the expres-
sion of the mood intensified.

Could painting extend itself into time and
present singly and In sequence the visions of
objective nature, dramatically synthesised with
colour and line, It could perhaps influence people
to emotion In the way music does. But the
musical quality of time-extension is impossible in
painting. And since a picture presents a simul-
taneous vision, which cannot be otherwise except
through a subjective process, it is incapable of
working from a prelude to a finale like music.
Music is abstract, though firmly based on the
rhythmic movement of all nature, yet it can
produce moods by far more distant and far less
tangible associations than can painting. But
mood in music Is no higher a quality than
illustration In painting, and the highly creative
artists ignore them both. The great composer is
the one who, seeing beyond the associative theory
In music, feels the deeper plasticity of movement
and form: and his plasticity is this only pre-

THE LESSER MODERNS 313

occupation, just as the plastic element of colour
Is the great modern painter's chief concern.
Kandinsky has only tried to introduce an unim-
portant element of one art into another art.
While the procedure has a superficial taste of
novelty it is no more creditable than if he had
declared himself frankly for illustration and
joined the ranks of Degas and his school He
has not probed into the pregnant recesses of
painting and attempted to discover the meaning
of form. He has contented himself with obscur-
ing the delineations of natural objects in such a
manner that the beholder feels led to decipher
his cryptic realities. The suggestion of actuality
is there, but there being no other strong attraction
in the picture, aesthetic or otherwise, the spectator
sets to work to penetrate its objective meaning.
In the majority of cases he succeeds, and gains
thereby a satisfaction similar to that of having
solved a simple problem in fractions.

In painting moods, which he refers to as
"spiritual impressions/ 3 "internal harmonies/*
"psychic effeds" and "soul vibrations/* Kan-
dinsky does not attempt to depict the dynamic
forces which produce moods, but strives to inter-
pret his own emotional impressions by means
of semi-symbolic and semi-naturalistic visions
and by inspirational methods. Unable to ally the
elements of colour and line to a given theme, he
contents himself with giving us a chaotic impres-
sion by such means as he personally associates
with his mood: and since this kind of association
is largely Individual, his depi&ion of the mood
is incomprehensible to anyone not tempera-
mentally and mentally at one with him. Did he

MODERN PAINTING

understand the inherent psychological dramatic
significance of colours and lines he could represent
a universally moving vision, and thereby attain
in a small degree the end for which he aims.
But his feeling for colour especially is so vague
and unscientific that it is, after^ all, a personal
thing, and his graphic representation of a mood is
little more than an individual and purely otiose
expression. Even Carra, in his colourless Funeral
of the Anarchist Galli, approaches^ nearer the
creation of a mood than does Kandinsky in his
best canvases, for in Carra there is exhibited a
certain knowledge of the dramatic use of Jine
which, when combined with recognisable subjed-
matter, augments the thematic drama.

Despite his complete preoccupation with colour
Kandinsky is decadent more than Van Gogh to
whom artistically he is closely Delated, because
the progress of modern painting is toward purity,
toward creation by means of a unique element,
toward an art which expresses only the qualities
of which that art is the most highly capable.
When other considerations enter into it, it is at
once drawn back toward illustration, and its
final defecation is postponed. Happily Kandin-
sky, an explorer of the limitless realms of meta-
physics, has given us no more specific a postulate
than that colour has meaning. Though he formu-
lates many vaguely associative theories (such as
"keen yellow looks sour because it recalls the taste
of a lemon/' "a shade of red will cause pain or
disgust through association with running blood/*
and "in the hierarchy of colours green is the
bourgeoisie self-satisfied, immovable, narrow");
he nevertheless relies largely on instinct for their

THE LESSER MODERNS 315

application. While attempting to turn painters*
minds from the precise discoveries of colourists to
a pseudo-philosophical consideration of colour, he
is too general and ambiguous to inspire extensive
imitation. Already painters since him have gone
forward in the great work of research begun by
the Impressionists.

If Kandinsky, as a theorist, is cabalistic and
illusory, he achieves a certain decorative pretti-
ness in his work. Though his ideas are old, the
appearance of his canvases is new: and it is
merely this novelty of conception, coupled with
his tendency toward abstraction, which makes
him of interest, and then only as a theoretical
deviation from 'the work of Gauguin, Matisse and
the Orientals. His colour is not without visual
charm, and his composition often has the fascina-
tion of the delicate patterns found in the Chinese.
In fadt, Kandinsky* s compositional debt to the
Chinese is large. His Improvisation No. 29 is
almost identical with a painting by Rin Teikei,
and many of his pictures appear like curved-line
generalisations of Chinese groupings, or the forms
In Chinese backgrounds. Like the Cubists Kan-
dinsky Is a step toward arbitrariness in formal
composition, but his advance is less significant
than theirs. In his desire to illustrate a mood
and produce a corresponding psychic emotion in
the spectator he is a transcendentalised Futurist.
His ontological terminology has given an Impetus
to his popularity, but it has tended unfortunately
to obscure his worth as a maker of arabesques.

Of a different decadent type are Bonnard,
Vuillard and K.-X. Roussel who call themselves
the Intimists. These artists descend In large

3 i6 MODERN POINTING

measure from Matisse, and though other and
sometimes stronger influences enter their work,
they are in a general way more closely akin to
him than any other modern painter. Their
appearance is more academic and, in the decora-
tive sense, prettier than that of Matisse. Also,
there is in their pidures a greater perpendicularity
than in the work of their master. The angular
and the perpendicular always represent the second
compositional step from symmetrically to order:
they are indicative of the earliest stage of aesthetic
consciousness. They are found in the Egyptians,
Phoenicians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, and in all the
primitive Christians, and in Gauguin and Puvis
de Chavannes. The artists who use them have
awakened to the faft that chaos is not conducive
to emotional satisfaction. In perpendicular lines
there is a primitive sense of fitness, for one feels
they are both well-planted and immovable. Not
infrequently they are employed by the decadents
of a movement or an epoch because they har-
monise so neatly and unostentatiously with pretty
colours and delicate themes. The Futurists found
in them a ready means to a decorative order.

Bonnard, the most genuine artist of the group,
uses perpendicularity of arrangement more con-
sciously than does either of the others. He stu-
died in the same class with Maurice Denis at the
Academie Julien, and his association with this
painter no doubt explains his compositional pre-
dilection. He is strongly influenced by Renoir,
although he has never penetrated beyond Renoir's
surface. His greys are always rich and sombre,
and even his simplest works are as artistically
opulent and lovely as the finest tapestry. Indeed

THE LESSER MODERNS 317

his large paintings are more appropriately wall
coverings than panels, ornaments rather than
decorations. In them are hot sunlight and cold
shadow in scintillating succession; and every
obje6t is put to genuine ornamental use. They
seem to exhibit an unconscious fluency in the
employment of bafflingly diverse greys which are
saturated with colour and applied so as to reveal
highly their attentuated purity. There are also
in his work harmoniously horizontal lines and
pleasing sequences of curves. In Le Jardin a line
starts with the head of a man on the left, con-
tinues along his arm and leg and the sofa back,
and reaches an apex in the child's head to the
right of the centre, sinks by way of the head of
the woman on the right to the man's arm, is then
caught up again by the contour of his legs, is
paralleled by the outline of the nearest standing
child's dress and face and the face of the kneeling
girl, is continued in the bottom of the skirt of the
child seated on the sofa, and then becomes
horizontal in a perfect continuation of the table's
surface. The line is beautiful and studiously
made, and is pointed out here for the purpose of
showing the simple ordonnance often found in
the lesser artists. Nor is it the only line in the
canvas. There are others as harmonious and as
beautiful; but what keeps the pidure from being
a great composition, although its forms are solid
and well adapted to their spaces, is its lack of
opposition or solution of warring elements. If
we do not try to class Bonnard with the greatest
artists, we are forced to praise him. He is
unpretentious, highly gifted, has a well-developed
sense of the beautiful, and is possessed of a most

3 i8 MODERN PAINTING

sensitive eye. He is neither an illustrator of
nature nor of moods, but an artist who paints to
obtain aesthetic expression, without^ the arnere
<pensee of a theoretical method. He is one of the
most purely pleasing painters of modern times.

Vuillard, a painter of interiors, owes his inspira-
tion as much to Toulouse-Lautrec as to Gauguin,
Like Bonnard he uses greys of dry and mat
colour, but his harmonies are slighter and ^ of
lighter tonality than those of Bonnard. Profiting
by the Impressionists' light discoveries he has
done some very admirable interiors; some^of his
works are more modern and artistic Whistlers.
His art is one in which the spotting of masses for
the sake of balance supplants any attempt to
produce generating lines. As with Bonnard and
Roussel there is in him a striving after beautiful
surfaces, matieres which in themselves^ will tempt
the amateur. In this common pursuit the Inti-
mists show themselves to be the successors of
Degas; but they are successors who, having taken
to heart the teachings of more significant fore-
runners, represent a sturdier decadence than that
of Degas. K.-X. Roussel is a feminised Poussin.
He searches solely for effed, and his canvases
have the singular charm of enamel Were they
smaller they would make admirable brooches and
vases. He too has made tapestries, but in spirit
they are less modern than the corresponding
efforts of his contemporaries. His compositions
embody reddish satyrs and nymphs, intense blue
sky, yellow-green foliage and yellow ground,
His drawing never has more than the rudimentary
charm of school-room talent, while that of
Vuillard is subjugated to his colour application,

THE 319

and that of Bonnard Is instinctively deformed to
the needs of line and decorative necessity.

Maurice Denis is more diredlly an outcome of
the school of Pont-Aven than are the three pre-
ceding men. His synthetic figures were first seen
In Courbet, then In Puvis de Chavannes, then in
Besnard and Gauguin, In Denis they have lost
much of their significance and have once more
become primarily academic. There was a time
about 1890 when Denis's colour was not aggres-
sively disagreeable. It was subjugated to a
certain greyness which was applied In little spots
resembling the black-and-white stippling of some
of Seurat's drawings. Now his colour has grown
acid and unpleasant. His line Is stiff and vitiated
and lacks even the quality of a pleasing silhouette.
He has written a book of theories, but It has
helped him little In his artistic achievements. He
Is the antithesis of Bonnard, and his colours possess
almost no harmonious Interrelation. In him there
are a few perpendicular lines, but one may seek in
vain 'for evidences of co-ordination. Many of his
figures are appropriated from the works of the
old masters, but because he fails to adapt them
sensitively to his needs, they lose, rather than
gain, in beauty by the transfer. He is at times
symbolic and allegoric, and while one might
overlook this literary phase of his art, provided
there were other qualities to compensate for it,
he fails to exhibit a complete appreciation of the
aesthetic possibilities of his models, and conse-
quently becomes merely an exponent of adopted
mannerisms. His popularity has entirely to do
with qualities unrelated to painting. Judged by
a purely aesthetic standard he is Inferior to an

320 MODERN PAINTING

Augustus John, a Desvallieres, a Bourdelle or a
Wyndham Lewis.

The highly talented Andre Derain is another
synthetic painter. He is sincerely moved by
multiramose tree forms and the sunlight effects of
Provence, and his admiration for Cezanne led
him into certain mannerisms which have for their
objeft a facilitation of the Aix master's methods.
In his use of soft yellows, hot earth tones, deep
warm greens and light blues, he reveals his debt
to the modern tendency toward colour. By out-
lining his objects with heavy contours, he has
acquired erroneously a reputation _ for virility,
and though he aspires to composition, he only
achieves pattern. He is much like the Scandi-
navian, Othon Friesz, who, having absorbed the
exteriors of Matisse and Cezanne, and having
read Cezanne's letter recommending Poussin re-
made on nature, has turned his attention to this
old Titian offshoot and endeavours to give us a
reversion to style. At one time he used colour
freely, but he now paints with ochres, blues,
blacks, greens and an occasional red a gamut
like Derain's, only yellower. He too has a heavy
technique and a reputation for virility. Maurice
de Vlaminck is another painter of similar inspira-
tion and palette. He is much prettier and has a
finer sense of soft harmonies than either of the
other two. He reveals a genuine feeling for his sub-
jects, and always tries to introduce into his works
a simple oppositional line. He comes direct from
Cezanne, and it is from paintings such as his that
Cezanne has acquired a reputation as a maker of
arabesques. De Vlaminck has a rich and impelling
matierc and an art sense which is almost coquettish.

THE MODERNS 321

Kees van Dongen has studied the sensual
drawings of Toulouse-Lautrec and the broad
exteriors of Matisse, and in combining his two
admirations has made eminently effective posters
of nearly harmonious colours in very broad planes*
De Segonzac also uses attenuated colours in a
broad manner after Matisse. Manguln, another
Matisse imitator, Is too academic to appeal
strongly to those who have acquired the modern
vision, despite the primitive order his canvases
at times possess. Flandrin Is more decorative.
His works reveal a classic perpendicularity of
composition, and though they are without a
sense of form, we feel in them a certain charm of
space and air. He brushes In his landscapes
broadly by planes of light and dark, somewhat
in the very early manner of Matisse. Pierre
Laprade has arrived at a style of surface which
may best be characterised as bad tapestry. Jean
Fuy applies his pictures In a broad, somewhat
bold, manner, and his light tonality and angular-
ities point to his having lingered over the work
of Cezanne. Lebasque is the feminine prototype
of Puy. His colour Is faded and unemotional,
and his exteriors are as flat as the simplest
decorations. Madame Marval differs from La-
basque only in theme.

Modem decadence in Zak, Rousseau, Vallotton,
Prendergast and Simon Bussy manifests itself
in a retrogression to primitive ideals. Though
using the modem methods of simplification, these
men revert to a static and dead past. Their aim
is to revive the most ancient manner of painting.
Of all the modern decadents they are perhaps
the most devitalising for they tacitly repudiate the

322 MODERN POINTING

discoveries of the new men, and strive to turn the
minds of the public and of painters alike to the
sterilities of antiquity. They even ignore the
aesthetic principles of the Renaissance, and by
pushing creative expression to its furthest limits
of artlessness, turn to naught the entire achieve-
ments of the great plastic composers. At best
these men are dealers in decorative material.
Simple arrangement is absent from their works,
and colour, which for nearly a century has fought
for its true place in painting, is once more used as
an instinctive means for filling in drawings. _

Vallotton, though a modern primitive, is not
allied to any recent school. In appearance his
work is unlike that of the other moderns. He
disdains all save the simplest means and the most
restricted colours. In him there are no delicate
plays of light, but broad and heavy shad ings
which are not without subtlety. He is a Teutonic
Ingres a Flandrin made serious as to precision
and reduced colour. At a distance his nude
studies are interesting, for there one loses the
dryness and hardness of their technical manner
a heritage of Vallotton's days of wood engrav-
ings. Other modern painters who elude classifica-
tion, but who are intimately related in a general
way to the new movements are Charles Guerin,
Piot, Spiro, Alcide Le Beau, Gustave Jaulmes and
d'Espagnat. Though they differ markedly from
Vallotton they are all preoccupied with self-
expression by means of colour. By making it a
dominant element in their work, they have
admitted their susceptibility to the modern ideal
and thereby have given an impetus to the spirit
which tends toward purification. Guerin is a

THE LESSER MODERNS 323

professor of the Academie Moderne; and though
clinging close to conventional drawing, he attains
a slightly novel asped in all his tapestry-like
canvases. He is eminently of the Beaux-Arts
tradition, is artificial and monotonous, and paints
very large pictures with both idealistic and realis-
tic themes.

Of the modern men who have found in Cubism
their strongest aesthetic fascination de la Fresnay
is a noteworthy example. So well does he under-
stand the demands of the Picasso tradition that
he has come to be looked upon as one of the
members of the Cubist group. His arrangements
are soft and pretty and his colour is harmonious.
He has in fa<5t surpassed in merit several of the
original Cubists. Frederick Etchells and W.
Roberts are English exponents of Cubism, and
the latter has done some work which rivals that
of Picabia. Wyndham Lewis, another English-
man, strives for an individual expression, but his
angularities reveal his debt to Picasso, although
the general impression of his pictures is Futuristic.
The hand of the Cubists can be found in many of
the canvases of the modern Americans. Arthur
B. Davies, the most popular of the new men in
the United States, is at bottom a superficial
academician, but he superimposes shallow Cubist
traits on his two-dimensional drawings, giving
them a spuriously modern appearance. Maurice
Stern treats Gauguin themes with a pale reflec-
tion of the early geometrical Picasso; and similar
means are employed by C. R. Sheeler, Jr., though
both Matisse and Delaunay have contributed to
his art.

To name all the modern painters who are con-

3 2 4 MODERN POINTING

scientiously battling against formalism and the
dry-rot of the academies would be impossible.
The field is too broad: the activities are too
numerous. Few civilised countries have escaped
the insistence of the new impetus. By some
painters the new methods are adopted tentatively
and by degrees. Others fly to the latest phases
of art and move forward with the epoch. Today
there are numerous representatives of all the
movements from Impressionism to Synchromism.
Kroll and Childe Hassam, both Americans, are
emulators of Monet, though Hassam, who appears
less modem than Kroll, is by far the more sensi-
tive painter. Marquet has done more than
imitate Impressionism. He has synthesiscd
Monet into a more masculine expression. _ His
planes are broad and luminous, and he achieves
a distinct feeling for air and distance by
simpler and more dire<l means than did the Im-
pressionists. W. S. Glackens combines a Renoir
technique with a modern purity of colour. J. D.
Ferguson, the Scotchman, also reverts to the Im-
pressionists but has learned much _ from Matisse.
Duncan Grant, an Englishman, is much more
modern than "Ferguson and more competently
expressive of the new. Roger Fry has^contributed
much to the modern impetus. His writings reveal
a wide comprehension of present-day paintings
and his insight into aesthetics is at times profound.
Every year adds to the ranks. Besides the
modern artists already named may be men-
tioned Bechteiev, Bolz, Lhote, Chagall, Chamail-
lard, Zawadowsky, Hayden, Ottmann, Lotiron,
Utrillo, Hartley, Peckstein, Valensi, Jawlensky,
Knauerhase, Miinter, Tobeen, Bloch, Dove, de

THE 325

Chirico, Walkowitz, Boussingault, Kanoldt and
Granzow.

One of the healthiest movements of the day,
though without novelty, is Vorticism whose head-
quarters are London. The Vorticists are unre-
stri&ed as to theories, and have for their aim the
final purification of painting as well as of the
other arts. Their creed is an intelligent one,
and is in dired; line with the current tendencies.
As yet they have produced no pictures which
might be called reflective of their principles, but
they have kept before English artists the necessity
of eliminating the unessentials. Their main doc-
trines,, so far as painting is concerned, were set
forth by the Synchromists long before the Vorti-
cists came into public being; but by their in-
sistence on the basic needs of purification, they
have done valuable service. The Synchromists in
their manifesto wrote: "An art whose ambition
it is to be pure should express itself only in the
means inherent in that art. . . . Painting being
the art of colour, any quality of a pidhire not
expressed by colour is not painting/ 31 A year
later in Blast, the Vorticists 31 publication, we
read: "The Vorticist relies on this alone; on the
primary pigment of his art, and nothing else. . . .
Every concept, every emotion presents itself to
the vivid consciousness in some primary form.
It belongs to the art of this form. If sound,
to music, if formed words, to literature; colour in
position, to painting. . . /'

All these painters are the t leaders of the secon-
dary inspirations in modern art, and out of them
grow other painters in Europe and America.
They do not as a rule go by the name of any

326 MODERN PAINTING

school, but they can be classed together because
in them all Is the same desire to create the
novel, to present a strikingly different aspect
from the academies, and to differentiate them-
selves Individually from their fellows. They all
feel their incompetency to create new forms, the
necessity to follow, the timidity which only
permits them to modify the surfaces of other
greater men. They are the creative exponents
and the decadents of vital movements, and they
in turn have their own imitators and decadents.
They have felt the need for change, but lack the
genius for new organisations. That many of
them are sound artists it would be folly to deny.
But they are in no sense of the word innovators.
Some of them In facB: are failures, but theirs is
the consolation of having failed in attempting
something vital and representative of the age in
which they live.

XV

CONCLUSION

IN conclusion there are several points which
require accentuation if the significance of
modern painting is to be fully grasped.
There have been three epochs in the visual
arts. The first was the longest, and extended
through more than two centuries. The last two
epochs have required less than a hundred years
for their fulfilment. Each epoch dealt with a
specific phase of painting and developed that
phase until its possibilities were exhausted. The
ultimate aim of all great painting was purifica-
tion, but before that could come about many
theories had to be tested; many consummations
had to take place; many problems had to be
solved. The laws of formal organisation were
first discovered and applied with the limited
means at hand. Then came experimentation and
research in the mechanics of expression the
search for new and vital methods wherewith these
principles of composition might be bodied forth
more intensely. Later the functioning properties
of colour were unearthed and employed. In the
course of this evolution many irrelevant factors
found their way into painting. The men of the
first epoch used primitive and obvious materials
to express their forms. When the new means
means inherent in painting were ascertained.

328 MODERN POINTING

it was necessary to eliminate the former media.
The subjed-matter of painting that is, the

recognisable objed, the human obstacle had to
be forced out to permit of the introduction of
colour which had become an inseparable adjund
of form. To effed the coalition of pure composi-
tion and the newer methods was a difficult feat,
for so long had the world been accustomed to the
pidorial asped: of painting, that it had come to
look upon subjedl-matter as a cardinal requisite
to plastic creation.

The first epoch began with the advent of ^oil
painting about 1400, and went forward^ building
and developing, until it reached realisation early
in the seventeenth century. Knowing that organ-
ised form is the basis of all aesthetic emotion, the
old masters strove to find the psychological
principles for co-ordinating volume. Their means
were naturally superficial, for their initial concern
was to determine what they should do, not how
they should do it. In expressing the form they
deemed necessary to great art they used the
material already at their disposal, namely; objec-
tive nature. They organised and made rhythmic
the objects about them, more especially the
human body which permitted of many variations
and groupings and which was in itself a complete
ensemble. And furthermore they had discovered
that movement an indispensable attribute of
the most highly emotional composition was
best expressed by the poise of the human figure,
Colour to these early men was only an addendum
to drawing. They conceived form in black and
.white, and sought to reinforce their work by the
realistic use of pigments. That colour was an

CONCLUSION 329

infixed element of organisation they never sus-
pected. Their preoccupation was along different
lines. The greatest exponents of intense composi-
tion during this first epoch were Tintoretto ?
Giorgione, Masaccio, Giotto, Veronese,, El Greco
and Rubens. These men were primarily inter-
ested in discovering absolute laws for formal
rhythm. The mimetic quality of their work was
a secondary consideration. In Rubens were con-
summated the aims of the older painters; that is,
he attained to the highest degree of compositional
plasticity which was possible with the fixed means
of his period. In him the first cycle terminated.
There was no longer any advance to be made in
the art of painting until a new method of expres-
sion should be unearthed. However, the princi-
ples of form laid down by these old masters were
fundamental and unalterable, Upon them all
great painting must ever be based. They are
intimately connected with the very organisms of
human existence,, and can never be changed until
the nature of mankind shall change.

After Rubens a short period of decadence and
deterioration set in. The older methods no
longer afforded inspiration. About the beginning
of the nineteenth century the second cycle of
painting was ushered in by Turner, Constable and
Delacroix. These men, realising that until new
means were discovered art could be only a
variation of what had come before, turned their
attention to finding a procedure by which the
ambition of the artist could be more profoundly
realised. This second cycle was one of research
and analysis, of scientific experimentation and
data gathering. To surpass Rubens in his own

33 o MODERN PAINTING

medium was Impossible: he had Beached the
ultimate outpost of aesthetic possibilities with
what materials he possessed. The new men first
made inquiry into colour from the standpoint of
its dramatic potentialities. Naturalism was born.
While Delacroix was busy applying the rudiments
of colour science to thematic romanticism, Cour-
bet was busy tearing down the tenets of conven-
tionalism in subjed-matter, and Daumier was
experimenting in the simultaneity of form and
drawing. Manet liberated the painter from set
themes, and thereby broadened the material field
of composition. The Impressionists followed, and
by labourious investigations into nature's methods,
probed the secrets of colour in relation to light.
The Neo-Impressionists went further afield with
scientific observations; and finally Renoir, assimi-
lating all the new discoveries, rejeded the fallacies
and co-ordinated the valuable conclusions. In
him was brought to a close the naturalistic con-
ception of painting- He was the consummation
of the second cycle. During this period the older
laws of composition were for the most part for-
gotten. The painters were too absorbed in their
search for new means. They forgot the founda-
tions of art in their enthusiasm for a fuller and
less restricted expression. The essential character
of colour and light and the new freedom in subjed
seledion so intoxicated them that they lost
sight of all that had preceded them. But their
gifts to painting cannot be overestimated. By
finding new weapons with which future artists
might achieve the highest formal intensity* they
opened up illimitable fields of aesthetic endea-
vour: they made possible the third and last

CONCLUSION 331

cycle which resulted in the final purification of
painting.

Of this cycle Cezanne was the primitive.
Profiting by the Impressionist teachings, he
turned his attention once more to the needs of
composition. He realised the limitations of the
naturalistic conception, and created light which,
though it was as logical as nature's, was not
restricted to the realistic vision. Colour with him
became for the first time a functional element
capable of producing form. The absolute freedom
of subject selection a heritage from the second
cycle permitted him extreme distortions, and
with these distortions was opened up the road to
abstraction. Matisse made form even more arbi-
trary, and Picasso approached still nearer to the
final elimination of natural objectivity, though
both men ignored colour as a generator of form.
They carried forward the work of Cezanne only
on its material side. Then Synchronism, com-
bining the progress of both Cezanne and the
Cubists, took the final step in the elimination of
the illustrative object, and at the same time put
aside the local hues on which the art of Cezanne
was dependent. Since the art of painting is the
art of colour, the Synchromists depended entirely
on primary pigment for the complete expression
of formal composition. Thus was brought about
the final purification of painting. Form was
entirely divorced from any realistic consideration:
and colour became an organic fundion. The meth-
ods of painting, being rationalised, reached their
highest degree of purity and creative capability.

The evolution of painting from tinted illustra-
tion to an abstract art expressed wholly by the

33 2 MODERN PAINTING

one element inherent In it colour, was a
natural and inevitable progress. Music passed
through the same development from the Imitation
of natural sounds to harmonic abstraction. We no
longer consider such compositions as The Battle
of Prague or Monastery Bells aesthetically com-
parable to Korngold's Symphonictta or Schon-
berg's Opus IT. And yet in painting the great
majority confines its judgment to that phase of a
pidure which is irrelevant to its aesthetic im-
portance. So long has form and composition
expressed itself through recognisable phenomena
that the cognitive objed has come to be looked
upon as an end, whereas it is only a means to a
subjective emotion. The world still demands
that a painting shall represent a natural form,
that is, that the basis of painting shall be illustra-
tion. The illustrative objed was employed by
the older painters only because their means were
limited, because they had no profounder method
wherewith to express themselves. And even with
them the human body was deliberately dispropor-
tioned and altered to meet the needs of composi-
tion. When the properties of colour began to be
understood,, the older methods were no longer
required. Colour itself became form. But so
deeply rooted was the illustrative precedent that
no one painter had the courage to eliminate
objedivity at one stroke. Cezanne took the
first great step; Matisse, the second; Cubism the
next; and Synchronism the final one,

So long as painting deals with objective nature
it is an impure art, for recogmsability precludes
the highest aesthetic emotion. All painting, an-
cient and modern, moves us aesthetically only in

CONCLUSION 333

so far as It possesses a force over and beyond Its
mimetic aspedL The average spectator Is unable
to differentiate Ms literary and associative emo-
tions from his aesthetic ecstasy. Form and
rhythm alone are the bases of aesthetic enjoy-
ment; all else in a picture is superfluity. There-
fore a picture in order to represent its intensest
emotive power must be an abstract presentation
expressed entirely in the medium of painting:
and that medium is colour. There are no longer
any experiments to be made in methods. Form
and colour the two permanent and inalienable
qualities of painting have become synonymous.
Ancient painting sounded the depths of composi-
tion. Modern painting has sounded the depths of
colour* Research is at an end- It now remains
only for artists to create. The means have been
perfected: the laws of organisation have been laid
clown. No more innovatory "movements" are
possible. Any school of the future must neces-
sarily be compositional It can be only a varia-
tion or a modification of the past. The methods
of painting may be complicated. New forms may
be found. But it is no longer possible to add
anything to the means at hand. The era of pure
creation begins with the present day.

Those who go to painting for anecdote, drama,
archaeology, illustration or any other quality which
is not strictly aesthetic, would do well to confine
their attention and their comments to the acade-
micians of whom there is and always has^ been an
abundant supply, Let them keep their hands
off those artists who strive for higher and more
eternal manifestations. The greatest artists of
every age have never sought to appeal to the

334 MODERN PAINTING

lovers of reality and sentiment. Nor have they
wished to be judged by standards which con-
sidered only verisimilitude and technical profi-
ciency. It is the misfortune of painting that
literary impurities should have accompanied its
development, and it is the irony of serious
endeavour that on account of these impurities
there has been an indefinite deferment of any
genuine appreciation of painting. It is difficult
to convince a man who has not experienced the
great aesthetic emotions which art is capable of
producing, that there is an intoxication to be
derived from the contemplation of art keener than
that of association, sentiment or drama. Not
knowing that greater delights await him once he
has penetrated beneath the surface, he has
doggedly combated every effort to eliminate the
irrelevant accretions. But if painting was to
reach its highest point of artistic creation, its
realistic asped had to go. When colour became
profoundly understood, no longer could the artist
apply it according to the didates of nature. It
lost its properties as decoration and as an en-
hancement of the naturalistic vision. Its de-
mands freed the artist from the tyranny of
nature. In becoming pure, painting drew further
and further away from mimicry; and the superfi-
cial lover of painting^ enslaved by the ignorant
and rigid standards of the past, protested with
greater and greater vehemence.

The misunderstanding which has attached to
modern painting has been colossal The newer
men, because they have dared search for means
of expression superior to those of the past, have
met with ridicule and abuse. From Delacroix

CONCLUSION 335

to Synchromism the critics and public have fought
every advance. Immured in tradition, their minds
have been unable to grasp the meaning of the

new activities or to sense the artist's need for
pure creation. No school has escaped the oblo-
quy of the professional critic who, judging art
from its superficial and unimportant side, has
failed to penetrate to its fundamentals, Dela-
croix was declared crazy by the leading critics.
The Journal des Artistes said of him, "We do
not say this man is a charlatan,, but we do say
this man is the equivalent of a charlatan/ 5 The
Observatcur des Beaux- Arts, commenting on this
artist's failure to procure an award, remarked,
"Delacroix, the leader of the new school, received
no honours, but in order to recompense him, he
was accorded a two hours* seance each day in the
morgue." Gros, Delecluze and Alfred Nettement
are conspicuous among the academicians and
critics who bitterly opposed Delacroix's innova-
tions. Courbet met with a similar reception.
Gautier, after studying one of his pictures, wrote,
"One does not know whether to weep or laugh.
There are heads which recall the ensigns of
tobacconists and of the menagerie." Clement de
Ris said of Courbet's work, "It is the glorification
of vulgar ugliness;" and de Chennevieres called
one of his finest pictures "an ignoble and impious
caricature/* Even Manet, whose radicalism was
slight, brought down upon himself the abuse of
the critics for daring to paint modern themes.
Claretie drew the following conclusion from the
Olympia: "One cannot reproach Manet for
idealising merges folles, for he makes of them
merges sales." The remark was characteristic.

336 MODERN POINTING

Manet revolted against classic subjects, and for
his modernity was excoriated by the moral
traditionalists.

The early Impressionists, as pretty as ^ they
were, did not escape critical abuse. Benjamin
Constant called them "the school of snobs, the
conscious or unconscious enemies of art/' and
added, "Their days are numbered." ^ Albert Wolff
was more venomous. "These soi-disant artists/"
he wrote, "call themselves the intransigents^ They
take canvases, colours and brushes, fling at
hazard several tones 5 and then sign the work.
It is thus that the wandering spirits at Ville-
Evrard pick up pebbles on the highway and
think they have found diamonds. Hideous
spectacle of human vanity straying toward de-
mentia!" Paul Mantz's remarks were similar.
His criticism in part read: "Before the works of
certain members of the group one is tempted to
ascribe to them a defed of the eyes, singularities
of vision which would be the joy of ophthal-
mologists, and the terror of families/' (How like
the recent criticisms of the very modern men
does all this sound these accusations of in-
sanity, these hints of defective vision! Such
comments would seem to have been lifted almost
bodily by the detractors of Cubism, Futurism and
Synchronism.) Renoir shared a similar fate.
One leading critic said it was futile to "try to
explain to Renoir that the female torso is not a
mass of decomposing flesh with spots of green
and violet which denote the state of complete
putrefaction in a cadaver/* Roger Ballu ex-
plained the appearance of Renoir's work thus;
"At first view it seemed that his canvases, during

CONCLUSION 337

their trip from the studio to the exhibition,, had
undergone an accident/' With the exception of

Manet two years prior to his death and Renoir
at the age of sixty-eight, not one of the Impres-
sionists was decorated by the French government,
They were banished from official Salons,, and
compelled to expose in private galleries.

To quote from the critics who denounced
Cezanne would be an endless task. When he
exposed at the Impressionist exhibition in the
Rue Peletier in 1877 he was universally regarded
with disgust and horror and considered a bar-
barian. The venom of the critics was appalling.
They attacked him from every standpoint, though
on one point they seemed in agreement, namely:
that he was a communard. Nor did the abuse
cease with his early works. His greatness has
consistently evaded critics and painters alike.
Recently the American painter, William M. Chase,
offered the suggestion that Cezanne did not know
how to paint. Chase's opinion is not an isolated
one: it is typical of the minor academic painters
and the critics who view art through the eyes of
the past, Henri-Matisse is another painter who
has received short shrift from the reviewers.
One need not have a long memory to recall the
adverse criticisms he provoked. His distortions
have served as a basis for a display of ignorance
which has few parallels in art history. Matisse
himself has fed fuel to the fire. In his interview
with newspaper men he indulged in much high
jesting, and the remarks attributed to him were
in many instances blague. Others, judging him
by his words, have pinned on him the labels of
charlatan and degenerate.

33 8 MODEM PAINTING

The Cubists, misunderstood from the first,
have been a source of ridicule rather than of
contumely. Systematisers have sought to trace
them to Diirer, forgetting that Cezanne once
wrote: "Treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere
and the cone; the whole put in perspedive, so
that each side of an objed and of a plane directs
itself toward a central point." Even today, after
the vital contributions of the Cubists have altered
the whole trend of modern art, there are few who
see in them aught but the material for laughter.
The critics who have accepted the Impressionists
and Cezanne deny the merits of Cubism, venting
their derision in a manner which recalls the de-
tractors of the very schools which these critics
now uphold. Synchromism has perhaps called
forth the bitterest protests. It was the last step
in the evolution of modern means. It had no
affinities with the academies. There was _ no
foothold in this new school for the conservatives
and reactionaries. The Munich critics were first
to attack it. Later in Paris Andre Salmon
wrote, "The public will believe that Synchromism
is the final movement of which it has learned.
Synchromism is the worst of backward move-
ments, a vulgar art, without nobility, unlikely to
live, as it carries the principles of death in itself."
Les Arts et Les Artistes summed up Synchromists
with: "The house painter at the corner can,
when he wishes, claim that he belongs to this
school." La Plume discovered the fad that
"Macdonald- Wright copies with a dirty broom
the Slave of Michelangelo." Charles H. Caffin
declared, "The whole tenor of their foreword and
introduction is one of egregious self-exploitation

CONCLUSION 339

and self-advertisement. This . . . raises the very
obvious question: 'Are these men megalo-
maniacs or charlatans?' Possibly they are
neither the one nor the other. I am not in a
position to decide/'

These quotations and comments are set down
to reveal the opposition which the genuine modern
painters have had to contend with. The criti-
cisms of each movement repeat themselves with
the following one,, even to a point of verbal
similarity. The attacks on Synchronism are
strangely like those which companioned Impres-
sionism. The same facetiousness, the same irrel-
evant denunciation, the same opposition to the
new, the same antipathy for progress are manifest
in all the critics of the new painting from Dela-
croix to date. All arise out of ignorance, out of
that immobility of mind which cannot judge
clearly until a thing is swathed in the perspedive
of the years* Art has grown faster than the
critic's ability to comprehend. Its problems are
a closed book to him, for, not being a painter
himself, he requires a longer period in which to
assimilate the new ideals. Gradually as the new
methods establish themselves, and become
accepted (as in the case of Impressionism), the
critic at last comes abreast of a movement; but by
that time art has gone forward and left him in the
rear* Again he attacks the new. All innovations
are as poison to his system, until he again becomes
adjusted. Thus can we account for the animosity
and ridicule with which each modem movement has
been met.

Nor are the animadversions of academic critics
the only obstacles In the path of aesthetic develop-

34 o MODERN PAINTING

ment. Those who sympathise with the new with-
out understanding it do more harm than good.
There are those who always accept the latest
men irrespective of their individual merit. But
modernity in itself is not a merit, and the modern
enthusiasts, in defending the newest painters,
very often expend their energies on the undeserv-
ing. Thus the mediocrities are given prominence
over the truly great; and the lesser artists are
looked upon as representative of the epoch.
Again, those who admire without comprehending
are given to emphasising the less important points
of departure in the new men, and of ignoring the
deeper qualities which represent the primary
importance of modern art. The true meaning of
the late movements is thereby obscured. Of this
class of critic Arthur Jerome Eddy may be
mentioned as representative. By crediting the
distinctly second-rate moderns with qualities they
have only absorbed from greater men, and by
misunderstanding the animating ideals of today's
painting, he presents so disproportionate and
biased a history that the entire significance of
modern art is lost. England, France and Ger-
many possess critics who feel the grandeur but
miss the meaning of the new ideals, and their
books and articles, while crediting the modern
painters with vitality, go little beneath the
surface*

However, there are a few men to whom, the
modernist owes much for intelligent assistance,
One may name Meier-Graefe as one of these,
despite his being in reality a pioneer. He has
shown an eager attitude to do justice, and has
succeeded in bringing the modern men to the

CONCLUSION 341

attention of the world. Giiillaume Apollinaire,
editor of Les Soirees de Paris, has done more
Intelligent service for the younger heretics in
France than any other man. Clive Bell and
Roger Fry represent the ablest and most discern-
ing defenders of the modern spirit in England;
although Mr. A. R. Orage 5 by opening up the
columns of the New Jge, has permitted a healthy
discussion and exposition of the radical art
theories. In America much credit is due Mr.
Alfred Stieglitz for his insistent demands that the
later men be given a respectful hearing. By his
sympathetic attitude and his ceaseless labours he
has brought before the American public the work
of many prominent modern artists; and his
sincerity and understanding have done much
toward ameliorating the conventional scoffs of
American critics.

But were there no far-seeing defenders of
modern painting^ the signs of the awakening are
too numerous and too conspicuous to be ignored.
On every hand we are conscious of the struggle
for new methods and forms. Not all the inertia
of the critics and the public has succeeded in
suppressing the vital spirit. Nor will it succeed.
The modern tendency in painting cannot be
dismissed as charlatanism or extremism. The
ignorant and reactionary may laugh and hurl
philippics. Such opposition, if it has any effect,
will only prove a stimulus to those who have
experienced the ecstasy of the new work. The
old dies hard. Even when the corpse is buried
(as it has been) the ghost lingers. But the light
will soon grow too strong. The ghost in time will
be dissolved. For centuries painting has been

342 MODERN PAINTING

reared on a false foundation, and the criteria of
aesthetic appreciation have been irrelevant.
Painting has been a bastard art an agglomera-
tion of literature, religion, photography and
decoration. The efforts of painters for the last
century have been devoted to the elimination of
all extraneous considerations, to making painting
as pure an art as music. But so widespread is
the general ignorance regarding art's funda-
mentals that the modern men have been opposed
at every step. Public and critical illiteracy in the
arts, however, matters little. The painter's joy
lies in the rapture of creation, in the knowledge
that he is carrying forward the banner of a high
ideal.

INDEX

Adoration of the Wise Men, 40.

Alexander, "John W., 98.

Aitichiero, 191.

Ambassadors, The, 24.

Andrelev, 52.

Angelina, 68.

Angelus, The, 57.

An$e<; au Tomleau, Les, 79.

Annunciation, 81.

Anquetin, 197,

Antwerp Museum, 40.

Apollinaire, Guillaumcj, 341.

Apres le Bain, 212.

Archipenko, 163.

Arm Organic ation in Blue"Green, 301.

Art of Spiritual^ Harmony, The, 310.

Arts et ies Artistes t Lr.r~338.

Ashe, E. M., 221.

Assommoir, //, 73.

Assyrian art, 78.

Augicr, 216.

Augrantl, 175,

Au Piano, 123.

Aurier, 193.

Avignon painters, 108,

e> La, 203,

ff, 1884, (Renoir), 120*
f, 1888, (Renoir), 122, 123,
j&dignffus<? au Griffon, La, 112,

Baigneuses* 1885, (Renoir), 121, 125.
Baignffuses, 1902, (Renoir), 125-126,

157.

Baigneuses^ (Matisse), 226, 235.
J&dignfusFS, Les, (Courbet), 56.
Baignfttsts* L$s, (Gleizes), 257.
Sain, Le, (Daumier), 60.
JBain, Lf, (Manet), see Dejeuner sur

Main TurCf Le, <5p.

BalftngQire* La, 115.

Balla, Giacomo, 276; Dog and Person

in Movement, 272,
Ballu, Roger, 336.
Balzac, 25, 216; Le Chef-d'(Euvre

Inconnu, 162.

l, 69, 70, 87* 284.

Bar des Folies-Begere, Le 9 80.

JSataille de Taillfbourg, 40.

Battle of Prague, The, 332.

Baudelaire, 43, 53.

Baudelaire Chez Ies Mufl.es, 219-220.

Bazille, 89, 103.

Beardsley, Aubrey, 181, 221.

Beaux-Arts, 153, 165, 223, 323.

Beerbohm, Max, 62, 221.

Beethoven, 25, 42, 82 155, 281;

Ninth Symphony, 8.
Bcchteiev, 324.
Bell, Clive, 341.
Bellini, Gentile, 188.
Bellows, 221,
Bernard, fimile, 130, 143, 152, 156,

175, 182, 195, 197.
Bernhardt, portrait or Sarah, 216.
Bernheim-Jeune galleries, 290, 297.
Besnard, 3 19,

Boccioni, Umberto, 275, 276.
Bocklin, 21, 203.
Bolz, 324.
Bonington, 37, 49.
Bonnard, 315, 316-318, 318, 319; Le

Jar din, 317.
Bonnat, 215.
Bononi, 23.
Borassa school, 191.
Botticelli, 2i> 22, 28, 93, 203.
Boucher, 34, 97, 121.
Bouguereau, loi, 222, 223, 239.
Bourdeile, 320,
Bourgeois, 31.
Boussingault, 325.
Blanc, 165.
Blast, 325.
Bloch, 324,
Blumenscnein, 221.
Bracquemond, 165.
Brangwyn, 21*
Braque, Georges, 257, 258.
Bronzino, 187.
Bruce, 262.
Bruyas, 5?*
Buen Fiaja, 219.
Bulks de Savon, Les, 80.
Bussy, Simon, 321-322.

344

INDEX

Buveur d* Absinthe., <?, 66, 68.

Byron, 43.

Byzantine art, 9, 35, 40, 51, 93, 204.

Cabanel, 222.

Cabaret de la Mere Anthony, Le, 109,

C aft-Concert, 215.

Caffin, Charles H., 338.

Caillebotte Collection, 98-99, 104,

Calvary (Memlmc), 217.

Canaletto, 188.

Caprichosy 22$.

Captimte de Babylone> La> 42,

Caravaggio, 44, 56.

Carlo pez, 221.

Carra, Carlo D., 275, 276; Funeral 0}
the Anarchist Galli, 3 14.

Carreno, 67.

Carriere, 60, 73, 194, 198, 223.

Cassatt, 165.

Casseurs de Pier res, Les, 57.

Castagnary, 79 ;

Castello, Valerio, 21.

Cathedral, La y 102.

Cazfn, 209.

Celesti, 23.

Cellini, 52.

Cesare, 221.

Cezanne, 21, 26, 27, 31, 32, 36, 45,
56, 6r, 75, 96, 97 *4> "5 &
128, 129-163, 175, 176, 1 80, 189,

I97 ? 20O, 203, 206, 208, 222, 223,

225, 234, 240, 241, 242, 244, 247,

249, 250, 251, 253, 254, 260, 262,

272, 274, 277, 280, 28l, 282, 283,

284, 286, 287, 289, 291, 295, 296,

298, 300, 303, 307, 308, 310, 320,

3^1, 33i 332 337> 338.
Chagall, 324.
Chahut, Le, 180.
Chamailiard, 197, 324.
Champfleury, 56.
Chanteuse des Rues, La, 79.
Chardin, 34, 225.
Charivari, 48.
Chase, William M. 337*
Chavannes, Puvis de, 74, 202, 316,

3*9-

Cbef-d'CEuvre Inconnu, Le, 162.

Ghemin de Per, Le, 80.

Cheret, 216.

Chesneau, Ernest, 44*

Cbevelure, La, 1 14.

Chevreul, 31, 84, 165, 166, 168,^180,

285; De la Loi du Contrasts Si

tarn dei Conteurs, 164.
Chien et Lievres, 51.

Chinese art, 64, 125, 128, 190, 215,

3*5-

Chnstophe, Jules, 177.
Chromo-luminarists, see Neo-lmpres-

sionism.
Cirnabue, 29.
Cirque, Le, I So.
Claire de Lune, Le, 80.
Claretie, 335.
Claude, 50.
Coco, heads of, 126.
Coco et les Deux Servant f$ 9 126.
Coins de Riviere, IQQ,
Combat de Ctrfs, Le, 51.
Combat du Kerseage et de l y Alabama^ Bo.
Concert Champetre, sec Rural Concert*
Concgliano, 79.
Conrad 3 Joseph, 52, 16 JU
Constable, 17, 37, 43, 46, 49, 50, 97,

Constant, Benjamin, 336,

Cormon, 215.

Corot, 21,48, 68^87, 8g, 91, 108, 189,

Correggio; La Vicrge d VEcuelle, 6z.

Courbet, 17, 45, 48, 50-58, 59, 63,
66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 7^> 73* 74. 7S
76, 77, 8 1, 83, 87, 89, 97, 106, 107,

108, 109, III, 112, 113, H5, 127,

J28, 131, 134, 158, 207, 208, 212,

239, 253, 282, 284, 319, 33p 355;
Les Baignmscs, 56; Les Casseurs
de Pier res > 57; Chien et Lievres^ 51;
Le Combat de Cerfs* 51; Fern me de
Munich, 53; I*es Grands Cbataign-
wrs* 57J La Grntte, 56; Le Mamac,
76; U Ewterre, went a OrnanSj 51, 54,
55, 63, 77, 239; I*es Luttewrs^ 59^60;
Le A tour de la Confetenct^ 5*1; La
Fagiu, 1 01.

Course ds T&ure,attx y 80,

Courtesan* The, 217,

Gourtois, 108.

Couture, Thomas, 66, 161; MStbodes
et Entretiens d* Atelier* 44.

Grayer, Caspar de, 306,

Creation of the Sun and Moon, 24*

Cromwell au Chateau de Windsor, 40.

Croquet^ Le, 123,

Cross, 174, 224.

Cubism (Cubists), 97, 187, 222, 227,
237-262, 274, 275, 277, 282, 283,

33 3 > 33 6 > 33$*'

da Bologna, Giovanni, 41,
da Bosozzo, Michelino, 191*

"a t 114.

INDEX

345

Dante et Virgile aux Enfers, 36, 55.
da Sesto, Cesare, 306.
Daubigny, 67.

Daudet) 216.

Daurmer, 17, 25, 58-63, 66, 68, 72,
97, 106, 126, 137, 144, 182, 200,

207, 208, 213, 220, 226, 243, 278,

279, 280, 330; Le Bain, 60, Don
Quichottf, 62; Le Drame, 63; Les
Emigrants, 62; Les Lutteurs, 59-60;
RatapoiL 62; Le Repos des Saltim-
banques, 60; La Rcpublique, 61;
Silene, 63.

David, 17, 34, 35, 43, 56, 239, 282.

Davies, Arthur B., 323.

da Vinci, Leonardo, 44, 60, 306;
Tratfato delta Pitlura, 148.

Dead Christ, The, 24,

Deb u court, 34,

Debussy, 52.

Decamps; Sonneurs d$ Cloches, 62,

de Chenncvieres, 335*

dc Chirico, 325.

Defoe, 191.

Degas, 19, 62, 63, 165, 191, 203,

207-22 1, 222, 226, 242, 253, 266,

37> 3I3> 3*8; Apres Iff B&in, ziz;
Cafe-Concert, 215; Femme au Tub,

212; Musicians a V Orchestra 213;
La Sortie du Bain, 212; La Toilette,
212; Torsf de Pemme S'ssuyant>
212; Trois DanseuseSy 212.

De Hahn, 197.

del Barbari, Jacopo, 223.

Dejeuner, Le> 79.

Dejeuner sur I'lfarbe, Le y 69-70, 77-78,

79'

Delacroix, 17, 25, 27, 30, 34, 35-46,
4B 50, $3 S^ S7> 5 8 > 59. 62, 63,
66, 67, 72, 75, 80, 8 1, 87, 88, 106,

107, 1 08, III, 112, 113, 114, 128,

133. *35> *37> 165, 175, 176, 177,
180, i8r 182, 201, 205, 207, 264,
277, 278, 281, 282, 303, 310, 329,
330> 334 335? 339> Bataille de
Tailkbourg 40; La Cqptivite de
Rabylunt\ 42; Cromwell au Chateau
de 'Windsor, 40; Dante ft FirgUff
aux Enjws, 36, 45; Entewinent de^
Rebecca, 40; Entree des Croises a
Jerusalem, 40; Les Fmmes d'Atyer
dans Leur d ppartement, 39, ill,
112; La Grffce JRxpirant sur Us
Muines de Missolonghi, 41; Janis*
saires a VAttaque, 40; La Justice de
Trajan, 40, 42; Jnstmun Com-^
pwant Iff Institutes^ 43; La Libsrte

Guidant U Peuph sur Us Barricades,

38, 40; Lion Dechirant un Cadavre,

41; La Lutte de Jacob avec V Ange>

40, 45; Massacre de Scio, 36, 39?

Pieta 9 41 j Renaude et Angelique 9

62; Repos, 42.
de la Fresnay, 323.
De la Loi du Contrasts Simultane des

Couleurs* 164.
Delaunay, 259-162, 323; U&quipe de

Cardi/ 9 260; Route de Laon, 261;

Les Tours, 261; Fills de Paris,

259-260, 260.

Delaunay-Terk, Madame, 262.
Delecluze, 335.
Delibes, 281.

Denis, Maurice, 197, 216, 319-320,
Derain, Andre, 163, 320.
de RLs, Clement, 335.
Descent from the Cross, 24.
De Segonzac, 321.
d J Espagnat, 322*
Desvallieres, 320.
Dethornas, Maxime, 221.
D'Eugene Delacroix au Neo~Impres~

sionnisme, 169.
Deux Scaurs, Les, 123.
Dens? Tah'itunSy 226*
Devil's Bridge, The, 50.
Diane Chasseresse, 109.
Diaz, 68, 89, 108, 182.
Dimanche a la Grande-Jatte, Un, 180,

20 j.

di Nicole, Pietro, 41.
Divisionists, see Neo-Impressionism.
Dog and Person in Movement, 272.
Donatella, 203.
Donde Fa Mama, 219.
Don ^uicbotte, 62.
Dostoievsky, 52.
Dove, 84, 324.
Drame, Le, 63.
Dreiser, Theodore, 52,
Dubois-PiUet, 175.
Duchamp, Marcel, 257, 258.
Dumas, 43.
Diirer, 187, 251, 338; Four Naked

Women, 24.
Duret, 102.

Dutch landscapists, 96.
Dynamisms d'une Auto, 269.

Earl and Countess of Arundd, The,

24.

East Indian art, 237.
Eddy, Arthur Jerome, 340.

a Farengemlk, U, 99.

INDEX

Egyptian art, 64, 7$* 205.
Eichler, R. M., 202.

El Greco, 20, 21, 22, 51, 9S> *25?
I3S> *58, 163, 203, 246, 254, 255,
259, 297, 308, 329; Annunc^at^on>
8lj Obsequies of the Count of
Qrgaz, SS; *Tfa Resurrection of
Christ, 24.

Emigrants, Les> 62.

mtte Zola, 79-

Emperor Charles F 3 24.

En Bateau, 79.

JSn/iwrf a /'%/<?, I'* 67-

En/ants en Rose ei Bleu, Les> 120.

English painters, 99, n6.

Engstrom, Albert, 221.

Enlfaement de Rebecca, 40,

internment a Ornans, L y 51, 54> SS>

jBnjfw ^>J Croisss a Jerusalem, 40.

jS^wt^ de Cardiff, L , 260.

Erler, Fritz, 202.

Etchells, Frederick, 323.

Eva GonzaltSt 79.

Execution de Maximilian, So,

Falaise a &retat, 100, 101.

Fantin-Latour, 55, 175.

Fauche, 197.

Fawt, 8,

Fawes, Chef des, 233.

Fauvisrn, 234*

Fecondite, 73.

Femme a la Mandoline, 251.

Femme a la Perruche, La, 112.

Femme au Ch&al, La, 258.

Femme an Miroir, La> nj-

Femme au Perroquet, La 9 79.

Femme au Tub, 212.

Femme aux Mangos, La, 75-

Femme de Munich, 55.

Femmes Assists a V Ombre des Palmier s,

196,
Femmes d'Mgtr dans Leur A$parte~

ment, Les, 39, ill, 112.
Ferguson, J. D. 324.
Fielding, 37.

Fighting femeraire, The, 47.
Filiger, 197.

Fillef de Caiulle Mendes, LeS 9 123.
Fittette a la Gerbe, La, 123.
Filletu a I' Orange, La, 2,6.
Filktte Attentive^ La, 1 14.
fin de siede movement, 219.
Flandrin, 321, 322.
Flemish masters, 137.
Flight Turning a Corner, 274.

Fotie, La, 55.

ForainJ.-L.,62,i65, 213, 219-221, 221;

Baudelaire Chez Us Muflts, 219-

220.

Fornerod, Rodolphe, 202.

Forum, The, g.

Fouquet, 34.

Four Naked Women, 24.

Fragonard, 34, 121, 244.

French art, 211.

Friesz, Othon, 22, 234, 320.

Frost, 262.

Fry, Roger, 324, 14*-.

Fuller, portrait of Loie, 210, ^

Funeral of the Anarchist Gatti, 314.

Futurism (Futurists), 257, 259, 264-

276, 282, 284, 285, 291, 295, 303,

316,323, 336.

Gainsborough, in, 181; Mrs, Sid-

dons, 115*
Gare St. Lazare, La, 50.

Gauguin, 22, 39, 93> I0 4j ^S> *&$*
183, 184, 1 86, 187-206, 208, 210,

222, 223, 225, 226, 227, 231, 243,

246, 247, 279> 2 8 *> 285, 306, 308,
315, 316, 318, 319, 323; Dfux
Tabttiens, 226; Femme s Assises &
lOmbre des Pafaniers, 196; La.

Femme &ux Mangos, 75; jeunes

Cretonnes, 195; Noa^ Noa, 190;

Paysage de la Martinique, 194;

Muperupe, 195; ^ahltiennes, 195;

Faimoumati Tel Oa, 196,
Gautier, 43 335-
Gerard, 17, 34, 35, 56.
Gericault, 34, 35, $i, H3> 2Xi ># 28x;

La Folle, 55; Rade&u de la Medus^

^35)55-

German art, 211.

Gerome, 222,

Ghil, Rene de, 266"*

Giampietrino, 306,

Gibson, C D., 221.

Giorgione, 21, 30, 95, 126, 320; Rural

Concert (Concert Champetre), 69.
Giotto, 22, 29, 44, 56, 75, 125,' 195,

203, 2^5, 280, 329; Death of Saint

Francis, 8l> Descent from the

Cross, 24,

Girardon, 121, 121-122,
Girodet, 34,

Glace sans Tain* La 9 231*
Glackens, W. S., 324*
Gleizes, Albert^ 257, 258; Let
25 7 j L lwmm$ au

INDEX

347

Goethe; Faust, 8.

Goya, 19, 25, 44, 67, 74, 75, 76, no,

187, 218, 225, 231, 255; Buen

Fiaje, 219; Capricbos, 225; Do^

Fd Mama, 219; la JWtfytf Desnuda,

42.

Grand Canal Venice > The, 24.
Grands Chataigniers, Les, 57.
Grant, Duncan, 324.
Granville, 62.
Granzow, 325.
Gravelot, 34.
Grece Expirant sur Its Ruines de

Missolongbi, La, 41.
Greek artists, 35, 125, 128, 163.
Greuze, 21, 34.
Gris, Jean, 258.
Gros, 17, 34, 35, 335.
Grotte, La, 56.
Guard i, 188; The Grand Canal

Venice, 24.

Guaricnto; The Heavenly Host, 274.
Guercino, 56.

Guerin, Charles, 35, 36, 322, 322-323.
Guillaumin, 89, 96, 103, 104, 165,

166, 194.

Guitarrero, Lf 9 67.
Guizot, caricature of, 62.

Hallock, Madame Mary, 266.
Hals, Franz, 70, 80, 89, 187, 284.

Ilarnac, Lr, 7$*
Hankwan> 127.
Hartley, 324.

Hartmann, Sadikichi, 266.
Hassam> Child e, 324.
Hauptmann, Gernart, 52,
Hayden, 324.
Haydn, 155.

II fad of a Chinese Lady 127*
Mead of an Old Man, 217.
Heavenly Host, The, 274.
Held, portrait of Anna, 216.
Helmholtz, 31, 165, 168, 285.
Henri, Robert, 273, 283.
Henri-Matisse. See Matisse,
Hiroshige, 73, 99; Series of the To-

kaido, 100.
Hogarth, 19, 116.
Hokusai, 73, 99, 218; Fiews of Fuji,

loo.

Holbein, 209; The Ambassadors^ 24.
Hommff au Bakon^ L\ 257
Horace, 134.
Houses of Parliament London^ ?Jk>

100*
Humbert, 165*

Impressionism (Impressionists), 31,
36, 43, 46, 47, 48, 49, 70, 74, So,

82, 83-106, 107, 1 08, III, 112,
H4, 119, 120, 129, 135, 136, 137,

139, 141, 144, 156, 158, 165, 1 66,
167, 168, 169, 173, 174, 175, 176,
177, 188, 189, 194, 195, 196, 198,

199, 202, 203, 208, 209, 211, 222,

223, 224, 238, 239, 241, 246, 248,

274, 279, 280, 282, 284, 285, 286,

287, 294, 295, 315, 318, 324, 330,

33i> 336 337, 338,339-
Iwprovisation No, 29, 315.
Ingenue ', 115,
Ingres, 17, 35, 56, 62, 108, in, 112,

126, 203, 210, 226, 227, 239, 243,

322; Le Bain Turc, 69; La Source,
69; Stratonice, 2IOJ Thetis et
Jupiter) 79.

Intimists, 315-319.

Intruse, if, 193.

Italian art, 56, 82, 97.

Janissaires d FAttaque 9 40,
Japanese art, 64, 93, 99, 100, 188.
Japonaisf 9 La, 98.

?ardin, Le t 317,
ardin de Bellewe, Le, So.
Jar din d f ssoyes, Le, 126.
Jafretiere, La, 75.
Jaulmes, Gustave, 202, 322.
Jawleasky, 324.
Jffu de Ballcsy 235.
Jeuntrs Brfftonnes, 195,
John, Augustus, 320.
Jongkind, 48, 69^91, 96, 175.
Journal, Delacroix's, 37, 39, 45, 164*

166, 177.

Journal des Artistes, 335.
Juanes, Juan de, 51.
Justice de Trajan, La, 40, 42,
Justinien Composant les Institutes, 43 *

Kandinsky, 234, 264, 308-315; The
Art of Spiritual Harmony, 3 10; Jw*
provisation No. 2p, 315.

Kanoldt, 325.

Keion; 'Flight Turning a Corner, 274*

Knauerhase, 324.

Korngold, 52 j Symphonietta, 332,

Kroll, 324.

La Fosse, 79.
Lancret, 34.
Landon, C, P.,

, ,'. ., .

de, Pierre, 321.

348

INDEX

Largilliere, 121.

Larson, Carl, 221.

La Tour, 34.

Lautrec, see Toulouse-Lautrec.

Laval, 197*

Lawencej 37, 209.

Lebasque, 321.

Le Beau, Alcide, 202, 322.

Leclerc, Julien, 193.

Leger, Fernand, 256-257, 258; Mai-
sons et Fumees, 256; Les Toils, 256.

Legrand, Louis, 213, 218, 218-219,
22 1 , 227; MaUresse, 219.

Legros, 209.

Leibniz, 269.

Le Moyne, 79, 121.

Le Nains, the, 34.

Lewis, Wyndham, 320, 323.

Lhermitte, 209.

Lhote, 324. , 7

Libertf Guidant le Peuple sur les
Barricades, La, 38, 40.

Liombruno, 223.

Lion Dechirant wn, Cadavre y 41*

Lise, 109, 109-110, in.

Liszt, 97.

Little Dutchmen, the, 188.

Logff La t 114.

Lola de Faience, 68.

London series (Monet), 102.

Lotj, Pierre, 191.

Lotiron, 324.

Louis Philippe, 43.

Louis XVI, 34.

Louvre, the, 36, 53, 69, 136, 223, 226.

Luce, 175,

Lucretius, 134.

Lutu de Jacob avec VAnge, La* 40, 45,

Lutteurs, Les (Courbet), 59-60.

Luttturs, Les (Daumier), 59.

Luxembourg gallery, 53, 68, 99, 104,
115.

Macdonald-Wright, S., 283, 284-285,
286, 287-288, 289, 289-290, 292,
293, 296, 298, 300-302, 303, 338;
Arm Organisation in Blue-Greenj
301; Synchronize en Bleu, 297.

Madame T. et Son Fits, 26.

Mile, Durand-Rucl, 113, 114.

Maeterlinck, 310; L'Intruse f 193.

Maisons et Fumets 9 256.

MaitrrssC) 219.

Mallarme, 275.

Manet, 25, 52, 53, 62, 64-82, 83, 87,
9o> 93? 9& 99 106, 107, 108, 109,

III, 112, 113, 05, I27> "8, 131,

*34> I35> J 9*> 204, 207, 212, 225,
226, 239, 243, 2^2, 283, 308, 3p,
335> 336, 337J Angelina, 68; Les
Anges au Tombcau, 7Q; Le Bar des
Folies-Bergete, 80; Les B'idlcs de
Savon, So; Le Biwcur d" Absinth?,
66, 68; La Chantcttse des Rues, 70;
Le Che min de Ft'r> Ho; 7,r Chi ire de
Lime, So; Combat du Kewage et
de I' Alabama, So; Course de "Tan-
reaux, 80 ; Le Dejeuner * 79; L'/V-
jcunersurrilerbf, 6(5-70, 77-78, 79;
Mmile Zola* 79; En liateau* 79;
U Enfant a rjftpt't\ 67; Jwu Gon-
zalcs, 79; Execution de Maximillen^
80; La Femme au Perraquc^ 79;
Le Guiterrero, 67; Le Jardin de
Bellwue, 80; La JarrftierC) 75;
Lola de J r tdence, 68; Nana^ 75;
La Nymphe Surprise, 66; Olympic*
74-7S> 79 335; L " Parents de
t Artiste, 67; Le Port de Bordeaux*
80; Rendezvous de Chats, 77, 80;
Le Repos, 76.

Manguin, 321.

Mantcgna; The Dead Christ, 24,

Mantz, Paul, 336.

Man with the Hoe, 'The, 57.

Marconi, 97.

Marinetti," 265, 276,

Marquet, 324.

Marseillaise, 3 1 1-312.

Martin, Henri, 101, 102, 175.

Martinet's gallery, 68,

Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, The,

Marval, Matlame, 321,
Masaccjo, 22, 42, 329; Saint Peter
Baptising tbe Pagans* 24.

Massarre de Scio, 36, 39.

Massys, 217; The Courtesan, 217;

Head of an Old Man> 217; Por-

trait of a GanoV) 217,

Matisse, 22, 32, 97, 133, 2O2 203,
216, 222-236, 237, 2jH 241, 243,
246, 247, 254, 256, 262, a8o aBi,
282, 284, 285, 289, 291, 308, 309,

33 *> 33 2 337; R<iiwittrs> 326,
235; La Glace. wns Tain> 235; *7^* <Jf
Balks, 235; Za A'[vsiqurestiuisse)
235; i Mwiqw (pannetw decora*

tij), 235-

Mauve, 182*
MtfjM Drsnueta, La, 42,
Maxo, 67.
Mazatola-Bcdoli, 203*

INDEX

349

Mejssonier, 53.

Meier-Graefe, 55, 340.

Memlinc, 217;' The Casting of the

Lots, 217; Our Lord's Passion, 217.
Menage Silky, Le, 109, no-in, 1 12,
Mere el^Enf ant) 123.
Merimee, 43.
Merril, Stuart, 193.
Methodes n Entretiens d y Atelier, 44,
Metzinger, Jean, 257, 257-258; La

Femme au Cbeval, 258; Le Port, 258.
Meules, Les, 102.
Meunier, 62.
Michelangelo, 27, 36, 42, 44, 60, 61,

7S 82, 95, 119, 122, 129, 145, 155,

159, 163, 165, 235, 236, 237, 254,

267, 273, 284, 285, 294, 306, 308;

Creation of ihe Sun and Moon, 24;

Slaves, 21," 290, 299, 338.
Mille et Une Nuits, 231.
Millet, 57, 182, 1 88; The Angdus,

57; The Man with the Hoe, 57.
Minerva Expelling Man, 57.
Miracle of Saint Mark, The, 24.
Mirsuoki, 77.
Modern Painters, 47.
Mokkei, 158.
Molineri, Antonino, 21.
Monastery Bells* 332.
Monet, 47, 48, 49, 50, 53, 80, 82, 90,

91, 96,96-102, 103, 104, 112, 03,

114, 115, 128, 144, 165, 166, 175,

199, 200, 210, 216, 223, 274,^280,

283, 285, 308, 324; La Cathedral,
102; Coins de Riviere, 100; U&glise
4 Parengwilky 99; Falaise a &tretat,
100, 101; L& Gare St. Lazare, 50;
The Houses of Parliament London,
100; La Japonaist, 98; London
series, 102; Les Meules, 102; Les
Nympbeast 102; Lffs Peupliers, loo;
Venice series, 102,

Monnicr, 62*

Moore, George, 25, 52,

Monticelli, 182.

Moreas, 103.

Moreau, Cmstave, 190, 221, 224.

Morgan, Wallace, 221.

Morisot, 165.

Moronobu, 274,

Mo rot, Aime, 258,

Moulin de la Gallette,Le, 26, 114, 115.

Mounet-Sully, portrait of, 216.

Mozart, 42*

Mts* SidaonS) 115.

Mflntcr> 324.

r^ Adolfj 202,

Murillp, 21, 67.

Musiciens d rOrchestre, 213.

Musique aux Tuileries, La, 109.
Murique esquisse, La, 235.
Musique (panne au decor atif), La, 235.

Nadelmann, 163.
Nana, 75,
Napoleon, 53.
Napoleon III, 69.
National Gallery, London, 41.
Natte, La, 123.
Nattier, 34.

Negro sculpture, 229, 230, 231, 236.
Neo-Impressionism (Neo-Impression-
ists), 164-186, 189, 197, 199, 203,

2O8, 222, 224, 234, 2O, 275, 278,
293 3Q3> 330-

New Age, The, 9, 341.

Ninth Symphony, 8.

Noa Noa, 190.

Nu a r&offe Fert et Jaune, 123,

Nympbr Surprise, La, 66.

NympMas, Les, 102.

Obsequies of the Count ofOrgaz, 55.

Observateur des Beaux* Arts, 335.

Ode aw Fleurs (d'apres Anacreon),

126,

(Euvre, L\ 134,
Olivier, 34.

Olympia, 74-75, 79, 195, 335.
Opus II (Schonberg), 332.
Orage, A. R., 341.
Orphism (Orphists), 239, 262, 275,

290, 291.
Ortolano, 191.
Ottmann, 324,
Our Lord's Prayer, 217.

Padovanino, 23.

PanneauX) decorative (Renoir), 117.
Pannffaux (tambourine player and
dancer), (Renoir), 126.

Parisiennes HabilUes en Algeriennes,

III, 112,

Pater, 34* Mi-
Paul, Hermann, 221^
Paysage de la Martinique, 194.
Peckstein, 324.

Persian art, 64, 190, 230, 231, 236.
Petitjean, 175,
Petit Peintre, Le, 126.
Peuplurs, Les, loo,
Philip IF, 24.
Picabia, Francis, 257, 258-259, 323,

35

INDEX

Picasso, 9, 22, 121, 234, 236, 240,
243, 246, 247, 251, 252, 255-256,
258, 259, 262, 274, 284, 308, 323,
331; Femme a la Mandoline > 251,

Piha, 41.

Plot, 322.

Pisanello, 28.

Pissarro, 47, 48, 69, 82, 89, 90* 95-96,
99, 104, 107, 114, 131, 135, 136,
165, 166, 180, 182, 192, 194, 199,
208, 212, 280; Sydenham Road) 99.

Pissarro, Lucien, 165.

Plume* La> 338.

Poe, Edgar Allan, 53.

Poe, tales of Edgar Allan, 219.

Pointillism (Pomtillists), see JSfeo-
Impressionism.

Polaire, portrait of, 216.

Pollaiuolo, 203,

Pont-Aven school, 187-206, 319.

Port de Bordeaux, Le^ 80.

Port, Le, 258.

Portrait de Dame, 1 14.

Portrait d'Homme, 184-185.

Portrait of a Canon, 217.

Post-Impressionism (Post-Impressio-
nists), 234, See also Matisse.

Poussin, 19, 21, 22, 40, 97, 129, 320.

Praxiteles, 218,

Prendergast, 321-322.

Prevost, 216.

Puget, 108.

Putz, Leo, 202.

Puy, Jean, 321.

Radean de la Meduse, 35, 55.

Raeburn, 89.

Rafaelli, 188.

Rain, Steam and Speed, 47, 50*

Raphael, 19, 21, 22, 165, 255.

jRatapoil, 62*

Ray, Louis, 197.

Rembrandt, 22, 25, 41, 44, 45, 51,
56, 61, 62, 66, 99, 108, 280, 284;
etchings, 59.

Redon, 165, 187.

Regnault, 21, 34,

Remberg, Baron, 53.

Renaissance, the, 26, 29, 39, 51,
92, 128, 223, 227, 255, 306, 322.

Rename ft Angelique, 62.

Rendezvous de Chats, 77, 80.

Renoir, 21, 22, 25, 26, 52, 56, 70, 77,
106, 107-128, 136, 154, 155, 156,
163, 166, 181, 197, 205, 207, 208,
213* 235, 237, 238, H4> 284, 302,
306, 308, 316, 324, 330, 336, 337;

Au Piano, 123; Baigneuse (1884)^
120, 122; aigneuse (1888), 122,
123 ; La Baigneuse ait Griffon, 112;
La Baigneuse Brune, 123; Baign-
euses (1885), 121, 125; fiaigneuses
(1902), 125, 126, 157; La^Bala*\c.oire>
115; Le Cabaret de la hlere Anthony,
109; La Cheshire )ii^ Coco, heads
of, 126; Coco et It's Deux Senwntrs,
126; Le Croquet, 123; LaDatneuse,
114; Les Deux Sa"ttn, 123; Diane
Chasvresse, 109; Les nf<wt$ en
Rose et Bku, 120; La Femmr d la
Perrucbe, 112; Lti Femme an
Miroir, 127; Les Flllcs de Cut idle
Mendh} 123; La Pillctte a la Gfrbf,
123; La Pillette Attentive, 114; La
Fillet et F0range 9 26; Ingenve, 115;
L<? Jardin d'JSssoyM, 126; La Logf^
114; List, 109, 109-110, in;
Madame T, et Son Fih, 26; Mere
et Enfant, 123; Le Menage Sislfy*
109, iio-ni, 112; Mile* Durand-
Ruel> 113, 114; Le Moulin de la
GaletlCj 26, 114, 115; La Musiquc
aux Tuileries, 109; La Naite, 123;
Nit a r&to/e Pert ft*Jauw, 123;
Ode aux Fleurs (d'apres /hiacmm)^
126; Panneaux, decorative, 117;
Panneaux (tambourine player and
dancer), 126; Parisiennes Ildhllees
en Algericnnes, in, t H2; Lt Petit
Peintre, 126; Port rait de Dame, 114;
La Rose dans les Cbeveux, 126; La.
Source, 114; Tete de Jeune FUlf,
1 20; La Toil? tie de la JBaigneuse, 125.

RffpOSy 42.

Mepos des SaltitribanqueS) Lf 9 60*

Repos, Le, (Manet), 76.

Republiquc-Jt$4$ 9 La, 61.

Resurrection of Ch ist, he 9 24,

Retour de Christopbe Colomb, 40^ 51.

Reynolds, Joshua, 21, 61.

Ribcra, 2i,5 4 i, 108, 187; The Martyr-
dom of Saint Bartholomew* 55,

Rigaucl, 79.

Rimbaud, Arthur, 266*

Rin Teikei, 315,

Ririomin; Mead of a Chinese lady>
127.

Roberts, W. 323,

Robinson, Boardman* 221.

Robusti 79.

Rodin, 62.

Roll, 101.

Romanelli, 223.

Romney* 116,

INDEX

351

Rondinelli, 79.

Rood, 31, 165, 168, 1 80, 285.

Rose dans les Cbeveux, La, 127.

Rossetti, 116, 221.

Rotonchamp, Jean de, 190.

Roubille, 221,

Rousseau, 68, 89, 108, 205, 321-322.

Rousseil, K.-X., 315, 318, 318-319.

Route de Laon, 251.

Rubens, 9, 20, 21, 22, 26, 28, 36, 40,
41, 44, 45, 51, 52, 71, 81, 82, 87,
97, 108, 121, 125, 126, 127, 138,

IS8, 163, 165, 187, 203, 205, 220,
245, 254, 273, 277, 283, 300, 306,

308, 329; The Adoration of the
Wise Men of the East, 40; The Earl
and Countess of Arundel, 24,
Rude, 273,

Ruperupe, 195.

Rural Concert, 69.

Ruskin, 46, 47; Modern Painters* 47.

Russell, Morgan, 283, 283-284, 285,
286, 286-287, 288, 289, 292, 293,
294, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 302,
294, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 302,
303; Syncbromie, 299; Syncbromie
en Blen-Fiolace, 299; Syncbromie
in Fert, 288-289, 297.

R ussolo, Luigi, 276.

Saint Peter ffia^tising the Pagans, 24.

Salmon, Andre, 338.

Salon d'AutQmne, 224, 257.

Salon des Artistes Independents, 167,
224, 262, 288, 297, 299,

Salon des Re/uses* 69.

Salon des Reprowes, 69.

Santerre, 121.

S, Vitale, mosaics in, 150, 204,

Sargent, 18, 98.

Scarsellino, 203.

Schonberg; Opus II, 332.

SchufFenecker, 165, 197.

Scott, Walter, 43.

Scriabine, Alexander, 266, 311.

Scguin, 3:97.

Serusier, 197.

Setting Sun, 100?

Seurar, 165, 165-166, 167, 176, 177,
178, 180, 180-181, 181, 182, 183,
184, 203, 226, 243, 264, 26c, 310,
319; La Baignadf, 203; Le Gbabutt
180; Le Cirque 9 i$o; Un Dimancbe a
la Grand fjalte, 180, 203.

Severini, 22, 276.

Shannon, 98.

Shaw, George Bernard, 52.

Sheeler, Jr., C R., 3^3-

Shiubun; Setting Sun, 100.

Sibelius, 52.

Sickcrt, Walter, 219.

Signac, 165, 1 66, 167, 169, 170, 174,

181, 182, 184, 224, 264; D* Eugene

Delacroix au Neo-Impressionnisme,

169.

Signorelli, Luca, 137-
Silene, 63.

Silvestrc, Theophile, 44.
Simon, 18.

Simultaneism, 262, 276.
Sisley, 49, 89, 96, 99, 102-103, 104,

280.

Slaves, 21, 290, 299, 338.
Sodoma, 218.
Soirees de Paris, Les, 341.
Sonneurs de Cloches, 62.
Sorolla, 1 8, 52, 187.
Sortie du Bain, La, 212.
Source, La (Ingres), 69.
Source, La (Renoir), 114.
Spanish art, 62, 97, ni,
Spiro, 322.
Stein, Leo, 284.
Steinlen, 62, 246, 255.
Stendhal, 43.
Stern, Maurice, 323.
Stevens, Alfred, 209.
Stieglitz, Alfred, 341*
Stradivarius, 121.
Strauss, Richard, 25, 52.
Stratonice, 210,

Sun of Venice Going to Sea, Tbe> 49.
Sunervilie, 165.
Swift, 191.
Swinburne, 82.
Sydenbam Road, 99.
Symphonietta, 332.
Syncbromif, 299.
Synchromie en Bleu, 297.
Syncbromif en Blew-Fidace, 299.
Syncbromie en Fert, 288-289, 297.
Synchronism (Synchroraists), 32, 97,

115, 275, 277-304, 324, 325, 331,

332,335.336,338,339'
Synthcsists, see F<

'ont-Aven school.

Table au Moulin-Rouge^ Une* 215.
Tab'itunnffs, 195.

Taine, 32.

Tanagra figurines, 218.

fete de Jeune Filk, 120,

Thetis et Jupiter, 79.

Thiers, 30.

Tiepolo, 87, 218, 244.

INDEX

Tillot, 165.

Tintoretto, si, 22, 51, 66, 137, 271,

329; Minerva Expelling Mars 57;

The Miracle of Saint Mark, 24.
Titian, 21, 36, 42, 44, 66, 72, 74, 75,

97, 1 08, 127, 189, 320; Emperor

Charles F, 24; Venus Reclining?

Toba Sojo, 218.

Tobeen, 324.

Toilette, La, 212.

Toilette de la Baigneuse, La, 125.

Toils, Les, 256.

Tokaida, series of the, 100.

STorj^ de Fern-me S'Essuyant, 212.

Toulouse-Lautrec, 6z, 213, 214-218,

220, 221, 242, 246, 255, 318, 321;

Une Table au Moulin- Rouge, 215;

Portraits of Loie Fuller, Sarah

Bernhardt, Mounet-Sully, Yahne,

Anna Held, 216.
Tours, Les, 261.
TraUato della Pittura, 148.
Trois Danseuses, 212.
Trovatore, II, 42.
Troyon, 67.
Tudor-Hart, 168.

Turner, 17, 43, 46-50, 58, 63, 88, 89,
277,

9i> 97. 99> io3 e ,*75 ?os, 277, 32 ?
329; The Devil't Bridge, 50; 5T^
Fighting Temeraire, 47; jRam,
fem and S$eed, 47, 50; f^ Su
of Venice Going to Sea, 49; Ulyss

Sun,
es

Deriding Polyphemus, 47.

Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus, 47.
Utamaro, 100.
Utrillo, 324.

Fague, La, 101.

Vairaoumati Tei Oa, 196.

Valensi, 324.

Vallotton, 321-322, 322.

Van de Velde, 175.

Van Dongen, Kees, 321.

Van Dyke, o.

Van Gogh, 46, 62, 150, 182-186, 187,

192, 193, 196, 199, 215, 234, 314;

Portrait d'Homme, 184-185.

Van Rysselberghe, !74> 175-

VanVranken,JtvMacdonald-WrigIit,S.

Faudemtte, the, 193.

Velazquez, 19, 51, 66, 67, 70, 82, 89,

110,212,282,284; Philip If\ z.
Venetians, 39, 43, 44> ^ 7^ ^35> I( S^'
Fenice set ies (Monet), 102.
Fhius Aicroupie, 226.
Venus Reclining, 75-
Verdi; Jl Tr oval ore, 42.
Verkadc, 197-
Verlaine, 193.

Veronese, 36, 38, 40, 44, 137, 282, 329.
Veron, Eugene, 44.
Vien, 34.

Viergc a VEcuflle, La, 62.
Views of Fuji, 100.
Vignon, 165.

Fille de Paris, 259-260, 260.
Virgil, 134-

Vlaminck, Maurice de, 32.0-321.
Vollard, Ambrpisc, 145.
Vollard collection, 125.
Vorticism (Vorticists), 325*
Vuillard, 315, 318, 318-319.

Wagner, 42, 53, 266,

Walkowitz, 325.

Wattcau, 22, 34, 97, us, 113, 121.

Whistler, zi, 47, 52, 69, 98, 134, 187,

209, 212, 244, 258, 318.
William of Orange, 50.
Wolff, Albert, 336.
Wright, S. Macdonald. Sef Mac-

donalcl- Wright, S.

Yahne, portrait of, ai6*
Young, Thomas, 84.

Zak, 205, 321-322.
Zanchi, 23.
Zawadowsky, 324.
Zola, 52, 73, 131, 133, 134?
moir, 73; Ftconaitt) 73;

134*

Zorn, 52.
Zuloaga, 21, 98.
Zurbaran, 50.

OTHER BOOKS BT WILLARD HUNTINGDON WRIGHT

WHAT NIETZSCHE TAUGHT

A comprehensive exposition of Nietzsche's philosophy, book
by book, with a complete biographical sketch and a frontis-
piece of Professor Karl DonndorPs bust of Nietzsche.

The best book of its sort I have ever seen. James Huneker.

We know of no other book just like Mr. Wright's, nor any-
one that, on the whole, we can recommend more heartily.

The Nation.

As a presentation in compact form of biographical data and
certain extracts from the philosopher's writings, the book is
admirable, Review of Reviews.

It offers a better and truer report of Nietzsche s s ideas than
any other book either in English or German, //. L. Mencken
in the Baltimore Evening Sun.

An excellent survey of the life and philosophy of Nietzsche
. , . The best summary of Nietzsche that has yet appeared in
English, Springfield Republican.

Just as one should begin the study of Nietzsche's works
with u Human, AIl-too-Human/* so could one most advanta-
geously undertake the study of Nietzsche with Mr. Wright's
volume. The Dial.

Mr Wright's compilation may be warmly recommended,

Boston Transcript.

Mr. Wright knows thoroughly what he is talking about,
and his book is excellent. New Tork Evening Sun.

THE PRINCIPLES OF ESTHETIC FORM
AND ORGANISATION

(In Preparation}

An inquiry into the laws governing aesthetic appreciation in
all the arts. The first basic co-ordination of the fa&ors which
make for empathy and aesthetic emotion, and the only funda-
mental rationale for criticism in existence. Mr. Wright, in this

new and important work, defines aesthetic form and rhythmic
composition, and establishes a definite foundation for artistic
judgment. "The Principles of Esthetic Form and Organi-
sation** is by far the most profound and important contribution

to the science of aesthetics since Kant.

BOOKS 3r mLL

THE MAN OF PROMISE

(To be published January > ip/tf)

Mr. Wright has here written one of the most penetrating and unusual
novels of this generation. Its conception, its point of view, its frankness,
its freedom from all prejudice, and its form are in accord with the
highest standards of the best Continental ficlion. The central character
"the man of promise/ 1 despite his potentialities of genius, is an intensely
appealing and sympathetic figure. In his nature are combined weakness
and strength, cruelty and tenderness, virtue and viciousness. In short, he is
inherently human, capable of ascending the heights, yet capable also of sink-
ing to the depths of life's degradations.

The story, which takes him from early boyhood to middle age, is centred
about his affairs, phsycological and sexual, with the many women who touch
his life. Not one of these women is able to assist him in his great work or
to attain to his high and solitary ideals. In not one of them can he find an
"inspiration." They are not necessary to his intellectual development. To
the contrary, each tends to drag him down to the mediocre level of the
world's criterion of greatness, to sap his vitality, to curb his heresies, to make
of him a commonplace man. The book, in short, is an undogmatic refutation
of the theory that great men need the influence of women. It shows how
women, by their conservatism and social conventionality, interfere with true
greatness and conspire instinctively and unconsciously against the higher
nature of the men they love.

First Mr. Wright shows the cramping influence of mother love,. the maternal
efforts to inculcate conventional and religious ideals into the child. Then we
are given a glimpse of the influence of the man's boyhood romance. Next
we see his college sweetheart, in love with life's pleasures and gaieties, turning
his mind from his work. Later we have the young man's mistress, a selfish
and calculating woman, ready to sacrifice his career to her personal ends.
Still later, his wife, a sweet, loving and admirable woman, hinders him by
her conservatism and constant attentions. In a final attempt to find a woman
who can wholly appreciate his exalted desires and follow him to the heights
he has in mind, he deserts his wife for what he thinks is an advanced
and intellectual woman. But she in the end proves little different from the
others. She exhibits the same petty jealousies and makes the same demands
on him, and he sends her away in a last desperate attempt to consummate
his aspirations. But at this time his daughter, now a young woman, appears;
,syjd he is forced to make the final sacrifice to her future,

i ,''!

i '** **The Man of Promise" goes deep into the undercurrents of life, and it is
not a novel any man or woman can afford to miss reading. It is a powerful
story and in many ways a ruthless one; but both in conception and execution
it marks a new epoch in American ficlion.