American artists

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RICKS COLLEGE LRC

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PAOE

Preface v

CHAPTER

II Ellis Island Art

"Art," said Whistler, in that famous "Ten o' Clock" of his, which he first delivered in London in 1885, "art is upon the town — to be chucked under the chin by the passing gallant." Art is again upon the town, after nearly forty years, but she is no longer gallantly chucked under the chin. On the contrary, she is subjected to strong-arm methods now. Politely speaking, she gets it in the neck. She gets it there at the hands of so many contributors to the exhibitions of the Society of Independent Artists that this organization might seem to rank as a portent by itself. As a matter of fact, its chief interest is that of a symptom. The modernism of which it so rankly savors is all around us and threatens to make increased headway. The practitioners have their fuglemen, mostly timid souls, tremulous with the apprehension of band-wagonomania — fearful of getting left.

Collectors and dealers, here and there, are on the job. There is something in this art situation analogous to what has been so long going on in our racial meltingpot. The United States is invaded by aliens, thousands of whom constitute so many acute perils to the health of the body politic. Modernism is of precisely the same heterogeneous alien origin and is imperilling the republic of art in the same way. It began, as our excessive immigration began, in an insidiously plausible manner. The French post-impressionists — Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin — retained just enough contact with the normal conventions of art for their subversive tendencies to be overlooked to a certain extent. They were tolerated, and presently they were free to play into the hands of the half-baked enthusiasts who are always sure that there is something good in anything that is exotic and new; the newness is, for them, talismanic. By the time the cubists came along there was an extensive body of flabby-mindedness ready for their reception here, and all manner of similarly absurd "movements" have been assured of a warm welcome, in some quarters at least, ever since. Such movements ! — crude, crotchety, tasteless, abounding in arrogant assertion, making a fetich of ugliness and, above all else, rife in ignorance of the technical amenities. These movements have been promoted by types not yet fitted for their first papers in aesthetic naturalization — the makers of true Ellis Island art.

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The compromising observer feels no alarm. "What harm can it do?" he asks. "This is a free country. Let every man have his chance. These people are trying to express themselves. It may lead to something yet. Tolerance is a good thing." "Tolerance" is the wrong word. There should be no tolerance for inimical influences. Especially there should be no toleration of offenses against the integrity of art. Whistler, into whom we may here profitably dip again, has a saying that is pertinent — "Art is art and mathematics is mathematics." What makes modernism intolerable is that it seeks to sap the loyalties inseparable from genuine artistic endeavor. It would not only substitute vagrant shallow impulse and egotism for the wisdom of centuries, but it would put dogmatic vanity in the place of that reverential aspiration which is at the very core of serious work. Consider merely this matter of the approach to art, the humbly industrious ambition from which great art springs. Four hundred years ago that hard-bitten realist Niccolo Machiavelli, working on his sinister political treatise, "The Prince," said in a letter to his friend Vettori some words which are those of a literary man, but which happen to express exactly the idea I have in mind. He said:

The evening being come, I return home and go to my study; at the entrance I pull off my peasant clothes, covered with dust and dirt, and put on my noble court dress and thus becomingly reclothed I pass into the ancient courts of the men of old where, being lovingly received by them, I am fed with that food which is mine alone; where I do not hesitate to speak with them and to ask for the reason of their actions, and they, in their benignity, answer me, and for four hours I feel no weariness, I forget every trouble, poverty does not dismay, death does not terrify me; I am possessed entirely by those great men.

There speaks the artist, disclosing the profound reverence for his craft which belongs to every faithful follower of the muses, whether he use the pen or the brush. And there is a passage in Sir Joshua Reynolds, in his famous fourteenth discourse, the one he delivered after the death of Gainsborough, which may fitly be cited here. "In the study of our art," he says, "as in the study of all arts, something is the result of our own observation of nature; something, and that not a little, the effect of the example of those who have studied the same nature before us and who have cultivated before us the same art with diligence and success." How modest that is ! With what thoughtfulness does Reynolds proceed upon his task ! Like Machiavelli, who not only reclothes his body but cleanses his mind, he attunes himself to a high mission. Nobody in his senses would expect the artist to be a perpetually rapt mystic. He is a human creature, like the rest of us. But he nevertheless recognizes that art is a sacred thing, not to be chucked under the chin. He respects his metier. I remember an old story of Walter Pater, told me by a man who knew him well. Pater was of the "beefy" type of Englishman, quite John Bullish in some of his tastes. He had a charming time one evening in an obscure pub, and a casual acquaintance he made there said to him at parting: "Blimey, guvnor, but ye're a strite bloke. I've got a nice little rat-pit down Wrapping way and any time yer care to come I'd be glad to see yer." It is perfectly conceivable that Pater may have accepted the invitation. What he saw down Wapping way may even have helped him to humanize the pages of "Marius." But I am morally certain that when he sat down to write that book he purged his mind of rat-pits. There hangs about modernism an atmosphere as brutalized, as callous, as theirs.

What the modernist needs is a drastic purgation of conceit and wilfulness, a thorough educational overhauling. Turning to Whistler once more and paraphrasing him, I may say that art is art, and modernism is, well, modernism. Does this, in its turn, smack of assertion? Let us suppose a wine-taster, confronted by a dozen filled glasses. As he passes from vintage to vintage, distinguishing between them, it never occurs to him to doubt the fundamental nature of the most differing varieties. But neither does he have any doubts when he comes to the last glass, tastes it, and finds that some one has filled it with assafcetida. He spews it out with the remark that it is not wine. Would that be assertion, in any arrogant, illegitimate sense? Wouldn't it be a rather mild statement of fact? If art as it has been known for some thousands of years is art, then modernism remains plain modernism, a totally different thing.

It springs largely from mental confusion. The army tests showed that out of a multitude of candidates for military service there was a certain astonishing percentage of adult males with the reasoning powers of a child. It is courteous to assume that the delicate and beautiful art of thinking is a universal attribute, but everybody knows perfectly well that there are thousands of nominally intelligent humans going about, creatures well born, well educated, solvent and responsible, who in their moments display the mental power of trepanned rabbits. The central error of modernism is this inability to think things out.

II

II

The golden age in American painting, foreshadowed nearly a hundred years ago, when George Inness was born in Newburgh in 1825, came to something like maturity in the seventies. It was at about that time that Inness, Winslow Homer, Wyant, Homer Martin, and John La Farge arrived at the point where their importance as a group was more generally recognized. Then and through the two following decades they and certain of their juniors absolutely dominated the scene. By a kind of divine right La Farge took the rank of "old master" in it. He gave to the period its noblest monument in painting, the sublime "Ascension," which belongs to the church of that name in New York. This was the age of Saint- Gaudens in sculpture, of McKim in architecture, and the latter's partner, Stanford White, had, too, a good deal to do with it. He was the inspiring comrade of men like Dewing, Bunce, and Sargent. They made the memorable pictures for which he designed frames that were in themselves works of art. It was our great period of creative personalities. Shining among them all, a remarkable spirit and a remarkable painter, was Abbott H. Thayer, who died on May 29, 192 1, at his home in New Hampshire. We have never had any one more original in character, richer in imaginative genius. He was a naturalist as well as an artist, a master of truth as well as of beauty, equally searching and eloquent in the interpretation of landscape and in the delineation of the figure. On principles discovered by him the art of camouflage was developed in the Great War, and he is thus doubly to be reckoned a benefactor of his time. To dwell upon his career is to dwell upon some of the most precious elements in the history of American art.

Thayer's singularity comes out in his complete detachment from those influences which ordinarily color a painter's work in his formative period. He was born in Boston in 1849. Reared as a boy at a country home in Keene, N. H., he was brought to Brooklyn while still in his teens, and began his artistic studies there. He carried them on also at the Academy of Design in New York. He meant at this time to be an animal-painter, and proceeded to Paris in 1875 with that idea in his head. He entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and studied under Gerome. Here, then, comes the moment at which one naturally expects his talent to receive a more or less lasting mark. But there is not the faintest trace of French academical teaching to be discerned in Thayer's work. If it were to be found at all, it would be found in his draftsmanship and his treatment of form, but as a matter of fact he is peculiarly himself in these matters, possessed of a method and a style intensely personal. His interest in animals persisted, as we shall see, but they soon ceased to provide the themes for his pictures. He painted women instead, angelic women. Sometimes they were literally winged creatures. The characteristic figure he chose to portray was a goddess, mournful, meditative, protective. But even without their wings his women were drawn from some mysterious immortal race. When he painted the famous "Caritas," which hangs in the Boston Museum, in which a woman stands with the dignity of a Greek column, her hands hovering in benediction above two children, he realized a conception to which he returned over and over again, the conception of a spiritual motherhood, ineffable in its strength and beauty. The same elevation marks his numerous portraits. One smiles at the thought of Gerome. Thayer forgot Paris, as though he had never been there. He turned his back on the idiom of the Ecole and used instead "the large utterance of the early gods." In this language he speaks straight from his heart. It is the deep feeling in him that more than anything else makes him unique.

My consciousness of this goes back to my first impressions of him, which date from the eighties. His eyes seemed to me then to burn with an essentially spiritual light, his voice to have in it, when it was warmed by emotion, a finer timbre than one ever recognized among other men. Above all, his whole being seemed permeated by a tremendous earnestness. I have observed some artists of decisive originality — La Farge, Whistler, Rodin — all men of absolutely distinctive traits. Thayer was of their company, a man instantly to be known as aloof from the rank and file, following a path of his own. It was his earnestness that I would call his determining quality, and as time went on I saw that what made it moving was its relation to his ruling passion, the passion for beauty. I had occasion once in discussing a picture of his to glance at his possible intention. The meaning of the figure, if angelic, was human, too. It was a spiritual meaning, and in so far as I could explain it at all I allied it with Thayer's ideal of beauty, but I could not assume to say, precisely, what he was driving at. "How you set me talking !" he wrote. " As to what my pictures mean, you see, now, exactly. I want the image of one I worship to become visible, for all time, to this world — voila tout!"

There was, I am proud to say, complete sympathy between us, and he often wrote to me freely of his ideas. He had none of the narrow-minded painter's prejudice against the art of criticism. It was a useful art as he saw it, so long as the critic was not "a barker," so long as he had "the Old World aesthetic attitude, that of a Latin-blooded beauty-seeker and not a New England measles-hunter." His New England origin must have counted, I think, in his growth as a naturalist, but in matters of art he was of another country. "Oh, you and I are Mantegnas and Gozzolis, not Yankees," he exclaims in one of his letters; and how, among Yankees, he hated what he called the " measles-hunter/ ' alike in criticism and in art! Here are some expressions of his feeling:

To-day people call it not telling the truth if you paint them the flower or serve them the apple to eat. They say now that we know both the flower and the apple are made of the manure in the ground beneath them; you would tell more truth if you serve them, instead, handfuls of manure, straight. Here is what they don't know. Being cheated by the general resemblance of a human figure in some work of art to everybody they see about them, and to photographs, while a Beethoven symphony has no corresponding resemblance to the daily sounds about them, they don't guess (and never will) that the essential difference between the artist's figure and the actual human beings that swarm about us is exactly as total as that between the symphony and the noises in our daily life. Both works of art are absolute births, exactly as real as the physical one. It is the accident of many related circumstances that the pictured human has so much more aspect of photography than the symphony has of phonography. Perhaps Fromentin's "art isnature seen through a temperament" is almost sufficient, but what great art means is that it comes out of its matrix consisting of only such, and so much, head, ear, lip, neck, hand, action, color, etc., as went to make the cherished image that love set growing in that heart.

The impulse to clarify his thoughts on this problem overtook him again and again, always carrying him to the same lofty conclusion. One of his letters is so illuminating on his point of view that I cite it intact, as follows:

The violin, whose strings ring whenever their note is sounded by an outside instrument, is pure symbol of the poet. In the poet, cumulative images of every form of beauty begin in earliest infancy to occupy the brain, till, in his early maturity, these have become true touchstones, like the violin string. Let the painter once look upon a person who has, beneath no matter how many surface defects, one dominant greatness — purity at heart and fiery love of truth and beauty — and in his own heart the image of such a personality wakes into brilliant ringing clearness and takes the helm, saying: " Watch this being! Thou wilt surely see, now and then, the being she really is (it's a she now !) come forth and be fully in sight. Watch, then, and take in how she looks, for in those aroused moments she dominates the whole face and body, ruling all their details into her heavenly form." Now he who in this way comes to know her looks thereafter waits, no matter how long. When he finds himself at the end of his last supply he waits, as it were, outside her window, sure that when she once more stands there in his sight he will quickly see how to go on with his picture of her. Dear Cortissoz, this is absolutely the way I work. You delineate it almost clearly. It is because you see it that I feel I could crystallize you a little.

Right you are, alas; the whole trade of art and literature is for the time off the planet. Man, finding himself up against that (if he knew it) greatest blessing, the obvious impossibility of ever understanding existence, will forever swing between periods of worship and periods like our present one. He is like a frog in a tub; he can see the light and jump up at it, but never jump out, and when he tires of this he finds that searching the tub's corners still offers no escape. So with man, his epochs of worship will always be followed by a period — such as we are now somewhere near the end of — of self-deluding digging, egged on by the elation of unearthing so many of the never before dreamed-of tools that God evidently uses — gravitation, steam, electricity, radium, etc.

In due time man will again tire of this hope and again be the simple worshipping know-nothing. His cosmos theories will forever be on the same principle as the theories of a worm, hatched in an apple and still in the apple, might be of the apple's external aspect. The world is now all for what they call science, and they weigh music, painting, and poetry by what it can do in this field. Or, say, man is a child that awakes, out of the grass, and gazes awhile at the toys his parents have set about him, till, wider awake, he begins to work them and learn what they can do. Elated at finding out some of the stunts the lightning toy can do and what the steam one, etc., he comes to feel very big and forgets that he doesn't know, and can't, where they came from. So, for the time, there lowers on his horizon no wholesome reminder that he is forever (thank heaven) stumped.

The horrible Nemesis that lies in wait for this individualism is the monkeyfiedness of to-day's craftsmen. Of old, each apprentice strove merely to help some beautiful picture to get born and placed where it would help the world, and this habit of self-subordination attended each of them in his subsequent master years. Behold, now, the whispers creep through the crowd that self must assert itself, and a change begins, growing till "I, I, I ! See how well I can do it !" has entirely supplanted "See how beautiful it is !" And then behold these egos all down at the monkey level. Like monkeys they have looked, unseeing, at their master's service, till they catch up the brush to show that they can do it, too. Like the ape, no longer seeing what this act of painting was making, when Gozzoli or Lippi held the brush, they paint and paint. None of them sees that — whether or no it is something to boast of to be able to turn a back-somersault, or paint an actually delusive counterfeit of one more real shop-girl, when there are more than plenty always to be seen wherever you look — it has no resemblance to being the means of erecting before men's sight the crystal type of any desirable attribute.

The foregoing observations do much to explain the nominally restricted range of Thayer's art. In the list of his works — not strikingly voluminous — such titles as " Winged Figure," "The Virgin/' "Caritas," "Diana," "Young Woman," point to the celebration of one theme, womanhood endowed with beauty. Only as his imagination plays about this theme he gives to it in each picture a really new investiture. The figure is generally youthful, but even so it is freighted with implications going deeper than anything in the wonted experience of youth. There are women on Thayer's canvases who with their maidenly bloom have also the heroic dignity of the Roman matron of legend. Their charm is drawn, as I have indicated, from Olympian sources. Yet it is one of their finest traits that they stand with their feet unmistakably on the solid earth. They are profoundly human presences. It is by character, by qualities of the soul, that they triumph, not through any dramatic or other significance derived from a specifically pictorial ingenuity. Once Thayer painted a mural decoration, the lunette symbolizing the city of Florence as protectress of the arts, which was erected in the

Walker Gallery, at Bowdoin College. There are five figures in the composition and, as a composition, it is well put together. But the decorative quality of the thing is not the secret of its spell; that lies in the central winged figure, in the divine creature of the painter's imagination. He was not a great inventive designer. He was just the consummate interpreter of a grand ideal of form.

He was too impatient of material issues ever to become a merely adroit craftsman. Thayer was, technically, a man of superb passages and of careless ones. He would paint a head with the supreme authority of an old master, an arm with the same imperial skill, or a drapery, and then he would brush in a part of his background as though he were in a hurry to get through. There are parts of some of his finest things which look unfinished. But they are never the essential parts. The beauty which he set out to express is always there. If the reader has any doubts about Thayer's technic let him go to the Metropolitan Museum and, after studying the glorious "Young Woman," turn to the "Monadnock," which is also in the Hearn collection. This is one of the greatest landscapes ever painted in America or anywhere else. The foreground is roughly generalized, on a principle which Corot used before Thayer, but which few modern artists have appreciated at its full value. The great mass and the shining crown of the mountain are defined with equal delicacy, precision, and grandeur. Only a technician profoundly versed in his mystery could with such piercing truth have interpreted so monumental a subject. The masterpiece is characteristic of Thayer. It is original. No other of our landscape-painters — and the group is an impressive one — could have set down a more personal impression of nature. And none could have exercised a more powerful sweep of the brush.

I have noted the outdoor nature of Thayer's boyhood. All his life long he was a lover of the woods and their inhabitants. His convictions as to the boundaries which are set for science, glanced at in one of the letters already quoted, never kept him from being a scientist himself. It began, unconsciously, I imagine, in those early days in which he painted portraits of dogs and other animals. He gave that occupation up, but he went on studying beasts and birds more and more as he retired to what was to prove his permanent home at Monadnock, N. H. Presently there flowed from those studies an epochmaking discovery, the discovery of what has come to be known as "Thayer's law." It is the law of protective coloration, that strange principle in nature which gives to some at least of the creatures of the wild a safeguard without which they would be handicapped in the struggle for existence. Thayer first announced it to the world in The Auk, our American journal of ornithology, in April, 1896. From time to time he made supplementary communications on the subject, and in 1909, under the title of "Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom/' a full exposition of his ideas was published. Gerald Thayer, his son, wrote the text summarizing the matter and produced some of the most brilliant of the illustrations. The book was momentous as a contribution to the science of the naturalist. Its fame has since been greatlyheightened by the fact that by the application of " Thayer's law" the art of camouflage was brought into the Great War.

This law established by the painter is not easily stated in bald terms. It is best approached through a moment's consideration of what naturalists previously believed to be the secret of protective coloration — namely, the establishment of an identity of color between a given object and its background. Thus, you would say, roughly, that a bird or butterfly not readily discovered in a tree or a bush " looked like" the web of twigs and leafage against which it had paused because it possessed kindred colors and markings. Much hinges upon that " because." Take, for example, a Plymouth Rock hen and place it against a background of the flat skins of similar hens. You would expect the living creature to achieve at once a certain degree of invisibility. Thayer made precisely this test, only to prove that "a more striking demonstration of the powerlessness of mere similar colors to conceal could hardly be devised." What, then, accounts for the fact — familiar to generations of men but unexplained until Thayer hit upon the secret — that many of the denizens of the animal kingdom remain, under the right conditions, indistinguishable from their environment? It is not simply that the patterns on their coats, both as regards line and color, are adjusted to the nature of their surroundings; it is that these patterns are vitalized as a kind of protection by the play of light and shade. "Animals," we are told in the book cited above, "are painted by nature darkest on those parts which tend to be most lighted by the sky's light, and vice versa," and the net result is that "the two effects cancel each other." The point is extremely difficult to set forth without the aid of diagrams and such aids, but I may, perhaps, clear it up a little by adding that while the model of a bird painted green all over and placed against a green background would be unqualifiedly conspicuous, the countershading of the same model, according to nature, would cause it to melt into the background. Where this process among the actual living creatures becomes enchanting is in the artistic subtlety with which costume, pattern, and shading are developed. It is as though nature painted a picture upon the dress of bird or beast, a picture reproducing the general character of the scene in which it lives — always assuming life in the bird or beast, the maintenance of a normal position.

I found the book absorbing, and not long afterward the opportunity came to observe its principles in operation. In the fall of 1910 Thayer wrote me: "I wish so much you could by some wild chance be present when I show the doubting ornithologists, etc., the concealing power of brilliant costumes (outdoors, of course), beginning at 9 A. m. at the Smithsonian in Washington next week." The chance was one to seize, and I met Thayer, pottering over the specimens at the Smithsonian with him as he chose the few which he deemed sufficient for the first seance. I remember among the feathered examples a marvellous rubythroated humming-bird, but our principal and quite unforgetable exhibit was a young stuffed prongbuck, worn by Thayer like a yoke over his head and shoulders as we marched forth to meet the enemy. Perhaps "enemy" is not altogether the right word. The scientists brought together under that sunny but chill November sky were not inimical to the demonstrator's purpose. But neither were they noticeably sympathetic. It was not asking too much of them to ask them to look at the humming-bird, set within a bush, and to note how it seemed mystically to disappear. But they balked at lying down on their stomachs in public and gazing up at the stern of the deer to see the white patches thereon. If they would do this, Thayer told them, they would see how when an animal pursuing the prongbuck draws near his prey and the quarry leaps into the air there is an instant during which those white patches are merged into the sea of light that falls from the sky. In that instant the pursuer may miss his stroke and while recovering himself give the prongbuck that much of a chance to recover also and continue its flight. The crux of the matter is that the patches must identify themselves with the sky, and that they only do so when the eyes following them look up at them against the sky.

Thayer himself gave years and unimaginable patience to the testing of those principles on which he laid such store, and it hurt when people failed to meet him half-way. There were questions on that morning in Washington. He answered them eagerly and, so far as I could judge, decisively. His demonstration was, to me, complete. I cannot say that the rest were flatly sceptical, but neither were they ardent, and as we went back to the museum, bringing the specimens with us, Thayer exploded wrathfully, not so much against the ornithologists we had just left as against the whole world of doubting Thomases. I speak of it now not to recall an old moment of disappointment for him, but because the incident seemed to bring out something very characteristic of Thayer. I have called him, in these things of a naturalist, the scientist. He never stopped being an artist, a lover of beauty. This was what made him so sensitive to an attitude of coldness toward his "law." The law, for him, was one of the most gloriously exciting ideas in the world, a new key to exquisite things. He couldn't understand why an elderly and not precisely slender ornithologist should object to extending himself upon the grass in a public place with his eyes directed at the behind-end of a stuffed deer. Down in the West Indies he had stretched himself in the mud without a qualm so that he might watch the flamingo in its rose-flushed costume melting into a background of rosy sky. He was watching more than a fact — he was watching a "big magic," and the artist in him was thrilled. He grumbled, at Washington, as I have said. But the image of him that stays in my mind is that of a dreamer, with a kind of sweet wistfulness about him.