Art and I

Front matter

THE LIBRARY

BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY PROVO, UTAH

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Dedication

TO

FREDERICK DIXON

EDITOR OF THE CHRISTIAN' SCIENCE MONITOR

Part I.— The Art Of Today

1. Eyes or Ears

PAGE

2. What Is Art?

3. / Listen

4. I Protest

5. “Bare Spring”

6. Art Talk

7. I Pose

8. / Am Consoled

9. The Charm of Bad Pictures

10. A “ Definite Job”

11. A Solitary

12. Searchers

13. Success

14. Propaganda

15. Dolls and a Man

16. Water Colour

17. Architecture

18. Practical Art

Part Ii.— The Art Of Tomorrow

1. A Tomorrow Picture

2. Cezanne

3. Freedom vii

viii Contents

PAGE

4. A Gauguin Landscape 132

5. Gauguin in My Anthology 138

6. Van Gogh 142

7. Matisse 148

8. A Master and Others 155

9. Picasso 160

10. Quality 167

11. Two Pioneers 175

12. Wanted: A Name 180

13. The Q9 Per Cent 186

Part Iii.— The Art Of Yesterday

1. O Rare Wang Wei! 195

2. Japanese Prints 202

3. Ancient Art and the Soldier 209

4. The Mount of Vision 215

5. The Juffrouw and Vermeer 219

6. 1 Hang Holbeins 224

7. Leonardo’s Smile 230

8. Missing the Mark 235

9. Art and the Anglo-Saxon 241

10. Pesellino by the Sea 247

11. El Greco’s Modernity 252

Part Iv.— Art And Mr. X

1. Introducing Mr. X 261

2. Mr. X and Advanced Art 268

3. Mr. X and Presentation 275

4. Mr. X and Velasquez 282

5. Mr. X and Sun Painting 290

Contents

ix

PAGE

6. Mr. X and a Critic

7. A Letter to Mr. X

8. Mr. X and Mural Painting

9. Another Letter to Mr. X

10. Mr. X Is Disturbed

11. Mr. X and Whistler

12. Mr. X in a Play

13. Mr. X as a Father

14. Good-bye to Mr. X

Part I

1. EYES OR EARS

ONE day I entered the shop of an eminent art dealer. I did so rather diffidently. It requires courage to push open the swing doors of a palatial art establishment. Courage came to me through my admiration for a Primitive picture that was exposed in the window. It was a lovely thing, all blue and gold, showing a procession of gay youths and beautiful girls, clothed as Florence knew how to clothe her children when art was young, and love of beauty was rife, and men and women were unashamed to dress. The gay procession swept along to a pagoda where a Prince sat, and he was a fairy prince, and his table utensils were of gold, and everybody seemed to be happy, because they were living in a beautiful world, where beautiful things happened, and a man could not be a Bolshevik because he loved his Prince, and was happier in serving him than in looking after his own rights. The frame of the picture, which was flat and wide, studded with blue and gold rosettes, and smeared with a filmy grey-blue, like a smoky opal, seemed to have grown with the picture.

After gazing at this decoration for a long time, I said to myself, “I wish there was a Circulating Picture Gallery, like the Circulating Libraries we have in England. I would gladly pay a hundred dollars to have that picture in my house for a month. It would cheer me, and make me happy, and make me more charitable to those who do not appreciate me.” I looked again at the picture, and then said to myself, “I wonder what it costs. I wonder who painted it.” With that I pushed open the swing doors and passed inside.

An elderly man with a shrewd, kindly face greeted me unostentatiously, but with a slight inclination of the neck. “Oh, I just wanted to ask the price of that picture in the window, and who painted it?” The Frenchman at once sized me up. Plainly I was not a man of substance; plainly I was not worth consideration as a buyer of an Italian Primitive.

So the Frenchman said, “The price, eh? Oh ”

His arms swept round, indicating an immense circle of money. Then he paused, adding presently, “The name of the painter? What matters it? It is a beautiful picture! What more would you have? It is from a Master’s atelier surely. His name? Who knows? A lark has no name. You hear the song. It is enough.”

I murmured an apology and, being something of a diplomatist, said: “It is a pleasure, and also an education, to meet a connoisseur.”

The Frenchman smiled, bowed, and, being touched by this homage from a stranger, proceeded to show me the pictures, chiefly Primitives, in his collection. He spoke of them so delightfully, so intelligently, so caressingly, with such understanding of the intention of the painters known and unknown, that when, an hour later, I turned to go, I said, “Please tell me, how did you acquire your knowledge of art?” To which the Frenchman answered: “My father taught me to understand pictures through the eyes, not through the ears.”

Come to think of it, that reply reveals the secret of true connoisseurship, and banishes from the hierarchy historians, delvers in archives, and all those, the great majority, who buy works of art for the names attributed to them, not for the face value of their beauty and interest. A Turner and a Gainsborough sold recently in London for large prices. They were not good examples. Had this picture by Turner, and this picture by Gainsborough, been sold anonymously they would have fetched, well — their value. They reached those large prices because most collectors buy through their ears, and because there are a certain number of small but determined collectors — ear-buyer collectors— who are determined to have examples by famous names. Rarity is the motive power of auction prices, and as Turners and Gainsboroughs become rarer each year the prices sweep higher and higher. Rarity was the reason that at auction a first edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tamerlane and Other Poems” sold for $11,600. “Tamerlane” has little merit, but only four copies of the first edition are known. It is a poor poem. It is not even a beautiful book. But it is a rarity: hence the price.

1 6

It is useless to scold: it is futile to complain that 90 per cent of the world buys through their ears, or for rarity. Obviously, it is better that people should collect through the ears than not at all. Indeed, it is rather a pleasant sight to see an elderly couple, prosperous, with a handsome bank balance, beginning to taste the delights of patronising art. You may see such couples at any of the fashionable evening auction sales. The gentleman is always in correct evening dress, the lady is always in resplendent costume. Be sure that they have examined the catalogue carefully beforehand, and have marked the works for which they propose to bid. The pictures of their desire have, of course, been painted by men whose names they know.

In any decade there are always a few living painters whose names, for reasons which are not as mysterious as might seem, have become familiar as family jokes in the art columns, and on Fifth Avenue and Bond Street. For these pictures the lady and gentleman who have begun to patronise art bid, and for none others. An exquisite interior by Smith may appear on the auction rostrum, or a delicately strong landscape by Jones, but they wait till a picture by Brown is offered. For that they bid. They know Brown’s name. They are not buying a picture. They are buying a Brown. He may be living, he may be recently deceased; but the point is he has caught the ear of the market.

We must be gentle and urbane with this lady and gentleman who are patronising The Art of Today. They are beginning. They are having a delightful time, for few indoor sports are so exciting as buying pictures at auction with your own taste, your own voice, your own money, for your own house. Besides, He and She may improve. The power of beauty — beauty touched with strangeness — in art may be gradually revealed to them. They may, half unconsciously, glide into the way of buying with the eyes: through rejections they may acquire taste. Then they will begin to frequent unimportant studios, and those dealers who encourage “les jeunes” and who are connoisseurs, lovers of art first and dealers second.

Perhaps some day they may notice the lovely and nameless Primitive in the Frenchman’s window: perhaps He and She, having learned to appreciate through the eyes, will be drawn to it; perhaps, who knows, some day they will actually acquire a picture without a name, merely because it is beautiful.

2. WHAT IS ART?

I HAVE a friend: here is an episode in our friendship.

Early in life he set his heart on his own house, and his own bit of land. “In a wood,” he would say, “on a wooded hill. My house must be in a wood. Trees are my familiars.”

One day he wrote me: “The house is nearly finished, the studio is quite ready. I was there yesterday. You might walk over — it’s within three miles of where you are staying — and tell me what you think of my long-waited-for Folly.”

I started early, taking my luncheon, with the notion of exploring the intermediate country. Leisurely I covered the three miles. A rutty, halfmile-long lane wound out from the main road. I plodded along it into a wood. The path began to ascend and there was the gable of the house lurking in the trees. Branches clawed at the structure: it was indeed a house in a wood. It was nearly finished. As I stood there thinking how little a house in a wood would suit me (I want one on a hill), the carpenters, who were nailing the last cedar shingles on the roof of the porch, eyed me curiously. Higher up, 30 feet higher up, on a level with the roof of the house, was a smaller building. It seemed to be quite completed. “Ah,” I reflected, 18

“the studio. He does not wish his work to interfere with domestic matters.”

I entered the studio. It was ready for occupation : an ideal workroom was this wooden structure, 15 paces long, 12 wide, the north side mainly glass, two tall windows to right and left, and peepholes at the back through which one peered into the depths of the forest.

There were an easel, two chairs, and a table, and on the table was a copy of Tolstoy’s “What Is Art?” I smiled. On the south wall of the studio were 10 large photographs in a line, affixed to the boards with glass pushpins. I knew those 10 pictures well. Each was by Velasquez. I smiled again. Clearly, my friend had prepared for me an aesthetic — or intellectual — trap — or lesson.

A whistle sounded from somewhere in the woods where lumbermen were cutting timber — the noon whistle. The carpenters threw down their hammers and trooped away to their midday meal. I was alone in the clearing with Tolstoy’s “What Is Art?” and 10 photographs of pictures by Velasquez. For reasons — he always has reasons — my friend wished me to read that book and examine those photographs: did he desire to have a sort of artistic-ethical studio-warming: would he appear later eager for a talk? Maybe; for over the line of photographs I noticed that he had scrawled in chalk the words, “An hour before sunset.” Well, the day was my own, and I had food. Why not, under these engaging conditions, study “What Is Art?” — a classic I had never read, but which certain Intellectuals of my acquaintance (who are not painters, and who know nothing about painting) had praised without reserve.

First I turned to the end of Chapter XX, called “Conclusions,” where the old man eloquent, and so single-minded and pure in heart, tells the reader that the answer to the question “What is art?” had occupied his mind for 15 years, that he had begun to write upon it six or seven times, but that each time he had laid it aside because his mind was not sufficiently matured on the subject. I skimmed this chapter, found his conclusion of the whole matter, sighed, then turned to the first page. On I read. Whenever I raised my eyes they encountered those Velasquez photographs, and each time I found it harder to leave them and to return to the book, for each seemed to be saying — “I am art,” and then the whole in unison would murmur — “We are art.”

Tolstoy’s early chapters are not intriguing. Fie quotes German professors. I nodded sleepily. I always nod when gentlemen with unpronounceable names, usually German, define beauty. They disagree one with another, and Tolstoy usually disagrees with them all, and at the end of the chapter I felt that I had been merely wasting my time — treating error as reality. Schiller and Kant both hold that the end of art is beauty, “the source of which is pleasure without practical profit.” That seems rather like offering a man the pips of an orange. Amid these philosophers Tolstoy picks his path: a quarter of his way through the book

The Art of Today he reaches this sensible conclusion : “Art begins when a person, with the object of conveying to other people a feeling experienced by him^ calls it up anew in himself, and expresses it by certain exterior t the Velasquez photographs and murmured, “Yes, Master, that is just what you did.” Tolstoy in the chapter called “Beauty and Goodness,” dips back to Plotinus, Baumgarten, Schassler and dozens of others: then he begins to lash out. Music, poetry; novels from Boccaccio to Marcel Prevost, even Beethoven, even Maeterlinck, come under the sting of his whip. Even himself — for this fearless preacher will teach nothing but the highest — even himself — “I relegate to the class of bad art my own artistic productions with the exception of the story ‘God Sees the Truth/ and ‘The Caucasian Prisoner/” (I have read them: they are poor stories, quite unworthy of the author of “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina.”) Having blasted all the producers of art who have any tinge of sensuousness, he proceeds to a chapter on “The Crimes of the Critics and Art Schools.” “Critics explain!” he cries. “What do they explain? The artist, if he is a true artist, has, in his production, conveyed to other people the feeling which he lived through: what is there to explain?” Alas, so few of us — artists, critics, baseball players — are perfect.

Next he lashes professionalism: he will have no professional artists, and no schools; then he stings the rich people, the upper classes, who have made art a special luxury for themselves. Here is his final lash on this subject: “These three conditions —

the professionalism of artists, criticism, and schools of art — have brought it to pass that the majority of people of our time perfectly fail to understand even what art is, and take the coarsest imitations of art to be true art.” Alas, that is what Tolstoy himself sometimes does.

In the chapter on “Art Good or Bad According to Its Subject,” which is surely an absurd statement, I find this: “Concern for technical perfec-

tion and beauty, for the most part obscures feeling.” I looked at the Velasquez photographs. They are a denial of this. But I really began to have doubts about Tolstoy as an art guide when he expressed high approval of a tenth-rate English picture because the subject is charity — a Lady Bountiful giving food to a beggar-boy. But how fine, how noble are the suggestions, or rather statements, he makes in the two final chapters, “How True Art Will Come” and “The Art of the Future.”

He analyzes “the reason of the lie” into which art has fallen, and decides that “the cause of the malady was the non-acceptance of the teaching of Christ in its true, that is, in its full meaning.” And what, in the view of this great dreamer, is the destiny of art? Hear him: “To translate, from

the region of reason to the region of feeling, the truth that the well-being of people consists in their union, and to substitute for the present kingdom of force the kingdom of heaven, that is, love, which presents itself to us all as the highest aim of human life. . . . The problem of Christian art is the realisation of the brotherly union of mankind.” This great emprise may be accomplished, must be, the world is working toward it, but it will be accomplished by something greater than art, as we understand the word today.

Ninety out of a hundred artists regard their art chiefly as a means of earning a living, and they influence the world according to the measure of their power and sincerity. They are spurred onward by the desire to express themselves and to excel; and when a patron buys a picture the artist is glad beyond the mere money: he is glad because he is appreciated. Take away the spur of having to make a living, and to win approval; take away professionalism, as Tolstoy calls it; force the artist, as he proposes, to do other work, and to paint only when the mood is on him; make him choose a moral subject merely because it is a moral subject, not because it attracts him artistically, and you extinguish art. Velasquez would be blotted out. He was great because he expressed his best and highest self. He rose above his subjects which happened to be rather ugly royal personages. He painted greatly because he loved greatly. To love

your art greatly: that is the secret of great art.

* * *

It is an hour before sundown. Here comes my friend. Why should not I try my hand at a definition, why should not I attempt to answer the question— “What is Art?” I take the chalk, I scrawl on the wall three words — “Art is love.”

3. I LISTEN

HE house, perched on a grassy hill, overlooks the road winding to the sea. After dusk there is little traffic, but every twenty minutes a brilliantly lamped trolley-car bumps over the tracks, where, amid high grass, the rails feel for their level. This mass of brilliant lights, this swiftmoving object grating and whirring, is not unpleasant. It reminds the secluded dwellers in the house on the hill of the outside world: it titillates without disturbing.

One sultry night a group of men were gathered in the porch. Three of them were expert talkers — the Painter, the Illustrator, and the ex-Editor; and in the corner I sat stroking the handsomest cat in the State.

The conversation had settled upon Tolstoy’s “What Is Art?” Each had lately read an essay on this unanswerable question: a copy of the book had been borrowed, and each had been reading it. “Tolstoy was a very great man,” said the Painter; “he was as great in his life as in his books, and if he failed he failed gloriously; he failed because he attempted, in the nineteenth century, to live primitive Christianity, which is, of course, real Christianity. Art to him was not a craft, it was an ideal. I hold, as you know, that art is a craft.

In the hands of a great craftsman, a great genius, it may teach and uplift; but such teaching and uplifting is incidental to the man, not to the craft. Whether it be a picture, a rug, a chair, lustre earthenware, or apple-green Chinese porcelain, a book or a symphony, the thing done must be technically satisfactory, if not superb, and it must express the craftsman’s individuality.

“Technically a good Gilbert Stuart and a good Albert Ryder are poles apart, but as each is an expression of himself, pushed to the limit of his powers, each is good art. Tolstoy’s fallacy is that he ignores technique and individuality, and asserts that the end and aim of painting is to illustrate beatitudes. A beatitude can be painted wonderfully and beautifully; Burne-Jones did it in ‘The Merciful Knight Who Forgave His Enemy,’ and so have many others, but if the world of art were set to paint beatitudes, merely because they are beatitudes, art would become so boring that it would cease.”

“True,” said the Illustrator. “You can’t make the world good by means of a Persian rug, or a Limoges enamel, but you can make such things so beautiful that the beholder realises beauty to the depth of his consciousness, and his life is the better for the vision. Such a vision brings exaltation. The observer is happier that day, and so makes those around him happier. Beauty is felt; it must not be defined.”

“That’s beautiful,” cried the Painter.

Their eyes followed the blazing trolley-car flashing

2 6 through the darkness like a gigantic jewel. It raced forward; the sidewalk trees, for a brief moment, were fantastically illumined.

“That’s beauty,” continued the Painter, “and the moral is that light, even artificial light, beautifies everything, even a trolley-car. Tolstoy would never consider such an artistic statement as that. You see that family waiting at the Halt. Ah, the car’s full! They’re refused admittance. Tolstoy would have wanted a picture made of a group of passengers jumping up and offering their seats to that tired family; but that kind of picture wouldn’t help to make the world unselfish.”

“Tolstoy,” said the Illustrator, “clamoured for the Illustration with a moral lesson: he barred the artistic motive as unchristian. Not that there’s anything wrong in the Illustration. I guess that two-thirds of our painters ought to confine themselves to the Illustration. It is all they’re fit for: an artistic painter is quite a rarity. Why don’t they illustrate? There’s all history to choose from. Why do Americans disregard historical pictures? I suppose they think it’s beneath them. Yet it was good enough for Giotto, and Ghirlandaio, and Pinturicchio. The reason our public exhibitions are so dull is because everybody is trying the artistic motive, and few can carry it through ; so few have the artistic flair of a Whistler, or an Arthur Davies. There ought to be a good communal studio where craftsman painters, who are not artistic, would be trained to paint sound historical pictures. Subjects abound. What a picture could be made of that memorable scene, in the cherry orchard, at Clermont, where Pershing sought Foch and said: ‘I have come to tell you that the American people would consider it a great honour for our troops to be engaged in the present battle; all that we have is yours; use it as you wish.’ That meeting was the turning point of the war. Is it not a better subject than a sham picture of ‘Daphnis and Chloe’ ? Do you remember the picture that the R. A. paints in Winifred Grahame’s ‘Mary’? The title was ‘Have Pity on Joseph’s Wife.’ That was a real idea, and the authoress devotes half the book to illuminating it. Our painters lack thoughts and ideas. They’re always fumbling toward an artistic motive, and they haven’t the force of character really to grapple with it.”

“Be merciful!” cried the Painter. “Because a few centuries ago there were men of transcendent genius making pictures, a sort of halo lingers over the business of painting, and most people, Tolstoy included, expect us to be something much greater than we really are. Tolstoy is like the young men who write the editorials for the high-brow weekly journals. They use words cunningly, oh, words, words, words, but their theories have little relation to life. They argue as if human nature and the basic fact of the struggle did not exist. Take my case. Outside what technical skill I possess, my fondness for beautiful things, and an inability to make my living any other way than by painting, I am a very ordinary person. I became an artist not because I desired to reform the world, but because I had to earn my living, and my choice fell upon the career of art. It happened in the most prosaic way. I was raised in a western town, and at fifteen I was apprenticed to a harness maker. I didn’t like the work, but that didn’t matter; what boy ever liked fixed hours and unremitting labour? I became an artist through the dreadful theatrical bills, all gaudy colour and gaudier melodrama, that were left regularly at the shop for display. Those bills seemed to me wonderful. They were my initiation into the mystery of art, and I soon began to make copies of the bills on their blank sides. That was my beginning. I had found my vocation, my way of earning a livelihood. The next step was simple. A firm of lithographers in an eastern town advertised for an artist. I answered it and sent specimens. The firm engaged me at double the wage I was earning as a bad maker of good harness. For three years I worked for them, and then, with my savings and help from my people, I went to Paris to study. Glorious days!

“Now I am earning my living as a painter, supporting a family, and realising that I am one of an enormous number of artists who produce goods for which there is very little demand. Still, in spots, it’s a glorious life, and I couldn’t do anything else. Really, I regard myself as a high-class tradesman with certain goods to sell, with the disadvantage of not having any shop window to show them in. I console myself with the reflection, which is perfectly true, that 50 per cent of my wages is in the joy I take in my work. A new idea, the first colour groping on a canvas, is like a sight of the Promised Land; but when I read a book like Tolstoy’s ‘What Is Art?’ I feel sort of ashamed of myself; I feel that I have so few of the noble and altruistic feelings that he seems to think the artist should have.”

“You’ve been talking sound horse^ense,” exclaimed the ex-Editor, “and that is not common among artists. I’ve suffered from them. I’ve known some in my time who cling to the Tolstoy idea that the artist is sacred, separate, and apart, and not governed by the laws that ordinary mortals obey; that he has a mission. Nonsense! Ninety per cent of the working artists of today are, as our friend said, just high-class tradesmen who have high-class goods for sale. There is nothing to prevent their being prophets and teachers if it’s in them, but their teaching must come through their craft. If the desire to teach is paramount in their natures, then let them be preachers, not artists. What,” turning to me, “do you say? You’ve been very quiet all the evening. As a rule, you’re fruitful in ideas. What secrets have you been whispering to that handsome cat?”

And I answered, “I was repeating to myself the opening of a poem by Amy Lowell:

The cat and I

Together in the sultry night Waited.

He greatly desired a mouse,

I an idea.

Neither ambition was gratified.

4. I PROTEST

ON a pneumatic-tired, public automobile seating eleven passengers, in the course of an extremely hot afternoon, I realised that I was answering the unanswerable question — “What is Art?” At any rate, I decided, quite to my own satisfaction — What Art Is Not.

The bulky automobile was conveying eleven opsimathic (opsimathy — education late in life) passengers through historic Boston — Cambridge (learning), Lexington (battles), Concord (transcendentalism), Waltham (watches), Walden (pond) and back to Boston over the Harvard Bridge, from which, as the eyes sweep around to the State House, may be seen, in contour and colour, one of the most beautiful architectural sights in New England. From the roof of the awning, above the driver’s head, hung a megaphone. Into this he roared information, but the automobile went so quickly, and the objects of interest were so plentiful, that had not I kept a level head I might easily have thought that the handsome Ford Motor Works building was Mrs. Jack Gardner’s Venetian palace. I remained tranquil, in spite of the heat and the opsimathic excitement, until we had passed the Lexington Town Hall. What followed may be stated in dialogue form.

Gay Driver — In that building, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the finest pictures in the world. It goes by the title of “The Dawn of Freedom.” Myself (pricking my ears) — Dear me, that’s very interesting. You really consider it one of the finest pictures in the world?

Gay Driver — That’s what I said.

Myself — Pray, who was the artist?

Gay Driver — There you have me. I haven’t seen the picture, but what I say, I say. “The Dawn of Freedom” is one of the finest pictures in the world. Mind your head. This is leafy June.

The automobile stops. The driver alights, pushes and taps prominent portions of the engine. He resumes his seat. The automobile groans, grunts, leaps forward.

Myself (resuming) — What do you do if any of your passengers question the information you give them? Do they ever argue with you?

Gay Driver — Once in a while.

Myself — A megaphone is not conducive to argument. I presume that you agree with Whistler, who, when there were any signs of dissent from a group gathered about him, would say: “I’m

not arguing with you. I’m telling you.”

Gay Driver (attending strictly to business) — This is the Parker Boulder, where the Minutemen were lined up. It is inscribed with the words (raises his voice), “Standyourground Don’tfireunlessfired upon butiftheymeantohavewar letitbeginhere.” Rightly or wrongly, I did not pay much attention to the Parker Boulder, or the house where John Hancock and Samuel Adams slept; I was regretting the publicity given to the incorrect art statement I had just heard.