Modern painting, its tendency and meaning

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 diredlly and seriously concerned with the produ<flion 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 nai'f standpoint of one's personal temperament or taste and of judging it haphazardly by its individual appeal, irrespective of its inherent aesthetic merit, is so strongly implanted in the average spedlator, that any attempt to define the principles of form and organisation underlying the eternal values of art is looked upon as an ad: of gratuitous pedantry. But such principles exist, and if we are to judge works of art accurately and consistently these principles must be mastered. Otherwise 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 cannot be taught; and a true appreciation of

FOREWORD it cannot grow up without a complete understanding of the aesthetic laws governing it. Those qualities in painting by which it is ordinarily judged are for the most part irrelevancies from the standpoint of pure aesthetics. They have as little to do with a picture's infixed greatness as the pundluation in Faust or the words of the Hymn to Joy in the Ninth Symphony. 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, symbolism, 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. I have tried to answer the following questions: What men and movements mark the milestones in the development 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 problems of aesthetics; and what was their influence

FOREWORD on the men who came later? Out of what did the individual men spring; what forces and circumstances came together to make their existence possible? What were their aims, and what were their adlual 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 possibilities lie before it?

Before setting out to solve these problems, all of which have their roots in the very organisms 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 or 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 indired: process of statement to make my fundamental postulate sufficiently 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 lO

FOREWORD to those whose minds 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 dehght. To the contrary, I believe that only by relieving painting of its dead cargo of literature, archaeology and illustration can it be made to fundion 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 exadness 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 pleasurable significance is primarily intelleaual. 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 emotional 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 intelledual rapture.

Paris, 1915

W. H. W.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Ancient and Modern Art 17

III. Edouard Manet 64

II

THE nineteenth century opened with French art in a precarious and decadent 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 subject-matter which did not inspire thoughts of inflexible simplicity. This attitude was attributable to the social readlion against the excesses of the voluptuous Louis XVL Vien it was who, suppressing the eroticism of Boucher, instigated the so-called classic revival founded on Graeco-Roman ideals. The public became so vehement in its praise of this hypocritical and austere art, that Fragonard, 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 aridity requisite for popular taste. Chardin, the Le Nains and Fouquet were set aside: they were considered too trivial, too insufficiently archaeological. Watteau's canvases were stoned by Regnault, 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.

Such men as these could not find approbation in a pubHc 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 temperament; 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 imagination is too fecund for only thorns. Ingres superceded 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 instin(5l 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 loosening 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 deviating from the methode David, but because the tragedy of its subjecft was still fresh in the national mind. Was this a clever device on the part of the painter to circumvent hostile criticism by clothing his innovations with a sympathetic theme.? Perhaps; but the pidure'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 retrospedl the readlion against an established order appears simple, but the world's innovators have required for their task an intelledual courage 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 reactionary 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 Delacroix. Like all the greater painters he was selftaught. The essence of knowledge is untransmittable. 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 Impressionism to art's latest manifestations.

In 1822 Delacroix exposed his first canvas, Dante et Virgile aux Enfers, one of the finest debut pidures ever recorded. Superficially it is his most obvious influence of Rubens whom he deeply respeded; and in it are also discoverable 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 pidlure indubitable indications of the advent of Venice. This pidure 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 vernissage, 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 picture.

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 explained that the superiority of the green in his prairies was due to the fadl 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, primitive as it seems today, he beheld a way of augmenting the dramatic significance of his conceptions. The next year, 1825, he went to London 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 Impressionistic 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."

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 exad science of colour is further attested to by the fadl 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. In 1832, after he had painted the admirable La Liberte Guidant le Peuple sur les Barricades, he visited Morocco. Before this event his work had contained many of the elements of sumptuousness and sensuality; but in this eastern land his colour reached maturity. Studying the productions of the native crafts in their relation to colour, he dreamed of making pictures as variegated as rugs and vases. In this he was trespassing on the precindls of Veronese who had made pidorial use of the produdls of the Orient and of Africa. On his return he painted Les Femmes d' Alger dans Leur Appartement. This pidlure, 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 important 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 reprodudlion. This comes perilously near being true. Today his pidlures 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," and added, "2/ 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 significance as an artist lay in his drawing which was his greatest asset. What raised him above the general run of painters, baroque and otherwise, was his slight talent for composition. Often in his Journal he speaks of the "balance of lines." 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 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 I'Attaque, La Lutte de Jacob avec i'Ange, the Enlevement de Rebecca and the Entree des Croises a Jerusalem. In this last canvas, his most masterful, the triangle is complicated by a curved line running inward from the centre. This pi(5lure 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 pi(5lures (in which he substituted 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 Windsor) 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

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, dramatic, are expressed. But in Delacroix there is merely co-ordinated adlion. 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 succeeded 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 drawings 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 pidlures the compositional elements of his Pieta, which had distind: 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 appreciable 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 inability to recognise the difference between the inventive intelligence and the imaginative instind:. Had he understood this he could have seen that his limitless ambition was incommensurate with his comparatively small capabilities. But this mind was not sufficiently open. In fadl 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 pretended to detest Wagner, his musical prototype, and ignoring the latter's dramatic undulations, criticised him severely for his methods. Beethoven was too long for Delacroix, and II Trovatore too complicated. However, he had a profound admiration for Titian and Mozart; and in these preferences we have the man's psychology. Both were great classicists, but both lacked that genuine and magistral fullness which was the propre of Beethoven and Michelangelo.

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 hopeless trend of the painting of his day, and combated it, he did not advance. His muse was the corpse of Venetian art. He was the brake which put an end to the readionary tendencies of art. His discoveries did not reach fruition until Impressionism, twenty years after his death.

In all his struggles destiny seemed to conspire to bring about his fame. In 1824, the very year he brought colour into his painting, Gericault, 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 obfuscated his true significance by their purely literary appreciations. Gautier, Dumas, Baudelaire, Stendhal and Merimee — there was none whose temperament was not either romantic or idealistic. They could not see that, though he strove with them for modernity of expression, his language was unmodern. However, Ernest Chesneau, Theophile Silvestre, Eugene Veron and C. P. Landon 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 understand him thoroughly, several of his fellow painters recognised his ecledicism. Among them was Thomas Couture who, in his highly instrudive booklet, Methodes et Entretiens d' Atelier, had the audacity to point out the painter's seledlive habits. In the main his charge was just. Delacroix's first canvas contains influences of both Rubens and Michelangelo. His second piAure 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 intelledlual 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 Caravaggio, a Rubens, a Rembrandt. He felt the call of these men, but instead of halting at appreciation, he tried to use them. But the old masters, like the lords of the earth, are not amenable 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 mistake was that he did not separate his capabilities from his desires. Had he done so he would have produced small figure pieces of gem-like richness and voluminous composition. Enthusiasm 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 pictures are viewed to better effedl framed and in galleries than as mural decorations. In trying to paint monumental subjed:s on extensive canvases he lost that spirit of organisation which would have been his on more limited surfaces. One of his finest expositions of colour, La Lutte de Jacob avec I'Ange, in a chapel at Saint Sulpice, is ineffective because its surface is too large for his treatment of the theme. Delacroix 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 restridled 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 reflecfting 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 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 pictures; and the Pointillists, with their system of complementaries, 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 expression. He is the link in the chain which holds the brilliant gems of painting. If he himself fell short of genius, 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 partiality. But a panegyric not founded on accuracy and authenticity defeats its own objed: in the end. Turner himself remarked that Ruskin discovered 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 fadl remains that the author of Modern Painters overestimated the painter for a reason totally inapposite to aesthetic consideration:— the almost photographic perfedlion of his canvases. Later, when the spirituel Whistler tarnished this English didadlician's reputation for infallibility, the latter's pronunciamentos were questioned, in some quarters ridiculed. And Turner, accepted because of Ruskin's assurances, became suspe(^l.

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 fadl to be longer ignored. In his Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus, The Fighting Temeraire and especially in Rain, Steam and Speed, he had begun to divide the surfaces of his objecls 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 representations of nature. These pictures Monet and Pissarro studied closely during the Franco-Prussian War, and there is no doubt that the result of this study determined the direc5lion taken by the Impressionists. Turner's earlier pidiures had been too sombre to meet the demand for brilliancy in that first great modern school, and the canvases in which his vision of sunlight began to take form had not yet been painted. These later pidlures, with their light tonality and their full use of misty blue and gold, had a further influence on the Impressionists' conception of colour.

When Monet and Pissarro went to London in 1 871 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 conjundlion with Delacroix's theories, into what later an unknown humorist of the Charivari named Impressionism. 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 effedls they sought by using the purity of Turner with the jaClure 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 constitute the only debt the Impressionists owed

Turner. They also found in him an added inspiration toward freedom of arrangement and unconventionahty of design. The landscape painters before Turner's day conceived their out-of-door pidlures 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 pidures were permeated by the same motif. But Turner, along with Constable and Bonington, began putting character into landscapes. As a consequence their pidures exuded a new freedom of arrangement.