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 decorative 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 spiritual interest for us in the ancient work. Intrinsically one is as great as the other. Those seeking for calm will find it in equal degree in both, for 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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: DEUX TAHTIENS by GAUGUIN]
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 distinctly different from nature"s; and while refusing to be dominated by the past, his temperament was such that he fabricated an art much closer to antiquity than that of the Zaks and the Rousseaus who servilely imitated it. He accomplished 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 painting 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 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 effects, 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 invited 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, 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 irregularities, retrogressions, forward spurts, divagations. Renoir first appeared with a rhythmic 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 deteriorated 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 embryonic statement of the ends of modern art. Courbet, ignoring colour, totally divorced subject-matter from antiquity and liberated drawing from the accepted style. He carried art forward, but not in a direct line. Daumier gave us a new conception 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 doc.u.mentary freedom of Courbet and began the 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 pa.s.sively all that had come before. They raised colour to an important 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 possibilities 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 pa.s.sed to a time when composition did not exist, interpreted, but did not imitate, nature. The Neo-Impressionists continued the impetus of p.i.s.sarro.
Cezanne unearthed secrets from nature which linked him to Impressionism, and by applying them arbitrarily to cla.s.sic organisations, 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-understood masters and to emphasise the qualities of texture, _matiere_ and prettiness. So rapid was the evolution of modern endeavour that nearly every painter overlapped his seemingly remote predecessor. Edgar Degas was born more than twenty years before the death of Delacroix. He was one of those painters who, content to remain stagnant, 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 femininity more than in actual technical innovations. He was an enthusiastic visitor to the Cafe Guerbois on the Avenue de Clichy where, from 1865 until the war, Manet was the dominating figure, and where the Impressionists and such men as Lhermitte, Cazin, Legros, Whistler and Stevens came to discuss aesthetics.
Although never radically opposed to scholasticism, as were these other men, Degas was nevertheless 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 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 detract from the vision of the whole-came to him direct 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 him 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 represented Gauguin"s ant.i.thesis. He strove to catch his model in flight. He immobilised their _elan_, and registered those characteristics of a model which express action 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 resiliency 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 _aesthetic_ poise which transmits itself to our subjectivities. He surprised the actional segment which epitomises the entire cycle of movement. Everything he touches becomes as charming and interesting as a wellstaged scene. His sympathies with the Impressionist colour methods and his manner of handling his material add to this charm and make pleasurable, fresh and adventuresome what would otherwise be ba.n.a.l 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 action, makes of it a picture with a rich and colourful surface-a surface beside which a Gericault, judged from the same ill.u.s.trative 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 distinct connotation when applied to arts and crafts. Vases, plaques, panels, screens, decorations, 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 adjective.
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 exact limitations. "Artistic" commonly refers to paintings in which the exact.i.tude of drawing is lost in a nonchalant _sensibilite_, 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" work. This desire for superficial and material 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 pictures have something more than an ill.u.s.trative value; they are highly attractive as _objets d"art_ as well. But while this attractiveness 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 pictorial 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 action should have been such a master of balance. He could never have achieved such perfect balance had he not realised that a work of art must be done coldly and consciously and without pa.s.sion 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 att.i.tude he was continuing the modern spirit of arbitrary subject selection found in Courbet, Manet and p.i.s.sarro. 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, Musiciens a l"Orchestre 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 pictures lack the rich volumes of a Daumier and the order of a Renoir.
[Ill.u.s.tration: DANSEUSES a LEUR TOILETTE by DEGAS]
Degas was neither academic nor revolutionary. He struck a middle course in which the scholastic and the heretical blent, and in blending neutralised 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 comprehension of life"s tragedies did not spoil his enjoyment in depicting them. Louis Legrand reveals the metropolitan l.u.s.t of mankind; Forain, its b.e.s.t.i.a.lity; 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 ill.u.s.trators of which Degas was the dominant figure had distinctly individual traits. In no sense were they followers of one leader. Their preoccupation with ill.u.s.tration alone held them together. Degas has given us well-balanced patterns with fragilely lovely surfaces. He was little interested in the traits of his models: he cared more for the picture than for individual character.
With Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec this mental att.i.tude was reversed. In his work are specific members of the _demi-monde_, marionettes who have all the accentuated vices, vulgarities, fatigues and pretensions of their trade. In their faces, moulded by unrestrained indulgences, joys and sorrows, we can read their innermost hopes and aspirations. 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 fantastic flowers nourished by artificial light and colour-come to work and play. He saw and set down the princ.i.p.als in the Bohemian music halls, the _cafes-concerts_ and the _cirques_, and those daylight moralists who come to relax viciously at night with all the _laisser-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. Pa.s.sions 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 n.o.ble one: his father was a sportsman, a lover of horses, a sculptor in his leisure moments. All the pride of race and dignity of cla.s.s tumbled from its pedestal in this young artist. He had worked in the schools of Bonnat and Cormon, 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 ephemeral, visionary life of the cafes; and no action, no type, no expression escaped his probing notice. He had many friends to whom he confided. "I am only half a bottle," he would say. He adored women impersonally and romantically, 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 princ.i.p.als 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 instinctive 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 end of his life he worked, for the most part, with a full brush and rich colours.
Before this, however, 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 subjects 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 characteristic traits, just as Matisse did in his sculpture. 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. To some it may seem strange that Lautrec should have liked Ma.s.sys and Memling. But in the first he found trenchant characterisation, especially in such things as Head of an Old Man, The Courtesan and Portrait of a Canon. And he was temperamentally akin to Memling in such arrangements as the latter"s The Casting of the Lots (a detail of Calvary) and Our Lord"s Pa.s.sion, at the Museum in Turin.
That the ill.u.s.trators of this group were decadent is borne out in their subject-matter 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 a.n.a.lyse their emotions, have dreamed only of depicting objectively their photographic impressions 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 Mahavelipore were used only by those puissant masters of form as friezes or shapes to fill in and ornament a vacant s.p.a.ce. 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 expression; and Lautrec and Legrand, both more robust than Degas, though minor and ornamentally ill.u.s.trative 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 Sodoma rather than toward the Latin ideal of Tiepolo. This almost Teutonic racial penchant in him explains why the b.e.s.t.i.a.lity of his subject-matter is so often done in the manner of Goya, with broad black and white ma.s.ses, not with the suggested line and the attractive _matiere_ 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 Frenchman, whose whole talent lies in a formula of draughtsmanship, works toward its creation as an end. His shallowness is at once apparent when we compare his Maitresse or his ill.u.s.trations for Edgar Allan Poe"s tales with etchings like Donde Va Mama or Buen Viaje. Psychologically he is intimately related to the _fin de siecle_ movement in England; and, although a better and more healthy workman, he has a temperament singularly akin to that ineffectual Victorian academician, 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 confreres 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 a.n.a.lysis which cannot be imposed upon by pretence, have touched on many sides of contemporary life-politics, extortion, courts, merchants, the _beau monde_, prost.i.tution, religion, the theatre and the tawdry Bohemianism of Montparna.s.se. With a few straight and fluent strokes of the pencil he builds up a type of the bl.u.s.tering _parvenu_ Jew, the mercenary picture dealer, the childish and vain actor who is avid for praise and obsessed with his vocation. Forain calls the actor a "_M"as-tu-vu?_" and depicts 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 reciting Baudelaire"s verses. Around her are grouped types of self-satisfied and vicious masculinity, 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 concentration. The whole picture 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 t.i.tles to his drawings are in the exact spirit of the pictures themselves, succinct, brutal and penetrating. Forain is the second greatest caricaturist the world has produced. 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 subpa.s.sage 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 character. 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 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 ill.u.s.trator of the bachelor clubs; Forain, the expositor of life"s pretensions.
It is these men who have given the greatest impetus to realistic ill.u.s.tration in all countries. Viewed from this standpoint they were a salutary, as well as a diverting, manifestation. By burrowing down into the depths of material existence they made unimportant such poetic men as Beardsley, Rossetti and Moreau. All good ill.u.s.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 actions and reactions. Its mere prettiness was supplanted by subcutaneous characteristics. It sought for motives rather than emotions, for causes rather than effects. It became critical where once it had been only photographic. From Degas, Lautrec, Legrand and Forain comes directly the best ill.u.s.trative talent in both Europe and America.
Without these four men we would not possess the best work of Max Beerbohm, Hermann Paul, Bellows, Maxime Dethomas, Roubille, Carlopez, Carl Larson, Albert Engstrom, C. D. Gibson, E. M. Ashe, Boardman Robinson, Cesare, Blumenschein and Wallace Morgan, the last of whom is unquestionably the most artistic ill.u.s.trator in either America or England.
X
HENRI-MATISSE
While the bitter struggle against the narrow dictates of a retrospective and so-called cla.s.sic academy was in progress, and before the older scholastic forces had finally been put to rout, the Impressionists calmly arrogated to themselves the authority of their dumbfounded predecessors. Their pictures, because more restricted and not based on the fundamentals of art, soon became as familiar and commonplace as the paintings of Gerome, Cabanel and Bouguereau, 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 react against them, and later Gauguin and his fellow synthesists openly declared 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. Gauguin, putting aside imitation of nature for interpretation, began the great movement which was to culminate in the most extreme reaction against Impressionism-Cubism. And Matisse who, arousing 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 whereas the Impressionists had completely forgotten the cla.s.sics, Gauguin wished to recommence the entire cycle by reverting to the forefathers of those very cla.s.sics. He also had his decadent followers, but there was no one to continue his methods and inspiration.
If it is difficult to perceive an a.n.a.logy 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 contrasted with the latter, will at once become apparent. Gauguin clung close to the drawing of the primitive Christians; and the cla.s.sic 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 Romanelli, there is a more purely sensitive reason for it than in the well-taught decadents of the later Renaissance. In the cla.s.ses of Bouguereau and Carriere at the Beaux-Arts he had seen to what an impa.s.se 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 cla.s.sics 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 a.s.sured thing, and while 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 picture merchants-that his fame took birth.
With Matisse"s advent we behold the paradox of an artist who is in full reaction against the Impressionistic and cla.s.sic doctrines 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-expression. 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 Neo-Impressionistic 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-ives 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 respect 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 perfect displacement of s.p.a.ces in the canvases of the Provencal master.
Gauguin, while still leaning to the cla.s.sic, desired a fresher impetus.
He therefore sought distortion in exotic inspiration; 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 pa.s.sion. 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 characteristic 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 naf effect. But in Goya and Matisse the deformations are the result of a highly developed plastic sense which glories in new and unusual forms.
With 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 Tahtiens, one of Gauguin"s best works, with Matisse"s Baigneuses, a canvas of three nudes one of which is playing 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 themselves.
They have no intellectual destiny. In the Matisse picture the exaggerations grow out of a desire to express more fully the form which the artist has felt to be important and characteristic. In the seated woman the torso and neck const.i.tute 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 Daumier through Seurat, Degas and Gauguin. That Ingres, the master of so cla.s.sic a school, should have unconsciously felt the need for modifying and simplifying an object is a significant indication 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 detract from the spontaneous emotion of the whole; in Degas and Manet, because they hinder the fluency of action and obscure the complete and direct image; in Seurat, because they interfere with the suavity of line itself; and in Gauguin, because they preclude that navete of appearance he wished to obtain. In Matisse began the conscious process of making form arbitrary, of bending it to the personal requirement of expression. In Cubism form became even more abstract. 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 rightness of proportion which is an outgrowth of the ultimate refinement of knowledge and taste.
[Ill.u.s.tration: BAIGNEUSES by HENRI-MATISSE]
The trick of drawing of a Louis Legrand has no parallel in Matisse. In the work of the latter each figure or object, 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, accepting 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 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 actual 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 cla.s.sic metres and caused them to seek a more plastic and adaptable medium in _vers libre_. Rondeaux, ballades, quatrains, octaves and the like are today as intrinsically perfect forms as they ever were, but the significance of their beauty has been lost through overuse, through too great familiarity. Our minds pa.s.s over them as over well-learned lessons committed to memory.
It is thus Matisse felt about the cla.s.sic forms of his predecessors.
These forms had once been beautiful; intrinsically they were still beautiful; but they had been habitualised by constant repet.i.tion; and new ones were needed. In order to find them Matisse says that, when before a model, he tried to forget that he had even seen a nude before and to look upon it with the eyes of one who had never seen a picture.
By this he does not mean that his vision was nave, but that it was innocent of set rules and preconceived ideas of how form should be obtained. As a theory this att.i.tude proved fruitful because, while he did not succeed in setting aside memory, he was nevertheless led to a conscious thrusting aside of his first impulses to depict form as he saw it. All painters, even the greater artists of the past, had copied form as it presents itself to the eye, but Matisse forced himself, through painstaking a.n.a.lysis, to express form in a totally novel manner; 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 realised 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 depiction of the human figure. Therefore a complete recognisability must be maintained.
If the artist omitted an eye or a mouth, for example, the spectator would experience physically the incompleteness of the vision. He would feel, through personal a.s.sociation, the blindness or the suffocation as suggested in the picture; and these shocks, being secondary physiological sensations, would detract from the _aesthetic_ 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 progressed the ill.u.s.trative gradually became relegated.
Much impetus for his abbreviations and accentuations 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. 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 influenced 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 ac.u.men. 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 encompa.s.sed only certain traits of form which, when expressed, became not composed but balanced, not imitative but abstract.
The abstractness of negro sculpture, its bending of all human forms to an ornament, its archaic rigidity which is the ant.i.thesis 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.