Colour was made a functioning element out of which grew all the qualities of the pictures. At first, adverse criticisms were aimed at the Synchromists" polychromatic nudes, still-lives and landscapes. The press remarked that the nudes appeared as if adorned in Harlequin suits; the landscapes, as if they were intended for theatre drops; and the still-lives, as if painted through a prism. The Synchromists answered that, in order to achieve a strong emotion of force and weight, they would "willingly sacrifice the lovely tints of the flesh and the joy of searching for coloured pots in the shops of the second-hand merchants."
But, despite all they could say, there was justice in the public"s criticism. So long as there was a natural form in a picture, the spectator would unconsciously judge it from a naturalistic standpoint.
To be sure, there were canvases in the Munich exhibition which were almost unrecognisable as nature; but, before the aims of this new movement could be fully attained, a style of arbitrary and pure form was necessary. In the Bernheim-Jeune show Russell exposed one wholly abstract canvas. As an indication of a deflection toward pure composition, it was important, but the picture itself was as manifestly an artistic failure as had been his first large Synchromie en Vert hung in the _Salon des Independants_ of that year. It was not the only failure exposed, however. From the point of view of complete and organised conception all the early Synchromist pictures were to a certain extent fragmentary and tentative. The large canvas by Macdonald-Wright, Synchromie en Bleu, was a flagrant example of a totally new vision unsuccessfully struggling with the objectively cla.s.sic inspiration of a defunct antiquity. The group of three males in its foreground, while competently and intelligently built, had the appearance of allegorical figures struggling against a toppling world.
Although their position and organisation were dictated by the needs of an almost El Greco-like composition, one was too conscious of natural objects to accept, with a clear aesthetic conscience, the seeming chaos of the elements.
In bringing together in a unified emotion all the impressions of form, the Synchromists at first overlooked the fact that purity of expression, in order to be highly potent, must embody a pure conception. Their early canvases demonstrated many new formal possibilities, but, while they were composed more compactly than those of the other moderns, the forms themselves were obviously naturalistic. Herein the Synchromists at their debut failed to take the step from Cezanne to abstraction. Cezanne conceived all nature"s qualities-form, colour and tone-simultaneously.
He was the first great realist, because nature dictated to him the colour he was to use. The Synchromists, on the other hand, used natural objects to create organisations of pure colour, thus making formal expression a wholly subjective performance. This method contained greater emotional potentialities than Cezanne"s, because where the latter"s palette was necessarily much subdued in order to approximate to the attenuated gamut found in nature, the Synchromists" palette was keyed to its highest pitch of saturation. Cezanne"s choice of colour was never absolute in the harmonic sense, because he depended for accuracy entirely on taste and sensitivity. With Macdonald-Wright and Russell the palette was completely and scientifically rationalised so that one could strike a chord upon it as surely and as swiftly as on the keyboard of a piano: the element of hazard in harmony was eliminated. This knowledge of colour gamuts was not employed for ornamental niceties, but was converted into a method of creating an aesthetic finality other than that of form and line. If, in a complete balance of line and volume, the colour overweighs at any point into warm or cold, the poise of the whole is jeopardised and the finality obscured. The perfect poise of all the elements of a painting, expressed by the single element of colour, is the final technical aim of Synchromism.
In the first arbitrary formal composition by Russell the desire was to carry out the continuations of form from one chosen generating colour and at the same time to create linear development as well. His compositional theory was that, through the inevitable evolution of line from an arbitrarily chosen centre, the artist would naturally and consciously create form which would definitely approximate to the human body. In his Synchromie en Bleu Violace the composition was very similar to that of the famous Michelangelo Slave whose left arm is raised above the head and whose right hand rests on the breast. The picture contained the same movement as the statue, and had a simpler ordonnance of linear directions; but, save in a general way, it bore no resemblance to the human form. The sketch for this canvas was a greater success than the final presentation, for its realisation was more complete, its order more contracted and intense. In both there was but one very simple rhythm with two movements; and the size of the large picture, which was twelve feet high, was incommensurate with the slightness of the expression.
His second large Synchromie, exposed in the _Salon des Independants_ in March 1914, was more complicated and more sensitively organised, both as to movement and to colour, than his first. By his colour rhythms he strove to incorporate into his painting the quality of duration: that is, he sought to have his picture develop into time like music. The ambition was commendable although he wrongly a.s.serted that older painting extends itself strictly into s.p.a.ce. A Rubens, while presenting itself to the spectator at one glance, is nevertheless more than a block-manifestation of forms, for it never reveals itself fully until after many periods of study. In the old painters there is a definite formal foundation on which the canvas is rhythmically built, and as a rule this formal figure is repeated in miniature many times throughout the canvas. These form-echoes are defined and complete linear orders, and into them rhythm is introduced. In Russell the process is reversed: with him the rhythm brings about the order. In Rubens there is a distinct and conscious development of line, but no development of form.
Russell, in his later canvases, sets down a central form which dictates both the continuity of the picture and its formal complications. His generating centre is not like a motif whose character imprints itself on all its developments, but rather like a seed out of which the different forms grow-a directing centre which inspires and orders its environment.
In fine, the surrounding forms are not a development of the central one, but a result of it. This type of composition corresponds to the melodic composition in music.
In the later works of Macdonald-Wright the motif form of composition is achieved. In Cezanne there are forms whose parallels are repeated in varied development throughout the work and are rhythmically ordered into blocks. But while these forms resemble motif repet.i.tion, they are not generated by rhythm but united by it. In Macdonald-Wright"s canvases the rhythmic continuation of a central form const.i.tute the movement of the picture as well as the final character of it. In his Arm Organisation in Blue-Green one can discern near the centre a small and arbitrary interpretation of the constructional form of the human arm.
The movement of these forms throws off other lines and forms which, through many variations and counter-statements, reconstruct the arm in a larger way. Again these lines of the larger arm, in conjunction with the lines of the smaller one, evoke a further set of forms which break into parts each of which is a continuation or a restatement of the original arm motif, varied and developed.
Macdonald-Wright holds that the forms which we have experienced in our contact with nature are more expressive and diverse than those which are born of the inventive intelligence. But, while it is true that every realisation of _aesthetic movement_ or of the _rhythm_ of form is based on the movement of the human body, it is not true that the human body is a necessary foundation for form alone. However, Macdonald-Wright, in interpreting the human form, makes use merely of the direction and counterpoise of volume; he does not indulge in the depiction of limbs and torso: the body is only his inspiration to abstraction. He changes and shifts its forms out of any superficial resemblance to nature. In his desire to cling to a solid and immutable foundation we recognise an artist who realises how meagre is the incentive to create abstract compositions. With centuries of tradition urging him to a realistic rendering of the life about him, he finds it difficult to break entirely with realism and to create without referring to materiality. Perhaps some day he will even forgo the inspiration found in the combined forms in nature. His work is tending toward that ultimate freedom, as also is Russell"s.
Such a development, however, cannot be definitely predicted, but one can say, without dogmatism, that in the future their work will become surer, their compositions of a higher and more complete order. With their knowledge of the fundamentals of rhythmic organisation, which is well in advance of that of the other painters of today, their progress seems a.s.sured. Their postulates are too definite to permit of the introduction of literary or musical transcendentalism; and their _apports_ are too significant to permit of any retrogression toward metaphysics or drama.
Their palette has become co-ordinated and rationalised. Their composition is founded on the human body in movement. And their colour, in its plastic sense, takes into consideration s.p.a.ce, light and form.
These factors represent their technical a.s.sets. With these painters comes into being an art divorced from all the entanglements of photography, of piecemeal creation, of inharmonic gropings, of literature and of data hunting.
But they must not be regarded merely as inventors of new pictorial methods, for their discoveries have already taken significant aesthetic form. As Renoir completed the first cycle of modern art which was ushered in by Turner and Delacroix, so have the Synchromists completed the cycle of which Cezanne is the archaic father. They have discovered the concrete means wherewith to bring about his desires. It remains now for the painters of today and of the future to realise more fully the dreams of a higher art history. With the Synchromists there is no system or method other than a purely personal one. The word Synchromism, adopted by them to avoid obnoxious cla.s.sification under a foreign banner, means simply "with colour." It does not explain a mannerism or indicate a special trait, as do Cubism, Futurism and Neo-Impressionism.
It is as open as the term musician. As a school it can never exist.
Indeed it is the first graphic art the application of whose principles cannot be learned by a course of instruction. Artists employing its means must depend entirely on their own ability to create. In Synchromist pictures the good or bad results cannot be obscured by the introduction of foreign elements, as in the case of pictures wherein nature is copied. Russell and Macdonald-Wright have already repudiated the appellation of Synchromist and call themselves merely "painters,"
for, since Cezanne, painting means, not the art of tinting drawing or of correctly imitating natural objects, but the art which expresses itself only with the medium inherent in it-colour.
All significant painting to come must necessarily make use of Synchromist means, although form and composition-that is, the creative expression-may be as arbitrary or personal as the artist desires. In the Synchromists" latest prospectus are to be found the following comments: "In our painting colour becomes the generating function. Painting being the art of colour, any quality of a picture not expressed by colour is not painting. An art whose ambition it is to be pure should express itself only with means inherent in that art. The relation of s.p.a.cial emotions and of the emotions of density and transparency which we wish to express, dictates to us the colours most capable of transmitting these sensations to the spectator. In thus creating the subjective emotion of depth and rhythm we achieve the dreams of painters who talk of drawing the spectator into the centre of the picture; but instead of his being drawn there merely by intellectual processes he is enveloped in the picture by tactile sensation. We limit ourselves to the expression of plastic emotions. We can no longer conceive of the stupid juxtapositions of colours devoid of any rhythmic interlinking as art organisations." The Synchromists do not pretend to have invented new qualities for art but to have brought to painting a new vision which permits them to express the old qualities with a greater potency than formerly.
XIV
THE LESSER MODERNS
Decadence is simply the inability to create new tissue. In painting it manifests itself in two ways: either in the endeavour of an artist to turn the attention from new and precise procedures to antiquated and irrelevant ones; or in the artist"s desire to base his inspiration on the great work of an immediate forerunner rather than on the foundation of all vitality, nature. In neither case is new material being added to the sum of art. Decadence usually takes the form of a facile imitation of the surface aspect of a master, not infrequently making that master"s _results_ prettier, more fluent and more attractive. This is a natural and inevitable consequence of copying the objective side of a great work which originally was the outgrowth of a profound aesthetic philosophy.
Decadents, as a general rule, are sufficiently a.n.a.lytic to sense their own paucity of constructive genius. In recognising that nature can never inspire them to significant co-ordinations, they are content to accept, with slight modifications, the artistic standards of their predecessors.
They vary the art that has gone before to meet the needs of their own temperaments. In many cases highly meritorious work results.
The word decadent is not wholly deprecatory. Often the decadent is a competent composer in the abstract. By presenting in an attractive way his own personal tastes, he sometimes makes his art both interesting and beautiful. His decadence lies in his retrogression from the point to which the art of his day has arrived and in his inability to introduce a new element to compensate for this retrogression. No amount of individuality can bridge this gap. Many painters, like Gauguin, have reacted against achievement but have possessed a tangential vitality which in itself has been a new contribution to aesthetic endeavour. Other painters, like Renoir, while introducing no innovations, have, by talented and comprehensive efforts, duplicated and improved upon the art of the latest creative masters and thereby pushed forward the highest standards. They are not decadents, for their work exhibits no deterioration. Even decadents may be excellent artists. Gaspar de Crayer was undoubtedly a great artist though an offshoot of Rubens; and Giampietrino and Cesare da Sesto were both solid and intelligent painters, though they did not rival their master, Leonardo da Vinci.
There has undoubtedly been great sculpture since the Renaissance; but Michelangelo closed up for all time the plastic possibilities of clay and marble, and consequently, there being no new functioning element to be introduced into it, all sculpture since his day has been in the broad sense decadent.
Modern painting has had its decadents also-men who have attempted to revert to a sterile past or who have followed in the paths blazed by others without approaching the achievements of the painters imitated.
This latter cla.s.s has its usages, for it tends to lend impetus to the movement it follows. The men composing it are popularly called exponents, and the appellation is just. There are painters in all countries today who adhere to Impressionist methods, and thereby keep ever before us one of the great steps in the development of modern painting. Cezanne has undoubtedly been given greater consideration because of the many artists who follow his precepts. And the numerous imitators of Cubism have done much to focus on that movement the consideration it deserves. In a general way all the lesser modern painters, by their feverish activities, expositions and pamphleteering, have, despite their inherent lack of genuine importance, kept the world conscious of the fact that it is in the midst of a great aesthetic upheaval, that new forces are at work, that the older order is being supplanted.
Today nearly every country has a group of men striving toward the new vision. They cannot all be innovators of new methods. They cannot all carry forward the evolution of modern painting. But they can at least give momentum to the current ideals and turn out work which bears so much personal merit that it becomes deserving of more or less serious consideration. Degas and his circle are of this cla.s.s, as are the Futurists who, though at bottom decadent, inasmuch as they turn their art back to ill.u.s.tration, are a force which cannot be ignored. In Dresden, Munich and Berlin are groups of modern men who have repudiated the academies and struck out into new fields. Russia has contributed many young artists to the present ideal. England has not been altogether impervious to the modern doctrines. America is represented by fully a score of artists animated by the new vitality. And in France there are a hundred painters at work tearing down the older idols. While few of these men can lay claim to introducing any intrinsically new and significant methods or forms into modern painting, their work in many instances, while being decadent in the strict sense, is nevertheless commendable. They are not great artists even in the sense that Monet, Manet, Gauguin, Matisse and Pica.s.so are great; but many of them are at least genuine artists.
One of the most conspicuous figures among the decadents is Wa.s.sily Kandinsky. In an age when all art was being arraigned before the tribunal of biology, physiology, and psychology, he came forward and attempted to drag it back into the murky medium of metaphysics. The generating forces of modern painting, however, rest on no metaphysical hypothesis. To attempt to define form by transcendental terms, or even to credit form with esoteric significance, reveals an ignorance of the principles of aesthetic emotion. Form in the art sense is a demonstrable proposition; it is answerable to physical laws. Michelangelo, El Greco, Giotto, Rubens, Cezanne and Renoir based composition on natural causes, and as each successive artist has approached intensity in organisation, he has come nearer and nearer to the rhythm which animates and controls corporeal existence. aesthetic form, in order to become emotion-producing, must reflect the form which is most intimately a.s.sociated with our sensitivities. It must primarily be physical. There is nothing mysterious about aesthetic rhythm, and any attempt to "spiritualise" the harmonies of art carries art so much further from the truth. The modern tendency to make objects abstract and to divest subject-matter of all its mimetic qualities, has led some critics and painters to the false conclusion that form itself is unrelated to recognisable phenomena. But even in the most abstract of the great painters, the form is concrete. In a broad sense it is susceptible of geometrical demonstration; and its intensity is in direct ratio to its proximation to human organisms. In fact, there are no moving forms in an aesthetic organisation which do not have their prototypes in the human body in action. Were this not true empathy would be impossible, and without empathy an artistic emotion is purely intellectual and a.s.sociative. The greatest painters, past and present, have recognised this principle; and art which does not adhere to it is decadent both in the aesthetic and the intellectual sense.
Kandinsky exemplifies this kind of decadence. While the innovators up to Matisse had tried to discover in nature secrets which would aid them in plastic expression, Kandinsky has tried, by numerous articles and at least one complete book, to turn back the minds of painters to the supposedly mystical elements of form and colour. But although this artist is to be commended on his effort to make colour significant in a day when angular forms of brown and black were the keynote, his study of colour should have begun where Cezanne left off and not with the writings of Maeterlinck and the symbolist poets. Kandinsky recognises that colour has possibilities, but he ignores the fact that colour is one of the physical sciences, as definite as those of the quadrivium, that its inductive qualities have become cla.s.sified and that its functioning is precise and answerable to natural laws. Consequently he cannot co-ordinate its governing principles, and, in an attempt to rationalise it he has sought refuge in music, an art which presents to him the same mystical difficulties. So long as he was under the healthy influence of Matisse his symbology was less evident; but when he adopted a metaphysical programme it all came to the surface.
Kandinsky"s early "impressions" are heavy and insensitive "Fauve"
pictures. His "compositions" for the most part are general statements of some rural scene in Matisse"s manner; and his "improvisations" represent semi-abstract lines delimiting scientifically meaningless colours. In his book, The Art of Spiritual Harmony, he presents an elaborate explanation of the metaphysical basis for colour, but he fails to contribute any ideas not to be found in Delacroix and Seurat. And the pictures with which he complements the text have been surpa.s.sed, in their own manner, by the Chinese. There are isolated comments on colour theories which are separately sound, and there are explanatory generalisations; but a diligent search fails to reveal any statement which is precise and at the same time new. The book refers constantly to music, and there are undeniable evidences of literary thought; but nowhere is there an explanation of the plastic significance of colour.
Kandinsky is a painter of moods, and as such encroaches upon the domain of music. He is a painter of the vision of an action without its objective integument, and as such he enters the realm of poetry. He is essentially pretty, and despite his idealistic nomenclature, he is at bottom ill.u.s.trative and decorative. What he designates the "soul" is only a.s.sociative memory, and his conception of composition is the breaking up of a flat surface into irregular compartments by lines and more or less pure colour. Like Scriabine he has overlooked the formal possibilities of colour and consequently has failed in any aesthetically emotional expression.
[Ill.u.s.tration: COMPOSITION NO. 2 by KANDINSKY]
Kandinsky"s attempts to create moods are largely failures because of the inherent limitations of his art medium. The arts may be synthesised when a profounder understanding of them has come about, but their functionality can never be interchanged. The art of literature will always be able to tell a story better than the greatest sculpture; and even a primitive song is more capable of producing a mood than the most highly organised painting. Kandinsky, for instance, fails to achieve what the Ma.r.s.eillaise achieves in music, namely: the dramatic presentation of an exhortation to action. Separate, for instance, the phrases of the original version. The first verse opens with a rousing appeal which culminates on "_patrie_," a word always welcome to the ear and heart of a Frenchman. Then the song acclaims the glory of the occasion and repeats dramatically the cause of the struggle-"_Contre nous de la tyrannie l"etendard sanglant est leve_." Then it recounts the tragedies which are befalling relatives and friends at the hands of the growling soldiers of the enemy; and suddenly, in an unexpected voice it calls, "_Aux armes, citoyens!_" ending in a patriotic and decisive flourish. The music throughout is subtly harmonised with the words: lively during the opening call; abated during the first statement of the cause; animated with its repet.i.tion; minor when the tragic words occur; vibrant and imitative of bugles during the call to arms; and highest in pitch at the end. This is the expression of the mood intensified.
Could painting extend itself into time and present singly and in sequence the visions of objective nature, dramatically synthesised with colour and line, it could perhaps influence people to emotion in the way music does. But the musical quality of time-extension is impossible in painting. And since a picture presents a simultaneous vision, which cannot be otherwise except through a subjective process, it is incapable of working from a prelude to a finale like music. Music is abstract, though firmly based on the rhythmic movement of all nature, yet it can produce moods by far more distant and far less tangible a.s.sociations than can painting. But mood in music is no higher a quality than ill.u.s.tration in painting, and the highly creative artists ignore them both. The great composer is the one who, seeing beyond the a.s.sociative theory in music, feels the deeper plasticity of movement and form: and his plasticity is this only preoccupation, just as the plastic element of colour is the great modern painter"s chief concern. Kandinsky has only tried to introduce an unimportant element of one art into another art. While the procedure has a superficial taste of novelty it is no more creditable than if he had declared himself frankly for ill.u.s.tration and joined the ranks of Degas and his school. He has not probed into the pregnant recesses of painting and attempted to discover the meaning of form. He has contented himself with obscuring the delineations of natural objects in such a manner that the beholder feels led to decipher his cryptic realities. The suggestion of actuality is there, but there being no other strong attraction in the picture, aesthetic or otherwise, the spectator sets to work to penetrate its objective meaning. In the majority of cases he succeeds, and gains thereby a satisfaction similar to that of having solved a simple problem in fractions.
In painting moods, which he refers to as "spiritual impressions,"
"internal harmonies," "psychic effects" and "soul vibrations," Kandinsky does not attempt to depict the dynamic forces which produce moods, but strives to interpret his own emotional impressions by means of semi-symbolic and semi-naturalistic visions and by inspirational methods. Unable to ally the elements of colour and line to a given theme, he contents himself with giving us a chaotic impression by such means as he personally a.s.sociates with his mood: and since this kind of a.s.sociation is largely individual, his depiction of the mood is incomprehensible to anyone not temperamentally and mentally at one with him. Did he understand the inherent psychological dramatic significance of colours and lines he could represent a universally moving vision, and thereby attain in a small degree the end for which he aims. But his feeling for colour especially is so vague and unscientific that it is, after all, a personal thing, and his graphic representation of a mood is little more than an individual and purely otiose expression. Even Carra, in his colourless Funeral of the Anarchist Galli, approaches nearer the creation of a mood than does Kandinsky in his best canvases, for in Carra there is exhibited a certain knowledge of the dramatic use of line which, when combined with recognisable subject-matter, augments the thematic drama.
Despite his complete preoccupation with colour Kandinsky is decadent more than Van Gogh to whom artistically he is closely related, because the progress of modern painting is toward purity, toward creation by means of a unique element, toward an art which expresses only the qualities of which that art is the most highly capable. When other considerations enter into it, it is at once drawn back toward ill.u.s.tration, and its final defecation is postponed. Happily Kandinsky, an explorer of the limitless realms of metaphysics, has given us no more specific a postulate than that colour has meaning. Though he formulates many vaguely a.s.sociative theories (such as "keen yellow looks sour because it recalls the taste of a lemon," "a shade of red will cause pain or disgust through a.s.sociation with running blood," and "in the hierarchy of colours green is the _bourgeoisie_-self-satisfied, immovable, narrow"); he nevertheless relies largely on instinct for their application. While attempting to turn painters" minds from the precise discoveries of colourists to a pseudo-philosophical consideration of colour, he is too general and ambiguous to inspire extensive imitation. Already painters since him have gone forward in the great work of research begun by the Impressionists.
If Kandinsky, as a theorist, is cabalistic and illusory, he achieves a certain decorative prettiness in his work. Though his ideas are old, the appearance of his canvases is new: and it is merely this novelty of conception, coupled with his tendency toward abstraction, which makes him of interest, and then only as a theoretical deviation from the work of Gauguin, Matisse and the Orientals. His colour is not without visual charm, and his composition often has the fascination of the delicate patterns found in the Chinese. In fact, Kandinsky"s compositional debt to the Chinese is large. His Improvisation No. 29 is almost identical with a painting by Rin Teikei, and many of his pictures appear like curved-line generalisations of Chinese groupings, or the forms in Chinese backgrounds. Like the Cubists Kandinsky is a step toward arbitrariness in formal composition, but his advance is less significant than theirs. In his desire to ill.u.s.trate a mood and produce a corresponding psychic emotion in the spectator he is a transcendentalised Futurist. His ontological terminology has given an impetus to his popularity, but it has tended unfortunately to obscure his worth as a maker of arabesques.
Of a different decadent type are Bonnard, Vuillard and K.-X. Roussel who call themselves the Intimists. These artists descend in large measure from Matisse, and though other and sometimes stronger influences enter their work, they are in a general way more closely akin to him than any other modern painter. Their appearance is more academic and, in the decorative sense, prettier than that of Matisse. Also, there is in their pictures a greater perpendicularity than in the work of their master.
The angular and the perpendicular always represent the second compositional step from symmetricality to order: they are indicative of the earliest stage of aesthetic consciousness. They are found in the Egyptians, Phnicians, a.s.syrians, Chaldeans, and in all the primitive Christians, and in Gauguin and Puvis de Chavannes. The artists who use them have awakened to the fact that chaos is not conducive to emotional satisfaction. In perpendicular lines there is a primitive sense of fitness, for one feels they are both well-planted and immovable. Not infrequently they are employed by the decadents of a movement or an epoch because they harmonise so neatly and unostentatiously with pretty colours and delicate themes. The Futurists found in them a ready means to a decorative order.
Bonnard, the most genuine artist of the group, uses perpendicularity of arrangement more consciously than does either of the others. He studied in the same cla.s.s with Maurice Denis at the _Academie Julien_, and his a.s.sociation with this painter no doubt explains his compositional predilection. He is strongly influenced by Renoir, although he has never penetrated beyond Renoir"s surface. His greys are always rich and sombre, and even his simplest works are as artistically opulent and lovely as the finest tapestry. Indeed his large paintings are more appropriately wall coverings than panels, ornaments rather than decorations. In them are hot sunlight and cold shadow in scintillating succession; and every object is put to genuine ornamental use. They seem to exhibit an unconscious fluency in the employment of bafflingly diverse greys which are saturated with colour and applied so as to reveal highly their attentuated purity. There are also in his work harmoniously horizontal lines and pleasing sequences of curves. In Le Jardin a line starts with the head of a man on the left, continues along his arm and leg and the sofa back, and reaches an apex in the child"s head to the right of the centre, sinks by way of the head of the woman on the right to the man"s arm, is then caught up again by the contour of his legs, is paralleled by the outline of the nearest standing child"s dress and face and the face of the kneeling girl, is continued in the bottom of the skirt of the child seated on the sofa, and then becomes horizontal in a perfect continuation of the table"s surface. The line is beautiful and studiously made, and is pointed out here for the purpose of showing the simple ordonnance often found in the lesser artists. Nor is it the only line in the canvas. There are others as harmonious and as beautiful; but what keeps the picture from being a great composition, although its forms are solid and well adapted to their s.p.a.ces, is its lack of opposition or solution of warring elements. If we do not try to cla.s.s Bonnard with the greatest artists, we are forced to praise him. He is unpretentious, highly gifted, has a well-developed sense of the beautiful, and is possessed of a most sensitive eye. He is neither an ill.u.s.trator of nature nor of moods, but an artist who paints to obtain aesthetic expression, without the _arriere pensee_ of a theoretical method. He is one of the most purely pleasing painters of modern times.
Vuillard, a painter of interiors, owes his inspiration as much to Toulouse-Lautrec as to Gauguin. Like Bonnard he uses greys of dry and mat colour, but his harmonies are slighter and of lighter tonality than those of Bonnard. Profiting by the Impressionists" light discoveries he has done some very admirable interiors; some of his works are more modern and artistic Whistlers. His art is one in which the spotting of ma.s.ses for the sake of balance supplants any attempt to produce generating lines. As with Bonnard and Roussel there is in him a striving after beautiful surfaces, _matieres_ which in themselves will tempt the amateur. In this common pursuit the Intimists show themselves to be the successors of Degas; but they are successors who, having taken to heart the teachings of more significant forerunners, represent a st.u.r.dier decadence than that of Degas. K.-X. Roussel is a feminised Poussin. He searches solely for effect, and his canvases have the singular charm of enamel. Were they smaller they would make admirable brooches and vases.
He too has made tapestries, but in spirit they are less modern than the corresponding efforts of his contemporaries. His compositions embody reddish satyrs and nymphs, intense blue sky, yellow-green foliage and yellow ground. His drawing never has more than the rudimentary charm of school-room talent, while that of Vuillard is subjugated to his colour application, and that of Bonnard is instinctively deformed to the needs of line and decorative necessity.
[Ill.u.s.tration: LE JARDIN by BONNARD]
Maurice Denis is more directly an outcome of the school of Pont-Aven than are the three preceding men. His synthetic figures were first seen in Courbet, then in Puvis de Chavannes, then in Besnard and Gauguin. In Denis they have lost much of their significance and have once more become primarily academic. There was a time about 1890 when Denis"s colour was not aggressively disagreeable. It was subjugated to a certain greyness which was applied in little spots resembling the black-and-white stippling of some of Seurat"s drawings. Now his colour has grown acid and unpleasant. His line is stiff and vitiated and lacks even the quality of a pleasing silhouette. He has written a book of theories, but it has helped him little in his artistic achievements. He is the ant.i.thesis of Bonnard, and his colours possess almost no harmonious interrelation. In him there are a few perpendicular lines, but one may seek in vain for evidences of co-ordination. Many of his figures are appropriated from the works of the old masters, but because he fails to adapt them sensitively to his needs, they lose, rather than gain, in beauty by the transfer. He is at times symbolic and allegoric, and while one might overlook this literary phase of his art, provided there were other qualities to compensate for it, he fails to exhibit a complete appreciation of the aesthetic possibilities of his models, and consequently becomes merely an exponent of adopted mannerisms. His popularity has entirely to do with qualities unrelated to painting.
Judged by a purely aesthetic standard he is inferior to an Augustus John, a Desvallieres, a Bourdelle or a Wyndham Lewis.
The highly talented Andre Derain is another synthetic painter. He is sincerely moved by multiramose tree forms and the sunlight effects of Provence, and his admiration for Cezanne led him into certain mannerisms which have for their object a facilitation of the Aix master"s methods.
In his use of soft yellows, hot earth tones, deep warm greens and light blues, he reveals his debt to the modern tendency toward colour. By outlining his objects with heavy contours, he has acquired erroneously a reputation for virility, and though he aspires to composition, he only achieves pattern. He is much like the Scandinavian, Othon Friesz, who, having absorbed the exteriors of Matisse and Cezanne, and having read Cezanne"s letter recommending Poussin remade on nature, has turned his attention to this old t.i.tian offshoot and endeavours to give us a reversion to style. At one time he used colour freely, but he now paints with ochres, blues, blacks, greens and an occasional red-a gamut like Derain"s, only yellower. He too has a heavy technique and a reputation for virility. Maurice de Vlaminck is another painter of similar inspiration and palette. He is much prettier and has a finer sense of soft harmonies than either of the other two. He reveals a genuine feeling for his subjects, and always tries to introduce into his works a simple oppositional line. He comes direct from Cezanne, and it is from paintings such as his that Cezanne has acquired a reputation as a maker of arabesques. De Vlaminck has a rich and impelling _matiere_ and an art sense which is almost coquettish.
Kees van Dongen has studied the sensual drawings of Toulouse-Lautrec and the broad exteriors of Matisse, and in combining his two admirations has made eminently effective posters of nearly harmonious colours in very broad planes. De Segonzac also uses attenuated colours in a broad manner after Matisse. Manguin, another Matisse imitator, is too academic to appeal strongly to those who have acquired the modern vision, despite the primitive order his canvases at times possess. Flandrin is more decorative. His works reveal a cla.s.sic perpendicularity of composition, and though they are without a sense of form, we feel in them a certain charm of s.p.a.ce and air. He brushes in his landscapes broadly by planes of light and dark, somewhat in the very early manner of Matisse. Pierre Laprade has arrived at a style of surface which may best be characterised as bad tapestry. Jean Puy applies his pictures in a broad, somewhat bold, manner, and his light tonality and angularities point to his having lingered over the work of Cezanne. Lebasque is the feminine prototype of Puy. His colour is faded and unemotional, and his exteriors are as flat as the simplest decorations. Madame Marval differs from Lebasque only in theme.
Modern decadence in Zak, Rousseau, Vallotton, Prendergast and Simon Bussy manifests itself in a retrogression to primitive ideals. Though using the modern methods of simplification, these men revert to a static and dead past. Their aim is to revive the most ancient manner of painting. Of all the modern decadents they are perhaps the most devitalising for they tacitly repudiate the discoveries of the new men, and strive to turn the minds of the public and of painters alike to the sterilities of antiquity. They even ignore the aesthetic principles of the Renaissance, and by pushing creative expression to its furthest limits of artlessness, turn to naught the entire achievements of the great plastic composers. At best these men are dealers in decorative material. Simple arrangement is absent from their works, and colour, which for nearly a century has fought for its true place in painting, is once more used as an instinctive means for filling in drawings.
Vallotton, though a modern primitive, is not allied to any recent school. In appearance his work is unlike that of the other moderns. He disdains all save the simplest means and the most restricted colours. In him there are no delicate plays of light, but broad and heavy shadings which are not without subtlety. He is a Teutonic Ingres-a Flandrin made serious as to precision and reduced colour. At a distance his nude studies are interesting, for there one loses the dryness and hardness of their technical manner-a heritage of Vallotton"s days of wood engravings. Other modern painters who elude cla.s.sification, but who are intimately related in a general way to the new movements are Charles Guerin, Piot, Spiro, Alcide Le Beau, Gustave Jaulmes and d"Espagnat.
Though they differ markedly from Vallotton they are all preoccupied with self-expression by means of colour. By making it a dominant element in their work, they have admitted their susceptibility to the modern ideal and thereby have given an impetus to the spirit which tends toward purification. Guerin is a professor of the _Academie Moderne_; and though clinging close to conventional drawing, he attains a slightly novel aspect in all his tapestry-like canvases. He is eminently of the Beaux-Arts tradition, is artificial and monotonous, and paints very large pictures with both idealistic and realistic themes.
Of the modern men who have found in Cubism their strongest aesthetic fascination de la Fresnay is a noteworthy example. So well does he understand the demands of the Pica.s.so tradition that he has come to be looked upon as one of the members of the Cubist group. His arrangements are soft and pretty and his colour is harmonious. He has in fact surpa.s.sed in merit several of the original Cubists. Frederick Etch.e.l.ls and W. Roberts are English exponents of Cubism, and the latter has done some work which rivals that of Picabia. Wyndham Lewis, another Englishman, strives for an individual expression, but his angularities reveal his debt to Pica.s.so, although the general impression of his pictures is Futuristic. The hand of the Cubists can be found in many of the canvases of the modern Americans. Arthur B. Davies, the most popular of the new men in the United States, is at bottom a superficial academician, but he superimposes shallow Cubist traits on his two-dimensional drawings, giving them a spuriously modern appearance.
Maurice Stern treats Gauguin themes with a pale reflection of the early geometrical Pica.s.so; and similar means are employed by C. R. Sheeler, Jr., though both Matisse and Delaunay have contributed to his art.
To name all the modern painters who are conscientiously battling against formalism and the dry-rot of the academies would be impossible.
The field is too broad: the activities are too numerous. Few civilised countries have escaped the insistence of the new impetus. By some painters the new methods are adopted tentatively and by degrees. Others fly to the latest phases of art and move forward with the epoch. Today there are numerous representatives of all the movements from Impressionism to Synchromism. Kroll and Childe Ha.s.sam, both Americans, are emulators of Monet, though Ha.s.sam, who appears less modern than Kroll, is by far the more sensitive painter. Marquet has done more than imitate Impressionism. He has synthesised Monet into a more masculine expression. His planes are broad and luminous, and he achieves a distinct feeling for air and distance by simpler and more direct means than did the Impressionists. W. S. Glackens combines a Renoir technique with a modern purity of colour. J. D. Ferguson, the Scotchman, also reverts to the Impressionists but has learned much from Matisse. Duncan Grant, an Englishman, is much more modern than Ferguson and more competently expressive of the new. Roger Fry has contributed much to the modern impetus. His writings reveal a wide comprehension of present-day paintings and his insight into aesthetics is at times profound. Every year adds to the ranks. Besides the modern artists already named may be mentioned Bechteiev, Bolz, Lhote, Chagall, Chamaillard, Zawadowsky, Hayden, Ottmann, Lotiron, Utrillo, Hartley, Peckstein, Valensi, Jawlensky, Knauerhase, Munter, Tobeen, Bloch, Dove, de Chirico, Walkowitz, Boussingault, Kanoldt and Granzow.