I
I
Duringthe Revolutionary Period, and immediately thereafter, art in America was something of sporadic growth, something not quite indigenous but rather transplanted from England. Painting was little more than portraiture, and the work was done after the English formula. America had no formula of its own. There was no native school of art, no tradition of the craft, no body of art knowledge handed down from one generation to another. West and Copley started out practically without predecessors. They were the beginners.
With Cole, Durand, and, later on, Kensett, that is about 1825, another kind of painting sprang up on American soil. It was the painting of landscape—landscape of the Hudson River variety—and, whatever its technical shortcomings, at least it had the merit of being original. Apparently nothing of artistic faith or of accumulated knowledge or art usage was handed down to the Hudson River men by the portrait-painters who had preceded them. The leaders worked from nature with little or no instruction. They were self-taught, and if any inkling of howwork was carried on in the painting-rooms of Copley, Stuart, or Vanderlyn was given them, they turned a deaf ear to it or found it inapplicable to their landscape-work. If they knew of a tradition they ignored it.
This matter of tradition—the accumulated point of view and teaching of the craft—is of some importance in our inquiry. It has gone to the making of all the great art of the past. There were several hundred years of sculptors in Greece, with a continuous story, before Scopas and Praxiteles brought their art to final maturity; for centuries painters, with their craftsman-making guilds, had preceded Raphael, Leonardo, and Titian; countless “primitives” and “early men” went to the shades unsung before Velasquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, Holbein came to power. In America the Copley-Stuart contingent caught at, and in large measure grasped, the foreign teaching handed down by Reynolds and his school. Perhaps that accounts in some measure for their success. A generation later Cole and Durand started out to paint landscape without any teaching whatever. Does that account in any degree for their failure? They failed to produce any fine quality of art, but they had pupils and followers in whom the Hudson River school finally culminated. It became a school because Cole and Durand established with themselves a teaching, such as it was, and handed down to their pupils a point of viewand a body of tradition. Perhaps again that explains, to some extent, the varied successes of such followers of the school as Inness, Wyant, Martin, Swain Gifford, Whittredge, McEntee.
But not entirely. Some of these last-named were influenced by European art, outgrew the teaching of their forerunners, and in middle life rather forsook their early love and faith. Yet it would be idle to contend that they had not received an inclination, even an inspiration, from contact with the older men. Short-lived though it was, and shallow as were its teachings, the Hudson River school, nevertheless, had weight with its followers. Even error is often helpful in establishing truth, and a feeble precedent is perhaps better than none at all. Some of the pupils—F. E. Church and Sandford Gifford, for examples—never outgrew their basic teaching. To the end they carried on the Cole-Durand tradition, improving and bettering it. They bettered it because they could add to their own view-point the observation and teaching of their masters. Three generations at least are supposed to be necessary to the making of the thorough gentleman. Is it possible to make the thorough artist in one?
But the Hudson River school was too frail inherently to carry great weight. Men like Inness, Wyant, and Martin soon began to see its weaknesses. Even before they went to Europe they had doubted and after their return to America they were openly heretical. They held allegianceonly in the matter of the Catskill-Adirondack subject, and even that became modified to a virtual disappearance toward the end of their careers. Both aim and method changed with them. They saw deeper and painted freer, until finally they were wholly out of sympathy not only with the thin technique of the school but with its panoramic conception of nature.
So it was that in 1876 when the United States held its first national art exhibition—the Centennial, at Philadelphia—the painting of the country was in something of an anomalous condition. The Hudson River school was practically at the end of its rope. The older portrait-painters had been succeeded by Harding, Alexander, Neagle, Elliott, Inman, Page, Healy—each of them more or less going his own way. The German Leutze had been here and had blazed a brimstone trail of Düsseldorf method, along which some painters followed. Hicks and Hunt at Boston had introduced the French art of Couture and Millet, and they also had a following. Quite apart from all of them stood some independent personalities like La Farge and Winslow Homer, who seemed to say, “a plague on all your houses.” And they, too, went their own ways. There was no school unity.
No wonder then with these conflicting individualities, and with all traditions obsolete or unknown, there was no such thing as an American school of painting at the Centennial Exhibition.The visitor in Memorial Hall wandered hither and yon among the pictures and vainly strove to grasp a consensus of art opinion or even an art tendency. The exhibition was more or less of a hodgepodge. As a result both painter and public went away in a somewhat bemuddled condition. Perhaps the only thing about the exhibition that impressed one strongly was the general incompetence and inconsequence of it.
Just at this time there entered upon the scene another generation, a younger group of American painters. Many of them had seen the exhibition at the Centennial and had, perhaps, been unwarrantably influenced by it. They brought away from it a longing to paint; but they realized that such art as that at Philadelphia was not what they wished to produce, and if American teaching was responsible for it, so much the worse for the teaching. They would have none of it. Once more there was a sharp break with everything that might resemble a school view or a school method. The younger group left the country and sought instruction in European studios believing that nothing of good could come out of the Nazareth of America.
Some of this later generation had gone abroad for study just before 1876. Shirlaw, Chase, and Duveneck were at Munich; Maynard, Minor, and Millet at Antwerp; Blashfield, Bridgman, Beckwith, Thayer, Alden Weir, Low, Wyatt Eaton at Paris. After 1876 the exodus was greater andParis was the goal. A few years later some of these students were homeward bound, having finished a more or less advanced course of instruction under competent masters. They immediately set up studios in New York, and, with the enthusiasm and assurance of youth, began to impart information to the effect that the only painting of importance was that of Europe. As for the native American art, it was not worth reckoning with. The Academy of Design was merely the abiding-place of the ossified, and, of course, it would be surrendered on the demand of the younger men. But the Academy, after a battle of words, declined to give up the fort, and a little later declined even to hang some of the pictures of the gifted. This was regarded as unspeakably outrageous, and swift action followed. In 1877 there was a call for the establishment of a new art body, and out of it came the Society of American Artists, with twenty-two initial members.
The younger men had not invited the academicians as a body to join them, but they had recognized the talent of certain men, who, though members of the Academy, were not in full sympathy with it. In other words, the aloof element of the Academy was elected to membership in the Society. These men—La Farge, Inness, Martin, Moran, Tiffany, Colman, Swain Gifford—joined the new without abandoning the old, and the Society quickly got under way, with itsdeclaration of independence nailed to the masthead. In ten years the Society had grown in membership to over a hundred, had held yearly exhibitions from 1878 on, and had achieved a substantial success—a success of technique, if nothing more.
It is worth noting just here that this departure was a third violent break in the American art tradition. The young men in the Society practically proclaimed that they would start all over again and build a more worthy mansion than their predecessors. Had they not gone to Europe and received the best of technical training? Did they not know how to draw and paint? For the first time in its history America might congratulate itself upon possessing a body of painters that understood the technique of their craft. American art would now begin.
Lest progressive craftsmanship should die out new students continued to go abroad, and the Art Students League was started for those stopping at home. This new institution was not bound by any conventionalities; its existence was a protest against them. It had no century-old precedents to live up to; it was free to stickle for good workmanship alone. It was the training-school for no peculiar kind of art; it stood ready and eager to adopt any new method or medium or material that was offered. It was progressive to the last degree—progressive to the extent of burning every bridge behind it and starting outde novoto produce technicians (and consequent art) worthy of the name.
Well, the men, and the institutions, and the movement have been under way for forty years. Much paint has been spread on canvas in that time and hundreds of hands have been busy producing pictures. The “young men” have become old men and many of them have dropped out. The movement itself no longer moves, though some of its best men are still painting. But what is the net result of these forty years? Have the European-trained, after all, succeeded in producing in their one generation,sanstradition, an American art? No one will question for a moment that they have produced many exceptionally good works, even masterpieces; that they are a competent, even learned, body of artists; but has what they have said proclaimed American ideals and reflected American life, or has it repeated the conventions andateliermethods of Europe? Has not the manner of saying with them been more in evidence than the thing said? Is their foreign-based art entirely satisfactory or representative of America?
From a Whistlerian point of view this matter of tradition is, of course, great nonsense. Art just “happens” inTen O’Clock, and the artist is that one in the multitude whom the gods see fit to strike with divine fire. He is called to service by inspiration as were the prophets of old. All of which no doubt explains the anointing ofWhistler but does not account for the high-priesthood of Velasquez, of Rembrandt, of Raphael, or of Rubens. To say that three centuries of guild-teaching in the best way to grind color, or lay a gesso ground, or draw a figure, or fill a given space, is not better than the intuition of any one man of a period is equivalent to saying that the accumulated knowledge of the world is worthless, and each new generation should discard it and begin all over again. That is substantially what Mr. Whistler advocated. And, further, that the artist should stand aloof and create independently of time, place, or people.
But out of nothing nothing comes, and psychology assures us that there is no such thing as originality save by a combination of things already known. The old is added to and makes the new. The old is the tradition of the craft; the new is the revised point of view and method plus the old. It was so with Whistler notwithstanding his pretty argument around the clock. He was beholden to Gleyre, Ingres, Boucher, Velasquez, Courbet, Albert Moore, Hokusai, and helped himself to them when, where, and how he could. He would have been the last one to deny it. Had there been more continuity and stability in his training, had he followed the teaching of the craft more intently, he would not have been worried all his life as to whether his people stood well upon their feet, and he might have producedart with the calmness and poise of his great Velasquez. His misfortune was that he had no thorough schooling, inherited no body of taste, and practically stood alone in art. That he succeeded was owing to exceptional genius. That he was never in the class with Velasquez or Titian or Rembrandt was perhaps due to the fact that they had the training and the tradition and he had not.
The Whistler type is not infrequently met in American life—the type that seeks to scale Olympus without the preliminary of antecedent preparation. In art he usually has half a dozen strings to his bow, and paints, lectures, writes, speaks, carries on a business in Wall Street or elsewhere. He is glib in many things, has great facility, is astonishingly clever; but somehow he never gets beyond the superficial. He has not depth or poise or great seriousness. There is no hard training or long tradition or intellectual heritage behind him. He is not to the manner born.
Every writer in America knows that present-day American literature, with some precious exceptions, does not reach up to contemporary English literature; that poetry or romance or criticism with us has not the form, the substance, or the technical accomplishment of the same work in France. Every architect in America must realize that with all the get-learned-quick of his foreign study, with all his appropriationsfrom the Gothic or the Renaissance or the Georgian, with all his cleverness in solving business needs and doing building stunts under peculiar circumstances, there is something lacking in his productions; that they are not so monumental as he could wish for; that they are not firm set in the ground and do not belong to the soil and remain a part of the land and the people in the sense of contemporary French or even English architecture. Every musician with us must have a similar feeling about our music. As with architecture and painting, there have been some remarkable compositions put forth by our composers. Europe compliments us by playing them and nods approval at the endeavor, but again they do not reach up to corresponding work in Paris or Berlin or Munich. Why not? Have we not as good brains and fiddles in New York as in Vienna? What is it we lack?
Surely we are not wanting in energy, in resource, in materials. Is it perhaps the restraint of these that we need? Time and patience are very necessary factors in all of the arts. Attitude of mind, a sense of proportion—a style, in short—cannot be attained in a few years of schooling. To the training of a lifetime must be added a something that has been more or less inherited. That something handed down from father to son, from master to pupil, from generation to generation, is what I have called tradition. Itis not technique alone, but a mental outlook, added to the body of belief and experience of those who have gone before. The skilled hand of a Kreisler, a Sargent, a MacMonnies is perhaps possible of attainment in a decade, but the mental attitude—its poise and its restraint—is that something which is inherited as taste, and many decades may go to its formation. In this latter respect, perhaps, Kreisler has had the advantage of both Sargent and MacMonnies.
Coming back, therefore, to the men of the Society of American Artists, we cannot say that they failed in skill or were wanting in endeavor, or had no intelligence. They had all of these, but, unfortunately, they were not of artistic descent, and inherited no patrimony of style. Instead they tried to adopt in a few years the long story of French style, and attained only that part of it relating to technique. They were of the third generation in American art, but each one of these generations had denied and forsworn its predecessor, had flung its mess of pottage, such as it was, out of the window, and had left the ancestral roof never to return. The third generation then had nothing by descent, not even a pictorial or a plastic mind that could see the world in images. It went forth empty-handed into the highways and byways of Europe, became proficient in craftsmanship, and relied upon that for success.
This is not merely figure of speech, but statementof fact. None of the American painters spoken of in these pages, with the exception of La Farge, came from what might be called an artistic family, or had æsthetic antecedents. They were boys on a farm or grew up in the atmosphere of trade or profession, and came to art at twenty or thereabouts. They then learned the technique of painting quickly, and with much facility, but their mental attitude toward art was untrained and remained undetermined. Long after they knewhowto paint they knew notwhatto paint or how to think. Their point of view was superficial or commonplace, or otherwise negligible. I have excepted La Farge, for, as we shall see hereafter, he did have an æsthetic legend behind him. Is that why he is now placed as the one Olympian of the period? I would also partly except Inness, Wyant, and Martin, who did know and follow at one time the rather feeble Hudson River school tradition. I ask again is that why they remain, even to this day, the best of our rather long line of landscape-painters?
Is tradition then synonymous with the academic? Not entirely; though the academies are usually the custodians and conservers of it. Unfortunately, their practice tends to perpetuate a manner that soon becomes a mannerism, and finally the mannerism usurps the place of style. The academic in France or Germany or Italy has of recent years become a term of reproach.All the rebels in art have been opposed to it. When they rebelled, their rebellion was called by them, or their biographers, “the break with tradition.” Rather was it a break with an indurated method or the tyranny of a hanging committee. For tradition has to do more with the spirit and style of art, while the academic is recognized in a method or a formula which, endlessly repeated, finally becomes trite and even banal.
The art of old Japan ran on for centuries and was excellent art notwithstanding it was academic and based in tradition. It did not run into formalism and never became trite until recent years. Its ruin lies straight ahead of it if it shall abandon its traditions and continue to coquette with Occidental art. But the bulk of painting by the young men of the Society of American Artists became commonplace within a dozen years after their return because they had learned abroad only a manner and reproduced it here in America with the persistence of a mannerism. They never knew the academic in its larger significance; they never felt the spirit and style of the traditional.
That is not to proclaim their work worthless or their movement inconsequent. On the contrary, almost everything that one generation in art could do was done. And well done. They established a foundation in sound technique. It remains to be seen if those who come after willbuild upon it or cast it down. Moreover, as an expression of the individual quite apart from the time, place, or people, as a representation of cosmopolitan belief about art, it must be accorded a very high place. Whistler and Sargent happen just now to be the most talked about exponents of the cosmopolitan, but dozens of painters here in America since 1876 belong in the same class and have the same belief. It is all along of a new departure in art, and how it shall work out no one can say, but that it does not entirely satisfy contemporary needs is already manifest. In spite of present practice, and quite apart fromTen O’Clockand other painter extravagances, art is still believed to be in some way an expression of a time, a place, and a people. The world has not yet grown so small that it does not continue to exhibit race characteristics in its art manifestations. That the all-the-world-as-one idea may be farther-reaching, more universal in its scope, and therefore loftier in its art expression than any national or race expression is very possible; nay, probable. Still, even then, with cosmopolitanism in the saddle, there will be the need and the use of tradition—the consensus of opinion and body of belief as to what constitutes style in art.