ANDERS ZORN—PAINTER-ETCHER
ByJ. NILSEN LAURVIK
BROADLY speaking there are but two kinds of artists—innovators and imitators. The first may be known by the opposition they arouse in the sacred sanctums of mediocrity and by their final but reluctant acceptance by the self-appointed custodians of the Hall of Fame whose business it is to exclude genius until Time shall have tempered all its buoyant, youthful enthusiasms, which are the very signs and tokens of those starry creatures whom the gods have blessed. Youth and all its amazing prodigality are of the very essence of genius, and it is by virtue of this exuberant overflowing of the spirit that the works of Anders Zorn make their vital appeal.
He celebrates with fervent, dramatic strokes the pageant of the visible world, and all that his alert eyes can see his nimble fingers depict with an unfailing sense of the pictorial possibilities inherent in the passing procession of contemporary life. There is in his work something of childlike spontaneity,—a healthy, natural enjoyment in the mere practice of his art that is infectious. He has the same impartial love for nature as it is as had Velasquez and Frans Hals, and the same incomparable interdependence of head and hand. His art is, in the best sense of the word, purely objective, dedicated to a specific transcriptionof the outward semblance of things. These bright, vivacious plates are not evolved by any painful process of mental cogitation, nor are they the result of imaginative vagaries.
Zorn is concerned but little with abstract form or involved compositions. But he cannot be accused of evading difficulties through any fear of failure, as he has so convincingly demonstrated in his vivid, sun-fleckedInterior of a Parisian Omnibuswith its sharply characterized passengers, and in his dramatically effectiveWaltzwith its assemblage of swaying figures moving rhythmically through the spacious ball-room, both marvels of discerning observation recorded with an almost clairvoyant magic of line that evoke the kaleidoscopic shimmer and brilliancy of the scenes depicted. The difficulties presented by these complex subjects are surmounted with the same nonchalant ease and certainty that distinguish his long series of individual portraits and figure pieces. That the latter predominate in the hierarchy of his etched work is a matter of choice rather than of chance and may, I think, be taken as an indication of his keen appreciation of the limitations as well as the possibilities of this medium. No one, not even Whistler, has realized more clearly than he that etching at its best is essentially an impressionistic art, to be practised only in the happiest moods, and his finest plates are marvels of swift, stenographic notations that have been scratched upon the copper direct from nature in a white heat of enthusiasm.
Zorn. Portrait of the Artist and his WifeSize of the original etching, 12½ × 8⅜ inches
Zorn. Portrait of the Artist and his Wife
Size of the original etching, 12½ × 8⅜ inches
Zorn. The WaltzSize of the original etching, 13¼ × 9 inches
Zorn. The Waltz
Size of the original etching, 13¼ × 9 inches
He calls etching his diversion, which accounts for the uniformly high quality of this side of his art.Done for the sheer love of it, as other men would ride horseback or play golf, these plates are the product of a joyousness that is the mother of all great art. It is typical of him that he should have taken up the practice of this exacting though elusive art merely as an amusement, as he himself says, “with which to while away odd hours, instead of sitting at home or going about for entertainment.” This is characteristic of his whole life and harks back to the genesis of his artistic career when, as a mere lad, he carved in birch-wood with his clasp-knife images of the flocks he tended in the Dalecarlian forests. Even in those early days this son of humble peasant folk revealed a power of lifelike characterization that did not pass unnoticed by these shrewd, clear-eyed peasantry whose sole criterion in matters of art was whether or not the counterfeit presentment looked like the original. And in these small carved images of cows and sheep they found a striking resemblance to their models that aroused their keenest admiration. His first patron was one of these peasant folk, a shepherd friend of his, who bought from him a carved statuette of an enraged cow for which Zorn received in payment a sou and a little white loaf. To make his sculpture more lifelike he used to imitate antique statuary by tinting his work. His palette was the palm of his hand, in which he mixed a composite of bilberry juice and certain coloring substances obtained from little forest flowers.
That was the beginning of a sturdy naturalism that no subsequent academic training has been able to nullify. Even in these first tentative attempts at personalexpression he revealed the essential qualities of his genius,—his very powerful color sense and his acute observation of natural phenomena. His work betrays an almost savage delight in the truth of nature, and if to be truthful is to be cruel, then Zorn is often cruel. He employs no gentle gloss, and, whether it be friend or casual sitter, each is treated with unblushing frankness. A full-blooded art, somewhat primitive and exulting in its crude strength, it gives one a pulsating sense of reality. His work has the natural daring of one who is on familiar terms with all the secrets of his art. Conveying an appearance of brilliant, almost reckless improvisation, it is none the less the result of astute and penetrating observation that has in each case recorded the face of actuality as well as its deeper and abiding spirit.
Strongly opposed to all the conventionalities of the studio, he abhors posing as much as he dislikes monogamy, preferring to study his subjects under natural conditions when they are off their guard and then to transcribe his impressions very largely from memory, after the essential lines have been noted. Thus have come into being some of his most memorable plates, such as theRenan, and the portrait of himself and his wife, each executed in a few hours of concentrated effort. The very swiftness with which these impressions have been recorded has no doubt contributed much toward giving them that convincing finality which, paradoxically enough, are theirs in a preëminent degree no matter how casual may appear the means by which this effect has been achieved. That is the impression left upon one by his illuminating portrait of the pontifical-looking Renan, for example.
Zorn. Madame SimonSize of the original etching, 9 × 6¼ inches
Zorn. Madame Simon
Size of the original etching, 9 × 6¼ inches
Zorn. Ernest RenanSize of the original etching, 9⅜ × 13½ inches
Zorn. Ernest Renan
Size of the original etching, 9⅜ × 13½ inches
Here is set down for all time in a few unerring lines the soul and body of the man—the casuist and the voluptuary of thought, the Balzacian bulk of him physically and the bigness of him mentally. The massive and apparently grotesque exterior of this speculative dreamer, immersed in his own meditations, conveys something of the same sense of aloofness with which Rodin has invested his statue of Balzac. They both appear to be dreaming of life and its mysteries until the immense torso seems but an Olympian pedestal supporting the domelike head. It is more than a pocket-edition biography, this portrait. Executed in one sitting in Renan’s study in April of 1892, nine years after his initiation into the mysteries of etching, this plate may be said to epitomize the whole art of Zorn,—his vigorous truthfulness, his synthetic treatment of salient points of character, and his love of dramatic contrasts of sharply juxtaposed masses of black and white. Moreover, it furnishes a striking exposition of the purely technical side of his art in which he has created for himself a highly original and personal method. No one has eschewed more rigorously than he the “happy accidents” employed as a convenient cloak by masquerading incompetents, foisting their meaningless scrawls on a bewildered public, to whom etching has become synonymous with a pretty dilettantism that is within the easy reach of every aspiring fledgling of art. These parallel, slanting strokes that seem to cut and divide the form into unrelated sections are really the expression of an accurate and well-defined intention that manifests itself in the extraordinary verisimilitude of the figure and its adroitly suggested accessories.It is like a fleeting glimpse in a mirror in which the impalpable spirit of reality is reflected, evoking by some mysterious incantation the most fugitive nuances of expression and gesture with the slightest inflection of his modeling.
It is the extreme refinement and subtility in this seeming brutality that give to these plates their unique value and interest. Seldom has a man suggested his predecessors less than does Zorn in these epigrammatic etchings. They are according to no established formula. If he has looked upon Rembrandt, as what practitioner of aqua fortis has not, there is but slight evidence of it in these straightforward vibrant plates. To be sure, he has the same love of bold contrasts of light and shade as had the master of Amsterdam, without the romantic glamour of the dreamy Dutchman. This modern Swede is more direct, more incisive, his line has something of the penetrating and biting analysis of a page from Strindberg, and not infrequently, as in the case of his haunting portrait of the besotted poet Paul Verlaine, there is discernible a sort of ironic humor that throws a revealing light upon his sitter. With what discerning and subtle insight he has portrayed that gentle flavor of intellectual skepticism which is the chief characteristic of Anatole France; while the head of Rodin, laughing in his foaming beard, is highly indicative of the immense creative energy of the author ofLe Penseur. In every instance he has successfully summarized the essential and abiding characteristics of his sitter, no less effectually accomplished in the twenty-minute impromptu of Marcelin Berthelot than in the more deliberately studied portrait of Marquand,or the very succinctly realized version of August Strindberg, the Swedish author. These portraits of contemporary men and women are fascinating records of repeated excursions into the realm ofcharacter, which holds for Zorn the strongest appeal, as it has ever for all men of the North, whose supreme happiness is the realization of a clearly defined individualism.
Zorn. August StrindbergSize of the original etching, 11⅜ × 7⅝ inches
Zorn. August Strindberg
Size of the original etching, 11⅜ × 7⅝ inches
Zorn. Sunday Morning in DalecarliaSize of the original etching, 10¾ × 7¾ inches
Zorn. Sunday Morning in Dalecarlia
Size of the original etching, 10¾ × 7¾ inches
While Zorn to-day occupies a position of unchallenged supremacy in the difficult and exacting field of portraiture—his portrait etchings would alone make a notable Pantheon of contemporary worthies—it is in his frank, unabashed nudes and in his delineations of Swedish peasant types that we find the most personal expression of his peculiar genius. Nowhere has his faculty of instantaneous perception, his ability to grasp at a glance and in its entirety either an isolated individual or a group of figures, been employed to greater advantage than in these brilliant, dazzling nudes and in these veracious records of his beloved Dalecarlian peasants. With a few swift, sure strokes he gives us the soft contour, the undulating curves of the fresh, firm flesh, of these strong-limbed Junos, as well as the wrinkled, time-worn visages of the aged tillers of the soil.
His interest in this type is not episodic, it is persistent. They were his first subjects as well as his first patrons, and throughout his career it is to them that he has turned for rest and refreshment from the social banalities of the mundane life in the great capitals of the world where he is in constant demand as a painter of exclusive society. At heart he remains a peasant, retaining a strong love for the scenes of hisboyhood with all their simple associations. Here he is at home, and here he has given untrammeled expression to that paganism which is the dominant trait of his character. He delights in portraying these sturdy, flaxen-haired peasants in all the unconscious abandon of their naïve natures, and the series of plates celebrating the intimate life of these people are the most authentic expressions of his art because the most closely related to the mainsprings of his personality.
His love of the unstudied, unposed naturalness of life has found its culminating expression in these nudes of women and children as seen in the open air in the free solitude of the shores of Dalecarlia. Zorn regards nature with the eagerness of the primitive, and these ruddy women are virile protests against the anemic, hyperæsthetic refinements of the school-room conventions. Stripped of all regard for the accepted ideals of feminine beauty these women of Zorn repel or appeal by the unfeigned candor of every look and gesture. These big, blonde women, whose naked bodies move with unrestrained freedom through the tonic, balsam air are imbued with a superb, healthy animalism such as has never been depicted in the whole history of art. They spring from a strong artistic impulse that has its roots in the subsoil of nature. To see these frankly realistic versions of unsophisticated, throbbing femininity is to feel that the nude has never before been adequately portrayed—all other nudes seem mere means toward some elaborately preconceived end while those of Zorn are gloriously self-sufficing, an end in themselves.
Zorn. The Bather, SeatedSize of the original etching, 6¼ × 4¾ inches
Zorn. The Bather, Seated
Size of the original etching, 6¼ × 4¾ inches
Zorn. Edo“Edo” is the name of the Swedish island where Zorn etchedthis beautiful plateSize of the original etching, 7 × 4⅝ inches
Zorn. Edo
“Edo” is the name of the Swedish island where Zorn etchedthis beautiful plate
Size of the original etching, 7 × 4⅝ inches
An ardent sensuousness marks all these things, but it is sane and wholesome, with no trace of doubtful submeaning.That is strikingly exemplified inMy Model and my Boat, in which the exuberant, re-creating force of life is presented in all its tantalizing seductiveness of ample, quivering curves. The beauty of vigorous symmetry, of inherent strength, overcome the somewhat obvious coarseness of the type of woman depicted here, and one can have nothing but admiration for the underlying sincerity as well as the consummate mastery revealed in every stroke of these plates. But the purely physical allure of his nudes is by no means always as insistent as in the foregoing. The elusive and half-reticent feminine charm has not escaped him, and there are some nudes out of doors, in the lambent light of dawn and twilight, more delicate, more subtly suggestive, than anything hitherto accomplished in etching.
The nudes of Rembrandt would look singularly coarse and heavy by comparison with these silvery, exquisitely modeled Brunhildas of Zorn, who disport themselves on the sunlit beach or emerge from the enveloping shadow of some protruding cliff with a childlike unconsciousness and a pagan naïveté that disarms prudish prejudices. In its supple grace and vibrant vitality the delicately modulated back of the bending figure ofThe Bather—Eveningis a pantheistic hymn to the eternal efflorescence of life. She pauses in the silvery twilight, before breaking the surface of the mirror-like lake into a thousand jewels of refracted light, and she is as much a part of the enshrouding stillness as the aged rocks on which she stands. Whistler never did anything more evanescent than the landscape of this plate, which is printed in a key as light and airy as the magically executedlines, that give the softness of the figure’s contours as well as the hardness of the rocks and the veiled serenity of distant lake and woodland. It is a splendid affirmation of the extremely delicate sensibilities possessed by this most vigorous and brilliant of contemporary etchers, whose art is one of the most powerful and significant manifestations of the re-awakened æsthetic impulse of the twentieth century.
Transcriber’s Notes:Larger images of most plates can be obtained by clicking on them.Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.Perceived typographical errors have been changed.
Transcriber’s Notes:
Larger images of most plates can be obtained by clicking on them.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
Perceived typographical errors have been changed.