Image unvavailable: Blake. Bathsheba Tate Gallery Plate XIV.Blake. BathshebaTate GalleryPlate XIV.
as a means to this end, owing them no allegiance and accepting from them only the service that they can render for this purpose. “Poetry,” says Blake, “consists in bold, daring, and masterly conceptions; and shall painting be confined to the sordid drudgery of facsimile representations of merely mortal and perishing substances, and not be, as poetry and music are, elevated into its own proper sphere of invention and visionary conception?” The theory that art appeals solely by the associated ideas of the natural objects it imitates is easily refuted when we consider music and architecture; in those at least the appeal to the spirit is made directly in a language which has no other use than that of conveying its own proper ideas and feelings. But in pictorial art the fallacy that nature is the mistress instead of the servant seems almost ineradicable, and it is difficult to convince people that increased scientific investigation of phenomena, increased knowledge of how things present themselves to our sight, changes the mode, but does not necessarily increase the power, of pictorial expression. The Byzantine artists, with a knowledge of appearances infinitely less than that of the average art student of to-day, could compass the expression of imaginative truths which our most accomplished realists dare not attempt. The essential power of pictorial as of all other arts lies in its use of a fundamental and universal symbolism, and whoever has the instinct for this can convey his ideas, though possessed of only the most rudimentary knowledge of the actual forms of nature; while he who has it not can by no accumulation of observed facts add anything to the spiritual treasure of mankind. Of this language of symbolic form in which the spirit communicates its most secret and indefinable impulses Blake was an eloquent and persuasive master. He could use it, too, to the most diverse ends; and though the sublimity which is based upon dread came most readily to his mind, he could express, as we have seen in the “Flight into Egypt,” the sublimity of divine introspection. In the “David and Bathsheba” (see Plate) he touches a different note, and he shows his true power of symbolic expression in this, that it is not by the treatment of the figure itself, not by any ordinary sensual enticements, that he gives the atmosphere of voluptuous abandonment. It is rather in the extravagant tropical flowers, in the architecture which itself blossoms with oriental exuberance, in the fiery orange of the clouds seen behindtrees preternaturally virid, that the spirit is bewildered with anticipations of extravagant bliss. The picture might be described in Blake’s own terminology as the mental abstract of voluptuousness.
All art gives us an experience freed from the disturbing conditions of actual life. Blake’s art, more concentrated than most, gives us an experience which is removed more entirely from bodily and physiological accompaniments, and our experience has the purity, the intensity, and the abstraction of a dream.
IN spite of all the attacks of critics, in spite of the development of emphasis and high flavour in modern romantic landscape, which might well have spoilt us for his cool simplicity, Claude still lives, not, indeed, as one of the gods of the sale-room, but in the hearts of contemplative and undemonstrative people. This is surely an interesting and encouraging fact. It means that a very purely artistic and poetical appeal still finds its response in the absence of all subsidiary interests and attractions. The appeal is, indeed, a very limited one, touching only certain highly self-conscious and sophisticated moods, but it is, within its limits, so sincere and so poignant that Claude’s very failings become, as it were, an essential part of its expression. These failings are, indeed, so many and so obvious that it is not to be wondered at if, now and again, they blind even a sensitive nature like Ruskin’s to the fundamental beauty and grandeur of Claude’s revelation. But we must be careful not to count as failings qualities which are essential to the particular kind of beauty that Claude envisages, though, to be quite frank, it is sometimes hard to make up one’s mind whether a particular characteristic is a lucky defect or a calculated negation. Take, for instance, the peculiargaucherieof his articulations. Claude knows less, perhaps, than any considerable landscape painter—less than the most mediocre of modern landscapists—how to lead from one object to another. His foregrounds are covered with clumsily arranged leaves which have no organic growth, and which, as often as not, lie on the ground instead of springing from it. His trees frequently isolate themselves helplessly from their parent soil. In particular, when he wants arepoussoirin the foreground at either end of his composition he has recourse to a clumsily constructed old bare trunk, which has little more meaningthan a stage property. Even in his composition there arenaïvetéswhich may or may not be intentional: sometimes they have the happiest effect, at others they seem not childlike but childish. Such, for instance, is his frequent habit of dividing spaces equally, both vertically and horizontally, either placing his horizontal line half-way up the picture, or a principal building on the central vertical line. At times this seems the last word of a highly subtilised simplicity, of an artifice which conceals itself; at others one cannot be sure that it is not due to incapacity. There is, in fact, a real excuse for Ruskin’s exaggerated paradox that Claude’s drawings look like the work of a child of ten. There is a whole world of beauty which one must not look for at all in Claude. All that beauty of the sudden and unexpected revelation of an unsuspected truth which the Gothic and Early Renaissance art provides is absent from Claude. As the eye follows his line it is nowhere arrested by a sense of surprise at its representative power, nor by that peculiar thrill which comes from the communication of some vital creative force in the artist. Compare, for instance, Claude’s drawing of mountains, which he knew and studied constantly, with Rembrandt’s. Rembrandt had probably never seen mountains, but he obtained a more intimate understanding by the light of his inner vision than Claude could ever attain to by familiarity and study. We need not go to Claude’s figures, where he is notoriously feeble and superficially Raphaelesque, in order to find how weak was his hold upon character, whatever the object he set himself to interpret. In the British Museum there is a most careful and elaborate study of the rocky shores of a stream. Claude has even attempted here to render the contorted stratification of the river-bed, but without any of that intimate imaginative grasp of the tension and stress which underlie the appearance which Turner could give in a few hurried scratches. No one, we may surmise, ever loved trees more deeply than Claude, and we know that he prided himself on his careful observation of the difference of their specific characters; and yet he will articulate their branches in the most haphazard, perfunctory manner. There is nothing in all Claude’s innumerable drawings which reveals the inner life of the tree itself, its aspirations towards air and light, its struggle with gravitation and wind, as one little drawing by Leonardo da Vinci does.
All these defects might pass more easily in a turbulent romanticist, hurrying pell mell to get expressed some moving and dramatic scene, careless of details so long as the main movement were ascertained, but there is none of this fire in Claude. It is with slow ponderation and deliberate care that he places before us his perfunctory and generalised statements, finishing and polishing them with relentless assiduity, and not infrequently giving us details that we do not desire and which add nothing but platitude to the too prolix statement.
All this and much more the admirer of Claude will be wise to concede to the adversary, and if the latter ask wherein the beauty of a Claude lies he may with more justice than in any other case fall back on the reply of one of Du Maurier’s æsthetes, “in the picture.” For there is assuredly a kind of beauty which is not only compatible with these defects but perhaps in some degree depends on them. We know and recognise it well enough in literature. To take a random instance. Racine makes Titus say in “Bérénice”: “De mon aimable erreur je suis désabusé.” This may be a dull, weak, and colourless mode of expression, but if he had said with Shakespeare, “Now old desire doth in his death-bed lie, and young affection gapes to be his heir,” we should feel that it would destroy the particular kind of even and unaccented harmony at which Racine aimed. Robert Bridges, in his essay on Keats, very aptly describes for literature the kind of beauty which we find in Shakespeare: “the power of concentrating all the far-reaching resources of language on one point, so that a single and apparently effortless expression rejoices the æsthetic imagination at the moment when it is most expectant and exacting.” That,ceteris paribus, applies admirably to certain kinds of design. It corresponds to the nervous touch of a Pollajuolo or a Rembrandt. But Claude’s line is almost nerveless and dull. Even when it is most rapid and free it never surprises us by any intimate revelation of character, any summary indications of the central truth. But it has a certain inexpressive beauty of its own. It is never elegant, never florid, and, above all, never has any ostentation of cleverness. The beauty of Claude’s work is not to be sought primarily in his drawing: it is not a beauty of expressive parts but the beauty of a whole. It corresponds in fact to the poetry of his century—to Milton or Racine. It is in the cumulative effect of the perfect co-ordination ofparts none of which is by itself capable of absorbing our attention or fascinating our imagination that the power of a picture by Claude lies. It is the unity and not the content that affects us. There is, of course, content, but the content is only adequate to its purpose and never claims our attention on its own account. The objects he presents to us have no claim on him but as parts of a scheme. They have no life and purpose of their own, and for that very reason it is right that they should be stated in vague and general terms. He wishes a tree to convey to the eye only what the word “tree” might suggest at once to the inner vision. We think first of the mass of waving shade held up against the brilliance of the sky, and this, even with all his detailed elaboration, is about where Claude, whether by good fortune or design, leaves us. It is the same with his rocks, his water, his animals. They are all made for the mental imagery of the contemplative wanderer, not of the acute and ardent observer. But where Claude is supreme is in the marvellous invention with which he combines and recombines these abstract symbols so as to arouse in us more purely than nature herself can the mood of pastoral delight. That Claude was deeply influenced by Virgil one would naturally suppose from his antiquarian classicism, and a drawing in the British Museum shows that he had the idea of illustrating the Æneid. In any case his pictures translate into the language of painting much of the sentiment of Virgil’s Eclogues, and that with a purity and grace that rival his original. In his landscapes Melibœus always leaves his goats to repose with Daphnis under the murmuring shade, waiting till his herds come of themselves to drink at the ford, or in sadder moods of passionless regret one hears the last murmurs of the lament for Gallus as the well-pastured goats turn homewards beneath the evening star.
Claude is the most ardent worshipper that ever was of thegenius loci. Of his landscapes one always feels that “some god is in this place.” Never, it is true, one of the greater gods: no mysterious and fearful Pan, no soul-stirring Bacchus or all-embracing Demeter; scarcely, though he tried more than once deliberately to invoke them, Apollo and the Muses, but some mild local deity, the inhabitant of a rustic shrine whose presence only heightens the glamour of the scene.
Image unvavailable: Claude. Landscape Prado, Madrid Plate XV.Claude. LandscapePrado, MadridPlate XV.
It is the sincerity of this worship, and the purity and directness of its expression, which makes the lover of landscape turn with such constant affection to Claude, and the chief means by which he communicates it is the unity and perfection of his general design; it is not by form considered in itself, but by the planning of his tone divisions, that he appeals, and here, at least, he is a past master. This splendid architecture of the tone masses is, indeed, the really great quality in his pictures; its perfection and solidity are what enables them to bear the weight of so meticulous and, to our minds, tiresome an elaboration of detail without loss of unity, and enables us even to accept the enamelled hardness and tightness of his surface. But many people of to-day, accustomed to our more elliptical and quick-witted modes of expression, are so impatient of these qualities that they can only appreciate Claude’s greatness through the medium of his drawings, where the general skeleton of the design is seen without its adornments, and in a medium which he used with perfect ease and undeniable beauty. Thus to reject the pictures is, I think, an error, because it was only when a design had been exposed to constant correction and purification that Claude got out of it its utmost expressiveness, and his improvisations steadily grow under his critical revision to their full perfection. But in the drawings, at all events, Claude’s great powers of design are readily seen, and the study of the drawings has this advantage also, that through them we come to know of a Claude whose existence we could never have suspected by examining only his finished pictures.
In speaking of the drawings it is well to recognise that they fall into different classes with different purposes and aims. We need not, for instance, here consider the records of finished compositions in the “Liber Veritatis.” There remain designs for paintings in all stages of completeness, from the first suggestive idea to the finished cartoon and the drawings from nature. It is, perhaps, scarcely necessary to remark that it would have been quite foreign to Claude’s conception of his art to have painted a picture from nature. He, himself, clearly distinguished sharply between his studies and his compositions. His studies, therefore, were not incipient pictures, but exercises done for his own pleasure or for the fertility they gave to his subsequent invention, and they have the unchecked spontaneityand freedom of hand that one would expect in such unreflecting work. These studies again fall into two groups: first, studies of detail, generally of foliage or of tree forms, and occasionally of rocks and flowers; and secondly, studies of general effects. Of the studies of detail I have already said something. They have the charm of an easy and distinguished calligraphy, and of a refined selection of the decorative possibilities of the things seen, but without any of that penetrating investigation of their vital nature which gives its chief beauty to the best work of this kind.
It is, indeed, in the second group of studies from nature that we come from time to time upon motives that startle and surprise us. We find in these a susceptibility to natural charms which, in its width of range and freedom from the traditional limitations of the art of landscape, is most remarkable. Here we find not only Claude the prim seventeenth-century classic, but Claude the romanticist, anticipating the chief ideas of Corot’s later development,[45]and Claude the impressionist, anticipating Whistler and the discovery of Chinese landscape, as, for instance, in the marvellousaperçuof a mist effect, in the British Museum.[46]Or, again, in a view which is quite different from any of these, but quite as remote from the Claude of the oil-paintings, in the great view of the Tiber, a masterpiece of hurried, almost unconscious planning of bold contrasts of transparent gloom and dazzling light on water and plain.
The impression one gets from looking through a collection of Claude’s drawings like that at the British Museum is of a man without any keen feeling for objects in themselves, but singularly open to impressions of general effects in nature, watching always for the shifting patterns of foliage and sky to arrange themselves in some beautifully significant pattern and choosing it with fine and critical taste. But at the same time he was a man with vigorous ideas of the laws of design and the necessity of perfectly realised unity, and to this I suppose one must ascribe the curious contrast between the narrow limits of his work in oil as compared with the wide range, the freedom
Image unvavailable: Claude. Water-colour British Museum Plate XVI.Claude. Water-colourBritish MuseumPlate XVI.
and the profound originality of his work as a draughtsman. Among all these innumerable effects which his ready susceptibility led him to record he found but a few which were capable of being reduced to that logical and mathematical formula which he demanded before complete realisation could be tolerated. In his drawings he composes sometimes with strong diagonal lines, sometimes with free and unstable balance. In his pictures he has recourse to a regular system of polarity, balancing his masses carefully on either side of the centre, sometimes even framing it in like a theatrical scene with tworepoussoirspushed in on either side. One must suppose, then, that he approached the composition of his pictures with a certain timidity, that he felt that safety when working on a large scale could only be secured by a certain recognised type of structure, so that out of all the various moods of nature to which his sensitive spirit answered only one lent itself to complete expression. One wishes at times that he had tried more. There is in the British Museum a half-effaced drawing on blue paper, an idea for treating theNoli me tangerewhich, had he worked it out, would have added to his complete mastery of bucolic landscape a masterpiece of what one may call tragic landscape. It is true that here, as elsewhere, the figures are in themselves totally inadequate, but they suggested an unusual and intense key to the landscape. On the outskirts of a dimly suggested wood, the figures meet and hold converse; to the right the mound of Calvary glimmers pale and ghost-like against the night sky, while over the distant city the first pink flush of dawn begins. It is an intensely poetical conception. Claude has here created a landscape in harmony with deeper, more mystical aspirations than elsewhere, and, had he given free rein to his sensibilities, we should look to him even more than we do now as the greatest inventor of the motives of pure landscape. As it is, the only ideas to which he gave complete though constantly varied expression are those of pastoral repose.
Claude’s view of landscape is false to nature in that it is entirely anthropocentric. His trees exist for pleasant shade; his peasants to give us the illusion of pastoral life, not to toil for a living. His world is not to be lived in, only to be looked at in a mood of pleasing melancholy or suave reverie. It is, therefore, as true to one aspect of human desire as it is false to the facts of life. Itmay be admitted that this is not the finest kind of art—it is the art of a self-centred and refined luxury which looks on nature as a garden to its own pleasure-house—but few will deny its genial and moderating charm, and few of us live so strenuously as never to feel a sense of nostalgia for that Saturnian reign to which Virgil and Claude can waft us.
MESSRS. CARFAX have on view the most complete collection of Beardsley’s drawings that has hitherto been shown. The development of his precocious and eccentric genius can here be studied in typical examples. We have the drawings of his childhood—drawings inspired by Dicky Doyle and Robida, but in which is already apparent his proclivity to the expression of moral depravity. We pass at a leap from these crude and artistically feeble works to the astonishing “Siegfried,” in which he is already a complete and assured master of an entirely personal style.
From this time onwards, for the remaining six years of his life, Beardsley kept on producing with the fertility of those artists whom the presage of an early death stimulates to a desperate activity. His style was constantly changing in accidentals, but always the same in essentials. He was a confirmed eclectic, borrowing from all ages and all countries. And true eclectic and genuine artist as he was, he converted all his borrowings to his own purposes. It mattered nothing what he fed on; the strange and perverse economy of his nature converted the food into a poison. His line is based upon that of Antonio Pollajuolo. Again and again in his drawings of the nude we see how carefully he must have copied that master of structural and nervous line. But he uses it for something quite other than its original purpose; he converts it from a line expressive of muscular tension and virile force into one expressive of corruption and decay. Mantegna, too, was a favourite with Beardsley, who seems to have had a kind of craving for the opposites to his own predominant qualities; and from Mantegna, the most austere of Italians, he derived again and again motives for his illustrations of depravity. The eighteenth century, China, Japan, even the purest Greek art, were all pressed into his service; the only thing he could do nothing with was natureitself. Here he was entirely at a loss, and whenever he yielded to the pressure of contemporary fashions and attempted to record impressions of things seen, as in the topical illustrations of plays which he contributed to thePall Mall Magazine, he failed to be even mediocre. Everything that was to be in the least expressive had to come entirely from within, from the nightmares of his own imagination.
His amazing gift of hand is perhaps the quality which most obviously attracts attention, the quality which endeared him most to publishers and process-block makers. It was the one indisputable quality he possessed, not to be denied by the most adverse critic, and yet in itself it is no more than thousands of journeymen artists—engravers, die-cutters, and such like—have always possessed. Nor, to be perfectly frank, is the quality of his line of a very high order; its precision is not unfrequently mechanical. Whistler called him the last of the writing-masters, and there was a truth in this, if we may add that the style of writing which he favoured was degenerate. His long, meandering flourishes ending in sharp spikes and dots, however firm and precise the line, are often mean in intention and poor in quality. What is deserving of real admiration is the fertility of his invention, the skill with which he finds the formula which corresponds, in his peculiar language, with what he wants to describe. As an instance, one may take the garden background to the “Platonic Lament” in the Salome series, where the rose trellis and cut yew-tree behind are brilliant examples of this kind of epitomised description. Still more important artistically, and closely connected with this power of invention, is the real beauty of his spacing, the admirable planning of masses of black and white. At times, as in the “Dancer’s Reward,” he rises almost to the height of the great Greek vase-painters in this respect, though, if we look even at this in detail, the line has an intricacy, amesquinerie, which is the very opposite of the Greek ideal of draughtsmanship.
No less remarkable is his success in the decorative planning of three tones, of black, white, and grey, and he divides these with such subtle skill that for once it is not a mere false analogy to talk of the colour effect of designs in black and white; for he so disposes the three tones, getting the grey by an evenly distributed network of fine black lines, that each tone produces the sensation of something asdistinct from the others as do flat washes of different tints. The “Frontispiece to Salome” is an excellent example of this.
Beardsley had, then, in an extraordinary degree the decorative impulse, the motive which made the mediæval scribe flourish his pen all over the margins of his vellum page; and, spurred by this impulse, he had the patience of an Indian craftsman, covering whole sheets with minute dots and scarcely perceptible lines. This instinct in its purest form rarely makes for the finest art; it is only when controlled by a larger, more genial sentiment for architectural mass that it becomes ennobled, and with Beardsley, in spite of the bold oppositions of his blacks and whites, in spite of his occasional wilful simplification, this rarely occurred. One might even argue that to some extent Beardsley’s moral perversity actually prevented him, in spite of his extraordinary specific talent for design, from ever becoming a great designer. It is just thatmesquinerieof line, that littleness and intricacy of the mere decorator, that love of elegance rather than beauty, which on purely artistic grounds one finds to be his great failing, that he cherished as a means of expressing his diabolism. But if Beardsley was corrupt, he was certainly sincere in his corruption. There is no suggestion in his work, as in that of some modern artists, like Señor Zuloaga, that corruption is an affectation taken up in order to astonish thebourgeoisie. Beardsley is never funny or amusing or witty; his attempts in this direction are contemptible; still less is he voluptuous or seductive; he is very serious, very much in earnest. There is even a touch of hieratic austerity and pomp in his style, as becomes the arch-priest of a Satanic cultus. He has, indeed, all the stigmata of the religious artist—the love of pure decoration, the patient elaboration and enrichment of surface, the predilection for flat tones and precision of contour, the want of the sense of mass and relief, the extravagant richness of invention. It is as the Fra Angelico of Satanism that his work will always have an interest for those who are curious about this recurrent phase of complex civilisations. But if we are right in our analysis of his work, the finest qualities of design can never be appropriated to the expression of such morbid and perverted ideals; nobility and geniality of design are attained only by those who, whatever their actual temperament, cherish these qualities in their imagination.
WHEN the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition was held in these Galleries two years ago the English public became for the first time fully aware of the existence of a new movement in art, a movement which was the more disconcerting in that it was no mere variation upon accepted themes but implied a reconsideration of the very purpose and aim as well as the methods of pictorial and plastic art. It was not surprising, therefore, that a public which had come to admire above everything in a picture the skill with which the artist produced illusion should have resented an art in which such skill was completely subordinated to the direct expression of feeling. Accusations of clumsiness and incapacity were freely made, even against so singularly accomplished an artist as Cézanne. Such darts, however, fall wide of the mark, since it is not the object of these artists to exhibit their skill or proclaim their knowledge, but only to attempt to express by pictorial and plastic form certain spiritual experiences; and in conveying these, ostentation of skill is likely to be even more fatal than downright incapacity.
Indeed, one may fairly admit that the accusation of want of skill and knowledge, while ridiculous in the case of Cézanne is perfectly justified as regards one artist represented (for the first time in England) in the present Exhibition, namely, Rousseau. Rousseau was a customhouse officer who painted without any training in the art. His pretensions to paint made him the butt of a great deal of ironic wit, but scarcely any one now would deny the authentic quality of his inspiration or the certainty of his imaginative conviction. Here then is one case where want of skill and knowledge do not completely obscure, though they may mar, expression. And this is true of all perfectly naïve and primitive art. But most of the art here seen is neither naïve nor primitive. It is the work of highly civilised and modern men trying to find a pictorial language appropriate to the sensibilities of the modern outlook.
Image unvavailable: Henri-Matisse. The Tea Party Plate XVII.Henri-Matisse.The Tea PartyPlate XVII.
Image unvavailable: Pablo Picasso. Still Life Miss Stein Plate XVIII.Pablo Picasso.Still LifeMiss SteinPlate XVIII.
Another charge that is frequently made against these artists is that they allow what is merely capricious, or even what is extravagant and eccentric, in their work—that it is not serious, but an attempt to impose on the good-natured tolerance of the public. This charge of insincerity and extravagance is invariably made against any new manifestation of creative art. It does not of course follow that it is always wrong. The desire to impose by such means certainly occurs, and is sometimes temporarily successful. But the feeling on the part of the public may, and I think in this case does, arise from a simple misunderstanding of what these artists set out to do. The difficulty springs from a deep-rooted conviction, due to long-established custom, that the aim of painting is the descriptive imitation of natural forms. Now, these artists do not seek to give what can, after all, be but a pale reflex of actual appearance, but to arouse the conviction of a new and definite reality. They do not seek to imitate form, but to create form; not to imitate life, but to find an equivalent for life. By that I mean that they wish to make images which by the clearness of their logical structure, and by their closely-knit unity of texture, shall appeal to our disinterested and contemplative imagination with something of the same vividness as the things of actual life appeal to our practical activities. In fact, they aim not at illusion but at reality.
The logical extreme of such a method would undoubtedly be the attempt to give up all resemblance to natural form, and to create a purely abstract language of form—a visual music; and the later works of Picasso show this clearly enough. They may or may not be successful in their attempt. It is too early to be dogmatic on the point, which can only be decided when our sensibilities to such abstract forms have been more practised than they are at present. But I would suggest that there is nothing ridiculous in the attempt to do this. Such a picture as Picasso’s “Head of a Man” would undoubtedly be ridiculous if, having set out to make a direct imitation of the actual model, he had been incapable of getting a better likeness. But Picasso did nothing of the sort. He has shown in his “Portrait of Mlle. L. B.” that he could do so at least as well as any one if he wished, but he is here attempting to do something quite different.
No such extreme abstraction marks the work of Matisse. The actual objects which stimulated his creative invention are recognisableenough. But here, too, it is an equivalence, not a likeness, of nature that is sought. In opposition to Picasso, who is pre-eminently plastic, Matisse aims at convincing us of the reality of his forms by the continuity and flow of his rhythmic line, by the logic of his space relations, and, above all, by an entirely new use of colour. In this, as in his markedly rhythmic design, he approaches more than any other European to the ideals of Chinese art. His work has to an extraordinary degree that decorative unity of design which distinguishes all the artists of this school.
Between these two extremes we may find ranged almost all the remaining artists. On the whole the influence of Picasso on the younger men is more evident than that of Matisse. With the exception of Braque none of them push their attempts at abstraction of form so far as Picasso, but simplification along these lines is apparent in the work of Derain, Herbin, Marchand, and L’Hote. Other artists, such as Doucet and Asselin, are content with the ideas of simplification of form as existing in the general tradition of the Post-Impressionist movement, and instead of feeling for new methods of expression devote themselves to expressing what is most poignant and moving in contemporary life. But however various the directions in which different groups are exploring the newly-found regions of expressive form they all alike derive in some measure from the great originator of the whole idea, Cézanne. And since one must always refer to him to understand the origin of these ideas, it has been thought well to include a few examples of his work in the present Exhibition, although this year it is mainly the moderns, and not the old masters, that are represented. To some extent, also, the absence of the earlier masters in the exhibition itself is made up for by the retrospective exhibition of Monsieur Druet’s admirable photographs. Here Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh can be studied at least in the main phases of their development.
Finally, I should like to call attention to a distinguishing characteristic of the French artists seen here, namely, the markedly Classic spirit of their work. This will be noted as distinguishing them to some extent from the English, even more perhaps from the Russians, and most of all from the great mass of modern painting in every country. I do not mean by Classic, dull, pedantic, traditional,
Image unvavailable: Georges Rouault. Profile Author’s Collection Plate XIX.Georges Rouault. ProfileAuthor’s CollectionPlate XIX.
reserved, or any of those similar things which the word is often made to imply. Still less do I mean by calling them Classic that they paint “Visits to Æsculapius” or “Nero at the Colosseum.” I mean that they do not rely for their effect upon associated ideas, as I believe Romantic and Realistic artists invariably do.
All art depends upon cutting off the practical responses to sensations of ordinary life, thereby setting free a pure and as it were disembodied functioning of the spirit; but in so far as the artist relies on the associated ideas of the objects which he represents, his work is not completely free and pure, since romantic associations imply at least an imagined practical activity. The disadvantage of such an art of associated ideas is that its effect really depends on what we bring with us: it adds no entirely new factor to our experience. Consequently, when the first shock of wonder or delight is exhausted the work produces an ever lessening reaction. Classic art, on the other hand, records a positive and disinterestedly passionate state of mind. It communicates a new and otherwise unattainable experience. Its effect, therefore, is likely to increase with familiarity. Such a classic spirit is common to the best French work of all periods from the twelfth century onwards, and though no one could find direct reminiscences of a Nicholas Poussin here, his spirit seems to revive in the work of artists like Derain. It is natural enough that the intensity and singleness of aim with which these artists yield themselves to certain experiences in the face of nature may make their work appear odd to those who have not the habit of contemplative vision, but it would be rash for us, who as a nation are in the habit of treating our emotions, especially our æsthetic emotions, with a certain levity, to accuse them of caprice or insincerity. It is because of this classic concentration of feeling (which by no means implies abandonment) that the French merit our serious attention. It is this that makes their art so difficult on a first approach but gives it its lasting hold on the imagination.
Note.—At least one French artist of great merit was un-represented at the Post-Impressionist Exhibitions—Georges Rouault, a fellow pupil with Matisse of Gustave Moreau. He stands alone in the movement as being a visionary, though, unlike most visionaries, his expression is based on a profound knowledge of natural appearances. The profile here reproduced (see Plate) will give an idea of his strangely individual and powerful style. (1920.)
Note.—At least one French artist of great merit was un-represented at the Post-Impressionist Exhibitions—Georges Rouault, a fellow pupil with Matisse of Gustave Moreau. He stands alone in the movement as being a visionary, though, unlike most visionaries, his expression is based on a profound knowledge of natural appearances. The profile here reproduced (see Plate) will give an idea of his strangely individual and powerful style. (1920.)
THE Burlington Fine Arts Club have arranged a most interesting collection of drawings by dead masters. Abandoning the club’s usual method of taking a particular period or country, the committee have this time allowed their choice to range over many periods and countries, excluding only living artists, and admitting one so recently dead as Degas. This variety of material naturally stimulates one to hazard some general speculations on the nature of drawing as an art. “H. T.,” who writes the preface to the catalogue, already points the way in this direction by someobiter dicta. He points out that the essence of drawing is not the line, but its content. He says:
A single line may mean nothing beyond a line; add another alongside and both disappear, and we are aware only of the contents, and a form is expressed. The beauty of a line is in its result in the form which it helps to bring into being.
A single line may mean nothing beyond a line; add another alongside and both disappear, and we are aware only of the contents, and a form is expressed. The beauty of a line is in its result in the form which it helps to bring into being.
Here the author has undoubtedly pointed out the most essential quality of good drawing. I should dispute, rather by way of excessive caution, his first statement, “A single line may mean nothing beyond a line,” since a line is always at its least the record of a gesture, indicating a good deal about its maker’s personality, his tastes and even probably the period when he lived; but I entirely agree that the main point is always the effect of two lines to evoke the idea of a certain volume having a certain form. When “H. T.” adds that “Draughtsmen know this, but writers on art do not seem to,” he seems to be too sweeping. Even so bad a writer on art as Pliny had picked up the idea from a Greek art critic, for in describing the drawing of Parrhasios he says:[50]
By the admission of artists he was supreme in contour. This is the last subtlety of painting; for to paint the main body and centres of objects is indeed something of an achievement, but one in which many have been famous, but to paint the edges of bodies and express the disappearing planes is rare in the history of art. For the contour must go round itself and so end that it promises other things behind and shows that which it hides.
By the admission of artists he was supreme in contour. This is the last subtlety of painting; for to paint the main body and centres of objects is indeed something of an achievement, but one in which many have been famous, but to paint the edges of bodies and express the disappearing planes is rare in the history of art. For the contour must go round itself and so end that it promises other things behind and shows that which it hides.
This is an admirable account, since it gives the clue to the distinction between descriptive drawing and drawing in which the contour does not arrest the form, but creates plastic relief of the whole enclosed volume. Now, this plastic drawing can never be attained by a meredescriptionof the edges of objects. Such a description, however exact, can at the utmost do no more than recall vividly the original object; it cannot enable the spectator to realise its plastic volume more clearly than the original object would. Now, when we look at a really good drawing we do get a much more vivid sense of a plastic volume than we get from actual objects.
Unfortunately this is a very severe test to apply, and would, I think, relegate to an inferior class the vast majority of drawings, even of those in the present exhibition. The vast majority of drawings even by the celebrated masters do appeal mainly by other more subsidiary qualities, by the brightness of their descriptive power, and by the elegance and facility of their execution. There is an undoubted pleasure in the contemplation of mere skill, and there are few ways of demonstrating sheer skill of hand more convincingly than the drawing of a complex series of curves with perfect exactitude and great rapidity. And when the curves thus brilliantly drawn describe vividly some object in life towards which we have pleasing associations we get a complex pleasure which is only too likely to be regarded as an æsthetic experience when in fact it is nothing of the kind.
The author of the preface has quite clearly seen that this element of brilliance in the execution of the line does frequently come into play, and he considers this calligraphic quality to be always a sign of a lowered æsthetic purpose, citing Tiepolo quite rightly as a great master of such qualities. And he quite rightly points out that with the deliberate pursuit of calligraphy there is always a tendency tosubstitute type forms for individual forms. On the other hand, all good drawing also tends to create types, since a type results from the synthetic unity of the design. The real question here would seem to be the fulness or emptiness of the type created, and it would be fair to say that the calligraphic draughtsman accepted most readily an empty type. For instance, one would have to admit that Ingres created a type, and repeated it as much as Tiepolo, only Ingres continually generated his type of form upon actual material, whereas Tiepolo tended merely to repeat his without enriching it with fresh material.
The exhibition has been to some extent arranged around Ingres, and as many of his drawings as possible have been collected. Ingres has long been accepted in the schools aspar excellencethe great modern master of drawing. His great saying, “Le dessin c’est la probité de l’art,” has indeed become a watchword of the schools and an excuse for indulgence in a great deal of gratuitous and misplaced moral feeling. It has led to the display of all kinds of pedagogic folly. Art is a passion or it is nothing. It is certainly a very bad moral gymnasium. It is useless to try to make a kind of moral parallel bars out of the art of drawing. You will certainly spoil the drawing, and it is doubtful if you will get the morals. Drawing is a passion to the draughtsman just as much as colour is to the colourist, and the draughtsman has no reason to feel moral superiority because of the nature of his passion. He is fortunate to have it, and there is an end of the matter. Ingres himself had the passion for draughtsmanship very intensely, though perhaps one would scarcely guess it from the specimens shown in this exhibition. These unfortunately are, with few exceptions, taken from that large class of drawings which he did as a young man in Rome. He was already married, and was poor. He was engaged on some of his biggest and most important compositions, on which he was determined to spare no pains or labour; consequently he found himself forced to earn his living by doing these brilliant and minutely accurate portraits of the aristocratic tourists and their families, who happened to pass through Rome. These drawings bear the unmistakable mark of their origins. They are commissions, and they are done to satisfy the sitter. Anything like serious research for form is out of the question; there is little here but Ingres’s extreme facility and a certain negative good taste. Probably the only drawing