Chapter 3

In her etchings and drawings Miss Cassatt early arrived at freedom of handling. The more responsive medium gave her an opportunity to produce delightful studies of domestic life while she was still far from having attained an easy control of pigment and brush. Her dry-points, pulled under her own direction and enriched with flat tints of color, are interesting and expressive, rich in line and large and full in modeling. The color was not, however, wholly an improving experiment. Under the friendly influence of time it may become an element of beauty, since in no case is it either commonplace or crude, but in its newness it lacks something of both delicacy and depth. The later etchings without color are more nearly completely satisfying. The three charming interpretations of children recently sent over to this country are full of freshness and life, and are admirable examples of the brilliant use of pure line. The attitude of the child in the etching reproduced here is, indeed, quite an extraordinary feat of richness of expression with economy of means. The heavy little head sagging against the tense arm, the small, childish neck and thin shoulder are insisted upon just sufficiently to render the mood of light weariness, and the little face, full of individuality, is tenderly observed and modeled with feeling. The psychological bent of the artist, her interest in the portrayal of mental and moral qualities, is nowhere more clearly revealed than in her drawings of children. She has never been content to reproduce merely the physical plasticity and delicacy of infancy, but has shown in her joyous babies and dreamy little girls at least the potentiality of strong wills and clear minds. Great diversity of character and temperament are displayed in the expressive curves of the plump young faces, and the eyes, in particular, questioning, exultant, wondering, reflective or merry, betray a penetrating and subtle insight into the dawning personality under observation.

One of her earliest works recently has been added to the Wilstach collection in Philadelphia. It shows a man and two women on a balcony. The straight line of the balcony railing stretches across the foreground without any modification of its rigid linear effect. The man's figure is in shadow, barely perceptible as to detail, yet indicated without uncertainty of drawing or vagueness of any kind, a solid figure the "tactile values" of which are clearly recognized. One of the women is bending over the railing in a half-shadow while the other lifts her face toward the man in an attitude that makes exacting requirements of the artist's knowledge of foreshortening. The whole is duskily brilliant in color, full of the sense of form, simple, dignified, sturdy, opulent. It shows that Miss Cassatt held at the beginning of her career as now, valuable ideals of competency and lucidity in the interpretation of life.

MAX KLINGER

III

MAX KLINGER

Max Klinger is one of the most interesting and representative figures in the art of Germany to-day. Essentially German in manner of thought and feeling, he has brought into the stiff formality of early nineteenth century German painting and sculpture a plasticity of mind and an elevation of purpose and idea that suggest (as most that is excellent in Germany does suggest) the influence of Goethe. In his restless interrogation of all the forms of representative art, his work in the mass shows a curious mingling of fantasy, imagination, brusque realism, antique austerity, and modern science. The enhancing of the sense of life is, however, always the first thought with him, and lies at the root of his method of introducing color into sculpture, not by the means of a deadening pigment but by the use of marbles of deep tints and positive hues, and of translucent stones. As an artist, his chief distinction is this unremitting intention to convey in one way or another the sense of the vitalizing principle in animate objects. We may say of him that his drawing is sometimes poor, that his imagination may be clumsy and infelicitous, that his treatment of a subject is frequently coarse and even crude, but we cannot deny that out of his etchings and paintings, and out of his great strange sculptured figures looks the spirit of life, more often defiant than noble, more often capricious than beautiful, but not to be mistaken, and the rarest phenomenon in the art product of his native country. He unites, too, a profound respect for the art of antiquity with a stout modern sentiment, a union that gives to his better work both dignity and force. What he seems to lack is the one impalpable, delicate, elusive quality that makes for our enjoyment of so many imperfect productions, and the lack of which does so much to blind us to excellence in other directions--the quality of charm, which in the main depends upon the possession by the artist of taste.

Max Klinger was born in Leipzig on the eighteenth of February, 1857. His father was a man of artistic predilections, and in easy circumstances, so that the choice of a bread-winning profession for the son was not of first importance. As Klinger's talent showed itself at a very early age, it was promptly decided that he should be an artist. He left school at the age of sixteen, and went to Karlsruhe, where Gussow was beginning to gather about him a large number of pupils. In 1875 he followed Gussow to Berlin, where he came also under the influence of Menzel. Gussow's teaching was all in the line of individualism and naturalism. He led his pupils straight to nature for their model, and encouraged them to paint only what they themselves saw and felt. For this grounding in the representation of plain facts Klinger has been grateful in his maturer years, and looks back to his first master with admiration and respect as having early armed him against his tendency toward fantasy and idealism. His early style in the innumerable drawings of his youth is thin and weak, without a sign of the bold originality characterizing his recent work, and he obviously needed all the support he could get from frank and sustained observation of nature. His first oil-painting, exhibited in Berlin in 1878, showed the result of Gussow's influence in its solidity and practical directness of appeal, but a number of etchings, executed that year and the next--forerunners of the important later series--indicate the natural bent of the young artist's mind toward symbolic forms and unhackneyed subjects.

About the art of drawing as distinguished from that of painting he has his own opinions, expressed with emphasis in an essay called _Malerei und Zeichnung_. Drawing, etching, lithography and wood-engraving he considers preeminently adapted to convey purely imaginative thoughts such as would lose a part of their evanescent suggestiveness by translation into the more definite medium of oil-color, and he holds _Griffelkunst_, or the art of the point in as high estimation as any other art for the interpretation of ideas appropriate to it, an opinion not now as unusual as when he first announced it to his countrymen. For about five years after the close of his student period, he occupied himself chiefly with etchings, turning out between 1879 and 1883 no fewer than nine of the elaborate "cycles" which are so expressive of his method of thought, and of the best qualities of his workmanship. In these cycles he delights in following a development not unlike that of a musical theme, beginning with a prelude and carrying the idea through manifold variations to its final expression. His curious history of the finding of a glove which passes through different symbolic forms of individuality in the dreams of a lover, is a fair example of his eccentric and somewhat lumbering humor in the use of a symbol in his earlier years. His etchings for Ovid's _Metamorphoses_ show the same violent grasp of the lighter side of his subject, but in his landscape etchings of 1881 we have ample opportunity to see what he could do with a conventionally charming subject treated with conventional sentiment and without symbolic intention. The moonlight scene which he calls _Mondnacht_, has all the subtle exquisite feeling for harmony and tone to be gained from a Whistler nocturne. The dim light on the buildings, the soft sweep of the clouds across the dark sky, the impalpable rendering, the grave and deep beauty of the scene combine to express the essence of night and its mystery. The oil-painting _Abend_, of 1882, also bears eloquent testimony to Klinger's power to evoke purely pictorial images of great loveliness.

In 1882, after about a year of study in Munich, he painted the important frescoes for the Steglitz Villa, in which the influence of Boecklin played freely. It was in Paris, however, where he studied between 1883 and 1885, that Klinger received his strongest and most definite impulse toward painting. His _Judgment of Paris_ revealed the fact that the young painter had come into possession of himself, and could be depended upon for qualities demanding constraint and a measure of severity. In choosing a legend of antiquity for the subject of his picture, he may have felt a psychological obligation to obey the greater influences of the antique tradition. At all events he rather suddenly developed a style of great maturity and firmness. From Paris he went back to Berlin, but in 1889 he started for Rome, where he spent four profitable years. The fruit of this Roman period has continued to ripen up to the present time, although since 1893 Klinger has made his home in Leipzig, his _wanderjahre_ apparently over and done with. He not only painted in Rome a _Pietà_, a _Crucifixion_, and a number of pictures in which problems of open-air painting are attacked, but he conceived there the powerful series of etchings on the subject of death, and there he made his first attempts in colored sculpture. From his earliest years, the image of death had often solicited him, and some of his interpretations are filled with dignity and pathos. In the slender, rigid figure on a white draped bed, from the etching cycle entitled _Eine Liebe_, there is the suggestion of a classic tomb, severe and impressive in outline, while nothing could be more poignant than the emotional appeal of the _Mutter und Kind_ in the second death series. To turn from these to the two religious paintings executed in Rome, is to realize that eccentric as Klinger often is, both in choice of subject and treatment, his attitude toward the mysteries and problems of man's existence is that of a serious thinker with a strong artistic talent, but a still stronger intelligence. It is not, however, until we reach the period which he devotes to sculpture, that we find in his art the quality of nobility, a certain breadth, which in spite of innovations in execution and almost trivial symbolic detail, impresses upon his conceptions the classic mark.

He began his studies for his great polychromatic statue of Beethoven as early as 1886, fifteen years before its completion. In 1892 it was reported in Rome that he had turned to sculpture as a new field in which to prove himself a master, and his first exhibited figure placed him above the rank of the amateur. He threw himself into his new work with his usual energy, making himself familiar with the technicalities of marble cutting in order to follow the execution with intelligence at every stage. He sought for his material with unwearying zest, taking long journeys into Italy, Greece and the Pyrenees to procure marble with the soft, worn, rich quality produced by exposure to the weather; with this he combined onyx and brilliant stones, bronze, ivory and gold, always with the intention of creating an impression of life in addition to producing a decorative result. His strong decorative instinct comes to his aid, however, in avoiding the incoherence that would seem inevitable from the mixture of so many and such diverse materials, and the equally strong intellectual motive always obvious in his work also tends to hold it together in a more or less dignified unity. The _Cassandra_, his second colored statue, finished in Leipzig in 1895, and now in possession of the Leipzig Museum, is especially free from eccentricity and caprice. The beautiful Greek head, with its deep-set eyes and delicate mouth, is expressive of intense but normal feeling. The flesh is represented by warm-toned marble, the hair is brownish-red, the garment is of alabaster, yellowish-red with violet tones, and the figure stands on a pedestal of Pyranean marble. In color effect, however, the _Beethoven_ is the most striking. In _Les Maîtres Contemporains_, M. Paul Mongré thus describes it:

"The pedestal, half rock, half cloud, which supports the throne of the Olympian master, is of Pyranean marble of a dark violet-brown; the eagle is of black marble, veined with white, its eyes are of amber. The nude bust of Beethoven is of white Syrian marble, with light yellowish reflections, the drapery, hanging in supple folds, is of Tyrolean onyx with yellow-brown streaks in it. The throne of bronze is of a dull brown tone, except in the curved arms, which are brilliantly gilded. Five angel heads in ivory are placed like a crown on the inside of the back of the throne; their wings are studded with multi-colored gems and with antique fluorspar; the back of the throne is laid with blue Hungarian opals." All these different elements, the French critic maintains, are held together in reciprocal cohesion, and are kept subordinated to the bold conception of Beethoven as the Jupiter of music--"the godlike power accumulated and concentrated, on the point of breaking forth in lightnings; the eagle in waiting, ready to take flight, as the visible thought of Jupiter, before whom will spring up a whole world, or the musical image of a world: that is what is manifested by this close alliance of idea and form."

This monument to Beethoven is a performance designed to express not merely the artistic interest of the subject for Klinger, but the abounding enthusiasm of the latter for the great musician's genius. Immediately after leaving Rome, Klinger also brought to completion a series of etchings called _Brahms-phantasie_, and intended to illustrate the emotions aroused by the compositions of Brahms. In 1901 he made a portrait bust of Liszt, and his drawings for the _Metamorphoses_ were dedicated to Schumann. In the autumn of 1906 his Brahms memorial was placed in the new Music Hall in Hamburg. This memorial monument has the form of a powerful Hermes with the head of Brahms. The Muse of tone is apparently whispering secrets of art into the ears of the master. His debt, therefore, to the masters of music may be considered as fully and promptly paid, and the impression of hero-worship conveyed by these ardent tributes is a reminder that the artist is young in temperament, Teutonic in origin, and untouched by the modern spirit of indifference to persons. Unlike many German artists of the present day, he did not find in Paris the atmosphere that suited him. In spite of his years there and in Rome, he has remained undisturbed by any anti-German influence. His compatriots speak with pride of the intensely national character of his mind, and have early recognized his importance, as perhaps could hardly have failed to be the case with powers so far from humble, and a method so far from patient. France also has paid him more than one tribute of appreciation, and the general feeling toward him seems now to be that expressed by one of his German admirers in America: "Why criticize him? He is so overwhelming, so overpowering intellectually that the best we can do is to try to understand him."

ALFRED STEVENS

IV

ALFRED STEVENS

An exhibition of the paintings of Alfred Stevens was held in April and May, 1907, at the city of Brussels, and later in May and in June at the city of Antwerp. The collection comprised examples from the museums at Brussels, Antwerp, Paris and Marseilles, and from the galleries of many private owners. It was representative in the fullest sense of the word, showing the literal tendencies of the artist's youth in such pictures as _Les Chasseurs de Vincennes_ (1855) tightly painted, conscientiously modeled, with only the deep, resonant red of a woman's cape to indicate the magnificent color-sense soon to be revealed; or _Le Convalescent_, in which the two sympathetic women hovering over the languid young man in a Paris drawing-room are photographically true to the life of the time, without, however, conveying its spiritual or intellectual expression; showing also the rich and grave middle period in which beauty of face and form and the charm of elegant accessories are rendered with singular intensity and perfect sincerity; as in _Les Visiteuses_, _Désespérée_, etc.; and, finally, showing the psychological synthesis of the later years, which reveals itself in such works as _Un Sphinx Parisien_, baffling in its fixed introspective gaze, and executed with an impeccable technique.

Many of the early pictures have a joyousness of frank workmanship, a directness of attack and a simplicity of arrangement that appeal to the world at large more freely than the subtler blonde harmonies of the later years. The _Profil de Femme_ (1855) in which M. Lambotte discerns the influence of Rembrandt, is more suggestive to the present writer of familiarity with Courbet's bold, heavy impasto and sharp transitions from light to shadow. The _Réverie_ of the preceding year has also its suggestions of Courbet, in spite of the delicately painted flowers in the Japanese vase; but in the pictures of the next few years, the robust freshness of the painter's Flemish vision finds expression in color-schemes that resemble nothing so much as the gardens of Belgium in springtime, filled with hardy blossoms and tended by skillful hands; _La Consolation_ of 1857, for example, in which the two black-robed women form the heavy note of dead color against which are relieved the pink and white of their companion's gown, the pale yellow of the wall, the blue of the floor and the low, softly brilliant tones of the beautiful tapestry curtain. Another painting of about the same time has almost the charm of Fantin-Latour's early renderings of serious women bending over their books or their sewing. In _La Liseuse_ the girl's face is absorbed and thoughtful, the color harmony is quiet, the white dress, the dull red of the chair, the blue and yellow and green wools on the table, forming a pattern of closely related tones as various in its unity as the motley border of an old-fashioned dooryard. In other examples we have reminiscences of that time of excitement and esthetic riot when the silks and porcelains and enamels of the Far East came into the Paris of artists and artisans and formed at once a part of the baggage of the Parisian atelier. _L'Inde à Paris_ is a particularly delightful reflection of this period of "Chinoiseries." It depicts a young woman in a black gown of the type that Millais loved, leaning forward with both hands on a table covered with an Indian drapery. On the table stands the miniature figure of an elephant. The background is of the strong green so often used by Manet and the varied pattern of the table cover gives opportunity for assembling a number of rich and vivid yet quiet hues in an intricate and interesting color composition.

_La Parisienne Japonaise_ is a subject of the kind that enlisted Whistler's interest during the sixties--a handsome girl in a blue silk kimono embroidered with white and yellow flowers, and a green sash, looks into a mirror that reflects a yellow background and a vase of flowers. The colors are said to have faded and changed, to the complete demoralization of the color-scheme, but it is still a picture of winning charm, less reserved and dignified than Whistler's _Lange Leizen_ of 1864, but with passages of subtle color and a just relation of values that have survived the encroachments of time.

From a very early period Stevens adopted the camel's-hair shawl with its multi-colored border as the model for his palette and the chief decoration of his picture. It is easier, says one of his French critics, to enumerate the paintings in which such a shawl does not appear than those in which it does. It slips from the shoulders of the _Désespérée_ and forms a wonderful contrast to the smooth fair neck and arm relieved against it; it is the magnificent background of the voluminous gauzy robe in _Une Douloureuse Certitude_; it falls over the chair in which the young mother sits nursing her baby in _Tous les Bonheurs_; it hangs in the corners of studios, it is gracefully worn by fashionable visitors in fashionable drawing-rooms; its foundation color is cream or red or a deep and tender yellow as soft as that of a tea-rose; it determines the harmony of the colored silks and bric-à-brac which are in its vicinity, it rules its surroundings with a truly oriental splendor, and it gives to the work in which it plays so prominent a part an individuality supplementary to the artist's own. It is as important as the rugs in the pictures of Vermeer of Delft or Gerard Terborch.

The silks and muslins of gowns and scarves are also important accessories in these pictures which have a modernity not unlike that of the pictures of Velasquez, in which the ugliness of contemporary fashions turns to beauty under the learned rendering of textures and surfaces. Bibelots and furnishings, wall-hangings, pictures, rugs, polished floors, glass and silver and china and jewels are all likewise pressed into the service of an art that used what lay nearest to it, not for the purposes of realism but for the enchantment of the vision. M. Lambotte has pointed out that Stevens introduced mirrors, crystals and porcelains into his canvasses with the same intention as that of the landscape-painter who makes choice of a subject with a river, lake or pond, knowing that clear reflections and smooth surface aid in giving the effect of distance and intervening atmosphere. The same writer has told us that so far from reproducing the ordinary costumes of his period Stevens took pains to seek exclusive and elegant examples, _chefs d'oeuvres_ of the dressmaker's art, and that such were put at his service by the great ladies of the second empire. The beautiful muslin over-dress of the _Dame en Rose_ is perhaps the one that most taxed his flexible brush. It is diaphanous in texture, elaborately cut and trimmed with delicate laces and embroideries, and the rose of the under-robe, the snowy white of the muslin, the silver ornaments and the pale blonde hair of the wearer make the lightest and daintiest of harmonies accentuated by the black of the lacquer cabinet with its brilliant polychromatic insets.

Unlike Whistler, Stevens never abandoned the rich and complicated color arrangements of his youth for an austere and restricted palette. He nevertheless was at his best when his picture was dominated by a single color, as in the wonderful _Fédora_ of 1882 or _La Tricoteuse_. In the former the warmly tinted hair and deep yellow fan are the vibrant notes, the creamy dress, the white flowers, the silver bracelet, and the white butterfly making an _ensemble_ like a golden wheatfield swept by pale lights. The piquant note of contrast is given by the blue insolent eyes and the hardly deeper blue blossoms of the love-in-a-mist held in the languid hands.