Part 4

At the exhibition in New York one had the unusual opportunity of seeing in close contact many works of all four. It would be difficult to imagine paintings more different in inspiration and technic. They had but one thing in common--a pronounced reaction from, not to say revolt against, Impressionism, evidenced particularly in the use of color _constructively_ and _decoratively_ rather than imitatively.

Color force is a feature of the new inspiration.

The painters of today have discovered anew the world’s coloring. We now recognize everywhere the power and vivaciousness, the thousandfold freshness, and the infinite changefulness of color. To us colors now talk directly; they are not drowned by covering tints, not hide-bound by a preconceived harmony. An instrument has thus been given, wherein innumerable melodies still slumber.

Color is a means of representation not only of what is colored, but also of the thick and the thin; of the solid and the liquid; of the light and of the heavy; of the hard and of the soft; of the corporeal and of the spacious. Cézanne models with color; with tinted color surfaces he builds a landscape. The proper couching of colored planes can force upon us the impression of depth; colored transitions call forth the impression of ascent and of motion; spots scattered here and there give the impression of sprightly vivaciousness.

Color is a means of expression talking directly to the soul. Deep mourning and soft glowing, warmth of heart and cold clarity, confused dumbness, flames of passion, sweet devotion--all conditions and all outbursts of the soul--what can communicate them to us more forcefully and more directly than a few colors with their effect exerted through the eye? As tones draw us with them without our will and without meeting resistance, so does color subjugate us: now it fills us with deepest sorrow, then again we are all glowing under its influence.

Color is a means of composition. The force of sensuous designation, the expressive power of the soul, both must combine and make for an always new, always original, and always unique harmony. The law of color beauty has not as yet been fathomed by the intellect. It is being created by feeling and by subconscious experience.[18]

* * * * *

“Cézanne, Gauguin, and VanGogh were men of very different minds; but they were alike in this, that they all attempted to subordinate representation to expression, and were all determined to express only their own emotional experience. Cézanne could not content himself with impressionist triumphs of representation. Above all, he revolted from the Impressionist insistence on the momentary aspect of reality. He was, so to speak, a kind of Plato among the artists of his time, believing that in reality there is a permanent order, a design which reveals itself to the eye and mind of the artist, and which it is his business to expose in his work. But this design he was determined to discover in reality itself, not in the works of other artists. His task was enormously difficult because he would take nothing whatever at second hand. Nature must tell him all her own secrets; and he would not listen even to her when she told him commonplaces. He was not interested, so to speak, in her caprices, in her chance effects of beauty that anyone can see. He painted landscape as Titian or Rembrandt painted portraits; searching always for the permanent character of the place, for that which, independent of weather or time, distinguished it from other places. This permanent element he found in structure and mass, but, like Titian and Rembrandt, he would not abstract these from color. For him, as for these masters, structure and mass revealed themselves in color, and all these must be verified by incessant observation.... For him a hill is not a screen for the play of light; it is built up of earth and rock. Nor is a tree a mere rippling surface, but a living thing with the structure of its growth. Everywhere he looks for character; yet he subordinates the character of details to the character of the whole. And the character of the whole means for him its permanent character, which he expresses in a design not imposed upon it but discovered in it, as Michael Angelo discovered the statue in the block of marble.

“If Cézanne, Gauguin, and VanGogh were charlatans, they were like no other charlatans that ever lived. If their aim was notoriety, it is strange that they should have spent solitary lives of penury and toil. If they were incompetents, they were curiously intent upon the most difficult problems of their art. The kind of simplification which they attempted is not easy, nor, if accomplished, does it make a picture look better than it is. The better their pictures are, the more they look as if any one could have painted them; in fact, they look just as easy as the lyrical poems of Wordsworth or Blake.”[19]

For a glimpse of VanGogh’s life and aspirations, see his letters published in English under the title, “Letters of a Post-Impressionist,” written mostly to his brother--simple, pathetic documents, showing the eager, earnest striving of a man who finally went insane and shot himself. Critics and opponents of his work have seized upon his madness as proof of lack of sanity in what he painted--perhaps, but then is dullness the only proof positive of sanity?

* * * * *

Gauguin, half Breton, half Peruvian Creole, was a restless spirit.

“More than once he circumnavigated the globe, and all his life he was at recurring intervals a victim to wander-thirst. In early manhood he returned to Paris and made an heroic attempt to settle down. He entered a bank, and got on there very well.

“One day he saw in a dealer’s shop some paintings which brought back memories of the light and color he had seen in the tropics. He sought out the painters Pissarro and Guillaumin, and began painting at the age of thirty. Two years later, in 1880, he exhibited two landscapes in the manner of Pissarro.

“Degas made the decisive impression on him, by his systematic division of large planes of color, and above all, by his strong drawing.”[20]

“Gauguin was as singular in his way as VanGogh in his. He did not “go mad,” but he withdrew from civilized society, buried himself in Tahiti and painted the natives, firmly convinced that only amidst primitive conditions could be found the inspiration of pure art.

“His combative disposition impelled him to fight against painters, critics, dealers, buyers, and against established institutions and conventions. One would say fate pursued him. In 1894 at Concarneau in a quarrel with some boatmen who had insulted him, his ankle was broken by a sabot kick, leaving a painful injury from which he suffered until his death (in 1903).”[21]

Of his aims he said in a letter to a friend:

Physics, chemistry, and, above all, the study of nature, have produced an epoch of confusion in art, and it may be truly said that artists, robbed of all their savagery, have wandered into all kinds of paths in search of the productive element which they no longer possess. They now act only in disorderly groups, and are terrified as if lost when they find themselves alone. Solitude is not to be recommended to any one, for a man must have strength to bear it alone. All I have learnt from others has been an impediment to me. It is true that I know little, but what I do know is my own.

Every human work is a revelation of the individual. Hence, there are two kinds of beauty; one comes from instinct, the other from labor. The union of the two--with the modification resulting therefrom--produces great and very complicated richness.... Raphael’s great science does not for a moment prevent me from discovering the instinct of the beautiful in him as the essential quality.

* * * * *

In 1895 there was a sale of Gauguin’s works at the Hotel Drouot. Strindberg was asked to write a preface to the catalogue. In declining, he admitted his own “immense yearning to become a savage and create a new world,” but said of Gauguin’s world, “it is too sunny for me, the lover of chiaroscuro. And in your Eden dwells an Eve, who is not my ideal--for indeed, I too, have a feminine ideal, or two.”

Gauguin answered,

Your civilization is your disease, my barbarism is my restoration to health. The Eve of your civilized conception makes us nearly all misogynists. The old Eve, who shocked you in my studio, will perhaps seem less odious to you some day. I have perhaps been unable to do more than suggest my world, which seems unreal to you. It is a far cry from the sketch to the realisation of the dream. But even the suggestion of the happiness is like a foretaste of Nirvana--only the Eve I have painted can stand naked before us. Yours would always be shameless in the natural state, and, if beautiful, the source of pain and evil.[22]

He had a profound admiration for Cézanne, and was often charged with imitating him, and in some of his pictures there is a certain resemblance in construction, but two painters could scarce be less alike in the handling of color. Gauguin handled color for the pure joy of it.[23] Cézanne used color as a mason uses bricks.

Gauguin’s admiration for Cézanne was not reciprocated.

“Gauguin likes your work immensely, and imitates you,” a friend once said to Cézanne.

“Eh! he does not understand me,” was the angry response. “I never have and never will accept a lack of modelling or graduation; that is nonsense. Gauguin is not a painter; he produces simply Chinese figures.”

* * * * *

Gauguin was a dreamer; Cézanne, in his way, was quite an exact thinker, for instance, he explained his ideas of form and color as follows:

Everything in nature is modelled on the lines of the _sphere_, the _cone_, and the _cylinder_, and one must understand how to paint these simple figures, one can then paint anything. Design and color are not distinct; to precisely the extent that one paints, one draws; the more the color harmonizes, the clearer and purer the design. When the color is at its finest, the form also attains its perfection. Contrasts and harmonies of tones--that is the secret of drawing and modelling.[24]

In the suggestion of the lines of the _sphere_, the _cone_, and the _cylinder_, as the _elements_ of all art, one recognizes the _alphabet of cubism_. But in reducing drawing to these elements Cézanne, without knowing it, simply repeated what Albert Durer printed in book form nearly four hundred years ago, and what the Chinese and Japanese had discovered centuries earlier.[25]

The fact that the work of four men so different, Cézanne, Henri Rousseau, VanGogh, Gauguin, began to be appreciated about the same time, shows how ripe the Paris art world was for the reaction from Impressionism--for a great movement in _creative_ and _decorative_ art.

* * * * *

Matisse taught drawing and for a time--from 1895 to 1899--painted along conventional lines. Influenced by Cézanne he then broke with the academic and sought new light effects, effects quite different from those of the Impressionists.

He sought to break with all ancient laws, and his use of color became and still is largely his own.[26]

While his coloring is always interesting and his drawing facile, there is at times something about his work that is not satisfying, an atmosphere of superficiality. He is described, however, by those who know him as a painter of almost bourgeois earnestness and sincerity, taking himself and his work most seriously.

At the same time many of his canvasses give the impression of having been executed in a spirit of sheer audacity.

* * * * *

To be sure, there is a rhythm and swing to some of his moving figures that is delightful, delightful in the elemental simplicity of the drawing and the seemingly--but only seemingly--naive coloring.

Yet even with these canvases there is often the feeling, “With so much skill, why did he not do better?”--a feeling of disappointment, of dissatisfaction.

One is disposed to agree with the opinion that Matisse’s “true gifts are those of address, of _souplesse_, of quick assimilation, of limited but easily acquired knowledge--essentially feminine gifts.”[A]

_“On a beaucoup vanté le goût d’Henri Matisse. Il n’est pas niable, mais d’une qualité secondaire. C’est le goût d’une modiste; son amour de la conleur vaut un amour du chiffon.”_

He lives in a simple country house in a suburb out of Paris. His studio is painted white, within and without, with immense windows.[27]

I found not a long-haired, slovenly-dressed, eccentric man, as I had imagined, but a fresh, healthy, robust, blonde gentleman, who looked even more German than French, and whose simple and unaffected cordiality put me directly at my ease.

Concerning his early experiences, Matisse said: “I began at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. When I opened my studio, years after, for some time I painted just like any one else. But things didn’t go at all, and I was very unhappy. Then, little by little, I began to paint as I felt. One cannot do successful work which has much feeling unless one sees the subject very simply, and one must do this in order to express one’s self as clearly as possible.

“I studied in the schools mornings, and I copied at the Louvre in the afternoons for ten years. I made copies for the Government, but when I introduced some of my own emotional impressions, or personal translations of the pictures, the Government did not care to buy; it only wanted a photographic copy.”

Of his present methods he said: “I certainly do think of harmony and color, and of composition, too. Drawing is for me the art of being able to express myself with line. When an artist or student draws a nude figure with painstaking care, the result is drawing, and not emotion. A true artist cannot see color which is not harmonious. Otherwise it is a _moyen_, or recipe. An artist should express his feeling with the harmony or idea of color which he possesses naturally. He should not copy the walls, or objects on a table, but he should, above all, express a vision of color, the harmony of which corresponds to his feeling. And, above all, one must be honest with one’s self.

“If one _feels no emotion_, one should not paint. When I came in here to work this morning I had no emotion, so I took a horseback ride. When I returned I felt like painting, and had all the emotion I wanted.

“I never use pastels or water colors, and I only make studies from models, not to use in a picture--_mais pour me nourrir_--to strengthen my knowledge; and I never work from a previous sketch or study, but from memory. I now draw with feeling, and not anatomically. I know how to draw correctly, having studied form so long.

“I always use a preliminary canvas the same size for a sketch as for a finished picture, and I always begin with color. With large canvases this is more fatiguing, but more logical. I may have the same sentiment I obtained in the first, but this lacks solidity, and a decorative sense. I never retouch a sketch; I take a new canvas the same size, as I may change the composition somewhat. But I always strive to give the same _feeling_, while carrying it on further. A picture should, for me, always be decorative. While working _I never try to think, only to feel_.

“I have a class of sixty pupils and make them draw accurately, as a student always should do at the beginning. I do not encourage them to work as I do now.”

When asked about a clay model of a nude woman with abnormal legs, he picked up a small Javanese statue with a head all out of proportion to the body and asked:

“Is not that beautiful?”

His interviewer answered, “I see no beauty where there is lack of proportion. To my mind no sculpture has ever equaled that of the Greeks, unless it be Michael Angelo’s.”

He replied: “But there you are, back to the classic, the formal. We of today are trying to express ourselves _today_--_now_--the _twentieth century_--and not to copy what the Greeks saw and felt in art over two thousand years ago. The Greek sculptors always followed a set, fixed form, and never showed any sentiment. The very early Greeks and the Primitives only worked from the basis of emotion, but this grew cold, and disappeared in the following centuries. It makes no difference what are the proportions, _if there is feeling_. And if the sculptor who modeled this makes me think only of a dwarf, then he has failed to express the beauty which should overpower all lack of proportion, and this is only done through or by means of his emotions.

“My favorite masters are Goya, Durer, Rembrandt, Corot, and Manet. I often go to the Louvre, and there I study Chardin’s work more than any other; I go there to study his technic.”

His palette was a large one, and so chaotic and disorderly were the vivid colors on it that a close resemblance could be traced to some of his pictures.

“I never mix much; I use small brushes and never more than twelve colors. I use black to cool the blue.

“I seldom paint portraits; and, if I do, only in a decorative manner. I can see them in no other way.”

One’s ideas of the man and of his work are entirely opposed to each other: The latter abnormal to the last degree, and the man an ordinary, healthy individual, such as one meets by the dozen every day. On this point Matisse showed some emotion.

“Oh, do tell the American people that I am a normal man; that I am a devoted husband and father; that I have three fine children; that I go to the theater, ride horseback, have a comfortable home, a fine garden that I love, flowers, etc., just like any man.”

As if to bear out this description of himself, he took me to the salon in his perfectly normal house, to see a normal copy which he had made at the Louvre, and he bade me good-by and invited me to call again like a perfectly normal gentleman.[28]

Matisse differs from Cézanne, VanGogh, Gauguin, in the accentuation of _feeling_ as distinguished from observation. While the three last named sought fresh inspiration from close and ever closer contact with nature, he seeks his inspiration in his own emotions.

It is this trait that makes him one of the leaders of Post-Impressionism, as well as a Fauve.

* * * * *

From the foregoing it is clear that _Fauvism_ does not mean a particular mode or technic, like Classicism, Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, etc., etc. It means a _mood_ rather than a _mode_. Every painter in revolt against prevailing taste and standards was and is a _Fauve_.

Not all Post-Impressionists are Fauves, but many are so called, for instance, the following:[29]

Odilon Redon, Othon Friez, Picasso (the founder of Cubism), Van Dongen, André Derain, Vlaminck, Marquet, George Braque, Raoul Dufy, Robert Delauney, M’lle Laurencin, Jean Metzinger, Pierre Girieud, Verhoeven.

Of the above four are well known Cubists; Redon is a poetic personality quite apart; while the others exhibit marked individualities in their work.

Les Fauves in Germany are “Die Wilden,” embracing the “Brücke” of Dresden, the “Neue Sezession” of Berlin, the “Neue Vereinigung” of Munich.[30]

Those of Russia are Larionoff, P. Kuznezoff, Sarjan, Denissow, Kantsch, Schalowsky, Maschkoff, Frau Gontscharof, von Wisen, W. and D. Burljuk, Kanabe, Jakulof; and others who live in foreign countries, such as Schereczowa, Paris; Kandinsky Werefkina, Jawlensky, Bechteyeff, Genin in Munich.[31]

Among the best known English artists who might fairly be classed as “Fauves” are Ferguson, Peploe, Lewis, Wyndhover Lewis, Duncan Grant, Mrs. Bell, Frederic Etchells, Miss Etchells, Eric Gill, Spencer F. Gore, and a man who has done heroic service for the new movement, Roger Fry.

There are, however, comparatively speaking, so few “Fauves” in England that the guns of the critics rust on the racks; while in America they are so scattered they have as yet attracted no attention by concerted action.

Almost the only man in this country who has persistently painted in Cubist fashion for any length of time is Arthur Dove, one of whose pictures is reproduced.

When asked how he came to paint as he does Dove said:

After having come to the conclusion that there were a few principles existent in all good art from the earliest examples we have, through the Masters to the present, I set about it to analyze these principles as they are found in works of art and in nature.

One of these principles which seemed most evident was the choice of the simple motif. This same law held in nature, a few forms and a few colors sufficed for the creation of an object.

Consequently I gave up my more disorderly methods (impressionism); in other words, I gave up trying to express an idea by stating innumerable little facts, the statement of facts having no more to do with the art of painting than statistics with literature.

He then refers to “that perfect sense of order which exists in the early Chinese painting,” and goes on:

The first step was to choose from nature a motif in color, and with that motif to paint from nature, the form still being objective.

The second step was to apply this same principle to form, the actual dependence upon the object (literal to representation) disappearing, and the means of expression becoming purely subjective.

After working for sometime in this way, I no longer observed in the old way, and not only began to think _subjectively_, but also to remember certain sensations _purely through their form and color_, that is by certain shapes, planes, light, or character lines determined by the meeting of such planes.

With the introduction of the line motif the expression grew more plastic, and the struggle with the means became less evident.

Referring to the painting reproduced he said:

It is a choice of three colors, red, yellow, and green, and three forms selected from trees and the spaces between them that to me were expressive of the movement of the thing which I felt.

As to going further and explaining what I felt, that would be quite as stupid as to play on an instrument before deaf persons. The deaf person is simply not sensitive to sound and cannot appreciate; and a person who is not sensitive to form and color as such would be quite as helpless.

The majority of people seem to be in the position of deaf persons. They see others listening intently, and apparently enjoying something, and because they fail to hear, they at once draw the false conclusion that the trouble is with the instrument or the performers.

In November last a group of young Americans held an exhibition of very modern work in The MacDowell Club in New York. The exhibitors were Oliver Chaffee, Konrad Cramer, Andrew Dasburg, Grace Johnson, Arthur Lee, Henry L. McFee, Paul Rohland, William Zorach.

IV

A FUTILE PROTEST