Part 7

Rodin’s bronzes exhibit these same elemental qualities, qualities which are pushed to violent extremes in Cubist sculpture. But may it not be profoundly true that these very extremes, these very extravagances, by causing us to blink and rub our eyes, end in a finer understanding and appreciation of such work as Rodin’s?

His Balzac is, in a profound sense, his most colossal work, and at the same time his most elemental. In its simplicity, in its use of planes and masses, it is--one might say, solely for purposes of illustration--Cubist, with none of the extravagances of Cubism. It is _purely_ Post-Impressionistic.

Twenty or twenty-five years ago painters who used a broad technic, and especially those who used the palette knife to lay the pigment in flat sweeps, were looked upon as charlatans and sensationalists. Today their pictures are accepted in the most conservative exhibitions and the public passes with scarcely a comment.

This broad technic is simply painting in planes--in a sense, simply modified Cubism.

To illustrate:

The surface of an orange may be so carefully painted or modelled in clay that the effect is a perfect sphere with no straight lines; or it may be painted or modelled in minute planes and no curved lines; or the use of planes may be carried so far the orange is represented by angles so sharp the shape is almost cubical--it is all a question of the _extent_ to which the artist carries the use of _plane surfaces_. The _fewer_ the planes used and the _larger_ their size, the nearer the _substance_ and more obvious the representation of _mass_.

The _smaller_ the planes and the _larger_ their number, the nearer the _surface_--the more superficial the representation.

* * * * *

The division of planes can be carried--geometrically--to such an extent that the unaided eye can no longer distinguish the minute flat surfaces, and the effect is a perfect sphere.

What is true concerning the painting or modelling of an orange is true of the painting or modelling of all objects.

* * * * *

“It has been charged that the new men are too much given to the geometrical. But geometrical figures are the essential elements of drawing. Geometry, the science which deals with extension, its measure and its relations, has ever been the basis of painting.

“Up to the present time the three dimensions of Euclid have sufficed to express the problems that infinity gives rise to in the souls of great artists.

“Geometry is to the plastic arts what grammar is to the art of the writer.

“Today philosophers do not confine their speculations to the three dimensions of Euclid. Painters, by intention, so to speak, have cause naturally to preoccupy themselves with these new lines of extension which, in the language of modern studios, are classed under the term, _fourth_ dimension.”[38]

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Speaking of Cézanne, it is said:

To him a sphere was not always round, a cube always square, or an ellipse always elliptical. Thus the traditional oval of the conventional face disappeared in his portraits, the generally accepted round surfaces of a vase or bowl was represented as flat and dented in spots and the horizontal stability of the horizon was rendered elliptical whenever it so appeared to him.

The general truthfulness of his observations may readily be tested by any one of normal vision who will carefully observe the actual appearance of the surfaces of a round sugar bowl, for example, when placed in the light of a window. It will be found that certain planes are as flat as the table, that others present the appearance of dents and hollows, and the more clearly this is perceived the more grotesque will the object appear as compared with the preconceived image of it established in our minds by the unconscious interaction of the sense of touch and sight.

We know that, scientifically regarded, there is no such thing as a round surface, that what appears to be such is simply the closely adjusted juxtaposition of infinitesimal planes that are each perfectly flat. And the very fact that painters refer to the surface of a figure as _planes_ is indicative of a partial recognition of this basic characteristic of structure. Nevertheless, both artists and laymen persist in speaking of the roundness of a torso, for example, when in reality, if we could disassociate the _sense_ of roundness from the _appearance_ of roundness as did Cézanne, we would find large surfaces of spheroids quite flat. Therein lies the real secret of the art of Cézanne who is the first of realists.

In a sense, “Cubism” is a misleading term, for, in the first place, “Cubist” pictures are not painted in cubes, but in all sorts of angles and curves; in the second place, the theory does not call for angles.

The theory being the expression of emotion in line and color, there is no conceivable reason why cubes and angles should be used to the exclusion of curves, swirls, sweeps, dashes. On the contrary, of all forms, cubes and angles would seem to be the most inappropriate for emotional expression, since they are peculiarly suggestive of the geometrical and the matter-of-fact.

“Curvism” or “Swirlism” would describe the movement just as well, save that for the time being angles are very much in evidence.

Picabia says that “Cubism” is a misnomer for the movement. He says:

After impressionism, neo-impressionism, then cubism, which sought a geometric third dimension in painting, the expression of things seen in geometrical figures. But a purely subjective art cannot, of course, be bound by any form of expression the moment that expression becomes a convention, an established body of laws with accepted values. Therefore, he has cut loose from cubism, and is what, again for handy classification--an evil habit from which we cannot emancipate ourselves--may perhaps best be called “post-cubist,” with entirely unfettered, spontaneous, ever-varying means of expression in form and color waves, according to the commands, the needs, the inspiration of the impression, the mood received. Objective expression is strictly barred. He even ignores form as far as possible, seeking “color harmonies.” Harmony and equilibrium are his device.

* * * * *

But the Cubists are rapidly getting away from the cubes and angles. It is quite possible that a year or two hence we shall see no more _purely_ Cubist pictures.

That does not mean the movement will come to an end--not at all. The movement toward abstract painting, toward the use of line and paint on canvas for mere pleasure of using them, and without copying objects in either life or nature, is in its infancy.

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“But I don’t understand them!”

Is it necessary to your enjoyment that you should?

Do you understand what Caruso is singing?

Do you understand that French song reproduced by the phonograph?

Do you understand what the orchestra is playing?

Do you understand the pattern in that Persian rug?

How many people who rave over Japanese art have the remotest idea what this or that precious print or painting represents?

Does an intricate design on a bit of Oriental pottery please you? And is your enjoyment lessened one whit by the fact it is all a mystery to you?

Why will you accept as beautiful and buy at a high price a painting you do not understand because it is by a Chinese artist, and reject as ugly the painting by a French artist simply because you cannot see “what he is driving at”?

* * * * *

Suppose a Cubist picture is a beautiful scheme of color; is it less beautiful _in color_ because you do not understand the painter’s theory? His painting may be fine, his theory absurd.

Would your enjoyment of Caruso be increased if he sang in English the ridiculous stuff he sings in Italian?

Fortunate it is for most grand opera that we _do not understand_--we are not diverted from the music by the nonsense of the libretto.

The enjoyment of music is a curious thing.

First of all, there are all kinds of music, from rag-time to Beethoven, and each kind has its following.

Then the following of each kind breaks up into its rag-time and Beethoven divisions.

That is to say, in an audience listening to rag-time there are always a few who enjoy the music in a Beethoven way--for what there is of real value in it.

While in an audience listening to a Beethoven symphony there are always a goodly number, often a big majority, who enjoy it in a rag-time way--just the emotional reaction, without knowing a thing about the music.

There are two entirely distinct enjoyments of the same composition--the purely intellectual and the purely emotional. There may be a mingling of the two, but as a rule what one gains the other loses.

The man who follows the score, is familiar with the different interpretations of this and that leader, whose ear catches every failure by any part of the orchestra to respond, and so on, and so on--that man is constantly holding his emotional response subject to his intellectual appreciation. What is a fine performance to most of the audience may be a very indifferent performance to him.

True, when the performance is so fine it carries him off his feet, then he gets an enjoyment--intellectual and emotional--far finer than the enjoyment experienced by others. In a sense, he is the one man worth playing for.

But while it is a fine thing to both understand and enjoy, understanding is not essential to enjoyment in the purely emotional sense--to the enjoyment most people feel when listening to music.

The voice of a street singer borne in upon the night air, even the sound of a hurdy-gurdy, pleases, though we do not

know the song or the air. There is a species of pleasure in not knowing that is dissipated when we recall or are told.

Many of our enjoyments are more than half dreamy. Is it not true that the dreamy element is essential to purely emotional enjoyment?

I confess to a very ignorant enjoyment of music. If I am at a concert I do not like to be told what it is all about. I enjoy good music without knowing or caring why, and I like to hear it without being seated where I am more than half-hypnotized by the rhythmical movements of the orchestra, especially the fascinating bowing of the violins.

* * * * *

What is true of the enjoyment of music should be true of the enjoyment of painting. But with painting, most people insist upon understanding. They will listen to Patti without knowing her language, but they will not look at a painting unless they know the painter’s language.

* * * * *

Why not accept at their face value all pictures that are beautiful in line and color, without bothering about their meaning? Perhaps they have no meaning beyond the vagrant fancy of the artist.

Take the three pictures by Sousa Cardoza. Suppose they have no more significance than so many illustrations to a fairy tale; they are interesting in line and fascinating in color. If the “Stronghold” had been on a Delft platter, or the “Leap of the Rabbit” on a piece of Persian pottery, everyone would have lauded their beauty, and collectors would give ten or twenty times the modest prices of the canvases.

When put to people in that matter-of-fact way the response is almost always favorable to the pictures.

In an interesting monograph entitled “Is It Art?”[39] the writer says:

It will be seen, therefore, that the efforts of these men to give a subjective rendering of actuality results in nothing better than a poorly realized form of objectivity which is as much the creation of the spectator as of the artist, inasmuch as the vaguely adumbrated forms in the picture simply serve as a hint to that reality of which it is a wilfully distorted symbol, and the discovery of the “mustard pot” would scarcely have been possible without the happy cooperation of the title with the spectator’s previous knowledge of the actual appearance of a mustard pot.

Without the intervention of the title and the association of ideas called forth thereby through the memory of past experiences with actuality, these pictures would be totally meaningless even to the most recondite. They would inevitably be reduced to a personal system of shorthand, an individual code, as it were, comprehensible only to the originator.

Regarded from that viewpoint, these enigmatic paintings and drawings may very possibly be altogether successful. At all events it is only fair to assume that these works express to the originator what he intended them to express. But it is quite obvious that they express something quite different to the spectator who has not been initiated into the meaning of this personal form of shorthand, and the appending of an objective title to what is intended as a subjective impression of the actual world hardly help him over the difficulty. On the contrary it takes him just that far away from the impression the artist desires to produce, plunging him deeper into that world of reality out of which he was to be extricated by this new art, and there is no doubt that in the minds of even the most intelligent spectator it only serves to reenforce his conception of reality upon which he is forced to fall back by the objective titles as well as the concrete representations of what is supposed to be a subjective mood.

I think it may safely be said that in no case does this mood manifest itself to the persons to whom it is addressed, although by a process of auto-hypnotism, a certain few no doubt succeed in making themselves believe that they penetrate the real inwardness of these arbitrarily individual mental processes. Granted that these very discerning ones do respond to the real intention of these abstractions it cannot be denied that this work is the most circumscribed in its appeal of anything so far produced in the name of art and, until its working premise is made clearer, its influence must be correspondingly limited. At present it appears to me to be a too purely personal equation to be intelligible to others than the artist himself and therefore, generally speaking, it can not be regarded as art, whatever else it may be. For that that communicates nothing expresses nothing and as the office of art is first and last expression this new form is as yet outside of the domain of art.

But that makes the attitude of the _observer_ the test whether a given product is or is not art, while the true test is the attitude of the _producer_.

Whether a given work is or is not art is _determined_ and _forever fixed_ at the time of its production. If art to him who creates it, it is art to all humanity for all time; neither a man’s neighbors nor future generations can deprive it of its character.

* * * * *

Quite a good many years ago I made the attempt, in lecture and book form, to define art.[40]

What is Art? The question is as old as man himself, for we have no records of men without some manifestation of the art impulse....

Man is the _combination_ of _thought_ and _symbol_; thought striving to express itself, and symbol, the means whereby it achieves that end. The symbol may be sound, word, or song; or it may be line, form, or structure; it matters not. A cry is the language of the child; speech is the every-day utterance of the man; the heart of the singer bursts forth in song; the musician speaks in harmonies, the painter in line and color, the sculptor in form, the architect in structure, the poet in rhyme and rhythm--and each is silent save in his own way....

Now what is the distinction between _thought_ expression which _is art_ and _thought_ expression which is _not art_?

In its broadest significance, and in its very essence, _art is delight in thought and symbol_.

Mark the union--art is delight in _both_ the thought _and_ the symbol. Without the double delight--the combination of these two quite distinct delights, there can be no art.

To the writer of prose there may come a beautiful fancy; he delights in it and hastens to record his thought. He may write the most flowing, the most perfect prose, but as he writes he is still occupied with his thought; his sole object is to find words which will but express it. The same fancy comes to the poet; he, too, delights in it, and seeks to record it; but when the poet touches pen to paper he is seized with a new and an entirely distinct delight, a delight _in his method of expressing_ his thought; he may even permit his delight in his symbol, the flow, rhythm and ring of rhyme, to sweep him onward in forgetfulness of his first fancy--literature is filled with such examples.

Now and then a writer of prose expresses himself so finely, writes so well, that we feel instinctively and immediately not only the delight in the thought, but also a certain amount of delight in the manner of expressing the thought, in the style, ... and to the extent of the _double_ delight such prose is art, for art, as we shall see, is by no means confined to the five so-called fine arts.

No hard and fast line can be drawn between that which is art and that which is not art, the one fades imperceptibly into the other.

And farther on in the same little volume:[41]

The current notions of art are such and the current notions of labor are such that it may seem to most of you as though any attempt to discuss the two together could result only in a waste of words; yet time was when art and labor were so intimately united in the great domain of human effort that the one almost invariably implied more or less of the other; and the time will yet be when there will be no labor without at least some art, even as there is now and ever has been no art without at least some labor.

Art lies not in the employment, but in the _manner_ of the employment of the powers of nature for an end; not in the task, but in the _attitude_ of the worker towards his task.

* * * * *

Whether a Cubist painting is or is not art does not depend upon the opinion of either critic or multitude; if it did it would be art to one man and not to another, art to one generation and not to another--an illogical conclusion.

Most Cubist pictures are plainly the work of men who are profoundly moved by an idea and who are striving to express that idea in a highly original manner. It may be the manner they have chosen is so abstract, so scientifically theoretical, that it will in the end--if pursued--kill the imagination, stifle all delight, and so result in failure as _art expression_; but so long as the men take sincere delight in both what they are trying to say and their manner of utterance, it is impossible to deny the character of art to their works.

In proportion to their originality and daring, there may be more of living and vital art in what they are doing than in the art of the academic painter who follows in the footsteps of others without any particular effort.

In other words, it is quite conceivable there may be more of vital and living art in a movement doomed to failure than in a movement that has achieved success and become stagnant.

_The vitality lies in the element of earnest striving rather than in the direction the striving takes._

VI

THE THEORY OF CUBISM

The art that is at hand is a highly _subjective_ art as distinguished from the highly _objective_ art of the Impressionist and Realist, but no man can say just what forms this new art will assume.

Cubism is one attempt, Futurism is another, Compositional painting is another; there will be many more attempts before freedom of expression is attained.

Cubism is interesting because it accentuates the value of planes and shows what can be done with elemental propositions in drawing. But the student or painter who turns to Cubism because he thinks it is to become a fad and will pay, runs the risk of making a great mistake; he would better stick to older methods.

* * * * *

The Orphists have been mentioned; there were no Orphist pictures in the International Exhibition. The movement is based on the purely practical proposition that color in itself, and color alone without drawing, may be beautiful. So they just place lines and masses of color on a canvas and frame the canvas.

It sounds absurd, yet the theory is the very foundation of wall decoration, of interior furnishing, of dressmaking--the mere juxtaposition of masses of color, with or without pattern.

The Orphist “picture” may not be much of a picture in the accepted sense of the term, but it may afford pleasure as a color combination and may be of very real value to the decorator, the furnisher, the dressmaker, the scene-painter, the costumer.

The theory is not new. So long as man has loved color he has used it irrespective of pattern.

One part of the theory of the Cubists is as old as that of the Orphists. It is simply that the painter can do with line and color what the composer does with sound. In other words they demand the same freedom in the use of line and color that every great composer has in the use of sound.

If, for instance, a great musician composes a pastoral symphony does he imitate the mooing of cows, the bleating of lambs, the rippling of brooks? Such attempts would be recognized as cheap in the extreme.

“Very well,” the Cubist says, “if I paint a pastoral symphony why should I so much as suggest cows, sheep, landscape, brook? Why should people insist upon _seeing_ in my painting what they cannot _hear_ in Mozart’s or Beethoven’s music?”

* * * * *

The comparison which Picabia is fondest of making is that with absolute music. The rules of musical composition, he points out, are sufficiently hampering in themselves to the composer’s mood, or call it inspiration. Words, as of songs, still further confine his vision of melody, even though they give in the beginning the impression that evokes the mood. Songs without words, the expression of the impression made on him by a great poem without the necessity of following in musical form the literary form of the poet, leave him far freer, give his subjectivity far wider scope. Modern composers have rebelled against the old fetters; modern painters have begun to feel the same need of a freer, an absolute method of expression. Hence, “post-impressionism,” which refuses altogether to be bound by objectivity, by literal reproduction of the object seen, in connection with the mood, the after-impression, received and fixed on the canvas. A composer may be inspired by a walk in the country, says M. Picabia, and produce a production of the landscape scene, of its details of form and color? No; he expresses it in sound waves, he translates it into an expression of the impression, the mood. And as there are absolute sound waves, so there are absolute waves of color and form. Modern music has won its way; this modern painting, too, will find appreciation and understanding in the days to come.

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