Part 8

The Cubists have set themselves a hard task. It is a good deal easier to _sing_ an _emotion_ than _paint_ one. It is a good deal easier to _paint_ an _object_ than _sing_ one--therein lies the trouble.

Yet in the beginning both music and painting were imitative. Music imitated natural sounds; drawing and painting imitated natural objects.

But soon men began to sing for the pleasure of singing and play on instruments for the pleasure of playing, and the imitation of natural sounds was left far behind as primitive and elemental, and music tended to become more and more expressive of emotions, elemental emotions at first, finer and purer emotions later, until in the western world abstract purity was reached in Beethoven.

Since Beethoven there has been a reaction to more imitative music, as in the operas of Wagner.

While music departed farther and farther from imitation of natural sounds, drawing and painting progressed toward the more perfect representation of natural objects.

Or rather painting developed along two distinct lines--one the more perfect representation of objects _for the sake of the representation_; the other compositions of line and color--not

imitative--for the sake of the pleasure afforded _by the pattern and the color scheme_.

This second development parallels that of music--compositions of line and color, like compositions of sound for the pleasure they give, and not for the associations they arouse.

Strange as it may sound, it is nevertheless true, that four-fifths of the pleasure we get in our daily lives out of line and color is not from the _imitative_ development, the _picture_ side, but from the _non-imitative_, the _abstract_ side.

Our clothes, our homes, our public buildings, our cities, our landscapes are made beautiful by the use of line and color in patterns and masses--in harmonious composition. It is only here and there that we come in contact with either line or color used imitatively.

We all know how distressingly tiresome a wall-paper becomes if it is made up of imitative scenes--that is, a series of pictures, and the better the pictures the sooner we tire of the paper.

While a paper that contains no imitative spots, or in which the imitative features are so subdued and conventionalized we _feel_ them rather than _see_ them, may be restful and pleasing; and a wall that is a monotone if bordered by wainscoting and frieze in monotones, may wear the best of all.

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But while the great, the practical use of line and color followed parallel lines with sound and got farther and farther away from imitative features, _the art_ of painting, as it is commonly called, developed in just the opposite direction, it became more and more imitative, until of late years it would seem that the last word has been said in the reproduction of natural objects and natural light and color effects.

Of course the _last_ word has not been said, and never will be said so long as _individuals_ are born, but _so much_ has been said that it is not surprising there is a reaction, nor is it surprising that one phase of this reaction should be an attempt to use line and color as the decorator and the dressmaker and a thousand others use them, to express and kindle pleasurable emotions.

In short it is not surprising that the painter of pictures should awaken to the realization of the fact that others use and have used, from the beginning, line and color to make delightful compositions that have no relation to natural objects, as the musician uses sound to make delightful compositions that have no relation to natural noises.

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As a rule women have a finer instinct for the use and arrangement of color than painters. Few wives of painters would trust their husbands to decorate their dinner tables.

Look at the gruesome and ugly “still lifes” done by painters of renown. I saw one the other day of some fish on a platter by an American painter famous for such things. If his wife had found that platter of dead and clammy fish in her drawing room she would have exclaimed, “For goodness sake, how did that get in here? Take it back to the kitchen.”

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Look at the naive and absurd compositions of flowers and fruit that painters put together to paint; no woman of taste would permit them on her tea table.

I know a charming woman whose dinner tables are a dream of beauty, veritable compositions in which flowers and fruits and lights and every detail are far more thoughtfully considered than are the details in most pictures. In short, without knowing it she creates a work of art each time she entertains. Imagine what her table would be if left to an artist or a committee of artists--or her husband!

Most painters’ studios are either devoid of all color arrangement or positively ugly.

So far as _color_ goes many a portrait owes its success more to the _modiste_ than the artist.

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From the painting of color harmonies and line harmonies it is but a step to insist that line and color composition may be used like sound compositions to express one’s moods and emotions.

That is what these modern men are trying to do.

You may not think it is possible for them to succeed but why should you ridicule the attempt?

The attempt is an ambitious one, it is an attempt to extend the sphere of painting, and it may lead to new and beautiful things. Should we not watch it with interest and sympathy even if you think it foredoomed to failure?

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Watch a painter preparing to paint a picture of still life. He takes a vase of flowers and places it on a table; beside it he poses, perhaps a brass bowl and some other objects, having regard throughout for light and, above all, for proportion and color. That is when he is _really painting_ his picture, when he is really _composing_, receiving his impression, creating his subjective mood. The objective part of his work is done; all that remains now is to give expression to that impression, that mood. Instead of thus allowing his inspiration to gain its full value and significance, he sits down and reproduces it with a varying degree of literalness. He becomes nothing more or less than a copyist, a photographer of his own work. He kills within himself its subjective values, or, at best, seeks to give them expression filtered by objectivity. Or, again, consider the case of the portrait painter. He studies sitters from every point of view, gathering impressions. Then he begins to experiment with poses, draperies, light effects, seeking to heighten the impression already received from the sitter himself. At last he is content with pose, draperies, background, lights--his picture is there. But why, then, go to the trouble of painting it, of copying it? If the work he has done, finished in all its details, is to benefit him, he must proceed from it and beyond it. His real work then is to communicate to others the mood awakened in him.[42]

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In another interview Picabia said:

You of New York should be quick to understand me and my fellow painters. Your New York is the cubist, the futurist city. It expresses in its architecture, its life, its spirit, the modern thought. You have passed through all the old schools, and are futurists in word and deed and thought. You have been affected by all these schools just as we have been affected by our older schools.

Because of your extreme modernity therefore, you should quickly understand the studies which I have made since my arrival in New York. They express the spirit of New York as I feel it, and the crowded streets of your city as I feel them, their surging, their unrest, their commercialism, and their atmospheric charm.

You see no form? No substance? Is it that I go out into your city and see nothing? I see much, much more, perhaps, than you who are used to it see. I see your stupendous skyscrapers, your mammoth buildings and marvellous subways, a thousand evidences of your great wealth on all sides. The tens of thousands of workers and toilers, your alert and shrewd-looking shop girls, all hurrying somewhere. I see your theater crowds at night gleaming, fluttering, smilingly happy, smartly gowned. There you have the spirit of modernity again.

But I do not paint these things which my eye sees. I paint that which my brain, my soul, sees. I walk from the Battery to Central Park. I mingle with your workers, and your Fifth Avenue mondaines. My brain gets the impression of each movement; there is the driving hurry of the former, their breathless haste to reach the place of their work in the morning and their equal haste to reach their homes at night. There is the languid grace of the latter, emanating a subtle perfume, a more subtle sensuousness.

I hear every language in the world spoken, the staccato of the New Yorker, the soft cadences of the Latin people, the heavy rumble of the Teuton, and the ensemble remains in my soul as the ensemble of some great opera.

At night from your harbor I look at your mammoth buildings. I see your city as a city of aerial lights and shadows; the streets are your shadows. Your harbor in the daylight shows the shipping

of a world, the flags of all countries add their color to that given by your sky, your waters, and your painted craft of every size.

I absorb these impressions. I am in no hurry to put them on canvas. I let them remain in my brain, and then when the spirit of creation is at flood-tide, I improvise my pictures as a musician improvises music. The harmonies of my studies grow and take form under my brush, as the musician’s harmonies grow under his fingers. His music is from his brain and his soul just as my studies are from my brain and soul. Is this not clear to you?

* * * * *

You say all this cannot be done.

That is precisely the question, and one thing certain, it cannot and will not be done, unless some one _tries_ to do it.

It is just as legitimate to attempt to express one’s emotions by the use of line and color as by the use of sound as in music, or by the use of motion as in pantomime.

One man says, “I will paint the portrait of a beautiful woman.”

A second says, “I will not paint her portrait, but I will put on canvas a composition of colors so joyous it will express my admiration for her.”

A third says, “I will compose a sonata or a symphony or a ‘song without words’ to express my love for her.”

The public accepts without question the work of the first and third--the portrait painter and the musician--but rejects the work of the second--the painter of harmonies. Why? Because he does not copy the features and the dress of the woman.

Picabia again says:

Art, art, what is art? Is it copying faithfully a person’s face? A landscape? No, that is machinery. Painting Nature as she is, is not art, it is mechanical genius. The old masters turned out by hand the most perfect models, the most faithful copies of what they saw. That all their paintings are not alike is due to the fact that no two men see the same things the same way. Those old masters were, and their modern followers are, faithful depicters of the actual, but I do not call that art today, because we have outgrown it. It is old, and only the new should live. Creating a picture without models is art.

They were successful, those old masters; they filled a place in our life that cannot be filled otherwise, but we have outgrown them. It is a most excellent thing to keep their paintings in the art museums as curiosities for us and for those who will come after us. Their paintings are to us what the alphabet is to the child.

We moderns, if so you think of us, express the spirit of the modern time, the twentieth century. And we express it on canvas the way the great composers express it in their music.

There is plenty of clear expression and fine enthusiasm in those three paragraphs.

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There is, however, another side to Cubism and one not so easy to understand.

Painting color harmonies for the sake of their emotional effect is easy of comprehension. But when the Cubist sets out to convey the impression, not of the surfaces, but of the very substance of things, he is attempting something very different from what has heretofore been considered within the sphere of painting. Possibly he is attempting something painting cannot do.

The theory is so abstract and so scientific it comes near paralyzing the art. It is _too coldly logical_ and unemotional to produce great art, for great art is and must be fundamentally _emotional_.

Of Picasso, the founder and leading exponent of Cubism, a sympathetic writer says:

His whole tendency is a negation of the main tenets of the gospel of Cézanne whose conception of form he rejects, together with Monet’s conception of light and color. To him both are non-existent. Instead he endeavors “to produce with his work an impression, not with the subject, but the manner in which he expresses it,” to quote his confrère, Marius De Zayas, who studied the raison d’être of this work, together with Picasso. Describing his process of aesthetic deduction further, M. De Zayas tells us that “he (Picasso) receives a direct impression from external nature; he analyzes, develops, and translates it, and afterwards executes it in his own particular style, with the intention that the picture should be the pictorial equivalent of the emotion produced by nature. In presenting his work he wants the spectator to look for the emotion or idea generated from the spectacle and not the spectacle itself.

“From this to the psychology of form there is but one step, and the artist has given it resolutely and deliberately. Instead of the physical manifestation he seeks in form the psychic one, and on account of his peculiar temperament, his psychical manifestation inspires him with geometrical sensations. When he paints he does not limit himself to taking from an object only those planes which the eye perceives, but deals with all those which, according to him, constitute the individuality of form; and with his peculiar fantasy he develops and transforms them.

“And this suggests to him new impressions, which he manifests with new forms, because from the idea of the representation of a being, a new being is born, perhaps different from the first one, and this becomes the represented being. Each one of his paintings is the coefficient of the impressions that form has performed in his spirit, and in these paintings the public must see the realization of an artistic ideal, and must judge them by the abstract sensation they produce, without trying to look for the factors that entered into the composition of the final result.

“As it is not his purpose to perpetuate on canvas an aspect of the external world, by which to produce an artistic impression, but to represent with the brush the impression he has directly received from nature, synthesized by his fantasy, he does not put on the canvas the remembrance of a past sensation, but describes a present sensation.... In his paintings perspective does not exist; in them there are nothing but harmonies suggested by form, and registers which succeed themselves, to compose a general harmony which fills the rectangle that constitutes the picture.

“Following the same philosophical system in dealing with light, as the one he follows in regard to form, to him color does not exist, but only the effects of light. This produces in matter certain vibrations, which produce in the individual certain impressions. From this it results that Picasso’s paintings present to us the evolution by which light and form have operated in developing themselves in his brain to produce the idea, and his composition is nothing but the synthetic expression of his emotion.”

Thus it will be seen that he tries to represent in essence what seems to exist only in substance. And, inasmuch as his psychical impressions inspire in him geometrical sensations, certain of these exhibits are in the nature of geometrical abstractions that have little or nothing in common with anything hitherto produced in art. Its whole tendency would appear to be away from art into the realm of metaphysics.

Here is a design, a pattern of triangles, ellipses and semi-circles that at first glance appears to be little more than the incoherent passage of a compass across the paper in the hands of some absent-minded engineer. After a little attentive study, however, these enigmatic lines resolve themselves into the semblance of a human figure and one begins to discover a clearly defined intention behind this apparent chaos of ideated sensations. There is evident a method in his madness which, after all, may only be truth turned inside out. And this is what should make one pause and investigate the matter further.

The fact that one may get nothing out of it as yet in the way of tangible or even vaguely experienced emotions is beside the point. The interest in this whole matter rests on the fact that here is revealed a new form of aesthetic expression as yet only tentative and groping perhaps, but reaching out in new directions. And it must not be forgotten that the pioneer is usually misunderstood; he is so far in advance of current ideas as to be out of touch with his fellow men who might appropriately be called follow-men, they lag so far behind the progress of new ideas. Cézanne and Picasso--they mark the parting of the ways: a fulfilment and a promise. Quo Vadis?[43]

Not many years ago Picasso was painting under the influence of the pointillists. Almost every year he changed his style, until he developed the pure, the geometrical Cubism of the drawing shown herein. He had a period of painting very uninteresting blue portraits, one of which was shown at the exhibition.

His “Woman with the Mustard Pot” belongs with his sculpture, which is interesting but, to most people, ugly.

He has such phenomenal powers of absorption and his technical facility is such that he does anything he pleases

with ease, and what he does today is no sure indication of what he will attempt tomorrow.

For the moment he seems absorbed in the _music of planes_, so to speak. Take, for instance, a still life wherein there seem to be a pipe, a wall, a musical instrument, a glass, something like a stairway, street signs, etc. These may or may not have been the objects the painter had before him, but whether they are or not it is quite clear that he was not content with dealing with superficial planes, that is, with the visible lines and surfaces of the objects, but he _lets the planes project and intersect_ very much as if the objects were semi-transparent.

To state the matter in other words--by using only the essential lines of an object and treating the object as otherwise more or less transparent, one readily understands why the essential lines of all objects in _the rear show through_, and the result is a confused mass of planes with here and there more conspicuous surface indications such as the pipe, the signs, the glass, etc.

In much of Picasso’s later work he suppresses all such surface indications, until only a few absolutely elemental lines remain.

The result is a picture so scientific, so abstract, it appeals to but few and excites no emotion in anyone because it was not the result of emotion in the artist.

In short, Picasso and a few followers have reached a degree of abstraction in the suppression of the real and the particular that their pictures represent about the same degree of emotion as the demonstration of a difficult geometrical proposition.

Beyond the few lines they use there is the bare canvas; they have reached the limit and they must turn in their tracks. The reaction is bound to come, and come quickly.

Meanwhile the Cubists, who have been painting along emotional, as distinguished from the coldly scientific lines, are still turning out pictures that possess a charm in line and color irrespective of their theoretical significance and much may still be done in this direction.

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The Cubists are fond of quoting the following from Plato:

Socrates: What I am saying is not, indeed, directly obvious. I must therefore try to make it clear. For I will endeavor to speak of the beauty of figures, not as the majority of persons understand them such as those of animals, and some paintings to the life; but as reason says, I allude to something straight and round, and the figures formed from them by the turner’s lathe, both superficial and solid and those by the plumb-line and the angle-rule, if you understand me. For these, I say, are not beautiful for a particular purpose, as other things are; but are by nature ever beautiful by themselves, and possess certain peculiar pleasures, not at all similar to those from scratching; and colors possessing this character are beautiful and have similar pleasures.--From “Philebus.”

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Every really great painter must have moments when, as he thinks of the days and years spent painting _things_--just things for people to look at and see--he asks himself, “Is it worth while to spend all one’s life painting things one _sees_? Is it not possible to paint the things one _feels_?”

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Sargent is tired of portrait painting--why? Because he longs to do something else. But what he is doing is simply another form of portrait painting--and not so big. He has simply turned from men and women to chairs and tables--so to speak; that is, from portraits of people to pictures of things--all the same art. So far as any one knows he has not tried to make compositions of line and color that would be beautiful in themselves. In short, great painter as he is, he seems to lack the ambition or the inspiration to try to do what Whistler for more than forty years was trying to do--lift painting from the rut of reality to a plane more nearly on a level with that occupied by the greatest masters of China and Japan.

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The following paragraphs from a little book on Cubism by two well known Cubist painters throw some light on the subject:

We should be the first to blame those who, to hide their incapacity, should attempt to fabricate puzzles. Systematic obscurity betrays itself by its persistence. Instead of a veil which the mind gradually draws aside as it adventures toward progressive wealth, it is merely a curtain hiding a void.

It is not surprising that people ignorant of painting should not spontaneously share our assurance; but nothing is more absurd than that they should be irritated thereby. Must the painter, to please them, turn back in his work, restore things to the commonplace appearance from which it is his mission to deliver them?