Modern Painting, Its Tendency and Meaning

That beneath all great art there has been a definite animating purpose, a single and profound desire to reach a specific goal, has been but vaguely sensed by the general public...

It must not be forgotten that the division between old and modern art is not an equal one. Modern art began with Delacroix less than a hundred years ago, while art up to that ti...

Among the paintings wherein the simple, three-sided composition does not appear, the most notable are his animal pictures (in which he substituted the S design) and those canvas...

Gericault's Radeau de la Meduse and Delacroix's Dante et Virgile aux Enfers were acceptable to the public, the one because of its dramatic interest, the other because of its lit...

From this time on Manet no longer used the conventional chiaroscuro of the academicians. Instead he let his lights sift and dispel themselves evenly over the whole of his groupi...

Impressionism, though analytic and self-conscious, was not based on science. One may look in vain for parallels between its theories and those of Dove, Thomas Young and Chevreul...

Monet, however, soon tired of figure pieces. His true penchant lay toward landscape. In this field he found an infinity of colour possibilities, innumerable subtleties of light...

The years from 1865 to 1876 constitute a period of Renoir's life rich in its promise of splendid things. His keen admirations and high enthusiasms made of him throughout this ti...

Renoir was a man who fundamentally was not revolutionary, an artist who was shown the way by others, a genius who culminated a great and febrile epoch. His beginnings were imita...

Although Cezanne had many times given out broad hints of his methods, his friends and critics were too busy trying to discover other less concise qualities in his work to apprec...

M. Bernard thinks these irregularities in Cezanne the result of defective eyesight. But such an explanation is untenable. There is abundant evidence to show that, to the contrar...

Suppose we admit that an approximate colour can be recorded for that part of the landscape's green which is in the light, that is, the green whose complement is to be placed on...

Landscapes he liked, and he took pleasure in doing copies of other men. In such works there was no hard and set reality to follow as in still-lives and portraiture. Here the col...

The Impressionists had made infinitesimal spots of colour in order to imitate as exactly as possible the colour effect of nature and to increase the dynamic power of a canvas by...

The other men in this circle of illustrators of which Degas was the dominant figure had distinctly individual traits. In no sense were they followers of one leader. Their preocc...

It is thus Matisse felt about the classic forms of his predecessors. These forms had once been beautiful; intrinsically they were still beautiful; but they had been habitualised...

The idea of synthesis in painting had been so thoroughly assimilated through familiarity with successive movements that, with the advent of Cubism, it was an accepted and unques...

Fernand Leger, with the exception of Picasso, is the most genuinely talented artist of the Cubist movement. His work at first was much less radical than that of his confreres an...

The Futurists' contention that all modern art should have as a point of departure an entirely modern sensation is wholly tenable, but they mistake the fact that a modern sensati...

Shortly after their meeting, Russell and Macdonald-Wright reached the end of their appreciative and formative period of imitation. They were both too intensely desirous of self-...

His second large Synchromie, exposed in the _Salon des Independants_ in March 1914, was more complicated and more sensitively organised, both as to movement and to colour, than...

Despite his complete preoccupation with colour Kandinsky is decadent more than Van Gogh to whom artistically he is closely related, because the progress of modern painting is to...

After Rubens a short period of decadence and deterioration set in. The older methods no longer afforded inspiration. About the beginning of the nineteenth century the second cyc...

Cezanne, 21, 26, 27, 31, 32, 36, 45, 56, 61, 75, 96, 97, 104, 115, 126, 128, 129-163, 175, 176, 180, 189, 197, 200, 203, 206, 208, 222, 223, 225, 234, 240, 241, 242, 244, 247, 2...

Turner, 17, 43, 46-50, 58, 63, 88, 89, 91, 97, 99, 103, 175, 205, 277, 302, 329; _The Devil's Bridge_, 50; _The Fighting Temeraire_, 47; _Rain, Steam and Speed_, 47, 50; _The Su...