Part 14

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 making it give off a light of its own. By this technique they had incorporated both air and sunlight into their art. The Neo-Impressionists made mathematical the Impressionists' haphazard stippling and had turned the spots into almost symmetrical squares. The squares were slightly separated, and the bare canvas was permitted to show between them in order to achieve a greater brilliance and a more vivid light. Van Gogh later elongated these squares into threads until his pictures resembled tapestries. There was no longer the technical unconcern in painting which Pissarro and Monet had prescribed. Paradoxically enough, while art was growing more scientific it was also becoming less significant. With the men of Pont-Aven the reaction against a too technically self-conscious painting began to set in. Their ardent advocacy of primitive conception and method was the rebound from the pseudo-scientific verbiage which, in the "advanced" studios, took the place of good painting. Consequently they favoured the broad arrangement of surfaces; classic, if the artist leaned temperamentally in that direction; barbaric, if his tastes so inclined him; Gothic, Chinese, Japanese or primitive--all according to which his inclination led him. But all work had to be completed during the first fury of inspiration, conceived imaginatively, and executed from the decorative standpoint. Gauguin, by his quick wit and youthful impetuosity, easily dominated the circle and developed, through the constant interchange of opinions, his vague ideas concerning a "synthetic" art. On his third and last voyage to the Islands his greatest work was done. Here he carried out those ideas which had had their inception at Arles and which had become crystallised at Pont-Aven. He made his art entirely out of colour, but instead of profiting by the teachings of Daumier and Cezanne whose visions were the most simultaneous in the history of art, he chose rather to emulate the early and ingenuous schools of plastic expression. In this his painting was retrogressive.

But there was another and more important side to Gauguin. He at least strove for a larger and more purely emotional interpretation of nature than had been attempted before: and our interest in him is due largely to the broad and peaceful vision he gives us. Monet put many greens in one tree. Gauguin saw the tree as green, but by depicting it in broad planes of pure pigment, he made it a more intense green than Monet could ever have done. "A metre of green is greener than a centimetre of green," said Gauguin; and this principle he applied to all his work. Instead of portraying light by colour as the Impressionists did, he interested himself only in the colour which resulted from light. Thus he was able to raise his paintings to the highest possible pitch of purity, while still being preoccupied with nature. In painting a landscape where a woman with a cerulean blue dress was seated among green trees on an ochre beach with purple hills in the rear, and where the yellow sunlight shone on the tree trunks and in the woman's hair, Gauguin would first of all draw apart the blues as much as possible. The woman's dress would be painted almost blue-green, and in order to contrast this colour with the other blue in his subject, he would paint the sky blue-violet-violet. Thus he would produce a greater range of emotional colour than if the two blues had been pale and similar in tint. Furthermore, he would make the sunlight a yellow-orange-orange and the sand a spectrum yellow. The trees would then be recorded as yellow-green and the hills as red-red-purple. By this process all the parts of the picture were differentiated, with the result that the canvas had a strong carrying power. This power was further increased by the figures being sharply outlined.

Gauguin's composition has little importance. It takes the form of perpendicularities, and rarely is any rhythmic order discernible. It is of a piece with the Romanesque painting in Saint-Savin near Poitiers. All his objects are personifications of calm, and are rooted in their environment as well as in the earth. They do not seem merely to pose there: Gauguin's work is not superficial to this extent,--but they grow naturally out of their matrix like flowers or trees, unconscious but immovable. The passivity which pervades them is not the calm of completion or of the perfect rest which comes after mental exercise, but rather the calm of the lethargic mind which avoids thought, dislikes action and is content to dream. Technically this feeling is caused by lines at right angles to the horizon, by big simple planes on which the eye can rest free from the disturbance of line opposition, by large flat patterns of dark tonality conducive to peace and introspection. Even the contoured volumes have a greater extent of base than of apex and thus add to the picture's aspect of immobility. Gauguin's drawing is interesting in that it portrays a race highly susceptible of picturisation. His models are impelling because it is an adventure to explore their parts, their joints, their distortions and disproportions. Their beauty is heavy and cumbersome, like that of the stone images of the Aztecs.

That which interests us most in Gauguin however is his colour. In this medium he arrived at a sumptuousness unsurpassed by preceding painters. His art was a new application of the old principle of wall decoration. Many had made use of broad planes of colour before his advent, but none had heightened the significance of these planes sufficiently to express nature. He was the first realist in decoration, and from him come, by direct descent, Matisse and a horde of lesser men like Fritz Erler, Leo Putz, R. M. Eichler, Adolf Muenzer, Rodolphe Fornerod, Alcide Le Beau and Gustave Jaulmes. The aesthetic import of a Puvis de Chavannes is almost equal to that of Gauguin, but the former's greys and grey-blues appear washed-out and dead, while Gauguin's pictures vibrate with the heat of tropical sunlight and the richness of tropical colour. Gauguin, however, could get no orders. His work was too sensuous. Interior decoration would have had to be far more joyous than it was at that time for his exotic creations to find a place on walls and ceilings.

Gauguin's animating desire was to synthesise his picture--to make each part of them relative to all the other parts, to order them as to colour, line and tone in such a way that they would give forth the impression of a simple vision, a perfect ensemble. This desire was in the air of the day. The Impressionists had unconsciously approached synthesis by using light and air as a solvent. Cezanne had gone much deeper and ordered form by means of colour. In Seurat Gauguin saw almost completely set forth an expression which by its simplicity satisfied him. Some assert that he was also influenced by Degas. But whether this is so or not, certain it is that there is more of Ingres in him than of Giotto. With Seurat as a starting-point--that is, the linear Seurat of La Baignade and Un Dimanche a la Grande-Jatte--Gauguin quickly abolished the tiny and labourious spotting which Impressionism and Pointillism had taught him, and branched out into simpler design and greater chromatic brilliancy. By these departures he achieved his synthesis. But this triumph must not be overestimated. There are degrees of synthesis. Rubens, Giotto, Degas, Ingres, Boecklin, Botticelli--all are synthetic, but all are by no means of equal importance. While synthesis is necessary to art, it is not the ear-mark of great art alone. The order which is obtained by three harmonious lines is not so extended an order as that found in the multilinear drawings of Pollaiuolo: and this complication of aesthetic ordonnance is what makes a Donatello more significant than a piece of negro sculpture, a Scarsellino greater than a Matisse, and an El Greco more puissant than a Mazzola-Bedoli. Furthermore, when this complete surface order extends itself into three dimensions it becomes an infinitely greater moving power. When from simple straight lines on a flat surface the artist carries his creation into opposition, development and finality, he is pushing the frontiers of his painting to art's extreme limits.

Gauguin's temperament was simple in the extreme. He had fallen under the sway of Manet: he had gone to a rugged country of primitive instincts where singular costumes were a part of the landscape: he had studied the stone and wooden figures in the old churches and cross-roads of Brittany, and had found the elemental to his liking. Consequently in synthesising his art he used simple forms, straight lines and large planes of shadow and light, all of which were presented on a flat surface, so that all the parallelisms and elementary curves of the picture would deliver themselves to the average spectator at first glance. His method of filling or balancing a canvas was little more than primitive, and the curved lines of light and shadow, which are intended to entice the eye, are so isolated that when we at length arrive at their end we discover they are without rhythmic intention. Nor is there a generating line out of which the others grow.

Gauguin's linear harmony is no greater, if a trifle more diverse, than in the Byzantine mosaic decorations in S. Vitale. Indeed the emotion we experience before each of them is to all purposes the same. The richness of medium in the mosaics is amply compensated for by Gauguin's richness of foliage forms and floral designs. The decorative colours in both are equally effective. As moderns we might get more enjoyment out of Gauguin's heat and brilliance and the diversity of his silhouette, but at the same time there is a greater archaeological attraction and a more spiritual interest for us in the ancient work. Intrinsically one is as great as the other. Those seeking for calm will find it in equal degree in both, for in each it is produced by the same method: by the static representation of form rather than by a sequence of movement. Gauguin's sculpture has the same qualities as his paintings, and resembles the religious effigies of some barbaric tribe. The figures are upright and rigid, their backs against a straight support, as in Egyptian architectural art.

Gauguin said many times that when a painter was before his easel he must not be the slave either of nature or the past. This is true, but as a principle it is too limited. Although he himself lived up to it, he did not go far enough beyond it to do truly significant work. He arrived at the brilliancy of nature by a method distinctly different from nature's; and while refusing to be dominated by the past, his temperament was such that he fabricated an art much closer to antiquity than that of the Zaks and the Rousseaus who servilely imitated it. He accomplished what he set out to accomplish. His failure to give birth to great art was due to the intellectual limitations of his ambitions. His place in modern painting, however, is secure.

That great cycle of aesthetic endeavour which was set in motion by the discovery of oil painting found its termination in Rubens. The cycle which Delacroix and Turner ushered in was less extended. Being more concrete in its aims, it took only five decades to reach completion in the works of Renoir. The first cycle, born with fixed materials, was based on an absolute and physiological law of composition which can never radically change, and therefore permitted of an extensive development and variation. Decadence naturally set in after its means had lost their ability to inspire artists. The second cycle was one of research, and during it artists were so narrowly focused on nature that they lost sight of the foundation laid down during the first cycle. Had their concentration not been rudely disturbed their data hunting would have carried them hopelessly afield. Gauguin exposed the futility of the meticulous imitation of nature's effects, and by so doing took a step forward toward liberty of method. For this reason he is of importance. Painters were rapidly becoming scientists. By turning men's minds away from nature to broadly natural pictures Gauguin invited them once more to become artists. He was the link which joined experimental research to pure creation. The first cycle gave us an absolute composition: the second furnished a scientific hypothesis for art: the third, of which Cezanne was the primitive, combined the first two and thus opened the door on an infinity of achievement. Gauguin prevented the second from running into decadence by showing its uselessness as an isolated procedure.

IX

DEGAS AND HIS CIRCLE

The development of art itself is no more mechanical than the artistic development of the individual: in both there are irregularities, retrogressions, forward spurts, divagations. Renoir first appeared with a rhythmic line-balance which first grew luminous, then voluminous, until it blossomed forth into his full form and line and colour. Sometimes he leapt ahead in one quality and deteriorated in another, abandoned one for the glory of the other, and sacrificed continually until by experience he knew his limitations. Then consciously, with all the reins in hand, he progressed steadily to his highest point of efficiency. Art in general also advances sporadically. Delacroix gave a new freedom to subject and drawing, resuscitated composition and found a new use for colour. He was the embryonic statement of the ends of modern art. Courbet, ignoring colour, totally divorced subject-matter from antiquity and liberated drawing from the accepted style. He carried art forward, but not in a direct line. Daumier gave us a new conception of form, but contented himself with Spanish colour: his art, though fragmentary, was another step toward a unique vision. Then came Manet who, forgetting composition, exalted the documentary freedom of Courbet and began the study of light. He, also, was a continuation of the modern art impulse, but in his struggle for the new he forgot the foundations. The Impressionists accepted passively all that had come before. They raised colour to an important place in painting and brought it to the consideration of all artists by showing its potency in the production of intense emotion. Renoir used their inspiration; reverted to the past through Delacroix, Courbet and Daumier; combined all that had preceded him; and in an incomparable flourish closed up the possibilities of his experimental forerunners. In him was a consummation. But there had to be a transition also, unless art was to stand still. Gauguin, though he went so far back that he passed to a time when composition did not exist, interpreted, but did not imitate, nature. The Neo-Impressionists continued the impetus of Pissarro. Cezanne unearthed secrets from nature which linked him to Impressionism, and by applying them arbitrarily to classic organisations, became an interpreter of the past as well as of the future.

At each step of this broad and prolific advance there were those painters who, profiting by the teachings of the great, set themselves to imitate and ornament the exteriors of their faintly-understood masters and to emphasise the qualities of texture, _matiere_ and prettiness. So rapid was the evolution of modern endeavour that nearly every painter overlapped his seemingly remote predecessor. Edgar Degas was born more than twenty years before the death of Delacroix. He was one of those painters who, content to remain stagnant, employ the qualities which have been handed down to them and breathe into old inspirations the flame of individual idiosyncrasy. He was a man who impressed everyone by the strength of his personality and by the power of his caustic wit. In his youth he travelled in Italy and America and went to school, not for artistic training, but merely as a concession to the conventions of the day. He copied Holbein and Lawrence. In his earlier portraits there are undeniable traces of the German master: the Lawrence influence exhibited itself in his femininity more than in actual technical innovations. He was an enthusiastic visitor to the Cafe Guerbois on the Avenue de Clichy where, from 1865 until the war, Manet was the dominating figure, and where the Impressionists and such men as Lhermitte, Cazin, Legros, Whistler and Stevens came to discuss aesthetics.

Although never radically opposed to scholasticism, as were these other men, Degas was nevertheless persuaded to share in a joint exhibition in 1867 with his revolutionary companions. But the ridicule of the public disgusted him so thoroughly that he never exposed again. He shut himself up in his studio, and there, isolated from his fellow painters and the vulgar populace, worked out his own salvation. He instinctively hated the brummagem show of popularity and put into his every subject this disgust with life's hypocrisies. Even in his prancing ballet figures, though they are in full light and amid joyous settings, one senses the satire which led to the depiction of their apparent _sans-souci_. One reads in them the sordid misery of their home life, the long trying hours of muscular strain, and the deceit of their simulated smiles. His synthetic figures--synthetic in that they were without details and accidents of contour which would detract from the vision of the whole--came to him direct and with little variation from Ingres--not the Ingres of Stratonice but the Ingres of the drawings in the _Musee Ingres_ at Montauban. His study of this master gave him a greater insight into the academic construction of the human figure than any school could have done. It permitted him to set forth a firmly drawn body in any pose with equal ease. This facile mastery of action is one of his greatest claims to popularity.

Gauguin held that nothing should be moving in a canvas, that all the figures should be static, arrested in their pose, and calm. Degas represented Gauguin's antithesis. He strove to catch his model in flight. He immobilised their _elan_, and registered those characteristics of a model which express action at its intensest dynamic instant. In all his racecourse pictures the very horses have that delicate balance of mincing tread that we first feel when we look at their prototypes in life--that dainty and slight resiliency as of weight on springs. Monet, on the one hand, caught the ephemeral effect of light on nature: Degas, on the other, recorded the fleeting movement of objects, that is, the _physical_ poise of a granted image, not the _aesthetic_ poise which transmits itself to our subjectivities. He surprised the actional segment which epitomises the entire cycle of movement. Everything he touches becomes as charming and interesting as a wellstaged scene. His sympathies with the Impressionist colour methods and his manner of handling his material add to this charm and make pleasurable, fresh and adventuresome what would otherwise be banal and sometimes even ugly and devoid of interest. He paints the racehorse, which Gericault first introduced into French art, and, by surrounding it with a vernal spring atmosphere, violet hills and green and ochre stubble, and by catching its instantaneous action, makes of it a picture with a rich and colourful surface--a surface beside which a Gericault, judged from the same illustrative standpoint, appears stiff and black.

Degas, in short, paints the kind of pictures which the general public calls "artistic"--a word which, though loosely used, has come to have a distinct connotation when applied to arts and crafts. Vases, plaques, panels, screens, decorations, posters and book-plates are all "artistic" provided they fulfil certain simple requirements. The bizarre exteriors of German art have given great impetus to this qualitative adjective. The word is used indeterminately, and its popular meaning has not been defined. But in Degas we find it exemplified; and by studying him we may discover its exact limitations. "Artistic" commonly refers to paintings in which the exactitude of drawing is lost in a nonchalant _sensibilite_, and in which the _matiere_ takes on a seductive interest merely as a stuff or a substance, the love of which lies deep in the most intellectual of men. The tactile sense will be found at the roots of the average person's idea of an "artistic" work. This desire for superficial and material beauty, as of a rare porcelain or of scintillating old silk, is a part of the same physical sensuality which makes some men choose rough-grained canvas, others the stone of the lithographer, others the fluid brushing of a Whistler or a Velazquez. The desire for texture is what led Degas to pastels. His pictures have something more than an illustrative value; they are highly attractive as _objets d'art_ as well. But while this attractiveness heightened the popular value of his work, it indicated the inherent decadence of his aims.

Nor was it the only sign of his retrogression. There is not even pictorial finality in his work. He never painted subjects as such, but used them only as bases for arabesques. Surface-covering was his forte, and it is not remarkable that one so sensitive to objective action should have been such a master of balance. He could never have achieved such perfect balance had he not realised that a work of art must be done coldly and consciously and without passion for the model, and that all enthusiasm should come only from the progressing work itself. His arrangements are wholly natural ones, and we feel that no studio posing has gone into their making. In this naturalistic attitude he was continuing the modern spirit of arbitrary subject selection found in Courbet, Manet and Pissarro. But where these men painted with colour, Degas only tinted his drawings. Consequently his colour, as well as composition, was a reversion to a sterile past. Although we may admire his Apres le Bain, La Toilette, the Trois Danseuses, Femme au Tub, La Sortie du Bain, Torse de Femme S'Essuyant, Musiciens a l'Orchestre for their verisimilitude and lightness of treatment, their _imprevu_ of arrangement and balance and their charm of colour, we can never credit their creator with even a slight genius, for all his pictures lack the rich volumes of a Daumier and the order of a Renoir.

Degas was neither academic nor revolutionary. He struck a middle course in which the scholastic and the heretical blent, and in blending neutralised each other's characteristics. In his canvases he tells inherently commonplace stories, but he does it with the force and the graceful ease of one on whom all the visions of the world have made a powerful impression. Life meant to him a pageant, neither moral nor immoral, but real, and as such interesting. If in what he tells us there seems a bit of the cynical indifference of a mind too fully disillusioned, it never obtrudes itself. He himself might have been surfeited and bitter, but his work contains only the barest hint of his temperamental retrospection. His comprehension of life's tragedies did not spoil his enjoyment in depicting them. Louis Legrand reveals the metropolitan lust of mankind; Forain, its bestiality; Toulouse-Lautrec, its viciousness. Each was prejudiced in some direction. Degas merely goes behind the scenes and by stripping his characters of their pretences shows them to us as they are, intimately and unsentimentally.