Post-Impressionism: A Conservative View
I
DURING a visit to Paris in 1907 I saw for the first time some sculpture by Maillol, and later I told Rodin how much I liked it. He said at once that, had he seen Maillol’s work earlier, his own ideas of form would have been changed — generous terms in which to speak of one so much his junior. I was soon to find English sculptors to be more grudging in their recognition of fresh talent.
About this time a stranger came to see me, bringing a letter from Bernard Shaw. Epstein was a young sculptor with a powerful head and frame, determined-looking, enthusiastic. His people were Russians who lived in New York, he told me. He wanted to work in Europe, but he had no means. Shaw could n’t help him, — he thought his drawings mad, like burnt furze bushes, he wrote, — but Epstein deemed I should think otherwise, so Shaw sent him to me. He showed me his drawings, illustrations to Walt Whitman, which were intense in feeling, if somewhat thin and tenuous. Judging from the style of the drawings, I believed he would find more sympathy in Paris or Berlin than in London. But Epstein replied he had reasons for wishing to work in London. For the moment he must go back to New York, but must somehow get back to England again.
A friend of Epstein told me that his parents would n’t hear of his being an artist; if he remained in New York they would ruin his career. Perhaps if I wrote to them they might be persuaded. There was a brother, too, who might help. Of course I would write, but would a letter from me be of any use?
Somehow Epstein did manage to return from New York. I approached a Jewish society and persuaded them to help him; and, with further small contributions, he was just able to live and work for two years. With a small shed for a studio, he began to model Rodinesque figures, wanting in form, I thought, but with a strange and uncouth power. ‘What you say about my work is true,’ Epstein said; ‘but do not think that I am satisfied with what I have done myself. I know its faults, and if a regard for perfect form makes an artist a classicist, I am a classicist of classicists.’
To bring a work of sculpture to perfection needs, more than anything else, time; also peace of mind in which to work out and perfect what one is doing. Neither of these conditions had, as yet, been realized by Epstein. He regarded what he had done as unfinished and only craved the time and opportunity in which to work on them to better them.
Epstein never complained of having to live on a very small sum, but worked ceaselessly. Then came Adams and Holden, those paragons among architects, who were planning a new building for the British Medical Association. They at once realized Epstein’s power and proposed he should fill certain spaces on the facade of their building with symbolic figures.
Directly Adams and Holden were able to assure him that the matter would go through, he took a suitable studio and set to work. It was a big undertaking to carve twelve figures, but he was full of courage. He found the work, as usual with sculptors, more costly than he had bargained for. I took Count Kessler to see it, hoping he might be interested; but it failed to move him. Epstein met with many difficulties while carrying out the work. To carve twelve life-size figures was no easy matter; but when the figures, depicting the birth and death of man, were uncovered, there was an uproar. Here was a sculptor who actually attempted to say, through his work, what he meant. This was not to be tolerated. For two centuries at least sculptors in England had been saying what they did n’t mean with such skill that mere empty gesture had crystallized into a tradition. Mischievous people complained to the police, and there was talk of action being taken against Epstein.
After fourteen months’ work on his figures, Epstein complained bitterly that, on the score of indecency, secret malice and enmity seemed likely to bring about the destruction of his conceptions. ’To have labored, conceived, and brought forth, to embody and make conceptions evident and then to have them destroyed and mutilated, would be damnable.’
Besides the architects, John, McEvoy and I wrote strong letters to the authorities defending Epstein, and finally the work was left undisturbed. ‘My dear friend Rothenstein,’ Epstein wrote, ‘I am overjoyed at the splendid result of the meeting on Wednesday and I will go on now quietly to the end. Your letter made me very happy and this great wave of sympathy from everyone has filled me with happiness.’ And, as usually happens, after all the fuss no further objection has ever been made, and the building with its figures remains one of the most significant examples of modern architecture in London. Epstein was now free to do other work. He made some admirable busts, of Mrs. Epstein, Mrs. McEvoy, and Mrs. Lamb; Lord Howard de Walden commissioned him to model his child, Lady Ottoline Morrell a garden piece. His worst difficulties were now over.
I admired much of Epstein’s work, most of all when it was not too forceful. He has a tendency, common among contemporary artists, to give more power to his forms than they can comfortably carry — as though one pumped more air into a tire than it needed. But when Epstein is at his best, as, for instance, in the ‘Lilian Shelley’ in the Tate Gallery, where head and figure are beautifully designed, there is no modeling in England to compare with his.
But Epstein seems to me essentially a great portraitist. So much was said, both for and against his ‘Rima’ and the carvings on the British Medical Association building, that in the din of controversy no sane voice could be heard. Indeed, no sane man could comfortably speak either for or against a man and his work so immoderately attacked, so uncritically praised. Epstein is by nature a modeler rather than a stone carver. There is no magic in carving; makers of tombstones have never ceased to carve. Nor is there anything derogatory in modeling in clay. Yet for the moment it would seem as though modeling were something inferior, and only carving were worthy of sculptors. Ruskin has written more wisely than anyone else about sculpture; he realized perfectly that roughness is necessary for work which is to be seen at a distance — a roughness which, from a distance, looks smooth. But Epstein’s stone carvings look neither rough nor smooth; I doubt whether he would have modeled his figures thus had he been working for bronze.
An artist is the god of his own creations. It is his business, as creator, to give them strength, sanity, and health; if he makes them either too feeble or too inflated, they are unlikely to survive. A disciplined ecstasy is the finest gift of the gods to man; it is likewise the best an artist can give to the work of his hands.
Meanwhile another figure appeared who was destined, though no one suspected it then, to stand high among English sculptors. This was Eric Gill, who was not yet a sculptor, however, when I got to know him.
I had recently painted a portrait for Magdalen College, Oxford, of George Edward Baker, their bursar. A Latin inscription was to be added. I was no letterer, but my friend Noel Rooke told me of Gill, who had recently painted their shop sign in Paris for Messrs. W. H. Smith. Gill had been trained as an architect, after which he came under Lethaby’s influence. He liked to think of himself as a working craftsman, his work anonymous as a blackbird’s song; and he charged so much an hour for his work. His ideal at this time was to change the lettering of London street names, an aim which was realized later. He now painted the inscription I needed.
I was charmed by Gill’s blithe temper and we became great friends. When we went to Vattetot in the summer, he joined us there. He was delighted with the barns, the carts, the flails still in use, and the reaping hooks; he played charmingly on the penny whistle, and astonished the visitors at Étretat, whenever we went there, with his sandals, his red beard, and his hatless head.
II
Augustus John had now left Liverpool and had joined Orpen in starting a school in Chelsea; which, proving successful, was to be taken over by some other painter. They were to be paid £200 for the good will on condition that they continued to teach. Scarcely was the agreement signed when John was again sounded about Liverpool, where there was talk of Lever founding a new University chair of art. John consulted me. ‘An excellent proposal, dear John,’ I said, ‘but are n’t you bound by your recent agreement?’ ‘Only morally,’ was John’s laconic reply.
John was wise to look to his painting for a living. The closer he kept to his easel, the better for himself and others; yet he was paid but little for his paintings. Even ‘The Smiling Woman’ found no purchaser for some time, and then the price for this masterpiece was only £60. Nature intended John to be a great improviser. To repaint did not suit his superb lyrical gifts, which were best expressed through swift and happy lines and the fresh bloom of an inspired brush. The neglect of his copious inventiveness, so perfectly adapted for the decoration of a theatre or concert hall, irked me. I pleaded with Beerbohm Tree to get John to decorate His Majesty’s Theatre; who better than John understood the genius of Marlowe and Shakespeare? The cost would not then have been great; and how great the loss! We think only of preservation, of acquisition — yet to employ John would be a more fruitful form of preservation and acquisition than the purchase of a new canvas for Trafalgar Square, or some early treasure for South Kensington. But we artists are largely to blame; we should not allow such unnatural conditions to continue without energetic protest.
Formerly there were no museums; but, through the fruitful use of artists and craftsmen, the people were familiar with the arts. To-day we turn a deaf car to living song, while we provide, as it were, golden cages for stuffed birds. We have removed images from our churches, to bend the knee and burn incense before them in our museums. By all means let us treasure the works of the great creators; above all, artists are grateful for the inspiration they get from such. Certainly it is the first duty of each country to look after its own inheritance, and a museum provides safe keeping for treasures which otherwise might be ill cured for or even destroyed; herein it performs a national service. Further, it offers, for our inspiration and information, a selection of masterpieces illustrating man’s past. But the greed, the scramble and rivalry among collectors and directors of museums for mere possession, has become an ugly, an unnatural thing. I read lately of a drawing by Dürer which Germany desired to retain; but we gloried in outbidding the Germans, paying for it an absurd price which we could as ill afford as they. Would not a good photograph have sufficed for the use of our scholars? Moreover, how many would notice the addition or absence of a single drawing among the riches we already possess? Our museums are as vast as public cemeteries, compared with the old churchyards, veritable cities of monuments. Each addition becomes more costly, more wearying and confusing to the visitor, and a further encouragement to restlessness and haste, where peace and leisure are needed.
What, I wonder, will future critics of our civilization say to this disproportion between the claims of the living spirit and the preservation of her past garments? For a new Titian, much repainted, £120,000 was lately paid — an annual rental of £6000 for a few feet of wall space! Such a sum, well spent, would enable many living artists and craftsmen to add to the national wealth. The museums, whose function was to improve taste and active craftsmanship, have created a lust for antiques and for that pleasing quality which time gives to the work of men’s hands. The growth of ‘antique’ shops is a disquieting sign of the times; our best craftsmen, who should be supplying the needs of the many who desire to have good modern furniture, silver, and tableware, are retained to make forgeries or copies of past styles.
It is true that much bad decoration would result from public patronage; but from quantity comes quality. Not from villages but from crowded cities hails the superfluous energy which generates art. There was much indifferent painting and carving in mediæval Europe, so general was art; but without a great demand few glorious works would have been achieved.
III
I imagine the great split between the older and younger painters in England came about through the Post-Impressionist Exhibition of 1910. I was away in India when that exciting show at the Grafton Gallery was held. Gill wrote to me: — You are missing an awful excitement just now being provided for us in London; to wit: the exhibition of ‘post-impressionists’ now on at the Grafton Gallery. All the critics are tearing one another’s eyes out over it and the sheep and the goats are inextricably mixed up. John says, ‘It’s a bloody show,’ and Lady Ottoline says, ‘Oh, charming! ’ As a matter of fact, those who like it show their pluck, and those who don’t show either great intelligence or else great stupidity. The show quite obviously represents a reaction and transition, and so if, like Fry, you are a factor in that reaction and transition, then you like the show. If, like MacColl and Robert Ross, you are too inseparably connected with the things reacted against and the generation from which it is a transition, then you don’t like it. If, on the other hand, you are like me and John, McEvoy and Epstein, then, feeling yourself beyond the reaction and beyond the transition, you have a right to feel superior to Mr. Henri Matisse (who is typical of the show — though Gauguin makes the biggest splash and Van Gogh the maddest) and can say you don’t like it. But have you seen Mr. Matisse’s sculpture? . . .
Yes, I had seen Matisse’s sculpture in his studio at Paris. I could not pretend to like it, notwithstanding that Matisse gave an elaborate explanation of his intentions. It was massiveness and significance of form he aimed at. ‘But is form merely massive?’ I asked. ‘May it not be alert as an animal resting is alert, ready to spring?’ I little thought when I saw this first example of the newest sculpture what was to follow. Indeed, it was puzzling, knowing the charm of Maillol’s virginal figures, to meet with this sudden move away from the smooth radiance of form, so akin to that which Renoir had shown in his paintings of young girls, which had replaced Rodin’s more restless modeling.
Why this dour heaviness, this solemnity which one was now to meet with? What total absence of movement, what megalomania! These cubistic sculptors seemed to be suffering from what might be called elephantiresomeness. There is a story of a saint, a lady whom a Roman general desired to share his bed. The lady thereupon sat on the ground, and first one and then several slaves were called upon to move her; finally a whole regiment was ordered up, but still the lady sat immovable. I am reminded of this saint before the massive blocks that now are alone deemed suited to architecture — as though carving should not play, like a flame, about a building. Ornament is the flower of the human spirit; yet some frost has now nipped its bloom. Observe the flowering of the chestnut — as though ten thousand candles in praise of life were lighted on the tree. I believe the human spirit will flower again; when this tedious pedantry of inert mass shall have passed its dull and heavy record, time and weather will refine with their merciful patina. Time is the master artist, who, with a touch or two, gives grace and style even to poor witless apprentice work.
I had also seen Matisse’s paintings in Paris — chiefly studio nudes. The nude was a Salon tradition; each annual Salon provided paintings of Parisiennes lying on divans in provocative poses, and each year reproductions of these brought a wide sale for the Salon catalogues. Matisse’s nudes were the honest studies of a serious student with a sense of good painting who improvised well from the model, yet a student with no clear aim, with no imagination, and with little sense of composition. Pritchard, a friend from Lewes House, had taken me to Matisse’s studio, and the Berensons introduced me to Leonard Stein and Gertrude, his sister, whose flat was full of Matisse’s paintings. Matisse had given up his rather dry studies and was now painting violent forms with violent colors. He was still an improviser from the model; an improviser of simple figures, for his gift was too slender to master the more complex difficulties with which the older painters were able to cope.
Here were powerful studies, but how they smelled of paint! And the red hair he painted was too crude a red, the black eyes too large and black, and the drawing was over-deliberate. But Matisse was very intelligent, a man to be reckoned with. He knew his museums, had looked about him with a discerning eye, and was aware of the charm, not only of improvisation, but of direct statement of pattern. So he aimed at giving on canvas something of the quality of design which Persian potters and tile painters gave to their deft, fecund brushwork. A large clumsy design of women dancing, a prominent work at the Post-Impressionist Exhibition, which might have been suitable enough for tiles, seemed to me quite unfitted for oil colors and canvas, materials adapted for representative painting. But Matisse happened to hit the taste of the time, when connoisseurs, scholars, and dilettanti brought up on museums were occupied with the comparison of styles and of schools, with attribution and denial of works to particular masters; and naturally such men are avid of theories which appeal to the mind, for the minds of experts are more sensitive and better trained than their eyes.
Henceforth criticism was to be occupied with a literary or philosophical interpretation of the arts, with elaborate theories about form which soon became popular among those who wished to be in the fashion. The imaginative side of the painter’s nature was now condemned as ‘literary’; and literary faculties were concentrated on painting and drawing which could not be understood without verbal explanation. The height of absurdity was achieved when, at one and the same time, representative art was to give way before significant form, and highly complex theories concerning the third dimension and of color values were evolved, which were now applied to Giotto and the primitives, who, according to the theorists, could have been as photographically accurate as modern painters had they wished; it was their conscious æsthetic choice which dictated their naïveté, not their place in time! Could anything be less ‘ unpsychological’? And at this time, when men pride themselves on their analytical insight!
But to-day the priest who knows all about God has been replaced by the expert who knows all about art; and the orthodox throng to hear the latest word on creation from men who do not create. Even Matisse must have tired of the doctrine, for he has dropped ‘significant form’ and distortion, to return to direct drawing and painting. A charming colorist is Matisse, and a lively draftsman. His aim is now a modest one; he remains true to simple studies, and has little ambition for any but a limited objective. He shoots his bolt; it may hit the target near the centre, but the target is very close to his bow.
Yet for a man to impress his vision, as Matisse has done, on his own generation is no mean thing. Always there are at the same time similar germs impregnating art, literature, science, and philosophy. Indeed, the fact that there is so general a response to Matisse’s art is itself significant, though that response may be the result of confusion, or despair, or hesitation after a period of conviction, of sustained faith and hope. Perhaps, when our philosophers return to a belief in the relative truth of appearance, painters too will again concentrate on this shining symbol of reality. Meanwhile there is an intuition among artists, in sympathy with that of our psychologists, that dynamic shapes, swift angles, and strong colors have a marked effect on our mood. The artists of the baroque period were well aware of this influence, and the early painters used horizontal and perpendicular forms to give dignity and repose to their panels and mural paintings.
This sense of the emotional power of pure shapes and colors was lost by the academic artists of the nineteenth century, and it was against their irresponsible picture-making that the Pre-Raphaelites and Impressionists protested. To-day the younger men in their turn react against what they regard as the tyranny of appearance. It is not for our academics who try to be historians or retailers of anecdote to point the finger of scorn at our ‘ moderns’ who put blinkers on their eyes to follow philosophers and mathematicians. Yet what irony in the fact that the very painters and sculptors we are asked to cherish — since, disregarding romance and illustration, they alone give us pure art — turn their eyes away from appearance, to look, as it were, inward, producing art so incomprehensible that it must be expounded in books and articles by men of letters.
The same fate has befallen Cézanne, whose good, solid, and powerful painting is enveloped in a fog of sentimental mysticism. But a much stronger claim is made, by the younger artists, for Cézanne: that he has revolutionized the painter’s approach to form, as no one since El Greco has done; that he looked at nature more profoundly than a mere surface painter like Velasquez did, and, taking visible form as his raw material merely, passed the natural images made on his eye through the shuttles of his mind, whence it was transformed into a new material, an organized pattern, significant, illuminating, born of the marriage of sight and intellect.
Cézanne’s hand, through its very inability to translate form from eye to canvas without constant failure, was to project rhythm less obviously representative, less like what men call normal appearance, than that of a more skillful artist like Manet or Degas. A solitary and impassioned worker, he was also a thinker, who saw that the value of a great work of art lies in its uniqueness, in the fact that what the painter did, that he experienced; that each touch of his brush was born of will and sensitiveness, and so, through a series of single acts, it became fused into a whole. He too felt himself to be unique; only in solitude, through his own struggle, he finally asserts his reality. In this spirit, as though no problem had yet been solved, he worked throughout his life. This, I think, is the secret of the power that Cézanne’s work has upon his successors. The best of those stirred by his influence will also feel their own uniqueness, and thus his example will lead to paintings, not like Cézanne’s, but far otherwise.
The younger artists are much preoccupied with volume; yet, to my mind, Cézanne never saw clearly, as did Millet and Daumier, that the sense of mass comes from our perception that parts of form are turned toward and others away from the source of light. They learned this lesson, perhaps, from the old-fashioned cube, though more likely from their firm grasp of this simple principle. Artists who have important truths to impart need a clear system of æsthetic. Daumier and Millet expressed the sense of volume more clearly and more completely, perhaps, than any artists before or since their time; yet, because their æsthetic sensibility was used to present a more epic picture of the life of man than their followers conceived, the importance of their formal qualities goes unrecognized. A generation that sanctifies the austere devotion of a Cézanne and acclaims a Picasso is not easy to comprehend. But men travel by different roads; some toil up mountain paths, others speed along smooth, broad ways through the valley. While one man looks out upon the landscape from a height, and sees a smooth sea, on whose bosom quiet islands rest, while around are hills, oliveand vineclad, and all seems eternal peace, the ears of another are split with the noise and confusion of a village which, to that other, appears but as a fleck of white on the crest of a hill or the sweep of a valley.
The impulse to replace vision by intellectual reason began in France, but the Frenchman has an innate classicism which gives distinction to his form and design, whatever his principles may be. It was not until some years later that the germ of this doctrine was carried to England. The urge to create pure form is, maybe, the first among many impulses; but an artist must relate his abstract conceptions to the evidence of his senses, for, fallible though our senses may be, they are yet, as it were, a fixed point to which all experience may be related. Art and literature which do not combine form with human drama cannot satisfy mankind. The minds of artists are not so limited that they cannot both create form and associate it with those emotions attendant on man’s pilgrimage through life which bring the arts within the orbit of common experience. There are signs, indeed, that this is again being realized by some of our younger painters. Interest in form for its own sake has never distinguished English painters.
To-day, standing aloof from the ‘abstract’ painters, there are a number of young artists who give fresh and vigorous attention to the life about them. In English painting there is something akin to the provincial flavor of Mark Rutherford’s and Thomas Hardy’s writing, an imaginative quality set down with reticence, yet by no means wanting in passion.
It is not always the men who are most discussed during their lifetime who to succeeding generations stand as the interpreters of their generation. There is still surprising creative vitality in Europe; yet one asks one’s self, seeing how naturally rich and fertile is the artistic field, whether the publicity given to artists in vogue does not corrupt many young, ingenuous natures, who, but for influences forced on their notice, would do more personal, more scrupulous work. Yet advertisement itself offers scope for much ingenuity, and the effect of contemporary painting on design, on the quality and pattern of our fabrics, pottery, book illustrations, posters, book jackets, fashion plates, — indeed, on everything connected with the making of books and magazines, — has been highly stimulating. Elegance and finish, disdained by painters, are happily expressed in the minor arts; much that is inappropriate to canvas and paint is perfectly suited to the crafts, and herein Picasso’s influence — I once called Picasso the gigolo of geometry — has been fruitful. We are singing, maybe, the swan song of luxury before a new social order sweeps it away.
IV
The glory of Western painting has been the compassing of great achievement. So low a standard of skill as now permits men to practise painting has not been known since the dark ages. Invention, a fresh outlook on art and on nature, is rightly praised; some amateurishness, some technical incapacity, may be condoned when true passion, or genuine naïveté, is present. But the imitation of passion, the affectation of innocence, these have no worth, save in the eyes of critics and dilettanti, who assume that something which looks like an acknowledged work of art must share its qualities.
The original Impressionists and PreRaphaelites, for instance, remain, while their imitators have disappeared. Up to the middle of the nineteenth century the followers of a sound master at least learned their trade as draftsmen, painters, or craftsmen, and could deal faithfully with the subject set them. Mulready, Landseer, Winterhalter, and Frith, painters who are now held in contempt, could do whatever their fancy bade them with a virtuosity denied to the ‘moderns.’ I have often been asked to recommend painters for portraits of women and children, but the grace and charm the early Victorian painters commanded are no longer within our compass.
No doubt contempt for skill arises from impatience with the triviality or unreality of aim and vision, for which the academic Victorians were especially blamed. There was trivial painting done, too, in the sixteenth century and after; hence the growing tendency to look back to early periods of art.
It is to my mind a fallacy based on comparison with later developments to insist on the more abstract quality of early painting and sculpture. Yet it is doubtful whether any art, even that which appears to us the most primitive, seemed simple when seen by contemporary eyes. Homer’s description of the shield of Achilles denotes a highly realistic complex art; yet, could we now behold such a shield as Homer wrote of, we should deem it naïve and archaic. Stories of paintings which have come down to us — the birds pecking at the painted grapes, for example — point to an acceptance of painting as a completely representative art. Shakespeare’s notion of a work of sculpture, in The Winter’s Tale, suggests a like conception; and no doubt the Byzantine mosaics and illuminations appeared, to contemporary eyes, vivid and lifelike pictures.
We prefer the simple, direct, and naïve qualities of early painting and carving to the false heroics of later artists, and need something of the austerity and conviction of the earlier masters in our work to-day. But we must look for a more profound explanation of a phase which is too characteristic of modern art to be overlooked. We are faced with a persistent effort, an attempt to replace the thing seen by the evidence of the intellect. Many of us differ profoundly from this attitude as applied to the arts; but it is in harmony with the challenge to our senses which is more and more occupying the attention of our all-powerful physicists.
Foreign critics first began to entice painters toward a new atheism: the denial of the material world. Painters and sculptors are no longer to trust their eyes, but must consciously use their intellects. They are unlikely to attend long to such unwise counsel. Indeed, if artists listened to this unseductive song of a blue-stockinged Circe, their art (like Humpty Dumpty) not all the King’s horses and all the King’s men could again set up.
Artists, always touched by genuine innocence, envy certain qualities which children — and sometimes amateurs — show in their work, a directness of vision and expression which seem beyond the compass of their own subtler eyes and more complex experience. The douanier Rousseau’s painting is typical of this ingenuousness; so are the paintings of many workingmen in England. But the affectation of naïveté is always ridiculous. Formerly there were harlots who walked in Regent Street, clad in the short skirts of schoolgirls, with golden hair hanging down their backs, but which of these poor wantons showed the maiden’s liquid eye and sparkling innocence? Yet quite clever people are deceived by a similar pretense in literature and art. Picasso, that sad æsthetic rake, spends each week-end with a different style; and how many young foreigners, who envy him his gallantry, he has debauched by his example! I sometimes wish certain English painters would be a little naughtier, after his fashion. I could wish them more faithful to their wives — more true to Mary Anne and more faithless to Cézanne. Their bourgeois fidelity to this last becomes tedious. Our originals all paint alike.
Though a modern painter can, through his own inner passion, give significance to the everyday things of life, I was possessed by the idea that some subject of common interest to artist and public as well was needed if a healthy interest in the arts was to be born again. Æsthetic and technical problems, an essential part of their craft, are chiefly of moment to artists. Popular interest comes from subject and its presentation; the finer sensibilities grow therefrom. It is thus, too, with literature; interest of story precedes the attraction of style. Moreover, the recognition of familiar things in the form of art pleases everyone. Painters know the countryman’s pleasure when he sees a familiar figure or landmark represented on canvas. In a village hall, the local hedger and thatcher, the carter and ploughman, would be fitly portrayed against the familiar local landscape. In town or city, the notables, the Lord Mayor, Vice Chancellor of the University, Town Clerk, doctor, banker, warehouseman, and others could serve as models for contemporary or past local history. For this local talent, too, would be well employed, and here and there a local school of painting might grow up.
I pleaded with Sir Robert Morant to appoint in Yorkshire or Lancashire an inspiring artist to lead the way in some such direction, and when (in 1910) a committee sat to inquire into the scope of the Royal College of Art, I gave evidence toward this end. I still cling to this heresy; indeed, the later developments of painting and sculpture, so little individual, so akin in their cosmopolitan sameness to the European tailoring which is everywhere replacing dignified and beautiful local dress, have convinced me of the fruitlessness of mere æsthetic gesture.
Let an artist, by all means, work for himself; he has within him something which he, and no other, can say. But let him not confuse this honorable isolation with painting or carving or modeling to please the cognoscenti, the baggage followers and the women who follow the foreign campaigns. To win the favors of these last is to risk an artistic disease, one from which many paintings and carvings suffer. Were I asked to name it, I would call it collector’s pox, a mal de Chine, or d’Afrique.
Style grows from within; it is intrinsic in all good work; it is the quiet good manners of art. You know a man by his speech, by his behavior, by his dress; by the same tokens well-bred painting may be recognized. ‘How like commonplace is a masterpiece,’ said Gauguin.
The desire for perfection other than that dictated by the client, who wants ‘finish,’ is innate in the artist. Perfection exists apart from accuracy; the Chinese or Japanese artist aims at precision of touch, at a suggestion of a grace he finds in every blade of grass, in the bend of a bough, in the petals of a blossom. He who desires to achieve this sweeping finish should not, to my thinking, use oil paint, which entails a less immediate but more complex process, fitted to render visual truth. In comparison with the graphic arts, too much prestige is given to oil painting. The essence of art is drawing, whereby body and spirit can be most perfectly united. Indeed, through drawing ‘the modern movement’ has perhaps been most legitimately expressed. Even in the pages of fashion magazines, in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, the fine flower of modernity can be seen; some of the fashion plates have a quality akin to that of Greek vase painting.
While painting sometimes seems to be a lost art, the number of men who do excellent drawings is surprising. Eric Gill, John Nash, Eric Ravilious, Gwen Raverat, and Blair HughesStanton have once again raised English wood engraving to a high level. Some of their white-line compositions are exquisite works of art. But the influence of Continental artists, of Matisse and Picasso especially, has seduced English painters from their old independence. Only a few among the younger painters have kept their birthright, notably Stanley and Gilbert Spencer.
Ten years before this, John had written to me from Paris: ‘I wish you could be in Paris these days. I don’t want to work — that is, not on anything I’m doing. I want to start something fresh and raw. I feel inclined to paint a nude in cadmium and indigo and orange. The “Indépendants” is effroyable — and yet one feels sometimes these chaps have blundered on something alive, without being able to master it.’ John too, for a time, looked on life with an ‘early’ eye. As with other virile men, his mind and heart were at the same time complex and simple. How often one hears the tedious cliché, ‘Though a great artist, he is so simple.’ The simplest persons are the egoists, who think overmuch of themselves; a superior spirit has more complex motives, which sensitive feelings allow him to educate.
John’s ardent soul dances before the ark of Leonardo and El Greco as it does before that of Giotto. He is a spiritual gypsy, and scorns the armchair thoughts of sluggish minds. Yet he takes his subjects by assault, never by cunning. Epstein has similar courage, but he has not John’s lyrical genius; it is in the external world that he finds his inspiration. That one should be head over ears in love with some aspect of life is what matters. An artist who turns from his work to fulfill his duties as a citizen may feel he is wasting precious life; for he is more ashamed of telling untruth with his pencil than of fibbing and prevaricating among his neighbors. Yet how tell the truth about the rainbow, about a blossoming almond tree, the lights and shadows that sweep over the mountains, changing their shapes from moment to moment, about the sun, about the night hung with a million million stars?
Behold a tree. It has grown, a miracle of strength and complex beauty, from a tiny seed; the sun has drawn it upward, gravity has disciplined its growth, the winds have twined and twisted its branches against the sky — no painter can comprehend the complex laws which have woven its shape on their mysterious loom. But by subjecting himself intuitively to its appearance, by emptying himself and concentrating wholly on this shape and that, he may yet interpret the hidden forces of which the tree is the effective symbol.
How absurd to speak of realism as though objective painting were of necessity less interpretative of spirit than illustrative, romantic, or abstract art. Creation is intuitive self-surrender, the entering into the thing loved. As the youth with the maid does not think of the miracle of childbirth that may ensue, or even of the beauty of the maid he clasps to him, but surrenders himself that he may unite, body and spirit, with her body and spirit, so the artist is oblivious of the final picture, and loses himself in active union with the object of his desire. This is the value of the work of art — it is the supreme surrender of self and at the same time an act of masculine virility.
Herein lies the impossibility of any wide understanding of art — indeed, the relative unimportance of understanding. Appreciation is one of the social amenities of life; creation alone has positive value. Hence the ancient difference betwixt critic and artist, between artist, and public. Criticism is refined gossip. The truth between man and woman is known only to the two concerned, but is yet the occasion of infinite surmise by outsiders; so only the artist knows what ecstasy, what agony, possessed him when he knew — simple and significant word! — his subject. The truth between man and woman! If women told it, how many men would hide their heads! The true work of art wears on its surface, as it were, something akin to the radiance on the face of the satisfied woman.
Yet how easily, with what cheap deception, can the appreciator be humbugged! An artificial accent, the frequent use of modish slang, — ‘top hole, fed up with, I simply love it, too devastating,’ — offend a sensitive ear; but a similar accent and slang in the form of painting may seem the last word in refinement. Hence one prefers ignorant people to the initiated, who are too familiar with the shibboleths of Mayfair, Bloomsbury, and Chelsea to have preserved their ingenuousness. In the company of a few rare spirits we are possessed by our truest self; and we see the light, as through a prism, red, orange, yellow, and violet. To speak of these colors to others were, for the most part, in vain. One can be truthful only with one’s equals; with those who have not his whole respect, the wise man is polite.
(Mr. Rothenstein’s next paper will be made of intimate memories of Conrad, W. H. Hudson, Galsworthy, H. G. Wells, and Walter de la Mare)