The Dilemma of the Modern Artist

I

THE art historian has always boasted that art alone is a record of the contemporary scene as it develops from decade to decade. The historian, he claims, is usually a generation at least after the event of which he writes; the man of letters, perpetually yearning for Utopia, a lifetime in advance. But the artist , working from living models, portrays them in the very moment of their existence.

What, then, is the record of our own immediate generation ? And how is art indicative of the world in which we live, a world which, although filled with more unrelated forms than man has known in any other civilization, is yet so apparently devoid of artistic significance? There is, of course, as in politics, no single answer to these questions that will appeal to both liberal and conservative. For, while the academician has given an uninspired version of material conditions, better expressed by the camera, the modernist has waved aside the issue of recording and has written instead, on canvas and in stone, scientific discourses on æsthetics, inspired by what he has seen in museums and in exotic lands and by what he has read in books. He has, for the most part, looked with his ears and has developed a critical approach in which he is justifying his distaste for academic art and setting down, unconsciously perhaps, a new set of scientific axioms for the academic painter of to-morrow.

It is, therefore, difficult to criticize the modern movement and to try to give it its proper valuation without being drawn into the controversy by either faction. I find that in New England I am a rabid modernist, whereas in the more rarefied atmosphere of New York I am set down as an Old Guard Republican of art, an exploiter of the American genius, in short the symbol of all that is uncreative — a museum director. Like Saint Simeon Stylites, however, I am able to maintain a certain calm by remaining lightly poised upon this twin column of accusation. For, while avowedly a proponent of modernism as an intellectual and liberal ideal, I feel that we must make haste slowly, that art has an almost physiological surge forward that may not be constrained, and that those of us who are charged with directing the public taste in the matter of exhibitions and in the acquisition of contemporary works of art are obliged to hold a detached and liberal view. We are challenged to bring whatever scholarship or knowledge we may have to a proper reconciliation with our taste — in other words, to be interested in art and in art only. And, since there is fundamentally but one kind of art, the question of whether it is academic or modern becomes completely unimportant.

Because of the violent partisanship of those engaged in the practice of art and because of the overwhelming rush of propaganda from the dealers, the current arguments for and against modernism have become more a matter of fashion than of conviction. There seems to be no unifying principle among artists, except, perhaps, that the other fellow is hopelessly wrong. And, since there is to-day no religious conviction to provide its rigid iconography for the artist to follow, nor any court convention or formal patronage to impose upon him a much needed discipline from the outside, he is free to adopt as his own philosophy any one of a dozen or more æsthetic systems of the past which he scarcely understands, and which he solemnly puts forward as his own contribution to our time. We find ourselves, therefore, whirling about in a maelstrom of æsthetics such as the world has not known since the days of the Hellenized Jews of Alexandria some fifteen hundred years ago. It is impossible to approach the problems of the present without taking into consideration the background of intellectual confusion which the painter and sculptor have had to accept as a large part of their inheritance. This background, which is bound up in the rather forbidding theories and terminologies of the professional scholastic, may be confined for our purposes to the comparatively brief and simply stated questions: What is art? What is classicism? What do we mean by ‘academic’? What is modernism?

II

We know pretty well what art is not, although no genius has been found to give a satisfactory definition to the term itself. Baumgarten, who with Lessing was one of the founders of modern æsthetics in the eighteenth century, maintained that the object of logical knowledge is Truth, whereas the object of æsthetic or sensuous knowledge is Beauty. Beauty is, then, the perfect or absolute recognized through the senses, and Baumgarten found this perfection in nature. Sulzer and Mendelssohn went a step further by implying a sense of moral responsibility; the ideal of beauty being ‘a beautiful soul in a beautiful body.’ Winckelmann, whose ideas dominated the German universities of the nineteenth century, is probably more to blame for the present-day revolt against convention than any other philosopher. An unrelenting classicist, he maintained that there were three kinds of beauty: beauty of form, beauty of idea (best expressed in the position of the human figure in plastic art), and beauty of expression, which is attainable only when the other two are present. Since this beauty of expression so surely abounded in the statues of antiquity, it became the summum bonum to which the artist of to-day should dedicate himself. The importation of this classical notion by Charles Eliot Norton and the professors of Latin and Greek to our New England colleges very nearly ended by smothering the infant American art in its cradle.

Already another movement had set itself up in opposition to this doctrine. Rising with the French Revolution, and fed upon the colorful romanticism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, this movement was soon to develop into the cult of ‘art for art’s sake.’ Immanuel Kant was to write the formal justification of it by saying that ‘Beauty is that which in general, and necessarily without reasoning and without practical advantage, pleases. In its objective meaning it is the form of a suitable object in so far as that object is perceived without any conception of its utility.’ Thus art became a game, not in the sense of an unimportant occupation, but in the sense of a manifestation of the beauties of life itself without other aim than that of beauty. The ponderous author of the Critique of Pure Reason and the sprightly Rousseau may seem strange bedfellows, but it is from their union that that most horrible of all artistic conventions was born — the ‘easel picture.’ Divorced from any architectural or other corporate significance, and lacking the instinctive decorative qualities of panel paintings or portraits of an earlier day, the nineteenth-century easel picture, such as ’The Attack at Dawn’ in the Walters collection, and ‘A Reading from Homer’ by AlmaTadema, became an end in itself and succeeded only in killing craftsmanship in the fine arts. It elevated the artist, furthermore, to a state of such spiritual and intellectual exaltation that the world has been suspicious of him ever since.

Victor Hugo, in his preface to Cromwell, wherein he sought to destroy the unities of the classical drama of the seventeenth century, provided the paper manifesto for the romantic movement which, after 1830, caused art to become analytical and introspective. The painter and sculptor, as well as the architect, began to work out their theories independently of each other and without regard to any common basis of understanding. Sculpture ceased to have a structural connection with the monument which it was destined to embellish and became at best a studio accomplishment that fairly reeked with the artist’s individuality. Mural painting, except for a few bombastic large-scale illustrations, went into a decline, and the architect became so engrossed with the engineering possibilities of steel construction that he quite neglected the problems of formal design. The improvement of the camera in 1839 was the final and most important sanction for the doctrine of art for art’s sake. It relieved the painter of the burden of concerning himself with exact representation, and permitted him to express himself according to his fancy and according to the dictates of the current fashion.

In the hundred years following the French Revolution there appeared more individual styles in painting than had been known in five thousand years of the history of art. Although it is true that there were certain well-defined movements, such as that at Barbizon for landscape, the Classicism of David and Ingres, Romanticism, which instituted a coloristic revolt from the golden ‘gallery tone’ of the eighteenth century, and the Realism of Courbet, the artist remained a law unto himself and accepted only those theories that most appealed to him. His interest in philosophical, psychological, and scientific questions had led him very far afield, away, in many cases, from the tedious practice of his craft to the more agreeable profession of oracle of world affairs.

With the advent of Impressionism in 1874 the painter developed a deeper interest in the physical sciences, particularly in the study of optics and in the finer subtleties of vision. Manet took his canvas out of doors in order to be able to record color in accordance with the laws of natural light. He wished, he said, ‘to enrich painting psychologically and to widen space physically.’ All of the great giants of the last quarter of the nineteenth century — and they were not few in number — made some equally important and experimental contribution to the new science of painting. Renoir, for example, by adopting El Greco’s subtle rotation of warm and cool tones, produced a hedonistic richness of color that had not been achieved since the Renaissance, while Degas, Gauguin, van Gogh, Seurat, and Lautrec each in his own way added something very vital to the programme of the earlier Impressionists.

This, then, is the background of the art of our own times, a background that must be thoroughly understood before one can intelligently pass judgment upon it. For the artist of to-day is, in a sense, a man without a country. Nobody may claim him; he is not yet a member of the new social and economic order, and, having lost his connection with the guild system of the past, he is forced to make his uncertain way in a hostile world. Moreover, the absence of an established patronage has made him increasingly dependent upon his own resources; he must supply not only the finished picture but the motive that inspires it. He is paying dearly for his emancipation, and we should not condemn him if we find him clinging desperately to whatever theory offers the best security in an uncharted sea of æsthetic doctrine.

III

Cézanne died in 1906. Three years previously a group of wild young men, les Fauves, who acclaimed him as their god, arrived in Paris and busied themselves with the artistic revolution. Among their number were Picasso, Matisse, Braque, and Modigliani. It is largely because of their admiration for Cézanne that he has been associated in the public mind as the ‘Father of Modern Art.’ I have always felt, however, that such a notion was in error, and that Cezanne was not the founder or originator of a new tendency but rather the culmination and logical result of a century of experiment. One of the first to discover the weakness of the Impressionists, he determined to give his painting, to use his own words, ‘the solidity and enduring quality of ancient art, of the art of museums.’ He accomplished this by reversing Manet’s programme of naturalistic color (which tends to absorption) and substituting for it a method of laying on color in successive planes, thus projecting it from the canvas and giving greater volume to his masses. From a technical point of view, Cézanne had said almost the last word; the revolution was a fait accompli and there was little for the younger men to discover except to ring up all the possible changes on the themes of their predecessors.

For this reason the movement which we have identified with the more recent School of Paris was in a sense stillborn. By its very insistence in finding new worlds to conquer, it has become completely archæological and dependent for its sources of inspiration upon the productions of antiquity. Instead of providing us with a creative and monumental style that posterity might point to as that of the first quarter of the twentieth century, we are served up brilliant and often witty interpretations of the art forms of the past. We are asked to sit by and applaud while critical virtuosi, artists of such unquestioned genius as Matisse and Picasso, play the compositions of the ancients and aborigines on any known or unknown instrument in any key, and we accept these short pieces, which are really no more important than finger exercises for the piano, as the masterpieces of our day.

Unwilling to dedicate himself to his profession with the singleness of purpose that marked the artist of only yesterday, the contemporary painter is perhaps too conscious of the world about him. He prides himself on being familiar with more different kinds of art than his forerunners ever knew existed. He scoffs at nationalism and claims that art is international and knows no barriers, yet overlooks the fact that to be an internationalist in art is simply another way of admitting that he is an eclectic. He defends his position on the ground that from the moment the first cave dweller put brush to the walls of Altamira the artist has been subjected to every influence of history and has successfully absorbed what he needed from each. He refuses to allow that the state of mind which admits all things from all countries of all periods of history sooner or later enervates and devitalizes the creative impulse. When the eye is cluttered up with images that are not indigenous it fails to see what is immediately before it and loses, therefore, the power of significant recognition.

Like the rest of us, the artist is dazzled also by the mysteries of science. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that since 1870 the best minds in the Western world have been attracted by scientific occupations. So the artist has been placed in the awkward position of choosing between two paths: the first, that of withdrawing into an inner world of his own creation, thus escaping what he considers the grossness of our material civilization (a path which the academic painter has usually found it easier to follow); the second, a sort of lover’s lane where the modern-minded individual may flirt with science in a totally unscientific language of his own invention. Psychoanalysis and systematic archæology are the primroses that brighten his journey. In the former he finds opportunities for selfexpression that the centuries have not opened up to him, and, in the latter, new forms in which to say it.

Granting the justice of this censure, it would hardly be fair to hold the artist responsible for this state of affairs. For he has been the victim of a series of social, economic, and intellectual circumstances which have affected equally the other branches of society and over which he had no possible control. He is no more to blame for having invested in the inflated educational stock of his generation, which was sold apparently in good faith, than is the small investor who was ruined by the utility holding companies. It may be well, therefore, to examine the most important factors which have contributed to his spiritual bankruptcy.

IV

There has never been, to my knowledge, so much archæological activity as there was in the twenty years between 1890 and 1910. It was the high point of European imperialism. The powers were vying with each other in grasping possessions in Africa, in the Far East, and in the Pacific Islands. Every colonial official who coveted the Legion of Honor or the Iron Cross when he came home on leave had to bring with him some newly discovered treasure for the Louvre or for the Kaiser Friedrich Museum. The Guimet, the Asiatic Divisions at South Kensington, and the incomparable Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin are not so much monuments to intellectual interest and patronage at home as they are testimonials to the industry of the Civil Service. Archæology became a symbol of imperial legitimacy, an alibi for taking up the white man’s burden.

Furthermore, the bitter struggle for the political supremacy of the Near East, with its two great engineering plums, the Suez Canal and the BerlinBaghdad Railway, naturally had drawn the attention of all educated people to the lower Mediterranean littoral and to the civilizations that lay hidden beneath the sands of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The commercial development of these countries brought about a frenzy of building and of excavating which turned up, in addition to the discoveries of the archæological missions, an almost ceaseless flow of art and architectural decoration that gradually filtered into the European capitals. Not only did this newly recovered wealth arouse the interest of everyone connected with the arts, but it gave rise to an enormous speculation in ethnological and psychological theory. The art academy and the university were brought into closer contact than ever before and the public learned to include strange ideas from exotic and distant lands as part of their regular mental diet.

It is small wonder that the younger group of artists who came after Cezanne, and who were trying so eagerly to carry on the torch of revolution, should look upon this unstudied material as manna from heaven and the solution of their problems. Not only was it tremendously en vogue, but it must be observed that the art of the Near East was of a unique character in that it was based largely upon rhythmic patterns of light and shade and on geometric principles. It provided a ready and authoritative formula for abstract art and thus prepared the way for the programme of the Cubists. The forms were simply conceived, of exquisite beauty, and in their infinite variety they supplied sustenance to a movement that otherwise would have proved abortive. One began to talk of the psychology of line and form, and before long Expressionism was fully acknowledged as a reputable doctrine. But its disciples failed to confess that it was straight archæology, freed from nineteenth-century inhibitions.

This Semitic art of the Near East could hardly have captivated the artists of 1900 to the extent it did had not some intuitive sympathy drawn them to it. I believe it is seldom realized how many of the important painters and sculptors of the past thirty years have Jewish blood in their veins. Certainly the majority of the art dealers and collectors of our time have been able to bring to their appreciation of the arts the amazing gifts for criticism and discernment which are a part of their racial inheritance. Traveling the earth for thousands of years, moving from one country to another as merchants and bankers, educated Jews have developed a flair for fine works of art that is shared to the same degree by no other Occidental people. Yet it is a curious paradox that, having perfected their critical faculties to the point of a fine art, they should have contributed so little to the creative productions of our European civilization. I think the answer must lie in the fact that while they have an instinctive love for art, and consider it, like music, a necessary factor in their lives, they are more deeply concerned with intellectual problems, with the analysis and manipulation of the processes of the mind. This may explain in part why so much of modern art is of a deeply critical nature and so difficult for the layman to understand, and why many forms of expression that at first sight seem incomprehensible may be communicable to individuals who, though they may never have had direct contact with one another, have had centuries of a common background.

Nor is this the first time in history that the Jew has affected the direction of artistic thought. In the early centuries which marked the decline of the Roman Empire the centre of Hellenistic culture shifted from Athens to Asia Minor, particularly to Alexandria. Here the Hellenized Jews, of whom Saint Paul was a distinguished example, and the Coptic Christians, who were of course of the same race, developed a simplification of art forms which seemed to come as a protest against the degeneration that had taken possession of Greek and Roman art. It is deeply significant that much of the most interesting work of Picasso, of Matisse, of Derain particularly, and of Modigliani, exactly parallels the two-dimensional and abstract compositions that, we find in Coptic textiles, in the Coptic frescoes of Bawit, and in the delicately carved surfaces of the bas-reliefs that are scattered throughout Asia Minor.

Whether the artists of the School of Paris fell by more or less natural accident upon these ancient vehicles for their expression, or whether they were irresistibly attracted to them by some atavistic impulse, is something that we shall never know. For whatever drew them into these channels of investigation was so deeply imbedded in their subconsciousness that they could not sincerely or truthfully say what it was that guided them and would have had to content themselves with the explanation that they were simply the products of their age. Perhaps, had not the course of events been interrupted by the war, a mature and creative style might have grown out of these experimental beginnings three decades ago. But with the war, and the almost more hideous Peace of Versailles, came hysteria and fear which affected the arts no less than they affected political and economic reconstruction. Society as a whole was overwhelmed by a wave of introspection and self-analysis; the jazz age of the twenties served only as a rather macabre and sinister leitmotif to a pathological despondency and fatalism that shook the very foundations of our social structure. Political and economic justification was sought for in the writings of Karl Marx, while to Dr. Freud and his school of cerebral investigation may be attributed the explanation for much of the moral and mental license with which the individual found it convenient to clothe his conduct. A complete absence of accepted truth or standard put a premium on any doctrine whose author could shout loudly enough to have a hearing. No phase of human insanity was so unimportant that it did not demand a study to see what deductions concerning the normal person could be made from it.

Movement followed movement with breathless rapidity: Futurists, Symbolists, Expressionists, all borrowed from the past and distorted what they had borrowed in order to fool the present. Other groups banded themselves into cliques known as Intimists, Synthesists, Orphists, and Purists. What their programmes were I cannot have any means of knowing and rather suspect that they did not know themselves. Dadaism, so the story goes, was invented in a Berlin café by an artist who, during the inflation, half-crazed by starvation and unable to purchase anything with his paper marks and his food cards, made a pattern of them and glued them to his last remaining canvas with odds and ends of paint scraped from his palette. The picture complete, he stood up on a chair, announced to the assembled multitude, ’I have invented the art of the Dada,’ whipped out a revolver, and shot himself. There is no doubt an element of the apocryphal in this history (I have heard no less than ten versions of the origin of this movement). At all events, when I was a student in Paris nearly ten years later the devotees of Dada were legion, and were generally accepted among the more serious artistic circles of the city. But the reductio ad absurdum of modernism was yet to be achieved by the Super-realists, of whom we had in New York last winter such an edifying example in the form of Salvador Dali, the now famous painter of ‘Wet Watches.’ In his honor was held the Surréaliste ball at which the cognoscenti (who a few weeks previously had lavished their attentions upon the all too stolid Gertrude Stein) appeared dressed as their favorite dream. Dali’s Surréaliste colleague, Joan Miro, an artist quite as facile with his brush and with an equally prurient and suppurating intelligence, made no secret of his ambition when he thrilled the bourgeoisie of Paris by declaring, ‘ Je cherche à anéantir la peinture.‘

V

We have seen during the past two years the heights of fury to which a people can be lashed when they are Anally persuaded that their intellectual and political leaders have led them to a dead end. Possibly the violence of the inevitable reaction that must take place in this country may be tempered or, I hope, even averted if we look upon these vital issues of political, social, and intellectual controversy dispassionately and take them not as personal convictions of which we approve or disapprove, but rather judge them from the point of view of cause and effect. The artist must not be considered a dangerous or antisocial being who is anxious to destroy the society from which he has become disassociated through no fault of his. It is to be regretted, perhaps, that in the past century and a half he has partaken too freely of the fruit of a Tree of Knowledge never intended for his Eden. We must help him to find himself and provide him not only with nourishment for his body but with food for the spiritual man whom he has long ago forgotten ever existed. As a Jewish friend has written me, a man prominent in the social and intellectual life of Germany who has lost everything at the hands of the Nazis, ’What we have come to in my country to-day is only natural. It had to come; I have expected it to happen at any moment since the war. It is the revolt of the soul against the intellect; our tragedy lies in the fact that the leader of this revolt has no soul.’

These, then, are the forces of dilemma and confusion that have caused the painter or sculptor to be so unhappy in his present existence and relatively so unsuccessful in attracting the lasting favor or confidence of the public. In defense he has had to pose in front of his easel as though it were the mirror of his inner consciousness and present his own irrelevant and usually rather boring reflexes as the most vital topics of the day. Dressing them up in some form of not too easily understood intellectualism, he has gone on month after month serving up to a tired audience abortive and totally uncreative twaddle, not unlike a child making bad smells in the test tubes of his junior chemistry set. If I have seemed to dwell too long and too harshly on the more extreme forms of modernism, it is because, however absurd they may appear upon the surface, they are of interest to the historian of ideas. They are valuable in recording the effect of current influences upon the artist’s mind, and above all they present a picture of the intellectual indigestion from which we all suffer to a degree.

Whatever the future holds in store or the remedy may be, the answer is certainly not that of the academics. However one may disagree with the modernists, one must grant them the courage of their convictions, convictions that have survived several generations of doctrinal evolution and revolution. The academics have produced nothing any better, seldom anything as good, and apparently have had no convictions or ideas at all except that they do not like modern art. They have developed a smug self-righteousness that is a good deal harder to stomach than the pornographic excesses of Mr. Dali. There should be a happy medium between the two extreme points of view. Let the artist do a little less talking and thinking about art and a great deal more looking; then, after he has looked a very long time, let him try to paint something that the customer could conceivably enjoy. The man in the street has troubles enough of his own without wanting to look at a picture of the subconscious of a man whom he has never met and in whom he is not in the least interested. And let the public try to accord the artist a few of the amenities of a so-called Christian civilization. In this way there will be less bitterness on the part of the artist and a more understanding patronage of art by the public of the future.