Modern Painters

THE reader of this work may wonder, when he peers at the table of contents, into what geological conception of time he has strayed: for two of Professor Venturi’s “modern" painters were born two hundred years ago, while his most recent artists, Daumier and Courbet, died before 1880. The writer defends his title, however, by showing how the subjects of his eight biographical and critical essays anticipated some phases of painting more conformably modern. The point, in each case, is well taken, from Goya through Courbet.

There were many Goyas, as Venturi shows, but the Goya who refurbished art history was the proletarian bullfighter who treated commonplace subject matter with beauty and dignity, in a style formed on what the eye sees in nature. Refusing to employ “line” in painting, since he saw none in nature, he broke with the imitative academic tradition for form and perspective. Except in the court paintings, executed with cynical impudence — how could Carlos IV and Maria Luísa have been so imposed on! — he likewise broke with tradition in his search for motifs: for he found in every aspect of life, not alone in the high-styled heroic, a fit subject for art.

John Constable, the son of a well-to-do miller, broadened the whole base of painting by his use of unpeopled landscapes. Loving nature humbly, he gave himself over to the enjoyment of her visible moods. As Goya saw contours in nature, and nothing of line, so Constable saw nothing of professional “handling.” Hence his most beautiful paintings, the impromptu oil sketches from which he produced the sometimes banal finished pictures, were laid down on the canvas with an almost artless intention merely to represent light and shade — the momentary impression. Since these sketches were private, the real Constable reached his like-minded successors, the so-called impressionists, only through the printed word of his lectures and the famous Preface to English Landscape, a work here amply quoted.

The appearance of Jacques Louis David, the lordly (if republican) painter of coiffures de style, and of Ingres, his rebellious young pupil, is not so easy to justify. David produced isolated examples of realism, calculated, like the modern Mexican murals, to serve social ends, but for the most part, the bequest of this commonplace man of small feeling — “he excites the nerves, not the heart “ — was his dogged insistence on rightness in draftsmanship. Manet and Degas were bound to take notice. Ingres, likewise an incomparable draftsman, though Cézanne thought him a very small painter, held that nothing essential had happened in art after Phidias and Raphael. The cubists admired the abstract quality that Ingres acquired from his study of the classical sculptures, and Renoir’s later period was informed by a study of Raphael inspired by Ingres.

Romanticism, as grandly expounded and sublimely practiced by Eugène Delacroix, taught that the imagination must be left to itself, must not be bound to the classical past: and so opened new country. Corot, who played the lark, as he said, to Delacroix’s eagle, painted only one picture, as his colleagues commented, after giving up the neo-classical style overnight, and reproduced it, under its “grey-greenish shroud,” by the dozen. But with that one picture, he advanced a new style, the style which came to be known, in the hands of its later practitioners, as impressionism.

Daumier is here because — to give Dr. Venturi a chance to speak for himself “all modern painting is indebted to [himj for taking the most difficult and decisive step in the conquest of pictorial liberty: the choice of themes at once of the moment and eternal, and the adjustment to the human figure ... of pictorial [versus sculptural] form.” And Courbet belongs to the company for the opposite reason. Both before and alter the impressionist epoch, painters like Manet, Cézanne, and Picasso turned to him for instruction in the abstract handling of volumes and sculptural forms.

Besides discussing these interesting historical matters in rather technical language, and illustrating them with 157 black and white reproductions, Dr. Venturi analyzes scores of individual paintings, sometimes oddly clothing his real genius for pictorial values in the dress of John Ruskin.

MACKINLEY HELM