TH II THE PAINTING OF TO-DAY BY EDWIN H. BLASHFIELD HE following paper is the result of a request for my "critical opinion as to the present situation in art," coupled with the statement that the public is not fair to the "advanced" artists, and "refuses to take them seriously." My counter-statement that my personal opinion might not be worth much was met by a request to give it whether or no. In complying, I may partly justify taking the reader's time in my belief that my views are shared by many artists; but before complying, I must ask first of all for a definition of advanced art. Who are the men that the public will not take seriously? Let us distinguish. There are artists. and artists. The works shown last season at the armory were not homogeneous; indeed, were sometimes opposed as to qualities. Many of them seemed to have virtually no relation to art; others seemed beautiful. I have always had hearty admiration for the virile talent of Mr. Henri and Mr. Bellows. The decorative and fanciful quality of Mr. Chanler's screens fascinates me. I love the pictures of bathing boys standing about on rocks or in the water, of nymphs running along before lines of blue mountains, of steelworkers or potters at their furnaces, of children dancing to hand-organs, or playing in our squares. If "advanced" work means this, and much besides that is akin to it, I think the sooner the public takes it seriously the better. Presumably these artists and I love many of the same things; whether we hate the same things I do not know. It is of little importance what either I or Mr. Advanced Progressive may love or hate. The important, very important point is, does the expression of our love or hate do harm? Does it retard the general knowledge and appreciation of art? Does it hinder development? It is this point that I shall try to make pivotal to my article. I believe that the new movement is potential for great good in its concentration upon color and light, its development, through experiment, of effects produced by broken color and the novel manipulation of material. But there is in this no excuse whatever for other tendencies, which occasionally seem to accompany the new movement, that are dangerous, and that may be even mortal, if pushed to their ultimate conclusion. Once the experiments made, the best effects of color and light found, there is no reason why the vigor and freshness acquired should not be applied to correct proportion, correct forms, and correct values. There are in the new movement two tendencies that cannot be too persistently combated: the tendency to consider labor bestowed on a work as a hindrance to excellence, and the tendency to a fatuous contempt for the lesson of the past. What any one artist likes or dislikes is not important to the public unless he has a great personality. If he is Michelangelo or even Puvis de Chavannes, he will do, like them, great good and great harm to lesser artists-good to those who study him, harm to those who imitate him. But I also believe that even artists who are not Michelangelo or Puvis de Chavannes can do good or harm by the form which collectively they give to the general talk of the studios. Talk is so easily accomplished, so easily spread abroad, and so easily impresses itself upon young and unformed minds! For instance, absolute condemnation of any one kind of art does harm, for there is no bad kind of art. There are feeble examples, bad examples of every kind, but there is no kind which, pushed to its ultimate point, may not produce a masterpiece. Admiration, therefore, so expressed that it infers condemnation of all save the thing or method admired is hurtful, and above all is bewildering to the public. Certain phrases have been referred rightly or wrongly to those who stand for "advance." For instance: "Anything in a work of art which shows evidence of training in the author is bad," or "Freedom and feeling are all that should be required from an artist," or "All that has been done in the past is useful only to show us what to avoid." This seems to me puerile nonsense, negligible, were it not dangerous. What freedom is greater than that of the man who has mastered methods? What slavery is more complete than that of him who can control no method? Since a flat surface is all a painter has on which to exhibit feeling, how can he exhibit it freely unless he can govern that surface? "Labored" is also an expression which has become a bogy to many a student, frightening him away from his work before his dough is half baked. What work is good if accomplished without thought? Indeed, thought is labor in its most strenuous form. And to decry laboriousness is to play with a two-edged tool. Not only does the intimidated pupil leave his work before he has accomplished it, but he is also fascinated by a promise of facile accomplishment; he is befooled and frightened at once. Indeed, it is hard to conceive of any one idea more dangerous to a beginner than the idea that work is superfluous and even hurtful. Most dangerous of all, perhaps, is the fact that a truth is mixed up with this the truth that work which does not look labored is better than work which does. But the ars est celare artem involves just the very hardest labor of all. This fact the beginner cannot grasp, and he does not wish to do so; he mounts his misapprehended truth, and gallops straight at the short cut. But what is so popular as the short cut? All the others are there, too, so that the result is trampling, exhaustion, and destruction of the weaker. If I seem to infer insincerity in followers of new gods, I do not mean to do so. Most of them are sincere, are ready to paint as enthusiastically in their "freedom" as we are to work hard in our allegiance to discipline; but is not he who lays his bricks in careful courses of diligent drawing and construction safer than he who begins by concentrating his thought on the superstructure only, and builds with no foundation? When I have stood before work which seemed to me careless, superficial, even incoherent, I have often been told by its advocates that in time I should be compelled either by public opinion or by my own more careful consideration to accept it; and they have added, "Remember that Manet and Monet were unheeded; now they are acclaimed." Manet and Monet have nothing to do with the case, for Manet and Monet demanded not eschewal of application, but greater application, closer observation of the forms, values, and colors in nature. I was in Paris when Manet was a focus; I knew some of his comrades and close personal friends, and I can affirm that nothing was further from him than looseness of methods. His critics could accuse him only of leaving his work in a condition which they called "unfinished." This means simply that he stopped upon the road before they would have stopped. But if the road is the right one, a man may stop when he likes; it is aberration from it which counts unfavorably. If an artist's forms are correct as far as he carries them, who is to decide when he must or must not let them alone? Avowed contempt for a laboriously acquired technic, I believe, then, to be one menace to art on the part of the "new movement." Another danger is that scorn for culture which is the natural yokefellow of intolerance. In this case contempt and ignorance react upon each other. If a man is sure that only his methods are good, why should he study the methods of others or of the past? of the past? Again, if he does not study them, how is he to know whether they are bad or good? Where are his standards of comparison? Many a man mistakes this vicious circle for a halo, which he may wear with proprietary assumption as a person glorified by his independence of spirit. Such an attitude of mind is perilously near. megalomania. Again, may we not distrust innovation which announces itself as such, and thereby proclaims a self-conscious preoccupation little akin to genius? To try to find something differing from the general is natural, simple, and diurnal with any inventive person, but to proclaim a break with the entire past sets the speaker at once strange tasks of argument. "Our art," he says, "is not old fashioned and decadent. It is a fresh departure, quite new; it looks forward like the art of the Italian Primitives, not backward." Could logic be more topsy-turvy? Could any comparison be more unfortunate than this with the art of the Primitives, who looked backward with passionate admiration of antiquity-antiquity which they misunderstood at times, but comprehended as fast and as soon as investigation would permit? Never were there more reverent and diligent students of the ancients and of tradition than the Primitives. If contempt of the past is dangerous, contempt of the capacity for sustained effort exacted of the artist in the past is still worse; for the power of mental tension belongs only to the sane. Its absence is the very first of danger-signals. And this contempt for industry is ten times worse because of its allurement to the young in its inference that the beginner may overleap the drudgery of preparation and seat himself on the throne without climbing the steps. Fierce impatience may in a way be a stimulus to progress, but to it are sacrificed always those thousands who, having little natural ability, trample underfoot their one potential chance of capacity obtainable through application. application. Michelangelo and Carlyle, possessors of two of the most rugged personalities that have existed, counted painstaking patience the crowning virtue. Some of his manuscripts prove how painstaking was the fiery Byron; the ardent Alfieri was a most diligent student. Michelangelo, you say, was impatient. Yes, but impatient of superficiality, and even more severe with himself than with others. Surely, with these examples and many more before us, temperament may not be invoked as a substitute for hard work. To those who say there is good in the new movement, one must reply, "Of course there is; great good." There is good in experiment, and men who for the moment cast drawing behind them and concentrate effort on color are bound to find some new and beautiful effects; but when these effects have been found, they can be used without violating any of the vital principles of art. I have declared my warm admiration for the work of many of our painters who are called progressive, and I am intensely interested in the possibilities of broken color, but I cannot see why the existence of the latter makes the "advanced" the only form of art worth while. The study of broken color is alluring and valuable, but Henri Martin, one of its most pronounced practitioners, applies it to soundly constructed and correctly silhouetted forms. There is in the work of many of the most progressive of the Americans nothing which is incompatible with good construction and proportion, and some of the most vigorous of our painters are very sound as to artistic principle. A group of artists in Boston has shown that, while rejecting the spectacular, it can be splendidly "strong" and solid at once. Even the very young men, in love with new color effects, as they well may be, are by no means ready to burn their ships. The other day a large party of them sat at dinner and discussion. They all loved "vigor," novelty, and what they called "snap," but nearly every one of them expressed his confidence in the value of proportion, construction, and correct drawing, and was highly skeptical as to the value of Ultra-Impressionism. On the other hand, the appealing quality of eccentricity is indubitably and dangerously cumulative, and in the example of certain "advanced" Frenchmen who exhibited at the armory there may be an influence nothing short of deplorable; a license to omit painstaking care, coherent thinking, an incitement to violence as compelling. attention; a tendency to research of naïveté-naïveté, a nymph who must present herself or remain hidden, and who is always coy in a hypersophisticated age. It is difficult to compress into a short article what I should like to try to state, but surely the unprejudiced art-lover will admit this at least: A, B, and C, men who possess a brilliant technic, may safely throw aside much of it for a time as hampering while they concentrate themselves on new effort and solve fresh problems; but X, Y, Z, beginners in art, who start with the idea that truth, freedom, and strength lie in forswearing a technic which they have never acquired, and disdaining the discipline to which they have never submitted, will wreck themselves, and become dangerous and deplorable examples to others who wish to "arrive" easily and quickly. It is quite possible to adopt some of the methods of the new movement with advantage; it is mortal, in my opinion, to adopt some of its principles, as they are stated by votaries. Variation of technic is helpful, eschewal of technic is deadly, and technic without training is non-existent. And the violence with which some of the new "principles" are stated is in itself a clog rather than an impulsion upon the wheels of progress. Clamorous disagreement among artists may amuse a part of the public, but it disgusts a more serious part; and if sensationalism holds the foreground too long, amusement may lapse into derision and a belief that art, which has been one of the teachers of humanity, is nothing, after all, but "a thriller" or "a shocker." Surely, to declare that one's own position in art is the only position sustainable argues strange unfamiliarity with history, which is a record of changes. Only a century ago, David, who in his methods would be anathema to the Impressionist, had his mouth full of the same big words -freedom and vigor-which the advanced man loves to-day. But David did not apply this freedom to the other man's art; he meant that his comrades should work in his way, and he went further even than the fiercest may to-day, for he mixed politics with artistic precepts, and chopped some of his comrades' heads off. He was kind, however, to Fragonard, poor Fragonard, who, having been an idol, was overthrown, and ground down under the turn of the wheel. The wheel has turned further. To-day any kind of Fragonard is bought at a huge price, and even among the conservatives there are those who sneer at David, which fact does not prevent some of his work from being great. But the intransigeant lumps David and Fragonard together as "Academic"; he cares nothing about what happened to either of them or their pictures. And throughout this article, when I speak of the "advanced" artist, I mean the intransigeant, the uncompromising man who enounces dangerous precepts. I do not mean the man who keeps his mind open and who, while demanding further experiment, accepts the results of past experiment. It is the former, not the latter, who will have a new art, quite new. And how? Has this modern Archimedes a lever which requires no fulcrum? In the long succession the chain is un broken from the cave-dweller to Phidias, from Phidias to Rodin. If we say, at least Greek and Gothic art were original, we soon find that the mason followed the monk, the cathedral the abbey, which in turn descended from the basilica. We dig up the forebears of Hellenic artists in Crete, we learn that there were kings long before Agamemnon, and we realize that there is no new art under the sun. And nota bene, we have no knowledge that any among all these artists flouted study or sustained effort. If the new art is indeed new, as new as they say it is, shall we not have to evolve a new set of senses for its appreciation? And what excuse have we for intolerance of the past? How may we conclude that to-day only we are right, when yesterday many were proved right who day before yesterday were unconsidered? The history of art is acclaim, then indifference, indifference, then acclaim again. And in every phase there have been masterpieces. The pupil who is hurrying into the Louvre white-hot with enthusiasm to copy a Velasquez "Infanta," may pass the Greek vases without looking at them, or may say, as I heard one say to another, in going by the Fra Angelicos, "Don't those old things make you feel sick?" Nevertheless, in a century or two the connoisseur will still treasure the vase and the Velasquez and the Angelico, and-who knows?-perhaps even some after work of that pupil who copied the "Infanta." For art is various as well as long, and the foolish are those who, while profiting by concentration, refuse to believe that concentration in another direction may help their neighbor. Enthusiasm is a sacred thing, but we may not with the Orientals revere it when it becomes madness. Ars longa is a great divinity, and although even a god may perhaps come only once in the same incarnation, yet a god is eternal. We may become indifferent to a masterpiece, we may change our form of worship of it, we may bury it under neglect, or we may again quicken to consciousness of it; but surely there is no dead art. |