Puslapio vaizdai
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combination of form as it was understood by the Florentines, and color that climaxes the efforts of a century that worked for color. The grandeur of the man's spirit is seen in his grave and profound design. It is a design which includes not only the general masses of his picture, but every finger's breadth and depth of it. If I devote so much space to his art, it is less for the reason that it resumes so much of the achievement of the past than because it has been so potent an influence on all the artists who have come after him. Before proceeding to our consideration of the later schools, we must notice one other great figure of the transition. This is Odilon Redon, whose words on the relation of the physical world to his pictures may be studied deeply as giving a key to the development of the younger men. Cézanne reached his commanding position. by a slow, but grand, ascent from the realistic painting which occupied his youth. If Redon has not the vast technical endowment which

pate the future, and seem at moments to have had an intuition of the truths to which later men give complete expression.

In Post-Impressionism we find an alliance of the decorative and expressive elements of art. The attainment of the final stages of the research into the rendering of appearances, which is due to the Impressionists, left their successors free to work out the problems of using the appearance of nature in an esthetic scheme. It is not the abstract decoration in which

SELF-PORTRAIT

FROM A PAINTING BY HENRI MATISSE

The remarkable faculty possessed by Matisse for using for purely esthetic purposes the forms and colors of nature, is to be seen in this picture. For those interested in the man, it is a likeness for those interested in art, it is a work of art

this career gave to Cézanne, his art is of extraordinary importance through his half-century of fidelity to the idea embodied in his first efforts the fecund principle of making his picture a reflection not of the outer world, but of the domain of the mind. Almost alone in our time he has thus been the representative of the art that in another epoch numbered Leonardo and Dürer among its glorious exponents.

The changes brought about by the PostImpressionists and the Cubists are in large measure referable to the ideas existing in Cézanne and Redon, and traceable even in the early masters; for in all ages there have been minds so great that they antici

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the architect of today uses the Greek wave-pattern volute, quite untouched by what these things signified to the men who invented them. It is the embodiment of living ideas in forms which respond to the sense of beauty in men who partake of the individual character of this epoch. So Gauguin paints. in fascinating, unsuspected design his delight in the exotic lands that were his by blood and by preference. So Van Gogh gives us that poignant expression of a mind on fire with the wonder of the world and its peo

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ple. I need scarcely refer to his "Letters," so many thousands of readers having found in them that part of the man's message which could be put into verbal form. So, too, Matisse translates into rhythms at once joyous and impressive his sense of life, and the beauty that one may see when he has outgrown the dry study of isolated facts, and feels the harmony they build in that ensemble which is before our eyes each day. The work of art having as its mission the conveying of that particular emotion which has seemed important to the producer, the demand for any of the thousand other sensations the work could afford becomes worse than irrelevant.

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The profundity of Cézanne's mind is here manifested in his attitude toward the character of a sitter. The form is sculptural, but he obtains it by color, not by mere contrasts of black and white.

When Matisse or any other painter has given full utterance to the idea that caused his enthusiasm, it is rather a mark of his good breeding as an artist to refrain from padding out with matters which he has found of moment to himself, and therefore considers uninteresting to others. In none of the men of this school is there an attempt to follow that will-o'-the-wisp, the representation of "the thing as it is." In each one there is a rendering of those ideas which were, or are, proper to his own art.

The main factors in the evolution of Cubism seem to me the composition of the

volumes which we noted in the work of Cézanne-the quality might be illustrated just about as well in Giotto or Signorelli or Rembrandt-and our demand for an esthetic equivalent for thought. Redon found one answer to this demand in an art where known objects or personages give a means of rendering his vision. The Cubists take the elements of expression from the forms and colors of nature, and use them not to represent objects, but to produce an organism which will contain in terms of art what a given subject means to them in terms of sensation.

This process has been familiar to us for centuries in architecture and music, every one of the great works of which is such an organism as I describe. In the masterpieces of the past the organization called "cubistic" is to be found. It is for this reason that we feel that such men as Picasso, Derain, and Duchamp-Villon are to be taken as representatives of the classic school of to-day. The fact that they have turned more and more to ideas incompatible with objective painting has surely no more bearing on their place in art than any other question of the subject of a picture. Raphael is classic when he finds one of his great harmonies in the line and plane and mass of an imagined Madonna; Degas is classic when he turns into design the incidents of the daily life about him; Duchamp-Villon is classic when he achieves his "phrasing" of the elements of motion, mass, and accentuation in such a picture

as the "Nude Descending a Staircase," even though the nature of his subject and those phases of it that he wished to render led him, after experiments with the older forms of painting, to choose his entirely unrealistic one. Every critic has at some time used the phrase, "art is a means of expression." The Cubists have already shown the possibility of an expression in painting without representation; it will be long before the future arrives at the limit of ideas to be rendered by such an art.

We are constantly made to wonder at the intellectual accomplishment of our time. It is one of intense activity, and our progress in science has made us only the more eager for a corresponding advance in other realms of thought. When I said at the beginning of this paper that we live in an era of the greatest artistic importance it is because the people who have come to appreciate the greatness of the

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For more than thirty years, Mr. Prendergast's joyous vision of nature has gone on in its development and intensity.

His design and color are among the most beautiful of present-day art.

modern movement in art see in it a value equal to that of any other manifestation of modern life. One fact that makes us feel that such an idea is sound is the parallelism that exists between the art I have discussed and the great currents of the world's thought in recent years.

As Romanticism tinged the mind and the art of the, early nineteenth century, and Realism, or the scientific spirit, its later years, so every indication to-day points to a deepening interest in the matters which go beyond self-conscious reasoning, and are dealt with by the power of intuition. If there is mysticism in the work of a Redon or a Picasso, it is that supreme mysticism to which Latin clarity gives a precision of its own. The great movement which began with painting has spread to sculpture in such noble works as those of Brancusi and Duchamp-Villon. The latter, a man whom Cézanne could claim with pride as his disciple, has produced what I shall call the first piece of architecture essentially of our time.

The so-called minor arts are affected in every branch. The movement is worldwide. On the day that I write these lines an exhibition opens in the Montross Gallery of New York, where the first fruits of the American interest in the new ideas are shown. Men are working with them in Paris and in Tokio. The Orient helped us not only to find the lost sense of design on surfaces which we first thought of as the message of its art, but to find the design of life which we of Europe had in pre-Christian days. Matisse's color is as beautiful as that of a Persian ceramist, and the pagan joy of life he paints with is found again in our demand for more games and dancing and music. And, what is best in it all is the vitality of the "new" art. It did not expend itself with the perfection of Renoir or with the grandeur of Cézanne. It is inventing and living in the great French people who fostered it, and from their hearth comes the generous fire which to-day is surely kindling in every land.

"A WORK should have within itself its full meaning," writes Matisse, "and impose it on the spectator even before he knows what the subject is. When I see the frescos of Giotto at Padua, I do not bother about knowing what scene of the life of Christ I have before me, but I understand at once the sentiment that emanates from it; for it is in the lines, in the composition, and in the color, and the title will only confirm my impression." (In "La Grande Revue," December, 1908.)

"FROM the beginning," says Redon, "I have always striven for perfection, and, if you will believe me, perfection in form. But let me say now that no plastic form -I mean one perceived objectively, for itself, under the laws of light and shade, through the conventional means of 'modeling'-is to be found in my works. . . My whole originality consists in placing, as much as possible, the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible." (In "La Vie," December 14, 1912.)

"STUDY," writes Cézanne, "modifies our vision to such an extent that the humble and colossal Pissarro is found to be justified in his anarchistic theories. . .

"We must become classic again through nature. Imagine a Poussin completely repainted according to nature; that is the classic that I mean." (In the "Mercure de France," October, 1907.)

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