Chapter IV: Part 4

Among the compositions in which many figures in a complicated environment tax the artist's technical skill to the utmost, are several representations of the bean feast, that saturnalia of Germany, upon which abundant eating and drinking are in order. One of the most beautiful of these pictures is in the Cassel Gallery. Steen himself, portly and flushed, sits at the table, grimacing good-naturedly at the racket assailing his ears. His handsome wife is in the foreground, her large free gesture and unrestrained pose bringing out the opulent beauty of her form draped in shining silken stuffs. Her face, turned toward the little urchin who has found the bean in the cake and thus won the right to wear a paper crown as king of the revels, is dimpled with smiles. The two children are babyish in figure and expression and the little dog is more serious than is his wont upon these occasions. A couple of men are making a din with bits of brass and iron, and the place is in complete disorder with eggshells and kitchen utensils scattered about on the floor, yet the aspect of the scene is curiously removed from vulgarity. Both beauty and character have been ideals of the artist. He has not only grasped the loveliness of external things but he has delved rather deeply into the individualities of these roistering Hollanders. You do not feel as you do with Jordaens that excess of flesh and the joys of the palate are all the world holds for the revelers. The world holds, for one thing, appreciation of rich accessories. The columned bedstead, the handsome rugs, the carved furniture, the glint of gold in the ornate picture frame, especially the sheen of the silk skirts, the soft thick velvet and fur of the sacques and bodices, these, while they are not uncommon in the Dutch interiors of the period combine to produce an impression of esthetic well-being that tempers the unctuous physical satisfactions of a merry-making class. With Jordaens it is the satyr in man that sets the standard of enjoyment, except in his religious pictures which often are filled with genuine and noble emotion, and in which he rises superior to Steen where the latter works in the same kind. Nothing could be more commonplace or characterless in color and form than Steen's rendering of the dinner at Emmaus. Occasionally, however, he is equally without inspiration in his lustiest subjects. In the "_Froehliche Heimkehr_" at Amsterdam, a merry enough scene of people returning from a boatride in high spirits, there is neither charm of color (save in the yellow jacket of a girl who leans over the side of the boat) nor subtlety of characterization.

Fully to appreciate Steen, we should know his pictures in the Louvre and at Amsterdam. They cover a wide range and comprise a considerable number of masterpieces. The life he depicts in them is not of a very high order, but he has seen the possibilities for pictorial representation in his surroundings as almost no other painter of his time. His people are alive and their living is active and fervent. What they do they do with zest. There is energy in the painter's line and vitality in his color. Nothing is dull or tame in his family drama. All has a touch of moving beauty. In the "_Schlechte Gesellschaft_" of the Louvre or the more vulgar "_Nach dem Gelage_" of the Rijks Museum--least rewarding of pictures for the moralist--how rich in beauties of color and line is the composition, how tender in modeling are the forms, how bewitching to the eye the fine enamel of the surface!

In the Metropolitan Museum, in New York, is one characteristic example: "The old rat comes to the trap at last," which badly needs cleaning, and one new purchase attributed to Steen in the lists of his work but hardly typical or even characteristic. The subject is a kitchen scene. In it we have neither Steen's charm of color nor his perfection of finish. Yet the turn of the woman's head, the unaffected merriment of her expression and that of the youth, and the type to which her face belongs sufficiently recall such examples of the artist's work as "_Das Galante Anerbieten_" at Brussels with which indeed it has more in common than with any other of Jan Steen's pictures known to me.

Steen's own portrait, painted by himself and hanging now in the Amsterdam Museum, shows a face upon which neither wild living nor ardent toil has left unhappy marks. His serious eyes look frankly out from under arched brows. His mouth is firm though smiling slightly. The high, bold nose and strong chin, the well-shaped head and thoughtful brow indicate a character more decided and more praiseworthy than the legends adrift concerning his life would lead us to expect in him.

ONE SIDE OF MODERN GERMAN PAINTING

XI

ONE SIDE OF MODERN GERMAN PAINTING

The best substitutes for the judgments of posterity are the judgments of foreigners. A group of pictures by the artists of one country, taken to another country for exhibition and criticism, is subjected to something the same test as the pictures of one generation coming under the scrutiny of another generation.

When a collection of pictures by modern German artists was exhibited in America in 1909, the American people were prompt in their recognition of a certain quality which they termed national. The critics--many of them--saw this quality from the adverse side and were far from complimentary to the Germans in their comparisons between American art and German art, but a general impression was given of a vitality sufficiently marked to make itself felt by the least initiated observer. A number of the pictures by the older men had little enough of this vitality, but where it existed it was so decided as to leaven the mass. And there was almost none of the sentimentality characterizing the Teutonic ideal as it had manifested itself in the pictures formerly brought to this country.

Compared, then, with the paintings of American artists and with those of the Frenchmen, whose work we have known so much better than that of any other country, compared also with the work of the modern Spaniards, whose paintings were on exhibition the same winter at the Hispanic Museum, we find the special character of the German painting to exist in a resolute individualism, a determination to express the inner life of the artist, his temperament and predilections and his mood at whatever cost of technical facility. Expressiveness, getting the idea into circulation, getting something said, this appears to be the common goal of the German painter of the present day.

In such case, of course, the idea is of particular importance. If it is to take precedence over purely esthetic qualities it is reasonable to expect it to be an idea of no little importance. Let us examine some of the painters represented in the exhibition arranged for America, and see whether in most cases the idea is emotional as with the artists of China and Japan, and therefore peculiarly appropriate to translation by rhythms of line and harmonies of color, or intellectual, and therefore demanding a complex and difficult expression and the solution of technical problems that do not come into the question at all when nothing else is required than to evoke an especial mood or temper of soul.

The oldest of the painters represented was Adolf von Menzel, who was born in 1815 and died in his ninetieth year. As he began work at an early age his accomplishment practically covers the period of the nineteenth century. He has been designated by one of his German critics as three Menzels in one: the first, the historian of the Freiderician period; the second, the historian of his own time, recording the court life in which he played his part; the third, the acute observer of the life of the streets and workrooms and a commentator on the amusing details of the passing show.

A number of his sketches were shown at the exhibition, a couple of landscapes, a ballroom scene and a theater subject, beside a little mediaeval subject in gouache. These displayed his dexterity of hand which was truly astounding, and also his memory, as the "Theatre Gymnase" was painted fully a year after he left Paris. The ballroom supper was painted in an ironic mood and the gluttony of his fellow humans, their unattractive personalities, their curious aspect of the educated animal, appear with an intense and pitiless fidelity to the fact which is of the essence of intellectual realism, but which could equally have been achieved through the medium of words. In spite of a cultivated color sense and a fine control over his instrument he was from first to last essentially an illustrator. It was difficult for him to omit any detail that would add to the piquancy or fulness of his story, however much the omission might have done for his general effect. He said himself, "There should be no unessentials for the artist," and he advised his pupils to finish as much as possible and not to sketch at all. This passion for completeness rarely accompanies a strong feeling for the romantic aspects of nature or for atmospheric subtleties. Neither does the painter who observes human nature closely and represents it with a detailed commentary upon its characteristics usually convey the impression of any subjective emotion.

Menzel is no exception to this rule. In his work he appears as emotionless as a machine, but his accomplishment is not mechanical. It is, on the contrary, the record of a busy, highly individualized, accurate mind. A Berlin man, he had the alertness, the clear-cut effectiveness, the energy, and the coldness typical of a cosmopolitan product. If we compare his "Ball Supper" in which the glare of lights, the elaboration of costume, the rapacity and shallow glittering superficiality of a Court festivity are presented almost as though in hackneyed phrases, so devoid is the picture of any meaning beyond the obvious, with the "Steel Foundry" in which the unsentimental acceptance of labor as a necessary factor in civilization is conspicuous, it is clear that his mind was free from dreams and visions whichever side of society he looked upon. In this respect his influence is salutary. It is like a cool and wholesome breeze blowing away all miasmic vapors, and there is a positively exhilarating quality in his firm assumption of the power of the human being over his material. His workmen are men of strong muscle and prompt brain. In the "Steel Foundry" we see their efficient handling of the great bars of metal with admiration as we should in life, and we note what in modern times is not always present for notation, the intelligence and interest in their faces. In one corner of the room, behind a screen or partition, a little group is devouring luncheon. Here we strike once more the note of the ballroom supper in the munching eagerness of the eaters, but seen in juxtaposition with the physical force and effort of the workers it ceases to be revolting, and seems to symbolize the lusty joy of living with a sympathetic zest of realization.

In all of Menzel's work we have this sense of physical and mental competency. It shows nothing of the abnormal or decadent, and it must also be admitted that only in a few instances does it show anything of esthetic beauty. He was able to paint crowds of people and he managed to get a remarkable unity of effect in spite of his devotion to detail, but his masses of light and shade are not held in that noble harmonious relation achieved by the peasant Millet who was Menzel's contemporary, his lines have no rhythmic flow, his color, though often charming, is seldom held together in a unified tone. Some one has called him "the conscience of German painting," but he is more than that. He is both conscience and brain. It is always possible to obtain an intellectual satisfaction from his point of view. What is lacking is emotion.

We feel this lack in other Berlin masters. Professor Max Liebermann is one of the most distinguished of the modern group, and his large, cool, definite art is innocent of the moving quality. He was represented in the exhibition by a portrait of Dr. Bode, a vigorous little composition called "The Polo-players," the "Flax Barn at Laren," and "The Lace Maker." The last two were especially typical of his steady detachment from his subject. The old lace maker, bending over her bobbins, suggests only absorption in her task. There is no ennobling of her form, no idealizing of her features, no enveloping of her occupation with sentiment, nothing but the direct statement of her personality which is neither subtle nor complex and the description of what she is doing. But she is intensely real, more real, even, than Menzel's closely observed individuals. Liebermann, born in 1847, was the leader of the new tendency characterizing the Germany of the seventies, the tendency toward constant reference to nature as opposed to the old-fashioned conventionalism and Academic methods. There could have been no safer leader for a band of rebels since he was the sanest of thinkers and worked out a style in which the classic qualities of nobility in the disposition of lines and spaces and remarkable purity of form played a prominent part.

PEASANT WOMEN OF DACHAUER

_From a painting by Leibl_]

Observing his "_Flax Barn_," in comparison with the work of his compatriots, its fine freedom from triviality of detail was apparent, and the beauty of its cool light, spread over large spaces and diffused throughout the interior of the low shed, made itself felt. One noted also, as elements of the picture's peculiarly dignified appeal, the severe arrangement of the figures with the long row of workers under the windows, the long threads of flax passing over their heads to the women in the foreground, and the almost straight line formed in turn by these women. The composition, quite geometrical in its precision, gave a sense of deep repose in spite of the vitality of the individual figures and the impression they made of being able to turn and move at will, an impression nearly always missed by Leibl, Liebermann's great forerunner in the painting of humble life. We get much the same austere effect from the almshouse pictures of old men and women on benches in the open square, always arranged in a geometrical design, and always calm in gesture and mild in type, which appear from time to time in the foreign exhibitions of Liebermann's work.

Liebermann has done for the Germans something of what Millet did for the French. He has built his art upon the daily life of the poor, but while, like Millet, he has introduced a monumental element into his work, it is clearer, more closely reasoned, more firmly knit than Millet's art, and at the same time less emotional. Liebermann's hospitality to purely technical ideas, his interest in problems of light and air, his diligent analysis of motion, his ability to translate a scene from the life of the laboring class without sentimentality, without prettiness or eloquence or any of the attributes that catch the multitude, give to his art a touch of coldness that is not without its charm for those who care for a highly developed orderly product of the mind.

Most of the Berlin men who are in any degree notable share somewhat in this attribute. Arthur Kampf, although he has less than Liebermann of cool detachment, has both elegance and gravity. He could hardly have had a better representation by any one or two canvases than by the "Charity" and the "Two Sisters" of the American exhibition. In the first he depicts a street scene with its contrasts of poverty and wealth. A man and woman in evening dress, returning from their evening's pleasure, are besought by poor people clustering around a soup stall and drop coin into the insistent hands. The smoking caldron of soup in the center and the circle of sharply differentiated faces form an admirable composition, the apparently accidental lines of which play into a dignified linear scheme. The "Two Sisters" reveals the influence of Velasquez in its flat modeling and subtle characterization, and in its atmospheric grays enlivened with geranium reds. Both of these pictures indicate a modern temper of mind in the fluency of their technique and the realism of their treatment together with the attention paid to the tonal quality and to the character of the space composition. Kampf, however, although a young man--he was born in 1864--has passed through many phases of development which are recorded in his many-sided art. His subjects range from the historical themes of his wall decorations at Magdeburg and Aachen through portraiture in which he grasps characters essentially diverse and suggests with unerring instinct the dominant quality, scenes of labor as in his "Bridge-Building," scenes of brutality and excitement as in his "Bull-fight," scenes from the drama of the Biblical story, scenes of domestic life as in his delicately humorous picture of the absorbed reader eating his breakfast with the morning paper propped up in front of him, and scenes of peaceful holiday-making among the poor as in his idyllic "Sunday Afternoon" which shows a peasant boy playing his harmonicum under the trees, with his old father and mother sitting by in placid enjoyment. Various as these pictures are and closely as the manner has in each case been adapted to the special subject, we nowhere miss the note of individuality, although in such a portrait as that of the Kaiser, which was shown in America, it unquestionably is subdued. Neither do we miss the note of locality. Born at Aachen, Kampf is a true Rheinlander and one of his German critics notes that we must look to this fact for the explanation of his special qualities, declaring that without the Rheinlander's cheerfulness and energetic temperament, and without the background of the ancient Rhenish culture, he would be inconceivable. On the other hand his turning to drama and romance for his inspiration speaks of his Duesseldorfian training and his realism of representation allies him to Menzel. At forty-two he was made president of the Royal Academy of Art in Berlin, and it is probable that the wholesome Rhenish energy of which his critic speaks will save him from sinking into the formalism of the academic tradition.

In his art, however, as in that of his compatriots, it is apparent that the world of ideas is the world in which he lives, and he works to express his mind rather than his soul, his thoughts rather than his emotions, if we follow the indefinite and arbitrary division between thought and feeling that does service as a symbol of a meaning difficult to express clearly.

There were other interesting painters represented in the Berlin group at the American Exhibition, Otto Engel, Fritz Berger, Hans Hartig--and of all it is more or less true that the idea in their work is more important than the feeling. It is true also that the tradition of the peasant Leibl, a great painter, but invariably cold, rests upon most of them. His wonderful manipulation of pigment is equaled by none of them, but his accurate, detached observation, his balanced rendering, the firmness of his method, have entered more or less into their scheme of art. And it is to be noted that his ideas and theirs are ideas appropriate to the painter's medium. Menzel's literary bent is not shared by them, his predilection for a story to illustrate almost never appears among the younger Berlin painters, and he cannot in any real sense be considered their prototype.

When we turn to the older members of the modern Munich school we find the influence of Boecklin dominant. Arnold Boecklin, a Swiss by birth, and possessed of the Swiss ingenuity of mind, has been the subject of endless discussion among the Germans of the present day. He exhausted his very great talent in painting a symbolic world, and by his appreciation of the value of coherence he made his paintings impressive. They are each a perfectly coherent arrangement of parts, making a whole which has the appearance of simplicity, however numerous the elements composing it may be. By a combined generalization and intensity he turned the actual world which he studied closely enough, into his own unreality. Thus, in his Italian landscapes, he reveals the architectonic structure of his scene stripped of all incidental ornament, the upright and horizontal lines left severe and uncompromised, and the blue of the heavens and the sea, and the dark green of the cypresses, pushed to an almost incredible depth. Everything is more significant than in nature, yet nature has provided the elements of significance. It is in his ability to see things whole and to co-ordinate the selected details that Boecklin is most an artist. This largeness of generalization gives him power over the imagination, and is, perhaps the only, certainly the chief source of his power. His color by its very intensity overdoes the intended effect. The imagination instead of being stimulated is sated, and his obvious symbolism fails to pique the curiosity. Moreover, his handling of paint lacks sensitiveness. He has something of the disregard shown by the English painter Watts for the beauty inherent in his material which might as well be clay or textile as pigment in his hands. But his appreciation of the effect upon the mind of noble arrangements of space and mass raises him to a much higher place as an artist than he can be said to occupy as a painter.

_From a portrait by Arnold Boecklin_]

Franz von Stuck is Boecklin's most distinguished follower. When we turn from the examples of Boecklin's work, by no means the most impressive examples, exhibited in America, to Stuck's "Inferno" we perceive both the influence of Boecklin and the powerful individuality that mingles with it.

There is Boecklin's insistence upon the symbol, and upon the bodying forth of things unseen, there is the solid violence of color, there is the pompous statement of the half-discerned truths which more sensitive artists are content to whisper. But there is also a splendid arabesque of line and a deeper reading of the spiritual content of the subject.

If we compare Stuck with William Blake whose fancy also was haunted by Dantesque conceptions, we see how much more impressive Blake's visions of the unreal world are and we find the reason in their swift energy of conception and in the artist's tenacity in holding his conception. With both Boecklin and Stuck we feel that the manner of rendering the conception becomes more important than the initial conception, and this seldom, if ever, is true of Blake. In spite of Boecklin's superb restraint in the disposition of his masses, when it comes to color he is at the mercy of the material pigment and permits it to obliterate where it should enhance and reveal. His forms, also, and even more than Stuck's, lose vitality under the weight of significance forced upon them, while Blake's emerge from the blank panel clean and strong and unencumbered. We feel that Blake, with all his struggle to utter truth by means of symbol, never allows his mind to lose the idea that "Living form is eternal existence," but in Boecklin's pictures "living form" is often buried beneath his colored clays.

Thus we see that it cannot truly be said of him and his followers that the idea is of first importance to them. It is their material that is of first importance, otherwise they would learn so to subordinate their material as to support and disclose their idea. This is the more obvious that their idea is emotional and therefore perfectly suited to expression through the medium of art. Liebermann's ideas although they are intellectual are not of a kind that cannot appropriately be translated into pictures, and his respect for them leads him to fit his manner of expression closely to their requirements. Like Leibl he is a painter and a thinker in one, and the faculties of the two work in complete coordination.

Painters of Boecklin's type, on the other hand, wish to produce in the observer a strong emotion, but they become slaves to their medium because their own emotion is not sufficiently powerful to conquer their minds, which become diverted by the colors and forms they produce. One of Blake's swift upward soaring lines has more power to carry the imagination heavenward than all the versions of Boecklin's "Island of Death."

Against Boecklin's followers, whose minds are more or less befogged by their lack of appreciation of paint as a means to an end, we must place Wilhelm Truebner who is a clear thinker and a great painter, with more warmth than Liebermann and with a reticent color sense, a feeling for expressive form, a love of reality, and no apparent desire to re-invent the grotesque. His elegance of line in itself sets him apart from most of his compatriots, and his knowledge of how to extract from his color scheme its essential beauty is greater than that of most modern painters, whatever their nationality. His blacks have the depth and luster without unctiousness characteristic of black as the great colorists use it, and in his touches of pale refined color enlivening a black and white composition, we have the delightful effect so often given by Manet, as of a bunch of bright flowers thrown into a shadowy corner.

If young Germany were content to follow in Truebner's footsteps we should soon have a revival of the ancient craftsmanship and conscience that animated Holbein and Duerer. Young Germany, however, has other plans. To learn of them the reader is referred to Meier-Graefe's comprehensive and stimulating volume on modern art. The only representation of the painters of the immediate present given in the American exhibition was confined to the Scholle School, which, however, indicates clearly the creative impulse that is stirring in the younger painters. "A warlike state," Blake wrote, "never can produce Art. It will Rob and Plunder and accumulate into one place and Translate and Copy and Buy and Sell and Criticize, but not Make." This has been true of the Germans, but the present generation is bent upon making and it is natural that the strongest impulse toward originality should come to the Munich painters rather than to the cosmopolitan Berlin men.

The Scholle is a Munich association consisting of a group of young men who, taking the humble and fecund earth as their symbol, as the title of the society implies, seek to get into their painting the vigor and intensity of life and force which devotion to the healthy joys provided by our mother Earth is supposed to engender.

They are like the giant Antaeus whose strength was invincible so long as he remained in contact with the earth, but who easily was strangled when lifted into the upper air. Their strength also melts into helplessness when confronted by problems of atmosphere and the delicate veils of tone which enwrap the material world for the American painter.

But the energy of these young Germans in their own field is something at which to wonder. They remind one of their critics of a band of lusty peasant boys journeying in rank from their University to the nearest beer garden, singing loud songs by the way. Leo Putz, Adolf Muenzer, Fritz Erler, are the leaders of the group, although Alex Salzmann and Ferdinand Spiegel were Erler's collaborators in the famous Wiesbaden frescoes which offended the taste of the Kaiser. These young men are entirely capable of offending a less conventional taste than the Kaiser's, but they all are doing something which has not been done in Germany for many a long year; they are busying themselves with the visible world and painting frankly what they see. It does not matter in the least that in their decorative work they give rein to their fancy and produce such symbolism as we find in Erler's "Pestilence," or that in the illustrations for Jugend they tell a story with keen appreciation of its literary significance. Their eyes are open upon the aspect of material things and they paint flesh that is palpitating with life, forms that live and move, and color that vibrates.

Here again as with Liebermann and Truebner the idea and the execution are in harmony, but with the Scholle painters the idea is apt to be a very simple one, depending upon straightforward representation for its impressiveness. Above all it reflects the national temper of mind, for all these individualists are German to the core and not to be mistaken for any other race.

One characteristic of this national temper is directness. Not necessarily simplicity, of course, since the German painter as well as the German writer has frequently complex thoughts to express and uses corresponding elaborations of expression. But he does not often say one thing while seeming to say another; he does not often give double and contradictory meanings to the same subject. He does not present for your contemplation the disheartening spectacle of sophistication masquerading as innocence, or duplicity masquerading as frankness. To that extent he is an optimist, however deep his native pessimism may go in other directions.

There is, for example, a picture by the French artist Jacques Blanche, entitled "Louise of Montmartre," and known to many Americans, in which the girl to whom Paris irresistibly calls is shown in her boyish blouse and collar, her youthful hat and plainly dressed hair, in a nonchalant attitude, pretty and plebeian, with honest eyes, yet revealing in every line of her frank and fresh young face the potentiality of response to all the appeals made by the ruthless spirit of the city. It is impossible to discern at what points the artist has betrayed that artless physiognomy in order to reveal the secrets of temperament, but the thing is done.

It is not what the German is interested in doing. His imagination works subjectively, giving form to his own conceptions, rather than objectively or as an interpreter of others. Hence the downright, and, in a sense, confiding aspect of so much of this brave art. Hence, also, its affinity with the American spirit, for the American still bends a rather unsuspecting gaze upon life and accepts character and temperament as they choose to present themselves. The German, however, is articulate and ratiocinating where we are more purely instinctive. We are not inclined to reason about our moods and we seldom are able to express them in our literature. In our art, on the other hand, especially in our landscape art, we manage to translate our subtlest emotion. We are able to suggest what is too delicate for analysis, and in this we stand almost alone in the painting of the present day.

TWO SPANISH PAINTERS

XII

TWO SPANISH PAINTERS

Modern art, particularly American art, owes much to Velasquez and something to Goya, and modern painters have been prompt to acknowledge their indebtedness. But there has been a prevailing impression that with Goya's rich and unique achievement Spanish art stopped in its own country so completely as to be incapable of revival. The impression was disturbed in this country by the appearance in the galleries of the Hispanic Museum in New York, and also in Buffalo and in Boston, of the work of two modern Spaniards, one a painter who demonstrated by his methods and choice of subjects that the old Spanish traditions and ideals had not been forgotten, the other a singularly isolated individual who illumined for us a side of Spanish life which art previously had ignored. Both spoke a racy idiom and conveyed a sense of quickened vitality by freedom of gesture, unhackneyed arrangement, intensity of color, reality of type, yet in their influence upon the public they were as far as might be asunder.

Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida was born at Valencia, Spain, in 1863, and began seriously to study art at the age of fifteen. He studied at the Academy of his birthplace for several years and won there a scholarship entitling him to a period of study in Italy. He visited Paris also, where he was profoundly impressed, it is said, by two exhibitions in the French capital, one of the work of Bastien LePage, the other of the work of the German Menzel. The modern note is clearly felt in all his later painting, but certainly not the influence of either Bastien LePage or Menzel. The painter to whom he bears the most marked resemblance is Botticelli. The spiritual languor, the melancholy sentiment, the mystical tendency, the curiosity and interest in the unseen which are important characteristics of the Florentine who read his Dante to such good purpose do not appear in the work of this frank and lusty Valencian, but where else in modern painting do we find the gracile forms, the supple muscles, the buoyancy of carriage, the light impetuosity of movement, and the draperies blown into the shapes of wings and sails, which meet us here as in the pagan compositions of Botticelli?

THE SWIMMERS

_From a painting by Sorolla_]

If we glance at Sorolla's young girls and young boys racing along the hot beach, or his bathers exulting in their "water joy," we recall at the same moment the "Primavera" with its swift-stepping nymphs, the wind gods in the "Birth of Venus," or the "Judith" with her maid moving rapidly along a flower-strewn path. This joy of motion and this continual suggestion of youth and vitality form the link that binds together the so dissimilar ideals of the old and the modern master. Sorolla's inspiration is by far the simpler. His art reflects the brilliant sunshine of the Mediterranean coast, the tonic quality of the fresh air, and the unconventionality of life by the sea. All his people use natural gestures and express in their activity the untrammeled energy of primitive life. In looking at these children, and there is hardly a figure that has not the naivete of childhood, we think less of the individuals portrayed than of the outdoor freshness of which they are a part. They are much more spirits of nature than the dryads and nereids and mermaids conceived by the Germans to express in symbol the natural forces. Nothing suggests the use of models, all has the look of spontaneity as though the artist had made his notes in passing, without the slightest regard to producing a picture, with only the idea of reproducing life. Life, however, appears in his canvases in a sufficiently decorative form, although not in the carefully considered patterns of those artists with whom the decorative instinct is supreme.

Observe, for example, the painting entitled "Sea Idyl." Two children are stretched on the beach, their bright bodies wet and glistening and casting blue shadows on the sands. They are lying so close to the water's edge that the waves lap over them, the boy's skin shines like polished marble under the wet film just passing across it, and the girl's drenched garments cling with sharp chiseled folds to the form beneath like the draperies of some young Greek goddess just risen from the sea. The insolence of laughing eyes, the idle fumbling of young hands in the wet sand, the tingling life in the clean-cut limbs, the buoyancy of the waves that lift them slightly and hold them above the earth,--all are seen with unwearied eyes, and reproduced with energy.

The management of the pigment in this picture as in many of the others can be called neither learned nor subtle. Apparently the artist had in mind two intentions, the one to represent motion, the other to represent light, and he set about his task in the simplest way possible, with such simplicity, indeed, that the extraordinary character of the result would easily be missed by a pedant. It has not been missed by the public, who have entered with enthusiasm into the painter's mood, perceived the originality of his vision and the joyousness of his art, and have radiated their own appreciation of this vitalized, healthful world of happy people until they have increased the distrust of the pedant for an art so helplessly popular.

THE BATH--JAVEA

_From a painting by Sorolla_]

The distrust is not unnatural. To follow the popular taste would lead us into strange errors in our judgments of art, and only rarely would produce a predilection capable of lasting over a generation. How is it, then, that we fearlessly may range ourselves on the side of the public in admiration of Sorolla's art? Because the painter has cast off the slavery of the conventional vision. He sees for himself, the rarest of gifts, and thus can well afford to paint like others. He spends, apparently, but little thought upon his execution, letting it flow easily according to his instinct for the appropriate. It is not a safe example to follow for painters who do not see with unusual directness. Often in searching out refinements of execution the eye discovers refinements of fact in the scene to be portrayed and makes its selection with greater distinction than would be possible at first sight. But Sorolla's prompt selective vision flies to its goal like a bee to a honey-bearing flower. He takes what he wants and leaves the rest with the dew still on it. His forces are neither scattered nor spent. His freshness is overmastering, and with our eyes on his creations we have that curious sense of possessing youth and health and freedom which we get sometimes from the sight of boys at their games. We are cheated into forgetfulness of the world's great age and our own lassitudes and physical ineffectiveness. This illusion is agreeable to the most of us, hence our unreserved liking for Sorolla's art which produces it.

The art of Ignacio Zuloaga, on the contrary, produces the opposite impression of complete sophistication. In place of adolescent exultations and ebullient physical activities, we find in it the strange sorceries of a guileful civilization. There are smiling women with narrowed eyelids and powdered faces, old men practising dolorous rejuvenations, laughter that conceals more than it expresses, motions that are as calculated as those of the dance, serpentine forms, fervid passions, and underneath the sophistries a violent primeval temper. In spite of the flowerlike gaiety of the color in rich costumes, the glint of silver, the sweet cool blues, the pale violets, in the painter's versions of the typical toreador of Spain the types are bold, cruel, and sullen. In spite of the fragility and elegance of the women on balconies under soft laces the prevailing note is that of undisciplined ferocity of emotion. This too is Spain, but not the Spain of the beach and sea life.

The rather numerous examples of what Mr. Christian Brinton has called Zuloaga's "growing diabolic tendency" make it clear that his art holds no place for spontaneity and the innocence due to ignorance, but where he keeps to Spanish subjects his work remains healthy. There is the picture entitled "The Sorceresses of San Milan" in which three old women are seen against a dramatic landscape. These haggard jests of nature bring before us a Spain from which the American finds it impossible not to shrink with horror, but they are rich in dramatic quality and recall the power of Goya to endow the abnormal with imaginative splendor while holding to essential truth. They are diabolic, if you will, but not Mephistophelian. There is the abstract horror in them which we associate with unknown powers of darkness, but not the guile with which we endow a personal devil. In striking contrast to this group are the balcony pictures in which women of ripe aggressive beauty lounge gracefully in the open-air rooms with the same freedom of pose as within doors, haughty yet frank, opulent, languid yet animated, flowers that could have bloomed nowhere else than under a scorching sun.

THE SORCERESSES OF SAN MILAN

_From a painting by Zuloaga_]

Then there is the group of dancers and actors and singers in each of which we find the adroit mingling of the artificial with the real, and the appreciation of the fact that with the people of the stage much that is artificial to others becomes their reality. The most vivid of them all is Mlle. Lucienne Breval as "Carmen." The sinuous figure is wrapped in a shawl apparently of a thousand colors; actually, a strong combination of yellow, green, and red. The skirt which the singer gathers in one hand and lifts sufficiently to show the small foot in its red slipper has a dark vermilion ground on which is a pattern of large flowers of paler vermilion, boldly outlined with blue.

Over it droops the dark fringe of the shawl. A crimson flower is in the dark hair, and the footlights cast an artificial amber glow on the face. This tawny harmony is seen against a background of slightly acid green; at the other side of the canvas is a little table with two men seated at it. They look "made up," in the theatrical sense, and the table looks rather light and rickety; there is one solid natural stage property, the yellow jug on the table with its dull blue figure. The whole life and reality of the picture are in the Carmen smiling and muffled in the curious shawl, as if she were about to move in a fiery dance in which her brilliant wrappings would take a part as animated and vital as her own. No one but a Spaniard could invest a garment with such expressiveness.

THE OLD BOULEVARDIER

_From a painting by Zuloaga_]

"Paulette as Danseuse" is another stage figure. Here again the costume speaks with extraordinary eloquence. The colors are green and pink, and play delicately within a narrow range of varied tones. Under the short green jacket the low-cut bodice shows a finely modeled throat and a chest that seems almost to rise and fall with the breath, so palpitating with life is the fleshlike surface. The poise of the figure suggests that the dance has that moment ended, and the eyes and mouth are slightly arched. The undulating line of the draperies, now tightly drawn about the figure, and again billowing into ampler curves, suggests the rhythm of the dance.

In another canvas we see Paulette once more, this time in walking costume, standing with her hands on her hips in a daintily awkward pose. Her lips, in the first picture upturned at the corners, mouselike, have widened in a frank smile, her eyes have lost their formal archness and look with detached interest upon the passing show, she still is supple, clear cut, with a flexible silhouette, but her gown would find it impossible to dance, and, as before, she and her gown are one.

In "The Actress Pilar Soler," on the other hand, Zuloaga dispenses as far as possible with definite aids to expression. The costume is undefined; the half-length figure, draped in black and placed high on the canvas, is seen against a dark greenish-blue background. The mass of the silhouette, unbroken as in an Egyptian statue, but with tremulous contours suggesting the fluttering of life in the dimly defined body, is sufficiently considered and distinguished; but it is the modeling of the face that holds the attention, a mere blur of tone, yet with all the planes understood and with a certain material richness of impasto that contributes to the look of solid flesh, the dark of the eyebrows making the only pronounced accent--a face that becomes more and more vital as you look at it, with that indestructible vitality of which, among the Frenchmen, Carriere was master.

In several other canvases, notably in the first version of "My Cousin Esperanza," and the second version of "Women in a Balcony," Zuloaga has caught this effect of vague fleeting values, changes in surface so subtle as to be felt rather than seen, a kind of floating modeling that suggests form rather than insists upon it. And he has done this in the most difficult manner. Whistler long ago taught us to appreciate the effect, but he worked with thin layers of pigment, a sensitive surface upon which the slightest accent made an impression. Zuloaga, on the contrary, works with a full brush, and consequently a more unmanageable surface. He attains his success as a sculptor does against the odds of his material, but he seems better to suggest his special types in this way.

MERCEDES

_From a painting by Zuloaga_]

Often he makes his modeling with the sweep of his brush in one direction and another. "Candida Laughing" shows this method, and so does the "Village Judge," in which the pigment is still more freely swept about the bone of the cheek and the setting of the eye, telling its story of the way the human face is built up in the frankest and briefest manner. With the lovely "Mercedes," a fragile figure, elegant in type, the workmanship becomes again less outspoken. The haughty, graceful carriage, and the intense refinement of the features that glow with a pale light beneath the fine lace of the scarf, demand and receive a daintier, more fastidious interpretation. In the portrait of Mrs. F., Jr., there is a fresher manner, a breezier, crisper feeling throughout. The color harmony of gray and green is cool and lively, the poise of the figure lacks the touch of languor that is present in the fieriest of the typical Spaniards. We seem to have passed into another and cooler air.

The composition of this picture too, is especially admirable. The subject stands, bending forward a little, the left hand resting on the hip, the other fingering a string of pearls, a gauzy scarf is about the shoulder and floats away from the figure at the hips, the sky is atmospheric and there is a background of trees, river, and bridge. At the left of the canvas an iron balustrade, bent into free, graceful curves, comes into the composition, beautifully drawn and painted in a just value, adding in the happiest manner to the decorative effect.

This is the class of pictures in which Zuloaga is at his best. The types offer him adequate opportunity for exercising the faculty of astute discrimination with which he is gifted, without calling into play the ironic temper that broods with cold amusement over such a canvas as "The Old Boulevardier" than which cynicism can go but little farther. It might reasonably be argued that it is only in subjects which call forth as many evidences as possible of the artist's temperament and character that we can fully measure his force. The impulse, however, that turns his gaze toward those physiognomies that offer the richest reward to the investigating scrutiny is a part of his force, as also his choice of subjects about which he can talk, as one of his French critics has put it in his own language.

Transcriber's Notes:

The word esthetic left as is throughout text. Compound words left as is throughout text. Alternative and original spelling has been maintained including Rijksmuseum and Rijks Museum.

Spelling and punctuation, by page number:

Page

3 - _Tiger devouring a Gavial of the Ganges_ changed to Devouring.

12 - the patine of commerce[inserted . period] "The ideal

27 - fluent handling and the mystery of tone changed to mastery.

44 - In Les Maitre Contemporains, M. Paul Mongre thus changed to
Maitre.

45 - but the abounding enthusisam of the latter changed to enthusiasm.

61 - the _Gobbi_, the _Beggars_?" inserted question mark and closing
quotation mark.

74 - Years 1827 and 1828 changed to 1627 and 1628 respectively.

82 -(Staedel Gallery) in the Museum of Brussels, changed to (Staedel
Gallery), in the Museum of Brussels,

84 - those set in the Virign's changed to Virgin's.

85 - physical anguish that mark the figure changed to marks.

92 - his most temperate moods, the _Pieta_ changed to _Pieta_.

100 - 1831 changed to 1631.

132 - of the two painters, Jordaen's silvery---Jordaen's left as is, corrected it would have been Jordaens'. Jordaens was the painter's name.

138 - In the "_Frohliche Heimkehr_" at Amsterdam changed to Froehliche.

174 - slightest accent made an impresssion changed to impression.

174 - With the lovely "Mercedes," changed to Mercedes.

End of Project Gutenberg's Artists Past and Present, by Elisabeth Luther Cary