Chapter M: J. L. Breton, deputy from Cherbourg, proposes to put to the (2)

Why not accept at their face value all pictures that are beautiful in line and color, without bothering about their meaning? Perhaps they have no meaning beyond the vagrant fancy of the artist.

Take the three pictures by Sousa Cardoza. Suppose they have no more significance than so many illustrations to a fairy tale; they are interesting in line and fascinating in color. If the “Stronghold” had been on a Delft platter, or the “Leap of the Rabbit” on a piece of Persian pottery, everyone would have lauded their beauty, and collectors would give ten or twenty times the modest prices of the canvases.

When put to people in that matter-of-fact way the response is almost always favorable to the pictures.

In an interesting monograph entitled “Is It Art?”[39] the writer says:

It will be seen, therefore, that the efforts of these men to give a
subjective rendering of actuality results in nothing better than a
poorly realized form of objectivity which is as much the creation
of the spectator as of the artist, inasmuch as the vaguely
adumbrated forms in the picture simply serve as a hint to that
reality of which it is a wilfully distorted symbol, and the
discovery of the “mustard pot” would scarcely have been possible
without the happy cooperation of the title with the spectator’s
previous knowledge of the actual appearance of a mustard pot.

Without the intervention of the title and the association of ideas
called forth thereby through the memory of past experiences with
actuality, these pictures would be totally meaningless even to the
most recondite. They would inevitably be reduced to a personal
system of shorthand, an individual code, as it were, comprehensible
only to the originator.

Regarded from that viewpoint, these enigmatic paintings and
drawings may very possibly be altogether successful. At all events
it is only fair to assume that these works express to the
originator what he intended them to express. But it is quite
obvious that they express something quite different to the
spectator who has not been initiated into the meaning of this
personal form of shorthand, and the appending of an objective title
to what is intended as a subjective impression of the actual world
hardly help him over the difficulty. On the contrary it takes him
just that far away from the impression the artist desires to
produce, plunging him deeper into that world of reality out of
which he was to be extricated by this new art, and there is no
doubt that in the minds of even the most intelligent spectator it
only serves to reenforce his conception of reality upon which he is
forced to fall back by the objective titles as well as the concrete
representations of what is supposed to be a subjective mood.

I think it may safely be said that in no case does this mood
manifest itself to the persons to whom it is addressed, although by
a process of auto-hypnotism, a certain few no doubt succeed in
making themselves believe that they penetrate the real inwardness
of these arbitrarily individual mental processes. Granted that
these very discerning ones do respond to the real intention of
these abstractions it cannot be denied that this work is the most
circumscribed in its appeal of anything so far produced in the
name of art and, until its working premise is made clearer, its
influence must be correspondingly limited. At present it appears to
me to be a too purely personal equation to be intelligible to
others than the artist himself and therefore, generally speaking,
it can not be regarded as art, whatever else it may be. For that
that communicates nothing expresses nothing and as the office of
art is first and last expression this new form is as yet outside of
the domain of art.

But that makes the attitude of the _observer_ the test whether a given product is or is not art, while the true test is the attitude of the _producer_.

Whether a given work is or is not art is _determined_ and _forever fixed_ at the time of its production. If art to him who creates it, it is art to all humanity for all time; neither a man’s neighbors nor future generations can deprive it of its character.

* * * * *

Quite a good many years ago I made the attempt, in lecture and book form, to define art.[40]

What is Art? The question is as old as man himself, for we have no
records of men without some manifestation of the art impulse....

Man is the _combination_ of _thought_ and _symbol_; thought
striving to express itself, and symbol, the means whereby it
achieves that end. The symbol may be sound, word, or song; or it
may be line, form, or structure; it matters not. A cry is the
language of the child; speech is the every-day utterance of the
man; the heart of the singer bursts forth in song; the musician
speaks in harmonies, the painter in line and color, the sculptor in
form, the architect in structure, the poet in rhyme and rhythm--and
each is silent save in his own way....

Now what is the distinction between _thought_ expression which _is
art_ and _thought_ expression which is _not art_?

In its broadest significance, and in its very essence, _art is
delight in thought and symbol_.

Mark the union--art is delight in _both_ the thought _and_ the
symbol. Without the double delight--the combination of these two
quite distinct delights, there can be no art.

To the writer of prose there may come a beautiful fancy; he
delights in it and hastens to record his thought. He may write the
most flowing, the most perfect prose, but as he writes he is still
occupied with his thought; his sole object is to find words which
will but express it. The same fancy comes to the poet; he, too,
delights in it, and seeks to record it; but when the poet touches
pen to paper he is seized with a new and an entirely distinct
delight, a delight _in his method of expressing_ his thought; he
may even permit his delight in his symbol, the flow, rhythm and
ring of rhyme, to sweep him onward in forgetfulness of his first
fancy--literature is filled with such examples.

Now and then a writer of prose expresses himself so finely, writes
so well, that we feel instinctively and immediately not only the
delight in the thought, but also a certain amount of delight in the
manner of expressing the thought, in the style, ... and to the
extent of the _double_ delight such prose is art, for art, as we
shall see, is by no means confined to the five so-called fine arts.

No hard and fast line can be drawn between that which is art and
that which is not art, the one fades imperceptibly into the other.

And farther on in the same little volume:[41]

The current notions of art are such and the current notions of
labor are such that it may seem to most of you as though any
attempt to discuss the two together could result only in a waste of
words; yet time was when art and labor were so intimately united in
the great domain of human effort that the one almost invariably
implied more or less of the other; and the time will yet be when
there will be no labor without at least some art, even as there is
now and ever has been no art without at least some labor.

Art lies not in the employment, but in the _manner_ of the
employment of the powers of nature for an end; not in the task, but
in the _attitude_ of the worker towards his task.

* * * * *

Whether a Cubist painting is or is not art does not depend upon the opinion of either critic or multitude; if it did it would be art to one man and not to another, art to one generation and not to another--an illogical conclusion.

House by the Brook]

Still Life]

Most Cubist pictures are plainly the work of men who are profoundly moved by an idea and who are striving to express that idea in a highly original manner. It may be the manner they have chosen is so abstract, so scientifically theoretical, that it will in the end--if pursued--kill the imagination, stifle all delight, and so result in failure as _art expression_; but so long as the men take sincere delight in both what they are trying to say and their manner of utterance, it is impossible to deny the character of art to their works.

In proportion to their originality and daring, there may be more of living and vital art in what they are doing than in the art of the academic painter who follows in the footsteps of others without any particular effort.

In other words, it is quite conceivable there may be more of vital and living art in a movement doomed to failure than in a movement that has achieved success and become stagnant.

_The vitality lies in the element of earnest striving rather than in the direction the striving takes._

VI

THE THEORY OF CUBISM

The art that is at hand is a highly _subjective_ art as distinguished from the highly _objective_ art of the Impressionist and Realist, but no man can say just what forms this new art will assume.

Cubism is one attempt, Futurism is another, Compositional painting is another; there will be many more attempts before freedom of expression is attained.

Cubism is interesting because it accentuates the value of planes and shows what can be done with elemental propositions in drawing. But the student or painter who turns to Cubism because he thinks it is to become a fad and will pay, runs the risk of making a great mistake; he would better stick to older methods.

* * * * *

The Orphists have been mentioned; there were no Orphist pictures in the International Exhibition. The movement is based on the purely practical proposition that color in itself, and color alone without drawing, may be beautiful. So they just place lines and masses of color on a canvas and frame the canvas.

It sounds absurd, yet the theory is the very foundation of wall decoration, of interior furnishing, of dressmaking--the mere juxtaposition of masses of color, with or without pattern.

The Orphist “picture” may not be much of a picture in the accepted sense of the term, but it may afford pleasure as a color combination and may be of very real value to the decorator, the furnisher, the dressmaker, the scene-painter, the costumer.

The theory is not new. So long as man has loved color he has used it irrespective of pattern.

One part of the theory of the Cubists is as old as that of the Orphists. It is simply that the painter can do with line and color what the composer does with sound. In other words they demand the same freedom in the use of line and color that every great composer has in the use of sound.

If, for instance, a great musician composes a pastoral symphony does he imitate the mooing of cows, the bleating of lambs, the rippling of brooks? Such attempts would be recognized as cheap in the extreme.

“Very well,” the Cubist says, “if I paint a pastoral symphony why should I so much as suggest cows, sheep, landscape, brook? Why should people insist upon _seeing_ in my painting what they cannot _hear_ in Mozart’s or Beethoven’s music?”

* * * * *

The comparison which Picabia is fondest of making is that with absolute music. The rules of musical composition, he points out, are sufficiently hampering in themselves to the composer’s mood, or call it inspiration. Words, as of songs, still further confine his vision of melody, even though they give in the beginning the impression that evokes the mood. Songs without words, the expression of the impression made on him by a great poem without the necessity of following in musical form the literary form of the poet, leave him far freer, give his subjectivity far wider scope. Modern composers have rebelled against the old fetters; modern painters have begun to feel the same need of a freer, an absolute method of expression. Hence, “post-impressionism,” which refuses altogether to be bound by objectivity, by literal reproduction of the object seen, in connection with the mood, the after-impression, received and fixed on the canvas. A composer may be inspired by a walk in the country, says M. Picabia, and produce a production of the landscape scene, of its details of form and color? No; he expresses it in sound waves, he translates it into an expression of the impression, the mood. And as there are absolute sound waves, so there are absolute waves of color and form. Modern music has won its way; this modern painting, too, will find appreciation and understanding in the days to come.

* * * * *

The Cubists have set themselves a hard task. It is a good deal easier to _sing_ an _emotion_ than _paint_ one. It is a good deal easier to _paint_ an _object_ than _sing_ one--therein lies the trouble.

Yet in the beginning both music and painting were imitative. Music imitated natural sounds; drawing and painting imitated natural objects.

But soon men began to sing for the pleasure of singing and play on instruments for the pleasure of playing, and the imitation of natural sounds was left far behind as primitive and elemental, and music tended to become more and more expressive of emotions, elemental emotions at first, finer and purer emotions later, until in the western world abstract purity was reached in Beethoven.

Since Beethoven there has been a reaction to more imitative music, as in the operas of Wagner.

While music departed farther and farther from imitation of natural sounds, drawing and painting progressed toward the more perfect representation of natural objects.

Or rather painting developed along two distinct lines--one the more perfect representation of objects _for the sake of the representation_; the other compositions of line and color--not

Summer Night]

The Duel]

imitative--for the sake of the pleasure afforded _by the pattern and the color scheme_.

This second development parallels that of music--compositions of line and color, like compositions of sound for the pleasure they give, and not for the associations they arouse.

Strange as it may sound, it is nevertheless true, that four-fifths of the pleasure we get in our daily lives out of line and color is not from the _imitative_ development, the _picture_ side, but from the _non-imitative_, the _abstract_ side.

Our clothes, our homes, our public buildings, our cities, our landscapes are made beautiful by the use of line and color in patterns and masses--in harmonious composition. It is only here and there that we come in contact with either line or color used imitatively.

We all know how distressingly tiresome a wall-paper becomes if it is made up of imitative scenes--that is, a series of pictures, and the better the pictures the sooner we tire of the paper.

While a paper that contains no imitative spots, or in which the imitative features are so subdued and conventionalized we _feel_ them rather than _see_ them, may be restful and pleasing; and a wall that is a monotone if bordered by wainscoting and frieze in monotones, may wear the best of all.

* * * * *

But while the great, the practical use of line and color followed parallel lines with sound and got farther and farther away from imitative features, _the art_ of painting, as it is commonly called, developed in just the opposite direction, it became more and more imitative, until of late years it would seem that the last word has been said in the reproduction of natural objects and natural light and color effects.

Of course the _last_ word has not been said, and never will be said so long as _individuals_ are born, but _so much_ has been said that it is not surprising there is a reaction, nor is it surprising that one phase of this reaction should be an attempt to use line and color as the decorator and the dressmaker and a thousand others use them, to express and kindle pleasurable emotions.

In short it is not surprising that the painter of pictures should awaken to the realization of the fact that others use and have used, from the beginning, line and color to make delightful compositions that have no relation to natural objects, as the musician uses sound to make delightful compositions that have no relation to natural noises.

* * * * *

As a rule women have a finer instinct for the use and arrangement of color than painters. Few wives of painters would trust their husbands to decorate their dinner tables.

Look at the gruesome and ugly “still lifes” done by painters of renown. I saw one the other day of some fish on a platter by an American painter famous for such things. If his wife had found that platter of dead and clammy fish in her drawing room she would have exclaimed, “For goodness sake, how did that get in here? Take it back to the kitchen.”

* * * * *

Look at the naive and absurd compositions of flowers and fruit that painters put together to paint; no woman of taste would permit them on her tea table.

I know a charming woman whose dinner tables are a dream of beauty, veritable compositions in which flowers and fruits and lights and every detail are far more thoughtfully considered than are the details in most pictures. In short, without knowing it she creates a work of art each time she entertains. Imagine what her table would be if left to an artist or a committee of artists--or her husband!

Most painters’ studios are either devoid of all color arrangement or positively ugly.

So far as _color_ goes many a portrait owes its success more to the _modiste_ than the artist.

* * * * *

From the painting of color harmonies and line harmonies it is but a step to insist that line and color composition may be used like sound compositions to express one’s moods and emotions.

That is what these modern men are trying to do.

You may not think it is possible for them to succeed but why should you ridicule the attempt?

The attempt is an ambitious one, it is an attempt to extend the sphere of painting, and it may lead to new and beautiful things. Should we not watch it with interest and sympathy even if you think it foredoomed to failure?

* * * * *

Watch a painter preparing to paint a picture of still life. He
takes a vase of flowers and places it on a table; beside it he
poses, perhaps a brass bowl and some other objects, having regard
throughout for light and, above all, for proportion and color. That
is when he is _really painting_ his picture, when he is really
_composing_, receiving his impression, creating his subjective
mood. The objective part of his work is done; all that remains now
is to give expression to that impression, that mood. Instead of
thus allowing his inspiration to gain its full value and
significance, he sits down and reproduces it with a varying degree
of literalness. He becomes nothing more or less than a copyist, a
photographer of his own work. He kills within himself its
subjective values, or, at best, seeks to give them expression
filtered by objectivity. Or, again, consider the case of the
portrait painter. He studies sitters from every point of view,
gathering impressions. Then he begins to experiment with poses,
draperies, light effects, seeking to heighten the impression
already received from the sitter himself. At last he is content
with pose, draperies, background, lights--his picture is there. But
why, then, go to the trouble of painting it, of copying it? If the
work he has done, finished in all its details, is to benefit him,
he must proceed from it and beyond it. His real work then is to
communicate to others the mood awakened in him.[42]

* * * * *

In another interview Picabia said:

You of New York should be quick to understand me and my fellow
painters. Your New York is the cubist, the futurist city. It
expresses in its architecture, its life, its spirit, the modern
thought. You have passed through all the old schools, and are
futurists in word and deed and thought. You have been affected by
all these schools just as we have been affected by our older
schools.

Because of your extreme modernity therefore, you should quickly
understand the studies which I have made since my arrival in New
York. They express the spirit of New York as I feel it, and the
crowded streets of your city as I feel them, their surging, their
unrest, their commercialism, and their atmospheric charm.

You see no form? No substance? Is it that I go out into your city
and see nothing? I see much, much more, perhaps, than you who are
used to it see. I see your stupendous skyscrapers, your mammoth
buildings and marvellous subways, a thousand evidences of your
great wealth on all sides. The tens of thousands of workers and
toilers, your alert and shrewd-looking shop girls, all hurrying
somewhere. I see your theater crowds at night gleaming, fluttering,
smilingly happy, smartly gowned. There you have the spirit of
modernity again.

But I do not paint these things which my eye sees. I paint that
which my brain, my soul, sees. I walk from the Battery to Central
Park. I mingle with your workers, and your Fifth Avenue mondaines.
My brain gets the impression of each movement; there is the driving
hurry of the former, their breathless haste to reach the place of
their work in the morning and their equal haste to reach their
homes at night. There is the languid grace of the latter, emanating
a subtle perfume, a more subtle sensuousness.

I hear every language in the world spoken, the staccato of the New
Yorker, the soft cadences of the Latin people, the heavy rumble of
the Teuton, and the ensemble remains in my soul as the ensemble of
some great opera.

At night from your harbor I look at your mammoth buildings. I see
your city as a city of aerial lights and shadows; the streets are
your shadows. Your harbor in the daylight shows the shipping

Landscape]

of a world, the flags of all countries add their color to that
given by your sky, your waters, and your painted craft of every
size.

I absorb these impressions. I am in no hurry to put them on canvas.
I let them remain in my brain, and then when the spirit of creation
is at flood-tide, I improvise my pictures as a musician improvises
music. The harmonies of my studies grow and take form under my
brush, as the musician’s harmonies grow under his fingers. His
music is from his brain and his soul just as my studies are from my
brain and soul. Is this not clear to you?

* * * * *

You say all this cannot be done.

That is precisely the question, and one thing certain, it cannot and will not be done, unless some one _tries_ to do it.

It is just as legitimate to attempt to express one’s emotions by the use of line and color as by the use of sound as in music, or by the use of motion as in pantomime.

One man says, “I will paint the portrait of a beautiful woman.”

A second says, “I will not paint her portrait, but I will put on canvas a composition of colors so joyous it will express my admiration for her.”

A third says, “I will compose a sonata or a symphony or a ‘song without words’ to express my love for her.”

The public accepts without question the work of the first and third--the portrait painter and the musician--but rejects the work of the second--the painter of harmonies. Why? Because he does not copy the features and the dress of the woman.

Picabia again says:

Art, art, what is art? Is it copying faithfully a person’s face? A
landscape? No, that is machinery. Painting Nature as she is, is not
art, it is mechanical genius. The old masters turned out by hand
the most perfect models, the most faithful copies of what they saw.
That all their paintings are not alike is due to the fact that no
two men see the same things the same way. Those old masters were,
and their modern followers are, faithful depicters of the actual,
but I do not call that art today, because we have outgrown it. It
is old, and only the new should live. Creating a picture without
models is art.

They were successful, those old masters; they filled a place in our
life that cannot be filled otherwise, but we have outgrown them. It
is a most excellent thing to keep their paintings in the art
museums as curiosities for us and for those who will come after us.
Their paintings are to us what the alphabet is to the child.

We moderns, if so you think of us, express the spirit of the modern
time, the twentieth century. And we express it on canvas the way
the great composers express it in their music.

There is plenty of clear expression and fine enthusiasm in those three paragraphs.

* * * * *

There is, however, another side to Cubism and one not so easy to understand.

Painting color harmonies for the sake of their emotional effect is easy of comprehension. But when the Cubist sets out to convey the impression, not of the surfaces, but of the very substance of things, he is attempting something very different from what has heretofore been considered within the sphere of painting. Possibly he is attempting something painting cannot do.

The theory is so abstract and so scientific it comes near paralyzing the art. It is _too coldly logical_ and unemotional to produce great art, for great art is and must be fundamentally _emotional_.

Of Picasso, the founder and leading exponent of Cubism, a sympathetic writer says:

His whole tendency is a negation of the main tenets of the gospel
of Cézanne whose conception of form he rejects, together with
Monet’s conception of light and color. To him both are
non-existent. Instead he endeavors “to produce with his work an
impression, not with the subject, but the manner in which he
expresses it,” to quote his confrère, Marius De Zayas, who studied
the raison d’être of this work, together with Picasso. Describing
his process of aesthetic deduction further, M. De Zayas tells us
that “he (Picasso) receives a direct impression from external
nature; he analyzes, develops, and translates it, and afterwards
executes it in his own particular style, with the intention that
the picture should be the pictorial equivalent of the emotion
produced by nature. In presenting his work he wants the spectator
to look for the emotion or idea generated from the spectacle and
not the spectacle itself.

“From this to the psychology of form there is but one step, and the
artist has given it resolutely and deliberately. Instead of the
physical manifestation he seeks in form the psychic one, and on
account of his peculiar temperament, his psychical manifestation
inspires him with geometrical sensations. When he paints he does
not limit himself to taking from an object only those planes which
the eye perceives, but deals with all those which, according to
him, constitute the individuality of form; and with his peculiar
fantasy he develops and transforms them.

“And this suggests to him new impressions, which he manifests with
new forms, because from the idea of the representation of a being,
a new being is born, perhaps different from the first one, and this
becomes the represented being. Each one of his paintings is the
coefficient of the impressions that form has performed in his
spirit, and in these paintings the public must see the realization
of an artistic ideal, and must judge them by the abstract sensation
they produce, without trying to look for the factors that entered
into the composition of the final result.

“As it is not his purpose to perpetuate on canvas an aspect of the
external world, by which to produce an artistic impression, but to
represent with the brush the impression he has directly received
from nature, synthesized by his fantasy, he does not put on the
canvas the remembrance of a past sensation, but describes a present
sensation.... In his paintings perspective does not exist; in them
there are nothing but harmonies suggested by form, and registers
which succeed themselves, to compose a general harmony which fills
the rectangle that constitutes the picture.

“Following the same philosophical system in dealing with light, as
the one he follows in regard to form, to him color does not exist,
but only the effects of light. This produces in matter certain
vibrations, which produce in the individual certain impressions.
From this it results that Picasso’s paintings present to us the
evolution by which light and form have operated in developing
themselves in his brain to produce the idea, and his composition is
nothing but the synthetic expression of his emotion.”

Thus it will be seen that he tries to represent in essence what
seems to exist only in substance. And, inasmuch as his psychical
impressions inspire in him geometrical sensations, certain of these
exhibits are in the nature of geometrical abstractions that have
little or nothing in common with anything hitherto produced in art.
Its whole tendency would appear to be away from art into the realm
of metaphysics.

Here is a design, a pattern of triangles, ellipses and semi-circles
that at first glance appears to be little more than the incoherent
passage of a compass across the paper in the hands of some
absent-minded engineer. After a little attentive study, however,
these enigmatic lines resolve themselves into the semblance of a
human figure and one begins to discover a clearly defined intention
behind this apparent chaos of ideated sensations. There is evident
a method in his madness which, after all, may only be truth turned
inside out. And this is what should make one pause and investigate
the matter further.

The fact that one may get nothing out of it as yet in the way of
tangible or even vaguely experienced emotions is beside the point.
The interest in this whole matter rests on the fact that here is
revealed a new form of aesthetic expression as yet only tentative
and groping perhaps, but reaching out in new directions. And it
must not be forgotten that the pioneer is usually misunderstood; he
is so far in advance of current ideas as to be out of touch with
his fellow men who might appropriately be called follow-men, they
lag so far behind the progress of new ideas. Cézanne and
Picasso--they mark the parting of the ways: a fulfilment and a
promise. Quo Vadis?[43]

Not many years ago Picasso was painting under the influence of the pointillists. Almost every year he changed his style, until he developed the pure, the geometrical Cubism of the drawing shown herein. He had a period of painting very uninteresting blue portraits, one of which was shown at the exhibition.

His “Woman with the Mustard Pot” belongs with his sculpture, which is interesting but, to most people, ugly.

He has such phenomenal powers of absorption and his technical facility is such that he does anything he pleases

Drawing]

with ease, and what he does today is no sure indication of what he will attempt tomorrow.

For the moment he seems absorbed in the _music of planes_, so to speak. Take, for instance, a still life wherein there seem to be a pipe, a wall, a musical instrument, a glass, something like a stairway, street signs, etc. These may or may not have been the objects the painter had before him, but whether they are or not it is quite clear that he was not content with dealing with superficial planes, that is, with the visible lines and surfaces of the objects, but he _lets the planes project and intersect_ very much as if the objects were semi-transparent.

To state the matter in other words--by using only the essential lines of an object and treating the object as otherwise more or less transparent, one readily understands why the essential lines of all objects in _the rear show through_, and the result is a confused mass of planes with here and there more conspicuous surface indications such as the pipe, the signs, the glass, etc.

In much of Picasso’s later work he suppresses all such surface indications, until only a few absolutely elemental lines remain.

The result is a picture so scientific, so abstract, it appeals to but few and excites no emotion in anyone because it was not the result of emotion in the artist.

In short, Picasso and a few followers have reached a degree of abstraction in the suppression of the real and the particular that their pictures represent about the same degree of emotion as the demonstration of a difficult geometrical proposition.

Beyond the few lines they use there is the bare canvas; they have reached the limit and they must turn in their tracks. The reaction is bound to come, and come quickly.

Meanwhile the Cubists, who have been painting along emotional, as distinguished from the coldly scientific lines, are still turning out pictures that possess a charm in line and color irrespective of their theoretical significance and much may still be done in this direction.

* * * * *

The Cubists are fond of quoting the following from Plato:

Socrates: What I am saying is not, indeed, directly obvious. I must
therefore try to make it clear. For I will endeavor to speak of the
beauty of figures, not as the majority of persons understand them
such as those of animals, and some paintings to the life; but as
reason says, I allude to something straight and round, and the
figures formed from them by the turner’s lathe, both superficial
and solid and those by the plumb-line and the angle-rule, if you
understand me. For these, I say, are not beautiful for a particular
purpose, as other things are; but are by nature ever beautiful by
themselves, and possess certain peculiar pleasures, not at all
similar to those from scratching; and colors possessing this
character are beautiful and have similar pleasures.--From
“Philebus.”

* * * * *

Every really great painter must have moments when, as he thinks of the days and years spent painting _things_--just things for people to look at and see--he asks himself, “Is it worth while to spend all one’s life painting things one _sees_? Is it not possible to paint the things one _feels_?”

* * * * *

Sargent is tired of portrait painting--why? Because he longs to do something else. But what he is doing is simply another form of portrait painting--and not so big. He has simply turned from men and women to chairs and tables--so to speak; that is, from portraits of people to pictures of things--all the same art. So far as any one knows he has not tried to make compositions of line and color that would be beautiful in themselves. In short, great painter as he is, he seems to lack the ambition or the inspiration to try to do what Whistler for more than forty years was trying to do--lift painting from the rut of reality to a plane more nearly on a level with that occupied by the greatest masters of China and Japan.

* * * * *

The following paragraphs from a little book on Cubism by two well known Cubist painters throw some light on the subject:

We should be the first to blame those who, to hide their
incapacity, should attempt to fabricate puzzles. Systematic
obscurity betrays itself by its persistence. Instead of a veil
which the mind gradually draws aside as it adventures toward
progressive wealth, it is merely a curtain hiding a void.

It is not surprising that people ignorant of painting should not
spontaneously share our assurance; but nothing is more absurd than
that they should be irritated thereby. Must the painter, to please
them, turn back in his work, restore things to the commonplace
appearance from which it is his mission to deliver them?

From the fact that the object is truly transubstantiated, so that
the most accustomed eye has some difficulty in discovering it, a
great charm results. The picture which only surrenders itself
slowly seems always to wait until we interrogate it, as though it
reserved an infinity of replies to an infinity of questions.[44]

By way of comment on this paragraph:

Why should we deny to painting one of the greatest charms of poetry--_elusiveness_?

Great poetry is _rarely_ superficially plain to the casual reader.

Great music is _never_ superficially plain to the casual hearer.

But the attitude of the public is that great painting shall always be superficially plain to the casual observer.

A painter may paint things every one understands at a glance, but is it not his _right_, if he wishes, to paint things no one understands but himself?

In other words, what right have _we_ to say to the poet, “If you don’t write things we understand you are no poet,” or to the painter, “If you don’t paint things we understand you are no painter?”

The only difference between poet and painter is that one uses a _pen_, the other a _brush_ to express _himself_.

* * * * *

Without employing any allegorical or symbolical literary artifice,
merely by inflections of lines and colors, a painter can show, _in
the same picture_, a Chinese city, a French town, together with
mountains, oceans, fauna, and flora, and nations with their
histories and their desires--all that separates them in external
reality. Distance or time, concrete fact, or pure conception,
nothing refuses to be uttered in the language of the painter, as in
that of the poet, the musician, or the scientist.

Here is a most significant statement of a _truth_ and an assertion of _freedom_.

We all know how the poet in a dozen lines may give us glimpses of the universe; he may leap from flower to star, from city to city, nation to nation, age to age; nothing confines him, he knows no restraint.

In one short poem he may give us glimpses of the four quarters of the globe--of Athens, London, Chicago, Pekin. His imagination knows no bounds, his art is unlimited.

For the first time in the history of painting painters are systematically claiming the same independence, the same right to _express themselves freely_ in each canvas, to paint in the one picture _if they see fit_ glimpses of different countries, cities, scenes, different times as well as places; to use them and suggest them as freely as the poet does to _express a mood_--and why not?

But the painter must be sure of his mood, and be doubly sure that what he is trying to say _requires_ a wealth of illustration, otherwise his painting will be but a fantastic jumble,

The Steer]

Landscape With Two Poplars]

just as many poems lose themselves in not a _wealth_ but a _confused mass_ of irrelevant illustrations.

* * * * *

The _assertion_ of freedom is one thing, the _exercise_ of it is quite another.

The point is that, fundamentally, there is no reason why a painter should not show in one canvas things and events unrelated in either space or time, leaving the observer to work out the more or less hidden meaning of it all.

There is no reason why he should be tied down to the realistic painting of an apple or an apple tree if he prefers to paint some flight of the imagination into which apple and apple tree enter together with strange glimpses of temples and pyramids, playing children and armed battalions, weeping women and fighting men.

Read the foregoing lines once more. Eight objects are mentioned--apple, apple tree, temples, pyramids, children, battalions, weeping women, fighting men--by no possibility could these strangely diverse objects be found grouped together in actual life, yet it is safe to say that _as you read them_ no feeling of utter incongruity was experienced. On the contrary your imagination unconsciously created a picture, vague and indistinct because fleeting, which combined them all, possibly a strange, poetic scene with orchards and playing children, temples and pyramids in the distance, with armed battalions, weeping women and fighting men passing by in clouds or fanciful shapes.

Thousands of such pictures are painted every year and they are mostly rather poor works of the imagination.

There is, however, no reason why the same freedom, the same arbitrary indifference to actualities, should not be exercised in the painting of good pictures.

No reason why, for instance, painters should not _experiment freely with all the so-called laws of art_, and that is what the Cubists and others of the moderns are doing.

* * * * *

That the ultimate aim of painting is to touch the crowd we have
admitted; but painting must not address the crowd in the language
of the crowd; it must employ its own language, in order to move,
dominate, and direct the crowd, not in order to be understood. It
is so with religions and philosophies. The artist who concedes
nothing, who does not explain himself and relates nothing,
accumulates an internal strength whose radiance shines on every
hand.

It is in consummating ourselves within ourselves that we shall
purify humanity; it is by increasing our own riches that we shall
enrich others; it is by kindling the heart of the star for our own
pleasure that we shall exalt the universe.

* * * * *

To explain Cubism, or any attempt in art to suppress the objective, one must fall back on music.

Grieg calls a certain composition “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” Not for a moment did he attempt realistically to suggest a hall, a mountain, a king or any object; to have done so would have been folly. And if that particular composition were played for the first time before a body of keen musicians, no title mentioned, and not a word said about its being a part of the Peer Gynt suite, no two would agree as to what the composer had in mind, though many might have very interesting impressions regarding the _mood of the composer in writing it_.

But once understand it is part of the Peer Gynt suite and once told it is “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” the weird and fascinating music explains itself, it is recognized as a wonderfully successful attempt to realize an impressive scene by a combination of sounds.

* * * * *

The veriest tyro in music feels the cheapness of imitative music, the imitation of the nightingale, the ripple of notes to imitate a rippling brook, the beating of a drum to imitate thunder, the tremolo of violins to represent fright, etc., etc.

From such bald attempts at realism to the abstract beauty of a symphony by Beethoven is a vast interval.

The severely logical composer will not name his symphony for fear of suggesting ideas that will interfere with the pure enjoyment of his abstract conception. There have been painters--like Whistler--who preferred to call their works “Harmonies” or “Arrangements” or “Studies” rather than subject their canvases to a clamoring horde of suggestions by choosing names that must inevitably divert the observer.

However at times a name helps, it at least puts us on the right track, it enables us to measure the piece of music or the picture by the artist’s intention. If it is utterly impossible for the best and most sympathetic minds after long study to find any suggestion of the title in the work, it means either the artist has been unsuccessful in conveying his idea in sound or in line and color, or--what often happens--he has carelessly and arbitrarily chosen a title after his work was finished, a title that imperfectly fits his original impulse.

* * * * *

It is most disappointing to hear a man go into raptures over what he cannot explain.

The greatest enemies of the moderns are their friends. But there have been published a number of books in German and French that are well worth reading if approached with an open mind.

If read with preconceived notions and prejudices the result will be very irritating. Several artists, notably Kandinsky, have taken the utmost pains to explain in print what they believe and what they are trying to do.

But it is often quite as difficult to understand some of the things the painters write about their work as it is to understand their pictures; but this is because some of the new men carry their theories so far it is hard for the layman to follow, however earnest and sympathetic his efforts.

But because we do not understand what a man says is no good reason for calling him an ignoramus.

The trouble _may_ be with him, it is _probably_ with us. At all events each re-reading, like each re-scrutiny of the pictures, yields clearer results.

To a man _really and profoundly interested_ in art nothing has occurred in many a generation so full of significance, so worthy one’s earnest attention, as the present new movements--all the more interesting because changing so rapidly and because some of them are certain to be so fleeting.

The art institute which does not secure and preserve some examples illustrative of the extraordinary upheaval in the art world is derelict--as derelict as a natural history museum would be if it passed over indifferently the evidence of some mysterious upheaval in nature.

* * * * *

When a man stands before a cubist painting or an improvisation by Kandinsky and says he sees all sorts of things in it, do not take him too seriously; he is like members of those extraordinary Browning Clubs who destroy our enjoyment of the poetry by reading into each line things the poet never dreamed.

* * * * *

The Cubists and most of the moderns are very young men, what they _think_ is of far less interest than what they _do_.

What a young man does is often of vital importance, what he thinks may be of no importance at all--save to himself.

Moved by the most naive theories and enthusiasms youth

Cemetery Gates]

will do wonderful things, things the sober reflection of age would fear to do.

One of the charms of the Cubists is their child-like faith in the absolute supremacy of their art; this faith is interesting in them because it leads them to produce works that cause us to stop and look and think, but when their followers indulge the same blind faith in print their utterances are mostly incoherent and boresome.

* * * * *

The violent partisan who sees all sorts of things in the modern painting is at one extreme, the violent opponent who sees nothing at all is at the other--let them fight it out.

The truth lies midway, that there is _something_ worth finding in even the most extravagant attempts of the new movement no thoughtful man will deny. The very fact the paintings attract such crowds and excite so much controversy proves there is _something_ for serious investigation; the something may not turn out to be of overwhelming importance, but it will have its influence upon the future of art.

No one for a moment doubts that the exhibitions held in New York, Chicago, and Boston are destined to have a very great effect upon American art, especially upon the art of the men most bitterly opposed to Cubism, and everything akin to Cubism. The academic has received a severe but healthful jolt.

Whatever affects us has, at least, the merit of _affecting_ us, and whatever moves us to do better work, whether in an old way or a new way, has the merit of _affecting us for good_.

VII

THE NEW ART IN MUNICH

“WE cling more closely to the old masters; what we are doing is simply the natural development of their principles and their methods,” said a well-known painter of Munich while speaking of the Cubists and other moderns of Paris, and the words had direct reference to the head of a woman, by Jawlenski, reproduced herein in color.

It would be difficult to convince the casual observer that this head has any relationship to portraits by Titian, _and yet_--

* * * * *

The Cubists are also equally quick to demonstrate the logical connection between their works and those of the old masters, tracing the connection through Courbet, El Greco, and so on.

The truth, of course, is that _everything_ modern is a development of _something_ ancient, that _nothing_ exists _unrelated_.

Art is as _continuous_ as everything else in life and nature.

One thing flows inevitably out of another.

* * * * *

Sorolla and Zoloaga are the children of Velasquez. Puvis de Chavannes may seem nearer Raphael and the Italian Primitives than Degas and Manet, but he is simply the fruition of one collateral line, while Degas is the fruition of another, and Manet of another--_they are all painters_, and the art of painting admits endless variations in theory and technic.

* * * * *

It is, therefore, true that every modern experiment, however strange, may trace its genealogy to the Old Masters and through them to the Primitives, and through them to the Cave Painters.

So that when a Munich artist argues that the strange heads of Jawlensky and the still stranger compositions of Kandinsky are based upon the best there is in Italian art, the proposition in its broad significance may be conceded and plenty of room be still left for startling differences between the art of Venice in the sixteenth century and that of Munich in the twentieth.

* * * * *

There is, however, some slight but tangible foundation for the assertion that the work of the extreme men of Munich is closer to that of the Old Masters than the work of the extreme men of Paris, in that most of the former paint more _solidly_ and _substantially_, while most of the latter paint more _lightly_ and _superficially_--just about the difference that exists between the two cities, the two environments. The worker in Munich cannot help being influenced by the _German_ atmosphere, the worker in Paris cannot help being influenced by the _French_--in fact each is where he is because he finds the particular atmosphere congenial.

* * * * *

“The New Artists’ Federation,” in Munich, was founded in January, 1909, by Adolf Erbslöh, Alexej von Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky, Alexander Kanoldt, Alfred Kubin, Gabriele Münter, Marianna von Werefkin, Heinrich Schnabel, and Oskar Wittenstein. During the first year Paul Baum, Wladimir von Bechtejeff, Erma Bossi, Karl Hofer, Moissey Koga, and Albert Sacharoff joined. Paul Baum and Karl Hofer soon resigned their membership. In 1910 the Frenchmen, Pierre Girieud and Le Fauconnier, became members, and in 1911 Franz Marc and Otto Fischer, followed in 1912 by Alexander Mogilewsky.

The first exhibition was held in the winter of 1909 in the Modern
Gallery, Munich. Indignation and derisive laughter, and insults
from the press were the outward result. Still the seed scattered
was not lost. Similar exhibitions were held in many cities of
Germany and Switzerland. Everywhere they met with opposition, but
also made some friends at each place.

The second exhibition, held in the fall of the following year,
brought the members into contact with a large number of outside
artists, some of whom have become of great importance in the new
art, and most of whom were, up to that time, unknown in Germany.
These were the Germans, Hermann Haller, Bernhard Hoetger, Eugen
Kahler, Adolf Nieder; the Frenchmen, Georges Bracque, André Derain,
Kees Van Dongen, Francisco Durio, Pablo Picasso, Georges Rouault,
and Maurice de Vlaminck; finally, the Russians, Mogilewsky, David
and Wladimir Burljuk, and Seraphim Sudbinin. This was the first
exhibition at which it was possible to rightly estimate the
development and the international character of the new movement.

The preparations for the exhibition in the year 1911 led to a
split. Some of the members insisted that, as regarded their works,
the custom of a jury should be dispensed with, while others were in
favor of having the entries rigidly judged in order to insure
proper selection. Kandinsky, Kubin, Marc, and Gabriele Münter in
consequence announced their withdrawal from the federation. Thus a
difference of opinion and convictions was openly vented that had
existed in secret for quite a time. The members named, under the
name of “Redaktion des Blauen Reiters,” opened a separate
exhibition and have since continued to work under this banner.

The New Artists’ Federation, since its third exhibition in 1912,
has held a series of exhibits of the works of individual artists in
its rooms at Munich, and its members are represented at nearly all
important exhibitions in Germany and Switzerland.[45]

* * * * *