Chapter XV: Conclusion 327 (9)

Macdonald-Wright, to the contrary, had little art training in the accepted sense of the word. Primarily interested in the purely technical side of painting, as were Renoir, Cezanne and Courbet, he had been influenced first by Hals, Rembrandt and Velazquez and later by their successors, Manet and the Barbizon school. Hoping to find help in the schools he studied at many academies, but after a brief period retired to the seclusion of his studio. About this time he began, with the aid of Chevreul, Helmholtz and Rood, to make experiments in colour in its relation to luminosity. Quite naturally the influence of Monet followed, and it was not until a year later that his enthusiasm for the Impressionists disappeared. He then began the construction of form by large and crude planes, building his figures with light and dark chromatic blocks. It was this broader application, coupled with his love of pure colour, that led him to an eager admiration for Gauguin. At this period of his development he met Russell, his senior by three years, to whom he has always admitted his debt for his early appreciation of Michelangelo as well as of the modern masters. From then on, through many struggles with light, he made rapid progress. When Futurism blinded the eyes of the younger men he went straight ahead in the path he had chosen.

Shortly after their meeting, Russell and Macdonald-Wright reached the end of their appreciative and formative period of imitation. They were both too intensely desirous of self-expression in its broadest and most precise sense to vary an already well-learned precept or theory. They were colourists, and had been even when passing through their most sombre stage. Now both turned to colour as to a longed-for goal. The art world at that time was being flooded with the mournful browns and whites of Cubism; and Matisse was too slight an inspiration to attract them, for they had consistently conceived form in three dimensions. Their desire was to create canvases of richly harmonious colour; but the difficulty lay in finding a new method of application. Neither of them was content merely to place suites of pure hues on the canvas, as an end in themselves. This would be to sacrifice organised volume for an ephemeral pleasure. Colour must have a formal and compositional significance, otherwise it would be but shallow decoration. The fact that, like all painters of the day, they were still bound to the depiction of natural objects, added difficulty to the solution of their problem. Their individual interpretation of Cezanne, however, little by little showed them the method by which they might eventually open the door on their desires. Russell approached form through light, combining both qualities in a simultaneous vision. Macdonald-Wright approached light through form, regarding them as an inseparable and inevitable unity. Both painters expressed their vision in the purest gamut of colour which painting up to that time had seen. Colour with them became the totality of art, the one element by which every quality of a canvas was to be expressed. Even their lines were obtained by the differentiation of colours in the same way that tempo delimits sound.

Russell began his Synchromism by extending and completing the methods of the Impressionists who had observed that one always has an illusion of violet in shadows when the sunlight is yellow, and who in their painting represented the full force of light as yellow, and its opposite extreme of shadow as violet. Russell, in observing that the strong force of light gives us a sensation of yellow and that shadow produces its complementary of violet, went further and discovered that quarter and half tones also possess colours by which they can be interpreted. He thus arrived at a complete colour interpretation of the degrees of light forces or tones. This method he aptly called the orchestration of tones from black to white. For it he made no hard and set rules. From the first it was a highly plastic and arbitrary manner of depicting objectivity. By modulating from light to dark (from yellow to violet) not only was light conceived forcibly, but form resulted naturally and inevitably. This was the principle by which Cezanne, although he did not completely grasp its import, achieved his eternal light which brought form into being. But the principle with him was subjugated to the influence of local colours, varying _milieu_, reflections, etc. Russell stated the principle frankly and applied it purely. Since his form at that period resulted from a sensitive depiction of light values expressed by colour, his canvases had much the same beauty of strongly lighted natural objects seen through the three-sided prism by which the transition from tone to colour is automatically brought about.

Macdonald-Wright approached his conception of Synchromism from the opposite direction. He had always been dissatisfied with the endless alternation of small shadows and lights which the Impressionists had introduced into painting, and with the tiny planes and spots which artists used for verisimilitude. He desired a method whereby the elements of shadow and light could be differentiated and drawn together in simple masses. He had studied pure colour more from the standpoint of form than from that of light, and during 1912 began to take note of the fluctuations of colours, their mobility when juxtaposed with other colours, their densities and transparencies. In fine, he recorded their inherent tendency to express degrees of material consistency. Thus with him a yellow, instead of meaning an intense light, represented an advancing plane, and a blue, while having all the sensation of shadow about it, receded to an infinity of subjective depth. The relative spacial extension of all the other colours was then determined, and a series of colour scales was drawn up which gave not only the sensation of light and dark but also the sensation of perspective. Thus it was possible to obtain any degree of depth by the use of colour alone, for all the intermediate steps from extreme projection to extreme recession were expressible by means of certain tones and pure hues.

The first Synchromist canvas was exposed by Russell in the _Salon des Independants_ early in the spring of 1913. It was called Synchromie en Vert and recorded a large interior in which all the light forces were treated in their purely emotional phases. The canvas lacked the complete visualisation and the solid space-construction which characterise his later work, and furthermore it revealed many traces of the academic composition. However, had there been critics possessed of artistic prescience they straightway would have sensed in it a new force in painting. But the picture's defects obscured their recognition of its potential vitality. This was due in part to the fact that the work lost much of its effect by piece-painting, that is, by the minute treatment of details each of which constituted an end in itself regardless of the total. Russell counted on the line of the different bodies holding it together; but he reckoned falsely, for if, in a work where colour is so important a part of line, the colour and line are not in complete harmony, the line alone is inadequate to effect the liaison of forms. In this same _Salon_ Macdonald-Wright, not yet having arrived at a defined conception, exposed two canvases in which his later developments were but vaguely foreshadowed. Both pictures were formal compositions of nude figures painted in three or four flat planes of pure colour, and recalled Matisse and Cezanne more strongly than they presented a new vision. From the standpoint of efficient visualisation all three Synchromist works were failures, or at least they were indications of incomplete progress. In Russell's canvas the diminutive breaking up of colour negatived what otherwise would have been the picture's brilliant effect; and Macdonald-Wright's large application of colour served only to place him under the banner of an established school. But both men realised that this was only a start, and set diligently to work on the canvases for their first exhibition which was booked in Munich for June of that year.

Between their first pictures and those of a few months later there was to be noted an advance both in conception and in application. Russell's small colour planes, applied wholly from the standpoint of light, expanded and took on a new effectiveness. His form became more abstract, and his colour more harmonious. Also his compositions were more compact, though they were ordered rather than rhythmically organised. Macdonald-Wright's progress was similar. In an interpretation of one of Michelangelo's Slaves, used as the dominant form in an arrangement of three figures, all the academism which had marked his earlier expression had disappeared. His method had been liberated from the exactitudes of static principles, and had become consistent, not with the new colour knowledge, but within itself. The theory of defined colour gamuts, which from the first had been applied by these two men, had now become a scientific principle. Though the truth of it had always been vaguely sensed by them, it had not become a definitely comprehended formula until they had worked out the naturalistic laws governing colour. The Synchromist pictures in which these laws were boldly applied were first brought together at 13, Prannerstrasse, Munich, in June, 1913.

In November of the same year their work was again exposed, this time at the Bernheim-Jeune galleries in Paris. The show in Munich, widely advertised by coloured posters, had attracted considerable interest, but in Paris the exhibition created a two-weeks' sensation. Though the more discriminating critics saw its importance, there was considerable adverse comment due largely to the Synchromists' spectacular and over-enthusiastic methods of putting forward their views and discoveries. In their two specifically worded prospectuses they devoted much space to the shortcomings of Orphism, then in vogue; and although their criticisms of that school, coupled with the statement of their own tangible and logical aims, had much to do with Orphism's demise, the impropriety of the attack created a feeling antagonistic to the new men. The appearance of their pictures was entirely different from any paintings hitherto exposed; and their conception, while being a normal and direct outgrowth of Cezanne, marked a revolution in formal construction. The inspiration of both these new artists was classic in that they recognised the absolute need of organisation which, if it was not melodiously and sequentially composed, should at least be rhythmic. Both were striving to create a pure art--one which would express itself with the means alone inherent in that art, as music expresses itself by means of circumscribed sound.

There was no precedent for purely abstract form--that is, form which has no antitype in nature--any more than there was a precedent for the construction of painting solely by means of colour and line. This was not due to an absence of desire in the artist for an abstract language of form, but to a natural diffidence on his part to break once and for all with centuries of tradition, and with one imperious gesture to cast aside the accepted _raison d'etre_ of the visual arts. We have seen how form from the first had been an imitation of natural objects, how it de-developed into synthesis, then into pure composition, how it reached a high degree of arbitrariness in Matisse, how it disintegrated in Cubism, and how in Futurism and Orphism there was a valiant attempt to convert it once more into pictorialism, to check its _elan_ toward perfect freedom of creation. It is not therefore strange that the Synchromist exhibition should have comprised, with the exception of one canvas, figure pieces, studies of landscape and still-lives (some almost archaic in their direct and simple statement), and not canvases which abandoned all semblance to natural form. Russell and Macdonald-Wright were still occupied tentatively in expressing the forms they knew best, each by his own individual method. But despite this compromise with tradition their exhibition presented a highly novel impression. There were human figures distorted almost out of recognition for the compositional needs of the canvas and painted in bars of pure colour; still-lives which seemed to be afire with chromatic brilliance; fantastic fruits; life-sized male figures in pure yellow-orange; and mountains of intense reds and purples, warm greens and violets. All the pictures, however, displayed decided organisational ability, and they possessed a more complete harmony of colour and line than had been achieved by any of the other younger painters.

But that quality of Synchromism which struck the discerning spectator more than any other was the force of volume resulting from the relationship of colours. For years painters had realised that certain colours when applied to certain forms rebelled at the combination, that they refused to remain passively on the planes assigned them. But this phenomenon had never been given any penetrating study. The more sensitive painters had merely changed their colours to more tractable ones, and had thus avoided the inevitable conflict that followed the fallacious commingling of two highly affirmative elements. Such chromatic inconsistencies should have taught artists the necessity of harmony for the sake of perfect order; but the matter was left to personal instinct. The clash between colour and form, however, was not due to any error or idiosyncrasy of taste, but to the absolute character of each separate hue which demanded, for its formal affinity, a fixed and unalterable spacial extension. At an early date artists had recognised that blue and violet were cool and mournful colours, and that yellow and orange were warm and joyful ones. They applied this primitive discovery with the feeble results to be found in Neo-Impressionism. That these colours had any further character they never suspected. Their insight extended only to the emotional and associative characteristics of the colours; the physical side was overlooked. Had the painters been more scientifically minded they would have known that these characteristics, which were the feminine traits, could not have existed in isolation; and they would have searched for the colours' dominating and directing properties which represented the masculine traits. Such a search would have led them to the meaning of colours in relation to volumes, that is, to colours' formal vibrations which alone are capable of expressing plastic fullness.

This vibratory quality Macdonald-Wright found and applied. By it he achieved light and shadow which resulted naturally by the juxtaposition of warm and cold colours. Russell, working altogether from the standpoint of light as revealed by form, attained practically the same results so long as his light came from the direction of the spectator, for in such a case the highest illumination was the most intense salient and, as with Macdonald-Wright, had therefore to be painted with a warm and highly opaque colour. But where the light came from a source at right angles to the line of vision, the expression reverted to an intensification of the Impressionistic method. Later this accident of light disappeared from Russell's work, and consequently his treatment became less restricted. This setting aside of light as the motif was a necessary departure, for when Russell carried his work into the higher elements of pure form, a realistic source of illumination would have made his suites of abstract volumes appear, not poised and relatively solid, but as paterae attached to an impenetrable substance. Under such conditions painting would merely be another and perhaps more beautiful way of making effective the ordonnances of surface form. But it would have no more power to create in us an aesthetic emotion than an exquisitely composed bas-relief.

The ambitions of the Synchromists went deeper. They desired to express, by means of colour, form which would be as complete and as simple as a Michelangelo drawing, and which would give subjectively the same emotion of form that the Renaissance master gives objectively. They wished to create images of such logical structure that the imagination would experience their unrecognisable reality in the same way our eyes experience the recognisable realities of life. They strove to bring about a new and hitherto unperceived reality which would be as definite and moving as the commonplace realities of every day, in short, to find an abstract statement for life itself by the use of forms which had no definable aspects. The Synchromists' chief technical method of obtaining this abstract equivalent for materiality was to make use of the inherent and absolute movement of colours toward and away from the spectator, by placing colours on forms in exact accord with the propensities of those colours to approach or recede from the eye. The Futurists had spoken of drawing the spectator into the centre of the picture, there to struggle with the principals of the work. They failed in this ambition because their canvases lacked the intense tactility of volume. The Synchromists, by making the enjoyment of form purely subjective, and by expressing form both by objectivity of line and the subjectivity of colour, achieved the ambition of both the Futurists and Cezanne. The latter's desire was ever toward a pure and subjective art. Although his colour viewed objectively is much like the Impressionists', the pleasure of the Impressionistic vision disappears when the eye is satisfied, whereas our emotions begin to work on a Cezanne only after the visual enjoyment has run its course.

Where Cezanne obtained a block solidity by the intelligent addition of local colour to light and by the subtraction of light from local colour, the Synchromists reject all local colour and paint only with hues which express the desired form. The position of a given volume in space dictates to them the colour with which it is to be painted. Consequently a receding volume whose position is behind the other volumes is never painted a pure yellow, for that colour advances toward the spectator's eye; and a solid volume which projects further than the others is never painted violet, for violet expresses not solidity but a quality of space, something intangible and translucent. All colours and tones and admixtures are answerable to the law of natural placement. This law is not absolute; it does not anchor each colour at a specific and unchangeable distance from the eye, but it determines the relative position of colours in space according to the influence of environmental colours, thereby making their position both dependent and directing but none the less inevitable. The perfecting of this principle by the Synchromists introduced an added element of poise and a new emotion in painting--poise, because, by changing a line or a colour, the formal solid constructed by interdependent hues would shift and adopt another position answering to the needs of the new order:--a new emotion, because colour in all painting before Cezanne had been used for ornament or for the dramatic reinforcement of the drawing or subject, and in Cezanne colour had been employed to express subjectively the emotions of volumes found in nature.

In Synchromism, which was first inspired by natural forms, all considerations other than light forces (as with Russell) and form (as with Macdonald-Wright) and composition (as used by both) were abolished. Colour was made a functioning element out of which grew all the qualities of the pictures. At first, adverse criticisms were aimed at the Synchromists' polychromatic nudes, still-lives and landscapes. The press remarked that the nudes appeared as if adorned in Harlequin suits; the landscapes, as if they were intended for theatre drops; and the still-lives, as if painted through a prism. The Synchromists answered that, in order to achieve a strong emotion of force and weight, they would "willingly sacrifice the lovely tints of the flesh and the joy of searching for coloured pots in the shops of the second-hand merchants." But, despite all they could say, there was justice in the public's criticism. So long as there was a natural form in a picture, the spectator would unconsciously judge it from a naturalistic standpoint. To be sure, there were canvases in the Munich exhibition which were almost unrecognisable as nature; but, before the aims of this new movement could be fully attained, a style of arbitrary and pure form was necessary. In the Bernheim-Jeune show Russell exposed one wholly abstract canvas. As an indication of a deflection toward pure composition, it was important, but the picture itself was as manifestly an artistic failure as had been his first large Synchromie en Vert hung in the _Salon des Independants_ of that year. It was not the only failure exposed, however. From the point of view of complete and organised conception all the early Synchromist pictures were to a certain extent fragmentary and tentative. The large canvas by Macdonald-Wright, Synchromie en Bleu, was a flagrant example of a totally new vision unsuccessfully struggling with the objectively classic inspiration of a defunct antiquity. The group of three males in its foreground, while competently and intelligently built, had the appearance of allegorical figures struggling against a toppling world. Although their position and organisation were dictated by the needs of an almost El Greco-like composition, one was too conscious of natural objects to accept, with a clear aesthetic conscience, the seeming chaos of the elements.

In bringing together in a unified emotion all the impressions of form, the Synchromists at first overlooked the fact that purity of expression, in order to be highly potent, must embody a pure conception. Their early canvases demonstrated many new formal possibilities, but, while they were composed more compactly than those of the other moderns, the forms themselves were obviously naturalistic. Herein the Synchromists at their debut failed to take the step from Cezanne to abstraction. Cezanne conceived all nature's qualities--form, colour and tone--simultaneously. He was the first great realist, because nature dictated to him the colour he was to use. The Synchromists, on the other hand, used natural objects to create organisations of pure colour, thus making formal expression a wholly subjective performance. This method contained greater emotional potentialities than Cezanne's, because where the latter's palette was necessarily much subdued in order to approximate to the attenuated gamut found in nature, the Synchromists' palette was keyed to its highest pitch of saturation. Cezanne's choice of colour was never absolute in the harmonic sense, because he depended for accuracy entirely on taste and sensitivity. With Macdonald-Wright and Russell the palette was completely and scientifically rationalised so that one could strike a chord upon it as surely and as swiftly as on the keyboard of a piano: the element of hazard in harmony was eliminated. This knowledge of colour gamuts was not employed for ornamental niceties, but was converted into a method of creating an aesthetic finality other than that of form and line. If, in a complete balance of line and volume, the colour overweighs at any point into warm or cold, the poise of the whole is jeopardised and the finality obscured. The perfect poise of all the elements of a painting, expressed by the single element of colour, is the final technical aim of Synchromism.

In the first arbitrary formal composition by Russell the desire was to carry out the continuations of form from one chosen generating colour and at the same time to create linear development as well. His compositional theory was that, through the inevitable evolution of line from an arbitrarily chosen centre, the artist would naturally and consciously create form which would definitely approximate to the human body. In his Synchromie en Bleu Violace the composition was very similar to that of the famous Michelangelo Slave whose left arm is raised above the head and whose right hand rests on the breast. The picture contained the same movement as the statue, and had a simpler ordonnance of linear directions; but, save in a general way, it bore no resemblance to the human form. The sketch for this canvas was a greater success than the final presentation, for its realisation was more complete, its order more contracted and intense. In both there was but one very simple rhythm with two movements; and the size of the large picture, which was twelve feet high, was incommensurate with the slightness of the expression.

His second large Synchromie, exposed in the _Salon des Independants_ in March 1914, was more complicated and more sensitively organised, both as to movement and to colour, than his first. By his colour rhythms he strove to incorporate into his painting the quality of duration: that is, he sought to have his picture develop into time like music. The ambition was commendable although he wrongly asserted that older painting extends itself strictly into space. A Rubens, while presenting itself to the spectator at one glance, is nevertheless more than a block-manifestation of forms, for it never reveals itself fully until after many periods of study. In the old painters there is a definite formal foundation on which the canvas is rhythmically built, and as a rule this formal figure is repeated in miniature many times throughout the canvas. These form-echoes are defined and complete linear orders, and into them rhythm is introduced. In Russell the process is reversed: with him the rhythm brings about the order. In Rubens there is a distinct and conscious development of line, but no development of form. Russell, in his later canvases, sets down a central form which dictates both the continuity of the picture and its formal complications. His generating centre is not like a motif whose character imprints itself on all its developments, but rather like a seed out of which the different forms grow--a directing centre which inspires and orders its environment. In fine, the surrounding forms are not a development of the central one, but a result of it. This type of composition corresponds to the melodic composition in music.

In the later works of Macdonald-Wright the motif form of composition is achieved. In Cezanne there are forms whose parallels are repeated in varied development throughout the work and are rhythmically ordered into blocks. But while these forms resemble motif repetition, they are not generated by rhythm but united by it. In Macdonald-Wright's canvases the rhythmic continuation of a central form constitute the movement of the picture as well as the final character of it. In his Arm Organisation in Blue-Green one can discern near the centre a small and arbitrary interpretation of the constructional form of the human arm. The movement of these forms throws off other lines and forms which, through many variations and counter-statements, reconstruct the arm in a larger way. Again these lines of the larger arm, in conjunction with the lines of the smaller one, evoke a further set of forms which break into parts each of which is a continuation or a restatement of the original arm motif, varied and developed.

Macdonald-Wright holds that the forms which we have experienced in our contact with nature are more expressive and diverse than those which are born of the inventive intelligence. But, while it is true that every realisation of _aesthetic movement_ or of the _rhythm_ of form is based on the movement of the human body, it is not true that the human body is a necessary foundation for form alone. However, Macdonald-Wright, in interpreting the human form, makes use merely of the direction and counterpoise of volume; he does not indulge in the depiction of limbs and torso: the body is only his inspiration to abstraction. He changes and shifts its forms out of any superficial resemblance to nature. In his desire to cling to a solid and immutable foundation we recognise an artist who realises how meagre is the incentive to create abstract compositions. With centuries of tradition urging him to a realistic rendering of the life about him, he finds it difficult to break entirely with realism and to create without referring to materiality. Perhaps some day he will even forgo the inspiration found in the combined forms in nature. His work is tending toward that ultimate freedom, as also is Russell's.

Such a development, however, cannot be definitely predicted, but one can say, without dogmatism, that in the future their work will become surer, their compositions of a higher and more complete order. With their knowledge of the fundamentals of rhythmic organisation, which is well in advance of that of the other painters of today, their progress seems assured. Their postulates are too definite to permit of the introduction of literary or musical transcendentalism; and their _apports_ are too significant to permit of any retrogression toward metaphysics or drama. Their palette has become co-ordinated and rationalised. Their composition is founded on the human body in movement. And their colour, in its plastic sense, takes into consideration space, light and form. These factors represent their technical assets. With these painters comes into being an art divorced from all the entanglements of photography, of piecemeal creation, of inharmonic gropings, of literature and of data hunting.

But they must not be regarded merely as inventors of new pictorial methods, for their discoveries have already taken significant aesthetic form. As Renoir completed the first cycle of modern art which was ushered in by Turner and Delacroix, so have the Synchromists completed the cycle of which Cezanne is the archaic father. They have discovered the concrete means wherewith to bring about his desires. It remains now for the painters of today and of the future to realise more fully the dreams of a higher art history. With the Synchromists there is no system or method other than a purely personal one. The word Synchromism, adopted by them to avoid obnoxious classification under a foreign banner, means simply "with colour." It does not explain a mannerism or indicate a special trait, as do Cubism, Futurism and Neo-Impressionism. It is as open as the term musician. As a school it can never exist. Indeed it is the first graphic art the application of whose principles cannot be learned by a course of instruction. Artists employing its means must depend entirely on their own ability to create. In Synchromist pictures the good or bad results cannot be obscured by the introduction of foreign elements, as in the case of pictures wherein nature is copied. Russell and Macdonald-Wright have already repudiated the appellation of Synchromist and call themselves merely "painters," for, since Cezanne, painting means, not the art of tinting drawing or of correctly imitating natural objects, but the art which expresses itself only with the medium inherent in it--colour.

All significant painting to come must necessarily make use of Synchromist means, although form and composition--that is, the creative expression--may be as arbitrary or personal as the artist desires. In the Synchromists' latest prospectus are to be found the following comments: "In our painting colour becomes the generating function. Painting being the art of colour, any quality of a picture not expressed by colour is not painting. An art whose ambition it is to be pure should express itself only with means inherent in that art. The relation of spacial emotions and of the emotions of density and transparency which we wish to express, dictates to us the colours most capable of transmitting these sensations to the spectator. In thus creating the subjective emotion of depth and rhythm we achieve the dreams of painters who talk of drawing the spectator into the centre of the picture; but instead of his being drawn there merely by intellectual processes he is enveloped in the picture by tactile sensation. We limit ourselves to the expression of plastic emotions. We can no longer conceive of the stupid juxtapositions of colours devoid of any rhythmic interlinking as art organisations." The Synchromists do not pretend to have invented new qualities for art but to have brought to painting a new vision which permits them to express the old qualities with a greater potency than formerly.

XIV

THE LESSER MODERNS

Decadence is simply the inability to create new tissue. In painting it manifests itself in two ways: either in the endeavour of an artist to turn the attention from new and precise procedures to antiquated and irrelevant ones; or in the artist's desire to base his inspiration on the great work of an immediate forerunner rather than on the foundation of all vitality, nature. In neither case is new material being added to the sum of art. Decadence usually takes the form of a facile imitation of the surface aspect of a master, not infrequently making that master's _results_ prettier, more fluent and more attractive. This is a natural and inevitable consequence of copying the objective side of a great work which originally was the outgrowth of a profound aesthetic philosophy. Decadents, as a general rule, are sufficiently analytic to sense their own paucity of constructive genius. In recognising that nature can never inspire them to significant co-ordinations, they are content to accept, with slight modifications, the artistic standards of their predecessors. They vary the art that has gone before to meet the needs of their own temperaments. In many cases highly meritorious work results.

The word decadent is not wholly deprecatory. Often the decadent is a competent composer in the abstract. By presenting in an attractive way his own personal tastes, he sometimes makes his art both interesting and beautiful. His decadence lies in his retrogression from the point to which the art of his day has arrived and in his inability to introduce a new element to compensate for this retrogression. No amount of individuality can bridge this gap. Many painters, like Gauguin, have reacted against achievement but have possessed a tangential vitality which in itself has been a new contribution to aesthetic endeavour. Other painters, like Renoir, while introducing no innovations, have, by talented and comprehensive efforts, duplicated and improved upon the art of the latest creative masters and thereby pushed forward the highest standards. They are not decadents, for their work exhibits no deterioration. Even decadents may be excellent artists. Gaspar de Crayer was undoubtedly a great artist though an offshoot of Rubens; and Giampietrino and Cesare da Sesto were both solid and intelligent painters, though they did not rival their master, Leonardo da Vinci. There has undoubtedly been great sculpture since the Renaissance; but Michelangelo closed up for all time the plastic possibilities of clay and marble, and consequently, there being no new functioning element to be introduced into it, all sculpture since his day has been in the broad sense decadent.

Modern painting has had its decadents also--men who have attempted to revert to a sterile past or who have followed in the paths blazed by others without approaching the achievements of the painters imitated. This latter class has its usages, for it tends to lend impetus to the movement it follows. The men composing it are popularly called exponents, and the appellation is just. There are painters in all countries today who adhere to Impressionist methods, and thereby keep ever before us one of the great steps in the development of modern painting. Cezanne has undoubtedly been given greater consideration because of the many artists who follow his precepts. And the numerous imitators of Cubism have done much to focus on that movement the consideration it deserves. In a general way all the lesser modern painters, by their feverish activities, expositions and pamphleteering, have, despite their inherent lack of genuine importance, kept the world conscious of the fact that it is in the midst of a great aesthetic upheaval, that new forces are at work, that the older order is being supplanted.

Today nearly every country has a group of men striving toward the new vision. They cannot all be innovators of new methods. They cannot all carry forward the evolution of modern painting. But they can at least give momentum to the current ideals and turn out work which bears so much personal merit that it becomes deserving of more or less serious consideration. Degas and his circle are of this class, as are the Futurists who, though at bottom decadent, inasmuch as they turn their art back to illustration, are a force which cannot be ignored. In Dresden, Munich and Berlin are groups of modern men who have repudiated the academies and struck out into new fields. Russia has contributed many young artists to the present ideal. England has not been altogether impervious to the modern doctrines. America is represented by fully a score of artists animated by the new vitality. And in France there are a hundred painters at work tearing down the older idols. While few of these men can lay claim to introducing any intrinsically new and significant methods or forms into modern painting, their work in many instances, while being decadent in the strict sense, is nevertheless commendable. They are not great artists even in the sense that Monet, Manet, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso are great; but many of them are at least genuine artists.

One of the most conspicuous figures among the decadents is Wassily Kandinsky. In an age when all art was being arraigned before the tribunal of biology, physiology, and psychology, he came forward and attempted to drag it back into the murky medium of metaphysics. The generating forces of modern painting, however, rest on no metaphysical hypothesis. To attempt to define form by transcendental terms, or even to credit form with esoteric significance, reveals an ignorance of the principles of aesthetic emotion. Form in the art sense is a demonstrable proposition; it is answerable to physical laws. Michelangelo, El Greco, Giotto, Rubens, Cezanne and Renoir based composition on natural causes, and as each successive artist has approached intensity in organisation, he has come nearer and nearer to the rhythm which animates and controls corporeal existence. AEsthetic form, in order to become emotion-producing, must reflect the form which is most intimately associated with our sensitivities. It must primarily be physical. There is nothing mysterious about aesthetic rhythm, and any attempt to "spiritualise" the harmonies of art carries art so much further from the truth. The modern tendency to make objects abstract and to divest subject-matter of all its mimetic qualities, has led some critics and painters to the false conclusion that form itself is unrelated to recognisable phenomena. But even in the most abstract of the great painters, the form is concrete. In a broad sense it is susceptible of geometrical demonstration; and its intensity is in direct ratio to its proximation to human organisms. In fact, there are no moving forms in an aesthetic organisation which do not have their prototypes in the human body in action. Were this not true empathy would be impossible, and without empathy an artistic emotion is purely intellectual and associative. The greatest painters, past and present, have recognised this principle; and art which does not adhere to it is decadent both in the aesthetic and the intellectual sense.

Kandinsky exemplifies this kind of decadence. While the innovators up to Matisse had tried to discover in nature secrets which would aid them in plastic expression, Kandinsky has tried, by numerous articles and at least one complete book, to turn back the minds of painters to the supposedly mystical elements of form and colour. But although this artist is to be commended on his effort to make colour significant in a day when angular forms of brown and black were the keynote, his study of colour should have begun where Cezanne left off and not with the writings of Maeterlinck and the symbolist poets. Kandinsky recognises that colour has possibilities, but he ignores the fact that colour is one of the physical sciences, as definite as those of the quadrivium, that its inductive qualities have become classified and that its functioning is precise and answerable to natural laws. Consequently he cannot co-ordinate its governing principles, and, in an attempt to rationalise it he has sought refuge in music, an art which presents to him the same mystical difficulties. So long as he was under the healthy influence of Matisse his symbology was less evident; but when he adopted a metaphysical programme it all came to the surface.

Kandinsky's early "impressions" are heavy and insensitive "Fauve" pictures. His "compositions" for the most part are general statements of some rural scene in Matisse's manner; and his "improvisations" represent semi-abstract lines delimiting scientifically meaningless colours. In his book, The Art of Spiritual Harmony, he presents an elaborate explanation of the metaphysical basis for colour, but he fails to contribute any ideas not to be found in Delacroix and Seurat. And the pictures with which he complements the text have been surpassed, in their own manner, by the Chinese. There are isolated comments on colour theories which are separately sound, and there are explanatory generalisations; but a diligent search fails to reveal any statement which is precise and at the same time new. The book refers constantly to music, and there are undeniable evidences of literary thought; but nowhere is there an explanation of the plastic significance of colour. Kandinsky is a painter of moods, and as such encroaches upon the domain of music. He is a painter of the vision of an action without its objective integument, and as such he enters the realm of poetry. He is essentially pretty, and despite his idealistic nomenclature, he is at bottom illustrative and decorative. What he designates the "soul" is only associative memory, and his conception of composition is the breaking up of a flat surface into irregular compartments by lines and more or less pure colour. Like Scriabine he has overlooked the formal possibilities of colour and consequently has failed in any aesthetically emotional expression.

Kandinsky's attempts to create moods are largely failures because of the inherent limitations of his art medium. The arts may be synthesised when a profounder understanding of them has come about, but their functionality can never be interchanged. The art of literature will always be able to tell a story better than the greatest sculpture; and even a primitive song is more capable of producing a mood than the most highly organised painting. Kandinsky, for instance, fails to achieve what the Marseillaise achieves in music, namely: the dramatic presentation of an exhortation to action. Separate, for instance, the phrases of the original version. The first verse opens with a rousing appeal which culminates on "_patrie_," a word always welcome to the ear and heart of a Frenchman. Then the song acclaims the glory of the occasion and repeats dramatically the cause of the struggle--"_Contre nous de la tyrannie l'etendard sanglant est leve_." Then it recounts the tragedies which are befalling relatives and friends at the hands of the growling soldiers of the enemy; and suddenly, in an unexpected voice it calls, "_Aux armes, citoyens!_" ending in a patriotic and decisive flourish. The music throughout is subtly harmonised with the words: lively during the opening call; abated during the first statement of the cause; animated with its repetition; minor when the tragic words occur; vibrant and imitative of bugles during the call to arms; and highest in pitch at the end. This is the expression of the mood intensified.

Could painting extend itself into time and present singly and in sequence the visions of objective nature, dramatically synthesised with colour and line, it could perhaps influence people to emotion in the way music does. But the musical quality of time-extension is impossible in painting. And since a picture presents a simultaneous vision, which cannot be otherwise except through a subjective process, it is incapable of working from a prelude to a finale like music. Music is abstract, though firmly based on the rhythmic movement of all nature, yet it can produce moods by far more distant and far less tangible associations than can painting. But mood in music is no higher a quality than illustration in painting, and the highly creative artists ignore them both. The great composer is the one who, seeing beyond the associative theory in music, feels the deeper plasticity of movement and form: and his plasticity is this only preoccupation, just as the plastic element of colour is the great modern painter's chief concern. Kandinsky has only tried to introduce an unimportant element of one art into another art. While the procedure has a superficial taste of novelty it is no more creditable than if he had declared himself frankly for illustration and joined the ranks of Degas and his school. He has not probed into the pregnant recesses of painting and attempted to discover the meaning of form. He has contented himself with obscuring the delineations of natural objects in such a manner that the beholder feels led to decipher his cryptic realities. The suggestion of actuality is there, but there being no other strong attraction in the picture, aesthetic or otherwise, the spectator sets to work to penetrate its objective meaning. In the majority of cases he succeeds, and gains thereby a satisfaction similar to that of having solved a simple problem in fractions.

In painting moods, which he refers to as "spiritual impressions," "internal harmonies," "psychic effects" and "soul vibrations," Kandinsky does not attempt to depict the dynamic forces which produce moods, but strives to interpret his own emotional impressions by means of semi-symbolic and semi-naturalistic visions and by inspirational methods. Unable to ally the elements of colour and line to a given theme, he contents himself with giving us a chaotic impression by such means as he personally associates with his mood: and since this kind of association is largely individual, his depiction of the mood is incomprehensible to anyone not temperamentally and mentally at one with him. Did he understand the inherent psychological dramatic significance of colours and lines he could represent a universally moving vision, and thereby attain in a small degree the end for which he aims. But his feeling for colour especially is so vague and unscientific that it is, after all, a personal thing, and his graphic representation of a mood is little more than an individual and purely otiose expression. Even Carra, in his colourless Funeral of the Anarchist Galli, approaches nearer the creation of a mood than does Kandinsky in his best canvases, for in Carra there is exhibited a certain knowledge of the dramatic use of line which, when combined with recognisable subject-matter, augments the thematic drama.

Despite his complete preoccupation with colour Kandinsky is decadent more than Van Gogh to whom artistically he is closely related, because the progress of modern painting is toward purity, toward creation by means of a unique element, toward an art which expresses only the qualities of which that art is the most highly capable. When other considerations enter into it, it is at once drawn back toward illustration, and its final defecation is postponed. Happily Kandinsky, an explorer of the limitless realms of metaphysics, has given us no more specific a postulate than that colour has meaning. Though he formulates many vaguely associative theories (such as "keen yellow looks sour because it recalls the taste of a lemon," "a shade of red will cause pain or disgust through association with running blood," and "in the hierarchy of colours green is the _bourgeoisie_--self-satisfied, immovable, narrow"); he nevertheless relies largely on instinct for their application. While attempting to turn painters' minds from the precise discoveries of colourists to a pseudo-philosophical consideration of colour, he is too general and ambiguous to inspire extensive imitation. Already painters since him have gone forward in the great work of research begun by the Impressionists.

If Kandinsky, as a theorist, is cabalistic and illusory, he achieves a certain decorative prettiness in his work. Though his ideas are old, the appearance of his canvases is new: and it is merely this novelty of conception, coupled with his tendency toward abstraction, which makes him of interest, and then only as a theoretical deviation from the work of Gauguin, Matisse and the Orientals. His colour is not without visual charm, and his composition often has the fascination of the delicate patterns found in the Chinese. In fact, Kandinsky's compositional debt to the Chinese is large. His Improvisation No. 29 is almost identical with a painting by Rin Teikei, and many of his pictures appear like curved-line generalisations of Chinese groupings, or the forms in Chinese backgrounds. Like the Cubists Kandinsky is a step toward arbitrariness in formal composition, but his advance is less significant than theirs. In his desire to illustrate a mood and produce a corresponding psychic emotion in the spectator he is a transcendentalised Futurist. His ontological terminology has given an impetus to his popularity, but it has tended unfortunately to obscure his worth as a maker of arabesques.

Of a different decadent type are Bonnard, Vuillard and K.-X. Roussel who call themselves the Intimists. These artists descend in large measure from Matisse, and though other and sometimes stronger influences enter their work, they are in a general way more closely akin to him than any other modern painter. Their appearance is more academic and, in the decorative sense, prettier than that of Matisse. Also, there is in their pictures a greater perpendicularity than in the work of their master. The angular and the perpendicular always represent the second compositional step from symmetricality to order: they are indicative of the earliest stage of aesthetic consciousness. They are found in the Egyptians, Phoenicians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, and in all the primitive Christians, and in Gauguin and Puvis de Chavannes. The artists who use them have awakened to the fact that chaos is not conducive to emotional satisfaction. In perpendicular lines there is a primitive sense of fitness, for one feels they are both well-planted and immovable. Not infrequently they are employed by the decadents of a movement or an epoch because they harmonise so neatly and unostentatiously with pretty colours and delicate themes. The Futurists found in them a ready means to a decorative order.

Bonnard, the most genuine artist of the group, uses perpendicularity of arrangement more consciously than does either of the others. He studied in the same class with Maurice Denis at the _Academie Julien_, and his association with this painter no doubt explains his compositional predilection. He is strongly influenced by Renoir, although he has never penetrated beyond Renoir's surface. His greys are always rich and sombre, and even his simplest works are as artistically opulent and lovely as the finest tapestry. Indeed his large paintings are more appropriately wall coverings than panels, ornaments rather than decorations. In them are hot sunlight and cold shadow in scintillating succession; and every object is put to genuine ornamental use. They seem to exhibit an unconscious fluency in the employment of bafflingly diverse greys which are saturated with colour and applied so as to reveal highly their attentuated purity. There are also in his work harmoniously horizontal lines and pleasing sequences of curves. In Le Jardin a line starts with the head of a man on the left, continues along his arm and leg and the sofa back, and reaches an apex in the child's head to the right of the centre, sinks by way of the head of the woman on the right to the man's arm, is then caught up again by the contour of his legs, is paralleled by the outline of the nearest standing child's dress and face and the face of the kneeling girl, is continued in the bottom of the skirt of the child seated on the sofa, and then becomes horizontal in a perfect continuation of the table's surface. The line is beautiful and studiously made, and is pointed out here for the purpose of showing the simple ordonnance often found in the lesser artists. Nor is it the only line in the canvas. There are others as harmonious and as beautiful; but what keeps the picture from being a great composition, although its forms are solid and well adapted to their spaces, is its lack of opposition or solution of warring elements. If we do not try to class Bonnard with the greatest artists, we are forced to praise him. He is unpretentious, highly gifted, has a well-developed sense of the beautiful, and is possessed of a most sensitive eye. He is neither an illustrator of nature nor of moods, but an artist who paints to obtain aesthetic expression, without the _arriere pensee_ of a theoretical method. He is one of the most purely pleasing painters of modern times.

Vuillard, a painter of interiors, owes his inspiration as much to Toulouse-Lautrec as to Gauguin. Like Bonnard he uses greys of dry and mat colour, but his harmonies are slighter and of lighter tonality than those of Bonnard. Profiting by the Impressionists' light discoveries he has done some very admirable interiors; some of his works are more modern and artistic Whistlers. His art is one in which the spotting of masses for the sake of balance supplants any attempt to produce generating lines. As with Bonnard and Roussel there is in him a striving after beautiful surfaces, _matieres_ which in themselves will tempt the amateur. In this common pursuit the Intimists show themselves to be the successors of Degas; but they are successors who, having taken to heart the teachings of more significant forerunners, represent a sturdier decadence than that of Degas. K.-X. Roussel is a feminised Poussin. He searches solely for effect, and his canvases have the singular charm of enamel. Were they smaller they would make admirable brooches and vases. He too has made tapestries, but in spirit they are less modern than the corresponding efforts of his contemporaries. His compositions embody reddish satyrs and nymphs, intense blue sky, yellow-green foliage and yellow ground. His drawing never has more than the rudimentary charm of school-room talent, while that of Vuillard is subjugated to his colour application, and that of Bonnard is instinctively deformed to the needs of line and decorative necessity.