Chapter XV: Conclusion 327 (7)

That the illustrators of this group were decadent is borne out in their subject-matter as well as in their methods. Since the earliest recorded antiquity artists have been attracted to the moving, the glittering, the brilliant; and the human occupation which embodies these three qualities most obviously is dancing. The men who are in love with life and not art and who paint and draw pictures merely to record their impressions, have always been hypnotised by the colour, the grace, the fluent movement and the rhythmic shiftings of dancers. These men, unable to analyse their emotions, have dreamed only of depicting objectively their photographic impressions of the dance. The artists who penetrated to the fundamental causes of rhythm used the dance only arbitrarily, whereas the superficial painters of the past saw in it merely the mosaic, the pattern, the arabesque. They thought that in portraying the dance literally they would arrive at its motive significance. But in this they failed. Had they done their figures in clay or stone they would have approached nearer their desire. But even this more masculine medium has, with few exceptions, resulted in failure. The dancing girls in the Grottoes of Mahavelipore were used only by those puissant masters of form as friezes or shapes to fill in and ornament a vacant space. The Tanagra figurines are a purely decorative endeavour. In Greece it was not the men of Praxiteles's calibre, but the smaller talents like the potters who used the dance in their designs. Even a man as slight as Hokusai leaves it to a Toba Sojo to make his models caper. But the feminine talent of Degas finds in the dance absolute and unordered expression; and Lautrec and Legrand, both more robust than Degas, though minor and ornamentally illustrative artists, are seduced into portraying it often.

Louis Legrand was more of the "maker" of pictures than were his two contemporaries. His nature leaned toward the heavy and boisterous Sodoma rather than toward the Latin ideal of Tiepolo. This almost Teutonic racial penchant in him explains why the bestiality of his subject-matter is so often done in the manner of Goya, with broad black and white masses, not with the suggested line and the attractive _matiere_ of his master, Degas. There is much Teutonic blood in Spain, and Goya, while being far the greater artist even in his slightest etchings, is the nearest approach to Legrand in the treatment of themes. Goya paints moral decay with disgust and genius, whereas Legrand, with his slight gropings after order of a surface variety, glories in it as in a pursuit, and paints it with a leer. The Spaniard uses it as a temperamental means. The Frenchman, whose whole talent lies in a formula of draughtsmanship, works toward its creation as an end. His shallowness is at once apparent when we compare his Maitresse or his illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe's tales with etchings like Donde Va Mama or Buen Viaje. Psychologically he is intimately related to the _fin de siecle_ movement in England; and, although a better and more healthy workman, he has a temperament singularly akin to that ineffectual Victorian academician, Walter Sickert.

In J.-L. Forain we have a man of different stamp, one who, knowing his ability for certain things, clings to them and does not attempt to thrust himself into the rank of artist. By developing his small potentialities to their highest actuality he has achieved as much as his confreres have by extraneous tricks and appearances. And there is no doubt that he comprehends art much better than they. His iconoclastic and acidulous cynicism, his ability to wrench from behind the veil of mundane hypocrisy the real motivation of an action, and his probing analysis which cannot be imposed upon by pretence, have touched on many sides of contemporary life--politics, extortion, courts, merchants, the _beau monde_, prostitution, religion, the theatre and the tawdry Bohemianism of Montparnasse. With a few straight and fluent strokes of the pencil he builds up a type of the blustering _parvenu_ Jew, the mercenary picture dealer, the childish and vain actor who is avid for praise and obsessed with his vocation. Forain calls the actor a "_M'as-tu-vu?_" and depicts him as with that phrase ever on his lips. Baudelaire Chez les Mufles is one of the world's greatest monuments to human hypocrisy. A chlorotic bourgeoise is standing in the centre of a small gathering reciting Baudelaire's verses. Around her are grouped types of self-satisfied and vicious masculinity, all pretending, like the speaker herself, to be feeling deeply the hidden spirituality of the poem. Some of the men have their heads raised high, others bowed low, for purposes of concentration. The whole picture is rough-hewn as though done with an axe in a square of clay. With the simplest means the artist gives us the impression of rugged stone and, at the same time, completion. The titles to his drawings are in the exact spirit of the pictures themselves, succinct, brutal and penetrating. Forain is the second greatest caricaturist the world has produced. He was not the artist that Daumier was, but as a serious creator of types and as a highly intelligent critic of contemporary shams, he is a master, even as Daumier was a master of a realm far above him.

Forain perfected what he set out to do, and for this praise is due him. That his ambition ran along a subpassage of aesthetic endeavour, as did that of his three confreres, he would be the first to admit. As artists these men cannot be judged either by the surface quality of their works or by their penetration into life and character. Such considerations have nothing to do with aesthetic emotion. No matter how much we may eulogise such painters--for they must be judged by their own standard rather than by a criterion set by a Rubens--our praise will never place them in the rank of plastic creators. They will ever remain in the realm of nearly perfect workmen with literary apperceptions. Toulouse-Lautrec, because of his love of formal distortion for its own sake, probably comes nearer the higher level: there is in his work a slight aesthetic element. Degas will ever remain the piece of old velvet in a frame; Louis Legrand, the illustrator of the bachelor clubs; Forain, the expositor of life's pretensions.

It is these men who have given the greatest impetus to realistic illustration in all countries. Viewed from this standpoint they were a salutary, as well as a diverting, manifestation. By burrowing down into the depths of material existence they made unimportant such poetic men as Beardsley, Rossetti and Moreau. All good illustration after them took on a deeper meaning. It ignored the mendacious surfaces of things and strove to reproduce the undercurrents which lie at the bottom of human actions and reactions. Its mere prettiness was supplanted by subcutaneous characteristics. It sought for motives rather than emotions, for causes rather than effects. It became critical where once it had been only photographic. From Degas, Lautrec, Legrand and Forain comes directly the best illustrative talent in both Europe and America. Without these four men we would not possess the best work of Max Beerbohm, Hermann Paul, Bellows, Maxime Dethomas, Roubille, Carlopez, Carl Larson, Albert Engstroem, C. D. Gibson, E. M. Ashe, Boardman Robinson, Cesare, Blumenschein and Wallace Morgan, the last of whom is unquestionably the most artistic illustrator in either America or England.

X

HENRI-MATISSE

While the bitter struggle against the narrow dictates of a retrospective and so-called classic academy was in progress, and before the older scholastic forces had finally been put to rout, the Impressionists calmly arrogated to themselves the authority of their dumbfounded predecessors. Their pictures, because more restricted and not based on the fundamentals of art, soon became as familiar and commonplace as the paintings of Gerome, Cabanel and Bouguereau, and in becoming familiar settled into the groove of a new academism as immobile and self-satisfied as the old. The Neo-Impressionists were the first to react against them, and later Gauguin and his fellow synthesists openly declared war. Cezanne at that time was little known and less understood. Living apart and alone, he was counted out of the main struggle. The decadents of the movement, Degas and his circle, continued their popularising process: their eyes were so fixedly turned inward that they saw little of what was going on about them. Gauguin, putting aside imitation of nature for interpretation, began the great movement which was to culminate in the most extreme reaction against Impressionism--Cubism. And Matisse who, arousing public interest in the new, is responsible for the popular Cezanne discussions of today, was the next man to carry on Gauguin's work of pigeon-holing Monet and his followers. But whereas the Impressionists had completely forgotten the classics, Gauguin wished to recommence the entire cycle by reverting to the forefathers of those very classics. He also had his decadent followers, but there was no one to continue his methods and inspiration. If it is difficult to perceive an analogy between him and a painter like Jacopo dei Barbari, compare the works of these men with a later drawing by Matisse. The similarity of the first two, by being contrasted with the latter, will at once become apparent. Gauguin clung close to the drawing of the primitive Christians; and the classic seed within him, though it never flowered, was never dead.

While the form in Matisse at times has all the suavity of contour of a Liombruno or a Romanelli, there is a more purely sensitive reason for it than in the well-taught decadents of the later Renaissance. In the classes of Bouguereau and Carriere at the Beaux-Arts he had seen to what an impasse a too great love of antiquity would lead. Furthermore, with his many copies in the Louvre, by command of the state, he began gradually to realise that the classics had become a fetich, and that the only salvation for a painter was to seek a different and less-known inspiration. This course was not so difficult as it had once been, for the younger men had already liberated themselves from popular mandates. The freedom of the artist was now an assured thing, and while the public still scoffed and offered suggestions, it no longer felt that a man's expression was its personal concern. To be sure, popular rage against things which appeared incomprehensible was still evident, but it was the impotent rage which sneers because it can no longer strike. The _Salon des Artistes Independants_ was in full swing, and the new artists who had ideas rather than tricks and who were intent on discovering new fields through devious experimentation, found therein a refuge where they could expose as conspicuously as could the academicians. In this healthful _Salon_ Matisse has exhibited regularly up to a few years ago, and it was here and in the _Salon d'Automne_--another exhibition which at first was animated by high ideals but which has lately fallen into the hands of cliques and picture merchants--that his fame took birth.

With Matisse's advent we behold the paradox of an artist who is in full reaction against the Impressionistic and classic doctrines and who at the same time reveals a certain composition and makes colour of paramount interest. The Matisse of exotic inspiration came from the studio of Gustave Moreau who, by his intelligent toleration of the virile enthusiasms of his pupils, facilitated the way toward complete self-expression. There are Matisse drawings extant which are impeccable from the academic standpoint--drawings in which is found all the cold "right drawing" of the school. There are paintings in the Neo-Impressionistic manner, except that they display a sensitive use of harmonious colours, which should have shown Signac and Cross the error of their rigid science. Also there are still-ives which recall Chardin, one of Matisse's great admirations; and at least one study of a head, done in Colorossi's old academy on the Rue de la Grande Chaumiere, in which a love of Cezanne's form and colour mingles with a respect for Manet's method of applying paint.

Gauguin too served as a provenance for the later colour vision of Matisse. Indeed it is as much from Gauguin as from Cezanne that he stems. The broad planes of rich tones and the decorative employment of form in the former had as great an influence in Matisse's art as did the perfect displacement of spaces in the canvases of the Provencal master. Gauguin, while still leaning to the classic, desired a fresher impetus. He therefore sought distortion in exotic inspiration; but the man who was led to distortion through a pure love of unfamiliar form and to whom Matisse owes the deciding influence toward a new body, was the Spaniard Goya. The deformed, the grotesque and the monstrous were with Goya a passion. In his Caprichos it is easily seen that he, too, was tired of the established formulas regarding the human body, and strove to vary and enrich it. By emphasising a characteristic trait, by shifting a certain form, by exaggerating a certain proportion, he sought to obtain, as did Matisse, the complete expression of what he felt to be essential in his model. The deformations in Gauguin came as a result of an outline which after the first drawing was left unchanged for the sake of its naif effect. But in Goya and Matisse the deformations are the result of a highly developed plastic sense which glories in new and unusual forms. With them the human body is treated as the means through which an idea is expressed--an idea of form, not of literature. Compare, for instance, the drawing called Deux Tahitiens, one of Gauguin's best works, with Matisse's Baigneuses, a canvas of three nudes one of which is playing with a turtle. In the former the proportions are distorted as much as in the latter, but these proportions are flat and are an end in themselves. They have no intellectual destiny. In the Matisse picture the exaggerations grow out of a desire to express more fully the form which the artist has felt to be important and characteristic. In the seated woman the torso and neck constitute a personal and original vision, and the crouching woman's back has as much solidity as the Venus Accroupie of the Louvre.

Matisse's simplified vision of form came, as did all synthetic modern art, from Ingres and Daumier through Seurat, Degas and Gauguin. That Ingres, the master of so classic a school, should have unconsciously felt the need for modifying and simplifying an object is a significant indication of the fatigue which is always produced by an adherence to a set form. In his drawings the details are omitted merely because they do not further the achievement of his own particular kind of beauty. In Daumier they are absent because they detract from the spontaneous emotion of the whole; in Degas and Manet, because they hinder the fluency of action and obscure the complete and direct image; in Seurat, because they interfere with the suavity of line itself; and in Gauguin, because they preclude that naivete of appearance he wished to obtain. In Matisse began the conscious process of making form arbitrary, of bending it to the personal requirement of expression. In Cubism form became even more abstract. In Ingres's drawings there is an entire lack of suppleness: his figures appear like a first sketch in wood for a German carving. In Gauguin this wooden look becomes a trifle more fluent; the proportions are artistically improved. And in Matisse there is no trace of the awkward or the stiff. While his form is more simplified than that of the two other painters, the simplifications come as a result of that artistic rightness of proportion which is an outgrowth of the ultimate refinement of knowledge and taste.

The trick of drawing of a Louis Legrand has no parallel in Matisse. In the work of the latter each figure or object, no matter how many times he has already drawn it, has a distinctively novel construction and presents a new vision. All familiar joints and hackneyed interpretations are absent. We have seen, for instance, the deltoids drawn in every conceivable pose of stress or calm. When one speaks of a nude we immediately visualise it with the angular shoulders, with the accustomed bulges over the upper arm which have been painted there in the same manner since the early Renaissance. In the delineation of deltoids the painter had become stagnant, accepting their conventional appearance as an external truth and recording them without thought. Matisse revolted against this fixed standard. Glance through his later nudes--and there are many of them--and every shoulder will present a different appearance; every arm will take on a novel form. We speak here of these particular muscles because they seem to obtrude themselves upon the sensitive sight more than any others. Matisse, seeking to overcome this structural monotony, made each shoulder he drew a new form, a new adventure, by expressing, not the actual bone and muscle of the clinic, but the salient meaning of that shoulder in a given _milieu_. It is this same desire to do away with the hackneyed forms of art that has driven the modern poets away from classic metres and caused them to seek a more plastic and adaptable medium in _vers libre_. Rondeaux, ballades, quatrains, octaves and the like are today as intrinsically perfect forms as they ever were, but the significance of their beauty has been lost through overuse, through too great familiarity. Our minds pass over them as over well-learned lessons committed to memory.

It is thus Matisse felt about the classic forms of his predecessors. These forms had once been beautiful; intrinsically they were still beautiful; but they had been habitualised by constant repetition; and new ones were needed. In order to find them Matisse says that, when before a model, he tried to forget that he had even seen a nude before and to look upon it with the eyes of one who had never seen a picture. By this he does not mean that his vision was naive, but that it was innocent of set rules and preconceived ideas of how form should be obtained. As a theory this attitude proved fruitful because, while he did not succeed in setting aside memory, he was nevertheless led to a conscious thrusting aside of his first impulses to depict form as he saw it. All painters, even the greater artists of the past, had copied form as it presents itself to the eye, but Matisse forced himself, through painstaking analysis, to express form in a totally novel manner; and to a certain extent he succeeded. One might well ask why, in modifying the human body, he did not, for instance, omit a leg or a head, thus making his expression at once purer and more abstract. The answer is that he realised that the spectator, after the first shock at seeing the unexpected form and the consequent mental readjustment to the new vision, would nevertheless recognise the picture as a depiction of the human figure. Therefore a complete recognisability must be maintained. If the artist omitted an eye or a mouth, for example, the spectator would experience physically the incompleteness of the vision. He would feel, through personal association, the blindness or the suffocation as suggested in the picture; and these shocks, being secondary physiological sensations, would detract from the _aesthetic_ pleasure provoked by the work. The point is an important one, for it demonstrates the impossibility of appreciating art purely as abstract form so long as recognisable objects are presented. As modern painting progressed the illustrative gradually became relegated.

Much impetus for his abbreviations and accentuations of form came to him with his personal discovery of the wood carvings of the African negroes, the sculpture of natives of Polynesia and Java and of the Peruvian and Mexican Indians. During the last five years we have heard much of these unknown artists and of their superlative ability for organisation and rhythm. But they have been a little too quickly and enthusiastically accepted as criteria at the expense of those greater artists, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the East Indians and the Chinese. Matisse found in them an inspiration toward synthesis and also a substantiation for his own desire to emphasise salient characteristics. They influenced his motives in depicting only what was personally important and in doing away with unnecessary details. After him there came a horde of imitators who saw in negro sculpture the quintessence of artistic expression, who looked upon it as a finality of organisation and rhythmic composing. Such judgment, however, contains more of enthusiasm than of critical acumen. Negro sculpture has an interest for us only in so far as it is novel and untutored. Its organisation is of the most primitive kind, symmetrical rather than rhythmic, architectonic rather than plastic. It is the work of slightly synthetic artists who were without models and whose visions encompassed only certain traits of form which, when expressed, became not composed but balanced, not imitative but abstract. The abstractness of negro sculpture, its bending of all human forms to an ornament, its archaic rigidity which is the antithesis of fluent movement--these are the qualities which have so gripped the imaginations of minor modern artists. In reality the negro sculptors did not seek these qualities consciously. Their lack of realistic observation was due to their partial isolation from exterior influences such as the Greeks and Egyptians, and to their desire to make an ornament of all images.

It was the Persians, however, who influenced Matisse more than did negro sculpture. He found in these artists a practical lesson in the application of his beliefs--a lesson which substantiated the tonic division and formal improvisation of Goya and the decorative colour application of Gauguin. Besides he learned from them a more direct method of image making, a method which was at once more delicate and more femininely sensitive. After seeing the pictures done by Matisse in Algiers, and such paintings as La Glace sans Tain, and after looking at the vistas through the open doors and windows in some of his large interiors, one realises at once the great influence these exquisitely delicate painters of ancient Persia had on him. The decorative illustrations of the Mille et Une Nuits, published in Paris by Fasquelle, are so similar to some of his pictures that one is inclined to believe he studied this book before painting them. His superiority lies in his liner comprehension of the human form and in the great diversity he exhibited in the repetition of its component parts. Persia, like other nations, had an academy, and while its yield was more charming and less given to complex reproductions, it had no more aesthetic importance than have the art schools of our own day. But unlike ours it had not forgotten the necessity of formal distribution in the making of artistic arrangements. This distribution in its flat sense Matisse appropriated to his own ends, and by applying to it freer modern means, made his art more aesthetically significant than that of the Persians.

His modern means were the outgrowth of his understanding of colour in its capacity to incite emotion. His first essays in this field were greyish. Later, through divisionistic methods, they grew brighter; and finally his colour became pure and was applied in large planes. His works of this period shine as a source of light, and with his development of exaggerated forms his colour interpretations also become exaggerated. Where he saw a green in a shadow he painted it a pure green; where he saw a yellow in light he made it a pure yellow; and so on with the other colours. But in these interpretations there is more than a mere desire to record hastily an optical vision. Each colour is pondered at length in its relation to the others. It is changed a score of times, modified and adjusted; and when it is finally posed it is artistically "right." In other words, it fills harmoniously an important part in a picture where understanding and taste are the creators. In the work of Matisse _sensibilite_ plays the all-important role, and while his results are satisfying as far as they go, there are times when we could wish for a greater rhythmic sense, a more conscious knowledge of the profundities of composition, and a less dominating desire to free each form and line from classic dictates.

With his colour we can find no such fault. Though here his knowledge, like that of all other artists before him, is limited, the perfect harmony between tints, which in him reaches a more advanced stage than in any preceding artist, is the result of a highly sensitive eye and an impeccable taste. The beauty of his colour alone makes him of paramount importance. Every one of his canvases is a complete colour gamut created by taste and authenticated by science not only as to pure colour but also as to greys and tone. In his still-lives he chooses objects alone for their colour and form, and his sense of proportion is so developed and his reduction of line is carried to so final an economy that, as flat as these objects are, they seem to have a rich consistency and to extend themselves into visual depth. As in the case of all men who deviate from the narrow and well-worn path of monotonous tonality, Matisse is accused of dealing in raucous and blatant colours which set the head aching and the eyes smarting. But the accusation is true only of his followers who display little sensitivity and even less artistry, and who, in imitating the superficial aspects of his work, see only grotesque distortions and pure colour. Matisse once had a school where he endeavoured to develop the native talents of the Americans, Poles, Russians and Germans; but when a Bohemian woman, in reply to his question as to what she wished to do, answered, "_Je veux faire le 'neuf'_," he abandoned the enterprise and retired to Clamart. She unwittingly summed up the desire of those meagre painters who, on seeing something novel, immediately throw themselves into imitating it. Matisse's followers approach his colour gamut, but they never bridge that lacuna which separates a precise art from one which is _a peu pres_. It is the last delicate refinement of perfect harmony which Matisse possesses and which his imitators can not attain to, which places him in the rank of greatness.

Matisse is called the _Chef des Fauves_, and his art has been catalogued and labeled, turned into a "school" and has come to be known in many quarters as Post-Impressionism, although that title, as well as the one of Fauvism, was originally intended to designate all the art movements after Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism and included such widely dissimilar men as Cezanne, Van Gogh, Picasso, Kandinsky, Matisse and Friesz. It stood for the new vitality in art, for the contemporary animating spirit, and implied an epoch rather than a movement. It was not sufficiently specific, however; and while modern art in the main is a homogeneous development of new means, its forces are too diverse and its evolution too complex to permit of its being described by a blanket term. It was therefore natural that in an endeavour to understand the underlying forces of modern painting a process of critical differentiation should have been instituted. But labels are offensive and impertinent when attached to serious aesthetic endeavours, and are apt to lead to misunderstanding and errors of judgment. The canvases themselves must be the final test of a movement's enduring vitality. Matisse is himself the whole impetus of the movement he represents. With the one exception of Cezanne, he is more remote from his followers than any other modern leader. He repeats himself so little that his disciples cannot make a fetich of his canons. Indeed, he does not work by rote or law, except in so far as there is a law governing his personal impressions and predilections.

Although Matisse's greatest impetus to modern art, after his carrying form nearer to an abstract conception, is the harmonising of colour, his finest canvases are those in which the form predominates, as for instance the Jeu de Balles, La Musique--Esquisse, La Musique (_panneau decoratif_) and Baigneuses. In these pictures, however, there is an entire absence of rhythm in the Renoir sense, but they possess a perfect disposition of forms to fill a given space, a harmony of subject with its frame, a dazzling succession of uncommon and beautifully proportioned spaces and an amazing feeling for two-dimensioned form. Where with Matisse the distinct _parti pris_ of reverting to a primitive inspiration was excusable, such an attitude was worse than folly for those who came after him. With him it was a manifestation of the disgust of an impatient and experimental mind for stereotyped expression: with his followers it was only an imitation of his motives, and hence it was decadent. If Matisse partially understood Giotto and Michelangelo, the understanding contributed little to his art. His greatest claim to consideration is that he gave painting its final impulse toward abstraction. But his canvases, while being aesthetically just, are not aesthetically satisfying, because in composition he never penetrated further than the surface. And even on the surface he did not attain to a greater fluency than that permitted by parallelisms and simple oppositions, although there has never been an artist who more perfectly adapted his expression to the shape and size of his canvas.

That all great artists worked like him from the standpoint of creating recognisable form by abstract thought, does not detract from his fine destiny. Where other artists failed to drag art from the quicksands of literary instantaneity, Matisse succeeded. His evolution was direct and logical, as a close study of his work will show; and those who see in him an _arriviste_ may with equal justice bring the same charge against Michelangelo. His aesthetic sources and admirations, of which so much has been written, are important in understanding the genealogical foundations of art, but they are of little moment in the actual enjoyment of his pictures. Looking impartially at his classic influences on the one hand and his Persian and negro influences on the other, it is difficult to see just where the benefits of the latter lie. Matisse merely shifted his inspiration from the greatest masters of form to the slighter masters--from a well-known and great antiquity to a little-known and less significant one. However, if negro sculpture can help produce a man like Picasso, and the Persian stuffs and enamels one like Matisse, they serve after all a high purpose.

XI

PICASSO AND CUBISM

Cubism first and foremost is an attempt to make art more arbitrary in its selection of compositional forms. In all ancient painting only the human figure was used as a basis for organisation. Later landscape widened the scope of the painter's material possibilities; but even the introduction of this new element merely extended the boundary of subject-matter. The essence of art remained the same. Landscape permitted new forms to be interwoven with the old ones, without making the old more plastic. The elasticising process was what the painter had always desiderated, but his literalness was such that he never went beyond primary distortions of the human body--distortions so small that they were almost unnoticeable. With the Greeks and Chinese these deformations were practised in order to beautify the body's relative proportions; with the East Indians and Michelangelo, to accentuate the emotion of forceful movement; with Renoir, to express form fully in its relation to the generating line of each picture; and with Matisse the distortions were the result, first, of a reaction against a hackneyed classic system, and later, of a desire to divorce aesthetic pleasure from mental association, in other words, to make form abstract rather than personal. In him there is no rhythmic composition, and while, as in the case of Renoir, his pictures are great as ensembles, each part of them is a separate item which does not depend, for appreciation, on its rapport to the whole. His is an art of colour, of sensitive and inspiring form in two dimensions--a decorative art of a high order. As such it is at once a derivation of Impressionism and a development of Impressionistic colour through the channels of taste.

Cubism is a far more arbitrary art than Matisse's. In its extreme expression it depends, not so much on the artist's adroitness at interpreting nature, as on his ability to express pure aesthetic emotion in its relation to form--form being used here in its extended sense to connote the solidity of the entire picture and the block relation of each part to the other parts. Composition prior to the Cubists had been the rhythmic organisation of a picture's integral parts by line, volume, chiaroscuro and colour. A totally unrelated set of objective figures or forms was drawn together into an ensemble by these abstract aesthetic means. Cubism retained the older methods of form and conception, and added to them the illustrative device of disorganising and rearranging objectivity so that the separated parts would intersect, overlap and partly obscure the image. Thus was presented a picture replete with all aspects of the model, that is, a picture in which the expression presented not only the vision of reality as it discloses itself to our eyes, but the vision which delivers itself to our intelligences, with its actions and reactions, its many and changing miens, its linear and voluminous struggles, its solidity and its transparency. In Cubism the details of this ubiquitous and omnifarious vision are subjugated to arbitrary order and expressed in tones of warm and cold.

At the outset Cubism was a Dionysian reaction against the flowing and soft decoration of the schools of Bouguereau and the Impressionists. The precise and masculine minds of a new cycle could not rest satisfied with the single melody of their immediate predecessors. Courbet, the Cubists' prototype on the side of painting which dealt entirely with objectivity, reacted against corresponding feminine tendencies in the schools of David and Ingres; and the decisive blow he struck in 1850 with his L'Enterrement a Ornans had a psychological parallel in the Cubists' exhibit in 1911. While Manet seemed to continue Courbet he in reality retrogressed to a classic prettiness. His achievements may be compared to those of the Orphists who, while seeming to carry on the principles of Cubism, nullified the effect of that school by the misapplication of colour. Cubism itself ignored colour and curved lines. It was a further step toward a more intellectual type of painting. The modern artist's mind, in becoming more self-conscious, was consequently growing more precise in its expression. And since the Cubists were the primitives of a new era, it was natural that this precision should express itself in straight lines and angular forms. The inconsistency of these artists lay in the fact that, while their first desire was to make their art arbitrary, they were so preoccupied with the dynamism of objectivity that the main object of their work was deputised. In the canvases of Picasso's followers naturalism is the first consideration. As a result the organisation of emotion-impelling form is obscured. It was from Cezanne that the Cubists garnered the greater part of their theories, and even the appearance of their work is not unlike his. Cezanne realised that a mere imitation of reality, no matter how interesting, could never set in motion the wheels of aesthetic ecstasy; and so he translated nature into a subjective impression of reality by expressing it in a complete order which was itself dynamic. The Cubists, profiting by his discoveries of linear and tonal modification, essayed to found a school on certain of his better-known and more easily grasped practices. The spirit of precision, the need for a renovation, and the example of Picasso who at one period copied the angularities of negro sculpture--all gave momentum to the movement. Later were introduced the philosophical reasonings and scientific explanations of which there has recently been so much discussion.

The total absence of colour in the Cubists is ascribable to the same revolt against prettiness and ambiguity that made them alter their line and form. They felt the subjective solidity of Cezanne without understanding that it was brought about by the use of colour whose emotional possibilities he had profoundly penetrated. In fact his art was composed entirely of minute chromatic planes which, by their complete adaptability to a given position in space, produced the intensest form. The Cubists' planes are based, not on colour, but on objective form itself, and are expressed by tone. In this respect Cubism is diametrically opposed to the conception of Cezanne. With him form was a result of the plastic employment of colour. With the Cubists even tone is subjugated to formal planes. In them we do not experience the subjectivity of emotion which can be produced alone by colour. Their pictures represent a recognisable solidity which, by an image, expresses subjective processes. Cezanne's simultaneous vision of reality had to do purely with the most mobile element of art; the Cubists attempted to express psychological phenomena by the limited methods of the early primitives. Their inability to sound (not in theory but actually) the possibilities of colour in the creation of aesthetic form, has caused them to diverge from the direct path in the development of means, and has restricted permanently their initial desire for concentrated composition. The Impressionists experimented in a highly dynamic element; but the Cubists have only dabbled in mental processes which, even should they become perfected, could give us only the sequential vision of a human action. The Cubist doctrine embraces no more than a side issue in an art which primarily has to do with the organisation of form. In the effort of the Cubists to create a pure art they merely disguise objectivity by abstract thought. This is by no means the same as creating abstract form--that is, form which is not reminiscent of a particular natural object; and by failing in this they let pass the great opportunity of taking the final step from Matisse to purity. They took only a half step, for in their exultation they forgot the preceding advances in composition.

In such forgetfulness there was nothing unusual. Every new movement in the progress of art has about it a certain isolation of ambition. The first innovators push out the boundary on one side; their followers, on another; and the final exponents of a method, having fully assimilated what has preceded them, combine the endeavours and accomplishments of their forerunners and go forward to new achievements. Cezanne had recognised that he could never round out his own cycle. No stricture can attach to his incompleteness: his life was too short for realisation. That the Cubists did not altogether achieve their desire does not detract from the importance of their departure from established precedent. Their reaction was a salutary event in the evolution of modern painting. The field of art was being overrun by the decadents of Impressionism and Cezanne, by the imitators of Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas, by those academicians who follow in the wake of every movement long after its methods have been accepted as vital. These scholastic men were incorporating spots and bright colours into their school-room drawings when Cubism came forward. By its unequivocal expression of opinions and by its neat delimitations of planes it has revealed the futility and pettiness of academic alterations. Besides their purely psychological innovations the Cubists have achieved all the ambitions of the academies in a way so net, so sure, so precise, that they have reduced the school, if not to silence, at least to ineffectualness. No longer can the admirers of scholastic art stand before a canvas exclaiming on the feeling, the atmosphere or the spirituality of the work. One must now use concrete terms and speak of those qualities which have to do with profound order; for although the theories of Cubism state one thing, the application of them has taken another and definite aesthetic form. In the Cubists' work lies their greatest importance. We may without loss lay aside their explanations, their manifestos and the reports of their lectures.

The idea of synthesis in painting had been so thoroughly assimilated through familiarity with successive movements that, with the advent of Cubism, it was an accepted and unquestioned law of painting. Synthesis had in fact become an almost unconscious knowledge. Ingres, Daumier, Manet, Seurat and Matisse had, in quick succession, proclaimed its value in eliminating the unimportant and unessential from models. With Cubism, as with Matisse and Gauguin, synthesis was the supreme ambition--synthesis which had for its goal the artistic consistency of all the picture's qualities. Subject-matter, colour and the method of expression were all harmonised in Gauguin: with him the synthesis was illustrative. In Matisse it manifested itself in the reduction of form and colour to their simplest and most personal expression, and was therefore a step toward a pure art. With Picasso synthesis went still further. It became almost basic. We know that the curved line stands for life, colour and movement; that the straight line represents the dead, the sombre and the static. A solid dark is conducive to peace, while quickly succeeding light and dark promote liveliness. Bearing these fundamental postulates in mind we can easily analyse Picasso's quality of synthesis. The straight line which predominates in Cubism repudiates colour:--the Cubists were not colourists. The curved line, when profoundly comprehended, expresses movement and fluidity; when used haphazardly mere prettiness results. There are seldom any curves in Cubism, and then only for relieving the monotony, for the sake of ornament. In the Cubists' scintillating succession of darks and lights, like a photographic negative of a Cezanne or an early Renoir, there is an unescapable feminine prettiness in which the twinkling of tone serves the same purpose as pretty colour. By their straight lines, subfuse tones and rigid forms, on the one hand, they achieve immobility. By their lights and darks, their curves and their dependence on nature, on the other hand, they reveal their emotional kinship to the illustrative schools of Whistler, Fragonard and Tiepolo. Now when we combine properly these two widely separated aspects of art--the one almost Egyptian and the other almost English--we obtain a combination of temperamental characteristics capable of the greatest achievements, for we have brought about the coalition of the purely masculine and the purely feminine. In Cubism, however, these two aspects are mingled disproportionately. The static predominates. The pretty is merely superimposed because of temperamental dictation: instead of functioning, it only attracts. But though in Cubism we do not find the perfect fusion of these creative sex impulses, the simultaneous presence of the two elements produces nevertheless a fundamental synthesis.

In order to bring about the greatest art, the form and order (which constitute the masculine side) must be all-pervading. Objective ornament and external beauty (which constitute the feminine side) must be only the inspiration to creation. This is an important principle, for all art, like all life, falls into either the masculine or the feminine category. All personal preferences for certain forms of art are imputable to the predomination of the male or the female in the individual. Necessarily all creation is to a certain extent masculine--in it there has to be order; and by the predomination of the male or female is meant simply the accentuation of one of these qualities in their relative combination in each of the sexes. For instance, should the feminine "predominate" in a man, the fact would merely indicate that the percentage of femininity in his bisexuality had over-balanced the normal ratio. Decoration, which is an ornamental art, is feminine, and it will appeal to men who have a subnormal amount of the creator in them. The colossally ordered art of a Rubens will be understood and enjoyed only by one highly capable of creation, for in the contemplation and comprehension of a profound work of art the spectator reconstructs the artist's mind after his own formula, and thus recreates the work for himself. That side of art which is the recording of some emotion the artist has experienced so intensely that it demands concrete expression, is feminine. It is merely an overflow of receptivity into objectivity. To the contrary, when great art is produced it is not dependent on a specific exterior impulse. It grows abstractly out of a collection of assimilated impressions. When the will dominates the expression, these impressions must take plastic form. The desire to create is in itself feminine. The constructive ability is masculine. The first desire always is to decorate and beautify, but the masculine will dictates and rules the expression. In feminine art the will to co-ordinate is absent. Consequently the expression is only the direct result of the reception. The Cubists realise that the will must play a large part in painting, but they exert their will on the analysis of thought rather than on their actual productions. The result is that, while their expression is highly restrained and reasoned, the will is exercised only on the emotion of the received impression, and is not manifested on their canvases' surface. In all their work they are decorators first and significant artists afterward. They belong distinctly to the lighter side of artistic tradition. They are the lyric poets of the plastic.

This is markedly true of Picasso who instigated the movement. When he first came to Paris he threw himself into a style of painting which recalled Steinlen at his best. From Steinlen he went to Toulouse-Lautrec and Impressionistic colour. Next he did carefully drawn portraits which proclaimed him a greater Gauguin. Later he become infatuated with the rhythm and skeleton-like creations of El Greco. It was at this period that he began to do his significant work. His pictures for the most part were painted in blue. They were sensitive to a high degree, and were, in the sculptural sense, sometimes ordered into a solid block form. Then, adopting a reddish colour gamut, he began to create full figures of nudes, portraits and animal studies. At this time he commenced his research in precise form. He organised copies of negro sculpture of which he had heard much from Matisse, and it was a result of his studying these rigid figures that angularities began to creep into his art. Other artists set to work along the same lines, and from the friction of ideas which followed the theory of Cubism was evolved. Picasso's still-lives then became more precise, more hard-cut, more personal, more completely ordered. It is from this period we receive some of his greatest work.

Shortly after came the Cubist theory of simultaneity. The authorship of this theory is in doubt. There has been much controversy as to whether it originated with Picasso or with one of his followers. But it was straightway adopted by the entire group and made one of the dominating principles of the movement. Simultaneity to these painters meant the combined presentation of a number of aspects of the same object from many different angles. In the visualisation of an object in nature during the absence of that object, we conceive it, not only as a silhouette or as a form with three dimensions, but as a congeries of silhouettes which, when imagined simultaneously, constitute the appearance of the object from every known angle. In short, our minds envelop it and all its attributes at the same instant. Such a vision is the result of collected and concentrated memory. In a desire to disarm criticism the Cubists offered as a theory the picturisation of this multilateral vision; but in reality it was little more than an excuse to make the utilisation of natural forms more arbitrary than in the case of Matisse, Cezanne and Gauguin and also to rid themselves entirely of the illustrative obstacle. Their ingrained weakness lay in that they did not possess sufficient genius to alienate themselves entirely from document and to create new abstract compositions. Nor did their instinct permit them to throw document aside when they sensed their inability to replace it with something more vital. Their spirit of revolution worked on the form which illustration would take, rather than on the discontinuance of illustration. But even in this attitude they marked a decided progress, for while in the paintings of their predecessors the disposition of line and form had made a unity of many separated figures, these figures, even to a mind unusually free from the taint of anecdote and objectivity in art, presented themselves separately as integers of a whole. The Cubists, by breaking up a model into parts which separately bore little resemblance to nature, proved that they not only recognised the demands of pure organisation but that they knew those demands could never be met so long as there were recognisable objects in a painting.

The presentation of a nude or a landscape from many different viewpoints was in itself no more important than the methods of the Impressionists. Indeed the pleasure derived from so constructing a picture is similar to the pleasure derived from copying light. It represents the nearest approach of the enthusiastic painter of form to the enthusiastic painter of light. They are both interested in recording a rather puzzling and interesting phenomenon: the one is after that which creates the impressions of form; the other, that which creates the impressions of colour. Both, in the broad sense, derive the same enjoyment in deciphering the work after it is finished. The one records only broad waves of scintillating colours with no demarcation of silhouettes; and these colours gradually resolve themselves into a sunny and ambiguous landscape. The other makes a number of broad planes of brown and white which, when diligently studied in their parts, become the angular representation of water, ships, sky-lines which run into and through houses, trees which obscure near-by objects, and houses which melt into distant skies. Both schools of painting are impressionistic; each treats of exactly what the other neglects. No artist as yet has seen the distinct advantage of uniting the two methods. Cezanne might be suggested as having approached this alliance, but his means were too profound for him to be led into portraying by concrete symbols his impressions of a model.

In painting the enveloping mental vision of a model, however, the Cubists actually failed in the synchronism for which they strove. In reality they extended the effect of their pictures into time more than ever before. To grasp their illustrative import, long and arduous search must be made. While their canvases present a simultaneous vision, each picture as a whole is incapable of creating a unified impression. A Cubist painting is, let us say, like the momentary blare of a hundred musical instruments all of which play consecutive bars. By approaching each performer in order and studying his particular notes, until every musical detail is learned, we might intellectually construct from our memory an impression of a related musical composition. But should the blare be repeated, even after our research, the music's meaning would be no clearer than before. On the other hand, if, having first heard the composition in its natural development, we had studied its parts and motifs and then heard it repeated sequentially, a greater enjoyment and comprehension would result. In breaking up nature, either for the sake of extending the aesthetic appreciation into time like music, or for simultaneity of presentation, all the parts must answer to an organisation;--in the first case, so that, after the spectator's first fleeting vision of the whole, his eye will be carried from one part to another by the rhythmic balance of volume, linear opposition and harmony of colour; and in the second case, so that the canvas will be an interdependent block-manifestation.