Chapter XXXIII: The New Idealism in France and Germany (2)

Marées was born in Elberfeld in 1837. In beginning his studies he had first betaken himself to Berlin, and then went for eight years to Munich, where he paid his tribute to the historical tendency by a "Death of Schill." But in 1864 he migrated to Rome, where he secluded himself with a few pupils, and passed his time in working and teaching. Only once did he receive an order. He was entrusted in 1873 with the execution of some mural paintings in the library of the Zoological Museum in Naples, and lamented afterwards that he had not received the commission in riper years. When he had sufficient confidence in himself to execute such tasks he had no similar opportunity, and thus he lost the capacity for the rapid completion of a work. He began to doubt his own powers, sent no more pictures to any exhibition, and when he died in the summer of 1887, at the age of fifty, his funeral was that of a man almost unknown. It was only when his best works were brought together at the annual exhibition of 1891 at Munich that he became known in wider circles, and these pictures, now preserved in the Castle of Schleissheim, will show to future years who Hans von Marées was, and what he aimed at.

"An artist rarely confines himself to what he has the power of doing," said Goethe once to Eckermann; "most artists want to do more than they can, and are only too ready to go beyond the limits which nature has set to their talent." Setting out from this tenet, there would be little cause for rescuing Marées from oblivion. Some portraits and a few drawings are his only performances which satisfy the demands of the studio--the portraits being large in conception and fine in taste, the drawings sketched with a swifter and surer hand. His large works have neither in drawing nor colour any one of those advantages which are expected in a good picture; they are sometimes incomplete, sometimes tortured, and sometimes positively childish. "He is ambitious, but he achieves nothing," was the verdict passed upon him in Rome. Upon principle Marées was an opponent of all painting from the model. He scoffed at those who would only reproduce existing fact, and thus, in a certain sense, reduplicate nature, according to Goethe's saying: "If I paint my mistress's pug true to nature, I have two pugs, but never a work of art." For this reason he never used models for the purpose of detailed pictorial studies; and just as little was he at pains to fix situations in his mind by pencil sketches to serve as notes; for, according to his view, the direct use of motives, as they are called, is only a hindrance to free artistic creation. And, of course, creation of this kind is only possible to a man who can always command a rich store of vivid memories of what he has seen and studied and profoundly grasped in earlier days. This treasury of artistic forms was not large enough in Marées. If one buries oneself in Marées' works--and there are some of them in which the trace of great genius has altogether vanished beneath the unsteady hand of a restless brooder--it seems as if there thrilled within them the cry of a human heart. Sometimes through his method of painting them over and over again he produced spectral beings with grimacing faces. Their bodies have been so painted and repainted that whole layers of colour lie upon separate parts, and ruin the impression in a ghastly fashion. Only too often his high purpose was wrecked by the inadequacy of his technical ability; and his poetic dream of beauty almost always evaporated because his hand was too weak to give it shape.

If his pictures, in spite of all this, made a great effect in the Munich exhibition, it was because they formulated a principle. It was felt that notes had been touched of which the echo would be long in dying. When Marées appeared there was no "grand painting" for painting's sake in Germany, but mural decoration after the fashion of the historical picture--works in which the aim of decorative art was completely misunderstood, since they merely gave a rendering of arid and instructive stories, where they should have simply aimed at expressing "a mood." Like his contemporary Puvis de Chavannes in France, Marées restored to this "grand painting" the principle of its life, its joyous impulse, and did so not by painting anecdote, but because he aimed at nothing but pictorial decorative effect. A sumptuous festal impression might be gained from his pictures; it was as though beautiful and subdued music filled the air; they made the appeal of quiet hymns to the beauty of nature, and were, at the same time, grave and monumental in effect.

In one, St. Martin rides through a desolate wintry landscape upon a slow-trotting nag, and holds his outspread mantle towards the half-naked beggar, shivering with the cold. In another, St. Hubert has alighted from his horse, and kneels in adoration before the cross which he sees between the antlers of the stag. In another, St. George, upon a powerful rearing horse, thrusts his lance through the body of the dragon with solemn and earnest mien. But as a rule even the relationship with antique, mythological, and mediæval legendary ideas is wanting in his art. Landscapes which seem to have been studied in another world he peoples with beings who pass their lives lost in contemplation of the divine. Women and children, men and grey-beards live, and love, and labour as though in an age that knows nothing of the stroke of the clock, and which might be yesterday or a hundred thousand years ago. They repose upon the luxuriant sward shadowed by apple-trees laden with fruit, abandoning themselves to a thousand reveries and meditations. They do not pose, and they aim at being nothing except children of nature, nature in her innocence and simplicity. Nude women stand motionless under the trees, or youths are seen reflected in the pools. The motive of gathering oranges is several times repeated: a youth snatches at the fruit, an old man bends to pick up those which have dropped, and a child searches for those which have rolled away in the grass. Sometimes the steed, the Homeric comrade of man, is introduced: the nude youth rides his steed in the training-school, or the commander of an army gallops upon his splendid warhorse. Everything that Marées painted belongs to the golden age. And when it was borne in mind that these pictures had been produced twenty years back or more, they came to have the significance of works that opened out a new path; there was poetry in the place of didactic formula; in the place of historical anecdote the joy of plastic beauty; in the place of theatrical vehemence an absence of gesticulation and a perfect simplicity of line. At a time when others rendered dramas and historical episodes by colours and gestures, Marées composed idylls. He came as a man of great and austere talent, Virgilian in his sense of infinite repose on the breast of nature, monastic in his abnegation of petty superficial allurements, despite special attempts which he made at chromatic effect. Something dreamy and architectonic, lofty and yet familiar, intimate in feeling and yet monumental holds sway in his works. Intimacy of effect he achieved by the stress he laid upon landscape; monumental dignity by his grandiose and earnest art, and his calm and sense of style in line. All abrupt turns and movements were avoided in his work. And he displayed a refinement entirely peculiar to himself through the manner in which he brought into accord the leading lines of landscape and the leading lines in his figures. A feeling for style, in the sense in which it was understood by the old painters, is everywhere dominant in his work, and a handling of line and composition in the grand manner which placed him upon a level with the masters of art. A new and simple beauty was revealed. And if it is true that it is only in the field of plastic art that he has had, up to the present, any pupil of importance--and he had one in Adolf Hildebrandt--it is, nevertheless, beyond question that the monumental painting of the future is alone capable of being developed upon the ground prepared by Marées.

BOECKLIN. FLORA.]

In this more than anything, it seems to me, lies the significance of all these masters. We must not lay too much stress upon the fact that they dealt with ideal and universal themes; a healthy art cannot be nourished on bloodless ideals, but only on the living essence of its own epoch. We must bear in mind, however, that a sound artistic principle has been formulated. A glance at the productions of classic art shows us that the old masters carefully considered the relation of a picture to its environment. Take, for instance, the Ravenna mosaics or Giotto's frescoes. They must needs resound in solemn harmony the whole church through; looked at from any point of view they must make their presence felt right away in the farthest distance: so both Giotto and the mosaic artists worked only in broad expressive lines, their forcible colour-schemes were fitted together in accordance with strict decorative laws. All naturalistic effects are avoided, all petty detail is left out in the flow of the drapery as well as in the structure of the landscape. Then the clear outlines tell out. The pictures must, when viewed from a distance, simultaneously, in all their lines, carry on the lines of the building.

BOECKLIN. IN THE TROUGH OF THE WAVES.]

Later on, in the Netherlands, there arose another style of painting. In abrupt contrast to the monumental works of the Italian school we have Jan van Eyck's tiny little pictures painted with a fine point, stroke by stroke, with the most minute exactitude. Every hair in the head, every vein in the hands, every ornament in the costume is drawn true to life. Jan van Eyck knew what he was about with this fine-point style of art, for his pictures did not lay claim to any effect from a distance; they were meant to be looked at, like miniatures in the prayer-books, from the closest point of view possible. They were little domestic altar-pieces: when anyone wanted to look at them, he drew the curtain aside and knelt or stood just in front of them. The style of painting of the later Dutch cabinet pictures is accounted for in the same way. These paintings were generally placed on an easel, as if to give the spectator a gentle hint, "If you wish to fully appreciate the beauties of this little picture, please stand right in front." Even when the pictures were meant to adorn the walls, the minute and dainty style of a Don or a Mieris was appropriate, for the narrowness of the old Dutch rooms precluded all possibility of the spectator's being able to stand far away from the picture.

BOECKLIN. THE SHEPHERD'S PLAINT.]

If by chance one of these Dutch artists, Weenix for instance, had to do work for a Flemish palace, he changed his style forthwith. He recognised the fact that a picture, to be effective in a large state-room, must differ not only in size, but in composition and style of painting from one that is meant for a small parlour. It is undoubtedly this lack of appreciation of the fact that a picture must be suitable to its surroundings that has robbed the nineteenth century of any claim to style. What abominable daubs mural painters have foisted upon us in our public buildings! The literary trend of the time drew away people's attention from the beauty of form and colour, and centred it upon the didactic value of the works. Instead of starting from the idea that a picture should "adorn," they covered the walls with historical genre painting, never troubling themselves about decorative effect, and offered the beholder instructive stories in picture cards. As to art in the home, well, we can all of us remember the time when small photographs and etchings, instead of being kept in an album or a portfolio, were put on the wall, where they looked like mere spots of dead black and white. It was the same sort of thing in galleries and exhibitions, confusion worse confounded. On one and the same wall you got the most heterogeneous collection, cabinet pictures by Brouwer or Ostade next to an enormous altar-piece by Rubens, a gigantic Delacroix flanked by neat little Meissoniers. In this way the power of appreciating the significance of a work of art as part of the decoration of a room was totally lost. Surely it is not to be wondered at that a picture seen close to in an exhibition, bought, taken home, hung on the wall and looked at from a distance, turns out a meaningless chaos of dirty-brown.

BOECKLIN. AN IDYLL OF THE SEA.]

In the province of mural painting the tendency towards an improvement set in earliest. In England, France, and Germany, almost simultaneously efforts began to be made with the object of restoring to mural painting once more its decorative element. In England Burne-Jones was the first to pay attention to harmony of style between picture and building. Before his time English churches were provided with stained-glass windows in a spurious sort of Cinquecento style that was absolutely unsuited to the building, but Burne-Jones satisfied the most exacting demands of the English Neo-Gothic architecture. All his subjects are brought into style with the slender pillars, the curves of the landscape as well as of the figures harmonise with the pointed arches of the building. Everything, colour as well as line, is so simplified that the pictures retain the clearness of their composition when seen from the farthest possible standpoint. In France, Puvis de Chavannes travelled by another road to the same goal. The decoration of the Pantheon was placed in his hands. Before him many artists had done work there, but the policy of all of them had been to adopt the old style of oil-painting to mural decoration, and so they adorned the Pantheon as well, though it was called a Grecian temple, with oil-paintings founded on Raphael or Caravaggio, mural pictures that would have been far better suited to a church of the Cinquecento or the _baroque_ period. Puvis was the first to realise that in the decoration of a building the artist must be strictly controlled by the style of the architecture; so in his frescoes he avoided all projections, all roundness, all wavy lines, bends, and curves, and dealt exclusively with groups of vertical and horizontal lines, that followed the characteristic lines of pillar and architrave. Similarly in the colours as well as the lines he excluded all detail that would distract the attention, all confusion of colours that would disturb the eye, and thereby gave his works the stately and dominant effect that they produce. Had Fate been kind, poor Hans von Marées might have won the same significance for Germany as Puvis did for France. Though individually his works are faulty, they are all informed with a marvellous feeling for style; one observes how beautifully the lines of the landscape are made to harmonise with the lines of the figures, and with what a finely decorative quality the colours are combined.

BOECKLIN. VITA SOMNIUM BREVE.]

In a similar manner we must bring our minds to bear upon the problem of the framed picture in connection with the decoration of a room. Our rooms are not only lighter but more spacious than the old-fashioned Dutch parlours, with their leaded panes; so it was merely a hereditary taint in our painters that made them cling so long to the ancestral style of painting, in spite of the altered conditions of the lighting and size of modern rooms. Impressionism did at any rate bring colour more into harmony with the improved lighting of our rooms; yet in every art the sins of the fathers are visited upon their children. The Impressionists discovered atmosphere, and so they denied the existence of lines, and the outlines vanished into thin air; they discovered light, and therefore they likewise denied the existence of colours. Then by means of light the colours were analysed, and patches of colour were decomposed into a heterogeneous conglomeration of luminous points. The Impressionists simply revelled in the most delicate nuances of vague tones of indefinite colour, and as they eliminated from their work all significant lines and all strong and frank colours, they spoilt to a great extent the decorative effect of their pictures when viewed at a distance: their paintings from that standpoint are often nothing more than a daub of violet and yellow, without form and void.

BOECKLIN. THE ISLE OF THE DEAD.]

Thus towards the close of the nineteenth century there came under discussion a new problem again in the matter of picture painting. The question arose as to how decorative qualities might be arrived at in painting pure and simple. The way seems to be pointed out in the works of Moreau and Boecklin; the way in which they placed side by side beautiful strong colours in broad masses, and invariably so as to avoid all discord, and combined the most conflicting tones into a harmonious whole in a manner which words fail one to describe. It was delightful, after having looked so long at nothing but the subtle, delicate nuances of the Impressionists, to turn again to these full-toned colours ringing out their deep and mighty harmonies.

It is scarcely to be wondered at that the younger generation of the present day refused to be bound by the principles of art laid down by their predecessors, notwithstanding the fact that Moreau, as well as Boecklin, was indebted to the Quattrocento for the mosaic-like brilliancy of his colours. Impressionism has discovered a whole range of new colour values by careful and intelligent study of the influence of light upon colour, and where formerly we saw ten we now find a hundred. Red, green, blue have lost their meaning in the category of complex and infinitely differentiated tones. So, as we advance from a realistic transcript of impressions taken direct from nature to free, symphonic compositions of the colours to which Impressionism has opened our eyes, we shall evolve harmonies richer than were ever imagined before, more melting than we ever dreamed of. This is the goal to which the efforts of the younger generation are primarily tending. Building upon the foundations laid by the Impressionists, they seek to ensure for their pictures both clearness and harmony, by simplification of form, by beauty of technique, and by subordination of colour to the decorative scheme. Their confession of faith is comprised in the words of Paterson: "A picture must be something more than garbled Nature: it must please the educated eye; and only so far as nature gives the painter his material can he or dare he follow her."