The Study Of Modern Painting, by Margaret Steele Anderson

The Study Of Modern Painting
by Margaret Steele Anderson
1914

PREFACE

The aim of this book is to find out, and to set down as briefly as possible, the various currents or trends of modern painting, showing each one of these trends as illustrated by the work of a few eminent men. It is addressed to laymen in general, and primarily to the reader who knows something of famous work something, let us say, of Titian, Watteau, Corot, Turner, and even of a few American paintersbut who knows very little as to the various tendencies of modem art and is not yet familiar with the names of its leaders. To this layman I have endeavored to bring the movements and the significance of modern painting, together with some idea of the work of the great men who stand for it.

As America is still too young for any variety of movements, I have considered her art by forms and not by currents, taking, first, landscape painting ? the form peculiar to the American~genius, and then, in due order, figure-painting, portraiture, the idyl, and mural decoration.

The argument of the book is three-fold. It maintains, first, that the particular achievement of nineteenth century painting is its solving of the problem of light, its conquest of the secrets of the air. It maintains, secondly, that the aim of the last twenty years has been towards decorative painting, the best and most appropriate subject of which is the idyl and this, as is noted more than once, results in a form

PREFACE

of expression which I have named "the idyllic-decorative. 33 Then, thirdly, it maintains that of later years let us say, since the rise of Manet as an influence the great aim, technically speaking, has been a fine synthesis, a gathering up of essentials, of fundamentals, even at the expense of details. With these three matters the triumph over light, the rise and progress of an ideal purely decorative, and the aim at synthetic presentation this study is especially concerned as the matters of most significance in the history of modern painting.

M. S. A.

CONTENTS

PART ONE

MODERN FRENCH PAINTING

OHAPTEB PAGE

I THE MODERN CONCEPT RACIAL QUALITIES ... 3

n NATURALISM 20

IH THE IDYLLIC DECORATIVE , . . 43

IV EXTREMISM . ... 62

PART TWO MODERN GERMAN PAINTING

I BASIC PACTS AND GENERAL TENDENCIES 79

H THE GREAT REALISM THE GREAT ROMANTICISMS 90

III PLEIN-AIRISM LIEBERMANN AND SOME FOLLOWERS 110

IV VARIETY, TENDING TO ECLECTICISM * 119

PART THREE MODERN ENGLISH PAINTING

I NINETEENTH CENTURY TYPES . . 145

H NEW MOVEMENTS . ... 172

CONTENTS

PART FOUR MODERN AMERICAN PAINTING

CHAPTER PAGE

I A FORM PECULIARLY AMERICAN . . 197

II THE LANDSCAPISTS OF TODAY . 215

III OTHER FORMS OF PAINTING . , . . .226

PART FIVE MODERN SPANISH AND MODERN ITALIAN PAINTING

I MODERN SPANISH PAINTING 257

II MODERN ITALIAN PAINTING , 28G

PART SIX MODERN PAINTING IN THE LESSER COUNTRIES

IN HOLLAND 309

IN BELGIUM . . , 321

IN SCANDINAVIA ... ,327

IN AUSTRIA HUNGARY BOHEMIA ... 335

IN RUSSIA . . 340

IN FINLAND 354

INDEX . . . 35!)

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

BATHING George Seurat 6

LA LOGE Pierre Auguste Renoir . 15

THE GUITARIST Edouard Manet 28

DECORATION Maurice Denis , . . . 35

THE BATHERS Emile Rent M ewrd 4*6

TAHITI Paul Gauguin 55

THE GODDESS OF FORTUNE IN DISTRESS Gaston La Touche 68

STUDY OF A WOMAN Henri Matisse 73>

AM WALDOUELL Ernst Liebermam 86

SPATZIERRITT Frmz wn Stuck 95

THE ISLE OF THE DEAD. . . . Arnold BoecUm 106 <

From a photogravure by Bruckmann

THE NET-MENDERS, .. Max Liebermann 115

By permission of Dodd, Mead and Company

THE SIREN Arnold BoecEm 121

ADAM AND EVE Ludwig von Hofmam. . 128

BURGOMASTER KLEIN .. . Wilhelm Leibl 1S7

MASTER BABY W. Q, Orchardson 144

SUMMER NIGHT ,. . . .Albert Moore 150

THE SCULPTRESS Charles H. Shannon ... 159

A BLOOMSBURY FAMILY William Orpen 169

Prom a photograph by Paul Laib, Drayton Gardens, London

THE GREEN FEATHER . , . . Laura Kwght 180

THE COMING OF SPRING . . , .Charles Sms 186

AN INTERIOR James Prude 191

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

THE LAW or REMOTE ANTIQUITY E. H. Bkshfield 202

By permission of the artist

POETEAIT STUDY Cecilia Beaux 207

Prom a photograph by Peter A Juley, N Y

FISHERMEN AND GULLS George W. Bellows . . . . 214

By permission of the artist

THE PAEEAKEETS . . . .Frederick C. Fneselce... 223

By permission of William Macbeth

THE MIEEOE Robert Held 230

By permission of N E Montross THE POETEE AND THE LADIES

OP BAGDAD Bryson Bwrouglu , . , . 236

By permission of the artist

LIFE AND DEATH ..E. H. Blashfield. *.. 245

By permission of the artist

THE GEEAT MOTHEE Arthur B, DCWMS . . 251

By permission of William Macbeth

DANIEL ZTTLOAGA AND His DAUGHTEES Ignacio Zuloaga 274

PLOUGHING IN THE ENGADINE Giovavm Segantmi . 283

By permission of Dodd, Mead and Company

THE TOILET Camdlo Innocenti . ., 294

PORTEAIT Arturo Nod , ... 303

WINTEE AETEENOON Carlo Formra 314

By permission of Count Alberto Gubncy de Dragon, Milan

THE HOLY FAMILY Gaetano Previati .. 323

By permission of Connt Alberto Gubncy de Dragon, Milan

CONVALESCENCE . . , . Emar Nielsen , . . . . , 330

Photograph by Paulsen, Copenhagen

THEOLDSCEIBE . . . . Josef Israels 338

Prom the collection of Dr Leslie D Ward, by permission

SWEDISH PEASANT GIEL IN WINTEE COSTUME Anders L Zorn . 343

Photograph by Blomberg, Stockholm

RUSSIAN PEASANT DANCERS, .Itya L R$pin . 351

PART ONE MODERN FRENCH PAINTING

THE STUDY OF MODERN PAINTING

MODERN FRENCH PAINTING CHAPTER I

THE MODERN CONCEPT RACIAL QUALITIES

A Logical Division Change in the Conception of Painting Brought About by Impressionism Matters of Interest to the Layman Racial Qualities, Latin and Gothic, Imagination and Idealism. Modern Currents Defined.

IN a study of modern French painting no matter whether the audience be of artists or of laymen it is possible to use one line of division, to part the time roughly, but with some degree of certainty, into the period before the great Impressionists and the period since their arrival. Such a division we maintain to be wholly legitimate; for, with the rise, practice, and influence of Impressionism, there has come a marked change in the French conception of painting a conception, it is needless to say, that has made its way from France into all other countries of modern civilization.

Under the older regime, painting made much of

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design and of the linear, and accepted, unquestioning, the supposition of fixed color. It was, moreover, an expression of emotion or of belief, a portrayal of character, or a setting forth of episode, fact, or situation- Impressionism, on the contrary, is wholly indifferent to subject. To the Impressionist, painting is a matter of optics, the very basis of which implies a denial of fixed color and fixed line, and for which, we safely affirm, design exists not of itself but only as a thing that is born of color and of light. While the older painters may be said to draw and paint, one may almost say that the Impressionists merely paint. The art of the former appeals to the human intellect and the human sensibility, but the art of the latter appeals to the eye alone, or to such intellect as may be called purely optical. The older men endeavored to say something; the Impressionists have endeavored to find harmonies. Monet's theory of Impressionism, it is true, has not been taken bodily into the practice of all modern Frenchmen, or even into that of the greater number; but the men are few, indeed, whose work bears no sign of the larger Impressionism. Even to the general public, reluctant to accept such a change, there has come a vague notion that painting is primarily an appeal to the eye, replacing the older notion of the art as in some measure illustrating life and character. This one clean division, however, is not of first in-

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terest to the layman; his concern is with matters quite different, though of much less importance to the painter. He has questions as to racial quality and national quality; he is concerned with such elements as idealism, subjectivity, passion, imagination; he has reached out of late to the significant and fascinating matter of comparative criticism. In the layman's study of an art there is always the factor of philosophy, for art, to his thinking, is at once a part of life and its witness. It is unwise, therefore, for him to approach the subject on the basis of a technical division, no matter how important this line of division in the history and the conception of painting.

A knowledge of this changing of ideals, however, is essential to his criticism and his enjoyment of what he sees by chance and of what he goes forth to see. Selecting an example from home, we may imagine him in the Metropolitan Museum of New York and intent upon a painting by Besnard, which was loaned, a few years ago, to the French paintings in that gallery. It is the figure of a naked woman, sitting on the floor, idle and listless and heretofore he has seen no beauty in it and has wondered, rather gravely, at its acquirement by the Museum. This knowledge of a changed ideal, while it does not answer his question as to morals, will enable him to understand the* ra&son d'etre of the painting. It is not an expression of sentiment or of emotion, it por-

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trays no character, it sets forth no dogma; it is merely an experiment with flesh in a certain light, an achievement in an art which is purely optic. The layman will understand, now, such pictures as the new Alexander of the Hearn collection, which is entitled "The Ring" and has nothing to do with any ring ever forged by any jeweler being, like the other, the achievement of an optic art, an exquisite game or frolic, with light as the most important player. He will know now, as he did not know before, the reason for a host of "Interiors" those of Tarbell in America, those of Bail in France, those of the new de Hoog in Holland some of them quite shut-in and showing reflected light, others with the light from an open casement on the faces and figures of women, sitting at some household task. He will understand, with the aid of this knowledge, why we have from modern painters so many a naked figure in green boscage with the play of the sunlight upon it; it is less, as he will see, to paint us the nymph in the brake, the oread on the mountain, than to exhibit a wonderful dexterity, to snatch at some fleeting effect of light on naked flesh, or to show us color as "the procreatrix of design."

The layman, when he sees the new conception, will compare it, no doubt, with that of an older type of artist. He will recall, perhaps, the severely ethical Millet and his description of one of his own paintings

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as designed to appeal to the spirit, the emotions, the sense of morality and of duty. Again, he will recall the feeling of the simple and devout Corot for the spiritual quality of his morning or evening landscape. To these, of course, he may oppose the famous dictum of Manet, "The principal person in the picture is the light"; or, perhaps, some trenchant remark from "Ten O'Clock," embodying the disdain of Whistler for all that looks like subject or emotion. At first, no doubt, he wiH be confused and wearied, unable to accept either one of these opinions in its entirety. With patience, however, he will find a golden mean, and will see that the ideal conception is the balanced conception that he cannot have always an expression of the spirit, nor always a mere lovely rendering of the ways and caprices of the light. It may be long, indeed, before this balance is achieved, for the love of experiment and the fancy for idyllic decoration have all but cast aside and brought to disfavor the picture of a spiritual intention. This, however, is not strange. The conquest of light is the great and magnificent triumph of modern painting, and the decorative purpose is a purpose peculiar to the twentieth century an era which desires, alternately, to experience the joys of living and to escape into a world of golden dream. It is natural, therefore, that the painters of this era should be divided between two aims, and natural, also, that the

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picture of another order should be temporarily neglected. The tendency of extremes, however, is to meet, and we hope to see, at no very distant date, a fusion of two ideals: the ideal of Watts, the teacher and messenger, the painter distinctly ethical, and the ideal of Whistler, who disdained all suhject, all message and all interpretation.

We may turn now, without more ado, to matters which are of interest to the layman, and which, indeed, are not without interest to the painter. "Man anxT the intention of his soul," said Leonardo, "are the supreme themes of the artist." To such a sublime profession, the profession of a very great master, there would seem to be no lawful contradiction. Man and the intention of his soul must still have some meaning for the painter, even for hi who despises all "subject." However that may be, such elements as we have named the racial and the national, idealism, imagination, passion axe elements of supreme interest to the layman. First, then, let us consider the racial quality of French painting.

It is claimed, now and then, that great art has no race and shows no signs of a physical environment. For answer, we call attention, briefly, to Italian art of the various provinces. The painting of the Tuscan is his Tuscany; it is Florence* it is the Apennines, it is a mingling of austerity and delicacy, of the sweet and the stern, of the reserved and the plainly ex-

MODERN FRENCH PAINTING

quisite, Venetian art is evidently Venice, splendid, sumptuous and earthly; Umbrian art has the calm of the Umbrian landscape; and Roman art, even in the hands of Raphael, has the qualities of imperial Rome. It is so with the art of the North, with Rembrandt and Hals on the one hand and the Little Dutch Masters on the other in all of which we have the broad and solid sobriety of the Northern country, and that wonderful mundane painting which followed the adoption of the Protestant faith and the expulsion of art from the churches into the world.

In all French painting, we maintain, the racial is a very marked element, but it is idle to make such a claim without some discussion of racial qualities. We may say at once, then, that the Frenchman is not primarily subjective, that he is not by first intention the idealist. Imaginative he is, but between imagination and idealism the distinction is as firm as it is delicate. Imagination is connected with material with words or notes or marble or pigment but idealism is independent of material and belongs to the infinite spirit. To illustrate from literature, we may say that the work of Poe is merely imaginative while that of Hawthorne, his compeer, is not only imaginative but superbly idealistic. We may take a much better example and say that the Elizabethan lyric beautiful and passionate as it is, and charged with the joy of new life has imagination but has not idealism, while

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the lyric of the nineteenth century is notable as possessing both qualities. Again, we may contrast the "Creation," that marvel of the Sistine Chapel, with Bareau's statue, "The Awakening of Humanity/' The first is idealistic, is charged with a sense of the divine, but the second is merely imaginative realism. Another example we may take from the Rodin marbles in New York. That terrible figure, "The Old Courtesan," is simply imaginative, a thing all piteousness and shame; the "Balzac" is that consummate man of the world who gave us the "ComSdie Humaine"; but "The Hand of God" is idealistic, belonging to the ultimate divine Will, which cannot be explained yet is felt to be tranquil and compassionate. These examples will emphasize the distinction and will bring it home, perhaps, to the younger and the less experienced reader.

The French imagination, then, is objective and stylistic, dealing with concrete things. This is because of a strong Latin element, a blood which makes for form, the very blood which shaped our modern Europe and brought her savage forces into order. The Gothic element, on the other hand, is concerned less with form than with vision, with the great shapeless dream of the universe or of humanity, with the immanent mystery of life. Now, in the veins of the Frenchman the blood of the two is commingled. He has all the energy, all the individualism of the North,

MODERN FRENCH PAINTING

and we find in his marbles the Northern capacity for the vision; but his painting, like the body of his literature, is dominated by the Latin sense of form, the desire, implacable and stern, for the perfect expression of his thought. To turn to his sculpture, we see a straight heritage from the Gothic, a something which existed before the Roman and is traceable from Rheims and Amiens, with their vivid, dramatic, almost flamboyant figures, through such work as that of Michel Colomb, Goujon, Richier, Clodion, Houdon in his portrait busts, Rude, Barye, and Carpeaux, on through the years to the marbles of Auguste Rodin. There is never a time, even in the worst of a false classicism, when the sharp, personal, visionary strain of the indigenous Gothic is not to be seen in French sculpture.

With painting the case is very different. Taken over partly from Flanders but chiefly from Italy, French painting has far less of the indigenous, and we miss, therefore, that intense and glowing individualism, that vivid expression, that quality sharply personal, which marks the line of sculpture to which we have just called attention. The painting of the late seventeenth century, as that of the century preceding it, was a painting distinctly eclectic, and the Gothic qualities, it is needless to say, are not the qualities that lend themselves to eclecticism. The painting of these centuries is not a romantic art, and the

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sense of high illusion, like that of a flaming intensity, is wanting to it, as it is never wanting to sculpture, where the Northern hlood is so much more in evidence. When the Frenchman is himself and unconscious, he shows the mingled bloods. When he borrows, he is conscious and deliberate he is critical, sophisticated, imitative and, borrowing from Italy with a firm belief in the greatness of the Caracci and of Caravaggio, he used his borrowings with fine style but with little of the old Frankish spirit. In Clouet, himself of Flemish origin, and in painters of his order there is clearly a strain of the Northern, but the general effect is Italianate, and the dominating factor is the classic sense of form.

On the element of desire all art is more or less dependent, and the desire of the French genius is clearly towards painting and sculpture, as the desire of the German is towards music and that of the English towards poetry. The Frenchman, moreover, is enamored of his craft. He, above all other peoples, has a feeling for that side of his art to which belongs the mere workmanship. The men of other races have regarded their meaning more passionately than the Frenchman, but it is he who performs with whitest ardor. This, however, is a fact that we have already intimated; to say that a genius is stylistic is to say that it does its work devoutly, with the flaming patience of a young devotee.

LA. LOGE

PIERRE AUGUSTE RENOIR

MODERN FRENCH PAINTING

In the quality of imagination French painting is a leader of the moderns. Since Watteau and Fragonard, with a brief interregnum of David and pseudoclassicism, its imagination appears to the world as at once the richest and most delicate, the subtlest and most various as great in the classic Ingres as in the romantic Monticelli, as marked in the diabolism of Degas as in the sad humanity of Millet. The Frenchman, we repeat, makes for form and imagination is nothing more or less than a great mental forming, the mind's concrete vision. The modern French artist is no seer of the spiritual type, but in the realm of imagination he adventures magnificently and without the least shadow of a rival. His material matters not at all; from myth to history, from nature to dream, from the domestic scenes of Chardin to the latest decorative panel of Maurice Denis, the French imagination is peculiar and unapproachable. Here is the racial delicacy and verve, the glow of the Gothic, the selectiveness of the Latin, the exquisite notion of fitness, the poignant apprehension of concrete beauty. In the orderly domain of Apollo, which is distinct from the Dionysian domain of emotion, the Frenchman is splendidly at home.

As to the matter of comparative criticism, this is of less moment to the present chapter than to others, since the Frenchman, in his modern career, is giving much more than he receives. We admit, indeed, cer-

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tain debts to the Spaniards and to the Dutchmen, but the Spaniards are Velasquez and Goya and the Dutchmen are Rembrandt and Hals, while the debt to the moderns is almost negligible. We shall touch necessarily, however, upon points of resemblance and of difference, while in the remaining chapters we shall note the French influence as it acts upon the art of other countries. In technique the French have been leaders and have sailed uncharted seas and the booty of their voyages, though a very strange booty of late, they have shared with all who have asked of them.

The currents of modern French art are currents of one great democratic movement, the tendency towards freedom of thought and of form. This tendency is well termed "romantic"; for the spirit of freedom, the spirit of illimitable aspiration, is exactly opposed to the classic qualities of order and restraint, while the infinite wonder, the sense of the mystery of life, is the antithesis of a pseudo-classic complacency. This great movement, we repeat, embraces the lesser movements, but for the sake of clearness the lesser shall be separately considered.

There is first, then, the tendency towards naturalism. This is a phase so broad that it includes the romantic spirit of the Barbizon men as well as the brutal realism of Courbet, and may even be said to include our modern Impressionism not, indeed, as a whole, but in so far as the term means the theory of

MODERN FRENCH PAINTING

Monet and his followers. There is, second, the trend towards the decorative with its two very notable concomitants the wish for the joy of life and the urgent desire for escape, the desire for repose in the lost world of dream. There is, third, that later form of Impressionism which is reactionary, the exponents of which are painting the effects of in-door light. Such effects, we note, are many and various, ranging from that of the foot-lights on a dancing-girl to that of the Bethlehem stable-lamp on Mary and the heavenly Child. The fourth and last movement, that of the Post-Impressionists, Cubists, and their kind, we define as a curious blend. On one hand, it is an attempt at the expression of emotion, to be achieved by a return to the primitive to the Egyptian, Assyrian, Byzantine, Etruscan, or another with the simplicity, sincerity, naivet6 and originality inherent in the early forms of art. On the other hand, it is an effort at abstract design, an effort which has been acclaimed as "classic" and is, in reality, akin to the Oriental. These various trends we must now follow in due order.

CHAPTER II

NATURALISM

a. The Beginnings: 'watteau, the Fore-runner; The Pseudo-

Classic Re-action; Delacroix; Courbet; The Barbizon Men.

b. Impressionism: Monet and His Theory; Manet., the Classic

among Impressionists; Renoir, the Most Gallic of the Group; Degas, Independent Ally.

c. Japanese Influence. Conclusions as to Impressionism.

T 1 1HE trend towards freedom of form, which, we JL repeat, is a part of the democratic movement of the nineteenth century, is expressed first by Antoine Watteau, who anticipates the moderns in more ways than one. Watteau is highly individual that is, free alike in his spirit and in his form. He is a romantic who follows a reign of would-be classicism, a painter allied by technique to the Venetians when such alliance was practically unknown. He is, moreover, an airy and exquisite prophet, who foretold the weariness of the moderns and their desire for the world of golden dream and who did it, not by any expression of grief or of sadness, but by a pensive gaiety, a sort of ethereal wistfulness, which intimated, though in an eighteenth-century fashion, the heartsickness that is possible to humanity. After Wat-

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teau the cause of freedom languished, for the period which followed was the period of David and pseudoclassicism. France was new-born and born republican and she, like other young folk, was enamored of the sterner virtues. In the limits of practical life this was admirable, but in art it took the form of rigidity, of a classicism that was not really classic but stiff, and inimical by its very nature to freedom. This period, however, is relieved by the purer classicism of Ingres, who is akin to the Greeks by his severe and absolute beauty of line, and to whose example, indeed, our moderns trace their purity of drawing.

Pseudo-classicism, however, is short-hved. With the opening of the nineteenth century comes the tidalwave of the democratic spirit, which brings c tis both naturalism and romanticism. So far as painting is concerned, the new spirit finds its first advocate in that big romanticist, Eugene Delacroix, the brilliant Victor Hugo of his art, who comes with new passion, new rhythm, new significance. It is followed into its beautiful youth by the men of the Barbizon School, with their simple, noble, and wholly uplifting naturalism, a romantic naturalism, the finest and most delicate in all modern painting. In the Barbizon -men Rousseau, Daubigny, Troyon, -Corot, Millet, Diaz we have painters who go back to nature, but to nature in her pleasantest aspects. Even in the fields

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of Millet, with their solemn, peasant figures, there is nothing ungentle or unlovely. For Corot that tender spirit, who has heen called the Fra Angelico of modern landscape the morning comes down from God out of heaven, divinely veiled, and adorned like a bride for her husband. For Daubigny the green earth is earthy, but is also very sweet and very dear; for Rousseau it has some of the old, dark, Flemish, Ruisdael spirit, but is none the less beautiful for that; and for Troyon it is quite big and simple, charged with the breath of the kine, and lying broad and patient beneath a patient sky. These men of the Barbizon forest with whom we count Corot, though he is really too classic for this company stand together at one end of the naturalistic movement and form its romantic group. At the other end is Gustave Courbet, an able draughtsman, with whom the natural is almost invariably the ugly, the dreary, the commonplace. He is the stern and savage realist, whose genius turns less often to beauty than to the transcript of a terrible plainness. We cannot do better here than to contrast his "Funeral at Ornans," a poor, rugged, peasant funeral, with Troyon's "Close of the Day," such a contrast being more effective than criticism. In Troyon's great painting, though it is something almost poignant, we see only the world of outward nature and of animal existence, while in the "Funeral at Ornans" we have something that belongs

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to human life, its last and its most impressive scene, at once so simple and so profound. It is partly for this reason, doubtless, that Courbet stands out boldly in the history of modern French painting. He is the realist, not merely of nature but of human life, and he is this, moreover, quite consciously and by profession. "I am not only a socialist," says the rough and sturdy fellow, "but also a democrat and a republican , . . and I am a sheer realist, which means a loyal adherent to the veriU vraie." Realism he fiercely declares to be "the negation of the ideal," and with this feeling he paints us his peasants and his marketwomen, his stone-breakers and his Paris firemen. A spade he sees as a spade s and for him a naked woman is neither a Daphne nor a Flora but a naked woman merely, though drawn with a big and powerful skill. That the ideal also is truth, and truth in its highest form, is something that he never understands. To Courbet and his stark realism, however, French painting owes a debt of gratitude, for it was he who emphasized the fact that the material of art includes the ugly and the commonplace as well as the beautiful and unusual. He is the Zola of French painting, with the virtues and the defects of Zola's fiction.

So strong is this trend towards naturalism that it persists side by side with an ardent and popular romanticism, and even with that form of it which is so deliberately decorative. We can follow the trend,

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through a dozen different shapes, into the art of a well-remembered yesterday and of an immediate present. There is G6rome, for example, half classic and half realistic, of a genius that is purely academic; there is the ill-fated Bastien-Lepage, whom we may term an imaginative realist; there is Albert Roll, the President of the Societe Nationale des Beaux Arts, who is chiefly a sane and delightful realist of catholic taste and feeling; and in landscape there is the splendid old Harpignies, the lovely and musical Cazin. Then, too, there is Charles Cottet, with his tragedies of the coast-people; Lucien Simon, with his Breton peasants and his charming scenes from French family life; L'Hermitte, the successor of Millet, and akin to the German Uhde; and the staccato Raffaelli, who gives us the varying aspects of Paris from the quays to the debonnair boulevards. There are, also, such new men as Dauchez the sombre landscapist ; Gillot, as a rule an uncompromising realist, who loves such things as the factory and the furnace; Prinet, the painter of some charming phases of modernity; and others whose names it is not necessary to "mention. These men are essentially naturalists, though by no means of one and the same order. There is, for instance, a great gulf fixed between Gerome and Lucien Simon, for Gerome is of the older tradition, as insistent upon line as the stern master, Ingres, and with academic standards as to the seeing and the painting

THE GUITARIST

fiDOUARD MANET

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

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of light, while Simon is a modern eclectic, learning from both old and new traditions and getting the secrets of light partly from the greater Impressionists. So, again, there is a difference between Simon and Raff aelh, the staccato touches of the latter being suited to the matter of his street-scenes and not to the charming pictures, made up of women and children, which are now so favored of Simon. Nevertheless, we may group such men together as "Naturalists," or "Realists," or under any title which shall intimate to the public that they deal with the actual world and not with the world of dreams. Their first business is to transcribe with poetry, perhaps, or even with a feeling idyllic but to transcribe rather than to interpret or to decorate.

To name such men at this moment, however, is to run far ahead of the history of modern work. Let us turn back, therefore, and imagine ourselves in Paris in 1865. It was in this year that Manet exhibited his "Olympia," the picture which was dismissed by Courbet as "The Queen of Spades going to her bath," the title, it is needless to say, referring to that strange new flatness of which Manet was the first and the sturdiest exponent. Manet, however, was not to be stopped by an epithet. He preferred, he said, to paint a Queen of Spades rather than a billiard-ball, the billiard-ball being a term of opprobrium for Courbet's solid modeling. These comments are the

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straws that show the wind. Courbet is the last of the older artists, for whom modeling was half the battle of art, while Manet stands for the new, the type whose flatness is akin to the Japanese, and who, indeed, have taken many lessons from Japan. The name of Manet brings us to the work of the Impressionists, from whom, happily, or unhappily, French art gains a new raison d'etre.

We must pause here, however, and acknowledge the value of the Academy at this very critical moment. Gerome, Constant, Cabanel, Bouguereau, Meissonier, and others of their order, masters of drawing and insistent upon older methods, were men who served as a check upon new liberties. Acting against the radicalism of Monet and his followers, they made towards a necessary balance, to deny which or to minimize would be but a feeble sort of criticism. We must note, moreover, that they were painters of a classic order the term "classic" signifying the fixed or established and that this new movement was of the romantic type, tending to the free, the unrestrained, the unlimited. Without the conservatism of the Academy, French painting had been lost in a swamp full of will-o'-the-wisps. The best of its art is an art which has learned from both sides, from the iScole des Beaux Arts as well as from the Batignolles School.

The aim of Impressionism, as preached by Monet

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and his immediate followers, is to give us the aspect, not the fact. Color, these men declare, is never fixed and definite but varies with the varying of the light. For example so runs their argument the bush which is green when one stands near it, or in the light of noon-day or of morning, is blue-green or graygreen at a distance or in the evening. The flesh of the human body is different in different lights. The Cathedral at Rouen, like any other object in the physical universe, has one aspect by morning light, and another under the mid-day sun, and another still by moonlight. This means, of course, that there is no such thing as fixed color and that color is dependent upon depth of atmosphere, upon light as affected by distance and time of day. Their idea of painting was nothing very new. In the first place there were the Venetians, who painted more than they drew and who fairly shocked the Florentine draughtsmen. In the second place, there was the Prado, rich in the work of Velasquez and Goya, whose painting was modern and impressionistic; in the third place, there were Rembrandt and Hals, the teachers and exemplars of the modern; there was Claude Lorraine, "the painter of the sun"; there were Turner and Constable, the former a master of atmosphere; and, last, there was Adolphe Monticelli, to whom light was a mere jewelled plaything. It was Claude Monet, however, who made all this practice into theory and

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who followed it with a far greater consciousness than any of these "natural Impressionists."

The seven hues of the spectrum, argued Monet, do not act separately but in a remarkable blend. Analysis, however, shows them to be really separated ; they are juxtaposed, making parallel vibrations, and these parallels are recomposed by the eye and made into something single and definite. Monet, therefore, determined to limit himself to Nature's own procedure; he no longer mixed the colors on his palette in the old and time-honored fashion, but juxtaposed them on his canvas in minute, parallel lines, these lines, by inevitable temptation, becoming mere spots or touches. The proportion of color he made to differ with his intention. Did he wish the light to come from a fire? Very well: the colors were chiefly red and orange. Did he wish it to come through a screen of foliage with the sun behind it? Then the colors he chose were mainly green and yellow. Even in his treatment of shadow he abandoned the old idea, and his shadow was not the absence of light but merely "light of another value."

Having discussed Monet's ideas of color, it is almost unnecessary to speak of his ideas of line. To quote from a recent criticism, we may say that he volatilizes line, this word expressing his notion of a contour that varies with the varying of light. To put it briefly, his theory suppresses line and does away

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with fixed color. Painting, as we have said, becomes an optic art, a search for beautiful harmonies, a sort of natural poem as distinct from expression. For an example we may quote from Mauclair, and compare an imaginary picturing of the death of Agamemnon, done in the academic style, with one of the same subject as painted by an Impressionist. The former will take Agamemnon as leading the whole composition, then Clytemnestra, then others in accordance with the story. The Impressionist, on the contrary, will pick out his strongest note let us say a red dress, which may or may not be worn by Clytemnestra and will build up his picture accordingly, the matter being one of values and not of the tragical figures or of any literary interest.

This theory is rightly ascribed to Monet, though in his later years he has not strictly alhered to it but has modified his short, close stroke. Yet Monet was no fighter for his doctrines. It was ifedouard Manet, who, when he had accepted these theories, stood with his back to the wall and met both Academy and newspapers. Manet, however, must not be classed wholly with the others of the Batignolles group the name of which, by-the-way, comes from the meetings at a Batignolles cafe. He is a painter of the big, classic order, and is akin, though distantly, to the great Northerners and the great Spaniards. His "Bon Bock" is like the work of Hals, his "Boy with the

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Sword" recalls Velasquez, his "Lola de Valence" is Goya and these three, chosen at random, are enough to establish him as a classic of the grand order. We see in Manet something of the broad and simple splendor of his masters, something of their knowledge of values, their treatment of blacks, browns and grays. He is never the minute Impressionist. No spots or Seurat for him! He will give you, rather, the broad stroke of the big Spanish Impressionists. He is, it need hardly be said, entirely "a painter's painter," a man whose whole interest is in his performance as a performance, and he has been too greatly lauded by a certain species of criticism, some of which has pretended to see what it never saw at all. His "Olympiad for example, is the subject of much indiscriminate raving, yet the best and sanest critics have acknowledged it as by no means his greatest piece of work and as something really experimental, though a fascinating and impudent performance. The figure has the meagreness of a Cranach and more than one hint of other Primitives, suggesting a white-paper doll pasted on a dark background. It is extreme in its shortening, although of a luminous whiteness; and the negress, the cat, and the bouquet are as plainly put there for sheer effect as if Manet had written to that purpose on the frame. Yet to complain of these things is merely to find fault in a circle, for all this is of Manet's particular intention. He means to

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paint a flat figure, or, rather, to paint his figure flatly thereby going to an extreme which did not occur to Velasquez when that painter thought out his "Venus," or to Mazo, if he painted it. As to the matter of shortening, Manet intends to shorten; while the cat, the negro woman, and the formal bouquet are each and every one painted for the sake of painting. For what could he paint if not for this* He had nothing to tell us, men or women, as to the fatal progress of the life of the courtesan, he had no intention to illustrate the fact that the wages of such sin is inevitably death. His intention was to show how the naked flesh of a woman will look in certain lights, against a certain color, and set off by certain accessories Voila! To do more were surely banal, or, at the least, were bourgeois and old-fashioned' That the result has a measure of charm and conviction we have already plainly admitted, but this is the result of technique, lacking which the picture would be repulsive, a thing to be ranked in the Limbo of those creations which are neither moral nor immoral but unmoral, and which carry no significance to the spirit or the mind of humanity. The better Manet, whose work it is pleasant to look upon, is the Manet of the "Boy with the Sword," of "Lola de Valence," of "The Woman with the Parrot," of "The Mirror," and of that very fine study, jj^ which the planes are so admirably treated, "The Bar of the Folies Bergeres."

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To speak of Monet is to speak of the English Sisley and the Anglo-Italian Pissaro, though Pissaro, for a brief period, went farther than Monet and practiced more of pointillisme, painting with Seurat's small spots or touches. Not another of the group has the exquisite brightness, the fragile and delicate charm of Claude Monet. Monet we may safely call "lyric," his quality being that of a lovely song or short poem simple, single, definite, and imbued with most delicate passion. A collection of his pictures, no matter how small it may be, gives a sense of light and air, of grace, of spiritual exquisiteness. We get it from no other painter nor do we expect it of any.

Manet, the second of the group, we have described as a painter who is essentially of the grand pr classic order; but in Auguste Renoir, the third, we have a dainty temper, a manner which reverts to the graces of the late eighteenth century, a painter who is a sort of modern Fragonard. Like Fragonard, Renoir is descended from Rubens, though the lusty blood of the Fleming grows pale as it courses through the veins of modern men. Renoir is distinctly Gallic, the most thoroughly French, perhaps, of all our modern painters. His tradition, like that of Watteau, Latour and Fragonard, is the tradition of the sumptuous Venetians translated into terms of modern French. It becomes, however, much softer and prettier, with the sumptuousness turned into gaiety, into a sort of

DECORATION

MAURICE DENIS

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dainty opulence. His subjects, too, like those of the Venetians and the eighteenth-century Frenchman, are subjects of pleasure, of ease, of delight. Here are young girls at their piano, here are beautiful women at the opera, here is a set of happy working-folk at a dance, or a blithe crowd on a boulevard of Paris, He paints, it is said, somewhat lusciously, and his women have been called "a trifle dropsical" so plump they are, of flesh so soft and yielding, without enough verve, without enough energy. Yet, on the other hand, they seem quite free and pure; they are wellfed, luxuriant creatures, who are yet sweet and tender, and no more sensuous than the grass or the darling flowers themselves. Renoir's later period has been criticised as faded and a little too fantastic, but the pictures recently added to the Metropolitan Museum bear no least witness to the epithet "faded." His middle period is his best, and to this belongs the beautiful portrait of Mme. Charpentier and her children, which is so well known to Americans. It is true that the many-colored background where, by the way, we note the Japanese influence is just a little crowded and confused. It is true, also, that there is so much in the picture as to make very nearly two pictures; and it is true, again, that this is not modern when compared with the terrible modernities of the moment. Yet it is sound, beautiful and durable, and will last, doubtless, when certain re-

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cent fantasies have long been forgotten or condemned.

The name of Degas, a synonym for mastery of line, has so often been coupled with the names of these men that we turn to it here automatically. Yet Degas is not wholly of this order; a pupil of Ingres and practising the precepts of his master, he could not "volatilize" his line, he could not see it as something half imaginary. So superb a draughtsman, however, is able to do anything with line, and Degas has come in his later years to a 'loose and pulsing drawing" that has its foundation in stern discipline. With the problems of light, moreover, he is truly and deeply concerned. This is witnessed by such things as the pink "Premiere Danseuse" of the Caillebotte collection in the Luxembourg, where the light is beautifully handled and by others with the same kind of subject, in which the light is as big a matter as the wonderful figures themselves. By the painting of such figures Degas has made his sorry fame, his pessimistic and satirical spirit joining with his mastery of line to portray a poverty-bitten world that affords so much pleasure to the great world of gaiety. With certain limitations as a colorist, he is the lord of a sorrowful line of poor dancers, whom he paints in the bitter fashion that suits their bitter lot. Degas is so unusual and such a great master of the linear that we stop, perforce, to speak of him, though he is a man

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who stands aside from common tendency. Of his followers the most notable is Henri de Toulouse de Lautrec, of whose work we shall speak farther on, in connection with the followers of Cezanne and his school.

It is to this time, with the rise of these men and their practice of flat painting, that we date the first phase of Japanese influence, an influence which has been summed up so well by a modern German critic that we venture to break our own rule of no quotation. The following lines need neither praise or comment:

"Japan expanded naturalism, made the brush looser, color more liquid. We owe to it an extension of the surface, a delight in lovely contrasts, movement in composition . . . and above all, a new pictorial pattern." "Some measures of the tendency fostered by Japan" we quote the same critic here "were already operative in European art before 'The Japanese* was discovered. There is a rapidity in Goya, a lightness of improvisation in Guys, the etcher, and a certain Japanese effect in Constable, which is akin to the painting of Japan. It must be admitted, however, that the gain of the European artists from the Oriental is what we have stated in the foregoing paragraph." The exigencies of the American and the European will keep them, doubtless, from pursuing too far the example of an alien race. Our manner of thought, the bounds of our expression, the needs

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and capacities of our audience, all are quite different from those of Nippon. When the Japanese paints like the Westerner, the West is deeply regretful and does not hesitate to tell him that he is walking on dangerous ground. When the Westerner imitates Japan, the situation is not likely to be different. On the heautif ul and finished art of France, however, this influence has never worked havoc; France has taken only what she liked and has held to her manifest destiny. This is the result of a great, severe discipline, a strict tradition, which, laugh as the radicals may, has kept the art of painting from falling into brilliant rags and tatters. What she has gained, nevertheless, is a gain in very truth, more especially that extension of surface, that movement of composition, and that new pictorial pattern the comprehension of which has enlarged the possibilities of European art.

The newness of Impressionism is long since over and done with, and we hear no more preachments as to the natural and a return to it. The conquest of light so often does humanity work in circles! has led men from the studio to the open, but now the indoor light has its hold upon us, with as much fascination as the sunlight. Men are turning, of late, to the light from a lamp on the table, to the light from a chandelier or gas-jet, from a garden of Japanese lanterns, from the globes on the corner of the street and the desire of the average art-student is for

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interior lighting, the decorative, and the successful rendering of the nude. The idea of art as an interpretation of life is an idea that has yet to he revived, though we hope, as we said in our first pages, to come at last to a fusion of two ideals. Spiritual and artistic alike, Impressionism is born of the old, democratic, Gothic spirit, with which goes the romantic quality of glamour. Out of this spirit has arisen that "new language" which has been called by a name that is admirably suited to it. For the desire of the modern, deriving so largely from the Gothic, is impregnated with the love of the mysterious, of a magical and glamorous beauty. It has demanded, not the definite form, but the impression of form, not clarity but intimation, not le grand secret but the hint of it. The language of this greater Impressionism is a language that does not reveal all of beauty; it is half a revelation and half a concealment. De Bussy, in music, D'Annunzio in drama, Rodin in sculpture such men and their army of followers have expressed the extreme of our desire. To borrow a metaphor from sculpture, they have left the figure too much in the stone; they have guessed, intimated, suggested; they have stated aspect, not fact; in brief, they have given us impressions. At this very moment, however, we re-act, and from places of authority comes the voice of urgent protest, preaching a Greek reserve, a fine Greek temperance and clarity. We admit, neverthe-

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less, the value of Impressionism in painting. It has increased, for the artist, the powers and possibilities of his instrument; through Manet, especially, it has brought back the tradition of Velasquez and of Hals ; it has revealed to both artists and laymen the mysterious secrets of the light. On the other hand, it has shown us, as we never were shown before, the value of common life as the subject for art; it has shown us the wonder of the world around us as we had not visioned it before; it has even emphasized for us, by the excellent method of contrast, the beauty and the value of the classic ideal*

CHAPTER III

THE IDYLLIC DECORATIVE

Reasons for the Decorative Tendency. Giorgione the First of the Idyllic-Decorative. Tendency to the Decorative Manifested in Three Forms; a. The Fantastic, Illustrated by Moreau; 6. The Supposed Classic, Illustrated by de Chavannes; c. The New Idyllic, Illustrated by Besnard, La Touche, Menard, Denis, Martin, Chabas, and Others.

OUR second current is the trend towards the decorative, or, as we put it here, "the idyllic-decorative." We have now the garden of the Hesperides, the forest of the German's Blue Flower, the Irishman's Tir n' an Og, and everybody's Happy Island or Ultima Thule. "But why?" asks the layman. "Why this universal revel, this morning and evening frolic of nymphs and oreads and bacchants? Why this repetition of Pan in the forest with his beautiful attendants? Why these many family picnics in little family gardens? And why these pretty maids, half naked in the sunshine after baths?"

Now the answer to this is simple. There are many men, not mural decorators, to whom painting is purely decoration, and for their purpose the idyl is absolutely suited, offering beautiful and decorative scenes with

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beautiful and decorative figures, and demanding very little of the intellect. Then, too, the idyllic world of repose is the special and cherished dream of our modern, strenuous life. In all this haste and hurry we sadly long for rest; in this noisy and peaceless endeavor we want peace and quiet. Of such desire the idyl is a very good expression, and the one most proper to the art of painting. We have, therefore, all these enchanted gardens and woodlands, these worlds of heauty and repose, peopled with happy figures which know neither sorrow nor care. Then, too, our desire grows with what it feeds upon. Given a few quiet idyls even a family picnic and girls in a green-wood! and we want the whole bright world of nymph and faun. Nor do we lack for painters who will paint it for us, our modern tendency being only too bacchic, and we too proud of our so-called "Greek" joy of living!

The first invitation was Giorgione's; he called the Venetians away, out of the splendor of their palaces to woodlands beyond the lagoons; but from Giorgione to Antoine Watteau there were few repetitions of the idyl. Watteau gives the invitation often; he is ff Le Peintre des FStes Galantes" and his fetes are gallant indeed, with a gallantry all ethereal, with certain qualities of the ancient world of f aene, of innocent, lost gayety. After Watteau comes the fascinating genius Monticelli, who is at once a throw-back

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to the Venetians and an Impressionist before Claude Monet, and who dwells inthe world of brilliant vision. Monticelli links Watteau to Monet, but following Monticelli comes Corot, who is wholly of this "Other World 35 except when he turns to the Dutchmen and to Chardin. These men lead to the dream-country and are followed by a bright rout of pilgrims.

It is not arbitrary, perhaps, to say of this desire for escape that it is manifested chiefly in three forms: thp fantastic or bizarre, the supposed classic, and the modern or new idyllic. As illustrative of the fantastic, we shall take the work of Gustav Moreau, and, though he left the state a houseful of his paintings, we shall use only those of one room in the Museum of the Luxembourg. Though some of the paintings are water-colors, the room holds the gorgeous East in fee upon its walls. The effect is that of superb and thickcrowded jewels, of topaz and emerald, beryl and chrysolite, ruby and amethyst, all massed and crushed together as in crowns of East Indian princes. Moreau, though he seeks the world of rest, achieves a mere rigidity, a strange and Asiatic rigidity, which is very deeply blended with voluptuousness. This is neither the Vale of Ternpe nor the garden of an early Paradise, but a brilliant, gleaming, Oriental region, which, for all its flame, is forever fixed and still. Let us recall his curious and unearthly rendering of "(Edipus and the Sphinx/' comparing it with the ren-

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dering by Ingres. The conception of the latter is not fantastic but vital, the old Greek legend as conceived by the Greek himself. It is simple, faithful, and pure, while Moreau's is phantasmagoric, of a fixed elaboration that recalls the Byzantine ideal Another world, truly, is the world of this strange genius, taught by his deep and varied knowledge of the East of Persia, China, India, Arabia; yet the region is airless and joyless, the flowers are gem-like but odorless; it is a place of bizarre and exotic brilliance but a place of peculiar silence!

In this world of the fantastic, Moreau lords it with a very few companions. Eugene Martel, Simon Bussy, Roualt and Desvallieres we note as his chief followers, the two latter going to the Primitives for an expression of the strange and raiexplainable. In Germany, where mysticism is at home, he is more admired than in his own country, and it is impossible not to see in the work of Gustav Klimt, the Viennese of decorative genius, a reminder of this brilliant and chryselephantine painting. At present, it would seem, his work is more in favor than it was at the time of its performance. The revival of the sense of mystery, the turn towards the various Eastern arts, the interest in experiments with pigment, and, more especially, the trend towards the decorative these, doubtless, are the reasons for a renewal of interest in such painting.

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To come from Moreau to de Chavannes is to come from a region of phantasmagoria to a region of exceeding placidity, from the Asiatic to a sort of pallid Greek, or to what is generally if mistakenly accepted as such. Consciously or unconsciously, the painter recalls with his figures the description of the old Greek heroes, who are

"Ever delicately marching Through the most pellucid air."

Yet, in truth, these figures- do not march; they sit, they stand, they bend, they kneel, hut movement is forever denied them. A world of repose is this, but a world which is very apt to pall. The garden of the Hesperides is no spot to live in; its fruit, when we make it daily food, will turn to dust and ashes in the mouth! For certain places, however for the Pantheon, with its solemn finality, for the deserted splendor of an Hotel de ViUe, for the stately Sorbonne, for the quiet and scholarly library this motive of golden quiet is absolutely appropriate.

A comparison between Sargent and de Chavannes is not out of place in this connection. With Saxgent the idea is paramount but with de Chavannes it is secondary, and it follows, then, that where Sargent's design is obscure, the design of the Frenchman is evident. On the ceiling of religions the decoration is purely intellectual, while the panels on the stairway are decorative only. It is true that we clearly under-

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stand them and that such understanding is an aid to our enjoyment, but, even if we did not understand, we should still have a genuine delight in them. This Chemistry with her fire, this History with her torch, these dim Oceanides encircling their dim hero they may or may not be fully comprehended, but our pleasure depends very little on the meaning. That pleasure we get from a beautiful, quiet, reposeful composition, from a pale yet luminous coloring, and from the fitness of the painting to the place.

It is here that we strike a mooted question, the question as to what is strictly mural. The extremist will answer by pointing to Egyptians and Etruscans, or at least, to the Italian Primitives, whether Sienese, Florentine, or Paduan. There are others, however, who will point to Veronese, the antithesis of the flat, the straight, the simple. This quarrel, however, we leave to the delight of the quarrelers. For ourselves, we may venture to speak thus :

A wall is a thing that is permanent. It is neither a screen nor a curtain; we do not move it; it is. The effect of its decoration, therefore, should be serenity, no scene should be painted upon it that demands too much of our minds or our emotions. Since a wall is broad and clear the composition of a wall-painting should be such ; its colors should be luminous though not necessarily brilliant; and its design should be

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suited, absolutely, to the purpose and the character of the room. The idea must not be oppressive, and, as to the figures, they should be either familiar like those of the older decorations, the subjects of which were well-known to the children of the Church or should be of such a nature that they do not put a strain upon the intellect. Veronese's conception is legitimate, the people for whom he painted being thoroughly familiar with his figures and his legends. The Doges of Venice did not fret about Europa on a ceiling; they knew her story and troubled themselves not a whit about it. The great matter, then, was design, or decorative pattern and Veronese's pattern, though the layman may not see it, is not only beautiful but appropriate. Legitimate also, or not very badly out of place, are the mural decorations of Tintoretto, though some folk have argued to the contrary. The monks of the Scuola di San Rocco were familiar with the whole life of Christ, and Tintoretto's pictures on their walls occasioned no least trouble. Involved and patternless as they were, drilling big holes in the wall, there was a certain familiarity about the subject which kept the work restful and appropriate to the place. This, it is objected, implies a relative standard; but, at our great risk, we answer, "There is no hard standard for mural painting. The thing that serves for one time, or for one place and one kind of people, will not serve for another time, another place, and

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another kind of people. The standards are necessarily relative and variable."

It is the great and crowning merit of de Chavannes that he originated a new ideal of decoration. He saw the wall, not as something to be filled, but as something to be beautified, and for this effect he has filled his wall by not filling it. He has left some large bare spaces which are, in truth, a part of the scheme; he has given up the forest for the trees, and he has left out many of the trees to show how well the wide spaces may serve in the decorative scheme. As a painter of the picture de Chavannes is disappointing, neither his drawing nor his composition being wholly satisfactory. It is his work as a decorator which protects him from the future, with its terrible impartiality.

The influence of de Chavannes is greater than the number of his followers; in fact, we cannot think of latter-day mural work without the example of his big and broad simplicities. If asked, however, to name the painters who especially illustrate this influence, we should speak of several men, selecting them at random. There is Maurice Denis, for example; we may note such alluring decorations as his panels in the house of M. Charles Stern, among which are fe La Potme, J * "La Danse? and "La Cantate" In these, while they are truly original, with a touch of old Florentine stiffness such as we never see in de Chavannes, the germ of the impulse is plainly from that master.

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Again, we have his "Nymphs in the Fields of Hyacinth," which is decidedly on the order of de Chavannes; then, too, his "Orchard," and "Our Lady with the School Children," the last heing a combination of de Chavannes and Fra Angelico, the religious feeling conscious and deliberate. Another and really noted follower is J. Francis Auburtin, from whose work we may cite almost anything as a good example of this great and pervasive influence. A third is Henri Martin, a pointilliste though the title is now disclaimed who is de Chavannes translated into terms of present-day Luminarism. A fourth is Simile Rene Menard, who has been named "a modern Claude," but who is really de Chavannes plus a hint of the earlier painter, and whose classic world is less dream-like than his. There is also Maurice Chabas, whose decorative panels, such as "Le Bain" ff Le Golfe" and "Vision Antique f* are clearly in the track of de Chavannes. In fact, there are followers innumerable, from men of an equal note to the great mass of students and amateurs.

The third division of the decorative we have named "The New Idyllic." That the idyl is so popular, so dear alike to painter and to spectator, is due, as we have intimated, to two very notable facts: our desire for a world of peace and our tendency towards the decorative, both of which the idyl so well suits. We are a strange folk, we moderns, and we dearly love

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this particular desire. "I do not want to find" so says a modern Celtic poet **f or, when I find, I know

I shall have claspt the wandering wind And built a house of snow "

The wandering wind, the dissolving snow, the moon on the slipping water, the bird that stays hut a moment and is gone these are the symbols of that restlessness, that "desire for desire" which is the mark of our lesser romanticism. In all our great poetry we hear a greater voice. We hear it in the noble affirmations of Wordsworth; in the high odes of Shelley, impassioned for unspeakable beauty; in the interpretations of life that we get from Robert Browning; in the wistful questioning of Arnold and of Clough; and from scores of modern poets who are much too familiar to be enumerated. In painting, however, we have the lesser cry, the cry which corresponds to the Celtic wistfulness, the mysticism of Poe and Symons and Mallanne. This is because painting is an art for the senses. The world of abstract idealism is closed to it, while the world that symbolizes the ideal the Vale of Tempe, the Land of Heart's Desire is easy enough to portray. It lends itself to the decorative, and the decorative, we repeat, has been for the past twenty years a chief end and aim of the modern Frenchman. There is never any trouble as to time- A Greek Arcadia, an eight-

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PAUL GAUGUIK

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eenth-century park, or some fair spot that never was on sea or land each place is our own earthly paradise, the realm of eternal youth and of beauty all immortal. The idyllic world of the modern is neither Giorgione's nor Watteau's but is sui generis, with a spirit and appearance all its own. Here are Daphne and Apollo, here is sweet Amaryllis, and here are the white nymphs of Dian; but here too, are Columbine and Pierrot, Peter Pan and Tinker Bell, the fays of Celtic legend, the Muses of a purely modern Parnassus and these are presented with a peculiar, unmistakable modernity.

Giorgione's "Pastoral Concert" and Fragonard's "Bathers" are the inspiration of many modern Frenchmen, who typify this joy of life, only too often, by naked women in a deep woodland on the banks of a silver stream, their figures being varied by the figures of satyrs and centaurs. The power of these things is not absolute but varies with the genius of the artist. Sometimes the picture is convincing. We say to ourselves, "This is a breath of Arcady, a breath of youth and morning." As often, however, we turn away disheartened. It is not Arcady, it is not youth and morning; it is not a nymph at all, but a naked Parisian woman! The mingling of mortals with satyrs and centaurs may constitute, at times, a beautiful picture, but we question the ultimate effect of such mingling; yes, on the spirit of the painter him-

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self! It was written long ago and the writing was not arbitrary but a statement of natural law that man should be man and not a mongrel. A piece of nature's ethics, Christianity has enforced this upon us, and we cannot lose our sense of its justice and its necessity. There are certain of these painters to whom we commend old Mantegna, who, in his "Virtue Repelling the Vices," gives to the vices those now popular shapes of satyr and centaur. We commend to them, also, that great Hellenistic marble, the "Barberini Faun," a coarse, drunken, animal figure; and, again, the superb fidelity of Rubens and his reeling, grinning satyrs. On the other hand, we would point them to Titian's lovely "Bacchus and Ariadne," to certain quaint German idyls of which we have already spoken, and to Stuck's "Ancient Wood" with its big, terrific, elemental creatures. These things are either all truth or all mythology; they are not mixtures of modern women, satyrs, and centaurs in a tableau of human happiness ! If this be but narrow and Philistine, we hasten to proclaim ourselves such. Examples of our "New Idyllic" are legion, and the paintings of Denis, Menard and Chabas, of which we have already spoken, are excellent illustrations of this idyllic trend as well as of the influence of de Chavannes. We note an idyllic touch even in FantinLatour, who does not wholly belong to this current but who turns of his own accord to a region of cloudy

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beauty which he fills with the shapes of modern music. To illustrate, however, from the most eminent Frenchman of today, we may speak of the work of Besnard There is, for one thing, his decoration of the Salle des Manages in the Maine de St. Germain I 5 Auxerrois the symbolic "Morning," "Noon," and "Eve," in each of which the effect is distinctly idyllic. For another example we have the flaming yet delicate "Stars," a thing all Parisian, an idyllic creation that smacks alike of absinthe and the boulevards. A third and last we take from the Musee des Arts Decoratif s, a painting of which Besnard says, "C'est moi" It is the "Isle of Happiness," on the green grass of which are naked and half -naked women alternating with satyrs and centaurs, and to which, from a faint white town across the lake, come little boats laden with mortal passengers. This last is a cross between Watteau and Boecklin, more delicate than the latter, far more sophisticated than either, and something which is subtly and most exquisitely decadent. A final example of Besnard's work, not half so lovely but very much saner in conception, is his "Astronomy" in the Salon des Sciences of the Hotel de Ville in Paris. This is not a seated woman with a telescope and some mathematical instruments, but a circle of bright, idyllic figures, some of whom move swiftly while others float, but all of whom suggest a world of dream in which the chief inhabitants are the stars. Besnard

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is many-sided, being the painter of women, the painter of horses, the painter of Oriental life, but he is also the decorative painter and one who has many opportunities for his genius. His decoration of a hall in the iScole de Pharmacie in Paris is one of his earliest performances and is characterized in parts by a delicate and brilliant sanity, though in other parts it is exaggerated, and in others prosaic. Besnard is the best living exponent of the best modern French painting; he is a master of the effects of light, a striking and even brilliant colorist, and a decorator who is purely modern yet seldom extreme.

To name other men of this order the men whose particular theme is the idyllic is a task that is not at all difficult. There is La Touche, for example, who has confined himself of late to a bizarre and very fanciful idylhsm. In La Touche we have a modern but inferior Watteau, who gives us a "marriage of nature with the opera," a something to which there is no other word as applicable as the French "confectionne," for it is really a candy-like compound. His world is all daintily bizarre, a place of pretty, artificial fountains and lakes, of little boats and white swans, a place which echoes silverly with the laughter of fair women Parisian ladies all, and very fine! who are playing the parts of water-nymphs and who greatly like their roles I These are not the dewy meadows of Corot and his dryads; they are the gar-

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dens of Versailles, frequented by the Loves and the Graces, who are gowned and coifed and perfumed with a most suspicious modernity. La Touche's craft is finer than his concepts. His abilities are worthy of a greater field than this Land of Bonbons and Peacock-feathers.

Another leader here is Aman-Jean, as novel as La Touche and much weightier. Of his mural painting one may say, "Mantegna Botticelli Blake in French" ; but the rest of his work is highly original, of an idyllic and decorative quality at once bizarre and disciplined.

To mention examples may seem useless, yet, since example is the best of all teachers, we may cite for the American public two beautiful things in the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh. The one is "The Judgment of Paris/* by Rene Menard. It is a picture both idyllic and realistic, since it is thus that Paris might have met the Idalian Aphrodite, but this idyllic realism is of a fashion purely modern. The second is Aman-Jean's "Mirror in the Vase," the idyl of a delicate French park, at once conscious and ethereal, emptied of all emotion in order to be absolutely decorative. To illustrate this new idyllism we could hardly ask better examples, but there still come to mind the names of Levy-Dhurmer, of Guay, of Mademoiselle Dufau, of Roussel, of Bonnard, and others that are equally illustrative.

CHAPTER IV

EXTREMISM

Leaders: Cezanne, Van Gogh, Odilon Redon. More Moderate Followers: Bonnard, Vuillard, and Roussel. Matisse,, Gauguin, Zak and Others, Pseudo-Primitives. Conclusions as to French Painting.

TO come from the men whom we have discussed to the Cubists, Futurists, and Post-Impressionists is a shock that is hardly broken even by such painters as Maurice Denis. Between the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists stands Cezanne, who is eyed askance by those one-time heretics, now orthodox, the strict followers of Manet and the other early Impressionists* For a discussion of his technique we commend the reader to such critics as Mr. Caffin and Mr. Brinton; it is enough for our purpose to say that the effect of his art is- the effect of a crude yet terrible realism. He impresses us, at times, as returning directly and deliberately to the Primitives; at times in "L'Enlevement" for instance he is like the big Delacroix; while at other times he recalls the grotesques of Daumier and of Goya. His color is glowing yet is also crude and childish, though of this he is apparently unconscious. It is not like the child-

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ishness of Gauguin and Matisse, but is, at least, as much a part of himself as Rossetti's mystery was part of Rossetti's self, or even as Turner's color was of Turner. By a certain element of the jeunesse doree he is worshipped as a master, but this is a youth which is drunken with modernity, a species of absinthe that produces strange obsessions. To decry Cezanne is easy, but it is quite as cheap to exalt him unduly. We do him some justice when we say that he is a master of still-life, that his color is a remarkable, halfcrude, loose mosaic, which yet impresses us as real, and that he has a veracity which is far from the Dutch effect of coolness, tightness, and quiet, yet is faintly akin to that of Vermeer and his compatriots.

With regard to the Dutchman Van Gogh, included by temperament with the French, we may borrow a criticism and say that his art is "an animal art," that his harmonies are "physical harmonies," his temper anarchistic and barbaric. To some extent he was a follower of Millet; but, where Millet was gentle, Van Gogh was ternble, a big and uncouth creature who is described by his admirers as "painting tremendous simplicities," To the majority Van Gogh's madness is evinced by his work color, line, values, all as deranged as the man's brain itself 1 Yet a gift he undoubtedly has, and there are times when we are truly affected by his big, crude, "physical art." He is like some poor, gigantic child, or some crude and childish

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giant, who does not know how to accommodate himself to the complex world about him. To mistake such originality for genius is one of the follies of the modern world, akin to the folly of proclaiming Walt Whitman's raw material to be the finished product of a great and solemn Muse. Whitman's is great material, indeed, and his concept is great, but his Muse writes very haltingly sometimes in superb and conquering measure, sometimes in a measure as rough and childish as a boy's. It is so with Vincent Van Gogh, who is a species of Whitman, though by no means so big as the poet.

In Odilon Redon we have a man with a feeling for line and color which, as a rule, is expressed in a fashion very fragmentary. His exquisite "Beatrice," of the Fabre collection in Paris, is reminiscent of the Hellenistic sculptures, though with some faint suggestion of the heads of Desiderio di Settignano. He is sufficiently versatile, however, to do things that are equally suggestive of the Gothic. He is a romanticist of an extreme order, whose work does not follow nature but exceeds her; he finds his best medium in pastel, and his flower-pieces have been likened to certain early Japanese caskets which are inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

In Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, a sorry figure, injured in his youth, we have a genius who ended life in madness. Lautrec took the Paris under-world as

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his subject, and found there a great deal that suited the severity of his line as well as the looseness of dress and of general effect that went with his impressionistic leanings* He was the follower of Seurat for a time, hut a man of distinct originality who chose his own paths and who portrayed the under-world and the world of the poor dancers with a satire that preached many sermons. "Lautrec," says a presentday critic, "never mistook Art for Beauty. He accused the whole social fabric through these poor women." Of the same order as Lautrec is Pierre Bonnard, who, however, has chosen much fairer subjects. His color is riotous but quite lovely, and it fills all his depths for he practically does away with shadow. To one who recalls a certain pretty experience the sudden "walking in" upon a Bonnard exhibition in the Bernheim gallery there comes with his name the memory of a riot of color, half poetic and half impudent, with just a few touches of absurdity. The figure that suggested itself was that of red roses blooming and quivering under something translucently white say alabaster, perhaps and the subjects were uniformly gay and joyous. Vuillard is less luminous and less intense, but he is of the same family, the family of Cezanne, of Van Gogh, of Gauguin. Where Bonnard is the poet, Vuillard makes a delicate prose, especially with his little interiors of still life. Roussel is the most exquisite of all, his

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pastel-landscapes being likened to the wings of lovely butterflies. Both Roussel and Bonnard are of the Golden World, but Bonnard gives us a French bourgeois family at tea in their little garden, where Roussel gives us Hylas, or Narcissus, or the nymphs. The spirit is the same, however, whether Arcadia be found in far-off Greece or at the side-door of a sturdy stone rncdson of France! Roussel, by the way, has recently done the curtain for a new theatre in Paris, selecting for his subject a Greek pastoral and finding ample room for his decorative talent. All three of these painters have been taught by the art of Japan Vuillard, perhaps, the most yet they have not followed the lesson too far nor too ardently, their accomplishment being such that they cannot be greatly influenced by any foreign teaching.

Cezanne has been called the link between the Impressionists and the Post-Impressionists. Of these, as of the Cubists and Futurists, it is difficult to speak in terms which shall be at all intelligible to the layman. Post-Impressionism, we say at once, is not so much Impressionism gone to its limits as Impressionism gone beyond its limits. To suggest, to intimate, to leave in the haze of glamor this was the aim of Impressionism, but it did not do away with what men had learned in the discipline of the centuries. These Extremists, however, are throwing their knowledge over-board and are being deliberately childish, though

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they call it being "child-like." Between Claude Monet and such a man as Gauguin, or as Matisse, there is so great a gulf that the name "Post-Impressionism" seems misleading. To illustrate : Paul Gauguin ahhorred the divisions and complementary colors of Monet, and considered him with Seurat, the ptintilliste, who is Monet's extreme as his natural archenemy. To illustrate again : the insistence of Matisse upon pattern, upon design, is exactly opposed to the practice of Monet, who is aiming to reproduce appearance and not to make a design. So far as the relationship is concerned, Post-Impressionism is the old movement pushed to an illogical extreme. The aim of the former was to give us the aspect or effect of things; but "effect" is taken by the new men as having a large and vague significance, of which their predecessors never dreamed, for they include in this term sentiment and sensation in the abstract. The movement has been defined as "the endeavor to express pure sentiment intellectually," (this, again, being opposed to the optic art of Monet), and Lewis Hind claims for Matisse that he is "an audacious explorer in the realm of sensation. 9 * In order to explore, however, this Extremist pretends to be a child, assuming an innocence of eye and an innocence of brain that cannot deceive anybody but himself. Gauguin, indeed, having a strain of tropical blood, went off and lived by himself in a barbarous country; but

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even there, we fancy, was some slight element of selfdeceit. Mr* Haldane MacFall, in his "History of Painting," sums up these men as trying to standardize the primitive, and refers to their style as "Primitive-Academism/ 5 This is excellent, and could hardly be bettered. Matisse holds a misshapen Javanese idol to be beautiful because it expresses the author, but on this ground we may exhibit, as beautiful objects, the dough-men made by our five-year-old children, ecstatically troubling the cook in the kitchen! His reversion, like that of Gauguin's, is to the primitive, a deliberate reversion on the part of both, and foolish because of its very consciousness. The simplicity of the Primitives is good. When the modern imitates it the modem, with all his style, his knowledge, and his manifold experience! it is not good at all, but ridiculous.

It is claimed that this "abstract" work is classic, and that, as classic music seeks for pure sound, so it seeks for pure and abstract pattern. Reference is made, of course to Bach and Mozart, who tell no story and offer no "program," in distinction from Wagner, Strauss, and De Bussy, whose music follows the whirl of the Valkyrie, the passions of Salome, the dreams of Pell6as and Melisande. The word "classic" here, however, is a title that is surely misapplied! At any earnest work we do not dare to laugh; but to claim for these men that they really turn to the classic,

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to the impersonal, monumental quality of the elder Greeks, the quality of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven this, we think, adds something to the gayety of nations! If we grant the desire, the achievement still lags and achievement, we repeat, is the final and the only reliable test.

Of the Futurists we may say that they offer a more comprehensible idea. They aim, it would appear, at an instantaneous rendering of the continuous stages of emotion or action. They would give, as in one piece, the whole flashing impression of a naked figure running down a stair-case; they would give the impression of a crowded ball-room or cafe, which makes, for the passing stranger, only a blur of lights and colors, out of which shines a woman's laughing countenance. It is the art of rapid transit, the art of the motor and the air-ship, in which there is possibly some reason, though the Futurist, like the others, is unequal to his own big idea.

In discussing the principles of Impressionism we have practically touched upon landscape-painting, for in this form, more than in any other, these principles find outlet and utterance. To talk of the theories of Monet, Pissaro, and Seurat is to talk of landscapework though we have said nothing, as yet, of the exquisite, soft landscape of their comrade, Le Sidaner, the effect of which we might have contrasted with the nervous effect of RaffaelFs street-scenes. The ex-

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travagance of violet and mauve in French landscape is hardly more remarkable than in our own; one may walk through exhibits at the Grand Palais, or through the Bemheim or the Georges Petit gallery, and see no mauve or violet that is much more astonishing than those at Knoedler's, at Macbeth's, at the Montross or at the Folsom gallery in New York. This is but a fancy and a fad, which will pass away like others of its kind. That the American is by temperament a landscapist, while the Frenchman is by temperament all things, is a fact that needs no statement, and one, moreover, of which we shall speak in another chapter.

As to modern French portraiture, this, also, must be practically passed. Our study is a study of tendencies, and when we have characterized the whole nineteenth century as romantic, when we have spoken of naturalism in its various phases which, by all means, includes Impressionism and when we have talked of the movement towards the decorative, we have intimated something, at least, as to the aims of the modern portraitists. It is needless, therefore, to say that men like Bonnat, Constant, and Chartran are realists of the older and "modeling" order, or that their ideals and methods have been largely superseded. It is equally needless to speak of their superseders, of such men as Jacques fimile Blanche and iSdouard Aman- Jean whose portraiture has the decorative f eel-

STUDY OF A WOMAN

HENRI MATISSE

IN THE COLLECTION OP MR. LOUIS STEIN

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ing very strongly developed; of Boutet de Monvel, also decorative in feeling, who verges upon the illustrative; of Flameng and his rather hard, rather unimaginative realism; of Henri Caro-Delvaille, the portraitist who was the vogue of Paris a year or two ago, and who mingles the realistic and the decorative ; of the Alsatian, Honore Umbricht, or of the Swiss Steinlen, both of whom are Parisian by adoption and both of brilliant achievements. If we do not speak of these men at length, it is because the substance of both forms has been indicated in the preceding pages, though portraiture, indeed, is a subject of itself and needs a whole volume for its adequate discussion.

In concluding this study we may repeat that the decorative, in its different forms, has been the chief and most significant element in modern French painting. This element at its best is beautiful and satisfying; it wears a wreath from Helicon and offers a cup from fair Castaly. At its worst that is, in certain fleshly forms it is matched by the worst of Baudelaire, and its spirit may be likened to that Belle Dame Sans Merci^ whose kiss was deceitful and whose fairy grotto was a dark cave of death. From the exaggeration of this and of other such elements there must speedily come about a change; otherwise, we cannot deny our fears for French painting! The stay, we think, is largely in the 3cole des Beaux Arts, or, at least, in the academic quality and element.

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Complacent it may be, stiff and deliberate and very hard to influence but in these selfsame qualities lies the safety and the hope for French art. Without them the whole world of painters would turn radical, and anarchy be the rule of all the world! From such a fate academism perpetually preserves us standing, as it does, for that great element in the French people which is sane, conservative and reliable.

PART TWO MODERN GERMAN PAINTING

MODERN GERMAN PAINTING CHAPTER I

BASIC FACTS AND GENERAL TENDENCIES

Basis for Study. Racial Qualities. Revival of Painting and Early Schools. Main Currents Indicated.

FOR a study of modern German work there are six facts, or matters, which together constitute a basis. The first is the fact involving a comparative study of art that German painting is racial to a very marked degree. The second is the fact that from Diirer and Holbein to the middle years of the great nineteenth century there are few famous names in the history of German painting. The third fact, which is really included in the first, is that German expression, of all periods, is subjective and idealistic, as distinct from the objective and stylistic expression of the French. The fourth to be noted is the existence of two dominant types, the Northern or Berlin type, which is impersonal and cosmopolitan alike in its feeling and its effect, and the Southern or Munich type, which, by comparison, is baroque, intense, and highly personal. The fifth, which is also intimated by the first, is the fact that line and not color is the true and peculiar expression of the German temper; and the

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sixth is the fact of the German's debt to France for a certain modernity of technique. Of these six facts we make the working-basis for our study.

As to racial feeling, the first of our basic matters, we note it as wholly unconscious. It has no knowledge of country, it has no patriotism, no feeling of any order. French art, which is not at all national, is yet markedly racial; English art is racial to its hurt; and American art is racial by virtue of a blend of the conventional with the cosmopolitan, a suggestion of new blood which is touched with a reverence for tradition. In the art of none of these, however, is the racial quality more marked than we find it in the art of modern Germany. If asked to name its elements, we might note first the idealism of which we have already spoken, and, second, that strong individualism, that emphasis on the free and personal, as opposed to the general and impersonal, which distinguishes the Gothic from the best Greek. Third, perhaps, is the jphilosophical quality, which is so German that the merest schoolboy knows it as such. The fourth is the sense of the mysterious, of beauty touched with strangeness, which is one of the prime factors of romanticism. Next in order we mark the fine German simplicity; then the ancient touch of the grotesque; and, last, the immemorial suggestion of the terrible, which comes like some threatening figure from the dark and primitive forest.

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It is here that we touch another fact, the fifth in our original order but one which connects itself with this and should have been listed with it. That is the strong Northern tendency to lineJ It is not by mere accident, not by any bald chance of material, that the Gothic style is a style that spells outline. The gauntness of Durer, the gauntness of the cathedral at Cologne, is a thing which is intrinsically Northern. When Leibl, in one decade, and Liebennann, in another, arranges his lines to produce a fine sense of repose, a sense of the monumental or typical, we find nothing new, but, on the contrary, an old principle and one which expresses Northern blood.

Our second fact is the fact that, from Durer and Holbein to the early part of the nineteenth century, there are no great names in the ranks of German painters. Painting in the Germany of the eighteenth century we hardly call painting at all, for it was in reality a species of sublimated illustration. It was led by Carstens, who was more a cartoonist than a painter^ and its apostle was Winckelmann, that pioneer critic who opened to the modern world the beauty and the glory of Hellas but the trend of whose preaching was greatly towards the dominance of form. In Carstens we have the Gothic importance of line carried to the last degree, and it takes the riotous color of Piloty to counteract his influence. In the earlier nineteenth century, then, a pseudo-classicism was the

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chief German style, and the breaking with this style is the only real achievement of two weak schools, the school of the "Nazarenes" and that of Dusseldorf .

"The Nazarenes" were German Pre-Raphaelites and went for inspiration to the sources which, many years later, were springs for Rossetti and his followers to pre-Renascence painting, with its mystery, its innocence, its simplicity, its profound Catholic fervor. They hated the "magnificent paganism" of St. Peter's, and they loved Siena and Padua and their effects of simplicity aad sincerity. "The Annunciation" is painted by Overbeck in a fashion which recalls Lippo Lippi, and Fuhrich paints the Prodigal Son somewhat in the spirit of old Giotto. All this is largely imitation, and, like other imitations, it speedily passes away. The school of Dusseldorf has been described as "a lyrico-sentimental school of painting, which did Marys and prophets, knights and robbers, gypsies and monks, water-nymphs and nuns, all with the same languishing tenderness." It is, of course, a pseudo-romantic movement, and its relation to modern German art is that of "Lalla Rookh" to modern English poetry. The great name of this era is that of Cornelius, who painted in a presumably grand style and who led the re-action to color, though he himself began as a classicist. There are certain enthusiasts at this moment who rank him as a very great painter, but to criticism in general he is hardly more than an

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earnest and gifted imitator, "with gestures of wouldbe greatness." It was not for Cornelius to restore the old-time vision to Germany; nor was it for Wilhelm Kaulbach, a man of similar genius though lesser, and a painter of the historical subject,

It is here that we touch on royal influence, the influence of the house of Bavaria. Both Ludwig I. and his mad grandson were patrons of the arts, the former erecting many of the classic buildings of Munich, though his taste in painting was falsely romantic. Those painters worked most ardently, however, who had no royal orders and therefore pleased themselves, and the best romantic of the mad king's era is the independent Schwind, who has met the impartial test of time. With the passing of the Nazarenes and of the Diisseldorf school there passes a weak and false romanticism, but Schwind is a true romantic and stands above the schools,

It has been said of this painter that he is a German Fra Angelico, and he has, indeed, the mediaeval spirit of simplicity and sincerity. To the heart of so naive a German the morning blooms forever, and the cuckoo, the symbol of romance, is forever calling him onward. He journeys to the end of the rainbow; he plucks, not the Blue Flower itself, that symbol of the great unattainable, but what we may know by the name of "The Little Blue Flower," the blossom of a simple and child-like magic, of a gentle and innocent enchant-

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ment. Schwind's color is not always good; in truth, it is sometimes motley and his composition is sometimes confused; but he has the gift of vision, he practices like an old German magician, a magician such as Albrecht Durer at his gentlest. His effect, to put it briefly, is the effect of the old Teutonic legend. In the Schack Gallery in Munich, where there is a number of his fairy landscapes and wood-scenes, the romanticist will grow enthusiastic, for here is the real old German spirit. Here, in truth, is the big, dark, German forest, the forest where you might meet Rubezahl, or Snow-white and Rose-red, or Hansel and Gretel and the witch, or the youngest of the three beautiful princesses, with long golden hair and a real golden crown on her head! This is the spirit of Durer's wood-cuts, though modernized and softened as befitted the later artist.

In connection with our third point, the dominance of subject over form, we may note this preference as essential in the idealist and the German, above all other Europeans, is the man of the dream, the man of the ideal. To the genius of the Greek the thought and form are equal, and to the genius of the French the form is distinctly paramount, but to those in whom Gothic blood runs pure the subject is the uppermost matter. The German is the dreamer of Europe; he is essentially the brooder, the philosopher, the strain of the visionary running through all his art.

AM WALDQUELL

ERNST LIEBERMANN

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Among the new men, it is true, there are many who endeavor to drop this racial preference, thinking to concern themselves with their painting as mere painting; but, happily, they cannot always work against the grain, and they return, now and again, to the true German f eehng for the vision.

In turning to our fourth point, the fundamental matter of a difference between ideals, we may say, roughly speaking, that modern German art follows three main currents or three distinct examples until, at last, the three have flowed together and have become one stream. The first is the example of Menzel and Leibl, the great realists of the seventies and eighties, who work on traditional lines; the second is that of Boecklin, a contemporary of their later life, who is the best known, though not the greatest of nineteenth-century German romanticists; while the third is that of Liebermann, the realist of a most modern order, who works on the lines opened up by French plein-airism. This is the usual classification, but is, indeed, only a species of rough sign-board, giving general directions and pretending to nothing more definite.

In coming to our last basic fact, the fact of a modern French influence, we see that we have this moment touched upon it in the describing of Liebermann and his followers as affected by the example of French plein-airism. It was not Liebermann but

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Gleichen-Russwurm who introduced Monet's linedivision, but it was Liebermann who led the movement, who stood definitely for secession from academic standards. Under the old regime > as we noted in our opening chapter, much care was given to the subject; with the Impressionists, to quote their best fighter, "the chief personage in a painting is the light** and the picture is painted, not with regard to the importance of any one figure, but in accordance with the highest note to be found in the whole material, be it the pink of a woman's dress, the yellow of a man's coat, or the red of a bunch of roses on the table. It is because of this influence, doubtless, that we see among certain German painters a waning in the importance of the subject. The German, too, is growing very busy as a Luminanst, and the rendering of the effects of artificial light is becoming almost a hobby* An avenue in Berlin at evening, with street-lamps softly glowing; a girl at the piano, with lamp-light on her hair; the electric light shining through a window on a man's head and face; Maud Allan, the dancer, before a dark curtain, with the foot-lights streaming upward on her figure and her garments these few but actual examples are typical of the many which fill the German studios and exhibition galleries.

To these six facts we may now add a seventh, which comes in most appropriately with the name of

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Adolf Menzel, who died but a few years ago and whose life-time is a period which takes in the old art and the new. This is the fact that German nationalism has served as a powerful cause in the fusion of the various elements of realism and romanticism, of classicism and naturalism, of Munich and Berlin, of Academy and Rebellion. This is the history of all such unifying forces in their relation to art. The Parthenon was inspired, in some measure, by the glory of united Greece as the conqueror of the Persian. It had the large simplicity, the breadth and grandeur of the feeling of that period, a period in which the civic ideal was an ideal dominant and from which the strong hands of War and the trembling hands of Victory had smoothed away the pettiness, the less important passions. This is noted here in connection with the growth of German art since the eighties. The Greek States, having vanquished a common enemy, became a united country, and the guarantee of security gave an impetus to art. It is so with imperial Germany; after a decade or more of national existence, the effect of security and peace was a new opportunity for the arts, which have flourished in the past forty years as they had not for many generations.

CHAPTER II

THE GREAT REALISM. THE GREAT ROMANTICISM

Realism: Menzel and Leibl. A Contemporary Revival of Color: Piloty; von Kaulbach. Franz von Lenbach and his Portraiture. Romanticism: Feurbach, Classico-Romanticist ; Boecklin, von Marees, Thoma, Pure Romanticists.

WHEN realism enters modern Germany it finds a world which is divided between Cornelius and Kaulbach, into which comes presently Carl Piloty. Cornelius and Kaulbach stand for "the grand manner," while the gorgeous Piloty, at whom it is now the fashion to sneer, has accomplished his destiny "by planting the banner of color on the citadel of idealistic cartoon-drawers." In this divided world looms the big figure of Menzel, who is the first of German painters to paint the life around him. He gives us what he sees: a German iron-mill with coarse and heavy workmen; a church filled with worshippers; a court-scene, brilliant with gay costumes; a group at the palace of Sans Souci; a busy marketplace; or a long street thronged with people. Menzel is the Berlin type Berlin standing, as we have said, for the cooler qualities, the qualities more northern and more cosmopolitan. He is critical and aloof,

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"a pains-taking and almost myopic painter/* a painter of no ulterior intent. Menzel has no narrative and no message, but what the eye can see he paints supremely well. He gives us nothing that is spiritual, but the work is so good and is done with such workman-like pride, such a sense for the beautiful in presentation, that we return to it when we have passed other men who are far more imaginative and even more idealistic. In Menzel we have the old, academic, traditional methods, yet now and again so original was his genius we find him suggesting modern light-effects and attacking such problems as are, to-day, affected by the Luminarists. We recall in this connection a picture entitled "An Interior,*' which is simply an empty room with a window, its broad white curtain spread out by open shutters. This is remarkable as a bit of painting and for Menzel's particular time. It does not mean anything to the layman, but to the painter it is important because of its values, even though the shaft of sunlight may look just a trifle like whitewash.

It is now, at the very height of Menzel's realism, that we have "a side-movement," a decorative revel which began with a recognition of the fact that painting had been a sort of story-book, telling tales and making humorous or instructive points. The object now becomes the pictorial and leads to a study of the great masters of Italian painting, the demi-gods of

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a lost world. To this revel belongs the earlier work of Fritz Albert von Kaulbaeh, whose painting of women has an effect which is almost bouquet-like. In these later years, however, Kaulbach and his kind have painted things very modern in feeling a row of bacchantes, for example, dancing on the edge of a woodland, their blue robes gleaming in the blue halflight with an appearance that is absolutely decorative, and decorative, too, after a fashion purely modern. Here, also, belongs Victor Muller, romantic in spirit but realistic in treatment, and here the work of Diez, robust yet of delicate tone and concerned not a little with out-door subjects.

In the same breath with Menzel we think of that greater realist, Wilhelm Leibl, who stands as a German Courbet. Leibl is his own man, however, and a man of monumental dignity and simplicity in an era when these qualities were lacking to German art painting his quiet, unforgettable Dachau peasantwomen at a time when men painted such subjects as Thusnelda before Germanicus. There is no more idealism in Leibl than in Menzel. He is always the realist, and at times he impresses us as painting, like Whistler, for the sheer love of doing the thing. He will paint, for instance, a pretty-faced, laughing girl, but he does not paint her because of any pleasure which he has, or expects us to have, in her enjoyment. He paints her thus "because of the lines of her mouth,

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which, taken with the lines of the stove-pipe behind her and the lines of a table at her side, make a very nice study in ellipses!" Yet to Leibl, as to Menzel, we find ourselves continually returning. His big and hearty quiet, which has nothing of the quiet of decadence, his very lack of emotion, the fact that he asks but little of us as spectators in brief, the large plainness and sanity of his art are qualities that make for our repose. There is nothing in Leibl that smacks of the extravagant; he is, in fact, of the older tradition, the older technique. His art is the art that "models," as distinct from the art of flat painting; he is not the plein-airist, he has nothing to do with decoration, or with spots or with cubes or with any other geometric figures. Yet certain things we note in him as modern and very progressive. For example, we mark his bold division of masses and his use of straight lines to obtain a restful effect. This was a principle taken over from the Dutch, and, as we have said, in accord with the Northern genius, but a principle which seemed new because it was really old, and the adoption of which implied a free spirit. Leibl, of all modern Germans except Liebermann, is the one who is most nearly monumental, the word "monumental," as used in this connection, meaning that which is impersonal, general, permanent, essential, as opposed to the personal, the individual, the fugitive.

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It is somewhat hard to realize, in looking at the clean, sound realism of Leibl, that the work of such men as Piloty belongs to the same era in Germany. Piloty is as pompous as Leibl is simple, and his themes are typified by "Thusnelda Before Germanicus," which we see in the New Pinakothek in Munich, Yet Piloty is not to be sneered at; of an undeniable flash and gorgeousness, he served a good purpose by bringing into German art the color that it so much needed. It is true that he brought too much, it is true that we have passed ar beyond him, but he is not the mere lump of pomposity which the average art-student is wont to believe and to label him.

Of the school of Wilhelm Leibl, yet neither a realist like this master, nor a romanticist such as Boecklin, is the portraitist, Franz von Lenbach. Lenbach is not so severely sound as Leibl, nor has he the large and monumental effect which is, apparently, the end and aim of Liebermann; his tone is too brown, perhaps, and is not sufficiently luminous; nor does he get, as a rale, a very firm hold on the reason of the spectator. Yet such things as his "Wilhelm I." and his famous "Bismarck' are things of a fine and generous treatment, of a big, imaginative realism. It is a peculiarity of Lenbach that he singles out the eyes of his portraits and gives them an emphasis which he gives to nothing else. The eyes of his sombre Bismarck are memorable the world over, so mysterious

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are they, of such infinite sadness, such a questioning of the ultimate meaning of lifel The whole face, we may say, is a face characteristic of Germany, of Germany the dreamer, the seer of visions, Lenbach's "Shepherd Boy," which we note in the Schack Gallery, was done at a time when the clamor was for such bright and large pomposities as those of Carl Piloty and when the out-door world was still unpopular. This humble though enchanting figure, on its hillside of grass and flowers, was imagined when such imaginations were not profitable, when such realism was thought incompatible with dignity, and it is, in a sense, a precursor of German plein-airism. Lenbach in his later years shows a change which is hardly for the better, but in his earlier period he is very stoutly German, and, if he is not quite so great as he once was rated by his public, he is, beyond question, a painter of vigor, of sincerity, and of a genuine and even glamorous imagination.

Having considered the realism of Menzel and Leibl, we must now turn about in order to keep our balance, and consider the chief romantic painters of this middle period of later German art the men whose work is contemporaneous with Leibl's, and, to some extent, with that of Menzel, The names of Anselm Feurbach, Hans von Marees, and Arnold Boeeklin are to be set against the names of these two

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realists as painters of an opposite purpose, painters who have been called "idealists" but whom it is better to call "romanticists," since they have but little of that rare spiritual quality which is one of the chief elements of idealism.

It is here, with the use of the term "romanticism/ 5 that we pause for a word of explanation. By the word "romantic," which of late years has been somewhat loosely used, we mean, not only that which is free and unrestrained as opposed to classic limit, severity and restraint, but that, also, which is charged with mystery. It is that "beauty touched with strangeness" which is at once the goal and the starting-point, the desire and the despair, of those who apprehend it and endeavor to express it through any medium the medium of words, or music, or marble, or color. The romantic, we may say, is the thing that forever eludes us, the thing that we never quite hold and conquer, that we never quite possess. Now the classic is something that we do possess. True, its loveliness may grow upon us. The Phidian marbles, the Demeter of Praxiteles, a sculptured drum from a column of the temple at Ephesus these, and things like these, may ravish us the more with each succeeding vision. Yet in the last analysis they are not mysterious, and we may say, without vanity, that we grasp them. The romantic, however, is something that we never quite hold. It is the bird unseen

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in the thicket; it is the flaine that runs along the hilltops at night; it is the nymph in the brake, the halfseen hody of the oread; it is the flying hair and fluttering hem of Dian herself, who eludes us in perpetual virginity. In art it is the thing which cannot be fully said or sung, or painted, or carved but which, in the end, must rely on the magical quality of suggestiveness.

Now in literature it is possible for the romantic to rise to the spiritual, for literature is, itself, the most spiritual of all the arts, depending least upon the human senses. So, in modern German literature this quality is apotheosized and blends with the spirit, while in painting it remains a lesser quality. In literature, as we have said, it is symbolized by the Blue Flower, the sign of perfect beauty, but in painting its emblem is a Little Blue Flower, meaning only a phase of the perfect. From most of these romantic painters especially from Boecklin, Von Marees and Thoma we get, not the spiritual, but this quality of mystery, of glamor, of "beauty touched with strangeness." The love of this beauty, we maintain, is distinctly characteristic of the German temperament. Scientific, Protestant, military yes, Germany is all this; but at the heart of her in that big, deep, secluded place she keeps forever the Rheingold, the beckoning Undine and the Lorelei; she keeps there the gnome and the giant and the fury,

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the old gods of Valhalla, and the old heroic figures, the Siegfrieds and Brunhildas.

The first of this group, however, is not of a marked romanticism, but is, rather, a classico-romanticist, mingling the Greek ideal with the true German. This is Anselm Feurbach, who traces chiefly to the Italy of the Renascence, though in part to modern France. In the new Pinakothek in Munich is his beautiful "Medea," by which, as one of his best achievements and as one of the finest of modern German paintings, it is only honest to judge the possibilities of this artist. The "Medea," while its color is somewhat chill, has the beauty of a Greek relief, being firm, clear and unified, "with a large harmony of form." This finished picture of the Munich gallery the student may wish to compare with two very interesting sketches, one in tempera at Breslau and one in the National Gallery in Berlin. In the Breslau sketch the departing boat appears the chief theme, while Medea, the nurse, and the children are subordinated. In the Berlin sketch there are really two pictures, so sharply is the thing cut in half. It is the Munich picture that triumphs over difficulties; for here Medea and her children are massed in the foreground at one side, while Jason's boat is a little beyond the group, in the middle of the other side, the figure of the nurse making the connecting mass between the two other masses. The lines of the fig-

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ures and of the draperies, while not so sharp as in a Greek relief, are yet very simple, large and clear; the space between the women's figures and the boat, with its pushing sailors, is clearly and unerringly calculated; and the effect, as we cannot fail to see, is an effect of Hellenic temperance, balance and intellectuality. In other paintings with a classic subject for example, in the "Iphigenia," despite its simplicity and despite a classic drapery the Greek feeling is something almost imaginary, with little of the real Hellenic about it. We sum up Feurbach's genius when we say of it that it suggests the sixteenth century, and that, with this Renascence feeling, there is a certain serene idyllicism which is partly Greek and partly romantic.

In the Swiss, Arnold Boecklin, we have a man who lived and worked in Germany, one who stands as a painter completely German, and one, moreover, who founds a modern type. We have, too, the most popular of German painters, or, to be exact, the one who was most popular up to a few years ago. The reasons for this popularity it is easy enough to trace. The first and most evident is not imagination but a personal, original, and vigorous fancy; the second is a tendency to push his colors to make his blue very blue, his pink very pink, and his white very white a feat which is likely to appeal to the general; the third and most important is the vivid and joyous

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realism with which he takes Greek myth and renders it into his German. We may add to these reasons a fourth his rendering of Italian landscape, in which we have the mingling of austerity and delicacy, of the grave with the exquisite, which is so characteristic of certain parts of Italy.

With regard to his fancy, we must insist upon it as fancy, for Herr Muther has called him an idealist and has even ranked him with Watts. Now Watts was truly the idealist, being full of that spiritual quality which is the first and chief est element of idealism, hut in Boecklin there is not one gleam of spirituality; he is the romantic fantasist e, from whom we expect no idealism and who is only belittled by such unjust comparison. We would beg our Herr Muthers to take him as he is and not to compare him with any alien genius.

From Boecklin we get the classic myth, but we get it in the terms of German realism. His Pan is a wild and hairy fellow, a true denizen of the forest, with nothing of the flower-like loveliness of the faun of Praxiteles and the Syrinx of the Dresden gallery, escaping his embrace in headlong flight, is a figure that is equally realistic. Boecklin, indeed, has been accused of a blatant naturalism. "This," says Meier-Graefe, "is not the vision of the Greek but the vision of Charles Darwin." The criticism is harsh and "Darwin" is not the exact word, but there is,

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we admit, some justice in the arraignment. This is theatrical naturalism, a combination of Darwin and the footlights. A nereid has the emotions of Cleopatra, a triton has the humor of old Falstaff, and the nymphs are like ladies of the opSra bouffe. BoecHin, however, is not always the literalist, and his better work consists of idyls like those of the Schack Gallery in Munich. It is in such things as "The Villa by the Sea," an Italian landscape of exquisite severity; it is in such things as "An Idyl of Theocritus," in which the lyric youth, naked and crowned with pink roses, is playing on a woodland pipe to his fair Amaryllis, who is clumsy but sweet in the background; and in such things, again, as "Pan Frightening a Goat-herd," the figures of which do not appear to us as in the paintings left from Pompeii, but as some Greek shepherd might have imagined them who believed in the goat-hoofed Pan and who feared that, at some lone hour, he might come suddenly on the god himself, vine-wreathed and fluting in the boskage, or bent upon a Syrinx or upon Apollo's Daphne. ^

It is urged by two or three people that Boecklin is not really German, but to these unreasonable critics we bring up such things as "The Solitude of the Forest." The forest is dear to the German as the place from which he sprang, and this peculiar sympathy, this feeling for the wild-wood and its silence, is ex-

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pressed here with absolute fidelity. The great, staring goat, the dark mass of cave and tree behind him, the solitary figure on his back it is the old German legend itself, with that very element of terror which Heine so greatly disliked. This, moreover, is but one picture in many; there are other things equally racial.

While Boecklin was not out of sympathy with Impressionism, being akin to it by the very nature of his talent, he was lacking in that big command of color which distinguishes all Impressionists, from the Venetians to Turner and Claude Monet. He is praised by certain critics as being a very great colorist, but this is precisely what he is not. Original, intense, and sometimes charming, he is yet bizarre and capricious, and is somewhat uncertain in the handling of his pigment. His color is, in truth, his weak point, his strongest being his treatment of mass. "Boecklin/' says one admirer, "composed in colors ; he was a true and great musician in color." We grant that he did so compose, but it does not follow that he composed very greatly. To realize the faults of his composition we need only compare him with others, with painters like Monticelli, Besnard, or Renoir, all of whom compose in color and do it with supreme distinction. Boecklin's color is inferior to his architectonics; he builds superbly, his straight lines, horizontal and vertical, giving us the desired effect of

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solemnity, darkness, and an almost exquisite melancholy.

To see an exhibit of the work of Hans von Marees or, rather, hefore seeing that of Cezanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, and other modern extremists is to wonder, to dislike, to remember. His elements, we say to ourselves, may he classified thus: One-third the stiffness of the Primitives, one-third something Dutch, and one-third Giorgione gone mad. When this has been hazarded, however, there is something left to say and to explain. Von Marees, we know now, was aiming at that very synthesis which Henri, Glackens, Hawthorne, and other artists, American and European, are practising today. In his Germany this was something new; the old tradition, the tradition descended from the Florentines and from many generations of German draughtsmen, was still dominant among his contemporaries, and the aim of that tradition was not a synthetic art, but, rather, an art analytic.

This, however, was not what Von Marees actually did, but only what he tried to do. His effects are decorative and they do give a suggestion of synthesis of slurred detail and emphasized essential, and of all parts bound together into an organic whole; yet we feel the unfinished quality of this art, and we are almost repulsed by these blurred, half -grimacing faces. On the other hand, the simplicity of his fig-

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ures is like that of the very ancient marbles with their simple gestures and attitudes. As idyllic as Giorgione, he is yet as stiff as the sculptors of the older temples. His experiments with the naked figure are, however, unique for his time and his country. He gives us naked figures plucking oranges from overhanging boughs, or naked and half -naked figures set in a woodland clearing, or naked figures of some symbolic meaning. Yet their nakedness is clothed upon with innocence; they are like the first man and woman in the first garden and do not even know themselves unclothed! Moreover, they are not lovely models; they are common figures, figures of an every-day reality, with bones and muscles and sinews very much in evidence. In his later years Von Marees becomes more and more the decorator, though with an insistence on the cubic quality which makes against the decorative and it is in this mural work that we see him at his best and at his worst, the frescoes at Naples being poor while those of Schleissheim are beautiful. A man who longed for great things yet never mastered the language of his art, Von Marees may be described as a poet but "a poet who stammers Ms message."

We must not leave the romanticists of this period roughly speaking, of the sixties, seventies and eighties without some mention of Thoma, though this aged German painter is also of the twentieth cen-

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tiny and is exhibiting, even

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The Study Of Modern Painting, by Margaret Steele Anderson