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THE MASTERS OF 
 MODERN ART 
 
 BY 
 
 WALTER PACH 
 
 NEW YORK B. W. HUEBSCH, INC. MCMXXIV 
 
ee eed 
 
 £ 
 
+f; 
 
The present book offers in revised and con- 
 
 siderably expanded form a series of articles 
 
 which appeared in The Freeman (New York) 
 during 1923. 
 
CONTENTS 
 The Modern Period, 1 
 
 From the Revolution to Renoir, 13 
 
 The Poles of the Modern Movement, 38 
 After Impressionism, 49 
 
 Cubism, 69 
 
 . To-day, 91 
 
 Notes on the Illustrations, 103 
 Bibliography, 116 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Frontispiece. Baryrt. ‘Theseus Slaying the Centaur; 
 
 IO. 
 
 II. 
 
 on the Ile St. Louis, Paris. 
 (Original etching by Walter Pach). 
 
 Davip. The Family of Michel Gérard; 
 Museum of Le Mans. 
 
 IncRES. Madame Riviere; Louvre. 
 Corot. The Woman with the Pearl; Louvre. 
 
 Deacroix. Bacchus and Ariadne (The Spring) ; 
 Collection of Mr. Albert Gallatin, New York. 
 
 DavuMIER. Small sculptural models of heads; 
 
 Private Collection, Paris. 
 
 CourBET. Woman on a Ship; 
 Collection of MM. Bernheim-Jeune, Paris. 
 
 Manet. Berthe Morisot (Le Repos) ; 
 Collection of Mr. George Vanderbilt, New York. 
 Monet. Landscape in Norway; 
 Collection of MM. Durand-Ruel, Paris. 
 
 PissaRRO. Garden with Flowering Trees; 
 Luxembourg Museum. 
 
 Renoir. Mother and Child; 
 
 Private Collection. 
 
 Renoir. Nude; 
 Collection of M. Elie Faure, Paris. 
 
12. 
 
 rR: 
 
 14. 
 
 15. 
 
 16. 
 
 Gk 
 
 18. 
 
 19. 
 
 20. 
 
 21. 
 
 PAI 
 
 23. 
 
 24. 
 
 Illustrations 
 
 CEZANNE. Portrait of M. Chocquet; 
 Private Collection. 
 
 CEZANNE. Mont Sainte Victoire; 
 Collection of M. Ambroise hes Paris. 
 
 REDON. Orpheus; 
 Collection of Mr. John Quinn, New York. 
 
 GAuGUIN. ‘Tahitian Pastorals; 
 Private Collection. 
 
 Van GocH. Mme. Ginoux (L’Arlésienne) ; 
 German Collection. 
 
 SEURAT. The Circus; 
 Private Collection. 
 
 RovaAuttT. Two Women; 
 Collection of Mr. John Quinn, New York. 
 
 MATISsE. Portrait of Mme. Matisse; 
 Collection of M. Stchoukine, Moscow. 
 
 DERAIN. Portrait of Mme. Derain; 
 Private Collection. 
 
 Braque. The Viaduct of Aix-en-Provence; 
 Private Collection. 
 
 Matisse.  Still-Life; 
 Collection of Mr. John Quinn, New York. 
 
 Gieizes. Landscape; 
 Private Collection. 
 
 METZINGER. Still-Life; 
 Private Collection. 
 
a5. 
 
 26. 
 
 27. 
 
 20. 
 
 29. 
 
 30. 
 
 ay, 
 
 ave 
 
 33: 
 
 34. 
 
 35: 
 
 36. 
 
 Illustrations 
 Picasso. Figure; 
 Collection of Mr. John Quinn, New York. 
 
 VILLON. Study for a Portrait; 
 Private Collection. 
 
 DucuaAmp. The King and Queen Surrounded by 
 Swift Nudes; 
 Collection of Mr. Walter C. Arensberg, Los Angeles. 
 
 DucHAmMpP-VILLON. Baudelaire; 
 Collection of Mr. John Quinn, New York. 
 
 DucHamp-VILLON. ‘The Horse; 
 Collection of Mr. John Quinn, New York. 
 
 BraAncus!I. Mademoiselle Pogany; 
 Collection of Mr. John Quinn, New York. 
 
 Henri RoussEAu. The Jungle; 
 Collection of Mr. Walter C. Arensberg, Los Angeles. 
 
 RIVERA. Fresco; 
 
 Ministry of Education, Mexico City. 
 BRAQUE. Figure; 
 
 In the possession of the artist. 
 
 Picasso. Fountain, Fontainebleau; 
 Collection of Mr. John Quinn, New York. 
 
 DERAIN. Still-Life. 
 
 Private Collection. 
 
 Matisse. Lithograph (1923) ; 
 Private Collection, 
 
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THE MASTERS OF MODERN ART 
 THE MODERN PERIOD 
 
 Two epoch-making events, the French Revolution 
 and the World War, mark the opening and the close 
 of a period of history which we of to-day call the mod- 
 ern period. It grows out of the past after a fierce 
 struggle but without a break in the continuity of hu- 
 man effort, and it leads into the after-time, again with 
 a terrific upheaval, and again without interrupting 
 the logic of our evolution. And thus it is with mod- 
 ern art, which is simply the ensemble of the painting 
 and sculpture that tell us of the genius of the period 
 (whose expression through architecture and the ap- 
 plied arts is of relatively slight importance) : the line 
 of descent from the past turns sharply with the Rev- 
 olution but it does not break. The external control 
 of the kings is gone, and with it the orderliness and 
 decorum of aristocratic periods. But if there is tur- 
 bulence after a regicide painter has initiated the pe- 
 riod, there is still control: the inner control of human 
 genius, going on to a succession of triumphs which 
 make of modern art something which will stand with 
 the greatest achievement of the modern period and— 
 we think (for only the future can say)—one which 
 can take its place beside the great achievement of the 
 past. 
 
 To-day as we stand before a new period, we see how 
 immense was the accomplishment of the one which is 
 
 ending. We see the limitless power that surged up 
 PS 
 
2 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 with the French Revolution and vented itself in the re- 
 newal of classic line, with Ingres, and of classic color 
 with Delacroix. The power of the time, impatient of 
 the idealistic symbols of the past, creates its own 
 symbols, as the fierce pride of the Realists bends the 
 glance of men from imagined divinities and distantly 
 remembered history to the actual men and women and 
 the material objects of Courbet, to the living crowds 
 and characters of Daumier. The new idea, as we see 
 it with these artists, is as vast in its effects as was the 
 contribution of the great Dutch school after that of the 
 Italian schools. The energy of the time, far from re- 
 laxing after such efforts, goes on to enrich its means, 
 calling to its aid arts newly recovered from the past 
 or from distant races; it calls on science to give it con- 
 trol over the magic of light and over aspects of nature 
 which are represented so perfectly that they seem only 
 to have been hinted at in the earlier centuries. And 
 with the enormous range then possessed by modern art, 
 the need for a synthesis of all the qualities suddenly ap- 
 pears—and is triumphantly met. As a result, men 
 press on to a new analysis, a new statement of the 
 means and purposes of art, and the period, at the out- 
 break of the Great War which doubtless heralds an- 
 other era, still radiated a vitality which seems in no 
 way inferior to that of the great epochs of the past. 
 If the foregoing estimate of modern art is still that 
 of a minority, it is so because our accomplishment in 
 the realm of material things is of so striking a nature as 
 to claim at present more than its due share of atten- 
 tion; and also because the art of our period has to be 
 extricated from a mass of insignificant or counterfeit 
 production such as no time in the past had to contend 
 with. That the future will make this elimination is 
 
The Modern Period 3 
 
 beyond doubt, even as artists and the close students of 
 modern art among laymen are making it to-day. The 
 purpose of the present book is to bring before a wider 
 public the result of their study. If we follow from 
 
 one to another the masters of modern art, the great 
 numbers of lesser but still valuable talents naturally 
 take the places due them. The period is so rich that 
 a very big volume would be required if we proposed 
 even briefly to consider the men and women entitled 
 to rank as artists but unable to show that creative power 
 which gives a new direction to art and so characterizes 
 the masters. In the United States, for example, even 
 such admirable men as Winslow Homer, Albert P. 
 Ryder, and Thomas Eakins can scarcely be regarded as 
 having contributed essentially to the evolution which I 
 shall endeavor to trace here. And in giving to this 
 book its title, I am aware that there can be nothing 
 definitive in any attempt to follow the course of mastery 
 in a period to which we still belong. The consideration 
 of the modern development which I present here is sure 
 to be revised by time. Yet I can offer it with more 
 confidence than that justified by a merely personal 
 opinion for, having known many of the living artists I 
 mention, as well as a number of the great men of the 
 preceding generation, I feel that the opinions here ex- 
 pressed at least approximate an average of their ideas 
 as to the men who have best carried on the heritage 
 from the past. Our problem in appreciating the great- 
 ness of modern art lies in following the unbroken line 
 that leads from the older classics to those of the present 
 day. 
 
 Not a single American museum as yet affords suf- 
 ficient material for such a study. ‘The fact is regret- 
 table; for the public, eager to understand the genuine 
 
4 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 works of the present time, finds nowhere a consecutive 
 series of those works which would show the achieve- 
 ment of modern artists, and the whence and whither of 
 the evolution of the modern period. We are likely to 
 think that there never was such a time before; but if 
 we listen attentively to the echoes of the past (such as 
 are gathered up by Count Gobineau, for example, in 
 his book, ‘“The Renaissance”), we see that the disputes 
 of our epoch very largely repeat those of the Quattro- 
 cento, that marvellous century which is probably near- 
 est in character to our own. Or let us take a phrase 
 from Petrarch (as quoted by Tancred Borenius in his 
 notes on Crowe and Cavalcaselle), and through it 
 consider the general appreciation of Giotto at a time 
 less than fifty years after his death. In his will, Pe- 
 trarch wrote as follows, “I bequeath my picture of the 
 Virgin by the noble painter Giotto, whose beauty, unin- 
 telligible to the ignorant, is a marvel to the masters of 
 the art... .” Change the name of the Florentine art- 
 ist to that of a modern master and the words “unin- 
 telligible to the ignorant etc.” might as well have been 
 written by an enlightened collector of our day as by the 
 old poet standing at the threshold of the Renaissance 
 and its rapidly changing ideas. The latter part of the 
 fourteenth century had been a period of relative calm 
 in art, corresponding to the aristocratic certitude of the | 
 painting before the French Revolution; the Middle 
 Ages had given the world a final and supreme expres- 
 sion in Giotto, and after him there is nearly a century 
 without any important movement in art. 'Then—and 
 with a scientific turn exactly parallel with the develop- 
 ment witnessed throughout the earlier part of our 
 epoch—the fifteenth century gets under way and, 
 with increasing impetus, investigates perspective, 
 
‘The Modern Period 5 
 
 modelling, atmosphere, chiaroscuro and anatomy. 
 The distance covered between the work of the late 
 Giottesque painters and the painting of Raphael and 
 Titian is nearly as great (or greater, who shall say?) 
 as that between the end of the eighteenth century and 
 the present day; and if there is any ground for the 
 charge of irreverence for predecessors sometimes 
 brought against the moderns, what shall we say of the 
 Renaissance artists, who thought so little of the older 
 -men as to cover over their works with whitewash, so 
 as to have more walls to paint on? 
 
 The great difference between the modern period and 
 the past lies in the realm of judgment and authority. 
 At the present time there is no parallel for the wisdom 
 with which the fifteenth century, for example, faced 
 its new problems, for power was then in the hands of 
 competent men, and however swiftly the changes in art 
 came about, the temporal or spiritual lords who gave 
 employment to the artists were equal to the task of se- 
 lecting the great men to do their work, the minor artists 
 being assigned the less important tasks, or remaining 
 craftsmen (all artists began as craftsmen). When the 
 Emperor Charles V made his famous remark that he 
 could create nobles but that God alone could create 
 _a Titian, he was not so much giving the measure of an 
 artist’s greatness as leaving to posterity a token of the 
 kind of judgment that Renaissance princes pos- 
 sessed; and as one looks over their portraits and the 
 decorations of their palaces, one sees how general such 
 appreciation was among the rulers of that time. 
 
 After the French Revolution, the great change be- 
 gan at once. There was no longer a Pope Julius II 
 to call for the decoration of a Sistine Chapel, no longer 
 a Charles V to stoop and pick up the brush of Titian, 
 
6 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 a Philip IV to pass his days watching Velasquez at 
 work, nor a Burgomaster Six to delight in the society 
 of Rembrandt. No one knows to-day where authority 
 resides in matters of contemporary art, and the past 
 is continually being fought over. The Revolution 
 took the Louvre away from the Kings and gave it to 
 the people as a public museum, and the French idea 
 was followed all over Europe with the creation of the 
 great public galleries, a new and powerful influence 
 in the modern period. Where, in the past, works of 
 art, especially those of distant places and times, had 
 been difficult of access, the whole art of the world was 
 spread out for everyone, and each year saw the treas- 
 ure grow in quantity and diversity. Instead of the 
 relatively simple standards of the earlier time, an im- 
 mense amount of ancient material, superficially dif- 
 ferent from current production, lent the weight of 
 its prestige to a fabulous “golden age” in the past and 
 brought about a false taste for things resembling those 
 consecrated by the museum. ‘To-day we see that noth- 
 ing so much resembles a fine ancient work as a fine 
 modern one, however different in outer aspect; and 
 that no work is farther from the classic than that which 
 copies merely its externals. But we have come to this 
 knowledge slowly, through an ever deepening knowl- 
 edge of the museum; and we find it difficult to place 
 ourselves in the mental attitude of the people of a 
 hundred or more years ago who first saw the shift in 
 standard—from arts which were familiar and natural 
 for everyone to arts which had previously been known 
 to only a few. This change, for which the multitude 
 was not prepared, created a distinction between 
 museum-art, a thing to be visited occasionally, in a 
 stately and rather cheerless place, and what is wrongly 
 
The Modern Period 7 
 
 called popular art—the trivial stuff that unthinking 
 people can understand and live with. 
 
 The genuinely popular arts of the past—the old 
 handicrafts such as iron-working, pottery, and 
 furniture-making—began to decline shortly after 
 the beginning of the modern period, when machinery 
 assumed its enormous development and rendered the 
 competition of hand-made products commercially im- 
 possible. The disinherited craftsmen, still needing 
 an outlet for their skill, but lacking the spiritual power 
 which alone gives value to the fine arts, turned to pro- 
 ducing paintings, illustrations and statues for the 
 crowd. It has been estimated that the annual output 
 of such things in Paris alone is more than a hundred 
 thousand works, a figure not to be explained by the 
 city’s needs—or the whole world’s—but by the need of 
 the artists to produce. Here again is a condition for 
 which there was no parallel in the past; and, with 
 the loss of leadership, it was the democratic factor of 
 quantity, not the aristocratic factor of quality, that 
 decided the making of sales and thus the awarding of 
 prizes and public commissions. A generation ago, 
 popular favor went to such men as Sir Frederick 
 Leighton, Bouguereau and Lenbach. Are the “crack” 
 painters of a later fashion, Sorolla, Besnard, Zorn and 
 Sargent, for example, any happier as a choice? Evi- 
 dently abler than other members of their school, per- 
 haps sincere according to their lights, and usually 
 above the level of the abject realism and sentimentality 
 of their Salons and Academies, they are as far from 
 the genuine art of their time, as far from the great 
 tradition of all time, as were their predecessors. 
 
 The continual increase of the rank and file of artists 
 has entailed a keener struggle for a living and a fur- 
 
8 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 ther lowering of standards—which have been sinking 
 pretty steadily for the last hundred years. ‘The mod- 
 ern world would make a pitiful showing indeed if its 
 artistic achievement were really represented by the 
 artists who are in control of most of the art-schools 
 and exhibitions in all countries, and whose work hangs 
 in too many museums. Fortunately, the “official” 
 bodies, by the very excess of their zeal in boycotting 
 the masters of their time, have come to be distrusted. 
 Is it surprising, indeed, when a rancorous dwarf like 
 Meissonier, using as a pretext Courbet’s connexion 
 with the taking down of the Venddme column, could 
 say, ‘‘He must be excluded from the exhibitions, he 
 must be considered by us as one dead,” and so rid the 
 Salon of the artist who was probably the greatest 
 painter then at worker An even more striking proof 
 of the perversion of judgment brought about by modern 
 conditions, is to be found in the fact that Cézanne, the 
 artist most highly esteemed by the generation that fol- 
 lowed him, was never able to get one picture of all 
 that he sent so regularly to the Salon, accepted by its 
 jury. His single chance to exhibit there came to him 
 through the “‘charity-vote” of a friend who had the 
 right to pass a work without the consent of the rest of 
 the jury. 
 
 I have said more than enough about the false art of 
 the modern period. As a rule the mere mention of 
 such a thing is an offence against good taste; but when 
 even a negative element in a period is as conspicuous 
 as the academic and the commercial aspects of the art 
 of our time, it can not be passed over in a summary of 
 conditions, however certain one feels that the future 
 will regard it as a misdirection of energy. That could 
 never be said about the work of the minor artists of the 
 
| The Modern Period 9 
 
 past. These men, so often dignified and lovable per- 
 sonalities, were not the enemies but the coadjutors of 
 the masters of their time, even as the great patrons of 
 the old days were in their way. The old princes 
 and priests whose hereditary culture led them to know 
 art—and know the artists—have but few successors 
 among present-day collectors, who often come to their 
 interest in art late in a lifetime occupied with very 
 different things and are thus but rarely able to form 
 valid judgments on a subject which exacts close and 
 intimate acquaintance. Perhaps the real reason for 
 the misunderstanding of art in the modern epoch is 
 the individualism which prevents men from working 
 in common. ‘This probably accounts for our failure 
 to produce architecture, the art which demands the 
 collaboration of many men animated by a single pur- 
 pose. But the closing of the outlet for energy which 
 architecture and the crafts afforded to the past, caused 
 the art-impulse of the modern world to be concentrated 
 in painting and sculpture and gave to the latter their 
 peculiar intensity. 
 
 As we study the men who have expressed this art- 
 impulse, we find that it is again the museum to which 
 we must turn for an explanation of their course. 
 From the beginning of the period, when Ingres went 
 to Italy and discovered the primitives, when—a little 
 later—Delacroix went to Morocco and discovered the 
 Orient, we see the tendency of the modern world to 
 extend its horizon and set its art upon a wider base than 
 that upon which the perfect but narrow art of the 
 eighteenth century had rested. Greek art was studied 
 anew and from such examples (the Elgin and the 
 /Eginetan marbles, for instance) as had not been known 
 since before the Christian era. ‘Then came an interest 
 
IO The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 in Egyptian and Assyrian art, which like the Gothic 
 and, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the 
 art of the Far East, came to be looked on as supremely 
 significant and not as curiosities outside the great tradi- 
 tion. In the last decades we have gone even farther 
 afield: Gauguin brought us an influence from the art 
 of the South Sea peoples, and the later men have ex- 
 tended their investigation to the principles of Byzan- 
 tine, Hindu, Negro and Mexican art. Thus, from In- 
 gres, discovering the early Italians in his youth and, 
 at eighty-seven, copying Giotto “so as to learn,” as he 
 said; through Barye with his great debt to the archaic 
 Greeks, and Delacroix with his color so strongly af- 
 fected by his contact with the world of Islam; through 
 Courbet and Manet, learning from the Spanish and 
 Dutch realists—who had been outside of the central 
 tradition of European painting; through the Impres- 
 sionists with their love of the unshadowed color and 
 the clear design of Japanese prints; through all these 
 artists and down to the men of our day whom I have 
 mentioned, the modern period has been one of new 
 influences. ‘They have marked our art indelibly: with 
 each new decade we have found ourselves farther from 
 the local or, at most, European outlook of the artists 
 who lived before the nineteenth century. This does 
 not mean that the gods of the earlier schools have in 
 any way been relegated to a lower position in the opin- 
 ion of the modern world. I believe, on the contrary, 
 that our new understanding of the exotic arts has given 
 us a new and deeper appreciation of the supremacy 
 of the classics of Europe. 
 
 When we find these classics themselves and the less 
 familiar schools made known by the modern museum 
 changing our vision, as they did a dozen times through- 
 
The Modern Period II 
 
 out the period, we are still, of course, strictly within 
 the field of art. Thus, if an archaic Apollo was rec- 
 ognized as an immeasurably healthier and purer ex- 
 pression than the “‘perfect”’ Apollo Belvedere, and art- 
 ists, in trying to recapture the qualities of the earlier 
 work, moved away from the extreme naturalism of the 
 Greco-Roman decadence, they were enriching them- 
 selves from their own resources. But they went be- 
 yond these into the domain of science. It was but natu- 
 ral, therefore, that laymen should apply to art the 
 standard of scientific logic which achieved such won- 
 derful results in the world of the inventor, for ex- 
 ample. Yet for the artists, the true ones, their new 
 acquisitions from science were only tools, to be used 
 for the traditional esthetic purposes which all such 
 discoveries in the past had served. ‘To the great pub- 
 lic of the last half century or so, scientifically accurate 
 representation seemed in itself the aim of art, and 
 so the breach between artist and public widened still 
 further. ‘The realists, observing certain half-forgotten 
 laws of optics, gave a rendering of solidity and actual- 
 ity that seemed at first monstrously vulgar, and later, 
 when people grew accustomed to it, made the work 
 of the preceding generation appear somewhat artifi- 
 cial. Following hard on the heels of Daumier and 
 Courbet, the young Manet studying the masterpiece 
 of the great realist at the Salon, said of the ‘“Bur- 
 ial at Ornans,” “It is too black.” Then begins that 
 observation of light which culminated in the reduction 
 of the study to formula as precise as those of anatomy 
 Or perspective. ‘These in turn were abandoned by the 
 designers of the Post-Impressionist group; and so each 
 time that we approach the method of the scientist— 
 the employment of principles which are invariable for 
 
12 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 all men—the period shows its strength by rejecting a 
 type of absolute which is contrary to that of the artist. 
 
 For when we transpose to the realm of thought the 
 objects with which the physical sciences deal, we ut- 
 terly transform their properties. ‘The final lesson of 
 the museums has been that the realm of art is the mind, 
 and that external criteria of judgment, measure- 
 ments by size, weight, light, etc., are inapplicable to 
 the work of art or to any phase of it. Moving towards 
 the grandeur of the symbols to which the Byzantine 
 mosaicists, for example, gave form and color, Chris- 
 tian art was not retrogressing when it abandoned even 
 the supreme perfections attained by the pagan world 
 in its realistic art. ‘The Byzantines were giving the ap- 
 propriate expression of their ideas, even as the Greeks 
 had done when they abandoned the hieratic formalism 
 of Egypt to produce an art based on their new delight 
 in the meaning that they found in nature. 
 
 The periods of decadence are those in which man 
 is too weak to perceive new aspects of the world, when 
 he can only attempt to repeat the expressions of the — 
 past—a hopeless task, for the ever-changing world 
 never shows the same features twice. The strength of 
 the modern period is precisely in its power of renewal, 
 in its bringing forth the succession of masters whom 
 we shall attempt to follow in these pages—the men 
 who have given us the greatest record of an era of 
 amazing health and fecundity. 
 
FROM THE REVOLUTION TO RENOIR 
 
 ALTHOUGH the art of the first three-quarters of the 
 nineteenth century gave rise to discussions which ex- 
 ceeded in bitterness those of our own day, time has 
 pretty definitely decided the questions of that period, 
 and our present concern with its masters is for the aid 
 they can give us in tracing the continuation of their 
 line through the maze of tendencies which have since 
 arisen. ‘The first step in the search is to observe that 
 modern art is, if not exclusively French, at least an art 
 having Paris as its hearth and focus. The great men 
 outside of France at the beginning of the modern pe- 
 riod, Goya, Blake, Constable and Turner, all formed 
 their art in the eighteenth century, which is to say, in 
 the preceding epoch. We may therefore regard them 
 as splendid figures in the transition between these two 
 centuries rather than as distinctly modern artists. 
 When, in the time under consideration, we reach for- 
 eigners of the first rank, like Jongkind, van Gogh and 
 Picasso, we find them coming to France and carrying 
 on the work of the French school. The fact is of the 
 greatest significance in explaining the length of time 
 that French art has existed as a continuous and vital 
 thing. Where Italy, Spain and.Holland have brought 
 forth schools of the utmost importance, their history 
 has been terminated in each case by a decline without 
 a renewal. France alone goes on through the centur- 
 ies, always herself and yet always able to accept from 
 others the aid which will enable her to issue from the 
 13 
 
14 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 decadence of one idea with a new one already in full 
 course of development. : 
 
 It is this process which we see throughout the mod- 
 ern period and which best explains its genius. One 
 must not ask, as in slow and tradition-governed epochs, 
 how much of a predecessor’s qualities a given artist 
 carries along; the need of the time was to find new ex- 
 pressions for the swiftly changing life of the world, 
 and the masters were those who offered new values to 
 a period which was revaluing everything. In such a 
 time, the character of the French mind, so tenacious of 
 its classical heritage and yet so quick to feel the stir of 
 contemporary life, could and did serve the world as no 
 other could. 
 
 The master who leads us to the modern period, the 
 one who does not merely influence it, like the great 
 Spaniard and the great Englishmen whom I have men- 
 tioned, but who dictates its course in its first years, is 
 David, the incarnation in art of the French Revolu- 
 tion. Beginning with the elegance and wisdom of the 
 lovely Dix-huitiéme, he stands like the guillotine (it 
 was Victor Hugo’s word in regard to him) that brings 
 the preceding era to its close and clears the way for the 
 next one. As our purpose is to read the character of 
 the present day through that of the past, let us observe 
 that the great artist of the Revolution works on grand 
 and impersonal principles derived from his study of 
 the antique, and does so in almost the way that his de- 
 vout admirers, the Cubists of the war-period a hundred 
 years later, have built their art on principles so severe 
 as to lead to an abstraction from which nature as seen — 
 is completely banished. Such peaks are reached by 
 men at moments of storm and stress, when they can 
 carry logic to the conclusion reached in the grim 
 
From the Revolution to Renoir I5 
 
 lines of David’s “Oath of the Horatii” or in the ac- 
 tions of a Robespierre; but it is bleak to live upon such 
 heights, and so men pass beyond them. 
 
 David himself passed beyond them, especially in his 
 portraits. Not to single out even that most adorable 
 one among them, the “Charlotte du Val d’Ogues” in 
 the Metropolitan Museum of New York, almost any 
 of his images of men and women is charged with so 
 direct an interest in life that we forget all the neo- 
 classical paraphernalia of the artist’s historical paint- 
 ing. In the severe order of his canvases, in their as- 
 pect of reason, of logic, we see the mind of the Revolu- 
 tion and of the republics of antiquity whose support it 
 invoked. The great blocks of form which build up 
 the design of the “Marat” in the Brussels Museum 
 have the bareness and impressiveness of Roman archi- 
 tecture, and it is as the man capable of rising to such 
 grandeur of conception that David must be remem- 
 bered. He has been traduced by the school which 
 claims descent from him and which is sufficiently char- 
 acterized by a detail of its procedure still recalled by 
 some of the older men in Paris. That learned and 
 excellent painter Paul Sérusier told me that it was 
 the practice in the so-called Davidian studios he knew 
 in his youth, to save the scrapings of the palette, the 
 colorless mud left after the day’s work, so as to use it 
 for the shadows in the morrow’s painting. Granting 
 that color was not David’s means of expression, one 
 knows that a travesty of one of the beautiful attributes 
 of painting as dismal as the practice mentioned could 
 not have come from the master, but from his unworthy 
 followers. 
 
 Their bad tendencies were doubtless what provoked 
 the revolt of David’s greatest pupil. In Ingres we find 
 
16 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 the genius of France for reaping a new harvest when — 
 the fruits of a former one are exhausted. He goes to — 
 Italy, discovers the Primitives (whose name still had — 
 its derisive meaning), and himself incurs the charge 
 of being a “Gothic.” Thus, beginning with the first — 
 master who is distinctly of the modern period, we have | 
 an example of the need among its artists to seek in the 
 past for new esthetic elements from which to form 
 their art, and also, in the—to us—astounding attacks 
 which the early masterpieces of Ingres drew forth, an 
 example of the misunderstanding by the public and 
 the critics of each new talent of capital importance 
 that appeared. To this rule there is no exception, and 
 in Ingres’s case we find him writing, very late in life, 
 that he is out of harmony with his century and wants 
 to withdraw from its whole activity. His love of the 
 masterpieces which surrounded him in Italy is not 
 enough to explain his prolonged sojourns in that coun- 
 try: we know that Italy was his refuge from the op- 
 position he found in Paris. 
 
 The resentment of his earlier years against those who 
 condemned his art in the name of the schools just be- 
 fore his own was transferred, later on, to the Romanti- 
 cists, not seeing that as his use of line brought into the 
 world an art akin to that of his beloved Raphael and 
 the Greeks, the color of Delacroix reverted to a form 
 of expression which, as in the time of Titian or of Ru- 
 bens, was to yield results no less necessary for the com- 
 pleteness of that supreme achievement which Euro- 
 pean painting is. Above all, Ingres did not see that 
 
 the new men, in giving freer and freer rein to the ris- _ 
 
 ing strength of the period after the Revolution were 
 
 only following the course which he himself had indi- _ 
 
 cated when he rejected the academic caricature of 
 
From the Revolution to Renoir 17 
 
 David’s genius. And it is not from his poor imitators 
 of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts that his own influence is 
 to be judged; the true line of descent from Ingres is to 
 be followed with the men who penetrated to the real 
 meaning of his work—with the creators, like Degas 
 and Renoir. 
 
 It is true that Ingres said that the study of the young 
 artist should be to raise himself to the feet of Raphael 
 and to embrace them. It is true that in works like 
 “la Vierge a l’Hostie,” the “Jupiter and Thetis” and 
 the “Apotheosis of Homer” where he came his near- 
 est to failure, it was through an abnegation of his own 
 genius which led him to try to repeat the achievement 
 of his master. But let us turn to any of his great 
 works, the “Grande Odalisque,” the ‘““Vénus Anadyo- 
 méne,”’ the ‘Madame Moitessier” or the portrait which 
 seems to many of us the most beautiful of all, the ‘““Ma- 
 dame de Senonnes,” at Nantes; consider the drawings, 
 particularly the studies—there is no longer a trace of 
 the follower of Raphael, it is a completely detached 
 personality we have before us, and the discipline to 
 which it had been subjected only concentrated the ef- 
 fort of the artist on those problems which he cared for. 
 
 To study the art of Ingres, one is forced, more than 
 with most other painters, to meet him on his own 
 ground. Setting aside any comparison with Raphael 
 and the Greeks on one hand, and the still more futile 
 contrast with Delacroix on the other, one sees the per- 
 fect mastery of line and plane and their ceaselessly 
 varied combinations. And one sees above all that 
 every nuance of line, every movement, bend or halt of 
 the planes, came in response to the working of the ar- 
 tists mind. Few pictures reveal more of deliberate 
 planning than Ingres’s, but the whole passion of the 
 
18 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 man’s southern nature went into the execution of his 
 plan. Convinced of the loftiness of his ideal, of the 
 supreme greatness of the arts which had been his in- 
 spiration, he laid out his course and held to it with un- 
 swerving probity—to use his own word. This single- 
 ness of aim, supported by a prodigious strength of will, 
 frequently carries his work to the level which we call 
 perfection, and so makes it one of the symbols of hu- 
 man genius. We have never the right to demand that 
 perfection be added to, and Delacroix’s terrible dic- 
 tum as to his rival’s work—‘The complete expression 
 of an incomplete intelligence’ can mislead while it il- 
 luminates. Does anyone think that Ingres would have 
 added to his perfection had he permitted himself a 
 broader range? Whoever has reached even a tenta- 
 tive understanding of Ingres’s art, has felt the appro- 
 priateness of his color, and realized that no change in 
 it could be for the better. So too his manner of paint- 
 ing is mastery itself when applied to the order of ideas 
 he had to express. 
 
 But we must face that fact that there was narrowness 
 in the ideas themselves. One writer has seen in In- 
 gres a sort of double personality—the fiery, intense na- 
 ture of the southerner, and “Monsieur Ingres” as the 
 French call him to this day—Monsieur Ingres in awe 
 of the purity of the masters and keeping an iron re- 
 straint on the hand of the painter. Again and again 
 Ingres the painter shakes off the critic, and before the 
 freshness of some girl-model, finds lines whose spon- 
 taneity can not be explained by the principles of design. 
 In the portrait of Madame de Senonnes there is color 
 which could only have come in a moment when he 
 abandoned himself to the deep sources of his nature, 
 which his intellect and will were powerless to call into 
 
From the Revolution to Renoir 19 
 
 play. He distrusts such contact with external nature 
 as was to become the watchword of the men of Barbi- 
 zon ; he is jealous of concessions to the impulses within 
 us too deep for reason—which were to furnish material 
 for arts greater than that of Barbizon. And yet his 
 own art has so much of these impulses playing through 
 it, that only when following his classic models too 
 closely did he fail to find the subtle divergence from the 
 vase-form that makes his drawing of a head or muscle 
 lovely, or the subtle varyings of the geometry of his 
 design, that save it from coldness and make it live. If 
 we cannot regret the narrowness of Ingres’ range, at 
 least there are times when we wish that he had given 
 freer play to the powers he had. ‘The Greek calm, pro- 
 ceeding from the balance of all ideas in full utterance, 
 does not breathe from the ensemble of his work. But 
 if in the very perfection of Ingres there is a sense of 
 ideas repressed, there is also the grandeur of our mod- 
 ern period, when art is attained only after struggle, 
 such as the world of antiquity seems not to have known. 
 The modernity of Ingres is best attested by the paint- 
 ers who follow him throughout the century: did he 
 not belong so fully to his time, we should scarcely find 
 men as different from one another as Courbet and 
 Manet, Degas and Renoir, Derain and Picasso seek- 
 ing his guidance. Even Cézanne, pushing his re- 
 search into regions where the “divine line” of Ingres 
 has no place, must render homage to him with an ejac- 
 ulation of droll regret: “Ce Dominique est bougre- 
 ment fort.” ‘To-day, when the younger generation, 
 again turning to severe realism and to classic measure, 
 has renewed its admiration for Ingres, we see the 
 strength acknowledged by Cézanne as something that 
 could assert itself once more, after nearly a century 
 
20 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 during which the Romanticism of Delacroix was the 
 triumphant tendency. 
 
 It is still this mood of adventure, carried to one of 
 its farthest limits of expression, which Delacroix sym- 
 bolizes to us to-day; and if this is so, almost exactly 
 a hundred years after the “Dante and Virgil” an- 
 nounced his advent to Europe, how much more elec- 
 trical must the effect of that masterpiece have been 
 upon his contemporaries! Goya had indeed done 
 work of a similar expressiveness, but at that time he was 
 known by few people outside of Spain. Géricault’s 
 “Raft of the Méduse,” which had been exhibited a 
 few years before, certainly announced the great spirit 
 of drama of the early nineteenth century, but as its 
 subject gave it both a journalistic and a political inter- 
 est, the tendency of art was not really defined for the 
 world until Delacroix exhibited his great canvas. 
 Moreover in the “Dante and Virgil” there is a first 
 fruit of the younger man’s genius for color, which 
 Géricault would probably never have equalled, even 
 had his death at the age of thirty-three not cut short 
 his career. The color of Delacroix, the thing of flame 
 which leaps under the sun of the Orient he discovers, 
 the rich, sonorous thing which he can use with the 
 purity of his beloved Mozart, or which he can make 
 resonant with the majesty of Beethoven—who is prob- 
 ably the musician most like him—this color of Dela- 
 croix’s which the future may yet call equal or even 
 superior to any produced by Venice, was a necessary 
 means for the voicing of that Romanticism through 
 which the modern period asserted its existence as dis- 
 tinct from the past, more strongly than David or Ingres 
 had done. 
 
 Indeed, for us to-day it is very difficult to see in In- 
 
‘ 
 
 From the Revolution to Renoir 21 
 
 gres anything but the classical strain—the qualities in 
 which all men are sharers. Delacroix seems nearer to 
 us because he yields so much more freely to the feel- 
 ings which belong to the individual—and in the mod- 
 ern period it was the Romantic, inner world of the 
 individual that enjoyed always increasing interest. 
 But to understand the immense influence which Dela- 
 croix has continued to exercise, we must see him from 
 the standpoint of what is impersonal in his art. The 
 chapel which he decorated at St. Sulpice in Paris has 
 taught the great moderns for the last sixty years almost 
 as Masaccio’s chapel in Florence taught the men of the 
 Renaissance; and in neither case did the later artists 
 
 come to the master for so vague a reason as his per- 
 
 sonal greatness, but because of the definite, even techni- 
 cal instruction to be obtained from his works. Though 
 we see a heritage from Delacroix’s impassioned spirit 
 in the vibrant, swaying and yet controlled rhythm of 
 a Renoir, of a Seurat, or of a Matisse picture, the in- 
 tellectual contribution of the great Romanticist—his 
 bringing back of the almost forgotten laws of color, 
 made the after world his debtor even more than his 
 revealing of the heroic freedom of his time. 
 
 The two phases of his mastery are closely related. 
 He knows so well the vehemence of his expression that 
 throughout his life he never ceases to seek the means 
 of strengthening the technical structure with which 
 his expression is fused. His paintings alone would 
 tell us of this, but in addition we have his Journal, 
 with its innumerable entries as to the nature of de- 
 sign and color during the forty years that it covers. 
 And in his splendid essays on the theory of art and 
 on the masters we follow him in his insatiable study, 
 and understand how his mind could go past the 
 
22 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 works of Poussin, of Veronese and of Rubens to a 
 still more classic source. For, when we turn to Dela- 
 croix after a contemplation of the frescoes of Pompeii, 
 he appears as the artist who gave to the modern world 
 that classic perfection of color which, in Greece, must 
 have rivalled the beauty of form. Coming near the 
 end of antiquity as it does, and doubtless the work of 
 minor men, Pompeiian painting is still so marvellous 
 that we can have confidence that it gives us a true in- 
 sight into the great pictorial schools of its time and 
 the time before it. Remarkably enough, it not only of- 
 fers the best confirmation of the validity of Delacroix’s 
 color sense, but its means—the breaking up of the tone 
 into its component hues—is the very one that Dela- 
 croix was developing, for himself and his successors, 
 the Impressionists, and Neo-Impressionists. 
 
 The confidence in the master that we find among the 
 later French artists is derived from a recognition— 
 due to their classical inheritance—that it is Delacroix 
 who brings to them the most important tradition of 
 European painting. The purity and intensity with 
 which the tradition is embodied in his own work is 
 only to be appreciated from the actual seeing of a pic- 
 ture such as the one reproduced in this book. The 
 beauty of this painting—a meeting-place of instinct 
 and experience—could come only at the end of a career 
 filled by the incredible activity of a Delacroix. It is 
 symbolic of the whole genius of France—the revolu- 
 tionary genius that breaks with outworn formulas, and 
 the conservative, constructive genius that transmits the 
 essentials of our earlier achievement to those men of 
 the modern world who are worthy to carry on the 
 work. 
 
 It is because of Delacroix’s color that he was looked 
 
From the Revolution to Renoir 23 
 
 on as the standard-bearer of his movement. Yet with 
 him we must remember another master whose genius 
 one may scarcely consider inferior to hisown: Barye, 
 loving fierce movement as much as the Romantic 
 painter and producing those sculptured Titans of the 
 animal and human world wherein his knowledge of 
 the archaic Greeks underlay the structure and opened 
 to it certain possibilities of controlling violence 
 through logic which were unknown even to the great- 
 est masters of the Renaissance, who based their art on 
 that of the Romans and the Greeks of the decadence. 
 With all that has been written of Barye’s equal inter- 
 est in animal and human subjects, I do not think it 
 has been noted that the fact is one of the marks of his 
 position as a Romanticist, for the artist who colors all 
 nature with his mood as the Romanticist does, will 
 make any object his symbol. A glance at his tranquil 
 figures convinces one that the force which thrills us 
 in his whole work comes from the mind of the artist 
 and not from nature of his subjects. 
 
 The Barye which, because of its size and placing, 
 is the one that gives us our truest estimate of the monu- 
 mental character of his art is, indeed, a portrayal of 
 struggle. But the subject of the “Theseus Slaying the 
 Centaur” might have been chosen by a lesser artist, 
 whereas no one but Barye could have conceived the 
 mighty silhouette that towers over the Seine in that 
 secluded nook on the Ile St. Louis where Paris (in 
 collaboration with American admirers of the master) 
 has erected the greatest sculpture of modern times. 
 No less a man than Barye could have found for the 
 Romantic subject that Classical structure, so firmly 
 determining the great lines, and binding the innumer- 
 able details into such unity that the slightest change 
 
24 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 would entail the modifying of the whole work. Con- 
 sider the three Graces on the candelabra made by 
 [Barye for the Duc d’Orléans and ask yourself whether 
 it is not to Michael Angelo alone that one can turn, in 
 the last five hundred years, to find the human figure 
 treated with such nobility. I have spoken of the 
 “Theseus and the Centaur’; stand before that other 
 Theseus who fights the Minotaur and try to think of 
 a modern sculptor whom the Greeks of A®gina or the 
 others before the time of. Phidias could look on as so 
 worthy an inheritor. Indeed the beauty of propor- 
 tion which distinguishes the ‘Theseus Slaying the Min- 
 otaur” is one of the best examples of what the intro- 
 spection of the Romantic School did in bringing to 
 light phases of art neglected for long periods but 
 never lost from the depths of the human mind. 
 
 And yet this work, in which Barye stands nearest 
 
 to the Greeks, does not reveal a trace of the epigoner 
 
 —the man attempting to express in one epoch the ideals 
 of another. The ideal is of the Nineteenth Century 
 and Barye had the wisdom to draw from the immense 
 heritage of the past only those properties of its masters 
 into which his particular genius could breathe the 
 breath of life. No man can use everything that the 
 Museum has to offer, and it is always to the problem 
 of form that Barye addresses himself,—in his occa- 
 sional (and impressive) painting as much as in his 
 sculpture. His works supply one of our latter-day 
 definitions of the quality. Apparently separated by 
 centuries from Ingres’s form with its suavity, its sub- 
 tlety, its perfections like those of Greek vases, it ap- 
 pears in Barye’s work with the turbulence of the Ro- 
 mantic movement. But it never fails to find its equili- 
 brium. Where the planes are piled up most violently, 
 
 eS ee 
 
From the Revolution to Renoir 25 
 
 as in the great work on the Ile St. Louis, one finds that 
 the sculptor has found the means of balancing one 
 direction by another; where the muscles and fur of his 
 animals present the most intricate surfaces one sees that 
 they are never allowed to interfere with the underly- 
 ing design. The details of his sculpture in their 
 planes, as the masses which these planes build into a 
 great architecture, are to be judged according to the 
 law of art, and Barye, neither a copyist of nature nor 
 of the classics, brings a new harmony out of his 
 tumult. | 
 
 The role of Corot in the evolution of the nineteenth 
 century is evidently a different one. An admirer of 
 the great Romantics, his serene spirit kept him from 
 having a part in their combat, and if he shared their 
 reprobation, it was because the self-styled defenders 
 of tradition lumped together all work having an ap- 
 pearance of novelty. In reality his art descends from 
 classic sources as easily as does that of Ingres. We 
 search it in vain for traces of the self-questioning of 
 the Romanticists and their struggle to give a freer 
 movement to the mind of the artist. What deceived 
 the academic school as to Corot (if indeed genius 
 alone was not sufficient to arouse its antagonism) was 
 the fact that with his classical design he combined a 
 nineteenth century love of nature and a close observa- 
 tion of her appearances. 
 
 The advance made by the painters of Barbizon was 
 not along esthetic lines. What they brought with 
 them from Paris in the way of influence from the 
 Louvre gives a classical foundation to their art, but 
 their general tendency was more toward nature than 
 toward the Museum. Corot alone amongst them 
 never lost sight of the masters who first guided him. 
 
26 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 From his earliest work to the painting of his old age, 
 he goes on in tranquil confidence of their support. 
 His trees sway with the breath of morning, but their 
 lines are under the control of a mind informed with 
 the grace of Tuscan and Umbrian draughtsmen. His 
 skies have the gentle clearness which makes them a 
 perfect tribute to the beauty of French landscape, but 
 his study of nature never permits him, even for a day, 
 to forget the lesson of Claude Lorrain: the clouds 
 move according to the needs of the design quite as 
 much as to the direction of the wind, and the ethereal 
 sky bends to the fairyland at the horizon in subtle 
 planes that complement those of the earth. Poussin’s 
 anatomizing of the ground and his organizing of the 
 forms thus obtained are to be found also as part of the 
 sure base of this delicate art, whose firmness of struc- 
 ture has made it endure in our interest even more than 
 the lyrical strain of the Theocritus of painting, as 
 Corot has so charmingly been called. 
 
 While his landscape was what first endeared him to 
 the public, one more often finds in his figure-pieces the 
 purity of form which has maintained and increased his 
 prestige among the artists. Before a work like “La 
 Femme a la Perle,” one would hesitate to say that In- 
 gres himself shows a greater insight into the nature 
 of design. A few years ago, André Derain observed 
 the likeness between this picture by Corot and the 
 Mona Lisa, and the best men in Paris applauded when 
 Derain said that the modern work could hang beside 
 the old one. Yet, with all of Corot’s debt to his Ital- 
 ian journeys, he is less concerned with Renaissance 
 style than is Ingres: it is a more purely French tradi- 
 tion that we feelin him. His landscape descends from 
 the lovely glimpses of the countryside in Foucquet’s 
 
From the Revolution to Renoir 27 
 
 pictures as well as from the classical compositions of 
 Poussin and Claude. His sense of form does not tend 
 toward the arabesque with which Raphael crowned 
 Italian designing: the mere mention of that art shows 
 us how directly Corot belongs to his soil, to the race 
 which brought forth the brothers Le Nain, with their 
 homely positivism and with the forceful rendering of 
 solid and hollow that places them among the masters 
 of construction. As with them, we find in Corot the 
 abstract quality closely united with observation of the 
 concrete, of nature. Between the idealism of Italy and 
 the materialism of Holland this is the middle ground 
 upon which French art remains throughout its history. 
 
 Corot holds this balance to perfection, the other 
 landscapists of 1830 donot. Their love of nature is so 
 nearly their sole means of approach to picture-making 
 that they set down their vision of the skies, the waters 
 and the trees with only a slight consideration of the 
 form and color through which classical art reaches out 
 beyond the particular object to the general, universal 
 properties of the mind. Yet with Théodore Rousseau, 
 the fervor of the artist’s nature-worship gives us a pure, 
 self-effacing work to which many a later man will 
 return in order to escape the vexing problems of intel- 
 lect and of tradition. Such questions pursue Millet, 
 even in his forest retreat, and, suspecting that merely 
 to recite the epic of the peasant is not to produce a 
 complete art, he strives to get back the drawing and 
 modelling that he remembers having observed, all too 
 imperfectly, among the giants of the Louvre. Dau- 
 bigny, Troyon and Dupré trouble themselves very 
 little over such matters; and while the Romantic ex- 
 pression of feeling still attains the dignity of an idea 
 in their solid pictures, one feels that with the next 
 
28 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 narrowing of the landscapist’s art, with any further 
 loss of the classical qualities, we shall be faced with a 
 mere copying of appearances, the thing taught in 
 schools, instead of the creation of new values, which is 
 the work of the artist. In America, the decadence 
 went on more slowly, because the feeling for out-door 
 scenery was so natural to an Inness or a Wyant that he 
 could find in sentiment a veil which concealed from 
 himself and his public the essential slenderness of his 
 art. And so this group of Americans, believing deeply 
 in its work, postpones our descent into the morass of sen- 
 timentality and materialism which awaited the men 
 who attempted to continue Barbizon painting in Eu- 
 rope. To make distinctions between them and the 
 weaklings who form most of the American school of 
 landscape to-day would be unprofitable. Let us rather 
 turn to the Dutch painters and observe the one who, in 
 the earlier nineteenth century, went to France and en- 
 tered the central tradition of his time. This was Jong- 
 kind, whose Northern sentiment for nature remained 
 throughout his lifetime the force behind that superb 
 painting from which the Impressionists drew certain 
 elements of color and light for their immense investi- 
 gation of those subjects. They would not, however, 
 have found a sufficient basis for their work in the heri- 
 tage from Romanticist nature-painting, and it is to 
 another point of departure that we easily trace their 
 beginnings. 
 
 Could there be any more dramatic proof of the 
 suddenness of change in the modern period and its 
 strength in meeting the test imposed thereby, than the 
 coming of the Realists while yet Romanticism was 
 offering its finest works? Delacroix was one of the 
 earliest to recognize the great qualities of Courbet, but 
 
From the Revolution to Renoir 29 
 
 it can scarcely be doubted that he saw also the opposi- 
 tion between those qualities and his own. Where 
 Delacroix lived so much with music and literature, 
 trying to make the processes of his craft equal the 
 certainty which the musical composer has of the re- 
 lationship among his elements, and studying the psy- 
 chology of the great dramas and poems in his desire to 
 keep his pictures on a similar plane of nobility, Cour- 
 bet enunciates his doctrine of painting as a thing of 
 the eyes and proceeds to copy peasants, rocks and still- 
 life objects with the one apparent purpose of enforcing 
 on the mind the fact of their existence. The marvel- 
 lous instrument of color that the science and the senti- 
 ment of Delacroix had evolved is discarded by the 
 rough mountaineer, who returns to a black-and-white 
 basis for the picture as best suited to his sculpturesque 
 intensity. Cézanne, who had been under the spell of 
 Courbet in early life and had imitated him as had the 
 other masters of his generation, said, towards the end 
 of his career, “It took me forty years to realize that 
 painting is not sculpture.” 
 
 The contact with reality which Courbet afforded 
 was like fresh air in the lungs to men who, had they 
 continued with the dream of Romanticism after the 
 moment when it had ceased to be the dominant factor 
 of thought, might have fallen into decadence. A per- 
 manent, not a transitional figure, Courbet is typical 
 of France in the wealth of elements through which it 
 corrects excess, even as in his own case the classical 
 structure inherent in French art acts as a balance for 
 his study of appearances and keeps it from descending 
 to the worthless copying of nature of a later time. For 
 example, his ‘Woman with a Parrot,” which has for 
 some years been loaned to the Metropolitan Muséum, 
 
30 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 is so complete in its phase of representation as to 
 make casual observers think of it as a mere “Salon 
 painting” of a beautiful nude. Zola, writing of the 
 men who had fallen away from their standards at the 
 exhibition of 1866, spoke strongly against the picture 
 which, to-day, seems to most of us a superb master- 
 piece: its lines hold to a grand and pure design even 
 while they partake in the work of simulating a thing 
 in nature—the aspect of the picture which misled 
 superficial judgments. 
 
 What misled them as to Daumier and Guys was of 
 course the fact that those two masters worked for the 
 newspapers and were thus looked on as outside the 
 field of serious art. Corot and Millet knew that this 
 was untrue in Daumier’s case, Baudelaire and Manet 
 judged aright of the worth of Constantin Guys, but. 
 even with such authority to recommend them, it was 
 long before the world in general came to see past the 
 phases of satire and illustration in their respective 
 works, and appreciated the grand draftsmanship of the 
 two men. Perhaps it is most of all to Cézanne that we 
 owe our better understanding of both of them. For 
 while we note how, in his early manner, he followed 
 Courbet’s passion for the existence of the object, we 
 see also that he is influenced by the sense of form, the 
 organization of form, at which Daumier arrived when 
 his realism in the world of ideas led him to find for it 
 an appropriate expression in the world of plastics. 
 This is perhaps most strikingly evident in the rare 
 sculptural work of Daumier. The consummate mas- 
 tery of black and white, the unfailing incisive line 
 which the earlier nineteenth century took to be attri- 
 butes of a mere illustrator, are seen by the later time as 
 having to do with something beyond the thousand 
 
From the Revolution to Renoir 31 
 
 scenes of comedy or tragedy which had chastened man- 
 ners with laughter—or with a scourge. Like Isaiah, 
 “he looked for justice, but, behold, oppression; for 
 righteousness, but, behold, a cry’; and even as no poet 
 would explain his love for the mighty cadences of 
 Isaiah in terms of the prophet’s denunciation of evil, 
 so the artists love Daumier, not because he attacked 
 the weaknesses and wrongs in his time (already half- 
 forgétten to-day), but because of the force in the man 
 himself and of the art that carried the force into a re- 
 casting of the visible world—into the structure which 
 recedes with the valley where Don Quixote rides 
 with Sancho, or into the planes inciting one another 
 to a climax in the head of a politician rapidly modelled 
 in wax. | 
 
 The subject matter in the art of Guys is outside the 
 field of polemics, and he seems to essay the role 
 of the “complete” painters even less than Daum- 
 ier; yet there is no less of intensity in his work and, 
 even while he remains the realist of the passing world 
 which he portrayed, one often finds an esthetic quality 
 even purer than Daumier’s in those drawings which 
 formerly were thought so slight. Once again time has 
 corrected a misunderstanding and we see that the few 
 lines which create the solid figure of some girl of the 
 dance-halls have all that is monumental in the drawing 
 of a great Florentine; Meier-Grefe has well observed 
 that the style in Guys’ drawing of horses is like that 
 of the horses on Greek vases—and worthy to be com- 
 pared with those supreme things; when one considers 
 the order that imposes itself in the flying brush-strokes 
 as Guys lays on his water color, one perceives that there 
 is in the work of the old newspaper artist an intimate, 
 living design of the web and woof of the picture very 
 
32 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 closely akin to that which we were to see in the paint- 
 ing of Cézanne. To realize this is to understand that 
 the realism of life and character in Guys as in Daumier 
 no more explains the greatness of their arts than does 
 Courbet’s continuing preoccupation with visual ap- 
 pearances: the physical and intellectual world was the 
 object of their conscious study—their place in the Mu- 
 seum is among the masters of the classical values. 
 Undoubtedly the tendency to follow appearances 
 with the greatest possible accuracy, the searching out 
 of unexplored phases of sight, which occurs with 
 Manet and the Impressionists, is directly traceable to 
 Courbet, and it is health-giving for all who can use it 
 —and not be overcome. It affects even the two great 
 classicists of the time, Degas with his love of line— 
 a heritage from Ingres, his teacher—and Chavannes 
 whose preoccupation with composition causes him to 
 follow the early Italians so closely as to weaken his 
 own art at times. The career of Degas exhibits the 
 opposite development, for he went from pictures char- 
 acterized by the schoolman’s withdrawal from life to 
 an ever closer adherence to Manet’s slogan of “‘contem- 
 poraneity.” Degas’s choice of subjects—the famous 
 ballet-girls and race-horses, both in his painting and 
 in his magnificent sculpture—show how much this 
 master of classical form belongs to the period when the 
 idea of being of one’s time was especially to the fore: 
 another aspect or consequence of Realism. Cha- 
 vannes had seen in his youth, upon contact with Cour- 
 bet, how inescapable the new vision was, and he fol- 
 lowed its development in the work of the Impres- 
 sionists. Yet his deepest concern was always with the 
 decorative and expressive sides of painting and, at his 
 best, his triumph in mural work is a noble one. If it 
 
 Ba it he el i”. le ° 
 
From the Revolution to Renoir 33 
 
 is not always sustained, if he inclines now to an ap- 
 pearance of conscious primitivism, now to literal 
 representation that he attempts only with partial suc- 
 cess to keep on the plane of his lofty idea, it is because 
 there is a conflict among the elements of his art. Too 
 much of a thinker on pictorial problems to adopt the 
 simple formulas of Courbet, Chavannes had not the 
 colossal instinct which carried the great realist over the 
 insufficiency of his definition of painting—‘‘a language 
 whose words are objects.’”’ Returning to Degas, one 
 asks whether the somewhat bitter tang of his splendid 
 art does not come from the harshness of his effort to 
 retain harmony between the esthetic qualities which 
 came to him from his schooling in the classical tradi- 
 tion—(one remembers his early copies of Poussin and 
 Holbein, his life-long fidelity to Ingres)—and his con- 
 tact with the world of sight,—which troubles him even 
 while he studies it with the most penetrating attention. 
 
 How different is the whole hearted conviction as 
 to the rightness of his work which carries Manet 
 past all such vexation of spirit! A born painter, and 
 born within sight of the Louvre, he goes early to the 
 masters there for instruction in the positive and aristo- 
 cratic style with which to attack the problem of the 
 object at the point where he finds it in Courbet’s hands. 
 Though he has not the latter’s grand singleness of pur- 
 pose, he shows, by carrying realism onward into finer 
 conceptions of color, design and technique, that there 
 is to be no interruption in the line of creative effort. 
 Secure in the control of his means, he makes excur- 
 sions into the realms of Goya, of Hals, of Velasquez, 
 of Raphael and of Piero della Francesca, and thereby 
 sets all Paris in uproar—so strange do the masters 
 seem when they walk the boulevards in modern attire. 
 
34 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 But the younger artists are made sure of their direction 
 by the audacious synthesis of the old qualities of the 
 museums and the new visions of nature. By substitut- 
 ing the strong contour of the early Italians for Cour- 
 bet’s heavy modelling, Manet frees his color and brings 
 it up into the light—not yet the perfect instrument 
 which color will become later, with Renoir and Ce- 
 zanne, but a rich and sonorous one none the less, whose 
 effects of breadth and splendor are enhanced by the 
 painter’s unsurpassed vigor of handling. And his 
 generous delight in the world about him infects the 
 masters of the new generation with his confidence and 
 sweeps them along in the é/an of his irresistible paint- 
 ing. Yet with all of its fascination, it can not yield 
 more than a momentary climax to the fecund, inventive 
 period we are considering. Claude Monet still tells 
 with relish of the way in which the young Impression- 
 ist group led Manet to accept some of their innova- 
 tions in the painting of light; and he may well rejoice 
 in his triumph of fifty years ago, for no incident in 
 the record of his subsequent success could be more elo- 
 quent of the importance of his work than the influence 
 which he and Pissarro and Renoir and Sisley could 
 exert on that great painter with whose lessons they had 
 begun. | 
 
 The theory of the Impressionists—or their practice, 
 as one may more accurately call it—has been described 
 often enough for us to touch on it but lightly here. 
 The indications of a truer rendering of luminosity by 
 the use of color which the new painters saw in Jong- 
 kind, in Manet, in Turner, and especially in Delacroix, 
 who provided their technical starting point, were car- 
 ried to full affirmation. The Impressionists had no 
 thought of creating a new art or a new science, as Re- 
 
 ; 
 4 
 i 
 
From the Revolution to Renoir 35 
 
 noir tells us in those recorded conversations wherein 
 he maintains that his group were followers of Corot 
 and that his own special predilection was for the art 
 of the eighteenth century. It is true that Monet and 
 Pissarro investigated the properties of the spectrum 
 with a view to greater accuracy in the painting of light, 
 and that they made the momentous step of juxtaposing 
 in separate brush-strokes the elements of color obtained 
 by their analysis of full light, passage, and shadow. 
 And when in their beautiful pictures they have given 
 to the palette its maximum of richness, employing 
 shades that seemed possible only to the enameller or the 
 mosaicist, the full diapason of the sunlight floods their 
 canvases as it had never done in the works of the Old 
 Masters and we have at once the final expression of the 
 modern love of nature and the furthest point we have 
 reached in our representing of appearances. Even in 
 achieving such things, Impressionism, through its 
 search for the facts of sight, was still obeying the dic- 
 tates of Courbet, and its findings did not attain full im- 
 portance in the building of pictorial structure until the 
 intellect of Cézanne and Seurat had changed the in- 
 stinctive painting of their immediate predecessors to a 
 thing of conscious purpose. That which is necessary 
 here is to show what phases of Impressionism caused 
 the later men to depart from it and even to adopt a 
 procedure directly opposed to that of Monet and his 
 group. Perhaps the deepest reason is that, after all, 
 Impressionism did not so much give the world a new 
 conception of nature as a new method of representing 
 nature. If one thinks of the change from the 
 eighteenth-century convention of landscape brought 
 about by men like Constable, Corot and Rousseau, one 
 has an example of the zdea in art, the idea that creates 
 
36 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 a new vision. As the Impressionists divided colors 
 into their components, so they divided up the great 
 Naturalistic vision of nature according to the effects of 
 sun, mist, etc. ‘They enrich us through their personal 
 intensity rather than through a new idea—their fruit- 
 ful color-analysis being a thing for the profession 
 rather than the public. 
 
 Without the color of the painters, one sees impres- 
 sionism in the manner with which Rodin, the sculptor 
 of their generation, conceives his art. He not only 
 brings light into the marble, but studies each bit of 
 the surface with the minute attention that Monet or 
 Sisley would give to analyzing the blue of a sky or a 
 shadow. One feels the very pulsation beneath the 
 skin, and the warmth of the flesh so carefully studied 
 in relation to the bones and sinews by this “intimist,” 
 as Rodin has been called. But he seems to know that 
 his concentration upon the parts of his statue is robbing 
 it of the unity, the monumental mass, which should be 
 one of the chief qualities of sculpture. And so he 
 makes those thousands of drawings wherein the whole 
 of the action is seized with one sweep of his pencil, 
 with one wash of his water-color brush. He used to 
 speak of them as the most personal achievements in 
 his whole art; and yet when he returned to his clay, 
 the synthesis of the drawing has disappeared, except 
 for the matter of its sentiment, and he is again caught 
 in the complexity of appearances,—his mastery over 
 modelling, however, and his superb energy saving him 
 from the pitfall that engulfs the mere copyist. By the 
 later ’eighties there was a deep consciousness among the 
 younger men that the long slope of Realism had been 
 climbed; and that is why they turn so sharply to the 
 intellectual, constructive art of Cézanne, to the exotic 
 
From the Revolution to Renoir 27 
 
 design of Gauguin and Matisse, to the world of the 
 mind opened up by Redon and explored with such 
 unexpected effect by the Cubists. 
 
 But as we are to-day passing through a moment of 
 reaction from the Impressionists, let our final glance 
 be at the achievement of their greatest painter—Re- 
 noir. Follow him from the early works preferred by 
 those who care least for him, to those productions of 
 his old age wherein his art is purest, and you see the 
 essential development of the artist, from painting in 
 which the object is represented in all its phases—with- 
 out the special emphasis which means intention and 
 expression—to a concentration, in his later work, on 
 design and color from which the dross of materialism 
 has been burned out in the fire of one of the world’s 
 great geniuses. He makes us think of Rubens by the 
 infallible mastery with which he makes the mysterious 
 wave of color turn and recede and come to climaxes 
 and pass on again, effortless and harmonious as the 
 sound of a great orchestra. But he is what even Ru- 
 bens is not—a Latin, with the heritage of three- 
 dimensional design which Frenchmen, from Poussin to 
 Derain, have been bringing from Italy, and which Italy 
 carried on from Greece. In the old age of Re- 
 noir, most of all in his old age, I think, there is that 
 unquenchable youth of his ancient country, always 
 thrilling to the beauty of the young faces and bodies 
 and flowers of which poets and artists have been sing- 
 ing ever since they had voices at all, about which the 
 museum makes weak men think there is no longer a 
 fresh word to say, but of which the miraculous, renew- 
 ing strength of the modern period gave us, in Renoir, 
 a new symbol. 
 
THE POLES OF THE MODERN 
 MOVEMENT 
 
 CEZANNE and Redon are so obviously different from 
 the Impressionists that it can not be other than a sur- 
 prise to one who knows their work and not their his- 
 tory, to find that they are exactly contemporaneous 
 with that group. Cézanne was born in 1839, the same 
 year as Sisley; Redon in 1840, the same year as Monet 
 and Rodin, and one year before Renoir. The early 
 work of Cézanne fits in perfectly with the Courbet- 
 esque and Manetesque painting of the Impressionists 
 among whom he began, and it is not until he is nearly 
 fifty years old that a fundamental difference between 
 his work and theirs becomes clearly apparent. Redon, 
 on the other hand, is marked for his life-work from 
 his earliest pictures, and it is only through certain 
 qualities of color in his later painting that we can 
 see any relationship between him and his great con- 
 temporaries—who were his friends and admirers. It 
 is natural that we should think of Cézanne and Redon 
 as later men than the Impressionists, for the world did 
 not appreciate the significance of the two masters until 
 long after Monet, Pissarro and the rest had achieved 
 fame and influence. There was nothing of accident in 
 this, for the Impressionists furnish the last chapter of 
 the scientific and realistic effort of modern times, while 
 the two painters we are to consider initiate the depar- 
 ture from it. 
 
 Cézanne and Redon are not merely different from 
 
 their contemporaries but from each other, diverging, 
 28 
 
 . 
 . 
 
Poles of the Modern Movement 39 
 
 as they grow older, until we may look on them as the 
 poles between which the modern movement has since 
 oscillated. In the words of a Dutch critic, they divide 
 the heritage of Delacroix—Cézanne developing the 
 qualities of form and color of the older master, Redon 
 carrying to new conclusions his research in the world 
 of vision. In both cases one traces these tendencies 
 farther back than Delacroix, but the essential differ- 
 ence between the two masters lies in the direction they 
 gave to their work, and not in the fact that Cézanne 
 is by far the greater artist. 
 
 In the time to come, when the struggles of the nine- 
 teenth century are forgotten, his place in the classic 
 line will be even clearer than it is to-day. Yet even to- 
 day any collection of his work showing his full de- 
 velopment carries us almost unaided from the heavy 
 modelling of the Realists and the fiery imagination of 
 Delacroix, through the exploring of light and color 
 which he made with the Impressionists, and so to the 
 threshold of the ideas of to-day, most of which are con- 
 tained, in germ at least, in his later work. ‘Though 
 we see him now as the same man from the first, it is 
 evidently the Cézanne of the twenty years or so before 
 his death in 1906 whom we must study more particu- 
 larly. 
 
 Yet to regard the later phases of his work as some- 
 thing which he evolved unaided after he left Paris in 
 the early eighties is to forget the magnificent quality 
 of many an early picture and to miss the connection 
 between him and the great men through whose in- 
 fluence he passed. Indeed it is important to follow 
 him from the first of his painting, from those works 
 wherein we see the old instinct for harmony that still 
 dwelt in the classic soil on which he was born. It 
 
Xe) The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 is the part of France where, as Elie Faure has shown, 
 the Greek genius gave some of the finest manifesta- 
 tions of its later power, as in the Maison Carrée of 
 Nimes and the Venus of Vienne. While the sense of 
 measure in Cézanne’s later work constitutes the most 
 intimate bond between him and the classics of anti- 
 quity, one may see, without too great a play of fantasy, 
 some of the ancient love of rhythm in the flying dra- 
 peries of those allegorical figures due to the instinct of 
 the young painter. Soon a more turbulent note an- 
 nounces his contact with Romanticism (his study of 
 Delacroix’s color will come later in his life), but the 
 decisive influence of his early period is that of Courbet, 
 and his “compatriot,” as he loved to call Daumier— 
 who was born in Marseilles—also pointed through his 
 work to the importance of reality. For years he works 
 at his investigation of the aspects of sight which give 
 us the sense of solidity in the painted object, and so in 
 later life, even when he is least concerned with exacti- 
 tude of representation, one has the conviction that the 
 forms in his pictures are based on sensations of the 
 weight and existence of matter. Then, with Manet, 
 whose work finds a generous and worthy response in 
 his own, and finally with the younger men—among 
 whom the thoughtful Pissarro is his closest friend—he 
 adds to his equipment the new ideas of color and light, 
 which he did his share in developing, during his Im- 
 pressionistic period and after it. | 
 When he is ready to withdraw to Aix-en-Provence, 
 his native town in the South of France, he carries with 
 him an experience even more valuable than that of the 
 contact with his century: it is his study of the Louvre, 
 which is henceforth to serve him, and be linked with 
 the “bonnes humanités’ of his youth. ‘The Greek and 
 
 ee le ee ee 
 
 SS ae eee eS ee 
 
Poles of the Modern Movement 41 
 
 Latin poets whom he loved to quote never had worthier 
 homage than the painting of Cézanne. In the phrase 
 of his which is most often repeated, that which ex- 
 plains his purpose of “making from Impressionism 
 something solid, like the work in the museums,” of do- 
 ing over the work of Poussin from nature, he might 
 have named other masters as well as the one who, for 
 Frenchmen, epitomizes their classical heritage. With 
 Signorelli, whose figures he copied and used over and 
 over in his pictures, he touches the Renaissance at one 
 of its highest levels; and numerous drawings from the 
 Greek sculptures in the Louvre attest his study of the 
 central focus of European art. On his wall hangs a 
 water-color by Delacroix; in his letters we find refer- 
 ences to Tintoretto, the Spaniards and Chardin. 
 
 He continues to paint from nature until the end of 
 his life; but the slightest sketch of his later years shows 
 his growing preoccupation with the esthetic qualities 
 of the picture. Herein lies the difference between him 
 and the Impressionists. With the latter one feels that 
 the limits of the picture, and its subdivisions, were 
 imposed from without, by the aspect of the scene por- 
 trayed; the oppositions of the colors were used to pro- 
 duce effects of luminosity, again an external thing: 
 what gives the picture its life is the splendid instinct 
 of the artist who transcends his theory in the excite- 
 ment of his work. Even Renoir, when questioned 
 about painting, preferred to go on farther than the 
 statement that it was a means of transmitting the pas- 
 sion that is in the artist. Concerning the way in which 
 this is accomplished, concerning the laws certainly rec- 
 ognized by him as underlying the works he loved in 
 the museum (which he considered the sole teacher of 
 the artist), he was silent. Cézanne’s immense author- 
 
42 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 ity proceeds precisely from his having rendered com- 
 prehensible to the next generation the laws of picture- 
 making which the haste and confusion of the nine- 
 teenth century had obscured. Needless to say, these 
 laws are such as can never be written down; they are 
 the principles, perceived by the mind without the in- 
 termediation of words, which govern the productions 
 of the masters of all times and races, the principles 
 which differentiate the work of art from everything 
 else in the world. 
 
 Before the French Revolution, the reign of law in 
 art was so easy and natural that men could paint or 
 carve without the consciousness of doing anything but 
 imitate nature. Leonardo himself, the most inquiring 
 and profound of men, has certain passages in his writ- 
 ings which, considered apart from others which mod- 
 ify them, directly affirm that the role of the picture is 
 to be a copy of a given person or landscape. When 
 hatred of the eighteenth century appears with the Rev- 
 olution, David feels that something more imposing 
 than personal preference in art matters is needed to 
 give authority to his ideas and he invokes the law de- 
 rived (according to his own lights) from the Greeks 
 and the Romans. ‘Thenceforward—through Ingres 
 and Delacroix, through Courbet even, most of all 
 through Cézanne, and so down to those who learn his 
 lesson and that of Redon—there is a constant, and in- 
 creasingly conscious investigation of the properties of 
 the work of art—the Museum being, of course, the field 
 where the research is conducted. ‘The greatest signifi- 
 cance attaches to the fact that every master of the 
 modern time has executed copies in the museums, usu- 
 ally from works of widely varying character, and not 
 alone during the student years when the Old Masters 
 
 ee eo 
 
Poles of the Modern Movement 43 
 
 copied to learn their craft, but during maturity or even 
 old age, when the hand was no longer to be influenced 
 _ but the brain was still tirelessly seeking to know the 
 truth. Why did Veronese use the two opposing colors 
 in the collar of that man in the “Marriage at Cana”? 
 asks Delacroix; how are we to explain the fact that a 
 similar sequence of hues appears in the drops of water 
 falling from Rubens’ nymphs? he inquires again. Or, 
 when a bright yellow cab drives through the street he 
 was observing, why is it that he now sees violet tones in 
 the shadows on the pavement, where before they had 
 been blue? And s0, later, when the problems of color 
 had to some extent been resolved, Cézanne inquires 
 into the effect on the lines and planes of a picture 
 when a new horizontal or vertical or oblique line 
 or plane is introduced. This outer world that seems 
 to the careless observer so settled and static is, then, in 
 a constantly dynamic state wherein nothing is isolated 
 or inert—where everything is affected by the forms and 
 colors of all the objects within the scene. As the 
 modern period’s growing skill in representation turns 
 the pictures at the academies into simulacra of nature 
 containing less and still less the quality of life, when 
 such counterfeit art gains more and more in prestige 
 with the modern mob in its growing ignorance of the 
 classics, the young painters who have still (and how 
 powerfully!) the instinct for the esthetic qualities, turn 
 to the man who above all others among their contem- 
 poraries was applying the law learned at the Museum 
 to the chaos in the world around him. 
 
 Cézanne, superimposing color upon color to get 
 their cumulative effect, watching the reverberation 
 throughout his canvas of each new touch, was per- 
 forming a mental operation similar to that of the mu- 
 
Ad The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 sician, whose material, farther removed from the imi- 
 tative than is the painter’s, arrived much sooner at its 
 purity as an agent of expression. Since form, more 
 than color, renders the thing seen, Cézanne’s organiz- 
 ing of the lines and planes of his pictures will stand as 
 an even greater achievement than his work with color. 
 A certain latitude has usually been permitted the color- 
 ist in his search for harmony—which has been pretty 
 generally understood as the object of his effort. But 
 drawing, “the probity of art,” was another matter. 
 For many hundreds of years, since the decline of By- 
 zantine art, Europe had been working for an ever- 
 greater completeness of representation; and Cézanne 
 himself, when his need for an esthetic structure forced 
 him to modify, in his painting, the physical structure 
 of objects, was tortured with doubts about his proce- 
 dure. Yet he went on, always in the same direction, 
 making a constantly more rigorous elimination of the 
 sensations which to him represented only accidents of 
 vision and which were not essential to the new organ- 
 ism he was building up. The thrill we get from his 
 later works comes from witnessing an act of creation, 
 from being associated in imagination with that act. 
 Every line, every plane, every touch of the brush works 
 together with the rest as the muscles and nerves of the 
 body respond to the impulses of the mind. It seems to 
 many men to-day, though it is dangerous to make ex- 
 treme statements about a contemporary, that neither 
 Michael Angelo in his mastery of form, nor Rubens 
 in his handling of color, has gone farther in this respect. 
 What one may affirm without confronting artists so 
 different from one another and so sufficiently equipped 
 for their own problems, is that with neither of these 
 
Poles of the Modern Movement A5 
 
 earlier masters are the vital elements of the picture so 
 directly accessible to the eyes of our time. 
 
 One sees the pictorial elements unmistakably in the 
 water-color sketches of which Cézanne made so many. 
 First come the large divisions of his subject, estab- 
 lished with a lead-pencil. Then come accents of the 
 parts, obtained with the brush, certain dominants of 
 form or color being insisted on from the start, while 
 the less important notes are held subordinate to them. 
 The work may be laid aside at any time and be com- 
 plete even when, as occurs quite often with these stud- 
 ies, one finds it difficult or even impossible to recognize 
 the subject. Cézanne never went to the length of de- 
 liberately suppressing the aspect of natural appear- 
 ances ; he was, after all, a man of the generation which 
 set itself to represent them most fully. But as he grew 
 older, the underlying laws of sight and of harmony 
 came to interest him more than their application to 
 the representing of objects, and so we get those pic- 
 tures wherein a space of nearly bare canvas will be 
 bent into form by the action of its contours (the high- 
 est conception of form, as we see with the Floren- 
 tines or with Holbein), where heads are without fea- 
 tures or where masses of foliage come forward without 
 apparent explanation of their source, because the 
 painter, having obtained the volume he needed in his 
 design, did not feel the need of going into questions 
 of representation which were irrelevant to his esthetic 
 purpose. 
 
 Probably in the whole history of art up to his time 
 no one had ever set himself this purpose so unrelent- 
 ingly. ‘To compare his painting with the work of the 
 architect or the rug-weaver is misleading, for the spe- 
 
46 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 cial function of their products gives them a different 
 basis of judgment; and if I permitted myself a refer- 
 ence to music, a little earlier, it was only to make clear 
 the distinction between representational and expressive 
 material. Cézanne’s preoccupation with law has 
 made a recent painter of great importance refer to him 
 as ascetic; and if one thinks of his work beside Rem- 
 brandt’s, the warm human sentiment of the Dutch 
 master may seem at first to justify the charge. Let us 
 rather say that the comparison (if comparisons of the 
 masters are to be permitted at all) makes us feel again 
 the strength of our period, which could bring forth 
 a work consonant with the findings of the past and 
 through it lay open to us a horizon of painting only 
 half perceptible in the art of the past. Certainly, 
 every man of importance in the younger generation 
 has acknowledged this work as basic; and yet it is not 
 sufficient to explain the art of the present day, as 
 Duchamp-Villon once remarked to a painter who said 
 that he had reached an appreciation of Cubism 
 through copying a Cézanne. 
 
 As little as the abstract painting of recent years 
 resembles the work of Odilon Redon, we shall see 
 later that before the new conception could arise, it 
 was necessary that the idea of the great visionary be 
 assimilated along with the sense of construction due 
 to Cézanne. Like Cézanne, Redon is too much of his 
 time entirely to abandon the world of sight; yet his 
 art is located in the plane of the mind, as against the 
 physical world with which our realistic age was so 
 concerned, almost more completely than that of Cé- 
 zanne, whose work always contains a direct reference 
 to the substance and the light of nature—and loses 
 nothing of freedom thereby. Redon has told us in 
 
Poles of the Modern Movement . 47 
 
 words (see the collection of his writings, ‘A Soi- 
 Méme”’), that the reality at which he aims is not the 
 one obtained through perspective, chiaroscuro and the 
 other means of representing the thing seen. For him, 
 true existence is not conferred on the visual image be- 
 fore the mind has fused it with imagination and pre- 
 vious experience. It may be said that this is true for 
 every aftist; what distinguishes Redon is his having 
 formulated the theory and so reached a special free- 
 dom in pursuing it almost to the extreme limits that it 
 allowed. 
 
 Like Delacroix, his favorite among French artists, 
 he lived much with books and music. Mallarmé and 
 Huysmans were his intimate friends, and he was one 
 of the first men in his country to appreciate the great- 
 ness of Brahms. Undoubtedly his communion with 
 them strengthened his love for the world of vision and 
 hastened the evolution of his art. In certain early 
 etchings there is an exact notation of landscape de- 
 tails; all through his life it was his practice to make 
 studies from nature with the closest visual fidelity— 
 and with a skilful hand. Yet even these works, a 
 preparation for his more characteristic production, are 
 part of his dream. They stand apart from the paint- 
 ing of his generation, as one sees at a glance if one 
 places his most objective effort beside any other pic- 
 ture of his time. The case is the same as that of the 
 naturalistic studies of Durer, which are felt to be 
 touched with the visionary quality of his whole art. 
 The “Melancholia” of the great master of Nuremberg 
 was an ideal with Redon. The “literary” quality of 
 that engraving was no obstacle to its reaching an ex- 
 traordinary level in plastics; so also Redon’s constant 
 preoccupation with the significance and symbolism 
 
48 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 of his subjects should blind no one to his esthetic 
 achievement. A severely blocked form, establishing 
 the great masses and angles and proportions, upholds 
 his draftsmanship in its wildest flights; and his color, 
 even more a thing of the imagination than his line and 
 composition, has an unearthly glow that makes one 
 think of the old enamellers and mosaicists. If Redon 
 belonged to their distant epoch we might estimate his 
 value more easily. As he is of to-day, we are con- 
 stantly tempted to make baseless comparisons between 
 him and his contemporaries. The very force with 
 which the latter swing us in their direction is the meas- 
 ure of Redon’s originality, since he could breast such 
 an opposing current and keep to his own course; and 
 we see in the character of the period as a whole our 
 need of the reminder, given us by Redon, of that world 
 beyond the world of the eyes, which, on rare occasions 
 in the Occident, but times without number in the 
 Orient, has been the subject of the artist. 
 
AFTER IMPRESSIONISM 
 
 IN one of his writings, Redon asks himself why he 
 found such difficulty in getting started on his work, 
 and we know that Cézanne was, throughout his life- 
 time, puzzled and mortified by the fact that his art was 
 so slow in finding recognition. ‘To-day we can see that 
 the reason for the two things, which are the same 
 thing, lies in the greatness of the art immediately pre- 
 ceding their own and in the extent to which they 
 changed men’s ideas. The painters we have consid- 
 ered thus far, and Seurat whom we reach in this 
 chapter, are not merely artists of genius, they are turn- 
 ing points in the art of their time; and this can scarcely 
 be said of the first painters to appear after the genera- 
 tion of the Impressionists. : 
 
 In Gauguin and van Gogh we have personalities 
 of unusual distinction: Gauguin, who was an almost 
 fantastic character, with his Peruvian blood and his 
 Parisian youth, his generosity, his wildness, his need 
 for the exotic, and withal the quick intelligence which 
 the Impressionism of his first years as a painter whet- 
 ted to a keen edge; and van Gogh, whose character is 
 manifest from the most summary review of his career, 
 its acts of faith and heroism, its fire sweeping on 
 in the ever increasing heat and light which we see in 
 his pictures. 
 
 Yet the passing of the years, while it assures the 
 place of these artists in the history of their time and 
 in the affections of men, tends also to convince us that 
 they are not the equals of the greatest men of the mod- 
 
 49 
 
50 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 ern period. Perhaps one makes the admission with 
 most regret in the case of van Gogh, whose art is of 
 such moving beauty that it seems mere pedantry to ask 
 what ideas he offered the world that it did not have 
 before. If the findings of art, like those of science, be- 
 came part of a common treasury to which each suc- 
 ceeding master contributes and on which all draw 
 according to their needs, the task of the critic—now 
 nearly hopeless if he aspires to definitive pronounce- 
 ments—would be a simple one. But the line of evolu- 
 tion that I am following in this book is essentially hypo- 
 thetical—a temporary convenience in a discussion 
 whose real object is to awaken a sense of the immense 
 energy of our epoch and to stimulate a wider recogni- 
 tion of the greatness of its achievements in art, our | 
 final purpose being to arrive at an ability to appreciate 
 the masters of to-day. Considering the great artists 
 in perspective, one perceives continuity and interde- 
 pendence among them. Had Courbet not produced 
 the work which so influenced Renoir in his youth, the 
 later production of that adorable painter, fine as it 
 would have been, could not have had the special char- 
 acter which we know. The contribution of ideas is, 
 therefore, a legitimate criterion in forming an appre- 
 ciation of an artist’s value and has some bearing upon 
 the question of his genius, even though we admit that 
 this, in the last analysis, can not be defined. 
 
 One may hold in contempt the fortune-teller’s tricks 
 for casting a horoscope, and yet notice that for over a 
 century it has taken the world about twenty years to 
 assimilate each epoch-making idea in art. Until the 
 idea is worked out, men can not leave it in order to 
 evolve a new one; and afterward it is without genera- 
 tive power. ‘There is almost complete agreement con- 
 
_ After Impressionism 51 
 
 cerning the masters of the earlier epochs of modern 
 art: Classicism (with Ingres, born 1780); Roman- 
 ticism (with Delacroix, born 1798), Realism (with 
 Courbet, born 1819) and Impressionism and its reac- 
 tion (with all the masters of the group born between 
 1839 and 1841, save Pissarro who came from the 
 colonies and therefore began his work later in life 
 than the rest). Between each of these movements and 
 the next the interval is within two years of the twenty 
 I have mentioned; just twenty years after Cézanne’s 
 birth comes that of Seurat, whom the wisest critics 
 to-day consider the great man of his time; while De- 
 tain, Picasso and Braque, undoubtedly the most influ- 
 ential men of the present generation, were born 
 respectively, twenty-one and twenty-two years after 
 Seurat. ‘There is here either a remarkable coincidence 
 or else—as I believe—a genuine indication that the 
 mind of the world has its periods of greater and lesser 
 energy; and the impressions of an artist’s youth, 
 falling within one or the other of those periods, deter- 
 mine the character of his achievement. The rule 
 is too liable to exceptions to offer more than probable 
 evidence for the idea that Gauguin and van Gogh, 
 born about midway through one of the twenty-year 
 periods, are less great than the men who came before 
 and after them. There is, however, one sure deduc- 
 tion to be made: that the modern period, rich as it is, 
 has had moments of respite, during which no new idea 
 appeared; and this is of interest to-day when we have 
 seen the rise of no master for ten years or more, and 
 when the usual cry of decadence is being raised. 
 Some people try to meet it by mentioning the war; but 
 that event, however stupendous, has probably had but 
 little effect on art. A better reason for the present 
 
52 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 state of affairs is to be found, I believe, in the periodic 
 action of thought in our time. 
 
 Returning to the artists who first engage us after 
 the generation of the Impressionists, we may recall that 
 the latter exercised a formative influence on all three 
 of them. Van Gogh and Seurat adopted the ideas of 
 the Impressionists only after an early period in other 
 schools; while Gauguin, whose art was to differ most 
 
 in appearance from that of the older men, adopted 
 
 them at once, his closest model being Pissarro, whom 
 we find so often as a giver of ideas. But soon it was 
 evident that those ideas had yielded to the generation 
 that had evolved them, all the results they could pro- 
 duce. Weaklings might try to gild the refined gold 
 of the Impressionists; men of Gauguin’s stature moved 
 to new fields. 
 
 “Le Christ Jaune,” a painting of his Breton period, 
 shows the influence of the art descended from the Mid- 
 dle Ages, whose picture-making, as represented, cen- 
 turies later, by the Images d’Epinal and other popular 
 prints, was eagerly studied by him and the younger 
 men who soon grouped themselves around him. Their 
 instinct for an art that offered possibilities of develop- 
 ment, had led them to a school distinguished by reli- 
 gious expression and by design, qualities that had been 
 absent from the work of their predecessors. But Paris 
 and its life and its art were still too near for Gauguin, 
 and he took refuge from them in the South Seas. The 
 voluptuous “island of odors” (Noa-Noa) taught him 
 what expressiveness the Tahitians could impart to the 
 broad sweep of line and surface of their wood-carving. 
 In the instinctive art of these primitive people he found 
 relief from the intellectualism of Europe, and inspira- 
 tion for the decorative painting for which he was so. 
 
 f 
 
 ee een ST Oe a ee oo 
 
- After Impressionism 53 
 
 remarkably gifted. In an age appreciative of its art- 
 ists he would have been allowed to make free with the 
 walls that he always longed to work on, and that he 
 would have treated in more original and vital fashion 
 than Puvis de Chavannes. His easel-pictures now 
 seem to most of us beautifully patterned illustrations of 
 the romance of the tropics rather than creations which 
 exist independent of the world of appearances, as 
 works of the finest type do. Nevertheless, Gauguin’s 
 art is so genuine, so much the expression of a man who 
 loved life and his work, that it can scarcely fail to give 
 pleasure to the future. His immense interest for his 
 time comes from his recognition of its need to recom- 
 bine into a pictorial scheme the elements revealed by 
 the analysis of the Impressionists. If his personality 
 and his decorative talent did not carry him entirely 
 through the difficulties of that big task, if he is not of 
 the main stem of modern art, he is a branch that bears 
 flowers of a rare perfume and that later men have not 
 neglected. 
 
 With Gauguin we are still thinking in terms of es- 
 thetic theory; with van Gogh it is the drama of human 
 life that thrills us. His own drama ends in a tragic 
 death, but his life was one of triumph. Its external 
 circumstances were of the bitterest; but no painter 
 would look on that as more than a cheap price to pay 
 for the chance to give color such resonance, to illumine 
 faces with so much expression, to cause light so te 
 kindle on gray canvas, and to capture space and atmos- 
 phere through the little ink- or pencil-marks which our 
 race has been studying for so many thousand years. 
 
 Again and again we are startled by the technical 
 ability of van Gogh. But his knowledge of the color 
 that will inflame another, the certainty with which he 
 
54 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 makes the whole work quiver with the fierce rhythm of 
 his painting, yield something very different from the 
 performance of the virtuoso. His certainty is only 
 the outer indication of his belief in his vision, in the 
 magnificence of the thing presented to us, in the mir- 
 acle of living, before which differences of mentality, 
 character or position sink into insignificance: his post- 
 man is a king or a prophet; the wife of the café-keeper 
 (“VArlésienne”) is marvellous with all the mystery 
 of womanhood, and the splendor of purple and green 
 and rose with which he surrounds her make their 
 unforeseen and stirring harmony because in this work, 
 as in all his work, the artist’s whole life is pouring 
 forth in that love of the world and its people which 
 we gather from reading his letters, with their schemes 
 for bringing about a brotherhood of mankind, with 
 their anguish, their return to hope, and their un- 
 questioning belief in the art which he finally reached, 
 and in which he expressed himself as fully, perhaps, 
 as ever aman has done. In his days as a clergyman he 
 had found words too weak for his idea; as a painter, 
 he seizes it passionately and unerringly. 
 
 The world could not live on at such a tempo, and 
 with Seurat it gives us the most severely intellectual 
 genius of modern times. He is not cold: it is passion 
 —the intensity of his feeling for nature and for art that 
 keeps his mind on its plane of faultless logic, that in- 
 forms his color and gives it the cool clarity of the skies 
 of his northern France. ‘The same passion raises his 
 form to the grandeur attained by his ancestors when 
 they built Notre Dame in the city of his birth. In his 
 last work, “The Circus,” one has even the illusion that 
 he is engrossed merely in his subject—the ring, the 
 flying white horse, the elfin dancer on its back, the 
 
- After Impressionism 55 
 
 painted clowns, and each one of the commonplace and 
 fascinating personages of the audience. It is only 
 when an artist is in full control of his means, that he 
 can do work of such apparent simplicity. Fra Angel- 
 ico’s absorption in his themes was possible because a 
 long line of artistic ancestors had placed in his hands 
 the perfect instrument for his work—an instrument 
 which the innovators of the Quattrocento were soon 
 to transform again. Like him, Seurat also receives 
 an art at its moment of full development, the splendid 
 painting of the Impressionists. He is not dazzled by 
 its brilliance, but calmly determines the next step 
 needed in the evolution which, as he sees, is not yet 
 ended. 
 
 Even in his earliest years as an artist, when studying 
 at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, his faculty for investiga- 
 tion is evident. His teacher, a pupil of Ingres, passed 
 on to him the principles of drawing inculcated by that 
 master. We know the decadence of these principles as 
 handled by at least two other students of the atelier— 
 men who saw the line of Ingres not as one of the great 
 elements of art but merely as a means of copying na- 
 ture. For Seurat, drawing is, from the first, a thing 
 governed by its own laws—which he sets himself to 
 discover. In hundreds of studies—of people and of 
 landscape—we see him searching out the relationship 
 among lines, curved and straight, horizontal, vertical 
 and slanting. At the end of his life he writes down 
 in words how each of the abstract qualities he evolves 
 is used by the composer of pictures, as also the esthetic 
 role of the lights and darks. As the result of his meet- 
 ing with Paul Signac, the admirable painter who ini- 
 tiated him into the new ideas of the Impressionists, 
 Seurat schematized the qualities of color as he had 
 
56 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 previously done with those of line—and of this he also 
 tells in the letter I have cited.’ As it is the heritage 
 from Ingres which underlies his analysis of drawing, 
 so in the study of color he and Signac consult Dela- 
 croix, the master who inaugurated and indeed almost 
 dictated our whole latter-day understanding of color. 
 In explaining to themselves the grand effects in Dela- 
 croix’s decoration at the Louvre, “Apollo Slaying the 
 Python,” in the paintings at St. Sulpice and in the 
 smaller works, the young painters find invaluable con- 
 firmation for their ideas in the “Journal” of the artist 
 who had penetrated deepest of all to the law of har- 
 mony, and laid bare its working in those late pictures 
 of his where the colors, juxtaposed in almost separate 
 strokes, permit us to follow his theory of the relation- 
 ship among the hues. The scientific spirit of the later 
 generation must needs, however, go farther than the 
 results obtained under the inspiration of Romanticist 
 enthusiasm, and so the books of Helmholtz, Chevreul 
 and Rood were consulted—the findings of the labora- 
 tory being used to corroborate and assist those of the 
 studio. Then, the varying tendencies of the time be- 
 ing harmonized—the line and color of the earlier, 
 more idealistic men and the fidelity to appearances 
 which grew out of Realism—painting had, with Seu- 
 rat, a moment of perfection and repose similar, as I 
 have suggested, to the unconsciousness of effort with 
 which Fra Angelico went from one masterpiece to an- 
 other in the cells of San Marco. The work of Seurat 
 is no less beautiful; indeed, as men of our time, we may 
 be permitted to enjoy even more fully the pictures of 
 the modern master. 
 
 1'The letter is reprinted in my study of Seurat, which is included in the 
 bibliography at the end of this book. 
 
After Impressionism 57 
 
 They are few in number, partly because of the short- 
 ness of his life, partly because of the wealth of detail 
 and the infinite care he bestowed on the six large 
 masterpieces which, with certain smaller pictures 
 (often no less perfect), make up the body of his work. 
 “La Baignade,” his first important painting, is built 
 on static lines of a calm grandeur for which there is 
 no precedent in the modern time. Less remarkable 
 for color than the later work of Seurat, it is already an 
 example of his capacity for obtaining in the minutiae 
 of his picture as well as in its general effect (the tiny 
 triangle of the sail in a corner of the composition as 
 well as the nobly drawn figures in the foreground), 
 that ultimate rightness which convinces one that the 
 artist has grasped and expressed the whole of his idea. 
 “Un Dimanche a la Grande Jatte” follows; with its 
 perspective of tree-trunks like the columns in a cathe- 
 dral, with the color kindling in the light which the 
 painter now understands better, with the purity of 
 form in the figures, and with the hieratic rhythm in 
 the draperies, it is perhaps the work in which we best 
 see Seurat as the student of the Louvre, for such 
 he always was. Going on to freer conceptions and to 
 severer execution, he arrives at the great canvas of 
 “The Circus,” in which his esthetic qualities are at 
 their fullest expansion, where the rigorous planning 
 of each curve and angle, and the uncompromising 
 division of the color are masked, for the layman, by 
 that amazed delight in the spectacle through which 
 the artist—so old in experience if not in years—rejoins 
 the child in his viewing of the world. 
 
 Again changes were at hand. The scientifically ac- 
 curate accounting for every phrase of appearances, 
 which Seurat (together with Signac) brought to its 
 
58 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 final point, demonstrated for the next group of men 
 that art, which is infinite, could not be contained in 
 representation, which is finite, even though the two 
 can exist together in one work. Also, when Seurat 
 had showed that it is with the properties of form and 
 color that the strongest effects of the artist are obtained, 
 the way was cleared for our latter-day investigation 
 of these properties, in complete independence of the 
 recognizable object. 
 
 Every so often one hears the statement—‘“‘I am in 
 favor of the modern artists—the real ones; I was of 
 the first to defend Manet and Monet; but these 
 painters that people are trying to make us accept to- 
 day are quite different.” And indeed they are, except 
 that they are the artists of to-day as Manet (who died 
 forty years ago) and Monet (still with us and paint- 
 ing, as one rejoices to hear, but eighty-four years old) 
 were the artists of their day. The error of the man 
 who makes a remark like that cited above is, of course, 
 in failing to notice that the aspect of art which was 
 new in his youth is no longer new,—that there is not an 
 artist in the younger generations who can any longer 
 do living work with the Impressionist idea. Perhaps 
 in the new period we are entering, when all that is now 
 called modern painting will be a thing of the past (the 
 glorious past), the evolution of art will go on slowly 
 and in the straight line followed by the eighteenth 
 century, for example. But nothing is more certain 
 than the fact that in our time the changes have come 
 quickly and that the line makes sharp turns. Claude 
 Monet tells how Corot, coming out from an early ex- 
 hibition of the Impressionists, was as nearly in a rage 
 as was possible to one of his gentle spirit. For once he 
 used harsh words, about “ce tas de jeunes fumistes.” 
 
‘After Impressionism 59 
 
 That seems strange to us, not only as language coming 
 from the always kindly old artist, but because in the 
 years preceding his death in 1875, Monet, Pissarro, 
 Renoir and the others were painting pictures which 
 to-day look so very traditional, so obviously the next 
 step from the work of Corot himself, whom all the 
 younger men revered. But they had made the step, 
 and that was too much for human nature, even that of 
 a Corot,—whose benevolence toward his imitators 
 ‘sometimes led him to sign the works they brought him 
 for correction—and for the signature which would 
 then fetch a round price. 
 
 To-day when the position of Cézanne and Redon is 
 scarcely less assured than that of Courbet, when Gau- 
 guin, van Gogh and Seurat are rapidly being sub- 
 merged in the ever-advancing wave of the accepted 
 and canonized, one asks oneself what new direction 
 appeared in the art of the late ’nineties and the first 
 years of this century which could win for its producers 
 the title of “Jes Fauves’—the Wild Beasts—and give 
 it the special quality that still seems fresh to-day, even 
 though two movements have appeared since. Here at 
 last is modern art, says some reader who has waited 
 patiently to get done with the talk about the pictures 
 of fifty or seventy-five years ago, “things that any- 
 one can understand.” Are old pictures really better 
 understood than modern ones? Only a little, I 
 believe; they are more familiar, more accepted, but 
 as mysterious, essentially, as the works of our own time. 
 At all events, if anyone thinks there is a fundamental 
 difference of purpose between the old and the new, let 
 me refer him to one of the most admirable articles 
 on art that has appeared in many a day—the one con- 
 tributed by Henri Matisse to the Grande Revue of 
 
60 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 25 December, 1908. Reading it, one almost thinks that 
 the writer is taking a mischievous pleasure in dis- 
 concerting an audience assembled to hear him roar and 
 howl, as befits a wild beast; whereas his words about 
 the old themes of color, composition and expression 
 are traditional in the severest and best sense. He is 
 conscious of his effect and replies to the criticism of it 
 by saying that there is never anything new in art. 
 Later on, echoes of this statement came from people 
 who, after having admired his originality, or after 
 rebuking him for a pretence to it, discovered that 
 Matisse had not done such unheard-of things after 
 all: witness the portraits in encaustic of Alexandrian 
 Egypt, the painting of. the Persians or especially the 
 frescoes of ancient Crete. As for Georges Rouault, 
 that other wild man, the superficial observer would ask, 
 wherein was his work essentially unlike what had been 
 shown us ages ago by Daumier—or was it by the glass 
 painters of the cathedrals? And Derain and Dufy, 
 had they done more than follow the hint of Gauguin 
 (who probably had it from Manet), that a whole 
 treasury of new material lay stored up in the old French 
 prints that were produced in great numbers for the 
 houses of the poor? 
 
 All this has truth in it, but more than this must be 
 said in order to explain why these painters gained their 
 prestige, why their admirers see them as the true in- 
 heritors of the great past, and why the direction taken 
 by the following group is inexplicable without them. 
 
 The answer to these various questions seems to me to 
 
 appear of itself when we recognize that the period 
 which Jes Fauves inaugurated is one of conscious pur- 
 pose, as compared with the more or less complete 
 reliance on instinct of the time before. 
 
After Impressionism 61 
 
 Certainly such a development does represent one 
 of those sharp turns in the line of evolution which I 
 mentioned before. The step which we saw as too 
 strange for Cézanne and Redon to make in their real- 
 istic period is now taken by the new men. For them 
 the significance of the previous work has become fully 
 apparent. Cézanne had said that painting from nature 
 did not imply copying the object but realizing one’s 
 sensations. Yet he himself continued to keep the ob- 
 ject well before his eyes, and spoke severely of Gauguin 
 and van Gogh, whose formula for nature contains less 
 of the object than does his own. Had they been his 
 equals in personal greatness, he would probably have 
 been no less troubled by their innovations; indeed he 
 dismissed all the artists after Impressionism with the 
 words “they do not count.’’ The trouble was that the 
 younger generation had found a different formula for 
 “realizing sensations.” ‘They knew so well that this 
 was the problem of the artist that they consciously ac- 
 centuated what were to them the essentials of their 
 pictures and consciously eliminated what seemed 
 merely accidental. In the art of the Gothic or—even 
 more, the Romanesque sculptors, or that of the Hin- 
 dus or the Africans, in Persian and in Chinese paint- 
 ing, the convention is arrived at through the slow 
 growth of tradition, and through racial habit and pref- 
 erence. In the work of the Fauve group, the conven- 
 tion (and of course all art implies convention) is 
 reached in a short time, as men realize that unaided 
 instinct will no longer guide them safely. 
 
 The older arts I have just mentioned are eagerly 
 studied, while among the moderns, Seurat offers to 
 the younger group his analysis of the picture and his 
 clear knowledge of the separate elements to be re- 
 
62 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 combined into a new synthesis. But the world was 
 ready for far greater consequences of his idea than his 
 pictures at first seemed to indicate. When Seurat 
 died, in 1891, Gauguin had not given much more than 
 a hint of the expressiveness of the design which the 
 non-realistic art of the primitives had taught him. 
 Van Gogh’s work was done, but it was hidden away 
 for several years after his death, and only then began 
 to make artists and public aware of the directness with 
 which its flaming color externalized the passion of 
 the man. Above all, in 1891 Cézanne had scarcely 
 entered upon the development which was to influence 
 the new generation most deeply—that extraordinary 
 series of pictures in which we can all see to-day that 
 he was evolving as the material of his art a structure 
 of form and color derived from the laws of the mind 
 which he saw incorporated in the works in the mu- 
 seums, and was using the appearances of nature as 
 means for his research. 
 
 It is because the movement of Jes Fauves synthetizes 
 these elements that we regard it as the next step in the 
 evolution of modern art. Its argument (offered in no 
 manifesto but deducible from the work) would be that 
 the expressive and esthetic qualities being the essen- 
 tial of the pictures of the preceding school—or rather 
 of all schools—it is the artist’s business to pursue form 
 and color and expression, to make them unite indis- 
 solubly into a work of art, something belonging to a 
 different sphere from that of the vague abstraction 
 which we call Nature. Art defines our sensations and 
 is the means by which men know one another: nature 
 is seen by different epochs, different races and different 
 individuals as an infinitely varied thing, one that is 
 known, after all, only as shaped and colored by the 
 
~ After Impressionism 63 
 
 preferences, prejudices, mood and experience of those 
 who look on it. But take men like Rubens or Char- 
 din, some one would object; is there not in their work 
 a phase of nature as we all see it, as well as the 
 esthetic qualities which we agree on as essential? 
 Yes, a phase, if you like, or to be more exact, various 
 phases; and a Leonardo or a great Chinese artist 
 would offer quite different phases, and a Holbein or 
 an archaic Greek vase-painting still others. Each 
 time that a master has made us see something that we 
 had not seen before, we call it nature; and if we do not 
 stop to consider, we have the illusion that this thing 
 has been defined and is unchangeable—but that is 
 only illusion. The measure of a new art, the thing 
 that makes the difficulty about appreciating it, is the 
 extent to which it changes our vision. 
 
 The tremendous movement of thought which began 
 coincidently with the French Revolution had given 
 artists the power to change the vision of Europe again 
 and again in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 
 We have seen that Impressionism, as new as it ap- 
 peared at first, went more to surface than to depth. 
 After Impressionism (not to mention the weaklings 
 who merely tried to repeat the work of its masters, 
 even less to consider the poor, still-born things of the 
 academies, the magazines, the inferior museums and 
 the public buildings), the ’nineties brought forth a 
 group of men like Bonnard, Vuillard and Roussel who 
 tried to make their quite genuine sentiment and sen- 
 sibility do duty for idea. Lacking the larger, genera- 
 tive quality, they were like men living on capital— 
 _a process which, in art, can not go on for long. Even 
 the resources of Renoir, Cézanne and Redon, upon 
 which they chiefly drew, existed only through the re- 
 
64 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 newal of vision which those masters continued to have 
 until the end of their long lives. Another generation, 
 without the vast experience of the older men as a 
 foundation, needed to put forth a special effort of its 
 own. Instead, the Salon d’Automne and its allied ex- 
 hibitions showed preciosity, the exploiting of nuances, 
 and a tendency towards the decorative arts—that 
 almost sure sign, in modern times, of ill-health. For 
 the decorative arts of the past owe their beauty to the 
 craftsmen, to the artisans, whose pride in their work 
 now finds its true expression in the miracles of our 
 machine-shops, in such modern perfections as the 
 engine, steering-gear and other parts of the automobile 
 which arrest our admiration as we pass the shop- 
 windows where they are displayed. ‘These admirable 
 things grow “from the ground up,” and the painter of 
 pictures who tries to approach them from the top— 
 from an aspect of beauty which is so different from 
 that of his own work—is ridiculous in his failure to 
 comprehend the source of excellence in the applied 
 arts, and accuses himself of impotence in the practice 
 of his own. Impotence was precisely what threat- 
 ened, twenty-odd years ago, when the splendor 
 achieved by the artists of the preceding decades lulled 
 the second group of Post-Impressionists into a surcease 
 from creating. An exception must be made in the case 
 of Maurice Prendergast who, in other respects, is to be 
 placed with this group. He returned to America 
 when his period of study in France had made him 
 aware of the problems offered by the Impressionists 
 and Cézanne; and the isolation in which he worked 
 out his exquisite color and fresh, personal design is 
 perhaps what gives his pictures the vigor which often 
 makes us prefer them to more accomplished per- 
 
After Impressionism 65 
 
 formances by some of the Frenchmen of the time, 
 whose superficial likeness to the masters cloaks their 
 underlying weakness. 
 
 Dislike for such a softening of modern art gave the 
 final spur to the men who came to be called Jes Fauves. 
 For them there should be no compromise, and they 
 launched out on their emphatic statement of the sig- 
 nificance of things as they saw them, stripping their 
 work of every unessential. Rouault, in his first 
 period, had painted dramatic compositions of much 
 beauty, but clogged in their effect by the mass of 
 realistic detail which he had thought it necessary to 
 include. He used his new freedom to stress those 
 elements which he felt to be the expressive ones. It 
 is the caricaturist’s method, but he applied it not 
 merely to the story-telling features of the picture, but 
 to the form and color as well. Violence was the 
 natural reaction of the whole group to the flabbiness 
 around them; and with Rouault, feeding on the strong 
 meat of his law-courts, his religious dramas and his 
 brothels, it was a natural, necessary mood, whose 
 genuineness is vouched for by the superb tonality and 
 the unfaltering beat of line in his pictures. He con- 
 tinues with very much the same point of view from 
 year to year, but with the increasing power and dignity 
 of his expression, the best of living artists and a 
 widening section of the public have become convinced 
 that his likeness to the old Gothic men, and to Dau- 
 mier and Guys, is no superficial matter, but one 
 inherent in the character of the man. 
 
 When Jes Fauves were forming, Derain was barely 
 twenty years old and scarcely recognizable as the artist 
 we know to-day. Yet when he observed how design 
 was used by Gauguin as a means of escape from mere 
 
66 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 reproduction of his romantic subjects, when he proved 
 by a return to solid color that van Gogh did not 
 achieve his immense luminosity by his broken brush- 
 work but by observing the laws of light, he was for the 
 first time falling into the role of leadership which he 
 continues to hold. Already the prime reason for his 
 authority lay in the beauty which his grave, logical 
 but imaginative mind has always given to his art. The 
 severe use of line in some of his early engravings 
 strongly suggests a likeness of mentality between him 
 and Durer, who is recalled again by some of the recent 
 work of Derain, of which I shall speak in a later 
 chapter. At least a mention must be made of the 
 charming art of Dufy, the sturdy Cézannesque paint- 
 ing of Friesz, and the great talent of Braque, which 
 was to find its real development through Cubism. 
 
 It was Matisse who carried farthest the effort of his 
 group. He not only heightened effects as Rouault 
 did, but made daring transpositions of color and form. 
 The colorists just before him had shown that each 
 tone exists through its relation with those around it; 
 Matisse, by forcing a pale pink into full crimson or a 
 gray blue into full cobalt, would raise all the rest of 
 the scale accordingly, suppressing intermediates but 
 keeping the equilibrium of the color. It was as if he 
 were observing it under a magnifying glass, not in 
 order to look farther into the component parts of it 
 which his predecessors had analyzed so carefully, but 
 to establish on the firmest base the harmonic relation 
 of the hues. In later years, with this preparation well 
 behind him, he has been able to reverse the process and 
 give us pictures painted with little more than black 
 and white but seeming to contain the full range of the 
 palette. In his use of line and mass also, his simplifi- 
 
- After Impressionism 67 
 
 cations were far more than a means of escaping the 
 trap constantly set for us by our modern sureness as 
 copyists of appearances; they served, above all, to per- 
 mit his investigating the effect of an added weight or 
 emphasis on one volume and the means of compensat- 
 ing it by the thrust and pressure of another volume. 
 When one has become sensitive to the fineness of 
 three-dimensional design which Matisse, and Derain, 
 influenced by the figure-pieces of Corot, attained ten or 
 fifteen years ago, one has, in judging the construction 
 of pictures, a criterion which will explain the failure 
 of many a work to maintain evenly the impression ot 
 beauty which it first produced. Pissarro’s fine senti- 
 ment for nature must depend for its expression on his 
 clear, harmonious color and his graceful silhouettes: 
 Renoir, with his deeper classicism, balances his picture 
 in depth as well as on its surface. He does so by in- 
 stinct and by practice, but other artists have the right to 
 demand a picture “with reasons in it,” as Falstaff said. 
 Leonardo, for example, was searching for reasons all 
 his lifetime, and so it was natural that, in this period of 
 consciousness, Matisse should make especial study of 
 the great Florentine. ‘This study is evident in the pic- 
 ture, “La Toilette,” where the seated figure is simply 
 Leonardo’s “Bacchus,” in the Louvre, painted in a new 
 key but held together as a living esthetic organism by 
 the same play of line and mass. Similarly, if for dif- 
 ferent reasons, Manet had helped himself to a whole 
 group from a well-known Raphael for his ‘“Déjetner 
 sur l’Herbe,” as the world failed to notice for over 
 forty years—during which time Bouguereau’s resem- 
 blance to Raphael was widely advertised, until every- 
 body saw that it was false. We know the moderns as 
 great when they give us the joy that we get from fine 
 
68 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 ancient works, but these, in turn, are partly explained 
 to us by the works of our time. To enjoy the mar- — 
 vellous bronze horse lately added to the Greek collec- 
 tions at the Metropolitan Museum of New York, shall 
 we best prepare ourselves for its beauty by a prelimi- 
 nary study of St. Gaudens’ horse in the Sherman 
 monument, a work of almost unredeemed literalness, 
 devoid of any structure save that taught in the 
 anatomy-class? Or, taking a step in the matter of 
 subject, in the material employed, and an immeasur- 
 ably longer step in the matter of the conception, shall 
 
 we not find ourselves quite in the line of intention of 
 
 the Greek sculpture when we come to it from a portrait 
 by Matisse, say that most beautiful one of Mme. 
 Matisse, dating from 1913? ‘The glide and stop of the 
 lines, the interplay between the hollows and the pro- 
 jections, the whole sense of proportion and harmony 
 in the two works, is governed by the same sense of fit- 
 ness; in both cases a mind has transmuted the feeling 
 derived from a contact with nature into the new entity 
 of the work of art. 
 
CUBISM 
 
 HAs ever a catchy jingle of words wrought more 
 havoc in the minds of the unthinking than that couplet 
 of Pope’s which makes up the complete system of 
 esthetics of so many people? 
 
 Art is but nature to advantage dressed, 
 What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed. 
 
 Only by saying that criticism of an analytical kind is 
 a thing of recent times can we explain the prosperity 
 of that parcel of half-truths, in which “what was 
 thought” and “nature” stand for the same thing, and 
 “to advantage dressed” may stand for anything. Dean 
 Swift unintentionally points out the looseness of idea in 
 the lines by giving us his still more succinct definition 
 of style: “Proper words in proper places.” Does 
 anyone to-day so much as imagine he knows which are 
 the proper words when he sits down to write? or hav- 
 ing written, can he hope for the agreement of more 
 than a tiny minority of mankind if he esteems himself 
 so fortunate as to have found these proper words and 
 their places? Such philosophy as that contained in 
 the two eighteenth century quotations I have given 
 could be afforded by the world in an epoch when art 
 proceeded in easy harmony with the desires of a pub- 
 lic able to follow the slow evolution of new forms. 
 The antagonism between artist and public throughout 
 the modern period, and the repeated contact at the 
 Museum with unfamiliar races and schools were 
 needed to set men thinking about the reasons underly- 
 
 69 
 
70 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 ing the impressiveness of the work of art. If a medi- 
 eval painting, say a Cimabue, attains its awesome 
 grandeur while its creator is unaware of a single one of 
 the scientific processes through which our century rep- 
 resented nature with such completeness (and with such 
 banal ugliness in the vast majority of cases), then 
 art is mot the nature which is to be tricked out in 
 advantageous dress. 
 
 From the moment when Ingres went back (or for- 
 ward) to the Primitives from a school more fully 
 equipped than theirs with the processes of realism, the 
 modern period has been one of unremitting search for 
 the truth about the relationship between nature and 
 art. This truth is embodied in all the great works of 
 the past, and perhaps we love a Sienese madonna bet- 
 ter because her painter is so completely under the spell 
 of his act of faith; probably a portrait by Rubens is 
 only the more superb because it appears to exist for 
 no other purpose than to tell how ravishing were the 
 eyes, the lips and the bosom of Isabella Brandt or 
 Helena Fourment. A later age will see that a beauti- 
 ful subject does not in itself make a beautiful picture, 
 and it will not be satisfied with the vague statement that 
 the ideas emitted concerning the subject are what count. 
 Such a phrase applies as well to a poem as to a picture; 
 but the two things have separate laws. Even if the 
 essence of the picture remain as mysterious as life it- 
 self, we have at least made progress when we recognize 
 that there is some vital force in art which is not in the 
 outer world it portrays; and here the question arises 
 of the means by which the force is transmitted. In- 
 numerable men had praised the sense of form evinced 
 by the early Italians and the sense of color which 
 makes the opulence of Rubens; but not until the 
 
Cubism 71 
 
 twentieth century did painters consciously take the step, 
 with Cubism, of accepting form and color as the 
 
 _ bridge which carries us from the chaos of the world of 
 appearances to the order brought out of it by the mind. 
 
 The artists knew that the need of their time was a 
 solution of the conflict between the claims of represen- 
 tation and the necessity of the esthetic qualities which 
 had always furnished their law; a necessity to which 
 other men were becoming less and less sensitive because 
 of their interest in the scientific realism that they could 
 connect with the material achievement of the time. It 
 was not difficult to demonstrate the scientific right- 
 ness of the Impressionists’ painting of light, however 
 strange their pictures seemed at first; and the thousands 
 of utterly talentless Impressionistic painters who are 
 to-day profiting by the vogue of Monet and Sisley are 
 proof that only a few persons, after all, appreciate the 
 great men of that school for their art. What has been 
 popularized is their vision of nature, their formula for 
 light and color—a thing referable to the same logic as 
 governs our ideas of the spectroscope, for example. 
 Considering the ideas of most artists as well as laymen 
 in the late nineteenth century, the confusion is com- 
 prehensible enough, for such was the cult of material 
 appearances that these were generally regarded as 
 the only possible reason for the presence of forms and 
 colors ina picture. Though the idea is losing ground, 
 it is still that of a majority. Post-Impressionism of- 
 fered a better conception of art, indeed any work, an- 
 cient or modern, does so if one penetrates to its signif- 
 icance. But with the retaining of any semblance of 
 the imitative, some chance for confusion between art 
 and nature remained. In a Cubistic picture there is 
 no such chance: one can judge the work only as good 
 
72 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 art or bad. There is a reference to the thing seen,— 
 certain phases of it are given (and no work can give 
 them all, since no man is impressed by them all), but 
 the structure of color and form built from these phases 
 of the object is now to be referred to no law of the ma- 
 terial sclences—anatomy, perspective, luminosity, etc. ; 
 the work is to be considered as idea, as art. 
 
 Had Cubism rendered us no other service, it would 
 be important enough as affording a new insight into 
 the qualities of the picture. If there ever was an ex- 
 cuse for an art-critic to think of the proportions of a 
 Mantegna figure (say those elongated ones in his mas- 
 terpiece of the “Crucifixion”) in comparison with a 
 living model, there is no such excuse to-day, nor is 
 there any for naturalistic explanations of the color in a 
 Giorgione or a Renoir: close to the facts of nature 
 or far from them as we may consider these pictures, 
 according to our habit and our period, we shall hence- 
 forward have to set our value on them not as attempts 
 to produce the illusion of seeing their subjects within — 
 a frame, but as offering us a new reality: that of the 
 master’s idea of life. The arts which demand the 
 severest application of this criterion are evidently 
 those which follow the appearances of nature most 
 closely, like the Greeks of the Phidian period or those 
 of the fourth century. No competent person has ever 
 confused the Hermes of Praxiteles with the natural- 
 istic sculpture of the modern academies; but in seek- 
 ing the reason for the unbridgeable distance between 
 the two, I believe no explanation will avail so com- 
 pletely as that of the difference between esthetic 
 structure and reproductive transcription. 
 
 As long as we persist in the habit of judging pictures 
 by their likeness to nature (that is, their likeness to a 
 
Cubism 73 
 
 given convention of nature, one determined by a previ- 
 ous experience with pictures), so long do we miss their 
 significance. Watch the dull expression on the faces 
 of the tourists who dutifully file past the old pictures 
 in the Louvre or the Uffizi, accepting the statement 
 of the guide-book that these are the world’s master- 
 pieces, but privately maintaining that “they aren(t 
 natural.” One would agree, if one were not giving 
 aid and comfort to the opinion that there is greater 
 naturalness in Inness and Sargent—not to mention the 
 baser imagery ‘which has formed the modern idea of 
 what the world looks like. The wise Orient attained 
 peace ages ago as regards the relationship of art and 
 nature in painting; and the masters of the Japanese 
 print, for example, eschewing any attempt to create an 
 illusion of sight, went on with tranquil surety until the 
 West forced its troubled art upon them, an art more 
 glorious in its disquietude, we may be permitted to 
 believe, however, than theirs in its serenity. Doubt- 
 less the appreciation of Oriental art in the nineteenth 
 century hastened us in becoming conscious of our prob- 
 lem; doubtless the African art which aroused the en- 
 thusiasm of certain painters and sculptors in the first 
 years of the twentieth century offered forms which 
 were of great aid to us, because the negro, with his in- 
 tensity of emotion and his incredible mastery of wood- 
 carving, translates his religious awe through hard 
 planes which elongate and intersect in a manner sug- 
 gesting an escape from the tyranny of the visible, 
 against which we were struggling. 
 
 At bottom, however, the sources of Cubism are all to 
 be found in European art. Gleizes and Metzinger, 
 in their book, take Courbet as their point of departure; 
 and indeed, with his titanic affirmation of our belief 
 
74 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 in the existing world, he is one of the fundamental ex- 
 pounders of European thought. But, as the authors 
 observe immediately afterward, Courbet continues 
 some of the worst of the conventions of sight held at 
 his time. Manet, with all his splendid courage in 
 attacking the blackness which Courbet left in painting, 
 was still not plunging to the essentials of the technical 
 problem that had been raised. It was Cézanne—and 
 to this he owes a part of his immense importance—who 
 saw that the reality we sought was not to be obtained by 
 making an eye-deceiving counterfeit of nature, but that 
 by erecting a structure of form and color whose inter- 
 vals and harmonies repeat the rhythm that the world 
 establishes in our brain, we produce a “truer” thing 
 than any imitative process can pretend to. Even 
 Cézanne, however, struggles to retain with his struc- 
 ture a representation of the object as seen. His last 
 letters speak of seeing the planes slip out of place, and 
 he is worried about it or, more likely, he is unable to 
 find an explanation for it when writing. Can we 
 doubt that when the old man stood before his canvas he 
 knew that the movement which was coming into his 
 picture was to carry the whole world with ite It is 
 not in a tone of despair that he states that he is the 
 primitive of the way that he has discovered. It is in 
 the tone of triumph with which he thundered at his de- 
 tractors those words that Elie Faure gathered up dur- 
 ing a visit to Aix: “You know well that there is only 
 one painter in Europe—myself!”’ 
 
 The young men—those who count—continue his 
 work. Derain, the haunter of the museums, the stu- 
 dent of form who has consulted the Florentines, the 
 Gothic artists and the Greeks, lays aside the brilliant 
 color of his Fauve painting in order to investigate the 
 
Cubism 75 
 
 properties of the contours and planes which Cézanne 
 had endowed with an elasticity like that of steel 
 springs. It is by the varying tension of line, and not 
 by modelling with light and shade, that European art 
 has always raised form to its purest expressiveness: 
 the most unimportant descendant of Giotto gives dis- 
 tinction to form as long as he retains something of 
 the master’s sense of contour; whereas modelling with 
 chiaroscuro, among the followers of Rembrandt, sinks 
 to a mere trick of producing illusion, when the spirit 
 of the old seer no longer animates it. 
 
 Before starting on the perilous adventure of depart- 
 ing from naturalism, farther than ever was done be- 
 fore, painting strengthens its hold on its most efficient 
 tool for dealing with form. Intent on giving to the 
 objects in his pictures a maximum of existence, Derain 
 found that he could force the planes at a centre of 
 vision to greater intensity by weakening, and finally 
 effacing, some passage in the scene to which little or no 
 interest attached. ‘This is the momentous step, similar 
 in direction and in boldness to that of Paolo Uccello 
 when he discovered that to represent the course of 
 parallel lines to the horizon, he must make them ap- 
 proach one another, which, in the mind, they do, and 
 in nature—by their very definition—they never do. 
 For a time, with Uccello’s great pupil, Piero della 
 Francesca, the discovery of perspective still served 
 artistic purposes; since then it has been hardened into a 
 scientific formula which few painters have been able 
 to put to expressive use. 
 
 But there was such use for the interpenetrating 
 forms that now appear in painting; the world needed 
 them in order to deal with one of its oldest problems, 
 that of representing simultaneously those aspects of a 
 
76 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 subject which may be seen only at different moments 
 of time or from different viewpoints. For example, 
 there is a Signorelli, depicting the Magdalen and the 
 disciples finding the tomb of the Savior empty, and 
 also—in the same landscape and without the slightest 
 demarcation between the two scenes—the Magdalen 
 kneeling before the risen Christ. It was such “child- 
 ish ignorance” of the fact that a person can not be in 
 two places at the same time which earned for Sig- 
 norelli, and the numberless painters who did this and 
 similar things, the epithet of primitives. After we 
 had come to appreciate the spiritual grandeur of these 
 men and their extraordinary control of the esthetic 
 qualities, we realized also that the “naive” conception 
 I have described came from an eternal need within us 
 to retain the continuity of experience—which the 
 Egyptian rendered by the seeming infinite of his form, 
 which a Gothic cathedral offers in the unity running 
 from the great structural lines through to the tiniest 
 detail, and which Rembrandt gives when he makes his 
 light and shadow only merging aspects of the existence 
 of the object in space. 
 
 At this point appears the role of the “French Rem- 
 brandt,” as Odilon Redon has so charmingly been 
 called by certain Dutch writers. All the younger art- 
 ists had studied him, and while some had carried into 
 their work the exotic color of his painting, Picasso— 
 who marks the next step in the central evolution of 
 our time—takes the older master at his word when he 
 says that the plane of the picture is not in the outer 
 world of appearances but in the mind of the artist. 
 An idea or an image never has reality (as distinguished 
 from resemblance) until it has been united by the mind 
 with our previous experience. ‘This being so, Sig- 
 
Cubism 77 
 
 norelli was not so naive after all when he showed the 
 same personage twice in the same scene; for, as the 
 sacred story unrolled before his mind, its phases were 
 not separate pictures such as we get when we stop the 
 film of a cinematograph: the essence of the subject 
 was in the totality of its images, which he rendered 
 according to the convention of his time. In our time, 
 the convention (referred to as “nature,” following our 
 inveterate habit) required the selection of a single 
 standpoint and a single vanishing-point, as if we were 
 seeing the subject with the photographer’s head-rest 
 gently keeping us from turning away to get a side or 
 rear view of the scene. 
 
 Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque decided at about 
 the same moment that they had had their heads held 
 in the one position long enough. Our knowledge of 
 objects depends on seeing them from different sides. 
 Braque and Picasso paint them so; the recombination 
 of the planes according to their importance in our in- 
 terest, which I mentioned before, giving the means for 
 relating, one with another, the phases of sight retained 
 by memory, and also the empty spaces separating them. 
 Considering therefore the derivation from the object 
 of the elements for the Cubistic picture, and consider- 
 ing it as a new statement of the existence of things, one 
 sees how Gleizes and Metzinger could claim descent 
 from Courbet for the painting of their group, even 
 as the laws of design regulating the organization of the 
 pictorial elements are drawn from Cézanne. Once 
 the new convention has lost its look of queerness, we 
 see that its two factors are those of all art—reality (the 
 existence of things before the mind) and esthetic right- 
 ness. “There is nothing outside of the classics,” as 
 Renoir once said in a conversation. “To please a 
 
78 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 pupil, and were he a prince, a musician could not add 
 another note to the scale; he must always return to the 
 first, an octave higher or lower. In art, it is the same 
 thing. Only, one must know how to recognize the 
 classic, which looks different at different times. Pous- 
 sin was a classic, but Je pére Corot was a classic too.” 
 Yesterday it was Renoir himself, a noble and joyous 
 classic; and to-day (I am aware that this is mere as- 
 sertion, but where is there proof in matters of art— 
 unless we have time to await the verdict of posterity, 
 and can accept that as proof?), the classic line has 
 been carried on by these men who have found the 
 Cubistic formula for expressing the relation of the 
 thing as seen to the thing as known. 
 
 It is this which differentiates Picasso and Braque, 
 and those who join them in their efforts, from decora- 
 tors, men evolving designs to apply to textiles, for in- 
 stance. The decorator’s pattern has its value, but it 
 robs the things of the world of their significance; and 
 the things of the world are too wonderful to be used 
 in such fashion in the discussion of them which it is 
 the painter’s business to give us. He may accept as 
 little or as much of appearances as he pleases, he may 
 keep his statement within the few essentials set down 
 by a Byzantine painter or extend it to the complete- 
 ness of a Velasquez. But there are limits of represen- 
 tation beyond which he never passes. As Kant showed 
 that we never can know the thing-in-itself, but only the 
 thing as it is affected by time and space, so the painter 
 never reaches that abstraction we speak of as nature, 
 but is enclosed within the boundaries of his perception. 
 
 What is essential to us is that his work render the 
 things he has perceived, that it be free from mere repe- 
 tition of the findings of other men. In a Cubistic pic- 
 
Cubism 79 
 
 ture, when objects appear and disappear as images do 
 in moving before the mind, an instant of sharply out- 
 lined detail being succeeded by a dissipation of the 
 form—the seeming emptiness being filled with other 
 forms, which in turn become distinct,—the painter is 
 setting down for us a record of experience. Any ob- 
 ject will serve him as the starting-point of the mi- 
 crocosm within the four walls of the picture-frame: 
 now it is the curious outlines of a violin which release 
 the current of images, now it is a human being, now 
 bottles and newspapers on atable. In the earlier years 
 of Cubism there will still be flashes of direct reference 
 to things, or parts of things, standing out in the starkest 
 relief. And there is still a sense of the picture’s being 
 based on the seen world when, for a time, the painters 
 succeed in banishing every recognizable object. ‘TIsn’t 
 that just what must happen in the minds of the in- 
 saner”’ asks some one. No, that can not be right. 
 The world has never gone to school to the insane, but 
 it has gone to school to the Cubists. Even some of the 
 older artists have accepted a partial influence from 
 them; as for the younger generation, it counts by thou- 
 sands the men who have worked in the Cubistic man- 
 ner or with the forms derived from it. When men are 
 ready to go beyond the severe logic of the school 
 and adopt a naturalistic convention again, they find 
 their vision affected by the painting of the Cubists 
 at least as much as by that of the great schools of the 
 nineteenth century. And so one has the conviction, 
 as with the arts of the earlier modern period, that 
 here again we are listening to “real voices and not to 
 echoes.” 
 
 When a movement in art has attained its fullest ex- 
 tension, the tide of ideas turns in a different direction. 
 
80 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 Thus after the intellect and style of the eighteenth 
 century, after the bloody crisis of the Revolution, the 
 world received eagerly the new ideas offered by the 
 English poets and landscape-painters. And so there 
 is justification for the words of Sir C. J. Holmes when 
 he called Constable “the first of the moderns.” But 
 neither Constable nor the men of Barbizon, whom he 
 influenced, make us conscious of the full implication 
 of the Romantic idea; it was Delacroix who raised the 
 Romantic movement to a point of such intensity that 
 we can see that we are in a new period. Let us recall 
 once more Corot’s illuminating and exact definition: 
 “Delacroix is an eagle. I am only a skylark.” ‘The 
 prestige of the creator of the noble decorations in the 
 church of St. Sulpice rests on the fact that he did not 
 simply renew our classic heritage, as Ingres did, or 
 give us a vision of nature, like that of the landscapists, 
 but that he fuses esthetics and vision into an expression 
 of the whole spirit of the time and so gives his work 
 a symbolic character. 
 
 I believe that an understanding of the genesis of 
 the thought of the early nineteenth century furnishes 
 the key to the thought of our own time, different as 
 it is. The immense accomplishment of the years be- 
 tween 1850 and 1goo, let us say, already seems far 
 from us. It has that kind of aureole that bygone 
 things have and is almost as difficult to use as the arts 
 of the Cinquecento; perhaps indeed the young painter 
 is safer if he addresses himself to Leonardo or to 
 Titian, not merely as greater masters, but as being less 
 apt than Manet or Renoir to offer the illusion that he 
 is continuing their work. For those admirable artists, 
 whom we still call modern, belong to a period whose 
 ideas have been expressed so definitively that we, in 
 
Cubism SI 
 
 our day, cannot see things with their eyes, any more 
 than Ingres or Delacroix could see with the eyes of the 
 eighteenth century. The parallel between our con- 
 ditions and those of a hundred years ago lies in the 
 need to unite the classic, esthetic principles (seen to- 
 day in the work of Cézanne, Seurat and Matisse), with 
 the vision of our time, especially that vision of the 
 inner world first predicated by Redon and carried by 
 the Cubists to a point where it breaks entirely with 
 the formula for appearances which was characteristic 
 of nineteenth-century realism. The formula had been 
 modified by the successors of Impressionism; but to the 
 new generation, conscious of the fundamental differ- 
 ence between its vision and that of its fathers and 
 grandfathers, mere modification would have been com- 
 promise, the poorest thing in art. The adjustments of 
 plane and color used by Cézanne with such immense 
 effect become meaningless deformation in the hands of 
 most of his followers, whom one counts by the thou- 
 sand in the modern exhibitions. The high, spiritual 
 expressiveness of Matisse is travestied by the idioti- 
 cally bad drawing of men who have neither his emo- 
 tional response to life nor his tremendous ability to 
 convert his sensation into design and color. It was be- 
 cause he had too much difficulty in getting pupils to 
 follow his methods, instead of imitating his effects, 
 that Matisse closed his short-lived and soon over- 
 crowded school. ‘The bad “modern” picture is just as 
 futile, and to-day, at least, a little more objectionable 
 than the bad “old-fashioned” pictures which would 
 lead us to believe that the attitude of a Théodore Rous- 
 seau towards nature was maudlin sentimentality; or 
 that what distinguished the artists before Raphael was 
 their accumulation of detail; or that the virtues of 
 
82 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 Hals and Velasquez can be attained again by a com- 
 bination of photography and sleight-of-hand. 
 
 Taking final leave of all these things which, in the 
 good expression of the French studios, ‘do not exist,” 
 and coming back to the realities of our time, one may 
 safely say that it has not yet found an inclusive, defini- 
 tive expression, such as Delacroix gave to his time. 
 Cubism might at most represent the point reached by 
 Géricault, a man on fire with the young genius of his 
 generation, but still under the harsh discipline of 
 David, the revolutionist, who carried into his studio 
 the rigors of an intolerant political logic. It is be- 
 cause we are, as Renoir said, in a period of seeking, be- 
 cause the synthesis towards which we were working 
 before 1914 seems only a little ahead, that one must 
 
 believe that the great modern effort can not have been 
 
 arrested or even deflected by the war. 
 
 I have used the word Cubism in its most widely 
 accepted sense, as denoting the outer appearance of a 
 certain group of paintings and sculptures, and not in 
 the more general sense in which some would apply it 
 to works combining into design the elements of a scene 
 consciously selected by the artist for their expressive- 
 ness. Such a definition, good as far as it goes, would 
 not exclude the arts of the past, which, in fusing the 
 content of the mind with what is seen by the eyes, have 
 given us our record of the character and life of the 
 various periods. The life of our own time has its 
 more obvious expression in the size of buildings, the 
 swiftness of vehicles and the quantity of manufactures. 
 But such things, by the very weight they lay upon the 
 imagination, make it seek the more eagerly for an ex- 
 pression dealing with the essentials of our experience, 
 not as they exist as expressed by topography, light, 
 
Cubism 83 
 
 avoirdupois and the yard-stick, but as we know them 
 in their assimilation into our thought, and through the 
 forms and colors which so define them. As the artists 
 give us their equivalent for this thought, their allusion 
 to the world of the eyes may be more or less complete 
 and specific: in this picture sections of objects seen re- 
 call an impression that seemed especially significant, 
 in another picture the whole tissue of the work is com- 
 posed of forms in which the subject that served the 
 artist as a “springboard”—to use an apt expression of 
 Gleizes’s—has become unrecognizable, in a third work 
 natural objects are transcribed with the most savage 
 realism—the grain of a piece of wood, for example, 
 showing as if under a powerful light. But the objects 
 are not copied for their own sake, as in the dismally 
 resembling family portrait, or in order to exhibit the 
 painter’s skill, as in the pictures where a visiting card 
 or a pair of spectacles “look real.” In these Cubistic 
 works the sharp visibility of the objects comes like a 
 concrete fact or a date in a discussion of ideas, and is 
 no more imitative than they. 
 
 “Granting that all this is in the intention of the art- 
 ist,” some one may ask, “how can any uninitiated 
 mortal be expected to know it, when you admit that in 
 some of these works all likeness to recognizable ob- 
 jects has disappeared P” 
 
 The intention of the picture may be reached by one 
 who approaches it as he approaches the pictures in 
 the great museums. How much do “subjects” inter- 
 estus therer What we ask to “recognize” is the spirit- 
 ual value of the artists who did the work; something 
 which is not expressed through resemblance to nature 
 but through esthetic quality. Leaving out the pic- 
 tures impeccable from the standpoint of representation 
 
84. The Masters of Modern Art a 
 
 but worthless as art, and taking two works by masters, 
 we prefer the “Odalisque” of Ingres to the “Olympia” — 
 of Manet, not because the former is more like its — 
 model, for it is not, but because the pictorial space — 
 within its rectangle is more perfectly distinguished — 
 from the actual space of the outer world; because the — 
 forms filling the space of the “Odalisque” are related — 
 according to the laws governing our sense of harmony — 
 between solid and void, emphasis and silence, and so — 
 give life to that space, and raise the work to a higher — 
 
 plane of creativeness than that of the “Olympia” with — 
 its less sustained assimilation of the actual forms and — 
 the actual life by which the great realist was at mo- — 
 ments too completely fascinated. We are impatient — 
 with the stupidity of the visitor to the museum who ~ 
 veils his eyes before the nudity of Rubens’ women, 
 or who fails to see that the gracious elegance of the 
 eighteenth century is preserved far more pure, more 
 intense, in a picture of eggs and meat by Chardin than ~ 
 in the portrait of a marquise by La Tour. Before 
 
 these works whose formula we know so well, we pass 
 beyond a consideration of subject to the mind of the ~ 
 man that gives beauty, not to the nude women, the still- _ 
 life objects or the marquise, but to a work of art. 
 Cubism, in our age of conscious purpose, has given us 
 works of art which, for anyone who grasps their sig- 
 nificance (as thousands of the people have already 
 done), abolish the confusion between the essential and 
 the apparent subject-matter of the picture. 
 
 The movement inaugurated by Picasso and Braque ~ 
 was not exhausted by them. Within a short time, 
 many or perhaps most of the strongest men of the — 
 younger generation saw its possibilities, and important 
 modifications of direction and increases of expressive- 
 
Cubism 85 
 
 ness were made by Metzinger, Gleizes, Léger, Villon, 
 de la Fresnaye, Gris and Rivera, who are probably 
 still the men who count most in their school, together 
 with Villon’s brothers, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, 
 the sculptor, and Marcel Duchamp, of whom I shall 
 speak at greater length, in order to typify, through 
 them, the best of the later Cubism. 
 
 Duchamp-Villon is himself from his first works. 
 They contained, as he said, something of the influence 
 of Rodin which was the starting point of almost every 
 young sculptor of his generation. He was quick to 
 see that the necessary step before him lay in an ad- 
 vance from Rodin’s lack of clarity in the structure as 
 a whole; a lack for which the Impressionist had partly 
 compensated by his delight in luminous, sensuous 
 modelling and by the sense of intimate knowledge at 
 which he arrived in fragments of his works. The 
 years which Duchamp-Villon gave to the development 
 of a more truly sculpturesque form may be said to 
 have culminated in his head of Baudelaire, which for 
 grandeur—both in its conception and in the handling 
 of the strong planes through which he built up the 
 volumes—seems by no means unworthy to stand with 
 the masterpieces of the old Gothic artists. Then, un- 
 der the influence of Cubism, he begins to isolate the 
 planes as the painters had done, to accentuate the direc- 
 tions of form and to make one section overlap an- 
 other, a bolder departure in the apparently more 
 literal art of sculpture than in painting. It was also 
 a more necessary step, for sculpture was being im- 
 mobilized by the bird-lime of brainless imitation even 
 more than its sister art. A period of remarkable and, 
 as we still hope, epoch-making work in architecture 
 followed. Duchamp-Villon, however, died in the 
 
86 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 war, its greatest victim, and we can not be sure whether — 
 
 others will be able to carry on his architectural achieve- 
 
 ment. Two points suggest themselves in this con- 
 nection: that the period had become conscious of its 
 need of an art in which many men could collaborate; 
 and that, considering the geometrical basis of archi- 
 tecture, we may see in this work of Duchamp-Villon 
 the fullest expression of the sense of proportion based 
 on mathematical relationships, which Cubism was 
 working to restore to art, and which Realism and the 
 instinctive artists (Cézanne and Seurat evidently not 
 among them) had almost lost. The last great work of 
 the sculptor had as its basis a running horse whose 
 motion, interpreted in mechanistic terms, suggests not 
 so much the parts of a machine, as our present concep- 
 tion of life and its forces. To find a precedent for 
 this work one must go back to the sphinx, the winged 
 bull and other hybrids of the ancients. Like them it 
 must be seen, not described; for none of these belongs 
 with Expressionistic or Futuristic works, which are 
 literary forms invented in an attempt to eke out an in- 
 capacity for plastic art. In looking at Duchamp- 
 Villon’s horse, one would do well to forget all the 
 reasons and explanations that I have attempted to give 
 in this chapter. They were well meant, as tentative 
 answers to the questions which perplex so many people 
 to-day when they try to follow the rapid course of mod- 
 ern art. But the only reasons and explanations of art 
 reside in its works; and the test of these works lies in 
 their likeness in essentials to the classics, the things of 
 which we are sure. Not a few of us believe that the 
 monumental work that Duchamp-Villon finished just 
 before his death is of the family of the greatest 
 achievement of nineteenth-century sculpture, Barye’s 
 
~ Cubism 3 87 
 “Theseus Slaying the Centaur,” whose terrific move- 
 ment and compensating firmness are exemplified again 
 in the work of our contemporary. 
 
 Marcel Duchamp’s painting is perhaps the purest, 
 perhaps the strongest in his group. ‘The evolution of 
 his two brothers—ten and twelve years older than he 
 —saved time for him by enabling him to pass from the 
 quasi-naturalism of his first works to the Cubistic form 
 more suited to his introspective mind. Experiments 
 with the painting of motion (such as the ‘Nude De- 
 scending a Staircase” ) carry him on to a complete ac- 
 ceptance of the conception of pictorial space as a thing 
 nonexistent outside the mind; a conception that Redon, 
 whose imagination was always haunted by the idea of 
 space, had hinted at, and that Picasso had realized 
 in freeing his still-life objects and his personages from 
 the death that comes of copying, of trying to arrest 
 a moment of time; for a work of art seizes the life of 
 the moment only to send it speeding on ahead of us, 
 as the classics always are. Did not the Greeks copy? 
 asks some one. Place a cast from a Greek sculpture 
 beside a cast from nature and see the difference—as 
 literally as can be—the difference between life and 
 death! In the last canvases that Duchamp did before 
 addressing himself to other mediums, the forms and 
 colors are pure inventions, or so distantly derived from 
 mature as to count as inventions. Their purpose is 
 still to give body to certain deep ideas, and they attain 
 a profound and original beauty. But this very beauty, 
 in its connection with the medium of painting, seemed 
 to the artist a bond to be broken in the interest of the 
 idea. 
 
 For those who had appreciated the absoluteness of 
 invention in a work like the “King and Queen Sur- 
 
88 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 rounded by Swift Nudes,” the grandeur of the forms 
 seemed a definitive achievement. But to the mind of 
 their creator, always fascinated by the unknown ahead 
 of him, there were steps yet to be taken. The canvas 
 on which he had painted, even though purged of every 
 trace of preciosity, seemed to be cut off from the life 
 of the surrounding world, and so Duchamp worked on 
 glass, covering only part of it and allowing the people 
 and objects in the room to be seen through it—his de- 
 signs hanging suspended in space. But the very glass 
 for this series of works gave to the pigment a new charm 
 under his skilful hand, and at once the followers of 
 the artist began to exploit this beauty of the material— 
 which Duchamp had adopted in order to orient his 
 work in the direction of pure idea. Perhaps a new 
 generation will have to come before the true effect of 
 his research will be seen, in the work of men who feel 
 the current of modern life strongly enough to render it 
 in such epitomized fashion once more. But this one 
 expression of thought cannot exist in entire isolation: 
 like that of Redon and of Seurat—artists whom Du- 
 champ especially admires—it may be long in finding 
 a fitting response, but it is too deep a thing to be other 
 than one of the symbols of our age. 
 
 Meanwhile, the multiplication of systems for pro- 
 ducing art—Futurism, Vorticism, Synchromism, Ex- 
 pressionism, etc.—among men who mistake a pro- 
 gramme for a performance, wearies the world until 
 some one replies with “Dada” (baby-talk), and the 
 whole tribe are invited to wipe off their slates, or turn 
 to the photographer’s clean representation of the ob- 
 jective. Indeed, from the admirable daguerreotypes 
 of the old days to the photographs made by certain 
 imaginative craftsmen in our time, and to certain films 
 
Cubism 89 
 
 of the cinematograph, the camera has been giving us a 
 production of great value. It is not to be estimated by 
 the resemblance of the photograph to a painting, any 
 more than one prizes a painting for its likeness to a 
 photograph. The two ideals exclude each other; yet 
 our delight in perfect accomplishment has caused 
 ‘many a modern man to wish that the older arts might 
 more often succeed in their field as completely as the 
 photographer does in his. Attempts at uniting the two 
 dissimilar processes have been made, and some people 
 have even despaired of the possibility of painting in 
 our time, when the camera has dominated men’s vision 
 to so great an extent and increased confusion as to the 
 significance of the Museum. But the world has not 
 had enough time to appreciate the value and the limi- 
 tations of the instrument. To those who see that its 
 definitive achievement lies with the world of external 
 appearances, it affords a new conviction that the clas- 
 sics are a reflection of thought. In all periods there 
 have been counsels of despair, at times uttered by 
 strong men—who have later gone on with their work, 
 at other times by men unfitted for their work. (Could 
 photography drive the thousands of ill-equipped 
 painters into other pursuits, it would accomplish some- 
 thing too vast even to hope for.) But the outcry of 
 men too weak to stand the impact of the idea is not even 
 heard in the quiet of those studios where the artists 
 of our time go on with their work. Whether they con- 
 tinue with a Cubistic formula or whether they turn 
 to another convention, there is never any turning back 
 for Picasso, Braque and Villon, among those whose 
 later painting must still be discussed. All go for- 
 ward; and in the direction they had previously set for 
 themselves. Only the future can decide how much 
 
90 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 Cubism is to be thought of as part of the central cur- 
 rent of art, how much as one of the eddies which result 
 from every great movement. That it is a great force, 
 negating the false things of our time and strengthen- 
 ing much that is best in it, I believe to be beyond doubt 
 —as also that certain of its works will endure as 3 vital 
 and beautiful things. 
 
TO-DAY 
 
 Two admirable artists whom I have had no occasion 
 to discuss in previous chapters, Constantin Brancusi, 
 the Rumanian sculptor, and Henri Rousseau, sur- 
 named Je Douanier because of his years in the customs- 
 service, stand outside all groups of the modern men but 
 are their very good neighbors. The work of Rous- 
 seau, a man of the people, with no more preparation 
 than that of the village sign-painter (which is not, 
 after all, the worst in the world), has a decorative 
 quality of a greater fineness than that of Gauguin. 
 Brancusi not only immersed himself in the spirit of 
 Paris, but is nearer its art on the technical and theo- 
 retical sides than he at first appears to be. 
 
 We understand how much a man of the modern 
 period Henri Rousseau is when we consider the esteem 
 in which he is held by the best artists of to-day. 
 Imagine him appearing in the eighteenth century, or 
 the seventeenth; periods when painting was a craft, 
 and when general opinion designated those individuals 
 who were fitted to practise it as an art! One can 
 hardly conceive a master of that time delighting in the 
 primitive and yet beautiful character of a picture like 
 “le Poéte et sa Muse,” about which the poet himself, 
 Guillaume Apollinaire, not to be outdone in ingenu- 
 ousness, wrote that it must have been like him because 
 the painter took the measurements of all the parts of 
 his face. Yet it was just this meticulous attention to 
 every tiny fact that won for Rousseau the admiration 
 
 of men who had the learning of the schools at their 
 OI 
 
92 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 finger-tips, and who might have dashed off things that 
 would “knock the walls” of the Salon, had they not 
 seen better use for their ability. But far more im- 
 portant than the astonishing design of Rousseau’s 
 jungle pictures, or the flower-like ‘‘quality” of his 
 paint, was the intensity with which he looked at the 
 people and the things about him, and so gave to a gen- 
 eration surfeited with thought, a contemporary ex- 
 ample of that freshness of vision which we love in a 
 Foucquet or a Breughel, and which has misled num- 
 berless people regarding the profundity of their skill 
 and power. While few would claim that Rousseau 
 will be ranked by the future as the equal of these two 
 men, there is something of their quality in him, and his 
 art helped to renew the attraction of naturalistic paint- 
 ing when artists were ready for it. 
 
 Perhaps there is no art more difficult to describe 
 than that of Brancusi; at least in those phases of it 
 that have to do with his incomparable workmanship, 
 his intimate knowledge of substances, wood, stone, 
 marble or brass. When one of his sculptures is re- 
 produced—say, a marble that is cast in bronze—he 
 works over it with chisel, polishers and acid until the 
 second piece is quite as much an original as the first. 
 For years he will keep under his eyes some beam of 
 weathered oak that he has saved from a demolished 
 house, or some water-worn stone that he has picked 
 up by the river, until, having lived with them, he feels 
 able to touch them without spoiling their natural 
 beauty, which must be embodied in his work. Per- 
 haps in telling of Brancusi’s feeling for his materials 
 I am, in the mind of some reader, convicting the artist 
 of a type of mysticism which seems out of place in so 
 “definite” an art as sculpture. But before such a 
 
To-day 93 
 
 judgment is passed, I would ask the reader to think 
 of the Egyptian’s handling of his basalt; the Negro’s 
 knowledge of his wood; the different ways in which a 
 Chinese works his stone, bronze and ivory; or the 
 Greek’s use of marble, so infinitely sensitive in its 
 largeness that a mere broken fragment (the architec- 
 tural bit from the Erechtheum in the Metropolitan 
 Museum, for example), may be said, without exag- 
 geration or sentimentality, to appear warm, and to 
 beat, under the light, like a pulse. After looking at 
 these classic works, I believe one will see a correspond- 
 ing quality in Brancusi’s sculpture; and one’s respect 
 for our period will be deepened. If the qualities of 
 surface that I have described were not the reverbera- 
 tion of the inner life of the work, they would, of course, 
 be mere preciosity; as false as certain American 
 imitations of Florentine art, or as certain confused 
 misunderstandings—also American—of the archaic 
 Greeks. But they are merely an index to the idea of 
 the sculpture as a whole, now gentle as in the ‘“‘Sleep- 
 ing Muse”; now huge in characterization and in sweep 
 of curving planes, as in the portrait of “Mlle. Pog- 
 any”; now resplendent with the wonder of an Eastern 
 folk-tale, as in the “Golden Bird.” Or again, they are 
 equally charged with the idea, but keep the secret of 
 their origins like some carved stone of the Aztecs or 
 the Hindus, or like a pyramid, a sonata, or a Cubistic 
 painting—none of which fails to give its meaning to 
 those who can see past the blank paper offered by the 
 appearances of nature, and read the writing which 
 is art. 
 
 When, in my last chapter, I spoke of the present time 
 as exhibiting both the impetuosity of Géricault and the 
 discipline of David, I had in mind the struggle be- 
 
94 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 tween the tendency to risk once more the painting of 
 appearances (the mark of that unprecedented degra- 
 dation shown in the bad art of modern times), and the 
 tendency to hold to the “‘abstract” material from which 
 the danger of imitating external things is eliminated. 
 Two masters, Matisse and Derain (it is not too soon 
 to give them the title), had indeed never gone far 
 in the direction set by Picasso and Braque. Matisse 
 once used the word “materialistic” to describe the con- 
 ception of a bad Cubist, who combined his images with 
 as little assimilation of them into vision as the most 
 servile copyist of nature at the Beaux-Arts. So the 
 tool remains a tool; and one method of painting is as 
 good as another, according to which individual uses 
 it. Matisse himself, after the period of Jes Fauves in 
 which he made lithographs with a line a quarter of 
 an inch wide, and when his whole art needed a simi- 
 larly insistent emphasis—in burning color and intensi- 
 fied form—comes rapidly to etchings of exquisite fine- 
 ness, and to drawings which, in their air of literalness 
 and in their minuteness of detail, recall Cranach or 
 Clouet. But the purity of design, the calm beauty of 
 color in his later painting are guarantees that the im- 
 age has passed through the alembic of his mind as 
 truly as did the “sensational” pictures that he did ten 
 or fifteen years ago. They do not, however, guarantee 
 him against charges of painting to please the public, 
 even as the older works were explained as attempts 
 to gain the notoriety which comes of outraging the 
 public. Having survived the earlier accusation he 
 will, I believe, also survive the later one. 
 
 Modern art and Paris need trouble as little as 
 Matisse about recent lamentations over their deca- 
 dence. Even without the war, it is normal, as I have 
 
 > yal ee a a 
 
| 
 
 To-day 95 
 
 shown previously, for a certain number of years to pass 
 
 without the appearance of a new master or a new tend- 
 
 ency: as Marcel Duchamp once remarked. ‘The 
 new men are there, but we are not able to recognize 
 them.” It will be time enough to speak of the hegem- 
 ony of art passing from the French when masters be- 
 gin to appear in other countries. Picasso came to 
 Paris when about twenty and Brancusi but little later 
 in life; so that their art may be said to have appeared 
 in France and to be largely a product of the French 
 school which, in frankly accepting ideas from them, 
 took back less than it had given. The other foreigners 
 in Paris to-day, meritorious as they sometimes are, 
 have nothing of a creative character to offer; the same 
 may be said of the painters and sculptors residing in 
 their own countries, with the exception of Diego 
 Rivera. For years a strong figure in Paris, where he 
 formed his art, he is now producing some most ad- 
 mirable mural decorations in his native Mexico. 
 Doubtless many people who accept my strictures as 
 applying to the United States, England, and Germany, 
 despite the immense vigor and intelligence of the Ger- 
 man artists, would consider that a special place should 
 be made for the Russians, either as a whole schoo! or 
 for certain individuals. I believe a closer acquaint- 
 ance with modern Russian work will show that, as a 
 rule, it only coarsens the fiber of the art which Paris 
 gave us a decade or two ago, either bawling its har- 
 monies out of tune or sickening them with the per- 
 fumery of an ill-assimilated orientalism. A few Rus- 
 sians do, indeed, rise above this level, but I believe not 
 one reaches the plane of mastery, such as the novelists 
 of the country occupy. In the less ambitious field of 
 the humorists and in certain remaining forms of 
 
96 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 peasant handicraft, one finds the healthier expression 
 of Russian art. 
 
 To write an inclusive history of modern art, omis- 
 sions from my pages far more important than that of 
 the Russians would have to be filled in. Men too big 
 to be thought of as minor figures in the period must 
 occur to every reader, and if I have not mentioned 
 painters like Chassériau and Toulouse-Lautrec, to 
 name but two of the most admirable among many 
 whose art will live, the reason is that their tendencies 
 are more completely expressed by others. It would be 
 a poor priggishness, however, to restrict one’s interest 
 to the men who may be called the masters; among the 
 works even of those who will never be given the title 
 there is a wealth of production that is of permanent 
 value, that is genuine and lovable. 
 
 The paucity of significant examples of the applied 
 arts in modern times and the virtual absence of archi- 
 tecture has made me leave them almost out of the 
 discussion. This loss is not altogether compensated 
 for by the superb workmanship and the design of such 
 things as the automobile and the aeroplane; nor is the 
 steel and concrete construction of our big buildings 
 and our bridges on a plane with architecture as it was 
 practised in the past. However much the two modern 
 forms are superior to the “art-craft” productions of 
 certain studios, and to our “tasty” imitations of the 
 various architectural styles of other eras, there is a 
 difference between the industrial artist or the bridge- 
 builder of to-day and the men of the old time whom 
 they replace as nearly as they can. For these modern 
 works are part of what we may call the unconscious art 
 of our period, things which neither their producers nor 
 their public usually think of as art; whereas, even if 
 
To-day 97 
 
 the medieval armorer or the Renaissance ceramist did 
 not think of his work as something which like painting 
 and sculpture would one day be placed in the mu- 
 seums, still the old craftsmen were very near in spirit 
 to the greater arts, at which they often arrived them- 
 selves; and of course a mere glance at the cathedral of 
 Chartres or the Ponte Santa Trinita in Florence tells us 
 how fully its architect was aware that such a work was 
 to have an aspect of beauty as well as of use. Yet our 
 articles of utility, in their increasingly modern char- 
 acter, and our building, with its growing frankness and 
 knowledge of its own qualities, offer every reason for 
 confidence that we are on the threshold of a genuine 
 and important style in these arts. 
 
 But it is on our painting and sculpture that we must 
 depend for an expression of our time; and this expres- 
 sion is so intimately our own that no one, I believe, 
 can yet estimate its value in comparison with that of 
 other periods. Renouncing such an attempt, I will 
 speak of the present work of certain men still in their 
 forties who, with Matisse, seem to me to be doing the 
 most significant pictures of to-day. In this group 
 Jacques Villon has a special interest because it is he, 
 I believe, who, more than anyone else, continues to ex- 
 press the indomitable spirit of adventure, the beautiful 
 youth of the world’s mind in the days before the war. 
 When he got back to the studio which he had not en- 
 tered since the August of 1914, it was to take up his 
 painting at the point where it had been interrupted, 
 more than four years before, and to push it forward in 
 the Cubistic direction it was then taking. For him, it 
 was not enough to rid himself of the tyranny of the 
 object; he painted pictures in which the suggestion of 
 light and of space was eliminated, as they were not 
 
98 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 in the earlier Cubism. A negative process? No; for 
 the design he attained had a quality of absoluteness un- 
 equalled by even the fine things he had done in former 
 years; and the color for which he always showed a dis- 
 tinguished aptitude, is of a purity and beauty that soon 
 carry one past the old difficulty about the subjects of 
 his works. ‘There is nothing about his art to connect it 
 with the color-organ (if that instrument may be said 
 to have produced valid results up to now), neither is 
 his painting abstract in the sense intended by the es- 
 thetes, who dream of abandoning not only the appear- 
 ances of nature but its significance. To use once more 
 an art of the past as an analogy, I would recall the 
 work of the old enamellers, and of the glass-painters of 
 the cathedrals, whose flat color, unmodulated over con- 
 siderable surfaces, expressed the fervor of their age 
 quite as well as those arts of their contemporaries 
 wherein a well-defined phase of representation exists. 
 Villon’s works, however, are not designs for enamel or 
 glass; they are paintings, created with regard for the 
 special qualities of their medium, proceeding from the 
 pictorial effort which immediately preceded them, and 
 leading up naturally and logically to the “objective” 
 convention in which he is again working. 
 
 Painting could scarcely have gone farther in the 
 direction of the subjective; and indeed, for Picasso, the 
 moment arrived some years ago when he felt that the 
 most interesting picture he could do would be one in 
 which his findings as a Cubist would be included in 
 works like the figure-pieces of his pre-Cubistic period. 
 But how different they are, these new Picassos! The 
 earlier restless excitement of his scenes of poverty and 
 Bohemia, splendid as it was in the swift drawing that 
 conveyed it, has given way to the calm and measure of 
 
 . eS ee 
 
To-day 99 
 
 an art whose classical basis is found alike in the works 
 in the museums which the artist has loved, and in his 
 investigation of pictorial structure during the years 
 when that which is now a head, an arm, a tree or a 
 sheet of water was translated by forms and their inter- 
 spaces and their penetration of one another. Yet if 
 the present work of Picasso offers no difficulty as to 
 the people or objects it represents, let no one think it 
 a whit less mysterious than the most “‘abstract” of his 
 painting between 1910 and 1920—a type of work 
 which he does not renounce, either as to its value or 
 as to its production. Quite conceivably, the student 
 of a later generation will find the Cubistic works more 
 clear in their intention, more “legible” as the French 
 say, than the pictures in which a naturalistic exterior 
 veils (but only half conceals) the zsthetic structure 
 within. : 
 
 A development similar to Picasso’s has taken place 
 in the painting of a number of men. With Rivera, it 
 is exemplified in those frescoes in Mexico which I 
 mentioned earlier. They are of great importance as 
 being the first works of large scale to be done by a man 
 who has run the full gamut of the modern evolution. 
 While realistic in their noting of appearances, and in- 
 deed very accurate in their sympathetic observation of 
 the life of the people they represent, they are as far as 
 the poles from the work of the mere illustrator. With 
 a full measure of that passionate pride in the things of 
 his country which is typical of the Mexican, Rivera 
 knows that the representation of a subject does not in 
 itself carry with it the expression of. an artist’s idea 
 of the significance of that subject. Accordingly, the 
 lines and colors of his frescoes are brought to a unity 
 even severer, more organic, than that which he could 
 
100 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 attain in the previous stages of his evolution, when he 
 was working with purely abstract form. “If I was a 
 Cubist then,” he has said, “I am ten times as much a 
 Cubist to-day.”’ And while I believe that some such 
 term as Post-Cubistic is needed for the present con- 
 ception of his painting, it is clearly a derivative of the 
 earlier forms of Cubism. 
 
 Among the main initiators of that movement, Braque 
 may be the one whose connection with it will yet ap- 
 pear as the most intimate of all. Picasso, with his 
 early tendency toward the illustrative, toward over- 
 emphasizing the aspect of sentiment and drama in the 
 characters he created, plunged into the work which 
 offered relief from this temptation and found in it a 
 discipline to which he owes some of the finest exam- 
 ples of his art. For Braque, coming from the Post- 
 Impressionist school which had already given him the 
 habit of revaluing for his picture the forms and colors 
 of nature, there was less of effort, even if the same neces- 
 sity for the evolution to a Cubistic style, and so he 
 continued with it longer than most of the other artists. 
 The peculiarly French quality of his liking for order 
 and logic made the use of the geometrical figures 
 appropriate to his taste, and no one employed the 
 restrained color of the school with more exquisite ef- 
 fect in certain canvases, or with more of dignity and 
 largeness in others. As Braque moves on to a more 
 naturalistic formula to-day (after a moment when one 
 feared that he would permit his work to become a 
 mere repetition of itself—even if a charming one), we 
 see how his mind has been enriched by his experience; 
 the new style which he is evolving at present could not 
 have come into existence without his years of investi- 
 
To-day IOI 
 
 gating the expressiveness of form and color in the 
 Cubistic manner. 
 
 The war has shaken Derain as little as it has the men 
 just mentioned. Perhaps, even, the long days and 
 years when he was away from his painting gave the 
 meditative mind of the artist a turn toward his present 
 conception of the picture; a graver and nobler concep- 
 tion than any he had attained before. Always un- 
 
 afraid in his use of the knowledge offered by the past, 
 
 his preoccupation with the geometrical quality in 
 Gothic sculpture, and with Cézanne’s use of angles and 
 planes in painting, has evolved toward a subtler syn- 
 thesis than he could handle ten years ago. He has 
 reached it under the guidance of Corot’s draftsman- 
 ship, and of the magical ordering of spheroidal form 
 which gives us our secure sense of reality in the pres- 
 ence of that love of the world which Renoir told of in 
 his imagery, a thousand times repeated, and yet al- 
 ways and inexhaustibly new. As with Corot and with 
 Renoir, as with Ingres whose name is so often invoked 
 by the later men, there is a prodigious life within the 
 classical forms which all have studied and made their 
 own. Derain, of all our contemporaries the most ex- 
 acting toward himself as regards his analysis of the art 
 of the Museum, goes to the world of men and women 
 for inspiration and tells of this world with intense and 
 yet serene enjoyment. We are still living in a time 
 when there are masters. One feels it again on return- 
 ing to one of those creations of new and impeccable 
 form which Duchamp has given us. One feels it be- 
 fore the late pictures of Matisse, no less creative, for all 
 the subtlety with which he now transmutes the ap- 
 pearances of the world of the eyes. 
 
102 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 Thus the work of the artists goes on “according to 
 the days, according to the season,” as Redon said. 
 “Nothing comes from nothing,” another of his sayings 
 ran: each painting or sculpture is both effect and cause. 
 We divide off a certain period and call it modern so 
 that we may, for the moment, study it for itself; but 
 these men whom we have been observing can not really 
 be detached from the past, and they—with it—have in 
 their hands the making of the future. 
 
NOTES ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 A. L. BARYE (1796-1875). Theseus Slaying the 
 Centaur (Frontispiece). 
 
 While, in general, photographs give a more accurate idea 
 of works of art than representations made by hand, the 
 case of the Barye monument in Paris presents an exception. 
 _ It is surrounded by trees planted so nearby that in order 
 to photograph the great figures at the top of the shaft, a 
 camera would have to be pointed upward at such an angle 
 as to give a false impression of them. It was to overcome 
 this difficulty that I resorted to the etching-plate, an original 
 print from which forms the frontispiece of this book. 
 
 The choice of the subject, as representing the art of 
 Barye, imposed itself for the reason that in this example 
 alone one sees the artist as the giant that he is. Other 
 works in full size are either too inaccessible or of lesser 
 importance. The version of the Theseus selected by the 
 Franco-American committee which erected the monument 
 on the [le St. Louis is Barye’s second and final rendering of 
 the subject. Its lines and surfaces are far more completely 
 organized than those of the earlier version, which seems, 
 by comparison, a naturalistic study. While it is not neces- 
 sary to consider Barye in the works having human sub- 
 jects in order to see that he is a sculptor and not merely an 
 ‘“fanimalist,’ as so many still think him, it is difficult for 
 most people to realize the full magnificence of his art 
 from the small bronzes through which he is usually known. 
 
 1. Louis Davin (1748-1825). The Family of 
 Michel Gérard. 
 In the portrait of David’s fellow member of the Revolu- 
 
 tionary Convention, Michel Gérard and his family, one 
 103 
 
104 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 has the full measure of the art which went into the paint- 
 er’s rendering of themes from the history of antiquity, like 
 the Oath of the Horatii, and also into scenes of his own 
 period like the Sacre de Napoléon. ‘The great picture of 
 Marat in Brussels is the work which most strikingly marks 
 the contrast of David’s art with that of his uncle, Boucher, 
 the eighteenth century painter, on one hand, and with that 
 of his pupil, Ingres, the nineteenth century painter, on the 
 other. In order to let the difference be seen from the 
 quality of painting alone, irrespective of the tragic sub- 
 ject of the Marat, I have selected the work here repro- 
 duced. 
 
 2. J. A. D. INGRES (1780-1867). Madame Riviere. 
 Although this picture is to-day regarded as one of the 
 painter’s masterpieces, the critics who wrote of it when first 
 exhibited treated it with great severity. An idea of the 
 changes in vision brought about by time and by the repeated 
 seeing of works of art, is to be obtained from reading the 
 contemporary criticisms of the great classicist in Lapauze’s 
 work “Ingres, sa Vie et son (Euvre.” 
 
 3. J. B. C. Coror (1796-1875). ‘The Woman with 
 the Pearl. 
 
 It is not alone in Corot’s earlier manner that one finds 
 works showing the classical quality of his art which is so 
 marked in the ‘‘Woman with the Pearl,” although recent 
 critics have been giving most attention to the painting of 
 
 his youth, and especially to the pictures he produced in — 
 
 Italy. The influence of his contact there with the masters 
 of drawing continued, however, quite to the end of Corot’s 
 lifetime and is to be seen in the best of his landscapes as 
 well as in his figure-pieces. 
 
 4. EUGENE DELACROIX (1798-1863). Bacchus and 
 Ariadne (The Spring). 
 
 One of a series of four great decorations dating from 
 
Notes on the Illustrations 105 
 
 the last years of the master’s life. The reproduction gives 
 an idea of the manner in which Delacroix will stand com- 
 parison with the great designers of the past. No black 
 and white can suggest the final knowledge of color which 
 is in this work—the warm tones of the flesh, the blue of 
 the sky, and the clear violet of the hill being held together 
 by intermediate colors and forming a unity as complete 
 as that of the lines and masses. 
 
 5. HONORE DAUMIER (1808-1879). Small sculp- 
 tural models of heads. 
 
 At the Chamber of Deputies, Daumier frequently mod- 
 elled in wax such studies as these of the politicians whom 
 he would afterward caricature, using these most vivid im- 
 pressions as his guide. In no works are the master’s great 
 qualities of form more evident than in his sculptures, many 
 of which have unhappily been lost. 
 
 6. GUSTAVE COURBET (1819-1877). Woman on a 
 Ship. 
 
 Among Courbet’s masterpieces one could select a land- 
 scape or a still-life as well as the figure-piece reproduced 
 here. Indeed the painter is perhaps most of all to be 
 credited with our modern seeing of all objects in nature 
 as alike susceptible of representation by the man of gen- 
 ius. The great nudes of Courbet may suggest most 
 strongly, however, the parallelism of his art with that of 
 the masters of the past. 
 
 7, EDOUARD MANET (1832-1883). Berthe Morisot 
 (Le Repos). 
 A picture of the artist’s mature style, still showing the 
 influence of his study of the museums, but already paint- 
 ing with that clarity which drew the young men to him. 
 
106 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 8. CLAUDE MONET (1840— ). Landscape in 
 Norway. 
 
 So much of the quality of Impressionistic painting re- 
 sides in the color, which indeed largely creates the design, 
 that photographs give only an inadequate idea of the works — 
 of this school. In the picture here reproduced, it may not 
 be amiss to see an influence from the Japanese painters of 
 landscape. Monet, like most of the other masters of his 
 generation, is an admirer of their work. 
 
 g. CAMILLE PISSARRO (1830-1903). Garden with 
 Flowering Trees. 
 
 The early works of Pissarro, as also of Manet, Monet, 
 Cézanne and Renoir, are based on the painting of Courbet. 
 Later as in the picture here shown, one finds something of 
 Corot’s lyrical quality. Though Pissarro accepts influence 
 from various men, his admirable personality permits him 
 to assimilate all he learns into the art that is so much 
 his own. 
 
 10. P. A. RENOIR (1841-1919). Mother and Child. 
 
 It was at the time from which this work dates that Re- 
 noir was making the great advances with design in the 
 third dimension which most distinguish his later from his 
 earlier work—and from the painting of the other mem- 
 bers of his school (Cézanne excepted). In the grand or- 
 dering of the rounded masses, something of Raphael’s love 
 of such form seems here to appear again; it is this quality 
 which has caused Derain and other men of to-day to study 
 Renoir anew, after the lesson of his color was understood. 
 
 11. RENOIR. Nude. 
 
 A work of the artist’s later years. At the very end of 
 his life, a new profundity in Renoir’s mastery of volume 
 developed, and permitted the creation of work whose am- 
 plitude is not attained in even the finest of his earlier 
 painting. 
 
- Notes on the Illustrations 107 
 
 12. PAUL CEZANNE (1839-1906). Portrait of M. 
 Chocquet. 
 
 The noting of the planes of color represented by the 
 separate brush strokes is not solely for the purpose of gain- 
 ing luminosity, though this work dates from but little later 
 than the Impressionist period in Cézanne’s career. A\l- 
 ready, and indeed in still earlier pictures, there is a con- 
 sideration of the elements thus arrived at as units in a 
 structure of form. 
 
 13. CEZANNE. Mont Sainte Victoire. 
 
 A picture of the very last years of the master’s lifetime. 
 The “sculpture” that he was working for in the time when 
 Courbet so much influenced him has given way to a concep- 
 tion of painting in which the aspect of nature—recalling 
 that of the great Chinese painters of mountain scenery— 
 is rendered by a succession of almost abstract forms, which 
 give to the younger men their strongest suggestion of the 
 expressiveness of an art built even more directly on such a 
 base. 
 
 14. ODILON REDON (1840-1916). Orpheus. 
 
 A work to which the artist was particularly attached, 
 and one that must stand with the finest of his production. 
 Again the lack of color prevents the full appreciation of 
 
 the almost unearthly quality of this art, but its reliance 
 
 on introspection, on the world of the mind, as compared 
 with the objective research of Redon’s contemporaries, is 
 evident. 
 
 15. PAUL GAUGUIN (1848-1903). Tahitian Pastorals. 
 
 The originality with which Gauguin handles design in 
 his later pictures (of which this is one) gives to his work 
 a charm which one cannot account for by any preceding 
 art of the modern time in Europe. It is not merely a fol- 
 lowing of the art of the South Sea peoples, however, but 
 the work of a French painter whose deeper instincts were 
 
108 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 released by his contact with a primitive race. Such pic- 
 tures influenced the men at work in the ’nineties to attempt 
 freer types of composition. 
 
 16. VINCENT VAN GOGH (1853-1890). Mme. Ginoux 
 (L’Arlésienne). 
 
 The blackness of van Gogh’s early work has completely 
 disappeared, and the studious, Impressionistic analysis of 
 light during his first months in France has developed into 
 an audacious synthesis of color suited to the intense con- 
 sideration of the life of his subjects which still absorbs him 
 in his last period. 
 
 17. GEORGES SEURAT (1859-1891). The Circus. 
 The extreme division of the color into its component hues 
 (as represented by the separate flecks of paint), is per- 
 haps less remarkable than the contro] over the elements of 
 form which the artist shows in this work; its technical 
 perfection only serves to leave him freer for the expres- 
 sion of his keen delight in the spectacle of the world. 
 
 18. GEORGES ROUAULT. (1871- _). —Two Women. 
 
 A painting of the time when the Fauve group was mak- 
 ing its powerful effort toward a more expressive organiza- 
 tion of line and color. ‘The artist’s admiration for Dau- 
 mier is apparent, but not less so the force of his own 
 personality. 
 
 19. HENRI MATISSE (1869- ). Portrait of Mme. 
 Matisse, 1913. 
 
 The work referred to in the text; it may be said to mark 
 a climax in Matisse’s earlier concentration on those ele- 
 ments of his picture which: bring his design to its maximum 
 of purity, and his characterization to its fullest intensity. 
 The succeeding works of the painter enrich his art, while 
 leaving it free—as at the moment of this portrait—from 
 detail unconnected with its esthetic and expressive con- 
 tent. 
 
Notes on the Illustrations LOQ 
 
 20. ANDRE DERAIN (1880- __)._ Portrait of Mme. 
 Derain. 
 
 The artist’s profound sense of the portrait dictates the 
 varying degrees of accentuation in the features and the 
 contours. His control over the relationships of line builds 
 the work into a structure parallel with that of nature but 
 not copied from nature. 
 
 21. GEORGES BRAQUE. The Viaduct of Aix-en- 
 Provence. 
 
 Working in Cézanne’s country, the artist moves toward 
 a more geometrical organization of the forms derived from 
 the landscape than had been attempted before the time 
 when he (and Picasso) evolved these elements,—out of 
 which the Cubistic picture was to be built shortly after- 
 ward. 
 
 22. MATISSE. Still Life. 
 
 The accenting of certain elements of the picture and the 
 gradual effacing of those less necessary to the design had 
 been tried by other men for a few years before Matisse 
 painted this very large and complete work. Its great im- 
 pressiveness, however, both in the matter of its esthetic 
 qualities and its clear statement of idea, makes the canvas 
 an especially valuable example of the evolution to an art 
 based on form as it exists before the mind. 
 
 23. ALBERT GLEIZES. Landscape. 
 
 The procedure just observed in the picture by Matisse 
 is here carried further by Gleizes. ‘The trees bridge, sky, 
 etc., are noted directly from nature but are immediately 
 given a new spacing and accent in the design. 
 
 24. JEAN METZINGER. Still Life. 
 
 The logical mind of the artist (who had served a severe 
 apprenticeship in the Neo-Impressionist school) carries to 
 
110 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 a temporary conclusion the idea of using several view- 
 points in representing the objects he portrays. (In the 
 text of this book I offer a description of the method by 
 which the masters called the Primitives rendered separate 
 moments of time simultaneously.) 
 
 25. PABLO PICASSO (1881- ). Figure. 
 
 The order followed in presenting the illustrations just 
 before and after this one is that of the evolution of the 
 new pictorial ideas, and not that of the chronological place 
 of the various artists who aided in their development. Pi- 
 casso, for example, stands at the very beginning of the 
 Cubistic development. I have preferred to represent him 
 by this important picture (of the year 1912), in which the 
 relations of forms and spaces are rendered with almost 
 complete independence from physical appearances. Some 
 of Picasso’s most admirable production is in the style of 
 this work. 
 
 26. JACQUES VILLON (1874— ). Study for a 
 Portrait. 
 
 A picture similar in conception to the Picasso just pre- 
 ceding, but showing the different temperament of the 
 French painter, with his more clearly ordered construction. 
 The Cubistic formula permitted the various personalities 
 to appear quite as freely as did the naturalistic conventions. 
 
 27. MARCEL DUCHAMP (1887- ). The King and 
 the Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes. 
 
 The earlier work of Duchamp had transposed elements 
 taken from the visible world, as the painters previously 
 mentioned had done. In the more personal expression 
 which continued the evolution of Duchamp’s art, the forms 
 and colors approach always more closely to absolute in- 
 vention, as compared with imitative or even adapted form. 
 An example of this stage in his work is the picture here 
 reproduced. The title must be construed figuratively— 
 
Notes on the Illustrations Ill 
 
 the words King and Queen evoking the idea of dynasty, 
 of the permanent things of the world; the nudes standing 
 for the naked, nameless crowd—the things that pass. Du- 
 champ has preferred to let his painting be its own explana- 
 tion, and for the many who have felt its great power, no 
 added words are necessary. The desire to fathom the 
 exact meaning of the title which he has painted at the bot- 
 tom of the canvas is, however, a natural one. I therefore 
 offer, though with some reluctance, the interpretation sug- 
 gested above; it would make the opposition of forms in 
 the painting a contrast between the forces of stability and 
 instability. Doubtless, the future will no more ask for 
 explanations of the modern works than we ask a transla- 
 tion into words of the beauty of a Rembrandt portrait or 
 a Greek marble. 
 
 28. RAYMOND DUCHAMP-VILLON (1876-1918). 
 Baudelaire (Bronze). 
 
 The work mentioned in the text. Persons who knew 
 Baudelaire have said that this sculpture is one of the best 
 portraits of the poet; the artist knew him only through the 
 writings, which he admired profoundly, and through photo- 
 graphs. The sculpture, one of the last works of Duchamp- 
 Villon’s earlier period, shows a marked accentuation of the 
 planes. A year or two later, when evolving the bas-reliefs 
 of his architectural decorations, he used forms derived 
 from the planes of his previous works, and on returning 
 to sculpture in the round, was able to give to it the deeply 
 reasoned, while still deeply felt construction apparent in 
 his last important work, the Horse. 
 
 29. DUCHAMP-VILLON. The Horse. (Bronze, the 
 sculptor intended to make a definitive casting 
 of the work in steel.) 
 
 The movement of the animal was studied by the artist 
 in scores of drawings and in small sculptural models, many 
 of which were made during the war, when, as an officer in 
 
112 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 a cavalry regiment, he became an expert horseman. The 
 sculpture, on which he had been at work for about a year 
 before the war, was finished during visits to his studio 
 while on leave. The work began, as all of Duchamp- 
 Villon’s later productions did, with naturalistic studies, the 
 planes and directions of line and mass which seemed 
 essential to the idea and the design gradually taking pre- 
 cedence over the details which partook more of the ac- 
 cidental. Simultaneously the work became an expression of 
 Duchamp-Villon’s idea that the world of to-day translates 
 its thought in terms of the machine, which, with its power 
 and speed, the dominant interests of the period, penetrates 
 our whole conception of life. ‘The ‘‘Theseus Slaying the 
 Centaur” of Barye may certainly be taken as symbolic of 
 the mood of his Romantic period; its portrayal of the con- 
 flict between a higher and a lower form of life—indeed the 
 whole epic formed by Barye’s work—is an expression of 
 the energy released by the Revolution and triumphing 
 under Napoleon. In parallel manner, Duchamp-Villon has 
 resumed in the monumental sculpture here reproduced, the 
 forces which molded the character of thought in his epoch. 
 The older work and that of the contemporary artist are 
 comparable also in the completeness with which their idea 
 is assimilated into sculptural form. To appreciate this 
 quality in a Barye is to safeguard oneself against error in 
 the case of animal sculpture having a merely zoological 
 interest; to appreciate the quality in Duchamp-Villon is to 
 avoid confusion in the matter of those contemporary at- 
 tempts to express the spirit of our period by merely copy- 
 ing the objects or scenes which typify modern conditions. 
 It is the quality of art in the Duchamp-Villon as in the 
 Barye which tells of the genuineness of their intellectual 
 background, and which mark them as continuers of the 
 tradition of great sculpture in France. 
 
 30. CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI. Mademoiselle Pogany. 
 Instead of the almost geometrical relationship among 
 
Notes on the Illustrations II3 
 
 the angles and planes apparent in the sculpture and paint- 
 ing of the French artists, the work of Brancusi employs 
 curved surfaces controlled by a subtle instinct, in which 
 one may see an Oriental strain. But the style of the 
 “Mademoiselle Pogany” evolved from the earlier form in 
 Brancusi’s art (that of the years when he was among the 
 best students of Rodin), and it did so with the same logic 
 as that which carried the other modern men from natural- 
 ism to stylization. 
 
 31. HENRI ROUSSEAU (1844-1910). The Jungle. 
 
 A memory of the Mexican forests which Rousseau had 
 seen some forty years earlier, when a soldier under the 
 Emperor Maximilian. The minute fidelity to each detail 
 of the scene helps in carrying the design of the picture 
 through every inch of the large canvas; for this artist it 
 also contributes to the rendering of deep aspects of charac- 
 ter in the portraits. 
 
 32. Dieco M. RIVERA. Fresco in the Ministry of 
 Education, Mexico City. 
 
 The first of Rivera’s great decorations was an allegori- 
 cal work recalling the mural painting of the Renaissance 
 masters. It was based on a severely geometrical scheme 
 for which the lines of the building furnished the elements. 
 His paintings of the following year (1923), of which one 
 is here reproduced, are more spontaneous in conception— 
 perhaps as a result of their derivation from rapid sketches 
 from nature, but the artist’s assimilating of the facts of 
 observation into esthetic form is none the less evident. 
 
 33. BRAQUE. Figure. 
 
 In each of the men who have passed through Cubism to 
 a new style one notices that the essential character of the 
 artist is the same at all periods. The fineness of the early 
 Braque appears again in the fastidious choice of form and 
 of tone in his Cubistic pictures. The work toward which 
 
114 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 he is tending to-day has the same qualities of delicacy, of 
 strength and of clarity. But the painter’s method has 
 completely changed: where, in his Post Impressionist pe- 
 riod, he would have laid in the whole of a scene with ap- 
 proximately equal emphasis throughout, his years of work- 
 ing with the separate elements of a subject permit him 
 to make his decisions as to the build of the picture with 
 greater deliberation and sureness. 
 
 34. Picasso. Fountain, Fontainebleau. 
 
 Some of the late Picassos seem to betray a conscious pur- 
 pose to achieve monumental quality, as if the artist felt 
 he needed it as a foil to the brilliancy of the line-drawing 
 which he has continued to practice throughout his career. 
 Perhaps the best of his works are those, like the present 
 one, where the more severe and the more gracious aspects 
 of his art meet and balance each other. 
 
 35. DERAIN. Still Life. 
 
 As Derain had initiated tendencies in the earlier develop- 
 ments of the artists of his generation, so his obtaining with 
 naturalistic forms a structure parallel with that of the Cub- 
 ists showed many men the possibility of pursuing esthetic 
 research with the elements furnished by representation. In 
 the three years since this “Still Life’ was painted, Derain 
 has advanced again to even closer observation of appear- 
 ances and to an even firmer control of the design which 
 assures their unity. 
 
 36. MATIssE. Lithograph (1923). 
 
 The opulence of Matisse’s art has never appeared so 
 clearly as in his production of the last few years. His 
 severe testing of each element that went into his picture 
 gave to his earlier painting an aspect of research—which 
 troubles some observers, while causing others to see in 
 his later work a too facile profiting by the resources he 
 had previously accumulated. I believe that a further ac- 
 quaintance with his art will show that both these estimates 
 
 i ia ir a 
 
Notes on the Illustrations II5 
 
 are wrong. The great sense of beauty which is Matisse’s 
 lent to the most rigorous of the simplifications he made in 
 other years a quality more noble than that of merely intel- 
 lectual investigation; and the purity as art of the form and 
 color he then achieved, having remained as an integral part 
 of his vision, he can to-day go on to work of the naturalis- 
 tic type here illustrated and, through it, offer us a picture 
 at once more profound and more subtle than those of 
 former years. I present last this maturest accomplish- 
 ' ment of one of the older modern artists because it seems to 
 me the best proof that a period which, after the war and 
 the peace, can still bring forth such work, will continue 
 in the great tradition. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 The principal books on the masters of the earlier part 
 of the modern period are accessible in every well selected 
 public library, and need not be listed again here. Much of 
 the literature on the later men is still in the form of un- 
 collected articles in such magazines as Le Mercure de 
 France, L’Occident, Les Cahiers d’Aujourd’hui, Les 
 Soirées de Paris, L’Amour de |’Art, L’Esprit Nouveau, La 
 Grande Revue; The Burlington, The Fortnightly Review; 
 Kunst and Kinstler, Jahrbuch der Jungen Kunst, Der 
 Querschnitt, Die Kunst, Der Sturm; Valori Plastici; The 
 Freeman, The International Studio, The Dial, etc., etc. 
 
 The following list of books makes no attempt at ex- 
 haustiveness, but merely offers to the reader a selection 
 among the more important publications on leading figures 
 and tendencies of the later time. I place first a few gen- 
 eral works. 
 
 Duret, Théodore, Manet and the French Impressionists. 
 
 J. B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia, rgro. 
 Meier-Graefe, J.; Modern Art, 2 vols. G. P. Putnam’s 
 
 Sons, New York, 1908. 
 
 Faure, Elie, Modern Art. MWarper and Brothers, New 
 
 York, 1924. 
 
 Moore, George, Modern Painting. Charles Scribner’s 
 
 Sons, New York, 1892. 
 
 Bell, Clive, drt. Frederick A. Stokes Company, New 
 
 York, 1913. . 
 
 Bell, Clive, Since Cézanne. Harcourt Brace & Company, 
 
 New York, 1922. 
 
 Fry, Roger E., Vision and Design. Brentano’s, New 
 
 York, 1921. 
 
 Vollard, Ambroise, Renoir. Vollard, Paris, 1919. 
 116 
 
Bibliography 117 
 
 Bernard, Emile, Souvenirs sur Paul Cézanne and Lettres de 
 Paul Cézanne. Mercure de France, two numbers, Oct. 
 - 1 and Oct. 16, 1907 (an indispensable document). 
 Vollard, Ambroise, Cézanne. Vollard, Paris, 1915. 
 Meier-Graefe, J., Cézanne und Sein Kreis. Piper, Munich. 
 Faure, Elie, Cézanne. Crés et Cie, Paris, 1923. 
 Redon, Odilon, 4 Soi-Méme. H. Floury, Paris, 1922. 
 Mellerio, André, Odilon Redon. H. Floury, Paris, 1923. 
 Gauguin, Paul, Noa-Noa. Brown, New York. 
 ‘Morice, Charles, Gauguin. Floury, Paris, 1919. 
 Fletcher, John Gould, Gauguin. Brown, New York. 
 Van Gogh, Vincent, Letters of a Post-Impressionist. Con- 
 stable & Co., London, 1912. (Extracts from complete 
 collections in Dutch and German—the latter in two vol- 
 umes published by Paul Cassirer, Berlin, 1914). 
 Duret, Théodore, Van Gogh. Bernheim Jeune, Paris, 
 
 1916. | 
 
 Meier-Graefe, J., Vincent. Medici Society, Boston, 
 1923. 
 
 Cousturier, Lucie, Seurat. Georges Cres & Cie, Paris, 
 1921. 
 
 Pach, Walter, Georges Seurat. Dufield & Co., New 
 York, 1923. 
 
 Signac, Paul, D’Eugéne Delacroix au Néo-Impressionnisme. 
 Editions de la Revue Blanche, Paris, 1899. 
 
 Puy, Michel, Rouault. Editions de la Nouvelle Revue 
 Francaise, Paris, 1921. 
 
 _ Faure, Romains, Vildrac, Werth, Henri Matisse. Georges 
 Cres & Cie, Paris, 1920. 
 
 Matisse, Henri, Propos d’un Peintre. Article in La 
 Grande Revue, Paris, Dec. 25, 1908. 
 
 Faure, Elie, Derain. Georges Crés & Cie, Paris, 1923. 
 
 Henry, Daniel, Derain. Klinkhardt & Biermann, Leipzig, 
 1920. 
 
 Bissi¢re, Georges Braque. Editions de L’Effort Moderne, 
 Paris. 
 
118 The Masters of Modern Art 
 
 Raynal, Maurice, Braque. Editions de Valori Plastici, 
 Rome, 1921. 
 
 Raynal, Maurice, Picasso. Georges Cres & Cie, Paris, 
 1022. | 
 
 Gleizes and Metzinger, Cubism. T, Fisher Unwin, Lon- ~ 
 
 don, 1913. 
 Apollinaire, Guillaume, Les Peintres Cubistes. Figuiére, 
 Paris, 1913. 
 
 Gleizes, Albert, Du Cubisme et des Moyens de le Compren- 
 
 dre. Editions de la Cible, Paris, 1920. 
 
 Henry, Daniel, Der Weg zum Kubismus. Delphin Verlag, 
 Munich, 1920. 
 
 Uhde, Wilhelm, Henri Rousseau. Kaemmerer, Dresden. 
 
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