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A) ona — sail ds ad er < “ f. * a oe oe a a oe) oe = = i = . 2 ? - = Ea = Fe r A PRIMER of MODERN ART A PRIMER of MODERN ART by SHELDON CHENEY with one hundred and seventy-five illustrations Bat ty PeaQan l AND LIVERILGH YT PUBLISHERS NEW YORK ce ey: x win s 7 _ | > ae : . -. = ~~ * " = . * Pj " . d oad r ; COPYRIGHT, waa, BY oe BONI & LIV ERI Gay tae PRINTED IN THE UNITED | STATES OF AMEBIOA First Printing, January, 1924 “4: Pe Second Printing, October, 1924 a i i > ‘ * i. + i_- - CHAPTER THE CO Nai Et Nis FOREWORD THE APPROACH TO MODERN ART THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND . THE THEORETICAL BACKGROUND THE BACKGROUND IN MODERN LIFE IMPRESSIONISM AND POST-IMPRESSIONISM . CUBISM FUTURISM SCHOOLS, FADS AND SENSATIONS THE SWING TOWARD ABSTRACTION . THE ART OF MOBILE COLOR . EXPRESSIONISM THE GEOGRAPHY AND ANATOMY OF MODERN ART . SCULPTURE: IMPRESSIONISM TO CUBISM SCULPTURE: EXPRESSIONISM | ARCHITECT, DECORATOR AND ENGINEER THE CHANGING THEATRE AFTERWORD LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS, WITH ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INDEX 113 125 155 175 189 217 249 marie 311 335 363 371 379 Ww a FOREWORD N thus rushing in where angels fear to tread, I hope to evade some part of thé possible consequences by ‘entering a disavowal here at the very start: I had no-intention of trying to write either an exhaustive or in any sense’a final: book on modern art. My hold on the subject is as sketchy as “might be expected of one who has gone out frankly to enjoy and not to study-art works; my lists are largely records of personal, contacts with artists or chance meetings with their works in exhibitions; my background in history and theory is about that of any minor worker in one of the arts who also writes an occasional journalistic article. Under such circum- stances an exhaustive and scholarly treatise is an impossibility. As for finality, modernism is too much alive, too multifold, too fluid, for anyone really interested to try to stop the current and think about histories and authoritative rankings. It is the sense of alive- ness and flow, more than anything else, that I have wanted to convey. I have chosen the Primer method—and title—because it seemed to me that what we need most, to widen appreciation of contempo- rary creative art, is to escape for a while from High Learning and get back to a child’s directness of approach. Without trying to ‘point out didactically what to see in individual works, without trying to add anything to them—you remember how the art-com- panion books ruthlessly chase down the last hidden meaning in a canvas—a Primer might, quite simply, lead on the interested but psi often puzzled Progressive Citizen, until he found himself on inti- mate emotional terms with modern art, with just enough of back- sround knowledge to make him feel at ease in such new surround- vii ings. That and nothing more is my hope for the volume. It is so much a product of a current phase of a great movement that I shall expect some later book to take its place before long; I should be disappointed if modernism did not move swiftly enough to make my ideas and data out of date in a year or two. In other words, I recognize that, in a creative time, what is modern today will not be modern tomorrow—and the fun is in being up near the front in your own day. I am not interested in putting forward or defending a Cause. There the modernist works are, themselves, for enjoyment. Being creative, they need no excuse, defense or pushing forward. But even while trying to keep that point in mind, I have probably turned dogmatic about some things that in the nature of art cannot be settled. Most of all, I have misgivings that I may have emphasized too insistently the idea of a search for form as the norm of the modern movement, when my better judgment tells me that artists very seldom crystallize any theory, or search for anything con- sciously. Remember, please, that the critic has an evil tendency to narrow things in, nail them down—and in your own mind make allowances, keep the border-lines fluid. © b As for the usual foreword acknowledgments, that matter boils down chiefly to cordial thanks to Mr. John Quinn, who has allowed me to see and enjoy his extraordinary collection of modern paintings and sculptures, and who has thrown light on certain phases of the movement which I did not know at first hand. I have become indebted in lesser measure to many people along the way, for services too various for mention here—but the book itself must be the answer to their kindness. I must add, however, that I not only have quoted in proper fashion from Willard Huntington Wright’s Modern Painting: Its Tendency and Meaning, but have doubtless put his ideas into my own words occasionally without any credit line—for which I acknowledge indebtedness (or guilt) here. I Vill suspect that Clive Bell and Ezra Pound might find a pat phrase lifted here and there from their critical works, if they read the book thoroughly—although I have tried to give them due credit in the text. The list of illustrations is placed at the back of the volume, and I have made acknowledgments there to those who have courteously supplied photographs. Alfred Stieglitz, to whom everyone interested in modern art becomes indebted sooner or later, has helped me particularly with illustrations. | No large part of this book has been published in magazine pages; but portions of several chapters have been rewritten from articles that appeared originally in The International Studio, Theatre Arts Magazine, Century Magazine, Shadowland, and the New York Times Magazine. The editors of these publications have kindly given their permission to reprint. I have also incorporated para- graphs out of a pamphlet, entitled Modern Art and the Theatre, which I printed and published two years ago. It achieved such a remarkably limited circulation that | am sure this reprinting of extracts cannot be considered unethical. And so I put my Primer before you, hoping only that it will serve to wipe clean some of the accumulated stains on your art- seeing spectacles, or that it may, in a sense, help you to find new eyes. SG: Scarborough, New York. October, 1923. ad IVR, ANTE EA CO) Od a TO MODERN ART " cr Sei mw eR ALT, BY .OSKAR KOKOSCHEKA HIS is an example of Modern Art. It is a good example: it has all the Earmarks. It is not in the least photographic. AI- most any student of drawing could copy the outlines and shading of the man’s head and hands more naturally. It is not prettily fin- ished—indeed, it is very rough. Lovers of Whistler, Sargent and Zorn will find its technique deplorable. One would say that this painter Kokoschka had never heard of Greek Purity. He seems 3 to have left out everything that makes art diverting and pretty. He has abandoned those very things that we all were so carefully taught to look for in paintings: sentiment, polish, literary interest, likeness, charm. A great many pictures of this rough sort are being painted today. There must be many people who appreciate and buy them, who are willing to overlook the lack of prettiness in a painting. Otherwise the artists could not afford to keep on making them, and there would not have been the enormous increase in the number of modernist painters and modernist exhibitions that we have witnessed during the last decade. Where so very many art-lovers have become in- terested, it hardly seems likely that they all are insane. It is just possible that they are finding something in these paintings that the rest of us have overlooked: that Kokoschka and his fellow artists have hidden something in the canvas that is more important to them than diverting subject-matter or polished technique. Even plain people very like ourselves are beginning to prefer Matisse, Picasso, Kokoschka and Derain to the more normal painters—people who admit that they get a sort of ecstasy from music or from standing in the Sainte Chapelle, and thrills from the early Greek sculptures, and a pleasant feeling from the stream-lines of an automobile. It is all very confusing. We are taught that one thing is art—and then people don’t stick to it. Is there something to be known .. . ? Let me right out with it: Not to be able to appreciate Kokoschka’s paintings, just because they seem rough and unphotographic, argues plain Ignorance. Continued dislike of modern art, in the face of all that has been written about it and after all the exhibitions of the last ten years, simply indicates a case of bigotry—stubborn 4, adherence to a set notion of what art is, and blind refusal to open the mind to a new thing that is coming as surely as death or taxes. Now please don’t think that I am setting up as less ignorant than you on most questions. God forbid that I should so forget my place. But in this one little matter of art appreciation I have worked myself out of something that I look back to as a sort of prison. I should like to help clear the way for you, take down a bar or two, help you to blow some of the dust off your mind. I will add—what may or may not be a comfort to you—that if you are one of the ignorant ones, it is probably because you are highly educated. For education, as it is taught, is calculated to kill out of every human being whatever creative ability and free love of beauty the God of art and life has endowed us with. It is training to a formula that makes the Average Citizen resist vigor- ously any disturbing of the dust coat. Education is busy putting ideas into set places. Having ceased long ago to live with art, you probably learned all about it, and now you want it to stay in its set place. You even feel irritated when it changes its pigeon- hole, alters its dress or its form, or appears in a guise that puzzles you. The chances are you were taught a formula built on two specific ideas: first, that art is imitation, that one must look primarily for likeness to a model in nature; second, that art must be “finished,” refined, a sort of technical display. These two cardinal virtues of the centuries-long realistic era in painting have been called by many names: Truth and Purity, Exalted Subject and Exalted Technique, etc. These were the idols, the obsession, of correct 19th Century painting and sculpture. Just here I may be able to help you to overcome the disadvan- tages of your education, by suggesting that you were trained to a superstition and not to a fact. I can report to you with all the con- fidence’in the world that those idols have been overthrown. The modernists have discovered that both correct representation and technical dexterity can be relegated to a subordinate place, and the soul of great art still be attained. They have made clear, more- over, that it was over-emphasis on the imitative element, upon rep- resentation as an end in itself, that brought the world to such a sterile time in the arts during the 19th Century. The whole fallacy is summed up in realism. I cannot do better, in trying to help you to an understanding of modernism, than to point out the devastat- ing effect the realistic movement had on the arts as a whole. Con- sider the art world’s utter obsession with imitation, through cen- turies, and how it led to the reign of Naturalism in literature—and that we are still in that bondage. Remember how it brought ob- servance of the removed-fourth-wall convention in the theatre, re- sulting in our peephole playhouse. Consider how it brought about the limitation of architecture to echoes of recognized and accredited historic styles, until the race of those who once were the Builders of the world is almost extinct, and in its place a generation of timid, devitalized, cultured designers. And finally consider how dread- fully long has been the reign of photographic realism in painting, sculpture and the visual arts generally—so that there has been no major artist in those fields for generations and generations. Through all that period an artist’s originality consisted of swinging to a classic extreme if the romantics were in vogue, or to a natural- istic extreme if the neo-classics were in vogue, or to an escape into 6 Wee ci respALE, BY PICASSO romantic-sentimental pastures when the realist began to pall—all these things being limited in vision to what a man could see on the cutside of nature with his eye. The public—if one may borrow that pretentious name for the comparatively few people who trouble at all about art—were helped to an acceptance of this fraud, of a sort of photography masquer- ading as art, by the confounding of creative art and illustration. In the last fifty years illustrated books and magazines have become i so cheap and all-pervading that “pictures” go daily into almost every home in the land. The people have come to love these things, doubtless for good enough reasons, and they have been misled into believing that that love constitutes a taste for art. Naturally illus- tration is imitative. It pleases first of all by the exactness and neat- ness with which it imitates. I hope to show that art is of a different order of experience. We have the perfect example of this sort of corruption here in America, where the weekly Saturday Evening Post has, I believe, | upward of two million circulation, and its imitators many millions more. Its illustrations, as illustrations, are often remarkably good. Its cover design, for instance, is likely to be an amusing anecdote in color, a sentimental likeness of the insipid “magazine girl,” a clever simplified photograph of a boy in mischief, the Ole Swimmin’ Hole, Rover, Kitty, Old Dobbin, Great Granny, etc., ete. There probably never was one of these covers that had a creative flicker in it—and yet millions on millions of people know them as 66 29 art.” (Does not the astute magazine publisher give color to the idea by listing an “Art Editor” in the staff column?) The example may be a bit extreme. But only by looking back on the phenomenon of the spread of illustration are we likely to under- stand how a primarily imitative activity all but usurped the name and place of art over a considerable period of history and almost throughout the Western world. And if the example really is ex- treme, one can only reflect that the insidious poison worked hardly less thoroughly in many other directions than the magazines. Many a canvas out of the Metropolitan Museum of Art would make a perfect Saturday Evening Post cover. That is the thing we must 8 recognize: journalistic art pervades our galleries, is expounded by the college professors, is discussed seriously at the women’s clubs, was set up as a model for you in your schoolbooks. A whole false standard of values has been given the sanction of authority. One feels the more compunction in attempting to pull down some of these traditional barriers to an enjoyment of modern art, be- cause it means doing away with much that people have come to love in the trusting belief that it is art. Let us consider separately and successively just those qualities in a painting which have been most esteemed, most loved, in the realistic illustrative era: intri- guing subject-matter, sentiment, perfect likeness, and technical dexterity. If one believes, as many of us do, that art is primarily a creative activity on the part of the artist, that it is one of the few ways in which divinity is constantly reasserting itself, that it has its own peculiar way of giving us pleasure, of bringing us to ecstasy, by the conveying of a definite esthetic emotion, then one must soon come to realize that the choice of subject-matter is of secondary importance. To picture the parting of lovers, the gray-haired pa- triot with the flag, the sweet babe, the wrecked ship in an angry sea, Diana’s chaste bath, death, marriage, etc., etc., is to add a literary element which simply has nothing to do with the fundamental prob- lem in hand. To ask a painting or statue to tell a story or convey a sentiment by association of ideas is a perversion of the function of those works of art. Subject-matter is somehow an inseparable part of the completed picture, and there must be a linking with life, but the heart of creative work really lies beyond subject-inter- est, beyond picturesqueness, sentiment and slices of life. TORSO, BY ARGHIPER RG It also lies beyond cleverness of transcription, beyond illusion. The photographic element, the factor that makes a picture beloved for its “perfect likeness,” is equally incidental. No doubt a paint- ing skilfully done can go farther than photography in getting a transcribed image; but if it does, it abandons its artistic function. The spectator admiring it for either its cleverness of exact imitation or for the conveyed natural beauty or charm or caressableness is 10 ¥ simply using art to tickle some itchy spot in his emotional anatomy. As for the finish, the polish, so esteemed for several generations back, it simply came to be valued because it was not clear what was the real value of painting and sculpture if that wasn’t it. If a painting had no artistic depth, the painter might get by with a show of technical dexterity, a blinding virtuosity. The masculine brush- swinging of Sargent is no less of this sort than is the sweetly femi- nine tender brushing of a Bouguereau or a Leighton. These all are adventitious values—literary or dramatic subject- matter, photographic cleverness, technical display. They are ear- marks of a phase in art history, and it happens to be the least in- ventive, the least emotional, almost the dullest of all phases. There are those who, having discovered so much, urge that the contemporary artist should throw to the winds everything that has been gained in recent art practice, and so accomplish a return to the primitive or archaic—back to the well-springs where art flows pure and strong and unspoiled. A healthy thing it would be, too; getting the stuffy breath of the studio out of the lungs of their understanding, sniffing a bit of free urge to expression, getting the feel of creation. But not so fast, my child! That sort of regres- sion is—perhaps fortunately—impossible. The developing of a modern art, with the authentic universal art-appeal in it, and typical of these intense times, is not merely a matter of sailing away to savage isles. Gauguin gained much of freedom and something of fresh beauty in that way, and we all thank him for it. But his was hardly more than a little side-stream of the modern art current, which certainly could not develop impetus enough for a world movement; the other primitives of modernism are of a different 11 sort. We have come upon a fallacy here—the Primitive or Child- Art fallacy. It is futile indeed to talk of getting back to a simple primitivism. It is as illogical as trying to reconstruct the modern economic world without machinery. Industry has become a part of life, and the machine is indispensable to industry. The machine will enslave us only so long as most men have slave-minds. The enriched means of the modern painter create new opportunities for him, and the accumulated tradition of painting and sculpture constitutes a legacy through which the modern artist should arrive at a greater freedom and creative intensity. He merely has enslaved himself to photog- raphy and a set of bewhiskered rules. He needs badly the tonic of mental regression, to restore a primitive directness, a childlike surrender to the urge to create. But the painter gives up almost as much as he gains if he throws aside the means developed, particu- larly in color, in the last half-century. A true Primitive approach is an affectation today, and must be based on a withdrawal from life. And however much art departs from surface nature, art and life must remain inseparable. This is, of course, a matter of judgment. What I should like my readers to preserve as we proceed is a fine balance of open-minded- ness and judgment. It is entirely necessary to take off the blinders we were discussing a few pages back—the 19th Century blinders that narrowed the outlook into an unimportant and barren corner of the art field. In that escape lies open-mindedness. Judgment is a more difficult matter. Modern art, like every other new move- ment, gathers about itself a sad company of hangers-on, charlatans, and pickpockets, who merely capitalize its novelty, its “freedom,” 12 Pes CAPE WiTH STREAM, BY KISLING and finally its vogue. Having removed the blinders one needs to stand still and look about a bit, let the surroundings grow on one’s consciousness before moving. Primitivists, decadents, dadaists, are all about. But one will soon learn to recognize true modern artists too. As guide I can point out only one or two signposts that may make easier the approach from here on. One concerns the integ- 13 COS COB, BY GEORGIA O° RESP rity, the self-sufficiency of art. Whatever you are considering, re- member that art can only justify itself on its own account. If it is not worth while for itself, it is just as well to forget it. Don’t ask it to serve morals, or photography, or as a backscratcher to your memory and desire. Art brings emotions of its own kind, and these are not the emotions of objective beauty or the emotions of living. 14 If there is not something in it that speaks to us as fundamentally, as self-sufficiently, as religious experience or love, it is not worth all the bother mankind has made over it. Another signpost has to do with the medium. ‘There is a health- ful insistence among modernists that the peculiar pleasure afforded by any work of art is partly an outcome of the materials in which it is shaped and the artist’s inevitable way of handling those ma- terials. Don’t be seduced by a statue dressed up in the pretty sketchiness and lightness of painting. Don’t be misled into be- lieving that a painting is more profound because it tells all the details of an interesting story. Don’t think that the steel panelling in a modern railway coach is any the more “artistic” for being painted over with a grain imitating wood. A lot of people have got into the jungle by that road. And finally, let me not ever, ever, hear you say about anything you see in this book: “J could do something as good as that.” Be- lieve me, you couldn’t. You must respect the artist’s sincerity. To think that he doesn’t know any better than to draw so roughly is probably an indication that your sense of values is undeveloped after all. More people expose their ignorance with that remark than with any other conventional expression of irritation at the lack of comforting shallowness or caressability in modern art. I hope to suggest how it may be rough and hard, and careless of the more delicate graces, and still bring more of the eternal in, evoke more of ecstatic response, than your grandmother’s portrait done by Sir John Lavery or Rodin’s ingratiating group The Kiss. The modernist is fundamentally concerned with esthetic problems, and willingly lets those surface values go by. 15 He may, of course, add delicacy and “finish” too; but he does not make those qualities the reason for his painting, sculpture or drawing. Don’t make the mistake of judging a thing as modern- istic just because it is rough. Delicate, sensitive line, for instance, is of the very essence of the medium of etching. But there, as everywhere in the realm we are entering, there must be esthetic form beyond the surface. \ , x \ Ny . MY FROM AN ETCHING, BY EDWIN SOARS II THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND Migeoey rae 6 aie: § ¢$ * all) i! “ . + tps ae ae « s ¥ > 7 fete ANCE, BY MAT ISOs EB EN like Paul Cezanne, Oskar Kokoschka, Henri Matisse, and in America John Marin and Walt Kuhn—the men who make art history—more often than not die while still officially neg- lected, although a small company of people who judge by their emotions only are likely to appreciate and buy their works. (Emo- tional people, alas, have so little money!) The museums and academies, of course, are notoriously concerned with the dead past and the living echoes of that past. Even the speeding-up process of modern machine civilization—Gauguin, I believe, al- ways spat when he pronounced the word—has not served to bring them closer to the living present. But the tragic part is that art appreciation in general is swayed by those institutions. The agen- 19 cies which should be closer to life, the schools, colleges, clubs, manufacturers, lecturers, and picture-buyers in general, are super- stitiously servile to the judgments of those in authority; and the journalists, living first of all to meet the best-seller demand, either echo these others or revert to illustration—or, in rare cases, notice the modernist to crucify him with their wit. In general, the Past rules, a code of recognized practice obtains, and divergence in the direction of creative effort is disciplined. It is little wonder, then, if the man who breaks through the bul- 9 wark thrown up by “authority,” intoxicated a little by the beauty he has found in the forbidden territory, develops a huge contempt for the whole cultural edifice of the modern world. His contempt is likely to extend to history—as if history and not the men who codified it were to blame. But if it was true that we failed to wel- come Cezanne because we judged by a narrow standard developed | out of what had been, it is also true that we have to go farther back into history to find his reasons for being; and it is likely that we can best come to full appreciation by understanding the whole story of painting, and the blind paths into which it has blundered at times. This is not a suggestion that historical sanction should qualify our appreciation, but only an intimation that a little per- spective never hurt anybody. Besides, most people’s prejudices about modern art have arisen out of distorted history. Specifically, the world has been judging the art of today— bustling, intense, shrill, energetic, dynamic today—by the standard of the quiet over-refined art of Greece’s almost decadent period, by the art of sweet Raphael, by the art of the sophisticated, ease- taking, profligate Courts of France. We Americans, even, have been 20 busy judging our period of youth, of birth, struggle, upheaval, of crude but pushing effort, perhaps of new heroic victories, by the refinements of a smoothed-out civilization, by the delicate orna- ments, frills and excrescences produced and fit for the fancies of a king’s mistress. The fallacy of establishing these periods as criteria is not to be laid wholly to any arbitrary academy or authority. The structure of modern culture was built in the image of modern capitalistic civilization. Our art museums are no less dependent on the bounty of Capital than they once were on the bounty of kings. An ease- loving class at the top, with below it a cushion in a Bourgeoisie that sought only a fair measure of comfort, created the cultural stand- ards and authorities—and these in turn decreed comforting art: Greek refinement, delicate ornamental court painting, safe, sane, cultured art. The art of the last hundred years, except where pho- tographic naturalism mushroomed out into the slums, has well served its leisure-class patrons in that respect. Art has all but died of good taste. The modernist, seeking to get to the soul of his art, is no less im- patient of these standards of good taste out of history than he is of the photographic and sentimental limitations demanded by the magazine-reading Bourgeoisie. He thinks he sees a new world era dawning politically and economically. He knows that art should be breaking new ground. It can no more stand still or repeat than can religion. He approaches history scornfully—and what he finds is sanction for his own insurgency. For he sees that it is chosen periods that are set up statically in the schoolbooks and museums as models. What is history, if not 1 a record of change? Then he notes that the much-touted art pe- riods usually correspond to the settled-down or decadent periods in the lives of the nations they represent. When the Greeks are stud- ied, it is the high Greeks, not the early, inventive, creative Greeks, with the marks of creation on them. It is rather “the perfect Greeks”: the sculptor who has become so clever that he can get in stone a perfect polished imitation of an athlete, disguising the stone quality, attaining to a certain pictorial beauty—but by no means so expressively, so emotionally, as the artists of the formative period. The modernist looks into the schoolbooks to find sculpture before Phidias practically ignored, its vigorous expressiveness discounted because the realistic touch and pleasing polish are lacking; while pretty things like Praxiteles’ Hermes are known to every grammar school pupil. He feels that the time in which this nobly simple Horse was produced, is nearer the high point of creative power among the Greeks than was the late 4th Century and early 3rd Century of Praxiteles. He sees the Renaissance generally revered for its warmed-over Classicism. Raphael, with his sweet purity, becomes the world’s standard of perfect painting, and all the fellows after Raphael are praised to the exclusion of the stronger, if often cruder pre-Raphaelites. (The so-called Pre-Ra- phaelite School in England recognized that fallacy—in theory—but continued to paint within the refinements and limitations of con- temporary English taste, took the surface characteristics but caught neither the spirit nor the freedom of the earlier time.) Along with these polished Greeks and reasonable Renaissance Italians, the modernists would bracket the French Court Painters and their prettified English fellows—Gainsborough, et. al—as es- 22 HORSE—-EARLY GREEK SCULPTURE teemed far above their due. They further deny any creative value in Roman art—vulgar, showy, realistic! They feel that for 400 years there has hardly been anything more creative than colored photography. The Dutch genre painters? My, my! As bad as Greuze or Bouguereau. The history of art as seen by this new generation of seekers, would outline about like this: In the beginnings of Western art, say from the period of the reindeer-hunters, there are works of marked esthetic sensibility. Man is not yet much troubled by intellect. An instinctive groping for some elementary symmetry leads first to rude sculpture and the shaping of vessels or weapons. There follow drawing (or scratch- ing), and wall painting, usually with an admirable emotional di- rectness. There were, to be sure, periods of realistic pursuit even in these prehistoric times, just as the imitative art of some savage 23 CAVE DRAWING peoples of today puts them on a level as low as, for instance, the _ sculptors of our average academy exhibitions. But in general the European primitive peoples stand high in artistic creativeness. Somewhat comparable to them are certain still-existent “backward” peoples. African negro carving at its naive best is an example, and the one most in public notice at the moment. The modernists are beginning to grant that even too much importance may have been read into negro art, simply for its negative value as being unrealistic. But in general, primitive art is highly esteemed as being emotionally expressive. If the art of the reindeer-hunter was, in its representative ele- ment, simple, immediate, limited almost exclusively to the animals which were so much a part of his everyday life, the art of Egypt was no less restricted by the life of the people on the Nile. A pow- erful priesthood, mystery, fear, have left their mark on the gen- erally servile artists of that larger half of known human history which is almost exclusively concerned with Egypt. But occasionally 24 a generation of sculptors, given unwonted freedom, escaped mere perfected craftsmanship and stereotyped conventionalization to gain a finely solid expressiveness, achieving works that rank with the world’s finest, as in the Theban and Saite periods. Chaldza and Babylon have left some few creative works, al- though the examples extant indicate no such surety of feeling as was evident in the best periods elsewhere; and Assyrian art be- queathes us hardly more than interesting realistic records of the cruelty of contemporary life. Greek art is free from the mystery of Egyptian, and for long free of Assyrian realism. At first it is emotional, then intellectual —hbut always there is an element of clearness about it. The finely primitive things from Crete and Mycene—primitive in the best sense, strong, expressive—were followed by the heavy and archi- tectonic works of the Dorians, and these again by the more feminine Ionians. After these periods, all richly creative, the strains fused DRAWING BY PiCASSO 25 to flow beautifully in Attic art—but the fusion itself held the seeds of decay, and Phidias is a leader when the decline has already started. Polish becomes a first objective, the approach becomes over-intellectual, works of art are esteemed for being true, pretty, sane. The doctrine of “Perfection” of which the Greeks became enamored, is dangerous to freedom of emotion, to human instincts, and finally to living beauty. It is this doctrine that animates the sculptors and architects almost throughout the periods usually glorified—at any rate, from the time of the building of the Parthe- non. Art becomes pictorial, imitative, unemotional, reasonable. Starkly creative things are no longer valued. Rome—except when one counts in the Etruscan contribution—is uncreative throughout her history, imperialistic, materialistic. The Romans build on slavery, love magnificence, lose the spirit. They get nothing out of their country, from their own hearts; they im- port Greek artists, then imitate Greek art, for their comfort. | Shal- low show of art! Christianity recovers the spirit of man. Emotion rises true again. So far as art is concerned, there is fumbling at first. After five or six centuries there is a flowering in the Byzantine of Eastern Christendom, which spreads Westward with individual works and with a general sensuous enrichment. As for the next development, Romanesque leading into Gothic, there has been an almost iconoclastic shifting of valuations by the modernists. They find “high” Gothic decadent, the spirit run out, the shell only surviving and getting itself over-decorated. The real art of the Middle Ages is in the stronger, serener, more honest Romanesque, and, at latest, in 13th Century Gothic. The later Gothic sculpture particularly, 26 in its concession to realism, is infinitely inferior to the earlier, cruder but more expressive works. Architecture is supposed by the moderns to have died with the coming of the Renaissance. Its last flicker was, perhaps, in the Florentine palaces, combining in a new synthesis Medieval, Roman and purely local elements. From that time architecture is eclectic, unoriginal, tame, concerned almost entirely with modes of surface decoration—with facades. Post-Gothic sculpture also is pretty rather than moving, except in the authentic giant Michael Angelo. Painting comes to its decadence later than these others. The “Primitives” and pre-Raphaelites in general are animated by a search for something formal or at least sensuous. Giotto, of all the “well-known” painters, is first claimed by the modernists as kin, and with him a considerable group of his immediate prede- cessors. After him, the decline, the true Classical Renaissance painters, Botticelli, Titian, Leonardo, the sweet Raphael, and all the also-rans of the schoolbooks. Modernism, I believe, accepts Rembrandt in his most expressive moments (remember the Old Woman Paring Her Nails at the Metropolitan Museum) ; it finds evidences of form-seeking in Tin- toretto; it grants that Rubens had the quality but in a showy ex- travagant way. Its one great god out of the period from Giotto to Cezanne is El Greco (Theotokopulos). How far this discipleship marks a reversal of accepted academic opinion may be judged from one instance: our most circulated history of art (in England and France as well as America, I believe), the Apollo of Reinach, illustrates no less than nineteen works of Raphael, whereas El Greco not only goes unillustrated but is not even mentioned in the 27 AGONY IN THE GARDEN, BY?) Ble book. Every school dictionary lists such illustrators as Correggio and Murillo, but El Greco is among those absent. And yet in the annals of world painting as compiled by the artists of today, El Greco’s name leads all the rest. The reason lies in his emphasis on form, his seeking for an expressive esthetic quality even at the expense of naturalness—a quality to be much talked about in com- ing chapters. I am adding here a reproduction from El Greco, op- posite a typical modernist work, to suggest certain obvious parallels. For the rest, there are conceded to be scattered painters of emo- tionally expressive achievement after the Renaissance, but no giants. And usually the “recognized” artists are littke more than 28 Monee tO RT RATT, BY KOKROSCHKEKA competent illustrators. In German art, appreciation begins to shift from Diirer and Holbein to Cranach and Baldung; and there is not an important post-Renaissance figure until Hans von Marées, Germany’s only important 19th Century painter. The modernists entirely overlook English art, except for a passing mention of Con- stable and Turner as an impetus to seeking for color-form. French art is dull or brilliant illustration through most of its history—very fine technically but very little expressive; although Poussin comes in for deserved appreciation. Those who grant to the “decora- tive’ movement a certain validity as a part of modernism, still find a good deal to praise and enjoy in Puvis de Chavannes; and 29 Daumier has gained considerably in stature by reason of his being clearly a forerunner of the present-day emotional-organizational painting. But Cezanne is really the first epochal figure since El Greco. The three centuries between, with these few minor excep- tions, have been given over to descriptive painting and sculpture, and imitative architecture. Realism, truth to nature, cramped the vision of the artist, and there were merely minor pendulum-swings to idealistic or naturalistic treatment, to added romantic or stylistic or classic rhetoric. Intellectualism rules; critics confound the spec- tator with facts; the world becomes too curious about externals, bashful about its own emotions. In this summary, modernist-fashion, I have hit only the high spots of history as I think the average “radical” artist sees it. There would be acrid debates over many of the names mentioned if one brought them up in any studio; I have not even pleased my own preferences; I have merely attempted a rough-hewn cross-sec- tion of opinion. But of this much I am sure: some such rewriting of history is becoming necessary as the world gradually accepts Cezanne’s achievement as a turning-point in art development, as it becomes apparent that for hundreds of years photography has been a false god among painters and sculptors. Many old idols are due fomactall. The reader, then, wiil do well to forget most of what he was taught out of the schoolbooks. He will do well to remember three points: First, there are no absolute standards in art, neither rules for creation nor tests that will serve for all peoples and all times— and particularly no authorities who can arrange artists in hierarch- ies that will stand the tests of newly creative eras. Second, the 30 modernist believes that, esthetically, we are at the breaking of a new era, that in it we are returning to emotional expressiveness as a fundamental—with perhaps a special intensity growing out of mod- ern life. And third, there have been artists in history, some little recognized during the realistic centuries, others famous, who have had that peculiarly expressive quality. There have been, most not- ably, the primitives, the archaic Greeks, the Romanesque and early Gothic builders and sculptors, certain Orientals (of whom I have said nothing, of course, in this summary of Western art), Giotto, Tintoretto, and—most important of modern “discoveries”—El Greco. If one must find in history a background for the modernist movement, these are the artists to study. a A £ v “ay Bay oeD AY. De 2B UR DUK t 4 > as. Cael JRLEL THE THEORETICAL BACKGROUND LOWER MANHATTAN, BY JOHN MARIN HIS picture seems to me to have quite obviously the quality -L that‘is the essence of modern creative painting. No individ- ually creative work, of course, can elucidate a complete set theory; but something implicit here brings us face to face with the ques- tions which we must meet sooner or later: what is the essential mark, the zsthetic warrant, of the modernist movement as distin- guished from preceding developments? If the imitative element and the element of surface prettiness are only subordinate, what is 35 it that really constitutes the heart of the visual arts? If it is a quality that can in a sense be isolated and recognized, is it univer- sal, applicable to the true art of all time—or substantially modern? It has been remarked often that one requires no knowledge of either history or theory to come to an enjoyment of music. At the present moment we are in no such fortunate position as regards the visual arts. We are bigoted. Due partly to the popular con- fusion of art with purely illustrative activity, and partly to mis- education regarding the fundamentals, one must dip into theory, as into history, to dislodge certain widely-held misconceptions. The Average Man has, in a very true sense, lost the power to judge for himself. When he trusted to his emotions—and that is what he does with music—he found himself in opposition to art “authority.” Then when his emotional reactions were trained out of him, he had to take someone’s else’s word for it that what he looked at was art. A whole false structure of associative values—photographic like- ness, moral truth, slick technique, symbolism, etc.—was formed for him. He must go deep enough into theory to find something in John Marin’s painting above, which will take the place of those qualities of likeness, sentiment, prettiness and “meaning” which are obviously lacking in most paintings “‘since realism.” In brief statement, the theory that specially applies to the bulk of modernist achievement and experiment in painting, sculpture and the graphic arts may be put about like this: Art is an activity, in- extricably bound up with life but only incidentally concerned with the surface aspects of nature, with an emotional realm of its own, concerned with expression rather than representation, with creation rather than imitation, and characterized in each separate work by 36 a particular and essential quality in the nature of emotionally expressive form—a quality which can be intensified today as never before, through enriched means and as a reflection of the intensity of contemporary life. The core of any absolute statement of modern art theory is in the inclusion of the one word “form.” It is that which we must in. vestigate further if we would understand what all the true post- Impressionists are after, and why they consider 19th Century art generally futile, feeble and gutless. When you listen to music you experience an emotion—reaching the point of ecstasy at times—which is entirely dissociated from the ordinary emotions of living. When you look at a noble build- ing you experience a pleasure different in kind from that arising from contemplation of a naturally beautiful landscape. When you look at a painting or statue which is characterized by artistic form and not merely by objective likeness and technical virtuosity, you experience a reaction different from that afforded by a woman’s pretty face or a beautiful body or a child among flowers. The beauty of the landscape may be very real to you, may seem to free you more than the work of art; and the woman’s face or body may have a more intimate appeal, and the child a more caressable qual- ity; but however pleasurable, it is not an artistic emotion which you feel from these things. You may even discover a “picturesque”’ value in them and say, “That is as beautiful as a picture’-—but you will only confuse your mind if you confound the pleasure received from them with the one determining and essential quality of a painting or statue. Indeed, one of the best kindergarten tests I know for a work of art is the question: “Is it merely picturesque, 37 or has it esthetic value of its own?” For, although the artist may be driven to creation by something he has divined in the woman or the landscape or the child, it is what he puts into the work that makes it art. It is entirely necessary to get clear this distinction between the beauty of things living and the beauty created by artists. The beauty of things born, of nature, arouses our admiration in many ways, usually with a mingled emotion of wonder, pleased senses, desire. Art strikes straight to some separate esthetic inner being, something as close to the spirit of man as it is possible to penetrate. To me this seems as fundamental an approach to the spirit, to dis- embodied spirituality, as those other two unexplainable highroads, love and religious experience. I will not venture here any specu- lation as to how close together or how distinct these three phenomena may be; I feel, however, that no man has lived his spiritual life to the full if he has not experienced widely of all three. Atsthetic emotion, arising from something which an artist has endowed with form, whether music, architecture or painting, is of that order, moves mankind thus fundamentally. The sensations arising from contemplation of a landscape or a butterfly or a flower are related to a different order of experience, closer to the physical senses. The beauty of a human face or body, to be sure, may be so bound up with love and with revelation of character and vaguely with desire that one cannot put physical or spiritual boundaries to it. But either way it fails to touch the esthetic emotions. Not only is the realm of art thus distinct from the realm of nat- ural beauty, but nothing could be more disastrous to the artist than to try primarily to transfer the beauty of the one sort into his crea- 38 tions of the other sort. If it is the flower’s natural appeal that he is carrying over with his art materials, there will be small place for creative form. Natural beauty is only a starting-point for the ar- tist’s emotion, and something naturally “ugly” or nondescript is as likely to serve. (I am adding here an illustration of Leighton’s The Bath of Psyche, which is one of the best examples I know of transcribed beauty. All the thousand tendernesses of a woman’s body are lovingly conveyed in the exquisite modelling and softly sensuous coloring. Such a picture is a thing to be desired—one would love to have it about; but it is beautiful emotional photogra- phy, not emotional art.) Artistic “form,” which, as nearly as blundering words can iden- tify it, is the quality characterizing each particular work of art, the quality evoking esthetic emotion in the spectator, varies in many ways: with the material of the art under consideration, with the intensity of the emotion felt and expressed by the artist, with the extent of abandonment to subjective emotion, with the degree of his naiveté or sophistication. It also varies in name, from the “rhythmic vitality, or spiritual rhythm expressed in the movement of life” of the Chinese Six Canons of painting, to the “spatial ex- istence’ and “voluminous form” of two recent American critics. The clearest elementary treatise about it is to be found in an admi- rable little book entitled Art, by Clive Bell. He calls it (in rela- tion to the visual arts) significant form; and his phrase has afforded a multitude of people a handy label for something they had before mentioned gropingly and even bashfully, because it seemed myste- rious and nameless. Bell brings out clearly how this “significant form” endows with living zsthetic values every moving work of 39 THE BATH, “OF BSYCHE EIGHTON Be 40 art from the primitives to the post-Impressionists. Despite the dangers in such a catch-phrase, it is so serviceable that I shall use it often, although I shall begin later to phrase it expressive form, because that seems to me a closer indication of the modernists’ particular goal, linking up with much that I shall have to say about Expressionism. First, however, it is necessary to inquire briefly into the artist’s way of creation: how he comes to expression, and more particularly what are the elements giving rise to or shaping or dictating the form. We may (arbitrarily) note three elements in the making of a picture or statue, after that unexplainable eruption of creative energy which we term inspiration. First of these elements is something in the nature of subject- matter, the objective element in nature or in memory or in imagina- tion; second, the subjective element, the artist’s emotion playing around the object, choosing it, shaping it, distorting it, submitting it to some abstract permutation—the experiencing element; and third, the element of material and methods, the paint-quality or sculpture-quality which more or less shapes, and is more or less intensified in, each separate work. The objective element, as we have seen, all but rode art to death in the period just drawing to a close. Not only did it enter into the making of a work of art, but any distortion of the outward aspect of the object was decreed to be a violation of Truth. (El Greco was explained away on the grounds of defective vision! Cezanne was astigmatic!) The modernists react violently from such deification of subject. Objective nature becomes merely a starting-point and not the end-and-all of art. In place of the old 41 search for pretty models and picturesque sketching grounds, there was at the first breaking of the new force a monotonous deluge of the familiar and the unpretentious. We were flooded with apples, table-cloths and salt-shakers, just to prove that picturesqueness didn’t count, that any subject-matter would serve. Some artists, to be sure, denied objective values entirely, painted abstractly; al- though it is not clear to some of us that they did not substitute some different order of subject-meanings, symbolic or psychic, for what they abandoned. Others, the Cubists, devaluated reality by dis- assembling the planes of nature and reassembling them according to an esthetically-felt need. All these artists came to believe that as long as natural truth enslaved them there was little chance to come at something they felt vaguely as form. There has been, indeed, an easily traceable progression toward the abstract, away from objective interest, ever since Cezanne dis- torted the vision of Impressionism to gain what he called greater “realization.” But there is almost general agreement that abstrac- lion, except in the case of a “time art” like mobile color or music, is a will-o’-the wisp in the arts. Some anchor must be maintained in objectivity, in life as experienced. To be sure, increased em- phasis on the inner structural essence of the subject, increased formal significance, increased respect for the demands of the ma- terial, whether stone, paint-and-canvas or paper-and-ink, have all but done away with surface-aspect—but the object does somehow survive. In so far as the modern artist takes heed of the object for its own sake, it may be said that he does so to discover in it some deeper significance, some structural over-value, an essential quality quite 42 PaGi hy Dye FRANZ MIA RC different (at times) from its outward one-view aspect. Someone has said that when Franz Marc painted a tiger, he painted the “tiger quality,” tigerishness, the emotion raised by tiger. How far this is an absolute quality in the tiger, with universal emotional sig- nificance, and how far it is subjective with the artist, we need not inquire here. But the example at least helps to define the new approach to subject, the search for deeper expressive values in the object than the accidental ones seen on the surface. The second element, the artist’s emotion, is of course the major factor. It differs from other people’s emotion (on seeing the same object) in combining a more profound sensibility with an instinc- tive impulse to artistic creation. His special sensitiveness, which makes him divine the inner tigerish essence—feel the tiger—rather than merely see the animal photographically, is matched by an emotional impulse to express himself, as affected by that quality, in form. It would be wholly futile to inquire, in a Primer, whether the 43 SCRIABIN, BY ZALKALNS important point in creation is reached in the artist’s emotional process or in his catching of the form-quality in paint or stone; whether the emotion shapes inevitably the crystallization, or the “feel for form” directs the emotion. Until the exstheticians and psycho-analysts have dug deeper, we are only sure that the form- problem is much more closely bound up with the artist's emotion than it is with objective nature. We may be sure, however, that his leaping forward to a vision of the final artistic form, the crea- tion of an “image” is spontaneous rather than reasoned. Kandinsky, chief modern seeker for the abstract in painting, identifies the soul with the source of artistic creation, and claims to get his materials out of an originating “spiritual harmony”; but he more often than not brings recognizable objects into his can- 44 vases somewhere, and the fact that he fishes these out of his sub- conscious self and not directly from nature, is not a proof of spir- itual origin. His purely abstract paintings, moreover, lack in general just that formal significance which we believe to charac- terize the most moving works of art. In short, the form-problem as the objective and subjective ele- ; ments enter into it, can be stated something like this: The artist sees objective forms in nature; due to his special sensibility, and in the grasp of his emotion they become, so to speak, forms subjec- tive; they then go through a filter of abstraction (his sense of abso- lute esthetic form); and in the final expression they retain more or less of the original object as emotionally felt, but it is the reve; lation of the abstract quality that counts most. | The third element influencing the artist’s conception of form, and helping to shape the crystallization, is that which grows out of the nature of his materials. For it is true that a part of the modern- ist’s struggle for greater expressiveness has been concerned with the attainment of some peculiar virtue arising from the materials of his art. Modern sculpture (post-Rodin sculpture) especially is marked by the attempt to grasp an essentially sculptural massive- ness dictated by the heaviness of stone or metal and its resistance to the tool; and progressive architects are trying to shatter their profession’s obsession with the designing of facades, in favor of a return to the fundamental problems of building in modern mate- rials. Charles Marriott recently wrote, in commenting on Clive Bell’s theory of form: “TI am inclined to believe that ‘significant form’ is nothing other than form in which the record of vision’ is ct A felt to be compatible with free and characteristic movement of the 45 BATHERS, BY “COURB ES human hand in or with the particular medium employed.” That seems like a shallow evasion of the deeper problems involved in a theory of form, but it serves to indicate how far material has been ) recently studied for its special sort of expressiveness. The current toward subjective presentation has been paralleled by a current toward purification and intensification of means. In thinking of form as a quality in art, then, it is well to keep “in mind the three things from which we have been unable to dis- sociate it, from which indeed it is probably inseparable: first, the anchor in objectivity, the emotion of reality; second, the subjective process, the creative emotion of the artist, working through an ab- 46 Dai ews woes) 6 6CCEL ZAIN NE stract conception; third, the expressiveness of materials. I do not mean that you should think of these things when looking at any specific work of art—that would be ruinous; indeed, I begin to think that when you have got some sort of glimmer of the place of each of these elements, you should forget them all and go look at some modern paintings or sculptures. If you find expressive form speaking to you, as against subject-matter, that is all. that counts. Analysis is only worth while as a part of forgotten ex- perience. ¥ The two Meet ions on these two pages are placed together as an object lesson. Courbet’s Bathers is typical naturalistic art at its 47 best; Cezanne’s Bathers is typical of the modern return to form- seeking. The difference involved in the comparison may be sum- marized as expression vs. representation; creation vs. description; form vs. aspect. In so far as nature survives in the Cezanne canvas it is not as the casual eye sees it, but as natural objects affect the creative emotion of the artist. That is the essential distinction— the boundary between realistic and modernistic art. Why this distinction marks a true revolution in the realm of esthetics should be clear when we reflect that, despite waverings between idealistic and naturalistic treatment (compare the Courbet and Leighton pictures), between classic and romantic escapes from familiar things, the whole normal development of art for approxi- mately 400 years has been limited by the imitation-of-nature canon. Expression in form as understood by practically all the modernists —whether emphasizing more the emotion of the subject, the artist’s emotion, or material essence—is the very opposite of 16th-17th- 18th-19th Century illustrative painting and sculpture and—in a slightly different way—imitative architecture. An understanding of this shift in the approach to art (not merely in means or treatment) enables one to clarify the way by turning r aside certain currents which have served to muddy the stream of e ‘modern art theory. These currents are symbolism, mysticism and ) “yomanticism. When one speaks of getting away from realism, 1 -sdinéone is bound to mention one of these other isms as an alterna- | tive; but they really have nothing to do with the case. Symbolism is, in baldest statement, the placing of one object or idea to suggest another. It is properly a subdivision of imitative art, because it deals with objective nature. The fact that it works 48 by analogy or association of ideas fails to bring it within the field of emotionally expressive art. It is, rather, an intellectual ten- dency, baiting the spectator’s mind with double entendre and with the aptness of one concept implying another. This is not a means to intensification but a sort of intellectual jugglery, on the material plane. If mysticism is the constant struggle to pierce behind those veils that hide us into the petty world as it accidentally is, then the new art cannot get along without mysticism; but the new slope does not lie in the direction of that generally-accepted mysticism that plays prettily with the veils that hide the heart of life. We have had enough of high priests and mystagogues, and of dimness for its own sake. Romanticism is at the far pole from modernist endeavor because it is based on a purely objective vision of a realm imagined from outward experience, much as Heaven is imagined with harps and streets of gold. The romantic artist merely takes the spectator away from life into a world of sentimental adventure—a weak escape from living. He ordinarily deals nine-tenths in glamour, bombast and sentimentalism. The art of today lies rather in the direction of a more abstract » means, of stark expression, not with symbols or illusory veils-or lie pretty excursions, but with emotional reality intensified and crys: &. ee, tallized in formal expression. yh der’ aN It is well, I opine, to add a word about realism andenaittaliont and particularly some explanation of my use of the terms in this book. Broadly, I have adopted “realism” as a blanket name for the sort of visual art where emphasis is on correct representation— 49 oth BATHERS, BY OTTO MUELLER thus including practically all phases that are not essentially form- seeking. When I speak specifically of the “Realists,” however, I have in mind those unrelentingly literal painters from Courbet to Sargent, who correspond to the Zolas and Tolstoys of fiction and the slice-of-life dramatists. Impressionism was a special aspect-of-the- moment sort of realism. And Naturalism, specifically, was that vicious phase which boldly and frankly existed for the clever me- ticulous transcription of nature, for illustration with detail deified. -. Distortion is rife in modern art. Some of it is wilful, unneces- ‘sary and unjustified by any esthetic gain. The timid and scan- dalized academically-trained Average Citizen has a right, perhaps, to ask what all the shootin’s for if no new bird is brought to ground. But the artist’s right to a deviation from natural aspects is more than justified if he realizes some deeper formal value such as that 50 existent typically in Cezanne’s mature work—as in his lady Bathers a few pages back and in his gentlemen Bathers a page or two for- ward. The German Expressionists, interpreting Cezanne’s aim as something strongly structural, go even farther in arbitrary treat- ment of nature—as in Otto Mueller’s Bathers. “Distortion” is, of course, a purely comparative word outside the field cf mathematical science. All art that has subject-matter is distorted if judged by photography. What we really mean in applying the term to modern art is that the artist has been so in- tent upon some purely emotional or artistic problem that he has shoved likeness to nature into a secondary place, being careless of her or twisting her aspects to such an,extent that the eye looking for likeness is shocked. Those who are so shocked—and academic critics are bound to be, at first—put forward various excuses for distortion as prac- tised by scattered great artists throughout history: the Primitives in general were lacking in sensibility and had imperfect control over their materials; El Greco suffered from defective vision; a very few, like Michael Angelo, must be excused because genius is above ordinary rules. But the modernist simply topples over the whole structure by saying that if art is to be an activity worth while on: its own account, its manifestations should be judged solely from’ nes the standpoint of artistic (not photographic) loss or gain; and that © the eye artistically trained will unconsciously leap the barrier’ ie distortion. It is being so proven every day, as people who sean laughed at what they called “crazy art” come over into the field of appreciation of Matisse, Cezanne, Picasso, Kandinsky and their fellows. The discords of the previous century become the mate- 51 rials for this century’s music. More people constantly turn to en- joyment of primitive and archaic sculpture as against that of the “finished” periods. And appreciation of El Greco grows while pho- tographically expert and sweet painters like Murillo, del Sarto and even Raphael tend to recede to a respected historical desuetude. Even William Blake comes in for a belated vogue in England. It is no argument, perhaps, but a significant coincidence that the seekers for a living formal quality in painting and sculpture seem to detect it most easily in those very artists whose distorted vision the academicians seek to excuse. But let us inquire into the quality of distortion only as it is evident in the work of Paul Cezanne. His paintings clearly achieve expressive form in the fourth-dimensional sense. Beyond the three dimensions of length, breadth and perspec- tive depth, there is a rhythm, voluminous movement, or a poised spatial relationship that speaks emotionally to the spectator. In a great many of his canvases one seems to detect a fluctuating of the volumes and planes, a palpable feeling of emotional organization. This roll within the canvas is the most evident visual sign in a room- ful of modern paintings. The physical phase of Cezanne’s distortion can be detected in the way in which objective bodies or planes are bent backward or forward at the point of meeting, as if leaning to each other in a profounder contrapuntal design. Accidentals of nature are bent tc advance or recede in accordance with the demands of abstract spatial organization. There is no other explanation than that Ce- zanne has deliberately (or instinctively) deformed nature for zs- thetic purposes, distorted aspect for the sake of poising abstract form in his canvases. Since physically it is largely light (color) 52 we. BaryrHERS, BY CEZANNE with which he hangs up, so to speak, this deeper rhythm, I must ask the reader here to search out and study an original Cezanne painting. We need pause only a moment over that arbitrary sort of distor- tion practised by the psychic Expressionists, the deviation from nat- ural truth in order that objects or symbols of cryptic meaning may be belched up out of the artist’s subconscious and substituted for immediate outward aspects. That is a return to the objective basis, and it usually takes the form of neurotic idea-transference, making art a sort of chimney for soul-distress. But distortion of natural forms for gain.in emotional intensity we must countenance. Next to distortion, crudity. The academicians are appalled at the lack of refinement in modern art. Need one take the trouble, in this age of scientifically terrible wars, million-volt discharges, steel and concrete, to say that table manners are well enough in their way, but hardly at the heart of progress? Repeatedly art has died of polish, to be reborn to glory with the effort-marks of crea- tion on it. Perfection of finish is practically never a mark of the great periods. Our pretty public library buildings and our slick pseudo-Greek-temple banks are only too eloquent of the refined culture of the architects who built them—knowing everything about design and ornament, and nothing of the romantic and exciting art of building. One longs for the mark of a tool or a gaunt stretch of wall in their buildings, for a building that above all else builds. If the deeper creative harmony is there, seeming surface crudity is not going to hurt either painting or architecture—or any work in any art. One word more about the quality form. It is not always under- stood, even among adherents of modernism, to mean that moving, voluminous, fluctuating, fourth-dimensional thing that is detectable in a painting by Cezanne or Kokoschka or Marin. That, I should say, is the most generally accepted interpretation. But another view is that compositional organization even in a surface sense, as in the decorative painting of Gauguin, is an achievement of signifi- cant form. Here it is linear rather than surface organization, a surface rhythm rather than spatial orientation, simple harmonic composition rather than contrapuntal. Atsthetically it is less pro- found, the spectator’s response being more largely sensuous, with- out the same emotional depth. *" 5 4 aie a > ro ee dhl > ie a, as Poon N So, DY PAUL GAUGUIN : But gorgeously sensuous values in painting are better than liter- ary or photographic or technical ones, and so this too must be granted a modern validity, as being revolutionary in a milder way. We shall hear more of the “decorative split” later on. Here I only want to guard against any reader’s zeal in trying to judge Gauguin, long grouped with the post-Impressionists, by the form-quality of Cezanne. Personally I prefer to consider the sensuous appeal in a Gauguin picture as a sort of first dimension of that deeper spatial order which is Cezanne’s—and both modern. & hs 595 a Nae = is a E az As a last prod to your thought about “form” I am putting a realistic 18th Century woodcut, in the familiar Bewickian style, at the top of the page, and at the bottom a somewhat emotionally ex- pressive beast, which might be by any one of a dozen modernist designers, or by someone of the period before imitation became an obsession—say, back in the 13th or 14th Century. Whatever it is, old or very new, it couldn’t have been done by artists in the period between. It might be well to think this out a little; then turn to the list of illustrations and learn its date. IV THE BACKGROUND IN MODERN LIFE “NS Cok t, ON CROSS—ABOUT 1200 HIS statue seems to meet all the specifications of the modern art theory outlined in the last chapter. It has definite form- quality which speaks to the spectator emotionally. It is free of subject-interest in any immediate sense. It is unphotographic to the point of distortion. But it is not modern in time. It is, indeed, an expressionistic work of art done in a time when the word “Ex- pressionism” had not been dreamed of. The Expressionists are the latest group of 20th Century modernists: this statue dates from 29 ihe 12th or 13th Century. It is time to inquire how far the modern art movement is a return to the ancients and how far typically a product of today. I am conscious that I have failed to indicate with any exactness to what extent my introductory chapters, and particularly the sketch of the theoretical background, apply to all formal art, and how much should be attributed definitely to the forces of life today. In this last of the background chapters, before going on to the ac- tual story of the development from Impressionism to Expression- ism, I hope to clear up some of the clouds of confusion that have, perhaps necessarily, hung over our approach to the subject. In the light of the theory of expressive form suggested in the last chapter, it should be evident why the post-Impressionists claim as kin the Egyptians of the less elegant periods, the Cretans, several phases of Oriental art, the early Gothic sculptors and architects, El Greco, and the negro carvers. Whenever something in the na- ture of emotional content became of greater importance than quali- lies of imitation, lofty subject-matter, virtuosity, etc., the artists of that time created works that link them with the modernist group. It is clear, then, that mere adherence to the idea of an essential expressive form at the heart of artistic creation cannot be consid- ered an earmark of modern endeavor. Probably the theory has never before been so consciously formulated as in the last twenty years; but in so far as it is a foundation-post of modern art, that art builds into the finest, although not the most recent, periods of the past. Through adherence to this universal central idea of what consti- tutes art, the painter, sculptor or architect has been brought back to 60 a directness and simplicity that may or may not be considered primi- tive or archaic. Ornament is stripped away, flourish disappears, all the elements of what Clive Bell calls “technical swagger” are exorcised. It is a gain not to be reckoned lightly. Primitive man, whether of the Europe of thousands of years ago or of black Africa of today, is direct not only by instinct but by vir- tue of ignorance of elaboration. The cleverness of exact involved imitation, of intricate ornament, of the transfer of the values of one medium to the materials of another, is a development of more so- phisticated periods. Bored civilizations crave the distraction of ornament. People who know too much about nature let her “truths” limit their expression: they must stop to put in accidental shadows, perspective, background. The primitive cuts through these to the thing itself, standing out naked. It is necessary, if we are to have any art that is worthy the name, to get back to that directness, that nakedness, as a starting-point. To adopt primitive conventions along with the directness is a con- fession that we are poorer than savages. Doubtless in many ways DRAWING, BY MASEREEL OLD WOMAN WITH A (S20 BYE RN oT (BAR LACH we are. But we cannot attain to their blessings by renouncing our own. The need is for modern expressiveness on a primitive or ele- mental foundation. In some of the arts there has been an “honest” period, a period of return to direct unadorned realism or imitationism, before the break into form-seeking post-Impressionism. In architecture Sul- livan and Berlage were crying out for an honest consideration of 62 structure and material before Wright, Mendelsohn and Taut began their experiments in modern expression. Maillol shook off the ad- ventitious Impressionistic qualities fastened on to sculpture by the generation of Rodin, and got back to plain honest sculptural quali- ties before Epstein, Gaudier, Lachaise and Lehmbruck began their practice of distortion for the sake of intensification. Even in painting, one of the three most-noted Post-Impressionists, Vincent Van Gogh, was most important for directness and simple honesty. And in those sub-arts where form-quality is necessarily incidental to representation—in illustration and in caricature—this return to directness is a chief characteristic of modern achievement. Could anything be more uninvolved than the little drawing by Masereel above? Could any primitive have gone more directly to the heart of his problem? No background, no detail, nothing but—cannon, churchman. The draughtsmen of the 19th Century did not think so simply. If that nakedness is primitive, ancient, let it be re- corded that modern art is not wholly modern. This sculpture in wood by Ernst Barlach, Old Woman with a Stick, typifies the period of return in sculpture. It is honest, with- out any dramatic or story-telling qualities, without ornament, and without asking that tribute of wonderment at faithfulness to life which Meunier, in a similar field, seems to demand. The example also serves to carry us over to consideration of another sort of return—to truth to materials. This is sculpture in wood, and the quality of the wood is in the very feel of it. The return to more intimate media—wood sculpture, etching (not reproductive but for its own sake), autographic wood engrav- ing, lithography, enamels, ceramics, etc.—is in itself an indication 63 of a new passion for direct expression. And throughout the arts the media are being explored for characteristic and essential values: stone no less than wood, paint (leading into light and mobile color) no less than words; and in architecture, steel, concrete and glass. How far the world had forgotten these essential values is clear when one remembers that few monumental statues of the 18th and 19th Centuries were cut by the “sculptors” themselves, and how com- pletely architecture and engineering were divorced, how exclusively the architect worked on paper. Fitness of material came as a mat- ter of instinct with the ancients. Twentieth Century art takes up that asset where it was dropped centuries ago. Let us turn to something in modern art that cannot be said merely to be reversion to other times, and so come at the question from the other direction. This Brooklyn Bridge by Joseph Stella seems at first glance to be 100-per-cent up to date. But let us go forward a little carefully here; it is really less expressionistic than the Christ on the Cross at the head of the chapter. The point is that, with subject matter become so minor a part of art works, a 20th Century objective interest really carries us a very small bit on the way to true modernism. ‘The spirit which creates airships, automobiles, dynamos and Brooklyn Bridges concerns us very much, and these things may have in themselves art values. But as subjects for representation they are merely novel. The Futurists ran aground on that objective reef. Their technique, too, was il- lustrative. They illustrated, and repeated, the “force lines” of the modern machine age. But that has little to do with a new direct- ness, a formal significance or a new expressiveness. We shall meet these Futurists again in a separate chapter. Meantime Stella’s 64 ee Pi ewieN BRIDGE, BY JOSEPH .STELLA Brooklyn Bridge must be judged for something beyond subject values if it is to hold as a significant modern work. It fortunately has a quality that satisfies quite apart from any recognitional delight. The quality that is, perhaps, most indisputably and completely modern is intensity. The current of life has deepened, the rhythm has quickened, improved means of communication multiply the sensations that crowd upon us, travel enriches our impressions and fertilizes the mind, machines assail and toughen the nerves, lights 65 FROM MY PARIS WINDOW, BY “MARC CHAGAS are brighter and noises louder than ever before. Art cannot re- main as quiet as in the past: it must not slip back into being merely a refuge from life. Its values must be intensified. It must live up to its age. | Buildings are built higher than ever before, because more people crowd into a tiny area. The architect, being educated, begins by trying to disguise the height, breaking up the fagades in accord- ance with the rules of the established horizontal architecture. But finally modern-minded architect-builders catch the spirit of rising steel and concrete. They put up here and there buildings that glory in their height, that make capital of their thousand window open- ings, that reflect power and intensity. Painting finds new sensation 66 Ui UTURISM descended upon the world from Italy. It embraced at once a literary heresy, a “movement” in the graphic arts, and an extraordinary means of self-advertisement for a group of young Italian intellectuals. Its intellectual-literary origin is im- portant, because it goes far to explain why Futurism became a world’s wonder and an influence on the development of painting, although no one ever saw a Futurist painting that had values pro- founder than novelty, arresting color or shallow decorative effec- tiveness. ee | The Futurists have been the champion manifesto-makers of all the schools of modernism. Their leader—both spokesman and * ; pee y . aye a “A a : ! 5 iK t F * 4 , *, 29 7 4 | eee 2 MARINETTI, BW KUIst oN : financial sustainer—the poet Marinetti, had the Manifesto habit. A Futurist manifesto was likely to be nine- -tenths anarchism and good old-fashioned bunk, and one-tenth shrewd and forward- ‘looking. thought about art. The rapid periodic appearance of these Jiter- ary bombs had two good effects: the shock jolted | loose'a lot of be- | lated Impressionists, dogma-bound Cubists and blind. followers of Cezanne, and started them to seeking on their ‘own account; and the fraction of artistic truth, although unrealized in the works of the five chief Futurist painters, gave impetus to the theoretical current toward pure painting. It was Gordon Craig who said: “There has been a positive need ~ for the Futurists ever since the first ass wagged its tail before the . portrait of a carrot.’ There one has a reason indeed. The Futur. ists or anyone else should be listened to if they promise an escape — from dull photographic painting, no matter what the substitute. | Craig goes on to point out that their substitute is only a portrait of 116 OE are chaotic civilization as it has become: snapshots of the “noises, jerks and squirms” of the external world we live in, in place of snapshots of the girl with the parasol, the nude model, the fish and copper kettle; the wintry landscape, which have crowded academy halls for generations. The ironic point is that Futurism, in that it ny concerned snapshots at all, reverted to 17th-18th-19th Century art, returned to representation, denied Cezanne, negated the future. The statements of the Futurists are likely to begin self-consciously 5 ‘like this: “We are young and our art is violently revolutionary.” ire Then follow their respects to the Cubists and other outmoded radi- cals. “They obstinately continue to paint objects motionless, B* - frozen, and all | the: static aspects of nature. . . . We, on the con- trary, with points of view pertaining ae ie to the future, seek f or a ae of motion, a thing which has never been attempted before Bo Pit t Ta paint from the posing model is an absurdity, and an ee, -act of Bia cowardice, even if the model be translated upon the picture in linear, spherical or cubic forms.” The maiter of motion is, indeed, always at the bottom of their picture making, ranging from mere photographed outward action to experiments with dynamic “force-lines.” The first Futurist manifesto began: eg .1. Our desire for the truth no longer contents itself with form and oo. color er ‘heretofore understood. eis ‘2s What we wish to reproduce on the canvas is not an instant or a ~ inoment ‘of immobility of the universal force that surrounds us, but the te "sensation of that force itself. 3. As a matter ‘of fact everything moves, everything runs, everything a rapidly. A gle is never immobile before us, but it appears ie sei 117 . and disappears without ceasing. Given the fact of the momentary per- sistence of the image on the retina, objects in movement multiply, change form and follow like vibrations in space. A running horse has not four legs, but twenty, and their movements are triangular. + 4. Nothing is absolute in painting. That which was a truth for the painters of yesterday, is a lie for those of today. We declare, for example, that a portrait should not resemble its sitter, and that the painter carries in his own imagination the landscape he wishes to place upon the canvas. 5. To paint the human figure it is not necessary to paint the figure but simply to give its envelopment. Space does not exist. Millions of miles separate us from the sun, yet that is no reason why the house before us | should not be incased in the solar disk. In our work we can secure effects similar to those of the X-ray. Opacity does not exist... . The sixteen persons about us in a moving omnibus are in turn and at the same time, one, ten, four, three; they are immobile and yet move; they go, come, bounding along the street, suddenly lost in the sun, then return seated before you, like so many symbols persistent of universal vibration. ‘es How often it happens that upon the cheek of the person with whom we are talking we see the horse that passes far away at the end of the street. Our bodies become parts of the seat upon which we rest and the seat becomes part of us. The omnibus merges in the houses that it passes, and the houses mix with the bus and become part of it. 6. The construction of pictures up to this time has been stupidly tradi- tional. Painters have always shown things and persons before us. We place the spectator in the midst of the picture. iy Heretofore we have looked at pictures; it is the idea of the Futurist that we should look through them, that the pictures should give us new visions of life and things, new sensations, new emotions. . . . ve, 7 Some of the Futurist painters seem never to have read beyond the third paragraph in this manifesto. At any rate Giacomo Balla 118 MONVEWEGe DOG IN LEASH, BY Gus COMO BALLA gives us pretty illustrations of objects in action with repeated out- lines indicating movement, blurring away at the edges like photo- graphs that have not been snapped quickly enough. What a juve- nile conception of art this was is indicated in the Moving Dog in Leash above. But it illustrates a basic principle of Futurism. The point that “opacity does not exist’ and the attempt to “place the spectator in.the midst of the picture” are illustrated in the dance scene of Severini at the head of the chapter. There is here not merely simultaneous recording of recurrent aspects of a moving object, as in Balla’s elementary work, but an intriguing puzzle- layout of bits remembered, repeated, pattern-arranged. Elsewhere the Futurists have recorded: ““The simultaneousness of states of mind in the work of art: that is the intoxicating aim of our art. . . . In painting a person, on a balcony, seen from inside the room, we oh not limit the. scene ‘to what the square frame of the window renders visible; but we try to render the sum total of visual sen- sations which the person on the balcony has experienced; the sun- 119 bathed throng in the street, the double row of houses which stretch to right and left, the beflowered balconies, etc. This implies the simultaneousness of the ambient, and, therefore, the disloca- tion and dismemberment of objects, the scattering and fusion of details, freed from accepted logic, and independent from one an- other.” Here, of course, the true Futurist simultaneity of action is added to the Cubist idea of synthetic simultaneity of remembered static aspects. Gino Severini, whose dance scene so perfectly illustrates the point, later turned Cubist of the Gleizes type—although more recently he has reverted to a sort of mathematical classicism. The third portion of the original manifesto includes a series of declarations against imitation, the tyranny of “harmony” and “good taste,” art critics, bituminous colors, false modernism, and the nude in painting—this last not on moral grounds, but because of the monotony of our “galleries of portraits of disreputables.” This portion of the document contains also two constructive points: “That it is necessary to brush aside all the subjects already used, in order to adequately express our turbulent life of steel, of pride, of feverish rapidity.” And “that the universal force must be shown in painting as a sensation dynamic.” The supposition that dealing with modern subjects—steel and rapidity—will make a modern art, is as childish as the theory of recording simultaneity of successive movements. A creative art- ist’s picture may as well be evoked by something out of Babylon as something out of an airplane or a motor car. But out of the “dynamic sensation” idea the Futurists developed a new sort of illustration. It is illustration, because you are no nearer to esthetic 120 DYNAMISM OP CANS bo BY RUSS OL O creation when you are merely recording force lines than when you are painting academically the objective aspects of nature. If the Futurists had grasped all they were after by way of rhythm, it might be a different story. “We have declared in our manifesto that what must be rendered is the dynamic sensation, that is to say, the particular rhythm of each object, its inclination, its movement, or, to put it more exactly, its interior force.” But they limit them- selves by discovering that “every object reveals by its lines how it would resolve itself were it to follow the tendencies of its forces’; and when they actually paint they bring forth things like Russolo’s Dynamism of an Auto, wherein the recorded force lines are the design. Russolo made a formula of the repeated angles of this picture. The same diagram would answer for his Train at Full Speed and his Revolution. 121 FUNERAL .OF THE -ANARCHIS Heeger. BY osC Ash REA Farther removed from mere “motion effects’ is the work of Carlo D. Carra. The sense of movement in the other pictures shown has been on the surface. There is more real movement, in an eesthetic sense, in one of Cezanne’s paintings than in anything that the Futurists have left to us. But Carra had at least a glimmer of the deeper thing. What then is the real heritage to painting out of Futurism? The emphasis on modern life, in spite of the Futurists’ own lapse to mere illustration, had its salutary effects. The general shaking- down process, following the shock of the manifestoes and the first exhibitions, also contributed to the impulse of the modernist move- ment. A few principles, like that of getting inside the picture, live on. The futility of the general practice of the coded laws may have 122 EULCURTSS SCULPTURE, BY BOC CrON! led some painters to a closer grapple with the mysteries of abstrac- tion. But roughly speaking Futurism blew up, because the world came to recognize that it embraced a return to straight representa- tion. And the full current of progress is in the opposite direction. America has perhaps the most effective contemporary practi- tioner of Futurism, in Joseph Stella, an Italian-American—and even he is more significant for other phases of his varied talent. His Brooklyn Bridge is reproduced on page 65. The English Nevinson went through a Futurist period, but one feels that the virus didn’t 123 really take. The Vorticists have been accused of being merely decadent Futurists, but that is hardly fair. Boccioni was sculptor as well as painter. His statues have al- ways seemed to me a pulling-to-pieces of plastic form, instead of mass organization. His Synthesis of Human Dynamism tells the whole story. One quite prefers that sort of elementary repeat- line Futurism, occasionally applied to sculpture, which the Ger- mans call “Kinetismus.” At least it has honest surface values in its unassuming and amusing cleverness. Of that sort of cleverness is the use to which E. McKnight Kauffer put Futurist ideas in this tailpiece, called Flight. Cleverness just about. measures the depth of Futurism. Cezanne and Kokoschka and Marin have n never been clever. VIII SGHO OLS, EADS AND SENSATIONS mf, J PEGASUS, BY ODILON REDO ” YT HE picture here is not in the slightest Cubistic or Futuristic; nor is it obviously related to that sort of modernist painting that flowed from Cezanne through Matisse to the “Junge Kunst” groups in many lands. It has beauty of a sort, even in this repro- duction which does not show the lovely coloring. We may well pause to ask, is this modern art? There are two special sorts of difficulty for a critic who is fool enough to try to interpret for his readers a world “movement” in art. One exists in the possibly two or three important artists in each generation who defy classification with any current or tend- ency—who are out of time altogether. The other exists in the ne- cessity to pause and explain away certain minor “schools” that arise, and by the sheer noise of their shouting, or the startling na- ture of their painting, shock the world into attention for a period. I, the fool in this case, have set aside this chapter to get out of the way such sensations as Vorticism, Dadaism and Tatlinism—and to say a word about one or two unrelated giants who simply cannot be overlooked. The picture on the opposite page shows a painting by Odilon Redon, a French painter who died six years ago. He was thus a contemporary of the Impressionists and of the post-Impressionists —from Cezanne to Picasso. But he might just as well have lived out of time and place. He was a true Independent. Redon’s art, reveling in a rare glory of fresh coloring, has to do with life in its dreamiest aspects, as if one might lie forever looking at a cloud, or a butterfly, or a woman’s breast, or an orchid. His paintings tempt one to think that art may after all exist in legends and delicate experience, rather than in some independent living 127 esthetic truth: that one may imitate living things (or imagined and legendary things), and score as creative artist if one’s selective sense is fastidious enough, one’s touch lyric enough. Redon avoided the vulgarly dramatic; in an age when realism was only beginning to be challenged, he tempered his own realism with poetry, with melody, with living in the secret places. He had the grace to walk clear of all the materialistic things in nature, letting an imaginative music drown the horrible and common sounds that seem to have been in the ears of most painters of his time. Such art as his marks not an intenser entry into life, but a sensi- tive withdrawal from life. That alone is enough to separate it from the burgeoning art of today. But there is, too, the fact that his painting is essentially on the side of imitation as against expres- sion. It may be that painting the spiritual aspect of an object will become the pursuit of some new modernism of the future. Then Redon will be looked back to as the master. But as long as the present current flows, seeking form within the canvas before all else, no matter how many intermingled minor currents there may be, Redon will be an outsider. He was not giant enough to turn the current. But let it be added, he was an outsider whom the out-and-out modernists respected—and upon whom, | think, they still cast now and then a rather wistful glance. A second Independent, who is even more important historically, and who made a contribution intrinsically valued as highly as Redon’s, was Henri Rousseau. His canvases are particularly treas- ured by those who find relief from the dullness, self-consciousness and pretension of academy art in a child-like naiveté and detach- ment. Rousseau throughout his life was perfectly the child-man, 128 Powis NDS CAPE, BY HENRI ROUSSEAU with apparently an incorruptible child’s-freshness. He was un- troubled by any respect for naturalness, perspective or any other traditional rule or quality of painting, and he frankly gave himself up to his somewhat limited fancy. He was less the Primitive with whose virtues he has been reproached, than the imaginative child who delights in fixing the features of Aunt Molly stiffly into the wholly arbitrary foliation of a romantic garden, or placing fanci- ful beasts in exotic and luscious forests. He treated familiar land- scapes or people with other-worldly aloofness, or wandered in imaginative gardens and woods such as one is supposed to cease imagining when one graduates into grammar school. It was this child mind, and its pictures, that drew to Rousseau le Douanier the friendship and the praise of many of the foremost artists and . 129 critics of the Paris of ten or twenty years ago. They appreciated his work for much the same reason that lay behind their deification of negro sculpture: it was direct, simple, immediate, the fruit of an unspoiled emotional approach to art. The influence of Rousseau was very great for a time, although it has waned a little in the last five years. His sort of art will always find ready appreciation where people are revolting from too much tradition and too much sophistication. It has a quiet and fresh charm that comes gratefully in the midst of so much virtu- osity and striving. But if one took to it for a steady diet, one might begin to detect an anachronistic note in it—or perhaps a lack of a certain fullness that belongs to these times. Never to go beyond it would seem like loving only seventeen-year-old girls all one’s life. In America there have been many artists who have gone through a Rousseau-influenced period—and a mighty good tonic it is too, if an artist can get back to that clearness of vision—and a few have remained there, although as yet without achieving the authentic naiveté through any long and important series of works. New York is fortunate in having a gallery—that of Stephan Bourgeois—where a collection of these “detached” and fanciful paintings can always be seen: utterly simplified and flatly colored compositions by Emile Branchard, shy little drawing-paintings by Jennings Tofel, delicate flower studies and poetic abstractions by Joseph Stella, and a wide range of similar unsophisticated and remote excursions. All these are undoubtedly in the direct line of protest against naturalism, and charming, but as a collection they seem to some of us to be a little off the main road of progress, too ascetically aside from the in- tensely emotional, dynamic art of the rich life of today. Like 130 Redon’s works, those of Rousseau and his followers must be marked as out of the main current because they smack of a delicate with- drawal, a sensitive return, rather than of a meeting with the condi- tions of modern life. If the vogue for Rousseau has a little passed—there will always happily be worshippers at his shrine—there is another vogue ap- parently developing, for the very beautiful work of Georges Seurat. He used to be called a Neo-Impressionist, and his paintings were Jargely lost to public sight after his death, when the Divisionists were being eclipsed by the excitement over the original post-Im- pressionists and the Fauves. But now painters and critics are re- discovering that Seurat used his color in a new and extremely ef- fective way, and apparently was headed for compositional achieve- ments beyond those of any of his predecessors except Cezanne. He evolved his delicate technique out of Impressionism, but he added an un-Impressionistic solidity of organization; and in his later work he coupled a feeling for moving form with a rainbow-tint freshness of coloring. There is in these paintings what I can only describe as an opalescent “underlay’—as if over or beyond the compositional thing there is an enriching counterplay of color. It is a quality that has been achieved elsewhere only by Ernest Law- son, among all the artists I can call to mind. This sort of color wiz- ardry is what served to place Lawson foremost among American landscapists—so that he is head and shoulders above the rather literal group of belated Impressionists from which he stems. An- other American who has attained to a very individual sort of Neo- Impressionism is Maurice Prendergast. He composes virile color- _ pattern paintings which have done much to enliven our too-dull exhi- 131 LA BAIGNADE, BY GEORGES 752.0577 bition halls these many years. But both Lawson and Prendergast are individualists with definite limitations—whereas Seurat gives promise of very strongly affecting a wide group of important young painters. There are probably many Englishmen who will ask why Augustus John is not similarly an independent giant, demanding a giant’s due, like Redon, Rousseau and Seurat. I rather think John will not last in his own niche so long as these others in theirs —it is equally clear that he is outside the main discussion. He did much to rescue English painting out of tag-end Impressionism and native sentimental realism; he brought a new note of vigor and color and simplicity, but it is not so clear that he escapes an aca- demicism as blighting ultimately as the sort he revolted from. His 132 early works had a daring simplicity and directness; but he fell on the decorative side of the fence. He must be reckoned in, but one feels, rather regretfully, that what might have developed into a creative feeling for color-form turned instead into a posteresque talent. © It is rather for one of the sensations of the school sort that I am turning to England here. Vorticism was a purely British develop- ment in locale, although an American and a Frenchman, resident in London, together with one Englishman made most of the noise and had most of the talent. In the visual arts, the sculptor Gaudier- Brzeska was the one real genius of the group, and he was taken away in the war when he was just beginning to show his true great- ness. Ezra Pound linked the school to Imagism in poetry, and did much to argue the development into alignment with the course of modern art. And Wyndham Lewis, chief painter of the group and its most consistent spokesman, has made significant contributions to modern experiment in painting. The Vorticists joined with their predecessors the Futurists in making war on the Cubists. No more nature-morte; no more posed model. They also wisely judged that although Futurism was more modern in a purely jazzy way, the Futurist painters tended to be- come pedants and illustrators of motion. (The common English conservative habit of calling the Vorticists themselves merely a spe- cial brand of Futurist, probably arose from ignorance of real Fu- turism, the term being used as a sort of handy all-round term of opprobrium for radicals.) The Vorticists also took care to shy a bomb or two at the abstract Expressionism advocated by Kandinsky, feeling that there was something dead about what they called spook 133 ROTTERDAM, BY EDWARD WADSWORTH composition, just as there was something dead about the Cubists’ nature-morte, They began with the theory that every painting must be in some slight sense representative. But: “The first reason for not imitat- ing nature is that you cannot convey the emotion you receive at contact of nature by imitating her, but only by becoming her. . . . The essence of an object is beyond, and often in contradiction to, its simple truth. . . . The sense of objects, even, is a sense of the significance of the object, and not its avoirdupois and scientifi- cally ascertainable shapes and perspectives. If the material world were . . . organized as in the imagination, we should live as though we were dreaming. Art’s business is to show how, then, life would be. . . . Imitation, and inherently unselective registering of impressions, is an absurdity. It will never give you even the feel- 134 ing of the weight of the object, and certainly not the meaning of the object or scene which is its spiritual weight.” The search, then, is for the “spiritual weight” of the object, its essence, its significance; and for the conveying of that. (I have been quoting from Wyndham Lewis in the Vorticist periodical Blast.) But there is some haziness about the means, and Vorticist paintings and drawings seem only to confuse the issue. Rigidity has something to do with their method of painting—(their drawings are in general deadly mechanical and unemotional)—and again and again they stress the idea of “spiritual weight.” As to the Vortex, that seems to have to do with the object itself and its seeing rather than with the painter’s mode of expression. Lewis writes: “The natural culmination of ‘simultaneity’ is the re- formed and imaginatively co-ordinated impression that is seen in a Vorticist picture. In Vorticism the direct and hot impressions of \ oe x ON. THE WAY. TO: THE TRENCHES, fave CG. 7.R! BWae evra VvLNSON 135 life are mated with Abstraction, or the combinations of the Will.” Ezra Pound elucidates the thing further. He dismisses Futurism as merely “accelerated Impressionism.” He describes Imagism in poetry, explaining the Imagist’s direct, absolute and unrelenting ap- proach to the “thing,” whether objective or subjective. From that he works over to an analogous visual art in Vorticism. “The Vor- ticist uses the ‘primary pigment.’ Vorticism is art before it has spread itself into flaccidity, into elaboration and secondary appli- cations. . . . Vorticism is an intensive art. . . . The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a vortex, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing. In decency one can only call it a vortex. And from this necessity came the name ‘Vorticism.’ ” And again Pound defines the vortex as “the point of maximum en- ergy, and speaks feelingly of “works of the first intensity.” Is it not clear, dear reader? Having seen more Vorticist paintings and drawings, perhaps, than most of my readers, I may be able to help by venturing a sum- mary. It is that the Vorticist believes that there is an absolute quality, a spiritual or essential characteristic, in every object; and he strives to express this while his emotion over discovering it is red-hot; and his means are purged of sentiment, elaboration or ornamentation and tend to a special rigidity and machine-like hard- ness. The “vortex” is of the object—the “form” in which or out of which it is drawn—and the vortex is also the artist’s will, the suc- tion, the magnetic quality which pulls to the object or swallows the object. But I confess that the hardness often repels me, leaves me little sense of formal structure artistically complete. 136 MINGRS’ > BAR, BY GEORG GROSZ Then I run across a sentence like this in Ezra Pound’s explana- tion: “The organization of forms is a much more energetic and creative action than the copying or imitating of light on a haystack’’ —and I see that the Vorticists really had the key to the modern structure. Then I look back at their works and I think that they were too muddied up in their own minds to use the key consistently. And I end by muttering something like this: Either they didn’t know what they were doing, and so aren’t really important, or else they actually did see the form-problem as the essential quest but weren’t up to truly creative practice, and therefore still aren’t important— and anyhow, if they did have that key buried away in a blanket of wordiness, they would be Expressionists, and then what’s the use of setting themselves off with a special cryptic name like “Vorti- 137 iy ee of ‘ SP aN ‘ ~ aes} ia a; PV By ky = BENG fe a 60) y r— “7 Oar g Kz Lad Sa . oy a. ave FACTORIES: BY GEORG (GO cists’? I have seen paintings by Lewis that appealed to me as the finest Expressionistic things done by an Englishman—very individ- ual and very expressive—but how Vorticist I couldn’t see. In the War Number of Blast I find the drawing by C. R. W. Nevinson entitled On the Way to the Trenches, which is shown a few pages back. Nevinson never was unreservedly admitted to the Vorticist ranks, and this picture is merely a clever Futuristic illus- tration. But when I compare it with the real Vortex goods in the publication, it seems to me that the Vorticists’ drawings are equally shallow, and not even redeemed by the reflective representative in- terest and the cleverness. A drawing by Edward Wadsworth is re- 138 produced herewith as typical. There is a suspicion about, that Vorticism was the English substitute for the irresponsible movement called elsewhere “Dadaism.” There were the same symptoms of noise, paradox, and almost incomprehensible “art.” But the Wynd- ham Lewis group was never guilty of the perverse, utterly out- rageous and cynical deviltries perpetrated by Tristan Tzara, Fran- cis Picabia, Kurt Schwitters and their bunch. Dadaism was an artistic and literary movement that became a sensation in Berlin, Paris and other Continental cities in 1919- 1920. There is a tendency now to trace the origin to New York, on account of the influence of jazz on popular world art. America did, indeed, contribute some Dadaish journals before the European crop, but these were only feebly nonsensical as compared with later developments. Francis Picabia, later chief Dadaist, had been on this side, and had been associated with Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray in publishing “291.” The conception of Dadaism might be traced back to people and events long antedating the great war, perhaps to the fin-de-siecle generation of Beardsley and Wilde. But the war and its ruins were the immediate precipitating cause. Thus M. André Gide, editor of the Nouvelle Revue Francaise, once exclaimed: “What! While our fields, our villages, our cathedrals have suffered so much, our language is to remain untouched! It is important that the mind should not lag behind matter; it has a right, it too, to some ruins. Dada will see to it.” | The war fathered the child. Tristan Tzara is generally credited with doing the rest. The christening, if not the birth, took place in Zurich. In the light of subsequent events, which have probably 13.9 outrun even M. Tzara’s anticipations, the name seems to have been chosen with uncanny canniness. The original meaning of “Dada” in the French is “hobby-horse”; but the associations the word has taken on through recurrence as the first spoken syllables of mil- lions of generations of infants are rich beyond compare. Dadaist “‘art” aims above all else at novelty, sensation, shock. ” wrote a Paris correspondent of the Christian “Dadaist portraits, Science Monitor, “‘resemble nothing so much as an old-fashioned plate of clam chowder, seen from above.” F. S. Flint once com- plained that Dadaist poetry, good or bad, “never says anything—it merely makes a noise.” He was reviewing Tzara’s poem begin- ning: “a e€ ou 0 youyouyou i e ou o youyouyou drrrrdrrrrdrrrrgrrrrgrrrrgrrrrrrr bits of green duration flutter in my room aeoiiiiea ou ii ii belly ambran bran bran and restore center of the four beng bong beng bang .. .” Mr. Flint’s comment on M. Tzara’s verse has an application to all Dada art: “It has a cachet of its own and its own species of unintelligibility. . . . His sincerity is such that he dumps his per- sonality in front of the world without reserve or arrangement. He shoots it as a scavenger shoots rubbish, and his style is strictly ade- quate.” There has been, indeed, an overplus of noise and an underplus of reserve and arrangement in almost everything accomplished under 140 Wate kCOLOR—-TUNIS, BY PAUL KLEE the Dada banner. If that were all, we could drop the matter here. But one finds an artist like Paul Klee joining the Dada ranks, our Ny “4 ne own Joseph Stella claiming to belong, and a draughtsman like _ Georg Grosz turning straight Dada. It is necessary to look deeper. = * - There seem to be three explanations of the phenomenon. The — first is that all Dadaists are crazy: that their humor is either non- sensical or diabolical, their art accidental, their bits of accomplish- ment the chance stumblings of the madman. This is the most widely-held opinion. After reading a single Dada journal, any person prejudiced in favor of sanity will find ample grounds for accepting this view. The second and opposite explanation is that 141 behind a mask of irresponsibility and humor there stands a cal- culating and unlaughing monster; that beyond the apparent pur- poselessness there is a deadly serious intelligence, with the ultimate aim of undermining civilization by destroying its props—art, cul- ture, religion and militarism. But there is a third, and to me more plausible, explanation: that it is only human for a certain number of people to be crazy, some in the way that gets them into “retreats,” others who only occa- sionally get “crazy with the heat,” others only as crazy as the aver- age artist is; and it is equally human for a lot of other folks to get awfully serious, to take culture seriously, to be patriotic, martyrs, college professors, etc. And there is a class that combines charac- teristics out of both the others. Then there comes a thing like the war, that upsets all the values, and a lot of these people get het-up to an extraordinary degree. . . . And there emerges a Dada move- ment, of which nine-tenths of the manifestations look crazy and probably are meant to look crazy; and irreverence shows itself all over the place; and behind it are all the incompetents and near- thinkers and degenerates and cynics and roisterers who always tag on to the “latest” movement, and along with them a few creative geniuses, and a little group of disillusioned clear thinkers direct- ing the center of the current because they really see that it is neces- sary to discredit Bourgeois culture, academic seriousness and de- cadent society; who are willing to assume the mask of insanity with the real irresponsibles to cloak the laughing but serious purpose of reducing to absurdity the pretensions of the Bourgeois elect. The war, with its lesson of ghastly futility, accomplished Dadaism politically; the ruins, then, must merely be brought into the fields 142 of mental activity. The most serious of intellectual achievements must be seen as the most horrible—for what would the war have been without the refinements of scientific murder, and without the blessing and impetus of the learned professions? Destroy the civi- lization that begot that horror, scratch the veneer of respectable education, show culture its own hypocrisies and dullnesses. As for art, use the arts to kill the arts; reduce the intellectualized senti- mentalism and “realism” of literature to the infantilism and vul- garity which they really are when stripped of their drawing-room manners; reduce the pretty imitative activities of contemporary painting and design to the puerilities and decadent futilities that they basically are. Reduce everything to a welter of meaningless- ness, perversion and disorder. Scourge the world, destroy the mind, laugh, laugh... . When art is ruthlessly reduced to such simple drawings as chil- dren or madmen might make, one may perchance run into a new naiveté and directness of expression; when literature is reduced to a jumble of sounds and random blurts, some Dadaist may turn up out of the ruins with the suggestion of an entirely new direction of poetry, unhampered by the old laws and conventions. Sometimes one even suspects the most avowed Dadaist of consciously creating beauty. Thus is the corner turned from destruction to creation, from the ridiculous to something esthetically moving. Whether Dadaism was conceived as a huge joke or as a cultural reign of terror, and whatever its faults, one must recognize that oc- casionally the Dadaists turn up an abstract composition that begets such a novel reaction, such a fresh emotion, that one forgets all the rest—and remembers wearily the sense of futility so often en- 143 WOODCUT, BY KURT SCHWITTERS gendered by a pilgrimage through our official art museums, with their miles and miles of descriptive canvases, examples of brilliant technique, and pale reflections of the glories of long ago. Perhaps we should merely say that the essential Dada thing is mad, cynical, futile, irresponsible, hopelessly in love with the paradoxical and the bizarre; but that it has drawn into its fold a certain number of artists who are recognized as great on both sides of the fence, men who have gone over not so much because they admire the madness on the other side as because they are sick of the general stupidity in regard to the arts on this side. Then it becomes clear that the move- ment is trivial, inconsequential and wholly destructive. We will claim the few really constructive Dadaists as Cubists or Expression- 144 ists—and Dada becomes merely the negative phase, the obverse side of the great post-Impressionistic-Expressionistic development. The usual Dadaist design is in the nature of a geometrical dia- gram-picture which escapes all contact with emotional or esthetic experience. I have reproduced Picabia’s portrait of Tzara, as typi- cal of Dada representative art. Most of Picabia’s drawings of his Dada period look like working-plans such as plumbers or furniture- makers might use, with the names of the parts carefully lettered on. They have an intellectual interest for the puzzle-minded, and it is possible—yes, just possible—that they have an esthetic purpose I have not fathomed. A chief Dada occupation for a time was the making of pictures with all sorts of extraneous objects and substances stuck on: but- tons, bits of tin, calico, subway tickets—even spools, wheels, etc., etc. Their aim presumably was to achieve abstract design and to show that they could do it with any old means. The Cubists had done this sort of thing with what appears in Dada company to be re- straint. And when an artist like Picasso attempted it, he usually made a composition which, if one disregarded the means, had true esthetic form and appeal. But the idea seems trivial; simply a desire to show the painter’s virtuosity, to prove that he could make tasteful arrangements even out of despised materials, a picture out of junk. The reproduced “painting” by Kurt Schwitters, the chief German Dadaist, is typical. To indicate the “infantile” phase of Dadaism at its best—and there is true emotional expression here—I have added two drawings by Georg Grosz. There was a brief flurry a couple of years back about Tatlinism. 145 SIINL 11439 MLUSIONS PORTRAIT OF TRISTAN TZARA, BY FRANCIS »PLCABID This was a movement instigated by an artist named Vladimir Tatlin, and was strongest in Russia, although it developed adherents in Germany and France. It probably grew out of decadent Cubism of the pasted-on-button sort. At any rate it disavowed picture-making as such; declared for ‘ “constructivism” (and was really a part of that constructivist movement of which more will be said in the chapters on sculpture) ; and blossomed out with a logic of “contra- reliefs,” and a claim of being the true modern art because it got its inspiration from the machine-age. It did, indeed, use machine materials—steel, glass, armour-plate, wood, cog-wheels, wire, etc. 146 otc aIN: b LANyG 5? Pere ouen felts GH Wal TD TERS -—for its constructions, and it seemed to its practitioners to embody the reality of today because the forms of the steel bridge, the power-house, the radio, etc., were built into its works. The com- plete constructions ran to geometric figures, of which the spiral was commonest—so much so that Tatlinism is sometimes taken to mean art works designed in spiral form, whether in sculpture, architec- ture, costume or what not. The drawing shown is Tatlin’s design for a monument to the Third Internationale at Moscow. It is meant to be distinctly a “machine 147 DESIGN FOR MONUMENT, BY Vi GADD M TR. Aiea monument,” as distinguished from the outmoded sort of thing in- herited from the dead past and still affected by unprogressive na- tions (even though their officials ride in motor cars). It is designed to be utilitarian as well as esthetically satisfying, supplying every public convenience from a radio station to an art gallery. It is planned on a huge scale, the height to be one-third greater than that 148 of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. It has not yet been built, I understand, although it is no more progressive than many things sanctioned by the very active and intelligent art division of the Soviet government. ““Synchromism”’ takes us back to the line of development in paint- ing which we followed from Impressionism through Cezanne, Cub- ism and Futurism. It is likely to have surer place in future art his- tories than Vorticism, Dadaism or Tatlinism. The word Synchro- mism means simply “with color.” The basic idea advanced by the Synchromists is that every color has a physical property which makes it, in effect, approach or recede from the eye—yellow, for instance, comes forward, while blue tends to run off into space; that there is a definite color scale governing the movement of form in paintings; and that to paint a receding form yellow or red just because the objective thing in nature is yellow or red is a violation of a structural truth; and further, that the true and “pure’”’ paint- ing of the future will be form composition, without drawing, in ac- cordance with this newly discovered color law. The history of color in painting began merely in color added to drawing for (apparently) realistic value—a green tree green, etc.; then it was added for sensuous effect, for ornamental value; then it became a source of increased dramatic effect, with the story- painters and the realists; finally the Impressionists analyzed nat- ural colors and transferred them scientifically (but in all their ac- cidentals) to the canvas. Cezanne was the first to use color crea- tively as a means to form-expression; and the Synchromists believed that they were carrying his work to its final goal, absolute purifica- tion of painting, by banishing from their works everything that op- posed the physical qualities of color. 149 COSMIC SYNCHROMY, BY MORGAN RUSSELL Willard Huntington Wright, who wrote a standard book on mod- erm art, Modern Painting: Its Tendency and Meaning—to which I am much indebted—felt so sure that this was a final consummation that he led up to “Synchromism” as the crucial chapter of his book. He finds in the “abstract coalition of color, form and composition” the final phase of the cycle that painting had traveled through all the important modernists from Delacroix and Turner to Cezanne and the Cubists. He saw, in the Synchromists’ color orchestration of all tones from black to white, the means of the painter resolved to a 150 medium without hazard. An exhibition in Paris of the works of S. Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell, two Americans of Euro- pean training, and the leading exponents of Synchromism, led Wil- lard Huntington Wright to say: There were human figures distorted almost out of recognition for the compositional needs of the canvas and painted in bars of pure color; still-lifes which seemed to be afire with chromatic brilliance; fantastic fruits; life-sized male figures in pure yellow-orange; and mountains of intense reds and purples, warm greens and violets. All the pictures, how- ever, displayed decided organizational ability, and they possessed a more complete harmony of color and line than had been achieved by any of the other younger painters. . . - They desired to express, by means of color, form which would be as complete and as simple as a Michelangelo drawing, and which would give subjectively the same emotion of form that the Renaissance master gives objectively. They wished to create images of such logical structure that the imagination would experience their unrecognizable reality in the same way our eyes experience the recognizable realities of life. They strove to bring about a new and hitherto unperceived reality which would be as definite and moving as the commonplace realities of every day, in short, to find an abstract statement for life itself by the use of forms which had no definable aspects. The Synchromists’ chief technical method of obtain- ing this abstract equivalent for materiality was to make use of the inherent and absolute movement of colors toward and away from the spectator, by placing colors on forms in exact accord with the propensities of those colors to approach or recede from the eye... . With their knowledge of the fundamentals of rhythmic organization, which is well in advance of that of the other painters of today, their progress seems assured. Their postulates are too definite to permit of the introduction of literary or musical transcendentalism; and their apports are too significant to permit of any retrogression toward metaphysics or 151 drama. Their palette has become co-ordinated and rationalized. Their composition is founded on the human body in movement. And their color, in its plastic sense, takes into consideration space, light and form. These factors represent their technical assets. With these painters comes into being an art divorced from all the entanglements of photography, of piecemeal creation, of inharmonic gropings, of literature and of data hunting. A year or two later, when these artists had actually turned (for a time) to abstract composition, Morgan Russell wrote as follows about the picture here reproduced: “My first synchromies repre- sented a personal manner of visualizing by color rhythms; hence my treatment of light by multiple rainbow-like color-waves which, expanding into larger undulations, form the general composition. In my next step I was concerned with the elimination of the natural object and with the retention of color rhythms. An example of this period is the Cosmic Synchromy. ‘The principal idea in this can- vas is a spiralic plunge into space, excited and quickened by appro- priate color contrasts. . . . While there will probably always be illustrative pictures, it cannot be denied that this century may see the flowering of a new art of forms and colors alone. Personally, I believe that non-illustrative painting is the purest manner of esthetic expression, and that, provided the basic demands of great composition are adhered to, the emotional effect will be even more intense than if there was present the obstacle of representation. Color is form; and in my attainment of abstract form I use those colors which optically correspond to the spatial extension of the forms desired.” I am reproducing also—although the reader is warned how in- complete Synchromist pictures are without color—Macdonald- 152 Diawiivwea TION 5, BY S. MACDONALD-WRIGHT Wright’s Organization 5. The painter writes: “I strive to make my art bear the same relation to painting that polyphony bears to music. Illustrative music is a thing of the past; it has become ab- stract and purely esthetic, dependent for its effect upon rhythm and form. Painting, certainly need not lag behind music.” Both Macdonald-Wright and Russell have recently reverted to some sort of vague and incidental representation of natural forms. That gives weight, perhaps, to my own opinion that any formula in art creation, even when it embraces so important a step forward in scientific knowledge of materials, is likely to prove deadening to its practitioners if they follow it academically, intellectually, abso- lutely. (The same criticism applies to Jay Hambridge’s widely discussed discovery of a formula of “dynamic symmetry.”’) 153 The name Synchromy—“with color’”—leaves out as much as it embraces. It may mark a further scientific step toward one phase of the thing Cezanne was groping for instinctively. But it leaves more than mere improvisation to be accomplished. If this is to remain painting, it must have a foundation in composition, in or- ganization. What of structure that we talked so much about a while back? That is obviously where the very inventive Synchromists lacked. Perhaps it is lack of the structure—perhaps Vortex!—of natural forms (which has little to do with outward aspects) which nullifies so much of the effort toward abstract painting. Let us give the Synchromists their due, and say that they put important knowl- edge into the hands of all painters; but let us plunge ahead into the muddy waters of pure abstraction itself. WOODCUT, BY KANDINSKY IX THE SWING TOWARD ABSTRACTION ¢ - IMPRESSION—MOSCOW, BY KANDINSKY HIS painting obviously is not true to nature. It distorts and mixes up whatever objects in Moscow inspired it. The pho- tographic function of painting has here been minimized, and what- ever is of value in the picture is of some different esthetic order. The artist has, in truth, been travelling toward abstraction. Abstraction in art may best be defined negatively, as the lack of representative form. It involves absolute composition (as in music)—composition which neither imitates nor suggests objective Ee forms. Abstract painting or sculpture never provides a transcrip- tion. It is the negation of the concrete, the material, the outwardly real. We have already seen how the Synchromists moved toward the abstract in the limited field of isolated color. Building on the fu- sion of color and drawing in Cezanne, and the scientific truths of the Neo-Impressionists, they took what they considered the final step toward the purification of painting. But having arrived at a com- plete knowledge of the physical properties of color—a mode of or- chestration, qualities of projection and recession, etc.—and thus being theoretically able to create in a free and absolute way, they found something lacking, a structural element missing, and they turned back to at least a speaking acquaintanceship with nature. Through the hundred years (from Turner, Constable and Dela- croix to the Synchromists) when color was progressing toward this purification, a similar progression was to be noted in another ele- ment. Compositional form was moving gradually but surely to- ward abstraction. For convenience I am doing violence to my own terminology here, and including in “compositional form” all the factors entering into the organization of a painting aside from color: subject matter, line, composition in the rhythm and balance sense, chiaroscuro (light and shade composition). I have noted at — intervals in the last four chapters how changes in this compositional form tended progressively toward distortion, suppression and finally elimination of the representative element. Drawing had been held to an imitative function, to transcription, almost throughout the centuries-long realistic era. The objective forms of nature were arranged according to a few elementary rules 158 of composition and by an instinctive feeling for organization on the part of the artist. Giotto, Tintoretto, Rembrandt, El Greco may have widened the conception of compositional form, or struck be- yond its generally understood functions, but the naturalistic or imitative limitation still held generally down to the 19th Century. With Cezanne the representative element was first decisively modi- fied; distortion entered. With the Cubists, who are even more clearly concerned in this progression because they renounced color, we reach the stage of almost complete elimination of representative forms. The next step is abstraction. It is almost impossible to state any theory of the abstract in art without recourse to the terminology and the parallel of music. For music is a wholly non-representative art based in its physical aspect on certain widely understood phenomena. The goal of the abstract painters is an art of color as free from associative and objective interest as is this other art of sound. There is no more reason, argue the abstractionists, why painting should be dependent upon the depiction or suggestion of natural objects than there is for music to be dependent upon likeness to natural sounds. Painting must be stripped of the trivial and extraneous elements that give rise to the pleasures typical of drama, anecdote, photography, etc. Many artists have felt this truth, and the timid experiments have been myriad. But the story of abstraction in modern painting is popularly and legitimately centered in the life-work of one man: Vasily Kandinsky. He is today the world’s foremost practitioner of a visual art wholly divorced from material actuality, and the most lucid theorist of the movement. His theory, to be sure, is shaped by an extraneous religious outlook on life, for he is a the- 159 osophist. It is limited to a spiritual vision which seems to some of us to ignore certain physical facts of art creation. But he is the greatest figure of the pioneer swing toward abstraction. Kandinsky was born in Moscow, and was Russian-trained. Later he went to Munich to study, and has ever since been associated with the modernist movement in German art. From his early German days we hear echoes of his obsession with composition, with color orchestration, with memory-painting, although his work up to 1908 was marked by nothing more radical than a posteresque simplifica- tion. In 191] he and Franz Marc, with two or three others, formed the famous “Blaue Reiter” group. His art reached maturity at about that time, and he has been a world influence ever since. In 1910 there was published Kandinsky’s book On the Spiritual Element in Art (published in an English translation in 1914 as “The Art of Spiritual Harmony”). His theory of painting had already set definitely toward abstract means, although he hesitated to com- mit himself wholly. Kandinsky argues the case for his sort of abstraction as follows: Painting has become materialistic, and the great mass of contem- porary painters are merely opportunists. Art should, however, be nothing more than an expression of the spirituality in man. Ce- zanne showed the beginning of a new way. Matisse followed it but got lost in the seductiveness of color, the French love for color- decoration; Picasso was important too, but he got lost in a scholar’s search for form. Kandinsky feels that color and form are physical means and only incidental—the expression of the artist’s inner life is the thing. Not only color and form, but the third, combining element, com- 160 Pee ROVISATION, BY KANDINSKY position, “must be decided only by a corresponding vibration in the human soul.” There is so much stressing of this “vibration in the human soul” in the book, that one marks that as Kandinsky’s major source of creation. It determines certain “‘combinations of veiled and fully expressed appeals,” which presumably are impro- vised from a multiplicity of colors and forms: “The adaptability of forms, their organic but inward variations, their motion in the picture, their inclination to material or abstract, their mutual relations, either individually or as parts of a whole; further, the concord or discord of the various elements of a pic- ture, the handling of groups, the combinations of veiled and openly expressed appeals, the use of rhythmical or unrhythmical, of geo- 161 metrical or non-geometrical forms, their contiguity or separation— all these things are material for counterpoint in painting. . . . “Painting is an art, and art is not vague production, transitory and isolated, but a power which must be directed to the improve- ment and refinement of the human soul—to, in fact, the raising of ihe spiritual triangle. . . . That is beautiful which is produced by the inner need, which springs from the soul.” The implication is clear: art must be cleansed of what is material. There is no talk of an absolute esthetic quality which is the essen- tial thing sought by the artist. Kandinsky does not renounce imita- tiveness for that search. When he mentions an element of “pure artistry’ (beyond personality and style), it is only to repeat that that too must arise out of “the inner need.” Always it is the inner need that is the source of all good art. Out of it one must develop his melodic and symphonic compositions as carefully as one must order his deeds, thoughts and feelings in life—to do otherwise would be to make bad “karma.” We are painfully close to the preacher and the schoolmaster here. Such an approach to art, sincere and purified though it is, leads to the substitution of a certain amount of mystery, mysticism and mood for those hard, simple, definite qualities which most signifi- cant modern artists have sought. Thus we find that Kandinsky works largely with what may be called the “mood values” of color. “Blue is the typical Heavenly color.” It stands for rest; blue- black for grief, and violet for the echo of grief. White is a preg- nant silence, black a dead silence. “Green is the Bourgeoisie—self- satisfied, immovable, narrow.” And so on. This is a reversion to symbolism—interesting enough in itself, but not on the high-road 162 DRAWING BY HELEN TORR to creation. The artist finds, of course, a musical equivalent for each of these color values. In his paintings there is a softness that belongs essentially to mood composition. His early pictures had titles. By 1910 he had adopted a system of dividing his canvases into three groups: Im- pressions, Improvisations and Compositions. He has not adhered strictly and exclusively to this classification, but it has served to label the greater bulk of his paintings. The picture at the head of the chapter is an “Impression.” The representative element is fairly definite still, although it is obvious that the artist is more in- terested in form-composition. The next reproduction is an “Im- 163 provisation.” Representation has almost disappeared. The pic- ture opposite is a “Composition.” Representation has been com- pletely renounced. Kandinsky has written of his three methods of work: “They rep- resent three different sources of inspiration: (1) A direct impres- sion of outward nature, expressed in purely artistic form. This I call an ‘Impression.’ (2) A largely unconscious spontaneous ex- pression of inner character, the non-material nature. This I call an ‘Improvisation.’ (3) An expression of a slowly formed inner feeling, which comes to utterance only after long maturing. This I call a ‘Composition.’ In this, reason, consciousness, purpose, play an overwhelming part. But of the calculation nothing appears, only the feeling.” Two questions arise immediately when one studies the three sorts of picture together. Does the artist ever escape objective or asso- ciative interest entirely, either in his own mind or in the mind of the spectator? And are his most satisfying works those farthest re- moved from representation? Before attempting to answer, it is only just to say that everything Kandinsky does is likely to be pleas- ing in color in the decorative surface way. He minimizes in his writings the value of this sensuous effect—but it is the first thing that charms and holds the spectator who otherwise would be re- pelled by the lack of imitative or literary values in his pictures. The Impression shown is clearly representative in origin. The Improvisation No. 30, like many another in this group, exhibits somewhere imitative values. This is so true that Kandinsky him- self has called it informally “the cannon picture.” He wrote to the owner, the late Arthur Jerome Eddy: “The designation ‘Cannons’ 164 SoeMoe Ost tt ON, oBY KAN DINS KY selected by me for my own use, is not to be conceived as indicating the ‘contents’ of the picture. These contents are indeed what the spectator lives or feels while under the effect of the form and color combinations of the picture. This picture is nearly in the shape of across. . . . The presence of the cannons in the picture could probably be explained by the constant war talk that had been going on throughout the year... .” Later he writes, “The ob- server must learn to look at a picture as a graphic representation of a mood and not as a representation of objects.” Here there is clearly representative means. The painter has not evaded them, but he tries to explain them away as sub-conscious on his part, and as something which the spectator should overlook. 165 PAINTING BY "GEO R'G-) MAG But the third picture, the Composition No. 5, has in it no object that we can name. One might make a game of finding approximate representative forms there, but the eye that is not overtrained to seek imitation first will not be seduced so shallowly. The question then is, do these purely abstract pictures give rise to deeper es- thetic pleasure than the partly representative pictures? Judging only from Kandinsky’s own work, I should say that they do not. In general there is a wandering, soft, unstructural quality about them which seems to me to be a denial of something impor- tant to painting. They may be pure transcriptions of spiritual meanderings, and perhaps we shall find that such things speak to us as we grow more spiritual. But at present I feel that this does not appeal to me (outside its color charm) as anything else than a 166 vague transcription of human mood, to which I must be personally attuned at the moment of seeing the painting. If I happen to be in a veiled Maeterlinckian mood, I am charmed; on other days I have no more than a passing interest. Perhaps this is art for the esoteric mind, for the dabbler into metaphysics. But that is putting art on the plane of an intellectual exercise. It admits of no such thing as a real esthetic emotion. Until the psycho-analysts and the spiritualists dig deeper, we must discount the mystical element. What is it, then, that the abstract painter probably needs out of nature—at least until his creative powers are more developed than at present? It is in some sense structure. His present com- positions are at best spineless, at worst chaotic. They lack “form” in the structural and voluminous sense. Perhaps this element is recognizable emotionally only when associated with naturally or humanly built forms. The sense of weight, poise, organization, must perhaps have a vaguely associative origin in something mathe- matical or stable or palpable. Form thus becomes significant when it speaks of a quality of force or direction or movement. The element in music which is lacking here is movement in time. Profound musical structure lies in the melodic and contrapuntal rather than the harmonic elements. Kandinsky’s paintings may be perfect in harmony, but he has little claim to use the words “me- lodic” and “symphonic” in reference to his work. His painting is comparable rather to a chord in music. Movement added to what Kandinsky has would lead us into the field of mobile color. Everything that he claims is possible there, as Thomas Wilfred has shown us; but that is not the art of painting. 167 “ op Lacking sequential movement, it is probabie that painting must get back to structure in the Cezanne sense, or to poised movement, as it lives in his canvases. Harmonization in color is not enough. So far no one has shown us that improvisation in color and spirit- form suffices. It is probable that Kandinsky realizes the structural lack in his painting. His work since 1920 exhibits more of lines and planes placed from edge to edge of the canvas. There is more of con- centricity, angularity and suggested interpenetration, and not a little suggestion of Cubistic flatness. But it has only been a move- ment toward the less profound Cubist ideals. If there has been any significant shifting, it has been away from mere prettiness and daintiness; it has approached decorative flatness but has made no gain toward structural voluminous form—toward a deeper expressiveness. Kandinsky’s follower, Rudolf Bauer, who also works “musi- cally,’ seems to me to produce pictures curiously like what I imagine my insides (physical, not spiritual) to be. They (the pictures) would serve well as decorations for a doctor’s office. Nell Walden’s abstract designs approach pattern-making. I think our silk manufacturers have stolen freely from her, much to their enrichment. But hers are not paintings in the beyond-decoration sense. Georg Muche adds something of Redon’s delicate grada- tions to the surface of his canvas, and he seems to hint at deeper qualities. But he hints through cryptic-suggestive forms that might be swimming spheres or cyclones or harlequin suits. Like- wise in America the abstract arrangements of “rhythm and form” of Andrew Dasburg, and many of the synchromatic organizations 168 of Morgan Russell and Macdonald-Wright seem to contain veiled allusions to other worlds. They all lack structural substance. Almost any painting of any one of these artists would be an excel- lent starting point for one of Wilfred’s compositions in mobile MOVEMENT, BY MARSDEN HARTLEY color; but he would substitute movement—development—for the element they lack within their static frames Perhaps it is merely that the giant of abstract creation has not yet arrived. Perhaps someone will bring architectonics into it. At present the lover of modernist art is in the paradoxical position where he likes the painter who strictly subordinates imitation to a hidden non-representational element, but finds unsatisfying the painter who goes over to non-representation entirely, attempting to 169 ROCKS AND SEA, MAINE, BY JOH NIE eG create in abstract form. Certainly most of us appreciate Kandin- sky’s Impressions and Improvisations, and such things as his Winter page 109), more than we do the Compositions. And yet—I con- fess that I have moments of wobbling on the questicn. I find 170 : Weaver Ok—OPUS 120, 1918, BY PAUL. KLEE something coming into the abstract work of certain Americans— particularly Georgia O’Keeffe and Helen Torr—which is emotion- ally very moving. There is a place where abstract painting borders on abstract decoration. Purely sensuous values are more easily obtained than structural ones from non-representative material. From Claude Bragdon’s higher-mathematical architectural ornament to the Matisse sort of painted decorative panel, there is a wide range of achievement in modern art that is hardly equalled outside of Persian or other Oriental history. Perhaps the sensuous impression afforded by an absolute decoration is a sort of first dimension of the deeper ecstasy that is afforded by a picture indubitably rich in 171 voluminous form. At any rate I am one who would give place to the “decorative movement” in the histories of modern art, if only because the decorative ideal is a step closer to what we are after than was anything revered in the long realistic era. I add a deco- rative painting by Marsden Hartley to supply material for your further thought about this—remembering too that Hartley has a clearer understanding of the extra-dimensional quality in painting than almost any other American—excepting John Marin and Walt Kuhn. Marin has given me more pure esthetic enjoyment than anything I have ever seen of Kandinsky’s. He stops just short of abstraction. Very few painters dare go so far toward it. Cezanne did in his watercolors. In them he seems to bare his painter’s soul more easily than he did in oils. Look back to page 99, and to Marin’s painting on page 35. These things register the high-water mark reached in sheer creation by the modernist painters. There is in them more of the essential artist himself and more of the essence of painting. It is intensified expression in the subjective sense and in truth to medium. And it borders on abstraction. I have put opposite each other here the Rocks and Sea by Marin and one of Paul Klee’s whatnots (Opus 120, 1918). Marin wrote once, in connection with this painting: “These works are meant as constructed expressions of the inner senses, responding to things seen and felt. . . . In all things there exists the central power, the big force, the big movement; and to this central power all the smaller factors have relation.” Out of that attitude grows a paint- ing like this. It seems to me a safer approach to abstraction than Kandinsky’s spirit-guidance. Then, as if to prove to us how little 172 fee oeHLCKR SALE, BY, FERANZ MARC subject has to do with the problem, Klee follows with his children’s block picture and lands at almost the same place ezsthetically— though less intensely. Klee and Franz Marc gained much from close intimacy with Kandinsky, and assimilated his ideas. But both were strong enough to remain individual, and both retained a modicum of the repre- sentative element—although Marc had come very close to abstrac- tion just before his death. Klee can put the slightest thing on his canvas or paper and it comes out a palpitating picture—although the imitative and subject interest may seem to be a child’s naive scratching. Marc puts his beloved animals into his consciousness, filters them through some abstract conception and they turn out an 1a) emotional expression—but with at least a remaining reminiscence of the originals. That is about as far as the creative use of abstraction has really gone. And yet the ideal of abstraction somehow seems to underlie the whole modern art movement. LAMPSHADE ~“BYo MAN RAW 174 X Nh sel ee Wngd het OD MOBILE COLOR i? =e . i . ; ‘ ¥ ; wha j j an 5 A *. t < é . ‘ 5 , , " A -* eet On ’ b . a” Su ‘ i x 2 ; a . ‘ # = . Oar - e . é ‘ “ * e © j \ ‘ . * ’ b , . 2 5 2 NE cannot properly speak of a modernist movement in the art of mobile color. The whole art as we have it is practically a development of the last decade: all there is of it is modern. But since my interpretation of typical modernism is built largely on the hypothesis that there is an epochal shift from obsession with representation to the search for expressive qualities, there is a special appropriateness in the inclusion of a chapter about this. new and purely abstract art of light. It answers, moreover, the ~~ ultimate question which musi be asked by those modernist painters. . who are tempted to abandon the anchor in objectivity and “compose _ absolutely.”” Every one of them has found that when he gave up © the materials for structure and organization in his canvases, there was need for some other element beyond color harmonies and structureless color-form. The answer is that he then needs move: ment—movement in time. And when he has gained that, his art l:as ceased to be painting, has become mobile color. Doubtless for centuries people have dreamed of an art of colors not only combined harmoniously but flowing in melodious suc- cession. Many have guessed the possibilities of an art of broken-up light no less fruitful of beauty than music, no less abstract, no less productive of ecstasy. But there was no means of liberating this potential art of flowing color-form until electricity was fairly conquered. (Certain sentimental art-lovers will wince at the idea of anything so modern as an electric machine acting as instrument eT —the long-ago-and-far-away romanticists and classicists—but for reassurance one need only remember that the “purest” of the arts, music, is the most mathematical.) There were already experiments making certain the ultimate fulfillment of the vision, before Thomas Wilfred built his color organ, which he calls the Clavilux, here in America a few years back. But Wilfred has for the first time constructed a machine so capable and so flexible that one is able to forget completely that there is any mechanical element involved; is able to sit in an “auditorium” and see this new art of visions and dreams come true. For already one accepts a composition in mobile color as freely as music, with the mind quiescent, the emotions responsive, the world well forgotten. No one supposes, I think, that Thomas Wilfred has all at once and at the first leap become a master of composition in this new art. Color composers of the future are likely to look back and feel somewhat contemptuous of the simple things he is playing for us today. They perhaps will be seen to correspond to the simple folk tunes of primitive peoples. Orchestral works will be a later development; the elements of contrapuntal composition are as yet but vaguely conceived. But the point is that already one experiences moments of such poignant beauty, and sustained pe- riods of such intense emotional responsiveness, that one does not question, speculate or prophesy. This simply is the thing itself— disarming the mind, speaking to the spirit. Let me tell as nearly as possible what I saw when I went to Wilfred’s “trial theatre” at Huntington, Long Island. (I have heard that when an adapted Clavilux came to a New York theatre, 178 the result was not at all the same, the conditions of the “throw’’ not being right.) Imagine, please, a small company of us seated at the back of a dimly-lighted theatre. We seemed to be looking out toward a wall of darkness, an effect that was further intensified when the last bit of overhead light gradually faded out. In front something moved away, so that one became conscious not of a dark wall but of a dark space—as if one were looking into a blackened camera-box of enormous dimensions. The actual beginnings of the “composition” came when shreds of color floated in—at what distance, a few feet or miles away, one could not guess—taking form, shifting, unfolding, building up into mighty movements, dropping away to faint playings-about, but always mixed in space. In that is the first great surprise for one who has more or less foreseen mobile color: in the fact that it appears not on a sheet or wall, but plastically, as space composition in color rather than painting in color, as an interpenetrating, space art rather than an imposed two-dimensional art. In the seeing, right there all previous expectations are surpassed, as if, for instance, one who had foreseen the art of music in a mere succession of beautiful sounds had come upon it instead in the greater fulness of harmonic compositions. How long one of the color pieces takes in the playing, I do not know. But four of them seem to make up a complete enough concert program. Each of the four I saw was marked by a dis- tinctive quality of theme, and within this there was complex variety of form, movement, hues and values, accompaniment, etc. One remembers certain themes as stately, slow-moving, turning in on themselves; others as bright, quick, tender—colors at play; still 179 others, perhaps, as oversweet, sentimental, pretty. And yet through them all ran a dignity and a directness of appeal and a sense of unity that left no doubt that here was the beginning of one of the great arts of the world. One had that feeling of detachment, of ecstasy, which is a response only to the most solemn religious or esthetic experience. It is almost impossible to describe any one composition because no words have been invented to convey the ideas of color-form in movement. But in general a single color (hue) and its shape, thrown into the stage space at the start, establish the theme, and the first large movement is the beginning of a series that varies in contrast, balance, parallel and repetition. The beginning may show a bulb of color floating down into sight, constantly changing, seldom without a harmonious accompaniment of surrounding colors: it falls, turns, unfolds, folds again, fades away in two directions, gathers itself, glows into brilliancy, floats up almost into blackness, glows a moment and disappears; suddenly the faintest beginnings of two similar bulbs come from nowhere, become brilliant, repeat the turnings, foldings, fadings, disappear- ance; then the original bulb returns, composed in other hues and repeats the movement; and so on to other variations within the same composition. Sometimes the shapes are too elusive to be named. One becomes conscious of a sea of dull color, into which a solo color or groups of colors swim slowly and silently, change in hue and values, float lazily, form the most enchanting enveloping veils of light, fade, grow momentarily brilliant, disappear again on the surface of the sea. Often these shapeless movements seem on the verge of taking 180 FORMS PROJECTED IN MOBILE COLOR, poy SPO MPA S. WW LIGk RED tangible form, but always when they seem about to resolve into “fioures” they float back into vague mistiness. The purely atmospheric effects prove in general less stirring than what might be called the more structural pieces. A domi- nating form seems necessary to stir the emotions to the point where one just naturally throws off every restraint and memory, and revels in the pure joy of emotional reaction. This form may be something that looks geometrical, such as a triangular or conical tower of light, or an oval, or three circles intertwined; or it may be cloud-like, or like two huge screens constantly turning over and unfolding, or mere flashes or perhaps planets. Sometimes it is 18f FORMS PROJECTED IN MOBILE CODTOR, BY THOMAS WILFRED luminous, giving off light, and again it seems merely to reflect light—a distinction which may hold the clue to one of the problems of composition: how to keep a motive dominant and its accompani- ment subdued. I retain the definite impression of solo colors or solo figures moving throughout in the midst of an accompaniment of harmonious colors, but never lost in that accompaniment. As to the actual colors, their range surpasses anything that the lover of color could imagine just from seeing paintings and mosaics, studying color charts, or experimenting in the usual channels. Perhaps only those of us who have had to do with stage lighting, and have watched in rehearsals the accidental effects produced 182 hrORMs PROJECTED IN MOBILE COLOR, BY 27 OMAS. WILE RED through a particularly flexible switchboard and equipment, could have guessed a fraction of the miracle of which colored lights are capable. The inventor of the Clavilux has brought these effects and gradations under control in a way that makes the best stage switchboard seem crude and inexpressive by comparison. Whether he has a scientific color formula or not, I do not know, but in all the compositions he played I cannot remember the slightest sugges- tion of a color discord. I remember especially certain pale greens, apparently lit up with warmer colors underneath; a specially beautiful deep blue (for which I have often searched in vain among pigments and fabrics) ; 183 grays that have lost their dullness; stains of red that shaded from the intensest of centers to borders of orange and violet; and a virgin white become glowingly alive and interesting by contrast. But it is in the constantly changing gradations and harmonies that the marvel really lies. The number of hues must literally run into millions— or infinity. The complexity of considerations must be a challenge to any venturesome artist. There is, first, the matter of hues, or color- tints; and beyond that the matter of color’s lightness or darkness, its values (a resource without counterpart in music, I believe) ; and beyond that again the matter of intensity. Then follows the ques- tion of form, the shape or figure of the light, which is capable of as many millions more of differences. And then harmony, the juxtaposition of harmonious hues, values, intensities; and paral- leling and contrasting forms. And to make it all alive, infinitely multiplying the variations and harmonies, there is movement, add- ing color melody and orchestration. Is it any wonder that the keyboard of the Clavilux looks to the uninitiated like sixteen piano playboards banked up in a half-circle and all asking to be played at once? It is too soon to attempt to build up a particularized theory for the art of mobile color; but this much may be said at the outset: it must be, like music, an abstract art. It will have a formal beauty of its own sort, distinctive, shaped by the limitations and possi- bilities of its medium, colored lights. But it will not ever (let us hope) get mixed up with the aim of representing nature. It would then—awful thought—become a sort of super-colored movie. As in music, where only the cheapest novelties of composition try 184 definitely to imitate the sounds of nature, so in this new art there will be no effort to suggest objective reality. The color organ, like the sound organ, plays compositions that are tender and plaintive, or stirring and stately, or light and playful; for it seems almost impossible to separate any esthetic experience from such associations of “feeling,” which are, after all, to some extent recognitional. I may even add further, in fairness to those who are partisan to representative art, that of those few people who had seen the mobile color recital, and to whom I put the question, every one admitted having discovered almost recognizable objects at various points—though each one said that he supposed that he “had read them into” the forms presented. At times some of the forms seemed to me about to take the shape of gigantic human or celestial figures. Again the accompaniment to a long movement seemed like blowing curtains, constantly pulling out and away from the center of light. And once I am sure that there floated up and out of the central pool of color and away to the wings two golden-brown loaves of Mother’s Best Bread. These, however, were the let-down moments of the program. The inventor of the color organ—I might better say, perhaps, the present inventor—is Thomas Wilfred, a young Danish-Ameri- can artist who has been experimenting in the field of color for four- teen years. He has been poet, designer, theatre artist and musician. But that would hardly explain the marvels of his instrument. It happens that he counts among his assets also a genius for electrical and mechanical engineering. This new art can flower only out of an intricate electrical machine, and Wilfred has been inventive enough both to create the machine and to get beyond any suggestion 185 of its mechanics in the exhibited result. This is his third instru- ment. While necessarily it cannot be fully explained at present— patents are pending, I suppose—this much may be said freely: The colors are projected as electric-light rays controlled through a keyboard somewhat similar to that of a church organ. One set of keys controls the color as such, another controls intensity, and a third controls movement. The forms are varied by means of “me- diums,” prisms or lenses through which the lights are projected. The effect of space instead of screen is achieved through the use of a background that is a modification of the theatrical stage-dome or cupola-horizon, in place of a sheet or flat wall. I have used many musical terms and musical analogies. Thomas Wilfred is particularly insistent, however, that this new art be considered on its own merits and within the limits of its own media, and that music be left out of the question. His attitude is doubtless in part a reaction to the famous attempts of Scriabin to add a colored-light accompaniment to orchestral music, based on a supposed scientific correspondence of sound waves and light waves. Even should such an art of combined abstract sound and abstract color develop, it would be a bastard art like opera, where good music is constantly interrupted by bad (or rarely good) acting, staging, etc. Other color organs, like Rimington’s, throwing colored lights on screens, have also been based on theories of musical notation. Wilfred’s approach seems the wiser one, for it forestalls a limi- tation of mobile color through a supposed rigid “scale.” It leaves the field for invention absolutely open, subject only to the limits inherent in the nature of its medium. And yet there remains the 186 illuminating fact that Wilfred himself is a professional musician. Mobile color has special advantages over other arts. There is something reposeful beyond words in the conditions of seeing it— in absolute darkness and silence. I imagine that people who like music but are bothered by the noise of it are going to hail mobile color joyously. I found in it, too, something of that quality which is so hard to describe, which metaphysicians call the fourth dimen- sion. In the projection of this art in space I sensed a new di- mension, a new direction. It reminds me to say that with Thomas Wilfred there stands, as leader in the development of an art of mobile color, Claude Bragdon, long known as architect, writer, stage designer, and fourth-dimensional theorist—and to some of us as experimenter in color-art. His organ, designed on a prin- ciple fundamentally different from Wilfred’s, was at last reports stored away, unfinished, awaiting more auspicious days for com- pletion. In the meantime still others, including the Synchromist leader Macdonald-Wright, are turning their inventive faculties and their passion for color toward the development of other instruments. One can only guess at the future of this art, and wonder. Wil- fred looks forward to the building of other organs and the training of color-organists. He sees the time when composers will bring him scores, perhaps first submitting sketch drawings of the primary theme, with notation of possible rhythms and accompaniment. The time will doubtless come when a bank of organs will be manipu- lated by a group of players, one carrying a solo part, perhaps, and the others an orchestral accompaniment—for the present linsitations of the Clavilux arise largely from the organist’s lack of more than 187 the two hands God gave him. Other vistas open—marvels only surmised and emotional responses only vaguely and sub-consciously sensed in the past. But this much is sure: here is the beginning, or at least the first serious achievement, of an art as primitive, as complex, as capable of varied emotional beauty as music; and its medium is light—that light which was the earliest god of human- kind, which to this day typifies all that is spiritual, joy-bringing and radiant. Perhaps, then, this is the beginning of the greatest, the most spiritual and radiant art of all. MUSIC—BLACK, BLUE AND GREEN, BY GEORGIA Or REE PEE 188 "ah XI EXPRESSIONISM % MANE ——bHE SATL BOAT, BY }.O HN AiA RIN EZANNE at the end of his search for the realization said, “I am the primitive of the way I have discovered.” The translation really understates Cezanne’s contribution. We must concede him more than a primitive’s achievement. He was the first master of a new epoch. All the chapters of this book since Cezanne’s have dealt with variations of the impulse he gave, except that on mobile color. The art of mobile color, in so far as it grew out of a confused notion of the art of painting, stems from Impressionism direct. Cezanne turned away from Impressionism 191 to a search in the opposite direction. Instead of isolating color as an art, he wanted above all else to combine the new-found but frittered-away color values with solid compositional values; he sought to recapture the “organization” he had seen in certain great painters of the past. In turning to Expressionism we return to the full current of Cezanne’s influence. One cannot say immediately and without qualification that Expressionism is the “way” Cezanne “discov- ered.” Only history can finally put limits to the word—and here we are no longer dealing with history but trying to keep afloat in the flood of contemporary practice. This much may be said imme- diately, however: No other movement since Cezanne has swept across the art world as has Expressionism; and every treatise on Expressionism dates the movement from Cezanne. Neo-Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Synchromism — these were schools with particularized technical credos. They were doc- trinaire groups tied to a method. Expressionism escapes any such limitation of technique or method. It is distinguished only by a difference in approach to art. It is broad enough to include the emotionally expressive artists out of all these other groups. It is only opposed to imitational art. It is broader in another way: it already has become a by-word of literary criticism, and the Ex- pressionistic playwrights are even recognized as such here in America, and Expressionistic architecture is with us but seldom recognized. The point is that Expressionism is near to being accepted as a summary of the post-Impressionistic art movements, and not merely a phase. There is still doubt about the first use of the term, and there are 192 mie OGhA PH ~ BY «FRANZ MARC widely varying definitions of it. The word Expressionism cer- tainly gained wide currency in Germany before other countries recognized its applicability to their own insurgents. The first artist- group to which it was generally applied was that which published the Blaue Reiter at Munich. Hermann Bahr, who wrote a book called Expressionismus, published in 1920, in his definition stressed expression of the artist’s subjective emotion above every- thing else. He struck to the heart of the modern conception of painting and sculpture by denying the importance of objective as against subjective values. He also saw the word “Expressionism” as a good foil to the word “Impressionism,” which had gone into history as the name of the last phase of realism. No other word seems so apt as Expressionism, if one’s purpose is to emphasize the 193 shift from impressionistic surface values to emotional values, from imitation to expression. Bahr defines the Expressionistic painter as one “who must paint, who cannot paint in any other way than he does paint, and who is prepared to hang for his way of painting.” Subjective indeed! The Munich group leaned heavily toward abstraction. Kan- dinsky was already a leader, Franz Marc’s Cubistic reflection was dropping away into abstract pattern, and minor men perceived a new non-representational goal. Expression with this group became soul-expression. There was much talk of absolute “experience” on the part of the artist, of the painter “painting out of himself,” of soul-substance. Fritz Burger, in his Finfuhrung in die Moderne Kunst, wrote that the Expressionistic work of art “does not want to be any longer the object of an zsthetically educated caste, but the embodiment of that incommensurable world which comprises our Inner Self. It will not deliver from the World but bring about for us the possession of the World’s Inner Greatness, the wonderful wealth of variety in form of the Creative Power itself, which is the salvation and the ruin of us all.”” Burger seems to have defined Expressionism to accord with Kandinsky’s practice. A third definition, or group of definitions, at the other extreme, has to do with the expression of the inner truth rather than the surface aspects of the object seen by the artist. If we are to keep an anchor in objectivity, or frankly accept subject-matter as neces- sary albeit of secondary importance, there may be in the object a deeper reality, a structural truth, an essential character, a uni- versal rhythm, which it is the artist’s business to divine and to convey. (Remember Marc and the tiger.) That may fairly be 194 called Expressionism too, in that it shifts emphasis from the sur- face to a deeper expressiveness in the object. The only malicious definition of Expressionism that has gained any currency is that of Dr. Oskar Pfister, whose book called Expressionism in Art has recently appeared in an English trans- lation. The author is a psycho-analyst and apparently has no par- ticular interest in or background of knowledge of the arts. He frankly disclaims any but a biological and psychological intent. But he does not hesitate to tell the world what Expressionism is, eesthetically as well as scientifically. His definition is this: “The Ego, that is, the subjectivity and its varying states, engrosses the interest so much that the external object may not dispute its suprem- acy and either disappears or becomes unrecognizable. In what follows I understand as graphic Expressionism subjective presen- tation accompanied by total or almost total distortion of nature to the point of unrecognizability, or by suppression of all external reality.” Later he speaks of “the psychical discharge into the work of art” as the “essential characteristic” of Expressionism; and again he says of the Expressionist painter, “all his pictures contain the fulfillment of secret desires, which are wholly hidden even from himself.” The trouble with Dr. Pfister’s evaluation is that he narrows his field of observation to the obviously neurotic distress-ridden painters, finds their whole source of discordant creation in the reservoir of the subconscious, and overlooks form-values entirely. He treats what others consider a non-representative movement in art as if it were a search for a new sort of representation, with the objective source in subconscious memory and desire rather 195 than in outward nature. He allows nothing for an absolute esthetic value—for that thing which some of us believe is the conditioning factor of all truly modern art. He conceives art only as some sort of idea-transference. (Readers will find in his book an interesting series of analyses, and much material about solipsism and autism in art, and their relation to automatic cryptolaly and religious glossalaly. But these are hardly subjects for a Primer.) I think that any definition of Expressionism, as the word is used in Europe and America today, would have to be broad enough to include all the developments upon which these earlier definitions were based. Personally I find myself using the term as a sum- mary of the phases in which the emphasis is on any sort of expres- siveness as against imitativeness—and I feel that that is the place it will find in history. | In short, I consider Expressionism to be that movement in art which transfers the emphasis from technical display and imitated surface aspects of nature to creative form; from descriptive and representative truth to intensified emotional expressiveness; from objective to subjective and abstract formal qualities. The greater expressiveness of this modern art may and usually does arise from three sorts of intensification: of the essential or structural quality or “rhythm” of the object as against its outward aspects; of the artist’s subjective emotion, of the “image” emotionally conceived out of his passion for absolute (though probably unobtainable) esthetic form; and of the essential characteristics of his materials. The significant form which is most easily identified as the chief goal of the Expressionists, and which links them with certain periods and artists out of the past, is doubtless achieved ordinarily 196 out of the virtues of all three elements, the expressiveness of structural truth in nature, the artists’ emotions, and the expressive- ness of materials; but it is the second, subjective emotional expres- sion, which is at the heart of the matter. This definition is purposely broad enough to include those artists who attempt abstract creation or are wholly contemptuous of “the trivial laws of nature,” and those who merely say that it makes no difference how close to natural aspects you come or how far you distort if emotional intensification is your dominating concern; it allows for the new outlook on nature, the artist’s divining and recording something there that isn’t obviously on the surface, and for absolute self-realization; it further grants that there is a special sort of expressiveness in intensification of the particular virtues of each material. The Expressionist, in general, is visualized as saying to himself: “The artist must forget all the nonsense about imitating or representing nature; he must apprehend a sort of essential reality in whatever he is dealing with, and express in eesthetic form the emotion he has felt. He must cut through so much of nature as may stand in the way of intensification and liberation of his emotion.” I have overemphasized, perhaps, the element of subject, but I wanted to guard against the common presumption that in opposing realism and denying surface nature, Expressionism gets away from the essentially real. It is the desire to go deeper within life that has led the Expressionists to deny the validity of surface observation. If Expressionism is to be defined so broadly—and we need some term to label collectively the emotional-formal tendencies of post- Impressionistic art—it will be serviceable to glance back and see 197 STILL LIFE, BY HENRI MASI So which developments of the last thirty years come within the defini- tion. The only really important exclusion is Gauguin and his fol- lowers in the decorative school. Sensuous expressiveness does, perhaps, link them closer to the Expressionists than to the realists —hbut decoration is what they are after and a decorative name should be theirs. It may be recorded that a great many modern painters feel that the essential art of painting goes deeper than that: to achieve purely decorative results is to miss the extra dimension that counts most. Two other exclusions must be noted: the Futurists, because they were at heart illustrators, merely prac- 198 ticing a new sort of representation; and the Gleizes-Metzinger wing of the Cubists, who went back to an insistence upon two-dimen- sional art. The banner of the Expressionists might easily spread over Ce- zanne, van Gogh (rather by virtue of his utter devotion to paint as such than for subjective expression), the Cubists who searched as Picasso and Braque did for a deeper structural expressiveness, the Vorticists seeking “the hot impressions of life mated with Abstraction,’ 9 and the entire Matisse-Picasso development with its emotional art stripped of trivialities and inessentials—together with the vigorous German, Russian and American off-shoots of this French school, and even a pale Cezannish reflection in England. But it was Germany where the name was adopted and where the Expressionistic current runs strongest today, and it is there that we may well take up the story-thread of this chapter. Munich had been the home of secession and counter-secession during the early years of the new century. When Franz Marc, Vasily Kandinsky and others formed what was later to be called the first Expression- istic group—the Blauen Reiters—it might have been possible to trace back their origins to two sources: Paris and the French “fauves,’ and the “young Germany” movement which had already stirred German art and letters without any very definite esthetic- radical aims. The Norwegian Edward Munch had come nearer than anyone else to crystallizing revolutionary thought in German painting—and there are doubtless roots out to Nietzsche, Russian Realism, Strindberg, etc. But the Munich development is the first important instance of a typical Expressionistic group coming into world prominence with that name tagged to them. Of Kandinsky I have said enough. His most important fellow- painter was Franz Marc, a versatile and vigorous artist too little recognized outside Germany. He had something of Cezanne’s color-form quality in his work throughout his mature years, and it is easy to trace the influence also of Cubism, Futurism and Kan- dinsky’s sort of abstraction. His paintings, drawings and wood- cuts dealt very largely with animals, but toward the end these were all but lost in the abstract “organization” of his canvases. The Thierschicksale (page 173) is one of the most famous examples. Since Marc has been labeled as an “animal painter,” it will be illuminating for the reader to call to mind those artists of another era, Rosa Bonheur and Landseer. A comparison should indicate again how far subject-matter has latterly been sacrificed to some inner necessity of the picture’s formal composition. At times, however, Marc fell prey to a Futuristic sort of illustrative art. The illustration a few pages back is one’of a remarkable series of near-abstract drawings with incidental animal motives. Among the others in the Blauen Reiters growp were the Russian Jawlensky, whose raw and vigorous portraits more than suggested primitive sources, and the American Albert Bloch, whose figure paintings seem in black-and-white reproduction to have a dream- like vagueness, although in the color they are usually brilliant and even, to unaccustomed eyes, insistent. Bloch has been through several “periods,” ‘but always he has been free from academic slavery to accidentals, and no American has been more thoroughly individual and independent. Few artists in this country—he has been back on this side for several years—have “distorted” so freely—or with so much sheer esthetic compensation. 200 A man of prime importance who was closely associated with the Munich group, if not of it, is Paul Klee. His work usually looks like primitiveness of the “child-art’ sort—paintings and drawings which might seem at first juvenile scratchings, but which never fail to have esthetic validity. He is counted one of the chief PROPHET, —bpY EMIL NOLDE figures in German Expressionism today, even though he seldom does anything more “important” looking than the three water- colors scattered through this book. Klee and Kandinsky are both associated at present with the group that has developed in Weimar what is at present the most interesting school and experimental laboratory of the arts existent anywhere. Oskar Kokoschka is the most significant figure in mid-European art today, ranking in importance with Picasso and Matisse. His 201 work is so typical of modernism that I find that I have used: three reproductions of his paintings as chapter headings and at other key points (pages 3, 29 and 88). He, more clearly than any other, has built solidly on what Cezanne “discovered.” But he has also gone beyond Cezanne if anyone has: he has accomplished authoritatively the broad, sweeping, structural, organizational thing which is the special object of search of the typically German Expressionists. He is not German by birth or early training; but his work and his maturer life have been in the full current of German radicalism. He is recognized there as perhaps the most essentially modern master, and he exerts—through his works—a wide influence. There are few things in this book which will so well repay study as his: for intensity, for directness, for rugged form. When the current of the Munich development flowed into those others out of Berlin’s “New Secession” group and the Dresden “Briicke” group which had iong before broken new ground, there came into existence the full stream of German Expressionism. And where the South-German development had been spotty and individualistic and sometimes markedly derivative, this larger movement had a distinctive cachet. The paintings of Kokoschka, Jawlensky, Cesar Klein, Karl Hofer, Max Pechstein, Emil Nolde, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Otto Mueller, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Kaus, Heinrich Nauen, W. R. Huth, have an inten- sity, a look of “wading through nature,” a ruthlessness in the search for form, which is wholly unparalleled elsewhere except in scat- tered individuals. If the academicians have been successively horrified by Cezanne, Matisse, the Cubists and the Futurists, they 202 EeNDSCAPE, BY ERICH HECK EL still will find room for new shocks when they visit the up-to-date German galleries. And the German official galleries, unlike those of the rest of the world, do buy freely of radical contemporary works. Perhaps the semi-Socialistic government has something to do with it; more likely it is an indication of the thoroughness of the Expressionistic conflagration in Central Europe. It was the Director of one of Germany’s greatest galleries who said to me last year that there was no longer any such thing as a conservative young painter in Germany: the country as a whole is committed 203 to Expressionism. It is difficult for an American, Englishman or Frenchman to realize how far the “Junge Kunst’? movement has gone; and it is an experience to go into the museums that corre- spond to the Metropolitan Museum, the Luxembourg and the Lon- don National Gallery, and there find not only Cezanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Kandinsky, Marc and Kokoschka, but the really wild things of Pechstein, Schmidt-Rottluff and Nolde. The National Gallery at Berlin, the great Dresden Gallery and the New State Gallery at Munich, all have their generous rooms of modernist work. Matisse probably created the greatest of all French sensations for daring directness in painting. He seemed to have stripped art of every shred of crnament, triviality or extraneous meaning. But his work seems tame in true “Junge Kunst” company. Incidentally one may add that no other of the Fauwves has had such influence upon the young German painters. But they set out for a fuller sort of intensification. As progress in modern music seems to conservative ears merely the discovery of more and more jarring discords, so the conservative eye is likely to see in these paintings only a step further in daring color combinations. But the saving point is that the painters know what they are after and why they are throwing away imitativeness and polish. With true German thoroughness the savants have written book after book on “The Form Problem in Art.” And painter after painter throws himself headlong into the search. The “treat ’em rough” aspect of so much contemporary German art, so disturbing to the newcomer’s eyes, is simply an indication that young Germany has caught a glimmer of some absolute quality named form, and has gone after it. We 204 WO MOASN © Wil THe CUAL Boo MARS PrOoOH' SE TN may be sure that not a great many will find it—or record it so that it speaks even to receptive minds; but with a Kokoschka the result is always authoritative, and Heckel, Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluff, Nauen and Pechstein have seemed to some of us to mark a new gain in organizational strength, to hive pushed farther along the road travelled by les Fauves. In any case, let no one fool himself into thinking that the whole effort is merely wild or that it marks retrogression. So much of feverish energy expended is bound to result in achievement. And if the men mentioned seem wild—if Cesar Klein is a Cezanne-follower who has thrown discretion and refinement to the winds, and if Pech- stein sometimes seems a crude Matisse, and Schmidt-Rottluff seems committed to the crudities of negro art, at least Hans Purrmann carries on the Matisse tradition with more grace than anyone I can 205 think of out of the rest of Europe, Josef Eberz tempers German ruthlessness with a certain technical restraint, and Lionel Feininger (originally American) is more interesting than any other Cubist except Picasso and Braque. The quality most characteristic of German Expressionism is, perhaps, intensity. The groundwork of the revolution here was, as in France, a shift from surface aspects to constructive and emo- tional qualities; to a feeling for structure, stronger and moving color, and, of course, independence of nature. But the reaction to “cultured” painting, to refinement and technical display, to “society” art, was even more complete. Everything was sacrificed to recording the emotion while it was hot. Colors piled up without regard to nature or timid ideas of harmony, unessentials were for- gotten, distortion came to be second‘ nature, the painter rode rough- shod out for structural feeling, compactness, intensity of emotion. And structural strength, profound organizational movement, is Germany’s contribution to the continuing search. Erich Heckel has the quality characteristically, and I am showing one of. his typical landscapes here. Even so I find that I have left out mention of the real extremists. Most notably they are Marc Chagall and Heinrich Campendonk. One cannot deny the validity of their canvases and woodcuts when considered without regard to subject. But there rises here the question where distortion for esthetic purpose ends and mere per- verseness begins. In Chagall’s work particularly, the objective abnormality obtrudes constantly: it is not merely that planes are rearranged, color arbitrary, or essentials built up at the expense of inessentials; heads are placed at the far corner from the bodies 206 they once presumably rode upon, figures walk upside down or float across the sky, women have cow-heads, etc., etc. There is, too, an excess of bottles, vomitings, and general physical sug- gestiveness. In Georg Grosz this is often carried over into not only sexual suggestiveness but illustration of sex vice of every sort, picturing a world of prostitutes, avaricious and bestial men, and general tenderloin surroundings. This sort of thing may serve as a castigating force for the social organization that warps life, but it has lost all claim to being art—simply because the emphasis is on the objective and meaningful. It is a good time to repeat, perhaps, that for every truly important modernist artist there are a host of charlatans, shockers and incompetents. The whole move- ment, too, is mixed up with the backwash of war violence, unre- straint and, at points, insanity. We touch here again on Dada and Dr. Pfister’s neurotic-subconscious, psychic-discharge Expression- ism. But if there seems to be an overplus of shock for shock’s sake, of horrors, profanity, sex perversion and supernaturalism in this current, we may look back to many a sane and clean Expres- sionist and know that the stream will come clear at last. When I turn from German Expressionism to French, I know that I am getting back to something comparatively safe and sane, into an atmosphere less feverish and more charged with background and certainty. But I must add that I miss a little the quality of vigor and a certain intensity which are among the finest characteristics of contemporary German endeavor. “Expressionism” must, indeed, be a broad term to cover the bulk of the radicals in Paris. For just now individualism (within limits) is the order of the day. Some critics feel that the lack of 207 GIRL CARRYING WATER; BY JOSEPH BERNARD significant movements or new figures since the war argues a case of arrested development, -others feel that this is the lull before a new storm, and at least one argues that painting is “done.” But an art does not die so quickly, and Paris will not so easily give way as center of art-progress. In actual esthetic achievement, the output of that one city can hardly be challenged for supremacy. It is true that Matisse these many years has made little new progress. Some of us even prefer—in most moods—the daring and starkly simple things of fifteen and twenty years ago to the softer, fuller Matisse product of today. But he is doing finely expressive work and must be counted in any roll-call of modern masters. Picasso, picturesque leaper from peak to peak of the modernistic range, has started school after school of radical experi- ment and search, the most notable being Cubism; but latterly he has been off on a vague hunt for some meeting-place of the classi- cists and the form-seekers. He wields an extraordinary world influence; but he seems to be fumbling a little about the shooting of his next bolt. His recent severe, rounded figure-studies have the appearance of seeking primarily sculptural values in painting; and his latest Cubistic experiments, fine as they are, add nothing to what he was accomplishing in that direction several years ago. But it is just as likely that he will stage a spectacular leap in the least expected direction at the least expected moment. In solid achievement, through all his periods, he remains probably the most significant painter living. (I have just seen John Quinn’s remark- able collection of his work, a pageant of living beauty without parallel in any other group of modern canvases I can recall.) Cubism drags on as a doctrinaire affair in Paris, but the wise 209 ones seem to be those who got out with an equipment of a new vision and an enriched technique. . Of the original Fawves—the “wild ones” of the early years of the century—the most important, aside from Picasso and Matisse, have turned out to be André Derain, Georges Braque, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Othon Friesz. Friesz has come closer than any other Frenchman to achieving that sort of intensity and structural strength that is so marked across the Rhine. He piles up his materials, he has vigor, he builds joy- ously and carelessly. And, as in the Germans, there is beyond the apparent carelessness of surface a sound structure and amazing compactness. Here is a man who adds to what he learned out of Cezanne and Matisse. Not quite so much can.be said of Vlaminck’s suave canvases. Strength is just what he lacks. _He makes Cezannism appealing— but seldom gets any farther. André Derain by contrast has kept full within the current of post-Cezanne modernism. He has been Cezannesque, Fauvish, Cubistic, and classical-Expressionistic. If he has never startled, being a follower, he at least has kept to the front with Matisse and Picasso. And he emerges today as one of the most influential men in French art. He assuredly ranks next to Picasso in world impor- tance. Perhaps the way in which he has incorporated each new discovery of his group into the essential French “good painting” has something to do with his popularity. There is a suspicion about that the essentially French radicalism is content to sit only part way on the left; certainly the Spaniard Picasso, the Italian Futurists, the American Synchromists, the Russian Ballet and German Expressionism, have borne in a great 210 POM NS HARVEST; BY OPHON FRIESZ deal of the extremer radicalism. One wonders whether, let alone, France might not prefer Marquet and Bonnard and Marie Lauren- cin—moderate modernists all. The French spirit perhaps could be best traced through Renoir, Bonnard, Vuillard, Marquet, Lauren- cin. There is a softer, prettier, more sensuous emotion about these—not the stark, uncompromising sensibility that animates alike the Cubists, the Vorticists, the German and Russian Expres- sionists. But these painters are, someone opines, the weak sisters of the revolution. Hardly that—but not ruthlessly radical either. Their 211 ITALIAN WOMAN, BY ANDRE DERAIN daring is tempered with an inherited grace. Which raises the subtle question how far a noble tradition may become a handicap in times of change. How far will France, having the only living national tradition in painting which is worth having, stand by, renounce or modify that tradition in conflict with the forces of 212 modernism? Or will there be enough Derains to follow, consoli- date the progress, make it sane? Marie Laurencin retains much that is typically, wholesomely, gracefully French. She has given way to modernist pressure to the extent of abandoning truth of aspect. But here is no urgent carrying on of Cezanne’s search or of later experiment. An occa- sional portrait may go back to a simplicity that is Matisse’s, a bit of a still life may catch something of abstract form—but in general the emotional expressiveness is not very deep. Marie Laurencin’s virtues are rather in an adorable femininity. She gives us of her- self—her lovely French self. The innumerable graceful girls of her pictures, the decorative arrangements, the cooling colors, these are—like Gauguin’s paintings—of an order for which we are grate- ful (and when have we not been grateful for French painting?), but they have lured us from the highroad of the moderns. In sculp- ture there is the similar graceful radicalism of Joseph Barnard— attractive but hardly profound. Dufy, Lhote, Renault, Segonzac, Marchand, de la Fresnaye, these are painters nearer in the full current—and yet not one a master in the sense that Matisse was one and Kokoschka is one. Beyond them I find in my jottings and notes about France a bewil- dering array of competent, able and progressive men, who would bulk as local leaders anywhere except in Paris. Some of them are immature, some are following Cezanne or Picasso but without genius, some doubtless are experimenting in fields that will be fruit- ful later. There is the saving point: you cannot bring together so many competent, thoroughly trained, sensitive artists and not reap a harvest of creative work every so often. 213 CIRCUS, BY MARIE LAURER CUS The more I consider the matter, the more I think there is a per- ceptible lull in French art. But out of the hosts who gather in Paris, if a new Matisse does not come, a new foreign-born Picasso will arise. In addition to her own, France harbors hundreds of the most talented from elsewhere. Painters as important as the. Polish Kisling and the Japanese Foujita and the Russian Larionoff are there. Someone has suggested that the next cycle may start when 214 the brilliant Paris hosts begin to understand what it is that German Expressionism has captured in its ten years of isolation—by way of compact structural movement and intensity of emotion. Or per- haps America, knowing something of intensity, will make its contribution. BY BORIS GRIGORIEFF a % XII THE GEOGRAPHY AND ANATOMY OF MODERN ART q a fewer hORGE, BY GEORGIA O’KEEFFE ATIONALISM is going out; but there will always be a geography of art. And a smattering of the geography of modern art is, I suppose, more or less necessary to a comprehension of the subject as a whole. There used to be great national schools, where racial characteristics were powerful in shaping the forms of expressiveness. But as nationalism becomes diluted, art tends to become cosmopolitan. The one great center of the graphic arts in recent generations, France, has become a center geographically rather than racially. There is, of course, a French tradition, a French spirit in paint- ing and sculpture. But stronger than that has been the tradition that Paris is the hub of the art world, that America and England and Scandinavia and Russia and Germany and the Mediterranean 219 countries must send their students there to learn “good painting.” Perhaps that same “good painting” which was the French tradition has become the world tradition—is France’s gift to the world- artist. But the racial element inevitably is pretty well watered out by now. Like the old New-England Americanism, it has been mixed, fused, almost lost as an entity. Paris is still geographically the center, but a Paris wherein Russians, Spaniards, even Americans sit in the high councils of (unofficial) art. How far the greatly increased facilitation of travel, and the rapid exchange of ideas through almost instantaneous news service and the phenomenal growth of magazine and book production, will tend to break down national barriers permanently cannot be prophesied. No one can be sure whether we shall have again the sort of overconcentration of art activities illustrated in the Paris of the 19th Century. Munich was beginning to attract considerable numbers of Russian and American students even before the war; and the time is fast passing when any American, if he really has the stuff in him, needs to go for training farther than New York. He might even better turn his face Westward. But what I am get- ting at is that the spread of what we today call modernistic art has been wider and swifter than any similar development in art history. Provincialism and insularity are less excusable than ever before, old frontiers are disappearing, we are all becoming world- minded. ; Geographically, America is for the first time on the creative art map. If we were there a quarter-century ago it was largely as a French province, 100-per-cent loyal. Today we take freely from Paris, but also from Russia and Germany. Drawing new strength 220 from our own rediscovered West, we are beginning to give to the world as well as take. What complexion any discernible racial strain in our art shows or will show, is a question absolutely defying analysis. We are typical of the new de-concentration. To learn geography properly, one must tour. In these pages we have already covered France and Germany pretty thoroughly, although the name-posts were not always out. We need only sum- marize developments there—then off to the rest of Europe and America to examine currents of achievement and influence more particularly. Italy we may mark off as having contributed little more than the furore over the clever Futurists. Through Russia, Holland, England, America, our route lies—after Paris, Munich, Dresden, Berlin. Paris was the home of the first revolution. No one would expect it to develop anywhere else, because the major portion of the world’s proficient painters were probably working there at the time. It takes a flourishing settled-down art to beget a vigorous revolu- tion. At any rate Cezanne was French. Paris might also be marked as a sort of false birth-place of modernist architecture. The “art nouveau” was born—but fortunately died young. But real modern architecture is more German than French, perhaps more Dutch than German, more American than either. Musical progress, too, has been spotty; the modern theatre belongs largely to central and northern Europe; and who shall say what was the origin of modern verse? It is in the visual arts that Paris domi- nates the rebellion. After Cezanne, the Cubists are largely a local group. The fawves, geographically centered at Paris, are a mixed company, and the gospel begins to spread. After Matisse a few 221 individuals are world figures, but the “movement” no longer revolves entirely about Paris. In the chapter on Expressionism I noted the individualistic aims of the several leaders in France today—the post-Fauve period. There is undeniably a lull in creative activity, a lack of unity of effort, a slowing up—age rather than youth at the front. France is perhaps paying the price of her early world-leadership. Gaining leadership, and with it satisfaction and self-sufficiency, Paris has been suffering from an in-growing tendency—and consequent isolation. The world’s capital has itself become provincial. New blood is needed. There is even a whisper that French modernist artists should go to school a little to German art. One can imagine the horror and contempt with which such a suggestion would be met in a Parisian atelier. But contempt, par- ticularly when colored with an old political animosity, hardly puts forward the uses of open-mindedness—and open-mindedness is part and parcel of true modernism. It is only open-minded to grant that what goes to make up German Expressionism is at the moment the most vigorous art development anywhere in the world, having its roots in music, in the theatre, in literature, as well as in painting and sculpture. I confess that it is difficult for me to reconcile with the recent creative progress in these arts, certain things in German life and customs: a general coarse- ness of character among the bourgeoisie, the way the German women wear their clothes, the stolid seriousness of earlier national art. It is true, too, that they seldom breed an individual leader and prophet of their own; but they recognize and absorb world geniuses more readily than any other nation. If it was not Cezanne or Matisse who did the groundwork for “Expressionismus” in paint- 222 Pi Wike LORMS, BY CHARLES SHEELER ing, it was the Norwegian Edward Munch or the Swiss Hodler. If it is sad to see Gordon Craig, chief revolutionary figure in the modern theatre, an exile from his native England and almost wholly without influence there, it is not difficult to see that his ideas have revolutionized the German theatres. The American Frank Lloyd Wright is quite without noticeable honor at home, but the Germans have books about him, acknowledge him as a modern master, and build after his fashion. The new generation in Germany is reaping the benefit of this receptiveness in the old. They are making the 2123 PORTRAIT, BY BORIS GRIGOR 2a derived traditions their own in a new synthesis, a living achieve- ment. Perhaps German thoroughness—at other times called ruth- lessness—is pushing it through to achievement. At any rate, there it is: painting which collectively has more of living quality, of unity of purpose, possibly more of a beyond-Cezanne organizational strength within the picture, than any other can show; the beginnings of an architecture that is of today, honest in construction, true to materials, expressive; and a theatre which is the most interestingly alive and forward-moving (and I suppose the most enjoyable 224 theatrically for those who understand the language) of all in the contemporary world. Russian art under the Soviets is reported to be the most modern- istic in Christendom—sometimes enthusiastically reported, more often horrifiedly. We may well believe that the country is almost as thoroughly committed to Expressionism as is Germany. It would only be natural, considering Russia’s art history and origins. Russia has, indeed, greatly influenced Germany toward radicalism. And today important Russian artists are scattered over Europe and America, to the enrichment of internationalism and _ local galleries. Among the leaders in Germany are the Russians Kandin- sky, Jawlensky and Chagall. Archipenko is also there, I believe, although he was for long considered a leader among the radical sculptors in Paris. France has long claimed Larionoff, Goncharova and Soudekin, of theatre fame as well as painters, and the impor- tant Grigorieff, of whose virile but polished Expressionism I am reproducing an example opposite. And here in America we have all the shades of Russian radicalism, from the slightly-so Anisfeld and Roerich to the intensely-so Burliuk. It is only fair to suppose that the younger generation within the Russian borders has developed equally important men who as yet are little-known out- side the Soviet dominion. Holland, original home of Vincent van Gogh, has since developed no individual figure of his stature. But no other country is more pervadingly modern in the thought and practice of its artists. This is especially true in architecture, where the pioneer Berlage trained up a new generation of original builder-artists who escape entirely the imitative “styles” to which ninety-nine per cent of the Western 225 PORTRAIT, BY- KEES VAN] DGONGEw world’s architects are slaves. The painters Kees van Dongen and Jan Sluyters are best known beyond the Dutch borders: van Dongen for a talent that is anything but realistic, with a catchy and light sort of modernness that has made him a vogue in Paris; Sluyters with a less personal but more firmly emotional and structural quality. One cannot fairly leave the Dutchmen without mentioning Jan Toorop, who pioneered in an imaginative but less essentially Expressionistic direction, and Jacoba van Heemskerck, whose 226 strange near-abstractions parallel pictorially some of the two- dimensional layout-panels of the later Cubists. Speaking of catchy things and two-dimensional things, one harks back inevitably to the Viennese-Munich decorative school of art— that development which came between “l’art nouveau’ and true modernism, escaping the vulgarity of the one and missing the spirit of the other. Vienna has her painters in the best tradition of expressiveness—notably a group of Kokoschka-influenced men, and Egon Schiele and Wiegele and Kolig. But to many of us the typical art of Vienna is the objective art of utter grace and exquisite sophistication. Style is deified, connoisseurship honored, an ultra- refined feminine sort of decorative beauty becomes the only objec- tive. “Stylization” tells the story: style for its own sake. We love these things the Viennese make for the gratification of our senses: the luscious decorative paintings of Klimt, the insinuating decora- tive architecture of Hoffmann and Witzmann, the smart decorative jewelry and vases and small sculptures and lettering of Dagobert Peche and Richard Teschner. And when we see the furniture and handicraft, with its generally simple, elegantly simple lines, but with a bit of seductive ornament placed with absolute rightness, we wish that all our stodgy craftsmen could go to school to the Austrian Werkbund for a while, that Joseph Urban would spread his New York branch of the Vienna Werkstaette until all America can feel the decorative influence—as all of Germany so richly has. In its ornamental way, this Viennese movement has been one of the most complete and most wholesome triumphs in the short annals of mod- erm art. This group found astyle. The catch is that in the absolute arts—not craft-arts—style and ornament are the last things that the 227 modernists want. Vienna can decorate a given surface—canvas, gold, textile or built wall—more charmingly than any other city in the world. But modern art, of the serious sort, must go below the surface or die. SILVER MATCH BO BY .DA.GOBE Re PECs England. The England where once Turner pointed a new way for world art. But now an England strangely cold to change. Somehow the word Expressionism simply will not come in connec- tion with any British activity. The form-arts have never prospered here. The English have had no genius in music, and little creative music for centuries; they have hardly had a first-rate talent in sculpture up to the present decade. Their architecture, except for the homelike cottage, is in general coldly correct and imitative. They have scored beyond all others recently in intellectual drama, but their theatre is least touched of any in Europe by the wave of 228 Expressionism. And aside from the theorizing of the Vorticists and the paintings of Wyndham Lewis, the modernism of English painters is an echo of nearby Parisian developments. The Ameri- can progressive always marvels, I think, at the vagueness of that echo when he considers the fewness of the hours that measure the distance between London and Paris. Emotional intensification is at the very heart of Expressionism, and emotional sensibility is not an English trait. (England has remained national, I think, more than any other important Western country.) English painting has ever tended toward illustration and away from problems of form. It is little wonder then, that aside from Lewis, one hears no large modernistic noise out of Britain; echoes from the French salons constitute the bulk of the undertone. Roger Fry practises an attractive sort of intellectual Cezannism, Harold Gilman was a sort of English van Gogh, with honest vision and solid color, and C. W. R. Nevinson has absorbed successively Futuristic, Cubistic and other techniques but never got far below any surface—although one “likes” his canvases. Clive Bell opines that Duncan Grant is the one English world-figure in painting since Constable, and the only one worthy to stand with the world’s fore- most modernists. His honestly British form-seeking landscapes and still-lifes hardly deserve to rank so high—but I hasten to repair the average by saying that men like Paul Nash and Mark Gertler and Edward Wadsworth give us hope that, after all, structure and form are finding their way into British painting. For these are painters who are doing work only a little short of great accomplish- ment. One must add the names of Vanessa Bell and J. D. Ferguson as significant also. But the greatest artist living in England today 229 is, I hazard, the American-Jewish sculptor Jacob Epstein—of whom, and the native Eric Gill, I shall have much to say in a later chapter. Of course the greatest living Englishman in the field of the arts, by circumstance more prophet than practitioner, is Gordon Craig of Italy—whom we shall meet again in still another chapter. America, English-derived, English puritanical, English provincial in so many matters, offers a curious contrast to England in most of the fields of art. Not that America has been wildly radical in face of English coldness, or generally art-loving. Far from it! We have had a long, hard struggle against Puritan and Anglo-Saxon tradition, and our artists have always been half-starved. But in such radicalism as we have with us, the quality is anything but British. Nor is it any longer quite 100-per-cent French. There is even a discernible native note in it. Our most indisputable advance has been in architecture, an art still academic and dead in both England and France. We have long had sculpture near to our hearts, and if we have there somewhat echoed Paris, the sound still has reverberated with a native fullness. We have never had a play- wright to compare with the English intellectual product, but our young theatre, unlike the British, is fairly alive with Expressionistic desires and experiment. About these three arts of sculpture, archi- tecture and the theatre I shall have more to say in coming chapters. It is the quality of American painting that I would explore here. The background is in general the weak Impressionism and the tired academicism of 57th Street, together with a very live virile native Impressionism, boasting a group of show painters with a virtuosity unequalled except in France along the entire belated- Impressionist cycle. The quality of the modernism which for 230 Cre Uo ae oii) Wea LU ON fifteen years or so has struggled toward recognition before this background, has been based, I think, on an early realization, on the part of perhaps a dozen painters, that the realistic-descriptive era in painting was over and that the form-quality in Cezanne and Matisse held the key to the future. I am putting the statement thus, because I think it was recognition of an accomplished break, and not individual vision, that pointed the way for most of the new men on this side of the Atlantic. The ground must have been fertile, however, and creative sensibility richly there, or we should not have 231 had such fine individual achievements as Marin’s, O’Keeffe’s, Kuhn’s, Hartley’s. If the group as a whole has failed to register in a great way, it has been because the search for formal qualities was too implicitly accepted as part of the new faith, too doctrinairely adhered to, not come at out of individual emotion. The anchor in objectivity was too often chosen to serve a set purpose, thus leaving out the life quality, failing to enrich the finished product with emotional over- tones. But it was something that so long ago so many American painters drew away from display-illustration. Expressionism in America has a history back to the first decade of the century. The date might almost be fixed by reference to the calendar of exhibitions at the Photo-Secession Gallery—the famous “29]”’—in New York. And the artist who is likely to be named oftenest in connection with the first quarter-century of American post- Impressionism, when the history of the movement is written, is Alfred Stieglitz. He knows better, instinctively, what expression is than any other American. In his photography he has given us a record that is a miracle of the machine as slave to artistic sensi- bility. He also has that gift for infecting other men with enthusiasm and creative impulse which made “291” an oasis in New York for many years. In the pre-war years most of what was most worth while in American painting centered there. Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, Braque, were introduced to America, as were lesser figures like Picabia, Henri Rousseau, de Zayas, Brancusi and Nadelman— and “special” things like Rodin’s drawings, Geiger’s etchings, negro sculpture and children’s drawings. The first collective exhibition of American moderns was held at 232 INOW OTK Key Beye ASB REAM. PW ALEK OW. DTZ “291” in 1910, and it is notable that already so important a group as Dove, Hartley, Weber and Marin was included. The first Marin show had been in 1909, and Alfred Maurer and Marsden Hartley were shown in the same year. Marin and Hartley one-man exhibi- tions followed at intervals until the closing of the gallery in 1917; Max Weber had his own show in 1911, Dove in 1912, Walkowitz in 1912 and 1916 and Bluemner in 1915. And finally Georgia O'Keeffe exhibited in 1916. Stieglitz as a personality affected the art development of all these leaders. 233 SKETCH ‘FO Reo PA DNA ia BY -ARTHU:R 5G. DO ONen The first big general exhibition was the famous international “Armory Show” in 1913, which fortunately was not New York’s alone. It will go down in history as the most important landmark of the “movement.” Since then several galleries owned by dealers have “turned modern,” the Societé Anonyme has been organized to 234 ‘ keep alive the spirit of daring and to offer wall space to the newest rebels. Independent Shows offer a haven to anything and every- thing, the art magazines (so-called) have opened their pages gener- ously to the heretics—and modernism is in danger of becoming popular. John Marin and Georgia O’Keeffe are perhaps the Americans who have escaped most freely and most joyously from the confines of the older painting. They seem to revel in a free playing with form, without the slightest trace of self-consciousness. No man anywhere is more master of the watercolor medium than is Marin. He is beyond it and free for expression. He not only is no slave to transcription of nature, but hardly holds to objectivity in the slightest degree. And yet there is never the feel of his reaching for abstraction as a separate thing: there is always enough of con- tact with the perceived world to quiet the mind. Beyond that the magic of emotion is almost invariably there—the realization, the rhythmic order. The only valid criticism of his work comes not from the academicians but from the modernists who feel that his achievement is too much in one key. But in its limited range it is magnificent. Where Marin seems to capture emotional intensity rapidly, bril- liantly, with feverish abandon, getting down the palpitating image broadly in emotional outline—Georgia O’Keeffe seems to intensify calmly, to work through clear-headedly in silence, but with heart no less stirred and kept aflame in her steady way. She wanders the whole field from apples to abstraction. She is bold, but always within a harmonious restraint; her canvases are compact, the design counting strongly, color emotional, the absolute feeling poised with 235 PORTRAIT; BY WADT) Bile exquisite certainty. Order here is conceived femininely, musically. In the still-lifes the corners, the patches, the objects answer each other compositionally. The abstract ‘“arrangements”—subtly geometrical and hard as compared with Kandinsky’s soft spirit- wanderings—are like planes out of space, made living with color, meeting with paper-edge sharpness or rounding into perfect breast- like contours. Incidentally her canvases more than those of any other artist might afford Thomas Wilfred the perfect theme for one of his mobile color improvisations. Contrast, organization, play of textures, woman’s emotion—made expressive in paint. 236 A true cosmopolitan, a constant seeker, more a dreamer, wanderer back and forth—America to Europe, Europe to America, East to West, West to East—Marsden Hartley is less stable than these others, but shows a wider diversity in exhibition. His native New England, a still-life and decoration period, a Far West period (wherein he made Cezanne’s direct influence his own more surely than any other American), a formalized arranged-object period— all these are easily marked in retrospect. Never merely a tran- scriptionist, he has grown steadily in power, in devotion to a hidden ‘order; more than a competent painter in each of the branches he has essayed, he has justly built up an international reputation. Walt Kuhn, I imagine, could more easily than any other Ameri- can send to Paris a group of canvases of such strength, richness and diversity that they would stand up brilliantly in any exhibition there. He has most definitely made himself master of the French “fine painting” as that tradition has been absorbed into modernism by men like Matisse and Derain. I have seen canvases of his that might go without apology into that company, finely organizational things, moving, masterly. He is more a product of his training, less individualistic, by token of that same mastery—but creative- ness and sensibility are richly there. There are those who count that of the Americans Charles Demuth most completely and definitely captures “form.” He almost has a method for it, a soft ground of rounded forms and a brittle geomet- rical organization against it. When he gets it right, it speaks clear and true emotionally. But too often his utter simplification, his elimination of everything extraneous, leaves the canvas a little empty, the color a little vague. 237 eee a BY CHARLES DEMUTH Of the “291” group there survive significantly, beside Marin, O’Keeffe and Hartley, three others: Max Weber, Arthur G. Dove and Abram Walkowitz. Dove is most known by virtue of concen- tration on one thing—or is it a sign of deeper emotion? No one else paints in his earthy, almost dull colors, or keeps so close to earth and the familiar in subject-matter. Very richly he has a sense of abstract form. I asked him about the making of the sketch for a 238 fe el RAID OU PAY P EAS ANE eG PRLS BY MAURICE STERNE painting which is here reproduced. He said that he drew it while knee-deep in flowing water, looking downstream into the woods; but that his friends called it Penetration—which came nearer to his intention. I leave the reader to struggle with the balance of objec- tive and abstract elements in such an approach. | One misses the modern intensity of color in Dove; but I am 239 REDWOODS, BY ARTHUR 8B DA eee reminded that Walkowitz occasionally brings in something without color at all, and has the very quality we have been talking most about. See his drawing, New York. And Walkowitz is at times, too, a decorator whom I would trust to do me‘a colored panel before almost any other artist | can name. Weber was an early Cezannist, one of the first American pioneers, with a fine talent, if a little derivative at times—from Cezanne, Picasso, Rousseau. His special gift, I should say, is for organization. He came near to grasping that structural thing beyond even Cezanne which the German Expressionists are so feverishly after. One watches for a little more passion, more color, a little firmer grasp of that structural thing, before suggesting a place with the three or four ranking figures. 240 awe BY ARTHUR B. DAVIES Arthur B. Davies pleases the conservative radicals more than any other American painter. He was revolutionary enough in the early days to get himself put down as a rebel, and he has always fought the good fight for open-mindedness and freedom of speech. Hewas individualistically poetic in a time when realism ruled, and later he grafted Cubistic flatness on to his delicate method. But Cubism gave him a surface variation rather than a spirit, or deeper struc- ture. He has remained his very charming, poetic, far-away self, lacking in modern power, directness, compactness—but sensitive, delicately colorful, inviting us to a sweet feminine refuge. With just a little more substance he might have demanded a place like Redon’s, as one of the Great Independents. As it is, he never seems 241 quite to belong to the true modernist group (perhaps we distrust his popularity!) and yet no one ever leaves him out. An individual, fine-tempered, lonely achievement. I explained once that I had no intent to be exhaustive. But even a primer must mention the names in so living a group as now flourishes (artistically speaking, not financially) in New York. There is Henry L. McFee, a sturdy painter who simply has the “quality” beyond dispute, and Preston Dickinson, whose drawing on page 244 is typical, and Charles Sheeler, a path-breaker who tries constantly to isolate “form” in both painting and photography. Man Ray is likewise intellectually interested in building pictures without affectation or flourish, and he has felt around in various media—even the air-brush of the “commercial artist” and the makeshifts of the Dadaists—but somehow I carry away reluctantly an impression of coldness and unemotional design. Then, too, Maurice Sterne is a man whose work in paints, black-and-white and sculpture, cautiously unconventional at first but latterly with the true ring, would arrest attention in any company; and Thomas Benton, who lacks color but gives a new significance to figure organization; and Macdonald-Wright, getting back from theoretical Synchromism to brilliant and appealing form-and-color composi- tions. And then someone asks, what of Oscar Bluemner, pictorial Cubist without being slave to Cubism, Samuel Halpert, important landscapist, Louis Bouché, who really ought to be a great painter but still only promises it, and William Yarrow, a certain ‘“‘comer,” and Walter Pach, and Kenneth Hayes Miller, and the uncompro- misingly direct and very important Varnum Poore, and Henry Patrick Bruce, and Andrew Dasburg, and the clever artist-writer- 242 PORTRAIT! (BY ALBERY RLELOCH thinker Guy Péne Dubois, and Stuart Davis, and John Pandick, and Raymond Jonson out of the Middle West, and the developing groups in New Mexico and California, and Zoltan Hecht and the Zorachs, and Gardner Hale and Rockwell Kent and Warren Wheelock and... Well, the answer is that these men in the aggregate are so impor- tant, promise so fine a continuation of the modernist idea, that one simply cannot overlook them; but to do them justice would mean a book on American Expressionism alone. If one could bring together with these the several Americans who 243 WASHINGTON “BRIDGE, BY PRESTON: DICKENS oe are largely expatriates—Feininger from Germany, Macdonald Wright and Russell from Paris, Epstein and Kauffer and Anne Estelle Rice from London—and bring from Chicago and St. Louis and New Mexico and California some bits of Western strength and native boldness—why then . . . then . . . then what? Well, well, one wonders. Perhaps the revelation of so much that is new and untrammeled and nakedly expressive would give the academicians that long overdue shock, they would drop dead 244 Nie wEXTCO, BY MARSDEN HARTLEY (as an Institution), and the radicals would have their galleries for a real show—and it would be such a show as would cheer the pioneers, because they would see that young America is alive, that there is a generation of art-seekers here, as in France and in Ger- many, who know that illustrative painting is dead, who love paint and color and give rein to their emotions. It would be an Event, because it would all be living art. And of course the Metropolitan Museum would come forth on that day, and buy another Davies out of the exhibition, to show that it is up-to-date. By the “anatomy” of modern art I mean the structure of the several arts interdependently. To study contemporary painting alone is like dissecting a leg to discover what makes a man live and breathe. In critical accounts of the fine arts, and in journalism, 245 painting stands for what is “Art” more than any other member— although music, the theatre and literature long have touched the general public more vitally. Architecture, which should be the mother art, without which painting and sculpture are derelicts, has been out of the way of creativeness so long that it comes as a surprise to many to find it mentioned where art is concerned. But the hopeful thing about the present movement is that all the arts are concerned, architecture no less than painting, music no less than sculpture. Painting, many centuries ago, took leadership among the visual arts. It is only natural, then, that painting should have experienced the real break into a new epoch. In becoming an independent and self-sufficient art, in divorcing itself from architecture, painting played some strange tricks. It left architecture with a coldness, a colorlessness, which still cramps and chills. It invaded the stage background, and gave an utterly untheatrical and pictorial quality to theatre art, an alien bias that has remained down to the present revolution. In taking the leadership it drew sculpture into many a false path—till even the brush-swing feeling was imitated in stone. Painting really isn’t fit for leadership—nor will it have that leader- ship long if architects wake up to their present opportunities. In dividing the balance of this book into chapters on architecture, sculpture and the theatre, I have no intention to suggest that the “new movement” in these arts is any more important or any more marked than in music or literature. But my scope was planned to cover only the visual arts. Besides, I confess freely that I am even more ignorant about music than about these others, and would not be led into saying more than that the same new freedom from 246 SeGLUStTON;, BY MAX WEBER cramping traditions seems to have been won for the Junge Kunst composers, the same directness and fearlessness is evident in the treatment of “materials,” a youthful, more intense spirit prevails. Intenseness—concentration—jazz! Well, that too has had _ its effect; but it is seen pretty clearly to be Dadaish and catchy. Real music goes deeper. Incidentally there is the same old cry from the academicians: “Ugliness! Discords! Bolshevism!” But new emo- tional beauties are brought to release. In literature, one finds the parallel in free verse, in the Imagist ~ movement, in the breaking down of older forms in fiction. There are similar outlines and exactly parallel applications: the general swing away from realism, and the search for a form that will be typically of the materials, spoken words and idea-symbols; the attempt to banish “dead spots,” the search for the intensified image, 247 the grasping of slang, of tabooed words and ideas—anything for greater expressiveness. If we were to chart the anatomy of the thing, not only would it show all these as major members, all growing vigorously, but there would be parts named for caricature, for etching and woodcutting (you really ought to see the inside of a German Expressionist print shop!), for the crafts, pottery-painting, poster design, book-making (this is not an example of Expressionist manufacture), textiles, whatnot? For this body is unified by a spirit. PAINTED.) (PO TCR aa BY VARNUM POOR XIII SCULPTURE: IMPRESSIONISM TO CUBISM , , ¥ ew ’ * sy e E . ~ > - 7 — bee ‘ - _ “ ee + ¢ A : art > " ‘ Sa oy; ~ : ‘~ ‘ » ee 8 Seat, Beate) Mel ee ee Ai ih | es ke, ahs ne eite € , b . i “< ( . Lens ae «ald ‘ oy Oh hE we) eee See 4 * ¥ F ‘ Le ; - 4 aN ; ; 3 » . © : - . ‘ . i , : ; ye > i ; xf . $ bal ? ; ; - “= < -~ i 1) Bi ee . 7 aa es ~ ‘ bet 5 } + , > e . » 7A - - “- % “— to . : ; 4 1 \ : -“ re "4 , = : ‘ ; La x pee, SSS AEE Ard Tas » s ’ . - “al m » * Y “s ~ t - ‘ 34 : Fi ra ti : } € . * 7 + « ” é f > L, : - = + ; ~ % “ " < Fe : Ki; i . = . = - , / £ oot , as . ~ oe 46 ' Mi ei . 4 . t ‘ < ‘y . : i : \ i - REeEPOSE, BY ARCHITPEN KO HIS, dear reader, is an example of modern sculpture. It is an extreme example. It is not like the statues you see at the Academy exhibitions. Nor is it like the be-au-tiful statues of the Greeks. It is not like many things in the Metropolitan Museum— although you may find hints of it in the sculpture of some very ancient peoples. You probably do not feel that it is pretty. The sculptor did not intend that it should be pretty. The sculptor, nevertheless, had a very definite artistic purpose. He probably was not wholly successful. He may even have lapsed into a thing which may be called decadent modernness: a sort of 251 “ flabbiness of the spirit, a rottening of the esthetic perception. But this is not to be mistaken for the typical works of the decadents who are hypocritically vulgar, who practice a delicate sophisticated sort of perversion. It has a quality. The sculptor was seeking that thing which some of us believe to be the most essential quality of great sculpture, a thing which was largely lacking in Rodin and in St. Gaudens and in all the realistic-pictorial sculptors, which was totally lost by Carpeaux and by the Neo-Classicists beyond him and by the Baroque sculptors beyond them, and which can hardly be detected in Praxiteles or Donatello or Daniel Chester French. But it was in the Egyptians, in the works of certain Chinese periods, in the early Greeks, in Michael Angelo. And it is that which the modernist sculptors are after. It corresponds to the quality that Cezanne sought beyond all else in painting, the quality so besought by the later Expressionists that they are willing to abandon all likeness to the surface look of nature and all refinement and prettiness of painted surface, if only they can achieve some slight revelation of it. In the field of sculpture it may best be described, perhaps, as expressive sculptural form. Now it might seem that the things most talked about in connection with the modern painter’s seeking for form—structure, volume and an extra dimension—would come readily to the sculptor’s hand, simply because he works in three dimensions as against the two of painting. That is a shallow conception of sculptural form. It is the dimension beyond the obvious seeable ones, that counts most eesthetically, the unmeasurable dimension beyond the two of paint- ing or the three of sculpture. 3 In its negative aspects, modernist sculpture corresponds closely 252 Mira, BY GASTON ELACHAISE to modernist painting. The representative element is relegated to a wholly minor importance. If one is to enjoy these works at all, one must get freely back to the point of considering sculpture as sculp- ture, with a truth of its own, without a reservation that first it must imitate accurately and neatly some observed aspect of nature. Similarly “finish,” both in the Victorian pretty sense, and in the sense of the Impressionist’s obsession with the surface play of light, becomes merely an incidental issue. Show and flourish, in the 253 od Rococo sense and as decoration (as in Beaux-Arts architecture) are absolutely disavowed. If these modern sculptors are successful, it will not be for the amazing life-likeness of their immediate prede- cessors, or for the pretty rounded “purity” of Thorwaldsen and Canova, or for ornament’s sake. This typical uncompromising head by Gaston Lachaise is far from being either a pretty photo- graph or an inconsequential bit of decorativeness—is indeed the very opposite of “show” sculpture. I am insisting on the sense of sculptural form as a basis for both creation and appreciation, because it seems to me perhaps easier to grasp than form in painting. When you do grasp it, dropping the “classical” notions which are fixed on us by our common-university and lecture-course educations, you will find new doors of esthetic enjoyment opened to you, not only among the moderns but with the Chinese, the Assyrians, the Egyptians and the Mycenzans. I probably have a mind that is sculptural rather than painty. I do not get half so excited over the idea of creating paintings as I~ do over the thought that»-I might create in stone masses. When I think sculpture, I feel rock and mountains, space occupied .and space around, voluminous balance of masses, serenity, repose. The figure by Archipenko, whatever may be its demerits, has something of the mountainous feeling. And there is silent rock quality in the Lachaise head. Each separate art has its limitations and its essential values. It was no virtue in sculpture that it was able to become pictorial, even sketchy, through a considerable period. Its particular virtue lies in something not suited to picture-treatment, not fitted for illus- tration. Its materials, stone and metal, are hard, heavy, intractable. 254 Lightness of effect in the finished work is only a lying quality. Sculptural form—not the accidental form it takes from the natural aspect of its subject, but the essential thing—lies, as nearly as anyone has been able to put it, in related masses, in the repose of balanced volumes, in created arrangement of masses. That is the soul of sculpture. One might break up this problem and say that the volumes, the masses, depend upon the flow of planes, surfaces and slopes. That is merely transferring the idea to the dimensions which we can see. In the same way it is possible to say that the problem of sculpture is a problem of how light falls on a shaped mass or arranged planes: it is the light and shade that make the statue intelligible to us. True—but that is getting farther and farther away from the heart of the art. Rodin got lost in that maze, fell victim to his passion for light and shade—partly the rather squeaky light values of the contemporary Monet-Impressionist school of painters, and partly the organ-tone shadows of Rembrandt which he thought he could — realize in stone. He largely saw sculpture by shadows, and there- fore by lines creating deep shadows and by minute hollows varying shadows. But that is pictorial rather than sculptural conception. And Rodin will go into history as the unrivalled giant of the period when sculpture approached closest to pictorial art. The Kiss is typical of all the values to be achieved along that road, and of the lost sculptural repose and amplitude. But we will come back to Rodin, because he is important as marking the breaking point. Some conventional sculptors, learning that lesson, have avoided deepcut shadows, have “kept the work white’”—but merely that cannot make them modern. Others have practiced habitual sim- 255 al plification of natural forms, as if that were the gate to the lost region of creativeness. Of those others who jumped to geometrical equivalents for natural forms—the “surface” Cubists—I shall have more to say later. Of “distortion” in general, for emotional or formal intensification in sculpture, I can only repeat that the mod- ernists don’t much care how close to natural aspects you hold, or how far from nature you stray, so long as you put expressiveness into your work. Some of the finest art of the past has been heedless of visual accuracy; distortion really means nothing one way or the other on its own account; people will come to consider it an inessen- tial again if the living sculptural-emotional form is there. I grant you that it sometimes looks funny at first: such bulbous limbs, such attenuated torsos, a noseless head. But if you are really open-minded, not choked up with a lot of theories and irrele- vant knowledge, you will not notice. You should have spent less’ time observing people on the bathing beach, and more with the seated Saite figures and the negro ritual masks. Your education has probably been too physical-cultural and photographic. - Of the history of sculptural art it is hardly necessary to say more than that there have been periods when form was more valued than imitation, directness of expression more than ‘surface refinement. The primitive peoples link up as arule. Greece began to slide into mere prettiness and imitativeness by the time of Phidias, although it would be a fanatical modernist who would rule out from the world’s masterpieces the early vigorous works. Rome was first imitative, then productive of the most vulgarly realistic display in the history of the art. The Middle Ages produced some fine Expressionistic things, and the Romanesque period is full of sculp- 256 mie KRESS; BY RODIN ture that is perfectly a part of an expressive architectural whole. The high Gothic and late Gothic lapsed to weak representation. A vigorous Michael Angelo stands out vividly, escaping the general prettifying and intellectualizing of the Renaissance. Followed the Baroque and Rococo, then the Neo-Classic, both far from the essen- tial thing. Then came what the histories term “modern sculpture.” Realism overspreads the world. Some sculptors are more indi- vidualistic, others are eclectic. Some are robust, others are light 257 and sentimental. But all are true to their new-found faith in observation. Rude varies the formula melodramatically. Car- peaux apotheosizes “show.” Hildebrand gives an intellectualist’s reasonableness to modern life in Greek dress. St. Gaudens puts a plausible nobility into our American monuments—in place of the insipid chemised ladies and hideous frock-coated gentlemen of an earlier day. Sculpture has come to its highest point in pictorial fluency, monumental illustration. Even so frankly pictorial a monument as the Shaw Memorial is endowed with noble composi- tion and an architectural completeness—but it is not typically sculptural. At this point let us take note of certain facts: the sculptor had in general given up cutting his own stone—he was a modeller, and skilled workmen translated his “design” to stone or bronze. The sculptor thus had no reason to conceive with that sort of sculptural emotion that rises from a passion for his materials; and combined with this, he had learned to rely more upon observation of nature than upon any subjective emotion of his own. ‘He had in general a vague idea of combining Greek finish with modern scientific observation of life. He was mimetic, a clever portraitist, and estimable as an upholder of patriotism and the capitalistic state through the easy fluency of his show monuments. But something of eternal art was passing him by. The final phase of the era of realism developed in the last quar- ter of the 19th Century. Even in sculpture it may conveniently be called Impressionism, although the term needs some further elucidation when used in this connection. As a matter of fact Impressionism, implying a certain sketchiness, is almost an impossi- 258 bility in true sculpture, i.e., cut stone; but in what currently passed for that art, in modelling, Impressionism made itself fairly plaus- ible and popular—and indeed is stiii the end and substance of four- fifths of the works of our facile exhibition modellers of today. Auguste Rodin touched the peak of purely naturalistic sculpture, then gathered to himself all of the glory and the blame that the world was ready to bestow on Impressionism in sculpture, and finally started on a too-long-deferred search for a new form. This giant, this great outstanding figure of the last half of the 19th Century, might alone serve as a foil against which to make clear the development of the “newer sculpture.” There will be many to cry out against this blasphemy, to say that Rodin was greater than any who has come since. But his greatness is only the greatness of an amazing naturalism at first, and then of Impres- — sionism. It has qualities more insinuating than anything in Manet or Monet. It has sweet surface appeal, and associative appeal of subject, and a cunning trick of half-concealment, of implied mysti- cism and possible profoundness. But it lacks one great essential element of sculpture., Of Rodin’s early naturalistic work—itself a revolt against the showy qualities of Carpeaux and the contemporary French school— it is hardly necessary to do more than mention The Age of Bronze and John the Baptist, which are widely known through replicas in many museums and through repeated illustration in books and periodicals. The quality of these is made clear by the incident which occurred when The Age of Bronze was first exhibited at the Salon of 1877. This single poised figure was so exactly and minutely modeled that the sculptor was accused of an imposition. 259 wd Fellow artists declared that to obtain such fidelity he must have taken casts from life. In order to disprove the charge, Rodin was obliged to take casts from parts of his original model, and show how they differed from his statue. Realism triumphant, in its illu- sion of nature, and its slight variance from nature! Rodin lived through the entire fight waged by the Impressionist painters, and it would be idle to suppose that he failed to test his own art by their discoveries. When one studies his sculpture with the works of the Impressionist painters—say, Monet and Pissarro— in mind, certain parallels become clear. . One is in the matter of pose. The Impressionist painters sought above all else to record a single fleeting aspect of a scene, often having to sacrifice structure and other qualities to the catching of this “impression.”” Rodin employed models to walk nude about his studio so that he could catch them unexpectedly in sudden revealing attitudes, and he would fix those in clay. There, certainly, is the parallel of the painted “aspect.” . There is, too, a sculptural counterpart of Monet’s achievement of vibration-of-light. If he laid on his pigments in a way to catch the light more brilliantly than any predecessor, Rodin may be said to have made sculpture more luminous than any before his time. He kept the larger masses of his pieces—I am thinking of the long line of works like The Danaid, The Kiss, The Eternal Idol and Satyr and Nymph—open and uninvolved, with full surfaces toward the light; and he varied these surfaces with bosses and hollows so minute (though natural) that there is a constant subtle play of half- obscure dark-and-light. The effect is spontaneous and sweetly flowing to a degree unknown in the history of sculpture. It is 260 Boe wea NCER, BY GEORG KOLBE realism made atmospheric, the “lightness”’ of painted Impression- ism grafted on to the heaviest of mediums. These painters, too, made a point of fading off their pictures at the edges, and Rodin creates a not dissimilar effect by failing to work his figures entirely out of the marble block. The ground is purposely thrown out of focus to make the statue stand out the more clearly by contrast. This method, which must be looked upon as something of an affectation, increases the sense of concentration, 261 and occasionally it helps to preserve that essentially sculptural feel- ing of massiveness which the Impressionist method is in general bound to destroy. This, then, is the great Impressionist, his the type of sculpture against which a revolt was ‘inevitable when a new generation came thinking new thoughts and dreaming new sculp- tural dreams. For despite his escape from the prettily rounded limbs and the sweet, smooth surfaces of an earlier school, and despite his avoidance of the typical Beaux-Arts flourish, Rodin was not modern in the post-Realistic sense. His surfaces were lively with variation, his restrained masses confined powerful movement, his figures achieved a certain sense of life; but he missed the mas- sive architectural feeling of later work, his “movement” was not of Cezanne’s voluminous sort, his sense of life not that living quality of Lehmbruck or Epstein. Despite his nursed concentration and his affectation of the broken block and spontaneous creation—which some commentators have confounded with the directness and divine heedlessness of the real moderns—he remained the inspired sensi- tive naturalist. Meier-Graefe put it in a few words: “His magic breathes Nature, that is its strength. There is not a single detail in his work which is not the outcome of a natural impression.” Rodin bred a whole school of sculptors with Impressionistic traits, but none has ever succeeded in reaching his perfection of rippling surface texture and absolute faithfulness of pose. Most of his followers have unconsciously been more honest than he in | that they recorded their impressions in clay rather than marble. Some of these followers carried the method to the absurd extreme of sketchiness and dim outline: notably Medardo Rosso with his soft-focus photographic Impressionism, and Bistolfi with his pretti- 262 Bou ZA Ces BY RODIN fied and painty figures which exact spontaneity at whatever cost to sculptural solidity. Other followers glorified Rodin’s subtle bosses and hollows into an intensely disagreeable sort of bulgy realism which supposedly substitutes “power” for repose. But these were only tag ends of decadent realism, and it is from Rodin’s work that I have chosen two of my illustrations of Impressionism. One is The Kiss, because it illustrates as well as anything of the period the best qualities of Impressionism in sculpture. The other is that famous sketch for a Balzac monument wherein Rodin went beyond his own previous limitations, and arrived at a summary treatment 263 of nature which led many a critic to align him with the ultra- moderns. But it is to be noted that this is only a partial surrender to sculptural emotion: the idea is realistic, and realism somehow breathes from the statue. A third illustration added for contrast to post-Impressionism is George Kolbe’s Dancer, an example of the eclectic sort of art practiced by a wise group of contemporary sculptors, gaining in surface and pose from Rodin, but clever enough to avoid any effort to imitate his highly individual method of realistic concentration. A remarkably graceful and seductive bit of sculptural illustration it is—and by a man who has since forsaken illustration to do notable things in starkly simple composition. There was no Cezanne in sculpture. No one artist marks the sudden break from Rodin into the slope called post-Impressionistic. There was, in between, a time which I can only call “the honest period.” It was like architecture in this, the really modern archi- tects having arrived at new forms not directly as a recoil from the eclectic, imitative period, but out of a period of new respect for engineering and common-sense building. Just so a few sculptors returned quietly to the basic principles of sculpture. First they inquired what was the essential quality suggested or determined by the heavy and plastic materials in which they must work—and they arrived at a certain massiveness. Second, they inquired whether the pictorial values developed under Impres- sionism, the straining for revealing pose and sketchy finish, were essentially sculptural—and they escaped from the burden of pic- torial and literary inessentials. And third, they conceived, instinc- tively rather than consciously, that there is something that can be 264 called essential sculptural form. They quite clearly found joy in seeking this sort of form—but still within the limits of normal aspects—seen honestly. Several names might enter into the story here, if this book were altogether dedicated to sculpture: Anton Hanak, Austria’s greatest sculptor; Jan Stursa, and that Jane Poupelet who is happily just coming into the height of her powers. But the period is perfectly summarized in the work of Aristide Maillol. Of him Meier-Graefe wrote nearly twenty years ago: “Maillol is perhaps the first Frenchman since the Gothic artists who shows no traces of the Baroque.” There was something prophetic in the words, and cer- tainly it was a good beginning; no trace of flourish, of sophisticated stylism, of show elements. After that, absolute freedom from any desire to be descriptive, to show a figure in a discovered or arranged pose; and no over-exaltation of finish. Here was a return to fundamentals. Maillol is direct where Rodin is ingenious, simple in spirit where Rodin achieves simplicity of effect out of a marvelous actual com- plexity. Maillol is little interested in either violent movement or the tense quivering figure. The posed ecstatic moment of Rodin, the peculiarities of pose and gesture avidly sought by the Impres- sionists—these would disturb the repose and serenity of his sculp- tured figures. He equally disavows any desire to compete with the littérateurs in clay or the illustrators. His thought and mode are based on a conception of sculpture as a massive, quiet art. Maillol is debtor to Rodin in one matter, in that the latter brought a new seriousness to the study of surface. But the newer man shapes it for vigor and for the sake of the broader mass, 265 SEATED FIGURE, BY ARISTIDE MAZTELOL instead of breaking it up for atmospheric play of light. That sweetly flowing quality of Rodin’s marble, the shimmer of minute variations of surface, which one never ceases to wonder at, would be no gain to Maillol’s art of simple contours and balanced vol- umes. The fine amplitude of his work could only be disturbed by Impressionistic “lightness.” Here then in the negative sense, at least, is true post-Impressionist sculpture. It has cut behind all the falsities of pictorial conception 266 which characterized the art from the Renaissance to Rodin. Sculp- ture has become again a thing in itself, not a means of imitating a thing seen. It conveys emotion rather than a thought or aspect. It has character of its own rather than the character of a model. It preserves the life of the material in which the artist worked. It is ihe negation of Realism. I am ready to grant that. Maillol’s work is post-Impressionistic chiefly in the negative sense of being a return. If one is thinking of the out-and-out modernists, the distortionists and the Expression- ists, It is necessary to make distinctions and reservations here. The bulk of the modernists have gone beyond merely a returned honesty, directness and simplicity. Those later men frankly abandon fidel- ity to natural form if thereby they can hope to intensify emotion or sculptural feeling. Maillol, in spite of all his contempt for realis- tic interest, never violates the accepted visual aspects of nature. He simplifies, summarizes and selects, but he keeps discreetly within observed natural normality. He returns to honest structural princi- ples and a plastic substantiality, and one feels that there is a mathe- matical basis beyond; but he never attempts to “cube” the outward aspect, never distorts the figure to gain intensity. If he achieves a fourth dimension, he always does it after arranging the other three in natural order. He goes half the way with the moderns: he seeks form, but he sacrifices no broad visual truth to intensify it. Here then is a giant of his own time. His is an achievement which will not interest readers the less for being not quite so mod- ern, in the sense of increased intensification through distortion, as is Archipenko’s or Epstein’s. And it is to be added that no artist of the later era has achieved in his own time a success quite as 267 complete as Maillol’s in his between-times period. Even the most exclusive of the later moderns grants him esthetic validity. He won his half of the fight superbly. The Seated Figure shown here exhibits a completeness that to some of us is more satisfying than anything ever done by an Impressionist or other realist. It lives in its own right, without any necessity of associative interest of subject or symbolism. The architectural panel (page 308) is no less re- markable for the quality of fullness, completeness. The illustra- tion of the mask of a woman is added here because it so typi- cally belongs to the chapter in sculptural history which lies between Rodin and Epstein. Before going on to Epstein and his fellows, however, it is neces- sary to say a word about the return to honesty in relation to the question of the archaic, and particularly about naiveté. Maillol in going back to something solidly structural, exhibits a massiveness and sheerness that have led to talk of primitive influences. He doubtless learned to value something finely heavy by a study of archaic works, but he has not returned to archaic conventions. His simplicity is elemental but by no means primitive. Particularly he lacks the naive touch. Naiveté implies a child-like quality: the vision and directness of the child who will draw a cat and a house of the same size, or a green cow, and see no absurdity in it. It would be well if we could all understand intuitively that such vio- lations of accidentals in Nature are inconsequential. But Maillol never asks us to overlook a distortion. Even educated people— provided they have not been trained so dry that they look for illus- tration and illusion above all else—can enjoy his statues. It re- mained for a later group to cultivate the naive approach. 268 ert tea TT Hee woOr A GURL, BY ARISTIDE IMALILLOL “Ff Certain types of archaic conventionalization have become a pretty trick with many sculptors. A little while back there was much dis- cussion of “formalization” as a desirable quality. This is not to be confused with the search for “form” which plays so large a part 269 in modernist art. It is rather a surface quality, a handling in con- formance with explicit conventions: like the “archaic smile” or Greek formalization of the hair. As a post-Impressionist phase, in time, formalized sculpture can- not be overlooked, and it may be exceedingly graceful and agree- able. It belongs, nevertheless, outside that slope of sculpture which parallels the Cezanne-Expressionist slope in painting. It is not without its backing of critical opinion, that would label it the truly modern development; and its chief practitioner in America, Paul Manship, has been heralded widely as the most promising and most talented of the new generation of native sculptors. Nothing could be more graceful and pleasing within the limita- tions adopted by the artist than this Dancer and Gazelles, and noth- ing could be more typical of the movement as a whole. Manship has had periods of Greek formalization, Oriental formalization, and Italian Renaissance formalization, each easily recognized. That very versatility is an indication of the shallow rather than profound influences to which the formalizing sculptors have subjected them- selves. They hold to certain rigidities and simplifications because those things produce agreeable effects. It is a sort of decorative conventionalization, a clever bit of craftsmanship in finishing, which has little to do with the soul of sculpture. Manship’s work is almost invariably charming, delicate and in perfect taste, but it has little emotion and certainly no sculptural passion (I use the term thoughtfully). It is perhaps perfect decorative illustration— and that is a deal better than perfect transcriptive illustration. One might follow this lead to treat of the work of the Servian Mestrovic, who applies a sort of formalization to brutally heavy 270 Peewee ReaD. GAZ CLES, BY sPAUL MANSHIP subjects; or of Hunt Diederich, who more than any other American designs with that sure decorative touch and stylistic appeal which we have noted as characteristic of Viennese art; or of the French Bourdelle, who is really very important, although only recently has he escaped from the realistic Rodin influence, to begin formalizing with a fine architectural feeling—and occasionally to get over into the field of form-seeking. But what of Cubism and sculpture? At superficial glance it would seem that the Cubist method would apply to glyptic or plastic art as an immediate aid to the securing of essential massiveness a 271 Fo GAER Ee BY EDWIN -S6©H ARMs and simplification. Hardly so simple. Cubism as applied to paint- ing was designed to develop another dimension, was a means to achieving synthesis. To use cubism in simply the ordinary geomet- rical sense in sculpture would mean nothing comparable because that art is already three-dimensional—and thus literally cubic. An application of the doctrine in spirit would mean seeking a further dimension. It has, indeed, proved its value only when it turned the 272 attention of the sculptors to that hidden thing, truly a fourth dimen- sion—to a seeking for volume and balanced masses in a new sort of relationship. Most so-called Cubist sculpture has been only the old sculpture with the planes flattened out—the application in letter rather than spirit. Important people like Archipenko and Scharff and Jan Stursa went through Cubist “periods”? and doubtless emerged with an enriched equipment, with a deeper sense of the structural thing that underlies life and art. The man who has made most out of the technical peculiarities of Cubism is William Wauer, whose head of Rudolf Bluemner is shown with the chapter on Cubism. One feels that here is a thing that gains vigor and a certain suavity by the simplifying of planes and the accentuation of angles separating planes. Despite the well- realized structure of the head, however, it is hardly to be counted great sculpture. Its arresting qualities are, in the last analysis, representative and technical. It smacks a little of merely giving natural forms a simplified geometrical equivalent. Somewhat more serious consideration should be given, perhaps, to Teidors Zalkaln’s Scriabin. In it (page 44) the flattening of planes is accomplished with more sculptural feeling, and there is evidence of creative seeking in the relationship of the broader masses or blocks. If one were able to draw a line between realism and Expressionism in sculpture, one might find it illuminating to study out just how close Rodin’s Balzac comes to the line, but within the realistic territory, and how close this Scriabin is to the line, but on the “seeking for form” side. I leave it to the reader to ponder this if he is interested. Meantime the Bolsheviki have set 273 ? EVENING BY JOHN MOWBRAY-CLARKE 274 up the Scriabin in stone in a Petrograd square, while Balzac, re- fused by an indignant Bourgeoisie in France, is relegated to a corner of the Rodin Museum. The soul of modernism seems to go marching on! There is no reason why the sculptor who considers his art pri- marily a question of related volumes and masses should not con- ceive those masses elementally as cubes. But flattening down nat- ural forms to a summary statement is not enough. If the statue is based on something seen in a model—is at least incidentally repre- sentative—the blocking down demands not only simplification of planes but a synthesis of planes and volumes, a synthesis of ob- served forms and conceived form. So far that synthesis has carried the more important sculptors in a direction where obviously Cub- istic traits are seldom noticeable. At any rate Archipenko, Duchamp-Villon, Gaudier, Lachaise and many of the other signifi- cant ones are better explained by a non-technical phrase like “Ex- pressionism.” Synthesis, however, is a word that particularly sticks in my mind in connection with the sculpture of John Mowbray-Clarke, who has long been a leader among the American radicals; and so I am put- ting an example of his work in here, before turning to those others. Mowbray-Clarke often gains effectiveness by flattening his planes, but that is only the start of the story; he stands closer than any fel- low-American to Hunt Diederich in a stylistic decorative touch, but that too is beside the central emotion. The point is that he does catch a living emotion in his modelled figures. Sometimes it is playful, sometimes even satiric—but if it is seldom profound, it is at least a creative rearrangement, an intensification of his emotion, 275 speaking to us directly, without flourish or swagger or dishonest bor- rowings from the other arts. I leave you with his emotion of three graceful ladies. THREE FREE, BY JOHN *MOWSRAY- CUA 276 * XIV SGUEPTURE: EXPRESSJONISM SEATED FIGURE, BY GAUDIER-BRZESKA XPRESSIONISM, as we have seen, is a term which implies no E technical formula, no codified laws of subject or treatment. It is broad enough to include the experimenters in absolute abstrac- tion, like Kandinsky, and those who seek instinctively to liberate form through and beyond reality, like Kokoschka and Marin. It is a label with as little doctrinaire implication as any that can be applied to a “movement” in art. It suggests, in baldest explanation, only that the artist has shifted from preoccupation with correct representation to a search for something in the nature of esthetic reality or expressive form. It is only by some such untechnical and inclusive word that one can group the bulk of the post-Impressionist sculptors. It has been suggested already how some of them went through a period of utiliz- ing Cubism merely as a diverting mask for representation, and how some achieved a certain sculptural blockiness and weightiness in their flattening of planes and their seeking of a new dimension in mass relationship. These latter touched over into Expressionism— and perhaps the heaviness of their work is the first obvious indica- tion. An Expressionist thinks heavy, if I may so put it, when he thinks sculpture. Part of his substitution for subject interest is the inherent virtue of his medium—in this case, of stone cutting. That virtue is as a rule expressive in massive volumes in relation. Because primitive peoples think more honestly in regard to ma- terials than civilized and sophisticated folk—who come to value 279 cleverness in imitating one material in another—primitive sculp- ture, whether pre-Greek, Egyptian, or Chinese, is usually solid, heavy, simple. It is for this reason that one so often sees the Ex- pressionist’s achievement of a typical sculptural massiveness her- alded as a return to the primitives. If achieved honestly, it is not a return at all, but an arrival at the same goal through a similar understanding of the qualities of stone. Coupled with this respect for materials—nay, love of materials —is the modernist’s directness of conception. His work is instinc- tively created, not reasoned or arranged in accordance with prin- ciples intellectually coded. Too much reasoning, inevitably in- volving a selective mode of working, leads to the addition of all sorts of adventitious trappings to a work of art, leads to high polish, symbols, and gencral prettiness. Emotional subjectivity is what counts, not intellectual. | ? Gaudier, or Gaudier-Brzeska, not a primitive in the imitational sense, was perhaps our best example of a sculptor who conceived with uncivilized directness, in both life and art. With a passion for stone and metal, he always reflected the virtues of these respective media in the finished work. He got closer to the heart of sculp- tural esthetics, too, than any other artist whose statements I have been able to find. Note how much is summed up in these three short sentences: “Sculptural energy is the mountain. “Sculptural feeling is the appreciation of masses in relation. “Sculptural ability is the defining of these masses by planes.” Gaudier, writing from the trenches, told of “ninching” a Ger- man rifle in a raid, and how he carved a “gentler order of feeling” 280 Moiese ke AND CHILD, BY JACOB EPSTEIN out of the brutal “image” of the rifle-butt. That presumably was his last work of art. He would have appreciated the huge irony of his taking-off, by means of another German rifle that he failed to pinch—this naive-minded, direct-thinking, hugely-creative, gentle modern savage, utterly contemptuous of civilization, and then killed at twenty-four in civilization’s most civilized war. His own statement about the matter of reason and instinct, from a letter to The Egoist (quoted with all his other fugitive writings 281 in Ezra Pound’s book, Gaudier-Brzeska), also touches profoundly on points pertinent to all the moderns: “The archaic works discovered at Gnossos are the expressions of what is termed a barbaric people—i.e., a people to whom rea- son is secondary to instinct. The pretty works of the great flel- lenes are the productions of a civilized—i.e., a people to whom in- stinct is secondary to reason. .. . “The modern sculptor is a man who works with instinct as his inspiring force. His work is emotional. The shape of a leg, or the curve of an eyebrow, etc., etc., have to him no significance what- ever; light voluptuous modelling is to him insipid—what he feels he does so intensely and his work is nothing more nor less than the abstraction of this intense feeling. . . . That this sculpture has no relation to classic Greek, but that it is continuing the tradition of the barbaric peoples of the earth (for whom we have sympathy and admiration) I hope to have made clear.” But he cut statues as the archaic peoples did, not in weakened imitation of them. In his Seated Figure there is evident more of conscious “appreciation of masses in relation” than any true primi- tive is likely to have felt. But it is the absolute negation of “the pretty works of the great Hellenes’—whom he more feelingly terms elsewhere “those damned Greeks.” Pound comments on Gaudier’s peculiar “soft bluntness,” which excellently characterizes a certain pervading quality of modern archaic-like work. It a little misses the austerity and rigidity of much early Egyptian and Chinese sculpture—a difference covered by the word “soft.” But it all, even when the bluntness is as rounded and restrained as Franz Metzner’s, is innocent of the over- 282 Depot R ES BY QPRANZ “METZN ER refinement, both of mass and of surface, characteristic of ‘“‘classic” work. Metzner was the most discussed modern sculptor of Germany a decade ago; but today a good deal of his modernness seems a bit strained: realistic subjects formalized into massiveness, the heaviness obtained largely by a trick of conventionalization. And yet it achieves a degree of purely sculptural feeling long absent be- fore his time. And he has had incalculable influence on the younger generation of European sculptors. The living embodiment of the primitive “feeling for stone” is to be seen in Eric Gill. He advocates (with absolute justice) that the 283 name “sculptor” be denied to any man who does not cut his own . stone. Gill insists too that the work of art is its own justification, that it should be conceived in that way and not as an imitation of the appearance of something else, or as a work which “conveys a criticism or an appreciation.” He has written a pamphlet about his art which sums up neatly several other modernistic principles: “The study of nature is not a prime necessity, though the love of nature may be such.” And: “The proper carving of stone results, and should so result, in a certain roundness and solidity of form with no detachment of parts.” , Again, as with Gaudier, it is instinct (love), non-representation, solidity of form. But most of all, with Gill, it is the feeling for stone, the evocation of some fourth-dimensional virtue that lies in the quality of his material. Could anything be more rock-like than this Torso? Of course if one has been educated almost exclusively to the look of rounded plaster casts of Greek and Roman statues, and to our polite eclectic sculptors (as most of us Americans have), it takes time to become accustomed to the rock look—but that is where the soul of sculpture lives. The existence of Eric Gill is the best sign I know for the future of art in England. There are other modern sculptors who do owe something to ac- tual copying of archaic conventions: I have already said a word about this apropos of Paul Manship and formalization. There is another direction that leads closer to the Expressionists. A fad for negro sculpture developed in Europe some years ago, and its ef- fects are apparent in the works of some really important artists. The French Post-Impressionists first became excited over these “bar- baric” carvings in wood, delighting in the directness of expression, 284 Ores OF BR Youre Rel Cr 3G LL LT the impersonality, and the naiveté of them. More recently the in- fluence has been rampant in Germany. There has been a consid- erable amount of loose rhapsodizing about this form of primitive- ness, which is in itself important up to a certain point, but usually lacking in some of the elemental and profound values inherent in certain archaic art periods. Negro sculpture is a healthful field of study for the average white sculptor because it is likely to give pause to his conceit, his 285 self-conscious show of virtuosity, his tendency toward over-refine- ment and flourish. These little idols, fetishes and masks are direct expressions of religious emotion and altogether impersonal. The sculptor approaches his work in humility, always feeling that he is less important than the figure he is carving. He has no eye on an ultimate “educated” spectator. His carving is for itself, out of his emotion. Is it any wonder that the European modernists, rebelling from a current mode of art characterized by cleverness and “show” above all else, should have hailed ecstatically such simple expres- sive beauty? Let one add, too, that negro art is formalized to the last degree, is innocent of any taint of naturalism—and it is easy to understand why Matisse, Picasso and the other fauves, and after them the German Expressionists, elevated these simple works to the level of their gods out of Egypt, China and archaic Greece. NEGRO SCULPTURE 286 NEGRO SCULPTURE And now, when the claim of negro sculpture is being examined a little more dispassionately, even the most level-headed critic, if he has any glimmering of what modern art is after, must recognize that these things are of more import than, for example, the art of the Roman era. (Consider carefully before you answer back, dear reader. ) To summarize the relationship of negro sculpture to modernist sculpture, I cannot do better than quote a paragraph written by Ladislas Medgyes: “All the peculiarities which were considered essential in the form language of negro sculpture are developed with the greatest intensity in the masks. The constructive beauty of the human face is retained as a basis, but freed from all sensual- ism. The eyes are more than human eyes; like deep lakes or tri- 287 umphal arches, they are almost geometrical, and still full of the greatest intensity of life. The nose as central axis plays an im- portant part in the composition, and is generally well developed as a high relief or deep incision. The free form-language can change the plus of a Cimension into a minus and even increase the har- mony of the composition thereby. . . . It is the rhythm of forms that determines this playing with positive and negative depth, and not the natural aspect of the object portrayed or suggested. .. . In spite of the strong deformation of visual aspect, the natural form remains the basis of creation, raised to such a high degree of concentration and objectivity that it becomes an independent, new being—a work of art.” Ceriain artists have so frankly copied or derived from the pe- culiarities of negro carved figures that there is no escaping the connection. Some are primarily painters, like Karl Schmidt-Rott- luff who has found occasional outlet for his gigantic primitive talent in wood sculpture; others, like Rudolf Belling and Emi Roeder had periods that showed the influence. Even so important an artist as Bernhard Hoetger seems in his most recent work to be attempting barbaric simplification tinged with negro conventions. But some- how the men who—whether the influence is negro or Egyptian or Hindu, or all these and more—synthesize all influences into some- thing of their own, are the ones who measure largest creatively in terms of today. Gaudier, a sculptor who must have seen, appreciated and ap- praised negro carved figures, arrived, in his Seated Figure, at a simplicity and an impersonality comparable to that of his African fellows, but without exhibiting any signs of indebtedness. The fact 288 that their work is less massive is partly due to the difference in ma- terial, but there is some other elemental quality here too—explain- able by the fact that civilization, while leading us into many paths that are dubious esthetically, has also enriched the vision of the artist who has remained unspoiled. Abstraction in sculpture. Gaudier again, going as near to ab- straction as the negroes, wrote somewhere that his experiments had made him believe that absolute abstraction was more suited to painting than to sculpture. He advanced two reasons: first, that the achievement of abstract beauty in a work of art usually in- volves a considerable complexity of forms, which could be encom- passed in a painting but would be prejudicial to the fundamental simple sculptural feeling; and second, that while painting has yet to explore almost the entire field of inorganic form, the sculptor has been anticipated by the designers of modern machinery. Gau- dier seems to have given up the attempt to compass pure abstrac- tions after doing a few inorganic “toys.” And those other sculp- tors who come nearest to abstract form seem to rely strongly upon some such (usually) incidental element as surface sensuousness or linear rhythm. Thus if I were pressed for an explanation of the attraction which Brancusi’s near-abstractions have for me, I would hazard that it is largely a sensuous surface appeal combined with creative massing of naked forms. In the Muse pictured here I feel that relating of masses which seems to me the nearest thing to pure and essential sculptural form that we can apprehend. But whether those related masses alone, without the faint basis in natural forms, and with- out the caressable, sensuous surface appeal, would speak to me as 289 MUSE. BY BRAN CUE strongly, I am not prepared to say. At any rate, Brancusi is one of the undoubted masters of near-abstraction and—legitimately or not —he adds a sensuous gloss to many of his architectonic composi- tions. Nearer to a wholly non-representative art is that of Oswald Her- zog, far less significant in achievement but pushing into new fields. His effort in one direction has come to the impasse suggested above: over-complexity, resulting in a wholly unsculptural spiky effect. 290 In another direction he is reduced to borrowing from another art, music. His attempts to build up form under titles like Harmony, Andante and Symphony are least successful when farthest removed from the forms of life. He can catch the thing in line, as in the » Andante * mn QGierz °s ANDANTE, BY OSWALD HERZOG Andante herewith, but the sculptural realization of this theme or conception only seems inept. What Herzog seems to be after is rhythmic abstraction in sculp- ture. That may be another name for expressive sculptural form; but in the search Herzog lets his consciousness wander over into the pastures of another art—a sort of betrayal of sculpture to music—or he tries to speak in terms of a feeling, experience or mood—Eruption, Erotik, Freude—and grasps at some symbol of experience which he hopes will convey the rhythm to the specta- tor. He is even less successful, it seems to me, than is Herta Muel- 291 ler-Schulda, who frankly composes for linear rhythm, as in this little Dancer. Her intention and the result are less deep—but she gets there! DANCER, BY HERTA MUELLER-SCHUDLURM The consideration of linear rhythm as an element leads naturally to the “sculpture-paintings” of Archipenko. Color in sculpture is not incompatible with the idea of an essential sculptural form. La- chaise has made some interesting things in that direction. But to mingle sculpture and painting in half-painted, half-relief panels seems even more inept than Herzog’s sculptured music. It simply does not register. I grant that it may be merely a personal lack of appreciation, but both here and in the case of Lipschitz’ relief pan- els, organized like near-abstract Cubist paintings, I am left cold. Jacques Lipschitz, however, makes a more interesting contribution 292 > some of which with what may be called his “block organizations,’ seem to open vistas toward a naked architecture, stripped of all petty excrescences of styles and ornament. Abstract (?) architecture and abstract sculpture would be one and the same if pursued down to the absolute, I suppose: the form-problem is the same. While we are considering Archipenko (who has done enough fine work to withstand even the enthusiasms of his friends for some of his wilder experiments), it is worth while to pause over his “non- being” statues. Let me quote from Ivan Goll’s pamphlet on Archi- penko, published by the Société Anonyme: “And so, after having utilized all the materials, and even their reflections, he hurls himself in pursuit of space and undertakes to mold, as he would clay, pure atmosphere. He makes ‘holes,’ mirac- ulous mirage. Phantasmagoria. All that we know and all that we are exists only in our imagination. Nothingness has an existence. That which is concave is also convex. Often the void seems to us as palpable as matter. And this is just what, in his most recent works, Archipenko assumes, when, instead of the head of a man or the breasts of a woman, he substitutes a hole—their non-being. The Artist-Creator reveals himself here; empty space surrounded by plastic shapes acquires in itself a personal form which gives us the same impression of vitality as the substance which it replaces.” It is always easy to be irreverent, and one is likely to note that the lady, the one with a stomach and not merely space expressive of one, has a pimple on it; and to speculate on the extreme appro- priateness of a void or vacuum in place of a head if certain of our friends were sitting for their portraits. But works of art should be considered only for their direct emotional or esthetic effect on 293 the spectator. The surprising thing is that, judged thus, these non- being statuettes turn out to be not only amusing but attractive with a certain sort of xsthetic validity, simply as suave form organiza- tions. When one has come to appreciate ali the kinds of sculpture I have described up to this point—and it has been a long way es- thetically—it will be time to go on to those compositions which one can only call “constructions.” I have seen whole rooms of them on exhibit, ranging from bits of pasteboard built into abstract figures to complex arrangements of wood and metal—sticks, wire, cog- wheels, blocks, discs, cylinders, etc.,—each attempting to achieve some balance or rhythm of line and form that is akin to an artistic creation. There can be no doubt that there is esthetic purpose here, because displacing a block or changing a fulcrum disturbs the “construction” in such wise that the feeling of “form”’ is lost. But I still am inclined to be skeptical—perhaps because the Dadaists ran away with that sort of thing—and I find that I get the same thrill more easily from the lines of an automobile or airship or in the power-house. And is it related to sculpture? I am painfully conscious that for several pages past we have been traveling in minor by-ways, well off the main road of progress in modern sculpture. But I wanted to give some idea of the amazing diversity of experiment, for that in itself holds a promise for the future. There not only is a remarkable group of sculptors in Europe and America who have come to the point of putting repre- sentation in a place secondary to some more essentially sculptural search, but there are scores of lesser artists feeling their way into every unexplored by-way of the three-dimensional art field. We 294 Peet ho, BY ARCHLPEN KO still are at the beginning rather than the height of a movement. But let us here get back to the men who are richer in actual achieve- ment. | Archipenko has entered into our deliberations at several points. He has achieved more kinds of acclaim than any other modern sculptor, simply because he has pried into so many unlighted cor- ners and brought out new, if not always sound ideas. There have been the matters of non-being sculpture, straight Cubist sculpture, 295 KNEELING FLGUR EQ DY WILHELM LEHMBRUCK 296 sculpture-paintings, abstraction, etc.—and he is one of the clever- est and most exact academic draughtsmen living today! His less arbitrary work shows real feeling for the relation of masses; and he has achieved elemental works like the Repose, shown at the open- ing of the last chapter, and sensuously appealing things like the Torso shown in the first chapter. He is important—and yet I sus- pect that I might name the half-dozen leading modernist sculptors without mentioning him. A man who consistently sought the soul of sculpture was Wil- helm Lehmbruck. He absolutely cast loose from the naturalistic burden, and his main objective was obviously to achieve something corresponding to what Cezanne called the “realization.” Lehm- bruck’s earlier statues might well be placed next to Maillol’s, in the honest between-periods group—I can think of no one more entitled to the place. But later a subtle sort of distortion of nature crept in, and was absolutely justified by the increased realization of the evasive pervading quality. Many of his figures lack the heaviness of most modernist work, and yet only at a loss that seems compen- 99 sated for, unexplainably, in the “set” of the piece. Even so at- tenuated a work as the famous Kneeling Woman, illustrated here, has an appearance of geometrical solidity. And it has a sensitive- ness, a flowing sense of form, a spatial adjustment, that are unique among modernists. How far Lehmbruck became careless of finish—utterly con- temptuous of that surface refinement which was a first objective of Western sculpture for so many centuries—is indicated in the Mother and Child, a work of his last period. It is an example of instinc- tive organization combined with Lehmbruck’s individual sensitive Zo distortion; and it is of exceptional interest here, perhaps, as exhib- iting the sculptural counterpart of that heedlessness in the search for form which characterizes so many of the Expressionist paint- ers: Kokoschka, Heckel, Nolde, etc. Here in America the search for form in sculpture is so far from evident in any usual exhibition that a work by Gaston Lachaise or Cecil Howard seems startling in the midst of so much that is self- sufficiently pretty and amusing. There are other progressive and important sculptors, to be sure: Maurice Sterne, Trygve Hammer, the mystic Alfeo Faggi, the intense Szukalski. But American sculp- ture in general is so clever, so graceful, so wholly ingratiating in a pictorial way, that one gets into the habit of accepting it at its face value, without asking for soul. What could be tenderer and more sensuously attractive than the polished marble nudes by a dozen clever artists—among whom recently Attilio Piccirilli is beginning to stand out as tenderest. This is the very counterpart in stone of that famous painting by Leighton, The Bath of Psyche, which has become the standard example of illustrated pink beauty (page 40). Indeed, whole sections of our sculpture shows could be called “Baths of Psyche” and no one to object. And there would be sec- tions of cleverly realistic animal studies—and cute animals and babes—and realistic Western anecdotes and realistic steel workers and immigrants. And a section for Paul Manship’s followers, formalizing dancing maids prettily; and a section for Daniel Ches- ter French (not without a certain nobility) and the other modellers of the perennial symbolic female; and a section for the showy men who haven’t learned that Carpeaux is dead; and the bulgy Rodin school in bronze and clay, and another Rodin school that tries in 298 Nr Ree AUN Do) CHE LD BY WILHELM LEHMBRUCK vain for his exquisite modulations in marble. . . . But these things are not modern, and a sort of essential and all-important sculptural form is the last conceivable thing any of the sculptors concerned could have had in mind. What is it, then, that Lachaise brings into our exhibition halls? Realized or only partly realized, it is that fourth-dimensional relat- ing of masses, combined with a total lack of sentimentality, literary trapping or surface decoration. The sheer solidity, the direct stone- like feel, of the marble head illustrated some pages back, is typical of the sort of structural simplification, with little distortion of nat- ural relationships, which characterized his earlier work. Another work shown, Woman, illustrates a characteristic attempt to pile up in sculptural form his emotional conception of the woman quality. This might serve as a study lesson for students of the modern, to 299 WOMAN, BY GASTON TLACHALSS determine how far the abstract relation of mass and volume deter- mines the result and how far the arbitrary balance of more or less natural forms: the small head and the mountainous breasts, the strong full torso and the tapering leg, etc. The Rising Woman by George Grey Barnard, more austere, and less distorted for emotional gain, might well be recalled here by 300 RISING*> WOMAN, BY GEORGE GREY BARNARD way of analogy and contrast. It achieves the same massiveness in simpler relationships. It is the work of a man who saw, when Rodin’s Impressionism had come to rule the world of sculpture, a vision beyond Rodin. But there was no Expressionism in those days, no precedent for a man sick of precious surface qualities to cut and run regardless of all that the strface-sculptors valued. 301 Barnard tempered his insurgency rather with something he appre- hended out of the giants of other times, out of the strong early Greeks and particularly out of the anachronistic Michael Angelo. He is the only man I can think of who seems to combine a classic purity of language with a true modernist’s conception of form. Often the language controls, but there is enough of form in the Rising Woman alone to demand for him a place with the men here discussed. Jacob Epstein began by seeking sculptural form in its most stone-like and heaviest manifestations. But latterly he seems to have tried to combine his conception of the essential sculptural quality with a revelation of the soul of his model. He has gone down through realism to what may be called the living reality of his subjects—their life force instead of their outward aspects. More than one commentator on the passing of realism has suggested that the immediate next phase might be a pendulum-swing to the region of abstract design, but that the real new development will come when the searchers for form combine their findings with that inten- sity of life, that psychological insight, which only the era of real- ism could have developed. If the path of the future lies in that direction, Epstein has taken the longest step forward. There are critics who call him the greatest living sculptor, and it would be an exceptional observer who failed to class him with the three or four undoubted geniuses in the field. In choosing illustrations of Epstein’s work, I have purposely lim- ited the portraits to one: the very sensitive but very broadly mod- elled Mask of Mrs. Jacob Epstein. It exhibits the characteristic synthesis of apparently archaic and apparently realistic traits—the 302 BASS bee Or RS. SE PSE DN’; Boye rA CO Be oP Sv bl N sculptural form and the psychological content; for the rest, there is on page 281 the very simple, very seductive Mother and Child. Herewith, in utter contrast, is the recent Christ. This last has pro- vided fuel for one of the hottest controversial fires in the history of London “art circles.” And well it might in a land where sculp- 303 (7H Sele, BY JACO Bat ne hern ture has traditionally been even politer and more watered than in America. Expressionistic it undoubtedly is—that is, careless of nature in the search for direct expression; look at the size of the hands and the “cut” of the figure. But J am wondering whether the critics and the small public who hailed it as one of the assuredly immortal works are not confounding intellectual expression with eesthetic expression. Much as I admire an architectonic quality in it, the way in which it builds sculpturally like a pillar, I feel never- theless that it is primarily a work of the intellect, rather than an emotional conception. It is a sort of intellectual realism, in which the idea diverts from pure esthetic enjoyment. The people who call the formal dimension in painting “volume” or “voluminous form” would, I suppose, call the extra dimension in sculpture “movement.” I have tried to find works which would illustrate a connotation of this word quite applicable to the new sculpture. It has nothing to do with the much-talked-about “ar- rested movement,” the caught aspect or posed revealing attitude, of the Impressionists. That is dead movement. It has to do with organized masses apparently moving in certain directions in a cer- tain relationship. In its most obvious surface form, nearer a two- dimensional rhythm, it is illustrated in this wood sculpture by Ernst Barlach—which I take to be somehow related to the decorative branch of modern painting, to Gauguin and the early Matisse. In a more essentially sculptural form it is in the work of Gaudier and in the Repose of Archipenko. But it is a thing I despair of point- ing out if the reader does not feel it. More superficially, movement as a subject is capitalized by Duchamp-Villon in the panel shown at the close of the chapter. 305 WOMAN, BY DUCHAMP-VILLON PANEL, BY ERNST BARLACH This same sculptor has the quality more profoundly in the Woman shown here. Perhaps it is only the living quality in these things, potential movement in the sense of aliveness—but in some vague way it does speak to me as movement. I wish to dwell particularly, however, on the architectural phase of Duchamp-Villon’s work. He did a number of panels designed to be set into walls. One some- times wonders what would happen if our architects—who have all but killed their art with perfectly tasteful ornament and an unfail- ing knowledge of the past—should forget all styles and compose again spatially, as if with so many blocks; knock through their windows and doors, and then accent the remaining bare wall space only in collaboration with an architect-sculptor. Duchamp-Villon 307 BAS-RELIEF, BY, ARISTIDE Ciao was working that way, having designed buildings with integral ab- stract sculpture (not pictorial sculpture-decoration such as one sees at the Architectural League exhibitions, and too often, though sel- dom, in buildings—painty subjects translated into stone). Few sculptors have gone so far as Duchamp-Villon, I think, in at- taining to a building technique in sculpture; but the whole modern- ist current, being toward solidity, massiveness and repose, has been 308 in that direction. There is nothing in Rodin, surely, so finely architectural as the panel by Maillol shown here, and later men like Metzner and certain of the Dutch and Scandinavian sculptors have practically found themselves through their actual composing in connection with buildings. Here in America the sculptural “‘adorn- ment’ of important structures is a bit of patronage thrown to a sculptor by an architect who is himself a Neo-Classicist or an eclec- tic or a man trained to the love of the typical Beaux-Arts flourish; at least it was that way until a modern architect began to raise his head here and there to the Westward. The tendency to modelling instead of stone-cutting, leading to facility and pictorial illustration, helped to widen the gap between sculpture and architecture. By going back over the illustrations of Ale oie UO DIY TNO AN Tioe BY HUNT DIEDERICH 309 these two chapters, and thinking of the originals in relation to buildings, you may be able to gauge how far the search of the mod- ern sculptors for form has tended to bring them back to an archi- tectural feeling of structure. Is it not clear how the repose, the solidity, the “stone quality” of the new sculptures fit in with the solidity, simplicity and serenity of all great architecture? Perhaps there is a new architecture not unworthy of association with this sculpture—perhaps an architecture born similarly of the search for form, even an architecture fundamentally based like this sculpture on volumes in relation. Let us inquire. . . PANEL, BY DUCHAMP-VILLOW XV ARCHITECT, DECORATOR AND ENGINEER ' a ' , ‘ ae . hi) : 7 ‘ * ; « a ‘ * a ‘ * . > € * ‘ 4 s * \ * . . 7 > oe i % - : ry : * c ¢ . * se, ‘ 7 » =? 4 “ ° * ree ; - + eg = 54 ? ge ‘ , ’ * >» * Siete CE BY Sh RICH MENDEL SOHN RCHITECTURE, in the nature of its materials and its pur- poses, cannot be “representative.” Its lack of originality and vitality during the last four hundred years cannot be traced to ex- actly the same cause as the lack of creativeness in the graphic arts —to servile representation of the outward aspects of nature. But a clear parallel exists: Architecture has been servilely imitative of the “accepted styles’—imitative of what were authoritatively sanctioned as the masterpieces of earlier times. In the period be- tween 1500 and 1900, roughly, it came to be a common supposition that the possible types of building art had been exhausted. Archi- tects were content to work in classic or neo-classic, Greek or Ro- man, Gothic or neo-Gothic, Italian or French Renaissance. The trail of this false belief is to be seen written in stone across the facades not only of the buildings which are themselves the descend- ants of structures of ancient or medieval days—churches, palaces, triumphal arches—but on the faces of nine-tenths of our business skyscrapers, our banks, our public libraries, our railroad terminals. These many centuries, architects have been the perfect type of imi- tative professional artist: cultured, correct, resourcefully decora- tive, tasteful—but they have been likewise unoriginal, tame, con- ventional, impotent. * Fortunately there is also a parallel to the 20th Century insur- 313 gency of the post-Impressionist painters and. sculptors, a mod- ernist development that has given us the first examples of a new creative architecture which goes, on the one land, back to the fun- damental principles of zsthetic building, and on the other, forward to a reflection of the spirit and uses of today, and to logical employ- ment of today’s materials. The architects who have so dared to defy convention are even more suspect in their own profession than are the modernist painters in theirs, and less known to the public; but the foundations they have laid are no less solid and secure, no less certain to carry the weight of the architecture of tomorrow. Creative architecture practically went out when the designers of Gothic buildings turned their attention away from structural and organizational problems to refinements of decoration. The Renais- sance, as the name implies, found its source in classic architecture, although the Florentine Palace type had something strong and ex- pressive in it that suggests new blood and original thinking. But French Renaissance and English Renaissance are merely imitative developments, marked by differing modes of prettifying their mod- els, by varying types of refinement in the decorative elements. The same old girl, getting pretty seedy looking if one inquired beyond the surface, dolled up in changing fashions of clothing! And inas- much as French clothes are more showy and have better lines than E English or German or Italian, French Renaissance or post-Renais- -sance_ ‘architecture has been a world fashion these several genera- tions, If the statement seems broad, you might look up pictures of the palaces* of Brussels, Moscow, Petrograd, Scandinavia, the Bal- kan states, the German capitals, etc., etc., or look at the “show” theatres of Europe, from Bucharest to Stockholm and Lisbon, in 314 Sie SS Oj tO | By hOB MAL Is tS GEV ENS London, New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, etc., down to your home-town “opera house.” Nine-tenths of them aspiring to be little Paris Opera Houses. Or stand where you are and look up at the nearest “architectural monument;”’ the New York Public Library, the Grand Central Terminal, the fire- house in the middle of your block, or Senator So-and-So’s new mansion, or whatever building happens to be the “ornament” to your particular town. Well, of course, the statement is too broad; we are still building a certain number of Gothic churches, the Boston Public Library is solid Italian, not French Renaissance, and English Collegiate is having a vogue in college towns But French architecture dominates the Western world today—by right of putting up the prettiest decorated front, when fronts are chiefly what the designer sees in the word “architecture”; and our “leading” architects are Beaux-Arts men, trained in a Paris. school and saturated with Parisian culture. Thus it comes about that the chief epithet of opprobrium in the mouths of the truly. modernist builders is ““Beaux Arts’; and France, instead of breeding the first rebels as in the graphic arts, lags last in the development of a typi- cally modern architecture. The rest of the nations are outdistancing 315 > France because, having got into the lying habit of putting French clothes over their buildings, they are beginning to recognize the lying quality of it. They are beginning to see, too, that clothing buildings in any pre-existing style is not honest creation; that it is necessary for the style, if there must be such a thing, to grow out of the living architect, his times, the spirit and the materials of those times. The architecture of the late 19th Century, and with rare but very important exceptions, that of the 20th Century, is sham art not only in the sense of thus being falsely dressed-up, but in its structural dishonesty. I am thinking particularly of our American business buildings now, because they are more usually a shell on a steel ‘ rame—although hollow columns are by no means unknown to coun- try houses and cottages everywhere. A frame of a sort unknown _ to earlier centuries is constructed, and on that the architect hangs a Ay fagade with decorations that grew out of ancient structural functions which’ have no longer any validity. Columns that pretend to carry the weight, but are simply set in when the actual organic structure has been completed; buttresses that have no side-thrust to resist, that are built up uselessly beside the steel-supported wall to make a false show of style; deep-cut openings in the stone facing to give the “effect” of heavy masonry, where only the lightest shell of stone “or brick is structurally needed; Roman or regal French “fronts” ~ on a railroad terminal that has functions never dreamed of by the | ~ Romans or the French courts; cornices hung up uselessly on flat- Monten buildings: these are some of the commoner dishonesties of our best architects. Our current architectural magazines are still full of them; they are taught as “architectural art” in the training 316 Poet LON. BUPLDING AT COLOGNE, Boye) OS PH. HORM AN N schools. For that art consists of the designing of facades, without first emphasis on structural truth. At best this current practice and teaching show up world architecture, except for a handful of rebels, as confessedly uncreative, imitative, eclectic, feeble; at worst, as ._ yh > a dishonest, hypocritic, willing to steal (tastefully), irresponsible— ~ dy » > and withal conceited over it. | oe eae . : 3 28 Fel S @ : : : : Toms The modern architect who comes at his work creatively brings to | * it an honest conception of building as such. Fundamentally, I sup- pose, the problem of architecture is to build walls and roof and knock the necessary holes for entrance and light. (Look some day 317 at the New York Public Library with that truth in mind, to see how far the architect has strayed toward considering decorative elements instead of this fundamental problem.) Beyond that there is the matter of organization of masses—much the same problem of space and volume that the sculptor has to treat. If I were teaching a group of architectural students, I would start them not on the “orders” but on problems of form-composition, organization of cubes or blocks, volume relationship, for that is at the heart of their problem’ of design. Expressive form in architecture comes out of the “reality of use,” if I may so put it—something paralleling that structural reality of subject matter which we discussed in connection with painting and sculpture; and out of the architect’s emotion over his building, his experience of the exciting “feel” of building; and ~- out of the potentialities of his materials, the opportunity to intensify ~some quality of the brick or stone or steel or wood that he em- ploys. Honesty of conception, truth to purpose, expressive shaping - -.. according to some emotional conception, form-seeking within the limits of function and material—these are the only suggestions I will make here of the esthetic principles underlying modernist practice, as against that of the men who deify style, charm and re- finement. The first real modernists were more engineers than architects. They went in for straight, unadorned, undisguised building. They created some of the least obnoxious factories we have, and some fine monuments like the Brooklyn Bridge, High Bridge and many railroad constructions. But there were attempts to come at a mod- ern style through decorative elements even before any marked structural movement took direction. One of these decorative styles 318 Palos lt LON “BUILDING, Bieoen wn O TAUT AND jJOSEPH HOFFMANN achieved a considerable vogue in Europe, and left its traces in > Tt was a terrible thing America—under the name “Art Nouveau.’ because it sought to cover up structural dishonesty with a sickly sort of curved-line ornamental distraction. It was doubtless hailed as “modernism” in its day; but it never got below the surface, and was rightly laughed out of court. Tasteful imitation, even with the hand of death on it, was better than such a forced style. A later decorative approach was fruitful of at least sensuously pleasing results, however. It culminated in what I can only call “Viennese Secession” architecture. It has a certain validity be- 319 cause it demands a return to simple lines and flat spaces before it begins to decorate; and its ornament is the loveliest, most seduc- tive sort ever invented by a sophisticated civilization. Its masters are the Viennese architects, Hoffmann, Witzmann, Strnad and their fellows, and Joseph Urban has transported their style—so far as interiors go—to New York with its appeal intact. We also see the fruiting of it, with a slight French flavor, in the Cammeyer Build- ing on Fifth Avenue. But Hoffmann remains the chief, as he was one of the first masters. His box-like arrangements, from which he has cut off all traditional ornament, but with the edges decorated in typical Viennese fashion, with “‘just the touch,” marked some- thing new in exteriors; and the interiors, panelled with a perfect sense of decorative proportioning and hung with all-over patterns of ravishing color and design, have set the fashion recently for in- terior decorators in all the Greenwich Villages the world over. A fine advance it is, too, in this time when dullness had become a vir- tue, color a crime, and methodism the standard of respectability. In addition to an example of Hoffmann’s work, I am adding a re- production of a design by Rob Mallet-Stevens, who has done (on paper) the prettiest and catchiest things that have come out of France in this posteresque Secession mode. But as I have said in an earlier chapter, a primarily sensuous surface art, appealing as it may be, and grateful as we are for it as compared with the dull dig- nified thing, does not hold the soul of great creative art. It is too largely decoration for its own sake—there is something deeper. The really great new architecture grows primarily out of the new problems of an industrial civilization, out of housing its business and out of housing its workers and its capitalist-aristocracy—and 320 this new architecture can hardly be said to have found its decora- tive mode. The skyscraper is the typical building of this time; typical of the fine energy, courage, ultimate though hardly realized aspiration; but typical, too, of the ruthlessness, the selfish exploi- tation, the financial tyranny. One would think that the architects would have detected immediately the basic esthetic premise here, would have grasped the possibility of capitalizing height, the sky pierced, scores of stories built up, up, thousands of windows, per- fected steel articulation that permitted the building to tower. But they have failed almost continuously, all but wasted the opportu- nity that is America. They uninventively stuck to their traditional, schoolbook methods. They built disguising masks over the tower- t Pye te | v0 0 WOH WD Wy 0 % 4 (i) a vr“ it 0 adadntie *f YY a %y PATA? NW. oy NOM 0 4 : Oop MN ( i, Oy 4 Nh, Hf ey NW a ; | Ay Rel i, QV i | fey ra | is | ' 4 DESETGN FOR A GARAGE, BY ROB MALLET-STEVENS 321 ing steel skeletons. They tried to make the skyscraper look what it was not—a low, reposeful, Greekish structure. They succeeded usually in making it look like several poor academic buildings piled on each other—characteristic that was, too, of the cultural confu- sion they felt when faced with this new problem. Particularly they are guilty almost everywhere of breaking the logical upright lines by repeated horizontal lines, courses, colonnades, entablatures, cor- nices, whatnots. They knew horizontal designing and thought to compress the skyscraper into it. Came the engineer, and had no more caution than to confess the skeleton underneath, let the height be seen unashamed. And then the architect-engineer, the man who sees building before decora- tion, the structure and the mass before the facade, the imaginative- emotional lover of the art of building. Most significantly he was Louis Sullivan, the great American pioneer builder-artist. Even a quarter-century ago he was outrageously revolutionary: he asked architects to be honest, to substitute service and love for “show,” to learn architecture from the ground up rather than from ornament part way down, to cut through the falsities of convention to the foundations of the esthetics of building and of our American civi- lization. To be sure, he castigated the “cultured” architects un- mercifully, showed up in no uncertain terms the lying, egotistic quality of their work—and happily finds occasion still to fire a broadside at the diminishing majority. For his fight is almost won. In the last five years the skyscraper has oftener and oftener con- fessed that it is a honeycomb tower of steel, with a protecting en- casement of stone, brick or tiling; the decorative features have measurably grown out of its soaring lines, out of its steel skeleton, 322 HEREC Owe RESRLE TSS S2ESeS ee bdind st RR a ee ae ee By Copgright by Underwood and U iiversused DOWNTOWN NEW YORK its immense expanse of glass and the subordinate encasing remain- der of walls. Already we have enough of these finely expressive buildings to know that a really modern type of architecture has been found. And taken collectively, the downtown section of an Ameri- can city is likely to stir one’s deepest emotional feelings, to thrill all but the timid-minded with a thrill that can only be regarded as esthetic. In America Sullivan was the pioneer, and we shall meet some of his pupils in a moment in other connections. * But the men who are profiting by the principles he first pointed out are so many, without 323 BUSH TERMINAL SALES BUTTOING, BY HELMLE AND CORDS 324 any great figure standing out, that we may leave the skyscraper mat- ter without further mention of names—except Helmle and Corbett, because I am putting in an illustration of their Bush Terminal Sales Building in New York, one of the most satisfying business- towers structurally. In Europe, although the skyscraper has gained no such place or fame, there has been a similar movement toward recognition of honest structural principles in the design of business buildings, toward recognition of the essential values of varying materials, and away from the old obsession with imitative styles and “finish.”” The name most revered by the modernists is that of A. P. Berlage, and it is to him most of all that the Hol- landers owe the vitality of their progressivism in architecture. No other country in Europe has quite so live a group of “radicals’”— men like de Klerk, Wijdeveld and Kramer—and they have notice- ably affected the aspect of the country’s architecture. Germany too had come to a finely solid, clean-cut sort of busi- ness structure even before the war—there has been precious little building since, but there has been a welter of imaginative and crea- tive experiment on paper—and even the sketchiest list of leaders must include Peter Behrens, Max Littmann, Alfred Messe] and J. M. Olbrich, and in Austria Otto Wagner. These are the names one meets oftenest in collecting the material that would seem to count in connection with the early days of “the new movement.” But these men, as radical as Sullivan and Berlage, are now the mild revolu- tionaries in Central Europe. It is rather Bruno Taut and Erich Mendelsohn and the Luckhardt brothers who are the storm center today. They are the truly Expressionistic architects, and they carry the ideas of distortion, intensification and free emotionalism over 325 MODEL FOR MAGDEBURG MUNICIPAL BUILOTA Gs. BY) Bi RA NiO pele eo into building design in a way that scandalizes those who see certain logical rigidities and straightnesses in the very nature of building materials. Perhaps they are extreme—one never hopes to meet some of their designs in the concrete on land or sea—but out of their extraordinary imaginativeness, their freedom of feeling, there is coming a new spirit of emotional approach to the problems of building, a new sense of the importance of a fascinating architec- tonic form-problem with millions of unrealized potentialities for plastic beauty. These are, perhaps, the forerunners of something to come after the skyscraper-honesty period. To return to the comparatively sane American field, we come to the man who is considered by many of the European progressives to be the greatest living architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. He has been less concerned with the skyscraper or business building problem 326 >*, 4 SASS t PLP LLP I EG LP LP LD LF PF | al — sive CRA RE R DES TGN:, BY “HANS SOEDER than with residential architecture, wherein he has created something so near to a style that one can go into any American suburb and pick the houses done by his imitators or their imitators; and in cer- tain sections of Europe what is known as “the American style”’ is straight Wright. (There are books about him in Europe, but none in America.) His mode of building is marked—or was, because he is after something else just now—by total absence of traditional ornament or illogical methods of design, by creative organization of the main masses, accentuation of these masses by emphasized roof lines, constant play of texture interest in his materials, and a general sense of horizontal repose, fitness to the surrounding scene and “‘color” in the broader sense. Sometimes in his houses, and al- most extravagantly in a conception like his Midway Gardens, an open air “resort” in Chicago, he runs to an individual decorative 327 motive based on flat geometric forms—an abstract sculptural com- posing in wooden beams, crossbars and projections. Lately Wright has made designs for the Barnsdall Theatre in Los Angeles which mark a new “phase” in his development, a remarkably direct method of composing in “cubes” with accents of ornament that give an almost jeweled effect. And at the other extreme he did the often-reproduced office building of the Larkin Factory in Buffalo, a structure that is based on his conception of the typical factory quality and factory needs, and that foreran the logical “pier-and- grill” type of construction which appears more and more frequently in business buildings. It is not necessary to go deeply into this matter of factory build- ing, beyond the suggestion that many people who had tired of con- ventional hypocrisy in architecture, long ago began to appreciate the sheer brick-and-glass buildings done by industrial engineers more than the “ornamental” buildings like libraries, city halls and art galleries. Many of those earlier structures had a feel of integ- rity and fitness about them that came as a grateful relief. And lately men like Behrens in Germany, Luthman in Holland, and even some of our originally academic architects like Cass Gilbert and Holabird and Roche in America, have been taking this sheer fac- tory quality and capitalizing it into something powerfully expressive and even esthetically moving. Most notably, perhaps, Erich Men- delsohn has made a remarkable series of Expressionistic designs for various industrial uses, each one reflecting the spirit of the in- dustry and the architect’s individual emotion over it, and having obvious form-values in the compositional organization. England has brought little to the modern architecture movement 328 scene ne 4 fener tee PAGTORY, BY FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT except in the field of domestic architecture. By reviving the admi- rable “cottage” type, wherein simple mass composition was handled with instinctive creativeness, that country put forward the impetus toward honest and expressive home design in most of the Western world. E. L. Lutyens and M. H. Baillie Scott picked up this essen- tially English tradition and developed it with a truly creative indi- viduality. A similar but less widespread creative revival has taken place in New Mexico and California, where the notably beautiful remains of Indian-Spanish architecture have been the starting-point for the most virile development of stylistic expression in this 329 HOUSE; BY FRANK LLOYD Wasa country since Colonial architecture came to its decadence. (Please, dear reader, don’t confuse this with what we used to call on the Coast “the Mission Style.”) I am reminded that California has had more than its share of modern architecture, in that beside these creative adaptationists, the very original and important Ber- nard Maybeck works there, putting up unostentatiously his resi- dences rich in color, always with a formal value that is at once an expression of the architect’s emotion and his reading of the char- acter of his client—and of the site and materials. Of another kind of residence, the apartment house, typically of today, of the teeming city, of our crowded intense life, there are 330 too few notable examples in truly creative vein. But that is coming too, honestly, with the recognition of the essential esthetic merits of skyscraper construction, and the growing sensitiveness of our archi- iects to fitness of decorative elements to use. Already we begin to see these human beehives blossoming out frankly as what they are, _and not as imitation palaces or overgrown Colonial manor houses or Gothic retreats. Of all countries Holland has been most success- ful in the application of modern logic to the apartment problem. We seem to be merely groping still for expressiveness of any modern spirit in our churches: the structures by Ralph Adams Cram and Bertram Goodhue in strict traditional style are still our most appealing houses of worship—although almost any old mod- ernist contraption may be judged better than “average’’ Gothic. Nor have we got away from the mausoleum style of art museum. Our theatres still ape hollowly the magnificence of Paris, with a few encouraging but hardly exciting exceptions. The colleges fall back for the most part on Neo-classic, Renaissance, Colonial, or that special phase called English Collegiate. Which leads me to make the reservation that creative adaptation, by a man who is honest-minded about it, is likely to prove next best thing to a really creative and successful modernist achievement, and far DESIGN FOR AN AERODROME, BY ERICH MENDELSOHN Se Mia ee. seo “Cobyragis by Underwood and Unllereoad WOOLWORTH BULEDING, BY CASS 3Giperat better than the average work of the would-be progressives. I am thinking about the Harkness Quadrangle at Yale, designed by John Gamble Rogers. I confess that I have gone up to New Haven three times just to wander around in it, and there isn’t anything really new except the texture interest, the scientific use of broken color, and perhaps a general spirit of loving craftsmanship. But there is emotion in the place, despite its frank copying of forms out of the past. Perhaps here the somewhat servile copying of the general forms of fine buildings of other days is combined with enough of the surface characteristics of creative modernism to make the whole seem living. Conversely I see in the famous Woolworth Building of Cass Gilbert an example of creative massing, creative design for modern needs, typical skyscraper soaring; but over it a coating of servilely imitative historic ornament—which still is not potent to destroy the emotion the structural element evokes in me. Both these are compromised creations—but there is honesty and love enough in them to make them stir us to admiration and enjoyment. Remember, dear reader, that honesty in one way or another is the first key to the situation, both in creation and in appreciation. If a building be not what it pretends to be, it is not a work of modern art. But you will find the honest buildings multiplying fast, and buildings with the quality of form-creation speaking to your spirit from them. If you cannot be stirred by them, you are not likely ever to come to anything but hypocritical enjoyment of modern painting or sculpture. Someone wise has said that a man who has not learned to discriminate between, the true and the false in the “arts of use” will never come to an appreciation of what is noble in the “‘fine arts.” In a primer, where I am supposed to 333 begin with the fundamentals, I should perhaps have put this chapter first. Still, it would have turned away a lot of readers. The time is coming, however, when architecture will be acknowl- edged again as a leader among the arts. Don’t be fooled by the Greek fronts and Beaux-Arts flourish. Look the other way and you may surprise beauty naked and unashamed. > REG BY WENZEL HABLISE be? XVI THE CHANGING THEATRE \- HE art of the theatre is stirred by the same forces of rebellion and renewed life that I have tried to trace in painting, sculp- ture and architecture. No other art, to be sure, is so wrapped up in confusion, contradiction and vain shoutings regarding its mod- ernism; but that is only an outcome of the multiple nature of the stage, play and actor as an art medium, and the exceptional difh- culty of bringing to final material consummation in a theatre any strikingly new conception. We have had, indeed, precious few examples of complete, rounded-out modernist productions in which the spirit of post-Impressionistic art characterized play, acting and mounting: the progress has been so piecemeal, indeed, that I find myself faced with the necessity of tracing the movement succes- sively and separately through the experiments of theorists, play- wrights and “decorators.” For that very reason I wish to begin by affirming that the larger theatre can move forward only by developing a new drama, a new stage, a fresh standard of acting and a new stagecraft concurrently. Developing a remarkably able group of clear-thinking scenic artists is not enough; nor is it enough to call in the ablest artists out of painting, literature, dancing, etc. For there are expressive forms that pertain particularly and peculiarly to the theatre, and the artist can capture them only through a thorough consideration and love of the complete theatre as such. They are not likely to be discovered by casual invaders who think in terms either of Expressionistic painting or of free 337 verse, or of theories of gesture-and-music or esthetic dancing or stylized acting. The stage, while partaking of the materials and of the nature of these other arts, has its own form in a synthesis of their collective values and something more. ‘The true artist of the theatre will create from visions of the theatre as a whole—stage and auditorium, movement and sound, light, color, poetry, human- ity, acting, soul related to soul. Negatively, the movement has closely paralleled the anti-realistic current in the graphic arts. There has been, indeed, a well-defined struggle to free the stage from the centuries-old obsession with representation and imitation, to free it for creative expressiveness; to find ways of escape from the sphere of sentiment, anecdote, plot- weaving and photography, into a sphere where beauty of form might be locked with the release of the spirit. It is but natural, however, that a composite art which has become also a great busi- ness, with vast numbers of non-artists dependent upon it for their living, should resist change even more bitterly than the compara- tively “removed” arts of painting and sculpture. The greater number of playwrights, actors, designers and other workers for the current theatre, having dedicated their lives to making a certain sort of drama live, naturally defend it against the attack of the modernists with all their weapons. They are even better entrenched than the academic painters: they are in possession of the very expensive machinery of the art. Looking at the question with the larger perspective of a study of the theatre’s entire history, however, one is tempted to ask: why should realism be expected to live? Recognizing that drama began as religious ritual, grew to noble group-entertainment in art and 338 ritual fused, had very distinctive theatrical “form,” and then decayed in spectacle and realistic mimicry; was reborn at the church altar, became the people’s outlet for their spiritual and play life, then flowered in poetic-theatric expression, only to fall away into a weak purveyor to the people’s desire for sentiment, romance and sophisticated story-telling; and finally narrowed itself down to objective picturing of observed or imagined existence, and so to the curiosity-satisfying analytic-photographic play and the peep-hole stage of today, concerned with the surprises and taboos of individual living—the whole a record extending from the gods through imagination and romance to contemporary life, with innu- merable branchings, decayings, rebirths; recognizing this as the constantly changing history of the theatre, why, in heaven’s name, should anyone think that the realistic-romantic drama is a final form? Not only is there nothing to indicate that any form can ever be considered final, but everything points to realism as the decadent thing, as the drama farthest removed from the spirit, as the expression of ages that have become material, self-conscious, devitalized. Moreover, realism with us today has already come to the impasse created by its own perfecting. It finds at last that it has encompassed, not the emotion of mankind, the spirit of a people, or formal beauty, but a perfected machine, a super-camera —able to give back a selective but always photographic reflection of life. I am not fooling myself into thinking that any little pack of rebels can drive realism from the theatres in any given quarter- century, or even that the gradual trend to a new type of production will make any perceptible difference in the number of realistic 339 plays to be produced on New York’s Broadway next season. There will be more counterparts of The Easiest Way, Rain, Loyalties and The Circle, even more Shaw, which is really a step upward; more stunts like the transplanted Childs Restaurant, and the elevator’s squeak, and the real cabbages, and endless faithful Period interiors, leading-hotel interiors and Harlem interiors; more natural acting, down to the last vulgarity, perfectly faithful to a studied original and perfectly uninspired. There are plenty of times when I think it is right that we should have these things, as we have The Saturday Evening Post, baseball and the movies, for our wholesome amuse- ment and shallow comfort (although the movies might be asked to tinker up their wholesomeness a bit). For most of us they are necessary, to take the place of religion and culture. In the absence of anything to be called a modern church, in the absence of any adequate amount of art related to contemporary life, these are at present our relaxation, our relief from the grind of making a living, our substitute of entertainment for spiritual life. But need we insist that they have to do with art? I suppose that one cannot claim a constructive modernist develop- ment for the theatre without pointing out the parallel to the expres- sive form quality in painting and architecture. I confess that I am even more at a loss for words to suggest what I feel theatric form to be, than I was in the case of the graphic arts back in the chapter on Theoretical Background. Although this is my own art, for I am a worker in the theatre, the essential thing we are after, the essential drama quality, the revelation of spirit that is beyond plot, charac- ter, action and ensemble, seems more elusive than the correspond- ing quality in the other art fields. I have responded to it in divers 340 places: at the culminating emotional moment of a typical story- play, in a cramped Broadway playhouse; in the open air when Margaret Anglin played something of Sophocles in the Greek Theatre at Berkeley; without understanding more than a rare word of the language, when I saw the driving, Expressionistic Masse- Mensch production at the Volksbiihne in Berlin; at rehearsals, at a simple production of Hamlet, most recently at moments in the performance of Six Characters in Search of an Author. What I mean is that at these times there got over to me, a spectator look: ing at action on a stage, a spirit out of the production; a nioving, compelling, dynamic thing that stilled my mind, emotionalized ny whole being, wrapped me up in ecstasy, that made me belong com: pletely and joyously to the theatre, a sheer dramatic emotion. : Where theatre productions at other times are merely amusement, or entertainments that play pleasant tricks with our surface emo: tions, these rare productions are profoundly stirring, and they leave one looking back pleasurably, with the thought that there all the resources of the stage were combined in one essentially theatric emotion; that the theatre has been used with profound expressive- ness—and in that lies the revelation of theatric form. The easiest types of drama to identify as “new” are those that are primarily sensuous in appeal—the wordless productions, swinging away from literature toward music and color, that are sometimes set off in a special category called “esthetic drama.” The best known, and perhaps most successful, examples have been created in some of the “dance-dramas” of Diaghileff’s Russian Ballet. Aside from the conjunction with music and dependence upon emotional as against imitative use of line and color in the 341 MOVEMENT—FROM AN ETCHING BY GORDON CRAIG backgrounds, there is here the central emphasis on movement instead of story—and movement is (thanks very largely to our American Isadora Duncan) in the best modern dancing wholly abstract and expressive. It would seem at first glance that these Russians, helped some- times by foremost French painters like Derain and Picasso, have achieved the answer to the question about theatric form. — For theirs is a typically and frankly theatric art, inclining toward abstract means, presentative of emotion and rhythm rather than imitative of outward aspects of life, carrying the spectator with certainty into an ecstasy of the senses. And yet, when all is said and done, this very fascinating thing seems to me to lack something of the finest nobility and expressiveness of which the theatre is capable. It tends too far toward the essential qualities of music and dancing as such; there is some finer and wider implication in the word “drama” which it has missed. It is magnificent; but like most magnificent buildings or paintings or sculptures, it is likely to be just a little empty—spiritually. In the joy it gives us sensuously, and in its failure to go deeper, it is perhaps the theatre’s counter- part of decorative painting, the stage version of Gauguin’s canvases. It is, to be sure, the completest thing developed in all the phases of theatric modernism. But the sensuous theatre is not all the theatre, and its half of the modernist stage movement is likely to prove a minor half. The theatre using words as one of its media seems to hold the larger promise of spiritual and formal beauty. There is great danger, of course, that the theatre will swing too far in the other direction, toward literary values, when the drama- tist attempts new creative things away from the primarily sensuous 343 field. For many centuries the greater portion of what is called drama has been predominantly literary, and recently it has been almost exclusively of the shallow fiction type, without the slightest formal beauty—journalistic, literal, unimaginative. One may see that danger, and still believe that drama is as closely related eesthetically to literature as it is to music, dancing or the color arts. For I think there is no way of evading the fact that in dramatic pro- duction in its most moving forms, story-development or character- development is a major factor. This need not be plot for its own sake, as the short-story writers use it. It may be the play of divinity shaping a sequence of events, soul brought to soul before our eyes, a reflection in unfolding action of the universal relating rhythm. It may be hardly more than a loose arrangement of improvisations on a certain theme, or it may move as swiftly and inevitably as a Greek tragedy; but the flow, the disposition of events, the unroll- ing, is of its essential character. We are dealing here with a time art, and it is precisely because words are the most expeditious aid to unfolding the relationships of humanity, because they hasten and intensify the emotional action, that they become a legitimate dramatic means. | In summary, the following elements probably enter into the theatre production’s effectiveness in reaching the emotions of the spectator; some sort of crescendo or varied form of action or story, words used tonally as well as literally, re-enforcement of the emotion by designed lighting, background, color and move- ment, and acting that is less personal than character-revealing—and beyond these, or perhaps implicit in the synthesis of them, some all-over theatrical attribute in the nature of a flowing rhythm. s 344 About three jumps back in theatre history, such minor revolu- tions as there were, clearly were based on changes in the literary or playwriting element. The “romantic revival’ was of that sort. The following phase, the naturalism of the late 19th Century, was likewise more clearly marked in its changing form of play and dialogue than in any other element of theatre art; although it brought about negative changes in acting and scenic background, purging away bombastic-romantic traditions in playing without substituting anything but an ineffective naturalism, and destroying the more negligently artificial elements in decoration in favor of the equally hollow distractions of photographic imitation. In play- writing there were always countercurrents to naturalism; romantic plays as recently as Rostand; symbolic-mystic plays as recently as Maeterlinck; and most important, amounting to a minor revolution in itself, the brilliant intellectual drama of Wilde, Shaw and Barker. No one need sneer at this English school of playwriting just because it failed to achieve formal beauty, and because it nar- rowed the theatre down to a playground for intellectuals. At that it was infinitely superior to nine-tenths of what passed as theatre art out of the preceding two or three centuries. At least it was intelligent jugglery of ideas, and that is a step ahead of cheap juggling with people’s surface emotions, or sentimental-scientific slicing-of-life. In the theatre there is a special development of realism which perhaps has more to recommend it than the usual realistic painting or sculpture. It almost warrants the name “‘spiritualized realism.” It moves the spectator in something more than a surface way—but it never has that sweep, that dynamic power, that all-enveloping 345 beauty which is embraced in some other types of play. It has found its richest interpretation in the productions of the Moscow Art Theatre under Constantin Stanislavsky, with a group of actors who touch the culminating point in repressed naturalistic acting. Perhaps because these Russians had refined realism down to the last point, the first notable rebellion against naturalistic play- writing, in favor of a more typically theatric form, came in Russia, in the experiments of Meyerhold and Yevreynoff. Neither one of these men has given us important plays upon which to build a new type of production. But both contributed to the idea which chiefly underlies later experiment. It is that dramatist and audience must both accept the fact that the theatre is always a theatre, for shows, with an emotional entity of its own, and that to reduce it to a place where playwrights and actors try to afford the illusion of real life, by imitating nature, is a perversion of its function. In that state- ment is the heart of modern dramatic theory. Meyerhold and Yevreynoff reverted to naked stages, cleared of the accumulation of painted settings and machinery for clever “effects” which the three-hundred-year reign of the realistic-pictorial drama had accumulated; this stripped stage was brought forward as a frankly theatrical element, in order that the actors might be brought forward too and appear frankly as actors—all to the end of re-establishing the long-lost relationship between players and audience that existed in Greek, Medieval and Elizabethan times. No more looking through a square frame and pretending that it was the removed fourth wall of a room of actual life; no more meticulous repre- sentation of nature in the background; no more straining for illusion. Dramatists must refuse longer to be bound by the sup- 346 posed necessity of holding their characters and action within the limits of what might probably and naturally happen in the world as we usually know it; they must feel free to violate any three-act or five-act formula, or any technical limitation of three settings or five or twenty; they must understand only that it is man’s soul and emotions and the materials of the theatre that they deal with, and that so long as they project these theatrically, in an unfolding “show,” it makes no difference whether they violate the appear- ances of reality, the limits of the realistic peep-hole stage, or the rules of current playwriting practice. The grasping of the essen- tially theatric thing is what counts. Perhaps the original experimenters with this revolutionary, anti- realistic idea worked too doctrinairely, perhaps they simply were not born to be world-masters in their art, or perhaps the chaotic conditions in war-time Russia and post-war Russia have halted their development—but certainly they have been eclipsed, temporarily or permanently, by the so-called Expressionistic playwrights. This group came into world prominence out of Germany in 1920 or 1921, and today their influence has been felt directly by consider- able groups of theatre workers wherever revolutionary ideas are welcomed. The Expressionist drama lives up to the suggested parallel with Expressionist painting. It grew out of the same im- patience with the nature-serving direction of current art practice, and out of the widespread groping for new expressive forms. It is characterized by the same distortion of the outward aspects of nature, the same disregard for technical formulas and niceties, a similar headlong, emotional approach. The best-known example of the type is Georg Kaiser’s From Morn to Midnight, because it 347 was first translated into English and was later produced in New York (and very briefly in London); and Ernst Toller’s Masse- Mensch has become a classic example because of its sensational qualities and its long run in Berlin. In New York the presentation of three native Expressionistic plays on Broadway in quick succes- sion, Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, John Howard Lawson’s Roger Bloomer and Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine, served to familiarize the theatre-going public there with at least the surface characteristics of the method. These five examples have this in common: they are all constructed—thrown together, some people would say—in many short scenes, leaping from crisis to crisis as fast as words and action can carry them, without regard to that intricate formula of preparation, minor climax and third-act climax which has been the respectable superstition of playwriting ever since professors first began to dissect the classic dramatists; they distort ruthlessly the outward aspects of nature, telescoping time, intensifying the emotional “look’”’ of a place to the exclusion of all material detail, caricaturing people; they use words with a new effectiveness, singly, for immediate emotional reaction, without regard to grammatical arrangement—and at the other extreme they pile up words and speeches into avalanches of emotion; and they all are swift, dynamic, abrupt, Whitmanesque. They burst the bounds, too, of the old philosophies and the old divisions of realism, romanticism and symbolism, piling these things in too, if the mixing helps. They are able to compass such a range and to span such chasms because with their first gesture they free them- selves of the realistic-naturalistic limitation; because they serve notice at the start that actuality doesn’t interest them, and then can 348 plunge along from emotional crisis to emotional crisis without stop- ping to compromise with plausibility or to make the action seem “natural,” Many of the incidents in From Morn to Midnight are utterly implausible, the Fifth Avenue scene in The Hairy Ape is, on second thought, laughably artificial, the caricatures of the capitalists in Masse-Mensch are outrageously overdrawn; and yet these extremes and abrupt contrasts move us as they are meant to do, and the whole piled-up conglomeration stirs us immensely—so that in the end we are left with a sense of having been lifted to a new height above mankind, of an experience beyond life. Perhaps we are a bit dizzy at first, but when that wears off, the sense of wonder, even exalta- tion, remains. I do not think we have a genuine masterpiece in the type yet—no Cezanne or Picasso or Kokoschka of the theatre—but from the pro- duction of Masse-Mensch particularly I caught gleams of something to come which seems to me most likely to crystallize as our modern- ist type of production. I see artists building on the intensity, the raw emotion of these plays, a new, virile sort of theatre production, as powerful as modern life, stirring, touching beauty at its most gorgeous and careless moments. It will never try to evade the con- fession of the stage as stage, it will leap into action at the first bound, compressing the drama of a lifetime into every episode, every moment, packing every speech with a torrent of ideas, laying bare life in the raw; it will not always be smooth and intelligible, and certainly not pretty; but it will act on you like emotional sledge-hammers, it will unaccountably move you and purge your soul like the old Greek dramas (curiously enough, considering our 349 refined and reverent attitude toward classic plays!) and shock you and stir your finest emotions, and outrage your sense of the con- ventions of polite drama and polite living, but reveal a deeper rhythm, and finally leave you with a feeling of spiritual exaltation. Perhaps the abruptness and shock and noisiness will wear down, so that the intensity and emotional directness and absolute theatrical- ness will remain, to be mated with those universal qualities of serenity, profoundness and unity which underlie the greatest art. There will always be great acting if there is great drama in the world. I am convinced that if we have lacked giants among our players in recent generations, it has been because no plays were being produced that called for giants. The acting profession is “down”’ at the moment, because playwriting has been weak, imita- tive, unimaginative, even dull. It made no demands beyond clever imitativeness. But here in America we have a remarkable group of young actors, intelligent, forward-looking, emotionally alive, intense with the feel of the times and love of the stage—and most of them are marking time artistically while the “producers” feed them on the pap of decadent realism, dramatized best-seller fiction and sugared classics. There may be modernist acting as distin- guished from what we generally have; if so, it is merely a return to real acting, to impersonation, where we have been content with the showing up of personal charm and clever mimicking. When we get the right combination of play and producer, the acting end will be adequately taken care of. What we need is dramatist- producers who can visualize acting as they write. I am reminded again of the unfortunate separation of functions in the theatre as I turn away from both the dramatists and the actors to the stage 350 Moet OR ““DANTE,** BY NORMAN BEL-GEDDES decorators, with whom lies the rest of the story of modernism on the stage. Some people still count David Belasco’s revolt against the artificiality of staging in the nineties as the beginning of modern producing in America. But his was only a much-needed, but ulti- mately unimportant, revolution within the field of naturalism. He made naturalism solid, of a built rather than a painty sort, but meticulously imitative. After him came the true revolution in stage setting, the decorator who understood something of unity and syn- thesis, who started first by trying to take the stage away from the playwrights and actors to make it a painter’s plaything, but who soon settled down to fill his niche more efficiently than any other 351 MODEL FOR ‘‘DANTE,’’?’ BY. NORMAN BEL =CERDD ee worker in the theatre is filling his; a generation which understands that the only excuse for the decorator on the stage is to help present a play to an audience adequately, appropriately, emotionally, with the visual appeal re-enforcing at every point the appeal of the spoken word and the individual gesture. | The visual appeal is important—co-important with the several sorts of appeal that go to make up theatric expressiveness. It is here that we come to Gordon Craig, the great pioneer figure in the changing world theatre. He stands behind these decorators, behind the Russians, and particularly as the great source of inspiration and ideas behind the many German modernistic playhouses. His influence is felt wherever the new generation is trying new sorts of 352 production. Back in the time when Craig was a young actor, stage decoration and the visual element in staging were at the lowest ebb. Theatre art was made up of play texts, acting and something that was ordered in from scenic studios. These studios “supplied the art’ in accordance with a run-down tradition, in diluted imitation of the grand manner of a century or two earlier, without the faintest notion of harmony of play and setting, of unity of impression, of creative use of line, mass and color. The visual appeal in the theatre was taken care of as an afterthought. Gordon Craig rediscovered that the theatre is by exact definition first of all “a place for seeing’; he has reaffirmed on a thousand occasions the fundamental importance of what can be understood by the spectator through the eye—“‘the art of the theatre has sprung from action—movement—dance”’; and in emphasizing—perhaps over-emphasizing—the importance of the visual element, he once added a memorable note: “. . . not a word about it being a place for hearing 30,000 words babbled out in two hours.” It is gener- ally agreed that this rediscovery of Craig’s marks a turning-point in the history of the modern theatre. Only by a complete under- standing of the multiple nature of theatre art, and its dependence upon movement and visual design as an integral part of its “form,” co-ordinate with the appeal to or through the ear, can one get an inkling of the visions that the younger theatre artists have seen. Craig has never proved a great deal by his productions—they have been too few and usually not done freely, independently—but through his provocative writings and his extraordinary designs he has fired the imaginations of theatre workers, from the commer- cially astute Max Reinhardt to the very “special” Copeau, from 3953 the Germans who have put his ideas to constructive work in their greatest theatres to the experimenters in our hundred amateur “little theatres.”” He was anti-realistic from the start; he implied if he did not directly point out the necessity for a return to the naked stage, the frankly theatrical theatre; he insisted upon a “noble artificiality” as a goal, and he experimented with such “pre- sentative’ media as the marionette and the mask—a step toward abstraction; but most of all, he paved the way for the more radical experimenters of today by showing up the lack of unity, the lack of vision, the lack of that synthesis of forces which alone can bring to flower the thing we have called typical theatric form. If he over- stated the importance of the visual element, thus driving minor artists to the sin of over-decoration, in the larger view he restored a balance which the theatre had to have before modern progress was possible. One must mention also Adolphe Appia, who likewise wrote and made remarkable and suggestive designs, although his influence was less widespread and his ideas less spectacularly radical. He urged a new unity—a unity that would emphasize the domination of the actor on the stage—and he particularly put for- ward the truth that there are great emotional values in lighting, even a possible spiritualizing, synthesizing power in light that would go far to weld together the then scattered forces of production. He had a vision of a sort of formal beauty that had been lost out of the theatre for many generations. That brings us back to the younger artists, particularly in the playhouses of Germany and America, who were nurtured on Craig and Appia; for I believe that collectively they have had that vision more clearly than the actors, dramatists or so-called producers, and 354 certainly they have had most to do with the preparation of the actual stage for a new drama. Their revolt accomplished at first merely a becoming re-dressing of the current drama, and strictly speaking had nothing to do with the development of a modernist theatre. To the surviving romantic play they added an eye-filling loveliness of lighting, coloring and general decors; and the realistic drama they rescued from a too-studied literalness on the one hand and the old flapping-canvas absurdity on the other. Through prac- ticing the newly-recovered principles of simplicity, suggestion and fitness, they added a new visual dignity to the current drama; for the first time in the memory of the oldest actor, the play was dressed appropriately, richly, honestly, to bring out its own best, if some- how over-familiar, points. There followed the search for a style in decoration—“‘sty]l- ized” Shakespeare, Viennese-decorative mimo-dramas, atmospheric Maeterlinck, fantastic dolling-up of dream-plays or nightmare plays. But mere betterment of setting, putting old plays in stylish clothes, somehow left a bizarrish feel in the eye. When Cubist and Expressionist modes of painting came in, these were tried on the old girl too—and distracted for the moment, but in the end made her look older than ever. But the young decorators were broad enough to see before anyone else, when the real signs of a new drama arrived, that the carefully studied types of post-Impression- istic “scenery” were inadequate, and they met the dramatist half- way by discarding decoration entirely and striking out for the > They cut out background entirely, arranging fore- “formal stage.’ stages for the actors to play on, and pools of light for them to play in—to the end that the emotional appeal to the audience might be 355 more direct, the intensity heightened. It would look as if the in- telligent decorator had thus done himself out of his job; but it is only the hundredth theatre that has turned even partly modernistic, and on Broadway Jones, Geddes, Simonson, Rosse, Bragdon, Thompson and Peters can still find plenty to do in the field of dress- ing realism or romanticism prettily; and the more imaginative of them are turning producers or dreamers of complete productions and of new theatres to house them. Robert Edmond Jones probably divined the thing that was developing in world art, the shift to a search for form, earlier than any other artist in the American theatre. His designs for purely “formal” productions are among the finest thrusts toward a new stage art. One of his conceptions was that “Expressionist produc: tion of Macbeth” which went so sadly wrong in the acting; but which at its best moments afforded New York audiences occasional vistas into an almost unexplored field of abstract beauty. His “‘set- tings” cast loose from reality, they were not meant to be even “suggestive” of palace rooms, heaths, etc., they were not symbolic (although many a spectator read symbolism into the leaning “arches” or “windows’); they were conceived as intensifying, abstractly, the feeling of dread that hangs over the play. So far as settings alone can go, Jones there initiated Expressionism into the larger American theatre. And he has greater formal projects visualized but as yet unrealized on the stage. Without doubt the most imaginative and most fecund of Ameri- can modernists in the theatre is Normal-Bel Geddes, who has designed a dozen theatres for radical types of production, and who has made extraordinary plans for a presentation of a Dante play. 356 eo LN Gli Fan wee EN) MACE ETH ,’” BY ROBERT EDMOND JONES These require the building of a special stage, the synthesis of all the elements commonly associated with mimo-drama—music, rhythmic movement in mass and individually, color accompaniment—with the poetry and the unfoldment of events of the profounder word- drama, and the services of perhaps a thousand actors (or slaves). The photographs shown here, from Geddes’ model, indicate the unusualness, and perhaps suggest something of the beauty, potential in the scheme. I think that Geddes and Jones, and perhaps all the artists I named in a paragraph above, would agree that the theatre to which we are coming (ultimately) depends for its form on a developing type of drama; and that the outward mark of that drama is a frank theatricality, a confessed employment of the 357 means that are typically the theatre’s, total abandonment of the realistic illusion, of photographic exactness, of representation of life as an end in itself. Its inward content is not life imitated, but life condensed, formalized, shaped into a performance by the intensification and liberation of emotion in theatric form. It is thus not representative, illustrative, descriptive, but expressive, presentative, creative. Our nearest approach here in America to what is called in Europe an “art theatre”’ is to be detected in the New York Theatre Guild. It has in general been content to assist in the perfecting of realism, with excursions into Shavian intellectualism, and in these fields it has achieved an enviable standard of visual produc- tion under the guidance of Lee Simonson. But the Guild has also served New York audiences modernistically by bringing forth two examples of Expressionism, the notable Kaiser play From Morn to Midnight, and the native Adding Machine of Elmer Rice—which latter, one must add, in its modernistic freedom and intensity really showed forth less of formal beauty than of the outpourings of a distress-ridden or sex-obsessed mind, like the graphic art of Chagall or Grosz and the other members of Dr. Pfister’s repression-outlet school. The organization is by no means committed to a “radical” or even an experimental program, and until it finds a producing director with both vision and strength, it is not likely to establish such a soundly forward-looking policy as that of Copeau’s theatre in Paris, or even the fairly-modern policy of -he several theatres of Fehling, Jessner, and a half-dozen others in Germany. There are special difficulties in the way of developing such producing stages in America—even greater than those in the way of such independ- 358 ent galleries as the “291” of Alfred Stieglitz. The organization of the theatre here is such that those of us who make our living by dramatic work of one sort or another, as minor cogs in the great producing machine, must be content to follow the public taste (or what the producers believe to be the public, or best-seller, taste), and wait with our really creative ideas until the thousandth chance that will allow experiment. For the New York professional theatre’s policy is dictated primarily by the necessity of making for non- theatrical owners speculative returns on enormous real estate values. The whole story with us workers is, I suppose, that we bow before this business necessity rather than starve it out on the chance that one of our number will survive to put over a new idea. But such conditions are subject to change in a world that moves as fast as ours of today, a hundred non-commercial little theatres out through the country are at least free to try things in their cramped way, and the Theatre Guild does have an eye out for modernist things with a more or less proven appeal. There are also other signs of an impending break in the line-up of things as they are. The Provincetown Players, the only important 100-per-cent experimental native stage organization in the country, albeit largely concerned with realism, begin to export plays to Broadway, and have already slipped two Expressionistic plays into their lists. The provincial little theatres have served to develop the vision of play- wrights and artist-directors, most notably the Chicago Little Theatre under Maurice Browne, the Cleveland Playhouse under Raymond O’Neill and Frederic McConnell, the Detroit and Berkeley ventures under Sam Hume and Irving Pichel, and the live group of “com- munity playhouses” on the Coast, from Hollywood, Pasadena and 359 Santa Barbara to Vancouver. These are preparatory laboratories for the larger experiments to come. In New York there are increas- ing signs of receptiveness: there are a few very progressive Broad- way producers, like Arthur Hopkins and Brock Pemberton; the Neighborhood Playhouse has a daring interest in new things and a fine record of experiment; and last season the associated actors, under the name “Equity Players,” organized their own theatre, and its directors had courage to present Roger Bloomer, the best example of native playwriting yet accomplished in the field of Expressionism. These projects still come and go—but the spirit behind them persists and grows surer. Granted that the architectural stage is the typical modernist thing, the best-established and perhaps most important producing theatre today is the Thédtre du Vieux Colombier in Paris. Here Jacques Copeau has experimented with various existing types of play on a stage that is an architectural skeleton, into which slightly changing backgrounds can be set, although the permanent “plat- form” is never disguised. Many a play has taken on new life when presented here theatrically and without attempt at fourth-wall illu- sion; but as yet Copeau has failed to develop new plays to fit his formal stage. There is here, indeed, a curious twist in the modern- ist movement; the decorators and producers have developed their phase of modernism in the form of a naked stage, and now can’t get anything but old plays (of the pre-realistic period) to put on it; while the modernist playwrights, with their Expressionistic scripts, wanting to play to the “regular” theatre’s audiences and not on the side-streets, go into the older playhouses and make the best of the stages built like camera-boxes for realistic illusion—and even 360 declare that any old stage is good enough for them. Nevertheless, the men who are welcoming them into those older proscenium-frame houses—and I have in mind especially Jurgen Fehling and Hans Strohbach, who put on Masse-Mensch and many another modernist play at the Volksbitihne—would build formal stages if they were putting up new houses now. Everywhere that is the tendency of the progressives; Reinhardt overdid it at the famous Grosse Schauspielhaus, but is incorporating the idea into his Salzburg theatre; a Brussels theatre has just been built with an enlarged Copeau stage, by Copeau’s fellow-worker Louis Jouvet; Elizabethan stages continue to be revived in England; the Theatre Guild, after scrapping Copeau’s original formal stage when it took over his New York playhouse, last winter set up a permanent formal arrange- ment, reviving some of Copeau’s conventions, when it presented The Tidings Brought to Mary; the Redoutensaal, the gay ballroom in the old palace of the Hapsburgs in Vienna, has been remodelled to become the most advanced anti-illusionistic theatre anywhere; and Germany’s newest generation of regisseurs—most notably Fehling and Jessner—clear their stages of “scenery” and get as close to a background of “space” as their framed stages will allow. That is where the future seems to lie—where the real modernist progress has been made; on frankly theatrical stages, by anti- realistic directors, in a form of drama, sometimes revived out of the pre-realistic period and sometimes drawn from the immature Expressionistic playwrights of today, which piles up peculiarly theatrical intensity by all the means that belong to the composite stage art. Already one may occasionally sit in an auditorium and give up to an emotion as profoundly stirring, zesthetically, as that 361 evoked by a Matisse painting, the downtown skyscrapers of New York, or Lehmbruck’s or Maillol’s sculpture. y NM < / ) aa = | | f | CHort? ~ if ‘sT HE SECOND FROM THE END 15 07A02 2 Clee BY WILLIAM GROPP AFTERWORD . Poy AFTERWORD T has been my hope, in thus spreading out a selective panorama of modern art, and particularly in adding chapters about architecture and the theatre, that I might afford the reader a hint of the breadth and of a certain unity of what is vaguely called “the movement.” I have tried to mark out its general direction, and to suggest its surface complexion. My plan was to trace it from the time when it stemmed from the drying-up main current of “the great tradition’—when it accomplished its immediate revolt from Impressionism and turned its direction directly away from realism—to the confused and confusing present. I have been hard put to accomplish any sort of simplification of this “modernist” current, to get it down to ponderable terms; for it is probably true that if we are to discuss art at all (and I still have grave doubts about any virtue in that activity), we must strip it to principles, tendencies and currents that the mind can get hold of; but truer still that the heart of zsthetics lies beyond regions open to the active mind, the essence of creative appreciation beyond study and thought. Only by violating the essential thing that is art, can one be concerned to analyze it, chart it, or introduce anyone to its least manifestation. By way of atoning for this violence to the deeper reality, by way of restoring a needed balance or unconcernedness, I wish to call attention here at the end, as I did in my Foreword, to the importance of keeping the border-lines fluid, of widening or freeing appreciation rather than narrowing critically to a formula. I am alarmed lest some reader may carry away an impression of rolling 365 Cezannish form, or geometrical near-abstraction, or Expressionistic intensity, as the big and only test of truly modern art, going forth to enjoy obediently or damn mercilessly in accordance with a principle. I stumble upon a painting like this self-portrait by Davringhausen, and ask myself with misgiving whether I have kept my definitions wide enough to include it, in spirit, in one chapter or another. I drift into Stephan Bourgeois’ gallery to enjoy the quiet, child-like things there, and wonder how far I may have over-emphasized modernistic intenseness. I ponder on the diversity of richness, in both painting and sculpture, in the extraor- dinary collection of John Quinn, and I wonder whether it is possible to sketch out a current or a period in terms that will do justice to all that must be included. In short, I not only am at a loss here for words to summarize my book, but feel only the urge to free the reader from any “set” notions about modern art that I may have imparted. I hope that I may have put him somewhat more at ease in the presence of “new” painting, sculpture or architecture. Perhaps he will trust more to his emotions—and if there are enough of him, that may be a considerable blessing. But let him browse in diverse fields, let him put up no fences, let him find new eyes esthetically. And yet one dogmatic fact stands out—one negative principle seems to be back of everything I have talked about, seems to afford a starting-point, to comprise a summary: modern art is anti-realistic. If we were not still in a preponderantly realistic era, it would be unnecessary to repeat that statement. But because one is so sur- rounded, in museums, in homes, in magazines, with primarily imitative art, one needs to get a glimpse of the havoc wrought by 366 Pee OR TRATIC BY HH. M,.DAVRINGHAUSEN realism through four centuries, and a release from that obsession, before one can enjoy one’s own emotions freely. Magazine art is one of the things I had hoped to come back to before finishing the book. In publications like Playboy, Pearson’s and The Liberator there is much that is creative and emotional, and even in caricature and illustration there are qualities that redeem the works from the old literalness and sweetness. There are workers in black-and-white like Hugo Gellert, Horace Brodzky, William Gropper, Hunt Diederich, Adolph Dehn, Winold Reiss and Bertram Hartman, who bring a modern directness and emo- tionalism to the printed pages that pass before us month by month. And there are cartoonists who have freed themselves for more than mere imitative-satiric comment. Such assuredly are 367 Art Young, Robert Minor and Boardman Robinson—and who would exclude from an effective anti-realism such “comic” creators as Fontaine Fox and Rube Goldberg? In a different direction there are the intimate media of wood-engraving and lithography, bringing modernism within the means of those who cannot hope ever to own paintings or works of sculpture. A man like Davies, who fails a little of freeing himself from the past in his paintings, is at his intensest and best in his prints. And there are beautiful emotional things being accomplished on wood by the younger artists in France and Germany. Indeed, the pervasiveness of modern art is one of the most notable things about it. When I came to New York six or seven years ago I happened upon the landscape by Cezanne in the Metropolitan Museum. I don’t remember that it particularly impressed me in an emotional way at first; but as I visited the Museum time after time, the painting grew upon my consciousness until it spoke to me more clearly, more movingly, than any other picture in the post- Rembrandt rooms. That one painting came near to accomplishing, alone, the revolution in my own art faith. The pleasure I found in it—not even one of Cezanne’s best in achievement, but full of his striving for “realization”—came nearer to setting things right with me in art appreciation than anything else I had experienced. The miles of surrounding paintings began to look very obvious, to confess themselves for what they were, works of illustration, faith- fully exact, prettily colored and technically impressive. The lack of other modern works in the Museum—so that I looked to the Cezanne corner as the culmination of each visit—may have served to emphasize the thing that lies beyond the surface, may 368 Poe EW SKY. BY HUGO GELLERT have intensified the emotional appeal. There, so far as painting was concerned, I found new eyes. I was not chasing theories; the canvas simply spoke to me, emotionally, expressively, intensely, joyously. The only thing I had to fit me for the experience was a wholesome dissatisfaction with imitative, realistic art. No one can explain exactly the mystery of personal esthetic appreciation. But I am sure that once you get some conception of what you have cut yourself off from by insisting upon the imitative canon in art—what regions of pure emotional joyousness you have foregone—you will find a new freedom of appreciation coming upon you, and works like this painting of Cezanne’s, or Davies’ prints, or Wright’s architecture, or an Expressionistic drama like Masse-Mensch, speaking to you, bringing forgetfulness of your 369 mind and your body, putting you into an ecstasy of the spirit. We have been through literal, materialistic times. But I have faith that spirituality constantly is reborn into the world. Our children ordinarily have it, until we drive it out of them by way of “fitting them for the world.” The artist has it in greater measure than other people; but he too has been driven to a conformity, a com- promise with the literal world, for some centuries past. Modern art seems to me to be a sign that we are getting back to an appre- ciation of the spiritual-emotional element in life: the artists’ anti- literal, emotionally expressive activity, amounting to a spiritual overflow, is no less eloquent of the change than is the increasing receptiveness, the fast widening appreciation on the part of a “public.” The cycle is almost complete: we have got almost back to that point where the recurring spirituality is conserved, where emotion is valued, where esthetic experience is recognized as valid in its own right, without reference to naturalness, sweetness, etc. What we need most, to get over the rest of the circle, is a background of open-mindedness. DRAWING BY FERNAND LEGER LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS WITH ACKNOWLEDGMENTS PAGE SELF-PORTRAIT, BY OSKAR KOKOSCHKA _. ; : ; r ‘ ‘ : ; 3 By courtesy of Paul Cassirer, Berlin ON THE BALL, BY PABLO PICASSO . : : ; ; ; ; ; . . 7 From DER EXPRESSIONISMUS, by Paul Feshiey TORSO, BY ALEXANDER ARCHIPENKO : ; ; : : : ‘ ; : , 10 By courtesy of Ernst Wasmuth, Berlin LANDSCAPE WITH STREAM, BY KISLING . : ‘ . ; , : ‘ 2 13 By courtesy of Hans Goltz, Munich MUSIC—BLACK, BLUE AND GREEN, BY GEORGIA O’KEEFFE . : : ‘ 14 By courtesy of Alfred Stieglitz ETCHING BY EDWIN SCHARFF : : : : 16 From DEUTSCHE GRAPHIKER DER GEGENW ART, eh Kurt akter THE DANCE, BY HENRI MATISSE . : . : 7 . : ; : : ; 19 By courtesy of the Galerie E. Druet, Paris HORSE—GREEK SCULPTURE A ; F eae ; : : : : 5s oe By courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of ve CAVE DRAWING : f é : ‘ : : ‘ : ‘ : ee ey From HISTORY OF ART, os Elie ake DRAWING BY PABLO PICASSO : . : : A 4 : : ; , 2 2G THE AGONY IN THE GARDEN, BY EL GRECO : - ‘ ; 5 ; 2S By courtesy of The National Gallery, London DOUBLE PORTRAIT, BY OSKAR KOKOSCHKA ene mee Fig ey me es 020 By courtesy of Paul Cassirer, Berlin DRAWING BY DAVID BURLIUK . : : : ; ‘ : ‘ : F : Vat LOWER MANHATTAN, BY JOHN MARIN _. i ; ; : : : p : : 35 By courtesy of Alfred Stieghtz THE BATH OF PSYCHE, BY FREDERICK LEIGHTON . 5 : . ; . -) ¥ 40 By courtesy of the Tate Gallery, London TIGER, BY FRANZ MARC : : : ‘ é : ‘ : ; ; a ae From EXPRESSIONISMUS, by ee. SBahe SCRIABIN, BY TEIDORS ZALKALNS _. ; é : Sead From ARCHITEKTONIK des PLASTISCHEN, by Paul Waesthene BATHERS, BY GUSTAVE COURBET : i ; : : : : ; . : Pea © By courtesy of the Galerie E. Druet, Paris BATHERS, BY PAUL CEZANNE : : ‘ A : : : . ; : Be, By courtesy of the Galerie E. Druet, Paris BATHERS, BY OTTO MUELLER : : : : ; . ; * = te By courtesy of THE INTERNATIONAL STUDIO BATHERS, BY PAUL CEZANNE ? : 7 3 : 3 : : oe From CEZANNE, published by Be lenae yee 371 PAGE TAHITIANS, BY PAUL GAUGUIN: .0.5 2s 6 0 5 By courtesy of the Galerie E. Druet, Paris WOODCUT BY BEWICK : A ‘ ee From A BRIEF HISTORY OF WOOD- ENGRAVING, By Tosehe Cundall WOODCUT—FOURTEENTH CENTURY . ‘ é : 5 F . : s, | 86 From DAS HOLZSCHNITTBUCH, by Paul Wiehe CHRIST ON CROSS—GERMAN SCULPTURE, ABOUT 1200 . ‘ ; ; ; i. 86 By courtesy of the Germanisches Museum, Nuremburg THE CHURCH—DRAWING BY MASEREEL ‘ ¢ . . ; ; é , + 6S OLD WOMAN WITH A STICK, BY ERNST BARLACH . ; ; ; ; : oe te eg By courtesy of Paul Cassirer, Berlin BROOKLYN BRIDGE, BY JOSEPH STELLA . : : { ; : 4 : : ia Os FROM MY PARIS WINDOW, BY MARC CHAGALL . : P ; ; : : ¢ > 766 EIFFEL TOWER, BY ROBERT DELAUNAY . : ; : ; ; , . : tee PAINTING BY HEINRICH CAMPENDONK 69 AUTOMOBILE 71 By courtesy of Buick toy Car Conta LOCOMOTIVE By courtesy of New York Contra Ratlroed IMPRESSION: SETTING SUN, BY CLAUDE MONET : From LES PEINTRES IMPRESSIONISTES, by Theodore Duret By courtesy of E. Weyhe PAINTING BY PAUL SIGNAC From QUELQUES PEINTRES, by je Werth NUDE SEATED, BY F. C. FRIESEKE By courtesy:of the Macbeth Gallery, New York HARBOR AT MARSEILLES, BY MAURICE DE VLAMINCK By courtesy of John Quinn LANDSCAPE, BY PAUL CEZANNE é From CEZANNE, published by Bernheim- pres Par LANDSCAPE, BY OSKAR KOKOSCHKA By courtesy of Paul Cassirer, Berlin LANDSCAPE, BY VINCENT VAN GOGH FRAGMENT OF PAINTING BY PAUL GAUGUIN . : ‘ : : P Oy From GAUGUIN, by Robert Rey PORTRAIT OF A GIRL, BY EDWARD MUNCH . - ; A f : ; ; fa Og From GANYMED, 1922 PORTRAIT OF MME. CEZANNE, BY PAUL CEZANNE . 3 F p : , ep EOS From CEZANNE, by Gustave Coquiot PAINTING BY HENRI MATISSE From QUELQUES PEINTRES, by Léon Werth WOODCUT BY MAURICE DE VLAMINCK WATERCOLOR BY PAUL CEZANNE , CARRIERES ST. DENIS, BY GEORGES BRAQUE. From BRAQUE, by Maurice Raynal DRAWING BY PABLO PICASSO From PICASSO, by Maurice Raynal 372 Ior 102 WOMAN WITH A MANDOLIN, BY PABLO PICASSO From DER WEG ZUM KUBISMUS, by Daniel Henry WOMAN WITH A MANDOLIN, BY PABLO PICASSO From MODERN PAINTING: ITS TENDENCY AND MEANING by Willard Huntington Wright MAN WITH A MANDOLIN, BY PABLO PICASSO From PICASSO, by Maurice Raynal THRER PEOPLE SEATED; BY ALBERT GLEIZES By courtesy of DER STURM Gallery, Berlin FUMEUR ET PAYSAGE, BY FERNAND LEGER From MODERN PAINTING: ITS TENDENCY AND MEANING by Willard Huntington Wright WINTER, BY KANDINSKY : By courtesy of DER STURM Sally Bevin BUST OF RUDOLF BLUEMNER, BY WILLIAM WAUER By courtesy of DER STURM Gallery, Berlin VOLLERSRODA, BY LIONEL FEININGER In the National Gallery, Berlin CAFE SCENE, BY GINO SEVERINI ; By courtesy of DER STURM Gallery, Berlin MARINETTI—DRAWING BY N. KULBIN ’ From NEUE KUNST IN RUSSLAND, by Rone ontin Comets DOG IN LEASH, BY GIACOMO BALLA By courtesy of DER STURM Gallery, Berlin DYNAMISM OF AN AUTO, BY LUIGI RUSSOLO MOE CUL IS RES hu LORISTES, PASSEISTES, by Cave Coneine FUNERAL OF THE ANARCHIST GALLI, BY CARLO D. CARRA From DER EXPRESSIONISMUS, by Paul Fechter SCULPTURE, BY UMBERTO BOCCIONI MromeokototeSshOULURIST ES, PASSEISTES, Hop eer fare eee FLIGHT, BY EDWARD McKNIGHT KAUFFER From THE APPLE, 1920 PEGASUS, BY ODILON REDON From a photograph by Hagelstein Bros. EXOTIC LANDSCAPE, BY HENRI ROUSSEAU From ROUSSEAU, by Roch Grey LA BAIGNADE, BY GEORGES SEURAT From SEURAT, by Andre Lhote ROTTERDAM, BY EDWARD WADSWORTH From BLAST ON THE WAY TO THE TRENCHES, BY C. R. W. NEVINSON From BLAST MINERS’ BAR, BY GEORG GROSZ ; : From MUSTERBOOK I, by courtesy of Hit Samah FACTORIES, BY GEORG GROSZ : : From MUSTERBOOK I, by courtesy of Hi Sinone WATERCOLOR—TUNIS, BY PAUL KLEE é From PAUL KLEE, by Leopold Zahn PAGE 103 104 105 107 108 109 110 132 115 116 119 ior 122 123 124 126 129 132 134 135 137 138 141 373 PAGE WOODCUT BY KURT SCHWITTERS : : : : é ‘ ; : : ; oo BLA: From DER ARARAT, 1920 3 PORTRAIT OF TRISTAN TZARA, BY FRANCIS PICABIA . E : ‘ : ye gels From THE CHAPBOOK, 1920 “PAINTING” BY KURT SCHWITTERS : : ; : é ; : : TnL, By courtesy of DER STURM Gallery, Berlin DESIGN FOR MONUMENT, BY VLADIMIR TATLIN ; : : : : ; . 148 From Friihlicht, 1922 COSMIC SYNCHROMY, BY MORGAN RUSSELL . : F 150 From THE FORUM EXHIBITION OF MODERN AMERICAN PAINTERS By courtesy of Mitchell Kennerley ORGANIZATION 5s, BY S. MACDONALD-WRIGHT : 153 Frum THE FORUM EXHIBITION OF MODERN AMERICAN PAINTERS By courtesy of Mitchell Kennerley WOODCUT BY KANDINSKY : : 154 From DER EXPRESSIONISMUS, by Poul eee IMPRESSION—MOSCOW, BY KANDINSKY 157 From THE ART OF SPIRITUAL HARMONY, by Koigeen IMPROVISATION, BY KANDINSKY ; 161 Fyrom CUBIS TS = ANDAEO Silk IMPRESSIONISM, by ae Seneone Eddy DRAWING BY HELEN TORR 163 COMPOSITION, BY KANDINSKY ; : 165 By courtesy of DER STURM Gallery, Berlin PAINTING BY GEORG MUCHE : 166 By courtesy of DER STURM Gallery, Berlin MOVEMENT, BY MARSDEN HARTLEY 169 Fron THE FORUM EXHIBITION OF MODERN AMERICAN PAINTINGS — By courtesy of Mitchell Kennerley ROCKS AND SEA, MAINE, BY JOHN MARIN 170 By courtesy of Alfred Stieglitz WATERCOLOR—OPUS 120, 1918, BY PAUL KLEE 171 From KUNST, by Clive Bell (German edition) TIERSCHICKSALE, BY FRANZ MARC 7g By courtesy of DER STURM Gallery, Berlin LAMPSHADE, BY MAN RAY 174 By courtesy of Societe Anonyme, New Vore FORMS PROJECTED IN MOBILE COLOR BY THOMAS WILFRED . i 2 s; EOE Photograph by Francts Bruguiere FORMS PROJECTED IN MOBILE COLOR BY THOMAS WILFRED 182 Photograph by Francis Brugutere FORMS PROJECTED IN MOBILE COLOR BY THOMAS WILFRED 183 Photograph by Francis Brugutere COS COB, BY GEORGIA O’KEEFFE, 2 - 188 By courtesy of Alfred Stieglitz MAINE—THE SAIL BOAT, BY JOHN MARIN 3 IgI By courtesy of Alfred Stieglitz ‘ LITHOGRAPH BY FRANZ MARC : 193 From FRANZ MARC: BRIEFE, AUFZEICHNUNGEN UND APHORISMEN STILL LIFE, BY HENRL MATISSE 198 37 4 PROPHET, BY EMIL NOLDE : : ‘A 6 ; : 6 5 LANDSCAPE, BY ERICH HECKEL . : ‘ - : By courtesy of THE INTERNATIONAL STUDIO WOMAN WITH CAT, BY MAX PECHSTEIN From DER EXPRESSIONISMUS, by Paul Fechter GIRL CARRYING WATER, BY JOSEPH BERNARD Photograph by Hagelstein Bros. AUTUMN HARVEST, BY OTHON FRIESZ By courtesy of the Galerie E. Druet, Paris ITALIAN WOMAN, BY ANDRE DERAIN From DERAIN, by Carlo Carra CIRCUS, BY MARIE LAURENCIN By courtesy of Paul Rosenberg, Parts DRAWING BY BORIS GRIGORIEFF . LAKE GEORGE, BY GEORGIA O’KEEFFE By courtesy of Alfred Stieglitz FLOWER FORMS, BY CHARLES SHEELER PORTRAIT, BY BORIS GRIGORIEFF From RASSEJA, by Boris Grigorieff PORTRAIT, BY KEES VAN DONGEN ‘ By courtesy of THE INTERNATIONAL STUDIO SILVER MATCHBOX, BY DAGOBERT PECHE By courtesy of THE WIENER WERKSTAETTE OF AMERICA CAUCUS, BY WALT KUHN . . NEW YORK, BY ABRAM WALKOWITZ SKETCH FOR PAINTING, BY ARTHUR G. DOVE PORTRAIT, BY WALT KUHN HOUSE AND TREE FORMS, BY CHARLES DEMUTH By courtesy of the Daniel Gallery PORTRAIT OF A PEASANT GIRL, BY MAURICE STERNE By courtesy of Stephan Bourgeois REDWOODS, BY ARTHUR B. DAVIES By courtesy of the Ferargil Gallery FACADE, BY ARTHUR B. DAVIES By courtesy of the Ferargil Gallery PORTRAIT, BY ALBERT BLOCK WASHINGTON BRIDGE, BY PRESTON DICKINSON By courtesy of the Daniel Gallery NEW MEXICO, BY MARSDEN HARTLEY .. : ‘ : 5 : 6 é By courtesy of Alfred Stieglitz SECLUSION, BY MAX WEBER . : ; A . ‘ c are ° 5 From PLAYBOY, 1923 PAINTED POTTERY, BY VARNUM POOR . 5 ; é : é ; 6 By courtesy of the Montross Gallery REROSE. BY ARCHIPENKO , : ‘ 5 < . . ° e ° A HEAD, BY GASTON LACHAISE fs : . : ° 0 c ° e ; Photograph by de Witt C. Ward PAGE 201 203 205 208 21I 212 214 PAGE THE KISS, BY RODIN. - : 3 : ‘ & - > A : 5 : ee) THE DANCER, BY GEORG KOLBE . ; ‘ 3 : c : 4 A ‘ Z Seer BALZAC, BY RODIN : : ; ; ° : : : - : : 5 81 SEATED FIGURE, BY ARISTIDE “MAILLOL pi : 3 ; A F < : A els By courtesy of the Galerie E. Druet, Paris HEAD OF A GIRL, BY ARISTIDE MAILLOL ‘ : ° ° ° e 3 c - 269 By courtesy of the Galerie E. Druet, Paris DANCER AND GAZELLES, BY PAUL MANSHIP ; 5 : . - - c eae By courtesy of Scott and Fowles FIGURE, BY EDWIN SCHARFF . : : ; : , : : é ; : . ere From DER ARARAT, 1921 EVENING, BY JOHN MOWBRAY-CLARKE . F 4 A “ 5 < : -« 274 THREE FREE, BY JOHN MOWBRAY-CLARKE . f : é ( : A A = 276 SEATED FIGURE, BY GAUDIER-BRZESKA ., 4 A - 4 Z : . i 3 278 By courtesy of John Quinn MOTHERA AND GHIED. BY JACOB BESTEL c ‘ 2 : ‘ 5 4 F = 282 By courtesy of the John Lane Company FIGURE, BY FRANZ METZNER . : . ; 5 : ; , - A 3 1203 From NEUERE PLASTIK, by Alfred Ri TORSO bet hiG= Gileleaee ; 3 z z : : 5 g wees From SCULPTURE OF TODAY, oe pen pore NEGRO SCULPTURE 5 : 6 ‘ - a : A s 3 Ae PANS From NEGERPLASTIK, by Gor Einstein ' NEGRO SCULPTURE “ , : : : : : - 306 By courtesy of John Quinn PANEL, BY ERNST BARLACH e ° = ¢ ° a e e e t} eo e e 307 In the National Gallery, Berlin 376 PAGE BAS-RELIEF, BY ARISTIDE MAILLOL e ° e e e e 8 _ By courtesy of the Galerie E. Druet, Paris vi A STUDY IN CATS, BY HUNT DIEDERICH . “ A ‘ A : : F 309 Photograph by Van der Wyde PANEL, BY DUCHAMP-VILLON . 5 : : A : A : : : 3 : es LO By courtesy of John Quinn SKETCH BY ERICH MENDELSOHN ; : : . ‘ ‘ : , : : eR SKETCH BY ROB MALLET-STEVENS ; : ; ; : A URE EXPOSITION BUILDING AT COLOGNE, BY JOSEPH HOFFMANN : 2 . es 1 7, By courtesy of thee WIENER WERKSTAETTE EXPOSITION BUILDING, BY BRUNO TAUT AND JOSEPH HOFFMANN . 5 BisaG) DESIGN FOR A GARAGE, BY ROB MALLET-STEVENS ., : : : ; : 2 ee From UNE CITE MODERN DOWNTOWN NEW YORK : : ; : : 4 j : : 6 Bee Copyright photograph by Underwood we Under pine BUSH TERMINAL SALES BUILDING, BY HELMLE AND CORBETT : ‘ 5 Bey MODEL FOR MAGDEBURG MUNICIPAL BUILDINGS, BY BRUNO TAUT . e320 By courtesy of Ernst Wasmuth, Berlin SKYSCRAPER DESIGN, BY HANS SOEDER . - : : : : ‘ : ; es 27 By courtesy of Ernst Wasmuth, Berlin THE LARKIN FACTORY, BY FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT ‘ ; é ; : 3 20 HOUSE BYehRANK LLOYD WRIGHT . ‘ 3 : : : ; 5 EEO DESIGN FOR AERODROME, BY ERICH MENDELSOHN > : : : é : s Bee By courtesy of THE DIAL WOOLWORTH BUILDING, BY CASS GILBERT . : ; : 3 : ; : wees 32 Copyright photograph by Underwood and Underwood SreicrerY WENZEL HABLIK . : : : ‘ ; 3 ; 5 eigye MOVEMENT—FROM AN ETCHING BY GORDON CRAIG : : : 4 ‘ 5 eye From CAMERA WORK MODEL FOR “DANTE,’ BY NORMAN BEL-GEDDES : : : ‘ : ; 5 Be Photograph by Francis Bruguiere MODEL FOR “DANTE,” BY NORMAN BEL-GEDDES é : : : . : Se) BRO Photograph by Francis Bruguiere OPENING SCENE IN “MACBETH,” BY ROBERT EDMOND JONES . : 357 “THE SECOND FROM THE END IS A PEACH ...,’ BY WILLIAM GROPPER 362 SELF-PORTRAIT, BY H. M. DAVRINGHAUSEN . . ‘ ; : : : ‘ re aOF By courtesy of Hans Goltz Gallery, Munich PADEREWSKY, BY HUGO GELLERT 4 ; . : A 5 ‘ 6 A : . 369 By courtesy of Pearson's Magazine DRAWING BY FERNAND LEGER 4 : ; : . ° e ° ° : ; 5 REE 377 INDEX Abstraction, 157 African negro carving, 24 Angelo, Michael, 27, 51, 85, 252, 257, 302 Anglin, Margaret, 341 Anisfeld, 225 Appia, Adolphe, 354 Archipenko, 254, 267, 273, 275, 292, 305 Architecture, 308, 313 Assyrian art, 25 Bahr, Hermann, 193 Baldung, 29 Balla, Giacomo, 118 Barker, Granville, 345 Barlach, Ernst, 63, 305 Barnard, George Grey, 300 Barnard, Joseph, 213 Barnsdall Theatre, 328 Bauer, Rudolph, 168 Behrens, Peter, 325, 328 Belasco, David, 351 Bell, Clive, Foreword, 39, 45, 61, 229 Bell, Vanessa, 229 Belling, Rudolf, 288 Bellows, George, 82 Berkeley little theatre, 359 Berlage, A. P., 62, 325 Bistolfi, 262 Blake, William, 50 Bluemner, Oscar, 233, 242 Bluemner, Rudolf, 273 Boccioni, 124 Botticelli, 27 Bouché, Louis, 242 Bouguereau, 11, 23 Bourgeois, Stephan, 130, 366 Bragdon, Claude, 171, 187, 365 Brancusi, 232, 290 Braque, Georges, 104, 199, 206, 210, 232 Brodzky, Horace, 367 Browne, Maurice, 359 Bruce, Henry Patrick, 242 Brueghel, 70 Burliuk, 225 Byzantine art, 26 Campendonk, Heinrich, 68, 70, 205 Canova, 254 Carpeaux, 252, 259, 298 Carra, Carlo D, 122 Cezanne, Paul, 19, 27, 30, 41, 48, 51, 69, Hi OU moo en LOU; ehl?, 122. 1245127. 149, 154, 158, 191, 199, 202, 204, 210, Bi oemee lawns eee Sl 231. 2A 252 Ib). 264, 270, 297, 349, 366, 368 Chagall, Marc, 68, 206, 225, 358 Chavannes, Puvis de, 29 Clavilux Color Organ, 178 Cleveland Playhouse, 359 Constable, 29, 77, 158, 229 Copeau, Jacques, 360 Corbett, 325 Correggio, 28 Courbet, 47, 50, 77, 86 Craig, Gordon, 116, 223; 352 Cram, Ralph Adams, 331 Cranach, 29 Cubism, 42, 69, 81, 98, 256, 271 Dadaism, 112, 139, 207 Dasburg, Andrew, 168, 242 Daumier, 30, 77 David, 76 Davies, Arthur B., 82, 112, 241, 245, 368 Davis, Stuart, 243 Davringhausen, 366 Degas, 86 Dehn, Adolph, 367 Delacroix, 76, 78, 150, 158 Delaunay, 110 379 del Sarto, 50 Demuth, Charles, 82, 237 Derain, Andre, 4, 82, 210, 237, 343 Detroit little theatre, 359 Dickinson, Preston, 242 Diederich, Hunt, 271, 275, 275, 367 Donatello, 252 Dove, Arthur G., 82, 233, 238 Dubois, Guy Péne, 243 Dufy, 213 Duchamp-Villon, 275, 305, 307 Duncan, Isadora, 343 Dtirer, 29 Dutch genre painters, 23 Eberz, Joseph, 206 Egyptian art, 24 El Greco, 27, 30, 41, 51, 60, 85, 92, 159 English art, 29, 228 Epstein, Jacob, 63, 230, 244, 262, 267, 302 Equity Players, 360 Expressionism, 41, 59, 69, 85, 195, 201, 210, 214,228, 273, 279, 298, 3477356, 360, 369 Faggi, Alfeo, 298 Fehling, Jurgen, 361 Feininger, Lionel, 111, 206, 244 Ferguson, J. D., 229 Flint, F. S., 140 Forain, 68 Foujita, 214 Fox, Fontaine, 368 French art, 29, 207, 221 French Court Painters, 22 French, Daniel Chester, 252, 298 Fresnaye, de la, 213 Friesz, Othon, 82, 210 Fry, Roger, 229 Futurism, 114, 210 Gainsborough, 22 Gaudier, 63, 275, 280, 282, 288 Gauguin, 11, 19, 54, 86, 89, 198, 204, 305, 343 Geddes, Norman Bel, 356 Geiger, 232 Gellert, Hugo, 367 380 German art, 29, 199, 222 Gertler, Mark, 229 Gill, Eric, 230, 283 Gilbert, Cass, 328 Gilman, Harold, 229 Giotto, 22, 31, 159 Gleizes, Albert, 107, 120 Goldberg, Rube, 368 Goll, Ivan, 293 Goncharova, 225 Goodhue, Bertram, 331 Gothic art, 26, 31, 60, 257, 313 Grant, Duncan, 82, 229 Greek art, 20, 24 Greek Theatre at Berkeley, 341 Greuze, 23 Grigorieff, 225 Gris, Juan, 108 Gropper, William, 367 Grosz, Georg, 68, 141, 145, 358 Hale, Gardner, 243 Halpert, Samuel, 242 Hambridge, Jay, 153 Hammer, Trygve, 298 Hanak, Anton, 265 Hartley, Marsden, 82, 232, 233, 237 Hartman, Bertram, 367 Hassam, Childe, 80, 82. Hecht, Zoltan, 243 Heckel, Erich, 82, 202, 205, 298 Helmle & Corbett, 325 Henri, Robert, 82 Herzog, 290 Hildebrand, 258 Hodler, 94, 223 Hofer, Karl, 202 Hoffmann, 227, 320 Holbein, 29 Hopkins, Arthur, 360 Howard, Cecil, 298 Hume, Sam, 359 Impressionism, 60, 73, 230, 255, 263 Ingres, 76 Jawlensky, 225 Jessner, 361 John, Augustus, 132 Marc, Franz, 43, 111, 173, 199, 204 Jones, Robert Edmond, 356 Marées, Hans von, 29 Jonson, Raymond, 243 Marin, John, 19, 36, 54, 82, 124. 172, Jouvet, Louis, 361 QdL 9200, o2an6 219 “Junge-Kunst,” 204 Marriott, Charles, 45 Masereel, 63 Kaiser, Georg, 347, 358 Matisse, Henri, 4, 19, 51, 81, 94, 111, Kandinsky, Vasily, 44, 51, 82, 110, 159, dee Lee 20] 209 22136-22128 231, 286, 1702 200.8225, 236, 279 Uy stays Kauffer, E. McKnight, 124, 244 Maurer, Alfred, 233 Kaus, Max, 202 Maybeck, Bernard, 330 Kent, Rockwell, 243 McConnell, Frederic, 359 Kirchner, Ludwig E., 202 McFee, Henry L., 242 Kisling, 214 Medgyzes, Ladislas, 287 Klee, Paul, 68, 70, 82, 141, 172, 201 Meier-Graefe, 262, 265 Klein, Cesar, 202, 205 Mendelsohn, Erich, 63, 313, 325, 328 Klerk, de, 325 Messel, Alfred, 325 Kokoschka, Oskar, 3, 19, 54, 82, 87, 124, Mestrovic, 270 201, 204, 213, 279, 298, 349 Metropolitan Museum, 8, 27, 245, 251, Kolbe, George, 264, 266 368 Kolig, 227 Metzinger, Jean, 108 Kramer, 325 Metzner, Franz, 282, 309 Kroll, 82 Meunier, 63 Kuhn, Walt, 19, 82, 172, 232 Meyerhold, 346 Miller, Kenneth H., 242 Lachaise, 63, 254, 275, 298 Minor, Robert, 368 Larionoff, 214, 225 Mobile Color, 176 Laurencin, Marie, 82, 213 Monet, 75, 77, 259 Lavery, Sir John, 15 Moscow Art Theatre, 346 Lawson, Ernest, 82 Mowbray-Clarke, John, 275 Lawson, John Howard, 348 Mueller, Otto, 202 Lehmbruck, Wilhelm, 63, 262, 297, 362 Mueller-Schulda, Herta, 292 Leighton, 11, 39, 48, 298 Munch, Edward, 93, 199, 223 Leonardo, 27 Murillo, 28, 52 Lewis, Wyndham, 82, 133, 135, 139, 229 Lhote, 213 Nadelman, 232 Lipschitz, Jacques, 292 Nash, Paul, 229 Littmann, Max, 325 Nauen, Heinrich, 202, 205 Luckhardt Brothers, 325 Negro sculpture, 24, 284 Luthman, 328 Neo-Classicists, 252 Lutyens, E. iia 329 Nevinson, C. W. R., 138, 229 Nolde, Emil, 202, 204, 298 Macdonald-Wright, 63, 82, 151, 187, 242, 244 Olbrich, J. M., 325 Maeterlinck, 345, 355 O’Keeffe, Georgia, 82, 171, 232, 238 Maillol, Aristide, 63, 265, 309, 362 O’Neill, Raymond, 359 Mallet-Stevens, Rob, 315, 320 Manet, 77, 86, 90, 92, 94, 259 Pach, Walter, 242 Manship, Paul, 270, 284, 286, 298 Pandick, John, 243 381 Peche, Dagobert, 227 Pechstein, Max, 82, 202, 204 Pemberton, Brock, 360 Pfister, Dr. Oskar, 195, 207 Picabia, Francis, 108, 232 Picasso, Pablo, 4, 51, 82, 99, 104, 109, 127, 6160, 1992-201. 206, 209: 213; 232, 240, 286, 343, 349 Piccirilli, Attilio, 298 Pichel, Irving, 359 Pissarro, 84 Poor, Varnum, 242 Post-Impressionism, 73, 232, 284, 355 Pound, Ezra, Foreword, 132, 136, 282 Poupelet, Jane, 265 Poussin, 29 Praxiteles, 22, 252 Pre-Raphaelite School, 22, 27 Purrmann, Hans, 82, 205 Quinn, John, Foreword, 209, 366 Raphael) 20; 22, 27,.52 Ray, Man, 242 Redon, Odilon, 127, 132, 168 Reinhardt, Max, 361 Reiss, Winold, 367 Rembrandt, 159 Renaissance, 22, 27 Renault, 213 Rice, Anne Estelle, 244 Rice, Elmer, 348, 358 Robinson, Boardman, 368 Rodin, Atgust..15; 03, 252, 202, 2o0.se09, 268, 273, 297, 30], 309 Roeder, Emi, 288 Roerich, 225 Rogers, John Gamble, 333 Roman art, 26, 31 Rosse, 356 Rosso, Medardo, 262 Rousseau, Henri, 128, 232, 240 Rubens, 85 Russell, Morgan, 152, 244 Russian art, 225 Russian ballet, 210 Russolo, 121 382 é Sargent, John S., 3, 11, 50 Scharff, 273 Schiele, Egon, 227 Schmidt-Rottluff, Karl, 202, 204, 288 Schwitters, Kurt, 145 Scott, M. H. Baillie, 329 Sculpture, 251 Segonzac, 213 Seurat, -79, 132 Severini, Gino, 119 Shaw, George B., 340, 345 Sheeler, 82 Simonson, Lee, 356 Sloan, 82 Sluyters, Jan, 226 Soudekin, 225 Stanislavsky, Constantin, 346 Stella, Joseph, 64, 82, 123, 130, 141 Sterne, Maurice, 82, 241, 298 Stieglitz, Alfred, Foreword, 232, 233 St. Gaudens, Augustus, 252, 258 Strnad, 320 Strohbach, Hans, 361 Stursa, Jan, 265, 273 Sullivan, Louis, 62, 322, 325 Symbolism, 48 Synchromism, 149, 242 Szukalski, 298 Tatlin, Vladimir, 145, 148 Taut, Bruno, 63, 325 Teschner, Richard, 227 Theatre, 337 Theatre du Vieux Colombier, 360 Theatre Guild, 358, 361 Theotokopulos, 27 Thorwaldsen, 254 Tintoretto, 31, 85, 159 Titian, 27 Tofel, Jennings, 130 Toller, Ernst, 348 Toorop, Jan, 226 Torr, Helen, 171 Toulouse-Lautrec, 68 Turner, 29, 77, 150, 158 “291” group, 238 Tzara, Tristan, 139 Urban, Joseph, 227, 320 Van Dongen, 82, 226 van Gogh, Vincent, 88, 199, 204, 225 Van Heemskerck, Jacoba, 226 Vijdeve!d, 325 Vlaminck, Maurice de, 82, 88, 210 Vorticists, 124, 133, 135, 138, 199, 227 Wadsworth, Edward, 138, 229 Wagner, Otto, 325 Walden, Nell, 168 Walkowitz, Abram, 82, 238, 240 Wauer, William, 273 Weber, Max, 82, 233, 238 Werkbund, 227 Werkstaette, 227 Wheelock, Warren, 243 Whistler, 3, 86 + Wiegele, 227 he ee Wilde, Oscar, 345 a. Wilfred, Thomas, 167, 178, 236 Witzmann, 227, 320 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 223, 326, 369 Wright, Willard Huntington, Foreword, 150 Yarrow, William, 242 Yevreynoff, 346 Young, Art, 368 Zalkaln, Teidors, 273 Zayas, de, 232 Zorach, 243 Zorn, 3 383 + Qo \§ 62 BO Mie a poet Var 44 ae | eee ‘ 1) i ey | - Z 7 © pase cree vor 4 ih , vy if y A aay ; i" \¥.a¥ y a 4% by an % t ie aw “A ae ye! j i a Sila! de bay) AY a \! a oe sre ? b 7 » if j By ds ft wr , ms a. :" : ‘ ' 1” a J a i) Ba “h mie) in 7 Pa , \ 4 an | ¢ i 7 x oe of ‘De ry J i ‘ A Si ue | ¥ io] J | ) ’ / m ae ae pet ; h he “4 | - Tay’, 7 4 S > WE ' vs é La o) 4 : j , Yolngu || \ om r Tv f Ny. : ( a + iY Cis Ay ; ' ’ : ’ ’ ‘ ' ; ? | = i} t ern 5 v y Ae " ' 1 I ' 3 ; i } Ger be] ~ 4 : a ‘ f Ps a ; a 4 i \ ETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE = 7 —_ EP a a a A A A A A a EE em, ag aie nie, Lomgria « - rt | Soe pc adlin le Sein ee a ee a len, Aa AEE em atin ene anny mar — Soe! ye AE A EF A le ote AE AO, al al dati, i do, ‘ j I A A ee A i, a i (a a el, lt a, . - 1 LL I A OO A A ae a, Ol A le pe a an tn A, A AS le A be hl, te CO th) i ss, oe | ee oe ; . é ‘ * ns a ae, eee, ‘ ei ae tan, Sry ci ¥ ; / a —_, ae ya tengl a W, —_ gp age age age age gs ag gay ca el lle ow he eon ng nea net er a gh an "i | Ai y Al ral, nt a al, pn, a, cg a ry oes EE AE: ES IE: SI A + ae A ee, ER a, A, Nae See ap gl es mop mt meg pe ep gyn oe cpa age age Ma eee og nn Nigel gathers ep ee ee aE I ge pe mapa A ce, lh it lk 7 ~ on ale lng clon, im, on te as Cg a rag a eh ag ag mage tpl ages Mae gh tag) ss eae ga a rahe 0 rae ee ee ee re a Nagel sa ne " " i, es mn - . 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