----- ------- 4........ '.. 111 It~ i.., '-.., II. m -,-I,:1.1-. L --- -- - - - -. - - E- I BRIS,, SIE HORTON KOESS] LIBRARY) i -g% 'a&~ A s.:~ A-GIt I9cv- ~ ..1. 7; 4', i IV-i.I i i I I_ z..od ern frnch Painters The Property of University of Michigan League Library X UN 5-7 I -:Trj ar jyji^ - - - \~L = - rRZN11 I N I ZP...i Igi I. r. s 0) __ w 1 I 4f ~~ NP? 9 5. p 7.? Stg T HIS book, copyright I928 by B R E NT A N O S, I NC., has been manufactured in the United States of America by TH E PLIMPT ON PRESS, Norwood, Massachusetts. The plates have been made by the WALKER ENGRAVING C ORPORATION, New York City Foreword HOUGH many have been called, few will be chosen to enjoy the celestial reward of reposing in this anthology. And if I had heeded certain suggestions, I should even have restricted the number of artists to a mere handful, to three, or to two, or even to one. But I am writing to inform, not to flatter. Accordingly, in the battle fought from 1906, the date of the first definite reaction against Impressionism, to I927, between the realistic observers of Nature and the idealistic poets of pictorial lyricism, I have chosen only those painters who have sought to enrich the technic of their art or to advance and realize new conceptions of painting. In weighing these candidates, I have added their esthetic intentions to their technical qualities, preferring a groping and blundering art to that of the imitators and diluters, whose everlasting re-working of the art of others only serves to mislead the ignorant. It is quite possible, of course, that the future will decline to ratify all the judgments which I have passed on the tendencies here under comment -it is, indeed, more than possible, it is certain. But if some of these artists are more commendable in intention than in attainment, all those whom the reader will find cited or studied in the following pages deserve their place there, either because of their technical qualities or because of their creation of movements or tendencies which, rightly or wrongly, offer an historical interest entitling them to a place in any anthology. Foreword As it is, I do not hesitate to maintain that none of those I have wittingly overlooked has a right to expect the favor of posterity, even if he should one day hang beside Madame VigeeLebrun in the Louvre. I refer to those who, for lack of intelligence, have spoiled their qualities as painters, to those who have attained some proficiency in bad painting and to whom I decidedly prefer those who practise, however unskillfully, good painting. The opinions of the artists on their own work, I have thought, might be of some use in helping the reader to understand them. Accordingly, I have published their confidences in full, feeling certain that, despite the length of some of them, they would contribute to a clear definition of the tendencies of the present day. The bibliographical notes have been reduced to strict essentials, in order to keep this manual to a convenient form. I must now add that the guiding principle of this book rests not on a modernism which, sooner or later, is bound to lapse into an accepted fashion, but on a summary of all the notions which, in one way or another, have influenced art and given it its characteristics. I believe that painting can not exist and thrive without an absolute fidelity to tradition; but by that I mean pictorial tradition, considered in its craft and not in its academic aspect and official acceptation. I am ready to accept any innovation, however bold, as long as it does not defy the eternal canons of our sensibility. And if I were to formulate an "'idea of the most perfect painter," as F6libien entitled one of his works, I should say that he is neither the painter who "astonishes " and " startles " by an ingenious and paradoxical plastic lyricism, nor the painter who " delights " and " charms " by an exact, flattering or cruel observation of reality, but the painter who " moves " a cultured and appreciative sensibility by a union Foreword of both tendencies, the painter who expresses the sentiments of a profoundly sincere humanity by the most powerful lyricism of his gifts and his technic, as did Fouquet, Clouet, Raphael, Le Nain, Ingres, Corot or Renoir. It is too early yet to inquire whether, among the artists here under consideration, there are some who may prove some day the peers of those great names. But of one thing I feel certain: if the not insignificant period of artistic history of which this book treats has brought forth one or several artists worthy of those Masters, it is among those I have studied here that he or they will be found. M. R. CONTENTS FAUVISM................. 3 NATURALISM............... 5 FUTURISM................ 12 ECLECTICISM............... 13 IDEALISM................. 7 PURISM................ 24 "DADA" AND SCEPTICISM IN PAINTING.....25 HYPER-REALISM.............. 26 POPULAR ART.............. 28 THE YOUNGER GENERATION IN PRESENT-DAY PAINTING. YVES ALIX... ANDRE BAUCHANT ANDRE BEAUDIN FRITZ VAN DEN BERGHE MARIA BLANCHARD BOMBOIS... R. T. BOSSHARD EMILE BOYER.. GEORGES BRAQUE MARC CHAGALL GIORGIO DE CHIRICO COUBINE VAN DONGEN. ROBERT DELAUNAY ANDRE DERAIN MAURICE DUFRESNE RAOUL DUFY. ROGER DE LA FRESNAYE..... 30........... 33........... 35.......... 37..... 41........... 43.......... 46.......... 46........... 49......... 50..... 55.......... 58....... 6i..... 64.......... 65.......... 68......... 75...... 78......... 8o Contents OTHON FRIESZ ALBERT GLEIZES. EDOUARD GOERG JUAN GRIS... MARCEL GROMAIRE HALICKA... KISLING... JEANNERET JEAN-FRANCIS LAGLENNE MARIE LAURENCIN FERNAND LEGER ANDRE LHOTE AUGUSTE MAMBOUR LOUIS MARCOUSSIS MENKES.... JEAN METZINGER JOAN MIRO... MODIGLIANI ROLAND OUDOT AMEDEE OZENFANT FRANCIS PICABIA PASCIN PICASSO... SUZANNE ROGER DUNOYER DE SEGONZAC SEVERINI SOUTINE... TCHELITCHEW TERECHKOVITCH UTRILLO SUZANNE VALADON VLAMINCK................ 84............ 86......... 91............ 93 101... ~ ~ ~ ~ ~IOI io6..... 107 107 IO9.... III........... 119 121 122..... 1I23...... 126..........26 129...... 130...... 134....... 136.......... 38........146......I. 47 I5I 5........ 152...... 154 154........., I60........ 6o........... 163 THE PLATES YVES ALIX Portrait of the Artist's Mother. The Balcony...... The Harbor............ ANDRE BAUCHANT Pericles Justifying the Use of the People's Money. The Assumption............. 67... 68 169 170 '7I ANDRE BAUDIN Maternity Nude with Steps FRITZ VAN DER BERGHE The Siesta...... The Eternal Vagabond MARIA BLANCHARD Still Life (1920). First Communion (1919) A Little Girl Seated (I921). BOMBOIS (Untitled).. R. T. BOSSHARD A Back (1926).. Nudes against a Viaduct ~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~... 172.... 173.......... 74......... 75.. ~...... 176......... 77.......... 178.......... I 79.......... 180.......... 18 The Plates EMILE BOYER Portrait of the Princess Lucien Murat. 82 GEORGES BRAQUE Still Life. 8..........3 Figure (1925)..................... 184 Still Life.................. I 85 MARC CHAGALL Flowers (1926)................86 My Village and............... I187 Portrait of a Rabbi............... 88 GIORGIO DI CHIRICO Melancholy (1913).............. 189 The Consoler (1926).............. I 90 Self-Portrait.................. 9I COUBINE Landscape in Northern Provence. Bowl-players... VAN DONGEN Portrait of the Artist's Father The Bather (Deauville).. ROBERT DELAUNAY Saint Sdverin (1907).... The Eiffel Tower..... The Runners (1926)....... 92........ 93....... I94..... 195..... 96...... 197..... 198 The Plates ii~~~~ i= ir ANDRE DERAIN The Kitchen Table.. Woman Seated.. Pastel...... MAURICE DUFRESNE (Untitled).. (Untitled).. (Untitled)... RAOUL DUFY Ruins in Sicily.. (Untitled) ROGER DE LA FRESNAYE Landscape The Conquest of the Air. Still Life..... OTHON FRIESZ The Harbor of Toulon (Untitled) ALBERT GLEIZES Women Sewing (1913) Mural Painting (1924) EDOUARD GOERG Phrynd (1925).. 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213........ 214 Luck (I925)......... 215 The Plates JUAN GRIS Peasant Woman (192 5)... The Blue Carpet (I925).... The Drummer (1926).... MARCEL GROMAIRE Woman Washing (i906).. Nude with Oriental Carpet (1926) HALICKA Interior........ Bathers (1926)....... KISLING Young Girl (1926)... Young Girl (1926)... JEANNERET Still Life (1926) JEAN-FRANCIS LAGLENNE Portrait in a Garden (1924). Panel (1926).. MARIE LAURENCIN (Untitled)........ (Untitled)........ FERNAND LEGER (Untitled- 1920).. (Untitled)...... (Untitled- 1923).......... 218... 219 220 ~~~~ C~~~ ~~~~ ~~~~. 221.. 222..... 223..... 224..... 225 ~ r ~ ~ 226 227......... 228......... 229......... 230......... 231......... 232 The Plates ANDRE LHOTE The Beach (1922)..........233 Woman Bathing (1926)............. 234 AUGUSTE MAMBOUR A Family (1925)............... 235 A Green Object (1925)......................... 236 LOUIS MARCOUSSIS Bottle and Cithar (1922)................. 237 Still Life with the Great Bear (1926)....... 238 MENKES Nudes with Fruit.............. 239 JEAN METZINGER Landscape..... Woman Dressing (1926) JOAN MIRO (Untitled)... MODIGLIANI (Untitled).... (Untitled)... Sculpture (1912).. ~............ 240........... 241 a............ 242.............. 243............ 244............ a 245 ROLAND OUDOT (Untitled). (Untitled). 6 0 0 0 0 0 0 & 0.... 246... 247 * * * * * 0 The Plates AMEDEE OZENFANT Still Life (1923) Still Life..... FRANCIS PICABIA (Untitled).. (Untitled)... PASCIN Embarkation for the Isles (Untitled) (Untitled) PICASSO Clowns (1905).. Clown (I918).. Still Life (1924). SUZANNE ROGER The Friends and the Dead (Untitled) DUNOYER DE SEGONZAC (Untitled)... (Untitled)... SEVERINI Dancing at the Monico. SOUTINE Still Life...... The Cook..... 0 0 0 ~~~ 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ 255 256 257....... 258....... 259......... 260........ 26I....... 262....... 263........ 264 The Plates TCHELITCHEW (Untitled) (Untitled)........... 265........ 266 TERECHKOVITCH Portrait of the Town Drummer of Avallon 267 UTRILLO The Gully of Presnes. Avenue de Paris in Sannois Protestant Church in Baigts. SUZANNE VALADON Fishermen Nude (1926).. Portrait (1925) VLAMINCK Landscape Landscape........ '.... 268.......... 269.......... 270........ 271.......... 272.......... 273.......... 274...... 275 c,Jtoern frnch Painters - ----- --- I I c5odern French Painters From I906 to the Present Day TO GIVE an adequate picture of the history of painting in the first quarter of the present century, we might cite once more the artistic disputes of all times, the diversities of tendency of every epoch. Indeed, we might wax epic and intone an invocation, in which by way of prelude we would sing the eternal strife waged throughout the course of the centuries between the observation of Nature on the one hand and the pure efforts of lyrical imagination on the other, provided, of course, we do not forget to celebrate the angel of Eclecticism, who alternately provokes and pacifies the everlasting struggle. These perpetual tendencies must be tagged. But the terms at our disposal vary in meaning according to the impression which they make on each individual, because they derive from rather than create the condition they aim to describe. Besides, they are too definite, too summary, to determine the degrees which divide aspiration from art. And it is not without reason that artists resent such classifications, which limit them to a specialty which they often feel themselves capable of surpassing. " Ingres was an Idealist," one will say. " Yet what could be more realistic than his Bain Turque? " And another will retort, "What could be more ideal than the humanitarian Naturalism of a painter like Courbet? " And neither will be wholly wrong, if we judge the qualities of these artists by a standard not strictly pictorial. But [I] Modern French Painters suppose that we describe the art of a painter like Ingres as idealistic because, though it takes its living models from reality, it transcends Nature by virtue of style, by a lyrical composition and plastic inventions which spring from the imagination of the artist; and suppose, on the other hand, that we call Courbet a realist because he is satisfied with analysis, with a pathetic observation of Nature, content to be merely a psychological painter and to subdue his inventions to the plane of fact; we shall then have a distinction of the tendencies of contemporary art into Idealism and Realism, which will be not only logical but perfectly well grounded. Furthermore, this matter of terms (if they are that merely) is a vital one to artistic history. We need comparisons to define a movement or depict an epoch by the use of certain generalizations. And if, for that purpose, we have to rely on words, are we not in the same position as the painters themselves, who must employ colors and lines to establish certain contrasts and harmonies, which are often quite as far from being final? - That leaves us quits. Broadly speaking, then, we may range on one side the Naturalistic tendency, illustrated by a pleiad of artists who might equally well be grouped under the heading of Art Vivant, or the art whose content is life, among whom we shall find Andre Salmon and Florent Fels. In the opposite camp, we shall recognize Idealism in the efforts of the Cubists and certain of their disciples. Finally, the Eclectics would be recruited either from among born eclectics, or those who are temperamentally remote from both the idealistic and the naturalistic poles, or from among discouraged and exhausted Naturalists and Idealists, by whom I mean those whose aptitudes for charm and cleverness predisposes them to the readymade art of the Museum. [21 Fauvism FAUVISM SOMEWHERE around I906, under the impulsion of Matisse, Braque, van Dongen, Vlaminck, Dufy and Friesz, Fauvism was born as a disciplinary reaction against the deliquescence of the Academic and Post-Impressionistic Schools. Those who came by this name of Fauves, given them in the same spirit of derision, of course, as that which later baptized the Cubists, had realized only too clearly the limitations of neo-Impressionistic science no less in the perfection of its technic than in the poverty of its esthetic content. This want of elevation was leading it more and more unmistakably toward decoration and fashion, toward a new academicism as indigent as that of the Institute. It was then that the Fauves felt the need of an ambition more lofty, aiming at more than the translation of natural impressions treated in the then current fashion of an optical medley and the divided touch, a mode now codified and exhausted. To the conception of Nature seen through a temperament the Fauves opposed that of a temperament no longer subservient to Nature but employing it to heighten its own sensations and seeking other results than the subtle inventory of natural aspects, that task being merely a poor little conjectural science, as Renan called History. The Fauves therefore used, for analytical purposes not unlike those proper to Science, the faculties of observation, which they had inherited from Impressionism. They claimed the right to choose freely in the "dictionary of Nature " propounded by Delacroix, to compose pictures which, however living in intention, should be transfigured by certain ideas of form developed by a more subtle use of color. Hence the need they felt of adding to the practical conquests of their elders the esthetic conquests which these had [3] Modern French Painters not made; hence their desire to enrich their works with style, the secret of the supremacy of all authentic masters. In short, the Fauves were attempting to put into practice the lessons of Cezanne, Seurat and Renoir. Post-Impressionism was definitely involved in the academic practice of the data of Impressionism and in neo-classic compilations; and to it they opposed a constructive era, capable of transforming the technic of Impressionism into an esthetic creed based on newer and more fruitful experiments than the Neo-Classicism of the legatees of Impressionism. The first experiments of the Fauves were marked by a return to tradition - to the spirit, not the letter, of tradition. For if a work exists in terms of its aspect, it lives in terms of its spirit. They turned to the museums, they questioned the past, they established the technical and esthetic principles of all such works as had been most fruitful in new experiments, of works created in periods of crisis-the archaic arts of Crete, Egypt, Rome, and Byzantium, then the Primitives, the Romanesque schools, the Mosaicists, and even Negro art, the virtues of which were then just beginning to be appreciated. Working for a new spiritualisation of form, the Fauves set themselves to create architectonic compositions by a discipline and economy obtained by deformations and re-formations, and especially by purifying, by means of their now famous conception of the color spot, the broken line and their love of constructive rigor, whatever process might be made to suggest the same virtues as the decrepit tricks of aerial perspective. Lastly, a sense of measure, resting on a very original conception of drawing, firmness, ellipses and plastic equivalences created a kind of powerful and expressive multum in parvo in sharp contrast to all that was diffuse, prolix and redundant in Post-Impressionism. [4] Naturalism NATURALISM FOR REASONS which we shall state, however, Fauvism soon revealed the inadequacy, the vagueness of an esthetic which remained, when all is said and done, rather uncertain. Moreover, a certain lassitude, a- certain indolence were beginning to appear; soon the paintings of this school were but sketches, for the art of a two-dimensional picture was a discovery yet to be made. And, above all, an aggressive return of the art of representational sensuality on the one hand, and the attractive charm of ready-made Museum art on the other, were responsible for a revival of the chronic and facile cult of observation, storytelling, naturalism and eclecticism. It was difficult indeed to emancipate painting from the subjective realism of Neo-Impressionism. Presently painting, once so sensitive, became frankly sensual again. Purely artistic experiments with matter were forsaken in favor of a scullery art, fit only to tickle the senses. The painter ousted the artist. And this animal sensuality, submerging the sensibility of the inventive artist, engendered all those combinations of succulent, hot, sombre and strong colors, the tendency of which Adolphe Basler described very neatly as the " School of the Dirty Dish-rag." German Expressionism abjured Nature, the better to commune with its own essence; it declined to photograph and organized a spectacle dictated by its own emotion alone; it made no attempt to imitate the aspects of Nature, but vibrated pictorially in unison with the soul of the world. Naturalism, on the contrary, merely embroidered such natural forms as excite our sensuality. It remained their vassal, it surrounded them with a wealth of ornament, an opulence of matter that works on our senses like [51 Modern French Painters an aphrodisiac stimulant. Such an art is far from the sense of measure, which is the distinctive trait of French art. Graver yet, however, psychological painting which Cezanne and Seurat had abolished, began insidiously to reappear. We even find a man like Marcel Sembat speaking, in reference to a painting by Matisse, of " the proud neck" and the " haughty mouth" of the sitter. Representational painting is misrepresenting Matisse's own intentions and, to satisfy a majority which, like all majorities, is always wrong, in rehabilitating a kind of demagogic cult of the sensual vision of natural aspects; painting, essentially an art of plastic hypotheses, becomes once more a method of scientific observation. We must add, however, that it is done with skill and not without temperament. The majority of the Naturalists are gifted. In fact, they are too much so, and in their confidence in their "t genius " they lavish color recklessly on schemes often happily conceived but slovenly and confused in execution: ingenious disorders which unfortunately soon weary the eye. The absence of anything like style in these works makes them truculent samples instead of finished achievements. They blend everything that is sublime in Corot with all that is sensual and pompous in Courbet. And, in their indecent eagerness to gratify the most vulgar visual instincts, we find these painters becoming ever more slipshod, contenting themselves with a sketch, abusing of arabesques, and falling victim finally to the fatal scourge of the decorative, the baroque and the romantic. Or else they cling to reality so closely that they dramatise and melodramatise Nature, ending by being, to all appearances, the none too welcome successors of Courbet, the Barbizon School, Monticelli or Van Gogh. This weakness in the Naturalistic School is due no doubt to its lack of a truly pictorial esthetic policy. It is quite plain, in [6] Naturalism fact, that many of the devotees of this movement have felt no concern whatsoever for the fortunes or misfortunes of painting. Because they are blessed with an excellent taste for tonal arrangements, they are quite satisfied with the exploitation of that modish facility and, making no effort to advance beyond it, consider as an end what is only a means. It is very much easier, obviously, to delicately adjust two colors than two lines and to make them conspire toward a single effect. That is why the lack of architectural feeling in the execution of the Naturalists leads them to the prettification and exacerbation of anecdotes more or less borrowed from Nature. This tendency to embroider on Nature may be traced to a certain academic spirit, due no doubt to the fact that many of the representatives of Naturalism, as of Eclecticism also, had studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Their biographers would like to have us believe that they soon outgrew that famous School; but they do not account for their entering it in the first place. We may conclude therefore that an academic bent was not necessarily an acquired vice with these artists. Also, it is quite normal to find in them a familiar tendency to stylisation and academic draughtmanship, as well as a fundamental need of repeating the painting of other men, traceable to powers of assimilation often out of the common. In this connection, it has been suggested that contemporary Naturalism may have had its share of Semitic influence. The imitation of reality is a taste which is eternal. But undoubtedly the artistic tendency of the Jewish race lends itself readily to the representation of humanity in its joys and sorrows and to the translation of human instincts into terms of sumptuous material forms suggestive of the art of rug-ware, of a certain Byzantinism or of Eastern art generally. Several Jewish art-critics have denied this influence. These gentlemen, however, supported the [7] Modern French Painters naturalistic efforts of imitative art. And they have violently combated the idealistic tendencies of Cubism. The influence of certain of our colleagues upon Naturalism, therefore, seems to us to have been a preponderant one. It is quite clear, furthermore, that their habit of defending sensualism in art rather than passion, impetuosity rather than energy, and excitement rather than warmth, has powerfully fortified the love of the living and sensual anecdote which, as it happens, the Semitic artists particularly favor. In short, contemporary Naturalism is a kind of academicism of the left, a Radical-Socialist school of painting, which occupies somewhat the same position in art as Radicalism does in politics, in relation to Communism. We may say at least that the Naturalists denatured the plastic efforts of the greatest among their elders, in order to mould them to more representational ends. The arts of composition, design and color have been so far subordinated by them to literary criteria of observation, that their painting would furnish a perfect illustration of that amazing remark made by Berthe Morizot in reference to a picture by Manet, when she said that you knew on what side to hold your sunshade to keep off the sun. Moreover, in speaking of academicism of the left, I meant merely that, in spite of their everlasting repetition of actual reminiscences, the Naturalists and the eclectic Realists, who are one in their common love of imitative art, have indeed achieved some brilliant bits here and there, but that they are to Courbet, Delacroix, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Renoir, what Benjamin Constant was to Delacroix, Jules Breton to Millet, Cabanel to Ingres and Bonnat to Corot. The effort of Fauvism had been defeated, its success deferred; after the elimination of the Naturalistic and Eclectic [8] Naturalism interruptions, the purity of its doctrine merited a more complete and realized development; and it was to Cubism that the task fell of rejuvenating the art of our time. With Dunoyer de Segonzac, who combines most individually the qualities and defects of Naturalism, other artists have distinguished themselves by their technical abilities and robust and conscientious temperaments. There is Bouche,,a patient masticator of doggedly dense pigments. He reminds one of the story of the Englishman confronted with a particularly shadowy canvas by Rouault, who struck a match, held it to the picture and then blew it out with a phlegmatic " Good night! " Gromaire dramatises his pictures in the Flemish and Spanish manner, with an impressive harshness. Then there are Chabaud, Emile Charmy, Charlemagne, and Le Fauconnier. Van Dongen is nothing if not bold in his fashionable portraits and in others, which must often bewilder the sitters, painted with unquestionable skill, in a coruscating and pied paste of pigment. Dufresne weaves sumptuous popular tapestries. Equally in the popular tradition, Vlaminck brushes vigorous and attractive romantic landscapes. Soutine, without style and with the enthusiasm of a cannibal who, for lack of better, would fall on himself, exaggerates in the most alarming way the hallucinations of the terrible Van Gogh. When we come to the drawing of the Naturalists, we find it practised with the playfulness of a patron of the bistrot and the brothel, by the delicate and sensual Pascin, whose line shows still some academic traces. There is also Conrad Kickert, a skilful cook of appetising pastes and heating charms. Then the young men: Gritchenko, Barat-Levraux, Thevenet, Richepin, Heuze, Thomsen, Mela-Muter, Kremegne, Jean Saint-Paul, Mane-Katz, Kikoine and Terechkovitch. [9] Modern French Painters The Naturalism of these artists was more particularly animal in character. We find it more romantic, more social in form in the group known as the School of the Pre-Saint-Gervais, whose leading spirit was the painter Loutreuil. Loutreuil, who lived in a hovel in the district of the PreSaint-Gervais on an infinitessimal income, died in early youth, in 1925, after a very brief and painful existence. In I9I6, he was acquitted by a Council of War as " subject to rational insanity and social dementia." His companions were the painters Billette, Andre Masson, Chotin, Caillard. Others artists, Dabit, Beatrice Appia, Sabouraud, Klein and de Brunhoff developed his researches, the ideas of which he has left us in letters eloquent with the apology of a painful and socializing Naturalism not unlike the evangelistic reveries of Van Gogh. " What I am trying to create," he wrote me, " is a popular, no longer an aristocratic art." "I conceive of art as a construction of our sensibility and of oil-painting as an art of study, not of realisation. " I believe that a man, dealing with the unknown nature and relativity of all things, will find an incomparable method of selfeducation and the fullest expression of his individuality in these constructive experiments, merely by heeding the dictates of his sensibility (expressed, of course, in terms of visual elements, the eye being the most sensitive and highly perfected of our organs), provided he apply himself to that task with unlimited passion, determination and abnegation. " In this sense painting has a secret relation to anarchy. "Painting being the relation which exists between Nature and what the painter perceives of it through his sensibility, it should, for its greatest truth, purity and richness, be as direct and spontaneous as possible, so that we may realize to the full every impulse and moment and give it a new and unique render[ Io] Naturalism ing (no formulas therefore, no imaginative or imitative or Cubist or Neo-Classic painting,...)." Though the works of the Ecole du Pre-Saint-Gervais have not adhered exclusively to the popular and social intentions of Loutreuil, they do avoid all concessions to an aristocratic art, evoking instead a picture of humanity in its most mournful aspects. The native air of this school is that of a Parisian popular suburb at nightfall. Here, under the light of squalid lamps, we are shown all the misery of the slums, hospitals, barracks, factory-chimneys, everywhere the haunting presence of poverty, illness, alcohol, the horror of haggard and suffering faces, in a land where flowers bloom only in graveyards. These impressions are rendered, of course, in muddy and lugubrious tones, thwarted lines and deformed planes, and, swobbed by the " dirty dishrag " dear to Basler, this art vivant is always of a mortal sadness. Another form of realism appears with the psychological study, properly so-called. To purely physical characteristics, the " proud neck," the "haughty mouth," etc., and social traits, succeeds the study of psychological characteristics. Daumier and Lautrec replace Courbet and Van Gogh in the preferences of some highly proficient artists of observation. Among these are Goerg, with his chastisements of an imbecile bourgeoisie, Antral, Dignimont, Vertes, Charles Laborde, annalists of vice, and the German Grosz, who derives from Lautrec, and who, as a savage critic of German foibles, has exercised a considerable influence on several of our artists. [II] Modern French Painters FUTURISM IN 191O a new form of Naturalism was imported from Italy with the manifesto of the Futurist painters Boccioni, Carra, Russolo, Balla and Severini. Pictorial Futurism, born maybe of a misunderstood Cubism, was based on what Marinetti had called plastic dynamism. Now, this plastic dynamism, for all its romantic name, was nothing but instinct. " The simultaneity of several states of soul in a work of art: such," says the manifesto, "is the exciting aim of our art! In painting a figure on a balcony, seen from within doors, we shall not confine the view to what can be seen through the frame of the window; we shall give the sum total of visual sensations of the street, the double row of houses extending right and left, the flowered balconies, etc.... In other words, a simultaneity of environments and therefore a dismemberment and dislocation of objects, a scattering and confusion of details, independent of one another and without reference to accepted logic." In spite of its break with tradition, all that pictorial Futurism was attemping to do was to place on canvas a visual impression derived from an actual scene. The Futurist painter saw more things than the Naturalist: he saw them more quickly, he tried to render more of them, but, in point of fact, his art was still in the Naturalistic tradition. At bottom, pictorial Futurism is a generous and entirely legitimate essay in revolt against the dead hand of the magnificent Italian past, which has weighed so heavily for four hundred years on all the arts of the peninsula. Now, a movement cannot be invented, not in art, at least: it comes by itself, without organisation or calculation. Above all, it does not exert itself: it waits patiently for the crowning success of a sneer. The defeat [ 2 ] Eclecticism of Futurist painting is due also to the fact that its conception contained no really original revelation. And this movement, which found expression in paintings curious and sometimes attractive in method (I have in mind especially those of Boccioni), could not endure, because it broke with tradition, instead of judiciously interpreting, digesting and renewing it, as all new movements in the history of art have done. ECLECTICISM WE SHALL now make the acquaintance of a rather large group of artists of sure taste and wide knowledge, who have grafted Naturalism on the idealistic tradition of the Museum and reconstituted a kind of classicism very much more logical, enterprising and attractive than that of the Institute. These accomplished humanists are the Eclectics, to whom I have already referred. They do not attempt to open up new paths, but to paint life through the medium of the most perfect painting of all times. Here, then, we find a close union of Naturalistic observation with the exploitation of Museum models, with the exploitation, that is, of a known technical perfection. The Eclectic School is best described as realistic. Its aim is to transfer human reality to canvas, prettified with some ideal intentions. Consequently, these painters draw their inspiration principally from those Masters who have attained technical perfection rather than from those who have been innovators in the choice of an esthetic creed. Moreover, the erudition of the Eclectics being fastidious and select, they incline toward popular and primitive sources of inspiration, which they wisely consider the soundest, the richest in evidences of imagination. We have here a peculiarly instructive and edifying art, an intelligent academicism of the right this time, for if the Naturalists were most influenced ['I3 ] Modern French Painters by Courbet, C ezanne, Renoir and Van Gogh, painters who passed for revolutionists in the eyes of the Institute, the Eclectics, less influenced by these than by the Old Masters, cut a reactionary figure. As between one form of academicism and another, however, that of the Eclectics, we may say, is incomparably more vital than the stodgy art of the Institute. This academicism of the Eclectics has many qualities of quiet feeling, plastic distinction and a dexterity vastly more attractive than the self-sufficient brutality of the Naturalists. With them the organisation of the picture is not left to the free dictation of " genius." Painting and drawing are combined to realize certain predetermined intentions, focused by a natural model which serves to stimulate them. There is no attempt at an original style, a style proper to the artist who invents it. The one goal toward which all strive is the style of the Old Masters; and it is a goal not easy of attainment. There is no attempt either to enrich the period with a new style, as the most enterprising of the Old Masters did, the most enterprising, I say, because the finest taste will always prefer a work of individuality, even if it errs, to one that triumphs too easily in the name of the Old Masters. I know, of course, that we are so wedded to tradition, that the majority will always give their suffrage to the most successful Eclectic paintings. And that because they afford an emotion, of which the prototype is readily recognised, the origin recalled, through the familiarity of the impressions produced by the use of a language to which we are perfectly accustomed. Eclecticism, in short, is a kind of art of quotation, when it is not an art of outright imitation. Ahd if it delights the amateurs rather than the professionals of painting, it is because the former, fed on the preconceptions of the Museum, consider painting as an art of fixed and immutable foundations rather than as an art owing allegiance to the aspect [ '4] Eclecticism of no one period in particular but to eternal evolution, an art evolving, in a word, in time and not in space. It is for this reason perhaps that this type of painting is always popular, charming as a ruin, an old song or an antiquated fad, more attractive certainly than the work of the path-finders to whom the eclectics of tomorrow will turn for inspiration. The qualities of charm of the Eclectics are more easily susceptible of counteracting the shock of the new and the startling than of suggesting a profoundly original creation, a creation which upsets our normal ways of feeling and produces, whether we will or no, emotions of an unsuspected nature and rhythm. Andre Derain, endowed with the rarest gifts but also with the dangerous facility of indolence, is the most powerful representative of a group of artists, on whom he has exercised an appreciable technical and intellectual influence. Modigliani, who died young, was a charming neo-Renaissance stylist, a delicate designer of curious and perverse poses, especially in his precious feminine figures, of the type of those character dolls popularized by the magasins de frivolites. Kisling, Galanis, Feder, Kars, Coubine, Mondzain, Lagar and Lotiron have all shown an unquestionable mastery of their craft and qualities of charm, which the piquancy of the technic employed has made substantial. Favory finds his inspiration in Rubens. Alix and Goerg follow Daumier even more closely. Asselin is a cunning interpreter of the human pathos dear to Carriere. Suzanne Valadon continues her cruel arrangements of certain aspects of reality, while Marie Laurencin embroiders her marginal notes on reality with the most charming decorative grace. In the same manner, Raoul Dufy and his brother Jean Dufy have shown themselves subtle chroniclers of bold tonalities and pretty arabesques. The influence of the Museum is particularly strong in the case of Friesz, who is haunted by memories of Poussin and [ 5] Modern French Painters Delacroix, and in the work of Jean Marchand, Kvapil, Astoy, Girieud and Dufrenoy. The last named is a powerful orchestrator of familiar sonorities. Alice Halicka, who has studied in the strenuous school of the Cubists, captures the freshest of visions in the most subtly charming and withal impeccable forms, and many landscapists like Verge-Sarrat, Pierre Farrey, Jean Frelaut, de Waroquier, Gernez, Leopold Levy, Genevieve Gallibert, Hermine David, Legueult, Rene Durey, Mainssieux, Brianchon and Bompard, maintain their popularity by their tenderness and power, their attractive if not very original qualities, their love of traditional culture, and insomuch by the conscientiousness, which keeps them from embracing tendencies for which they are unsuited. In making the distinction between realistic and idealistic painting, with which I prefaced this discussion, I suggested that we needed to establish certain intermediary shades of difference and degree. I was anticipating the problem of Belgian art. The characteristic tendencies of Belgian art have very few affinities with those of French painters or of such foreigners as have taken up their residence in France. But I have thought it necessary to speak of them, because a number of Belgian artists are frequently represented in our exhibitions and their value is unquestionable. Now, allowing for exceptions such as Mambour, Servranckx and Jespers, who have followed more idealistic tendencies, the art of the Belgian painters of to-day may be said to be based on a kind of realism which inclines, in its constructive fantasy, toward the poetry of the picturesque. The realism of contemporary Flemish painters, of Van den Berghe, Permeke, de Smet, Masereel, Tytgat, Campendonck and their fellows, derives from Jerome Bosch, Breughel the Elder, Callot, Teniers, Rops or [ 6] Idealism Ensor. On the other hand, its living intentions are influenced by the decorative attitudes of Gauguin, by a fondness for stylisation, borrowed from Derain's pre-war period, and also by certain reminiscences of the Slavic poetry rejuvenated by Chagall. The Belgian artists of the younger generation have renewed the form of their racial art, which so many bad influences had submerged in academicism. Furthermore, we may say that, thanks to a free and fresh plastic sense, instead of succumbing to fashions for which they were not fitted, they have asserted their own individuality in harmony with their traditional love of an imitative art not easily renewed. IDEALISM Cubism THE AIMS of Fauvism, which the majority of its disciples succeeded only in elaborating superficially, were finally developed in depth by the Cubists. It was they who restored the real standard of artistic emotion, that is to say sensibility instead of sensuality, and in so doing the Cubists embraced a hazardous task, that of renunciation and austerity, in order to devote themselves to pure plastic analysis. This tendency was by no means revolutionary. As far as its esthetic import goes, it may be traced perhaps to certain hints, such as that of Mallarme (" the unending strife of a garland with itself ") or the lyrical nature of Rimbaud, and, in the plastic field, of Cezanne, of Negro art, and of Fauvism. The Cubist movement was less a ready-made and complete system than the natural evolution of a poetical tendency common to all ages. Cezanne, in resorting to geometry, was merely manifesting the creative faculty which every real artist bears in himself, by an appeal to primary plastic moulds, in view not of imitating or [' 7 ] Modern French Painters organizing Nature, but of creating independently a work recognisably human, an authentic structure, a work, in other words, capable of suggesting, at least momentarily, our free human agency. The pressing need was to renew the tradition active in the work of Angelico, Giotto, Greco, Clouet, Tintoretto, Vermeer, Le Nain, Poussin, Chardin, Ingres, and Corot; and the Cubists were in effect perpetuating the work of these Masters by their attempt to dominate Nature, by their refusal to surrender to its clamorous chaos and charming contradictions. Cubism derived from the modern conquests of Science, from conquests founded on the boldest and often the most improbable hypotheses; it was animated by the same revival of imaginative power, which is the outstanding characteristic of the twentieth century. To create a new composition deliberately constructed with known elements of reality, but independent of all sensual, decorative, psychological or other expression, became the one rule of this school, and that rule was at bottom the only and the very simple theory which its enemies found so difficult, abstruse, mathematical and contradictory. Painting was restored to its proper base: it aimed to move us by objective creations alone proper to its method and purposes. Realism was banished as a hybrid art, reproducing photographically emotions already experienced in life, and for realism the Cubists substituted the emotional stimulation of compositions relying for their effect on the pure play of lines and colors. A great theatrician like Michelangelo exerted himself mightily to move and astound us, while Chardin obtained far more effect with a box and a pipe. To be sure, this is an essentially professional creed. But it is its professional character which is one of the best recommendations of Cubism. As long as painting, to be understood, is forced to have recourse to a comparison with reality, it is an art more appealing to amateurs than to professionals. The amateur wants [ 8] Idealism to know what a picture " represents." The professional is interested only in " what it is." The former is blind before a picture that stimulates no sensation of sensual origin, no reminiscence of every-day life; the latter knows that lines and colors have their own language, that they are quite capable of their own autonomy and can create a work of art independent of all actual associations. A diamond, to be beautiful, need not be heartshaped. In pursuit of this essentially lofty and disinterested ideal, Cubism began by analytical experiments with the resources of line, tone and compositon. About the year i9io a group of artists were working, in unconscious accord, to dissociate the plastic elements of reality by the use of the broken line, a principle first introduced by Fauvism. These artists included Picasso, Georges Braque, Robert Delaunay, Juan Gris, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Fernand Leger and, some years later, Marcoussis, La Fresnaye; Le Fauconnier, Herbin, Reth, de Souza Cardoso, Marcel Duchamp, Picabia, and Filla. Each in his way advanced the tendency of the movement. But, because each was working in his own unpreconcerted way, the movement as a whole underwent certain fluctuations in the course of the years. Picasso and Gris, for instance, were pursuing a very strict plastic lyricism; Braque painted in adherence to the same conception, but in his case it was tempered by a slightly decorative softness; Fernand Leger was exploiting his love of mechanical spectacles, and Robert Delaunay his chosen theme of the dynamism of simultaneous contrasts. These painters began by decomposing objects into their geometric constants, in much the same way as Bach resolves a theme in a fugue. Painting in fact should be a kind of lyrical geometry. The sensitive eye seeks an intimate satisfaction in the pure forms, the mother-moulds of geometry. It is through [' 9 ] Modern French Painters them that it has learned the true nature of light, and, at the same time, these geometric forms are the eye's own creation. And it is in this admirable vicious circle that imagination must turn in its search for the emotional apprehension of form which we need. Next, Cubism discovered graphic connections between the elements so discovered. These ties did not exclude an intrinsic representation of Nature, since, though the substantial aspect of objects might be abandoned, the elements which constituted their vital or mechanical being were now re-grouped in new modes, based on their appeal to the eye. The point was no longer to imitate a splendid or a stirring landscape, to place on canvas the pose of a nude body, to harmonize objects according to known or ancient rhythms, it was to create new objects susceptible of stirring us by the mere arrangement of their lines and the distribution of their substance. In fact, this problem of substances was one which engaged the prolonged attention of the Cubists - proof that they were not insensible, after all, to the resources of color and technic. Since they were dealing with objects, they incorporated in the picture certain substances alien to painting, such as printed paper, curved cardboard, glass or sand.... In the opinion of certain Cubists, it was not illogical to imitate Nature in some of its aspects, even to the point of incorporating in the picture the object itself, if the work was to maintain some correspondence with reality. But this rather specious and excessively subversive idea soon disappeared. Other artists felt that a piece of curved cardboard or glued paper furnished new elements, by which the painter might better direct the orientation of light or the effect of matter. Others again employed this subtle and charming trick merely because it was agreeable. We should note, however, that with all these experiments -soon abandoned, since they [20] Idealism were sterile of expression, a mere jargon of technical tricks Cubism was obeying its lyrical concept of a purely objective art, even when it was busied with the analytical phase of its initial investigations. The first of these works seemed congested, sometimes compact, sometimes loose. They were brilliant sketches which, for lack of a tested style, verged at times on decoration. It was hard, in fact, to rise above technical preoccupations. After running the whole gamut of the resources of composition, the Cubists repeated themselves in numerous examples of a painting more grammatical than lyrical, the value of which lay in analysis alone. It was in 192 i and in the following years that Cubism gradually developed into an art of expression. There were signs then of a synthetic period, the logical consummation of the analytical phase. After having rejuvenated the spirit of painting, Cubism was to stimulate it with a new soul. The Cubists were now in possession of a goodly number of the famous graphic and constructive secrets of the Old Masters, which they had at last rediscovered, and they began to utilise the plastic elements which they had originated for the edification of some complete and finished works. The period of sketches is over, the period of pictures begins, of pictures, that is, painted in an entirely renovated style, destined to exert an overwhelming influence not only on the painting of the whole world but even on fashion and decorative art, which is always quick to claim (and denature) innovations, which have proven their value. Braque, Gris, Delaunay, Leger and Picasso emerged from their early period of schooling and study; they simplified their methods; and they continued their ever-objective researches, never consenting to imitate themselves, as the disciples of " living art " do. To be sure, the art of these men of middle age lacks something of the [ 2I ] Modern French Painters fire, the uncompromising vigor, the obstinacy and audacity which they had shown fifteen years before: it has grown more "artistic." But whatever shortcoming this lack of juvenility may show are amply compensated by an authoritative skill, a serenity and decision no less to be prized. Their early works were brilliant plastic fragments; to-day their painting is an architecture of indisputable value, built on so-called Cubist methods, on those methods of plastic art, that is to say, which have been most commonly practised by the best painting of all time. As was to be expected, several critics of art, who had been periodically announcing the demise of Cubism ever since its birth, hailed its achievement, its conquest of complete expression and authentic style, by a new burial-march. Cubism, apparently, dies hard. In reality, however, let me say once for all that there is not and never has been any such thing as Cubism. I have accepted the term, the slur which Matisse flung at the movement, only as a generally intelligible description of the question under discussion. There has been merely a new orientation, a rejuvenation of the good painting of all time, practised by the best artists of to-day. And if the movement that has been called Cubistic continues to develop, as no doubt it will, in new directions which artists dedicated to new truths will discover, it is certain that, now that the movement has been synthetised, a new conception will merely perfect its expression and prolong the tendency to complete a structure already realized. The Influence of Cubism and Its Successors After the revolution which it had brought about in painting, Cubism and its spirit of analysis soon found devotees in a large number of artists gathered from all over the world. The auda[22] Idealism cious and fruitful example given by Picasso, Braque, Gris, Leger and Delaunay influenced many and various talents. But, as is so often the case with disciples, the faith of the most brilliant successors of Cubism was short-lived. Eager to abandon the movement as soon as possible and return to the traditions of their chosen Masters, they were too impatient to wait until the analytic period had matured and given plastic fruit. They passed on to the expression and practice of a style, which, in their opinion, was a direct derivative of Cubism, but which was nothing more, in fact, than the transcription of one aspect of reality, disguised with some outworn Cubistic trimmings. Andre Lhote, despite his real intelligence, is the leading culprit of this too hasty movement, which he called le cubisme sensible. Once more the subject reappears, manipulated by scientific geometric deformations, clever and nimble, but coldly impersonal, because of the absence of all authentic style. Hayden, Herbin, Survage, Ortiz, Zarraga, Pruna and Gimmi embraced this tendency, and their ability was such that they often made it very attractive. They were followed by other artists. Maria Blanchard alone, an artist of undeniable plastic gifts and a delicate, thoroughbred sensibility, succeeded in negotiating the passage with some measure of conviction. Others, and I am referring only to those who have exhibited in France, continued to practice the creative esthetic creed of Cubism, following, however, a fairly clearly marked decorative tendency: Jean Lurqat, Jacques Villon, Bissiere, Kupka, Bruce Hellesen, Sakata, Georges Valmier, and Buchet. And finally, in connection with idealistic endeavors, mention must be made of the art of Chagall and of that of Chirico which, different as they are in conception, are at one in their striving toward lyrical invention. [23] Modern French Painters PURISM AN ABUSE of analysis sometimes led the Cubists into deliquescent insipidities, into more or less baroque compositions, into decorative graces and affectations not untainted with preciosity. The Purism of Ozenfant and Jeanneret, continued by Peri, Servranckx, and Baumeister, attempted to correct this flaw by bringing a rational severity to an over-fanciful imagination and submitting it to a kind of moral hygiene. Their principles were formulated as follows: " Purification of plastic language, a sorting of forms and colors to create a scale of compelling and sufficient methods of expression (economy and intensity) - a scale which will produce clearly defined and as far as possible universal impressions. " The determination of what ideas and feelings are naturally associated with forms and colors. " Representation or non-representation. Can painting exist as pure creation, without any foundation or point of departure in the world of objects? " To realise these intentions, Purism established what it called the constants of sensation, constants selected from the simplest and purest forms and colors. As regards composition, Purism confined itself to relating plastic forms in an arabesque which should emphasize, without denaturing, the forms of objects. At this point Purism departed from the Cubism from which it was born: Purism attempted to create an object in a picture, whereas Cubism regarded the picture as a whole as an object. The value of Purism lay especially in the distinction it drew between painting that pleases and painting that moves. For a fleeting pleasure, fragile pictures; for a deep one, durable [ 24] " Dada " and Scepticism in Painting works. This formula, like all ready-made ones, sins by excess of logic. The deliberate avoidance of all charm can hardly be compensated except by a lyricism of exceptional grandeur, by some overwhelming, if inhuman, vision, the only spectacle capable of arousing an emotion that can eclipse the effect of fleeting pleasure. But, be that as it may, and in spite of tendencies more determined than inspired, Purism has done its share in accelerating the synthesis of Cubism and its accession to style. Outdoing even Purism, the formula of " Style," introduced from the Low Countries, yet further curtails a conception congenial enough to the love of luminous neatness that flourishes in Holland. Here abstraction is pushed so far that all semblance of a subject is abolished. The desired emotion is suggested by the use of a style obtained by the assemblage of colored elements, that give the illusion of stained-glass windows composed entirely of geometric forms. Theo van Doesburg, Piet Mondrian, B. van der Leck, Vilmos Huszar, and van Tongerloo are the leaders of this movement, which impresses a Frenchman at least as a charming decorative curio, lacking as it does all contact, however slight, with reality. " DADA" AND SCEPTICISM IN PAINTING A PERIOD of pictorial faith so rich in fierce convictions, in unshakable' beliefs, in uncompromising dogmas, was bound to provoke doubt among those who had never believed very firmly in the sensible powers of painting. Thus " Dadaism " was born in I920. "I want to assassinate painting." So, several years later, spoke the leader of the Hyper-realist School, Joan Miro, the Catalan; but Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Crotti and Ribemont-Dessaignes did really attempt its life with a great deal of wit and cleverness, the only qualities which such a motive [25] Modern French Painters could have. They stuck a mustache on the smile of Gioconda, they parodied the artistic manners most in vogue at the time, and they composed weird graphic constructions, in which the most discordant objects, larded with unexpected labels, successfully flabbergasted the man in the street. They organized manifestations, which produced their effect for a time. The term of " Dada " had its hour of popularity, thanks to a wellorganized but expensive campaign of publicity. Particularly popular was the magazine " 391.' Then, after Picabia's ballet, Reldche, had been produced by Rolf de Mare and danced by Jean Borlin, this revival of Murger's Vie de Boheme lost its vogue, and all that is left to-day of this amusingly turbulent movement is the memory of some charming compositions, in which a great deal of wit was expended and a great deal of amiable impotence revealed, all for the invention of a rollicking crazy-quilt travesty of stylistic painting. HYPER-REALISM A GROUP of gently revolutionary writers, authors of novels which the Academy would be only too happy to crown, recruited from former Dadaists and not a little shamefaced at having been taken in by the elegant scepticism of Picabia, discovered one day a common faith in something which they hastened to assure us was not art and which they baptised, not very confidently, hyper-realism. Hyper-realism is a medley of politics, sociology, philosophy, medicine, dancing, music, commercial transactions, and literature. It is practised to a characteristic accompaniment of manifestos and riots and abuse and nights spent in communion with a violin: a romantic picture - ridiculous and charming as are all things romantic - of a period representative of the moral and financial disorders of these after-war [ 26] Hyper-Realism days. It is safe to assume that this movement will subside, when the stabilisation of exchange has restored calm in the national life. In any case, this hyper-realist society has been recently reenforced by the accession of a group of painters, borrowed from a movement of romantic origin bred in Germany (where everything romantic is bred) and deriving from Expressionism. This movement may be seen in the delicate and charming essays of Paul Klee, of the Bulgarian Papazoff, of Heinrich Hoerle, of the Neue Saclichkeit. In technic it derives from Braque, Picabia and especially from Picasso, all conscientiously imitated. Some few artists of rather confused and inorganic tendencies, such as Pierre Roy, Viollier, Masson, Arp, Max Ernst, Malkine, Sunbeam, Tanguy and Joan Miro - the latter is generally regarded as the leader of the school —have attempted a reaction against Cubism by opposing a subjective conception to its objective plasticism. As in all romanticism, technique and esthetics count for nothing. At least, an attempt is made to give that impression, for in reality the Cubists are merely pilfered. The doctrine of the Hyper-realists, entirely extra-pictorial as it is, draws its inspiration from Freudism: it consists in obeying the inspiration of thought uncontrolled by reason; in painting, in short, moods and dreams of the unconscious mind by any graphic methods that suggest themselves. The aim is to suggest the mystery of the subconscious mind by translating the most usual objects into sentimental terms, into forms as bizarre, as disturbing, as melancholy, as tragic and nightmare-like as possible. For a time this school found its patent in the early work of Chirico, whom they baptised " an outpost on the limitless highroad of challenge." Later, however, when Chirico had modified his early tendencies and returned to an art of plastic symbolism, which showed signs of becoming less and less mysterious, he was deposed in favor of Picasso, who thus became the patron of an as[27] Modern French Painters sembly which numbered Dostoievsky as well! This ingenuousness was sincere and not impractical, for it proved that the cult of the mysterious was by no means incompatible with a traditional esthetic, since Raphael, I forgot to mention, was also enrolled on the Committee of Honor of the Hyper-realists. It is to be regretted that this movement, which is not without its good points, should have been developed by the most approved methods of an insolent hoaxing, which has made its adepts in general quite insupportable. Be that as it may, though the movement has no pictorial value as such, it has a literary and illustrative interest. The works of the Hyper-realists are attempts often informed with taste, in the case of Miro, with a personal and charming taste. Aside from their poetical purport, technically they remind one of ancient diableries, of the mystical compositions of the XVIth and XVIIth centuries, of the drawings of Grandville, the tales of Hoffman and Poe, of the freaks of a fair-ground, of the knickknacks of i830, of certain anatomical plates and the inventions of some German cinemas that we have seen -in short, of all sorts of rococo trifles, amusing in their pretentiousness and particularly charming in the work of Klee, Papazoff and Miro. But, when all is said and done, it is a fashionable whim more German than French, more literary than plastic, principally because of a pathological influence, which hardly corresponds to the tendencies of our art. POPULAR ART A REAL revival of popular art has arisen in the last twenty years, due no doubt to the complete absence of prejudices on the part of the most proficient artists and also to the realization of what constitutes authentic evidences of feeling in painting. [ 281 Popular Art The douanier Rousseau has been followed by other artists: Andre Bauchant, the farmer Utrillo in his earlier canvases, the Georgian Goudiachvili, the terrassier Bombois, Boyer the marchand de frites, the officer Le Gay, the chimney-sweep Emile Gody, have all attempted to rehabilitate sentimental painting. They paint in obedience to ideal precepts, which have little connection with the rules of traditional painting, and which are appealing by reason of their charm, their inventiveness, often even of the plastic felicities and keen sense of light and color by which they are illustrated. There is no need of dignifying the art of these painters as a model or of comparing it to that of the masters, as some have done rather rashly in the case of the good Douanier. But, all the same, because of the fragile charm which their undeniable imperfection begets, their painting may have but the beaute du diable, the fleeting beauty of youth, but that it unquestionably has. And what a warning (wasted, of course), if not what a lesson (even less possible) to the skill that bores and the knowledge that lacks imagination! If these popular painters move us very delicately - though quite superficially, I admit —it is because their inventive fancy was their only guide, and that for the excellent reason that they knew no other. For that reason their nice little concoctions may be regarded as the incunabula of artistic sensibility. In truth, so exquisite are the hours we owe to the little pictures of the popular school, that we should view them very leniently. Art consists, no doubt, of skill and imagination. But since these precious artisans lack only one half of the double figure of Hermes, which might be taken to symbolize art, only one half of their peccadilloes - their painting - need be forgiven. And if anyone is so cruel as to argue that their little felicities are the [29] Modern French Painters fruit of merely a happy accident, we should be even more generous; for their authors are, as other men are, the offspring of more or less happy accidents - no more than we, creatures of design. The charming inventions with which their work abounds may well prove to be but Pyrrhic triumphs. But, in judging their conquests, we should remember that, as non-professionals, they had nothing to lose. And I am not sure that their methods do not mark the critical moment in the development of present-day painting, when Method at last ventures to cut the traces and Empiricism is seriously considering winding up its career. THE YOUNGER GENERATION IN PRESENT-DAY PAINTING THE CUBIST MOVEMENT is still too recent to be profitably forgotten or to provoke a sincere reaction, and it is not surprising therefore that it should have profoundly affected the painting of the young men between the ages of twenty and thirty. The ablest of these young people, Berard, Bosshard, Andre Beaudin, Francis Laglenne, Mambour, Menkes, Roland Oudot, Suzanne Roger, Tchelitchew and others such as Ismael de la Serna, Bores, Cossio, in other words all those who want to do something more than repeat the past or found a new group and another ism, are groping for a goal, hesitating as to what course to give to their inspirations. They know that not every generation can bring forth a movement like Romanticism, Impressionism or Cubism. They know also how deeply their work is affected by a reigning conception, the authority of which it is difficult to escape or deny, even by such subterfuges as those of the Hyper-realists. If I describe these young men as idealists, it is because they know that ever since Cubism a picture, as Max Jacob said of a poem, is a constructed object and not a jeweller's show-case. With this [30] The Younger Generation thought to guide them, they take the analytic period of Cubism as their point of departure, remaining, however, quite individual, and attempt to create a style in conformity to the tendencies of the present, comparable to recent traditions and corresponding to their own feelings. They question the Past. In the Old Masters there is always something that has been overlooked. And the restlessness of this sensitive generation is expressed in paintings, full of contradictory intentions and excellent results mingling with numerous failures. That is as it should be. The painter who never goes wrong is a detestable one. It is not given to everyone to go wrong. Furthermore, what really inspires confidence in painters like these, who are obviously determined to pursue a personal creation and not to lapse into " living art," is that they do not, as bad painters do, begin in full cry of radicalism, only to end, as infallibly such upstarts do, in incorrigible convention. By practising the lessons of the Old Masters and of their direct predecessors without misinterpreting their intentions, they begin like the greatest of their colleagues, that is to say, like the Old Guard, the best and surest way of ending eventually as the Young Van. And to avoid the variations of fashion and preserve a more lasting plastic unity in their work, they forbear to ply us with little sentimental stories, which have nothing to do with painting, though they may furnish tabletalk for a few days in society. This surely is proof that they are artists rather than naturalists in feeling. There is no danger of their trying to attract attention without being able to hold it, by tricks and affectations. Consequently, though they are not deliberate and sworn foes of charm, they make no attempt to please or to astonish. To establish a general idea of the tendencies which we shall study with more discrimination later on, I might say, first of all, that the most interesting of the younger painters of the present [ 3' ] Modern French Painters day all show some influence of the romantic breath that has been blowing, logically enough, ever since the war. Eighteen-thirty attracts them. On the other hand, the painting of I9I4 exerts an undeniable influence on them. It is probable therefore that the artists who will turn out to be the best of to-morrow, though not necessarily the best-known, will follow a tendency, which will combine the suggestions of both of these important dates. The most authentic, the most plastically lyric wing of the young painters, will seek a style that shall combine the rehabilitations due to the Cubists with the notion of lyrical but not naturalistic life of the painting of a hundred years ago, including certain discoveries effected by the Renaissants. That movement may bring with it a new climax and crisis. But it is just in such crises that art is most captivating and compelling of interest. It is by such climaxes that it maintains a perpetual progress, thanks to which it escapes standardization, routine and a stagnation, which breeds and multiplies its reasons of decay. [32 ] YVES ALIX YVES ALIX was born in Fontainebleau, August 19, I890. His family made no opposition to his becoming a painter and he was allowed to frequent the schools from the age of eighteen. He studied at Jullian's, with Baschet and Roger as his teachers. He was enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where, however, he never set foot. Subsequently he spent a more profitable period at the Academie Ranson, where Bonnard, Vuillard, Ramet, Serusier and Maurice Denis were teaching. Chardin, Delacroix, Corot, Manet, and Daumier were his real masters. He spends seven months of the year in the country, working and tending his flowers. He has travelled only in France and Belgium, but Belgium is his favorite country. "In art," says Alix, " I feel that we discover but never invent. We discover sometimes a new country by energy and determination. But how many schools and tempting theories we must avoid! " Here are other of his maxims: "A simple soil, capable of rearing the poetry sown in it. "The greatest artist and the greatest poet of his art is Renoir. "French art, I think, should be simple, frank and serene. " A work of art that inspires no restlessness or perplexity is the one whose beauty and meaning we may best enjoy. "Mastery is acquired less by the cultivation of one's native gifts than by the gradual elevation of mind and feeling. At twenty-five one should know one's craft sufficiently to be able to forget it. [33] Modern French Painters "We should, of course, forget the Old Masters; but it is even more important that we forget the modern ones." In spite of the last two assertions, when we examine the work of Yves Alix, we are forced to conclude that he has allowed his personality to be cramped by two despotic tendencies: fidelity to Nature, on one hand, and to the tradition of certain recent works, on the other. As he himself says, it is Delacroix, Corot, Manet and Daumier, who have fed his unquestionable but not very individual talent. He is one of a half-dozen contemporary artists, for whom the science of the Masters holds no secrets. But if he has also discerned the significance of their esthetics, he has been content apparently to remain faithful to preoccupations, which modern lyricism has long left behind. His art, masterly as it is, constitutes a kind of critical development of the art of Manet and Daumier, a scholastic demonstration; his pictures are highly erudite and well-documented commentaries on the works of these Masters; they are a way of teaching, very intelligently, the methods of the great painters he loves. In short, Yves Alix might be described as a kind of pictorially intelligent academician, who should hold a chair in a School of Fine Arts, where Art and not Commerce would be the guiding principle. The work of Yves Alix, ranging from 150 to 200 paintings, is represented in the following collections: those of Manteau, Templier, Flameng, van Gheluwe, Schwarzenberg, Galilee, G. Roussel, Hottat, Maister, J. Hebert-Stevens, etc. His most important pictures are: "La Cathedrale" (I9I2) -" L'Atelier" (I913)-" Le Maitre de Moissons" (1921) —"Le Ruisseau du Village" (1922) -- Le Balcon" (I923) - "Portrait de M. Koubitzky" (I924) -" Jeune [34] Andre Bauchant Femme arrangeant des Fleurs " (1924) -" Le Port " (1925)"L'Avocat" (1926). Alix has also done the designs for the costumes of Sganarelle, Le Menteur, Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement, and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme for the Theatre du Marais in Brussels. He has also designed furniture, painted paper and printed fabrics. ANDRE BAUCHANT ANDRE BAUCHANT is certaintly the best-equipped of the representatives of the school of popular painting. He lives in Touraine and divides his time between farming and painting, to which he is passionately devoted. Faithful to antiquity, he goes to history for the subjects which he paints with authentic freshness and candor. His talent shows in certain plastic felicities worthy of the best work of popular folk-lore. Like many another rudimentary artist, he has an engaging sense of light and some very unusual qualities of composition. Many of his canvases strike one as a little hasty and improvised, but this defect is traceable to a rather over-abundant inspiration and the lack of a science, which would no doubt merely hamper him. Here is the curious letter he writes me; it emphasizes the nature of his precious talent. " Andre Bauchant, born in Chateaurenault, April 24, 1873, was given an elementary education. He was an apt pupil and went to school until the age of fourteen; he then took up farming, and only after his period of military service resumed his studies and pursued the reading, of classic works. " Every year he travelled for a month in the centre and west of France on business, and when his leisure allowed he would visit the antiquities and curiosities of the town in which [35] Modern French Painters he happened to be. The love of beauty was so strong in him, that he has remembered most of what he saw then. ".... Documented by a number of standard histories, both French and foreign, I grew more and more attached to those ancient ruins so eloquent of past glories. "As for museums, I visited them only as a layman, having no knowledge of art and being incapable of judging its value. " In spite of a youthful love of geography, which led me to study maps closely, it was only in 1917 that I took up a course in surveying, which established me. Because of the number of candidates (forty for six positions), I had to take an examination, and the drawing that I offered won me first place. I thus gained many advantages for improving myself. I advanced in this work rapidly enough to have a great deal of time to myself. "In I9I8, near Reims where I had been sent as a military draughtsman, after holding a clerical position in the secondline formations, I made sketches for a panorama of the Marne, which were exhibited in the Salon d'Automne of 1921. "My favorite pictures are: -Pericles Justifying the Use of the People's Money (429 B.C.). - The Assumption. -The Battle of Thermopylae. (July, 480 B.C.). - The Declaration of American Independence (July 4, I776) and Washington reading that declaration to his troops in the presence of Rochambeau and La Fayette. After my first exposition, in 1921, when I was elected a member of the Salon d'Automne, I grew more persevering. In that year I offered the National Committee of the Beaux-Arts a choice of my paintings, and the following were selected: The Battle of Palermo (Roman-Punic Wars), with elephants, and Adam and Eve Expelled from Eden. I have also painted a [36] Andre Beaudin Perseus Delivering Andromeda, The Dream of the Virgins, and Almsgiving at the Church Door. I have also a Parnassus, Hippocremes, and a Pindus.. ANDRE BEAUDIN ANDRE BEAUDIN was born on February 3, I895, at Mennecy (Seine-et-Oise). He entered the School of Decorative Arts, where he studied until I9I5, when he left for the front. After the war he devoted himself entirely to painting and to the friendship of Max Jacob, Juan Gris, and other artists, who encouraged his efforts and contributed to the development of his personality. Certain developments of the art of the younger generation, to which we are not accustomed, are a little trying! But, at bottom, we are only too glad to be upset. And those who upset us intelligently in our too set and artistic little ways, are the men who are destined to make their own discoveries and to contribute to the evolution of art far more effectively than their brothers, who have no higher ambition than to charm and flatter us in our ordinary and wilful ways of seeing and feeling. Beaudin models his picture by pure line, even in his earliest attempts. He invents linear sinuosities, the pedigree of which we might trace to Carpaccio's theories of angels, to primitive phylacteries, the coils of the Laocoon, Greco, the interlacings of certain Athenian vases or the circles of aureoles. At the same time that it is a line, Beaudin's arabesque constitutes the element of color which conditions form. It is developed throughout the picture like a musical theme and contributes to the composition like a kind of luminous sap. We watch it rise impetuously, grow, develop, and outdo itself, with a precise and ample [37] Modern French Painters audacity. If an obstacle momentarily halts its onward sweep, it seems to say: Well, and why should I not go that way, after all? And it strikes out boldly, in a clean single jet, casting new shadows and unfamiliar lights, with all the inventive grace of its very necessary superfluity. In his most recent works, Beaudin has been reacting against the fragility of so fortuitous a conception. At the bidding of a temperament which the Romanticism of the present day is poetising more and more, he is working on compositions that are more substantial, more audacious, but that his cult of tradition seeks to render in more classic forms. And here we have the crux of the difficulty which is besetting a talent in search of a necessary synthesis. He now seeks to legitimize the charm of his earlier works, and it is in this logical though seemingly contradictory adventure, in this classical romanticism, that he is pursuing the development of his personality. "In this language which is no longer mine, in this language of words, in this foreign tongue," he writes, " you expect me to speak of the methods I have chosen to express my thoughtsof painting -! I shall probably write you that it is very hard to explain oneself, if not impossible to do oneself justice in a letter. The only explanation I can offer is, I think, to explain that I can explain nothing. The joy of painting, lyricism, poetry, ideals... the heart laid bare! But the heart is constantly changing! It varies from day to day, though it is constantly swayed by its attraction to one or another of the great men who are its models.... But really, it remains always implacably the same! What more identical than the last picture and the first? And the very latest ones -will they not be just the same too, only with more skill, more ease, and more greatness? The mark of the author will always be there, his real signature. How describe that signature? It is impalpable, whether it is reason or [38] AndrJ Beaudin abandon, since the method of expression which it attests is an art and art, whatever its form, is inexplicable. " Now as for the germ, the period of gestation: what could be more mysterious? One's esthetic preoccupations - a strictly personal question - derive, to be sure, in part at least, from one's whole education or one's environment or merely from a particular school. Rarely, however, from a school nowadays, when artists are apt to be self-taught. All the equipment which Raphael derived from Perugino and Greco from Tintoretto, etc.... (then in their youth), we need years to-day to recover even a small fraction of, too small a fraction to attain the dimensions of those great artists. Their science never cramped them. What shall we say of this generation, when painters are so afraid of schooling, of bonds?... I feel on the contrary that the more limited I am, the freer I am, and it is that freedom which thrills me, because it is well founded. All his life Greco employed the methods he had learned from Tintoretto: wag he any the less lacking in personality? and what a personality! "The mysterious virtue of painting lies, I believe, in light. There is a cultivated contempt for tradition. That deliberate, stubborn, fond ignorance leads painting to reminiscence or resemblance (hence the recrudescence of painters who have only a confused idea of their mission), to an art from which all esthetic preoccupations are absent but which satisfies practical requirements, whereas, on the contrary, the truth is that we do not see lines and forms -we create them. Besides, intellectual qualities should take precedence over those. of pure execution. In short, to really understand a work of art and the artist who creates it, you must have a ' sympathetic urge,' and the artist, as Kant says, 'must have the knowledge of his ignorance.' [ 39 ] Modern French Painters "I have taken the example of Raphael and Greco quite at random, without wishing to give any particular preference to that period. I do not mean that we must conform to rules that are purely conventional. What rules? We should not confuse the means with the end. Form has never thwarted originality: it has rather tended to create it. We should learn what can be learned, and for the rest, the artist has perfect freedom. There lies the real sympathetic element: 'what can not be learned,' the only element capable of really moving us. Too much speculation is deadening. Although painting is an art of reasoning (since it was born long after architecture and sculpture), it needs a maximum of abandon, at least in appearance. Imagination (a word often misused, when it is merely a matter of fantasy) I mean creative imagination something infinitely higher - imagination and invention are the noblest aims and the only ones worthy of an artist. " I was in Italy in I919. I have changed a great deal since then and what impressed me at that time would doubtless leave me cold to-day. The Primitives went straight to my heart, unreservedly, whereas the Titians, Tintorettos, Raphaels, etc.,... I found very pompous, with the exception of the Veroneses in Milan, much deeper in their extraordinary ease. Still, I always returned to Cimabue, Carpaccio and those admirable mosaics of San Marco, and I could never get Cimabue out of my head. If I were to go back now, I dare say I should return with very different opinions. I don't think I should feel very differently about Veronese, but I am sure that I would adore Tintoretto." Andre Beaudin has travelled in Italy - Milan, Venice, Florence. He was particularly impressed by the mosaics of the Basilica of San Marco and by Cimabue. He is represented in the following collections: Maurice Level, Andre [40] Fritz van den Berghe Lefevre, Raoul Duval, Andre Level, Fleming, Guy Schwob, the Vicomte de Noailles, Richet, Leonce Rosenberg, Raoul Pelquer, Dr. Bonnet, and Charles Schneider. FRITZ VAN DEN BERGHE FRITZ VAN DEN BERGHE is forty-three years old and was born in Ghent, Flanders. He drew and painted from early childhood, though no example or encouragement in his environment led him to art. He followed the courses of the Academy of Fine Arts of Ghent, where he worked from Nature for several years. " I wasted a great deal of time," he writes, " in attempting to reconcile what I had to say with visually perceptible form and color. For years I could not complete a single canvas I undertook. I have not travelled. It was only thanks to the war that I came to know Gauguin and Van Gogh. When at last I was able to render more or less well what I could see with my eyes, I realized that that could not be my only aim in painting. The forms and colors I desired were never those I could see with my eyes, and I learned to mistrust my eyes. I came to understand that I had first to separate my own vision from life, before I could organize color and form. None of the various contemporary currents affected me for the simple reason that I saw them all as one-sided reactions from a preceding period, each current constituting a facet of contemporary effort, and nothing more." The personal vision to which Fritz van den Berghe alludes is the result of his practise of a mysticism traditional in Flanders, a mysticism psychical in character and not merely picturesque. This mysticism is expressed through apperceptible motives drawn from the observation of Nature, rather than by [4 ] Modern French Painters the creation of new values. And like all mystics, he adopts crude, blunt, abrupt forms, which correspond exactly to his type of feeling. Van den Berghe derived from Gauguin and Van Gogh. The former, in particular, influenced his work. But van den Berghe informs his work with more poetry, more intimate life, more popular sensibility than Gauguin. And he did not have to go so far for his inspiration. Moreover, he has escaped the decorative aspect, which threatens every too rigid intention, as we so often see in the case of pictorial mysticism. His form is deficient in the unity of composition, which we prize so highly in France. But we have no right, after all, to expect a Fleming to be a Latin, and the Romanticism of Fritz van den Berghe is not ill-suited to the casual character of his composition. The most important canvases by van den Berghe date from I9I8. 1918: Les Hommes - Le Cabaret - L'Attente. I919: Malpertuis - L'Attente II - La Pomme - Forains. 1920: La Foire- Souvenir- Le peintre du Soleil-Les Baigneuses. 1921: Portrait de Permeke —La Baigneuse-Le Veau-Le Vacher. 1922: La Lys - Le Tilbury - La Friture. 1923: La bonne Auberge - Danseurs. 1924: Le Pecheur - Dimanche - Double portrait - Le Flirtiste. 1925: Le Pauvre - Pique-nique- Le Vagabond - VacancesVoyage - La Vie. These paintings and others are to be found in Belgian and Dutch collections, notably those of P. G. van Hecke, A. de Ridder, and Duesberg. [42] Maria Blanchard MARIA BLANCHARD MARIA BLANCHARD was born in Spain of a Spanish father and a French mother. Her great-grandmother was Polish. In Paris she studied under Anglade, Van Dongen and Marie Vassilief. Her taste was largely influenced by Cubism. Her ambition is " to devote all one's knowledge of painting to whatever motive interests or amuses one." An early canvas, which she showed at the Salon d'Automne (Premiyre communiante) won her an enthusiastic success with the press and the public, a success which alarmed her modesty but did not turn her head. She travelled in Italy, in Belgium and in England. Several important pictures by her hang in the Museums of Nantes and Grenoble. The art of Marie Blanchard takes two forms of expression which, in her case more than that of any other artist, show clearly the difference of nature and not of degree, which is at their root: the tendency which we must perforce call Cubist and the Realistic tendency. Maria Blanchard is endowed with an exquisite sensibility, which could not remain indifferent to the new conception of objective representation we call Cubism. With remarkable courage and disinterestedness, as early as I914, she was devoting her sensitive and unfettered imagination to the construction of pictures of a great purity, quick with a rhythm at once severe and supple, and always animated by a generous and serene temerity. Living a solitary and painful life, Maria Blanchard has been able to give herself to Cubism with the entire renunciation which that form of expression demands of its disciples. Immune by life and by temperament to the sensual suggestions inherent in color and design that are not self-sufficient, she has been working for the greater glory of an art which she has chosen for her own, [ 43 ] Modern French Painters in the brooding solitude of a sensibility easily wounded and disconcerted: Human reason is hostile to extreme conceptions, because of their lack of stability, of proven foundation. We are forced, despite the demonstrations to the contrary of a Riemann, to believe that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles. Admirable as the discoveries of Cubism may be, they can not give us the sense of a livable and convenient world, the comfort of which, sooner or later, we demand. This craving reflects little credit on human nature, which prefers practical certainties proven to its satisfaction by the vulgar need it feels of them, to the radiant probabilities which create a perpetual introduction to new investigations and discoveries. But we must reckon with this reason and its practical despotism, if we are to live the common life of humanity. Maria Blanchard understood these facts perfectly. She felt the difference of nature which separates Cubist from traditional art. In the latter practical reason rules, the type of reason which argues that it is better to purchase an object ready-made than to make it oneself; in the former, on the contrary, we obey the mysterious injunctions of our sensibility, which remind us that in constructing that object by ourselves, we shall be rewarded by discoveries and inventions that will satisfy our love of experiment and open, as the phrase is, new horizons. Far from subordinating her Cubistical conceptions, therefore, to the Naturalistic conceptions which govern Cubism to-day, Maria Blanchard has steadfastly applied her mastery of the practice of painting to the requirements of the traditional motives of good painting. In this body of her work we find the same conscientiousness as in her earlier achievements. Certain concessions she does make to representation, to be sure, but not for a moment does [ 44] Maria Blanchard she forget the plastic reasons of her art. The realistic instinct which she inherits with her Spanish nationality keeps her from all taint of considerations alien to art. No psychology, no decoration, no anecdotes. Her subjects are mere pretexts for the exercise of her perfect knowledge of technical practice. Her pictures could be divided into a number of compositions, which might be described as little plastic ensembles. But such an analysis of them would not affect the unity which is their solid armature. The richness of her palette has been sufficiently remarked, to make it unnecessary to call attention to it once more. I should like merely to emphasize the sincerity of her methods. No tricks, no evasions, nothing slipshod. She does not invent difficulties in order to solve them brilliantly, but when she encounters them she does not avoid them. She tries to solve them very simply. Far from attempting to hide her weaknesses, she displays them with an ingenuousness which is, however, not a disarming challenge; and the qualities which she shows are never wearily repeated. To define the secret of her sensibility, we should have to dwell on her profound feeling of reality, of a reality every detail of which her melancholy finesse detects in all its hardness and crudity. Maria Blanchard is so much the painter, that there is no need of congratulating her on having escaped a mysticism which her temperament might easily have been prone to. She is always very human, with a generosity of spirit which approaches liberality and which animates her conception of an art the essence of which is sacrifice. See: Maria Blanchard, by Waldemar George published by Ceux de Demain, Brussels. [45] Modern French Painters BOMBOIS HERE is a popular artist, little favored by his origin. Gifted with Herculean strength, he worked for a long time as a manual laborer; at one period of his life he might have been seen engaged in the difficult manipulation of the cylinders of the public presses. He was later a terrassier (a digger): it was then that the love of painting began to stir in him. He soon attracted attention and, the better to devote himself to his art, he left Paris for the country, where he now divides his time between painting and market-gardening. Like many great rudimentary painters, he excels in the rendering of light and of reflections on water, which he translates with a purity and precision, that are really poetically suggestive. R. T. BOSSHARD RODOLPH-THEOPHILE BOSSHARD was born on June 7, I889, in Morges, a small town on Lake Leman between Lausanne and Geneva. His father was born in Zurich and died in Poland. His mother was a Frenchwoman born in Saint-Hippolyte-du-Fort, near Nimes. After taking his degree at the Gymnase de Geneve, he devoted himself to music, although he had shown a marked aptitude for drawing. "Painting bores me," he says. " No Museum influence except for Velasquez and Rembrandt. I paint because I could not master music. I tried the piano for seven years, unable for a long time to decide between music and painting. I like to invent, to improvise, to make mistakes and to work them out, as best I can." Painting finally claimed him, however, and he entered the [ 46] R. T. Bosshard Ecole des Beaux-Arts of Geneva, where he stayed only a short time. Later he travelled. He spent some time in London, Dresden and Munich, and in Paris he enrolled in the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere. "Suppose I were to say," he writes charmingly, " that my real biography is mother, Lydia, Nadia, Ernest, my uncle Alfred the naturalist with his Noah's ark, Aunt Maria, Ruth, Martha, Ingeborg, Anne, Irene, then a great gap, the name I dare not name, the woman who refused to live and who lies now under a red rocky soil, and after that Sonia, Ingeborg, Manon and Andre, who mourn her with me like four guardian angels, and then - let me see - mountains, suburbs, viaducts, some seaports where I am timid, my thoughts flying to the mountains and their inhuman refuge, and then a few brandies, some tobacco, some coffee, and then - and then laughter and sobriety to hold and hide it all. My real biography is such an intelligent one: jaunts with my cousin Richard, a lover of biology and letters, the delights of the mountains, of fishing, sailing, and the love of liberty, of which I have abused. Then the war, the interminable mobilisations - that moral suicide - finally my true birth in Paris; the birth of my two children, with twenty francs in the house; my marriage on the same sum; my wife, a goddess of unconquerable courage. " At 3 7 a man wonders just how much he can do without. It depends on how strong and wide are the roots that sustain him. "Then work, work, work. In my case the freest play of lines and color planes always ends by resembling an -object. You begin that way and then you purify. In decoration: geometry, eventually with suggestive silhouettes; a great respect for architecture;.the will to understand and master cement, concrete, iron and glass. My sin: boredom." [ 47] Modern French Painters Bosshard, whom many contemporary artists have imitated, owes his evident personality as a colorist to his poetical temperament. He is one of the few who have succeeded in humanly developing the lyric geometry of Cubism by individual methods and obvious pictorial gifts. His work proves that a talent for color can be reconciled with one for composition, that the science of harmonies, beautiful substances and rare tonalities can result in style and not in a more or less melodramatic chaos. In the work of Bosshard we find a kind of mute ardor, of warmth, of which a very broad discipline measures and controls the degrees. We find a charm which is not that of the startling so dear to certain Cubists, but that which comes from the sensibility of a painter who is as much the very vivid man whom his confidences and delicately intimate banter shows as the most convinced of easel-painters. Bosshard is now living the period of his mastered formula. With a slightly facile fire, his art exults in that triumph, but at times somewhat imprudently. Some few more years will settle that impetuosity and his paintings will show more solidity when they consent to obey the bold formula of "lines and planes, which always end by resembling an object." In chronological order, the most important works of R. T. Bosshard are: 1920: "Ville Folle," shown at the Swiss National Exhibition, in Neuchatel. I923: " Ville romantique" (Girardin collection). 1923: "Nude" (Mazaraki collection). I924: " Leda" (Salon des Tuileries). I924: Exhibition in the Galerie Henry. "Nus au viaduc," "Enlevement des Sabines," "Femme couch6e." - Hintsch collection, Geneva. [48] Emile Boyer 1925: Exhibition in the Galerie Marcel Bernheim. 1926: Salon des Tuileries. "Nu aux rochers." 1927: Salon des Tuileries. " Nu." EMILE BOYER EMILE BOYER was born in Paris, June 30, 1877. His family was poor, and at an early age he was making designs for embroidery to support his paralyzed mother. Later he became a printer and had an arm crippled by an accident with a machine. Then he moved to Montmartre, place du Tertre, where he met Modigliani and Utrillo, in 1912, and set up shop as a marchand de frites, while he continued to paint. Boyer is one of our popular painters who has been favored by fashion. A sensitive but unskilful colorist, he paints warmly toned and swiftly spotted landscapes, and in his very ignorance he finds picturesque accents, which have a curious relation to the incidents of his life. He has the fertility so often found in rudimentary artists, and he translates the objects he wants to imitate in his own way, which is not the way of certain Primaires of the Salon des Artistes Franqais. For Boyer has no taste for the anecdote - a fact rather rare among popular painters. He paints like a Romantic, accenting or softening a natural effect in obedience to a whim often happy and fertile in charming details. No construction, no drawing; all is color, and it is amusing to find in the impulses of so untutored a sensibility notes as graceful and of as rudimentary a lyrical charm as one meets with in his strange and astonishing conversation. Paintings by Boyer are to be found in the collections of A. Kann, the Princess Murat, Foujita, May, Tronche, Uhde, Nas Simon, Dr. Kastorovicz, von Roques, Nottebohm, Paul Guillaume, Saincere, and the Princess Aga Khan. [ 49] Modern French Painters GEORGES BRAQUE GEORGES BRAQUE was born in Argenteuil, in I882. His parents ran a paint-shop. The mysteries of its various technical processes, the file, the letter, the couches grasses, of imitation marble and wood, destined to decorate shop-windows, stirred in him at an early age a deep and intimate love of painting. He was about twenty when he took contact with the best artistic inspirations of the day, and his disciplined and analytical temperament led him to join the experiments of the Fauves, along with Matisse and Friesz, in their struggle against academic Impressionism. But he soon recognized the insufficiency of Fauvism in all that regarded lyrical invention. The devotion to reality which Fauvism demanded and its habits of sketchiness were alien to his creative temperament, to the exacting nature of a painter who was so profoundly and essentially a painter. With Picasso he then undertook to establish an art which, without attempting to repeat that of the Old or recent Masters, should interpret the picture as a lyric fact, by means of a subtle analysis of the methods of the immediate past and the invention of new ones, leaving for later the synthesis of these discoveries and the creation of their vital principle through such elements of life as his own humanity might discover. Here are some of Braque's thoughts upon painting. They are extremely important and illumine the efforts of Cubist technic: " In art, progress lies not in an extension but in a knowledge of limitations. " The limitations of a method secure its style, engender a new form and lead to creation. "Limited methods often constitute the charm and power of [50] Georges Braque primitive paintings. Extension of methods, on the contrary, causes the decadence of the arts. "New methods-new subjects. "The subject is not the object of painting, but a new unity, the lyricism that results from the mastery of a method. " The aim of painting is not to reconstruct an anecdotic fact, but to constitute a pictorial fact. "Painting is a mode of representation. "We must not imitate what we want to create. The aspect of things is not to be imitated, for the aspect of things is the result of them. " If it is to be pure imitation, painting must omit the aspects of what it imitates. "To work from Nature is to improvise. "We must avoid anything that savors of a universally applicable formula (une formule a tout faire), as applicable to other arts as to reality, for such a formula, instead of creating, would only produce a style or rather a stylization. The arts which are impressive by their purity have never been arts of that character (arts a tout faire). Greek sculpture and its decadence are there to prove it. " The senses deform, the spirit forms.- We must labor to perfect the spirit. There is certainty only in what the spirit conceives. "The painter who tries to make a circle only produces something round. The aspect of it may satisfy him, but he will still be open to doubt. The compass will give him absolute certainty. The bits of paper I have stuck on my pictures have also given me certainty. "Illusion (le trompe-l'oeil) is the result of an anecdotic chance, which we find convincing because of the simplicity of its constituent facts. [5I] Modern French Painters "The bits of glued paper, the imitation wood and other elements of the same sort, which I have employed in some of my designs, are equally valid because of the simplicity of these compositional facts, and for that reason have been confused with illusion, of which they are the exact contrary. They too are simple facts, but they have been created by mind, by the spirit, and they are one of the justifications of a new spatial figuration. " Nobility arises from the reticence of emotion. " Emotion must not be rendered by an emotional quivering. It must not be an exaggeration or imitation of itself. It is the germ, the flowering and the created work. It is complete and self-contained. " I like the rule, the discipline, which controls and corrects emotion." During the analytical period of Cubism, Braque was at once recognized as one of the greatest painters of the day. His technical knowledge was such that he could master every form of virtuosity, the most questionable exercises, the most original and charming methods of research and investigation. His compositions with glued paper and cardboard, initiating a curious adaptation of forms and substances, signalised an important date in his work and in that of the Cubist movement (19I3). Even his Fauvist pictures of the year i906 and those immediately following, among others his Harbor of Antwerp, his Provenqal landscapes, and his nudes, showed a remarkable gift for light, which he was soon to employ for less representational ends. In i909 and i910, in fact, he gradually emancipated himself from the translation of natural aspects and began to study the possibilities of an art susceptible of rising and of raising us above such preoccupations. Determined henceforth to " think only in terms of color and forms," as he himself said, he opposed [ 52 ] Georges Braque the conception of a static work to the dynamism of Fauvism and Impressionism, the conception of a composition situated no longer in time but in space alone - an absolute creation. In the conversations which I had with him and Picasso at that time, I was at once struck by the authority already accruing to Braque, in this slow elaboration of a new technic, by the methodical certainty with which he verified each of his investigations. Where Picasso gave free rein to a dangerously bold temperament, to his astonishingly lyrical virtuosity, Braque, because of his sensibility as a born colorist, showed a deliberation to which his innate charm gave the appeal of that penetrating sweetness and intimate poetry which were to procure us pleasures such as no other painter had been able to afford us. The lyrical pleasure which we found in the paintings of Braque, despite their many renunciations, was due no doubt to the superior nature of his sensibility. But Braque made no effort to be revolutionary. At that time I was demonstrating to the early Cubists how the esthetics of the philosophers (of the great, not of Victor Cousin, whose doctrines still dominate academic art) had confirmed their experiments by anticipation. For a time they may have been hampered by such considerations. But it is certain that the esthetic principles of Kant, Schelling, and Hegel served to develop their desire for an art of pure creation, a desire which Braque formulated clearly in his own words, when he said, "the senses deform, the spirit forms," or, "we must not imitate what we want to create," or, "if it is to be pure imitation, painting must omit the aspect of things." True to the recent cult of " everything in its place," painters now wish to be painters primarily, and in general they fight shy of all theories. They are right, especially when their painting is pure painting. By that I mean, when it moves us by purely [s53] Modern French Painters pictorial expedients, as the greatest of the Old Masters have always done, and as the Cubists have attempted to do. Now, Braque is certainly the most purely painter-like painter of all his contemporaries. Even in his most analytical experiments, he has always shown a charm, grace and persuasion which, at their very weakest, are those of a painter dominated by sensibility far more than by reason. If in the case of Picasso or Juan Gris or Leger the mechanics of the picture sometimes creak, they never do so with Braque. One never thinks of mechanics. Hence the blandness, the blended fusion, we find even in the most decisive oppositions of a picture by Georges Braque; qualities which, because of the artist's superiority, easily and ably avoid the pitfalls of softness, irresolution and inertia. Since the war, in which he served as a Lieutenant of Infantry and was severely wounded, and in recent years, Georges Braque has felt the necessity of adapting the brilliant lyrical vocabulary drawn from his Cubist analyses to those lyrically human motivations, which mark the uncontested master. With his old technic he has constructed figures, nudes, which are really architectural structures rich in personal accents and classic qualities. Modulations and degradations of scale are developed and juxtaposed and opposed in sumptuous arrangements of green, ochre, grey and white by the full unfolding of forms characterized perhaps by a certain decorative tendency but susceptible of further perfection. That perfection will be attained, no doubt, when, with age, the artist will eventually master complete simplification, condensation and possibly a little more humanity. Georges Braque has contributed to the Russian Ballets of S. de Diaghilew the designs for Les Fdcheux, a ballet built on a book furnished by Albert Flament. His work is represented in the col[ 54] Marc Chagall lections of Paul Rosenberg, Alphonse Kann, Paul Guillaume, Pierre Loeb, G. Steen, La Roche, Baron Gourgaud, de Noailles, and Ozenfant. See: G. Apollinaire, Meditations esth~tiques, 1913 - Braque, by Georges Biniere (Effort Moderne, 1921)- Braque, by Maurice Raynal (Edition Valori Plastici, 1921)- Braque, by Waldemar George (Esprit Nouveau no. 6 and Armour de Part, 1925) - A. J. Eddy: Cubists and Impressionists (Chicago, 1916) - Kubismos, by V. Kramar (Prague, 1921). MARC CHAGALL MARC CHAGALL was born in Vitebsk, Russia, in 1887. His childhood was spent in his father's mercer-shop. He began painting in 1907. In Saint Petersburg he studied under Bakst, and in 1910io he came to Paris. The war and the Russian Revolution kept him in Russia from 1914 to 1922. He founded an Academy in Vitebsk and then returned to France, where he now resides permanently. " From my earliest youth," he writes, " I have been opposed to that artistic profession of painting which has no higher purpose than to decorate the walls of an apartment. What I have wanted to do has been to give concrete and human form to Man's impotence in the face of Nature. I have not tried to revenge myself on Nature but to create an expression parallel to hers, if I may so express myself. We have each our own personality and we must have the courage to exteriorize it. I like to remember that I come from the people. But, much as I like popular art, I am not satisfied by it, because I find it too exclusive, too restricted; I have a distinct taste for refinement of feeling, for culture. No single esthetic tendency satisfies me. I am convinced that in art i plus i do not make 2, though that principle [55] Modern French Painters may apply technically and realistically, and I have preferred to explore the more obscure and profound sides of my ego. " I detected the realism that lay in the work not only of the Impressionists but also of the early Cubists: in the former taking the form of a landscape externally dismembered by the theory of light; in the latter that of a still life deformed in accord with the investigations of a third and fourth dimension. " But all these conceptions seemed to me still too material. Nature had to be altered, I felt, not only externally and materially, but also internally, ideologically, without fear of what is called 'literature.' And I think that I was right, since today after eighteen years of work on my part, that tendency is active more violently than ever, under the name of Hyperrealism. " Futurism never struck me as extraordinary, for, allowing for the lack of technical skill of the first Futurists, that tendency added nothing to Cubism but an element of speed. I am not responsible either for the fact that my efforts have been described as being parallel to those of German ' Expressionism,' a movement which is literary or at least too-realistic only in name. "We are moving further and further from professionalism, and art, apart from all schools and tendencies, will be recognized to lie in every form of expression distinct from Nature, not only in actual aspect but in spirit. "I owe whatever I have done well to Paris, to France, whose air, whose men and whose nature have been the true school of my life and my art." The colored mysticism of Marc Chagall has exercised a considerable influence on contemporary art. Though Expressionism and Hyper-realism have now cast him off, they have drawn from his work certain fundamental intentions, which they have [ 56] Marc Chagall transformed or denatured according to the differing sensibilities, natural or artificial, of those who have utilized them. A part of the Belgian school, besides, has used the work of Chagall as a kind of microscope, which has revealed the most original side of the Flemish tradition. As he himself says, Chagall interrogates life in the light of a refined, anxious, childlike sensibility, a slightly romantic temperament influenced by the memories of a troubled youth. The representations which flow from his brush derive from a lyrical conception of life, the essence of which is a kind of humor, in the English sense of the word, that is to say, a blend of sadness and gayety characteristic of a grave view of life. Chagall expresses that feeling, not in obedience to the characteristic aspects of a particular tendency, school, or manner, but under the influence of many plastic memories blended and remoulded by his imagination, as the Romanesque artists did in their day. The fact that Chagall's art is marked by an original and exuberant color sense is not a sufficient reason to compare it to Russian popular imagery.... As well compare the wood-cuts of Anton Koburger, Diirer, Cranach, Baldung Grien, Rotluf or Derain to the rudimentary lithography of our own Images d'Epinal. For in the art of Chagall there is an imaginative invention, which is a little illustrative at times no doubt, but which is the product of a novel, finely-bred and highly poetic sensibility. Moreover, his technic is first-rate. His imagination, his temperament, no doubt forbid a Latin severity of composition, and there is no need of raising a meaningless ethnical distinction in his disfavor. But it is impossible not to feel the charm and almost the conviction of his subtle art, in which the science of light, of color-spotting, of linear design seems so spontaneous, so persuasive, so instinctively skilful, and of which the unstaled 57] Modern French Painters imagination is rare, living, dramatic, comic and always so freshly youthful. Chagall's paintings are distributed among the museums of Dresden, Cologne, Wiesbaden and Essen. In Russia, they may be seen in the Museum of Alexander III and the Museum of Pictorial Culture; in Paris, in the Luxembourg and in the following collections: Caghan, Chabchaj, Rene Gaffe, de Beffie, Reinhardt, The Dail, Coquiot, LugnePoe, Jana Chavarel, Lindavier, Vinaver, Van Diemen, Meunier, Fontaigne, Bienert, Garvens, Mutzenbecher. Chagall has done a number of etchings for books: Dead Souls, by Gogol, The Fables of La Fontaine (Editions Vollard), The Seven Cardinal Sins. He also made the designs for The Playboy of the Western World, by Synge, for a production in Leningrad. GIORGIO DE CHIRICO GIoRGIo DE CHIRICO was born in Volo, Greece, in i888, of Italian parentage. He left Greece at the age of sixteen and travelled in Italy, between Rome, Florence and Milan. He spent a year in Munich, but he was not happy in academic circles. In I9I i he came to Paris, where he remained until 1915. It was during this period that he made the acquaintance of Apollinaire, Picasso and Paul Guillaume, who encouraged his groping efforts and supported his personality. During this period he painted those compositions in which architectural memories afford the principal emotion. " Almost all those pictures," he writes, " were inspired by memories of Italian towns." The art of Chirico charmed us immediately by its poetry. It was a romantic and rather literary poetry, not, strictly speaking, an originally plastic one. Arcades with intense and eternal shadows, public places blazing with a cold steady light, where [58] Giorgio De Chirico the tragic immobility of marble statues or of factory chimneys brooded in mysterious and terrifying silence; and among architectural fragments, imaginary cast shadows and unfamiliar objects, such as: hands cut by paper-weights or glovers' signs, bizarre manikins of pathetic or dramatic aspect, square rules, fish, books, cannon, and artichokes - such were the paraphernalia of this poetry. This display of startling materials constituted a kind of pictorial metaphysics, romantic and alluring, leaving an impression comparable to that which fabulous monsters, ancient Oriental divinities, negroes, the characters of a fairy-tale or of certain English novels of the last century, or the disquieting expression of an inexistent and hardly possible reality can arouse in the imagination. And the titles which Chirico gave to his pictures-Metaphysical Interior, Sacred Fish, The Disquieting Muses, The Logical Land, The Terrifying Voyage, The Engineer's Spring, The Child of Genius, The Reward of the Soothsayer - were calculated to enhance the esoteric effect of a poetically enigmatic art, plausible in its unreality and congenial to every form of imagination. But the indubitable originality of the art of de Chirico was essentially the personal manner of a very special nature. What we had here was a kind of a teratological case, born of an immoderate sensibility, the impossible imitation of which was bound to lead to mannerism and formula, as we now see in the case of the Hyper-realists, who chose him as the head of their school and later renounced him. Any poetry or painting or sculpture, which does not preserve some precise points of contact with reality, must always be regarded as a case. A case of that sort may charm for a time, but it unseats the intelligence, misleads the sensibility, and offers a purely transitory attraction, even if it rests, as it rarely does, on strictly traditional plastic premises. Such was not the case with de Chirico and he knew it. [ 59] Modern French Painters That is why he soon abandoned the disquieting and highly alluring inventions of his metaphysical period and, realizing that, after the age of twenty, it is impossible to constantly renew such poetic ingenuity, relinquished experiments which were perilously close to illustration in favor of a more traditionally plastic art. Chirico then set himself to acquire a technic, which his inventive temperament had hitherto neglected. From I925 on he began to frequent the Museums of Italy and to study the practice of the Masters in the old treatises on painting, abandoning completely that metaphysical tendency which had inspired Picasso and given birth to a school in Italy marked by the efforts of Carlo Carra and Felice Casoreti. Judging by the articles which appeared in Valori Plastici, Mario Broglio's review, the artist's new manner derives from the traditional aspect of the high Renaissance; Chirico now executes portraits and solemn landscapes true to Nature, motivated by a lyrical composition, design and treatment of material. In his recent works the painter has evolved new lyrical and inventive conceptions. We no longer find the mysteriously tragic poetry of his first canvases. This lyricism is perhaps more literary but also more graphic; his apparently sentimental figures represent more plastic dramas than in his metaphysical period. Chirico has remembered certain curious artists of the past like Giovanni Battista Bracelli, the author of the Bizzarerie, as well as the anecddtic designs of A Pantagruel of the Sixteenth Century, and German wood-cuts such as those of the Logica memorativa or the illustrated history of Frau Venus und der Verliebte of 1486. The realism with which he sets forth his figures is attenuated and contrasted by fragments of statues, by modellings of round bosses - truncated heads, arms or hands - [60] Coubine in the manner of the Renaissance (notably the strange portrait of Lorenzo de Medici in the Uffizi Gallery), or by bits of architecture or figures clad in togas and dignified by titles like the following: Roman Comedy, The Tragedies of Aeschylus, Orestes and Electra. Chirico's invention now draws on historic fantasies or Freudian imaginings rather than, as formerly, on the mysterious sense of certain aspects of reality. His most recent work shows a slightly deliberate inclination towards the supernatural, translated into compositions more analytical, more anatomic, but less delicately mysterious, less curiously solemn than his early metaphysical works. In point of design and composition, however, they are more carefully conceived and executed than his early painting. Chirico is represented in the Museum of Chicago, in the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, and in the collections of Dr. Barnes, L. Rosenberg, Paul Guillaume, F. Aubier, and Raval. In 1924 he composed the designs for a ballet, La Giarra, mounted by the Ballets Russes of S. de Diaghilew. COUBINE COUBINE, now a man of forty-two, was born in Boskovice, Moravia. He has recently assumed French nationality. He studied in the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Prague and in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts of Antwerp. He has travelled in Germany, Belgium, Holland, Italy and France, and it is in France that he has taken up permanent residence. His culture is broad: he has long been devoted to the study of the arduous forms of mathematics, while music is one of his passions. [6x] Modern French Painters "Art," he says, " is a language by which one communicates with one's environment. I communicate those things which I find interesting and which I think might interest others. To be sincere with myself and my neighbor is what I most want. Primitive art is beautiful because of its sincerity and not because of its ignorance. To play with matter and its descriptive projection is not the aim of art. The rendering of an object must be the portrait which we create of it through our senses and our taste, without concession to trivialities. Thought comes before any question of technic. If our sensations are to have unity and coherence, they must have measure: measure is everything. To read the reviews and visit the exhibitions to-day is to realize how rare is the appreciation of measure, of exactitude, of a balanced beauty. A feminized Christianity has led us to sentiment and that decadence, from which realism and naturalism alone can save us." This love of measure to which Coubine refers seems to be the informing spirit of an effort, which is in direct contradiction to the turbulent and romantic works born of a study of reality in one of its aspects only; it is an example of pondered expression, asserting a more essential inward reality. Coubine's work is the result of a very distinguished artistic culture employed by a temperament of moderate impulses, the warmth of which is tempered by a controlling will. His painting, therefore, seems more deliberate than spontaneous: it is above all a kind of very learned demonstration, and often a very attractive one, of the value of an idea carefully translated into the technic of painting. Coubine is primarily a classic thinker and only secondarily a painter. His humanistic tendency leads him to reincarnate the intentions of the Primitives and of certain Masters of the Italian Renaissance, as well [62 ] Coubine as those of Corot, by lending them the aspect of our time. The motto of his work might well be in the line of Chenier: Sur des pensers nouveaux faisons des vers antiques. In a time when a romantic ignorance tends to exalt realistic or naturalistic exaggerations, often captivating in themselves but of little weight artistically, it is pleasant to note such a recall to discipline. A rebuke of that sort is at least as meritorious, by reason of its eclectic intentions, as the anarchy of the naturalists, since in reality the latter form of expression is no more novel than the former. Moreover, the coldness which the naturalists profess to find in the art of Coubine and of which they make a reproach, is compensated by his undoubted technical gifts. Certainly, Coubine in his landscapes, his flowers, shows a very rare sense of light, admirable transitions and modelling, in a word, all the resources contained in the classic arsenal. Furthermore, his drawing is remarkably correct; his engravings also display a persistent joy in the evolution of lines. And if in general he composes his canvases rather by drawing than by color, it is because he is primarily a draughtsman. He has succeeded in investing the methods of graphism with a very purified tenderness. No affectation, no ideology, no anecdotes, but a luminous rhetoric. I once wrote and I cannot do better than to repeat: " The art of Coubine, without attaining an elevation to which he does not pretend, is that of a slightly blase bucolic shepherd, who has read everything, but who cherishes Virgil in his heart of hearts." Coubine is represented in the Museums of Prague, Strasbourg, and Frankfort, in the British Museum, in the Albertini in Vienna, and in the Public Library of New York. He has also made a number of etchings as illustrations for books. [ 63 ] Modern French Painters VAN DONGEN KEES VAN DONGEN tells me that he was born in Cassiongo, on the White Nile, of Dutch parents, that he is forty-three years old, and that he has neither memory nor personal opinions. The temperament of van Dongen, in appearance deliberately humoristic, is fiery, arbitrary and sensual; it is a temperament which explains and justifies his collaboration with the Fauves. In I907, the period of that collaboration, he was living in Montmartre, in the celebrated wooden house of No. 13, rue Ravignan, which welcomed the most conspicuous artists and poets of the time, Pierre Reverdy, Max Jacob, Andre Salmon, Picasso, Juan Gris, Pierre Mac-Orlan, Gargallo and many others. Van Dongen would walk the streets of Montmartre bare-foot, clad in blue over-alls. Occasionally he would draw at the Assiette au Beurre. He sold his first pictures to Mademoiselle Weill. After the war, he took a house of his own, Villa Said, then he moved to his present residence in the rue Juliette Lambert, where the smartest of Parisian and foreign society gathers for his parties. Van Dongen, in his earliest works, combated the decorative symbolism which followed Impressionism by the harsh vigor of his sensuous palette, inherited from the Dutch Masters. Far from following the traditional aspect of those masters, however, he adapted the learned and pathetic virulence of his color to compositions emancipated from all representative preoccupations. His figures and landscapes were deformed with an often dangerous boldness; they were instinct with a life usually inhuman but sumptuous and resonant. Drawing and composition were subordinated to the demands of a color-scheme, of which every shade and variation was marked by the brio of a [64] Robert Delaunay virtuoso and a pitiless certainty no less in pictures that failed than in those that succeeded. For with van Dongen as with Vlaminck, whose temperament resembles his, no esthetic consideration, no traditional contingency impedes the reckless development of a nature more pictorial than artistic. To-day van Dongen has turned the triumphant trick of winning a rich bourgeois clientele by his qualities as a portraitist, qualities of an extreme and unhampered freedom, which he has never consented to employ in the service of those academic effigies and resembling flatteries, which that public has always been accustomed to. Drawn into a smart and worldly set, to which he caters with unspoiled and unsparing frankness, he is pitiless in rendering the plastic qualities and defects of his models. His figures blaze and crackle with a brilliance in which the crudest tones compose the most seductive and often the cleverest fantasies. Though this art possesses none of those qualities of style which might make it enduring —a matter of complete indifference to van Dongen - it is, and it will long be, a brilliant illustration of a particular society and of a date in the evolution of fashion. The best-known pictures by van Dongen are his portraits of Anatole France, of Yves Mirande, of Boni de Castellane, of Rappoport and of many familiar American figures. ROBERT DELAUNAY ROBERT DELAUNAY was born in Paris in i882. He began to paint at an early age and exhibited in I905 at the Salon des Independants. Later he played an important part in the elaboration of the Cubist esthetic creed, which he practised after an exhaustive study of the resources of Cezanne's art. His participa[65] Modern French Painters tion in the Independent shows of I9II and his versions of the Tour Eiffel soon brought him a notoriety well-deserved in view of his powerful and sensitive constructive experiments. From this Cubistic analysis he retained only the conception of a new and independent form of creation as a possibility for further research. His notions as a colorist led him to develop a personality, which has grown more and more positive. The study of Seurat, his admiration for Rousseau (le Douanier), with whom he was long intimate, and his study of the works of Helmholtz, Fechner, Grant Allen, Charles Henry and especially Chevreul in his " Laws of Color Contrasts," were responsible for his experiments in simultaneous contrasts of color. His wife, Sonia Delaunay, applied them brilliantly in the field of textile art and created an innovation in, and a renovation of, the art of fashion. " Words are a little too abstract," he writes, " to render the concrete value of painting. The essence of the painter lies in his craft, his technic, his expression, 'the supernatural side,' as Apollinaire called it, or rather his creative sensibility. "When I painted my picture of Saint-Severin in I907, I was still under the influence of Cezanne's methods. But I was trying to escape that influence and to discover a less static, less descriptive, less linear art. I was still lacking in technic. I could express myself only in terms of broken lines-broken very timidly. In my work of this period the deformation is obvious, it is a mixture of chiaroscuro and of colors subjected to a rigid, overlaid linear design. The paintings in which Cezanne breaks the classically continuous line to discover the rhythms of discontinuity, prove that drawing has no longer the same value that it had. "In another series of pictures (Les Villes) I was in search of [66] Robert Delaunay movement, but my chiaroscuro technic prevented my realization of that intention. My devotion to line kept me from being really a painter. In I912, however, with my Windows, on which Apollinaire wrote a poem, I believe that I discovered the first symptoms of a primitive art, which is still entirely in the making. "With Cubism, we are still dealing with the coloring of surfaces, without any specific technical innovation, and in obedience to a very ephemeral cult of the startling. Anything in the nature of a shock has always compelled my admiration. I would receive each new shock and set myself to observe it, to measure, to compare and to evaluate it -often a process of elimination, that. I played with the law of contrasts, the antagonism of colors, the opulence of material. But, whatever the theory might be, I like the movement that breaks the line. An automobile is a modern creation, a fact. The following diagnosis holds true for any age: a really living work is an authentic spontaneous birth; with it is born the technic proper to it: technic is a kind of human prospecting, the only avenue by which the artist may pursue action and the possibility of innovation. The new bases on which he works soon become popular expression. His art is no longer the privilege of a closed set, a chosen few: it enters the public domain. " With the theory of simultaneous contrasts I have been trying to create a technic, which may be extended to many other activities beside painting, to colored cinematographics, for example, where nothing has been done yet in the domain of the new, of the Occidental. The art of motion must bear the imprint of our time, though it need not necessarily be opposed to that of the Orient, provided we modify the static nature of its traditional influence." As these remarks show, the art of Robert Delaunay makes of pure color the organizing factor in any scheme of dynamic [ 67 ] Modern French Painters surfaces. For that purpose he has experimented doggedly with all the resources of the prism. Indifferent to the taste of his arrangements, the association of lines or the invention of compositions, he groups local colors by contrasting them vigorously to make them yield the maximum of motive intensity. His technic has not yet produced as satisfactory results as he expects. But his painting shows a singular intensity of color, despite the aridity inherent in all purely technical endeavors. On the other hand, if animation, movement and dynamism are the aims which he is pursuing in common with the feverish agitation of so much of contemporary art, he is not far from the realisation of an art, which needs merely a little more purely human life -unless that desideratum be in his opinion too Oriental. Robert Delaunay has illustrated the poems of Apollinaire and of Blaise Cendrars, the Transsibdrien of V. Huidobro, and the Tour Eiffel. He is the author of lithographic plates for a book by Joseph Delteil, Allo, Paris! (Editions des Quatre Chemins). ANDRE DERAIN ANDRE DERAIN was born in Chatou, June io, I880, of a Picardese family. An excellent student, he was preparing his preliminary examinations for the Polytechnic Institute, when his love of painting- which he had been practising since the age of fifteen - led him to abandon engineering, a form of abstraction ill-suited to a temperament all too human to enjoy the vivisection of time and space by mathematics. On that point he later expressed himself in no uncertain terms when he turned his back squarely on the problems of Fauvism and Cubism, saying: "They can't bulldoze me: I know all about it." [68] Andre Derain In his youth in Chatou he knew Vlaminck, who was his neighbor and who soon turned to painting. Derain studied for some time in the Atelier Carriere; then he met Matisse, Marquet, Braque, Dufy and Friesz, with whom he contributed to the foundation of the Fauves as a reaction against Impressionism, the discoveries of which he had been practising, and against the decorative style of I900, which was a little too poor in esthetic content to satisfy his intelligence and his culture. It was in the ranks of the Fauves that Derain came into contact with the best and most complete of esthetic creeds; it was in the analysis of line and the practice of local color that he disciplined his sensibility by confronting it with the tendencies of eternal art. It is not at all surprising, therefore, that the outstanding works of the artist's twentieth year should be conceived in archaic terms, a little reminiscent of the art of our Primitives. Derain, when he first took up painting, sought inspiration in the models most apt to move his delicate humanity, in the same way as the Romanesque artists turned to the miniaturists. The artist had not yet been directly touched by Nature. And his personality, in respect at least of the methods employed, developed through a phrase of self-instruction, as regards both the character and technic of such works as quickened and roused it. But we felt at once in the work of Andre Derain an infinite charm, which won us very quickly by the qualities of its defects. Gradually the humanity of the artist proved its measured, its very French flexibility, as far, despite certain appearances to the contrary, from all frivolity as from all tragic gravity. And from then on his work exercised a great influence on many artists, who were fascinated by his voluptuous robustness and natural health. The sensibility of Derain has never been subject to melancholy; his nature is happy, for his lack of specific gravity saves [69] Modern French Painters him from all the mishaps, the cares and despairs of life. We may find him sometimes scratching his head, but never eating out his heart. When he laughs, it is never like a bilious man, on one side of his face only, but with all his heart, from ear to ear. He has never taken the problems of painting tragically: the bird has never been to flying-school, the savage has not pined for Montparnasse. Derain sees in painting a tragic-comedy rather than a drama; that is to say, an extremely varied game, which must never be allowed to become a labor and tire his easy-going temperament. It is easy to see why the temperament of Derain has remained throughout the years so fresh and unjaded. As a boy, he sauntered through the museums. Sauntered, I say; because, instead of methodically investigating the Masters, he merely picked up their unsolicited confidences. There was always something else to attract his eye: the glimpse of a garden beyond the windows of the museum, of a garden where one could sit and smoke and watch the world go by. So Derain imbibed from the museum only what was strictly to the measure of, and in unison with, his sensibility. His spirit responded only where it was in tune. From these impressions he preserved not a purely formal lesson but an emotion, the exact notion of which he soon forgot and the experience of which merely served to enrich and develop his own rich nature. To be sure, Derain professes a sound faith in painting. But faith is perhaps a little too idealistic a word for his purpose: what he feels is rather a need of painting. Painting, for him, is not merely a pretext to construct objects, but a means of expressing himself, of communication, of saying his say upon Nature. "The point is not to reproduce an object, but the virtue of that object, in the old sense of that word," he has said. Now, it is that need which appears again and again, in his best [ 70] Andre Derain works, that need which, in those works, has never fallen into a set mould, never formulated a theoretic requirement, never been tainted with literature, and which has not yet become a pretext for the making of Art. In his pre-war painting one feels that Derain has never obeyed anything but the caprices of his feeling, that he has always withstood the deplorable influences which would induce him to systematize his natural love of painting. Like the horse that can be led to the trough but not made to drink, he knew little or nothing of the measurements of space or the laws of perspective. And we must rejoice that he has preserved that blessed ignorance and remained in maturity the primitive, who slumbers in the heart of every child. The most significant works of Derain, therefore, are deliberately flat, like Cretan idols, or the funereal figures of primitive Greece, or certain Mediaeval sculptures, or Negro fetiches. All the important, the indispensable parts of the picture are emphasized and studied one by one; that is to say, they are not meticulously selected nor especially arranged in view of a predetermined artistic ensemble. Derain synthesizes them in a scheme, which his temperament always fills with delicate feeling. He feels no need as yet of composing a general synthesis with all these elements, merely because the frame of his picture demands it. As for color, it is a means rather than an end. The picture is painted when it is drawn. And Derain draws it with his brush. Therefore Derain's most personal work usually seems to be conceived in two dimensions, an effect due to the schematic tendency with which human sensibility, without other means at its disposal, renders the impressions suggested by volumes. In Derain's case this is the effect of no predetermined convention but of that humanly perceiving nature of which we find the first traces in the child. It would be the greatest mistake, in fact, to assume that Derain works by principle; all the more so, since in reality he [ 7I] Modern French Painters often does not bother enough to contradict his native tendencies, when it might be opportune to do so; though it must be added that he usually convinces us that it is just as well not to try to improve upon nature, in his case at least. That is why Derain, all in preserving the Fauvist notion of a rendering of implied perspective by a discriminating use of two-dimensional forms, has never attributed to a system introducing the fourth dimension, as practised by certain Cubists, the mathematical value which some have assigned to it. The theory of an artistic fourth dimension, a theory mathematical in name only and that name an inexact one, since the dimension it assumes has no perceptible dimensions, that theory, I say, is not more illegitimate than the theory of perspective. It may even be a product of the latter. In fact, nothing contradicts the notion that the idea of perspective contains in embryo that concept of hyper-space, of which the Primitives had already some intuition. Now, if Derain has never been undermined by that love of speculation, which is one of the most legitimate symptoms of the art of a profoundly restless and inquiring period, he has never been convinced by the laws of perspective. On the contrary, and bearing in mind the principle that the creation of rules always follows the feelings which give rise to their objects, it is easy to recognize that Derain usually considers the plane of his canvas as the essential soul of Nature. He regards that white surface as constituting a kind of ideal hyper-space, no longer of four but of an infinite number of dimensions, on which certain images are to be placed. Derain leaps from the second to the fourth dimension, that is to say, his sensibility refuses to be caged in any but the simplest formulas: it claims the right to exist in a space uncircumscribed as yet by mathematics, in a space which Euclid has not darkened by undemonstrable postulates. [ 72 ] Andre Derain Hence the undeniable freshness, which gives the art of Derain that restful and serene aspect with which we are all familiar. Just as there are two kinds of distinction, so there are two kinds of freshness, the natural and the acquired. An acquired freshness always over-reaches itself and ends in coldness. Look at the official Salons: grace is confused with mannerism, elegance with studiousness, vivacity with convulsions, coquetry with grimacing. Whatever the subject demands, the artist is ready to furnish, freshness or severity; and for that purpose he employs every subterfuge of pictorial chemistry. On the other hand, there are paintings of a so-to-speak constant freshness, of a freshness that animates the subject, whatever that subject requires or represents. That is natural freshness, that is to say, the sort of freshness we are always sure to find in a painting by Derain. So young was he born, that Derain will still be twenty when the records write him sixty. In fact, in his best work, Derain lets his ingenuousness carry him to the very verge of simple-mindedness. But that is the defect of a quality which we like, one of those defects that one often prefers to their qualities and which, particularly in Derain's case, takes the form of an easy, natural assurance, a spontaneous irresponsibility, and a complete absence of anything like presumption. Nevertheless, Derain's admirers are sometimes moved to regret that he so rarely consults his conscience. They would not have him make such an examination an irksome duty, which would be sure to imperil his native instincts. His temperament, in the first place, would forbid it, conflicts would arise from the shock of his reason and his sensibility, which would be to the advantage of neither. But Derain should go to confession on certain specified days: on the eve of a picture important in execution, for instance. No doubt he would be highly astonished [73] Modern French Painters to find himself summoned to the bar of his conscience, so much so that he would turn perhaps to a manual of catechism to discover what sin he might be guilty of. And he would not find it, of course, for the religion of this world is very lenient. But it is certain that the amazement of finding himself in such a plight would raise a healthy notion of doubt-doubt which sleeps so uneasily with some and so hard with others. Maybe Derain would then require his sensibility to be a little more exacting. He would remind it, as least, that it is not prudent to rely entirely on its own force and activity, for fear that its own momentum end in disaster. Facility, thy name is woman! We know, of course, that when Derain gives rein to his qualities a little too carelessly, he does not lapse into an ornamentation void of thought or humanity, but we know also that facility leads that way and that if the brushes are not watched, they are likely to scamper across canvas all by themselves, in a fling for which the master would find it hard to account. Derain's beguiling facility was one of his reasons for abandoning Fauvist constructions, as it was one of the causes of his return, in behalf of style, to that museo-Impressionism which Cezanne and Renoir wished and, fortunately, failed to realize. The gifts, the qualities, and the science that are Derain's do not justify him in turning out a new article with old material. The imitation of oneself is a danger, which only stubborn work can dispel. It may be, of course, that Derain is in " mid-Channel," that he is undergoing the stress of middle-age, of the dangerous and distressing forties. He is not of those who can give full rein to their sensibility any more than to their science, for he has too much of the one and the other. Fortunately, as happens with artists of such a temperament, an age comes when one weighs and judges oneself with an ever nobler detachment. Such was the case wth Renoir, and Derain has all the virtues neces'[74 Maurice Dufresne sary to equal his illustrious Master, if only he will subdue his facility to the demands of that plastic lyricism which, combined with the living quality of an authentic sensibility, constitutes the style indicative of the greatest Masters. Derain has designed the costumes and settings for a Diaghilew ballet La Boutique Fantasque, and for a ballet produced by the Comte de Beaumont. He has also supplied illustrations for many books by Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob (L'Enchanteur pourrissant) Andre Salmon, and Pierre Reverdy. His paintings are to be found in numerous museums in France and abroad, and in the collections of Paul Guillaume, Dr. Basner, Kahnweiler, Tzanck, G. Stein, A. Simon, L. Rosenberg, Stchonkim, Morosoff, A. Kann, Level, G. Bernheim, N. Mazaraki, Dr. Palkowski Flechtein, and Tannhauser. See: Derain, by Elie Faure (Edition Cres, 1924); Apras le Cubisme, by A. Ozenfant, 1917; Derain, by Carro (Ed. Valori Plastici); Umeni po Impressionisme, by Dr. Nebesky (Prague, I923); La Peinture, religion nouvelle, by A. Basler, I916; Derain, by A. Salmon (Nouvelle Revue Franqaise); Derain, by Maurice Raynal (Esprit Nouveau, no. 8). MAURICE DUFRESNE MAURCE DUFRESNE is forty-seven years of age and comes of a seafaring family. Seamen have always been attracted to painting: we all know the touching and ingenious pictures they paint on their vessels and offer as ex-votos to their village churches. From his earliest youth Maurice Dufresne loved painting and travel. Inspired by these two loves, he has developed a highly[75] Modern French Painters colored imagination and found his favorite themes of composition in such spectacles as the grandeur of ships, the sea, hyperbolic countries and tumultuous vegetations could offer him. Dufresne lives the life of a solitary. His imaginary travels are unrolled on the many-hued palette of the globe and the colored map of his own palette. " I have found a little house in the South, with one window opening on the sea," he wrote once, very amusingly, to his friend Hodebert. "In the court there is a palm tree. And between them I make the most wonderful trips in the world." I must add that Dufresne has a passion for trifles and sundries, or rather the love of discovery of those trifles and sundries rather than of the objects themselves. You are likely to meet him any day, marching off to the Flea Market, as another man might to the discovery of a new America. The sensitiveness of Dufresne makes him timid and leads him to avoid over-populous places and over-popular occasions. He creates in imagination unexplored regions, into which he comes as a plenipotentiary or Ambassador-extraordinary, who of course immediately waives all ceremony, takes a drink with his sailors and sets off into the jungle of sensual visions which his keen eye invents or discovers. Thus, at one or more removes from ordinary life, Dufresne lives in his own familiar world of mariners, nymphs, hunters and exotic landscapes, which he knows as well as if he had seen them with his mortal eyes. As one admires his warm, vibrant, petulant, highly-colored, sumptuous work and its popular inspiration, one cannot but think of the remark of a wit of the eighteenth century: when someone observed that men like to dream of an imaginary land, where they will enjoy every conceivable bliss, he assented with: " That explains the popularity of Paradise." Dufresne, in fact, invents the fantasmagoric world, in which the land-bound traveller sees the most perfect of paradises. This love of travel, to [76] Maurice Dufresne which he has preferred that of painting, broadens and intensifies, by that very restriction, the strength of his desires. Restrained and compressed, they echo even more humanly through his painting. And, to satisfy them, the painter constructs his various combinations of the most sentimental mythological or colonial bric-a-brac to be found in the fantasies of paganism or the filibusters' tales of the seventeenth century. He gives us The Discovery of America, Acteon Surprising Diana, Jonah Cast into the Sea, and The Slave Market. In all these compositions (compositions which are mere fragments and tit-bits) Dufresne treats his anecdote with witty freedom. His work goes beyond mere decoration. As one savors the cunning (if slightly superficial) cookery of his colored volumes, one thinks of a charming remark by Brantome. After having related, in his Vie des Dames Galantes, a thousand and one anecdotes each more telling and mortal than the other, the aged author concluded: " But these stories, after all, may not all be true! " Dufresne's art does really take the boldest liberties with the laws of drawing and composition, as he does with the local color of his anecdotes. He draws and composes instinctively, like all popular artists. He can assemble a group very cleverly; and with all his impulsive and sometimes uncouth romantic naturalism, he draws with power and careless ease. And it is with the same naturalness and exquisite playfulness that he seems, like his brother populars, to be parodying the Masters. But where Dufresne does show his skill is in the manipulation of a rapid, warm, persuasive palette, in the revelation of an exhaustive technic. He never takes the liberty with color that he does with his subject. If the sources of his imagination spring from his dreams, his technical methods are the result of patient, intelligent work. Dufresne paints slowly, advancing cautiously, [ 77 Modern French Painters like an attentive child or a model workman. If he orchestrates brilliantly, he harmonises minutely, as again we find him analyzing penetratingly the tones of a cameo. The love and perseverance with which he paints the subjects that bewitch his childlike imagination give a living and often very curious lyric density to these fragments, which the inadequacy of his drawing and composition sometimes makes heavy and fragile. But the most significant quality of Dufresne lies in the freshness, the ingenuousness, which imbues the naturalism of his work with a charming juvenility, the free expression of an artist who has remained naturally, and not artificially, a lover of simplicity, of popular pleasures, of suburbs and good wine, but an enemy of publicity and popularity. It was that artist who replied one day to the friends who wanted to present him to the Queen of the Belgians, as he was hanging a picture in a corner of the Tuileries: " I am not dressed to shake hands with a Queen." RAOUL DUFY RAOUL DUFY was born in Havre in I880. As a boy he worked in the office of an exporting firm. Then he came to Paris and frequented the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with Othon Friesz (Atelier Bonnat). Shortly after, he shifted to Gustave Moreau, in whose studio he met Matisse, Rouault, and Marquet; then he took quarters in Montmartre, in a district where a whole covey of writers and painters lived elbow to elbow —Van Dongen, Picasso, Derain, Braque, Utrillo, Modigliani, Suzanne Valadon, Gris, Salmon, Mac-Orlan, Dorgeles, Carco, Andre Warnod, Max Jacob and many others. Raoul Dufy lived in Studio no. 2 in the rue Cortot, the same studio which was occupied by Antoine, the actor, Friesz, Leon Bloy, Almereyda, the editor of the Bonnet Rouge, Poulbot and Galanis. The passage-way leading to it was [78] Raoul Dufy so narrow, says Andre Warnod in his excellent Cradles of Presentday Painting, that when one day Jean de Bonnefon came to visit the painter and compared its breadth with his waist-line, he limply decided to pay his call on the threshold. In this excellent company Raoul Dufy's color sense developed rapidly, and the artist joined the experiments of those who were termed, in derision, as we know, Fauves. The influence of Van Gogh and of Matisse did much to emancipate his taste from whatever pomposity and exaggeration he may have acquired in the Atelier Bonnat. Dufy's talent soon asserted itself in compositions brimming with sparkling symphonies of color. Provengal or Norman landscapes were invested with luminous vibrations, which the artist was careful never to exaggerate. By the precise intensity of his touch he avoided any suggestion of exasperation. And the clouds, the waters, the foliage, which so prettily adorn his pictures and water-colors, achieve a real triumph of skill in transfiguring reality without falling into the sensual hypertrophy of certain Naturalists. On the other hand, it must be said that Dufy never showed any great enthusiasm for the cultivation of drawing and composition. He expresses his feelings directly. His drawing is usually a bold and flexible arabesque, which goes its own way, which lives its own life, if I may so say, and which is only saved from collapsing dismally at the end of its sweep or colliding with the frame by the acrobatic dexterity with which it is conducted. In the work of Dufy, it is these arabesques, fertile with a lovely graphic fullness, that guide the composition of the picture. Of the latter Dufy requires little complication; correct it should be, of course, his color will see to the rest. That is why Dufy's talent turned more and more toward a purely decorative conception. For almost a year he studied the technic of dyes and color-printing. In a studio on the Boule[79] Modern French Painters vard de Clichy, he made some preliminary experiments with a chemist. And his light, flexible and brilliant talent adapted itself perfectly to the technic of those brilliant materials, the colorschemes of which immediately attracted attention and created a lasting fashion. Poiret and Bianchini interested themselves in Dufy's discoveries, and the smocks of the smart paid homage to the artist's taste. Andre Salmon tells an amusing story of a young lady who was outraged by one of Dufy's pictures in the Salon, little suspecting that the highly colored dress she was wearing was entirely the work of the artist. Recently Raoul Dufy has taken up the study of ceramics with Llorens Artigas. He has been quick to assimilate the material resources of his new craft, and he has decorated plates and vases, very respectably proportioned, with luminously shimmering compositions and figures reminiscent of Pompeian grace. Raoul Dufy has illustrated the Bestiaire and the Pokte assassind of Guillaume Apollinaire, the Friperies of Fernand Fleuret, the ElEgies of Duhamel and the Elegies martiales of R. Allard. His work is to be seen in the Bernheim, Marzaraki, Quinn, Aubier, and other collections. ROGER DE LA FRESNAYE ROGER DE LA FRESNAYE was born in Le Mans, July II, 1885, and died prematurely at Grasse, November 27, 1925, from a malady contracted during the war. In La Fresnaye our generation lost one of its most important painters. Roger de La Fresnaye came of an aristocratic family, which traces its descent from the fifteenth century. Among his ancestors was Vauquelin de La Fresnaye, who was a member of the Pleiad and who corrected Ronsard in his Art Poetique. He [80] Roger de La Fresnaye studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, then at the Academie Ranson, and travelled in Italy and in Germany. Here are some of his reflections: "The myth of all painting is originality. One is always influenced in one way or another. If one follows, one imitates; if one innovates, one imitates also, by modifying one's model, or else by reacting against what one opposes. " The painting of the present day, being unable to equal that of old, tries to save its face by makeshift methods (des moyens a cote): and such success as it attains by those methods should not be held against it. "Nowadays we paint with improvised methods, and the public knows it - it knows it perhaps only too well." In his earliest work La Fresnaye reveals his dependence on the work of Cezanne, as later we find him drawn to Picasso. Between these two formidable influences, he succeeds in preserving intact his own attractive temperament, his keen intelligence, and his fresh taste. A self-portrait (1905), his Breton landscapes (909o), and his copies of Cranach and Greco (g91o) show him not so much in search of a discipline as naturally disposed to paint according to feelings, the source of which lies in such tendencies as formed his sensibility - a sensibility happily lacking in all prejudice. This lack of prejudice soon turned into a keen longing for lyric liberty, when he came into contact with Cubism. After his Artillerie of 19 I, the famous Vie Conjugale of I912 and the Conquete de l'Air of I913 mark a decisive turn toward a plastic lyricism, which he stamps with the brio and limpidity of our ancient miniaturists. So considered, La Fresnaye is less a creator of new esthetic values than a belated Primitive recovering, in a notion re-invented in our day, some of the eternal principles [8Ii] Modern French Painters which had been forgotten since their distant origin. For several years he labored to organize a new technic, and his talent developed with unruffled intrepidity. The modelling of his pictures was never strident, forced or deliberate, as in the case of so many Cubist paintings of before the war. He never lost the notion of a " painting," the prototype of which existed in his sensibility; in other words, he never forced himself to concoct a temperament or to invent a tendency. He was the freest, the most natural, the most detached of the early Cubists, and if his first canvases did not adhere to the rigorous severity imposed in I914 by the new discipline, they at least took the most intelligent of liberties with it. This independence was expressed in compositions, which were always prettily spotted and of a colorscheme thoroughly his own at the same time that it was unmistakably French. The war produced in La Fresnaye, as it did in all those who had to sacrifice to it five empty years of their artistic life, a distinct distress not to be accounted for merely by the sufferings he underwent. From 1920 on, he divided his talent between compositions in which, in obedience to the Cubist principle of the dissociation of the plastic elements of Nature, he invented self-sufficient technical and lyrical ideas (especially his stilllives), and others in which he tried to lead Cubism, as Cezanne had tried to lead Impressionism, into a kind of alliance or understanding with the art of the Museum, for the sake of a return to natural expression. Perhaps it was the sense of humanity wakened by the war or the secret apprehension of his imminent death, which roused the sensibility of La Fresnaye. At all events, his work turned toward a more and more human phase, embodied in compositions in which, for all their casual elegance of form, one could detect a certain sentimental tendency. (A Young Man and a Young Girl Quarreling, A Man Seated and Stooping, and the por[ 2 ] Roger de La Fresnaye trait of his friend Gampert, by whom he was nursed with such intelligent and affectionate devotion.) Now, though La Fresnaye never dramatised, he was not averse to exaggerating, to deforming a feature to emphasize its living accent. And that tendency in a man who had no love for nor excessive interest in humanity, resulted in a slightly sentimental, sometimes literary conception of the plastic aspects of Nature. In this second phase of the work of La Fresnaye we are confronted with what is perhaps, in effect, decadence. The purity of Clouet and Cranach, adulterated with the rhythmic energy of Greco - might these not lead to the artifice of the School of Fontainebleau? The question remains unanswered. La Fresnaye died prematurely, and we can only wonder whether he had the ability to attain to a type of work as lyric and human as that of Corot or Ingres. Or was his late work the expression of a temperament spiritually sensitive, delicately accomplished, a little Pleiad-like in its refinement, but bent on rendering only the most reticent aspects of human reality? I incline to the latter opinion. La Fresnaye always cherished El Greco, but he had none of the mysticism of the fierce Greco-Spaniard. All that remained with him of the influence of that master was his love of the character of his work and especially of the admirable science of rhythm which governs it. We are forced to recognize in this tendency of La Fresnaye a more graphic than human inspiration. But this exclusive concern with method is applied to living subjects, and it produces, because of its lack of human mysticism. a kind of mannerism. And it is this mannerism which is most conspicuous in the artist's last works. But whatever be the solution of this delicate question, La Fresnaye will always remain one of the purest and most finely bred painters of our time. And his natural tendency to perfect [83] Modern French Painters a style, already so personal and so charming, should, in the normal course of things, have made his work one of the most intelligently French manifestations which we had ever seen. Roger de La Fresnaye exhibited in the Section d'Or in 19I2, and in April, I914, at the Galerie Levesque (Roger Allard wrote the introduction to the catalogue). In December, 1926, the BarbazangesHodebert Gallery organized an important retrospective exhibition of his work. His pictures hang in the Poiret, Pierre, Halvorsen, Hahn Ranser, de Magallon, Stern and other collections. See: Andre Salmon (Revue de France, November, 1926); Jean Cocteau (Esprit Nouveau, no. 3); Drieu la Rochelle (Les Feuilles Libres, no. 38); Rene Schwob, L'Amour de l'Art; Roger Allard (Editions de la Nouvelle Revue Franmaise, I922). OTHON FRIESZ OTHON FRIESZ was born in Havre, February 6, 1879, of an old family of Norman seamen. He first studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts of Havre, where Raoul Dufy was a fellowpupil and Charles Lhuillier, an excellent professor, balanced but vital in mind, was his teacher. His love of the open brought him at once into sympathy with the Impressionists, and in 1899 he came to Paris and entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he studied until 1903 in the company of Marquet, Matisse and Rouault. From 1903 to 1908 he exhibited at the Independent shows a series of paintings deriving from Fauvism. Then he travelled. He went first to Belgium, in I905 and 1906: an important trip, the date of his remoulding of painting to his own purposes. Later he went to Germany and to Portugal, a country which gave him a certain exotic stimulation. After the discipline [84] Othon Friesz of the Fauves, his acquaintance with the Giottos in Florence gave him a lesson in liberty. In I908 he was working for the mastery of form and the discovery of construction and composition. Those studies led to the painting of the following works: Travail (Salon d'Automne), Adam et Eve, Navire dans la Calanque, and his Circus canvases, in which he shows his love of the nude and the human figure. "What am I working for? What are my ideas to-day? Rhythm and measure, without reference to rules," he writes. "Painting objectifies thought by one great principle: Light. "The burden of proof lies with instinct - when once a man's gifts have found their channel, no science should be allowed to choke them. "Let us avoid petttifogging details. We should try to constantly keep our feeling for Nature fresh (for art lives by love, by feeling), observing, however, all the exact and inflexible requirements which painting demands, if we are to create a beautiful work of art (but without formula, without rules) - any and all technics which obey that principle are living and beautiful." Principal pictures: Le Pont-Neuf, 1902. - Anvers, 1905.- Travail l'automne, I908. La Cathddrale, 90o8. -Les Acrobates, 909. - Le Pecheur, I909. - Le Paradis, 910o. - Le Navire dans la calanque, 19I0. - Coimbra, 191. -Femmes a la fontaine, 191. - Le Hamac, I9I3.-La Neige (Tervueren), I912.-La Guerre (painted during his convalescence in March, 19 5). - La Femme sous la Roche (Jura), I919. -Les Patineurs, I920. Les Baigneuses (Havre), I922.Portrait de M. Paquereau, I923. - Grand nu, 1922 (exhibited at the Exhibition in the Pavillon Marsan known as Fifty Years of Painting). Othon Friesz is a member of the Jury of the Salon d'Automne and a Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur. In 1912 he organised a studio, which was closed during the war, but which has been re-opened since. [85] Modern French Painters Paintings by Friesz figure in the museums of Copenhagen, Christiania, Stockholm, Bergen, Brussels, Bremen, Elberfeldt, Zurich, Vienna, St. Sebastian, Leeds, and Washington; and in France, in the Luxembourg, in Grenoble, in Havre, and in the Morozoff, Leon Pedron, Latil, Dr. Sabouraud, Parent, Fetslund, Roede, Rump, and other collections. ALBERT GLEIZES THIS is how Albert Gleizes introduces himself: "French. Paternal origin: the Comte de Foix. Maternal: Flanders. Born in Paris, December 8, i88i. " Secondary education. Apprenticed as a technical craftsman to his father, an industrial draughtsman. " Painted under the influence of the Impressionists. " Exhibited in I902 and several times in 1907 at the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts, at the Salon d'Automne, in I903, I905, 19IO, and at the Salon des Independents ever since I909, at the Salon des Tuileries since its foundation, and since I907 in many exhibitions in Europe and throughout the world. "Took part in the first manifestation of the so-called Cubist movement in I9I1, Room 41 in the Salon des Independents - was one of the founders of the Salon de la Section d'Or in I9I2. " Has travelled in Europe and America. " Was a member, in I905, of the Committee for the foundation of the Ernest Renan Society and the Society of University Students and Independent Students for the propagation of popular education. "Founded the ABBAYE DE CRETEIL, in I907, with Arcos, Barzun, Duhamel, Mercereau and Vildrac. " Is a member of the governing board of the Union Intellectuelle Franfaise, founded in 1923." [86] Albert Gleizes And here is what Albert Gleizes has to say about his art: "My childhood and youth were spent in an environment, where painting was practised both as a craft and as an art. Twenty-five years of personal experience have been marked, I am sure, by their conflict, the one being necessarily regular and methodical, the other rebellious and self-willed. Speaking therefore out of my own experience, I am convinced that both the general and individual character of past periods are most exactly expressed in their works of art and the impressions which these have made on their own time. Better than any verbal testimony, the words of which vary in meaning while their sound remains relatively the same, plastic creations of a high coefficiency remain positive and measurable: and in any historical study a greater importance should be attached to the latter than to the former. "... In a period like ours, when one cycle of civilisation is closing and a new one opening, it is quite understandable that what is ending and what is beginning should be ill understood. We can criticise only what we know and understand. Ah exhausted state of mind cannot recall exactly what it felt in the freshness of youth. REASON cannot recover the consciousness of youth, it claims merely that it led us out of a state of ignorance. Now, in the field of the fine arts - which are manual crafts, producing in terms of sentiment an equilibrium in the play of proportions and relations -CUBISM has undertaken with the utmost authority and disinterestedness the reclamation of that forgotten moral domain - by disintellectualising its craft and cultivating humanity. If we are beginning to realize to-day that our first experiments have broken the cramped confinement of the picture, as we knew it heretofore, and if, among these pioneer artisans, some are alarmed by that result, no matter, our recovery of the past requires patience to develop the consequences of our [87] Modern French Painters discoveries, and we should remember that what we discard to-day we may be able to use to-morrow under other conditions. For it is true that out of the Cubist PICTURES of yesterday a great revival of mural painting is arising, architectural in discipline, requiring substantial knowledge in the artisan who would practise it, and a religious faith both in those that give and that receive it, a faith in life which is the confidence in those two changing conditions of its nature, the past and the future, ending in the concrete realisation in terms sentiment of that otherwise inaccessible immutability of divine nature, the present. Painting will make us raise our heads by its natural verticality instead of making us dip them to squint an eye misled by perspective. So it will become profound, enrapturing the mind through the eye, and epic by the rhythmic action of its numbers. The condition of present-day painting is perplexing only for those who have never suspected the biological causes, that have brought about the fall of empires and occasioned at the same time new births to counterbalance them; for those who continue to regard what is going on about them as merely a temporary disturbance, which will pass away without changing anything fundamental, so sure are they, though everything is breaking up more and more, of the possession of eternal security. But if, with their futile faculty of adaptation which makes them forget the essential and immutable conditions of all life, they were capable of reflecting freely on the continual shrinkage of collective and individual vitality, they might realize and even compute the role played by primitive Christianity in the breakup of the Roman Empire, for reasons analogous to those of to-day, a role which revived the vitality destroyed by the abuse of urban civilisation, and taught men again the value of work through manual crafts, and their absolute need of the soil [ 88] Albert Gleizes stupidly depreciated in favor of accessory manufactures, giving them once more a stable foundation for intelligent education by which to judge the varying lessons of different epochs. Then it might occur to them that perhaps CUBISM has been the periodic recommencement of that rehabilitation, which has once more become necessary, and that maybe it has been the response to a secret impulse to restore a degenerate technic to its pure functions and to give the artisan once more a sense of human responsibility. They would then understand the violence of the condemnations which were heaped upon it, when it was seen to be challenging the foundations of an order regarded as settled; though they would not understand why the word, CUBISM, still exists as a description of a movement, when the metamorphoses of that progress which has been bringing it back to the soil have led it to a point, where such a label no longer applies." Gleizes has published studies and articles in Les Bandeaux d'Or, the Revue Independante, the Annales Politiques et Litteraires, Montjoie, Le Mot, La Forge, Clarte', Cahiers Idkalistes, La Vie des Lettres et des Arts, Vers l'Unit, and in numerous foreign periodicals. Published works: Du Cubisme (Figuiere, Paris, 19I2), in collaboration with Jean Metzinger; Cubisme (Geneva, 19I8); Du Cubisme et des moyens de le comprendre (Povolozky, Paris, I920); La Mission crgatrice de l'Homme dans le domaine plastique (Povolozky, Paris, I922); La Peinture et ses Lois, ce qui devait sortir du Cubisme (Vie des Lettres et des Arts, 1923); Vers une conscience plastique, articles and lectures, 19II —925 (Povolozky, Paris, 1926); Cubisme, vers une conscience plastique, essai de gcntralisation (Albert Langen, Munich, 1926). Most of these works have been translated into English, German and Russian. He has illustrated: Le Bocage amoureux, by Roger Allard, I911 (Figuiere, Paris); La Conque miraculeuse, by Alexandre Mercereau, [89] Modern French Painters 1910 (Povolozky, Paris, 192I ); Au pays du mufie, by Laurent Tailhade (E. Joseph, Paris, 1920); La Mineralisation de Dudley Craving McAdam, by Juliette Roche (La Connaissance, Paris, 1926). He has lectured in Paris, Lyons, New York and Geneva. He is at present editor of the French section of the International Review ARS, published in Berlin and appearing in four languages, French, German, English and Italian. His pictures hang in the Museums of Russia, Germany and America (Moscow, Hanover, Los Angeles) and in various American and European collections. His principal paintings: Paysage de l'Abbaye de Crdteil (1907), Le Pavilion des Muses (I908, Robert de Montesquiou Collection), L'arbre (I9I0), La Chasse (1911, Pellerin Collection), Portrait de Jaques Nayral (I9Io), Les Joueurs de Football (I912, in a Spanish collection), L'Homme au balcon (I912, Eddy Collection, Chicago), Les Baigneuses (1912), Le Depiquage des Moissons (1912), La Ville et le Fleuve (I9I3, in a German collection), Les Bateaux de la Peche (19I3, also in a German collection), L'Homme au hamac (1913, German collection), Portrait of the publisher Figuikre (1913), Portrait of Professor L. of the University of Nancy (I914), La Femme au piano (1914, W. C. Arensberg Collection, New York), Femmes a la fenetre (I914, Queen Collection, New York). After 1914 his work is of a character that calls less and less for descriptive titles; except for a series of compositions on American towns (most of them in German or American collections), it would be hard to designate them otherwise than as " PAINTINGS," a word that best covers the tendency of his present experiments. Among these the most important are probably: A Mural Painting for a Railway Depot (1920), Salon d'Automne (I920, Musee de Grenoble), Mural Paintings (I922), Salon d'Automne (1924). Murals, with multiple elements, exhibited in the Salon d'Automne in 1925, in the International Exhibition in Zurich in 1925, in those of Vienna, Berlin and Dresden in 1926 (see reproductions), and the [90] Edouard Goerg murals exhibited in the Salon des Tuileries (sketches) and in the Salon d'Automne in I926. Finally, another group of three mural paintings, imprudently solicited by the Faculte de Pharmacie de Paris, in 1924, for its new lecture-hall, and subsequently shelved by the Hauts Services des Palais Nationaux, who naturally shrink from the idea of assuming responsibility. EDOUARD GOERG BORN on June 9, I893, in Sydney, Australia, of a French father and a mother who was half-Irish, Goerg left the land of his birth and spent his early childhood in England. When he was seven years old, his family removed to France, where he was educated. "The ideas current in the commercial middle-class to which I belonged," he writes, " very soon roused in me a spirit of contradiction and disrespect, which I may have inherited from the Irish blood of my grandmother, and a premature but not yet practically articulate desire of becoming a painter, instead of the business man my people wanted to make of me. These opinions are to blame for my having lived my life more often in reaction against, than obedient to, influence. " There is no hatred in me, though, but I cannot help seeing what exists - and painting it. Middle-class life, with its prejudices, its ceremonies, its spirit of caste, holds its own in the present-day confusion of classes, clings to its love of show, its days of reception, its teas, its whole creed of keeping up appearances. It is a great show for the painter. Madame Jourdain is dressed in the best of taste and Monsieur is proud now of his ancestors. " When one could still do so, I travelled (to-day tickets and quarters are at a premium). From 191o to 9I14 I travelled in [91] Modern French Painters France and Italy, and I even pushed into India for a few months with (it seems incredible, as I think of it) the sum of Iooo francs in my pocket. The war took me to Greece, Turkey and Serbia. But, with all my travelling, I came to the conclusion that a sedentary life is best suited to the understanding of Man. "Art Schools? None. A year with Maurice Denis, an exquisite spirit, but one who has turned his attention away from my' world. " My schooling? partly with the Fathers, who have left me many a beautiful memory which I hope to turn into paint, and partly with Janson. " What I like in art is humanity, Man... an art of expression, in other words. Oh yes, I know- as we have all been taught only too well, at the expense of feeling, nowadaysthat a picture has its own laws, that it is a flat surface - a combination of volumes- a color-scheme- but I say that if expression is not enough, neither is abstraction, at least not for me, and that I find a fuller and richer feeling, when mathematics are clad in humanity. Mathematics alone do not guarantee a picture, they are no proof of talent, a priori. More, I maintain that they can be as silly as the silliest anecdote and as boring as a school-drawing, that they are, after all, only the foundation; and that, when Man comes into the picture, Man who is so constantly changing, so old and so new, the field widens and the walls fall away. Everything is new every moment with Man, while a cube is always a cube and 2 plus 2 always make 4. I know the danger of Man, of Life: the danger of the subject, that sore-spot of contemporary painting, the dominating preoccupation of all these recent years, because of the suspicion and fear in which it is held. This fear of lapsing into literature and a subject has led us all up a blind alley. I prefer to believe that the field of painting is wider than these tabooed subjects would [92] Juan Gris lead you to think, that there are many things to see and to paint, and that though three apples and a package of tobacco may not be literary, they are less various and moving than the face of a man, suffering, laughing, or inflated with vanity." The works of Edouard Goerg are to be found in the following collections: Georges Bernheim, Emile Bernheim, Feneon, Epstein, Galilee, Alphonse Kann, Girardin, Largy, Monteux, Peronne, Pettidi, Simon, and Tzanck. Some of his most important pictures are: Le Pirate (1922) which first attracted attention to his name, then Le Gourmand (1923), Le Bar (1923), Nus (1923), Le Mariage (1924), La Fenetre (1924), Don Quichotte, and La Bonne Fortune (1925). He has exhibited at the Independents, the Salon d'Automne and the Salon des Tuileries. JUAN GRIS JUAN GRIS was born in Madrid, March 13, 1887, of a family of Castilian and Andalusian origin. After a period of conscientious preparation, he entered the School of Arts and Crafts. In I905 he came to Paris, where he met Apollinaire, Picasso, Max Jacob, Braque, Derain and the mathematician Maurice Princet, and became one of the founders of the Cubist movement. His love of philosophy and mathematics made him the controlling figure in the new school and one of the surest artists of his day. He taught the greatest of his fellow-workers the use of the rule and the square, though he left the utmost lyric freedom to his plastic imagination. After a very painful life, he succumbed to an attack of uremia and died, at the age of forty, on May ii, 1927. He described his esthetic system as follows: " I work with the elements of the spirit," he wrote in I92 to L'Esprit Nouveau, " I work with imagination: I try to give [93] Modern French Painters concrete form to what is abstract, I pass from the general to the particular, by which I mean that I take an abstraction as my point of departure and a real fact as my point of arrival. My art is an art of syntheses, a deductive art, as my friend Raynal says. " I want to find a new description for it: I want to create special individuals by evolution from a general type. " I consider mathematics to be the architectural side of painting, the abstract side, and I want to humanise it: Cezanne makes a cylinder of a bottle: I begin with the cylinder in order to create an individual unit of a special type. Of a cylinder I make a bottle, a particular bottle. Cezanne works toward architecture, I work away from it; that is why I compose with abstractions (colors) and I build an arrangement, when those colors have become objects. For example, I compose with a black and a white, and I make my arrangement, when the white has become a piece of paper and the black a shadow; I mean that I arrange the white so as to make it become a piece of paper and the black to turn it into a shadow. "This sort of painting bears the same relation to the other that poetry does to prose." His method: " If in theory I disclaim all idealistic or naturalistic art, in method I always return to the Louvre; my method is the method of all time, the method employed by the Masters: it is a matter of principles, and principles are constant." When I spoke to him of this book, Juan Gris said to me: " To-day I see that until I918 I was going through a purely representational period. Soon after came the period of composition, then that of color. The junction of the stages marked by these tendencies constitutes a kind of analytical period in my work. [94] Juan Gris "To-day, when I am almost forty, I believe that I am entering a new period, which I should describe as the period of expression, of pictorial expression, the period of the picture, of a fused and finished whole. In short, the synthetic period following the analytical phase. Juan Gris has formulated his esthetic system clearly. In his work, it is not the subject which governs the picture. The subject is the outcome of the object which it has created, which in this case is the picture. Hence Gris, as a painter, occupies his imagination with nothing but the constant evolutions of colored volumes. He is only too happy to have those evolutions reveal new and luminous relations, illumined by the most autochthonous poetry, and he asks nothing else of them. We might call him the Master of Plastic Relations, so true is it that he has made them the basis of his esthetic system. The impossibility of expressing in pictorial language all the variations of plastic sensibility in exactly differentiated forms forces the artist, who wishes to give them external form, to resort to analogies, to approximations necessitated by the inadequacy of his vocabulary. And that is how he comes to employ the notion of comparison indispensable to human expression, and, more particularly in the case of the artist, of that form of comparison, more lyrical, more inventive in nature, which we call a metaphor. By a plastic metaphor we must understand the result of an effort of pure imagination, since, as we know, in contradistinction to a mere comparison, a metaphor not only compares but evolves from the affinities of certain related objects an essentially new object, endowed with an existence of its own, though still bearing a so-to-speak blood relation to the elements which condition it. From this it results that a comparison is the product of a dictionary where a metaphor is a product of creation: the 1 95 ] Modern French Painters former is an accumulation of stones, the latter a constructed edifice. Now whether it be the staff of the guitar or the strings of the score, the billowing of lines of print, the plugs of the vine, or the grape-pippins of the neck of a violin, in all these interchangeable elements of comparison Juan Gris is merely developing that science of lyrical relations which he has mastered so imaginatively, a science which rests on the association of plastic ideas administered by the artist for the best cadence which they will produce in his picture. A legitimate method, if ever there was one, and one consecrated by the masters, but a method which it was granted to Juan Gris to develop to the furthest consequences of a pure formal lyricism. It has been described - mistakenly - as a kind of punning. Punning, in language, corresponds to no constructive or interpretative necessity: it results from no observation, no judgment. On the contrary, a plastic metaphor does contain a truth detected by judgment and observation: it is a kind of synthesis, legitimately derived from the confrontation of two elements of the same quality. In the case of the sinusoid of the guitar and that of the hill, as employed by Juan Gris, the former can become the latter and vice-versa, the plastic properties of both elements being of the same quality. Moreover, the metaphors of Juan Gris are also legitimate, because they are purely plastic: I mean that no intervention of an element alien to painting conditions them. The isomorphic connection between the orifice of a glass and the hole of a guitar is the result of a unilateral comparison, since the relation exists between two objects plastically identical. And is not a comparison of that sort much more legitimate than the one we draw, in the case of a portrait, between the prominence of a chin, say, and its supposed indication of will-power, or, in an allegory, [ 96 ] Juan Gris between upraised eyes and an expression of faith? Comparisons of that nature are really little short of puns, and approximative puns at that! The plastic metaphors of Juan Gris are no doubt lyrical illusions, but illusions, at least, which mislead no one! And if we were challenged to give more explicit proof of the legitimacy of such a method, we might do so by comparing it to the use of the same method in grammar, which is a direct expression of thought. Among the figures of rhetoric there is one known as catachresis, which enables the imagination to employ a known word in partial description of a new object. Thus, when we say a sheet of paper, the foot of a table, the arm of a windmill, our inventive faculty borrows from two different objects the resources necessary to construct a third one. In fact, catachresis permits of even bolder usages; we speak of burning daylight or of being horsed on an ass in the same way in which the poet speaks of being clad in candid integrity and white linen. The principle in all these expressions is the same; the imagination merely varies lyrically these more or less happy inventions. Similarly, in the plastic field, when at the bidding of his imagination, Juan Gris feels that several groups of parallel elements are necessary to the general harmony of his picture, he does not hesitate to repeat the same plastic idea in different terms. And since in the figure of rhetoric the arms of a man become those of the windmill, in the picture the lines of the musical staff may equally well become the strings of the guitar. Finally, I would add that this question of phraseology is not one of conceits. What we have here is not a tendency to linear description but to plastic construction. And the poetic sense of Juan Gris is much more human than that of any comparable literary tendency based on conceits or preciosity, because it de[97] Modern French Painters rives from much more deeply emotional premises. In fact, it is only after having conceived his metaphor that he subjects it to preparations, mechanical if you like, which that surest plastic technician of the present day that he unquestionably is, subsequently studies, organises, co-ordinates and exploits. No orismology, therefore, nor terminology, far less any stylisation. Instinctively drawn to the constant renewal of the data of his imagination, he is careful not to take certain products of the use of those data as bases for new works. The form which he lends to a particular metaphor, or to certain specific relations of closely or distantly connected volumes is never given to the elements of a picture a priori, but purely and simply in consequence of the developments required by the composition of the picture. And if I have recalled the connection between the conception of poetic metaphors and that of plastic ones in the work of Juan Gris, it is not merely to note the curious coincidence between the methods common to both means of expression, but to emphasise the fact that the artist's work, regarded from this point of view, is alien to any spirit of eccentricity, affectation, preciosity or irresponsibility, and that the angel of the bizarre is not his guardian. The creative faculty of the spectator, therefore, is invoked by Juan Gris and invited to give its own interpretation to the elements of reality assembled by him, in accordance with the eternal laws, which he learned in the Louvre. We are at liberty to define the aspects of these elements in the same way in which we describe the conformation of a particular site or landscape. In reality, however, we must not forget that the still-life at which we are looking is more living than we are: it looks at us, and it is we who are in the cage or on the canvas. Nay, Juan Gris is himself the spectator of his own work, when he reads a meaning into it. And that is why the aspect of his work [98] Juan Gris admits of no classification: it is neither Cubistic nor Naturalistic: it derives only from the esthetic system by which it was conceived. To be sure, Juan Gris may neglect so-called visual reality, but it is never deliberately that he does so, just as it is never voluntarily that he sometimes follows faithfully certain elements of that reality. In any case, the subject, in Gris' work, is never allowed to modify the relations established between those elements. If their value does not correspond to a visual reality, it will be found to tally, however, with some other element of the picture by qualitative analogy, the exactness of which is the result of a kind of mathematical computation of equivalences. The aspect of plastic relations, accordingly, may be subject to modification, but the relations themselves will be identical and unchanging. Such, rapidly resumed, is the basis of the esthetic system of Juan Gris. We are impressed immediately by its lyric greatness no less than by its scientific value. It is the most exactly formulated code of painting per se. It is difficult to say whether we should more admire the delicacy of the ideas that have conceived it, or the severity of execution that has reduced those ideas to the most classic discipline. It is not by any haphazard choice of objects that the artist can attain the goal of creation at which he aims. Neither can he hope to create by hypnotising himself in the contemplation of a stale world, all too confined in the cage of its meridians. The work of Gris has been accused of crypticism, but no one so far has taken the trouble to discover the guiding intentions of his pure lyrical science. No matter. Some artists exhibit, while others work, and one cannot do both at the same time. That is why the work of the latter usually holds the most ad[ 99 Modern French Painters mirable surprises, whereas that of the former is the better for not being seen. The artist who tries to take stock of his heart never succeeds, when he closes the account, in assessing it completely. And yet, by a kind of empiric grace, the mechanism works, even though many stray pieces may have been left out. True, it does not work perfectly. We may say, therefore, without fear of exaggeration, that if Gris had seen the possibility of using sensible elements, which after all have their purpose and justification, he might have successfully bridged the gaps of feeling, the lapses in response, to which most men are subject. In 1923 Juan Gris was invited by Serge de Diaghilew to compose the scenery and costumes for three of his Russian ballets: La Colombe, Les Tentations de la Berg~re, and L'Education manqude. Subsequently he designed the settings for the fetes of the Chateau de Versailles. In 1924 he delivered a lecture at the Sorbonne (in a series of philosophical studies organised by Dr. Allendy). Juan Gris has also illustrated some books by Raymond Radiguet and Armand Salacrou (Editions Galerie Simon). His pictures may be seen in the following collections: Kann, Gertrude Stein, Norero, Dr. Allendy, Kahnweiler, LIonce Rosenberg, Forchheimer, La Roche, Rolf de Mare, Andre Simon, Rupf, F. Aubier, Tzanck, Ozenfant, Jeffries, Flechtein, Reber, Baron Gourgaud, and Mendelssohn. See: The Little Review, article by Gertrude Stein. Notes sur ma peinture, in Der Querschnitt, (1923). G. Apollinaire, Mdditations esthetiques, (I913). A. J. Eddy, Cubists and Post-Impressionists, Chicago, (I919). Maurice Raynal, Juan Gris (Effort Moderne) (I92I). L'Esprit Nouveau, no. 6. Adolphe Basler, La Peinture, religion nouvelle, (I926). Tavelsamling, R. de Mare, Stockholm, (1923). Bissiere, in L'Opinion, (I919). Charensol, in Paris-Journal, (I924). Carl Einstein, L'Art au XIXigme siecle, Berlin. Paul Westheim, Kunstblatt, (1925). [ oo] Marcel Gromaire MARCEL GROMAIRE MARCEL GROMAIRE was born in Noyelles-sur-Sambres, July 24, 1892, of a Parisian father and a North-country mother. He received his schooling at the Lycee Buffon; then he studied law, which he gave up for painting. He worked in the Art Schools and made friends among the pupils of Matisse. He visited Holland and Belgium; later he lived for a time in England and Germany. Wounded in the war, the cessation of hostilities found him serving as interpreter to the American Expeditionary Force. " I am opposed to all theories," he says. " If you had asked an artist of Vezelay, Chartres or Reims, a Fouquet or a Charonton, for his personal conception of art, he would have been entirely at a loss to answer you. He sacrificed his 'personality' to something much higher; disdaining artifice no less than a vain imitation, his one ambition was to offer to his vast audience the evermarvelous image of the real. Our own active period may be thought to offer some analogies to the great Gothic age, the most purely French epoch of our art. And, compared to this strange day of ours, individual theories seem to me, I must say, very limited indeed." I have often observed how those who describe their own day as strange lay themselves open to the suspicion of relying a little lamely on what is commonly called tradition. Here we find Marcel Gromaire describing our day as strange; but he compares it to the great Gothic era, with which he thinks it has many analogies. But has not every period been " strange "? There is no reason - just because we are living it - to think ours an exception. All ages and all lands have known wars, financial [ Io ] Modern French Painters straits, pederasty and artistic theories. In so obstinately backward-looking a tendency is there not a certain partiality to the line of least effort? By all means let the artist go to the Old Masters to learn his trade —nothing is more normal or more necessary. But what a modern artist should never do is to commune so exclusively with the past as to deny his own day. Posterity, no doubt, will regard the art of this first half of the twentieth century as rather theoretical, but that is because it is addressed to a portion of the public that has more leisure and inclination to study art intimately than it had in the past, especially in the Middle Ages. Lacking educated spectators to appeal to, those admirable artists of Chartres and Vezelay had to impress the mind of the untutored rustic, of the crowd. Realism was governed by requirements of pictorial story-telling, which reduced it to materialism. To-day, however, there is a place for spectators of a somewhat higher order; technical questions have yielded to esthetic considerations of rather less prosaic a nature. So true is this that whatever form it takes, Realism is obliged not only to study the most beautiful models of the past but to imitate them both literally and in spirit, never to surpass or even to equal them. Restricted by imitative intentions extremely limited for the display of imagination, Realism must either repeat itself or lapse into a dry stylisation, which gives it an appearance of originality but rarely any genuine style, such as is found only in works more natural in expression or bred of less vulgar plastic thinking. In his study of Gromaire (Les Peintres Franfais Nouveaux, Editions de la Nouvelle Revue Franqaise), M. Jean Cassou would have us believe that " the painter hopes to achieve a synthesis of modern life, of crowds and their movements." Such was the aim of the Romanesque sculptors - hence Gromaire's preference for them. Now, a conception of that sort, difficult in the Middle [ 102 ] Marcel Gromaire Ages, is easier to realize to-day, when each spectator is a stubborn individualist and can see, weigh and appreciate life without the interpretation of pictorial artifice. But should art be a guide, an aid to memory, a magnifying glass, or an eloquent pretext for the edification of works capable of exciting selfsufficient pictorial emotions? Artificial light serves a practical purpose of illumination, but it may also be the occasion for luminous combinations of less utilitarian a nature. Consider the proud sunlight of the studios or Citroen's electrical displays on the Eiffel Tower. Observe, too, that Gromaire has felt the danger of utilitarianism in his conceptions, so much so, in fact, that he has often borrowed from Negroid art ideas of measure deriving, in the case of the Primitives, qpt so much from realistic as from purely plastic standards. All of which leads me to think that theories (or what are called such) are the legitimate result of the plastic evolution of our day. Despite the foregoing remarks, we may notice in Marcel Gromaire a peculiar love of pessimistic deformations, of over-artistic melodramatic exaggerations, suggestive not so much of the satiric barb of a Rowlandson, an Ensor or a Pascin, as of the tragic morbidity of the German Primitives and xylographic artists. Besides, his temperament is a little dry, a little artificial, though both powerful and personal. He may be properly classified as one of the warmest colorists of his generation. The most important pictures of this artist are: Les Brasseurs (1914), AllUgorie de la Fenaison (1919), Les Musiciens mendiants (I919), La Vieille (1920), Grand nu assis (I920), La Robe bleue (I92I), La Martiniquaise (192I), Le Repas Paysan (192I), Le Boxeur (1922), Une Gare (I922), Paysage de banlieue (I922), Le Wagon de Mdtro (1923), Music-hall (1923), La Rue (I923), L'Homme au pain (1923), La Loterie foraine (1923), Le Marchand de Marrons (I923), L'Acaddmie de Peinture (I924), La [103] Modern French Painters Toilette (1924), Le Fuacheur flamand (1924), Les Buveurs de Biare (1924), La Batelikre (1924), Les Joueurs de Quilles (1924), La Guerre (1925), Les Paysannes au bain (1925), Les Bords de la Marne (1925), La Laveuse (1926), Nu au tapis d'Orient (I926). Books illustrated by Gromaire: L'Homme de Troupe (a series of ten wood-cuts), Edition Bernouard. Ruptures, by Noli Bureau (two wood-cuts). Vers un monde volage, by Henri Hertz, with ten etchings. Les Petits Poemes en Prose of Baudelaire (Quatre Chemins). HALICKA HALICKA was born in Cracow, Poland, in I894. Settling in Paris in 1912, after her travels in Germany and Italy, she worked for several months in the Academie Ranson. Cubism was then in full flower. She was deeply influenced by it. She was a frequent visitor to the Louvre; her favorite painters were Chardin and Le Nain. Later she travelled in Scandinavia, Austria, Switzerland, Spain and England. She married the painter, Louis Marcoussis. One of her most vivid impressions of travel was born of a stay in Tangiers. In Holland she was also deeply affected by Vermeer of Delft, whose influence on her work has been considerable. She adopted the discipline and technical methods of Cubism, not, of course, its esthetic system. The conception of an art of pure creation, divorced from life by its root principles, would naturally be uncongenial to her feminine sensibility. What the Cubists are trying to do to-day-to combine lyrical methods with a vital lyricism-she attempted to do by relying on the example of the Old Masters. But Cubism gave her an insight into their composition and sense of rhythm. The living inten[ I04] Halicka tions of her work were influenced entirely by her own sensibility, which is of the utmost distinction. "If it is true," she writes, "that God created Man in his image, it may also be said that Man has attempted to vie with God in the domain of art. For ages and ages he has imitated as closely as possible the world in which he was placed. " But, this feat accomplished by technical methods, Man has surpassed God, or the God of the Bible at any rate. That is where art begins. Science teaches us that our human possibilities are limited only by our ability to vary ad infinitum the relations existing between certain permanents such as colors, sounds, lines and volumes. The art of to-morrow will merely exploit new variations of these relations by new inductive methods, such as, in the past, Italian or Oriental perspective, or, in the present, Cubism. The technic of the future, however, may reveal absolutely new discoveries as to the fixed values of the universe, discoveries which a poet, seated at the right hand of God, may glimpse before the rest of us." The work of Halicka is represented in many collections and principally in the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, U. S. A., and in the collections of M. Kapferer, Chevalier, Reinhardt, Bernard, Bloch, and Lederlin. She has recently illustrated a volume of stories by Israel Zangwill. Her most important pictures are: Le Repas (1920), Vues du Ghetto de Cracovie (1922), Enfant a la Fenetre (1923), L'Atelier (1924), Baigneuses (1926). KISLING MosEs KISLING was born in Cracow, Poland, January 23, I891. After the war, in which he was badly wounded, he became a French citizen. In Cracow he had studied at the Ecole des [ I05] Modern French Painters Beaux-Arts under Professor Parkiewicz. In Paris, where he settled as a young man, he frequented the artistic circles of Montparnasse and taught in an Art School. "My ideal," he writes, " is to paint well. Ideas? I have none." In those few words lies the gist of Kisling's art. His sensibility is an attractive one, and he is concerned merely with exteriorising it by ever more and more perfect methods. That sensibility is the product of an intimate love for certain sentimental sides of Nature. There is melancholy in the art of Kisling - a melancholy of which he seeks to veil the insistent tenacity. He challenges it by investing it with the subtlest tones of his delicious palette. At times, however, that delicate despondency gets the better of him, and he is most powerful and complete in the pictures born of that overweening weakness. In the art of Kisling, therefore, two tendencies are in perpetual conflict. Often he laughs, lest he weep. And both moods are vital, thanks to the skill with which they are rendered. Like all the artists of his generation, Kisling began by sacrificing to Impressionism, but he soon realized the insufficiency of an art which was only a technic. He then turned to tradition for the foundations of a more fully developed art. From his race he inherited a love for experiments with color and light, which was to stand him in good stead in his vaunted purpose of "painting well." The brio and brilliance of his color and the bravura of his detail show the popular imagination of the Pole. Luckily, however, a highly cultivated artistic intelligence preserves him from any tendency toward the picturesque. The solidity of some of his constructions, the deliberate weight of his classical drawing, constitute an armature sufficient to offset the snares to which his seductive imagination might be liable [ o6] Jeanneret in the glazes, transparencies and the many resources of his charming and enterprising palette. Kisling's work is represented in the Doucet, Zamaron, Druet, Dr. Barnes, Ullstein, F. Aubier, B. Weill, and other collections. JEANNERET EDOUARD JEANNERET, born in Switzerland, was the founder, with Ozenfant, of the Purist esthetic system. He has devoted the greater part of his activity to architecture and, under the name of Le Corbusier, he has contributed notably to the revival of Urbanism. He was responsible for the introduction into architecture of the Purist principle, which rigorously excluded ornament and based a rational esthetic system on comfort and hygiene. In both painting and architecture, the art of Jeanneret is notable for plastic distinction, nobility of line, and a sobriety, from which emotion is perhaps too systematically excluded, but which is not unimpressive. Le Corbusier-Jeanneret has published several volumes: Apres le Cubisme and La Peinture Moderne, in collaboration with Ozenfant (chez Cres), followed by Vers une Architecture (I923), L'Art Ddcoratif d'Aujourd'hui (1925), Urbanisme (1925), and L'Almanach d'Architecture Moderne (1926). JEAN-FRANCIS LAGLENNE JEAN-FRANCIS LAGLENNE was born in Paris in i898. Listed on the registers of the School of Decorative Arts in I9I6; leaves it almost immediately to work by himself, away from the atmosphere of Montmartre. Resumes in I9I9 his studies interrupted by the war. [ 107] I Modern French Painters Theatrical costumes in the workshops of the Printemps. Articles: Peinture et Cinema (Cinea). Motion-picture criticism (" Choses de theatre " and "Paris-Journal "). Shows his first pictures in 1920 at the Independents and the Salon d'Automne. At his debut J. F. Laglenne takes a paradoxical attitude toward painting. He hyphenates his two given names, facetiously, because it is more "painter-like," the old story of fighting the devil with his own weapons. He claims that the only way in which a young painter can escape influence is to parody what he is afraid of imitating. He parodies stylisation to find a style the reverse of decorative art. He embraces that restriction, in order to be free to follow his inclination " as a creative factor, in defiance of consequences." Reaction of the love of painting against Cubist austerity. "Painting," Laglenne informs us, "is in a period of stabilization and decay, which is probably the forerunner of a new revival. We are all contributing to a strange confusion of values, like that which marked the end of Impressionism. The group-shows of 1926 look like retrospective exhibitions, for the spirit of the time is developing more rapidly than its realisations. " This crisis may be traced to the exaggerated value attached to technic and innovations of method. To-day perfection is within anyone's reach for the price of a few lessons, but it goes hand in hand with an evident sterility of inspiration. The socalled 'new' painters, who had such a good laugh at DidierPougetism, turn out endless replicas of their battle-horses. - A period of painter-prodigies: each with his labored little originality, his manner, his palette, his chosen subjects, for all the world like the Artistes Frangais! Picasso alone escapes this classification. "The Hyper-realists reverse the problem instead of facing [ Io8] Jean-Francis Laglenne it, but their negative attitude shows a new state of mind, in line with that of the young painters who believe that grace - both in the sense of charm and of faith -may equally well be a revolutionary factor. Is not self-conscious heroism the acme of cowardice? " This new state of mind is not to be identified with L'Esprit Nouveau, which is as antiquated as the so-called Modern Style in relation to present-day decorative art. The Cubists claimed to be building a cathedral, which they had neither the time nor the means to complete. But who would think of adding the missing spires to Notre-Dame? Scorning to complete the towers of an old edifice, the prentice hands of to-day will keep their stones to put up a new one beside it." Collections: Amos, Daber-Berger, Delompre, du Bosquet, Bine, R. Faure, Francis, Baron Gourgaud, Granoff, Hauser, Lefebvre, LugnePoe, R. Nathan, Paul Rosenberg, Sainsere, Tzanck, Crick, Delgouffre, Gaffe, Grimard, Coleman, Main Bocher, Fernand Aubier, S. Kahn, Malpel, Marval, Michaut, Robinson, and Manteau. MARIE LAURENCIN MARIE LAURENCIN was born in Paris in 1885. She went to school at the Lycee Buffon and later worked in the F. Humbert Academy. With her fine sensibility and artistic taste, she soon felt the inadequacy of such a master, however, and her real personality began to emerge, when she came into contact with artists like Picasso and Braque and poets like Moreas, Fleuret, Max Jacob and Apollinaire. She exhibited with the Independents in I907, then at the Galerie Barbazanges in I912, and finally in the Paul Rosenberg Gallery in 1920, where her new pictures have appeared periodically ever since. [ 109] Modern French Painters Among the poets who celebrated Marie Laurencin and her art was Jean Cocteau, who wrote of her one day: Poor little doe, Caught between Cubist and Claw.. Caught between Cubist and Claw, it was no mean feat indeed to have escaped the influence of the great painters who menaced her personality-a personality, whose expression ranged beteen a flutter and a coo, between the maniare poussiquette and the maniere coco, as she smilingly described the phases of her talent. Thanks to her flexible, if wilful femininity, she kept clear of all serious art. True to her own happy ego as an artist, she never attempted to judge or to criticise, ignored what she did not feel, and communed with whatever suited her own taste. She never discussed the problems so hotly debated about her. Never did she deny their truths or their errors: she dropped them cold, as we say to-day, nursing the little world her painting peoples and developing her own sweet will and way of making it live. For her chosen hunting-ground she turned to her memories of Persian miniatures or the Rococo or popular motives of the eighteenth century. Even in her most studied pictures she merely continues the reveries which had delighted her girlhood. They supplied her with her stock-in-trade, with the pretty themes that trot, flirt, flutter, scamper and loll on her canvas: the maidens, children, ponies, doggies and does and doves and charmed snakes that peep through flowers, fruits, pianos, guitars and flimsy curtains. Yet, for all the futility of her subjects, the art of Marie Laurencin never lapses into decoration. With all her seeming nonchalance, she knows the value of a line, a curve, and particu[ Io] Marie Laurencin larly of a contrast or a juxtaposition of colors. And that is what makes her art so sure in its frailty, so appealing in its innocence. Moreover, she avoids a defect to which women are easily prone - the imitation of the human orchestras of Naturalism. With a meagre palette of black, white and rose, she concocts constantly inventive color-scales, that are singularly happy in their rightness of values. On occasion, she can be something of a dare-devil, giving chase to a line at the risk of bumping flat into the frame. But she catches herself in the nick of time and like an acrobat, with the prettiest twirl, alights daintily, saving her picture and, incidentally, this bad simile. On more than one occasion Marie Laurencin has made her influence felt in the art of dressmaking. Groult and Paul Poiret have executed costumes and materials after her designs. She has designed scenery for a Russian Ballet, Les Biches, and for one of Musset's comedies at the Comedie-Franqaise. She has done lithographs and etchings for books by Andre Salmon, Andre Gide, and Rene Schikele. Her pictures hang in the Benard, Dubost, Alphonse Kann, Stoop, Paul Rosenberg, Quinn, W. Berry, and other collections. FERNAND LEGER FERNAND LEGER was born in Argentan in i88i. His family had no desire to see him a painter and, to spare them too great a shock, he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1901. But he did not remain there long. He began work as an architectural draughtsman; later he became a photographic retoucher; and meanwhile he tried to formulate and exploit the impressions made on his temperament by the work of Cezanne in 1903 and 1904. The purity and simplicity of the douanier Rousseau also exercised a healthy influence on his temperament, and it was with [iI] Modern French Painters a practised sensibility that he supported the first efforts of Cubism, in the ranks of which he immediately took a prominent place. His personality soon attracted attention. To the system of dissociation of plastic elements introduced by Cubism - the Cubism of Braque, Gris, Picasso, Metzinger and Gleizes —he opposed his own conception of pictorial dynamism. "I consider mural painting," he says, " as an abstract art, another form of architecture. I color my surfaces in the flat, without modelling or contrasts of form. In the case of easelpainting, the problem is reversed: here we want contrast and objectivity. I deny absolutely the subject and perspective: I introduce the object as a factor reacting on a plastic ensemble. See my picture, The Rose and the Compass. "Technic must become more and more exact, the execution must be perfect; the influence of the Primitives should be preserved. At all costs we must get beyond Impressionistic or Cubist-Impressionistic painting, beyond all forms of painting determined by intention. I prefer a mediocre picture perfectly executed to a picture beautiful in intention but not executed. Nowadays a work of art must bear comparison with any manufactured object. The artistic picture is false and out-of-date. Only the picture, which is an object, can sustain that comparison and challenge time." When he had assimilated from Impressionism what it had to offer, not the lay spectator, but his temperament, Fernand Leger gave full rein to the latter. This he did through his strong instinct for colored surfaces. And his love of amplitude, of fundamental form, found expression in studies which flung to the winds - to the four winds of intensity, sobriety, stability and energy[I2 ] Fernand Leger our all too ready partiality for the insipid sensitiveness of a now inexorably codified good taste. You may enjoy fusion and flow, sentimental gradations and essentially sensual deformations. But if you are not moved by what Leger has to show you, if you have nothing in you that responds to the unprecedented in his performance, if you prefer to be flattered by pretty arabesques, enervating subtleties, and over-facile arrangements, if in a word you snap up too readily the bait flung you by unconscionably clever anglers, why then, as far as any control of your feeling goes, you are an-esthetic, you are incapable of controlling, as control we sometimes must, the promptings of what the psychoanalysts call your Narcissic instincts. The spectator, however, who makes up his mind to see in a picture by Leger a purely plastic idea is at once struck by the fact that, like the Old Masters, he adheres to their method of local color, which is no innovation, to be sure, but which is, for that very reason, a method and not an end. To this conception the work of Leger owes an infinite variety and a constant plastic unity. When Impressionism forgets the action of volumes, it produces a kind of purely pictorial dynamism. But whereas the use of the theory of complementaries and the optical medley begets monotony, because the state of motion on which it is based produces grey, the classic method of colored surfaces employed by Leger creates a kind of architectonic dynamism, a function of movement and not a coloring function, allowing of a great variety of plastic effects. The formal imagination of childhood is constantly solicited by an inarticulate desire to renew and to originate. For instance, the enthusiasm of children for animals derives mainly from their need of discovering unfamiliar combinations of perfectly natural forms. Now, there is no doubt that the artistic impulse of maturity, when it is a rational one, may be traced to that early [ I3 ] Modern French Painters craving of our sensibility, developed and perfected by a habit of invention or, if you prefer, of creation. The need of grouping plastic elements borrowed from Nature in new combinations is therefore just as human as the child's desire to admire and make new objects, much as he invents sentences without sense, for instance, with known words. Nothing is more human than Leger's need of discovering new effects and setting on canvas new associations suggested by his imagination. Our emotional centers recognize these formal discoveries as the issue of a perfectly pure plastic automatism, which is the vital principle of his imagination. On the other hand, his work is also governed automatically by an esthetic control, the result of his early practice of tradition. Hence his bold associations of rhythms, always measured and controlled by a fine feeling for the canons of plastic sensibility. Because it is so purely pictorial, Leger's work achieves a kind of sane balance between those of our faculties affected by art, which are of a sensual or a sensible origin. He may found his constructions on mechanical elements or on those of the human heart, but he always avoids literature. His plastic feeling is concerned only with form and its aspects: he hates the romanticism of Rodin and Michelangelo: expression with him is never anything but formal: he is always the painter and the purest example of the genus. Furthermore, versed as his feeling is in every resource of the palette, it gives him a swift and sure eye for the exact tone required. And if his recent works show an admirable serenity and weight suggestive of good sculpture, the explanation of those qualitites is to be found in a robust and decisive temperament more interested in a plastic study than in artistic organisation. Some may criticise the latter tendency as leading necessarily to the decorative art of a Tiepolo, a Canaletto or a Veronese, for example. To my way of thinking, however, such a criticism [II4] Fernand Leger would be in order only if that disposition were compensated by no virtue capable of supplementing it. Now, quite the contrary is true in Leger's case. Fernand Leger believes (if I interpret him rightly) that it is a little silly to plan a palace, when you have only odds and ends to build it with. Leger is primarily a disinterested inventor: he is a man who is perpetually discovering new plastic effects and even new methods without bothering about the use they are to be put to. Powerful, even violent, but always true to himself, progressing steadily, indifferent to the influence of routine art, Fernand Leger is one of the plastic inventors of our time. He is one of the few whose influence will be valuable in directing the development, if not of art, at all events of painting -and that, after all, is all that he is trying to do. For that result he is working with all the strength of a temperament incapable of flattering, a temperament which startles, grips and sometimes overwhelms, a temperament which acts on our sensibilities not with the charm that wins but does not hold, but through a force of persuasion that begins by distressing, proceeds by convincing and ends by subduing and holding us enduringly. Fernand Leger's work is represented in the following collections: Alphonse Kann, LIonce Rosenberg, La Roche, Simon, Dutilleul, Level, Comte de Leche, Baron Gourgaud, Ozenfant, de Mare, and in the Museums of Vienna, Frankfort, Moscow and Chicago. Fernand Leger has designed the settings for Skating Rink and The Birth of The World for the Swedish Ballets organised by Rolf de Mare and Jean Borlin. He also composed a film, Le Ballet Mdcanique built, curiously, on manufactured objects in motion. His most important pictures are Le Nu dans un Paysage (I908 -191I), La Femme en Bleu (I9I2), La Partie de Cartes (I917), Les Disques, La Ville (I9I8), La DEjeuner (1921), and a panel first shown at the Exhibition of Decorative Arts (Collection A. Kann). Fernand Leger also directs an Art School with A. Ozenfant. He has delivered [ 15] Modern French Painters several lectures at the Sorbonne (in Dr. Allendy's Series of Philosophical Studies) and abroad. See: Meditations esthdtiques, by Guillaume Apollinaire. Waldemar George (Amour de l'Art, I926). Fernand Leger, Origines de la peinture contemporaine (Der Sturn, I913). A. J. Eddy, Cubists and Impressionists (Chicago, 19Io). Travelsamling, R. de Mare (Stockholm, 1923). Maurice Raynal (Edition de l'Effort Moderne, 1922). ANDRE LHOTE ANDRE LHOTE was born in Bordeaux, July 5, 1885. As a boy he studied decorative sculpture. On Sundays and at meal hours he painted, copying Rubens and Delacroix in the Museum. In I906 he exhibited with the Independents and in the following year at the Salon d'Automne. In La Grappe (I908), rejected by the Salon d'Automne, he shows the influence of the Gothic sculptors, whom he studied with enthusiasm, attempting to translate into painting their "constructions," a word he used in writing to Jacques Riviere. In later pictures we find the influence of Delacroix. Rouault, whom he met at this period, encouraged him to develop this dramatic phase. His first show chez Druet, in I9I0, met with some success. Maurice Denis bought one of his pictures, not without deploring, however, what he called the artist's " dangerous" tendency toward Cubism. "Yes, I had discovered Cezanne and Picasso," Lhote writes. "The latter seemed to me a continuation of the former. I gave up violent color and began to paint in blue-greys, in order to experiment with form without reference to color. I took part in the first Cubist show, rue Tronchet, and in the first Section d'Or, declining however, to join any group, a grave blunder, which [I6] Andre Lhote deprived me of the honor of being represented in Apollinaire's book on Cubism, though he had spoken very warmly of my first pictures. The Gothic sculptors had given me a love for simple planes and geometricised drawing and had prepared me quite naturally for the influence of Braque and Picasso. I can claim no originality, therefore, except in one point: I have never painted a guitar or a tobacco-package - a detail more important than it seems. I have always been interested in landscape and the human figure, even the nude, in defiance of both Cubist and Futurist excommunications. " In I9I6 and I917 I took to an art of flat tones. For a time I gave up all modelling, degradations, transitions and atmosphere, and worked out a composition based on color alone applied in inter-acting fields. This discipline gave me a more pictorial understanding of painting: up to that time I had been working sculpturally. The defect, for instance, of Escales (Retrospective Independent Show) is that it is a large-scale drawing heightened with color. I am planning a new version of it, composed entirely by color, and using modelling only to modulate and enliven the surfaces. " I am just as interested as ever in the experiments I made in my first pictures. I am trying to enrich and develop my resources, to add them one to another-what I call 'funding' them. " One word more, to avoid misunderstanding. " Because I wrote about David and referred to the classic ideal, I have been accused of starting the Neo-Classic movement, which is blighting the young generation. —First of all, that would be to exaggerate my influence; secondly, it is to misconstrue my own ideas. That movement is odious and sterile, as are all neo movements. The truth is that I thought it necessary (at a time when I was still ingenuous) to uphold the classic 11 [7]. Modern French Painters ideal of severity and precision as against the Fauve cult of the spontaneous, the confused, and the approximative. " But that was only an impulse of reaction on my part, not the formulation of a permanent theory, a discipline 'for life.' Times having changed, and poverty of method and of heart having succeeded the looseness of old, as we see in the pompous rigidity of the young painters, I should be inclined, if I had time to waste, to vindicate the romantic ideal with the same enthusiasm. But I am through with all proseletysing. I apply that inverse discipline to myself alone and in secret. That is why I regard those early works of mine, with their color and vehemence, with some satisfaction; that is why I contributed the Calvaire to the Retrospective show; that is why I plan to revise my own subjects with more freedom and color than before. " But there I go writing 'my own subjects '- I who claim no originality! I have been described as the painter of ports, sailors and street-girls. But I was not the first to paint such subjects. I may have treated them a little more awkwardly than my predecessors, that is all - certainly not with less fervor. I want to devote the rest of my life, therefore, to improving those little attempts, some tokens of which I am sending you... " Andre Lhote is represented in many private collections (Pauli, Maleprel, Krtichewsky, Dorival, Monnier, Paul Rosenberg, O. Sainsere, E. Daems, Frizeau, Coutrot, Dubost, Van Ghetuwe, Y. Paris, Delgouffre, and F. Aubier) and in the Luxembourg, the Museums of Grenoble, Nantes, Liege, Stockholm, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Lhote is a regular contributor to the Nouvelle Revue Franjaise and other periodicals. He teaches in an important Art School in Montparnasse. [II8] Auguste Mambour AUGUSTE MAMBOUR AUiGUSTE MAMBOUR was born in Liege, May 13, I896. He competed for the Belgian scholarship in painting of the Grand Concours de Rome (corresponding to our Concours de Rome and recently recast by M. Destrees, the Belgian Minister of Fine Arts). The set subject and the show-room have been abolished; the competition is open to everyone, the jury visits the studios and makes its choice on the spot. Mambour won the prize. But instead of the time-honored trip to Italy, he spent his purse on a cruise to the Congo, where he lived for six months, to the considerable consternation of his teachers. " I shall not outline any theory," he says, " for I am an instinctive painter, and I should be distressed to be considered anything else. I decline to have anything to do with schools or movements - all that I am interested in is pictures. To study their relations to one another is the critic's business; for what is new or unprecedented is a measure only infallible in the hands of one whose knowledge must by definition be absolute, or nearly so. " As for the vexed problem of 'the subject in painting,' that is an unavoidable poison, the effects of which only a veritable Mithridates could annihilate. "As an antidote to the anecdote, the best thing to do is to paint a picture containing them all. " Conception is an accident; if you know the main road, you may go your own way. Painting without a subject is an illusion; it reaps many victims, particularly among those who are dominated by the subject." " Art begins where the moral significance of a picture leaves off." [ II9] Modern French Painters Mambour realized the danger to his personality of making the formidable Italian tour, while he was yet at an impressionable age. The error of that academic institution of a sojourn in Rome lies in its brusquely confronting young men, mere students, reared on the externals of tradition, with the most indisputable masterpieces. Their temperament being yet unformed, they are paralyzed by admiration for those masterpieces. And if they are not gifted with personality, commonly the case of artists eager to see their work crowned with a medal, if they are not prepared to receive that dangerous shock, what happens? they are forever incapacitated, reduced to imitating the pictures that have so impressed them. Hence, past all question, the insignificance of the work of most of the graduates of the Prix de Rome. Mambour knew that the artist's first duty is to develop his perceptive personality; the problem of technic must take second place. And in his trip to the Congo he looked on life plastically, not dramatically. His temperament is disinclined to the mysticorealistic conceptions of Flanders, for he is a Walloon. For him a picture is a work of art: he subjects reality, in other words, to plastic laws, which are diametrically opposed to constructions based on the outward appearance of reality. His pictures are, not groupings of details, but drastic architectural structures. They appeal by their solidity, their plastic felicities and the zeal for perfection with which they are executed. Mambour's art is essentially Latin, he has the plastic vigor, the weight, the density of certain Renaissance masters. There is no imitation of ancient art, there is merely, in Mambour's case, a recognisable personality controlled by a well-grounded knowledge of Art. Mambour is represented in the Museum of Ixelles, in the Colonial Museum of Tervueren, in the Le Centaure and La Vierge Poupine galleries, and in the Gaffe, Brackpot, Mantelet and other collections. [ 120 ] Louis Marcoussis I I i i LOUIS MARCOUSSIS MARCOUSSIS was born in Warsaw in I882. In I901 he gave up the practice of law to enter the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied landscape in particular. He came to Paris in I903 and worked for three months in the studio of J. Lefebvre. Before long he joined the group of writers and artists responsible for the birth of Cubism: Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Picasso, Braque, Metzinger, Gleizes, Juan Gris, R. de la Fresnaye, Leger, Herbin, Delaunay, and many others. In I905 he exhibited at the Section d'Or under the name of Louis Marcoussis conceived by Apollinaire, his real name being Louis Markous. In I9I3 and 19I4 he exhibited with the Independents. He fought the war as a Lieutenant of Artillery, and since then has exhibited regularly at the Salon des Independents, the Tuileries and various Parisian and foreign galleries. His travels in France, Spain, Belgium, Germany, Holland and Austria have been numerous. But his most vivid impressions he owes to Tangiers-a locality transformed by light. "To create light is the purpose of painting. Light is the only real mystery. All the rest is literature. Without color there is no light. Without design there is no form." Despite this epigraph, Marcoussis has revealed a charming sensibility as a painter. He has not belied his Polish origin. And we all know the love of the Nordic countries for color and light. Marcoussis has been remarkably happy in adapting to Cubist concepts his impetuous sense of the colorful and the picturesque. In his compositions and in those paintings under glass which he has so cleverly revived, he lavishes an ingenuity that might seem arti[121] Modern French Painters ficial, were it not instinct with an attractively poetic plastic inspiration. Well aware of his perilous racial proclivity for the picturesque, he has rigorously adhered to the Cubist principle which bids the artist delve in the dictionary of Nature and choose neither such natural elements as are too richly plastic nor a previously conceived work of art. The elements which Marcoussis selects are those governed by geometric laws. He never plagiarises Nature, he merely takes certain essentially human points of contact with her, which he uses as a theme for light and subtle variations sometimes verging on, but never actually lapsing into decoration. A number of his pictures hang in the following collections: A. Lefevre, A. Kann, Richer, Chareau, Dr. Laugier, Dr. Barnes, Dr. Tzanck, Miss G. Drier, Wanamaker, Barclet, Comte Garvens, Flechtein, and Walden. MENKES AMONG the young painters, who are still in their twenties, no one has a better knowledge of his craft than Menkes. He acquired it under painful but remarkably effective conditions. Menkes was born in Poland in Lemberg. As a boy he entered one of the professional schools of his country to learn - house-painting! Just at this time, to make matters worse, hand-painted ceilings were coming into fashion; and Menkes has not forgotten his lime-chapped hands. Leaving these labors for the provinces, he picked up some work in a church under restoration. His foreman made him cover the frescoes with Biblical compositions of his own. A few years later he entered and soon left the Cracow Academy of Arts. He passed on to Berlin and eventually reached Paris. [ 122] Menkgs "I recall a still life I painted about a year ago," writes Menkes. "In the life of a painter, you know, there are moments, when he feels his heart and brain growing extraordinarily clear. His capacity for absorbing plastic impressions becomes so full and so clear, that whatever object he sees then - a landscape, a head, a still life - is reflected in him as in some very subtle substance, more than normally sensitive to plastic impressions. There goes on in him, at those times, a kind of instinctive co-ordination, an appreciation of values, an evaluation, I might say, of every tone, every plane- and he sets them on canvas at once with the proper expression and in the required place. " In my still life of The Accordion I gave outward form to my inward labor, to the emotion which I translated upon canvas in terms of plastic values. I recall even today very clearly the vision I had of it then. I have made myself a crude picture of the effect which that still life produced on me: I felt as if a plane pierced with needles of varying length and thickness were resting against my chest: the heavy tones acted on me like sharper pricks, the intensity of the pricks varied, and that variation made me place on canvas heavy or light tones, as the case might be. "The sense of rhythm and touch, with which every painter is born, dictates the structure of a picture, because the painter possesses, beside his human nature, a complementary nature, varying in every artist, the reactive capacity of which is of unequal intensity. Now, it is the extent of that nature, its capacity for development and discovery, which constitutes his true value." JEAN METZINGER JEAN METZINGER was born in Nantes in 1883. He frequented the most popular Parisian art schools of the time and later was connected with the Cubist movement. With Albert Gleizes he [ I23 ] Modern French Painters wrote a book On Cubism, which appeared in 1910. In it the two artists formulate the first problems of their new esthetic system. They present their subject with enthusiasm, and only the later developments brought to their theme and the consequent corrections involved have made their book date somewhat. It remains, however, the earliest book on a difficult subject. Jean Metzinger taught in the Academie de la Palette with Segonzac and Le Fauconnier, and later at the Academie Arenius. He was one of the organisers of the Exhibition of the Section d'Or (1912) and a regular exhibitor at the Salon des Independents in the heroic days of Room No. 41, in i9i i. " It seems pretty well established to-day that the beauty of a picture does not depend on the painter's fidelity to his' motive,' " writes Metzinger. "It is even admitted that the best portraits make one forget the model, that we are conscious only of their pictorial qualities. But we still believe in the' motive,' the model, Nature. " The natural thing and the thing painted, belonging to entirely different categories of space, can only be combined by the use of a convention which, so far as I am concerned, is as absurd as it is old, and I hope to see the day when a painter's sincerity will no longer be gauged by the extent to which he employs symbols so familiar that we recognize without seeing, without realising them. The most sincere of Naturalistic painters always seem to me to have an alphabet for a brain: for one thing a certain color, for another a certain form. It is as mechanical and impersonal as stenography! "If the beauty of a picture depends entirely on its pictorial qualities - as I firmly believe -I think that we should proceed quite differently: select certain elements of things, those best suited to our need of expression, then, with those elements, build [124] Jean Metzinger a new object, which we can honestly adapt to the surface of our picture. I consider it totally immaterial, whether or not that object resembles something recognisable. All I ask is that it shall be well made, that there shall be a perfect harmony between the parts and the whole and between these and the medium employed. "What could be more true or more human than a picture constructed by instinct out of materials furnished by feeling? What function could be more sincere than to bring into the light of day the concrete result of our individual reactions to the outer world with which we are in contact? "I know of nothing which better satisfies the conditions of painting - the art of exciting imagination by means of colored forms. "We must react, we must return to a simple, robust art. The pearly gates which Giotto opened are closed now forever, but our own life has magnificent possibilities. Without for a moment suggesting that we return to the Primitives, I believe that we can deduce from them certain elements of plastic expression as beautiful as in the first centuries of our art. "To begin with, we must simplify our technic, renounce chiaroscuro and its trickery and all the artifices of the palette, and no longer regard as the end of painting the mere multiplication of tints and detailing of forms without reason, by feeling. " Feeling! It is like the expression of the old-school tragedian in acting! " I want clear ideas, frank colors. 'No color, no, nothing but tone,' Verlaine used to say; but Verlaine is dead, and Homer is not afraid to handle color." l [ 25] Modern French Painters JOAN MIRO JOAN MIRO was born in Montroig, Catalonia, twenty-nine years ago. His first exhibition in France was held at the Galerie Licorne, where he showed in I92I a group of pictures deriving from a kind of compromise between mild realism and an objectivism not alien to the example of Cubism. He has since been recognised as the leader of the Hyper-realistic School. To a pure pictorial romanticism, based on new methods and novel plastic expressions, he preferred a literary romanticism, subjective, fantastic and instinctive rather than poetically pictorial, in the proper application of that word. Nevertheless, his productions are sometimes graceful harmonies or amusing spatterings, which can only be regarded as sketches, as clever studies, inspired by reveries or variations on subjects too personal to conform to the traditional canons of painting. In aspect at least, Miro's effort belongs among the Fauves, as a reaction against Cubism. As for his Hyper-realistic ambitions, we can only trust that in time he will become enough of a painter to lend very little value to their avowedly anti-pictorial spirit. MODIGLIANI AMADEO MODIGLIANI, one of the strangest figures of the artistic history of his period, was born in Leghorn in I885. He died in 1920, of the effect of numerous excesses, in a public hospital. Arriving in Paris in 1905, he settled in Montmartre, made friends of the denizens of that over-grown village, and lived for a long time in a house in the rue Norvins once inhabited, it appears, by Emile Zola. [ 126] Modigliani Modigliani was one of those hapless painters - Montmartre has known many - whose life was a long tragedy of pain, exasperation and disillusionment. Subtle of mind and even more fastidious of feeling, he was powerless to stay, either in life or art, the steady disintegration of his unquestionable powers, because of an infirmity of the will, from which his pride of race (he was a Jew) should have saved him. He lived in a state of protracted over-stimulation induced by more than drugs and alcohol. Complicated love-affairs, unjust criticism, and the chronic poverty in which he was kept by dealers who lured him into their shops and bartered his pictures for a bottle of spirits or a suit of old clothes, were factors which contributed in no mean measure to the deterioration of his already unsound health. Two devoted friends- Paul Guillaume and Zborowski eventually succeeded in improving his circumstances. At this period his life seemed to be on the point of developing more sanely and happily. But tuberculosis brought him to the hospital where he died. His brother, Emmanuel Modigliani, deputy for Leghorn and official orator of the Italian Socialist party, wired: "Give him a royal funeral." On the very night of his death, his mistress, Jeanne Hebuterne, killed herself in despair, under peculiarly horrible circumstances. And, as if to complete the bitter account, from that day his pictures began to fetch incredible prices. This romantic life was the background for an artistic talent that was extremely delicate but that relied too much on its sensuality for its successful development. Attractive, as he was himself, that art was the result of direct emotion and a waste of sensitory impressions due to an indolence too charming to be harshly censured. Modigliani was at his best in the rendering [ 127] Modern French Painters of tormented and ungainly attitudes, of arbitrarily posed nudes, more suggestive than sensual, and ever eloquent of his love for the ingenuousnesss of popular art and the Italian Primitives, of whom he was forever extolling the magnificent virtues. Now, it was just in this fealty to the externals of a tradition which, had he had more will-power, he would have cultivated in spirit, that we must seek the origin of a sentimental mannerism, which made his work, for all its charm, very fragile. One might be tempted to ascribe the stiff posing of his models to Cubist influence. Undoubtedly there is a certain geometrisation in his art, especially in his statues, which are perhaps the best of his work. But his none too malleable spirit was incapable of responding to influences, which did not work on his temperament atavistically. Modigliani was fundamentally Italian, an Italian Primitive, and of this there is evidence enough in his able cultivation of a tradition, which the art of modern Italy is incapable of practising, to allow us to add that Modigliani's art did not have time to develop and that such works as he left do not permit us to judge an effort which remained incomplete. Modigliani's art seems to have coincided with the period when, as every young artist must, he was studying tradition through his own temperament. We may note, furthermore, that his color was always very sober, save in his latest pictures, when a new method of modelling developed scales which he had never employed before. But it is certain that, like the majority of Latins, he considered his picture finished, once it had been conceived in terms of drawing. And it is for that reason perhaps that the drawing of his pictures always remains obvious, that the planes and volumes are creased with accents which give his picture the appearance of an illustration. In sum, the work of Modigliani is characterised primarily by an appearance of pathetic mawkishness due no doubt to his [ 128] Modigliani morbid sensibility, and this is its least interesting side. In point of execution, his art was mannered, a little artificial, a little Botticelli-esque, but charming; it was the art of a young man still imbued with the tradition of his land, whose glorious past he adored, of a young man greatly gifted but too unfortunate in life to realize as yet where artistic values really lay. A man of such gifts had much still to give at the age of thirtyfive, particularly at a time when a more tranquil life would have allowed of those plastic meditations, his interest in which could only be gathered from his conversation. Modigliani's most important pictures hang in the Paul Guillaume, Zborowski, Dr. Barnes, Bing, Francis Carco, Tzanck, Zamaron and other collections. See: Andre Warnod, Les Berceaux de la jeune Peinture. Andre Salmon, Propos d'Atelier. Francis Carco, Le Nu dans la Peinture Moderne. Waldemar George, L'Amour de 'Art. Reproductions of his work may be found in Les Arts a Paris. ROLAND OUDOT ROLAND OUDOT was born in Paris thirty years ago. He studied furniture and textile design at the School of Decorative Arts. For several years he worked also with Leon Bakst, with whose general ideas on art he was in sympathy. The first pictures he saw in the Louvre were those of Le Nain, and he is still fascinated by them. He was deeply touched, too, by the Breughels and the Vermeers. For Delacroix he has a boundless admiration; the "painting" of that master affects him profoundly, though his subjects leave him cold, while he does respond to those of Le Nain or Breughel. " I am much too young to have absolute or set ideas about art," writes Roland Oudot. "I am still groping and I have no [ I29] Modern French Painters idea what I shall be doing three months hence. In any case I do not believe in theories or formulas. As far as I am concerned, they matter very little. I think that a great many elements go to make up painting. The ideal would be to acquire as many as possible. A choice must be made, but slowly, I think, gradually. Mere fads ought, I suppose, to be avoided; but how and why should we resist the currents of the day? We see some painting that is extraordinarily intelligent, some that is purely sensitory. Might not both types be combined? What matters, it seems to me, is that we should express something. Every influence, every enthusiasm is valuable: we shall be sure to find our own way later on. I have, as you see, no ideas of my own, and I think that most of the young men of to-day are in the same boat. All that matters is what we may eventually produce. I do not feel that I am giving anything new, maybe I shall do so some day. Meanwhile I am not trying to force my talent or to misrepresent the value of what I may have to say." AMEDEE OZENFANT "I WAS BORN in i886," Ozenfant writes me, " in Picardy, where it rains unmercifully -so I love the sun. I was sickly in the North, but the South saved me. - Arcachon, an old Greek colony, a sea of light divided from the sky by the thinnest of horizon-lines; Saint-Sebastian, where the Concha is really carte postale: a lesson in purity, a lesson too in pure color (not orthodox). " Father: French-Spanish,, a great builder, collaborator with Hennebique, the inventor of re-enforced cement: constructionwork; my mother painted for a China factory (Sevres): lovely work. "Clear of Latin - after my second classic term in Arcachon [1 30 ] Amkdde Ozenfant - I ditch the living languages and paint out of doors; schooling over, back in Saint-Quentin, I work in the Art Department of the ltcole Quentin la Tour (founded by my renowned fellowtownsman) where the hours for classes are from 6 to 8 a. m.; the collection of pastels now in the Louvre belongs to that school, to which La Tour left it; La Tour is a little sugary, but ever so warm after the morning mists of my native town; Matisse, who comes from near Saint-Quentin, also studied in that school; at ii a. m. my train left for Paris, where I was preparing for the Beaux-Arts-architecture; soon chucked that bore and went to the Academie La Palette with Segonzac, La Fresnaye, and Moreau, where the criticism of J. E. Blanche, Cottet, and Desvallieres was sound. Settling in Paris, circumstances led me to travel a great deal: Holland and Venice taught me what Paris shows us every day: the subtlety of light. Three years of Russia made me forget- except for the prismatic whites of Moscow - three years of dyeing and exoticism; but I read there —Descartes, Pascal, Kant and the mathematician Henri Poincare, whose courses I took later on. Three years in the Ural: infinite horizons: makes you a little romantic, but able to appreciate Paris with fresh eyes -Paris, that mirage of the 'foreign' capital I Paris startles me more and more every day; Rome sobers me; Paris acts on me; meanwhile the restlessness of Cubism began by disgusting me but ended by affecting me, all the same. " 19I5: the date of l'Elan, written to establish a communication between Paris and her artists; my painting oscillates between Ozenfant-cum Russia and Ozenfant-cracked-by-Cubism. The war brought many changes; finally in 1918 my ideas are clear enough to pick up my own thread again; I am back in ArcachonDamascus; and with Jeanneret I am writing Apres le Cubisme, which steered painting, a bit roughly, a point or two off the course [ 3I ] Modern French Painters followed at that time by Cubism (I was afraid it was going stale in ornamentation). I realized, though, that no carpet, however beautiful, could produce great emotions or great sentiments - the aim, after all, of art. It was too bad, I thought, that a great artistic movement like Cubism should be, or should think itself unable to climb higher and should remain set in brilliant experiments. " In formulating ' Purism ' I had no intention of founding a school. You can't found a school; it just happens; anyway only the masters matter; I wanted to suggest an ideal, a desire, a determination, a dissatisfaction, for which that name was handy, theoretically. " Draw the line sharply between conception and execution. "Imagination: a gift, heredity, fatality. " Execution: a dictionary which you must master, a technic, which you learn either by invention or inheritance, but every term of which must be of a perfectly known sensible and psychological effect (invention being a matter of the unconscious, the instinctive; execution, of reason). "I am what I am; but when I want to paint, I satisfy that desire by methods, which I believe to be of proven value; I don't wait for inspiration to prompt me and tell me what methods I should use: I pour my inspiration into a mould which my reason and experience have prepared; I have spent years in acquiring a vocabulary. "In painting, a vocabulary is not made up of symbols, as in language: a vocabulary in painting consists of forms and colors, in other words of the properties of our senses and the systematic action of sensible acts on our senses and our mind; a word is a constant, a means of releasing an idea or a sentiment; whereas form and color, or rather color-form (for there is no color without form or form without color), I mean primary, not figurative color-form, is a kind of sensible word; I have tried to discover [132] Amedge Ozenfant among an infinite number of colors and forms those which produce a similar reaction on everyone, on the eyes and the mind and the heart. It is laboratory work, of course, but useful, I think, if one considers that the point is to arouse human emotion as surely as it is humanly possible. I firmly believe that the only works that count are those that have universality and durability. I founded L'Esprit Nouveau, and among other slogans I hammered in this one: if the Egyptians and the Negroes and the Greeks and the Chinese,... touch us through the medium of art, it is because they employ universal methods; men differ in respect of race, period and individuality, but they are much more similar than they are dissimilar, for all that. Descartes says, there are ten original passions. " Purism: an attempt to paint by the use of factors common to the senses and the soul, and not by a kind of symbolical code of a particular period; not by a happy combination of colors and forms, imitative or not, but by creating in the spectator states of feeling and sentiment (an art of expression) comparable in kind to the allegros, the andantes, etc. of music.... And death to the ambiguous, to plastic punning, to futile art... " Briefly (you don't expect me to write you a book, do you?), to break with empirical painting - we know where that gets you, as we know where the contrary does, where the knowledge of constantly perfected methods brought the Egyptians, the Greeks and even Corot...compare them with the pathetically muddled efforts of our innovators of to-day, with the inspirations and failures of those who lack the spirit of method. " Method, method.... and then get to grips with your soul and your Fate; try to be born lucky and born for painting; to have lived well, for you can't be better than you are, in your work; it is not art that fails, but the artist; and if his soul rises, his art rises; the vocabulary should be common property. I [I33] Modern French Painters like the vocabulary; still, Descartes did not write better than Voiture, he thought better." Books by Ozenfant: L'Elan (1915-1917). Aprgs le Cubisme, Le Purisme (1918). L'Esprit Nouveau, in collaboration with Jeanneret (1920-1924). Pictures in the Museums of Moscow and Chicago. Principal collections: Leonce Rosenberg, La Roche, Power, Speiser, de Montmollin, Friedrichs, etc. FRANCIS PICABIA FRANCIS PICABIA was born in Paris in I878. His mother was French, his father Spanish. He began to paint as a boy and at the age of seventeen he exhibited at 'the Salon des Artistes Franqais, to please his family. Perhaps it was that obligation which first fired his revolt against bad painting and his love, as a young man, of Impressionism. In any case, he was soon seeking inspiration of Sisley and Pissaro and displaying clearly pictorial qualities. A still groping personality, however, prompted him to develop his faculties more boldly. He was drawn to Cubism. He quickly grafted his personal tastes on the new formula and produced those vast canvases, in which his preference for colored rhythms is exercised at the expense of drawing and composition. He exhibited at the Section d'Or in I912, along with Gleizes, de Segonzac, L. A. Moreau and Marcel Duchamp. During the war he travelled in Amnerica and there, with Marcel Duchamp and de Zayas, he laid the first principles (after all, they did need some) of what Tzara later named Dadaism. With a charming wit, an appealing gift and, unfortunately, a huge fortune, Picabia naturally took to the r61le of the spoiled [ I34] Francis Picabia darling of painting and revelled in wittily exploding the timehonored dogmas of all ages. A review was founded, which bore for title the numeral " 391." It published drawings and especially poems, in which as an iconoclastic angel Picabia codified principles affecting every form of human activity, and always in a light, witty, paradoxical vein laden, at times, even with truth. But the anarchic imp was, unfortunately, only an anarch and a scoffer. Dada offered plenty of criticism but no reform. And it was as an intellectual fad that we accepted its amusing compositions, for their felicity or entertainment or for the odd frames into which they were forced. The graphic designs which Picabia showed at this time were full of shapely arabesques and unexpected spottings, but always a little disappointing. His work seemed to be the fruit of a deliberate pose rather than the spontaneous flowering of an emotion -a clever freak, the calm enormity of a conjuror rather than the expression of a human sentiment. Painting has many shortcomings, but, such as it is, it satisfies a human need. Our humanity may not be very brilliant, but to date we have found nothing better and all the scepticism in the world has suggested no modern improvement. Picabia's Dada-ist phase, developed later by Marcel Duchamp, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Jean Crotti land Suzanne Duchamp, must be relegated therefore to the case-history of an impossible revolt against a state of mind eternally governing painting, against the perennial canons of picture-making, in defiance of ideas for which as yet we have found no acceptable substitute. Dada was the occasion as well for many witty and amusing manifestations, at least while Picabia was its tutelary genius. Picabia has since felt the impossibility of settling the question he raised. He has returned to frankly traditional pictures, to portraits and figures, in which his elegance of line and science of [ 35 ] Modern French Painters color are happily exercised. His conversion suggests that he has decided to concede our regrettable little limitations, to the great chagrin, no doubt, of his delightful satiric romanticism. Beside a number of poems, Picabia has composed illustrations for books and a brilliant ballet for Rolf de la Mare and Jean Borlin (Relache), in which much that is charming suffers from much that is distressing. This ballet was a kind of intermediate form between the classic ballet and the music-hall parade. PASCIN PASCIN was born in Vidin, Bulgaria, March 31, 1885, of an Italian mother and Spanish-Jewish father, and somehow this makes him an American. This freak of citizenship was to result in a nomadic life and an art as vagrant. In his teens Pascin studied in the Viennese Art Schools; later he was a brilliant contributor to Simplicissimus. In 1905 he came to Paris. During the war he roamed through both Americas, Algeria and Tunisia. Finally he came home to Paris, to the studio on the Boulevard de Clichy, where his wild parties were celebrated. There he paints, draws and engraves from time to time. Pascin is primarily a plastic observer, whose remarks are couched in a nervous, bold and suggestive drawing. From the many lands he has visited he has returned with picturesque visions, in which the strangest elements perform a sort of fascinating tragi-comedy. The blacks of Havana, dancers and musicians, their negresses fleshy and naked or done up in extravagant duds, keeping company with gentlemen of color arrayed in old-fashioned frock coats and stovepipes, sing at the top of their bent their now fashionable " Blues." Strenuous Yankees, [ 136] Pascin -.horrible tarts, Jewish hucksters, recollections of New York and Louisiana supply the canvas on which Pascin embroiders extremely living and personal compositions, severe at times but, unlike Lautrec whom he often resembles, never bitter. In fact, in the very shrewdness of this art there is a certain genial good humor: Pascin is never splenetic, he never distorts -he jokes. He might murder mother and father for an epigram, but there would be no premeditation about it. As much may be said of his extremely able drawing, its natural skill derives from the direct impression his subject makes on him. Besides, Pascin does not caricature his contemporaries alone. Any pretext serves his vagabond pencil: mythology, Holy Scripture, fable and legend. Venus, Solomon, Lazarus and La Belle Helene turn up at all his parties, for if Pascin is a charming companion and an exquisite purveyor of bombes, his art resembles his life. He composes all his subjects as if for a costume-ball or a Montparnasse revel — diversions in which he is thoroughly at home. Here we strike the principal defect, or at least the quality of the defect, of Pascin's work. In his recent compositions he has lavished on nudes and disreputable scenes-swiftly sketched - an extremely clever sensuality, but, to obtain life and intensity, his principal qualities, he has allowed his drawing to become loose, crowded and inordinately distorted. Because of this licence, the characteristic vitality of his spontaneous work is lacking in his more seriously executed compositions, his oils, for instance. Pascin's drawing is a debauched drawing. When he rests, he becomes merely sensual, he loses the joviality which is his charm, he becomes melancholy and a little discouraged. Charming, for all that, his melancholy suggests a kind of post coitum animal triste, which might be, at bottom, the best definition of the true nature of our all too impressionable painter. Pascin's temperament, unquestionably, requires an over[ 371 Modern French Painters stimulation, which is frequently foiled by a feeling of disillusionment, that no honestly intellectual consideration can compensate, since his esthetic is based entirely on his senses. We may well wonder, therefore, what will happen to Pascin's art, when age will have quenched the fires of a temperament, whose powerful originality is really only an attribute of its physical qualities. Still, we need not be too nice in discussing the prospects of a talent, of which we cannot at present predict the development. Pascin charms us by his highly individual vision of a world all his own, the phases of which he rehearses in a drawing that is bold, frequently powerful in its feeling comment, and, much as we may wish to deny it, strangely fascinating. Pascin has illustrated a number of books, among others: Trois petites fillUes, by Andre Warnod, and Vgnus dans la balance, by Andre Salmon (Editions des Quatre Chemins). Collections: Paul Guillaume, Pierre, Warnod, A. Basier, and Carcu. See: Andre Salmon, Propos d'Atelier (Cres). Francds Carco, Le Nu dans la Peinture Moderne (Cres). Andre Warnod, Les Berceaux de la Jeune Peinture (Albin Michel). Waldemar George, L'Amour de I'Art. PICASSO PABLO PICASSO was born in Malaga, October 23, I88I. The name of Picasso is that of his mother: his father's was Ruiz. The scenes of his childhood were Pontevedra, La Ceruna and Barcelona. Very early in life he began to paint under his father, who was a drawing-teacher. In Barcelona he studied in an Art School and edited an art-magazine, El Renacimiento. In 1900 he visited Paris for the first time, and in 1903 he settled there permanently. How profoundly the many phases of his talent influenced the art of our day from then on we all know. [138] Picasso His beginnings in Paris were difficult, though his talent was immediately recognized by Guillaume Apollinaire, Andre Salmon, Max Jacob, Maurice Cremnitz and myself. Picasso amazed us by his piquant and profound intelligence and delighted us by his wit and often unsatisfying eccentricity of his humor. His first pictures, influenced by the Spanish manner, disclosed a phenomenal gift of observation, an amazing intensity of life, a little exaggerated, however, a trifle too exasperated. For a time he emulated the acuity of a Toulouse-Lautrec. But he soon discovered how much his model relied, especially in his painting, on a literary tendency which it had no need of. This was in 1903 and I904, Picasso's Naturalistic period, the period of suffering, emaciated figures inspired by the Primitives - Harlequins, acrobats, paupers and gutter-hags. This period is called his " blue manner." A trip to Holland in I905 was responsible for a more serene, more luminous view of life. That was the pink period. Of these two periods we need only retain the proof that Picasso, as a sentimental poet, showed an amazing acquaintance with tradition and an incomparable power as a draughtsman, despite an aridity which time could not attenuate but which at least has taken a markedly different form since. As yet, however, Picasso's personality had not fully emerged. His compositions were brilliant, but, for the most part, inspired by Spanish tradition. One thing, however, we knew: he was a remarkable assimilator. Only in 1907, under the influence of Cezanne and Negroid art, did he begin to evolve, gropingly, a more lyrical conception of plastic painting. From then on, indeed, we find him pursuing that analysis of form which, year by year, tends more and more to dissect the subject and decompose it into plastic factors without reference to appearance, attaining, [ 39] Modern French Painters in 1911, to an analysis so subtly purified that it creates a kind of new pictorial world, where lyric imagination is able of its own power alone, with the known forms of Nature, to create new groupings. The aspect of Nature is now left far behind, and only the traditions of the purest artistic canons are continued in principle and in spirit by a lyricism magnificently superior to the meagre Naturalist sublimation of commonplace reality. Developing steadily toward the depiction of a new world, the art of Picasso then passed through periodic re-births, each marked by some signal discovery. In one of his customary paradoxes he claims that his so-called Cubist art and the more realistic manner he cultivates simultaneously with it are one and the same phase of painting. Both, he would have us believe, show the same cult of the plastic, based on a common exploitation of drawing and composition. But wait: let us see. In the course of his Cubistic analyses, certain discoveries, as in any analytical experiment, may develop which are forthwith synthesized. Now, in Picasso's Cubist art we find some such discoveries; in his representational art we find others; but they can no more be compared to each other than can the beauties of a lyrically human music (Wagner) to those of a lyrical sonorous music (Bach). Take the face of any of his Naturalistic clowns of I9I8 and compare it to the face of a Cubist Harlequin of the same year: the difference between them is one of nature and not of degree, a difference inherent in the plastic-dramatic expression of the former and the purely lyrical conception of the latter. The point is that in the latter tendency Picasso was employing the idea of creation, which remains the most important factor of his influence. And it is a matter of common knowledge that, to secure the success of that new notion, he thought it necessary to experiment with materials [1 40] Picasso -sand and glued paper, - proof enough of the need of a new technic of expression to suit his new esthetic. Fundamentally, the motives which explain the Cubist Picasso were probably somewhat of this order. As good a reason for living as any is the stubborn, unconscious resistance some men make to an inexorable privation of liberty, only aggravated and increased by the hopeless speculations of the philosophers. Now, to foster one of our most valuable illusions of liberty, the invention of art remains the surest means of objectifying what little creative imagination we may have acquired. Nature has given us clearly defined sensorial capacities; but Art can give us others. Is not this the best reason in the world to believe that it may not be altogether impossible for us to defy Fate and play our lone creative hand by inventing objects non-existent in Nature but designed, at least, for more than the satisfaction of our sensual requirements? Happily, and to the unending glory of some of our rebellious angels, that priceless invention of art has now been restored to its original function, and to Picasso is mainly due the credit for that conquest. There are three kinds of form: the crude forms of Nature, the forms elaborated by geometry, and finally the forms emancipated from either restriction by art. Well: Picasso, breaking the bonds of representation, casting aside perspective and preconceived subjects, believes that the artist, no less than Nature, can create objects born of combinations of existing forms. And if their representation begets emotion, it will no longer be through the imitation of familiar arrangements of yet more familiar forms, but by the perceptible radiation of the pure properties of plastic elements, of elements originally combined. In other words, Picasso will give you a purely artistic -not a living — emotion. Our illusion of liberty here takes the form of Art pro [ I4I ] Modern French Painters posing to Nature an arrangement hitherto unknown to her, an arrangement which no longer duplicates but extends her. Art takes a phenomenal step forward, when Picasso makes colored plasticity furnish elements of emotion to our sensibility, independently of such known subjects as formerly restricted it. By employing the vital functions of painting and developing methods more and more personal, Picasso is pursuing, like the biologist, the essence of life, the plastic embryon. No one need be told that we apprehend objects sensibly before we classify them with regard to their uses. It was eminently right and proper, therefore, that we should restore the use of their properties to plastic entities. Of course, Picasso's combination of these elements obeys unchanging sensible canons of the co-ordination of form and that is why, though he departs from certain former esthetics, he is no longer the slave of his subject but the master of its constituent forms; that is why he no longer works as a copyist or a sensible observer, but as an animator of new architectures and gives the most convincing illusion of free initiative with which a creative artist can challenge ready-made Nature. And what brilliant proofs of liberty could not the philosopher draw from Picasso's work! Illusions, yes -our only truths. Art: a pure play of illusion. I hasten to add now that, brilliant as has been its essay in artistic emancipation, Cubism may yet succumb to the decorative fate usually reserved by routine for the rebellious angels of art. Picasso sensed that danger. Therefore, side by side with an art dictated by creative compulsion, he has composed in the classic tradition those more representational works, which have led Stupidity or Envy to say that he has forsaken his Cubist principles. But here his temperament as a man comes into play, since these pictures are based on life. Will then the psychological nature of the man allow him to create a lyricism of life, dictated [ 142] Picasso by the heart, as authentically valuable as the plastic lyricism invented by his extraordinary eye? Will the exasperation, will the uncommon susceptibility of his sensibility respond in harmony with the world, like the deep and simple humanity of a Poussin? Is he not more akin to a visionary like Greco than to a man like Corot? Time will answer this question. But, for the present, it is easy to see that Picasso's artistic activity is a fundamentally different thing from his human restlessness. Those who know him need not be told that in both phases he displays an impulsive, exasperated hyperbolic attitude, perfectly suited to the former but resulting in the latter in something cold, inhuman, metallic and relentless. In an art based on life those qualities are bound to appear. With some few exceptions (certain figures of the i908 period) Picasso's representational art is either sentimental or cold: it is rarely human. It was in this sense, perhaps, that he meant that his work was neither Cubistic nor Realistic, but the expression of one and the same attitude. In that case Picasso is trying to bend the eternal form of art - of the greatest art -to his own purposes as a rebellious angel. It is, in fact, only too clear that his persistent striving takes the form not so much of improvement as of exaggeration. And no doubt that is why he has borrowed the esthetics of Hyper-realistic pathology: its superhuman pretensions are thoroughly congenial to his own inhumanity of temperament. " You cannot invent every day," he said to me once. For the failure of creative imagination he seeks compensation, therefore, in a romantic interpretation of certain aspects of Nature; for a reality grown impotent and incapable of supplying him with plastic poetry, he substitutes notions borrowed from dreams, phantasmagoria and their distortions. But Picasso is still young, and humanity comes sometimes with years. Will they heighten his lyric power; will the latter [ '43 ] MAodern French Painters serve then merely as a laboratory for new methods, as an instrument of greater perfection? Let us hope so. Picasso has accustomed us to so many surprises. He may yet make terms with humanity, if only he remembers that the best is not necessarily what pleases us most, if only he will curb his virtuosity and forsake those extraordinary compositions which are perpetual dramas, and seek in the serenity of simplicity and love the inspiration of those good, human plastic tragi-comedies, which no art has surpassed and of which, since Renoir, we seem to have forgotten the precious and fecund example. We no longer ask to be startled (that has been done now) but to be moved by some authentically human lyricism. Picasso's pictures hang in all the great collections of the world, among others those of Gertrude Stein, Huldschmsky, Hoerschelmann, R. de Mare, Paul Rosenberg, Leonce Rosenberg, Kahnweiler, Vollard, A. Kann, Level, V. Kramar, Dr. Reber, Dutilleul, Dr. Barnes, La Roche, Morosoff, Tchoukine, Paul Guillaume, Pierre, and Baron Gourgaud. Picasso has illustrated with drawings, etchings and lithographs books by Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, and Jean Cocteau. He has composed the designs for several Russian Ballets of the de Diaghilew company: Parade, with music by Erik-Satie, and Le Tricorne Enchante, and for a version of Romeo and Juliet made by J. Cocteau. See: Rodriguez Codola, La Vanguardia (Barcelona, 1897), Raventos (Barcelona, 1898). Guillaume Apollinaire, La Plume (I905), Meditations esth6tiques (Figuiere). Camille Mauclair, L'Art Inddpendent Francais (1920, Renaissance du Livre). Max Deri, Die Neue Malerei (Munich, I9I3). Max Raphael, De Monet & Picasso (I920). A. J. Eddy, Cubists and Post-Impressionists (Chicago, 1919). Rote, Kunst fur alles (Berlin, I9I2-I3). Ludwig Coellen, Die Neue Malerei. Daniel Henry, Der Weg zum Kubismus. Dr. Lebesky, Umeni po impressionismo (Prague, 1923). Alfred Dreyfus, Der Querschnitt. Dr. Kramar, Kubismos (Prague, 1921). Maurice Raynal, Picasso, [1 44] Picasso Delphin Verlag, Munich. Maurice Raynal, Picasso (Edition de l'Effort Moderne). Pierre Reverdy, Picasso (Ed. de la N. R. F.). Jean Cocteau, Ode a Picasso. Waldemar George, Picasso (Edition Valori Plastici). Waldemar George, Picasso (Editions des Quatre Chemins). [ 45] Modern French Painters SUZANNE ROGER SUZANNE ROGER was born in Paris twenty-nine years ago. On the completion of her classical studies, she made a trip to Italy. There her discovery of realistic elegance, of the purity of the Paduan and the intellectualism of Florentine composition, awoke one of the most powerful and individual sensibilities of our time. The originality of the art of Suzanne Roger lies in the fact that she at once combined the plastic exigencies of a picture with that atmosphere of life, lacking which a work of art can hardly be more than an ornament. Thanks to her highly developed critical instinct, she knows how to give any subject she selects an equivalent of vitality which may at times be dramatic but which is never literary or theatrical. Her figures and landscapes are adapted with a rare sense of measure to the strict objectivity of her plastic ideas. And that is why they are living. Never, in her vision of a world which is as severe as that of a Romanesque Primitive, does she try to penetrate the quintessence of things in the manner of Expressionism, Walter Cale, Stefan Georges or Edschmidt, of the Saugrobheit, of Rouault, or the mysteries of Hyper-realism. We feel, on the contrary, in the work of Suzanne Roger a purely French atmosphere, the element of our Primitives, of the Romanesque Imagists, of Le Nain, of Corot. Impassiveness, bred of a repressed emotion, dominates her work: it is the source of an individual style averse to all mysticism. Her technic is tormented and uncertain, as it should be, since the artist is young and luckily in no danger of virtuosity or of repeating others' work or of a tendency toward the decorative. She attacks her problem at first hand and, with plain black, white and grey, develops her own novel sense of composition, varied and [ 146 ] Dunoyer de Segonzac vivified by an impressive lyricism. On that point the critical spirit of Suzanne Roger tolerates no compromise. Step by step she discovers for herself the secrets of color, and it is in this progress that her work is most appealing. In their conflict instinct and intelligence raise many hot problems. The pot of color and the kettle of composition often call each other black, and very roughly too. Many and violent are their quarrels, and their issue is frequently confusion. But we should know them for what they are - the expression of an unusually exacting will, which leaves little scope to chance and only succumbs to that poetry, which finally persuades and sometimes submerges her. That is what usually happens to great artists, in their salad days. DUNOYER DE SEGONZAC ANDRE DUNOYER DE SEGONZAC was born in Boussy-SaintAntoine, in the province of Quercy, July I6, 1885. Graduating from the Lycee Henri IV, he enrolled in the School of Oriental Tongues, took a degree in Sudanese dialect and travelled in Africa, Italy, Sicily and Spain. In I902 he entered the 1Ecole des BeauxArts, working in the classes of Luc-Olivier Merson and later in those of Jean-Paul Laurens. From the Beaux-Arts he passed to the Academie La Palette, where his teachers were Charles Guerin, Desvallieres and J. E. Blanche. "My preference," says Dunoyer de Segonzac, "goes to the arts of direct expression - to Egyptian sculpture, Roman busts, Rembrandt, the Douanier Rousseau, rather than to the periods of assimilation and intellectualism." In other words, what Dunoyer de Segonzac sees in art is not art itself, but a kind of prolongation of life, a more exact explanation, through painting, of the spectacle of Nature. Dunoyer [I471 Modern French Painters de Segonzac loves Nature, he loves a rich, fertile countryside, he loves sensual bodies, and he loves them with a passion so intense that it imparts a kind of tragic grandeur to his work. In him we see a sort of realism, which his vehemence soon develops into naturalism. His love for Nature is so enthusiastic, so fanatical, so akin to that of a visionary, that he never stops to consider her defects, to organize or correct them. He loves her faults as much as her virtues. Nature for him is a kind of honest, if loud-mouthed vulgarian, and he adores her just as she is. One might almost say that he asks her to emphasize her defects, when she poses for him. And as he bears the stamp of the Beaux-Arts which its pupils almost never lose, as, at bottom, he is as susceptible as most artists to " the artistic," Segonzac is not afraid to apply what he has learned and say to his model, " Hips, Mademoiselle," as no doubt he says, "Hips, Monsieur," to the mighty tree or valley that consents to pose for him. This much by way of warning that the Naturalism of Dunoyer de Segonzac is stamped with a kind of Art-School spirit, which the power of his brilliant palette cannot disguise. We see that spirit especially in those broadly and vividly moulded drawings, where everything rotund - everything sensual, in other wordsis vigorously and energetically accented, just as everything lush in matter magnetically attracts his deep and impulsive instinct for color. Some have spoken of Romanticism in connection with Dunoyer de Segonzac. But that formula implies too much intellectualism to cover his interest in the expression of natural visions in their essential truth. Segonzac is far more the painter than the poet of woman and earth, and his love for the exquisite Douanier Rousseau proves it. But the good Douanier never went to school. " Just as his drawings show his swiftness in seizing the symptoms of form and movement," writes Roger Allard, "so his [I48] Dunoyer de Segonzac painting proves his determination to render the essence of matter, the mystery of the vegetal realm, its thickness and density, and the magnificent animality of the human body." And that is quite true. It remains to be seen, though, if his pathetic conception of art is not subject to limiting methods which, far from developing an artistic motivation, enclose it on the contrary in the little daily round of our immediate sensual appetites. The art of de Segonzac is professedly an art of appearances, that is to say, of the phenomenon, the particular instance, the natural mirage. Now all that may be very appealing, but it is not moving. Besides, are there really so many spectators in need of a helping hand to discover love or Nature? Are we not sufficiently educated artistically, to-day, to dispense- if I may be allowed the expression - with a nurse-maid? Aphrodisiacs, effective as they may be, seem to us both useless and dangerous. We require something better of art than the more or less disguised stimulation of our sentiments, or a copy of the aspects of Nature. I use the word " aspects " advisedly, because the work of Dunoyer de Segonzac offers the aspect of reality (Courbet) rather than its soul (Corot). For in the heart of reality, and despite its heat and its turbulence, there is an order, a measure, a kind of mechanical suspiration, which should lead the artist to give his work that style that is the essence of art and that Nature herself possesses as a secret and inflexible armature. But with Dunoyer de Segonzac the cult of apparent reality entails the absence of all style. And despite his indubitable mastery of matter and the power of his line, despite his dynamism and the vigor of his temperament, his work remains, compared to that of Le Nain or Corot, what a Russian dance is to a Spanish one or a Charleston to the pure dance-forms of some of our own French provinces. [ I49] Modern French Painters Dunoyer de Segonzac has been a member of many Salons des Independents. He is the author of stage-designs for Nebuchadnezzor, a tragic ballet by Maurice de Faramond, and of theatrical costume plates executed by Paul Poiret. He was responsible for much of the camouflage on the French front during the war. His paintings hang in the Paul Poiret, Claude Roger Marx, Turner, Marseille, Princess Bassiano, and other collections. Albums of drawings and books illustrated: Shkharazade, twentyfour drawings of a Russian Ballet (Editions Sheherazade, I9I0). Isadora Duncan, Critical Commentary by Fernand Divoire (La Belle Edition). XXX Dessins. Mesdames Isadora Duncan, Ida Rubinstein - Boxeurs. (Editions du Temps Present) Notes prises au front (Societe Litteraire de France, I917). Chansons Aigres-Douces, by Francis Carco (Drawings for the) (Collection des Cinque, Paris, I912). Les Croix de Bois, by Roland Dorgeles. Etchings and stereotyped drawings, (La Banderole, 1920). La Boule de Gui (Id. Ibid., I922). Tableau de la Boxe, by Tristan Bernard, twenty-four etchings and dry-points (Editions de La Uouvelle Revue Francaise). L'Education sentimentale, by Gustave Flaubert (drawings for) (Librairie de France, 1922). Contributions to illustrated periodicals: La Grande Revue, Shdherazade, La Vie, L'Oeuvre, Le Tgmoin, Montjoie, L'Elan, Le Crapouillot, Le Nouveau Spectateur, New Age (London), The Egoist (London), Revue de France et des Pays Franfais, Almanach des Lettres et des Arts (1917), L'Armoire en Bois de Citronier (1919), Almanach des Muses, Ariane, Architectures (I92I), La Revue Musicale... See: Francis Carco, Le Nu dans la Peinture Moderne (Cres). Dunoyer de Segonzac, by C. R. Marx (Cres). Rene-Jean, Preface for the catalogue of his Exhibition held in 1914. [ 50] Severini SEVERINI SEVERINI, who was one of the leaders of Futurism, has since adopted the Cubistic formula and drawn from it a neoRenaissance style. SOUTINE SOUTINE was born in Vilna, where he studied for several years in the School of Fine Arts. In 1913 he came to Paris, worked for some time in the Cormon Studio, and lived in Montparnasse with Modigliani, whose poverty he shared. It was only thanks to Zborowski and Paul Guillaume that he finally escaped from his lamentable situation. No doubt that situation was in keeping with his feverish, disconcerting, hyperbolic art, but certainly not with the Bohemian tastes, which were a concomitant of his restlessness and his strange talent. Soutine, it appears, has literary tastes: he loves Baudelaire, Poe, Gogol, Rimbaud, Flaubert and, above all, Dostoievsky. In painting his predilection is for Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Courbet and Cezanne. He detests one artist: Van Gogh, that is to say, the one man whose temperament most resembles his own. The art of Soutine is the expression of a kind of Jewish mysticism through appallingly violent detonations of color. His work is a pictorial cataclysm, comparable, in its exasperated vision, to the reckless frenzies of martyrs and heroes. The Naturalism of this art is spiritualised by its very excesses. And its impetuosity, its paroxysms, its flood and fury, its eruptions of colors savagely confused, compounded and juxtaposed, are not lacking in power, but they sting and blind the visual sense like a passing tornado, like a scorching mistral. [151] Modern French Painters As may be readily inferred, this art is the very antithesis of French tradition. Despite its popular inspiration, it defies all measure and control, in drawing and composition. The subject is flung on the canvas any which way; it might as easily have landed beside it as on it, or at least in one of its corners, as very often it does. Some timid attempts at classic arrangement show that Soutine has not entirely forgotten the Vilna Academy or the Cormon Studio. But all those distorted, devastated, un-axed landscapes, all those appalling, inhuman figures, treated in a stew of unheard-of colors, must be regarded as the strange ebullition of an elementary Jewish mentality which, weary of the yoke of its rigorous Talmud, has kicked over the Tables of the Law, liberating an unbridled temperament and indulging at last in an orgy of criticism, destruction and reconstruction of Nature - cursing the while, and cursing very copiously, its Creator. Pictures by Soutine hang in the Dr. Barnes, Bing, Pierre, Guillaume, Zborowski, Gosset, Level and other collections. TCHELITCHEW PAUL TCHELITCHEW was born in Moscow, September 8, I898, of parents who were only mildly interested in art. He was given a good education in a local grammar school, but he had to train himself artistically. At the age of eighteen he began to travel, visiting Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Turkey and France. The influences which developed him were various, and all the more so since he met with too many material difficulties to paint regularly. Until very recently even he was engaged in decorative work in Germany; but he left it to return to France and devote himself entirely to painting. He believes that there is too much talk of painting. [152] Tchelitchew "These interminable artistic discussions have produced any number of schools, movement and principles. It is time to call a halt on all these programs and manifestos, which are as dead as a door nail the day they are published! Painting has become a purely outward process, the copy of a copy. Our brain, our eyes, our hands, are after all only tools, by which to express some conception. Art is the conception of a composition. And that is why, among thousands of so-called painters, we see so few personalities to-day." The art of Tchelitchew immediately attracted attention: here was a personality bent on developing the plastic lyricism restored by Cubism in a romantic feeling for the monumental, which Cubism had often lacked, and for lack of which it grazed, in the hands of its followers, the fashionable and the futile. Tchelitchew is a man for whom art means sensible intelligence rather than an over-rationalised sensuality. His work shows an artistic culture, in which all the historic manners to which his temperament responds have been faithfully collated. Chaldea, pre-Hellenic art, Roman mosaics, Byzantine art, and certain Renaissance painters (Piazzetta, Pietro Cossa, Piero della Francesca) have developed in him a laudably objective feeling. Tchelitchew's unmistakable personality has honestly adopted the permanent motives of art and not those of fashion. He employs it assiduously in an intelligent interpretation of tradition. We may be sure that in time he will lose a certain dry pomposity, a certain plastic vacuity inherent in those objective conceptions, which might perplex even the Masters and all the more so therefore an artist so young, but one whose influence is beginning to be felt by a great many painters. [ 53] Modern French Painters TERECHKOVITCH TERECHKOVITCH was born in Moscow in 1902. He was sixteen when he entered the local School of Fine Arts, but he soon left it, nauseated by the anti-artistic spirit which governed the education he received there. He travelled, came to Paris where he spent a year, then visited Italy, Greece and Turkey, and finally returned to Paris. Turkey made a strong impression on him; the palaces of the Bosphoros developed his love of color. We may easily detect the trend of Terechkovitch's art by remarking first that, due to his Israelite origin, he conceives of art as a method of dramatic expression. In the tragic feeling of the Byzantine mosaicists he felt a charm akin to his own Naturalism. Certain technical aspects of mosaic art have also affected him; the lyricism of the Gethsemane in Saint Mark's and its furrowed modelling are not unlike the manner in which he emphasises and condenses the volumes of his figures, his still lifes and flowers. Furthermore, his Oriental sumptuousness of color is sustained by a very brilliant and varied palette. Terechkovitch is one of the most gifted and proficient representatives of the Naturalistic School and of what Adolphe Basler calls the " dirty dishrag " manner, a manner common to many Jewish artists of to-day. UTRILLO MAURICE UTRILLO was born in Paris, December 25, 1883. He is the son of Suzanne Valadon, to whom he owes his love of art and his first instruction. As a student at the College Rollin he was proficient, but it was at this time that he contracted the [ I54] _ _.__ ____ _ ____ ___ __~_____1 Utrillo vice, which ruined his sound intelligence and exasperated his already precocious sensibility. His family was then living in the Seine-et-Oise and every evening, to reach his home, the lad would beg a lift readily accorded him by the plasterers of Pierrefitte, who gave him a seat on their cart and invited him in to many a drink on the way. Utrillo took to drinking, unknown to his family, and when the physicians attempted to cure him, it was too late. It was then that, to keep watch over him, his mother urged him to paint: he was nineteen when he first took up the brush. His first models were the familiar scenes of the Parisian suburbs. Churches, town-halls, barracks and dram-shops became his favorite subjects. The love which he showed for his new profession seemed to promise a serious improvement. Unfortunately his craving for drink, the influence of a grandmother who spoiled him and supplied it in secret, and lastly his arrival in Montmartre only aggravated his case. In I902 and again in 19I0 he had to be confined in a sanatarium - each time without results. He frequently escaped from these institutions; friends would save him from the jeers of the street and lead him home to the rue Cortot. Meanwhile, though he showed every sign of a premature breakdown, Utrillo was producing pictures, some of which indicated the advent of a very great painter. The dealers were already disputing him. Attracted by his budding fame, the winemerchants would shut him up in their back-shops with colors, brushes, canvas and cans of wine, releasing him only when he had guzzled, painted and, of course, left behind him the pictures he had executed. In his study of Maurice Utrillo, Francis Carco has established a well-considered classification of his work into four periods: i) from I903 to I904-05, from life; 2) from I905 to I907, the [I55] Modern French Painters so-called Impressionistic period; 3) from I907 to I910, the white period; 4) from I9Io to the present day, the period of color. We might also divide Utrillo's work into two fairly clearly defined types. The first, which would extend to I9I8, would include all his more pictorially conceived pictures. Nature meant little to him. He painted by the light of the lamp and from memory. His pictures of this period are often badly constructed and incomplete. On the other hand, they have the vitality of a real pictorial sincerity: they are less artistic, more popular. The second type, which extends from I918 to the present, is characterized by a more artistic concern with technic. There is perhaps less fire, less youth in these pictures but, on the other hand, they are better realized. This later evolution is due no doubt to the fact that, after having been five times interned, Utrillo now enjoys a much improved state of health. His slowly recovered lucidity accounts for his making, at an advanced age, experiments which would normally succeed the first fires of youth. Maurice Utrillo is a creature of exception. His physiological ruin is well known: it is unnecessary either to dwell on it or to conceal it. Much as one might be tempted to, it would be a mistake, in fact, to do so, since it is not an accident that explains his enigmatic talent, but merely a curious coincidence. In fact, the mental disorder of Maurice Utrillo may have had much to do with the development of his ability. The miracle of his pictorial qualities lies, I believe, in the sensual hypertrophy with which he is endowed. Luckily there is little trace in his work of the elementary ideology so often met with among unhealthy painters. In that he has a distinct advantage over Van Gogh, whose work is superior to his in other respects. Utrillo is never obsessed by an extra-pictorial Don-Quixotism. Utrillo is an eye, an admirable exact eye, that discovers at once the right [156] Utrillo tone, the exact shade, with amazing certainty. His best pictures are those in which he is least artistic. That the art of Utrillo is accompanied by no extra-pictorial consideration admits, to my mind, of no dispute. Some have tried to make out a case for him as the painter of the suburbs, the bard of the outer boulevards, of those old scabby walls still known as " leprous," of dark corners and disreputable alleys. No. In Utrillo there is no literature nor, by so much the less, any sentimentality. If he paints Montmartre, it is not out of any sentimental affection for it. There is no more love or romance in his choice of Montmartre scenes than in the supposed love of the farmer for his soil. The proof of it is that in his latest pictures the subject has become so secondary, literary associations so lacking, that he finds his theme in a post-card. This fact is a matter of common knowledge. Those same "leprous " walls reappear in the picture of some cathedral he has never seen quite as often as in the aforesaid cards. In reality, Utrillo finds the most exact and scintillating combinations of tones only by the light of his oil-lamp. This proves that he makes the " motive" merely an indispensable pretext for his eye, and that if, as Albert Flament has said, some of his landscapes look like wonderfully embroidered dish-rags, it is not because they are conceived in a spirit of vulgarity or mawkishness, but solely because he knows how the meanest as well as the most brilliant color can be made to furnish extremely rich and rare variations. Maurice Utrillo, therefore, is not a poet of the palette, as he has been unfairly described, but a painter and the most authentic painter imaginable. Consequently the origin of his talent lies perhaps, and to a greater degree in his case than in most, in what the psychologists have recognized as the automatism of certain of our subconscious acts. The automatic, we know, need not imply the spontaneous. [s57] Modern French Painters But if an automatic act, unlike a reflex one, is an act requiring no direct external provocation, it describes exactly the case of Maurice Utrillo. The act of picture-making is a more or less involuntary one for Utrillo. He can not modify it at will, because - I repeat -his work is totally lacking in intellectual conception. The pictorial act, in Utrillo's case, might be included in the category of mechanical movements described by Charles Richet: just as the pianist plays without thinking, so Utrillo paints, while his mind is on something else. It may be said, therefore, that the pictorial act, in Utrillo's case, is not free or deliberate, in contradistinction to the practice of artists more especially concerned with esthetic conceptions. Hence there is something lacking in the work of this artist. Compared to that of the greatest, it is unfinished. The absence of intellectualism forbids all possibility of an art not strictly sensual. We need not conclude therefore that it is that of a madman. But it is obvious that as a rule the laws of plastic prosody are a sealed book to him and that his most successful works are largely brilliant improvisations, sparkling notations lacking in all the difficulties and also the plastic inventions derived from experiment, from the sense of the lyrical requirements of composition and design. The work of Maurice Utrillo, therefore, is open to a fundamental criticism, which the rigorists of drawing and composition would heartily applaud. But here we must reckon with the miracle which I mentioned. The lack of reason and sensibility in Utrillo's work is of course undeniable, but it must be admitted that the sensuality which governs it is of the noblest. It is not a literary or sentimental sensuality, like that of imitative art, deriving its inspiration from any random idea; no suggestive anecdote ever sullies its purity. Utrillo's sensuality is that of the painter par excellence. Pure [ I58] Utrillo color is his province, as pure form is that of others. Without lapsing into the defunct theories of Orphism, Utrillo treats Nature wth childlike simplicity. He simply goes ahead and colors her with his often admirable daubs, like a child illumining its story-book. Utrillo has been described as a belated Romantic; but if a school must be found for him, let us describe him as a popular Romantic, as a kind of illustrator. That one excellence covers, in his case, all the generic virtues of art, and that is why he is so exceptional. Others have maintained that he belongs in the main line of the great French landscapists. Maybe he does, but, if so, it is quite by chance. He has been compared to Sisley and Pissaro. Here again the mania for classification over-reaches itself. Utrillo, of course, knew all there was to be known about the Impressionists, but he knew something more. I should even say that he recreated them, as it were, in his own purely feeling way: that he is without their tics, their apriorism, their deliberate adherence to system. And his greatest glory is this: in his work the mechanism never creaks, you never see the armature, you are never reminded of the machinery of a particular manner or school. That more than anything gives it its popular character, strong with the strength of a pure pictorial inspiration. In sum, and as I said above (exceptional abilities, normal results), it would be interesting for a psychiatrist to determine why the semi-insanity of Utrillo has produced such sensible pictures, when so many idiotic concoctions (I have in mind certain allegorical canvases of the official Salon) are signed by reputedly right-minded painters. But here we touch on the curious problem of popular painting. At all events, that is how the likable genius of Utrillo works. To use an old stencil, true in this case, he paints as he breathes: [ I59] Modern French Painters he is a little to the cult of pure color what the Douanier Rousseau was to Idealistic painting. And we shall long be perplexed by the curious paradox which makes the art of an Utrillo, a sickly, intoxicated, unreasonable Utrillo, not only the least morbid and ailing imaginable, but actually the most brilliant in health, freshness and youthfulness. Utrillo has composed a Russian Ballet, Birabeau, for S. de Diaghilew. His work hangs in the Museums of Nantes and Grenoble, in the Luxembourg, and in several foreign galleries, as well as in the following collections: Zamaron, Lepoutre, Paul Guillaume, A. Flament, A. Level, F. Carco, Guillemin, G. Aubry, Bernheim, Bing, A. Tabarant, A. Warnod, Mazaraki, Dorival, Dr. Viard, Decourcelle, Gourgaud, Levasseur, and Deslignieres. See: Utrillo, by Francis Carco (Nouvelle Revue Franqaise). Albert Flament, Preface to his Catalogue, I9I9. Edmond Jaloux, L'Art Vivant. Maurice Raynal, L'Art d'Aujourd'hui, 1924. Robert Rey, L'Amour de 'Art, I925. Gustave Coquiot, Maurice Utrillo, 19I2. Andre Salmon, Les Gouaches d'Utrillo (Ed. des Quatre Chemins). Florent Fels, Des Querschnitt, I925. Utrillo, by Adolphe Tabarant (Ed. Bernheim jeune, I926). SUZANNE VALADON SUZANNE VALADON was born in Limoges in i867. At the age of fifteen she was in touch with artistic life. She knew Puvis de Chavanne, for whom she posed for a number of years, after abandoning her profession as an acrobat, in which she had gained only an injury. In i886 or thereabouts she attracted the attention of Renoir. She posed for him too, painting meanwhile, or rather painting professionally, for the first time - as a matter of fact, she had [ 60] Suzanne Valadon drawn since childhood. The society of the great artists she met at this time proved of lasting and immediate benefit. ToulouseLautrec was struck by one of her drawings and showed it to Degas. He was no less amazed; later he wrote to her: " When are you going to show me some more of those good, hard, supple drawings? " In fact, Suzanne Valadon owed to her temperament, harassed by the vicissitudes of an often cruel life, a gift of shrewd realistic observation, which she translated into spontaneous, sharp and supple drawing. Less austere than Degas, less cruel than Lautrec, her sense of reality took the form of a truth to life, a naturalness not uncalculated to surprise the tastes of a period when Naturalism tended toward caricature. From Degas she derived merely her scrupulousness of method, her exhaustive intensity of observation and her avoidance of facility. She declined to follow, in Lautrec, a dramatic inspiration often developed to the detriment of plastic instinct. In color she learned much from Cezanne. Her light but vigorous modelling is developed by linear furrows, which show her determination to subordinate color to strict design. It gives her work a certain hardness but also a precision which, by some happy miracle, escapes any suggestion of the decorative and proves, too, a very resolute personality. The art of Suzanne Valadon has taken a new turn in recent years, and one which robs that charge of hardness of all point. Penetrated by the plastic resources of the subject which inspires her, she is gradually outgrowing the limited reality of her drawing. She now sees reality in its purified essence; the plastic subject lives its own life. Suzanne Valadon has become more and more of a painter; she has mastered her medium with a certainty which can go no further. That is why she lets the plastic action of her picture develop at will, at the whim of her brush, relying [ 161 ] Modern French Painters on her sense of measure to halt it where necessary, and without any preconceived contour in mind to correct its development. Furthermore, her recent pictures are animated by a naturalness rather new in the course of their plastic development, a quality which we may attribute perhaps to the fact that she has adhered to no group, no preconceived idea. In one of those stubborn impulses which are the mark of her personality, she perpetually reasserts the tendency of her lawless temperament to work only with such methods as she has acquired by her own means. Perhaps the work of Suzanne Valadon coincided with a period none to well suited to appreciate the nature of her intentions. She was a little young in the days of Degas, of Lautrec. And her work is not adequately honored to-day, it is because other artistic interests, risen since the days of Naturalism, have been responsible for the neglect of a peculiarly sincere and clear-sighted contribution to art. But time will settle these questions. And Valadon's work will have a secure place for its technical science, the dignity of its inspiration and the consistency of her own views. We should not forget either her difficult struggle to develop the talent of her son, Maurice Utrillo, a talent which he owes in large part to his mother's instruction. Suzanne Valadon is represented in the following collections: Parent, Zamaron, Weill, Tzanck, Eugene Descaves, Aubry, Lepoutre, Bode, Netter, Marien Pres, and Werner Ducker. She is also represented in the Luxembourg and in the Museum of Grenoble. See: Suzanne Valadon, by Robert Rey (Edition de la Nouvelle Revue Francaise). [ I62] Vlaminck i VLAMINCK MAURICE DE VLAMINCK was born in Paris, April 4, I876, in the rue Pierre-Lescot, aux Halles, above the fruit and fresh vegetable shop of the Maison Decugis. His parents were Flemish and he was educated in the Vezinet, where his first teachers would send home notes such as this: " A poor pupil - undisciplinedhot-tempered - generous - impulsive. Has not learned his geography. Reconstructs history to suit himself." When he grew up, Vlaminck excelled as a cyclist and a selftaught violinist. He even turned these two aptitudes to pecuniary profit. Between times, he wrote some gay novels: Ames de mannequins, Tout pour fa, D'un lit dans l'autre. He took a great liking to his neighbor, Derain, and the two husky athletes were often to be seen canoeing on the Seine together. Vlaminck produced his first pictures in 1903. They were violently colored landscapes of the environs of Chatou, inspired by Van Gogh. His first sale was made to Ambroise Vollard, who bought him out. The story goes that Vlaminck was consciencesmitten at having, as he thought, fleeced the poor man, and threw in for good measure a hand-carved table. As early as I908 Vlaminck joined the Fauves, and his art immediately created an impression by its spirit, its good nature, its conviction and many other qualities of popular appeal. Vlaminck has never been artistic, in the professional sense of the word. "I never set foot inside a Museum," he writes, "and I have not been decorated with the Legion d'Honneur." He paints as he plays the violin or canoes or farms or writes verse or makes love or adds to the world's wealth of lovely girls. " I don't ask my neighbor how he loves his wife to learn how to love mine," he wrote once. " I love like a man, not like a schoolboy or a professor. All these a priori styles like Cubism or Ron[ 63 ] Modern French Painters dism leave me cold. I am neither a milliner nor a pedant nor a scientist. I flee the mustiness, the monotony and the austerity of the Museum, for they remind me of nothing so much as my grandfather's fury, when I played hookey... The Cubist uniform is very militaristic and you know how much of a soldier I am! Painting is a damn sight more difficult and more stupid than that. Cookery is one thing and chemistry another." These spirited remarks indicate Vlaminck's interests - his desire to blend art with one of the needs of our prolific, vegetative life. In that his art is essentially popular. The facility and lack of study in his charming work, powerful as it often is in its sheer bravura, are perhaps the explanation of a uniformity somewhat - despite his convictions- militaristic. But if his resources are limited, Vlaminck uses them with consummate mastery. There is a real fascination in his romantic fluency, his science of chiaroscuro and the transitions for which he is famous. And we cannot but like Vlaminck for the youthful fertility of his inspiration, his vehement imagination and charmingly contradictory ideas. Collections: Bernheim, Kahnweiler, Aubry, Mazaraki, F. Fels, Gourgaud, Vanderpyl, Aubier, and Simon. See: Vlaminck, by Daniel Henry (Ed. Klinghardt und Biermann, Leipzig). Vlaminck (Ed. Stock). Vlaminck, by Francis Carco (Edition de la Nouvelle Revue FranSaise). [164] .Th e Plates Y V E S AL IX: Portrait of the Artist's Mother [167] YVES ALIX: The Balcony [ I68] YVES ALIX: The Harbor [169] A N D R E B A U C H ANT: Pericles Justifying the Use of the People's Money [70o] ANDRE BAUCHANT: The Assumption [ I7I ] ANDRE BAUDIN: Maternity [ 172 ] M. R. ANDRE BAUDIN: Nude with Steps [173 ] LonIecuon r. u. van i FRITZ VAN DEN BERGHE: The Siesta [I74] LUlIectOun r...van necKle-luonne FRITZ VAN DEN BERGHE: The Eternal Vagabond [175] LolleCcuon Leonce Rosenoerg MARIA BLANCHARD: Still Life (1920) [I76] Collection Paul R MARIA BLANCHARD: First Commun'on (1919) [i77] ~senberg ion Leonce Rosenberg MARIA BLANCHARD: A Little Girl Seated [178] UOlleCtlon iviazaraKi BOMBOIS [ 79] __ Collection nentscn R. T. BOSSHARD: A Back (I926) [i8o0] Collection Bliancne R. T. BOSS H ARD: Nudes against a Viaduct [ i8i ] M I L E B 0 YE R: Portrait of the Princess Lucien Murat [182] I 1 - - -iP - - -- - - F-CI IolleCtion raul Kosenoerg GEORGES BRAQUE: Still Life [ 83] ^UllCtLUII raul n steinilUe l GEORGES BRAQUE: Figure (I925) [ 184] GEORGES BRAQUE: StillLife [ 85 ] MARC CHAGALL: Flowers (1926) [ i86] MARC CHAGALL: My Village and I [ I87 ] M A RC C HA GA L L Portrait of aRabbi [ i88 ] GIORGIO DI CHIRICO: Melancholy (I913) [ 89] Collection Leonce Rosenberg GIORGIO DI CHIRICO: The Consoler (1926) [ 190] GIORGIO DI CHIRICO: Self-Portrait lurLg ['9']1 C o U B I N E: Landscape in Northern Provence [192 ] COUBINE: Bowl-players [ I93] VA N DO N GE N: Portrait of the Artist's Father [ I94] VAN DO N G E N: The Bather (Deauville) [ I95 ] ROBERT DELAUNAY: Saint Sve'rin (I907) [ 96] ROBERT DELAUNAY: The Eiffel Tower [ I97] ROBERT DELAUNAY:The Runners (I926) [ 98] ANDRE DERAIN: The Kitchen Table ul tuuiiaUme [ I99] Barnes rounaatlon ANDRE DERAIN: Woman Seated [ 200] viazaraki ANDRE DERAIN: Pastel [20 ] Collection noaebert MAURICE DUFRESNE [202 ] lection MAURICE DUFRESNE [ 203 ] MAURICE DUFRESNE [ 204 ] Collection RAOUL DUFY: Ruins in Sicily [ 205 RAOUL DUFY [ 206] Lollectlon rlerre LOeD ROGER DE LA FRESNAYE: Landscape [207 ] Collection Pierre Loeb ROGER DE LA FRESNAYE: The Conquest of the Air [ 208 ] ion Pierre Loeb ROGER DE LA FRESNAYE: Still Life [ 209 1 OTHON FRIESZ: The Harbor of Toulon [210 ] Collection Granoff OTHON FRIESZ [ 211 ] ALBERT GLEIZES: Women Sewing (I913) [212] ALBERT GLEIZES: Mural Painting (1924) [213] EDOUARD GOERG:.Phryne (I925) [214] ____ __ EDOUARD GOERG: Luck (I925) [215] Collection Mendelssohn-Bartholdi JUAN GRIS: Peasant Woman (I925) [216] Collection Alphonse Kann JUAN GRIS: The Blue Carpet (I925) [ 217 ] UllNCtUUII DIarUS Ttuurgt UU J UA N G R I S: The Drummer (I926) [218] MARCEL GROMAIRE: Woman Washing (1906) [ 219] MARCEL GROMAIRE: Nude with Oriental Carpet (1926) [ 220 ] H A L IC K A: Interior [22I ] HALICKA: Bathers (I926) [ 222 ] KISLING: Young Girl (I926) [ 223 ] KISLING: Young Girl (I926) [224] , " - 1,-j., to- --- JEANNERET: Still Life (1926) [ 225]1 JEAN-FRANCIS LAGLENNE: Portrait in a Garden (1924) [ 226 ] t8 Collection Baron- Gourgaud JEAN-FRANCIS LAGLENNE: Panel (I926) [ 227 ] Collection Paul Rosenberg MARIE LAURENCIN [228] Collection Paul Rosenberg MARIE LAURENCIN [ 229] FERNAND LEGER: (I920) [ 230] FERNAND' L"EGEW'' [ 231]1 FERNAND LEGER: (1923) [ 232] ANDRE LHOTE: The Beach(I922) [233] ANDRE LHOTE: Woman Bathing (1926) [234] AUGUSTE MAMBOUR: A Family (1925) [235 ] AUGUSTE MAMBOUR: A Green Object (I925) [236] L.onlecuun n LOUIS MARCOUSSIS: Bottle and Cithar (1922) [237] __ _1 ____ __ _ ______C _ __ LOUIS MARCOUSSIS: Still Life with the Great Bear (I926) [238] CLIUVII i.azaraiK M EN K E: Nudes with Fruit [239] JEAN METZINGER: Landscape [240] Collection Leonce Rosenberg JEAN METZINGER: Woman Dressing (I926) [241] Collection Pierre Loeb JOAN MIRO [242 ] olleCtlOin PaUl iiullaume MODIGLIANI [243] MODIGLIANI [ 244] ___ _ _ _ __ MODIGLIANI: Sculpture (I912) [ 245 ] ROLAND OUDOT [ 246 ] ROLAND OUDOT [247] L.UIlUCLlUI rower AMEDEE OZENFANT: Still Life (I923) [248] I LVOSLCO W AMEDEE OZENFANT: Still Life [249] Collection Pierre Loeb FRANCIS PICABIA [250] _ ___ ____ FRANCIS PICABIA [25I] -. -.. -. -. -... -, -. -: -. 7. Coil P A IN: Embarkation for the Isles [252] PASCIN [ 253] PASCIN [ 254] Collection Paul Rosenberg PICASSO: Clowns (I905) [255 ] Collection Paul Rosenberg PICASSO: Clown (1918) [256] PICASSO: Still Life (I924) [257] collectul SUZANNE ROGER: The Friends and the Dead n Simon [258] Collection Simon SUZANNE ROGER [259] DUNOYER DE SEGONZAC [260] DUNOYER DE SEGONZAC [26 ] SEVERINI: Dancing at the Monico [262] Collection Paul Gi SOUTINE: Still Life [263 ] SOUTINE: The Cook [264] _ Collection Pierre Loeb T C H ELI T CHEW [265] TCHELITCHEW [266] T ERECHKOVITCH: Portrait of the Town Drummer of Avallon [ 267] Collection Mazaraki U T R I L L: The Gully of Presnes [ 268 ] __ __ ____ Collee U T R I L L: Avenue de Paris in Sannois n Mazaralk [269] olleCtlO n iviazaraKi U T R I L L 0: Protestant Church in Baigts [ 270] SUZANNE VALADON: Fishermen [ 271 ] SUZANNE VALADON: Nude (1926) 272 ] SUZANNE VALADON: Portrait (1925) [ 273] ctioln vliazaraKi VLAMINCK: Landscape [274] Collection VLAMINCK: Landscape [275] I I I. ti I I,I 7,I I. 4, w THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN DATE DUE JUN 1 9 1997 UNIVERSITY OF MlICHIGAN 3 9015 02195 0228 DO NOT REMOVE s * 13 i-. - 9 a OR MUTILATE CARD -. 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