Читать книгу Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art - P. H. Emerson - Страница 18

Before beginning the renascence we must glance through Mohammedan, Chinese, and Japanese art. |Mohammedan Art.| With Mohammedan art we have little to do, as it was entirely decorative. It is seen at its best in the Alhambra, and was not the outcome of any study of nature. The Arabian mind seems to have been unable to rise beyond a conventional geometrical picture-writing. Such minds are seen to-day in all countries amongst the undeveloped. Quite recently we have seen some of the best modern negro work from the West Coast of Africa; there too was the love of geometrical ornamentation as strong as in the Arabian art. |Art amongst the Philistines.| We repeat, this artistically-speaking low standard of development is often seen among the people of to-day, and though highly educated in all else, in art they are uneducated, in short they are survivals; and the mischief is, that they judge pictures by their survival decorative standard; they look for bright colours placed in Persian-rug juxtaposition, and talk of “glorious colouring.” It never seems to occur to them what art really is, and what the artist has tried to express, and how well he has expressed it; and they never refer their “glorious colouring” to the infallible standard—nature; but seem to imagine there are abstract standards of colour and form. |Water-colours.| “Glorious colourings” are oftener than not meretricious lies dressed out in gaudiest, vulgarest apparel, and when compared with nature these “colourings” will be found veritable strumpets. Look carefully at many of the much-vaunted water-colours, and then carefully study the same scene in nature, and if many of those water-colours please you afterwards—well, in matters artistic, you have the taste of a frugivorous ape. But apply this test to the water-colours of Israels or Mauve, and you will see they interpret nature. But they have painted chiefly in oils, and wisely so, as there is more to be expressed by oil-painting, and we know of few, if any, great men who confine themselves to water-colour as a medium. But it serves the turn of a host of men—painters, but not artists, who, with their pretty paints, make pot-boilers, of which the form and idea are often stolen—stolen, perhaps, from a photograph. Do such ever study nature? No. They sit at home, and coin vulgar counterfeits with no more of nature in them than the perpetrators have of honesty. It is time that it was clearly and distinctly understood that the man who copies a photograph is as despicable as the man who copies a painting, and it is very certain neither will ever be respected by his contemporaries, or remembered by his successors. Yet the “cheap” work of these men sells well, and the gulled public talk glibly over them of “strength” and “tone” and “colouring,” and what not. Nature is so subtle and astonishing in her facts that but few even of those who do paint directly from her can come anywhere near her, whereas, those who do not study her at all, who do not paint coram ipse, fake and fake, and by faking they lie, and set the example to others to lie, and, if not fought against, this sort of thing would speedily take us back to the art of the Middle Ages, when we should be under the tyranny of Crœsus, instead of Clericus.

Picture-buyers.

It is, then, the absolute duty of every picture-buyer, who has any regard for truth, and any interest in the future of art, to learn to study nature carefully, and to buy only that which is true and sincere, and let the pink and white school of dishonesty die of inanition.

In short, it is high time that educated people ceased to judge painting as they often do, by the standard of coloured rugs. This talk of “colour” is one of the stumbling-blocks of the weak-kneed in art. Colour is good so long as it is true, and no longer. A Persian rug, or Turkey carpet, is not the standard of colour whereby to judge pictures, and only those in the mental state of the frugivorous ape or the Arab craftsmen can think so.