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A book that uses the name of Ananias in its title may well begin with a word of explanation as to what that personage represents. Like many another character in literature or history, he is better known in the aspect that popular speech has given to him than in the manner intended by his original discoverer. I have accordingly placed the passages from the Bible which tell of his act on my title page. They make it clear that to use the name of Ananias merely as a synonym for the word liar, or possibly a form of it implying the quasi-justification of a Biblical precedent, is to hit pretty wide of the mark. Peter lays his hand on the essentials of the case when he distinguishes between an ordinary lie and that of the man who breaks faith with a great trust. The fact that the old fisherman explains to Ananias the enormity of his conduct proves that the unhappy man was not well aware of what he had done, though, with the relentless justice of the old beliefs—and of nature—the punishment follows hard upon the sin, whether it was committed with full knowledge or in ignorance. So also with the False Artist, he could not have produced such work as he has done if he had grasped its significance.

The title of this book, therefore, does not imply that all the men it treats are to be classed with the Biblical forbear of the weak in faith. The spirit symbolized by him has its results in the acts of men very different from himself. In art, their failure to equal the masters is explained by them (in the cases where they recognize it, as some do not) through the insufficience of their gifts from nature, or through the unfavorable character of their period. They would be honestly horrified to think that their work was connected by anyone with the mentality of a betrayal, even if the connection was indirect—through the progressive weakening, in the course of generations, of the sense of true values.

The writer of the Ananias story was not the judge who meted out the result of the man’s wrongdoing; that followed of itself, and the historian merely recorded the facts and their steady logic. The False Artist is one misled by the error which betrayed Ananias; and in telling of certain painters and sculptors in this book it is not I, again, who am passing judgment. The nature of art is such that every deviation from the truth declares itself in the work, and with that there appears in it also the punishment which automatically follows—the loss of the quality of life. My own rôle here is simply to make known things which everyone in the profession will recognize from his memory of many a private talk within the walls of the studios. As I shall show, there is little difference of opinion as to which artists are the false ones, when a sufficient length of time (usually not more than a generation) has given opportunity to see things in perspective.

The causes of the tragedy in the case of Ananias are difficult to fathom. My suggestion, later on, that we must look to his ancestry for an explanation of his bad thinking is one that I venture to insist on. It frequently transpires that women engaged in the most pitiful trade open to their sex have never realized its baseness, or even understood that their mode of life was anything but the common lot of those who have to earn a living. From earliest childhood, their associates, their mothers even, prepared them for their course; and it is not begging the issue to say that not the individuals nor the class, but the whole of society has a share in their shame.

I know that in giving to Sapphira a character usually held even lower than that of Ananias, I am adding insult to injury in my reckoning with the False Artists. And, as regards many individual members of the clan—fine men, perhaps, in everything save their professional life—I very sincerely regret that my explanation of their wrong course must give so much offense. It will not be lessened by my statement, a moment before, that they do not personally bear more than a small part of the blame. I repeat that false training is largely at the bottom of the trouble, and I would ask those who feel hot for condemnation to see whether they are themselves quite free of reproach. Small wonder if Ananias and Sapphira looked on themselves, until denounced, as people of blameless life. The part of their goods which they withheld from the apostles made such a brave show before the world. The big public that laughed at the poor folk with its wild creed, felt a particular friendliness toward Ananias, and flattered him with honors and prizes. To the crowd, contemptuous of the new order proclaimed by the fanatics who would have none of the things of the everyday world, Ananias was doubtless the man who understood whatever tatter of truth there might be in the ravings of ill-bred Peter and fierce Paul, but who did not, like them, break out into terrifying denunciations of Things as They Are. And so, having been told so many times what a clever fellow, what a charming and good and romantic fellow he is, Ananias really believes his public, and sees his conduct as the golden mean between bourgeois placidity and the dæmonic excess of the fervent but “impractical” believers. He will steer a middle course between the two—laying part of his wealth at the apostles’ feet, but keeping the rest for dealing with the world of common affairs. In his relations with it he is strictly honest (“Ananias, thou has not lied unto men”). He was not of those who voted for Barabbas, the robber: he is of the elect, and is very harsh about any wrongdoing among the people, convinced, as he is, of his own uprightness. (Men who have no single good word to say about the painting of a certain prominent modern—about the essential fact of his life, that is—will ask: “How can you speak so against him? He is so sincere!”)

As his credit with the big world would be endangered if he appeared to be too close to the radical horde (those who went to the roots of contemporary evils), Ananias can be depended on for the greatest severity toward them when they make a new move. And even when he says a word in their favor—at moments when they are harmless—there is always a mitigating tone of disdain with his approval, to reassure his hearers. Cézanne having died, Besnard could permit himself the amount of generosity contained in his remark about the wild man’s painting: “A beautiful fruit, though rather unhealthy.”[A] Or read, in Vollard’s book on Renoir, almost any of the reports on the true artists of his time, in which the fascinating recital is so rich. For example, telling of his experiences with Roujon, the official who had charge of choosing works from the Caillebotte Collection when it was bequeathed to the Luxembourg Museum, Renoir said, “The only canvas of mine that he admitted with confidence was the Moulin de la Galette, because Gervex appeared in it.[B] He regarded the presence of that master among my models as a sort of moral safeguard. He was, on the other hand, quite disposed to like, though without too much exaggeration, Monet, Sisley, and Pissarro, who were beginning to be accepted by collectors.” Being strong for respectability, Ananias lends a quick ear when the voice of the market-place confers that quality on men he has previously been told to consider dangerous.

And lest it be thought that I am favoring the French by too frequent citation of their words, let me balance the account by telling of the distress that overwhelmed one of the False Artists of America when I asked him about a “colleague.” A work by the latter was about to enter the Metropolitan Museum, where my informant himself had for years had a picture, and one of the most foolish pictures in the group that represents our country so feebly. The natural thing would have been for him to express satisfaction over an honor for the man he professed to like. But it was pity for the quality of the other’s work that modulated the sad voice in which this son of Ananias bade me ask no more as to the artist whom he had known. And it was just that hint of chivalrous pity for a man supposed to be a failure which one always met with when one inquired about the painter—a man of whom every American may be proud. In general, this afforded the most effective means of keeping up around him the wretched fiction that only a few painters and collectors broke through—to find the splendid artist that the “sympathetic friend” tried to dismiss as “Poor Ryder! Poor, poor Ryder!”

A mistake as to my position, that I must take more seriously than that which would make me a mere Francophile, appeared in replies to an article in “Harper’s Magazine” for June, 1927, wherein I published an outline of the ideas contained in the present book. I believe that very great art has been produced in the last hundred years or so, with work of extraordinary importance in the most recent decades, and I have at various times asserted that belief. And so, several more or less friendly critics, assuming that modern art is my sole interest, treated the article as a new attack by a “modernist.” But the attack was not on the older schools. It was against the counterfeit of art in the recent schools as well as those of an earlier time. I spoke of the thing growing progressively worse, and indeed reaching its lowest level among the so-called modernists. I do not reckon my critics as partisans of the art of Ananias, but surely it would seem bad tactics on their part to credit the modernists with an effort to dislodge the False Artist from his position. The attack ought naturally to come from the upholders of the great tradition; so that my critics seem to be lending support to an idea several times expressed by the admirable painter and thinker that we possess in John Sloan. He observes that the conception of the most recent schools, passing over the heresies of the nineteenth century, rejoins the conception of the greatest periods of the past. If this is modernism, then I can only rejoice at the thought that my own painting is considered to have any slightest share in it. But I insist that this book is no more a defense of Cézanne, Derain, or Duchamp-Villon than it is one for Chardin or Rubens. To be sure, no one is attacking the latter men—though it is a pity to see their names invoked by the False Artists. If I refer to the great modern men frequently, it is because the facts about the past are so much less accessible and sure, for purposes of illustration, than those of the present, which is, moreover, the period in which Ananias has developed his powers in a way that simply eclipses all his previous efforts.

Let me add a brief note on the paintings and sculptures reproduced in the book. In selecting them my watchword has been moderation—as indeed it has been throughout the text, which affords only one passage that might be considered as extreme; and that is not my own, but that of the paragon of virtue who modestly veils his identity behind the name of an ancient exemplar of the chaste mind—Petronius. I bear cheerful testimony to the fact that he outdoes all other spokesmen for Ananias, and so I cannot claim that he is typical. The illustrations, on the other hand, are not only typical, they are the work of men in the most eminent official positions, represented in the chief museums of the world, and exercising almost unlimited influence on the taste of their time. The Titian is, of course, included for a special reason, and does not belong to my own text; like the picture by Thomas Eakins, it is to be considered for its contrast with the other works reproduced. The Cypriote sculptures, which alone bear the burden of representing the school of Ananias in the time before the modern period, are evidently in a class apart. Only a student well acquainted with ancient art will be apt to know offhand that these works are contemporary with the greatest of all sculpture. Behind the art of the Phœnicians, we see the Egyptian, Assyrian, and Greek works which they travesty. It would have been no great task to have followed out their spiritual descendants, but it would have been unprofitable. Time has dealt so definitively with their work. And if I have avoided the most grotesque, most ludicrous productions of the False Artists of modern times, the things that every visitor to exhibitions and, alas! to museums will be able to recall in large numbers, it has been because of my desire to treat only men of pivotal importance. The waters of oblivion that are rising to close over them have already hidden away the lesser sons of Ananias.

It may seem that, in my reproductions and the text, I have devoted an undue amount of the discussion to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. I hope most sincerely that my criticism of some of the museum’s possessions will not be thought by anyone to suggest the slightest lessening of our gratitude to the institution whose service to art in America is unequaled and beyond estimate. It has built up collections that represent the Greek, the Renaissance, and other great schools of the past with a wealth of fine examples truly astounding, if one consider how brief America’s experience with connoisseurship has been, and also the difficulty in recent times of obtaining works by the masters. The collections at the Louvre, for example, are the work of centuries, the modern Republic having given to all men what was once the private gallery of the kings, though it has added much since their time. Our own institution started with nothing but an idea—to develop the tremendous store of treasure we have today. Even without making allowance for drawbacks, if we study the galleries simply on their merits, they would be an honor to a great capital in Europe. In achieving such a result, the museum has helped to place the future of our country on a base firmer than any other that is known to men.

Those who care most deeply for their city, however, are the ones who want to see it cleared of the relics of insecure building, bad drainage, and other tokens of a pioneering past or mistaken government in later days. We have some museums which have not yet begun to emerge from the stage of the beginner, and on their walls one can still see canvases bearing, in large letters, what purports to be the signature of Leonardo da Vinci. There, also, are modern pictures by Ananias, in the special employment of his name which I have tried to define in this book. But to have drawn my examples from places which represent the Age of Innocence too conspicuously would have robbed the illustrations of their value, which derives, above all, from the fact that work by the False Artist is found in the most important places, and that it is still entering them. My purpose is to aid in our developing of the sense which distinguishes the true artist’s works. It is no pleasure to let one’s mind dwell on the false; but the effort will not have been wasted if this book contributes even slightly to freeing people from the things which contradict the classics in their summing up of all that is heroic or gay or calm or otherwise expressive of the finest in human activity. The vast majority of works in all museums worthy of the name have such characteristics. No other works should find a place there.

W.P.

ANANIAS

OR THE FALSE ARTIST