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I am not merely vituperative in choosing the name of Ananias to represent the man whose faith in his calling has been insufficient. One must look behind his action to its cause. One must consider the probable ancestry of the man and ask oneself whether a failure such as his does not point back to forbears whose thinking was vitiated by compromise between ideals and avarice. Ananias is a type; one recognizes him in unnumbered spiritual descendants, and as they are so plentiful, it is logical to see in the past of his tribe also, one individual after another who sensed the truth at some time, but wore away its point by misuse of the faculty for making right decisions. The process is so gradual that one needs to examine the minds of such men at long-separated moments to realize the way they have gone downhill. Visit the studio of the worst artist you can think of, and you will probably find in some cupboard or portfolio a painting or drawing that takes you back to a period of idealistic youth that you could never have suspected from his mature work. Not infrequently the artist has a recognition of his own debasement and will speak of it quite freely when there is no question of his losing trade. A portrait-painter whose annual income ran into many tens of thousands of dollars told me that he would never again enter the Louvre, because of the humiliation his last visit there had cost him. The reminder of his student days in Paris, the contrast between the masterpieces he had loved in his youth and the work he had done since, threw him into such despair that he plunged into heavy drinking for a week to rid his mind of thoughts of what he had become. A member of the Institute of France said to a friend of mine, “If my wife’s hats” (I nearly wrote, “If Sapphira’s hats”) “did not cost such sums, do you think I would paint the cochonneries that I am turning out?”

Sargent refused to sell many of the works he considered his best, especially among his earlier pictures. “I need to keep them around to console me for the rotten stuff I am doing,” as he said to some visitors to his studio. The words were, of course, not intended to describe his later painting as a whole. He believed in it thoroughly, though the genuine modesty of the man, which kept him from being misled by the adulators of even his worst work, doubtless gave him some idea how low he stood in comparison with the masters. The Old Masters, that is, (with capital letters). Once they were enshrined in the mystic penumbra of the Museum, Sargent in later life could recognize them, though he could not see the true line of their descent among his contemporaries. Yet he had, in his twenties, stood side by side with Claude Monet and other big men in Paris, when they demanded the admission of Manet’s Olympia to the Luxembourg. Was it the favor with which society flattered his mundane elegance that led him to turn away from the conscientious effort of Manet and his descendants? If so, he paid for the sacrifice with more than the loss of his standing as an artist.

He really hated the “society portraits” that crowded in on him in ever-increasing numbers. “I’ve simply got to finish that damn thing,” he said of his big canvas of the Countess of Warwick and her son, “the boy keeps getting older and the woman keeps getting younger”;—which did not prevent him from recommending the picture as one of his best works to the museum of Worcester, Mass., which purchased it accordingly.[C] When portrait-painting had become positively intolerable to him he refused all commissions, even those for pictures of people for whom he had the greatest fondness. When Monet was told of this, his simple comment was, “It is too late, isn’t it?” Sargent did return to portraiture occasionally, when his subject was a Woodrow Wilson or a John D. Rockefeller, and perhaps I ought to set down, for


Worcester Museum

The Countess of Warwick and Her Son—John S. Sargent

purposes of contrast, an opinion the contrary of my own, such as that of the well-known critic who spoke of the rapt expression the painter had caught on the upturned face of the oil man, which he said was like that of a mediæval saint, St. Francis of Assisi receiving the stigmata, if my memory serves me.

An admirable poem, Idéal, by Albert Samain, tells the story of the young men who start out together in the morning, lifted up by the faith which is to carry them to the mountain heights. By evening almost all are seated comfortably, stupidly, before the doors of their shops—a well-rouged matron at their side. But occasionally they raise their faces to the peaks they had thought to climb, and their dull eyes descry for a moment certain moving figures silhouetted against the sky—those of the men who kept on.

It is before such an image that one realizes the moderation contained in the story of Ananias. His punishment is only death. But suppose he had lived on: either he would have realized that his refusal of a complete faith had rendered valueless even the halfway gesture that he had made, and he would have known the despair of the shopkeepers who look up to the mountain, of that painter who could no longer enter the Louvre, or a worse—if less painful—fate would have awaited him. Speaking of the False Artists in Paris, a friend of mine used to say, “Their prayer, morning and evening, ought to be—‘Let us never wake up and see the thing we are!’” Most of the sons of Ananias simply do not know the wretchedness of their work.

How should they know it? They have long since lost all true vision of the masters, and their mental distortion of the great works actually makes these a justification of their own efforts. Whistler used to tell of some artists who wanted him to go and look at certain pictures he had called very bad without seeing them. Upon their insistence that he go to look at these particular works by the man he detested, he agreed to do so on condition that they first go to look at some pictures that he liked and that they had never seen. The proposal being accepted with enthusiasm, he marched them to the National Gallery and showed them the Rembrandts. “But you didn’t mean those pictures, Whistler? Of course we’ve seen those.” “No, you haven’t. You’ve doubtless glanced at them, but if you’d ever seen them, you’d not be proposing to make me look at the stuff you talk about.”

The worst punishment for Ananias, then, is that blindness to standards which makes him unaware of his worthlessness, or rather of his rôle as a spreader of corruption. Let me give an example of his teaching. A few years ago, a group of artists got together to combat the growth of appreciation of Cézanne, Matisse, and other moderns whom they hated.


Uffizi Gallery

Venus and Amor—Titian

For a description by Ananias of this work, see page 19

Backed by a well-intentioned millionaire, they founded a magazine which had such contributors as F. Wellington Ruckstuhl, Dr. Theo. F. Hyslop (who wrote in support of the insanity theory as applied to the modern artist), Kenyon Cox, Daniel C. French, Robert Underwood Johnson, E. H. Blashfield, Brander Matthews, and William M. Sloane. It is only fair to say that some of the men who lent their names to the scheme have since disclaimed all sympathy with it and affirmed that they looked on the magazine as one that would, as its founders claimed, be used as an aid to American culture. Others of those involved must accept their share of responsibility for the following extract from an article. Though signed with a pseudonym (“Petronius Arbiter”), a foreword under the title “Our Creed” gave it the standing of an editorial pronouncement, and therefore acceptable to the various participants in the work of the publication.

In the words of the old French poem, Here singeth one (his subject being one of the most magnificent of Titian’s works, the Venus and Amor of the Uffizi).

This is a trivial work of art. Why? Because it is a nude? No!... Then what is the matter with it? Much!

Titian had a weakness for plethora in woman—he loved the planturesque. And nearly all his pictures of women are buxom. When draped, this is all right. When undraped it is all wrong. And in this picture he went to excess and made Venus so padded with embonpoint that he reduced the goddess to a naked earthly woman. By dragging the goddess from Olympus to the earth he trivialized a sublime subject. He made a lofty thing common. And, in art, at least, this should not be done. If he had reverently painted, and even slightly idealized, a beautiful, nude young girl, and called it simply Spring, he would, perhaps, have poetized an ordinary subject and, in so far as he did so, would have lifted us above the brutal reality.[D] That is the rôle of a great Artist. But in this picture, no doubt painted for some sensuous, royal lubber of his day, he frankly reversed the process and appealed to the senses, not exactly the immoral—because there is here not even the budding of an impure gesture in movement. But he dragged the Goddess down from Elysium to the earth earthy. Instead of idealizing his model he de-idealized his Goddess—materialized her and so trivialized a sublime poetic subject.

How different is his nude in his own Sacred and Profane Love! How graceful and merely nude the beautiful body!—the whole work lifting us to the plane of serene delight where dwell the Gods.

To take a subject capable of being conceived on a lofty plane, and to conceive it on a common carnal plane, is to trivialize it, no matter how great, or by whom, the craftsmanship displayed. And, however one may pardon this in life, in art that is: The sin against the Holy Ghost! Titian in this work was guilty of this sin. That is why it is trivial.

Some people who have read this passage and others from “The Art World” (long since defunct) have thought its ideas merely comic; and so they would be if a vast number of persons did not devoutly believe in them. To be sure, the age-old fame of Titian and our respect for the classics, even when they commit the sin against the Holy Ghost, render such works as the one discussed secure in their position. But do we all see the comedy that is involved, or rather the humiliation to every American, when the leading museum of the United States is called upon to answer the charge of exhibiting degenerate art—as the matter was called in an anonymous letter sent out by “Petronius Arbiter” or some of his associates and printed on the front pages of the newspapers? Again quoting the old French poet, let us introduce the lament of the afflicted with the blithe words: Here singeth one (this time about the exhibition of works by Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, Matisse, Derain, and other modern painters at the Metropolitan Museum, in 1921):

This cult of “Satanism” appeals to a limited number of European painters and sculptors, for the most part men of no talent, and handicapped by taints of hereditary, or acquired, insanity. To this class the cult of the ugly and the obscene became the prime stimuli of their work. From these, since the early ’sixties to the present time, there came a steady output of hideous examples of mental degeneracy in the plastic arts. It goes without saying that the work of these artists was not generally approved. Their paintings and sculptures were refused, regularly, at the exhibitions, at Paris and elsewhere, and they were flouted as men of defective mentality, or charlatans—playing for sensation.

Ananias telling of his maudlin dislike for the picture by Titian is a joke, for his drivel disturbs nobody. Time has assured the place in art of the great Venetian; and time is already bidding fair to carry Renoir, Cézanne, Seurat, and other modern men to a secure hold on the affection of mankind. If we cannot pretend to anticipate the judgments of the future, it is quite within our power to give the present an opportunity to know the work that most concerns it. A later chapter will attempt to define the rôle of the Museum; for the present let me give two more examples of the way the False Artist reacts to the work of the masters—and few people today will even question the application of that word to Rodin and Manet. There are some who will, to be sure, just as after all these centuries there was still a man to write those lines on Titian. And as the question of the modern masters still puzzles many sincere people, it is a help in studying it to know the opinions of the men whom William Blake had in mind when he wrote his proverb: “Listen to the fool’s reproach; it is a kingly title.”

If one man in America succeeded in making his name a synonym for deadness in art—through the spurious quality of his imitations of the classics and through his intolerance toward new talent in the exhibitions—that man was Kenyon Cox. So that his comments on the Armory Show of 1913 are a pretty safe indication of the untruth about it: “The thing is pathological! It’s hideous.... Many of Matisse’s paintings are simply the exaltation to a gallery of the drawings of a nasty boy.... That row of Rodin drawings at the Metropolitan Museum is a calamity.” Such calamities—to the artists represented by Kenyon Cox and his like—are increasing in frequency. If Ananias is growing more and more impotent to prevent the acceptance of the better men, he loses no means of minimizing the effect of his defeats. Thus when Manet had reached the Metropolitan Museum (and his early recognition there is one of the real triumphs of American connoisseurship), the opponents of the great painter managed for many years to reduce his biography in the catalogue of the Museum to the following lines: “Pupil of Couture, with whom he studied for six years. An eccentric realist of disputed merit; founder of the school of ‘Impressionists.’ His pictures were several times rejected at the Salon.”

Here, as in the previous quotation, from the manifesto of 1921, where he recalls the rejection of other modern works, Ananias is gloating over the penalty incurred by those whose faith made them give up the whole of their goods. Disdain for the worldly success of the False Artist, refusal to compromise upon matters of principle, did indeed cause the exclusion of the modern masters from many of the official exhibitions of the nineteenth century, and their works were indeed often treated as mad or perverse. This does not by any means refer to the recent masters alone, for if we turn back to the words dictated by the False Artist to his press representatives a hundred years ago, we find that they are surprisingly like those which we hear about the great men of today. Here is what was written in 1834 about the portrait of Mme. Leblanc by Ingres, formerly in the collection of Degas and, since his death, in the Metropolitan Museum: “I cannot believe that this monster, with no top to her head, with her bulging eyes and her sausage-like fingers, is not the deformation, due to an effect of perspective, of a doll seen from too near by, and reflected on to the canvas by several curved mirrors applied to each detail, each one being left separate.” Of Delacroix’s early masterpiece, the Dante and Vergil of the Salon of 1822, the aptly-named “Moniteur Universel,” wrote: “This is a picture which is no picture; it is a mere spattering of colors.” When the great painter exhibited his Death of Sardanapalus in 1827, the “Observateur des Beaux-Arts,” again taking up Ananias’s favorite argument of the nonsuccess of the men who hold to their faith, remarked: “M. Delacroix and the other leaders of the new school have received no prize, but to console them for this defeat, they are to be permitted two hours of sojourn in the Morgue every day. We must encourage our young talents.”

Ananias or the False Artist

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