Читать книгу Modern Painting, Its Tendency and Meaning - Willard Huntington Wright - Страница 9

THE purely pictorial has always been relished by the public. The patterns of the mosaicists and very early primitives, the figured stuffs of the East and South, the vases of China and Persia, the frescoes on the walls of Pompeii, the drawings and prints of old Japan—all are examples of utilitarian art during epochs when the public took delight in the contemplation of images. Even the delicate designs on Greek pottery, the rigid and ponderous arts of architectural Egypt and the drawings and adorned totem poles of the North American Indians are relics of times when the demand for art was created by the masses. For the most part all these early crafts were limited to simple designs, wholly obvious to the most rudimentary mind. The ancients were content with a representation of a natural object, the likeness of a familiar animal, the symmetry of an ornamental border, an effigy of a god in which their abstract conceptions were given concrete form. At that time the artist was only a craftsman—a man with a communistic mind, content to follow the people’s dictates and to reflect their taste. Art was then democratic, understood and admired by all. It did not raise its head about the mean level; it was abecedary, and consequently comprehensible.

When the Greek ideal of fluent movement took birth in art and became disseminated, drawing, painting and sculpture began to grow more rhythmic and individual. Slowly at first and then more and more swiftly, art became insulated. The popular joy in the native crafts, despite the impetus of centuries behind it, decreased steadily. The antagonism of the masses to the artist sprang up simultaneously with the disgust of the artist for the masses. It was the inevitable result of the artist’s mind developing beyond them. He could not understand why they were no longer in accord with him; and they, finding him in turn unfathomable, considered him either irrational or given over to fantastic buffoonery. So long had they been the dictator of his vision that his emancipation from their prescriptions left them astounded and angered at his audacity. The nobles then, feeling it incumbent upon them to defend this new luxury of art, stepped into the breach, and for a time the people blindly patterned their attitude on that of their superiors. Later came the disintegration of the nobility; its caste being lost, the people no more imitated it. From that time on, although there were a few connoisseurs, the large majority was hostile to the artist, and made it as difficult as possible for him to live. He was looked upon as a madman who threatened the entire social fabric. His isolation was severe and complete; and while many painters strove to effect a reinstatement in public favour, art for 300 years forced its way through a splendid evolution in the face of neglect, suspicion and ridicule.

For so many generations had the public looked upon art as the manifestation of a disordered and dangerous brain that they found it difficult to recognise a man in whose work was the very pictorial essence they had originally admired. This man was Édouard Manet. Instead of being welcomed for his reversion to decoration, strangely enough he was considered as dangerous as his contemporary heretics, Delacroix and Courbet. Courbet was at the zenith of his unpopularity when Manet terminated his apprenticeship under Couture. The young painter had had numerous clashes with his academic master, and the latter had prophesied for him a career as reprehensible as Daumier’s. Spurred on by such incompetent rebukes, Manet determined to launch himself single-handed into the vortex of the æsthetic struggle. This was in 1857. For two years thereafter he put in his time to good purpose. He travelled in Holland, Germany and Italy, and copied Rembrandt, Velazquez, Titian and Tintoretto. These youthful preferences give us the key to his later developments. In 1859 he painted his Le Buveur d’Absinthe, a canvas which showed all the ear-marks of the romantic studio, and which exemplified the propensities of the student for simplification. It was a superficial, if enthusiastic, piece of work, and the Salon of that year was fully justified in rejecting it. Two years later Manet had another opportunity to expose. In the meantime he had painted his La Nymphe Surprise which, though one of his best canvases, contained all the influence of a hurriedly digested Rembrandt and a Dutch Titian.

In 1861 these influences were still at work, but the Salon not only accepted his Le Guitarrero but, for some unaccountable reason, awarded it with an honourable mention. In this picture, Manet’s first Spanish adaptation, are also traces of other men. Goya and even Murillo are here—the greys of Velazquez and Courbet’s modern attitude toward realism. In this canvas one sees for the first time evidences of its creator’s technical dexterity, a characteristic which later he was to develop to so astonishing a degree. But this picture, while conspicuously able, is, like L’Enfant a l’Épée and also Les Parents de l’Artiste, the issue of immaturity. Such paintings are little more than the adroit studies of a highly talented pupil inspired by the one-figure arrangements of Velazquez, Mazo and Carreño. Where Manet improved on the average student was in his realistic methods. While he did not present the aspect of nature in full, after the manner of Daubigny and Troyon, he stated its generalisations by painting it as seen through half-closed eyes, its parts accentuated by the blending of details into clusters of light and shadow. This method of visualisation gives a more forceful impression as an image than can a mere accurate transcription. As slight an innovation as was this form of painting, it represented Manet’s one point of departure from tradition, although it was in truth but a modification of the traditional manner of copying nature. The public, however, saw in it something basically heretical, and derided it as a novelty. The habit of ridicule toward any deviation from artistic precedent had become thoroughly fixed, ever since Delacroix’s heterodoxy.

It was not until 1862 that Manet, as the independent and professional painter, was felt. Up to this time his talent and capabilities had outstripped his powers of ideation. But with the appearance of Lola de Valence the man’s solidarity was evident. This picture was exposed with thirteen other works at Martinet’s the year following. It was hung beside the accepted and familiar Fontaineleau painters, Corot, Rousseau and Diaz; and almost precipitated a riot because of its informalities. In these fourteen early Manets are discoverable the artist’s first tendencies towards simplification for other than academic reasons. Here the abbreviations and economies, unlike those in Le Buveur d’Absinthe, constitute a genuine inclination toward emphasising the spontaneity of vision. By presenting a picture, free from the stress of confusing items, the eye is not seduced into the by-ways of detail, but permitted to receive the image as an ensemble. This impulse toward simplification was prefigured in his Angelina now hanging in the Luxembourg Gallery. Here he modelled with broad, flat planes of sooty black and chalky white, between which there were no transitional tones. While in this Manet was imitating the externals of Daumier, he failed to approach that master’s form. Consequently he never achieved the plasticity of volume which Daumier, alone among the modern men, had possessed. However, despite Manet’s failure to attain pliability, these early paintings are, in every way, sincere efforts toward the creation of an individual style. It was only later, after his first intoxicating taste of notoriety, that the arriviste spirit took possession of him and led him to that questionable and unenviable terminus, popularity. One can imagine him, drunk with eulogy, reading some immodest declaration of Courbet’s in which was set forth that great man’s egoistic confidence, and saying to himself: “Tiens! Il faut que j’aille plus loin.”

The famous Salon des Refusés, called by some critics of the day the Salon des Réprouvés, gave Manet his chance to state in striking fashion his beliefs in relation to æsthetics. For whereas mere realism could no longer excite the animosity of the official Salon jury, as it had done twenty years before, immorality—or, as Manet chose to put it, franchise—could. Therefore Manet was barred from the company of the Barbizon school and the other favourites of the day. In the Salon des Refusés, which must be held to the credit of Napoleon III, those painters who had suffered at the hands of the academic judges were allowed a hearing. Whistler, Jongkind, Pissarro and Manet here made history. Manet sent Le Bain, which, through the insistence of the public, has come to be called Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe. But despite the precedent of Giorgione’s Rural Concert (the Concert Champêtre in the Louvre), it was looked upon only as the latest manifestation of degeneracy in a man who gave every promise of becoming a moral pariah. The nude, contrasted as it was with attired figures, was too suggestive of sheer nakedness. Had the nude stood alone, as in Ingres’s La Source, or among other nudes, as in Ingres’s Le Bain Turc, the picture would have caused no comment. Its departures in method were not extravagant. The scene is laid out of doors, yet it bears all the evidences of the studio conception; and those lights and reflections which later were brought to such perfection in the pictures of the Impressionists and Renoir, are wholly absent. But in one corner is a beautifully painted still-life of fruits, a basket and woman’s attire, which alone should have made the picture acceptable. This branch of painting Manet was to develop to its highest textural possibilities.

From this time on Manet no longer used the conventional chiaroscuro of the academicians. Instead he let his lights sift and dispel themselves evenly over the whole of his groupings. This mode of procedure was undoubtedly an influence of the Barbizon painters who had done away with the brown sauce of the soi-disant classicists. In his rejection of details and his discovery of a means whereby effects could be obtained by broad planes, Manet was forced by necessity to take the step toward this simplification of light. Were colour to be used consistently in conjunction with his technique, it must be spread on in large flat surfaces. By diffusing his light the opportunity was made. He might have omitted the element of colour from his work and contented himself with black and white, as in the case of Courbet; but he was too sensitive to its possibilities. He had observed it in the Venetians and Franz Hals, as well as in nature; and in its breadth and brilliance he had recognised its utility in enhancing a picture’s decorative beauty. Even the colour of Velazquez was at times sumptuous. Manet, because his simplicity of manner permitted a liberal application of colour, was able to augment its ornamental power. It is true that today his large and irregular patches of tints appear grey, but, to his contemporaries, their very extension made them seem blatant and bold.

Courbet remained in great part the slave to the common vision of reality. In his efforts to attain results he sacrificed little. This, in itself, delimited his accomplishments. Nature to him appeared nearly perfect, and he painted with all the wonderment of a child opening its eyes on the world for the first time. On the other hand, Manet realised that nature’s forces become objective only through an intellectual process. This attitude marked a decided step in advance of Courbet. Manet painted single figures and simple images devoid of all anecdotal significance, out of his pure love of his medium and his sheer delight in tone and contour. In other words, he represented the modern spirit which repudiates objects conducive to reminiscence, and cares only for “qualities” in art. His intentions were those of Courbet pushed to greater freedom. Unlike his master he was a virtuoso of the brush. His very facility perhaps accounts for his satisfaction with flat decoration, for it concentrated his interest on the actual pâte and thereby precluded a deeper research into the psychology of æsthetic emotion. But in his insistence on the æsthetic rather than the illustrative side of painting he carried forward the ideals which were to epitomise modern methods.

In this lay the impetus he gave to painting. Even with Rubens the necessities of the day forced him, in his choice of themes, to adopt a circumscribed repertoire, the subjects of which he repeated constantly. In him we have mastery of composition with the substance as an afterthought. Delacroix conceived his canvases in the romantic mould, and adapted his compositions so as to bring out the salient characteristics of his chosen theme. This was illustration with the arrière pensée of organisation. Daumier struck the average between these two and conceived his subject in the form he was to use. Courbet minimised the importance of objects as such by raising them all to the same level of adaptability: but he invariably chose, as with an idée fixe, his subjects from the life about him. Manet cared nothing for any subject whether traditional or novel. That he generally chose modern themes was indicative of that new mental attitude which recognises the unimportance of subject-matter and urges the painter to abandon thematic research and utilise the things at hand. He made his art out of the materials nearest him, irrespective of their intrinsic topical value.

This was certainly an important step in the liberating of art from convention. It proclaimed the right of the artist to paint what he liked. Courbet would have painted goddesses if he had seen them. Manet would have painted them without having seen them, provided he had thought the result warranted the effort. Courbet, the father of naturalism, extended the scope of subject-matter, while Manet tore away the last tie which bound it to any tradition, whether Courbet’s or Titian’s. After him there was nothing new to paint. It is therefore small wonder that artists should now have become interested in the forces of nature rather than in nature’s mien. Manet, by his consummation of theme, foreshadowed the concern with abstractions which has now swept over the world of æsthetics. Zola, like him in other ways, never equalled him in this. L’Assommoir and Fécondité portrayed only the extremes of realism. Manet painted all things with equal pleasure. Here again is evident the continuation of that mental attitude which Courbet introduced into painting. The qualities in Manet which inclined toward abstraction have secured him the reputation for being a greater generaliser than Courbet whose brutal naturalism could not be dissociated in the public mind from concrete and strict materialism. For this contention there is substantiation of a superficial nature. But a mere tendency toward generalisation, with no other qualifications, does not indicate greatness. In fact, were this purely literal truth concerning Manet conclusive, it would tend to disqualify him in his claim to an importance greater than Courbet’s. Carrière is an example of a painter who is general and nothing more. Manet had other titles to consideration.

What Manet’s enduring contributions to painting were have never been surmised by the public. His recognition, coming as it did years after his most significant works had been accomplished and set aside, was due to a reversion of the public’s mind to its aboriginal admirations. Manet is popular today for the same reason that the lesser works of Hokusai and Hiroshige are popular, namely: they present an instantaneous image which is at once flat and motionless. As in the days of the mosaicists and early primitives, the appreciation of such works demands no intellectual operation. Their recognisable subjects only set in motion a simple process of memory. The Olympia, Manet’s most popular painting, illustrates the type of picture which appeals strongly to minds innocent of æsthetic depth. Its mere imagery is alluring. As pure decoration it ranks with Puvis de Chavannes. But in it are all the mistakes of the later Impressionists. Manet consciously attempted the limning of light, but brilliance alone resulted. He did not realise that, in order for one to be conscious of illumination, shadow is necessary. This latter element, with its complementary, produces in us the sensation of volume. True, there is in the Olympia violent contrast between the nude body, the bed and the flowers, on the one hand, and the background, the negress and the cat, on the other; but it is only the contrast of dissimilar atmospheres. The level appearance of the picture is not relieved.

The cardinal shortcoming in a painting of this kind is that it fails to create an impression of either the aspects or the forces of nature. Such pictures are only flat representations of nature’s minor characteristics. The most resilient imagination cannot endow them with form: the intelligence is balked at every essay to penetrate beyond their surface. In contemplating them one is irritated by the emptiness, or rather the solidity, of the néant which lies behind. Courbet called the Olympia “the queen of spades coming from her bath.” Titian, had he lived today, would have styled it a photograph. Goya (who is as much to blame for it as either Courbet or Titian) would have considered its shallowness an inexcusable vulgarity. In painting it undoubtedly Manet’s intention was to modernise Titian’s Venus Reclining now hanging in the Uffizi; just as later it was Gauguin’s intention, in his La Femme aux Mangos, to endow the Olympia with a South Sea Island setting. Such adaptations are indefensible provided they do not improve upon their originals. There is no improvement in Gauguin’s Venus; and Manet’s picture, while it advances on Titian in attitude, is a decided retrogression viewed from the standpoint of form.

In such pictures as the Olympia, Nana and La Jarretière we recognise Manet’s effort to obtain notoriety. He was not an aristocrat as was Courbet or Goya or Titian. It was not a need for freer expression that induced him to paint pictures which shocked by their unconventionality, but a desire to abasourdir les bourgeois. In choosing his subject-matter he always had a definite end in view in relation to the public; but his conceptions were spontaneous and were recorded without deliberation. He painted with but little thought as to his method. This fact is no doubt felt by the public and held in his favour by those who believe in the involuntary inspiration of the artist. But art cannot be judged by such childish criteria. Can one imagine Giotto, Michelangelo or, to come nearer our day, Cézanne painting without giving the closest and most self-conscious study to his procedure? Credence in the theopneusty of the painter, the poet and the musician, should have passed out with the advent of Delacroix; but the seeming mystery of art is so deeply rooted in public ignorance that many generations must pass before it can be eradicated.

The truth is that Manet himself had no precise idea of what he really wished to accomplish. Up to the last year of his life he groped tentatively toward a goal, the outlines of which were never quite distinct. We today, looking back upon his efforts, can judge his motivating influences with some degree of surety. In bringing about the paradox of staticising Courbet, Manet feminised him. He turned Courbet’s blacks and greys into pretty colours, and thereby turned his modelling into silhouette and flattened his volumes. Thus was Courbet not only made effeminate but popularised. Compare the superficially similar pictures, Le Hamac of Courbet and Manet’s Le Repos. In the former the movement in composition accords with the landscape and is carried out in the pose of the woman’s arms and in the disposition of the legs. The figure in the latter picture is little more than an ornament—a symmetrical articulation. Manet has here translated the rhythm of depth into linear balance. In this levelling process all those qualities which raise painting above simple mosaics are lost. A picture thus treated becomes a pattern, incapable of embodying any emotional significance. Manet’s paintings are remembered because they are so instantaneous a vision of their subjects. For this same reason Goya is remembered; but beneath the Spaniard’s broad oppositions of tone is a limpid depth in which the intelligence darts like a fish in an aquarium. In Manet the impassable barrier of externals shuts out that world which exists on the further side of a picture’s surface.

In Manet we have the summing up of the pictorial expression of all time. His love for decoration never left him long enough for him to experiment with the profounder phases of painting. In many of his canvases he was little more than an exalted poster-maker. His Rendez-vous de Chats was frankly a primitive arrangement of flat drawing, as flat as a print by Mitsuoki. Even details and texture were eliminated from it. It was a statement of his theories reduced to their bare elements. Yet, though exaggerated, the picture was representative of his aims. A pattern to him was form. Courbet’s ability to model an eye was the cause of Manet’s repudiating the painter of L’Enterrement à Ornans. The two men were antithetical; and in that antithesis we have Manet’s aspirations fully elucidated. Even later in life when he took the figure out of doors he was unable to shake off the influence of the silhouette. But the silhouette cannot exist en plain air. Light volatilises design. This knowledge accounts for Renoir’s early sunlight effects. Manet never advanced so far.

The limitations and achievements of Manet are summed up in his painting, Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe. This picture is undoubtedly interesting in its black-and-white values and in its freedom from the conventions of traditional composition. At first view its theme may impress one as an attempt at piquancy, but on closer inspection the actual subject diminishes so much in importance that it might have been with equal effect a simple landscape or a still-life. There is no attempt at composition in the classic sense. Even surface rhythm is entirely missing: the tonal masses decidedly overweigh on the left. But the picture nevertheless embodies the distinguishing features of all Manet’s arrangements. It is built on the rigid pyramidal plan. From the lower left-hand corner a line, now light, now dark, reaches almost to the upper frame at a point directly above the smaller nude; and another line, which begins in the lower right-hand corner at the reclining man’s elbow, runs upward to his cap, and is then carried out in the shadow and light of the foliage so that it meets the line ascending from the other side. The base of these two converging lines is formed by another line which runs from the man’s elbow along his extended leg. This is the picture’s important triangle. But a secondary one is formed by a line which begins at the juncture of the tree and shadow in the lower right-hand corner, extends along the cane and the second man’s sleeve to his head, and then drops, by way of the large nude’s head and shoulder, to the basket of fruit at the bottom. This angularity of design is seen in the work of all primitive-minded peoples, and is notably conspicuous in the early Egyptians, the archaic Greeks and the Assyrians of the eighth century B.C. It is invariably the product of the static intelligence into which the comprehension of æsthetic movement has never entered. It is the result of a desire to plant objects solidly and immovably in the ground. Those artists who express themselves through it are men whose minds are incapable of grasping the rhythmic attributes of profound composition. Manet repeats this triangular design in the Olympia where the two adjoining pyramids of contour are so obvious that it is unnecessary to describe them. The figures in canvases such as La Chanteuse des Rues, La Femme au Perroquet, Eva Gonzalès and Émile Zola are constructed similarly; and in groups like En Bateau and Les Anges au Tombeau (the latter of which recalls, by its arrangement and lighting, the Thétis et Jupiter of Ingres) is expressed the mental immobility which characterised Conegliano, Rondinelli, Robusti and their seventeenth-century exemplars, de La Fosse, Le Moyne and Rigaud.