Adventures in the Arts Part 5

As he stood attending to the duties of irrigation and the ripening of the alfalfa crops, he spent the moments otherwise lost in carving pebbles he found about him with rare gestures and profiles, either of his own face or body which he knew well, or the grace of other bodies and faces he had seen. He was always the young eye on things, an avid eye sure of the wonder about to escape from every living thing where light or shadow fell upon them gently. He was a sure, unquestionable, and in this sense a perfect poet, and possessed the undeniable painter's gift for presentation.

He was of the company of Odilon Redon, of whom he had never heard, in his feeling for the almost occult presence emanating from everything he encountered everywhere, and his simple letters to his friends hold touches of the same beauty his drawings and paintings and carvings on pebbles contain.

A born mystic and visionary as to the state of his soul, a boy of light in quest of the real wisdom that is necessary for the lyrical embodiment, this was Rex Slinkard, the western ranchman and poet-painter. "I think of the inhabitants of the earth and of the world, my home." This might have been a marginal note from the Book of Thel, or it might have been a line from some new songs of innocence and experience. It might have been spoken from out of one of the oaks of William Blake. It must have been heard from among the live oaks of Saugus. It was the simple speech of a ranchman of California, a real boy-man who loved everything with a poet's love because everything that lived, lived for him.

Such were the qualities of Rex Slinkard, who would like to have remained in the presence of his friends, the inhabitants of the earth, to have lived long in the world, his home.

It is all a fine clear testimony to the certainty of youth, perhaps the only certainty there can be. He was the calm declaimer of the life of everlasting beauty. He saw with a glad eye the "something" that is everywhere at all times, and in all places, for the poet's and the visionary's eye at least. He was sure of what he saw; his paintings and drawings are a firm conviction of that. Like all who express themselves clearly, he wanted to say all he had to say. At thirty he had achieved expression remarkably. He had found the way out, and the way out was toward and into the light. He was clear, and entirely unshadowed.

This is Rex Slinkard, ranchman, poet-painter, and man of the living world. Since he could not remain, he has left us a carte visite of rarest clarity and beauty. We who care, among the few, for things in relation to essences, are glad Rex Slinkard lived and laughed and wondered, and remained the little while. The new silence is but a phase of the same living one he covered all things with. He was glad he was here. He was another angle of light on the poetic world around us, another unsuspected facet of the bright surface of the world.

Surfaces were for him, too, something to be "deepened" with a fresh vividness. He had the irresistible impulse to decorate and to decorate consistently. His sense of decoration was fluid and had no hint of the rhetorical in it. He felt everything joined together, shape to shape, by the harmonic insistence in life and in nature. A flower held a face, and a face held a flowery substance for him. Bodies were young trees in bloom, and trees were lines of human loveliness. The body of the man, the body of the woman, beautiful male and female bodies, the ideal forms of everyone and everything he encountered, he understood and made his own. They were all living radiances against the dropped curtain of the world. He loved the light on flesh, and the shadows on strong arms, legs, and b.r.e.a.s.t.s. He avoided theory, either philosophic or esthetic. He had traveled through the ages of culture in his imagination, and was convinced that nothing was new and nothing was old. It was all living and eternal when it was genuine. He stepped out of the world of visible realities but seldom, and so it was, books and methods of interpretation held little for him. He didn't need them, for he held the whole world in his arms through the power of dream and vision. He touched life everywhere, touched it with himself.

Rex Slinkard went away into a celestial calm October 18, 1918, in St.

Vincent's Hospital, New York City. It is the few among those of us who knew him as poet and visionary and man, who wish earnestly that Rex might have remained. He gave much that many wanted, or would have wanted if they had had the opportunity of knowing him. The pictures and drawings that remain are the testimony of his splendid poetic talents. He was a lyrical painter of the first order. He is something that we miss mightily, and shall miss for long.

SOME AMERICAN WATER-COLORISTS

With the arrival of Cezanne into the field of water-color painting, this medium suffers a new and drastic instance for comparison. It is not technical audacity alone, of course, that confronts us in these brilliantly achieved performances, so rich in form as well as radiant with light. It is not the kind of virility for its own sake that is typical of our own American artists so gifted in this special medium, like Whistler, Sargent, Winslow Homer, Dodge Macknight, John Marin, and Charles Demuth. With Cezanne it was merely a new instrument to employ for the realization of finer plastic relations. The medium of water-color has been ably employed by the English and the Dutch painters, but it seems as if the artists of both these countries succeeded in removing all the brilliance and charm as well as the freshness which is peculiar to it; few outside of Cezanne have, I think, done more with water-color than the above named American artists, none who have kept more closely and consistently within the confines and peculiarities of this medium.

In the consideration of the American water-color artists it will be found that Sargent and Homer tend always toward the graphic aspect of a pictorial idea, yet it is Homer who relieves his pictures of this obsession by a brilliant appreciation of the medium for its own sake.

Homer steps out of the dry conventionalism of the English style of painting, which Sargent does not do. Much of that metallic harshness which is found in the oil pictures of Homer is relieved in the water-colors and there is added to this their extreme virtuosity, and a great distinction to be discovered in their sense of light and life, the sense of the object illumined with a wealth of vibrancy that is peculiar to its environment, particularly noticeable in the Florida series.

Dodge Macknight has seen with a keen eye the importance of this virility of technique to be found in Homer, and has added to this a pa.s.sion for impressionistic veracity which heightens his own work to a point distinctly above that of Sargent, and one might almost say above Winslow Homer. Macknight really did authenticate for himself the efficacy of impression with almost incredible feats of visual bravery.

There is no array of pigment sufficient to satisfy him as for what heat and cold do to his sensibility, as experienced by the opposite poles of a New England winter and a tropical Mexican landscape. He is always in search of the highest height in contrasts, all this joined by what his sense of fierceness of light could bring to the fantastic dune stretches of Cape Cod in fiery autumn. His work in water-color has the convincing charm of almost fanaticism for itself; and we find this medium progressing still further with the fearlessness of John Marin in the absolute at-home-ness which he displays on all occasions in his audacious water-color pictures.

Marin brings you to the feeling that digression is for him imperative only as affording him relief from the tradition of his medium. John Marin employs all the restrictions of water-color with the wisdom that is necessary in the case. He says that paper plus water, plus emotion will give a result in themselves and proceeds with the idea at hand in what may without the least temerity be called a masterly fashion; he has run the gamut of experience with his materials from the earliest Turner tonalities, through Whisterian vagaries on to American definiteness, and has incidentally noted that the Chinese have been probably the only supreme masters of the wash in the history of water-color painting. I can say for myself that Marin produces the liveliest, handsomest wash that is producible or that has ever been accomplished in the field of water-color painting. Perhaps many of the pictures of John Marin were not always satisfying in the tactile sense because many of them are taken up with an inevitable pa.s.sion for technical virtuosity, which is no mean distinction in itself but we are not satisfied as once we were with this pa.s.sion for audacity and virtuosity. We have learned that spatial existence and spatial relationships are the important essentials in any work of art. The precise ratio of thought accompanied by exact.i.tude of emotion for the given idea is a matter of serious consideration with the modern artists of today. That is the special value of modern painting to the development of art.

The Chinese really knew just what a wash was capable of, and confined themselves to the majesty of the limitations at hand. John Marin has been wise in this also though he is not precisely fanatical, which may be his chief defect, and it is probably true that the greatest experimenters have shown fanatical tendency, which is only the accentuated spirit of obsession for an idea. How else does one hold a vision? It is the only way for an artist to produce plastic exact.i.tude between two planes of sensation or thought. The parts must be as perfect as the whole and in the best art this is so. There must be the sense of "existence" everywhere and it might even be said that the cool hue of the intellect is the first premise in a true work of art.

Virtuosity is a state of expression but it is not the final state. One must search for as well as find the sequential quality which is necessitated for the safe arrival of a work of art into the sphere of esthetic existence.

The water-colors of John Marin are restless with energy, which is in its way a real virtue. They do, I think, require, at times at least, more of the calm of research and less of the excitement of it. All true artistry is self-contained and never relies upon outer physical stimulus or inward extravagance of phantasy, or of idiosyncrasy. A work of art is never peculiar, it is always a natural thing. In this sense John Marin approaches real art because he is probably the most natural water-colorist in existence.

With Charles Demuth water-color painting steps up into the true condition of ideas followed by experience. He has joined with modernism most consistently, having arrived at this state of progression by the process of investigation. The tradition of water-color painting takes a jump into the new field of modernism, and Demuth has given us his knowledge of the difference between ill.u.s.tration, depiction, and the plastic realization of fact. Probably no young artist has accomplished a finer degree of artistic finesse in ill.u.s.tration than has Charles Demuth in his series of ill.u.s.trations for "The Two Magics" of Henry James, or more explicitly to say "The Turn of the Screw". These pictures are to the true observer all that could be hoped for in imaginative sincerity as well as in technical elusiveness. Demuth has since that time stepped out of the confinement of water-color pure, over into the field of tempera, which brings it nearer to the st.u.r.dier mediums employed in the making of pictures evolving a greater severity of form and a commendable rigidity of line. He has learned like so many moderns that the ruled line offers greater advantages in pictorial structure. You shall find his approach to the spirit of Christopher Wren is as clear and direct as his feeling for the vastiness of New England speechlessness. He has come up beyond the dramatisation of emotion to the point of expression for its own sake. But he is nevertheless to be included among the arrived water-colorists, because his gifts for expression have been evolved almost entirely through this medium. There is then a fine American achievement in the art of water-color painting which may safely be called at this time a localized tradition. It has become an American realization.

THE APPEAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Photography is an undeniable esthetic problem upon our modern artistic horizon. The idea of photography as an art has been discussed no doubt ever since the invention of the pinhole. In the main, I have always said for myself that the kodak offers me the best subst.i.tute for the picture of life, that I have found. I find the snapshot, almost without exception, holding my interest for what it contains of simple registration of and adherence to facts for themselves. I have had a very definite and plausible aversion to the "artistic" photograph, and we have had more than a surfeit of this sort of production for the past ten or fifteen years. I have referred frequently in my mind to the convincing portraits by David Octavius Hill as being among the first examples of photographic portraiture to hold my own private interest as clear and unmanipulated expressions of reality; and it is a definite as well as irresistible quality that pervades these mechanical productions, the charm of the object for its own sake.

It was the irrelevant "artistic" period in photography that did so much to destroy the vital significance of photography as a type of expression which may be cla.s.sed as among the real arts of today. And it was a movement that failed because it added nothing to the idea save a distressing superficiality. It introduced a fog on the brain, that was as senseless as it was embarra.s.sing to the eye caring intensely for precision of form and accuracy of presentation.

Photography was in this sense unfortunate in that it fell into the hands of adepts at the brush who sought to introduce technical variations which had nothing in reality to do with it and with which it never could have anything in common. All this sort of thing was produced in the age of the famous men and women, the period of eighteen ninety-five to nineteen hundred and ten say, for it was the age when the smart young photographer was frantic to produce famous sitters like Shaw and Rodin. We do not care anything about such things in our time because we now know that anybody well photographed according to the scope as well as the restrictions of the medium at hand could be, as has been proven, an interesting subject.

It has been seen, as Alfred Stieglitz has so clearly shown, that an eyebrow, a leg, a tree trunk, a body, a breast, a hand, any part being equal to the whole in its power to tell the story, could be made as interesting, more so indeed than all the famous people in existence.

It doesn't matter to us in the least that Morgan and Richard Strauss helped fill a folio alongside of Maeterlinck and such like persons.

All this was, of course, in keeping with the theatricism of the period in which it was produced, which is one of the best things to be said of it. But we do know that Whistler helped ruin photography along with Wilde who helped ruin esthetics. Everyone has his office nevertheless. As a consequence, Alfred Stieglitz was told by the prevailing geniuses of that time that he was a back number because of his strict adherence to the scientific nature of the medium, because he didn't manipulate his plate beyond the strictly technical advantages it offered, and it was not therefore a fashionable addition to the kind of thing that was being done by the a.s.suming ones at that time. The exhibition of the life-work of Alfred Stieglitz in March, 1921, at the Anderson Galleries, New York, was a huge revelation even to those of us who along with our own ultra modern interests had found a place for good unadulterated photography in the scheme of our appreciation of the art production of this time.

I can say without a qualm that photography has always been a real stimulus to me in all the years I have been personally a.s.sociated with it through the various exhibitions held along with those of modern painting at the gallery of the Photo-Secession, or more intimately understood as "291". Photography was an interesting foil to the kind of veracity that painting is supposed to express, or rather to say, was then supposed to express; for painting like all other ideas has changed vastly in the last ten years, and even very much since the interval created by the war. I might have learned this anywhere else, but I did get it from the Stieglitz camera realizations with more than perhaps the expected frequency, and I am willing to a.s.sert now that there are no portraits in existence, not in all the history of portrait realization either by the camera or in painting, which so definitely present, and in many instances with an almost haunting clairvoyance, the actualities existing in the sitter's mind and body and soul. These portraits are for me without parallel therefore in this particular. And I make bold with another a.s.sertion, that from our modern point of view the Stieglitz photographs are undeniable works of art, as are also the fine photographs of the younger men like Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand. Sheeler, being also one of our best modern painters, has probably added to his photographic work a different type of sensibility by reason of his experience in the so-called creative medium of painting. It is, as we know, brain matter that counts in a work of art, and we have dispensed once and for all with the silly notion that a work of art is made by hand. Art is first and last of all, a product of the intelligence.

I think the photographers must at least have been a trifle upset with this Stieglitz Exhibition. I know that many of the painters of the day were noticeably impressed. There was much to concern everyone there, in any degree that can be put upon us as interested spectators. For myself, I care nothing for the gift of interpretation, and far less for that dreadful type of effete facility which produces a kind of hocus-pocus technical brilliancy which fuddles the eye with a trickery, and produces upon the untrained and uncritical mind a kind of unintelligent hypnotism. Art these days is a matter of scientific comprehension of reality, not a trick of the hand or the old-fashioned manipulation of a brush or a tool. I am interested in presentation pure and simple. All things that are living are expression and therefore part of the inherent symbology of life. Art, therefore, that is enc.u.mbered with excessive symbolism is extraneous, and from my point of view, useless art. Anyone who understands life needs no handbook of poetry or philosophy to tell him what it is. When a picture looks like the life of the world, it is apt to be a fair picture or a good one, but a bad picture is nothing but a bad picture and it is bound to become worse as we think of it. And so for my own pleasure I have consulted the kodak as furnishing me with a better picture of life than many pictures I have seen by many of the so-called very good artists, and I have always delighted in the rotograph series of the Sunday papers because they are as close to life as any superficial representation can hope to be.

It was obvious then that many of those who saw the Stieglitz photographs, and there were large crowds of them, were non-plussed by the unmistakable authenticity of experience contained in them. If you stopped there you were of course mystified, but there is no mystery whatever in these productions, for they are as clear and I shall even go so far as to say as objective as the daylight which produced them, and aside from certain intimate issues they are impersonal as it is possible for an artist to be. It is this quality in them which makes them live for me as realities in the art world of modern time. All art calls for one variety of audacity or another and so these photographs unfold one type of audacity which is not common among works of art, excepting of course in highly accentuated instances of autographic revelation. It is the intellectual sympathy with all the subjects on exhibition which is revealed in these photographs: A kind of spiritual diagnosis which is seldom or never to be found among the photographers and almost never among the painters of the conventional portrait. This ability, talent, virtue, or genius, whatever you may wish to name it, is without theatricism and therefore without spectacular demonstration either of the sitter or the method employed in rendering them.

It is never a matter of arranging cheap and practically unrelated externals with Alfred Stieglitz. I am confident it can be said that he has never in his life made a spectacular photograph. His intensity runs in quite another channel altogether. It is far closer to the clairvoyant exposure of the psychic aspects of the moment, as contained in either the persons or the objects treated of. With these essays in character of Alfred Stieglitz, you have a series of types who had but one object in mind, to lend themselves for the use of the machine in order that a certain problem might be accurately rendered with the scientific end of the process in view, and the given actuality brought to the surface when possible. I see nothing in these portraits beyond this. I understand them technically very little only that I am aware that I have not for long, and perhaps never, seen plates that hold such depths of tonal value and structural relationship of light and shade as are contained in the hundred and fifty prints on exhibition in the Anderson Galleries. Art is a vastly new problem and this is the first thing which must be learned.

Precisely as we learn that a certain type of painting ended in the history of the world with Cezanne.

There is an impulse now in painting toward photographic veracity of experience as is so much in evidence in the work of an artist of such fine perceptions as Ingres, with a brushing aside of all old-fashioned notions of what const.i.tutes artistic experience. There is a deliberate revolt, and photography as we know it in the work of Alfred Stieglitz and the few younger men like Strand and Sheeler is part of the new esthetic anarchism which we as younger painters must expect to make ourselves responsible for. It must be remembered you know, that there has been a war, and art is in a condition of encouraging and stimulating renascence, and we may even go so far as to say that it is a greater world issue than it was previous to the great catastrophe.

And also, it must be heralded that as far as art is concerned the end of the world has been seen. The true artist, if he is intelligent, is witness of this most stimulating truth that confronts us. We cannot hope to function esthetically as we did before all this happened, because we are not the same beings intellectually. This does not mean in relation to photography that all straight photography is good. It merely means that the kind of photography I must name "Fifth Avenue"

art, is a conspicuous species of artistic bunk.u.m, and must be recognized as such.

Photographers must know that fogging and blurring the image is curtailing the experience of it. It is a foolish notion that mystification is of any value. Flattery is one of the false elements that enter into the making of a work of art among the artists of doubtful integrity, but this is often if not always the commercial element that enters into it. There is a vast difference between this sort of representation and that which is to be found in Greek sculpture which is nothing short of conscious plastic organization.

These figures were set up in terms of the prevailing systems of proportion. Portraits were likewise "arranged" through the artistry of the painter in matters of decoration for the great halls of the periods in which they were hung. They were studies on a large scale of ornamentation. Their beauty lies chiefly in the gift of execution. In these modern photographs of Stieglitz and his followers there is an engaging directness which cannot be and must not be ignored. They do for once give in the case of the portraits, and I mean chiefly of course the Stieglitz portraits, the actuality of the sitter without pose or theatricism of any sort, a rather rare thing to be said of the modern photograph.

Stieglitz, therefore, despite his thirty or more years of experimentation comes up among the moderns by virtue of his own personal att.i.tude toward photography, and toward his, as well as its, relation to the subject. His creative power lies in his ability to diagnose the character and quality of the sitter as being peculiar to itself, as a being in relation to itself seen by his own clarifying insight into general and well as special character and characteristic.

It need hardly be said that he knows his business technically for he has been acclaimed sufficiently all over the world by a series of almost irrelevant medals and honours without end. The Stieglitz exhibition is one that should have been seen by everyone regardless of any peculiar and special predilection for art. These photos will have opened the eye and the mind of many a sleeping one as to what can be done by way of mechanical device to approach the direct charm of life in nature.

The moderns have long since congratulated Alfred Stieglitz for his originality in the special field of his own creative endeavor. It will matter little whether the ancients do or not. His product is a fine testimonial to his time and therefore this is his contribution to his time. He finds himself, and perhaps to his own embarra.s.sment even, among the best modern artists; for Stieglitz as I understand him cares little for anything beyond the rendering of the problem involved which makes him of course scientific first and whatever else afterward, which is the hope of the modern artists of all movements, regardless.

Incidentally it may be confided he is an artistic idol of the Dadaists which is at least a happy indication of his modernism. If he were to shift his activities to Paris, he would be taken up at once for his actual value as modern artist expressing present day notions of actual things. Perhaps he will not care to be called Dada, but it is nevertheless true. He has ridden his own vivacious hobby-horse with as much liberty, and one may even say license, as is possible for one intelligent human being. There is no s.p.a.ce to tell casually of his various aspects such as champion billiard player, racehorse enthusiast, etcetera. This information would please his dadaistic confreres, if no one else shows signs of interest.

SOME WOMEN ARTISTS IN MODERN PAINTING

It is for the purpose of specialization that the term woman is herewith applied to the idea of art in painting. Art is for anyone naturally who can show degree of mastery in it. There have been a great many women poets and musicians as well as actors, though singularly enough the women painters of history have been few, and for that matter in question of proportion remain so. Whatever the wish may be in point of dismissing the idea of s.e.x in painting, there has so often been felt among many women engaging to express themselves in it, the need to shake off marked signs of masculinity, and even brutishness of attack, as denoting, and it must be said here, a fact.i.tious notion of power. Power in painting does not come from muscularity of arm; it comes naturally from the intellect. There are a great many male painters showing too many signs of femininity in their appreciation and the conception of art in painting. Art is neither male nor female. Nevertheless, it is pleasing to find women artists such as I wish to take up here, keeping to the charm of their own feminine perceptions and feminine powers of expression. It is their very femininity which makes them distinctive in these instances. This does not imply lady-like approach or womanly att.i.tude of moral. It merely means that their quality is a feminine quality.

In the work of Madame Delaunay Terck, who is the wife of Delaunay, the French Orphiste, which I have not seen since the war came on, one can say that she was then running her husband a very close second for distinction in painting and intelligence of expression. When two people work so closely in harmony with each other, it is and will always remain a matter of difficulty in knowing just who is the real expressor of an idea. Whatever there is of originality in the idea of Orphisme shall be credited to Delaunay as the inventor, but whether his own examples are more replete than those of Mme. Delaunay Terck is not easy of statement. There was at that time a marked increase of virility in production over those of Delaunay himself, but these are matters of private personal attack. Her Russian temper was probably responsible for this, at least no doubt, a.s.sisted considerably. There was nevertheless at that time marked evidence that she was in mastery of the idea of Orphisme both as to conception and execution. She showed greater signs of virility in her approach than did Delaunay himself. There was in his work a deal of what Gertrude Stein then called "white wind", a kind of thin escaping in the method. The designs did not lock so keenly. His work had always typical charm if it had not always satisfying vigor. His "Tour Eiffel" and a canvas called "Rugby" I think, I remember as having more grace than depth, but one may say nevertheless, real distinction.

In the exchanging of ideas so intimately as has happened splendidly between Pica.s.so and Braque, which is in the nature of professional dignity among artists, there is bound to be more or less confusion even to the highly perceptive artist and this must therefore confuse the casual observer and layman. So it is, or was at that time with the painting of Robert Delaunay and Mme. Delaunay Terck; what you learned in this instance was that the more vigorous of the pictures were hers.

She showed the same strength and style in her work as in her interesting personality which was convincing without being too strained or forced; she was most probably an average Russian woman which as one knows means a great deal as to intelligence and personal power.

MARIE LAURENCIN

With Marie Laurencin there was a greater sense of personal and individual creation. One can never quite think of anyone in connection with her pictures other than the happy reminiscence of Watteau. With her work comes charm in the highest, finest sense; there is nothing trivial about her pictures, yet they abound in all the graces of the 18th Century. Her drawings and paintings with spread fans and now and then a greyhound or a gazelle opposed against them in design, hold grace and elegance of feeling that Watteau would certainly have sanctioned. She brings up the same sense of exquisite gesture and simplicity of movement with a feeling for the romantic aspect of virginal life which exists nowhere else in modern painting. She eliminates all severities of intellect, and super-imposes wistful charm of idea upon a pattern of the most delicate beauty. She is essentially an original which means that she invents her own experience in art.

Marie Laurencin concerns herself chiefly with the idea of girlish youth, young girls gazing toward each other with fans spread or folded, and fine braids of hair tied gently with pale cerise or pale blue ribbon, and a pearl-like hush of quietude hovers over them. She arrests the attention by her fine reticence and holds one's interest by the veracity of esthetic experience she evinces in her least or greatest painting or drawing. She paints with miniature sensibility and knows best of all what to leave out. She is eminently devoid of excessiveness either in pose or in treatment, with the result that your eye is refreshingly cooled with the delicate process.

That Marie Laurencin keeps in the grace of French children is in no way surprising if you know the incomparable loveliness of them. Apart from her modernistic excellence as artist, she conveys a poetry so essentially French in quality that you wish always for more and more of it. It is the light breath of the Luxembourg gardens and the gardens of the Tuilleries coming over you once more and the same grace in child-life as existed in the costly games at Versailles among the grown-ups depicted so superbly by Watteau and his most worthy followers, Lancret and Pater, in whom touch is more breath than movement. It is a sensitive and gracefully aristocratic creation Marie Laurencin produces for us, one that makes the eye avid of more experience and the mind of more of its subtlety. It is an essentially beautiful and satisfying contribution to modern painting, this nacreous cubism of Marie Laurencin.