Adventures in the Arts Part 6

GEORGIA O'KEEFFE[1]

With Georgia O'Keeffe one takes a far jump into volcanic crateral ethers, and sees the world of a woman turned inside out and gaping with deep open eyes and fixed mouth at the rather trivial world of living people. "I wish people were all trees and I think I could enjoy them then," says Georgia O'Keeffe. Georgia O'Keeffe has had her feet scorched in the laval effusiveness of terrible experience; she has walked on fire and listened to the hissing of vapors round her person.

The pictures of O'Keeffe, the name by which she is mostly known, are probably as living and shameless private doc.u.ments as exist, in painting certainly, and probably in any other art. By shamelessness I mean unqualified nakedness of statement. Her pictures are essential abstractions as all her sensations have been tempered to abstraction by the too vicarious experience with actual life. She had seen h.e.l.l, one might say, and is the Sphynxian sniffer at the value of a secret.

She looks as if she had ridden the millions of miles of her every known imaginary horizon, and has left all her horses lying dead in their tracks. All in quest of greater knowledge and the greater sense of truth. What these quests for truth are worth no one can precisely say, but the tendency would be to say at least by one who has gone far to find them out that they are not worthy of the earth or sky they are written on. Truth has soiled many an avenue, it has left many a drawing room window open. It has left the confession box filled with bones. However, Georgia O'Keeffe pictures are essays in experience that neither Rops nor Moreau nor Baudelaire could have smiled away.

[Footnote 1: American.--Ed.]

She is far nearer to St. Theresa's version of life as experience than she could ever be to that of Catherine the Great or Lucrezia Borgia.

Georgia O'Keeffe wears no poisoned emeralds. She wears too much white; she is impaled with a white consciousness. It is not without significance that she wishes to paint red in white and still have it look like red. She thinks it can be done and yet there is more red in her pictures than any other color at present; though they do, it must be said, run to rose from ashy white with oppositions of blue to keep them companionable and calm. The work of Georgia O'Keeffe startles by its actual experience in life. This does not imply street life or sky life or drawing room life, but life in all its huge abstraction of pain and misery and its huge propensity for silencing the spirit of adventure. These pictures might also be called expositions of psychism in color and movement.

Without some one to steady her, I think O'Keeffe would not wish the company of more tangible things than trees. She knows why she despises existence, and it comes from facing the acute dilemma with more acuteness than it could comprehend. She is vastly over-size as to experience in the spiritual geometric of the world. All this gives her painting as clean an appearance as it is possible to imagine in painting. She soils nothing with cheap indulgence of wishing commonplace things. She has wished too large and finds the world altogether too small in comparison.

What the future holds for Georgia O'Keeffe as artist depends upon herself. She is modern by instinct and therefore cannot avoid modernity of expression. It is not willed, it is inevitable. When she looks at a person or a thing she senses the effluvia that radiate from them and it is by this that she gauges her loves and hates or her tolerance of them. It is enough that her pictures arrive with a strange incongruous beauty which, though metaphysically an import, does not disconcert by this insistence. She knows the psychism of patterns and evolves them with strict regard for the pictural aspects in them which save them from ba.n.a.lity as ideas. She has no preachment to offer and utters no rubbish on the subject of life and the problem.

She is one of the exceptional girls of the world both in art and in life. As artist she is as pure and free from affectation as in life she is relieved from the necessity of it.

If there are other significant women in modern art I am not as yet familiarized with them. These foregoing women take their place definitely as artists within the circle of women painters like Le Brun, Mary Ca.s.satt, Berthe Morisot, and are in advance of them by being closer to the true appreciation of esthetics in inventing them for themselves.

REVALUATIONS IN IMPRESSIONISM

In the consideration of the real factors in the impressionistic movement, we learn that it is not Monet and the younger crew such as Moret, Maufra, George d'Espagnat and Guillaumin who give us the real weight of this esthetic argument. We find Monet going in for hyper-sentimentalized iridiscences which culminate or seem to culminate in the "Lily" series until we are forced to say he has let us out, once and for all, as far as any further interest in the theory with which he was concerned. We are no longer held by these artificial and overstrained hues, and we find the younger followers offering little or nothing to us save an obvious integrity of purpose. These younger men had apparently miscomprehended idiosyncrasies for ideas and that, save for a certain cleanness of intention, they were offering scarcely anything of what is to be found by way of realization in the pictures of a really great colorist like Renoir.

The two artists who give the true thrill of this phase of the modern movement are without question p.i.s.sarro and Sisley. It is the belief of these two artists in the appearance of things for themselves, under the influence of the light problem, which gives them a strength not always visible at first by reason of a greater simplicity of effect which dominates all of their pictures. We see in both these men a real and impressive desire for a more exacting scientific relation as discovered by intellectual consideration, than is to be found in the emotional outcry predominating in most of the pictures of Monet. These do not hold for us in this day as solidly as they were expected to.

There is a kind of superficiality and consequent dissatisfaction in the conspicuous aspiration toward the first flush, one may call it, of enthusiasm for impressionistic experience. There comes to one who is really concerned, the ever increasing desire to turn toward p.i.s.sarro and Sisley and to quietly dispense with many or most of Monet's pictures, not to speak of a legitimate haste to pa.s.s over the phlegmatic enthusiasms of the younger followers.

One feels that p.i.s.sarro must have been a great man among men not so great. One feels likewise that the stately reticence of a man like Sisley is worth far more to us now, if only because we find in his works as they hang one beside another in numbers, a soberer and more cautious approach to the theme engrossing him and the other artists of the movement of that time. In the pictures of Sisley there is the charm of the fact for itself, the delight of the problem of placing the object in relation to the luminous atmosphere which covers it.

Men like p.i.s.sarro and Sisley were not forgetting Courbet and his admirable knowledge of reality. They were not concerned with the spectacular aspect of the impressionistic principle, not nearly so much as with the satisfying realization of the object under the influence of the new scientific problem in esthetics with which they were concerned. For myself I am out of touch with Monet as a creator and I find myself extracting far more satisfaction and belief from p.i.s.sarro and Sisley, who deal with the problem of nature plus idea, with a much greater degree of let me even say sincerity, by reason of one fact and perhaps the most important one: they were not dramatizing the idea in hand. They were not creating a furor with pink and lavender haystacks. They were satisfied that there was still something to be found in the old arrangement of negative and positive tones as they were understood before the application of the spectrum turned the brains and sensibilities of men. In other words Courbet survived while the Barbizonians perished. There was an undeniable realization of fact still there, clamoring for consideration. There was the reality then even as now, as always. With p.i.s.sarro and Sisley there appeared the true separation of tone, making itself felt most intelligently in the work of these men from whom the real separatists Seurat, Signac, and Cross were to realize their principle of pointilism, of which principle Seurat was to prove himself the most satisfactory creative exponent.

The world of art lost a very great deal in the untimely death of Seurat; he was a young man of great artistic and intellectual gifts.

There was an artist by the name of Vignon who came in for his share during the impressionistic period, probably not with any more dramatic glamour than he achieves now by his very simple and unpretentious pictures. I am sorry for my own pleasure that I have not been able to see more of this artist's pictures from whom I think our own Theodore Robinson must have gained a deal of strength for his own bridge building between Bastien Le Page and the Monet "eccentricity," so to call it.

There is always a reason for reticence, and it is usually apt to come from thinking. Sisley and p.i.s.sarro, Vignon, Seurat, and Robinson were thinking out a way to legitimize the new fantastic craze for prismatic violence, and they found it in the direct consideration for the fact.

They knew that without objects light would have nowhere to fall, that the earth confronted them with indispensable phenomena each one of which had its reason for being. They were finding instead of losing their heads, which is always a matter of praise. I could stay with almost any p.i.s.sarro or Sisley I have ever seen, as I could always want any Seurat near me, just as I could wish almost any Monet out of sight because I find it submerged with emotional extravagance, too much enthusiasm for his new pet idea.

Scientific appreciation had not come with scientific intentions. Like most movements, it was left to other than the accredited innovators for its completion and perfection. That is why we find Cezanne working incessantly to create an art which would achieve a union of impressionism and an art like the Louvre, as he is said to have characterized it for himself. We know now how much Cezanne cared for Chardin as well as for Courbet, and Greco. There is a reason why he must have respected p.i.s.sarro, far more than he did at any time such men as Gaugin, the "flea on his back" as he so vividly and perhaps justly named him. There was far more hope for a possible great art to come out of Van Gogh, who, in his brief seven years had experimented with every aspect of impressionism that had then been divulged. He too was in search of a pa.s.sionate realization of the object. His method of heavy st.i.tching in bright hues was not a perfected style. It was an extravagant hope toward a personal rhythm. He was an "upwardly"

aspiring artist by reason of his hyper-accentuated religious fervours.

All these extraneous and one might even say irrelevant attempts toward speedy arrivism are set aside in the presence of the almost solemn severity of minds like p.i.s.sarro and Sisley, and of Cezanne, who extracted for himself all that was valuable in the pa.s.sing idea of impressionism. The picture which lasts is never the entirely idiosyncratic one. It is that picture which strives toward realization of ideas through a given principle with which it is involved.

So it seems then, that if Monet invented the principle of impressionism as applied to painting, p.i.s.sarro and Sisley a.s.sisted greatly in the creative idea for our lasting use and pleasure by the consideration of the intellect which they applied to it; just as Seurat has given us a far greater realization than either Signac or Cross have offered us in the principle of pointillism.

The "test of endurance" in the impressionistic movement is borne out; the strength of realization is to be found in p.i.s.sarro and Sisley and not in the vapid niceties of Monet, whose work became thinner and thinner by habitual repet.i.tive painting, and by a possible false sense of security in his argument. Monet had become the habitual impressionist, and the habitual in art is its most conspicuous fatality. The art of Monet grew weaker throughout the various stages of Waterloo, Venice, Rouen, Giverney, and the Water Lilies which formed periods of expression, at least to the mind of the observer.

Monet's production had become a kind of mercerized production, and a kind of spurious radiance invested them, in the end. It remained for p.i.s.sarro, Sisley, Cezanne, and Seurat to stabilize the new discovery, and to give it the stamina it was meant to contain, as a scientific idea, scientifically applied.

ODILON REDON

With the pa.s.sing of this rare artist during the late summer months,[2]

we are conscious of the silencing of one of the foremost lyricists in painting, one of the most delicate spirits among those who have painted pictures so thoroughly replete with charm, pictures of such real distinction and merit. For of true charm, of true grace, of true melodic, Redon was certainly the master. I think no one has coveted the vision so much as, certainly no more than, has this artist, possessed of the love of all that is dream-like and fleeting in the more transitory aspect of earthly things. No one has ever felt more that fleeting treasure abiding in the moment, no one has been more jealous of the bounty contained in the single glancing of the eye upward to infinity or downward among the minuter fragments at his feet.

[Footnote 2: Of 1917.--Ed.]

It would seem as if Redon had surely walked amid gardens, so much of the morning is in each of his fragile works. There seems always to be hovering in them the breath of those recently spent dawns of which he was the eager spectator, never quite the full sunlight of the later day. Essentially he was the worshipper of the lip of flower, of dust upon the moth wing, of the throat of young girl, or brow of young boy, of the sudden flight of bird, the soft going of light clouds in a windless sky. These were the gentle stimulants to his most virile expression. Nor did his pictures ever contain more; they never struggled beyond the quality of legend, at least as I know them. He knew the loveliness in a profile, he saw always the evanescences of light upon light and purposeless things. The action or incident in his pictures was never more than the touch of some fair hand gently and exquisitely brushing some swinging flower. He desired implicitly to believe in the immortality of beauty, that things or ent.i.ties once they were beautiful could never die, at least for him. I followed faithfully for a time these fine fragments in those corners of Paris where they could be found, and there was always sure to be in them, always and ever that perfect sense of all that is melodic in the universe.

I do not know much of his early career as an artist. I have read pa.s.sages from letters which he wrote not so long ago, in which he recounts with tenderness the dream life of his childhood, how he used to stand in the field for hours or lie quietly upon some cool hill shaded with young leaves, watching the clouds transforming themselves into wing shapes and flower shapes, staining his fancy with the magic of their delicate color and form--indeed, it would seem as if all things had for him been born somewhere in the clouds and had condescended to an earthward existence for a brief s.p.a.ce, the better to show their rarity of grace for the interval. Although obviously rendered from the object, they were still-lifes which seemed to take on a kind of cloud life during the very process of his creation. They paid tribute to that simple and unaffected statement of his--"I have fashioned an art after myself." Neither do I know just how long he was the engraver and just how long he was the painter--it is evident everywhere that his line is the line of the fastidious artist on steel and stone.

Beyond these excessively frail renderings of his, whether in oil or in pastel, I do not know him, but I am thinking always in the presence of them that he listened very attentively and with more than a common ear to the great masters in music, absorbing at every chance all that was in them for him. He had in his spirit the cla.s.sical outline of music, with nothing directly revolutionary, no sign of what we call revolt other than the strict adherence to personal relationship, no other prejudice than the artist's reaction against all that is not really refined to art, with but one consuming ardor, and that to render with extreme tranquillity everything delicate and lovely in pa.s.sing things.

There is never anything in his pictures outside the conventional logic of beauty, and if they are at all times ineffably sweet, it is only because Redon himself was like them, joyfully living out the days because they were for him ineffably sweet, too. Most of all it is Redon who has rendered with exceptional elegance and extreme artistry, the fragment.

It is in his pictures, replete with exquisiteness, that one finds the true a.n.a.logy to lyric poetry. This lyricism makes them seem mostly Greek--often I have thought them Persian, sometimes again, Indian; certainly he learned something from the Chinese in their porcelains and in their embroidery. I am sure he has been fond of these outer influences, these Oriental suggestions which were for him the spiritual equivalent from the past for his spontaneous ideas, for he, too, had much of all this magic, as he had much of the hypnotic quality of jewelry and precious stones in all his so delicate pictures, firelike in their subtle brilliancy. They have always seemed to contain this suggestion for me: flowers that seemed to be much more the embodiment of jades, rubies, emeralds, and ambers, than just flowers from the common garden. His flamelike touches have always held this preciousness: notations rather for the courtly robe or diadem than just drawings. All this gift of goldsmithery comes as one would expect, quite naturally, from his powers as an engraver, in which art he held a first place in his time and was the master of the younger school, especially in Belgium and Germany. Of all the painters of this time it is certain he was first among them essaying to picture the jewelled loveliness of nature; it is most evident in La Touche who was in no way averse to Renoir either, but Redon has created this touch for himself and it is the touch of the virtuoso. Perhaps it would have been well if Moreau, who had a sicker love of this type of expression, had followed Redon more closely, as he might then have added a little more l.u.s.tre to these very dead literary failures of his.

I cannot now say who else beside Ferdinand Khnopff has been influenced greatly by him, but I do know that he was beloved by the more modern men, that he was revered by all regardless of theories or tenets, for there is in existence somewhere in Paris a volume of letters and testimonials celebrating some anniversary of Redon in proof of it. And I think that--regardless of ideas--the artist must always find him sympathetic, if for no other reason than that he was the essence of refinement, of delicacy, and of taste. When I think of Redon I think of Sh.e.l.ley a little, "he is dusty with tumbling about among the stars," and I think somewhat, too, of some phrases in Debussy and his unearthly school of musicians, for if we are among those who admire st.u.r.dier things in art we can still love the fine gift of purity. And of all gifts Redon has that, certainly.

His art holds, too, something of that breathlessness among the trees one finds in Watteau and in Lancret, maybe more akin to Lancret, for he, also, was more a depicter of the ephemeral. We think of Redon as among those who transvaluate all earthly sensations in terms of a purer element. We think of him as living with his head among the mists, alert for all those sudden bursts of light which fleck here and there forgotten or unseen places, making them live with a new resplendency, full of new revealment, perfect with wonder. Happily we find in him a hatred of description and of ill.u.s.tration, we find these pictures to be illuminations from rich pages not observed by the common eye, decorations out of a world the like of which has been but too seldom seen by those who aspire to vision. _Chansons sans paroles_ are they, ringing clearly and flawlessly to the eye as do those songs of Verlaine (with whom he has also some relationship) to the well-attuned ear.

He was the master of the nuance, and the nuance was his lyricism, his special gift, his genius. He knew perfectly the true vibration of note to note, and how few are they whose esthetic emotions are built upon the strictly poetic basis, who escape the world-old pull towards description and ill.u.s.tration. How few, indeed, among those of the materialistic vision escape this. But for Redon there was but one world, and that a world of imperceptible light on all things visible, with always a kind of song of adoration upon his lips, as it were, obsessed with reverence and child wonder toward every least and greatest thing, and it was in these portrayals of least things that he exposed their naked loveliness as among the greatest. Never did Redon seek for the miniature; he knew merely that the part is the representation of the whole, that the perfect fragment is a true representative of beauty, and that the vision of some fair hand or some fair eye is sure to be the epitome of all that is lovely in the individual.

We have as a result of this almost religious devotion of Redon's, the fairest type of the expression of that element which is the eye's equivalent for melodious sound. In his pictures he perpetuated his belief in the unfailing harmony in things. Either all things were lovely in his eye, or they are made beautiful by thinking beautifully of them. That was the only logic in Redon's painting. He questioned nothing; he saw the spiritual import of every object on which his eye rested. No one shall go to Redon for any kind of intellectual departure or for any highly specialized theory--it is only too evident from his work that he had none in mind. He had, I think, a definite belief in the theosophic principle of aura, in that element of emanation which would seem sometimes to surround delicate objects touched with the suffusion of soft light. For him all things seemed "possessed" by some colorful presence which they themselves could in no way be conscious of, somewhat the same sort of radiance which floods the features of some beauteous person and creates a presence there which the person is not even conscious of, the imaginative reality, in other words, existing either within or without everything the eye beholds. For him the very air which hovered about all things seemed to have, as well, the presence of color not usually seen of men, and it was this emanation or presence which formed the living quality of his backgrounds in which those wondrous flowery heads and hands and wings had their being, through which those dusty wings of most unearthly b.u.t.terflies or moths hurry so feverishly. He has given us a happy suggestion of the reality of spiritual s.p.a.ces and the way that these fluttering bodies which are little more than spirit themselves have enjoyed a beauteous life. He was Keats-like in his appreciation of perfect loveliness, like Sh.e.l.ley in his pa.s.sionate desire to transform all local beauty into universal terms.

No one will quarrel with Redon on account of what is not in him. What we do find in him is the poetry of a quiet, sweet nature in quest always of perfect beauty, longing to make permanent by means of a rare and graceful art some of those fragments which have given him his private and personal clue to the wonders of the moment, creating a personal art by being himself a rare and lovely person. He remains for us one of the finest of artists, who has reverted those whisperings from the great world of visual melody in which he lived. It was with these exquisite fragments that he adorned the states of his own soul in order that he might present them as artist in tangible art form. We are grateful for his lyricism and for his exquisite goldsmithery.

After viewing his delicately beautiful pictures, objects take on a new poetic wonder.

THE VIRTUES OF AMATEUR PAINTING

WITH SPECIAL PRAISES FOR JENNIE VANVLEET COWDERY

Some of the finest instances of pure painting will be found, not as might be imagined by the layman, among the professional artists, but among those amateurs whose chief occupation is amusing themselves first of all. If you who read will make close reference to those rich examples of the mid-Victorian period, when it was more or less distinguished to take up painting along with the other accomplishments, you will find that the much tabooed antimaca.s.sar period produced a species of painting that was as indicative of personal style and research as it was fresh in its elemental approach. The perfect instance in modern art of this sort of original painting raised to the highest excellence is that of Henri Rousseau, the true primitive of our so eclectic modern period. No one can have seen a picture of this most talented douanier without being convinced that technique for purely private personal needs has been beautified to an extraordinary degree.

Rousseau stands among the very best tonalists as well as among the best designers of modern time, and his pictures hold a quality so related to the experience contained in their subjects, as to seem like the essence of the thing itself. You feel that unquestionably Rousseau's Paris is Paris, and you are made to feel likewise that his jungle scenes are at very least his own experiences of his earlier life in Mexico. Rousseau convinces by his unquestionable sensitivity and integrity of approach. He was not fabricating an art, he was endeavoring to create a real picture for his own private satisfaction, and his numerous successes are both convincing and admirable.

As I have said, if you have access to a variety of amateur pictures created during the mid-Victorian era, of whatever style or subject, you will find in them the most admirably sincere qualities of painting as well as singularly enchanting gifts for simplication and the always engaging respect for the fact itself out of which these painted romanzas are created. There was the type of memorial picture for instance, with its proverbial tombstone, its weeping willow tree, and its mourner leaning with one elbow, usually on the cornice above, where the name of the beloved deceased is engraved; below it the appropriate motto and its added wealth of ornamentation in the way of landscape, with houses, hills, winding roads, with maybe an animal or two grazing in the field, and beyond all this vista, an ocean with pretty vessels pa.s.sing on their unmindful way, and more often than not, many species of bright flowers in the foreground to heighten the richness of memory and the sentimental aspects of bereavement.

I wish I could take you to two perfect examples of this sort of amateur painting which I have in mind, now in the possession of the Maine Historical Society, of Portland, Maine, as well as one other superb and still more perfect example of this sort of luxuriously painted memory of life, in the collection of a noted collector of mid-Victorian splendours, near Boston. It is sensation at first hand with these charmingly impressive amateur artists. They have been hampered in no way with the ba.n.a.lity of school technique learned in the manner of the ever-present and unoriginal copyist. They literally invent expression out of a personally acc.u.mulated pa.s.sion for beauty and they have become aware of it through their own intensely personalised contact with life. The marine painters of this period, and earlier, of which there have been almost numberless instances, and of whose fine performances there are large numbers on view in the Marine Museum in Salem, Ma.s.s., offer further authentication of private experience with phases of life that men of the sea are sure to know, the technical beauty alone of which furnishes the spectator with many surprises and fascinations in the line of simplicity and directness of expression.

Many of these amateur painters were no longer young in point of actual years. Henri Rousseau was as we know past forty when he was finally driven to painting in order to establish his own psychic ent.i.ty. And so it is with all of them, for there comes a certain need somewhere in the consciousness of everyone, to offset the tedium of common experience with some degree of poetic sublimation. With the result that many of them find their way out by taking to paints and brushes and canvas, astonishing many a real painter, if not the untutored layman, who probably expects to be mystified in one way or another by something which he thinks he does not understand. It is of the charming pictures of Jennie Vanvleet Cowdery that I wish to speak here.

Mrs. Cowdery is a southern lady, and of this fact you become aware instantly you find yourself in conversation with her. She evidences all the traits and characteristics of a lady of her period, which is to say the late mid-Victorian, for she must have been a graceful young woman herself at the close of this fascinating period. And you find, therefore, in her quaint and convincingly original pictures, the pa.s.sion for the charms and graces that were consistent with the period in which she spent her girlhood, and which has left upon her consciousness so dominant a trace. The pictures of Mrs. Cowdery, despite their remoteness of surrounding--for she always places her graceful figures, which are no less than the embodiments of her own graceful states of being, in a dense woodland scene--bring up to the senses all the fragrances of that past time, the redolence of the oleander by the wall, of the camelia in the shadow, and of the pansy by the hedge. You expect these ladies to shake gently upon the air, like flowers in the morning, their own fascinating perfumes, as you expect them to recite in the quietude of the wood in which they are walking those sentiments which are appropriate to the season and of other soft remembrances.