Artists Past and Present Part 6

When we turn to the older members of the modern Munich school we find the influence of Boecklin dominant. Arnold Boecklin, a Swiss by birth, and possessed of the Swiss ingenuity of mind, has been the subject of endless discussion among the Germans of the present day. He exhausted his very great talent in painting a symbolic world, and by his appreciation of the value of coherence he made his paintings impressive. They are each a perfectly coherent arrangement of parts, making a whole which has the appearance of simplicity, however numerous the elements composing it may be. By a combined generalization and intensity he turned the actual world which he studied closely enough, into his own unreality. Thus, in his Italian landscapes, he reveals the architectonic structure of his scene stripped of all incidental ornament, the upright and horizontal lines left severe and uncompromised, and the blue of the heavens and the sea, and the dark green of the cypresses, pushed to an almost incredible depth. Everything is more significant than in nature, yet nature has provided the elements of significance. It is in his ability to see things whole and to co-ordinate the selected details that Boecklin is most an artist. This largeness of generalization gives him power over the imagination, and is, perhaps the only, certainly the chief source of his power. His color by its very intensity overdoes the intended effect. The imagination instead of being stimulated is sated, and his obvious symbolism fails to pique the curiosity. Moreover, his handling of paint lacks sensitiveness. He has something of the disregard shown by the English painter Watts for the beauty inherent in his material which might as well be clay or textile as pigment in his hands. But his appreciation of the effect upon the mind of n.o.ble arrangements of s.p.a.ce and ma.s.s raises him to a much higher place as an artist than he can be said to occupy as a painter.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIDDLING DEATH

_From a portrait by Arnold Boecklin_]

Franz von Stuck is Boecklin's most distinguished follower. When we turn from the examples of Boecklin's work, by no means the most impressive examples, exhibited in America, to Stuck's "Inferno" we perceive both the influence of Boecklin and the powerful individuality that mingles with it.

There is Boecklin's insistence upon the symbol, and upon the bodying forth of things unseen, there is the solid violence of color, there is the pompous statement of the half-discerned truths which more sensitive artists are content to whisper. But there is also a splendid arabesque of line and a deeper reading of the spiritual content of the subject.

If we compare Stuck with William Blake whose fancy also was haunted by Dantesque conceptions, we see how much more impressive Blake's visions of the unreal world are and we find the reason in their swift energy of conception and in the artist's tenacity in holding his conception. With both Boecklin and Stuck we feel that the manner of rendering the conception becomes more important than the initial conception, and this seldom, if ever, is true of Blake. In spite of Boecklin's superb restraint in the disposition of his ma.s.ses, when it comes to color he is at the mercy of the material pigment and permits it to obliterate where it should enhance and reveal. His forms, also, and even more than Stuck's, lose vitality under the weight of significance forced upon them, while Blake's emerge from the blank panel clean and strong and unenc.u.mbered. We feel that Blake, with all his struggle to utter truth by means of symbol, never allows his mind to lose the idea that "Living form is eternal existence," but in Boecklin's pictures "living form" is often buried beneath his colored clays.

Thus we see that it cannot truly be said of him and his followers that the idea is of first importance to them. It is their material that is of first importance, otherwise they would learn so to subordinate their material as to support and disclose their idea. This is the more obvious that their idea is emotional and therefore perfectly suited to expression through the medium of art. Liebermann's ideas although they are intellectual are not of a kind that cannot appropriately be translated into pictures, and his respect for them leads him to fit his manner of expression closely to their requirements. Like Leibl he is a painter and a thinker in one, and the faculties of the two work in complete coordination.

Painters of Boecklin's type, on the other hand, wish to produce in the observer a strong emotion, but they become slaves to their medium because their own emotion is not sufficiently powerful to conquer their minds, which become diverted by the colors and forms they produce. One of Blake's swift upward soaring lines has more power to carry the imagination heavenward than all the versions of Boecklin's "Island of Death."

Against Boecklin's followers, whose minds are more or less befogged by their lack of appreciation of paint as a means to an end, we must place Wilhelm Truebner who is a clear thinker and a great painter, with more warmth than Liebermann and with a reticent color sense, a feeling for expressive form, a love of reality, and no apparent desire to re-invent the grotesque. His elegance of line in itself sets him apart from most of his compatriots, and his knowledge of how to extract from his color scheme its essential beauty is greater than that of most modern painters, whatever their nationality. His blacks have the depth and l.u.s.ter without unctiousness characteristic of black as the great colorists use it, and in his touches of pale refined color enlivening a black and white composition, we have the delightful effect so often given by Manet, as of a bunch of bright flowers thrown into a shadowy corner.

If young Germany were content to follow in Truebner's footsteps we should soon have a revival of the ancient craftsmanship and conscience that animated Holbein and Durer. Young Germany, however, has other plans. To learn of them the reader is referred to Meier-Graefe's comprehensive and stimulating volume on modern art. The only representation of the painters of the immediate present given in the American exhibition was confined to the Scholle School, which, however, indicates clearly the creative impulse that is stirring in the younger painters. "A warlike state," Blake wrote, "never can produce Art. It will Rob and Plunder and acc.u.mulate into one place and Translate and Copy and Buy and Sell and Criticize, but not Make." This has been true of the Germans, but the present generation is bent upon making and it is natural that the strongest impulse toward originality should come to the Munich painters rather than to the cosmopolitan Berlin men.

The Scholle is a Munich a.s.sociation consisting of a group of young men who, taking the humble and fecund earth as their symbol, as the t.i.tle of the society implies, seek to get into their painting the vigor and intensity of life and force which devotion to the healthy joys provided by our mother Earth is supposed to engender.

They are like the giant Antaeus whose strength was invincible so long as he remained in contact with the earth, but who easily was strangled when lifted into the upper air. Their strength also melts into helplessness when confronted by problems of atmosphere and the delicate veils of tone which enwrap the material world for the American painter.

But the energy of these young Germans in their own field is something at which to wonder. They remind one of their critics of a band of l.u.s.ty peasant boys journeying in rank from their University to the nearest beer garden, singing loud songs by the way. Leo Putz, Adolf Muenzer, Fritz Erler, are the leaders of the group, although Alex Salzmann and Ferdinand Spiegel were Erler's collaborators in the famous Wiesbaden frescoes which offended the taste of the Kaiser. These young men are entirely capable of offending a less conventional taste than the Kaiser's, but they all are doing something which has not been done in Germany for many a long year; they are busying themselves with the visible world and painting frankly what they see. It does not matter in the least that in their decorative work they give rein to their fancy and produce such symbolism as we find in Erler's "Pestilence," or that in the ill.u.s.trations for Jugend they tell a story with keen appreciation of its literary significance. Their eyes are open upon the aspect of material things and they paint flesh that is palpitating with life, forms that live and move, and color that vibrates.

Here again as with Liebermann and Truebner the idea and the execution are in harmony, but with the Scholle painters the idea is apt to be a very simple one, depending upon straightforward representation for its impressiveness. Above all it reflects the national temper of mind, for all these individualists are German to the core and not to be mistaken for any other race.

One characteristic of this national temper is directness. Not necessarily simplicity, of course, since the German painter as well as the German writer has frequently complex thoughts to express and uses corresponding elaborations of expression. But he does not often say one thing while seeming to say another; he does not often give double and contradictory meanings to the same subject. He does not present for your contemplation the disheartening spectacle of sophistication masquerading as innocence, or duplicity masquerading as frankness. To that extent he is an optimist, however deep his native pessimism may go in other directions.

There is, for example, a picture by the French artist Jacques Blanche, ent.i.tled "Louise of Montmartre," and known to many Americans, in which the girl to whom Paris irresistibly calls is shown in her boyish blouse and collar, her youthful hat and plainly dressed hair, in a nonchalant att.i.tude, pretty and plebeian, with honest eyes, yet revealing in every line of her frank and fresh young face the potentiality of response to all the appeals made by the ruthless spirit of the city. It is impossible to discern at what points the artist has betrayed that artless physiognomy in order to reveal the secrets of temperament, but the thing is done.

It is not what the German is interested in doing. His imagination works subjectively, giving form to his own conceptions, rather than objectively or as an interpreter of others. Hence the downright, and, in a sense, confiding aspect of so much of this brave art. Hence, also, its affinity with the American spirit, for the American still bends a rather unsuspecting gaze upon life and accepts character and temperament as they choose to present themselves. The German, however, is articulate and ratiocinating where we are more purely instinctive. We are not inclined to reason about our moods and we seldom are able to express them in our literature. In our art, on the other hand, especially in our landscape art, we manage to translate our subtlest emotion. We are able to suggest what is too delicate for a.n.a.lysis, and in this we stand almost alone in the painting of the present day.

TWO SPANISH PAINTERS

XII

TWO SPANISH PAINTERS

Modern art, particularly American art, owes much to Velasquez and something to Goya, and modern painters have been prompt to acknowledge their indebtedness. But there has been a prevailing impression that with Goya's rich and unique achievement Spanish art stopped in its own country so completely as to be incapable of revival. The impression was disturbed in this country by the appearance in the galleries of the Hispanic Museum in New York, and also in Buffalo and in Boston, of the work of two modern Spaniards, one a painter who demonstrated by his methods and choice of subjects that the old Spanish traditions and ideals had not been forgotten, the other a singularly isolated individual who illumined for us a side of Spanish life which art previously had ignored. Both spoke a racy idiom and conveyed a sense of quickened vitality by freedom of gesture, unhackneyed arrangement, intensity of color, reality of type, yet in their influence upon the public they were as far as might be asunder.

Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida was born at Valencia, Spain, in 1863, and began seriously to study art at the age of fifteen. He studied at the Academy of his birthplace for several years and won there a scholarship ent.i.tling him to a period of study in Italy. He visited Paris also, where he was profoundly impressed, it is said, by two exhibitions in the French capital, one of the work of Bastien LePage, the other of the work of the German Menzel. The modern note is clearly felt in all his later painting, but certainly not the influence of either Bastien LePage or Menzel. The painter to whom he bears the most marked resemblance is Botticelli. The spiritual languor, the melancholy sentiment, the mystical tendency, the curiosity and interest in the unseen which are important characteristics of the Florentine who read his Dante to such good purpose do not appear in the work of this frank and l.u.s.ty Valencian, but where else in modern painting do we find the gracile forms, the supple muscles, the buoyancy of carriage, the light impetuosity of movement, and the draperies blown into the shapes of wings and sails, which meet us here as in the pagan compositions of Botticelli?

[Ill.u.s.tration: In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

THE SWIMMERS

_From a painting by Sorolla_]

If we glance at Sorolla's young girls and young boys racing along the hot beach, or his bathers exulting in their "water joy," we recall at the same moment the "Primavera" with its swift-stepping nymphs, the wind G.o.ds in the "Birth of Venus," or the "Judith" with her maid moving rapidly along a flower-strewn path. This joy of motion and this continual suggestion of youth and vitality form the link that binds together the so dissimilar ideals of the old and the modern master.

Sorolla's inspiration is by far the simpler. His art reflects the brilliant sunshine of the Mediterranean coast, the tonic quality of the fresh air, and the unconventionality of life by the sea. All his people use natural gestures and express in their activity the untrammeled energy of primitive life. In looking at these children, and there is hardly a figure that has not the navete of childhood, we think less of the individuals portrayed than of the outdoor freshness of which they are a part. They are much more spirits of nature than the dryads and nereids and mermaids conceived by the Germans to express in symbol the natural forces. Nothing suggests the use of models, all has the look of spontaneity as though the artist had made his notes in pa.s.sing, without the slightest regard to producing a picture, with only the idea of reproducing life. Life, however, appears in his canvases in a sufficiently decorative form, although not in the carefully considered patterns of those artists with whom the decorative instinct is supreme.

Observe, for example, the painting ent.i.tled "Sea Idyl." Two children are stretched on the beach, their bright bodies wet and glistening and casting blue shadows on the sands. They are lying so close to the water's edge that the waves lap over them, the boy's skin shines like polished marble under the wet film just pa.s.sing across it, and the girl's drenched garments cling with sharp chiseled folds to the form beneath like the draperies of some young Greek G.o.ddess just risen from the sea. The insolence of laughing eyes, the idle fumbling of young hands in the wet sand, the tingling life in the clean-cut limbs, the buoyancy of the waves that lift them slightly and hold them above the earth,--all are seen with unwearied eyes, and reproduced with energy.

The management of the pigment in this picture as in many of the others can be called neither learned nor subtle. Apparently the artist had in mind two intentions, the one to represent motion, the other to represent light, and he set about his task in the simplest way possible, with such simplicity, indeed, that the extraordinary character of the result would easily be missed by a pedant. It has not been missed by the public, who have entered with enthusiasm into the painter's mood, perceived the originality of his vision and the joyousness of his art, and have radiated their own appreciation of this vitalized, healthful world of happy people until they have increased the distrust of the pedant for an art so helplessly popular.

[Ill.u.s.tration: In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

THE BATH--JaVEA

_From a painting by Sorolla_]

The distrust is not unnatural. To follow the popular taste would lead us into strange errors in our judgments of art, and only rarely would produce a predilection capable of lasting over a generation. How is it, then, that we fearlessly may range ourselves on the side of the public in admiration of Sorolla's art? Because the painter has cast off the slavery of the conventional vision. He sees for himself, the rarest of gifts, and thus can well afford to paint like others. He spends, apparently, but little thought upon his execution, letting it flow easily according to his instinct for the appropriate. It is not a safe example to follow for painters who do not see with unusual directness.

Often in searching out refinements of execution the eye discovers refinements of fact in the scene to be portrayed and makes its selection with greater distinction than would be possible at first sight. But Sorolla's prompt selective vision flies to its goal like a bee to a honey-bearing flower. He takes what he wants and leaves the rest with the dew still on it. His forces are neither scattered nor spent. His freshness is overmastering, and with our eyes on his creations we have that curious sense of possessing youth and health and freedom which we get sometimes from the sight of boys at their games. We are cheated into forgetfulness of the world's great age and our own la.s.situdes and physical ineffectiveness. This illusion is agreeable to the most of us, hence our unreserved liking for Sorolla's art which produces it.

The art of Ignacio Zuloaga, on the contrary, produces the opposite impression of complete sophistication. In place of adolescent exultations and ebullient physical activities, we find in it the strange sorceries of a guileful civilization. There are smiling women with narrowed eyelids and powdered faces, old men practising dolorous rejuvenations, laughter that conceals more than it expresses, motions that are as calculated as those of the dance, serpentine forms, fervid pa.s.sions, and underneath the sophistries a violent primeval temper. In spite of the flowerlike gaiety of the color in rich costumes, the glint of silver, the sweet cool blues, the pale violets, in the painter's versions of the typical toreador of Spain the types are bold, cruel, and sullen. In spite of the fragility and elegance of the women on balconies under soft laces the prevailing note is that of undisciplined ferocity of emotion. This too is Spain, but not the Spain of the beach and sea life.

The rather numerous examples of what Mr. Christian Brinton has called Zuloaga's "growing diabolic tendency" make it clear that his art holds no place for spontaneity and the innocence due to ignorance, but where he keeps to Spanish subjects his work remains healthy. There is the picture ent.i.tled "The Sorceresses of San Milan" in which three old women are seen against a dramatic landscape. These haggard jests of nature bring before us a Spain from which the American finds it impossible not to shrink with horror, but they are rich in dramatic quality and recall the power of Goya to endow the abnormal with imaginative splendor while holding to essential truth. They are diabolic, if you will, but not Mephistophelian. There is the abstract horror in them which we a.s.sociate with unknown powers of darkness, but not the guile with which we endow a personal devil. In striking contrast to this group are the balcony pictures in which women of ripe aggressive beauty lounge gracefully in the open-air rooms with the same freedom of pose as within doors, haughty yet frank, opulent, languid yet animated, flowers that could have bloomed nowhere else than under a scorching sun.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Courtesy of the Hispanic Society of America.

THE SORCERESSES OF SAN MILAN

_From a painting by Zuloaga_]

Then there is the group of dancers and actors and singers in each of which we find the adroit mingling of the artificial with the real, and the appreciation of the fact that with the people of the stage much that is artificial to others becomes their reality. The most vivid of them all is Mlle. Lucienne Breval as "Carmen." The sinuous figure is wrapped in a shawl apparently of a thousand colors; actually, a strong combination of yellow, green, and red. The skirt which the singer gathers in one hand and lifts sufficiently to show the small foot in its red slipper has a dark vermilion ground on which is a pattern of large flowers of paler vermilion, boldly outlined with blue.

Over it droops the dark fringe of the shawl. A crimson flower is in the dark hair, and the footlights cast an artificial amber glow on the face.

This tawny harmony is seen against a background of slightly acid green; at the other side of the canvas is a little table with two men seated at it. They look "made up," in the theatrical sense, and the table looks rather light and rickety; there is one solid natural stage property, the yellow jug on the table with its dull blue figure. The whole life and reality of the picture are in the Carmen smiling and m.u.f.fled in the curious shawl, as if she were about to move in a fiery dance in which her brilliant wrappings would take a part as animated and vital as her own. No one but a Spaniard could invest a garment with such expressiveness.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Courtesy of the Hispanic Society of America.

THE OLD BOULEVARDIER

_From a painting by Zuloaga_]

"Paulette as Danseuse" is another stage figure. Here again the costume speaks with extraordinary eloquence. The colors are green and pink, and play delicately within a narrow range of varied tones. Under the short green jacket the low-cut bodice shows a finely modeled throat and a chest that seems almost to rise and fall with the breath, so palpitating with life is the fleshlike surface. The poise of the figure suggests that the dance has that moment ended, and the eyes and mouth are slightly arched. The undulating line of the draperies, now tightly drawn about the figure, and again billowing into ampler curves, suggests the rhythm of the dance.

In another canvas we see Paulette once more, this time in walking costume, standing with her hands on her hips in a daintily awkward pose.

Her lips, in the first picture upturned at the corners, mouselike, have widened in a frank smile, her eyes have lost their formal archness and look with detached interest upon the pa.s.sing show, she still is supple, clear cut, with a flexible silhouette, but her gown would find it impossible to dance, and, as before, she and her gown are one.

In "The Actress Pilar Soler," on the other hand, Zuloaga dispenses as far as possible with definite aids to expression. The costume is undefined; the half-length figure, draped in black and placed high on the canvas, is seen against a dark greenish-blue background. The ma.s.s of the silhouette, unbroken as in an Egyptian statue, but with tremulous contours suggesting the fluttering of life in the dimly defined body, is sufficiently considered and distinguished; but it is the modeling of the face that holds the attention, a mere blur of tone, yet with all the planes understood and with a certain material richness of impasto that contributes to the look of solid flesh, the dark of the eyebrows making the only p.r.o.nounced accent--a face that becomes more and more vital as you look at it, with that indestructible vitality of which, among the Frenchmen, Carriere was master.