Part 12

“The Engaged Couple,” like “Maternity,” like his portraits of a married couple, a young maiden, etc., etc., are unapproachable works. His grasp of the essential in phenomena, his economy of form, are of supreme craftsmanship. It is in this direction, I think, that the future development of painting lies. It will soon be over with mere transcription of nature, however clever; certainly, on the not very distant day when colour photography will be handed over from the experimental laboratory of the physicist, to professional use. Then the individual standpoints of observation will alone hold good. People will want views, not as the mechanically reproducing, dead object-glass, but as the inspired eye of the artist sees them. Pictures will have to be a selection, an interpretation, an emotional excavation of the optic phenomenon; every picture an anthology of vision; and the personality of the artist revealing himself in it, will be the fascination of his work, its value and its beauty. Let no one say: “These are trivialities. It has always been so since plastic art existed.” The plastic artist was hitherto always in the first place a depictor. His soul revealed itself only discreetly in his works. Carrière goes far beyond what he sees: he paints souls; he paints feelings. In his representation the inexpressible becomes an incident. A fugitive movement, a pose, a line of head, neck, shoulders, or hand in which unconsciousness is manifested, when self-control is relaxed for a moment; these treacherous means of expressing mood, which the will is not always able to influence—these are the elements with which he works. He discloses the impulses, up to their most delicate moods, which are the causes of movements and deportment. To such a spiritual art must painting be developed. And this is why I call Carrière’s pictures the art of the future.

X

PUVIS DE CHAVANNES

Puvis de Chavannes is dead, and his influence is dying; his School is desolate, and I see now hardly any stragglers worrying themselves to paint with his palette of pale moonlight. So it is no longer necessary to attack him. It is enough to explain his spiritual transformation and his successes.

When he attained the maturity of his powers, that Naturalism was the trump-card in painting, of which Bastian Lepage’s abominable “Reaper,” whose brutalised grimace grins at the visitor to the Luxembourg Museum, was admired as the highest achievement. The young critic had eyes only for this art. The multitude dared not question the fulsome praise squandered on the works of the naturalists; but their inner voice was not mute. They had qualms of conscience about their culpable cowardice, and were quite well aware that naturalism, which was lauded to them as Progress and the Future, was in reality the negation of all art. Then Puvis de Chavannes stepped forward with his big wall-paintings, which put symbolism, sacred legend, and history on the stage, on a literary background, and reunited them to tradition, which had been disowned or scoffed at by naturalism, out of barbaric ignorance or vulgar arrogance. The multitude, whose inward feelings partisan criticism outraged, turned forthwith to the painter who seemed to them a deliverer and an avenger. He was a living protest against the art of the vulgar, the hideous, and the commonplace; against the art of the mechanically dull copying of a soulless reality. He took pains to serve beauty. He showed unmistakably the object of his spiritualising his figures and actions. Before his pictures one could once more dream. After prose, after vulgar, slangy prose, it was verse. People did not even ask if the verses were good; people were satisfied with mediocre verses, provided they were verses. To Puvis de Chavannes his fundamental, academic instincts had given the direction; but whilst he followed his bent, he became, without intending it, and without previously knowing it, the file-leader of the right-about turn, which began in “the ’eighties” and has now long ended.

In a period of idealism he would have been one of the many. People would not have noticed him or would have found in him much to take exception to: the banality of his symbols, the impersonality, smoothness, and polish of his draughtsmanship, the intentional incoherence of his compositions. During the predominance of naturalism, his academic banality itself seemed a courageous act, and seekers after the ideal even accounted his most obvious faults and weaknesses as excellencies in him.

He got his faded, spectral colours by imitating the fresco painters of the Quattrocentro. His ideal of picturesque beauty united in inseparable association the stateliness of the old monumental wall-paintings with their fadedness; and when he wished to paint in their style and produce their æsthetic effects, he at once gave his pictures the faint coloration which had never been intended by the Quattrocentists, but which their works have suffered through the devastating force of five centuries. The obliterated, remote, ghostly qualities of this faded type of painting came to meet a morbid mood of the time. This mystic coloration harmonised with the prevalent mysticism. The decadents were thankful to him for his moon-stricken colouring; those athirst for beauty for his conversion to classical tradition; and so he became a great man through the sins of the naturalists and their critical heralds.

Puvis was the first academical and recognised master in France who began to paint the morbid. His whim is chalk-wash. He covers, on principle, his pictures with a white, semi-transparent broth that extinguishes all the colours. His eye detests colour. His glance has a sort of chloridising effect; it takes the colour out of everything it ranges over. With him, however, morbidity is natural and not an affectation. He has that horror of all that is loud, full, and impressive, which marks the nervous man, whom every rough touch pains. It is well with him only when nature whispers, when her looks are veiled in a fine mist, when all life in her is motionless. In his soul reigns a melancholy absence of sound, and he likes to carry this into the outer world also. Moreover, the multiplicity of living forms confuses and repels him; it is too full of motion and gaudiness. He simplifies, therefore, all lines which thus lose their distinctive individuality. He retains only what is typical of the phenomenon; he infuses his style into all that his brush and pencil touch, and this cold stylisation is then called by people his “idealism.”

Has Puvis laid himself open to the reproach that all his figures are awkwardly typical because he cannot draw? We might almost think so. It is only as a reply to such a reproach that we can understand his exhibiting in 1896 several hundred drawings, preliminary studies for all his chief works. After a minute inspection of these smaller and greater sheets of sketches scarcely indicated or industriously executed, of figures scarcely outlined or carefully shaded in lead-pencil, Indian ink, red and other coloured chalks, we are bound to feel every respect for his industry and conscientiousness. For the originality of his talent, too? That to me is questionable. If I gaze on the studies of Leonardo and Albrecht Dürer, I am, in a very short time, over-mastered by an inexpressible emotion. A holy of holies is revealed: the most secret feelings of an artist’s soul which would fain become conscious of itself whilst seeking to give shape to the emotion that is urging it. You can see the struggle with the resistance of the material, the mustering of all his forces, in the majority of cases the artist’s victory, ofttimes his despairing confession of impotence. A feature of the phenomenon—a fugitive yet expressive movement has made its impression on the artist. He hastens to fix his conception. At first in a few hasty strokes, which are then strengthened, deepened, emphasised, and developed. Five times, ten times, till the artist desists disheartened, or till the vision is overcome and fixed by a spell in its whole force and verity, in its distinctive character that is never to be repeated. In Puvis I observed with astonishment the contrary process. The first sketch has always the greatest individuality, every later state of the figure shows it less differentiated, and more reduced to an average type lacking expression. He never ascends, he goes down. The artist’s emotion in face of the phenomenon—the impulse to produce in the rapture of an intuition is never traceable in him. None of the sheets is the arena of that awful fight waged by talent against the hostile demon of the material, which reminds me of the night-long struggle of Jacob with the spectre at the ford Jabbok. The starting-point of the work is correct, ice-cold _métier_. It progresses to simplifications that are just so many evasions of difficulties, and it finally arrives at insignificant puppets. “That was intentional,” cry the painter’s eulogists. So much the worse if it was intentional. But was it really intentional? That is the question. Often enough, as an afterthought, a person imagines he is exercising volition, whilst, as a matter of fact, he is constrained. For him who has learnt to see in all works documents bearing on their creator’s psychology, the drawings of Puvis are proof positive that this highly famous man never glanced at the world with an artist’s eye, but that he was originally a cold, academical technician, who, later on, by pure reason and without attaining the slightest fervour, has subtilised a peculiarity: the imitation of faded frescoes in colour, archaic indifferentiation in drawing, abstract literary symbolism in his subjects.

In fact, what is unreal and dream-like about his vision is not only determinative in regard to his archaically simple, almost poor drawing and his pallid colour, but also the choice of his subject. He likes best to portray allegories, in which the figures are reduced to the _rôle_ of symbols. When he cannot be allegorical, in his famous wall-paintings at the Pantheon, for instance, which tell the legend of St Géneviève, he satisfies his craving for spectre painting by spiritualising the given historical figures into fleshless, bloodless denizens of the ballad of the land of Thule. In individual and very rare instances, he finds a material organically suitable for his moon-struck style of painting. In such cases, of course, he strives after extraordinary effects; for instance, with his “Poor Fisherman” in the Luxembourg Museum. This dreadfully poor, emaciated man—more a shadow than a human being—who, sorrowfully but resigned, stands in his old patched boat, drops his wretched net into the sluggish, greyish-yellow water, and is surrounded and, as it were, fixed by the dead lines of a flat melancholy landscape, breathes a disconsolateness and abandonment that, at the sight of him, “humanity’s whole sorrow” seizes the beholder.

Once again, in his last period, Puvis lighted on one of those rare subjects which not only bear, but demand his peculiar methods of execution, and out of this lucky encounter came forth a masterpiece, viz., the fresco which concludes his Géneviève cycle.

St Géneviève has stepped out of her cell on to the balcony of her convent and lets her glance roam over Paris. At her feet lies the slumbering city; in the foreground surge the red-tiled roofs, between which soar a few tree-tops in the luxuriant verdure of midsummer; in the distance stretch the soft hill lines of a cheerful landscape, the green of whose meadows is interrupted, here and there, by the white mass of a convent or abbey. Slender lilies and _gladioli_ bloom in noble vessels on the balcony. In the bare cell, the door of which is wide open behind the saint, the smoking flame of a lamp of antique pattern smoulders. At the summit, in a deep blue sky, hangs the full moon, which softly illumines city and landscape, and casts an eerie gleam on the curled leafage of the tree-tops. Immersed and bathed in its soft radiance, the saint stands there, unearthly with her thin, ascetic countenance and her white nun’s habit, which from her headcloth to the trailing hem of her garment flows down in unbroken, perpendicular lines, and seems to lift up her soul in a quiet, ecstatic prayer for the slumbering town, whose peaceful prosperity is a work of her solicitous love. Here Puvis’s peculiar method triumphs in every feature. Here his temperament needed only to give itself its natural scope to attain the highest artistic result. What elsewhere is intolerable affectation becomes here the honest revelation of a mood. The subdued harmony of violet and blue in different gradations of intensity that blend softly into one another is legitimate in the picture of a summer night, which takes its sole spectral light from the moon and an oil-lamp. The paleness of the flesh is understandable in the aging nun who mortifies herself by prayer, vigils, and fasting. The simplicity of the drawing, which is reduced to a few straight and slightly though expressively curved lines, finds its defence in the dusk of the semi-transparent night which suppresses all individualities of forms; and leaves only for us general, essential features, and these rather surmised than clearly seen. Thus here a special subject finds its special and fully adequate means of expression, and the work becomes a model of what is termed style in the highest sense.

A rejuvenation seemed to come over Puvis when he seized once more on the Géneviève theme which had occupied him from the days of his youth. This theme was to him what the theme of Faust was to Goethe: while the octogenarian was engrossed in it, something of the flame that glowed in the young man of twenty fired him, and the last cry of _Una pænitentium_[5] is still an after-thrill of Gretchen’s passion. Puvis, too, appears to have thought or felt “_Ihr naht euch wieder, schwankende Gestalten!_” when he set about painting this concluding picture of the Géneviève cycle; and for the last strophe of his ballad, which dies away so sadly, he found again some of the power and unction which secures to its predecessors their glorious place in the century’s Art.

If the brazen foreheads of the babblers who have the chief say in the art criticism of the time were at all capable of a decent blush, they would turn red with shame at his series of frescoes in the Pantheon. People had the audacity to claim Puvis for some “modernity” or other, in which certain moods of our time were said to be incorporated. The only time when one can wholly surrender oneself to him, he is absolutely of no time. What, in that instance, fascinates in him is nothing relating to the present, and still less to the future, but the past and the remote past, the atavistic. His life’s great work is a legend of a saint, which he has treated after the manner of a legend with the feelings of a primitive who, in the manner natural to him—the manner of about the fourteenth century—tells a story that is to him a living verity, in which he believes, as those souls believe it for whose edification he presents it, and which moves and touches him as it does the beholders who will fold their hands devoutly before his work. Puvis cannot reckon on such a reception from his contemporaries, for whom he designs his creation. To us the legend is strange; it is a bit of learned literature which we look at critically, and in which we cannot be expected to plunge believingly. If Puvis, nevertheless, overcomes our opposition, and can suggest to us for moments the child-like faith and all the emotions of dead and gone times that are connected with that faith, he has achieved something more difficult than the primitives, for whom the spirit of their time was no opponent, but a confederate.

Blessed are the ignorant. Their lack of suspicion secures them, whenever they glance at the world, the enthusiasm of discovery and invention, and every phenomenon delights them as something unprecedented. During the lifetime of Puvis de Chavannes his peculiar style was particularly extolled by his eulogists. They exhibited him as a God-sent foundling; as a Moses of painting, without ancestors, himself an ancestor; as a great solitary wandering apart from the multitude through the history of contemporary art. Such phrases can be uttered only by one who rejoices in the most refreshing ignorance of the historical continuity of things. Puvis is of a family. The expert can name his forefathers and relations; he finds their lineaments repeated—often coarsened and disfigured—in him.

Puvis, this great, original genius of his admirers, is an impoverished descendant of Cornelius. He represents the worst aberration in art that this century has seen, viz., thought-painting. Nowadays it is no longer necessary to prove that abstraction is the negation and abrogation of plastic art. This maxim, fortunately, has become an æsthetic commonplace. Painting has to do only with sensuous phenomena; abstraction distils from the sensuous one quality, which, since it is common to many phenomena, is reminiscent of many phenomena, yet is itself not phenomenon. He who feels the impulse to paint not views but thoughts, proves that in his innermost soul he is not a painter, but a rhetorician, and that he has deceived himself marvellously as to the method of expression natural and organic to him. Cornelius’s painting presented thoughts, religious, philosophical, and historical dogmas, in a picture-language considerably less clearly than might have been done in well-ordered words. It pleased all those whose soul was seven times sealed against understanding what really constitutes painting. As long as the Cornelius tendency was dominant in Germany, that country was depressingly behind in the art life of the period. As soon as Cornelius and his school were overthrown, a sound development of German painting began. And now, at the close of the nineteenth century in France, in the France which has produced, in landscape, Corot, Rousseau, Diaz, Harpignies: in figure-painting, Millet, Courbet, Bonnat, Roll: from which has come the return to nature and the renaissance of art, the allegorical thought-painting of a Puvis has been praised as the greatest advance, as the latest step in development! The snake biting its own tail still remains the truest symbol of human activity that the self-knowledge of the race has as yet discovered.

And how far, in his special direction, Puvis lags behind his obsolete predecessors! A Cornelius, Kaulbach, and Stilke, displayed, after all, in the invention of their symbols, a rich power of imagination which might have been worthy of better things. Their two-legged abstractions were so honestly drawn that they deceived with regard to their phantom-like nature, and could give themselves out to be real creatures of flesh and blood. Puvis’s invention, on the other hand, is so poor that it whines pitifully for alms. The representations which kindle his imagination seem derived solely from an illustrated handbook of mythology for girls’ schools. For an example of this, one has only to look at the wall-paintings for the Boston Library, which are among the most important work that Puvis has done, at least so far as their range and claims are concerned. The first represents the inspiring Muses “greeting with acclamations light carrying the Genius.” From a schematic landscape with sickly pale meadows, a sea of ultramarine blue, and spanned by a sky the colour of autumn foliage, nine female figures are flying to meet a delightfully insignificant naked youth striding on clouds of wadding. This youth holds in each hand a powerfully brilliant electrical lamp, evidently the Teslasch alternating current light, as wires are nowhere visible. The least fault of this picture is that the Muses are not aspiring in voluntary, independent flight, but hang motionless in the air in a passive attitude, like Giotto’s angels and saints, who have not yet learnt to fly. Its mortal sin is that it wishes to represent in painting a vulgar, rhetorical arrangement composed of a number of abstractions.