PART III

_Paris_

_Section_ 1. _French Realism._ ” 2. _The Uses of Fashion._ ” 3. _Cézanne._ ” 4. _The General Tendency in Paris._ ” 5. _Matisse and Dérain._ ” 6. _Picasso._

_French Realism_

The French talent is neither quite happy nor satisfactory in its “Classic,” its “Romantic,” or its “Scientific” manifestations. As a great “classic” or traditional artist you get Ingres. About him at present a considerable cult is in progress of springing up: whether it is a dealer’s manœuvre or a piece of French (and Allied) sentiment it is difficult to say. Probably it is both. But in the teeth of any fashion it should be easy to discern that Ingres, with all his dreary theatrical costume pieces of “classical” subjects is not as satisfactory an artist as Giotto, let us say, nor for that matter, as Raphael. His malicious and meticulous portraits give him a permanent and peculiar place. But it is not the place, nor quite the kind of place, that is being prepared for him. To admire Racine or Corneille, similarly, is an amusing game, but not a scientifically or emotionally exact proceeding. If it is true, for instance, that Racine should be praised for his psychological insight, I prefer to find that without going into such a barren region to look for it. As a “Romantic,” again, the Frenchman is a failure compared to the better equipped romantics of more romantic nations. Delacroix and Géricault are not as satisfactorily romantic as Turner; Victor Hugo’s novels are not as good romances as Hoffman’s or Dostoievsky’s. Dostoievsky is nearer the real and permanent romance of life. Turner is a delightful dreamer, nearer to the reality of romance than an equivalent Frenchman.

When he becomes scientific in a reaction against Romance or Traditionalism, as in the case of the Impressionists, or Pointillistes, in painting, the Frenchman becomes _too_ scientific, in that likewise, to be quite real. The next thing you notice, having come to these conclusions, is that a variety of Frenchmen, Stendhal, Flaubert, Villon, Cézanne, Pascal, a big list--who form such a group, if stuck together, as to be more numerous than all the specific successes of another country put together--do not fit into the French national cadre. They are less local than the successes of other modern European countries. Dostoievsky, the most intoxicated of his worshippers must concede, has the blemish of being sometimes altogether too “Russian” to be bearable; too epileptic and heavy-souled. Turner had too much of the national prettiness of the “dreamy” Englishman.

French Realism means, if it has a meaning, what these best Frenchmen had: they were almost realler than anything in the modern world. They have made France the true leader-country. But it is not what people generally mean, in this land or elsewhere, when they talk about the “realism of the French.” Reality is what you want, and not “realism.” And to find that, you must watch for some happy blending of the vitality of “Romance,” the coldness of “science,” and the moderation and cohesion of a “classical” mind.

_The Uses of Fashion_

How are we to regard the movement in painting that has succeeded the Impressionist movement? As the revenge of Raphael, a pilgrimage to Poussin, a reawakening of austerity, a barbarous or a civilised event? Creative Line once more asserted itself; the rather formless naturalism of the Impressionist evolved into what were once more synthetic and constructed works. The tenets of catching the Moment on the hop, of photographing that Moment of Nature with the eye, and so forth, gave way before the onslaught of Invention, recuperated, and come out of its disgrace, dating from the time of its supposed liaison with the Romantics. Impressionism was really a period of decay itself, or one of humdrum activity; a scavenging the ground after the riots and too popular festivities of the Romantics.

But then what you will base your views of these movements on will really depend on what latitude you give, in your mind, to human enterprise: how closely you consider the possibilities of any short individual life: and whether fanciful claims of Progress excite you or not. Three or four human types--about as many as there are large sub-divisions of the human race--Yellow, White, Negritic--wrangle and wrestle about with each other, rise, flourish and decay, then once more ascend.

The only flaw in this parallel is that the Black race may die out, the Yellow predominate, or all races mingle in a resultant grey-yellow mixture for some time. But the types of mind are likelier stubbornly to persist and maintain their struggle for mastery. There are different kinds of Romantics, different sorts of Classics, and so forth, but in any movement you may be sure that one of these great warring sub-divisions is at the bottom of the disturbance. It may be a composite movement. A movement at once Scientific and Classic is possible for instance. And all individuals are very mixed. Cézanne, considering himself probably an Impressionist, as he nominally was, only with, he would tell himself, a way of his own of doing Impressionism, has turned out to be something like a pure Classic. Dérain, one of the two or three most conspicuous figures in French painting to-day, is almost a pure Romantic, in feeling, and capable of every sentimentality. This is natural in a man for so long a disciple of Gauguin, and the pasticheur of Rousseau the Douanier, as we find him in his ballet, “La Boutique Fantasque.” Picasso has dealt, in earlier periods of his work, in every sentimental and romantic flavour. Most men with energy and illusion enough in them to do anything have something of the complete, composite character that I have in the preceding section attributed to the chosen, most universal Frenchman.

But a perfectly balanced, divinely composite _movement_ is an impossibility. Anything so intelligent or so good as that is out of the question. For in the first place that class is such a small one that the rare existence of such individuals is quite independent of movements. And, in the second place, were there numbers of such men co-existing their aggregate of work would not be a movement. It would be the reverse of that. Any movement of such an obvious sort as we are considering would bring them away from their centre. And for that they are disinclined.

So any movement is largely either a Romantic invasion or reaction: a Classical or a Scientific one. It usually will have the character of these limiting sub-divisions. It is the swing of the pendulum from side to side: it is the superficial corrective and fashionable play of the general sea of men. So all men must wear black in one generation, green in the next, then white, then black again: for that uniformity is a law of regulated life that cannot be contradicted. Fashion is the sort of useful substitute for conviction. At present it is the substitute for religion.

So you get the cry against tradition, the cry against emotion, or against superstition, or against science. Men’s consciousness can only grasp one of these ideas at a time: they can only do any useful work under the spell of Fashion; that is, the one limited conformity prescribed for their generation.

The work of any artist living under this spell of fashion, unable to function without this stimulus, and to see beyond this convention, dates very quickly and is seldom remembered after his death, except through some prank of the erudite, or some accident of history. But this slavery to fashion is a different thing from the acceptance of the form, the data, and atmosphere of a time. Rowlandson could evidently have existed, from the testimony of his work, in no other time than the eighteenth century. He _used_ the spirit, the form-content, the dress, the impressionability of his time with an uncanny completeness. But evidently had he been a dependent on fashion he could have done nothing of the sort. For he would have been far too afraid of what he handled, and far too obliged to it, to develop it in that bold and personal way.

I would apply this analysis of the general character of movements to present events in the art of painting in the following way.

To a good painter, with some good work to do in this world, the only point of the new movement, or whatever you like to call it, was simply that it changed the outlook and pre-occupation of the living section of art from one mode to another. To look for anything more than the swing of the pendulum would be an absurdity. That _more_ is supplied at the moment of every movement by the individual. And the painter who is at the same time an individual and the possessor of that “more,” is not likely to try and find in a movement what he has in himself. Still, the individual, although ideally independent of and superior to the flux and reflux, is beholden to conditions and to the society in which he finds himself for the possibility of the full development of his gifts. So the “movement” in art, like the attitude of the community to art, is not a thing to be superior about, though it is a thing you may be superior to. And really it is the same type of man who displays a sceptical aloofness and superiority as regards any activity directed to _improve_ the conditions around us (_i.e._, our own condition) who shows himself the most unimaginative and cringingly fashionable in respect of what he produces in the art he follows: the most assiduously up-to-date, the most afraid of opinion.

So this movement in painting really looked as though it were going to be the goods from the point of view of its uses for the best talents. Opportunities, through the successful even victorious progress with which the campaign began, seemed to be indicated for the full inventiveness of the human mind to get once more into painting, and its right to be there sure of a general recognition. This was at least a refreshing prospect, after the Impressionist years, during which this full inventiveness could show itself in painting only in some ingenious disguise, or risk denunciation: or else pretend that it had really come to look at the gas-meter, to grind colours, or to scrub the floor. All this seemed for the best: very much for the best! But naturally the ragtag and bobtail of the “movement” would not look at it in that light. For them it would be Le Mouvement, as who should say the Social Revolution or La Carmagnole, presided over by God Fashion, who is another form of Dame Liberty.

So, has the worst happened? As far as Paris is concerned, has the revolution turned into a joke, as it is always liable to do in a Latin city? Or into some crafty bourgeois reaction?

Let us recapitulate the possibilities: the reason that would induce an individual painter to support this movement, engage in it, and use it as a material optimistically. The creative line, structure, Imagination, untrammelled by any pedantry of form or of naturalist taboo, a more vigorous and permanent shaping of the work undertaken: these were the inducements and the prizes. The movement also developed a cult of experiment which allowed of any combinations and inventive phantasies. All the scientific notions as they came along of any useful application could be used without a foolish outcry. But this liberty and these opportunities also begot a necessity for moderation or rather _concentration_ which would have been a vice in any age of repression and academic tyranny. The painters have been thankful for this disembarrassing of the ground for them, and have been delighted at these splendid opportunities. They do not want to _lose_ what has been won by an infatuation for some effete mode that there is no rhyme or reason to succumb to, apart from the megalomania of an individual artist, or the commercial promptings of some tortuous and sordid game. They do not wish to be involved in the mere acrobatics of freedom. Freedom bristles with unexpected tyrannies. It would not have been easy for Cézanne, the laborious innovator and giver of this freedom, to do so; but any very able and at the same time resourceful artist could invent you a new mode _every week_ without any difficulty; some new stylistic twist; some new adaptation of a scientific notion. This is not, however, what is needed. If he can do nothing _else_ than that, he must be allowed to go his way, and his chief praise be a pæan to his agility.

How we _need_ and can _use_ this freedom that we have is to invent a mode that will answer to the great mass sensibility of our time. We want to construct hardily and profoundly without a hard-dying autocratic convention to dog us and interfere with our proceedings. But we want _one_ mode, for there _is_ only one mode for any one time, and all the other modes are for other times. Except as objects of technical interest and indirect stimulus, they have nothing to do with us. And it is not on the sensibility of the amateur, which is always corrupted, weak, and at the mercy of any wind that blows, that the painter should wish to build. It is on the block sensibility, the profoundest and most personal foundations of his particular time.

Fashion is not always the exact physiognomy of a time. And every physiognomy in any case is made to be changed.

What we really require are a few men who will _use_ Fashion, the ruler of any age, the avenue through which alone that age can be approached to get something out of it, to build something in Fashion’s atmosphere which can best flourish there, and which is the best thing that therein could flourish.

Picasso and the men associated with him seem to have taken their liberty at once too seriously and not seriously enough. They have taken Fashion, too, too seriously on the one hand, and on the other they have not used it as they might, or done with it what they could. I do not see amongst them all, except possibly in Matisse, a man who is above Fashion, or one unimpressed by it.

_Cézanne_

When this very useful process of corrective reaction occurred in the art centres of Europe twenty years ago, the Impressionists came in for the customary heavy reversal of opinion. But the root theories of the Impressionists remained in the consciousness of the new men, and completely as they might imagine they had discarded Impressionism, Naturalism, and the rest of that movement, Impressionist compunctions and fetishes could be found at every turn in the new painting. There was nothing wrong with this, for the Impressionists did much good work, and their experience was a useful one to inherit. This would no doubt not be apparent to the benighted body of the movement, but must have been to the leaders. And it was these leaders who cast round and went through their immediate heritage once more before finally discarding it. Here in turn the familiar faces of Dégas, Manet, Renoir came up for inspection; also Cézanne. Cézanne came up rather crabbed and reluctant, a little aloof, and with something in his eye liable to awake suspicion. And sure enough suspicion awoke. In fact, what the journalist would describe as a “shrewd” suspicion grew up that this till then thought to be second-class artist, rather incompetent, though well-meaning old fellow, had something very useful and new in him; and was probably more a portion of the new sensibility, and possibly of more intrinsic importance altogether, than any of his Impressionist contemporaries.

This suspicion grew into a furious conviction that a very great artist had been unearthed. He became the most fashionable art figure in the world. So much so that it is impossible to write three lines about painting to-day without mentioning his name. Matisse has not much to do with Cézanne. But the whole cubist movement comes out of him. Picasso is described by Lhote, the new apostle of David, as the Interpreter of Cézanne. More apples have been painted during the last fifteen years than have been eaten by painters in as many centuries. And all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. But---- Once more, it is a pity that this figure is so solitary (which means so much under present-day conditions of individual exaltation). The only advantage is that at least there you have a condition favourable to homogeneity and concentration of effort. This one, very narrow personality, enamoured of bulk, of simplicity, of constructive vision, sombre and plain as could be found, should be a boulder against a diffusion of the inroad of anything like a dilettante, indiscriminating sensibility. But possibly the weakness inherent in this first condition, of a lonely source, has left a loophole for the irresponsible, disintegrating passage of the second. I do not feel that Cézanne would have agreed to Ingres, much less to David. But he would be asked to-day to agree to Everything, five minutes devoted to each.

_The General Tendency in Paris_

In Paris to-day there is a mass of “advanced” work being done, in the art of Painting and Design, which can roughly be classified as follows, not necessarily chronologically. For inevitably the degree in which a painting at present is “modern” is decided simply by its relative “abstractness.” This is an unavoidable result of the startling innovation resulting from the progressive experimentation all over Europe during the last twenty years in painting. Whereas formerly it was a question whether you should paint a naked lady refined to some Greek type of the “beautiful” animal, or should choose her coarse, and give the Public a bit of the “real stuff,” some lumpy Flemish frame squatting on the edge of a dingy soapy bath (approximating to the undraped Saskia, to Dégas or the facile Japanese realists); and whereas over periods of fifty years these opposing females were bandied about, and hurled at the head of the opposing faction; and it took half a century for the “Modern Art” of the time reluctantly to espouse one beauty, having laboriously divorced the last; to-day it has been found possible and expedient, within the trivial space of ten years, entirely to eliminate from the face of the earth the naked, clothed or other lady--every vestige or tatter even of a human being at all, from the horizon of the purest, of the latest, art. This is how the Public views this matter. And the Public, the ruffled, shaken, gasping but rather pleased, though not very helpful public, influences in his turn the Artist; and so back again.

Among the few hundred painters who form the façade of the temple of Fashion in Art, according to this rough and obvious classification, Kandinsky is the most advanced artist in Europe; Matisse, I suppose, of the same elect _avantgarde_, is the most leisurely, or the least furibundly outstripping. His “funniness” consists of distortion, of a simplicity akin to the facile images of French caricature, and a certain vivacity of tint, often, in his pictures.

To proceed with the classification of the modes of the new movement in Paris. Cézannism is by far the most widespread mode. As Cézanne may also be said to be at the bottom of “Cubism,” he has really effected by the tremendous sincerity and certainty of his work a revolution in painting, and has made new eyes for a crowd of men. In the French show being held at Heal’s Gallery in the Tottenham Court Road (August 7, 1919), fifty per cent. of the work is monotonously Cézannesque. In the best represented painter there, Modigliani, the heads of his sitters incline to this side or that because Mrs. Cézanne during the interminable sittings she must have undergone, drooped her head stoically and brutally in that way. She is, as it were, the leader of a Chorus of, from the standpoint of the theatre queue, very plain and even preposterous females. Similarly, that the hands meet and are crossed in the lap is a trick or habit in the search for the compact and simple that was Cézanne’s occupation. Is there any lack of apples on tables? Do jugs abound? Are rigid napkins and tablecloths in evidence? Yes, they are everywhere in this exhibition, as in every other modern exhibition of the last eight years. Most of these things are a little more garishly coloured than Cézanne’s still-lifes were, and side currents arrive in the midst of the bed of apples and crockery, from Vuillard, or from Matisse or Van Gogh. But Cézanne is at the bottom of it, and will be for many a day.

The Futurists, and their French followers, have as the basis of their esthetic the Impressionists generally. They are simply a rather abstruse and complex form of the 1880 French Impressionists. Their dogma is a brutal rhetorical Zolaism, on its creative side, saturated with the voyou respect and gush about Science, the romance of machinery engraven on their florid banner. On the technical side the Futurist paintings are again in their creative essence purely 1880 Impressionism, worked on by the same dogged logic, carried much further, and tinctured with Braquism and a score more odds and ends.

_Matisse and Dérain_

Matisse at his best is certainly as good a painter as any working in Paris to-day. He possesses more vitality than Picasso; and he appears to have more stability--as a result possibly of that. I am not concerned in this pamphlet with recapitulating the phases of the modern movement, so much as analysing a late development of it, and only giving so much general matter again as is necessary to remind a non-specialist public of the rough points of the position up to date. Matisse has had far less influence than Picasso, and is in every way a different mentality. Dérain, similarly, beyond influencing Picasso at a certain period, does not come within the scope of my immediate purpose. He is a great artist of impeccable taste. If I enlarge this treatise to book form, I shall devote sections to these artists.

Of the names of artists working in Paris well known to us here, most are those of foreigners, not Frenchmen. Matisse, Picasso, Gris, Modigliani are Belgian, Spanish, Italian. But outside of the large groups of artists working in Paris there are other European artists, some of equal note, and of equal importance in the history of this movement. Kandinsky among them, was, I believe, the first painter to make pictures of purely non-representative forms and colours. And Kandinsky, with his Expressionism, is probably the most logical of the artists directing their attention to abstract experiment. He is not obsessed by Natures Mortes; nor does one find in him the rather obvious obsession with common objects simply because they are common (which is a similarly limiting mode of the mind to the predilection for important and obviously significant objects). He differs from the Paris group in his interest for the disembodied world and the importance he attaches to this new avenue of research and inspiration. Actually his pictures possess too much of the vagueness and the effect of a drunken tracery that all spirit drawings have.

The painters working in England find no place in this pamphlet, but not because I do not esteem them. Nothing but a stupid parochial snobbism could make a half-dozen English names I can think of, seem any less weighty than any half-dozen French ones producible at this moment. As to the Jewish painters, they are evidently of the same race and talent everywhere. And there are at least as many here as in Paris.

First, this is not a review of painting in Europe. It is primarily an indication of what I consider is the only line that the painting of to-day can take if it is to justify itself, and not fizzle out in a fireworks of ingenious pseudo-scientific stunts, and ringing of stylistic changes on this mode and that. And the extra-studio preoccupations, the effort towards construction that I recommend, conflict with the spirit that appears to be guiding the cubist movement in Paris. The emotional impulse of the latest phases of that movement looks to me contradictory to any creative impulse in painting. And more clearly, it seems to preclude the development of any sensibility but that of an exasperated egotism. The eye becomes a little gluttonous instrument of enjoyment; or watches from the centre of its brain web for more flies and yet more flies. It would eventually become as mechanical and stupid as a spider, if it is not so already.

An effete and hysterical mechanism certainly threatens every art. A sorrowful Eastern fatigue wedded to a diabolical energy for materialistic reactions; a showy and desiccated scepticism, wedded to a tearful sentimentality as sweet and heavy as molasses. What is to be done about that? But that is a problem for another day.

Well, then, what I propose is that as much attention might be given--it would end by being as concrete--to the masses and entire form-content of life as has been given by the Nature-morte school to the objects on a table. If architecture and every related--as we say, applied--art were affected and woken up, the same thing would be accomplished on a big scale as is at present attempted on a small scale. All the energies of art would not be centred and congested in a few exasperated spots of energy, it is true, or in a few individuals. But the individual, even, would lose nothing by it, with respect to the quality of his pictures. And a nobility and cohesion would be attained that under present conditions it is difficult to visualise. Most people grasping at such a notion have stopped short at some fantastic Utopian picture.

But to enable you to arrive at a fair estimate of my conclusions, I must give you the analysis through which I come by them in detail. And I cannot avoid some investigation of the record and evident moyens, a critical survey, of Picasso.

_Picasso_

Pablo Picasso is one of the ablest living painters. It would be impossible to display more ability. In addition to this, he is extremely resourceful and inventive. The back of his talent is too broad to suffer from even an avalanche of criticism. It is the consciousness of this that makes it more easy for me to state plainly his case as I see it.

This is, put pretty directly, what I feel about him.

With remarkable power he has refertilised many extinct modes, and authenticated interesting new and specifically scientific notions. He has given El Greco a new bit of life on the Catalan hills in his painting of Spanish shepherds, oxherds and vagrants. He has revivified a great artist’s line there, another’s colour combinations here, and has played the skilfulest variations. Since every great creative painter must at the same time have great executive ability--the more dexterity he can command the better--it is always difficult to decide where this hand-training does or should leave off, and where imaginative invention, apart from the delights and triumphs of execution, may or does begin.

Briefly, Picasso’s periods are as follows. His earliest work contained a variety of experiments: women sitting in cafés in reds; Daumier-like scenes, but more fragile and rather definitely sentimentalised; then a painting of a poor family standing by the side of a languid and mournful bit of sea, their bones appearing through their clothes, their faces romantically haggard and delicate, and a general air of Maeterlinck or some modern German “poet-painter” all over it, has been widely reproduced. (Title: “Pauvres au bord de la Mer.”) Then came a period during which Dérain’s Gauguinism appealed to him. El Greco was a still more prolonged infatuation and source of study. Then Cézanne arrived in his painting. The portraits of Miss Stein and of Monsieur Sagot are of that time.

African carvings supplied the next step, in conjunction with the Marquesas Islands and André Dérain. These solid and static models, African, Polynesian, Aix, drove out the Grecos, Maeterlincks and Puvises. Braque appears to have been the innovator in Cubism; and obviously in Braquism--the brown brand of mandoline, man’s eye and bottle; lately, through Picasso’s gayer agency, taking on brighter and purer colours. Futurism once more gave this Wandering Jew from not far from the Sierras a further marching order. Off his talent leapt into little gimcrack contrivances--_natures mortes_, in fact, come out of the canvas; little pieces of _nature-morte_ sculpture, nature as the artist sees her, in fact; the bottle, mandoline and copy of _La Presse_ reappearing out of art transfigured, after passing first through the artist’s eye, spending a bit of time in the busy workshop of his brain, and so abiding for a year or so, into the flat world of the artist’s canvas. After this series of hairbreadth adventures it is natural that this docile collection of objects should no longer remind the casual observer of any category of objects known to him.

In considering the future of painting, Picasso is the most useful figure on which to fix your attention. This is partly in his favour inasmuch as it recognises his activity; but it is the uncertain and mercurial quality of his genius, also, that makes him the symptomatic object for your study and watchfulness. Everything comes out in him perfectly defined. Every influence in his sensitive intelligence burns up and shows itself to good advantage. There is nothing, as I have said, with regard to technical achievement, that he cannot do. He appears to me to have a genius similar to Charlie Chaplin’s; a gnome-like child. His clock stopped at fifteen summers (and he has seen more winters than Charles, although Charles is not averse to a Dickens scene of the Poor Orphan in the Snow), with all the shallowness of a very apt, facile, and fanciful child, and the miraculous skill you might expect in an exquisitely trained Bambino. These cases of arrested growth are very common in his race. You merely have to consider what sort of a child you have to deal with, what moves him most; whether this mercurial vitality, so adaptive as to be flesh-creeping, is preferable to a vertical source of power, like the sour and volcanic old _crétin_, Cézanne. It is which manner of life you most prize, admire really. You have your critical flight; and I am ready for the moment to suspend you, glide you, spin you, plunge you, or stand you on your head, according to your fancy.

Now, if you are not used to critical flights, and you turn to me as one accustomed to banking, looping and splitarsing, and ask me what I advise, or, to put it in another way, what is _my_ fancy, I should answer as follows:--“I consider Pablo Picasso as a very serious and beautiful performer in oil-paint, Italian chalk, Antoine ink, pastel, wax, cardboard, bread--anything, in fact. But he appears to me to be definitely in the category of executants, like Paganini, or to-day, Pachmann, or Moiseivitch; where Cézanne is clearly a brother of Bach, and the Douanier was a cousin of Chardin.”

That his more immediate and unwavering friends are dimly acquainted with this fact is proved by a statement I have just read, in the current (September 26) number of the _Athenæum_, by the French painter, M. André Lhote:

“Cézanne embodies, through the romanticism with which he was impregnated, the avenging voice of Greece and Raphael. He constitutes the first recall to classical order. It was necessary, in order that the lesson he gave us might be understood, that an _interpreter_ should appear. This was Picasso.

“The young Spanish painter deciphered the multiple enigma, translated the mysterious language, spelt out, word by word, the stiff phrases. Picasso illuminates in the sunshine of his imagination the thousand facets of Cézanne’s rich and restrained personality.”

What a performer on a pianoforte does in his concerts is to give you a selection of the works of a variety of musical composers. Now, apart from giving us very complete interpretations of Cézanne, Daumier, El Greco, Puvis, as Picasso has done, there are other ways, and far more convincing ones, in which a painter can betray the distinctively interpretative character of his gift. What do all these phases and very serious flutterings of Picasso’s imply? To dash uneasily from one seemingly personal mode to another may be a diagnostic of the same highly sensitive but non-centralized talent as you would think that a playing first in the mode of El Greco and then of David probably implied. These are difficult things to decide since painters _are_, through the nature of their art, at the same time composers and executants. And you must usually get at this by consideration of, and sense for, the man’s work as a whole.

What has happened in this volatile and many-phased career of Picasso’s? Has he got bored with a thing the moment it was within his grasp? And he certainly has arrived on occasion at the possessive stage. If it is boredom, associated with so much power, one is compelled to wonder whether this power does not mechanically spring from a vitiated and tired source. He does not perhaps _believe_ in what he has made. Is that it? And yet he is tirelessly compelled to go on achieving these images, immediately to be discarded.

But when we consider one by one, and with a detailed scrutiny, the best types of work representing his various periods, we must admit that he had certain reason in abandoning them. However good a pastiche of El Greco may be, it is not worth prolonging indefinitely this exercise. The same applies to his Daumieresque period. Splendid paintings as the Miss Stein and Monsieur Sagot undoubtedly are, they are still pure Cézanne. And although many artists, among his dilettante admirers or his lesser brethren, would give their heads to produce such pure and almost first-hand Cézannes, once you _can_ do this as easily as Picasso, it can hardly seem worth while to continue to do it. Very likely, at the present moment, his Ingres or David paintings will induce the same sensations of boredom in him (I can imagine David inducing _very_ dismal feeling in an interpreter), and have a similar fate. All that remain to be considered are the less easily deciphered works of his more abstract periods. I think his effort of initiation and obstinacy in this brand of work showed a different temper to the other set of things that we have been considering. But they, again, are open to question. They reduce themselves to three principal phases. The first, or Cubist, phase, really a dogmatic and savage development of Cézanne’s idiosyncrasy (example: “Dame jouant de la mandoline”) is in a way the most satisfactory. But I am not convinced that Cézanne gains anything by what is a very interesting interpretation of his vision. But, on the other hand, the Lady with the Mandolin appears to me as interesting as a typical Cézanne portrait, and it is a powerful and inventive variation on Cézanne. About the next step--fourth dimensional preoccupations and new syntheses added to the earlier ones (“Dame assise”) and the first Braque-like contrivances--you wonder if they are not more important as experiments, and important because of their daring and new nature, than as final works. But the whole character of these things: the noble structural and ascetic quality, the feeling that he must have had, and that he imparted to them, that he was doing something at last worth while, and in fitting relation to his superb painter’s gift--this makes them a more serious contribution to painting than anything else done by him. All the admiration that you feel for the really great artist in Picasso finds its most substantial footing in the extraordinary series of works beginning with the paintings of the time of the Miss Stein portrait, and finishing somewhere in the beginning of his Braque period.

That, put as clearly and vividly as I am able, is my account of Picasso up to, I suppose, about 1913 or 1912. It must be remembered, however, that I have been analysing this work according to the highest standards that it is possible to apply to a painter. And in the light of the subsequent work, with which I entirely disagree, and for the purposes of combating the tendencies that must inevitably result from its influence, I have underlined those things in Picasso that would be liable to result in the mechanical eclecticism that I describe in the next section of this pamphlet (The Studio Game). It has been a critical, and, in intention, destructive analysis.