Modern Painting, Its Tendency and Meaning Part 5

aim was to reproduce nature's externals: Cezanne's desire was to reproduce its solidity. Both achieved their ends. Cezanne's pictures are as impenetrable as sculpture. Every object seems hewn out of marble.

Solidity alone, however, though a high and necessary virtue of painting, is a limited quality. Unless it is made mobile it gives off the impression of rigidity. It is to painting what the rough clay is to sculpture-the dead material of art. In order for it to engender aesthetic empathy it must be organised, that is, it must be harmonised and poised in three dimensions in such a way that, should we translate our bodies into its s.p.a.cial forms, we should experience its dynamism. This Cezanne did, and therein lay his claim to greatness. In his best canvases there seems no way of veering a plane, of imagining one plane changing places with another, unless every plane in the picture is s.h.i.+fted simultaneously. Cezanne's solidity is organised like the volumes in Michelangelo's best sculpture. Move an arm of any one of these statues, and every other part of the figure, down to the smallest muscle, must change position. Their plasticity, like Cezanne's, is perfect. There is a complete ordonnance between every minute part, and between every group of parts. Nothing can be added or taken away without changing the entire structure in all its finest details. Cezanne once said to Ambroise Vollard, a picture merchant, who had called attention to a small uncovered spot on a canvas which the artist had p.r.o.nounced finished: "You will understand that if I were to put something there haphazardly, I should have to start the whole picture over from that point."

The individual solidity of Cezanne's colour planes is due to the eternalism and absolutism of his light. But it was the other qualities which entered into his art which brought about the interdependence of the parts and evoked the sensation of unity we feel before them. One of these qualities was a perfect rapport of lines. Cezanne, better than any other painter up to his day, understood how one slanting line modifies its direction when coming in contact with another line moving from a different direction. When colour was first investigated realistically, artists saw that two pure complementary tints, when juxtaposed, tended to draw away from each other and to differentiate themselves. Therefore they set about to study the influence that one colour has upon another, a.s.suming that lines were more static and absolute and consequently did not change at contact with other lines. Cezanne recognised the fallacy of this a.s.sumption, and wrote: "I see the planes criss-crossing and overlapping, and sometimes the lines seem to fall." He realised that the laws governing the opposition of line are most important in the production of the emotion of movement. In all the old painters this emotion was engendered by just such devices, but with them the laws were only dimly suspected-instincts rather than applied science. In contemplating their work we seem torn by some physical impulse to follow one line, but cannot, because the lure of the other line is equally great.

To the man of sensitive and trained eyesight this physical emotion is incited also by nature, only nature is more complex than art and is without aesthetic finality. Thus in regarding the rapports of two lines in nature, one leaning to the right and one to the left, the highly sensitive person feels unrest and strife, and subconsciously produces order and calm by imagining a third line which harmonises the original two. Cezanne looked upon nature with perhaps the most delicate and perceptive eye a painter has ever possessed, and his vision became a theatre for the violent struggles of some one line against terrible odds, for the warring clashes of inharmonious colours. He saw in objective nature a chaos of disorganised movement, and he set himself the task of putting it in order. In studying the variations and qualifications of linear directions in his model, he discovered another method of accentuating the feeling of dynamism in his canvases. He stated lines, not in their static character, but in their average of fluctuation. We know that all straight lines are influenced by their surroundings, that they appear bent or curved when related to other lines. The extent to which a line is thus optically bent is its extreme of fluctuability. Cezanne determined this extreme in all of his lines, and by transcribing them midway between their actual and optical states, achieved at once their normality and their extreme abnormality. The character, direction and curve of all lines in a canvas change with every s.h.i.+fting of the point of visual contact. Since the unity of a picture is different from every focus, all the lines consequently a.s.sume a slightly different direction every time our eye s.h.i.+fts from one spot to another. Cezanne, by recording the mean of linear changeability, facilitated and hastened this vicissitude of mutation.

Another contribution he made to painting was his application of the stereoscopic function of the eye to all models by means of colour. From the earliest art to Cezanne, objects have been portrayed as if conceived _in vacuo_, with absolute and delimited contours. Such portrayals are directly opposed to our normal vision, for whenever we focus our sight on any natural object whatever, each eye records a different perspective representation of that object; there is a distinct binocular parallax.

Certain parts are seen by one eye which are invisible to the other. But these two visual impressions are perceived simultaneously, combined in one image; that is to say: the optic axes converge at such an angle that both the right and left monocular impressions are superimposed. The single impression thus produced is one of perspective and relief. This is a rudimentary law of optics, but on it our accuracy of vision has always depended. In the lenticular stereoscope the eye-gla.s.ses are marginal portions of the same convex lens, which, when set edge to edge, deflect the rays from the picture so as to strike the eyes as if coming from an intermediate point. By this bending of the rays the two pictures become one impression, and present the appearance of solid forms as in nature. The problem of how to transcribe on a flat surface in a single picture the effect later produced by a stereoscope with two pictures, has confronted painters for hundreds of years. Leonardo da Vinci in his Trattato della Pittura recorded the fact that our vision encompa.s.ses to a slight degree everything that pa.s.ses before it; that we see around all objects; and that this encircling sight gives us the sensation of rotundity. But neither he, nor any artist up to Cezanne, was able to make aesthetic use of the fact. The vision of all older painting (although by the use of line and composition it became plastic because used as a detail) was the vision of the man with one eye, for a one-eyed man sees nature as a flat plane: only by a.s.sociation of the relative size of objects is he capable of judging depth. Cezanne saw the impossibility of producing a double vision by geometric rules, and approached the problem from another direction. By understanding the functioning elements of colour in their relation to texture and s.p.a.ce, he was able to paint forms in such a way that each colour he applied took its relative position in s.p.a.ce and held each part of an object stationary at any required distance from the eye. As a result of his method we can judge the depth and sense the solidity of his pictures the same as we do in nature.

Cezanne was ever attempting to solve the problem of the dynamics of vision. An a.n.a.lysis of his pictures often reveals a uniform leaning of lines-a tendency of all the objects to precipitate themselves upon a certain spot, like the minute flotsam on a surface of water being sucked through a drain-hole. We find an explanation for this convergence in one of his letters. He says: "In studying nature closely, you will observe that it becomes concentric. I mean that on an orange, an apple, a ball or a head there is a culminating point; and this point, despite the strong effects of light and shadow which are colour sensations, is always the nearest to our eye. The edges of objects retreat toward a centre which is situated on our horizon." It is small wonder that Cezanne, obsessed with the idea of form and depth, should have had little admiration for his contemporaries, Van Gogh and Gauguin, both of whom were workmen in the flat. He let pa.s.s no opportunity of expressing himself on these artists who of late years have become so popular. Van Gogh was to him only another Pointillist; and he called Gauguin's work "_des images Chinoises_," adding, "I will never accept his entire lack of modelling and gradation." Does not this explain his aversion to the primitives in whom he saw but the rudiments of art? How could Cezanne, preoccupied with the most momentous problems of aesthetics, take an interest in enlarged book illuminations, when the most superficial corner of his slightest canvas had more organisation and incited a greater aesthetic emotion than all the mosaics in S. Vitale at Ravenna?

Cezanne was never attracted by the facial expressions, the manual att.i.tudes, or the graceful poses of his models. The characteristics of materiality meant nothing to him. He was perpetually searching for something more profound, and began his art where the average painter leaves off. Realistic attributes are interesting only as decoration; they are indicative of the simplicity of man's mind; they are unable to conduce to an extended aesthetic experience. Van Gogh and Gauguin said well what they had to say, but it was so slight that it is of little interest to us today. We demand a greater stimulus than an art of two dimensions can give; our minds instinctively extend themselves into s.p.a.ce. So it was with Cezanne. He left no device untried which would give his work a greater depth, a more veritable solidity. He experimented in colour from this standpoint, then in line, then in optics. With the results of this research he became possessed of all the necessary factors of colossal organisation. He knew that, were these factors rightly applied, they would produce a greater sensation of weight, of force and of movement than any artist before him had succeeded in attaining.

Their application presented to Cezanne his most difficult problem. He must use his discoveries in these three fields in such a way that the very disposition of weights would produce that perfect balance of stress and repose, out of which emanates all aesthetic movement. The simplest manifestation of this balance is found in the opposition of line; but in order to complete this linear adjustment there must be an opposition of colours which, while they must function as volumes, must also accord with the character of the natural object portrayed. In short, there must be an opposition of countering weights, not perfectly balanced so as to create a dead equality, but rhythmically related so that the effect is one of swaying poise. Obviously this could not be accomplished on a flat surface, for the emotion of depth is a necessity to the recognition of equilibrium. Cezanne finally achieved this poise by a plastic distribution of volumes over and beside s.p.a.cial vacancies. He mastered this basic principle of the hollow and the b.u.mp only after long and trying struggles and tedious experimentations. He translated it into terms of his own intellection: to the extent that there was order within him so was he able to put order into his pictures. This vision of his was intellectual rather than optical; and M. Bernard unnecessarily tells us that, so sure was Cezanne of his justification, he placed his colours on canvas with the same absolutism he used in expressing himself verbally. His art was his thought given concrete form through the medium of nature. His painting was the result of a mental process-an intellectual conclusion after it had been weighed, added to, substracted from, modified by exterior considerations, and at last brought forth purged and clarified and as nearly complete as was his development at the time.

For this reason Cezanne resented the presence of people while he worked.

To attain his ends his mind had to be concentrated on its ultimate ambition. It could support no disturbing factors. Even though he had no trick which might be copied, he once said to a friend: "I have never permitted anyone to watch me while I work. I refuse to do anything before anyone." Had he allowed spectators to stand over him he probably would have fatigued them, for his work progressed by single strokes interspersed by long periods of reflection and a.n.a.lysis. M. Bernard would hear him descend to the garden a score of times during the day's work, sit a moment and rush back to the studio as if some solution had presented itself to him suddenly. At other times he would walk back and forth before his picture awaiting the answer to a problem before him. It is such deliberateness in great artists that has, curiously enough, acquired for them a reputation for esotericism. Their moments of deep contemplation and their sudden plunges into labour have been interpreted as periods of intellectual coma shot through occasionally by "divine flashes of inspiration" coming from an outside agent. The reverse is true, however. An artist retains his sentiency at all times. He necessarily works consciously, with the same intellectual labours as a scientist. A painter can no more produce a great picture unwittingly than an inventor can construct an intricate machine unwittingly. They are both labourers in the most plebeian sense.

Cezanne's hatred for facile and thoughtless workmen who continually entertain amateurs, was monumental. To him they were pupils who, by learning a few rules, were able to paint conventional pieces after the manner of thousands who had preceded him. They represented the academicians with whom every country is overrun-the suave and satisfied craftsmen who epitomise mediocrity, whose appeal is to minds steeped in pedantry and conservatism. In France they come out of the government-run Beaux-Arts school to which the incompetents of both America and England flock. Cezanne harboured a particular enmity for that school; anyone who had pa.s.sed through it aroused his scorn. "With a little temperament anyone can be an academic painter," he said. "One can make pictures without being a harmonist or a colourist. It is enough to have an art sense-and even this art sense is without doubt the horror of the bourgeois. Thus the inst.i.tutes, the pensions and the honours are only made for cretins, farceurs and drolls."

In writing of Cezanne one is led to make a comparison between him and his great compatriot, Renoir, for it is almost unbelievable that one century could have produced two such radically different geniuses.

Renoir, first of all, was not an innovator: he was the consummation of Impressionistic means. In Cezanne, to the contrary, we see a man dissatisfied with the greatest results of others, ever tortured by the search for something more final, more potent. "Let us not be satisfied with the formulas of our wonderful antecedents," he said many times, and he might have added, "and of our wonderful contemporaries." Renoir was the apex of an art era, while Cezanne was the first segment of a greater and vaster cycle. Renoir, by mastering his means at an early date, acquired a technical facility to which Cezanne, ever on the hunt for deeper conceptions, never attained. Renoir's genius was for linear rhythm. In the acquisition of this there entered, in varying degree, form, colour and light; but the line itself was his preoccupation.

Cezanne's genius was for plastic volume out of which the rhythmic line resulted. That is: the one constructed his creations out of colour and made colour appear like form; while in the other's creations, which are the result of colour, the colour is _felt to be form_. In Renoir is _recognised_ the solidity and depth of form, while in Cezanne the colour is a functional element whose dynamism gives birth to form which is _felt subjectively_. Renoir synthesises nature's forms, by grouping them in such a way that the lines move and are harmonious. Cezanne looks for the synthesis in each subject he sits before, and instead of grouping his forms arbitrarily, he penetrates to their _inherent_ synthesis. This is why almost every one of his pictures is built on a different synthetic form. His penetration gave him at each essay a different vision of the organisms of a particular subject, a vision which varied as the subject varied. In Renoir movement is attained by _relating the lines_: Cezanne has produced harmony by _accentuating their differences_. In the former the lines lead smoothly and fluently into others, until they all culminate in a line which carries the movement to a finality; while in the latter we feel little of that suavity of sequence: the lines are formed by the s.p.a.ces between his volumes rather than by linear continuation. Cezanne, if less pleasing, is the more powerful; and with all his lack of suavity he is the more complex and less monotonous. The extraordinary _imprevu_ of his formal developments and his unique manner of stating parallels recall the symphonic works of Beethoven. The ensembles of both are made up of an infinitude of smaller forms, and both display a colossal power of absoluteness in setting forth each smallest form. Renoir's work is more on the lines of Haydn.

After Michelangelo there was no longer any new inspiration for sculpture. After Cezanne there was no longer any excuse for it. He has made us see that painting can present a more solid vision than that of any stone image. Against modern statues we can only b.u.mp our heads: in the contemplation of modern painting we can exhaust our intelligences.

Cezanne is as much a reproach to sculptors as Renoir is to those who continue to use Impressionist methods. He is the great prophet of future art, as well as the consummator of the realistic vision of his time.

Both men deformed nature's objects-Renoir slightly to meet the demands of consistency in his preconceived compositions; Cezanne to a greater extent in order to make form voluminous. Some of his deformations resulted from extraneous line forces which, when coming in contact with an object's contour, made it lean to the right or left, or in some other way take on an abnormal appearance as of convexity or concavity.

M. Bernard thinks these irregularities in Cezanne the result of defective eyesight. But such an explanation is untenable. There is abundant evidence to show that, to the contrary, they are the result of a highly sensitised sight-a sight which simultaneously calls up the complementary of the thing viewed, whether it be a line, a colour or a tone. This double vision is only a dependency of the plastic mind which, instead of approaching a problem from the nearest side, throws itself automatically to the opposite side, and, by thus obtaining a double approach, arrives at a fuller comprehension. While slanting his line and distorting his volumes Cezanne was unconsciously moulding the parts to echo the organisation of the whole. In turning his pictures into block-manifestations, he strove for a result which would conduce to a profounder aesthetic pleasure than did the linear movements of Renoir.

After we have enjoyed Renoir's rhythms we can lay them aside for the time as we can a very beautiful but simple melody. The force of Cezanne strikes us like that of a vast bulk or a mountain. Contemplating his work is like coming suddenly face to face with an ordered elemental force. At first we are conscious only of a shock, but when our wonder has abated, we find ourselves studying the smaller forms which go into the picture's making. In the 1902 Baigneuses of Renoir each separate figure is a beautiful and complete form which fits into and becomes part of the general rhythm. In Cezanne the importance of parts is entirely submerged in the effect of the whole. Here is the main difference between these two great men: we enjoy each part of Renoir and are conducted by line to a completion; in Cezanne we are struck simultaneously by each interrelated part. Viewing a canvas of the latter is like going out into the blazing sunlight from the cool sombreness of a house. At first we are aware only of the force of the light, but as we gradually become accustomed to the glare, we begin to perceive separately objects which before had been only a part of the general impression. The fact that Cezanne invariably spoke of the "motif" should have given his friends a clue to his conception of composition. Before him composition had been to a great extent the formation of a simple melody of line in three dimensions, constructed by the forms of objects.

It corresponded to the purely melodious in music, the opening of the theme, its sequence of phrasing and the finale. Cezanne chose a motif, and in each movement of his picture it is to be found, varied, elaborated, reversed and developed. Each part of his canvas is a beginning, yet each part, though distinct as a form, is perfectly united both with the opening motif and with every variation of it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: POMMES SUR UNE TABLE by CeZANNE]

In this little-understood side of Cezanne's genius lies an infinitude of possibilities. Without an ability to organise, all his knowledge is worthless to the painter. He himself could apply it, and his understanding of the exact adaptability of a form to a hollow permitted him to express his knowledge with a force his followers lack. His sensitiveness to s.p.a.ces and the characters of his forms recall at times the works of Mokkei who used protuberances and hollows (namely: accidents of portraiture and landscape) to enrich and diversify form.

Nature to Cezanne was not simple, and he never depicted it thus. Even in his bathing pieces, whose disproportions are deplored by many, the composition is minutely conceived, not on a simple harmonic figure, but on complicated oppositional planes. Not only are the surface forms perfectly adapted to a given s.p.a.ce, but the directions taken by these forms are as solidly indicated and the vacancies made by them are as solidly filled in, as in a Rubens. Indeed these canvases, as block-manifestations, are nearly as perfect as the pictures of El Greco who was the greatest master of this kind of composition.

Cezanne should be numbered among the experimenters in art. With him, as with the Impressionists, the desire was to learn rather than to utilise discoveries. The painters from Courbet to Cezanne were the first to usher in an authentically realistic art mode, and they were also the first who sensed the possibilities of inanimate reality for aesthetic organisation. Others before them had regarded nature strictly _en amateur_, using only the human body for abstract purposes. Even Michelangelo said that aside from it there was nothing worth while.

These modern innovators refuted his a.s.sertion by proving the contrary, namely: by introducing order into chaotic nature. Their simple arrangements, however, would not have satisfied Michelangelo who, like all men who come at a florescence when the lessons have been learned and it remains only to apply them, demanded an arbitrary organisation which should be not only ordered but composed. Cezanne did little composing in the melodic sense of the word. He stopped at the gate of great composition which, after pointing the future way, he left for his successors to enter. His synthetic interest was limited to the eternal fugue qualities of nature. He undoubtedly saw the futility of creating polyphonic composition from lemons and napkins, but he had not found a menstruum in which the qualities of his materials would disappear. The old masters had done all that was possible with the recognisable human body; Cezanne's desires for the purification of painting kept him from attempting to improve on their medium.

Among a great scope of oil subjects one cannot say through which of them Cezanne has exerted the strongest influence. His landscapes have made as many disciples as his portraits, and his figure pieces and still-lives are universally copied. But his greatest work, his water-colours, has almost no following. In these he found his most facile and fluent expression. His method of working in oil had always been the posing of small, slightly oblong touches of colour which gave, his canvases the appearance of perfect mosaics. In his water-colour pictures these touches are placed side by side with little or no thought of their ultimate objective importance, and they become larger planes of unmixed tints juxtaposed in such a way that voluminous form results. His work in this most difficult medium has an abstract significance, for in it even the objective colouring of natural objects is unnoticeable. The colours stand by themselves; and while the aspect of Cezanne's pictures in this medium is flat and almost transparent, the subjective emotion we feel before them is greater than in his oil work. In these pictures there was no going back to retouch. They had to be visualised as a whole before they could be commenced. Each brush stroke had to be a definite and irretrievable step toward the completion of the ensemble. As we study them a slow s.h.i.+fting of the planes is felt: an emotional reconstruction takes place, and at length the volumes begin their turning, advancing and retreating as in his oil paintings, only here the purely aesthetic quality is unadulterated by objective reality. In these water-colours, more than in any of his other work, has he posed the question of aesthetic beauty itself. When we contemplate them, we are more than ever convinced that Cezanne was the first painter, that is, the first man to express himself entirely in the medium of his art, colour. Unfortunately these pictures are difficult of access. Only occasionally are they exposed in a group. Bernheim-Jeune has a magnificent collection of them, and it is to be hoped they will soon find their way into public museums.

Eventually, when a true comprehension of this great man comes, they will supplant his other efforts. His desires for a pure art are here expressed most intensely.

Cezanne, however, is not always able to "realise," as he put it. Even in these water-colours he did not attain his desire. He started too late in life to acquire complete mastery over his enormous means. "One must be a workman in one's art, must know one's method of realisation," he said.

"One must be a painter by the very qualities of painting, by making use of the rough materials of art." He failed to gain that great facility by which supreme realisation is achieved, because the span of life accorded him was too short. He was old when his best work was begun, and like Joseph Conrad, he had pa.s.sed his youth before the great ambition fired him. "Realising" to him meant the handling of his stupendous means as easily as the academicians handled their puny ones. This he could never do, and his age haunted him to the end. Many have taken him literally when he said he desired to expose in Bouguereau's _Salon_, but though he earnestly wished it, he desired to be received there as Bouguereau was: as one who had mastered his expression. "The exterior appearance is nothing," he explained. "The obstacle is that I don't realise sufficiently." In other words, he did not have great enough fluency to permit only the highest qualities of his art to be felt. In his gigantic efforts to "realise," his pictures changed colour and form many times before they were finished. His respect and admiration for inferior men like Bouguereau and Couture was due to their enviable facility in handling their means. He knew that the fundamental and unalterable laws of organisation had been found and perfected by the old masters, and that, so long as we were human, we must build on their discoveries.

"Only to realise like the Venetians!" he cried. And later: "We must again become cla.s.sicists by way of nature, that is to say, by sensation.... I am old, and it is possible I shall die without having attained this great end." A year before his death he said: "Yes, I am too old; I have not realised, and I shall never realise now. I shall remain the primitive of the way I have discovered."

The prediction proved true, but his destiny was none the less a glorious one. Deprived of the phrenetic impulse which took him in all weathers over country roads to the "motif" from six o'clock in the morning until dark, he would never have achieved what he did. The fact of this great modern genius going to work in a hired carriage, too weak to walk, should be a lesson to those painters who are always awaiting the combination of propitious circ.u.mstances which will provide them with a perfect studio, a perfect model and a perfect desire. Cezanne, however, knew his high place in art history. Once when Balzac's Le Chef-d'uvre Inconnu was brought up in conversation and the name of its hero, Frenhofer, was mentioned, he arose with tears in his eyes and indicated himself with a single gesture. So sure was he of what he wanted to do that when he failed he discarded his canvases. Many of them are only half covered. He could never pad merely to fill out an arbitrary frame.

With Cezanne's death came his apotheosis. As he had predicted, thousands rushed in and cleverly imitated his surfaces, his colour gamuts, his distortions of line. His white wooden tables and ruddy apples and twisted fruit-dishes have lately become the etiquette of sophistication.

But all this is not authentic eulogy. Derain, his most ardent imitator, is as ignorant of him as Nadelmann is of the Greeks or Archipenko is of Michelangelo. And the majority of those who have written books concerning him merely echo the unintelligent commotion that goes on about his name. Cezanne's significance lies in his gifts to the painters of the future, to those in whom the creative instinct is a sacred and exalted thing, to those serious and solitary men whose insatiability makes of them explorers in new fields. To such artists Cezanne will always be the primitive of the way that they themselves will take, for there can be no genuine art of the future without his directing and guiding hand. His postulates are too solidly founded on human organisms ever to be ignored. He may be modified and developed: he can never be set aside until the primal emotions of life are changed. Only today is he beginning to be understood, and even now his claim to true greatness is questioned. But Cezanne, judged either as a theorist or as an achiever, is the preeminent figure in modern art. Renoir alone approaches his stature. Purely as a painter he is the greatest the world has produced. In the visual arts he is surpa.s.sed only by El Greco, Michelangelo and Rubens.

VII

THE NEO-IMPRESSIONISTS

The Impressionists, although they turned their backs upon casual selectivism and branched out into a.n.a.lytic research, had-contrary to the generally accepted opinion-no precise and scientific method of colour application. This came later with the advent of a group of painters who have been called, in turn, Pointillists, Divisionists, Chromo-luminarists and Neo-Impressionists, but who chose to regard themselves only as the last of these four designations. And there is perhaps more logic in this nomenclature, for it is not limited technically; it contains no claim to achievement as does Chromo-luminarism; and it suggests this new school's consanguinity with the movement out of which it grew. With Delacroix's Journal, the pictures of Claude Monet and Chevreul's pioneer treatise on colour, De la Loi du Contraste Simultane des Couleurs, the Neo-Impressionists evolved a coldly scientific method of technique. By carrying a simple premise to its ultimate conclusion, regardless of everything save the exacting demands of logic, they endeavoured to heighten the emotional effect of the Impressionist vision. In this movement, as in other similar ones, can be detected the spirit which animates the ardent visionary when he contemplates a novel method-the spirit which invites him to go to even greater extremes. In it there is as much enthusiasm as serious purpose, as much of the essence of youth as of the _arriviste_.

In no instance has such a spirit led to significant results; and the Neo-Impressionists prove no exception. In looking too fixedly at means, they lost sight of their ends. Their debut took place at the last concerted exhibition of the Impressionists in 1886 where the canvases of Seurat and Signac were hung beside those of Ca.s.satt, Bracquemond, Morisot, Camille and Lucien p.i.s.sarro, Gauguin, Guillaumin, Redon, Schuffenecker, Tillot, Degas, Forain and Vignon. Here was seen for the first time the logical extension of the earlier methods of Monet and p.i.s.sarro.

Georges Seurat had once been a good student at the Beaux-Arts, but his quick, precise and questioning intelligence had saved him from falling under the professorial injunctions. Most of his studying was done in the art museums where he contemplated for long the old masters. Here he discovered that "there are a.n.a.logous laws which govern line, tone, colour and composition, as much with Rubens as with Raphael, with Michelangelo as with Delacroix: rhythm, measure and contrast." (By rhythm, measure and contrast he meant curved lines, s.p.a.ce and opposition.) Still searching for the secrets of art he studied the works of the Orient and the writings of Chevreul, Superville, Humbert, Blanc, Rood and Helmholtz. Then, by a.n.a.lysing Delacroix, he found substantiation for his discoveries. The result of this study was, as Signac tells us, his "judicious and fertile theory of contrasts." From 1882 on he applied it to all his canvases. The theory in brief was to use scientifically opposed spots of colour of more or less purity. This method he might have learned direct from the first modern French master, for in that artist's Journal are discussed at length colour division; optical admixture; the dramatic unity of colour, line and subject; and the juxtaposition of complementaries for brilliancy.

Paul Signac's evolution was different. He had first been under the influence of p.i.s.sarro, Renoir, Monet and Guillaumin, and though being a zealous pupil of their methods, he knew little of their motives. It was only after he had observed the interplay and contrast of colours in nature that he sought explanation in the works of his masters, the Impressionists. Failing, he turned again to nature. In copying it, he discovered that in the gradation from one colour to another, let us say from blue to orange, the transition was always muddy and disagreeable when mixed on the palette, although if distinct spots of these two colours were juxtaposed in alternating ratio, the modulation would be smooth and clean. This observation impelled him to seek a method whereby this "pa.s.sage" could be highly clarified. Consequently he completely divided the Impressionists' spots so that each individual touch remained pure and at the same time left patches of the white canvas showing for purposes of brilliancy. His next step led him to Chevreul whose theory of complementaries he committed to memory. His technical education he now deemed complete.

Seurat and Signac first met at the _Salon des Artistes Independants_ in 1884, and their discoveries were at once mutually appropriated. Signac's colour divisions, combined with Seurat's more scholarly equilibrium of elements, formed the nucleus from which evolved the Neo-Impressionists who later repudiated Impressionism, using it only as the point from which they leapt off into a mora.s.s of set formulas. It was a laudable desire on the part of these new men, especially of Seurat, to try to s.n.a.t.c.h from a purely inspirational school its halo of mystery and to place painting methods on a sound rationalistic basis. But while they were right in believing a picture should be more than the visual accompaniment to sentiments, they should have gone deeper than the mere exterior of painting. For example, they should have tried to see in what plastic way their colour theories could be used, instead of limiting themselves to the synthetic unity of aesthetic ill.u.s.tration. And they should have tried to make a form-producing faculty of their light instead of introducing into it another poetic element in the shape of dramatic line. But they were more concerned with the clothes in the wardrobe of art than in its body. Their painting, as a result, was without sustaining structure.

With the Impressionists, as with all significant art movements, the desire for change and for higher emotional power came first: the method came later. With the Neo-Impressionists this order was reversed. Their canvases for this reason are less emotional than those of their forerunners. By limiting their palettes to certain pure colours they restricted their diversity of interest. Even their aim at a scientific art has gone far of the mark because their science was in many instances faulty. By conditioning their methods on the observations of inaccurate writers they were able to progress only so far as these observations went. Chevreul is far from authoritative today: in fact there is no comprehensive scientific work on colour in existence. Tudor-Hart, the greatest of all colour scientists, has blasted many of the older accepted theories of such men as Helmholtz, Rood and Chevreul, and his experiments have shown conclusively that many of their postulates are unreliable. The Neo-Impressionists were unaware of Chevreul's errors, and their minds were too literal to enable them to make new and more advanced observations in the realm of colour. The meagre attention paid them is not due to their novelty, but to the fact that they have done nothing the Impressionists did not do better. They are like a cartridge which, having all the combustible ingredients, fails to explode because it is wet.

The Neo-Impressionists may, in refutation, point to music as a scientific art. But it must be remembered that taste brought about the construction of chords and that the mathematical explanation came later.

The primitive peoples who found an aesthetic pleasure in broken-up major chords were ignorant of nodal points and the laws of vibration. The early a.s.syrians had a pipe of three notes, C, E and G, perfectly attuned, yet they were ignorant of the science of harmony. Taste in the arts has always come first: science follows with its interpretations.

The Impressionists, through instinct, created their marvels of light and atmosphere. Afterward the science of optics explained their efforts.

Personal taste was their only criterion, and no books could have taught them their lesson, because their methods were so plastic that whatever was to them artistically consistent was right. Had they been familiar with science, it still would have remained to be applied: and it is only by the superimposition of taste that knowledge in the artist becomes pregnant. The Divisionists, by making a hard and fast code of science, enslaved themselves to the demands of theories. The functioning of their tastes was nullified. They therefore fell short of art.

In Signac's book, D'Eugene Delacroix au Neo-Impressionnisme, are explained many points of divergence between this school and that of the Impressionists. The difference of the two methods may be exemplified by describing the manner in which each approached a landscape wherein the gra.s.s and foliage were partly in shadow and partly in sunlight. In such a landscape the artist's eye records a fleeting, dimly-felt impression of red in that part of the green of the shadow which is nearest the light region. The Impressionists, satisfied with having experienced this sensation, hastened to put a touch of red on their canvas, while the actual colour in nature might have been an orange, a vermilion, or even a purple. In this haphazard choice of a red Signac detected slovenliness. He says that the shadow of any colour is always lightly tinted with the colour's complementary; that if the light is yellow-green the shadow will be touched with violet; if orange, the shadow will contain blue-green. Had the Impressionists known this fact and cared to use it, says Signac, they could have made their pictures scientifically correct by posing the exact complementary of light in their shadow. And he adds that it is difficult to see in just what way this process would have harmed their work.

It is, however, not so difficult as he imagines. If, in copying nature by a strictly scientific vision as the Neo-Impressionists advocate, we closely study the light, we will discover not only that a local colour is modified by the colour of the sun's rays, but that an added suite of colours is introduced by the absorption of some of the object's particles, by the encompa.s.sing air, and by the circ.u.mjacent reflections.

We may have (1) the local colour which, let us say, is green, (2) the colour of sunlight, (3) the colour caused by atmospheric conditions, (4) the reflection of sky, and (5) the reflection of the ground.

Furthermore, if the object has any indentures their shadows will lower to a limited degree the whole tone of the object. At the least calculation then we have (1) green, (2) yellow-orange, (3) any colour in the cold region of the spectrum, (4) blue or violet, and (5) green, brown, Venetian red or any colour in the warm region of the spectrum:-all of which colours change and s.h.i.+ft unceasingly, dependent on the density of the air which obscures, to a lesser or greater degree, the sun's rays and hence changes the reflection from sky and ground, thereby modifying the local colour. Thus it is impossible when copying nature even to determine the colour of its lightened parts. And if a colour premise cannot be established, it is obviously impossible to find its exact complementary.

Suppose we admit that an approximate colour can be recorded for that part of the landscape's green which is in the light, that is, the green whose complement is to be placed on the outskirts of the shadow. Let us say that this green is technically a yellow-green, since it is in the sun. Now the complement of yellow-green is not, as the Neo-Impressionists hold, violet, but red-violet or purple. But, were red-violet used in the shadow, its effect would be false, because, in order for yellow-green to call up its pure complementary, the light itself must be an intense yellow-green-so intense in fact that the local colour of the object (whatever it is) is entirely absorbed and unable to influence the light. Then, and only then, would the shadow be pure purple, for the local colour, being nullified, would not interfere with the optical sensation of complementaries. But on an object which appears yellow-green in the light, the yellow of which is the sun's rays and the green the local colour, the shadow also is modified by the local colour in the same proportion that the light is modified, only its modification is in an opposite direction; that is, the yellow of the sun's rays, in raising green to yellow-green, lowers the green of the shadow to blue-green. Therefore the shadow is not the complementary of the light colour. But in the darkest part of the shadow, which is the boundary dividing it from the light, there is a sensation of red derived from purple, purple being the complementary of the yellow-green. Thus in a blue object, though the pure complementary of the lighted part would be orange, the shadow in sunlight is merely dark blue with that fugitive sensation of red through it. In the shadow on such an object Signac calls for pure orange, claiming that a vermilion, a lake or a purple is out of place. His colour science in the abstract may be unimpeachable, but his physics is faulty. The _sensation_ caused by the complementary of the lighted part is that of a reddish tint; and so long as the painter introduces a colour into the shadow so as to give this impression of red, he is at least empirically, though not scientifically, correct. There is only a sensation of red, not a definite spot where red can be placed; and for the canvas to be truthful emotionally there must be only that sensation of red in the painted shadow. And the only way to produce it without making a spot of orange, which is a light colour and which in its pure state has no properties in common with shadow, is to use a colour which is intimately connected with shadow and which contains the elements of both light and shadow.

Thus in the cold bluish-orange shadow of a blue object there must be placed a cold lake or a purple which partakes of both the light and shadow and therefore does not offend the eye by its isolation. In the bluish or blue-green shadow of a yellow-green object, a purple is too aggressive and blatant, while a blue-violet or an attenuated violet is doubly harmonious.

Indeed there is another reason why complementaries should not be used, but merely their approximations set down. Perfect complementaries neutralise each other and, when optically mixed or applied in such small particles in a pure state that at a short distance the eye cannot distinguish their limitations, produce a metallic and acid grey which is to colour harmony what noise is to music. When C and G? are struck together the sensitive ear revolts in the same way a sensitive eye revolts at complementaries in colour. But while in music a minor, or diminished, fifth is displeasing, by increasing or reducing the interval a semitone, by making it, for instance, C-F or C-G, a pleasing effect can be obtained. In colour also this principle holds good. The complementary combination of red and green is harsh, but by placing red with one of the spectrum tones on either side of green a pleasurable harmony is at once established. The Impressionists through instinct generally made use of colours which primitively or softly harmonised, again proving the ascendency of taste over system, for if taste is sensitive it will be verified by science. Science, however, cannot create taste. When we consider the Neo-Impressionists' antagonistic and neutralising complementaries, it is difficult to understand their criticism of Impressionism. The Impressionists, they said, "put a little of everything everywhere, and in the resulting polychromatic tumult there were antagonistic elements: in neutralising each other, they deadened the ensemble of the picture." Now in the entire range of colour from violet to yellow there is hardly a possible dual combination which cannot be made harmonious by the addition of one or two other colours.

In this process of complication lie the infinite harmonic possibilities of sound as well as of colour. There are no two notes in music which, though when struck together are jarring, cannot be drawn into a perfect chord by the introduction of certain other notes. And any two lines, no matter how inapposite, can be aesthetically related by other lines properly placed. Even were the Neo-Impressionists, in their criticism, referring to the placing of blue in light and of yellow in shadow, they would still be open to refutation, for their predecessors, by placing on their canvases the colours they had _felt_ in contemplating their models, were once more emotionally right although not exactly right from the standpoint of abstract science.

With all the brilliancy of their pure pigments the Neo-Impressionists have yet to produce a canvas as brilliant or as harmonious as those of the Impressionists. The reason is not far to seek. In an Impressionist picture there is a certain amount of neutrality caused by mixing the colour of light with that of blue shadow; and this mixture heightens the scintillation of the ensemble. The Divisionists, on the other hand, went so far as to abolish neutrality altogether. In raising all values to a point of saturation, they diminished the brilliancy of the picture as a whole. It is to be doubted seriously if even Signac is still of the belief that the Pointillists' squares of colour blend optically.

Theoretically they should, but actually the impression we receive is not one of vibrant light. We see only an extended series of spots which are all about the same size-a size which was varied but little as the dimensions of the canvas varied, as was the case with the Impressionists. But these latter artists mixed their spots not only on the palette but on the canvas as well, and blent them into neighbouring spots. The result was a richly decorated surface whose minute parts do not foist themselves upon our sight. But in Signac, Cross, Van Rysselberghe, Dubois-Pillet, Luce, Pet.i.tjean, Van de Velde or Augrand, who developed these means to their ultimate limits, these spots are so displeasing and obtrusive that it is mentally impossible to lose sight of them in the contemplation of the pictures. All of these artists produce flat work, with the possible exception of Van Rysselberghe who has merely superposed this technique on an obvious and insensitive academism. He is to the Neo-Impressionists what Henri Martin is to Monet.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LES TOURS VERTES a LA ROCh.e.l.lE by SIGNAC]

There has been too much credit taken by the Neo-Impressionists for the discovery of this stippling technique. As a matter of fact it is not wholly original with them. Turner, Constable, Delacroix, Jongkind, Fantin-Latour, Cezanne and the Impressionists were all interested in breaking nature up into parts in order to arrive at a dynamic representation of the whole. The process with them was commendable, but the Chromo-luminarists carried it to such an extreme that they saw nature only in order to break it into spots. They repudiate vehemently the appellation of Pointillists, and the name that emile Bernard gave them-Pointists-has remained beneath their notice. They point out that one may be a Pointillist without being a Divisionist, for Pointillism is the using of colour in spots so as to avoid its flat application, while "division" is the application of separated spots of pure pigment for the purpose of bringing about an optical admixture. The idea of optical admixture was born when some one placed several planes of different colours on a disc and, by revolving it rapidly, caused them to blend perfectly. Immediately the Neo-Impressionists jumped to the conclusion that distance would accomplish the same result with any-sized spots.

This a.s.sumption was their initial error. There is a very definite limit to the size of colour spots which at a distance will blend optically, and the artists of this school, with the one exception of Seurat, made their spots too large. Delacroix never juxtaposed large strips of complementaries in one plane, but applied hachures of almost the same tint. The effect would have been little different had he painted flatly, except for the richer _matiere_ this method produced. The Impressionists mixed their colours both on the palette and on the canvas, except when they wished to reproduce a certain texture that called for small lights and shadows placed side by side. And Cezanne modulated his colour spots so that there were no jumps or hiatuses between them.

The Neo-Impressionistic methods have no such subtleties. In applying their colour these painters keep each spot separated from its neighbour by a tiny bit of white canvas which is intended to give added light to each part. The spots are unmixed and are applied straight from the palette in preponderating proportions to obtain certain general colour impressions. They use only the seven colours of the prismatic spectrum, and in thus restricting their palette they have limited their range of greys. Since nature itself is a series of high-pitched greys in which only occasionally does a pure colour appear, they were inadequately equipped for reproducing it. If, by raising all tints to their purity, they hoped to obtain the maximum of colouration and therefore the maximum of luminosity, they overlooked the fact that to produce any light whatever there must be negation or shadow. They failed to achieve light because they equalised the brilliancy of all colours. Even to produce colour there must be black or grey. Their equilibrium of elements led to the cold grey aspect of their work and to the acid and inharmonious effect of their colour.