Willard Huntington Wright

“ In Renoir’s life story, as in that of Titian, Rubens and Rembrandt, we see in miniature the evolution of all the painting that preceded him—the bitter struggles with the chimeras of convention, and each slow change that came over drawing, style, colour and composition. In the end, after a life full of near defeats, strife, yearning and anxiety, we behold the great man emerge triumphantly from his broken fetters and take his place beside the masters of the past. Some painters have more arduous fights than others, for the odds against them are greater. ”

“ We are slaves to accuracy of delineation, to prettiness of design, to the whole suite of material considerations which are deputies to the organic and intellectual qualities of a work of art. It is the common thing to find criticisms—ever from the highest sources—which praise or condemn a picture according to the nearness of its approach to the reality of its subject. Such observations are confusing and irrelevant. Were realism the object of art, painting would always be infinitely inferior to life—a mere simulacrum of our daily existence, ever inadequate in its illusion. ”

“ I value a man according to the quantum of power and fulness of his will; not according to the enfeeblement and moribund state thereof. I consider that a philosophy which teaches the denial of will is both defamatory and slanderous.... I test the power of a will according to the amount of resistance it can offer and the amount of pain and torture it can endure and know how to turn to its own advantage; I do not point to the evil and pain of existence with the finger of reproach, but rather entertain the hope that life may one day be more evil and more full of suffering than it has ever been. ”

“ With only the example of canvases filled with familiar gods and goddesses and melting nudes in golden pink, he dared set forth, in a sacred theme, peasants’ faces and peasants’ shoes, cloudy skies, and holes in the brown earth. To those who had come to look upon art as something ethereal and evanescent, L’Enterrement à Ornans was more than blasphemy. It was this picture, falling like a bomb into the midst of the vagaries of his time, that sounded the death knell of romanticism. It was the last spade of earth on the graves of the classicists. ”

“ We are prepared as no other age has ever been for a carnival in the grand style, for the most spiritual festival-laughter and arrogance, for the transcendental height of supreme folly and Aristophanic ridicule of the world. Perhaps we are still discovering the domain of our invention just here, the domain where even we can still be original, probably as parodists of the world's history and as God's Merry-Andrews,—perhaps, though nothing else of the present have a future, our laughter itself may have a future! ”

“ THE development of art itself is no more mechanical than the artistic development of the individual: in both there are irregularities, retrogressions, forward spurts, divagations. Renoir first appeared with a rhythmic line-balance which first grew luminous, then voluminous, until it blossomed forth into his full form and line and colour. Sometimes he leapt ahead in one quality and deteriorated in another, abandoned one for the glory of the other, and sacrificed continually until by experience he knew his limitations. ”

“ Little doth woman understand otherwise about honour. But let this be your honour: always to love more than ye are loved, and never be the second.
Let man fear woman when she loveth: then maketh she every sacrifice, and everything else she regardeth as worthless.
Let man fear woman when she hateth: for man in his innermost soul is merely evil; woman, however, is mean.
Whom hateth woman most?—Thus spake the iron to the loadstone: "I hate thee most, because thou attractest, but art too weak to draw unto thee."
The happiness of man is, "I will." The happiness of woman is, "He will." ”

“ To whatever height mankind may have developed—and perhaps in the end it will not be so high as when they began!—there is as little prospect of their attaining to a higher order as there is for the ant and the earwig to enter into kinship with God and eternity at the end of their career on earth. What is to come will drag behind it that which has passed: why should any little star, or even any little species on that star, form an exception to that eternal drama? ”

“ In Guillaumin we have a man who gave promise of good work but who, up to the last, failed in its fulfilment. Indubitably talented, he never succeeded in reaching that point where talent is only a means to an end. But nevertheless there was in him a solidity of modelling, a real feeling for the ponderous hardness of hills and plains. He was a friend of Cézanne, and undoubtedly learned much from that master of form. At first he had painted in sombre tones, but later, after meeting Cézanne and Pissarro in the Académie Suisse, he adopted their lighter and more joyous colour schemes. ”

“ Art is above all and meant to embellish life, to make us ourselves endurable and if possible agreeable in the eyes of others. With this task in view, art moderates us and holds us in restraint, creates forms of intercourse, binds over the uneducated to laws of decency, cleanliness, politeness, well-timed speech and silence. Hence art must conceal or transfigure everything that is ugly—the painful, terrible, and disgusting elements which in spite of every effort will always break out afresh in accordance with the very origin of human nature. ”

“ One cannot think of a Renoir canvas merely as a painting. It is a new and visually complete cosmos. In looking at his work the intelligence enters a world in which every form has interest, every line completion, every space a plasticity: in short, a world in which everything is visibly interrelated. A host of influences have been read into Renoir, and indeed there were many in his development. But they were only the steps by which he mounted to high achievement. ”

“ The Cubists’ greatest apport to art (not in theory but in achievement) is their almost total abolition of the painter’s slavery to nature. It was but a step from Matisse to the complete elimination of recognisable objects, and though Cubism did not cover the entire distance, it nevertheless made an advance toward that pure expression which Cézanne saw was inevitable. Even today the followers of this school are beginning to realise their early mistakes and to throw off their self-imposed restrictions. They are launching forth into colour and are seeking expression in purely arbitrary form. ”

“ To require of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a wish to overpower, a wish to overthrow, a wish to become master, a thirst for enemies and antagonisms and triumphs, is just as absurd as to require of weakness that it should express itself as strength. A quantum of force is just such a quantum of movement, will, action. ”

“ Giotto, El Greco, Masaccio, Tintoretto and Rubens, the greatest of all the old painters, strove continually to attain form as an abstract emotional force. With them the organisation of volumes came first. The picture was composed as to line. Out of this grew the subject-matter—a demonstration a posteriori. The human figure and the recognisable natural object were only auxiliaries, never the sought-for result. In all this they were inherently modern, as that word should be understood; for the new conception of art strives more and more for the emotion rather than the appearance of reality. ”

“ When the centre of gravity of life is laid, not in life, but in a beyond—in nonentity, life is utterly robbed of its balance. The great lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, all nature in the instincts,—everything in the instincts that is beneficent, that promotes life and that is a guarantee of the future, henceforward aroused suspicion. The very meaning of life is now construed as the effort to live in such a way that life no longer has any point.... Why show any public spirit? Why be grateful for one's origin and one's forebears? ”

“ Thus has it always been the case with art: appreciation for anything newly vital lags far behind the achievement.
The true significance of Impressionism, however—like the true significance of all emotion-provoking art—remained undiscovered to the general. When the mean intelligence of mankind brings itself to bear on a work of art, it applies itself through the channels of literature, archæology, photography, botany, mineralogy and physiology. To be a popular artist a painter must be something of a professor in all these sciences. ”

“ Ye shall love peace as a means to new wars—and the short peace more than the long.
You I advise not to work, but to fight. You, I advise not to peace, but to victory. Let your work be a fight, let your peace be a victory! ”

“ Cézanne’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 Cézanne 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. ”

“ Every one knows at present that the ability to endure contradiction is a high indication of culture. Some people even know that the higher man courts opposition, and provokes it, so as to get a cue to his hitherto unknown partiality. But the ability to contradict, the attainment of good conscience in hostility to the accustomed, the traditional and the hallowed,—that is more than both the above-named abilities, and is the really great, new and astonishing thing in our culture, the step of all steps of the emancipated intellect: who knows that? ”

“ If one aspires to innovation of means, graphic traits have to be sacrificed: steps must be taken in the dark. Those who cling with one hand to the old while groping toward the new can never reach their desires. Pissarro’s lack of constructive genius was too evident, his timidity too great, his intelligence too literal for him ever to effectuate new plastic forms. His instincts were those of a teacher, and he displayed indubitable traits of an exalted doctrinaire. But his art, with these limitations, was able and complete. Cézanne says he learned all he knew of colour from him. ”

“ The darkening of the heavens over man has always increased in proportion to the growth of man's shame before man. The tired pessimistic outlook, the mistrust of the riddle of life, the icy negation of disgusted ennui, all those are not the signs of the most evil age of the human race: much rather do they come first to the light of day, as the swamp-flowers, which they are, when the swamp to which they belong comes into existence—I mean the diseased refinement and moralisation, thanks to which the "animal man" has at last learnt to be ashamed of all his instincts. ”

“ His sculpture is but his painting in a solider medium. It is broken up into planes and organised as to each contour in exactly the same manner as is his work in oils. The difference between Picasso, the sculptor, and Matisse, the sculptor, is the difference between a man who has a slight genius for rhythm and a block order, and one who has a slight genius for characterisation and a perfect ensemble. The art of Picasso, having to do with form as decoration, is admirably adapted to sculpture. The art of Matisse, being flat and dealing with colour as decoration, is inexpressible in clay. ”

“ EXCERPTS FROM "THE DAWN OF DAY"
Morality is nothing else (and, above all, nothing more) than obedience to customs, of whatsoever nature they may be. But customs are simply the traditional way of acting and valuing. Where there is no tradition there is no morality; and the less life is governed by tradition, the narrower the circle of morality. The free man is immoral, because it is his will to depend upon himself and not upon tradition: in all the primitive states of humanity "evil" is equivalent to "individual," "free," "arbitrary," "unaccustomed," "unforeseen," "incalculable." ”

“ 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 æsthetic 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 spacial forms, we should experience its dynamism. This Cézanne did, and therein lay his claim to greatness. ”