Arthur Jerome Eddy

“ Color is a means of representation not only of what is colored, but also of the thick and the thin; of the solid and the liquid; of the light and of the heavy; of the hard and of the soft; of the corporeal and of the spacious. Cézanne models with color; with tinted color surfaces he builds a landscape. The proper couching of colored planes can force upon us the impression of depth; colored transitions call forth the impression of ascent and of motion; spots scattered here and there give the impression of sprightly vivaciousness.
Color is a means of expression talking directly to the soul. ”

“ Every really great painter must have moments when, as he thinks of the days and years spent painting things—just things for people to look at and see—he asks himself, “Is it worth while to spend all one’s life painting things one sees? Is it not possible to paint the things one feels?”
Sargent is tired of portrait painting—why? Because he longs to do something else. But what he is doing is simply another form of portrait painting—and not so big. He has simply turned from men and women to chairs and tables—so to speak; that is, from portraits of people to pictures of things—all the same art. ”

“ Without employing any allegorical or symbolical literary artifice, merely by inflections of lines and colors, a painter can show, in the same picture, a Chinese city, a French town, together with mountains, oceans, fauna, and flora, and nations with their histories and their desires—all that separates them in external reality. Distance or time, concrete fact, or pure conception, nothing refuses to be uttered in the language of the painter, as in that of the poet, the musician, or the scientist. ”

“ The interest expressed in much impressionist painting is only an interest of curiosity. The painter represents facts that he has only just noticed. He is like a clever journalist who makes an article out of his first observations of a new country. But the aim of the Post-Impressionist is to substitute the deeper and more lasting emotional interest for the interest of curiosity.
Like the great Chinese artists, they have tried to know thoroughly what they paint before they begin to paint it, and out of the fulness of their knowledge to choose only what has an emotional interest for them. ”

“ The sole question regarding form the artist should put to himself is, “Which form, or combination of forms, shall I use in this case to express most fully and plainly my spiritual mood?”
The ideal art critic is not the critic who tries to discover mistakes, ignorance, imitations in the form, but he who tries to feel and understand how the form expresses the inner feeling of the artist and who tries to make the public understand.
A painter may use new and strange forms for the sake of the forms, just for the sake of painting new and strange pictures, but the result will be lifeless. ”

“ For the first time in the history of painting painters are systematically claiming the same independence, the same right to express themselves freely in each canvas, to paint in the one picture if they see fit glimpses of different countries, cities, scenes, different times as well as places; to use them and suggest them as freely as the poet does to express a mood—and why not? ”

“ The artist who concedes nothing, who does not explain himself and relates nothing, accumulates an internal strength whose radiance shines on every hand.
It is in consummating ourselves within ourselves that we shall purify humanity; it is by increasing our own riches that we shall enrich others; it is by kindling the heart of the star for our own pleasure that we shall exalt the universe.
To explain Cubism, or any attempt in art to suppress the objective, one must fall back on music. ”

“ When a man stands before a cubist painting or an improvisation by Kandinsky and says he sees all sorts of things in it, do not take him too seriously; he is like members of those extraordinary Browning Clubs who destroy our enjoyment of the poetry by reading into each line things the poet never dreamed.
The Cubists and most of the moderns are very young men, what they think is of far less interest than what they do.
What a young man does is often of vital importance, what he thinks may be of no importance at all—save to himself. ”

“ A cry is the language of the child; speech is the every-day utterance of the man; the heart of the singer bursts forth in song; the musician speaks in harmonies, the painter in line and color, the sculptor in form, the architect in structure, the poet in rhyme and rhythm—and each is silent save in his own way.... ”

“ A composer may be inspired by a walk in the country, says M. Picabia, and produce a production of the landscape scene, of its details of form and color? No; he expresses it in sound waves, he translates it into an expression of the impression, the mood. And as there are absolute sound waves, so there are absolute waves of color and form. Modern music has won its way; this modern painting, too, will find appreciation and understanding in the days to come.
The Cubists have set themselves a hard task. It is a good deal easier to sing an emotion than paint one. ”

“ Painting Nature as she is, is not art, it is mechanical genius. The old masters turned out by hand the most perfect models, the most faithful copies of what they saw. That all their paintings are not alike is due to the fact that no two men see the same things the same way. Those old masters were, and their modern followers are, faithful depicters of the actual,{98} but I do not call that art today, because we have outgrown it. It is old, and only the new should live. Creating a picture without models is art. ”

“ If he paint a storm he must at the moment realize passing over him the very tornado which tears up trees from their roots and houses from their foundations. Should he depict the seacoast with its cliffs and moving waters, at the moment of putting the wave-bound rocks into the picture he must feel that they are being placed there to resist the fiercest movement of the ocean, while to the waves in turn he must give an irresistible power to carry all before them. ”

“ I will paint you men and women, not as you see them on the street and in the drawing room—superficial resemblances—but as they really are to you and to me, human beings the true significance of which is not expressed in the drooping of a moustache, the lifting of an eyebrow. I will paint them in black or brown or red or blue, or in gold or bronze, as does the sculptor ”

“ Great poetry is rarely superficially plain to the casual reader.
Great music is never superficially plain to the casual hearer.
But the attitude of the public is that great painting shall always be superficially plain to the casual observer.
A painter may paint things every one understands at a glance, but is it not his right, if he wishes, to paint things no one understands but himself?{104}
In other words, what right have we to say to the poet, “If you don’t write things we understand you are no poet,” or to the painter, “If you don’t paint things we understand you are no painter?” ”

“ If the painter who laughs at a Cubist painting and denounces it will only stop to think he will find one of two things true, he himself is either advancing in his art or he is not. If he is not, there is nothing further to be said, his attitude toward the Cubist painting is quite consistent; but if he is advancing, if his style, his technic, his point of view are changing, however slightly, from year to year, then he should be exceedingly cautious how he ridicules or condemns, for without knowing it he may be traveling the highroad, one of the interesting byways of which is Cubism. ”

“ I certainly do think of harmony and color, and of composition, too. Drawing is for me the art of being able to express myself with line. When an artist or student draws a nude figure with painstaking care, the result is drawing, and not emotion. A true artist cannot see color which is not harmonious. Otherwise it is a moyen, or recipe. An artist should express his feeling with the harmony or idea of color which he possesses naturally. He should not copy the walls, or objects on a table, but he should, above all, express a vision of color, the harmony of which corresponds to his feeling. ”

“ The theory is not new. So long as man has loved color he has used it irrespective of pattern.
One part of the theory of the Cubists is as old as that of the Orphists. It is simply that the painter can do with line and color what the composer does with sound. In other words they demand the same freedom in the use of line and color that every great composer has in the use of sound.
If, for instance, a great musician composes a pastoral symphony does he imitate the mooing of cows, the bleating of lambs, the rippling of brooks? ”

“ Thus, in art, we have the classical spirit for the thesis, the modern art movement, its antithesis, and we may confidently expect and hope for an age which shall select the bold, fresh spirit of the modern movement and infuse it into the proportion of classical art, which shall be the great synthesis of the artistic future. Thus the extravagant and apparently insane movement of the Futurist and Cubist will be of the greatest value in reviving art, putting red blood into art again. ”

“ The trouble with most of us is that even when we do react to new impressions and experience new emotions we are afraid to admit it. If any one of us, while alone in a museum, happened to run across a strange painting or a strange piece of sculpture—say a Javanese or a cubist production—we would not burst out laughing any more than we would laugh at some of the archaic sculptures and primitive works that are found in every great collection. ”

“ And again the sensations are the bridge from the material, the artist, and his work, to the immaterial, emotion in the soul of the observer.
The sequence is, emotion (in artist) —sensations—work—sensations—emotion (in observer) .{120}
The two emotions will be like and equal to the extent the work is successful. In this respect a painting is no different from a song, each is a message; the successful singer succeeds in arousing in his hearers the emotions he feels; the successful painter should do no less.
The inner element, emotion, must exist, else the work will be a sham. ”

“ The great majority of people view a painting only from the latter point of view, only in the light of their preconceived notions and prejudices—hence the ridicule of the strange and the protest against the new.
A very, very small minority—a minority so small it numbers scarce one in ten thousand—view a new work searchingly and at the same time sympathetically from the artist’s point of view, seeking diligently to find out what he is trying to do, and not permitting a single prejudice or preconceived notion of their own to bias their judgment. ”

“ If we understand this we shall see that a new artistic movement, such as Post-Impressionism, is not to be judged merely by a few pictures or to be condemned because those pictures seem to us very unlike reality. Whatever may come of it, it is something that is happening in all the arts, because discovery is turning in a new direction. All the successes of the past are obstacles to new success of the same kind, and discovery naturally takes a line of least resistance away from them. ”

“ Their final appreciation may be that granting the theories of the artist the picture is a fine one, but they do not agree with the artist’s theories, hence the picture from their point of view is a failure as a work of art.
To rightly view a work of art is an act of creation; the true observer is a painter; the true reader is a poet.
It is not at all strange that the great majority referred to should resent Kandinsky’s improvisations, for they are not easy to understand, though most of them are undeniably fascinating in color. ”

“ If it is utterly impossible for the best and most sympathetic minds after long study to find any suggestion of the title in the work, it means either the artist has been unsuccessful in conveying his idea in sound or in line and color, or—what often happens—he has carelessly and arbitrarily chosen a title after his work was finished, a title that imperfectly fits his original impulse.
It is most disappointing to hear a man go into raptures over what he cannot explain.
The greatest enemies of the moderns are their friends. ”

“ We have entered into one of those periods of artistic revolution in which the public, audience, or spectators become partisans and express their opinions as if they were at a political meeting. The Russian Ballet, for instance, produced a conflict of opinion last Friday, which recalls the conflicts provoked by the plays of Victor Hugo in the thirties. Post-Impressionism now is what the Romantic movement was then. To one party it means the end of all beauty; to the other a new birth of it. People no longer clap or hiss because they think a particular performance is well or ill done. ”

“ In sculpture this cannot be done save, in a measure, in such crude mixtures of sculpture, relief, and painted scenes as those large circular panoramas so popular twenty years ago, where the spectator stood in the center—where the theory of the Futurist requires him to be—and gazed from life-size figures and objects at his feet across smaller and smaller, until reality imperceptibly joined the painted canvas, which gave a sense of great distance—entire battle-fields. ”

“ Nothing is absolute in painting. That which was a truth for the painters of yesterday, is a lie for those of today. We declare, for example, that a portrait should not resemble its sitter, and that the painter carries in his own imagination the landscape he wishes to place upon the canvas. ”

“ Now and then a great painter, a great sculptor, takes off his coat, turns workman for the moment and makes sculptures for buildings, paints pictures on walls, devises costumes, and contributes to making our environment more beautiful.
But not infrequently the sculptor and the painter upset the equilibrium of the work of others by doing things which are out of key or out of proportion. The “fine artist” may bring the work of decorating to a standstill by painting spotty easel pictures on walls that should be treated in harmony with the entire building and with its uses. ”

“ Even if one does not recognize it as a landscape, it is easier to find one’s way about in it, because the forms have the same sort of relations as the forms of nature, whereas in the two others there is no reminiscence of the general structure of the visible world. The landscape is easier, but that is all. As one contemplates the three, one finds that after a time the improvisations become more definite, more logical and more closely knit in structure, more surprisingly beautiful in their color oppositions, more exact in their equilibrium. They are pure visual music. ”