Sadakichi Hartmann

“ Why could not a single man, even with the whole world against him, live up to some big ideal! To be an artist simply for one's own gratification. To fashion something beautiful simply because one feels like doing it. To purify one's mind by projecting into life what is accumulated there by some curious grace of nature. Whistler undertook the task, and created a new art form that may be destined to rule art for the next thousand years.
A new art form is always the expression of a new spirit. In painting the new spirit is rebellious. ”

“ When the evening mist clothes the riverside with 'poetry' as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky and the tall chimneys become campanile, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and the fairy land is before us—then the wayfarer hastens home, the workman and the cultured one, the wise and the one of pleasures cease to understand as they have ceased to see, and nature, who for once has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son and her master ”

“ Beauty is confounded with virtue and, before a work of art, it is asked: 'What good shall it do?'"
"Hence it is that nobility of action in his life is hopelessly linked with the merit of the work that portrays it; and thus the people have acquired the habit of looking, as who should say, not at a picture, but through it, at some human fact, that shall, not from a social point of view, better their mental or moral state. So we have come to hear of the painting that elevates, and the duty of the painter—of the picture that is full of thought and of the panel that merely decorates." ”

“ It became apparent that light does not emphasize, but that it generalizes, and that colours and tones, although more varied, are less decisive than in the painting of the Old Masters. The charm of pictorial illusion seemed to have shifted from the juxtaposition of contrast to the more subtle and less powerful variety of half tones. It is not so much the richness and fullness of colour the modern painter strives for, as Raffaelli has pointed out, but the combination of colours which yield a sensation of light, which, in a way, is a reflection of our temporary light conditions. ”

“ Its glimmer of light is sad and dreamy, as if it were woven out of grey monotonies of everyday life. And in Whistler's "Sarasate" we see in the plastic, but solitary light passage, on face and shirt front a symbol of all the glamour of romance and poetry that light can yield in our prosaic age. Whistler translated all objects into flat surface planes, and, in that way, sacrificed more to the realization of tone than any other painter. His fragmentary visions are almost colourless but never give the impression of monochrome. ”

“ There is nothing more exquisite, more enjoyable, perhaps, to the art lovers than a perfect line. Pure line expression, as it is found in Dürer, Harunobu, Raphael, and Ingres, is a pleasure apart from all other pictorial representations. It is more intellectual and more remote from all sensuous pleasure than colour, tone, light or shade. It is a language of itself which enables the artist to convey an abstract impression of his individuality. ”

“ A beautiful room is like a simple melody, but if the melody has any striking individuality, we soon tire of it. If the decoration could be kept entirely neutral the problem could be solved satisfactorily. But pink and lemon-yellow are not neutral. Not everybody would feel happy in a blue room decorated with purple fans. Even a woman in a certain gown would destroy the harmony, and a definite colour seen all the time, even if unconsciously, would soon disturb our mental serenity. The Whistler rooms were beautiful when no human being moved in them. ”

“ The plea of the modern experimentist that all poetry of painting should be in the paint, which also Whistler advanced, is a just one if not carried to extremes. Absolute paucity of idea is as unfavourable as story-telling. The intrinsic beauty of a painting lies in the method of painting, and the only guide for the painter is colour and the general arrangement—not a method learned by rote, not an arrangement garroted by a thousand rules which others have invented, but that personal style or rhythm which is inveterately the painter's own. ”

“ And yet he worked in Paris as prodigiously as he played. To us it is incomprehensible how he found time to read as a student, and yet he knew the literature of the period thoroughly, and always the charm of his manner and his courtesy made it delightful to do anything for him. Few men ever ate less than Whistler, but few were more fastidious about what they did eat—no man ever shrank more from thought, or at the mention of death than Whistler. There was always in life so much for him to do and so little time in which to do it. ”

“ Our eyes are perpetually moving in a restless manner from one part to another, and no longer find any place to rest in the depth of shadows.
Luckily for us, we have been rendered unconscious of these dangers, we have grown accustomed to them, but their influence on modern painting has been a most palpable one. Chiaroscural composition underwent a complete transformation. Saliency of object induced the modern painter for a time, at the beginning of the last century, to strive solely for fixed and precise conceptions of form and to utterly neglect the beauty of light and shade. ”

“ The one aim of this unsuspecting painter is to make his man stand out from the frame—never doubting that on the contrary, he should really, and in truth absolutely does, stand within the frame—and at a depth behind it equal to the distance at which the painter sees his model, and nothing could be more offensively inartistic than this brutal attempt to thrust the model on the hitherside of this window. Lights have been heightened, until the white of the tube alone remains—shadows have been deepened until black alone is left. ”

“ The eye is led to noticing gradations of obscurity, the darkness grows animated with colour and form, and we see the objects as through a glaze of Van Dyke brown.
No wonder that the painter of the Middle Ages, having become sensible to the beauty of transparent darkness and the brilliant passages of light, dared to unite extremes and to show every form and colour in its full strength. ”

“ It is difficult to imagine a more delightful pastime than to look over a collection of his pastels, lithographs and aquarelles. They are carried out lightly, but with true touches of genius and joyous mystifying excursions into the dreamland of pictorial fancy, quite in the Whistlerian manner. No one, I think, quite so well fulfilled Whistler's own theory that an artist should see nature through the spiritual eye of an individual. Few painters were such frank interpreters of their own intimate moods. ”

“ No painter can surpass Van Dyke in the elegant delineation of men and women, or Franz Hals in the representation of instantaneous expression. Whistler wanted a characteristic attitude that expressed in a simple pose or movement an entire personality. But the purely technical problem fascinated him even more, to express himself forcefully in black and dull colours, to paint broadly and yet so delicately that no brushwork became visible, and to create the illusion of atmosphere and space around the human form. ”

“ Of all modern painters Whistler and Carrière seem to have excelled in conquering the modern limitations of light and shade composition and making the most of them. They have enveloped their figures in clair-obscure that is uncertain in form, mystic in tendency, but suggestive of atmosphere, depth and space, some grey or dark interior filled with struggling shadows, capricious gleams of light and tonal gradations, tantalizing in their subtlety and power of suggestion. ”

“ The white gods are worshipped no longer in the sacred woods and the Old Masters have lost much of their spiritual glamour. But no need to mourn their loss, they will remain beautiful. We will always look with awe and wonder at the figures of the Parthenon frieze. We will never cease to love the Primitifs. We will continue to make pilgrimages to the Prado and the Sistine Chapel. And Rembrandt will as heretofore receive the adoration of mankind.
Yet the new art will be different. It has to be different to equal the old. It will be attuned to the moods of the modern mind. ”

“ To Rembrandt even the Bree-straat in Amsterdam, resplendent in his time of Oriental culture and Moorish pomp, may have seemed dull and colourless. He had to create for himself a distant and enchanted realm from out the prosaic world in which he lived. And so must every ambitious artist dream himself far away from the grey of everyday life and construct a poetic world for himself alone. ”

“ The majority of artists entertain no kindly feeling towards art writers. In their just anger with critics, who arrogate to themselves the right of telling an artist how he should have done his work, they forget that the real writer on art, misnamed critic, has quite a different aim, and is their best friend. For he takes upon himself the duty of mediating between artist and public. Without him, we may say, the true artist is nowhere. ”

“ Whistler himself was all his life a subject painter. Of course he has avoided telling stories, but he has suggested them, and given to each picture that vague note of interest which every true painting should possess. The main purpose is to make the picture more interesting. And you cannot make a picture more interesting without adding something. Painting for painting's sake is an impossibility. One cannot translate nature and life into colour without the help of the imagination. ”

“ And that is the reason why Whistler has painted her in that attitude. Thus every object has its moment of supreme beauty. In life these moments are as fugitive as the fractions of a second. Through art they can become a permanent and lasting enjoyment.
The ancient Greek believed in an ideal standard of beauty to which the whole universe had to conform. The modern artist, on the other hand, sees beauty only in such moments as are entirely individual to the forms and conditions of life he desires to portray. ”

“ The art of a landscape painter is determined by a thousand influences upon his mind other than those of nature. The essence of Monet's art is one of an hour, but with such a painter as Daubigny or Rousseau it is one of a place. There is the sense of the atmosphere of the moment given by one school of landscape painters, of locality by another, poetry by a third and of the historic associations of a place by yet another school. ”

“ It was Whistler who taught that painting was a science of colour manipulation. That the first requisite of a painter is to know how to paint. Everybody can learn how to draw and how to handle a brush. To explore the secrets of colour, to discern their influences upon each other, to render them atmospheric and musical, that alone is of vital importance. For painting should be a visual language that speaks directly and distinctly to the cultured mind. ”

“ Such worship of art, such absolute disinterestedness, such fidelity to painting cannot be too highly esteemed.
And it was Whistler who proclaimed that art cannot be taught but must be an inborn gift, that everything can be acquired by long practice save that one supernatural quality of genius which alone can transform a painter into a great artist. ”

“ If there was ever a man tormented by the accursed ambition to put the whole world into one picture, the whole picture into one tonality, and the whole tonality into one colour note, it was Whistler. It is difficult to understand why his work was ever criticized as being unfinished. ”

“ Grey is the colour of modern life. There is some truth in the statement. Modern civilization shuns the slashed doublet and purple cloak. Beauty of colour, as a Titian and Veronese understood it, belongs to the past. ”