Willard Huntington Wright

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A picture to be a great work of art need not contain any recognisable objects. Provided it gives the sensation of rhythmically balanced form in three dimensions, it will have accomplished all that the greatest masters of art have ever striven for.
Once we divest ourselves of traditional integuments, modern painting will straightway lose its mystery. Despite the many charlatans who clothe their aberrations with its name, it is a sincere reaching forth of the creative will to find a medium by which the highest emotions may most perfectly be expressed. ”

“ The force of Cézanne 157strikes 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 Cézanne the importance of parts is entirely submerged in the effect of the whole. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But if painting was to reach its highest point of artistic creation, its realistic aspect had to go. When colour became profoundly understood, no longer could the artist apply it according to the dictates of nature. It lost its properties as decoration and as an enhancement of the naturalistic vision. Its demands freed the artist from the tyranny of nature. In becoming pure, painting drew further and further away from mimicry; and the superficial lover of painting, enslaved by the ignorant and rigid standards of the past, protested with greater and greater vehemence. ”

“ Those qualities in painting by which it is ordinarily judged are for the most part irrelevancies from the standpoint of pure æsthetics. They have as little to do with a picture’s infixed greatness as the punctuation in Faust or the words of the Hymn to Joy in the Ninth Symphony. Small wonder that modern art has become a copious fountain-head of abuse and laughter; for modern art tends toward the elimination of all those accretions so beloved by the general—literature, drama, sentiment, symbolism, anecdote, prettiness and photographic realism. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Our participation in a dance, for instance, is infinitely more intense than the Futurists’ kinematic representation of it. In the actual experience one not only sees chaos but can touch the swirling forms, blink at the lights, smell the perfumes and hear the noise and music. In other words, one is moved to sensation or feeling by the physical forces themselves. To the true artist these physical forces are only his weapons, never his ends. And it is only through their intelligent use in the production of form that æsthetic emotion results. ”

“ While their canvases present a simultaneous vision, each picture as a whole is incapable of creating a unified impression. A Cubist painting is, let us say, like the momentary blare of a hundred musical instruments all of which play consecutive bars. By approaching each performer in order and studying his particular notes, until every musical detail is learned, we might intellectually construct from our memory an impression of a related musical composition. But should the blare be repeated, even after our research, the music’s meaning would be no clearer than before. ”

“ He is one of the most purely pleasing painters of modern times.
Vuillard, a painter of interiors, owes his inspiration as much to Toulouse-Lautrec as to Gauguin. Like Bonnard he uses greys of dry and mat colour, but his harmonies are slighter and of lighter tonality than those of Bonnard. Profiting by the Impressionists’ light discoveries he has done some very admirable interiors; some of his works are more modern and artistic Whistlers. His art is one in which the spotting of masses for the sake of balance supplants any attempt to produce generating lines. ”

“ 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 men who are in love with life and not art and who paint and draw pictures merely to record their impressions, have always been hypnotised by the colour, the grace, the fluent movement and the rhythmic shiftings of dancers. These men, unable to analyse their emotions, have dreamed only of depicting objectively their photographic impressions of the dance. The artists who penetrated to the fundamental causes of rhythm used the dance only arbitrarily, whereas the superficial painters of the past saw in it merely the mosaic, the pattern, the arabesque. ”