On art and artists

The little palace, the charming edifice which was already attractive as the abode of the Dutuit collection, has received a new value and consecration. A room has been opened in it, in which a great artist reveals himself, whose acquaintance, though not indeed quite exhaustively, but nevertheless very profoundly and familiarly, can be made only here in the wide world. This artist is Jean Carriès, who died in 1894, at the early age of thirty-nine, after a marvellously planned life. To this pattern life, as expressive as any whose story Vasari has told, belonged a patron who kept what is vulgar away from him, who saved him from care and anxiety, who made his mind easy as to his influence on contemporaries and posterity, and, to a certain extent, symbolically personified his fame for him. This useful part was played by a certain Herr Hoentschel, who acquired most of Carriès’s works. He has now presented them to the City of Paris, and, by so doing, rendered the opening of the Carriès Museum possible. In return his name has been engraved in letters of gold on the marble slab which declares the purpose to which the room has been assigned, beside that of his trusted artist—no mean satisfaction to a high-aiming ambition.

Carriès was the son of a poor artisan of Lyons. He seemed destined, as he thought, to follow his father’s avocation; but the fairies had conferred gifts on the proletarian’s child in his cradle: sense of beauty and power of design. He was for a short time apprenticed to an artisan; then he taught himself to be an artist. He pursued no beaten tracks, and could follow no guides. He was left to his own sense of locality for finding out a path, and he made wide détours, but, nevertheless, raised himself safely to the highest peaks. Phenomena delighted him as form and colour. His pleasurable sensations sufficed to impel him to utterance in sculpture and painting; he satisfied his delight in form by modelling in clay, his delight in colour by enamelling.

For nearly two decades he sought, strove, and created in solemn loneliness. Only the patron whom he luckily found at the right time glanced over his shoulders when at work with bated breath. His reverential admiration expressed itself in a convincing manner by the helpful gesture of the open hand. Some intimate comrades were allowed to witness the lofty drama of an exquisite development. His studio, however, was far removed from the noise of the market. The heat of praise and the icy breath of blame brought no disturbance into the even climate in which his talent was powerfully developing. Quiet and collected, he worked on until he saw his inner vision realised before him. Then he said: “It is good”; and allowed a great Sabbath to follow the hard days of creation. Absolutely unknown to wider circles, in 1892 he stepped before the public for the first time in the Champs de Mars with a rich exhibition. An hour after the doors of the “Salon” were open, he was famous. In the history of modern art, never before had such an impressive revelation been observed. There was no hesitation, no vacillation. Artists, critics, connoisseurs made pilgrimage, as if guided by the shepherds’ star in the bodeful procession of the three kings of the East to Carriès’ glass cases and pedestals, bent their knees, and brought incense and myrrh. His countrymen shouted for joy: “France has one great painter more.” Thoughtful persons looked at one another and said softly: “The world is by one beauty richer.”

All asked: “Who is the man?” for they insisted, in their amazement, that nobody knew him. And then they found out that Jean Carriès was a finished artist, a man of thirty-seven, who lived in the provinces, and had, up to that time, sought nothing but the satisfaction of himself. He had not wasted the tiniest little spark of his Promethean strength in the vulgar melodrama of fighting for success. His tragedies were the great struggle with the resistance of material, and doubt of himself, and they had been played in secret in his soul. And now was pressed upon him that for which candidates strive convulsively, and how often fruitlessly! The Champs de Mars Society elected him with acclamation to full membership, and dispensed him from the probationary period is associate. The State asked for specimens to serve as models for its museums, and tied the red ribbon to the buttonhole of his blouse. What was purchasable was bought up by the ladies of Arc de Triomphe quarter during the first days of the “Salon.” A rich American lady, Mrs Winnareta Singer, commissioned him to carry out the model of his fantastic “door.” The artists fêted him by a banquet in his honour—a homage which at that time was not lavished as was the case afterwards. Mdlle. Luise Breslau painted his portrait, which is now exhibited in his room in the midst of his works, and showed his admirers a still youngish man of noble beauty, with a Lucius Verus head, the Cæsarean nobility of which was not in the least injured by a careless slouched hat. I do not know whether Mdlle. Breslau has flattered her model or has been honest, for I never saw Carriès himself; but in the picture he appears, as one would like to fancy him, every inch a gentleman, on whom his careless working-dress has the effect of a disguise which does not for a second deceive as to the rank of the wearer. A delicate, slender figure; wonderfully active, inspired hands; deep, searching eyes that seem to sight and fix a dream-picture hovering away; soft, narrow cheeks, on which uneasy shadows play, under the short beard; a thoughtful, white forehead over which an abundance of light brown curls falls. How many women may have indulged in dreams before this likeness, for it fascinates even men!

The homage received had no intoxicating effect on him; the activity of the Press concerning him did not infect him with the smallest beginnings of conceit. He withdrew from the curiosity of the world by quietly returning to his provincial nest, where, day and night, he stoked his flaming furnace, and mixed his acids and metallic salts; suffered under frequent disappointments, and enjoyed rare delights in the success of a firing or a coloured enamel. In the ensuing year one looked in vain for him in the “Salon,” and not quite two years after his unparalleled triumph that came like a bomb, men learnt that he had died.

His life had ended artistically. Carriès disappeared ere his locks grew scanty or grey. Beautifully and noiselessly, like another Euphorion, he soared away from the admiration of his contemporaries in the full lustre of his fame; and his works, through his early death, experienced the enhanced value of the Sibylline books. We may call him happy, for in this room we feel that he had given his best when he died. With a longer life he might have gone astray, for there is no lack of short openings to false paths. Very likely he would have repeated himself many times, and that would have detracted from the dainty charm of rarity which, besides their noble beauty, is peculiar to his works.

He unites in himself two different and equally perfect artists: the sculptor and the art-potter. Each tilled a tiny field; but with what intensity! And what harvests they conjured out of it! As sculptor, curiously enough, the whole human figure in its Olympian nudity failed to interest him. He has not on a single occasion sought to represent the body’s Paradisaic beauty. He confines himself, apparently on principle, to head and hands; but these are surpassed by nothing, and equalled only by little, that all the centuries since the Renaissance have produced. I pass respectfully, yet without deeper feeling, by his busts of Velasquez and Franz Hals. They are merely exercises of his hand, perhaps only pastimes. They seem theatrical by reason of the accentuation of the costume. In their countenances the absence of the model is too evident. But beside them the busts of Gustave Courbet, of Jules Breton, especially of Carriès himself, operate with unequalled authority. They live before us; they think, and they reveal themselves. In looking at them we involuntarily call to mind the old stories of the earthen statues which a magician filled with the breath of life in order that they might serve him.

The same impression, only intensified and deepened, is felt before the busts of the “Young Girl with the Drooping Head,” the “Dutch Wife,” and the “Dutch Maiden.” This young Dutch girl is particularly adorable. I do not consider I am exaggerating when I say she ranks as a sister, though in a different technique, with the “Mona Lisa.” The maiden’s innocent eyes, which have no presentiment of the passionate secrets of Gioconda; the graceful, reposeful countenance, that seems wondering blissfully over her own blooming youth and the loveliness of the world, charm us like the miracle of a spring day. Similar joy streams from his sleeping and waking little children. The softness of this baby flesh, the delicate texture of this plump, warm, satin skin, are unattainable. Carriès discovered a new technique for the life of the outer skin, the results of which, in his hands, are amazing. He gives a delicate, perpendicular creasing to the membrane of the lips, and marks it off from the skin of the face in a discreet but firm line, so that it imparts the illusion of seeing swelling lip-red framed in mother-of-pearl. The mouths of his women are weirdly seductive. It would really not surprise me if semi-fools and lunatics were to pounce upon these ravishing lips with eager kisses.

Even when Carriès is not idealising, but is reproducing portraits true to nature, he imparts to them an inwardness which seems unfathomable, like that of a deep soul. For this let any one only look at the “Bust of an Unknown Lady” and “Mother Callamand”—the former a cold, proud patrician, perhaps the Clara Vere de Vere, in whom Tennyson admires “that repose which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere”; the latter a splendid old nun, probably an abbess, a sturdy, peasant woman who is conscious of her high rank in the convent, and in whose broad face goodness and severity, healthy power and enthusiastic spirituality, are mingled. This gift of filling the subject with inward life is the strongest element in Carriès’ genius. In a series of works which were exhibited in the Champs de Mars Salon, and are, unfortunately, not to be found in the room of the Little Palace, this cropped up overpoweringly. There were fabulous animals, monsters, which a luxuriant imagination had invented—toads, frogs, lizards of gigantic size, in positions humanly conceived, the female reposing on the breast of the male, whose eyes are closing in rapture, and delicately embraced by his paws. One might think they would have a grotesque effect; by no means. Their anthropomorphism brought them in danger of derision; but the genius of Carriès was here directly revealed. The quasi-human, emotional life manifested in their attitudes made them pathetic. The toads’ legs were not seen; their mouths and goggle eyes were not seen. People saw only the unmistakable trait of love, and were moved by this exhibition of the primitive feeling—the same in man and beast—which holds the world together.

Perhaps it is in accordance with this gift of spiritualisation that Carriès never worked with marble, rarely with bronze, but, as a rule, and preferably, with potter’s clay. Stone and metal, however painfully correctly they render, with every stroke of the thumb and impression of the finger, the clay model, seem to him too hard for the inexpressible tenderness which he wants to express. Only one material satisfies him—the one which possesses the softness of flesh and of nerve-plasm. He can knead only clay so that it retains his lightest vibrations. There is something about his busts of burnt clay that reminds me of phonographic cylinders. There is soul-melody inscribed in them in invisible lines, and, set in our mood, they again begin to give forth sounds, and to repeat the mood of him who composed them.

The ability with trembling fingers to coax emotions into soft clay and to render them plastic seems to be something divine. It did not satisfy Carriès. Anybody else would have found the limits of his genius enviably wide; to him they appeared narrow, and he tried to pass beyond them. He wanted to create monumental pieces of sculpture, and he constructed his “Martyrdom of St Fidelis” and his astounding “Gate.” The “Martyrdom” is a group, composed of the kneeling martyr in monastic habit and the executioner behind him, raising his armed fist to deal the murderous blow. In the details the artist is here, too, distinctly Carriès, i.e., the executioner is of superb cruelty—a fine specimen of the family of brutalised legionaries or torturers who, in mediæval relievi of the Way of the Cross, scourge Christ at the pillar and nail Him to the Cross. Taken as a whole, the master’s art is a failure; the group has no line. The drama cannot be seen from any side, that is, the gesture of the executioner, with its menace of death, and the countenance of the martyr who is awaiting his last trial, cannot be comprehended at once in a single glance.

If this group is weak, the “Gate” is a complete failure. He imagined a gateway with a depressed keel-arch top, divided by an intervening pillar into two gates. The pillars are covered with grotesque masks and mythical animals from top to bottom. The arch of the gate is formed by a dragon, in the gaping jaws of which stands a noble lady. The separate masks and monsters scintillate with spirit, fancy, and humour. In richness and variety of invention, and in depth of humour, I unhesitatingly place these heads far above Germain Pilon’s Pont Neuf masks. The contrast, too, between the fearless maiden standing in the animal’s jaws, full of quiet self-confidence, and the hideous beast, is of pregnant symbolism. The work is, nevertheless, an aberration, as a whole. The masks and monsters have no organic connection with the gate, either constructively, or in accordance with the meaning. They are simply stuck on. And the gateway itself is an insoluble riddle. Where should it lead to? To a lunatic asylum, a museum of caricatures, or a carnival ballroom? Or should it mean “the abstract door,” the door pure and simple, without the purpose of an entrance into a building? The poor, great artist consecrated years of his life to this prodigy, and never saw that he had wasted them.

The decorator amused himself in devising unheard-of enamels. He modelled vessels of smooth, supple plant-forms—calabashes, melons, cucumbers, mamillaria-cactuses, bulging or fallen in, smoothly swelling, or warty and shrivelled, whimsically dinted like a thin copper-plate, wantonly hammered, or lumpy and swollen. And over these whimsicalities, which show an incredible mastery of the material, he poured glazes which look so fat and moist that they seem to flow still, viscous and languid. Many are purple, like half-curdled blood; others white and rich, like fresh cream; and others like coloured fruit juices; but many a time we think we see thick matter and brains in frightful discharges; and on some vases the enamel imitates the lichens which overrun the bark of trees in spots, grooves, and bands. And when Carriès has done enough with these glazes, which remind us of opalescent life-saps, he tries diversity in glazes of gold, silver, coral, and precious stones, which change his stoneware phials into splendid vessels from a treasury of the Thousand and One Nights.

As a sculptor in clay Jean Carriès stands as high as Della Robbia; in details—in forming lips and cheeks—far higher than the latter; and, as a decorator, no one can be compared with him, not even Bernhard de Palissy—to mention a name by which his rank may be estimated. Carriès is not a man of to-day, and fashion lies far below the height on which he works. The wretched æsthetic-babbling coteries of the period cannot get hold of him, or make use of him for the senseless but furiously bellowed catchwords peculiar to the polemics of the day. He is not a modernist, not a classic, not an impressionist; he is not this, he is not that, but, he is, quite simply, himself. He works up what he has learnt in his own person; he invents his own, and always gives himself. He creates from his own soul, without looking to right or left. In him there is no school, no tendency, and no straining, but only feeling, personality, and the service of beauty. Yet it is through these great artistic natures, which belong to no time, that the line of development in art proceeds, and not through the pitiful homunculi, whom Faust caricatures artificially engender in advertisement-retorts.