Although Matisse’s greatest impetus to modern art, after his carrying form nearer to an abstract conception, is the harmonising of colour, his finest canvases are those in which the form predominates, as for instance the Jeu de Balles, La Musique—Esquisse, La Musique (panneau décoratif) and Baigneuses. In these pictures, however, there is an entire absence of rhythm in the Renoir sense, but they possess a perfect disposition of forms to fill a given space, a harmony of subject with its frame, a dazzling succession of uncommon and beautifully proportioned spaces and an amazing feeling for two-dimensioned form. Where with Matisse the distinct parti pris of reverting to a primitive inspiration was excusable, such an attitude was worse than folly for those who came after him. With him it was a manifestation of the disgust of an impatient and experimental mind for stereotyped expression: with his followers it was only an imitation of his motives, and hence it was decadent. If Matisse partially understood Giotto and Michelangelo, the understanding contributed little to his art. His greatest claim to consideration is that he gave painting its final impulse toward abstraction. But his canvases, while being æsthetically just, are not æsthetically satisfying, because in composition he never penetrated further than the surface. And even on the surface he did not attain to a greater fluency than that permitted by parallelisms and simple oppositions, although there has never been an artist who more perfectly adapted his expression to the shape and size of his canvas.
That all great artists worked like him from the standpoint of creating recognisable form by abstract thought, does not detract from his fine destiny. Where other artists failed to drag art from the quicksands of literary instantaneity, Matisse succeeded. His evolution was direct and logical, as a close study of his work will show; and those who see in him an arriviste may with equal justice bring the same charge against Michelangelo. His æsthetic sources and admirations, of which so much has been written, are important in understanding the genealogical foundations of art, but they are of little moment in the actual enjoyment of his pictures. Looking impartially at his classic influences on the one hand and his Persian and negro influences on the other, it is difficult to see just where the benefits of the latter lie. Matisse merely shifted his inspiration from the greatest masters of form to the slighter masters—from a well-known and great antiquity to a little-known and less significant one. However, if negro sculpture can help produce a man like Picasso, and the Persian stuffs and enamels one like Matisse, they serve after all a high purpose.
CUBISM first and foremost is an attempt to make art more arbitrary in its selection of compositional forms. In all ancient painting only the human figure was used as a basis for organisation. Later landscape widened the scope of the painter’s material possibilities; but even the introduction of this new element merely extended the boundary of subject-matter. The essence of art remained the same. Landscape permitted new forms to be interwoven with the old ones, without making the old more plastic. The elasticising process was what the painter had always desiderated, but his literalness was such that he never went beyond primary distortions of the human body—distortions so small that they were almost unnoticeable. With the Greeks and Chinese these deformations were practised in order to beautify the body’s relative proportions; with the East Indians and Michelangelo, to accentuate the emotion of forceful movement; with Renoir, to express form fully in its relation to the generating line of each picture; and with Matisse the distortions were the result, first, of a reaction against a hackneyed classic system, and later, of a desire to divorce æsthetic pleasure from mental association, in other words, to make form abstract rather than personal. In him there is no rhythmic composition, and while, as in the case of Renoir, his pictures are great as ensembles, each part of them is a separate item which does not depend, for appreciation, on its rapport to the whole. His is an art of colour, of sensitive and inspiring form in two dimensions—a decorative art of a high order. As such it is at once a derivation of Impressionism and a development of Impressionistic colour through the channels of taste.
Cubism is a far more arbitrary art than Matisse’s. In its extreme expression it depends, not so much on the artist’s adroitness at interpreting nature, as on his ability to express pure æsthetic emotion in its relation to form—form being used here in its extended sense to connote the solidity of the entire picture and the block relation of each part to the other parts. Composition prior to the Cubists had been the rhythmic organisation of a picture’s integral parts by line, volume, chiaroscuro and colour. A totally unrelated set of objective figures or forms was drawn together into an ensemble by these abstract æsthetic means. Cubism retained the older methods of form and conception, and added to them the illustrative device of disorganising and rearranging objectivity so that the separated parts would intersect, overlap and partly obscure the image. Thus was presented a picture replete with all aspects of the model, that is, a picture in which the expression presented not only the vision of reality as it discloses itself to our eyes, but the vision which delivers itself to our intelligences, with its actions and reactions, its many and changing miens, its linear and voluminous struggles, its solidity and its transparency. In Cubism the details of this ubiquitous and omnifarious vision are subjugated to arbitrary order and expressed in tones of warm and cold.
At the outset Cubism was a Dionysian reaction against the flowing and soft decoration of the schools of Bouguereau and the Impressionists. The precise and masculine minds of a new cycle could not rest satisfied with the single melody of their immediate predecessors. Courbet, the Cubists’ prototype on the side of painting which dealt entirely with objectivity, reacted against corresponding feminine tendencies in the schools of David and Ingres; and the decisive blow he struck in 1850 with his L’Enterrement à Ornans had a psychological parallel in the Cubists’ exhibit in 1911. While Manet seemed to continue Courbet he in reality retrogressed to a classic prettiness. His achievements may be compared to those of the Orphists who, while seeming to carry on the principles of Cubism, nullified the effect of that school by the misapplication of colour. Cubism itself ignored colour and curved lines. It was a further step toward a more intellectual type of painting. The modern artist’s mind, in becoming more self-conscious, was consequently growing more precise in its expression. And since the Cubists were the primitives of a new era, it was natural that this precision should express itself in straight lines and angular forms. The inconsistency of these artists lay in the fact that, while their first desire was to make their art arbitrary, they were so preoccupied with the dynamism of objectivity that the main object of their work was deputised. In the canvases of Picasso’s followers naturalism is the first consideration. As a result the organisation of emotion-impelling form is obscured. It was from Cézanne that the Cubists garnered the greater part of their theories, and even the appearance of their work is not unlike his. Cézanne realised that a mere imitation of reality, no matter how interesting, could never set in motion the wheels of æsthetic ecstasy; and so he translated nature into a subjective impression of reality by expressing it in a complete order which was itself dynamic. The Cubists, profiting by his discoveries of linear and tonal modification, essayed to found a school on certain of his better-known and more easily grasped practices. The spirit of precision, the need for a renovation, and the example of Picasso who at one period copied the angularities of negro sculpture—all gave momentum to the movement. Later were introduced the philosophical reasonings and scientific explanations of which there has recently been so much discussion.
The total absence of colour in the Cubists is ascribable to the same revolt against prettiness and ambiguity that made them alter their line and form. They felt the subjective solidity of Cézanne without understanding that it was brought about by the use of colour whose emotional possibilities he had profoundly penetrated. In fact his art was composed entirely of minute chromatic planes which, by their complete adaptability to a given position in space, produced the intensest form. The Cubists’ planes are based, not on colour, but on objective form itself, and are expressed by tone. In this respect Cubism is diametrically opposed to the conception of Cézanne. With him form was a result of the plastic employment of colour. With the Cubists even tone is subjugated to formal planes. In them we do not experience the subjectivity of emotion which can be produced alone by colour. Their pictures represent a recognisable solidity which, by an image, expresses subjective processes. Cézanne’s simultaneous vision of reality had to do purely with the most mobile element of art; the Cubists attempted to express psychological phenomena by the limited methods of the early primitives. Their inability to sound (not in theory but actually) the possibilities of colour in the creation of æsthetic form, has caused them to diverge from the direct path in the development of means, and has restricted permanently their initial desire for concentrated composition. The Impressionists experimented in a highly dynamic element; but the Cubists have only dabbled in mental processes which, even should they become perfected, could give us only the sequential vision of a human action. The Cubist doctrine embraces no more than a side issue in an art which primarily has to do with the organisation of form. In the effort of the Cubists to create a pure art they merely disguise objectivity by abstract thought. This is by no means the same as creating abstract form—that is, form which is not reminiscent of a particular natural object; and by failing in this they let pass the great opportunity of taking the final step from Matisse to purity. They took only a half step, for in their exultation they forgot the preceding advances in composition.
In such forgetfulness there was nothing unusual. Every new movement in the progress of art has about it a certain isolation of ambition. The first innovators push out the boundary on one side; their followers, on another; and the final exponents of a method, having fully assimilated what has preceded them, combine the endeavours and accomplishments of their forerunners and go forward to new achievements. Cézanne had recognised that he could never round out his own cycle. No stricture can attach to his incompleteness: his life was too short for realisation. That the Cubists did not altogether achieve their desire does not detract from the importance of their departure from established precedent. Their reaction was a salutary event in the evolution of modern painting. The field of art was being overrun by the decadents of Impressionism and Cézanne, by the imitators of Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas, by those academicians who follow in the wake of every movement long after its methods have been accepted as vital. These scholastic men were incorporating spots and bright colours into their school-room drawings when Cubism came forward. By its unequivocal expression of opinions and by its neat delimitations of planes it has revealed the futility and pettiness of academic alterations. Besides their purely psychological innovations the Cubists have achieved all the ambitions of the academies in a way so net, so sure, so precise, that they have reduced the school, if not to silence, at least to ineffectualness. No longer can the admirers of scholastic art stand before a canvas exclaiming on the feeling, the atmosphere or the spirituality of the work. One must now use concrete terms and speak of those qualities which have to do with profound order; for although the theories of Cubism state one thing, the application of them has taken another and definite æsthetic form. In the Cubists’ work lies their greatest importance. We may without loss lay aside their explanations, their manifestos and the reports of their lectures.
The idea of synthesis in painting had been so thoroughly assimilated through familiarity with successive movements that, with the advent of Cubism, it was an accepted and unquestioned law of painting. Synthesis had in fact become an almost unconscious knowledge. Ingres, Daumier, Manet, Seurat and Matisse had, in quick succession, proclaimed its value in eliminating the unimportant and unessential from models. With Cubism, as with Matisse and Gauguin, synthesis was the supreme ambition—synthesis which had for its goal the artistic consistency of all the picture’s qualities. Subject-matter, colour and the method of expression were all harmonised in Gauguin: with him the synthesis was illustrative. In Matisse it manifested itself in the reduction of form and colour to their simplest and most personal expression, and was therefore a step toward a pure art. With Picasso synthesis went still further. It became almost basic. We know that the curved line stands for life, colour and movement; that the straight line represents the dead, the sombre and the static. A solid dark is conducive to peace, while quickly succeeding light and dark promote liveliness. Bearing these fundamental postulates in mind we can easily analyse Picasso’s quality of synthesis. The straight line which predominates in Cubism repudiates colour:—the Cubists were not colourists. The curved line, when profoundly comprehended, expresses movement and fluidity; when used haphazardly mere prettiness results. There are seldom any curves in Cubism, and then only for relieving the monotony, for the sake of ornament. In the Cubists’ scintillating succession of darks and lights, like a photographic negative of a Cézanne or an early Renoir, there is an unescapable feminine prettiness in which the twinkling of tone serves the same purpose as pretty colour. By their straight lines, subfuse tones and rigid forms, on the one hand, they achieve immobility. By their lights and darks, their curves and their dependence on nature, on the other hand, they reveal their emotional kinship to the illustrative schools of Whistler, Fragonard and Tiepolo. Now when we combine properly these two widely separated aspects of art—the one almost Egyptian and the other almost English—we obtain a combination of temperamental characteristics capable of the greatest achievements, for we have brought about the coalition of the purely masculine and the purely feminine. In Cubism, however, these two aspects are mingled disproportionately. The static predominates. The pretty is merely superimposed because of temperamental dictation: instead of functioning, it only attracts. But though in Cubism we do not find the perfect fusion of these creative sex impulses, the simultaneous presence of the two elements produces nevertheless a fundamental synthesis.
In order to bring about the greatest art, the form and order (which constitute the masculine side) must be all-pervading. Objective ornament and external beauty (which constitute the feminine side) must be only the inspiration to creation. This is an important principle, for all art, like all life, falls into either the masculine or the feminine category. All personal preferences for certain forms of art are imputable to the predomination of the male or the female in the individual. Necessarily all creation is to a certain extent masculine—in it there has to be order; and by the predomination of the male or female is meant simply the accentuation of one of these qualities in their relative combination in each of the sexes. For instance, should the feminine “predominate” in a man, the fact would merely indicate that the percentage of femininity in his bisexuality had over-balanced the normal ratio. Decoration, which is an ornamental art, is feminine, and it will appeal to men who have a subnormal amount of the creator in them. The colossally ordered art of a Rubens will be understood and enjoyed only by one highly capable of creation, for in the contemplation and comprehension of a profound work of art the spectator reconstructs the artist’s mind after his own formula, and thus recreates the work for himself. That side of art which is the recording of some emotion the artist has experienced so intensely that it demands concrete expression, is feminine. It is merely an overflow of receptivity into objectivity. To the contrary, when great art is produced it is not dependent on a specific exterior impulse. It grows abstractly out of a collection of assimilated impressions. When the will dominates the expression, these impressions must take plastic form. The desire to create is in itself feminine. The constructive ability is masculine. The first desire always is to decorate and beautify, but the masculine will dictates and rules the expression. In feminine art the will to co-ordinate is absent. Consequently the expression is only the direct result of the reception. The Cubists realise that the will must play a large part in painting, but they exert their will on the analysis of thought rather than on their actual productions. The result is that, while their expression is highly restrained and reasoned, the will is exercised only on the emotion of the received impression, and is not manifested on their canvases’ surface. In all their work they are decorators first and significant artists afterward. They belong distinctly to the lighter side of artistic tradition. They are the lyric poets of the plastic.
This is markedly true of Picasso who instigated the movement. When he first came to Paris he threw himself into a style of painting which recalled Steinlen at his best. From Steinlen he went to Toulouse-Lautrec and Impressionistic colour. Next he did carefully drawn portraits which proclaimed him a greater Gauguin. Later he become infatuated with the rhythm and skeleton-like creations of El Greco. It was at this period that he began to do his significant work. His pictures for the most part were painted in blue. They were sensitive to a high degree, and were, in the sculptural sense, sometimes ordered into a solid block form. Then, adopting a reddish colour gamut, he began to create full figures of nudes, portraits and animal studies. At this time he commenced his research in precise form. He organised copies of negro sculpture of which he had heard much from Matisse, and it was a result of his studying these rigid figures that angularities began to creep into his art. Other artists set to work along the same lines, and from the friction of ideas which followed the theory of Cubism was evolved. Picasso’s still-lives then became more precise, more hard-cut, more personal, more completely ordered. It is from this period we receive some of his greatest work.
Shortly after came the Cubist theory of simultaneity. The authorship of this theory is in doubt. There has been much controversy as to whether it originated with Picasso or with one of his followers. But it was straightway adopted by the entire group and made one of the dominating principles of the movement. Simultaneity to these painters meant the combined presentation of a number of aspects of the same object from many different angles. In the visualisation of an object in nature during the absence of that object, we conceive it, not only as a silhouette or as a form with three dimensions, but as a congeries of silhouettes which, when imagined simultaneously, constitute the appearance of the object from every known angle. In short, our minds envelop it and all its attributes at the same instant. Such a vision is the result of collected and concentrated memory. In a desire to disarm criticism the Cubists offered as a theory the picturisation of this multilateral vision; but in reality it was little more than an excuse to make the utilisation of natural forms more arbitrary than in the case of Matisse, Cézanne and Gauguin and also to rid themselves entirely of the illustrative obstacle. Their ingrained weakness lay in that they did not possess sufficient genius to alienate themselves entirely from document and to create new abstract compositions. Nor did their instinct permit them to throw document aside when they sensed their inability to replace it with something more vital. Their spirit of revolution worked on the form which illustration would take, rather than on the discontinuance of illustration. But even in this attitude they marked a decided progress, for while in the paintings of their predecessors the disposition of line and form had made a unity of many separated figures, these figures, even to a mind unusually free from the taint of anecdote and objectivity in art, presented themselves separately as integers of a whole. The Cubists, by breaking up a model into parts which separately bore little resemblance to nature, proved that they not only recognised the demands of pure organisation but that they knew those demands could never be met so long as there were recognisable objects in a painting.
The presentation of a nude or a landscape from many different viewpoints was in itself no more important than the methods of the Impressionists. Indeed the pleasure derived from so constructing a picture is similar to the pleasure derived from copying light. It represents the nearest approach of the enthusiastic painter of form to the enthusiastic painter of light. They are both interested in recording a rather puzzling and interesting phenomenon: the one is after that which creates the impressions of form; the other, that which creates the impressions of colour. Both, in the broad sense, derive the same enjoyment in deciphering the work after it is finished. The one records only broad waves of scintillating colours with no demarcation of silhouettes; and these colours gradually resolve themselves into a sunny and ambiguous landscape. The other makes a number of broad planes of brown and white which, when diligently studied in their parts, become the angular representation of water, ships, sky-lines which run into and through houses, trees which obscure near-by objects, and houses which melt into distant skies. Both schools of painting are impressionistic; each treats of exactly what the other neglects. No artist as yet has seen the distinct advantage of uniting the two methods. Cézanne might be suggested as having approached this alliance, but his means were too profound for him to be led into portraying by concrete symbols his impressions of a model.
In painting the enveloping mental vision of a model, however, the Cubists actually failed in the synchronism for which they strove. In reality they extended the effect of their pictures into time more than ever before. To grasp their illustrative import, long and arduous search must be made. 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. On the other hand, if, having first heard the composition in its natural development, we had studied its parts and motifs and then heard it repeated sequentially, a greater enjoyment and comprehension would result. In breaking up nature, either for the sake of extending the æsthetic appreciation into time like music, or for simultaneity of presentation, all the parts must answer to an organisation;—in the first case, so that, after the spectator’s first fleeting vision of the whole, his eye will be carried from one part to another by the rhythmic balance of volume, linear opposition and harmony of colour; and in the second case, so that the canvas will be an interdependent block-manifestation.
In constructing formal planes with definite tones whose values are mechanical and absolute, the Cubists have missed that possible subjectivity of movement which, in its highest degree, colour alone can give. They have constructed only primitively ordered bas-reliefs each plane and line of which has a distinct direction. And this direction, no matter what is added to or subtracted from the work, will remain the same. The planes are consequently static and absolute. In the great art of Cézanne there is only a relative absolutism. By any alteration in one of his pictures, the entirety is shattered: the direction of each plane and line is changed to concur with the needs of a different order. This is because Cézanne’s work possesses the poise which is demanded in the highest art. And this poise is what Cubism, with its rigid lines and planes, has entirely missed. Illustratively the Cubists’ conception was new, compositionally it was old; and an art cannot be significantly renovated save from the bottom upward. The foundation of all art is composition, and the only means which can be accepted as vital are those which increase the artist’s power to express that which is more inherent in painting than in any of the other arts, namely: rhythmic form in three dimensions. That the Cubists failed to develop such means may be perceived by comparing the compositions of Picasso’s “red” period, which were but slightly cubic and which contain a certain amount of arbitrary form, with his late and wholly cubic black-and-white drawings and paintings such as are seen at Kahnweiler’s back of the Madeleine. The latter are almost wholly flat. His Femme à la Mandoline marks the transition from the early period to the late one. In all his pictures one finds a charming rhythm of lights and darks and a slight comprehension of surface form. But he never goes very deep. Even in his sculptured heads, while there is order, there is no form in the compositional sense.
To ascribe Picasso’s Cubism to so childish an impulse as a desire to square an academic drawing is both untrue and unjust. Some have pointed to Dürer as his artistic forbear merely because Dürer once described a number of curves which he said could be made into a human body and drew a block-diagram of box-like forms which he said was the basis for the body’s construction. But no relationship exists between these two artists. Cubism’s first consideration was to cover the surfaces of its canvases with form, thus doing away with the empty spaces so prevalent in all art works, spaces which Cézanne left blank. To accomplish this logically it was necessary either to introduce superfluous figures, or to stretch the ones already present into impossible distortions. Since the elimination of all unessentials was the keynote of the day, Picasso decided to make multiplex his essentials. Herewith was born the Cubist conception of breaking up the model for the attainment of a more complete work and one in which there would be no dead planes. At first an extensive linear direction, which started at the lower frame, was carried up into the background by the demarcation of a shadow or an object, for the purpose of holding tightly together two or more forms. Later, in order to facilitate this procedure of multiplying their models, the Cubists began to walk round them. This process unchained them from the slavery to a single model and from the given contour of an absolute subject. At the same time it permitted them a fantastically arbitrary composition, and made their expression more dependent on the personality of the artist, and less contingent on preconceived ideas, than ever before.
Cubism expressed a laudable tendency toward an aristocratic vision as opposed to the popular vision of reality. Its pictures therefore became doubly complex, for in the contemplation of the picturisation of our mental process, another process is started which is far more complicated than the first. Herein we have an explanation for the fact that Cubism is incomprehensible to the untutored person who regards art as an imitation of nature. The very word “form” is æsthetically meaningless to the average spectator. In order to experience its meaning, aside from organisation, one’s attention has to be given over to the object’s weight, its force, its circumferential volume. A form in a picture cannot be considered merely as to its employment and its utilitarian destiny, or from the standpoint of one’s experience with it. To the great artist an object exists as a volume with which to fill a given space. He completely forgets its raison d’être in life, and views it only as a means for tightening a picture’s order. To this extreme of pure artistic conception the Cubists never attained. And while Cézanne advanced from Courbet’s surface realism to the realism of causes, the Cubists were unable to progress along similar lines. They simply translated abstraction into terms of concrete expression. The profound reasons for dynamism in art were left untouched by them. They endeavoured to portray objectively an abstract process, expecting its mere portrayal to be dynamic.
The dynamic, however, cannot be rendered by imitation. It is as impossible of attainment by this method as in the dancing-girl canvases of Degas. Behind the emotional power of nature there is a great abstract force; and the effect of dynamism can be got only when this force is expressed. Then the result is a natural outgrowth of a cause. Otherwise we have only a detached effect which does not lead us back into the undercurrents of causation. When a Cubist picture is interesting it will at most make us puzzle over the application of its theories; it can never move us æsthetically by the sheer power of its methods. The one dynamic element which the Cubists have in common with Cézanne—namely: the modification of lines and forms through contact with other lines and forms—they have nullified by constructing with rigid tones the planes which the lines delimit, thereby making their planes frozen and immovable. Because ignorant of the functionality of colour the Cubists were unable to present, at one and the same time, perfect mobility, planar solidity and indefinite depth. As a result of too much study of Cézanne’s and El Greco’s composition and too little study of Michelangelo and Rubens, they failed to achieve, even with the great arbitrariness and convenience of their means, a profound composition which is a rhythmic order of volume, as distinguished from a simple organisation of parts. Their accomplishments do not realise the promises of their programme because their theories were too inflexible. Cubism was too tightly bound by rigid systems and methods to produce plastically significant results.
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. But these new developments have not yet been productive of a new artistic worth. Indeed, it is doubtful if they will lead to important results so long as the geometrical phase of Cubism is adhered to, and so long as the Cubists ignore the dynamic possibilities of colour. In its present status Cubism can only continue striving toward a style that goes deeper than tonal prettiness and lyric immobility. Already Picasso has passed out of painting altogether. An artist with his extraordinary gift to do anything superficially well could not remain anchored to an idea after the novelty of its method had worn off. He is not a man who is the slave of thought, but rather an obstinate artist with a spark of genius who has passed through many different stages with a rapidity born of astounding dexterity and cleverness. Many of his early female heads rival in sheer classic beauty the best of the Renaissance painters. Some of his pen-and-ink drawings are the most sensitive of modern times. There are caricatures done by him which closely approach the fantasy of a Goya. Indeed it may be justly said that he is as great an illustrator as Raphael. And in this analogy lie both his glory and his limitation. Like Raphael he lacks that profound penetration of exteriors which would permit him a comprehension of his greater influences—of El Greco, for instance. But, with a glance, he can sound the depths of a Toulouse-Lautrec, a Steinlen or a piece of negro sculpture.
Picasso’s inability to conceive two elements at once and to construct a complicated development of composition, is exemplified in his earlier work, first, by his adherence to certain single colours at different stages of his career, secondly, by the extreme simplicity of his circus folk, and thirdly, by his figure compositions which, though they are never tedious or dull and possess an almost nervous sensibilité, are limited to one or two human forms. Again Picasso’s limitation of compositional conception is attested to by his stubborn use of brown and white in his latest Cubist pictures, by his employment of line alone in the drawings of his architectural-plan stage, and by his application of objects at hand to the clay blocks which mark his latest metamorphosis. But no matter what his medium or style, he remains essentially unchanged. In all his work is felt the superficial lightness of one who conceives order only as an ornament to decoration and who is interested in three-dimensional form merely as an after-thought. 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.
Fernand Léger, with the exception of Picasso, is the most genuinely talented artist of the Cubist movement. His work at first was much less radical than that of his confrères and gave greater evidence of depth because it had never completely shaken off perspective. His canvases, Les Toits and Maisons et Fumées, represent little more than a highly artistic angularisation of a subject which, being angular in itself, lends itself admirably to Cubistic treatment. Léger’s method is to place in the foreground large planes which serve as a frame for the actual picture which is seen between them as through a tunnel. By this device he creates a diversity of form and with it a recognisable depth. His paint at first was light in tone, but is now taking on colour. Since his first Cubist exhibits he has made a logical progress in rhythmic conception, and if his past development can be assumed as a criterion of the future it is safe to prophesy that eventually he will be the most significant man of the original group. Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Marcel Duchamp, Georges Braque and Francis Picabia are all prominent figures in the Cubist movement. Gleizes manifested his first Cubist tendencies by giving form a solid angularity, thereby making it precise. His canvases are devoid of interest because so slightly creative. His well-known L’Homme au Balcon appears to us today almost Futuristic in conception. In fact, it was exposed at the Salon d’Automne in 1912 one year after the Futurist show; and when we compare it with his early and less significant Les Baigneuses, with which it was hung, it gives the impression of having been the result of a sudden and enthusiastic inspiration from the newer men. Later his work grew broader and simpler, but in it there is little or no composition. Even the order is that of the straight line. Metzinger is a better artist. In him is a greater order, although, as in Gleizes, it is produced by the straight line. During his artistic beginnings he was under the sway of negro sculpture and painted in small planes of light and dark. Later, turning from the influence of negro antiquity, he directed his talent on nature and began to interpret form into angularities. His La Femme au Cheval, done in 1912, was a distinct step, both as to form and composition, in advance of the naturalistic vision; and his Le Port is one of the finest examples of the Cubist theory of synchronous picturisation and interpenetrating lines and masses. Duchamp, a slighter talent than either Léger or Gleizes, is the Whistler of the movement. In his pictures are less form, less composition and less comprehension of volume than in any other Cubist work except that of Juan Gris whose lethargic canvases have not even the interest of an Aimé Morot. Braque has added nothing to Cubism. He followed Picasso closely, and his whole creative impetus seems derived from the latter’s canvases.
Picabia, despite his popularity, is but a second-rate Cubist. He was quick to grasp the fact that the Cubists were working away from illustration, and attempted to step beyond them. Where they had endeavoured to bring about the precise stylisation of form, he merely dealt in ribbon-like patches of colour which were without contour, shape, proportion or volume. His canvases wherein many of these strange amorphous hachures are grouped, have a highly bizarre appearance but are only remotely intelligible. He used almost monochromatic schemes, as did his master Picasso, and continued this style of work until his fellow Cubists, by diligent research and serious study, had approached the abstract appearance of his surfaces. Picabia then found a new impetus in the works of the Futurists—an impetus toward movement expressed, not by bodies, but by line. This Futurist influence resulted in his making flat pictures of many sharply defined silhouettes tinted red, green, blue and grey. His lines serve only to accentuate the chaos of his ensemble, for in his work there is no definite conception of the whole.
Cubism’s possibilities as a dynamic illustrative art have never been adequately exhausted, and, since the angular mode is rapidly disappearing as a result of newer and more vital visions, they probably never will. Picasso was its high priest up to two years ago, at which time colour, coming back on the wave of a counter-revolution, threw most of the Cubists into its application. Robert Delaunay was responsible for this reaction. Early in 1912 he came forward with a very large canvas entitled Ville de Paris, whose surface was broken up into many angular planes after the Cubist fashion. But instead of depicting forms and formal relations, the picture was painted in greys and high colours solely as a means of surface filling. Its contours recalled El Greco despite their being disguised by triangular dislocations. The picture represented three mammoth Graces standing before a distant Paris landscape, and so transparent and ethereal was it that it seemed as though a breath could have dispersed it into mist. It possessed the delicate loveliness of a butterfly, and the eye, in running over its glittering and pretty array of colours, was fascinated as in the contemplation of a kaleidoscope. But the canvas, while provoking a distinct visual pleasure, failed to arouse any æsthetic enjoyment.
Delaunay’s L’Équipe de Cardiff the following year was equally unemotional. Fundamentally this picture was the same as his Ville de Paris, though treated differently as to surface. The same up-shooting type of svelte beauty as formerly bodied forth in his three Graces was here repeated in the bodies of the athletes, but there was in addition a very slight surface rhythm; and the colour, because its application was broader, had a greater fascination. In his Ville de Paris, not daring to paint a naturally drawn nude with the colours his sense of prettiness and ornament dictated, he fragmentised the surface by luxating the lines. Thus, while the sensitive contour was retained, the picture appeared as if viewed through a polygonal prism. In the second canvas this artifice for the sake of charm was discarded. The players were dressed in solid colours of bright pigment; the sky was blue-violet; the Eiffel tower, eminently appreciable, stood to the right; down the centre of the canvas was a large affiche in yellow; and overhead soared an aeroplane. The transition from a hackneyed theme to a modern one was the result of the artist’s desire to pass beyond the methods of the day to more vigorous ones.
Before Delaunay’s decisive work was done he had been influenced by the Neo-Impressionists, Cézanne, the Cubists and, in his two mentioned early works, by the Impressionists. Indeed these pictures are the expression of Impressionist methods broadened and extended to suit the dimensions of his canvases. His cityscapes with the Eiffel tower as the principal object are interesting though not profound, and such canvases as the Route de Laon and Les Tours are so dainty they seem breathed onto the canvas. He is essentially a decorator in that he works always in two dimensions. This surface quality enters into all art, but in itself it is never significant. Only when it is a result of ordered plasticity does it have power to move us. In Delaunay, however, there exists no fundamental order. Consequently his power is strictly limited. His desire is to make decoration which will be profound, instead of profound composition which will result in decoration. By thus reversing the natural order, effects are considered before causes; and only by the dynamism of causes can we be made to feel beauty. Beauty such as his is merely prettiness: it is only the objective mask of beauty, and is of no more æsthetic importance than a view of nature. The true beauty of a work of art is subjective; it is the effect of one’s having sensed the accumulated and sequential aspects of co-ordinated expression. Herein lies the difference between æsthetic emotion and the pleasure aroused by a sunset, a stage setting or a dramatic story. When one is able to penetrate finally into art, neither dolour nor depression results, but always a feeling of exultation and joy, for by one’s intellectual comprehension one has been physically aroused by a dynamic force, not merely moved by a scene or story which sets in motion the associative processes.
To the inadequate comprehension of this psychological truth is attributable the failure of the Cubists and of Delaunay. The latter strove to preserve the individuality of his work under the name of Orphism, and later under the designation of Simultaneism. But his temperamental kinship to Picasso and the Cubists is too obvious to be denied by nomenclature. Even his latest work, while more abstract and more luminous, is at most secessionistic. His canvas hung in the Salon des Indépendants in 1914 was Cubism translated into light colours and twisted into curves and circles. Delaunay’s wife, Madame Delaunay-Terk, follows him closely in inspiration and application, but her pictures are less ordered than his. The American, Bruce, once an imitator of Matisse and later of Cézanne, has joined the Simultaneist ranks; and Frost, another American, is an ardent disciple of Delaunay. The orthodox Cubists had passed colour by, but its reappearance in the Orphists-Simultaneists was a significant augury. Though it was not understood by them as an element capable of organic functioning, its mere presence was an inspiration and a call to all genuine artists to penetrate its meaning in relation to the intensification of form.
THE dramatic enhancement of painting by line so well understood by the ancients, and the literary intensification of subject-matter by colour foreshadowed by the primitives and made more conscious by Delacroix, reached their highest development in the theories of Kandinsky and the Futurists. With Delacroix’s comments concerning the harmonising of line and colour with subject and Seurat’s and Signac’s subsequent addenda to these comments, began scientific observation in painting. So long as these theories remained secondary to the great truths of composition they were admissible, because they had to do only with the unimportant ornamentation of an æsthetic organisation. But when, as in Kandinsky and the Futurists, they became the all in all of the artist’s ambitions, they ceased to produce painting, and gave birth only to bad music, as in the Russian, and to bad poetry, as in the Italians. But while the Futurists’ work had little to commend it to the discriminating spectator, their ideas were interesting and inspiring, and it is from their manifestos that has come what little influence they have exerted. Their pictures are neither pretty nor agreeable, while Kandinsky’s, to the contrary, possess dainty and pleasing traits. In both cases the pictures are puzzles to be deciphered at length: they are expressions of moods brought about by half veiling reality and by making symbolically concrete an abstract force or cause.
In music where the form is an abstract result of concrete causes and in literature where the form is wholly abstract and represented by symbols, moods can be easily expressed, for they are the natural outgrowth of the media of these two arts. But in painting and sculpture, which are the visual arts wherein the form itself is concrete, emotion can be provoked only by a plastic poise of subjective weights. The balance and opposition of such weights or volumes when rhythmically organised give rise to complete æsthetic satisfaction and engender a feeling of finality which encompasses both line and colour. The Futurists, as did Delacroix and Seurat, count on “force-lines” to express an emotion, thereby branding themselves two-dimensional artists. And their desire to represent an emotion of objectivity on canvas places them at once in the ranks of illustrators. The highest art has nothing to do with objective reality whether as a spectacle or as a means to sensation. It is true that painting, in becoming pure, will eventually incorporate the associative emotions, but these emotions will be the psychological results of abstract form, not memorial experiences produced by cognitive objects. And the line, of which we have heard so much, will then become a direction and equality of pure form; it will no longer be simply an indication on a flat surface by means of a mark. The Futurists did not strive for purity. Rather did they emphasise an irrelevant side of painting. They declared themselves the renovators of subject-matter. Their whole ambition worked toward that end; and it is from that standpoint they must be judged.
In arriving at their conclusions many necessities of æsthetic emotion were sensed. Their most important statement, and one which, because of the dearth of significant art criticism, had not previously been set down, is that the person who contemplates a picture should not feel himself a mere observer of the events taking place in the painted work, but one of the principal actors in the canvas. In illustration such empathy is impossible unless the work is wholly and ultimately synthesised as to volume, colour, line, direction, size and subject. No such work has ever been produced because all the dramatic uses of these elements have never been understood by one man. That there are hundreds of canvases which entrain us into their ramifications is indisputable, but the æsthetic emotion we feel in them has to do with formal line alone, not with the perfect concord of line, form and subject. Marinetti and his group have striven earnestly to accomplish this difficult feat, but in every instance have failed. The explanation of their theories has far more to do with the emotion their pictures arouse in us, than has the actual application of these theories to canvas. They state that perpendicular, undulating and worn-out lines attached to hollow bodies express languor and discouragement; that confused, somersaulting lines, straight or curved, confounded into suggested gestures of appeal or haste, express the chaotic agitation of sentiments; that horizontal, jerky lines which brutally cut into semi-obscured faces, and bits of broken, irregular landscape give us the sensation of one departing on a journey. But while all this may be true, it has nothing to do with the æsthetic emotion which in painting grows entirely out of the dynamic use of the elements inherent in that art.
The desire of many modern painters and theorists to introduce into their own art emotions derived from the other arts results, first, from the modern ambition to intensify each of the arts, and secondly, from certain observations in æsthetic fundamentals, which have led artists little by little toward a vague realisation that the basis of all the arts is identical. But in this synthesis of the arts there is nothing new. The Futurists, in attempting to fuse poetry and painting, are many decades too late to lay claim to originality. Numerous attempts—all of them failures—have been made along similar lines. Wagner’s was the most conspicuous. Then there were Sadikichi Hartmann, Madame Mary Hallock, René de Ghil, Arthur Rimbaud and recently Alexander Scriabine, all of whom commingled the different arts in an attempt to produce intensity. Commendable as these efforts for a hybrid expression may be, they are a futile expenditure of energy until the arts have been more precisely understood; and it is worth noting that those who have tried to coalesce them have been, in nearly every instance, the ones who understand none of them profoundly. The Futurists prove no exception. Their misapprehension of painting is analogous to that of Degas who, in picturing the dance, imagined that the spectator, by contemplating its static representations, would experience its rhythm.
The emotion of movement which the Futurists wish to call up can never be produced by disordered and tumbling lines. The effect is chaos. Movement grows out of the placement and displacement of volumes. It is a result of rhythmic organisation. We are conscious of movement in a human body when a position or pose is shifted, and we are conscious of it only during the process of shifting. Should we look at a body in one position, close our eyes during its change of attitude, and then behold it completely altered, we should not experience a sensation of action at all. But if the static points of movement present themselves to us with sufficient rapidity they produce the effect of continuous movement, as in the simulacra of the kinematograph. Otherwise we record merely the result of the change of position—not the act of changing itself. In a Michelangelo statue we see at first glance only a solid rigid mass; but the moment we begin mentally to reconstruct the form, we sense the opposition of volume-direction and the delicate poise of weights which overhang hollows and which are proportionally exaggerated in order to give a greater emotion of struggling forces. Then, our will guiding our eye, the mind translates to us physically the statue’s expansion and contraction, the withheld completion of absolute balance, the approximation to equilibrium: and it is only after we have passed through discords and struggles and complicated developments—in other words, after we have striven for physical completion—that the finality comes as a satisfying consummation, like the knowledge of a tremendous task, long laboured over, brought to perfect and final accomplishment.
Is not the desire for an emotion, so completely reflective of the very undercurrents of life’s forces, worthier of an artist’s aim than the desire for the momentary sensation that someone is going away or that one is looking on at a dance? The emotional depictions of such episodes are at best but remote reflexes of reality. 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. The superficial portrayal of effects, whether mental or physical, can never lead us inward to their causes. Any result is simply the dead end of a force, like the sea-weed a submarine volcano has thrown to the surface of the ocean. Art, being the causative force itself, should bring about the upheaval whose final manifestation is complete and satisfying. In great painting the spectator is led through every step of kinetic energy from chaos to order. When he emerges he has undergone a colossal dynamic experience. After all, energy is the ultimate physical reality.