'QUITE FROM THE MARK OF PAINTING" Browning THE HE screaming sensation of four years ago-modern art " says Mr. Louis Weinberg, in The Sun for Sunday, September 10, 1916, "is now accepted with a shrug of the shoulders." I should like to ask Mr. Weinberg, who is a lecturer in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and an instructor in the College of the City of New York, if the painters whom we distinguish from artists by calling them "moderns" are satisfied with a shrug of the shoulders by way of appreciation and, in case they are, if they really understand that shrug. It does not signify acceptance. Beneath its quiescence lies the same distaste that greeted the first "independents" with jeers and laughter. We do not scream long over anything in this twentieth century; there is too much matter for screaming; but we shrug our shoulders as the Capulets bit their thumbs, "which is a disgrace to them if they bear it." The repulsive hideousness of much of the modern extremists' work and the inane futility of the rest may be trusted to limit it to the exhibition rooms of speculators in art, where it will die a noisy but beneficent death. Patience is the sure cure for the affliction of the last ten years, but a new and more subtle affliction is upon us. A school of ultra-moderns has arisen men of tomorrow rather than of today who claim to have reached the climax toward which art has been moving through the ages. They call themselves "Synchromists," and declare the object of their efforts to be the expression of spiritual emotion through the beauty of pure form in pure color. Their theory of art is insinuating because of the magic power of the word "beauty," but it is a fallacy, nevertheless, and a fallacy which carries a threat. The magic word has often been made to disguise immorality; here it is invoked to conceal a disease; pernicious anæmia. "Beauty," for the Synchromist, has no red blood — it is an ephemeral presence which pleases only the eyes. The first manifestation of quick consumption is a crimson cheek and a sparkling eye. That the laws of visual æsthetics are the sole criterion of a picture's worth, we must believe if we take the word of several of the modern critics. Clive Bell asserts that the one quality common to all great art, and therefore the one quality indispensable to a great picture, is what he calls "significant form." Just what he means by this what constitutes "significance" in form - we are left to guess. By Willard Huntington Wright we are apprised that the sine qua non of great painting is "æsthetic organization": the opposition of line to line, the thrust of plane against plane, the balance of mass with mass, the push and pull and resultant equilibrium of various bodies: inferential movement so controlled by other movement that, in spite of omnipresent activity, nothing can fall out of the picture. And this is all: a harmless commotion among nondescript shapes. The "significant forms" in "æsthetic organization must be completely abstract. Chief among possible offences is "likeness." The construction and muscular functioning of the human body is the admitted archetype, but a genuine artist refers only in his secret preliminary processes to any acquired knowledge: on his canvas he copies nothing - depending solely on inspiration. "Recognizability," says Mr. Wright, "precludes the highest æsthetic emotion. . . . Form and rhythm alone are the bases of æsthetic enjoyment: all else is superfluity;" and æsthetic enjoyment is the only effect a picture is entitled to have. Mr. Andrew Dasburg tells us: "I differentiate the æsthetic reality from the illustrative reality. In the latter it is necessary to represent nature as a series of recognizable objects. But in the former we need have only the sense or emotion of objectivity. That is why I eliminate the recognizable object." Yet the sense of objectivity, if not the emotion thereof, is just what we derive from clear representation of objects. Such sense and emotion as we derive from paintings with recognizable objects left out are too vague and uncertain to be valuable. The desideratum must, moreover, be accomplished, according to the modern idea, by the use of unmixed color. There must be no suspicion of drawing in black and white, with color laid over like a becoming garment. The "simultaneity of form and color" is the thing to conjure with. Colors have intrinsic perspective, so to speak unvarying relative distance from the eye. Some are bold, others shy. "Color is form; and in my attainment of abstract form I use those colors which optically correspond to the spatial extension of the forms desired." "Thus with him [McDonald Wright] a yellow, instead of meaning an intense light, represented an advanced plane, and a blue, while having all the sensation of shadow about it, receded to an infinity of subjective depth." If an abstraction, then, is to show three dimensions, its nearest side must be yellow, and its farthest violet unvaryingly. Intermediate planes must be orange-redviolet or green-blue-violet, though we die of ennui. Everything but "abstract form" thus produced by unmixed color is parasitic, enfeebling, anathema; and those who thus conceive and produce are the only men who have any just claim to the title of artist. "Ancient painting sounded the depths of composition. Modern painting has sounded the depths of color. Research is at an end. It now remains only for artists to create. The era of pure creation begins with the present day. Cézanne took the first great step; Matisse the second; Cubism the next; and Synchromism the final one." Is Synchromism indeed the final word in art? It may be the word that commits to the grave. That those to -- whom art expression is addressed, and whose approval is necessary to the survival of art, will never be satisfied with the output of the Synchromists is certain. Their so-called pictures do not get off of the canvas and out of the frame into our minds and hearts, where the immortals are cherished. The possible shiftings of colored shapes are not many, and looking for such variations is a game that soon loses interest. There is nothing else to look for -nothing that "takes us where we live." The Synchromists may "organize" to the demonstration of every rule of visual composition, they may lay on their colors with incontrovertible propriety of sequence and relation: they achieve only unbearable monotony. They may have eliminated the unessential, but they have at the same time omitted the essential. To narrow art to the one appeal -the aesthetic is to cramp and dwarf it pitifully. It is like condemning a splendid woman, capable of motherhood and of citizenship, to spend her days as a mannequin. The spell of a great picture is not so simple, though it is more direct and sure. The "modern" painter affirms that to awaken emotion a picture need only express emotion, and that the emotions of an artist can be expressed only by geometrical, vortiginous or other preferred abstraction. The second claim obviously annuls the first. The cubists, futurists, vorticists, what not, are fully expressing themselves after the manner of their choice, but they are failing as artists, because they are not communicating their emotions. In their spoken and written utterances the modernists use the word "emotion," indeed, in a fashion as strained as their use of pigment; and thereby involve themselves in contradictions and paradoxes. We have quoted "the emotion of objectivity:" they talk about the emotion of size, the emotion of distance of any sense-perception. Since they disavow any remote consciousness of objective reality, these forms of speech cannot be taken to mean the physical experience of seeing the dimensions or the position of things: they must, then, mean the feeling of pleasure or displeasure accompanying such perception: but size and distance are attributive, accidental, unimportant, having no power whatever, in themselves, of arousing emotion. Why not, for the sake of mutual understanding, be guided by an emotion of reasonableness? The pictures that move us to gayety or to tears touch us by depicting the expression of emotion, or by showing us replicas of the objects that awakened emotion in their painters, without reference to the question whether or not they may themselves be a means of self-expression. A picture of a smiling child, of a grieving woman—a statue of a man in triumph or despair — these move us, through human fellowship, to rejoice or to suffer. Abstract forms, in any number of dimensions, produced by the most expert manipulation of abstract color, do nothing of the kind, though the painter may have seethed with æsthetic exaltation. Their utmost possibility is a suggestion of beauty adaptable to some decorative scheme or othera very faint emotion compared with the effect of a masterpiece of art. Is the charm of The Song of the Lark its dark bulk against a light space, beautiful as this may be, or is it the cool breath of morning and the entrancing bird-song which the girl's face makes us realize? Does the power of Hawthorne's The Trousseau lie in the balanced shapes on either side of the upright shaft of the maidenly body, admirable as these are, or in the young bride's wistful gaze into the unknown and vaguely feared future? Schreyfogel's The Fight for Water would doubtless bear analysis by the most punctilious æsthete: suppose he render the composition "abstractly" withdraw from the picture all its likenesses; the terrible horse and its thirst-mad rider, the fallen one, shot through, no doubt, and the desperate companion who was so near the goal - would their shapes, denatured and filled with flat or self-modelled |