XII Virile-Impressionism
What is happening in America? Exactly what might be expected in a young, vigorous, and virile country.
America has been keenly susceptible to art influences from every section. Her students are everywhere, her exhibitions are gathered from the four quarters of the globe. She is very much alive to what Europe is doing, she has long been interested in what China and Japan have done.
While her art is in the main conservative, it is not the conservatism of stubbornness or stolidity, it is rather the conservatism of isolation; but her isolation is a thing of the past. Communication is so frequent, travel so easy, transportation so cheap, that both art and artists flow hither and thither almost unrestricted.
In spite of this freedom of inter-communication, the development of American art has been along independent lines—at least along one independent line, a line so individual in its characteristics it deserves the name American-Impressionism, or, more generically, Virile-Impressionism.
By Virile-Impressionism is meant a manner of viewing nature and a mode of painting quite different from the more superficial refinements of Impressionism on the one hand and the extraordinary developments of Post-Impressionism on the other.
Let us try to make this clear.
As already noted, Impressionism attained a logical end in the painting of brilliant light effects, especially in the works of the Neo-Impressionists, the pointillists.
In short, the drift of Impressionism in France was toward more and more brilliant reflections of the surfaces of things.
This extreme attentuation was quite foreign to the spirit of America, which is more material and practical.
It may be our fault, it is certainly our virtue, that we are material and practical in our outlook. In a big, sane sense we are dreamers. Only dreamers could carry the Panama Canal to completion, and, to mention lesser works, only dreamers could build such terminals as the Pennsylvania and New York Central in New York, and such buildings as the Woolworth and the Manhattan. But our dreams always take practical shape. We are a nation of inventors because we are a nation of dreamers.
Hence, while our artists were quick to respond to all that is good and strong in Impressionism, they found little satisfaction in the ultra-refinements of Neo-Impressionism.
The result was that when France pressed Impressionism to its extreme, a normal and healthy reaction took place in American art.
Many of the strong painters of America began doing things of their own. They still adhered closely to nature. They remained Impressionists in the older significance of the term, but they painted not the surfaces of things but the substance—in short, they were Cézanne-Impressionists as distinguished from Monet-Impressionists.
For instance, Winslow Homer was a great and true Impressionist, but he had nothing in common with the Neo-Impressionists, and little in common with Monet. He had, however, a great deal in common with Cézanne. His pictures give one an impression of nature herself, of the power of the sea, the adamant of the rocks, the significance of life, yet each one is an accurate transcript of what he saw. He did not go into his studio and create pictures out of his imagination; he let his imagination play upon nature, but nature controlled all he did.
He was, in a sense, the greatest of American-Impressionists—he was a Virile-Impressionist.
There are many Virile-Impressionists in Europe, but they are so many individuals; here Virile-Impressionism is the result of racial, national, geographical conditions.
It was inevitable that Impressionism in America should follow along virile and substantial lines rather than along nervous and superficial; it is the way the country is built.
Sargent is a Virile-Impressionist. He paints striking likenesses, but he also paints marvellous characterizations; that is, he gets beneath the skin of his sitters and paints them as they are, not as they seem. His sense of color is very deficient; many of his portraits from a decorative point of view are almost the reverse of pleasing; he had not the faintest appreciation of the subtle refinements of the things Whistler strove so long and earnestly to achieve; in his best things he is strong and direct to the point of brutality—all of which is characteristic of Virile-Impressionism, and exactly what one would expect from a vigorous, muscular, frank American. Though Sargent spends most of his time on the other side, he is no more English than French; his pictures fit into an American exhibition far more comfortably than into the Royal Academy or the old Salon.
Robert Henri is another strong Virile-Impressionist.
The attitude of American painters toward the extreme modern developments is both curious and interesting.
On the opening of the International Exhibition there was an outburst of violent indignation from the older men, ordinary speech failed to express their feelings, and they rushed into print with language as violent as the press would accept. All that made lively reading and lent zest to current literature.
Six months later this feeling of angry opposition largely subsided. As an illustration, one of the bitterest of the Academicians accepted as a “good idea” the organization of an independent exhibition, open to artists without the intervention of a jury, under the auspices of the National Academy, as soon as a building could be provided that would adequately house all exhibitions.
Again, the very conservative authorities of a large art institute listened receptively to the suggestion that every art museum owed the public two things in the way of exhibitions:
First, exhibitions selected by juries which would give the public the benefit of the best expert judgment available.
Second, exhibitions wherein painters and sculptors barred by the juries would have opportunities to present their works to the judgment of the public.
In short, suggestions that would not have been listened to before the International are now discussed as quite within the range of possibilities.
There is no danger of these things coming to pass in the immediate future; there is still too much latent opposition, but the virulent has measurably subsided.
So much for the older men.
The younger were naturally much more tolerant. They were more—they were both curious and receptive. Many of them searched with eager eye for valuable hints, for ways and means to perfect their own art.
It was a great pleasure to watch and talk with these young men, the rising generation.
Many of them, to their own surprise, found they had been working along modern lines without fully realizing it.
They had not cut loose from Impressionism, but they were doing things constructively rather than superficially; they were painting like Cézanne rather than Monet.
If the attempt were made to name these younger men, the result would be injustice to many whose works are unknown to the writer, and the argument would be confused.
To speak, therefore, of one of the paintings reproduced, take the “Still Life,” by Kroll. In the decorative arrangement of the draperies and in the manner in which the fruit and stone jug are painted, the feeling is quite Post-Impressionistic; while the glimpse of the street out the window is purely Impressionistic.
That is to say, all within the window is painted solidly and constructively, quite under the influence of Cézanne; all that is without is painted fleetingly and superficially, more under the influence of Monet. It was done intentionally, to secure a certain effect of contrast; but the result is neither French-Impressionism nor Post-Impressionism, but American-Impressionism—a certain eclecticism.
The glimpse of the street is delightful, but the arbitrarily arranged interior is more than delightful; it possesses strength of line, fine color, and solid masses, done constructively.
Still, one has only to compare this picture with the “Still Life,” by Herbin, and the “Forest at Martigues,” by Derain, to see how close to nature it is, how Impressionistic it is as distinguished from the Post-Impressionistic, or creative, spirit.
Kroll painted what he felt, controlled by what he saw. Derain painted what he felt, influenced only slightly by what he had seen.
The foregoing illustrates the position of the more vigorous of the younger American painters; they are so strong, so virile, so muscular—let us say—that instinctively they lean toward the painting of things in a big, broad constructive manner; the refinements of superficial impressionism do not interest them.
At the same time they have not reached the point where they are willing to let go of nature entirely and do purely creative things.
Perhaps this is just as well.
America—like every new country—is so essentially practical, practical in even its most imaginative flights, that it is difficult for its painters to retire within themselves and do things that have only an esoteric or metaphysical relation to actualities; that sort of thing in both art and literature is much easier on the continent than in either England or America; it is especially easy in the highly charged and hyper-artificial atmosphere of Paris.
Purely creative work is done in a masterly manner—in his best things—by Arthur Davies. It is attempted and quite successfully by Kenneth Miller, to mention only two of many.
To the casual observer Davies may seem to lose himself at times in his theories, to press his dreams and speculations beyond the confines of his art, but on this point the opinion of the “casual observer” is of little value, for Davies’s pictures cannot be casually observed; they challenge the attention of the most serious and repay study. I make no pretense to having fathomed their mystery, to understanding their inner significance, but enjoy and have always enjoyed the marvellously fine way in which they are done, and their rare decorative quality.
Here is a man doing creative work, work in which he plays with and uses nature to attain ends far above and far removed from nature. He is in no sense a Virile-Impressionist, no one would think of classing him as an Impressionist at all. Yet he is not a Post-Impressionist as the term has been defined in this book.
He belongs rather to the class of inspired or poetic painters, a few of whom are with us always, men who neither found nor belong to a “school,” but who express on canvas or in stone their fancies in a way that reminds one of fairy-tales.
Davies may admire much of the work of some of the ultra Post-Impressionists; he likes, for instance, much of Matisse’s work; he may even fancy he has something in common with these men, but he has not. He was painting his pictures long before theirs were very much known, and he would have painted his if theirs had never been produced at all.
Matisse is moved by a spirit fundamentally different from that which animates Davies.
“The Bridge,” by Kroll, is another striking example of American-Impressionistic art. It is one of a series of pictures of lower New York, each painted “on the spot,” some from roofs and high places difficult of access and dangerous.
It is comparatively easy to go out and make a few sketches of portions of a city like New York and then retire to the studio and paint faint and superficial reproductions, such inadequate reproductions as appear on the walls of any metropolitan exhibition; it is quite another thing to plant one’s easel on slippery rocky heights and day after day, in the cold, paint from nature as directly as Monet ever painted and in a much more virile way.
It takes imagination and enthusiasm and the superb confidence of youth to attempt such colossal things, and it takes an unusual technical facility to “get away” with the attempt.
Winslow Homer’s name has been mentioned and mentioned with the respect due one of the greatest painters this country has produced, but the besetting weakness of picture buyers is undue reverence for the man who has “arrived,” above all for the master who is dead.
Better pictures are being painted in America today than Homer painted, and he would be the first to say so if living.
Since he painted his best pictures the art of painting has advanced, painters have improved their technic and broadened their outlook.
There are pictures being painted today by young Americans that will be worth far more than Homer’s, and that is said with the full realization that no lover of what is big and strong in art could ask for more virile impressions of nature than those of Homer at his best.
When the Morgan pictures were hanging in the Metropolitan Museum, acclaimed in parrot phrases by critics and visited by multitudes, it was a delight, a veritable refreshing of the soul, to get away from the smell of the dead into the living atmosphere of the Hearn collection and see pictures that belong to us, to our own times, that are flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone.
Every picture in the Morgan collection had its vital relation to life once—when it was painted and where it was painted.
Not one has even a remote relation to the life of America.
They are valuable, very valuable, in the sense that old tapestries, old armor, old brocades, old pottery, etc., etc., are valuable—valuable as illustrating the history and development of painting, and beautiful as many old things are beautiful—but not half so beautiful as the living and breathing things of today.
But how can we appreciate the beauty of the things our painters and sculptors are doing when we are blind to the superb, the magnificent beauty of what our engineer-builders are doing—our steel “sky-scrapers”—America’s greatest achievement and unique contribution to the arts—an absolutely new architecture?
Though the artist may be quick to disavow all such intention, it is obvious that there is much Post-Impressionism in John W. Alexander’s work.
In both his technic and his inspiration he is very Post-Impressionistic.
In the delightful sweep of his line, and the purely decorative use of color, he departs far from nature.
The attitude of Sargent toward a model or sitter and that of Alexander are diametrically opposed, the one seeks to paint a vigorous characterization of the person before him, the other seeks to create a picture, and to do so by a technic so different from that commonly used it still occasions much of the wonderment it excited years ago.
Some of the portraits by Alexander are conspicuous on the walls of an exhibition for very much the same reasons such a picture as Van Rees’s “Maternity” would be conspicuous.
The landscape and cattle piece by Segonzac are both examples of Virile-Impressionism. But Segonzac has painted many other pictures that are Post-Impressionistic—arbitrary in design and execution, and still others that are both Virile-Impressionistic and Post-Impressionistic, such as his large canvas, “A Pastoral,” shown at the International, wherein the cattle are Virile-Impressionistic creations while the nude figures and the entire scheme are purely Post-Impressionistic.
The two landscapes by Vlaminck and Charmy are good examples of the transition state from Virile-Impressionism to Post-Impressionism.
They are sufficiently close to nature to be Impressionistic in the large sense of the term; at the same time they are so arbitrary and decorative in technic as to be quite Post-Impressionistic. They are about as far removed from the average exhibition of Impressionistic pictures as they are from the creative and abstract art of the Cubists, yet they will hang with either without unduly shocking the spectator’s sense of the fitness of things.
The three Cardoza’s are purely Post-Impressionistic; they are charming examples of what might be called romantic Post-Impressionism as distinguished from the more abstract conceptions of the Cubists; they have no more relation to life than a fairy tale, rather less if anything, for they are primarily decorative rather than significant.
Zak’s “Shepherd” is also Post-Impressionistic, romantic in feeling like Cardoza’s, but of deeper human significance. The utter loneliness of the shepherd’s life, the monotony of its outlook, the note of resignation, are all as subtly indicated as are any of the human qualities in Millet’s pictures of peasant life; yet in technic and composition the picture is essentially Post-Impressionistic, a decorative and musical work of the creative imagination. One would not be far astray in classing it with the poetic work of Arthur Davies.