IX Degas and His Circle
The development of art itself is no more mechanical than the artistic development of the individual: in both there are irregularities, retrogressions, forward spurts, divagations. Renoir first appeared with a rhythmic line-balance which first grew luminous, then voluminous, until it blossomed forth into his full form and line and colour. Sometimes he leapt ahead in one quality and deteriorated in another, abandoned one for the glory of the other, and sacrificed continually until by experience he knew his limitations. Then consciously, with all the reins in hand, he progressed steadily to his highest point of efficiency. Art in general also advances sporadically. Delacroix gave a new freedom to subject and drawing, resuscitated composition and found a new use for colour. He was the embryonic statement of the ends of modern art. Courbet, ignoring colour, totally divorced subject-matter from antiquity and liberated drawing from the accepted style. He carried art forward, but not in a direct line. Daumier gave us a new conception of form, but contented himself with Spanish colour: his art, though fragmentary, was another step toward a unique vision. Then came Manet who, forgetting composition, exalted the documentary freedom of Courbet and began the study of light. He, also, was a continuation of the modern art impulse, but in his struggle for the new he forgot the foundations. The Impressionists accepted passively all that had come before. They raised colour to an important place in painting and brought it to the consideration of all artists by showing its potency in the production of intense emotion. Renoir used their inspiration; reverted to the past through Delacroix, Courbet and Daumier; combined all that had preceded him; and in an incomparable flourish closed up the possibilities of his experimental forerunners. In him was a consummation. But there had to be a transition also, unless art was to stand still. Gauguin, though he went so far back that he passed to a time when composition did not exist, interpreted, but did not imitate, nature. The Neo-Impressionists continued the impetus of Pissarro. Cézanne unearthed secrets from nature which linked him to Impressionism, and by applying them arbitrarily to classic organisations, became an interpreter of the past as well as of the future.
At each step of this broad and prolific advance there were those painters who, profiting by the teachings of the great, set themselves to imitate and ornament the exteriors of their faintly-understood masters and to emphasise the qualities of texture, matière and prettiness. So rapid was the evolution of modern endeavour that nearly every painter overlapped his seemingly remote predecessor. Edgar Degas was born more than twenty years before the death of Delacroix. He was one of those painters who, content to remain stagnant, employ the qualities which have been handed down to them and breathe into old inspirations the flame of individual idiosyncrasy. He was a man who impressed everyone by the strength of his personality and by the power of his caustic wit. In his youth he travelled in Italy and America and went to school, not for artistic training, but merely as a concession to the conventions of the day. He copied Holbein and Lawrence. In his earlier portraits there are undeniable traces of the German master: the Lawrence influence exhibited itself in his femininity more than in actual technical innovations. He was an enthusiastic visitor to the Café Guerbois on the Avenue de Clichy where, from 1865 until the war, Manet was the dominating figure, and where the Impressionists and such men as Lhermitte, Cazin, Legros, Whistler and Stevens came to discuss æsthetics.
Although never radically opposed to scholasticism, as were these other men, Degas was nevertheless persuaded to share in a joint exhibition in 1867 with his revolutionary companions. But the ridicule of the public disgusted him so thoroughly that he never exposed again. He shut himself up in his studio, and there, isolated from his fellow painters and the vulgar populace, worked out his own salvation. He instinctively hated the brummagem show of popularity and put into his every subject this disgust with life’s hypocrisies. Even in his prancing ballet figures, though they are in full light and amid joyous settings, one senses the satire which led to the depiction of their apparent sans-souci. One reads in them the sordid misery of their home life, the long trying hours of muscular strain, and the deceit of their simulated smiles. His synthetic figures—synthetic in that they were without details and accidents of contour which would detract from the vision of the whole—came to him direct and with little variation from Ingres—not the Ingres of Stratonice but the Ingres of the drawings in the Musée Ingres at Montauban. His study of this master gave him a greater insight into the academic construction of the human figure than any school could have done. It permitted him to set forth a firmly drawn body in any pose with equal ease. This facile mastery of action is one of his greatest claims to popularity.
Gauguin held that nothing should be moving in a canvas, that all the figures should be static, arrested in their pose, and calm. Degas represented Gauguin’s antithesis. He strove to catch his model in flight. He immobilised their élan, and registered those characteristics of a model which express action at its intensest dynamic instant. In all his racecourse pictures the very horses have that delicate balance of mincing tread that we first feel when we look at their prototypes in life—that dainty and slight resiliency as of weight on springs. Monet, on the one hand, caught the ephemeral effect of light on nature: Degas, on the other, recorded the fleeting movement of objects, that is, the physical poise of a granted image, not the æsthetic poise which transmits itself to our subjectivities. He surprised the actional segment which epitomises the entire cycle of movement. Everything he touches becomes as charming and interesting as a wellstaged scene. His sympathies with the Impressionist colour methods and his manner of handling his material add to this charm and make pleasurable, fresh and adventuresome what would otherwise be banal and sometimes even ugly and devoid of interest. He paints the racehorse, which Géricault first introduced into French art, and, by surrounding it with a vernal spring atmosphere, violet hills and green and ochre stubble, and by catching its instantaneous action, makes of it a picture with a rich and colourful surface—a surface beside which a Géricault, judged from the same illustrative standpoint, appears stiff and black.
Degas, in short, paints the kind of pictures which the general public calls “artistic”—a word which, though loosely used, has come to have a distinct connotation when applied to arts and crafts. Vases, plaques, panels, screens, decorations, posters and book-plates are all “artistic” provided they fulfil certain simple requirements. The bizarre exteriors of German art have given great impetus to this qualitative adjective. The word is used indeterminately, and its popular meaning has not been defined. But in Degas we find it exemplified; and by studying him we may discover its exact limitations. “Artistic” commonly refers to paintings in which the exactitude of drawing is lost in a nonchalant sensibilité, and in which the matière takes on a seductive interest merely as a stuff or a substance, the love of which lies deep in the most intellectual of men. The tactile sense will be found at the roots of the average person’s idea of an “artistic” work. This desire for superficial and material beauty, as of a rare porcelain or of scintillating old silk, is a part of the same physical sensuality which makes some men choose rough-grained canvas, others the stone of the lithographer, others the fluid brushing of a Whistler or a Velazquez. The desire for texture is what led Degas to pastels. His pictures have something more than an illustrative value; they are highly attractive as objets d’art as well. But while this attractiveness heightened the popular value of his work, it indicated the inherent decadence of his aims.
Nor was it the only sign of his retrogression. There is not even pictorial finality in his work. He never painted subjects as such, but used them only as bases for arabesques. Surface-covering was his forte, and it is not remarkable that one so sensitive to objective action should have been such a master of balance. He could never have achieved such perfect balance had he not realised that a work of art must be done coldly and consciously and without passion for the model, and that all enthusiasm should come only from the progressing work itself. His arrangements are wholly natural ones, and we feel that no studio posing has gone into their making. In this naturalistic attitude he was continuing the modern spirit of arbitrary subject selection found in Courbet, Manet and Pissarro. But where these men painted with colour, Degas only tinted his drawings. Consequently his colour, as well as composition, was a reversion to a sterile past. Although we may admire his Après le Bain, La Toilette, the Trois Danseuses, Femme au Tub, La Sortie du Bain, Torse de Femme S’Essuyant, Musiciens a l’Orchestre for their verisimilitude and lightness of treatment, their imprévu of arrangement and balance and their charm of colour, we can never credit their creator with even a slight genius, for all his pictures lack the rich volumes of a Daumier and the order of a Renoir.
Degas was neither academic nor revolutionary. He struck a middle course in which the scholastic and the heretical blent, and in blending neutralised each other’s characteristics. In his canvases he tells inherently commonplace stories, but he does it with the force and the graceful ease of one on whom all the visions of the world have made a powerful impression. Life meant to him a pageant, neither moral nor immoral, but real, and as such interesting. If in what he tells us there seems a bit of the cynical indifference of a mind too fully disillusioned, it never obtrudes itself. He himself might have been surfeited and bitter, but his work contains only the barest hint of his temperamental retrospection. His comprehension of life’s tragedies did not spoil his enjoyment in depicting them. Louis Legrand reveals the metropolitan lust of mankind; Forain, its bestiality; Toulouse-Lautrec, its viciousness. Each was prejudiced in some direction. Degas merely goes behind the scenes and by stripping his characters of their pretences shows them to us as they are, intimately and unsentimentally.
The other men in this circle of illustrators of which Degas was the dominant figure had distinctly individual traits. In no sense were they followers of one leader. Their preoccupation with illustration alone held them together. Degas has given us well-balanced patterns with fragilely lovely surfaces. He was little interested in the traits of his models: he cared more for the picture than for individual character. With Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec this mental attitude was reversed. In his work are specific members of the demi-monde, marionettes who have all the accentuated vices, vulgarities, fatigues and pretensions of their trade. In their faces, moulded by unrestrained indulgences, joys and sorrows, we can read their innermost hopes and aspirations. We can reconstruct their entire day’s activities. In order to study his characters Lautrec went to the milieu where gaiety was unchecked, where the denizens of the under-world—those unreal beings who live like fantastic flowers nourished by artificial light and colour—come to work and play. He saw and set down the principals in the Bohemian music halls, the cafés-concerts and the cirques, and those daylight moralists who come to relax viciously at night with all the laisser-aller of violent reaction. His search was for character; and in these establishments character did not masquerade in the hypocritical garb of pride and dignity. Passions were aired frankly, even proudly.
Lautrec had personal as well as artistic reasons for choosing this sphere. He had an ardent, almost febrile, desire to live fully and furiously. He was deformed; he had a man’s head and body on a child’s legs—the result of incompetent bone-setting in his youth. His family was a very old and noble one: his father was a sportsman, a lover of horses, a sculptor in his leisure moments. All the pride of race and dignity of class tumbled from its pedestal in this young artist. He had worked in the schools of Bonnat and Cormon, had met and admired Forain, and had finally been revealed to himself by Degas who led him to the theatre. He drank much, one suspects, to forget his deformity, just as Van Gogh drank to forget disease. He sought solace in the ephemeral, visionary life of the cafés; and no action, no type, no expression escaped his probing notice. He had many friends to whom he confided. “I am only half a bottle,” he would say. He adored women impersonally and romantically, but in his own station of life they looked upon him askance. Consequently he lived where money would always buy attention and where good-fellowship was repaid with good-fellowship.
Lautrec was an indefatigable worker, but his pictures possess little of the surface beauty of a Degas. Rather do they attest to a love of exaggerated and uncommon form, as do Chinese paintings. But in him is more order than in Degas. Compare Une Table au Moulin-Rouge with Degas’s Café-Concert. In the first the character in the physiques of the principals harmonises with the character of the faces; and the female figure’s hair, hat and fur-trimmed coat indicate the artist’s love for grotesque and beautiful abstract form. There is more than balance here: there is the rudiment of an instinctive composition which Degas never had. Beside this picture the Café-Concert seems flat silhouette, sprightly and entertaining, but far from profound. The nucleus of composition can be found in all of Lautrec’s best canvases, especially those he painted after his return from Spain. Toward the end of his life he worked, for the most part, with a full brush and rich colours. Before this, however, pencil, chalk, lithographs and water-colours had claimed him. His greatest fluency was in the use of separated hachures of rich greyish colour on neutral backgrounds. This method of application permitted him line as well as colour; and with his lines, summary and economical though they were, he caught the animality of his subjects with as sure a hand as Monet caught the light and Degas the action.
Lautrec, with Chéret, revolutionised the poster art. There are few men today in this field who do not owe much to him. His love of the eccentricities of his model was an ideal gift for the poster-maker, and he had himself sufficiently in hand not to be led into the grotesque. He was a caricaturist in that he exaggerated characteristic traits, just as Matisse did in his sculpture. He always noted fully the uncommon, and his love of every manifestation of life gave him a wide range of inspiration. Life was his great adventure; his art was merely his diary. He is a historian of the theatre of his time and has left salient portraits of Loie Fuller, Polaire, Sarah Bernhardt, Mounet-Sully, Yahne and Anna Held. His types of the raptorial woman of the past—the kind that today is found in the hidden corners of Les Halles, at the fortifications and about the “Rue de la Joie”—are as real as the female characters of Balzac, Daudet, Augier and Prévost. They live in his pictures because one feels that they once were realities: his caricaturisations of them, as of his clowns and dancers, only intensify their intimate humanity. To some it may seem strange that Lautrec should have liked Massys and Memling. But in the first he found trenchant characterisation, especially in such things as Head of an Old Man, The Courtesan and Portrait of a Canon. And he was temperamentally akin to Memling in such arrangements as the latter’s The Casting of the Lots (a detail of Calvary) and Our Lord’s Passion, at the Museum in Turin.
That the illustrators of this group were decadent is borne out in their subject-matter as well as in their methods. Since the earliest recorded antiquity artists have been attracted to the moving, the glittering, the brilliant; and the human occupation which embodies these three qualities most obviously is dancing. The men who are in love with life and not art and who paint and draw pictures merely to record their impressions, have always been hypnotised by the colour, the grace, the fluent movement and the rhythmic shiftings of dancers. These men, unable to analyse their emotions, have dreamed only of depicting objectively their photographic impressions of the dance. The artists who penetrated to the fundamental causes of rhythm used the dance only arbitrarily, whereas the superficial painters of the past saw in it merely the mosaic, the pattern, the arabesque. They thought that in portraying the dance literally they would arrive at its motive significance. But in this they failed. Had they done their figures in clay or stone they would have approached nearer their desire. But even this more masculine medium has, with few exceptions, resulted in failure. The dancing girls in the Grottoes of Mahavelipore were used only by those puissant masters of form as friezes or shapes to fill in and ornament a vacant space. The Tanagra figurines are a purely decorative endeavour. In Greece it was not the men of Praxiteles’s calibre, but the smaller talents like the potters who used the dance in their designs. Even a man as slight as Hokusai leaves it to a Toba Sojo to make his models caper. But the feminine talent of Degas finds in the dance absolute and unordered expression; and Lautrec and Legrand, both more robust than Degas, though minor and ornamentally illustrative artists, are seduced into portraying it often.
Louis Legrand was more of the “maker” of pictures than were his two contemporaries. His nature leaned toward the heavy and boisterous Sodoma rather than toward the Latin ideal of Tiepolo. This almost Teutonic racial penchant in him explains why the bestiality of his subject-matter is so often done in the manner of Goya, with broad black and white masses, not with the suggested line and the attractive matière of his master, Degas. There is much Teutonic blood in Spain, and Goya, while being far the greater artist even in his slightest etchings, is the nearest approach to Legrand in the treatment of themes. Goya paints moral decay with disgust and genius, whereas Legrand, with his slight gropings after order of a surface variety, glories in it as in a pursuit, and paints it with a leer. The Spaniard uses it as a temperamental means. The Frenchman, whose whole talent lies in a formula of draughtsmanship, works toward its creation as an end. His shallowness is at once apparent when we compare his Maîtresse or his illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s tales with etchings like Donde Vá Mamá or Buen Viaje. Psychologically he is intimately related to the fin de siècle movement in England; and, although a better and more healthy workman, he has a temperament singularly akin to that ineffectual Victorian academician, Walter Sickert.
In J.-L. Forain we have a man of different stamp, one who, knowing his ability for certain things, clings to them and does not attempt to thrust himself into the rank of artist. By developing his small potentialities to their highest actuality he has achieved as much as his confrères have by extraneous tricks and appearances. And there is no doubt that he comprehends art much better than they. His iconoclastic and acidulous cynicism, his ability to wrench from behind the veil of mundane hypocrisy the real motivation of an action, and his probing analysis which cannot be imposed upon by pretence, have touched on many sides of contemporary life—politics, extortion, courts, merchants, the beau monde, prostitution, religion, the theatre and the tawdry Bohemianism of Montparnasse. With a few straight and fluent strokes of the pencil he builds up a type of the blustering parvenu Jew, the mercenary picture dealer, the childish and vain actor who is avid for praise and obsessed with his vocation. Forain calls the actor a “M’as-tu-vu?” and depicts him as with that phrase ever on his lips. Baudelaire Chez les Mufles is one of the world’s greatest monuments to human hypocrisy. A chlorotic bourgeoise is standing in the centre of a small gathering reciting Baudelaire’s verses. Around her are grouped types of self-satisfied and vicious masculinity, all pretending, like the speaker herself, to be feeling deeply the hidden spirituality of the poem. Some of the men have their heads raised high, others bowed low, for purposes of concentration. The whole picture is rough-hewn as though done with an axe in a square of clay. With the simplest means the artist gives us the impression of rugged stone and, at the same time, completion. The titles to his drawings are in the exact spirit of the pictures themselves, succinct, brutal and penetrating. Forain is the second greatest caricaturist the world has produced. He was not the artist that Daumier was, but as a serious creator of types and as a highly intelligent critic of contemporary shams, he is a master, even as Daumier was a master of a realm far above him.
Forain perfected what he set out to do, and for this praise is due him. That his ambition ran along a subpassage of æsthetic endeavour, as did that of his three confrères, he would be the first to admit. As artists these men cannot be judged either by the surface quality of their works or by their penetration into life and character. Such considerations have nothing to do with æsthetic emotion. No matter how much we may eulogise such painters—for they must be judged by their own standard rather than by a criterion set by a Rubens—our praise will never place them in the rank of plastic creators. They will ever remain in the realm of nearly perfect workmen with literary apperceptions. Toulouse-Lautrec, because of his love of formal distortion for its own sake, probably comes nearer the higher level: there is in his work a slight æsthetic element. Degas will ever remain the piece of old velvet in a frame; Louis Legrand, the illustrator of the bachelor clubs; Forain, the expositor of life’s pretensions.
It is these men who have given the greatest impetus to realistic illustration in all countries. Viewed from this standpoint they were a salutary, as well as a diverting, manifestation. By burrowing down into the depths of material existence they made unimportant such poetic men as Beardsley, Rossetti and Moreau. All good illustration after them took on a deeper meaning. It ignored the mendacious surfaces of things and strove to reproduce the undercurrents which lie at the bottom of human actions and reactions. Its mere prettiness was supplanted by subcutaneous characteristics. It sought for motives rather than emotions, for causes rather than effects. It became critical where once it had been only photographic. From Degas, Lautrec, Legrand and Forain comes directly the best illustrative talent in both Europe and America. Without these four men we would not possess the best work of Max Beerbohm, Hermann Paul, Bellows, Maxime Dethomas, Roubille, Carlopez, Carl Larson, Albert Engström, C. D. Gibson, E. M. Ashe, Boardman Robinson, Cesare, Blumenschein and Wallace Morgan, the last of whom is unquestionably the most artistic illustrator in either America or England.