Modern Painting, Its Tendency and Meaning Part 9

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 aesthetic satisfaction and engender a feeling of finality which encompa.s.ses 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 ill.u.s.trators. 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 a.s.sociative 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 aesthetic 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 princ.i.p.al actors in the canvas. In ill.u.s.tration 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 aesthetic 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 aesthetic 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 aesthetic 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, Rene 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 a.n.a.logous 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 s.h.i.+fted, and we are conscious of it _only during the process of s.h.i.+fting_. Should we look at a body in one position, close our eyes during its change of att.i.tude, 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 ma.s.s; 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 pa.s.sed 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 partic.i.p.ation 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 aesthetic 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DYNAMISM D'UNE AUTO by RUSSOLO]

The Futurists, it is true, strove sedulously for dynamism. Several of the t.i.tles of their later canvases contain the word. But their consistent misinterpretation of Leibniz's doctrine led them into the most superficial statements of the laws of force. By confusing action with movement and tempo with rhythm, and by constantly juggling causes and effects, they never arrived at a basic exposition of energy. In contemplating their pictures we experience only visual confusion. There is no movement because there is no static foil, no consummation. There is no dynamism because there is no suggestion of the inherent force which all substance involves. Let us a.s.sume the hypothesis that it is possible to photograph a kinematic force in movement. The Futurists'

pictures wherein the representation of dynamism is attempted, as in Dynamisme d'une Auto, there is a series of these hypothetical photographs each of which has caught a segment of immobility, as any snap-shot catches some static pose of a moving object. By super-imposing each of these images successively on the other the Futurists imagine that a state of action is created. But even were this the case the picture would be innocent of dynamism. Again, Futurism claims not to paint maladies but their symptoms and results. Admittedly therefore it works against its own gropings for dynamism, for symptoms and results are the outgrowth of causes, and as such can have only an objective interest. Would the Futurists maintain, for instance, that, by portraying a head from many viewpoints on the same canvas, they can give us the emotion of a head turning? Even were it possible thus to extend the contemplation of pictures into time, the effect of a series of dissimilar profiles would be no more convincing than that obtained by a slowly moving cinematograph film. Should we grant that by such a device the effect of movement resulted, it would depend entirely upon which end of the movement the eye alighted first whether the head moved one way or the other. And if the picture was a perfect organisation the change of direction would throw every part of the canvas out of gear.

Considering Futurism purely from the standpoint of ill.u.s.tration we still are unable to justify its aims. In painting a picture of a person setting forth upon a journey from a railway station, the Futurist represents the departure by means of horizontal, fleeting and jerky lines, half-hidden profiles, the station's interior, the engine, etc.

Then by introducing into the canvas bits of landscape and other incidentals which depict the thoughts of the person about to depart, the artist endeavours to call up the same mental state in the spectator of the canvas. The a.s.sociative process of the human mind, however, makes such a proceeding unnecessary, because in beholding a simple, even an academically pictured, scene of someone entering a train amid the confusion and haste of pa.s.sengers and guards, the spectator involuntarily calls up the landscape running past, the telegraph poles jerking by, the clanging of the bell, the shouts of attendants, the shuffling of many feet and the hiss of steam. In setting these things down the Futurists succeed only in limiting a highly imaginative person's thoughts by restricted visions of objectivity, just as in the theatre a producer, by placing many _papier mache_ trees and rocks and fibre gra.s.s about the stage, circ.u.mscribes the onlooker's imagination.

The Greeks, whose theatrical presentations were sufficiently intense to evoke an imaginative _milieu_, did not need fact.i.tious properties: but the theatrical Belascos must necessarily make their settings absolute and meticulously realistic. A Tintoretto needs no such tricks to strengthen its emotive power; but the Futurists, unable to move us by dynamic canvases, need recourse to dramatic tricks. At most their pictures could be significant only as auxiliaries to literary texts.

The Futurists' contention that all modern art should have as a point of departure an entirely modern sensation is wholly tenable, but they mistake the fact that a modern sensation is merely the sensation which pertains specially to the contemporary man. It has nothing to do innately with the delineation of an automobile or an aeroplane. The modern aesthetic spirit goes deeper. It implies the expression of an emotion by use of the latest refinements and researches in the medium of an art. In painting it is not limited to the ill.u.s.trative portrayal of a novelty. Were this the case any painter who confined himself to the picturisation of the latest dreadnaughts and the highest skysc.r.a.pers would be the pioneer of a new expression. In order to express himself in a modern manner, an artist needs only to have divested himself of all predilections for antiquity, to have subdued all conscious desire to will himself into the bodies of an ancient people, and to have seen the error of the childish maxim that there is nothing new under the sun. Any painter free from tradition, with a comprehension of aesthetic movement and an ability to apply it, will produce canvases which, though they have no radical theory behind them, will be as distinctly modern as those of the Futurists. Modernity has to do with methods and mental att.i.tude. It is in no wise related to subject-matter.

Consider, for instance, the famous Futurist statement that "a running horse has not four legs, but twenty." Then contemplate Balla's picture, Dog and Person in Movement, to which this theory is applied. Neither the dog nor the person seems to move at all. They are static figures with blurred triangles resembling lace where their legs should be. Such a juvenile artifice to give the effect of movement is certainly not modern or even novel. Long prior to the Futurists, caricaturists and comic journalistic draughtsmen sought to express action by placing circular lines round the wagging tails of dogs or by drawing long sweeping lines behind a swiftly moving figure to indicate from what direction it had come and the rapidity of locomotion. Such inventions are outside the field of aesthetics. They have to do only with slow optical action. But the modification of objects in contact with others, of which Cezanne wrote, is a profound postulate of organisation. It creates a poise of volume which causes us to experience an emotion of movement. The Futurists' contrivance of endowing a horse with twenty legs precludes any possibility of their calling up forcibly a running horse, for only the legs seem to move, as of a horse in a treadmill. Save for the pictorial side of a picture so presented there is nothing in it of interest to us: and our memory of an actual horse clashes with the vision of a multipedalian one.

The Futurists' statement, however, that a picture's lines should subjectively drag the spectator into the centre of the canvas, where he will personally experience the rhythmic interplay of forms, is not only pertinent but expresses an absolute aesthetic necessity. Pictures which do not so affect the beholder have failed as great art. But though the Futurists were the first to give succinct utterance to this s.h.i.+bboleth, the practice of const.i.tuting a work of art so that the spectator was transposed into its stress and strain, had been going on ever since great composition came into painting. One cannot study a Michelangelo or a Rubens without feeling, even to the point of physical fatigue, the struggle of their finally harmonised volumes. This does not hold true of the Futurists' work. In studying their pictures our eyes alone become tired; and, though we succeed in unravelling the involutions of their pictures, there is for us no recompense of emotional satisfaction.

Action in itself has little charm for us, and action is what the paintings of Futurism, in their ultimate expression, are founded on. But while action may attract us when expressed by an interesting and sympathetic personality, as in the paintings of Henri and in the sculpture of Rude, there is in Futurism no actional sensation or explicit element of deep enjoyment that we cannot obtain in greater intensity by gazing upon a busy thoroughfare, or by watching the landscape from a swiftly moving train, or by attending a dance. Even the chaos of a Futurist painting does not present the interest of the Flight Turning a Corner from Keion's panoramic roll of the Hogen Heiji war, or the prints of Moron.o.bu, or even The Heavenly Host by the primitive Guariento. All these works, while they represent action, are also ordered. And order, which the Futurists lack, is more than an arbitrary ingredient in art. Just as the eternal desire in life is for something positive and absolute, so the attempt at order in painting is an outgrowth of the desire to make a picture complete and satisfying.

There is no doubt that the Futurists exerted much good in imbuing the artists of the day with a greater consciosity and in showing them, by an elaborate critical prospectus, the error of their ways. Futurism quieted the animadversions the modernist painters were hurling at Monet and his school, by pointing out that, to react against Impressionism by adopting pictorial laws which antedated it, was futile, and that the only way to combat it seriously was to surpa.s.s it. The Futurists, however, were unable to fulfil their proposition. They were, in fact, the abstract perpetuators of Impressionism through the Cubists who represented its formal side. The man who surpa.s.sed Impressionism was Cezanne.

Furthermore, the Futurists chided the Cubists for painting from models, whether in squares, cubes or circles; and thus turned the light of a.n.a.lysis on the actual achievements, and away from the theories, of Pica.s.so and his followers. The consequence was that for a short time the Cubists became somewhat Futuristic. Then, the strong impetus slowly ebbing out, the two schools gradually approached each other. Futurism has taken on a somewhat Cubistic mien; and the Cubists, having profited by the Futurists' teachings and having partially divorced themselves from the model, have begun to seek expression in Orphism and Synchromism. The work of Boccioni and Carra has a.s.sumed a wholly abstract appearance, and is much more interesting than formerly.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HIeROGLYPHE DYNAMIQUE DU BAL TABARIN by SEVERINI]

The methods of Futurism have their provenience in many preceding art movements. One finds in this school's canvases cubes, spots, divisionistic technique and wholly academic drawing; some of the pictures are monotonously brown and grey, while others possess the acid colouring of Neo-Impressionism. But aside from their work the Futurists proved a salutary event in modern art. The painting of the day needed just such a cataclysm to turn its eyes from the contemplation of partial traits to a more encompa.s.sing vision. Their motto might be the saying of Mallarme: "To name is to destroy, but to suggest is to create." Their art is largely one of suggestion. Their initial mistake was in supposing that the depiction of mental states would recall the causes of those states. Life would indeed be monotonous if in it there was no struggle.

We could never appreciate its consummations were we ignorant of the travail which brought them about. The Futurists present, as it were, the conclusion of an oration in which has been developed a colossal thought, and ask us to applaud. This we cannot do, for not having followed the struggle of the new idea against opposing forces, we are unable to appreciate the import of the results.

Notwithstanding their many failures the Futurists have greatly widened the field of ill.u.s.tration; by a word they have given birth to a school, Simultaneism; and they have forever turned Cubism from its narrow formalism. But in themselves they were not significant. They were too stringently literary, and in attempting to advance their own theories at the expense of profounder doctrines, they have succeeded only in a.s.sisting other painters toward a greater purity of expression, despite the fact that they advocated a retrogressive objectivity. Marinetti, a poet, is the spiritual (and monetary) father of Futurism; and the names signed to the original manifesto were Umberto Boccioni, a sculptor as well as a painter; Carlo D. Carra, the most genuine artist of the group; Luigi Russolo, its most orthodox exponent; Gino Severini, its ill.u.s.trator _par excellence_; and Giacomo Balla, its high priest of prettiness. In an attempt to preclude all censure, they closed their manifest with these words: "There will be those who will accuse our art of being cerebrally distorted and decadent. But we will answer simply that we are, to the contrary, the primitives of a new and centuple sensitivity, and that our art is drunk with spontaneity and power." With the slight change of "theory" for "art" we would heartily agree with them.

XIII

SYNCHROMISM

In order to understand the last step in the evolution of present-day art methods, it is necessary to be thoroughly cognizant not only of what has taken place before but of the chronological development of all the qualities of modern painting, for Synchromism embraces every aesthetic aspiration from Delacroix and Turner to Cezanne and the Cubists. At the same time it reverts to the compositions of Rubens, complicating them further to satisfy the needs of the modern mind. Delacroix took the first decided step toward making colour an organic factor in art-a factor which would help present a more h.o.m.ogeneous emotion of the picture as a whole, and which would be intimately connected with the picture's vital expression. He was a decided advance on those painters to whom colour was as arbitrary a means of adorning a good work as the gilt frame they placed about it. Colour with them was dictated by the demands of an age of voluptuousness and unrestrained living. The great art nations of Spain, Italy and Flanders were then pa.s.sing through a sensuous epoch, and the painters reflected in their work the tone of the national temperament. The primitives of these countries and of Germany had used colour because the religious qualities in their pictures became more realistic when nature's general tints were employed. By making their work more dramatic they were able to set forth more forcibly the lesson they strove to teach. The art of the primitives was primarily dogmatic. In it was none of those subtleties of composition which come only with the conscious artist's delight in bringing order out of chaos: it contained only that simple and instinctive order which is the avoidance of chaos. That which the primitives had to say was so rudimentary and well-learned that it took a definite visional form in their minds. When dogmatism began to lose its charm for the painter his forms gradually became more suave, and his colour likewise grew gracious and ornamental. The lessons were forgotten, and composition as an element of first importance, dressed in a robe of rich and varied hue, supplanted them.

Such was the employment of colour at the advent of Delacroix whose probing mind sensed not only its importance as drama, but also its potentialities for brilliance. With him, however, it remained an adjunct to drawing-something to be applied when the rest of the picture had been laid in, an element with which to intensify the importance of subject.

He gave a great and necessary impetus to its study, but he outlined no directions for its significant application: indeed, by following out his original concepts one is led into the impa.s.se of Neo-Impressionism. But at so early a stage the impetus is the important thing, and to Delacroix belongs the credit for having set in motion the wheels of colour inquisition. It was Daumier, however, who, apparently ignoring it, brought its exclusive use appreciably nearer. By conceiving contour and form as one, he disposed, as it were, of these two elements which, in the scale of pictorial importance, had always been placed before colour.

Had each successive painter profited by all the _apports_ and qualities of his direct predecessor's art, the progress of painting might have been more rapid, but it would never have been so perfect. Each painter would have inherited both the shortcomings and the merits of his forerunner. Thus one side of his art would have developed out of all proportion to the other. Daumier, going back to tone, discovered a wholly natural method for the achievement of intense form. His pictures present themselves as great bulks of flesh and matter, crude but vital, which have about them a force of actual weight. In nowise was he a colourist. He lived in a time when prettiness was the keynote of the day, and his whole life was a revolt against it. His reaction was so extreme that he disregarded the capabilities of colour.

The Impressionists, on the other hand, over-emphasised its objective uses. They held that the colour seen in nature is all-important for picture making, and proceeded to copy it. As a result their work is highly emotional, but only in the same way that a sunny landscape is emotional. These artists were the slaves of nature, doing its bidding; Gauguin bent everything into the mould of his own personality: and it is only when these two types of creative impulse combine and modify each other that great naturalistic art is possible. The Impressionists, being receptive, believed all that nature openly proclaimed. They unearthed none of its formal secrets; they probed none of its causes. Theirs was only the joy of the discoverer. But their insistence upon the discovery was important, because it helped give birth to Cezanne. He was a direct outgrowth of Impressionism, but he was also an outgrowth of art's entire history. Superficially he may seem more closely akin to p.i.s.sarro's school than to the older painters, since it was from p.i.s.sarro he learned his first colour lessons; but in reality he was more intimately related to a Giotto or a Rembrandt, because his knowledge of colour was used only to heighten the emotion of volume; and this volume, which Monet or Sisley would not have understood, was the chief concern of the old masters.

With the Impressionists colour was an end in itself. They looked upon it not merely as expressive of light, but as synonymous with light, whereas Cezanne, ignoring colour's dramatic possibilities, used it to express and intensify the fundamentals of organisation, just as Giotto, disregarding the dramatic possibilities of line, employed line as a means to ordinate volume. Cezanne is related to Daumier and Rembrandt in that while these men created their art (which was primarily one of tone) by building up volume simultaneously with contour, he created his art (which was primarily one of colour) by presenting his visions as nature presents itself to our eyes and intelligences, that is, as forms in which tone, contour and colour are inseparable. That he has been little understood is due to the fact that his profoundly logical methods took birth in an age of "inspirational" painting. Matisse who came later made of Cezanne's still-lives a highly enjoyable decoration whose destiny can rise no higher than that of tasteful and complete ornament.

Cezanne's art is dynamic, while Matisse's is exaltedly excitatory. The former bears the same relation to the latter that a Beethoven symphonic movement bears to a ballet by Delibes. One inspires thought: the other incites to action, to spontaneous admiration and joy. Matisse loves and knows colour in its harmonic relations. He and Gauguin, by the broad beauty of their work, have given an impetus toward large planes of pure pigment. In brief the evolution of colour is as follows: it was used first for verity; secondly, for ornament; thirdly, for drama; fourthly, for its inherent beauty as light; and last, for intensifying natural form.

All this has to do only with the concrete side of art's progress. There is also a progress of the mental att.i.tude which is inseparable from art's concrete development and without which its material evolution could not have gone forward significantly. This mental progress resulted in the emanc.i.p.ation of the artist from the intellectual limitations of his public. Up to Gericault and Delacroix painting had idealised contemporary life, had held itself to the interpretation of biblical history, or had spoken in legend and allegory. It had expressed itself in the Italian mode of drawing; it had followed set rules of balance and chiaroscuro; and above all it had possessed a very definite finish.

Naturally the art historians expected this style of painting to continue indefinitely. But with Delacroix it began to change. The hard contours grew freer. The depiction of the human form halted at approximation.

Drawing became more arbitrary. Then came Courbet who insisted that there was beauty in everything if one knew how to bring it forth. He turned to the commonplace life about him for inspiration, repudiated the suavities of David, the romance of Delacroix, the elegance of Velazquez and the colour of Veronese; and began to order realistic nature. About his name there grew up a tempest of adverse criticism; but no man so sure of his own genius as was Courbet could be weakened by public condemnation; and he made no compromise. Manet continued Courbet's freedom of selection and painted _n'importe quoi_. The Impressionists also carried forward this modern att.i.tude. They sought for that which generally was considered ugly, and made it artistically enjoyable by drenching it with light and colour. Then came Cezanne, Matisse, the Cubists and the Futurists, with each of whom subject-matter became more and more emanc.i.p.ated. Natural objects gradually lost their importance and grew more abstract. Form was considered for its own sake, and models were not copied merely because they filled certain utilitarian destinies in the spectator's mind. Objects were used by Cezanne to create abstract ensembles. In Matisse the form itself became more purely aesthetic, though with him there was a residue of objectivity for the sake of ill.u.s.trative consistency. With the Cubists natural form was an echo, a memory of life, retained because they were not sure of how to turn their minds away from it. Futurism attempted a rehabilitation of ill.u.s.tration, but lately it has been converted into a purer vision by the Cubists.

To sum up: colour reached its highest development in Cezanne; composition attained its highest intensity in Rubens; and the greatest freedom in material form was represented by the Cubists. Thus the art of painting stood in 1912. But at that time the development of modern means had not reached its highest point. The purification of painting had not been attained. The tendencies of the past century fell short of realisation. As yet there had been no abstract coalition of colour, form and composition. Colour had not been carried to its ultimate purity as a functioning element. Form had become almost unrecognisable but had just missed abstraction, its inevitable goal. And composition, the basis of all great art, had been temporarily abjured in the feverish search for new methods. The step from the condition of art in 1912 to its final purity, in which would be embodied all the qualities necessary to the greatest compositional painting, was not a long one, but until it was taken the cycle must remain incomplete. The last advance in modern methods was made by the Synchromists at _Der Neue Kunstsalon_ of Munich in June, 1913. This movement was fathered by Morgan Russell and S.

Macdonald-Wright, both of whom, though native Americans, were partially European in parentage and education. Russell is more than half French, and Macdonald-Wright, whose family name is Van Vranken, is directly descended from the Dutch.

Russell first studied in New York under Robert Henri, one of the most sincere and intelligent products of American art. There he acquired a sound and capable foundation for his later work both in clay and paint.

He then went to Paris, still feeling nature through the inspiration of Manet, and like Manet fell under the sway of Monet. From the Impressionists he was attracted to Matisse with whom he was personally acquainted. He did many canvases attractive in colour and competent as to form, as well as a number of synthetic and obviously disproportioned statues which recall the modern "Fauve" to a marked degree. Later he began to take an interest in Cezanne, and to his study of this master and of Michelangelo is attributable his later development in colour and composition. These men const.i.tuted his main influences; but in the course of his development he had cast a glance at Pica.s.so and even at the Futurists; and it is a significant commentary on their methods that they are more susceptible of understanding than either Renoir or Matisse. Leo Stein, an astute and discerning connoisseur of the more modern art movements and a man who can see with occasional flashes of genius through the aspects of a canvas to its basic cause, no doubt had much to do with Russell's rapid intellectual progress through the disciples.h.i.+p of the student to the creation of individual endeavours.

Macdonald-Wright, to the contrary, had little art training in the accepted sense of the word. Primarily interested in the purely technical side of painting, as were Renoir, Cezanne and Courbet, he had been influenced first by Hals, Rembrandt and Velazquez and later by their successors, Manet and the Barbizon school. Hoping to find help in the schools he studied at many academies, but after a brief period retired to the seclusion of his studio. About this time he began, with the aid of Chevreul, Helmholtz and Rood, to make experiments in colour in its relation to luminosity. Quite naturally the influence of Monet followed, and it was not until a year later that his enthusiasm for the Impressionists disappeared. He then began the construction of form by large and crude planes, building his figures with light and dark chromatic blocks. It was this broader application, coupled with his love of pure colour, that led him to an eager admiration for Gauguin. At this period of his development he met Russell, his senior by three years, to whom he has always admitted his debt for his early appreciation of Michelangelo as well as of the modern masters. From then on, through many struggles with light, he made rapid progress. When Futurism blinded the eyes of the younger men he went straight ahead in the path he had chosen.

Shortly after their meeting, Russell and Macdonald-Wright reached the end of their appreciative and formative period of imitation. They were both too intensely desirous of self-expression in its broadest and most precise sense to vary an already well-learned precept or theory. They were colourists, and had been even when pa.s.sing through their most sombre stage. Now both turned to colour as to a longed-for goal. The art world at that time was being flooded with the mournful browns and whites of Cubism; and Matisse was too slight an inspiration to attract them, for they had consistently conceived form in three dimensions. Their desire was to create canvases of richly harmonious colour; but the difficulty lay in finding a new method of application. Neither of them was content merely to place suites of pure hues on the canvas, as an end in themselves. This would be to sacrifice organised volume for an ephemeral pleasure. Colour must have a formal and compositional significance, otherwise it would be but shallow decoration. The fact that, like all painters of the day, they were still bound to the depiction of natural objects, added difficulty to the solution of their problem. Their individual interpretation of Cezanne, however, little by little showed them the method by which they might eventually open the door on their desires. Russell approached form through light, combining both qualities in a simultaneous vision. Macdonald-Wright approached light through form, regarding them as an inseparable and inevitable unity. Both painters expressed their vision in the purest gamut of colour which painting up to that time had seen. Colour with them became the totality of art, the one element by which every quality of a canvas was to be expressed. Even their lines were obtained by the differentiation of colours in the same way that tempo delimits sound.

Russell began his Synchromism by extending and completing the methods of the Impressionists who had observed that one always has an illusion of violet in shadows when the sunlight is yellow, and who in their painting represented the full force of light as yellow, and its opposite extreme of shadow as violet. Russell, in observing that the strong force of light gives us a sensation of yellow and that shadow produces its complementary of violet, went further and discovered that quarter and half tones also possess colours by which they can be interpreted. He thus arrived at a complete colour interpretation of the degrees of light forces or tones. This method he aptly called the orchestration of tones from black to white. For it he made no hard and set rules. From the first it was a highly plastic and arbitrary manner of depicting objectivity. By modulating from light to dark (from yellow to violet) not only was light conceived forcibly, but form resulted naturally and inevitably. This was the principle by which Cezanne, although he did not completely grasp its import, achieved his eternal light which brought form into being. But the principle with him was subjugated to the influence of local colours, varying _milieu_, reflections, etc. Russell stated the principle frankly and applied it purely. Since his form at that period resulted from a sensitive depiction of light values expressed by colour, his canvases had much the same beauty of strongly lighted natural objects seen through the three-sided prism by which the transition from tone to colour is automatically brought about.

Macdonald-Wright approached his conception of Synchromism from the opposite direction. He had always been dissatisfied with the endless alternation of small shadows and lights which the Impressionists had introduced into painting, and with the tiny planes and spots which artists used for verisimilitude. He desired a method whereby the elements of shadow and light could be differentiated and drawn together in simple ma.s.ses. He had studied pure colour more from the standpoint of form than from that of light, and during 1912 began to take note of the fluctuations of colours, their mobility when juxtaposed with other colours, their densities and transparencies. In fine, he recorded their inherent tendency to express degrees of material consistency. Thus with him a yellow, instead of meaning an intense light, represented an advancing plane, and a blue, while having all the sensation of shadow about it, receded to an infinity of subjective depth. The relative s.p.a.cial extension of all the other colours was then determined, and a series of colour scales was drawn up which gave not only the sensation of light and dark but also the sensation of perspective. Thus it was possible to obtain any degree of depth by the use of colour alone, for all the intermediate steps from extreme projection to extreme recession were expressible by means of certain tones and pure hues.

The first Synchromist canvas was exposed by Russell in the _Salon des Independants_ early in the spring of 1913. It was called Synchromie en Vert and recorded a large interior in which all the light forces were treated in their purely emotional phases. The canvas lacked the complete visualisation and the solid s.p.a.ce-construction which characterise his later work, and furthermore it revealed many traces of the academic composition. However, had there been critics possessed of artistic prescience they straightway would have sensed in it a new force in painting. But the picture's defects obscured their recognition of its potential vitality. This was due in part to the fact that the work lost much of its effect by piece-painting, that is, by the minute treatment of details each of which const.i.tuted an end in itself regardless of the total. Russell counted on the line of the different bodies holding it together; but he reckoned falsely, for if, in a work where colour is so important a part of line, the colour and line are not in complete harmony, the line alone is inadequate to effect the liaison of forms. In this same _Salon_ Macdonald-Wright, not yet having arrived at a defined conception, exposed two canvases in which his later developments were but vaguely foreshadowed. Both pictures were formal compositions of nude figures painted in three or four flat planes of pure colour, and recalled Matisse and Cezanne more strongly than they presented a new vision. From the standpoint of efficient visualisation all three Synchromist works were failures, or at least they were indications of incomplete progress. In Russell's canvas the diminutive breaking up of colour negatived what otherwise would have been the picture's brilliant effect; and Macdonald-Wright's large application of colour served only to place him under the banner of an established school. But both men realised that this was only a start, and set diligently to work on the canvases for their first exhibition which was booked in Munich for June of that year.

Between their first pictures and those of a few months later there was to be noted an advance both in conception and in application. Russell's small colour planes, applied wholly from the standpoint of light, expanded and took on a new effectiveness. His form became more abstract, and his colour more harmonious. Also his compositions were more compact, though they were ordered rather than rhythmically organised.

Macdonald-Wright's progress was similar. In an interpretation of one of Michelangelo's Slaves, used as the dominant form in an arrangement of three figures, all the academism which had marked his earlier expression had disappeared. His method had been liberated from the exact.i.tudes of static principles, and had become consistent, not with the new colour knowledge, but within itself. The theory of defined colour gamuts, which from the first had been applied by these two men, had now become a scientific principle. Though the truth of it had always been vaguely sensed by them, it had not become a definitely comprehended formula until they had worked out the naturalistic laws governing colour. The Synchromist pictures in which these laws were boldly applied were first brought together at 13, Prannerstra.s.se, Munich, in June, 1913.

In November of the same year their work was again exposed, this time at the Bernheim-Jeune galleries in Paris. The show in Munich, widely advertised by coloured posters, had attracted considerable interest, but in Paris the exhibition created a two-weeks' sensation. Though the more discriminating critics saw its importance, there was considerable adverse comment due largely to the Synchromists' spectacular and over-enthusiastic methods of putting forward their views and discoveries. In their two specifically worded prospectuses they devoted much s.p.a.ce to the shortcomings of Orphism, then in vogue; and although their criticisms of that school, coupled with the statement of their own tangible and logical aims, had much to do with Orphism's demise, the impropriety of the attack created a feeling antagonistic to the new men.

The appearance of their pictures was entirely different from any paintings. .h.i.therto exposed; and their conception, while being a normal and direct outgrowth of Cezanne, marked a revolution in formal construction. The inspiration of both these new artists was cla.s.sic in that they recognised the absolute need of organisation which, if it was not melodiously and sequentially composed, should at least be rhythmic.

Both were striving to create a pure art-one which would express itself with the means alone inherent in that art, as music expresses itself by means of circ.u.mscribed sound.

There was no precedent for purely abstract form-that is, form which has no ant.i.type in nature-any more than there was a precedent for the construction of painting solely by means of colour and line. This was not due to an absence of desire in the artist for an abstract language of form, but to a natural diffidence on his part to break once and for all with centuries of tradition, and with one imperious gesture to cast aside the accepted _raison d'etre_ of the visual arts. We have seen how form from the first had been an imitation of natural objects, how it de-developed into synthesis, then into pure composition, how it reached a high degree of arbitrariness in Matisse, how it disintegrated in Cubism, and how in Futurism and Orphism there was a valiant attempt to convert it once more into pictorialism, to check its _elan_ toward perfect freedom of creation. It is not therefore strange that the Synchromist exhibition should have comprised, with the exception of one canvas, figure pieces, studies of landscape and still-lives (some almost archaic in their direct and simple statement), and not canvases which abandoned all semblance to natural form. Russell and Macdonald-Wright were still occupied tentatively in expressing the forms they knew best, each by his own individual method. But despite this compromise with tradition their exhibition presented a highly novel impression. There were human figures distorted almost out of recognition for the compositional needs of the canvas and painted in bars of pure colour; still-lives which seemed to be afire with chromatic brilliance; fantastic fruits; life-sized male figures in pure yellow-orange; and mountains of intense reds and purples, warm greens and violets. All the pictures, however, displayed decided organisational ability, and they possessed a more complete harmony of colour and line than had been achieved by any of the other younger painters.

But that quality of Synchromism which struck the discerning spectator more than any other was the force of volume resulting from the relations.h.i.+p of colours. For years painters had realised that certain colours when applied to certain forms rebelled at the combination, that they refused to remain pa.s.sively on the planes a.s.signed them. But this phenomenon had never been given any penetrating study. The more sensitive painters had merely changed their colours to more tractable ones, and had thus avoided the inevitable conflict that followed the fallacious commingling of two highly affirmative elements. Such chromatic inconsistencies should have taught artists the necessity of harmony for the sake of perfect order; but the matter was left to personal instinct. The clash between colour and form, however, was not due to any error or idiosyncrasy of taste, but to the absolute character of each separate hue which demanded, for its formal affinity, a fixed and unalterable s.p.a.cial extension. At an early date artists had recognised that blue and violet were cool and mournful colours, and that yellow and orange were warm and joyful ones. They applied this primitive discovery with the feeble results to be found in Neo-Impressionism. That these colours had any further character they never suspected. Their insight extended only to the emotional and a.s.sociative characteristics of the colours; the physical side was overlooked. Had the painters been more scientifically minded they would have known that these characteristics, which were the feminine traits, could not have existed in isolation; and they would have searched for the colours' dominating and directing properties which represented the masculine traits. Such a search would have led them to the meaning of colours in relation to volumes, that is, to colours' formal vibrations which alone are capable of expressing plastic fullness.

This vibratory quality Macdonald-Wright found and applied. By it he achieved light and shadow which resulted naturally by the juxtaposition of warm and cold colours. Russell, working altogether from the standpoint of light as revealed by form, attained practically the same results so long as his light came from the direction of the spectator, for in such a case the highest illumination was the most intense salient and, as with Macdonald-Wright, had therefore to be painted with a warm and highly opaque colour. But where the light came from a source at right angles to the line of vision, the expression reverted to an intensification of the Impressionistic method. Later this accident of light disappeared from Russell's work, and consequently his treatment became less restricted. This setting aside of light as the motif was a necessary departure, for when Russell carried his work into the higher elements of pure form, a realistic source of illumination would have made his suites of abstract volumes appear, not poised and relatively solid, but as paterae attached to an impenetrable substance. Under such conditions painting would merely be another and perhaps more beautiful way of making effective the ordonnances of surface form. But it would have no more power to create in us an aesthetic emotion than an exquisitely composed bas-relief.

The ambitions of the Synchromists went deeper. They desired to express, by means of colour, form which would be as complete and as simple as a Michelangelo drawing, and which would give subjectively the same emotion of form that the Renaissance master gives objectively. They wished to create images of such logical structure that the imagination would experience their unrecognisable reality in the same way our eyes experience the recognisable realities of life. They strove to bring about a new and hitherto unperceived reality which would be as definite and moving as the commonplace realities of every day, in short, to find an abstract statement for life itself by the use of forms which had no definable aspects. The Synchromists' chief technical method of obtaining this abstract equivalent for materiality was to make use of the inherent and absolute movement of colours toward and away from the spectator, by placing colours on forms in exact accord with the propensities of those colours to approach or recede from the eye. The Futurists had spoken of drawing the spectator into the centre of the picture, there to struggle with the princ.i.p.als of the work. They failed in this ambition because their canvases lacked the intense tactility of volume. The Synchromists, by making the enjoyment of form purely subjective, and by expressing form both by objectivity of line and the subjectivity of colour, achieved the ambition of both the Futurists and Cezanne. The latter's desire was ever toward a pure and subjective art. Although his colour viewed objectively is much like the Impressionists', the pleasure of the Impressionistic vision disappears when the eye is satisfied, whereas our emotions begin to work on a Cezanne only after the visual enjoyment has run its course.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SYNCHROMIE COSMIQUE by MORGAN RUSSELL]

Where Cezanne obtained a block solidity by the intelligent addition of local colour to light and by the subtraction of light from local colour, the Synchromists reject all local colour and paint only with hues which express the desired form. The position of a given volume in s.p.a.ce dictates to them the colour with which it is to be painted. Consequently a receding volume whose position is behind the other volumes is never painted a pure yellow, for that colour advances toward the spectator's eye; and a solid volume which projects further than the others is never painted violet, for violet expresses not solidity but a quality of s.p.a.ce, something intangible and translucent. All colours and tones and admixtures are answerable to the law of natural placement. This law is not absolute; it does not anchor each colour at a specific and unchangeable distance from the eye, but it determines the relative position of colours in s.p.a.ce according to the influence of environmental colours, thereby making their position both dependent and directing but none the less inevitable. The perfecting of this principle by the Synchromists introduced an added element of poise and a new emotion in painting-poise, because, by changing a line or a colour, the formal solid constructed by interdependent hues would s.h.i.+ft and adopt another position answering to the needs of the new order:-a new emotion, because colour in all painting before Cezanne had been used for ornament or for the dramatic reinforcement of the drawing or subject, and in Cezanne colour had been employed to express subjectively the emotions of volumes found in nature.

In Synchromism, which was first inspired by natural forms, all considerations other than light forces (as with Russell) and form (as with Macdonald-Wright) and composition (as used by both) were abolished.