Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh

And the Part They Have Played in Modern Art

STEPHEN HAWEIS

THEY say that the first man who carried an umbrella down the Strand in London was stoned to death. People thought him a dangerous lunatic. The umbrella was a queer shape and he was opposing his human will to the Divine Will which ordained that when the rain fell upon the grateful earth, man ought to be equally grateful—and get wet. Of course, when the pioneer was dead, honour was satisfied. It was no longer an innovation to carry an umbrella in the Strand, so the crowd went home and made serviceable imitations. At this day one may carry an umbrella anywhere with complete security. Humanity has progressed a little, though it was obliged to register its usual disapproval of change, in the usual manner.

WHEN Giotto began to paint pictures which did not resemble those of Cimabue and the fashionable Byzantine school, there were many who thought the innovation dangerous and impious. Every radical change in the method of approaching pictorial expression has always met with violent opposition. In our own time, changes which hitherto have only happened every hundred years or so have been frequent and drastic and the age in which we live will be remembered by future generations as one of the greatest and most interesting of Art Epochs. In England, Turner revolutionized landscape painting and among his works are many canvases which, only recently brought out from the cellars to which almighty Ruskin consigned them, foreshadow in some degree the works of the post-impressionists. Rossetti was responsible, together with Ford Madox Brown, for another eruption of the Art volcano. Whistler led yet another far-reaching movement which made critics and Academicians squirm in their death beds. In France, Monet gave birth to the First Impressionist school, a family of boys and girls which grew up rapidly and married all sorts of people! Monticelli, whom every one thought mad as well as drunk, flung paint at panels with careless enthusiasm, the results of which sometimes resembled the sketches and smaller pictures of Diaz. Now the problem of the dishonest dealer is how to get Diaz's name off the picture, so that Monticelli's may be sustituted!

MANET was refused at the Salon but exhibited his work with Whistler and manydistinguished confreres in the Salon des Refuses which afterwards became the Salon des Independants, where anyone could show his pictures without submitting them to & jury for admission. Pouitillism came into existence with Van Rysselberghe, Seurac, and Signac. Post Impressionism followed with Cezanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin soon to be developed into something new by Matisse and Picasso. Futurism burst like an anarchist outrage among the Italians. Marinetti had discovered talent among some of his friends and said so. He also discovered some talent in himself and said so again —louder. Zang-tum-tum! That was the name of his book of poems, many of which could only.be repeated properly to the accompaniment of broken crockery and flying hardware! Could music and poetry sit still in the tradition of Wagner and Swinburne—no, Schoenberg and Schriabine made infernos of cacophony to old fashioned ears, Masefield dared to print "damn" with all its letters, and even that other terrible word indicating a haenior rhagenous condition by which the vulgar in England register their deepest convictions and emotions. "Break, Break the Old Tables" shouted Nietsche. The infuriated artists, long bound by pink ribbon conventions in rosescented prisons, sprang up and did things. Walt Whitman Was now an old Master: None of the madmen I have named were half as mad as they seem to the stock broker on his way to Wall Street. Each hasdiscovered something, each has found a tiny bit of Truth, perhaps not very much, but enough to fulfil the promise The Truth has niade them free.

Madness indeed is not the least offensive epithet applied to the Shrine-breakers. If any abuse has been forgotten it may be printed now, for the new men have made it possible—though not necessary!

AS we have said, Impressionism attempts. to express what one sees in one comprehensive view of nature at any given moment. Its aim is truth of impression, which is just as real a truth as the attempt to represent what actually exists by the process of copying each detail as faithfully as may be and colouring it with earnest care and attention. The difference lies between what you see in a moment and what you may see with an investigating and recording eye. No doubt when man tried to put both eyes into a profile face he thought he was getting near the truth because we know that most men have two eyes. In a sense he was recording a fact; in fact, he was recording a lie. It is not easy to determine what Truth is, but if we can determine from what angle a Truth is approached, it becomes considerably easier to discover if the artist has or has not succeeded in his aim. That is the first snag we meet with in the consideration of Modem Art. The General public presupposes that it knows what a picture should be like. It supposes that everything enclosed in a gold frame is intended to represent Nature as it commonly appears or at least as it is accustomed to see it conventionalized.

Clear the mind of this illusion and Modern Art at once becomes easier to understand.

ALL we have to do now is to find out what it is meant to be and what it is for. That being so the time is not yet ripe for abuse and expressions on the artist's character. It is time for investigating the reason why the artist has not done exactly what we were expecting to see. Why has he not followed in the footsteps of the Old Masters whom we revere, although they bore us to tears when we have to take our country cousins to see them?

The artist's reply is that he did follow as long as he could. His reply is that he has studied the Old Masters and any number of other old things and has come to the conclusion that what they did, has been done about as well as man may ever hope to succeed in doing it. He finds, however, that to continue doing that is to mark time, and to mark time for long, besides being a weariness to the spirit and the flesh is to spoil a perfectly good piece of ground on which something new might grow. He can't continue in the path because the path has stopped. It is not even going in the direction he wants to go. Blindly he starts out in another as he feels his need direct. We are not obliged to follow him but we can all refrain from throwing stones and making a hard road harder.

THE Impressionists, led by Monet, Manet, Renoir, Degas, and ably backed up by Sisley, Pisarro and a host of others met and mastered a thousand problems which came into existence owing to the new point of view. Little by little these artists who were more interested in light and colour and in form, as it appears, in contradistinction to how it actually is, felt less interest in the subject under consideration than the method of attacking it. If the subject of their pictures happens to be pretty that is not the principal reason for painting it. It may even be thought that the impressionists deliberately chose ugly and uninteresting motifs in order not to be led away by their charm. The subject picture fell from the first place in their hearts to the last. The noble precept it conveyed was swamped for them by the inferiority of its presentment. Impressionist began to feel that worship before the God who made the sea blue and clothed the Everlasting hills in purple was a meeter service for that alone than the contemplation of "Pussy's fiist violin lesson" or Doggie adorned with Grandpapa's Spectacles. In fact they disposed of all the KissMammy pictures and emotions with one mighty swipe. The greater aspects of Nature in her entirety were of more, serious importance to them than faint and frivolous criticisms of details.

(Continued on page 116)

(Continued from page 73)

It is not wrong to this day for a picture to convey a meaning or even to tell a story, but most creative artists feel that these expressions belong more fitly to literature or to rhetoric. Serious painting to-day occupies itself almost exclusively with what cannot find expression by any other means. That is its province. Every kind of use to which paint can be put was tried, to express what the great impressionists had indicated in their works. Freedom to use any method was the right they demanded and won for themselves.

THEN there arose a new set of painters, each with a slightly different aspect, or a point of view which, as it arose directly out of the impressionists studies may be called Post Impressionism, though it is merely an amplification of the First movement.

Cezanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh are the best known names of this school. Their work was Impressionism, but it aimed at a different line of impression. Different essential truths impressed them as being of superior and vital importance. For example, Cezanne was not impressed so vividly with the fact that a tree is composed of thousands of little bits of things (viz leaves) attached to a big thing (viz the trunk and branches). He saw it as a mass of colour which must first of all be true in its largest sense in relation to what was before and behind it. He studied the "values" or the intensity of one mass of colour against another.

(Continued on page 118)

A slow laborious worker who worked untiringly to attain perfection of what # he thought of paramount importance in every particular, but you never find Cezanne attempting with tricks to represent the delicate tracery of foliage against the sky nor the surface of lichened bark upon a tree trunk. You may suspect that he could not have done it, but it is wiser to say that we do not know as the matter did not interest him.

CÉZANNE never lived to sec himself acclaimed the head of a school, he lived quietly upon a small income painting without attempting to force himself upon public notice often, it is said, leaving his canvases in the field where he painted them.

Gauguin was a great colourist and a great decorator. Like Cezanne he is now dead and the world allowed him to die without giving him a great wall or building to decorate just as it let Aubrey Beardsley and Charles Conder die without designing ballets which might have rivalled the creations of the Italian Comedy of the eighteenth century. Gauguin was also a consummate draughtsman, but he chose to simplify form in a way that the general public of his day were not accustomed to see it. He used and adapted the modem experience with regard to colour and arranged masses of gorgeous hues in relation to each other from the point of view of their decorative glory. Often he used forms so simply that it seemed as though a child had done it. He used shapes for his own purposes without any regard to what another person might think of them. At the same time he painted perfectly normal studies of people and things up till the end of his life when he felt so disposed. This was the man of French-Chilian parentage who abandoned Paris and French civilization to. bury himself in the South Seas. The last ten years of his life were spent in Tahiti and the Marquesas islands where he died in 1904, and the violent change of life and inspiration he received there produced his finest contributions to Art. Beyond a certain naive simplicity which was the dominant note of his character, Gauguin's early pictures in Brittany and the South of France are not so very different from the Impressionist Masters that were his contemporaries.

VAN GOGH was the fire-brand of the school. He fought and argued with Gauguin for preeminence and recognition. He was intensely vital and violent in his reaction to life. If the sun shone on the apple blossoms and the birds sang, what paint could express the vivid glory of what he saw and felt. The pink blossoms and the blue sky must needs also express the scream of the black bird disturbed from her nest. Was there a man digging potatoes? It was not the colour of his trousers that interested Van Gogh most as it might have done with Monet—was he in the landscape as a vital integral part? Was he digging? Then let him DIG, by gum! If Van Gogh could not make him look as if he was digging till the perspiration rolled down his nose— that picture was a failure, a damned failure. Bum it!

Do you see how the secondary impression received from nature begins to creep into Art as the most important thing! The impression of the whole is sought first expressed in a purely personal manner. The emotional reaction perforce must be the next step—to emphasize the intellectual or emotional reaction apart from the first direct impression from Nature and the technical methods is obviously the next step to be taken.

LET US notice in passing what another felt about a labourer with a hoe. Jean Francois Millet painted the peasantry about him all his life. The Angelus is now one of the celebrated pictures of the world. Millet loved the peasant, the life in the fields, he loved to see the rhythmic swing of a man digging or hoeing or reaping. It meant to him the dignity of manual labour, not very far removed from a literary concept bliss, and it meant the essential nobility of a simple soul perfectly in tune with the phase of life he was fitted for, a subject that poets and philosophers have dealt with in a thousand different guises. The Artist knew that where a man digged there he would plant, he loved the work stained clothes and horny hands because they were the symbol of honesty simplicity and endeavour. He delighted in the glow of the evening sun upon the Earth like creatures and he felt the distinction of Greece in the hang of a homespun skirt. A sincere Christian himself he shared the prayers of the farmer's lad when the Angelus tolled and had he been a poet in words as he was in paint he would have written something exactly parallel and even more complete may be than the great picture by which he will be chiefly remembered.

BUT Van Gogh, if he was interested in anything besides the action and vigour of a man in relation to a landscape was probably more interested in the potato to be. He liked to see a strong man dig and hoped he was doing it well. "Whatsoever thy hand ' findeth to do, do it with thy might." Whether Van Gogh cared for the Angelus or had any secret dreams about the dignity of toil I know not, but Moore may even say that what Vincent Van Gogh attempted, whether he succeeded or failed, and he did one as often as the other, he did it with his might; and his might was that of a giant.