Picasso, Matisse, Brancusi and Arthur Lee

An American Novelist Passes an Afternoon in a Sculptor's Studio in New York

GLENWAY WESCOTT

author of "The Apple of the Eye"

A RTHUR LEE, the sculptor, is altogether too little known in America. Lately, however, the Metropolitan Museum has purchased a fine marble of his. Just after that event, I chanced in on him at his studio on Macdougal Alley.

The dank January light forced its way through the sky-lights upon piles of books and photographs, upon wicker chairs, boxes, and model stands. Arthur Lee's studio looked like a storeroom. Everything in it was powdered with plaster; crumbs of plaster flattened under foot; the sculptor appeared to revel in it, and already there were a few pale dabs upon my coat. Chunks of clay falling from the armature, a large figure rising in the centre of the room like a crumbling mummy with iron bones. A head of clay was swathed in wet rags. Breathless plaster bodies, variously tall, stood all around, each arrested in a momentary quietude.

In their midst a marble torso called Volupte lifted from its base—the arms that were not there, raised above her head; the mouth that was not there, seeming at once to yawn and to smile. As if, I thought, a slighter Venus felt, mingling with her blood, dripping through her veins; a dreamily inflaming drug. Sitting before this Venus, which had just been purchased for the Metropolitan Museum I began to wonder how she had come into existence in my day.

"How did it happen," I began, "that you, who knew Brancusi, the modernist sculptor, in his youth, and yours, should give us now a torso that might have been dug up in Carthage by Count Prorok?"

Arthur Lee smiled, and on his face that seems to have inherited the sea-beaten look of his Norwegian grandfathers, the smile was as indolent as the one I imagined on the invisible face of Miss Venus. "Don't forget," he said, "that we never worked together. It was not our ambition, but late afternoons and evenings that we shared. In fact, when Brancusi sent those heads like monstrous, oval pearls, to the Armoury show in New York before the war,

I did not realize that the name of the sculptor was my friend's name. When I went back to Paris I was sitting in a cafe when some one, pointing to my boyhood friend, said, 'Brancusi.' I rushed between the tables and embraced him. 'Do you mean to say,' I shouted, 'that you are Brancusi?' 'I am the very man.' 'But I thought he would be the wildest wild man in the Quarter, and you—' 'My friend, have you forgotten that we liked each other so much that we made a pact never to visit each other's studios, lest our friendship be lost in the bigotries of art?' "

G. W. "Did you discover his secret? Did you learn why the simple man did such curious work? "

A. L. "I asked him one day, as casually as I could, 'Why, with all your skill, do you undertake nothing but abstract heads? ' He said, 'I would rather make them and be wrong, than make the Venus de Milo and be right; for she has been done. And she is unendurably old.' He is not altogether simple; say instead, he is gentle. But ..."

G. W. "I saw him but once, as he followed Tzara and Yvonne George into the Dome; I remember the iron and white tufts of his beard, and his slow pace, the pace of a bewildered man, but one who is happy in his bewilderment . . ."

A. L. "Nevertheless, he looks like Carlyle, and when he brings in Turkish coffee and liqueurs for his guests, as gently as a woman, there is something very severe in his suavity. He had as his neighbour a sculptor who had made a sword hilt for the King of the Belgians. At one time this Belgian's wife was so ill that the sound of stone-cutting annoyed her; and Brancusi, eager to be at work, began to build inside his studio a sound-proof wall of plaster blocks about a foot square. But the building of a sound-proof wall is not a soundless operation, and the Belgian came in once more to complain.

Brancusi stood on a ladder, and glared down at his neighbour, infuriated by the thanklessness of his task. Then he shouted, 'If you don't want to be killed, go!' and threw his hammer after the terrified maker of sword hilts."

The marble of Lee's Venus had been stained with tobacco juice and rubbed down with oil; and in the New York winter light, so like the light of an enormous cellar, the subtle planes palpitated one upon another, overlapping softly as ripples of water overlap. The sculptor asked if I liked the colour of the marble, and said that he had tried to get the tone of church candle wax. It resembled no less, I thought, the pearliness of almonds scarcely tanned by the fire. With his tapering fingers, like the fingers of one of Van Dyck's gentlemen, but much stronger, Arthur Lee caressed the torso.

G. W. "You and he both went to the Beaux Arts, did you not? And you never speak of it."

A. L. "I wasted three years there; that is tribute enough. The real Beaux Arts was Gertrude Stein's drawing-room, which we called the Sacred Wood. There were Gertrude Stein —her lucid eyes and her laughter—and her brother Leo with his laborious mind. There were Matisse, Derain, and Picasso. There were the rarest books and photographs, and if the guests grew interested in anything which required illustration, the Steins hunted, and brought them out, and turned pages, like a pair of librarians in heaven."

G. W. "But they were all painters in that house . . ."

A. "L. "But it was aesthetics we discussed, not palettes or stone-carving. Do you know how Matisse became a painter, and why he turned for a while to sculpture? As a young man he was a scientist, but it amused him to go to his friends' studios on Sundays to copy their pictures. Then some one said to him, 'If you want to copy, go to the Louvre; copy masterpieces.' So he would sit down before the little Dutch canvasses, and as he worked, he would brighten their faded colours. Then he thought, 'Why should I imitate these gloomy things? I will arrange some flowers and fruit, and paint a still life myself.' He sent this canvas to the Salon d'Automne. Thereupon his logical mind proposed, as the next step, a portrait. His wife sat for him, and a reflected green light fell in an obtuse streak along her nose. Matisse peered at it over his spectacles, and transferred it in clear Veronese green to his canvas. All Paris laughed, but Miss Stein, laughing with the rest, bought it and took it home. Matisse said, 'Everybody's mad or I'm mad; I shall find out; I shall try sculpture.'

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"There was a model in the quarter who was the smallest giant in the world. He had great Assyrian calves, and a cavity in his chest as large as two fists. Matisse worked with this man every other day for two years. He cast the bronze himself, and the arms fell off. He looked at it, and said, 'I know that I am not mad.'

"Morgan Russell and I went to Clamart while Matisse was painting the Music and Dance for Russia, which took another two years. 'You see,' he said, 'things aren't easier, but I know what I want.' He was changing a head that looked to us like a goop's head, humming the Ninth Symphony as he worked. 'Now,' he said, 'don't you think I have made it more nobler And I must make the flowers also more noble. You boys talk so well} we shall see what you know; we shall see if your intelligence is practical.' He wiped out a bunch of tulips. 'Russell, go out of the room. Now, Lee, where shall we put the flowers:' I pointed to a corner of the canvas. Matisse beamed approbation from the top of his ladder. 'Russell, come back. Where would you put the flowers to make them more nobler' Russell indicated the same place. 'Marvellous! Amazing!' cried Matisse, and resumed his singing and painting.

"But he has had no followers, while Picasso was driven on, from extreme to extreme, by his imitators. One day in the Rotonde, Picasso sat looking at a tree, and presently he said, 'A tree has no design. It is disgusting!' Thereupon all his disciples went about announcing that a tree was formless, that Nature was anti-design. Picasso heard how they had made a doctrine of his distaste, so he waited until another time when they were gathered around him, and again he stared at the tree. 'My God,' he shouted, 'there is no design so beautiful as a tree!' The faces of his disciples fell.

"In 1914 some one asked him if he would never do acrobats again. He replied: 'I was twenty. If I live long enough, I shall be forty. I shall never be twenty again.' "

G. W. "The velocities of our day have sharpened in every one the terror of death . . ."

A. L. "Thc-terror of death, and the love of death. For Picasso will not do one thing two days in succession, and he has made sculpture of paper."

Arthur Lee motioned toward his torso, which seemed to shiver in the waning light like a great baroque pearl. "I took that girl to his studio, into which he permitted the concierge to come only once in six months. There were four incomplete paintings, each with its palette on the floor beneath, which was heaped and strewn and carpeted with magazines, halftones, and newspaper clippings, so-that we had to tiptoe nervously, and jump from one clear space to another. On the walls also were pinned a miscellany of reproductions—Ingres beside photographs of society women, Negro images beside wheels, valves, and ball-bearings. The girl who posed for Volupte paused before one of the paintings, wonderiag aloud if it would offend him if she asked what it was. 'When I started it,' he said, 'it was a woman. Now it is only painting.' I thought—only cubism, though by contrast with the disorder of that room, the painting which 'had been a woman seemed actually to possess lucidity and calm."

G. W. "Perhaps it was the relation between his arranged disorder and the hurricane derangements, the hurricane accumulations of modern life, which made his fame suddenly so great."

A. L. "Because modern life is a novelty, must our arts also be novelties? I suppose no painter has ever been so celebrated. Raphael and Rubens were unknown in Japan and America and Australia. It is as if Paris were the world's heart, and every pulsation carried Picasso's name to the borders of savagery." It is not because of any correspondence between his imagination and the needs of other men's minds, but merely by virtue of his giant energy. He has invented more modes of painting than ten painters could have brought to perfection. His talent alone might have been called genius."

G. W. "But you think he has failed of mastery?"

A. L. "He has mastered only a sort of divine vaudeville. As a man who works in material which decays— paper or wax—so he has worked in ideas which will decay."

G. W. "And what is eternal?"

A. L. "The human body, for example. Nature endures, by its fecundity. I have seen on the beaches bodies more beautiful than the marbles of the Greeks, bodies of a beauty which must have been seen, but which has not yet preoccupied the artist's eye. The hands of Picasso were able to confine this mobile, this drifting loveliness to pictures by which tired or less keen eyes might have been guided many hundreds of years. He has preferred to startle his generation, to hector the critics, to fire inferior minds, with his vagaries."

G. W. "What is he like, in person?"

A. L. "He was magnificent. So energetic that when one walked with him, he pushed one off the sidewalk with his strong shoulders. When I saw him last, he looked old; the magic had gone from his presence.

The early New York darkness—a porous gloom, a merely intensified greyness—had come. I rose to go, remembering my question: 'How did it happen that you, who knew Brancusi and Picasso . . .' It had not been answered; it would require many afternoons to achieve the suggestion of an answer. Arthur Lee had explained as phenomenal the work of his friends, in comparison with which his own work was a phenomenon. Did he realize that his Volupte, in her sensual grace, her fruit-like simplicity—she who seemed meant for a memorial of joy—did he realize that she was phenomenal? I saw on my friend's face the sadness, not precisely sadness, but the loneliness of a classicist in a period whose greatest talent had pasted strips of newspaper upon his canvas. "He is the fallen angel," Arthur Lee said. He was still thinking of Picasso.