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Page 14
A parallel course has been followed by the Impressionist movement
in painting. It is seen in its dogmatic and most naturalistic
form in so-called Neo-Impressionism. The theory of this is to put
on the canvas the whole glitter and brilliance of nature, and not
only an isolated aspect of her.
It is interesting to notice three practically contemporary and
totally different groups in painting. They are (1) Rossetti and
his pupil Burne-Jones, with their followers; (2) Bocklin and his
school; (3) Segantini, with his unworthy following of
photographic artists. I have chosen these three groups to
illustrate the search for the abstract in art. Rossetti sought to
revive the non-materialism of the pre-Raphaelites. Bocklin busied
himself with the mythological scenes, but was in contrast to
Rossetti in that he gave strongly material form to his legendary
figures. Segantini, outwardly the most material of the three,
selected the most ordinary objects (hills, stones, cattle, etc.)
often painting them with the minutest realism, but he never
failed to create a spiritual as well as a material value, so that
really he is the most non-material of the trio.
These men sought for the "inner" by way of the "outer."
By another road, and one more purely artistic, the great seeker
after a new sense of form approached the same problem. Cezanne
made a living thing out of a teacup, or rather in a teacup he
realized the existence of something alive. He raised still life
to such a point that it ceased to be inanimate.
He painted these things as he painted human brings, because he
was endowed with the gift of divining the inner life in
everything. His colour and form are alike suitable to the
spiritual harmony. A man, a tree, an apple, all were used by
Cezanne in the creation of something that is called a "picture,"
and which is a piece of true inward and artistic harmony. The
same intention actuates the work of one of the greatest of the
young Frenchmen, Henri Matisse. He paints "pictures," and in
these "pictures" endeavours to reproduce the divine.[Footnote:
Cf. his article in KUNST UND KUNSTLER, 1909, No. 8.] To attain
this end he requires as a starting point nothing but the object
to be painted (human being or whatever it may be), and then the
methods that belong to painting alone, colour and form.
By personal inclination, because he is French and because he is
specially gifted as a colourist, Matisse is apt to lay too much
stress on the colour. Like Debussy, he cannot always refrain from
conventional beauty; Impressionism is in his blood. One sees
pictures of Matisse which are full of great inward vitality,
produced by the stress of the inner need, and also pictures which
possess only outer charm, because they were painted on an outer
impulse. (How often one is reminded of Manet in this.) His work
seems to be typical French painting, with its dainty sense of
melody, raised from time to time to the summit of a great hill
above the clouds.
But in the work of another great artist in Paris, the Spaniard
Pablo Picasso, there is never any suspicion of this conventional
beauty. Tossed hither and thither by the need for self-
expression, Picasso hurries from one manner to another. At times
a great gulf appears between consecutive manners, because Picasso
leaps boldly and is found continually by his bewildered crowd of
followers standing at a point very different from that at which
they saw him last. No sooner do they think that they have reached
him again than he has changed once more. In this way there arose
Cubism, the latest of the French movements, which is treated in
detail in Part II. Picasso is trying to arrive at
constructiveness by way of proportion. In his latest works (1911)
he has achieved the logical destruction of matter, not, however,
by dissolution but rather by a kind of a parcelling out of its
various divisions and a constructive scattering of these
divisions about the canvas. But he seems in this most recent work
distinctly desirous of keeping an appearance of matter. He
shrinks from no innovation, and if colour seems likely to balk
him in his search for a pure artistic form, he throws it
overboard and paints a picture in brown and white; and the
problem of purely artistic form is the real problem of his life.
In their pursuit of the same supreme end Matisse and Picasso
stand side by side, Matisse representing colour and Picasso form.
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