Kenyon Cox - Artist and Public
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Kenyon Cox >> Artist and Public
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9 ARTIST AND PUBLIC
AND OTHER
ESSAYS ON ART SUBJECTS
BY
KENYON COX
[Illustration: From a photograph by Braun, Clement & Co.
Plate 1.--Millet. "The Goose Girl."
In the collection of Mme. Saulnier, Bordeaux.]
ARTIST AND PUBLIC
AND OTHER
ESSAYS ON ART SUBJECTS
BY
KENYON COX
_WITH THIRTY-TWO ILLUSTRATIONS_
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK MCMXIV
_Copyright, 1914, by Charles Scribner's Sons
Published September, 1914_
TO
J.D.C.
IN GRATEFUL RECOGNITION OF UNFAILING KINDNESS
THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED
PREFACE
In "The Classic Point of View," published three years ago, I endeavored
to give a clear and definitive statement of the principles on which all
my criticism of art is based. The papers here gathered together, whether
earlier or later than that volume, may be considered as the more
detailed application of those principles to particular artists, to whole
schools and epochs, even, in one case, to the entire history of the
arts. The essay on Raphael, for instance, is little else than an
illustration of the chapter on "Design"; that on Millet illustrates the
three chapters on "The Subject in Art," on "Design," and on "Drawing";
while "Two Ways of Painting" contrasts, in specific instances, the
classic with the modern point of view.
But there is another thread connecting these essays, for all of them
will be found to have some bearing, more or less direct, upon the
subject of the title essay. "The Illusion of Progress" elaborates a
point more slightly touched upon in "Artist and Public"; the careers of
Raphael and Millet are capital instances of the happy productiveness of
an artist in sympathy with his public or of the difficulties, nobly
conquered in this case, of an artist without public appreciation; the
greatest merit attributed to "The American School" is an abstention
from the extravagances of those who would make incomprehensibility a
test of greatness. Finally, the work of Saint-Gaudens is a noble example
of art fulfilling its social function in expressing and in elevating the
ideals of its time and country.
This last essay stands, in some respects, upon a different footing from
the others. It deals with the work and the character of a man I knew and
loved, it was originally written almost immediately after his death, and
it is therefore colored, to some extent, by personal emotion. I have
revised it, rearranged it, and added to it, and I trust that this
coloring may be found to warm, without falsifying, the picture.
The essay on "The Illusion of Progress" was first printed in "The
Century," that on Saint-Gaudens in "The Atlantic Monthly." The others
originally appeared in "Scribner's Magazine."
KENYON COX.
Calder House,
Croton-on-Hudson,
June 6, 1914.
CONTENTS
ESSAY PAGE
I. ARTIST AND PUBLIC 1
II. JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET 44
III. THE ILLUSION OF PROGRESS 77
IV. RAPHAEL 99
V. TWO WAYS OF PAINTING 134
VI. THE AMERICAN SCHOOL 149
VII. AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS 169
ILLUSTRATIONS
MILLET:
1. "The Goose Girl," _Saulnier Collection, Bordeaux_ _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
2. "The Sower," _Vanderbilt Collection, Metropolitan Museum, New York_ 46
3. "The Gleaners," _The Louvre_ 50
4. "The Spaders" 54
5. "The Potato Planter," _Shaw Collection_ 58
6. "The Grafter," _William Rockefeller Collection_ 62
7. "The New-Born Calf," _Art Institute, Chicago_ 66
8. "The First Steps," 70
9. "The Shepherdess," _Chauchard Collection, Louvre_ 72
10. "Spring," _The Louvre_ 74
RAPHAEL:
11. "Poetry," _The Vatican_ 112
12. "The Judgment of Solomon," _The Vatican_ 114
13. The "Disputa," _The Vatican_ 116
14. "The School of Athens," _The Vatican_ 118
15. "Parnassus," _The Vatican_ 120
16. "Jurisprudence," _The Vatican_ 122
17. "The Mass of Bolsena," _The Vatican_ 124
18. "The Deliverance of Peter," _The Vatican_ 126
19. "The Sibyls," _Santa Maria della Pace, Rome_ 128
20. "Portrait of Tommaso Inghirami," _Gardner Collection_ 130
JOHN S. SARGENT:
21. "The Hermit," _Metropolitan Museum, New York_ 136
TITIAN:
22. "Saint Jerome in the Desert," _Brera Gallery, Milan_ 142
SAINT-GAUDENS:
23. "Plaquette Commemorating Cornish Masque" 182
24. "Amor Caritas" 196
25. "The Butler Children" 206
26. "Sarah Redwood Lee" 208
27. "Farragut," _Madison Square, New York_ 212
28. "Lincoln," _Chicago, Ill._ 214
29. "Deacon Chapin," _Springfield, Mass._ 216
30. "Adams Memorial," _Washington, D.C._ 218
31. "Shaw Memorial," _Boston, Mass._ 220
32. "Sherman," _The Plaza, Central Park, New York_ 224
ARTIST AND PUBLIC
I
ARTIST AND PUBLIC
In the history of art, as in the history of politics and in the history
of economics, our modern epoch is marked off from all preceding epochs
by one great event, the French Revolution. Fragonard, who survived that
Revolution to lose himself in a new and strange world, is the last at
the old masters; David, some sixteen years his junior, is the first of
the moderns. Now if we look for the most fundamental distinction between
our modern art and the art of past times, I believe we shall find it to
be this: the art of the past was produced for a public that wanted it
and understood it, by artists who understood and sympathized with their
public; the art of our time has been, for the most part, produced for a
public that did not want it and misunderstood it, by artists who
disliked and despised the public for which they worked. When artist and
public were united, art was homogeneous and continuous. Since the
divorce of artist and public art has been chaotic and convulsive.
That this divorce between the artist and his public--this dislocation of
the right and natural relations between them--has taken place is
certain. The causes of it are many and deep-lying in our modern
civilization, and I can point out only a few of the more obvious ones.
The first of these is the emergence of a new public. The art of past
ages had been distinctively an aristocratic art, created for kings and
princes, for the free citizens of slave-holding republics, for the
spiritual and intellectual aristocracy of the church, or for a luxurious
and frivolous nobility. As the aim of the Revolution was the
destruction of aristocratic privilege, it is not surprising that a
revolutionary like David should have felt it necessary to destroy the
traditions of an art created for the aristocracy. In his own art of
painting he succeeded so thoroughly that the painters of the next
generation found themselves with no traditions at all. They had not only
to work for a public of enriched bourgeois or proletarians who had never
cared for art, but they had to create over again the art with which they
endeavored to interest this public. How could they succeed? The rift
between artist and public had begun, and it has been widening ever
since.
If the people had had little to do with the major arts of painting and
sculpture, there had yet been, all through the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance, a truly popular art--an art of furniture making, of
wood-carving, of forging, of pottery. Every craftsman was an artist in
his degree, and every artist was but a craftsman of a superior sort. Our
machine-making, industrial civilization, intent upon material progress
and the satisfaction of material wants, has destroyed this popular art;
and at the same time that the artist lost his patronage from above he
lost his support from below. He has become a superior person, a sort of
demi-gentleman, but he has no longer a splendid nobility to employ him
or a world of artist artisans to surround him and understand him.
And to the modern artist, so isolated, with no tradition behind him, no
direction from above and no support from below, the art of all times and
all countries has become familiar through modern means of communication
and modern processes of reproduction. Having no compelling reason for
doing one thing rather than another, or for choosing one or another way
of doing things, he is shown a thousand things that he may do and a
thousand ways of doing them. Not clearly knowing his own mind he hears
the clash and reverberation of a thousand other minds, and having no
certainties he must listen to countless theories.
Mr. Vedder has spoken of a certain "home-made" character which he
considers the greatest defect of his art, the character of an art
belonging to no distinctive school and having no definite relation to
the time and country in which it is produced. But it is not Mr. Vedder's
art alone that is home-made. It is precisely the characteristic note of
our modern art that all of it that is good for anything is home-made or
self-made. Each artist has had to create his art as best he could out of
his own temperament and his own experience--has sat in his corner like a
spider, spinning his web from his own bowels. If the art so created was
essentially fine and noble the public has at last found it out, but only
after years of neglect have embittered the existence and partially
crippled the powers of its creator. And so, to our modern imagination,
the neglected and misunderstood genius has become the very type of the
great artist, and we have allowed our belief in him to color and distort
our vision of the history of art. We have come to look upon the great
artists of all times as an unhappy race struggling against the
inappreciation of a stupid public, starving in garrets and waiting long
for tardy recognition.
The very reverse of this is true. With the exception of Rembrandt, who
himself lived in a time of political revolution and of the emergence to
power of a burgher class, you will scarce find an unappreciated genius
in the whole history of art until the beginning of the nineteenth
century. The great masters of the Renaissance, from Giotto to Veronese,
were men of their time, sharing and interpreting the ideals of those
around them, and were recognized and patronized as such. Rembrandt's
greatest contemporary, Rubens, was painter in ordinary to half the
courts of Europe, and Velazquez was the friend and companion of his
king. Watteau and Boucher and Fragonard painted for the frivolous
nobility of the eighteenth century just what that nobility wanted, and
even the precursors of the Revolution, sober and honest Chardin, Greuze
the sentimental, had no difficulty in making themselves understood,
until the revolutionist David became dictator to the art of Europe and
swept them into the rubbish heap with the rest.
It is not until the beginning of what is known as the Romantic movement,
under the Restoration, that the misunderstood painter of genius
definitely appears. Millet, Corot, Rousseau were trying, with
magnificent powers and perfect single-mindedness, to restore the art of
painting which the Revolution had destroyed. They were men of the utmost
nobility and simplicity of character, as far as possible from the
gloomy, fantastic, vain, and egotistical person that we have come to
accept as the type of unappreciated genius; they were classically minded
and conservative, worshippers of the great art of the past; but they
were without a public and they suffered bitter discouragement and long
neglect. Upon their experience is founded that legend of the
unpopularity of all great artists which has grown to astonishing
proportions. Accepting this legend, and believing that all great artists
are misunderstood, the artist has come to cherish a scorn of the public
for which he works and to pretend a greater scorn than he feels. He
cannot believe himself great _unless_ he is misunderstood, and he hugs
his unpopularity to himself as a sign of genius and arrives at that
sublime affectation which answers praise of his work with an exclamation
of dismay: "Is it as bad as that?" He invents new excesses and
eccentricities to insure misunderstanding, and proclaims the doctrine
that, as anything great must be incomprehensible, so anything
incomprehensible must be great. And the public has taken him, at least
partly, at his word. He may or may not be great, but he is certainly
incomprehensible and probably a little mad. Until he succeeds the public
looks upon the artist as a more or less harmless lunatic. When he
succeeds it is willing to exalt him into a kind of god and to worship
his eccentricities as a part of his divinity. So we arrive at a belief
in the insanity of genius. What would Raphael have thought of such a
notion, or that consummate man of the world, Titian? What would the
serene and mighty Veronese have thought of it, or the cool, clear-seeing
Velazquez? How his Excellency the Ambassador of his Most Catholic
Majesty, glorious Peter Paul Rubens, would have laughed!
It is this lack of sympathy and understanding between the artist and his
public--this fatal isolation of the artist--that is the cause of nearly
all the shortcomings of modern art; of the weakness of what is known as
official or academic art no less than of the extravagance of the art of
opposition. The artist, being no longer a craftsman, working to order,
but a kind of poet, expressing in loneliness his personal emotions, has
lost his natural means of support. Governments, feeling a responsibility
for the cultivation of art which was quite unnecessary in the days when
art was spontaneously produced in answer to a natural demand, have
tried to put an artificial support in its place. That the artist may
show his wares and make himself known, they have created exhibitions;
that he may be encouraged they have instituted medals and prizes; that
he may not starve they have made government purchases. And these
well-meant efforts have resulted in the creation of pictures which have
no other purpose than to hang in exhibitions, to win medals, and to be
purchased by the government and hung in those more permanent exhibitions
which we call museums. For this purpose it is not necessary that a
picture should have great beauty or great sincerity. It _is_ necessary
that it should be large in order to attract attention and sufficiently
well drawn and executed to seem to deserve recognition. And so was
evolved the salon picture, a thing created for no man's pleasure, not
even the artist's; a thing which is neither the decoration of a public
building nor the possible ornament of a private house; a thing which,
after it has served its temporary purpose, is rolled up and stored in a
loft or placed in a gallery where its essential emptiness becomes more
and more evident as time goes on. Such government-encouraged art had at
least the merit of a well-sustained and fairly high level of
accomplishment in the more obvious elements of painting. But as
exhibitions became larger and larger and the competition engendered by
them grew fiercer, it became increasingly difficult to attract attention
by mere academic merit. So the painters began to search for
sensationalism of subject, and the typical salon picture, no longer
decorously pompous, began to deal in blood and horror and sensuality. It
was Regnault who began this sensation hunt, but it has been carried much
further since his day than he can have dreamed of, and the modern salon
picture is not only tiresome but detestable.
The salon picture, in its merits and its faults, is peculiarly French,
but the modern exhibition has sins to answer for in other countries than
France. In England it has been responsible for a great deal of
sentimentality and anecdotage which has served to attract the attention
of a public that could not be roused to interest in mere painting.
Everywhere, even in this country, where exhibitions are relatively small
and ill-attended, it has caused a certain stridency and blatancy, a
keying up to exhibition pitch, a neglect of finer qualities for the sake
of immediate effectiveness.
Under our modern conditions the exhibition has become a necessity, and
it would be impossible for our artists to live or to attain a reputation
without it. The giving of medals and prizes and the purchase of works
of art by the state may be of more doubtful utility, though such efforts
at the encouragement of art probably do more good than harm. But there
is one form of government patronage that is almost wholly beneficial,
and that the only form of it which we have in this country--the awarding
of commissions for the decoration of public buildings. The painter of
mural decorations is in the old historical position, in sound and
natural relations to the public. He is doing something which is wanted
and, if he continues to receive commissions, he may fairly assume that
he is doing it in a way that is satisfactory. With the decorative or
monumental sculptor he is almost alone among modern artists in being
relieved of the necessity of producing something in the isolation of his
studio and waiting to see if any one will care for it; of trying,
against the grain, to produce something that he thinks may appeal to
the public because it does not appeal to himself; or of attempting to
bamboozle the public into buying what neither he nor the public really
cares for. If he does his best he may feel that he is as fairly earning
his livelihood as his fellow workmen, the blacksmith and the
stonecutter, and is as little dependent as they upon either charity or
humbug. The best that government has done for art in France is the
commissioning of the great decorative paintings of Baudry and Puvis. In
this country, also, governments, national, State, or municipal, are
patronizing art in the best possible way, and in making buildings
splendid for the people are affording opportunity for the creation of a
truly popular art.
Without any artificial aid from the government the illustrator has a
wide popular support and works for the public in a normal way; and,
therefore, illustration has been one of the healthiest and most
vigorous forms of modern art. The portrait-painter, too, is producing
something he knows to be wanted, and, though his art has had to fight
against the competition of the photograph and has been partially
vulgarized by the struggle of the exhibitions, it has yet remained, upon
the whole, comprehensible and human; so that much of the soundest art of
the past century has gone into portraiture. It is the painters of
pictures, landscape or genre, who have most suffered from the
misunderstanding between artist and public. Without guidance some of
them have hewed a path to deserved success. Others have wandered into
strange byways and no-thoroughfares.
The nineteenth century is strewn with the wrecks of such misunderstood
and misunderstanding artists, but it was about the sixties when their
searching for a way began to lead them in certain clearly marked
directions. There are three paths, in especial, which have been followed
since then by adventurous spirits: the paths of aestheticism, of
scientific naturalism, and of pure self-expression; the paths of
Whistler, of Monet, and of Cezanne.
Whistler was an artist of refined and delicate talent with great
weaknesses both in temperament and training; being also a very clever
man and a brilliant controversialist, he proceeded to erect a theory
which should prove his weaknesses to be so many virtues, and he nearly
succeeded in convincing the world of its validity. Finding the
representation of nature very difficult, he decided that art should not
concern itself with representation but only with the creation of
"arrangements" and "symphonies." Having no interest in the subject of
pictures, he proclaimed that pictures should have no subjects and that
any interest in the subject is vulgar. As he was a cosmopolitan with no
local ties, he maintained that art had never been national; and as he
was out of sympathy with his time, he taught that "art happens" and that
"there never was an artistic period." According to the Whistlerian
gospel, the artist not only has now no point of contact with the public,
but he should not have and never has had any. He has never been a man
among other men, but has been a dreamer "who sat at home with the women"
and made pretty patterns of line and color because they pleased him. And
the only business of the public is to accept "in silence" what he
chooses to give them.
This kind of rootless art he practised. Some of the patterns he produced
are delightful, but they are without imagination, without passion,
without joy in the material and visible world--the dainty diversions of
a dilettante. One is glad that so gracefully slender an art should
exist, but if it has seemed great art to us it is because our age is so
poor in anything better. To rank its creator with the abounding masters
of the past is an absurdity.
In their efforts to escape from the dead-alive art of the salon picture,
Monet and the Impressionists took an entirely different course. The
gallery painter's perfunctory treatment of subject bored them, and they
abandoned subject almost as entirely as Whistler had done. The sound if
tame drawing and the mediocre painting of what they called official art
revolted them as it revolted Whistler; but while he nearly suppressed
representation they could see in art nothing but representation. They
wanted to make that representation truer, and they tried to work a
revolution in art by the scientific analysis of light and the
invention of a new method of laying on paint. Instead of joining in
Whistler's search for pure pattern they fixed their attention on facts
alone, or rather on one aspect of the facts, and in their occupation
with light and the manner of representing it they abandoned form almost
as completely as they had abandoned significance and beauty.
So it happened that Monet could devote some twenty canvases to the study
of the effects of light, at different hours of the day, upon two straw
stacks in his farmyard. It was admirable practice, no doubt, and neither
scientific analysis nor the study of technical methods is to be
despised; but the interest of the public, after all, is in what an
artist does, not in how he learns to do it. The twenty canvases together
formed a sort of demonstration of the possibilities of different kinds
of lighting. Any one of them, taken singly, is but a portrait of two
straw stacks, and the world will not permanently or deeply care about
those straw stacks. The study of light is, in itself, no more an
exercise of the artistic faculties than the study of anatomy or the
study of perspective; and while Impressionism has put a keener edge upon
some of the tools of the artist, it has inevitably failed to produce a
school of art.
After Impressionism, what? We have no name for it but
Post-Impressionism. Such men as Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh recognized
the sterility of Impressionism and of a narrow aestheticism, while they
shared the hatred of the aesthetes and the Impressionists for the current
art of the salons. No more than the aesthetes or the Impressionists were
they conscious of any social or universal ideals that demanded
expression. The aesthetes had a doctrine; the Impressionists had a method
and a technic. The Post-Impressionists had nothing, and were driven to
the attempt at pure self-expression--to the exaltation of the great god
Whim. They had no training, they recognized no traditions, they spoke to
no public. Each was to express, as he thought best, whatever he happened
to feel or to think, and to invent, as he went along, the language in
which he should express it. I think some of these men had the elements
of genius in them and might have done good work; but their task was a
heart-breaking and a hopeless one. An art cannot be improvised, and an
artist must have some other guide than unregulated emotion. The path
they entered upon had been immemorially marked "no passing"; for many of
them the end of it was suicide or the madhouse.
But whatever the aberrations of these, the true
Post-Impressionists--whatever the ugliness, the eccentricity, or the
moral dinginess into which they were betrayed--I believe them to have
been, in the main, honest if unbalanced and ill-regulated minds.
Whatever their errors, they paid the price of them in poverty, in
neglect, in death. With those who pretend to be their descendants to-day
the case is different; they are not paying for their eccentricity or
their madness, they are making it pay.
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