Kenyon Cox - Artist and Public

K >> Kenyon Cox >> Artist and Public

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The enormous engine of modern publicity has been discovered by these
men. They have learned to advertise, and they have found that morbidity,
eccentricity, indecency, extremes of every kind and of any degree are
capital advertisement. If one cannot create a sound and living art, one
can at least make something odd enough to be talked about; if one cannot
achieve enduring fame, one may make sure of a flaming notoriety. And, as
a money-maker, present notoriety is worth more than future fame, for the
speculative dealer is at hand. His interest is in "quick returns" and
he has no wish to wait until you are famous--or dead--before he can sell
anything you do. His process is to buy anything he thinks he can "boom,"
to "boom" it as furiously as possible, and to sell it before the "boom"
collapses. Then he will exploit something else, and there's the rub.
Once you have entered this mad race for notoriety, there is no drawing
out of it. The same sensation will not attract attention a second time;
you must be novel at any cost. You must exaggerate your exaggerations
and out-Herod Herod, for others have learned how easy the game is to
play, and are at your heels. It is no longer a matter of
misunderstanding and being misunderstood by the public; it is a matter
of deliberately flouting and outraging the public--of assuming
incomprehensibility and antagonism to popular feeling as signs of
greatness. And so is founded what Frederic Harrison has called the
"shock-your-grandmother school."

It is with profound regret that one must name as one of the founders of
this school an artist of real power, who has produced much admirable
work--Auguste Rodin. At the age of thirty-seven he attained a sudden and
resounding notoriety, and from that time he has been the most talked-of
artist in Europe. He was a consummate modeller, a magnificent workman,
but he had always grave faults and striking mannerisms. These faults and
mannerisms he has latterly pushed to greater and greater extremes while
neglecting his great gift, each work being more chaotic and fragmentary
in composition, more hideous in type, more affected and emptier in
execution, until he has produced marvels of mushiness and incoherence
hitherto undreamed of and has set up as public monuments fantastically
mutilated figures with broken legs or heads knocked off. Now, in his
old age, he is producing shoals of drawings the most extraordinary of
which few are permitted to see. Some selected specimens of them hang in
a long row in the Metropolitan Museum, and I assure you, upon my word as
a lifelong student of drawing, they are quite as ugly and as silly as
they look. There is not a touch in them that has any truth to nature,
not a line that has real beauty or expressiveness. They represent the
human figure with the structure of a jellyfish and the movement of a
Dutch doll; the human face with an expression I prefer not to
characterize. If they be not the symptoms of mental decay, they can be
nothing but the means of a gigantic mystification.

With Henri Matisse we have not to deplore the deliquescence of a great
talent, for we have no reason to suppose he ever had any. It is true
that his admirers will assure you he could once draw and paint as
everybody does; what he could _not_ do was to paint enough better than
everybody does to make his mark in the world; and he was a quite
undistinguished person until he found a way to produce some effect upon
his grandmother the public by shocking her into attention. His method is
to choose the ugliest models to be found; to put them into the most
grotesque and indecent postures imaginable; to draw them in the manner
of a savage, or a depraved child, or a worse manner if that be possible;
to surround his figures with blue outlines half an inch wide; and to
paint them in crude and staring colors, brutally laid on in flat masses.
Then, when his grandmother begins to "sit up," she is told with a grave
face that this is a reaction from naturalism, a revival of abstract line
and color, a subjective art which is not the representation of nature
but the expression of the artist's soul. No wonder she gasps and
stares!

It seemed, two or three years ago, that the limit of mystification had
been reached--that this comedy of errors could not be carried further;
but human ingenuity is inexhaustible, and we now have whole schools,
Cubists, Futurists, and the like, who joyously vie with each other in
the creation of incredible pictures and of irreconcilable and
incomprehensible theories. The public is inclined to lump them all
together and, so far as their work is concerned, the public is not far
wrong; yet in theory Cubism and Futurism are diametrically opposed to
each other. It is not easy to get any clear conception of the doctrines
of these schools, but, so far as I am able to understand them--and I
have taken some pains to do so--they are something like this:

Cubism is static; Futurism is kinetic. Cubism deals with bulk; Futurism
deals with motion. The Cubist, by a kind of extension of Mr. Berenson's
doctrine of "tactile values," assumes that the only character of objects
which is of importance to the artist is their bulk and solidity--what he
calls their "volumes." Now the form in which volume is most easily
apprehended is the cube; do we not measure by it and speak of the cubic
contents of anything? The inference is easy: reduce all objects to forms
which can be bounded by planes and defined by straight lines and angles;
make their cubic contents measurable to the eye; transform drawing into
a burlesque of solid geometry; and you have, at once, attained to the
highest art. The Futurist, on the other hand, maintains that we know
nothing but that things are in flux. Form, solidity, weight are
illusions. Nothing exists but motion. Everything is changing every
moment, and if anything were still we ourselves are changing. It is,
therefore, absurd to give fixed boundaries to anything or to admit of
any fixed relations in space. If you are trying to record your
impression of a face it is certain that by the time you have done one
eye the other eye will no longer be where it was--it may be at the other
side of the room. You must cut nature into small bits and shuffle them
about wildly if you are to reproduce what we really see.

Whatever its extravagance, Cubism remains a form of graphic art. However
pedantic and ridiculous its transformation of drawing, it yet recognizes
the existence of drawing. Therefore, to the Futurist, Cubism is
reactionary. What difference does it make, he asks, whether you draw a
head round or square? Why draw a head at all? The Futurist denies the
fundamental postulates of the art of painting. Painting has always, and
by definition, represented upon a surface objects supposed to lie
beyond it and to be seen through it. Futurism pretends to place the
spectator inside the picture and to represent things around him or
behind him as well as those in front of him. Painting has always assumed
the single moment of vision, and, though it has sometimes placed more
than one picture on the same canvas, it has treated each picture as seen
at a specific instant of time. Futurism attempts systematically to
combine the past and the future with the present, as if all the pictures
in a cinematograph film were to be printed one over the other; to paint
no instant but to represent the movement of time. It aims at nothing
less than the abrogation of all recognized laws, the total destruction
of all that has hitherto passed for art.

Do you recall the story of the man who tried to count a litter of pigs,
but gave it up because one little pig ran about so fast that he could
not be counted? One finds oneself in somewhat the same predicament when
one tries to describe these "new movements" in art. The movement is so
rapid and the men shift their ground so quickly that there is no telling
where to find them. You have no sooner arrived at some notion of the
difference between Cubism and Futurism than you find your Cubist doing
things that are both Cubist and Futurist, or neither Cubist nor
Futurist, according as you look at them. You find things made up of
geometrical figures to give volume, yet with all the parts many times
repeated to give motion. You find things that have neither bulk nor
motion but look like nothing so much as a box of Chinese tangrams
scattered on a table. Finally, you have assemblages of lines that do not
draw anything, even cubes or triangles; and we are assured that there
is now a newest school of all, called Orphism, which, finding still some
vestiges of intelligibility in any assemblage of lines, reduces
everything to shapeless blotches. Probably the first of Orphic pictures
was that produced by the quite authentic donkey who was induced to smear
a canvas by lashing a tail duly dipped in paint. It was given a title as
Orphic as the painting, was accepted by a jury anxious to find new forms
of talent, and was hung in the _Salon d'Automne._

In all this welter of preposterous theories there is but one thing
constant--one thing on which all these theorists are agreed. It is that
all this strange stuff is symbolic and shadows forth the impressions and
emotions of the artist: represents not nature but his feeling about
nature; is the expression of his mind or, as they prefer to call it, his
soul. It may be so. All art is symbolic; images are symbols; words are
symbols; all communication is by symbols. But if a symbol is to serve
any purpose of communication between one mind and another it must be a
symbol accepted and understood by both minds. If an artist is to choose
his symbols to suit himself, and to make them mean anything he chooses,
who is to say what he means or whether he means anything? If a man were
to rise and recite, with a solemn voice, words like "Ajakan maradak
tecor sosthendi," would you know what he meant? If he wished you to
believe that these symbols express the feeling of awe caused by the
contemplation of the starry heavens, he would have to tell you so _in
your own language_; and even then you would have only his word for it.
He may have meant them to express that, but do they? The apologists of
the new schools are continually telling us that we must give the
necessary time and thought to learn the language of these men before we
condemn them. Why should we? Why should not they learn the universal
language of art? It is they who are trying to say something. When they
have learned to speak that language and have convinced us that they have
something to say in it which is worth listening to, then, and not till
then, we may consent to such slight modification of it as may fit it
more closely to their thought.

If these gentlemen really believe that their capriciously chosen symbols
are fit vehicles for communication with others, why do they fall back on
that old, old symbol, the written word? Why do they introduce, in the
very midst of a design in which everything else is dislocated, a name or
a word in clear Roman letters? Or why do they give their pictures titles
and, lest you should neglect to look in the catalogue, print the title
quite carefully and legibly in the corner of the picture itself? They
know that they must set you to hunting for their announced subject or
you would not look twice at their puzzles.

Now, there is only one word for this denial of all law, this
insurrection against all custom and tradition, this assertion of
individual license without discipline and without restraint; and that
word is "anarchy." And, as we know, theoretic anarchy, though it may not
always lead to actual violence, is a doctrine of destruction. It is so
in art, and these artistic anarchists are found proclaiming that the
public will never understand or accept their art while anything remains
of the art of the past, and demanding that therefore the art of the past
shall be destroyed. It is actual, physical destruction of pictures and
statues that they call for, and in Italy, that great treasury of the
world's art, has been raised the sinister cry: "Burn the museums!" They
have not yet taken to the torch, but if they were sincere they would do
it; for their doctrine calls for nothing less than the reduction of
mankind to a state of primitive savagery that it may begin again at the
beginning.

Fortunately, they are not sincere. There may be among them those who
honestly believe in that exaltation of the individual and that revolt
against all law which is the danger of our age. But, for the most part,
if they have broken from the fold and "like sheep have gone astray,"
they have shown a very sheep-like disposition to follow the bell-wether.
They are fond of quoting a saying of Gauguin's that "one must be either
a revolutionist or a plagiary"; but can any one tell these
revolutionists apart? Can any one distinguish among them such definite
and logically developed personalities as mark even schoolmen and
"plagiarists" like Meissonier and Gerome? If any one of these men stood
alone, one might believe his eccentricities to be the mark of an extreme
individuality; one cannot believe it when one finds the same
eccentricities in twenty of them.

No, it is not for the sake of unhampered personal development that young
artists are joining these new schools; it is because they are offered a
short cut to a kind of success. As there are no more laws and no more
standards, there is nothing to learn. The merest student is at once set
upon a level with the most experienced of his instructors, and boys and
girls in their teens are hailed as masters. Art is at last made easy,
and there are no longer any pupils, for all have become teachers. To
borrow Doctor Johnson's phrase, "many men, many women, and many
children" could produce art after this fashion; and they do.

So right are the practitioners of this puerile art in their proclaimed
belief that the public will never accept it while anything else exists,
that one might be willing to treat it with the silent contempt it
deserves were it not for the efforts of certain critics and writers for
the press to convince us that it ought to be accepted. Some of these men
seem to be intimidated by the blunders of the past. Knowing that
contemporary criticism has damned almost every true artist of the
nineteenth century, they are determined not to be caught napping; and
they join in shouts of applause as each new harlequin steps upon the
stage. They forget that it is as dangerous to praise ignorantly as to
blame unjustly, and that the railer at genius, though he may seem more
malevolent, will scarce appear so ridiculous to posterity as the dupe of
the mountebank. Others of them are, no doubt, honest victims of that
illusion of progress to which we are all more or less subject--to that
ingrained belief that all evolution is upward and that the latest thing
must necessarily be the best. They forget that the same process which
has relieved man of his tail has deprived the snake of his legs and the
kiwi of his wings. They forget that art has never been and cannot be
continuously progressive; that it is only the sciences connected with
art that are capable of progress; and that the "Henriade" is not a
greater poem than the "Divine Comedy" because Voltaire has learned the
falsity of the Ptolemaic astronomy. Finally, these writers, like other
people, desire to seem knowing and clever; and if you appear to admire
vastly what no one else understands you pass for a clever man.

I have looked through a good deal of the writings of these "up-to-date"
critics in the effort to find something like an intelligible argument
or a definite statement of belief. I have found nothing but the
continually repeated assumption that these new movements, in all their
varieties, are "living" and "vital." I can find no grounds stated for
this assumption and can suppose only that what is changing with great
rapidity is conceived to be alive; yet I know nothing more productive of
rapid changes than putrefaction.

Do not be deceived. This is not vital art, it is decadent and corrupt.
True art has always been the expression by the artist of the ideals of
his time and of the world in which he lived--ideals which were his own
because he was a part of that world. A living and healthy art never has
existed and never can exist except through the mutual understanding and
co-operation of the artist and his public. Art is made for man and has a
social function to perform. We have a right to demand that it shall be
both human and humane; that it shall show some sympathy in the artist
with our thoughts and our feelings; that it shall interpret our ideals
to us in that universal language which has grown up in the course of
ages. We have a right to reject with pity or with scorn the stammerings
of incompetence, the babble of lunacy, or the vaporing of imposture. But
mutual understanding implies a duty on the part of the public as well as
on the part of the artist, and we must give as well as take. We must be
at the pains to learn something of the language of art in which we bid
the artist speak. If we would have beauty from him we must sympathize
with his aspiration for beauty. Above all, if we would have him
interpret for us our ideals we must have ideals worthy of such
interpretation. Without this co-operation on our part we may have a
better art than we deserve, for noble artists will be born, and they
will give us an art noble in its essence however mutilated and shorn of
its effectiveness by our neglect. It is only by being worthy of it that
we can hope to have an art we may be proud of--an art lofty in its
inspiration, consummate in its achievement, disciplined in its strength.

II

JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET

Jean Francois Millet, who lived hard and died poor, is now perhaps the
most famous artist of the nineteenth century. His slightest work is
fought for by dealers and collectors, and his more important pictures,
if they chance to change hands, bring colossal and almost incredible
prices. And of all modern reputations his, so far as we can see, seems
most likely to be enduring. If any painter of the immediate past is
definitively numbered with the great masters, it is he. Yet the popular
admiration for his art is based on a I misapprehension almost as
profound as that of those contemporaries who decried and opposed him.
They thought him violent, rude, ill-educated, a "man of the woods," a
revolutionist, almost a communist. We are apt to think of him as a
gentle sentimentalist, a soul full of compassion for the hard lot of the
poor, a man whose art achieves greatness by sheer feeling rather than by
knowledge and intellect. In spite of his own letters, in spite of the
testimony of many who knew him well, in spite of more than one piece of
illuminating criticism, these two misconceptions endure; and, for the
many, Millet is still either the painter of "The Man with the Hoe," a
powerful but somewhat exceptional work, or the painter of "L'Angelus,"
precisely the least characteristic picture he ever produced. There is a
legendary Millet, in many ways a very different man from the real one,
and, while the facts of his life are well known and undisputed, the
interpretation of them is colored by preconceptions and strained to make
them fit the legend.

Altogether too much, for instance, has been made of the fact that
Millet was born a peasant. He was so, but so were half the artists and
poets who come up to Paris and fill the schools and the cafes of the
student quarters. To any one who has known these young _rapins_, and
wondered at the grave and distinguished members of the Institute into
which many of them have afterward developed, it is evident that this
studious youth--who read Virgil in the original and Homer and
Shakespeare and Goethe in translations--probably had a much more
cultivated mind and a much sounder education than most of his fellow
students under Delaroche. Seven years after this Norman farmer's son
came to Paris, with a pension of 600 francs voted by the town council of
Cherbourg, the son of a Breton sabot-maker followed him there with a
precisely similar pension voted by the town council of Roche-sur-Yon;
and the pupil of Langlois had had at least equal opportunities with
the pupil of Sartoris. Both cases were entirely typical of French
methods of encouraging the fine arts, and the peasant origin of Millet
is precisely as significant as the peasant origin of Baudry.

[Illustration: Plate 2.--Millet. "The Sower."
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vanderbilt collection.]

Baudry persevered in the course marked out for him and, after failing
three times, received the _Prix de Rome_ and became the pensioner of the
state. Millet took umbrage at Delaroche's explanation that his support
was already pledged to another candidate for the prize, and left the
_atelier_ of that master after little more than a year's work. But that
he had already acquired most of what was to be learned there is shown,
if by nothing else, by the master's promise to push him for the prize
the year following. This was in 1838, and for a year or two longer
Millet worked in the life classes of Suisse and Boudin without a master.
His pension was first cut down and then withdrawn altogether, and he
was thrown upon his own resources. His struggles and his poverty during
the next few years were those of many a young artist, aggravated, in his
case, by two imprudent marriages. But during all the time that he was
painting portraits in Cherbourg or little nudes in Paris he was steadily
gaining reputation and making friends. If we had not the pictures
themselves to show us how able and how well-trained a workman he was,
the story told us by Wyatt Eaton, in "Modern French Masters," would
convince us. It was in the last year of Millet's life that he told the
young American how, in his early days, a dealer would come to him for a
picture and, "having nothing painted, he would offer the dealer a book
and ask him to wait for a little while that he might add a few touches
to the picture." He would then go into his studio and take a fresh
canvas, or a panel, and in two hours bring out a little nude figure,
which he had painted during that time, and for which he would receive
twenty or twenty-five francs. It was the work of this time that Diaz
admired for its color and its "immortal flesh painting"; that caused
Guichard, a pupil of Ingres, to tell his master that Millet was the
finest draughtsman of the new school; that earned for its author the
title of "master of the nude."

He did all kinds of work in these days, even painting signs and
illustrating sheet music, and it was all capital practice for a young
man, but it was not what he wanted to do. A great deal has been made of
the story of his overhearing some one speak of him as "a fellow who
never paints anything but naked women," and he is represented as
undergoing something like a sudden conversion and as resolving to "do no
more of the devil's work." As a matter of fact, he had, from the
first, wanted to paint "men at work in the fields," with their "fine
attitudes," and he only tried his hand at other things because he had
his living to earn. Sensier saw what seems to have been the first sketch
for "The Sower" as early as 1847, and it existed long before that, while
"The Winnower" was exhibited in 1848; and the overheard conversation is
said to have taken place in 1849. There was nothing indecent or immoral
in Millet's early work, and the best proof that he felt no moral
reprobation for the painting of the nude--as what true painter,
especially in France, ever did?--is that he returned to it in the height
of his power and, in the picture of the little "Goose Girl" (Pl. 1) by
the brook side, her slim, young body bared for the bath, produced the
loveliest of his works. No, what happened to Millet in 1849 was simply
that he resolved to do no more pot-boiling, to consult no one's taste
but his own, to paint what he pleased and as he pleased, if he starved
for it. He went to Barbizon for a summer's holiday and to escape the
cholera. He stayed there because living was cheap and the place was
healthful, and because he could find there the models and the subjects
on which he built his highly abstract and ideal art.

[Illustration: Plate 3.--Millet. "The Gleaners."
In the Louvre.]

At Barbizon he neither resumed the costume nor led the life of a
peasant. He wore sabots, as hundreds of other artists have done, before
and since, when living in the country in France. Sabots are very cheap
and very dry and not uncomfortable when you have acquired the knack of
wearing them. In other respects he dressed and lived like a small
bourgeois, and was _monsieur_ to the people about him. Barbizon was
already a summer resort for artists before he came there, and the inn
was full of painters; while others, of whom Rousseau was one, were
settled there more or less permanently. It is but a short distance from
Paris, and the exhibitions and museums were readily accessible. The life
that Millet lived there was that of many poor, self-respecting,
hard-working artists, and if he had been a landscape painter that life
would never have seemed in any way exceptional. It is only because he
was a painter of the figure that it seems odd he should have lived in
the country; only because he painted peasants that he has been thought
of as a peasant himself. If he accepted the name, with a kind of pride,
it was in protest against the frivolity and artificiality of the
fashionable art of the day. But if too much has been made of Millet's
peasant origin, perhaps hardly enough has been made of his race. It is
at least interesting that the two Frenchmen whose art has most in
common with his, Nicolas Poussin and Pierre Corneille, should have been
Normans like himself. In the severely restrained, grandly simple,
profoundly classical work of these three men, that hard-headed,
strong-handed, austere, and manly race has found its artistic
expression.

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