DUNCAN GRANT
To-day,[N] when the Carfax Gallery opens its doors at No. 5 Bond Street, and invites the cultivated public to look at the paintings of Duncan Grant, that public will have a chance of discovering what has for some time been known to alert critics here and abroad—that at last we have in England a painter whom Europe may have to take seriously. Nothing of the sort has happened since the time of Constable; so naturally one is excited.
Footnote N:[ (return) ] February 6, 1920.
If the public knows little of Duncan Grant the public is not to blame. During the fifteen years that he has been at work not once has he held "a one-man show," while his sendings to periodic exhibitions have been rare and unobtrusive. To be sure, there is a picture by him in the Tate Gallery. But who ever thought of going there to look for a work of art? Besides, during the last few years the Tate, like most other places of the sort, has been given over to civil servants. Duncan Grant is a scrupulous, slow, and not particularly methodical worker. His output is small; and no sooner is a picture finished than it is carried off by one of those watchful amateurs who seem a good deal more eager to buy than he is to sell. Apparently he cares little for fame; so the public gets few opportunities of coming acquainted with his work.
Duncan Grant is the best English painter alive. And how English he is! (British, I should say, for he is a Highlander.) Of course, he has been influenced by Cézanne and the modern Frenchmen. He is of the movement. Superficially his work may look exotic and odd. Odd it will certainly look to people unfamiliar with painting. But anyone who has studied and understood the Italians will see at a glance that Duncan Grant is thoroughly in the great tradition; while he who also knows the work of Wilson, Gainsborough, Crome, Cotman, Constable, and Turner will either deny that there is such a thing as an English tradition or admit that Duncan Grant is in it. For my part, I am inclined to believe that an English pictorial tradition exists, though assuredly it is a tiny and almost imperceptible rill, to be traced as often, perhaps, through English poetry as through English painting. At all events, there are national characteristics; and these you will find asserting themselves for good or ill in the work of our better painters.
Duncan Grant's ancestors are Piero della Francesca, Gainsborough, and the Elizabethan poets. There is something Greek about him, too; not the archæological Greek of Germany, nor yet the Græco-Roman academicism of France, but rather that romantic, sensuous Hellenism of the English literary tradition. It is, perhaps, most obvious in his early work, where, indeed, all the influences I have named can easily be found. Then, at the right moment, he plunged headlong into the movement, became the student of Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, though not, curiously enough, of Bonnard, the modern artist with whose work his own has the closest affinity, and, for a year or two, suffered his personality to disappear almost beneath the heavy, fertilizing spate. He painted French exercises. He was learning. He has learnt. He can now express, not someone else's ideas, but himself, completely and with delicious ease, in the language of his age. He is a finished and highly personal modern artist.
I dare say Duncan Grant's most national characteristic is the ease with which he achieves beauty. To paint beautifully comes as naturally to him as to speak English does to me. Almost all English artists of any merit have had this gift, and most of them have turned it to sorry account. It was so pleasant to please that they tried to do nothing else, so easy to do it that they scampered and gambolled down the hill that ends in mere prettiness. From this catastrophe Duncan Grant has been saved by a gift which, amongst British painters, is far from common. He is extremely intelligent. His intellect is strong enough to keep in hand that most charming and unruly of its sister gifts, sensibility. And a painter who possesses both sensibility and the intellect to direct it is in a fair way to becoming a master.
The sensibility of English artists, whether verbal or visual, is as notorious as their sense of beauty. This becomes less surprising when we reflect that the former includes the latter. The fact is, critics, with their habitual slovenliness, apply the term "sensibility" to two different things. Sometimes they are talking about the artist's imagination, and sometimes about his use of the instrument: sometimes about his reactions, and sometimes—in the case of painters—about the tips of his fingers. It is true that both qualities owe their existence to and are conditioned by one fundamental gift—a peculiar poise—a state of feeling—which may well be described as "sensibility." But, though both are consequences of this peculiar delicacy and what I should like to call "light-triggeredness" of temperament, they are by no means identical. By "sensibility" critics may mean an artist's power of responding easily and intensely to the æsthetic significance of what he sees; this power they might call, if they cared to be precise, "sensibility of inspiration." At other times they imply no more than sensibility of touch: in which case they mean that the contact between the artist's brush and his canvas has the quality of a thrilling caress, so that it seems almost as if the instrument that bridged the gulf between his fingers and the surface of his picture must have been as much alive as himself. "Sensibility of handling" or "hand-writing" is the proper name for this. In a word, there is sensibility of the imagination and sensibility of the senses: one is receptive, the other executive. Now, Duncan Grant's reactions before the visible universe are exquisitely vivid and personal, and the quality of his paint is often as charming as a kiss. He is an artist who possesses both kinds of sensibility. These are adorable gifts; but they are not extraordinarily rare amongst English painters of the better sort.
In my judgement Gainsborough and Duncan Grant are the English painters who have been most splendidly endowed with sensibility of both sorts, but I could name a dozen who have been handsomely supplied. In my own time there have been four—Burne-Jones (you should look at his early work), Conder, Steer, and John, all of whom had an allowance far above the average, while in America there was Whistler. No one, I suppose, would claim for any of these, save, perhaps, Whistler, a place even in the second rank of artists. From which it follows clearly that something more than delicacy of reaction and touch is needed to make a man first-rate. What is needed is, of course, constructive power. An artist must be able to convert his inspiration into significant form; for in art it is not from a word to a blow, but from a tremulous, excited vision to an orderly mental conception, and from that conception, by means of the problem and with the help of technique, to externalization in form. That is where intelligence and creative power come in. And no British painter has, as yet, combined with sure and abundant sensibility power and intelligence of a sort to do perfectly, and without fail, this desperate and exacting work. In other words, there has been no British painter of the first magnitude. But I mistake, or Gainsborough, Crome, Constable, and Duncan Grant were all born with the possibility of greatness in them.
Many British (or, to make myself safe, I will say English-speaking) painters have had enough sensibility of inspiration to make them distinguished and romantic figures. Who but feels that Wilson, Blake, Reynolds, Turner, and Rossetti were remarkable men? Others have had that facility and exquisiteness of handling which gives us the enviable and almost inexhaustible producer of charming objects—Hogarth, Cotman, Keene, Whistler, Conder, Steer, Davies. Indeed, with the exceptions of Blake and Rossetti—two heavy-handed men of genius—and Reynolds, whose reactions were something too perfunctory, I question whether there be a man in either list who wanted much for sensibility of either sort. But what English painter could conceive and effectively carry out a work of art? Crome, I think, has done it; Gainsborough and Constable at any rate came near; and it is because Duncan Grant may be the fourth name in our list that some of us are now looking forward with considerable excitement to his exhibition.
An Englishman who is an artist can hardly help being a poet; I neither applaud nor altogether deplore the fact, though certainly it has been the ruin of many promising painters. The doom of Englishmen is not reversed for Duncan Grant: he is a poet; but he is a poet in the right way—in the right way, I mean, for a painter to be a poet. Certainly his vision is not purely pictorial; and because he feels the literary significance of what he sees his conceptions are apt to be literary. But he does not impose his conceptions on his pictures; he works his pictures out of his conceptions. Anyone who will compare them with those of Rossetti or Watts will see in a moment what I mean. In Duncan Grant there is, I agree, something that reminds one unmistakably of the Elizabethan poets, something fantastic and whimsical and at the same time intensely lyrical. I should find it hard to make my meaning clearer, yet I am conscious enough that my epithets applied to painting are anything but precise. But though they may be lyrical or fantastic or witty, these pictures never tell a story or point a moral.
My notion is that Duncan Grant often starts from some mixed motif which, as he labours to reduce it to form and colour, he cuts, chips, and knocks about till you would suppose that he must have quite whittled the alloy away. But the fact is, the very material out of which he builds is coloured in poetry. The thing he has to build is a monument of pure visual art; that is what he plans, designs, elaborates, and finally executes. Only, when he has achieved it we cannot help noticing the colour of the bricks. All notice, and some enjoy, this adscititious literary overtone. Make no mistake, however, the literary element in the art of Duncan Grant is what has been left over, not what has been added. A Blake or a Watts conceives a picture and makes of it a story; a Giorgione or a Piero di Cosimo steals the germ of a poem and by curious cultivation grows out of it a picture. In the former class you will find men who may be great figures, but can never be more than mediocre artists: Duncan Grant is of the latter. He is in the English tradition without being in the English rut. He has sensibility of inspiration, beauty of touch, and poetry; but, controlling these, he has intelligence and artistic integrity. He is extremely English; but he is more of an artist than an Englishman.
Already the Chelsea show of African and Oceanian sculpture is sending the cultivated public to the ethnographical collections in the British Museum, just as, last autumn, the show organized in Paris by M. Paul Guillaume filled the Trocadero.[O] Fine ladies, young painters, and exquisite amateurs are now to be seen in those long dreary rooms that once were abandoned to missionaries, anthropologists, and colonial soldiers, enhancing their prestige by pointing out to stay-at-home cousins the relics of a civilization they helped to destroy. For my part I like the change. I congratulate the galleries and admire the visitors, though the young painters, I cannot help thinking, have been a little slow.
Footnote O:[ (return) ] 1919
Negro art was discovered—its real merit was first recognized, I mean—some fifteen years ago, in Paris, by the painters there. Picasso, Derain, Matisse, and Vlaminck began picking up such pieces as they could find in old curiosity and pawn shops; with Guillaume Apollinaire, literary apostle, following apostolically at their heels. Thus a demand was created which M. Paul Guillaume was there to meet and stimulate. But, indeed, the part played by that enterprising dealer is highly commendable; for the Trocadero collections being, unlike the British, mediocre both in quantity and quality, it was he who put the most sensitive public in Europe—a little cosmopolitan group of artists, critics, and amateurs—in the way of seeing a number of first-rate things.
Because, in the past, Negro art has been treated with absurd contempt, we are all inclined now to overpraise it; and because I mean to keep my head I shall doubtless by my best friends be called a fool. Judging from the available data—no great stock, by the way—I should say that Negro art was entitled to a place amongst the great schools, but that it was no match for the greatest. With the greatest I would compare it. I would compare it with the art of the supreme Chinese periods (from Han to Sung), with archaic Greek, with Byzantine, with Mahomedan, which, for archæological purposes, begins under the Sassanians a hundred years and more before the birth of the prophet; I would compare it with Romanesque and early Italian (from Giotto to Raffael); but I would place it below all these. On the other hand, when I consider the whole corpus of black art known to us, and compare it with Assyrian, Roman, Indian, true Gothic (not Romanesque, that is to say), or late Renaissance it seems to me that the blacks have the best of it. And, on the whole, I should be inclined to place West and Central African art, at any rate, on a level with Egyptian. Such sweeping classifications, however, are not to be taken too seriously. All I want to say is that, though the capital achievements of the greatest schools do seem to me to have an absolute superiority over anything Negro I have seen, yet the finest black sculpture is so rich in artistic qualities that it is entitled to a place beside them.
I write, thinking mainly of sculpture, because it was an exhibition of sculpture that set me off. It should be remembered, however, that perhaps the most perfect achievements of these savages are to be found amongst their textiles and basket-work. Here, their exquisite taste and sense of quality and their unsurpassed gift for filling a space are seen to greatest advantage, while their shortcomings lie almost hid. But it is their sculpture which, at the moment, excites us most, and by it they may fairly be judged. Exquisiteness of quality is its most attractive characteristic. Touch one of these African figures and it will remind you of the rarest Chinese porcelain. What delicacy in the artist's sense of relief and modelling is here implied! What tireless industry and patience! Run your hand over a limb, or a torso, or, better still, over some wooden vessel; there is no flaw, no break in the continuity of the surface; the thing is alive from end to end. And this extraordinary sense of quality seems to be universal amongst them. I think I never saw a genuine nigger object that was vulgar—except, of course, things made quite recently under European direction. This is a delicious virtue, but it is a precarious one. It is precarious because it is not self-conscious: because it has not been reached by the intelligent understanding of an artist, but springs from the instinctive taste of primitive people. I have seen an Oxfordshire labourer work himself beautifully a handle for his hoe, in the true spirit of a savage and an artist, admiring and envying all the time the lifeless machine-made article hanging, out of his reach, in the village shop. The savage gift is precarious because it is unconscious. Once let the black or the peasant become acquainted with the showy utensils of industrialism, or with cheap, realistic painting and sculpture, and, having no critical sense wherewith to protect himself, he will be bowled over for a certainty. He will admire; he will imitate; he will be undone.
At the root of this lack of artistic self-consciousness lies the defect which accounts for the essential inferiority of Negro to the very greatest art. Savages lack self-consciousness and the critical sense because they lack intelligence. And because they lack intelligence they are incapable of profound conceptions. Beauty, taste, quality, and skill, all are here; but profundity of vision is not. And because they cannot grasp complicated ideas they fail generally to create organic wholes. One of the chief characteristics of the very greatest artists is this power of creating wholes which, as wholes, are of infinitely greater value than the sum of their parts. That, it seems to me, is what savage artists generally fail to do.
Also, they lack originality. I do not forget that Negro sculptors have had to work in a very strict convention. They have been making figures of tribal gods and fetiches, and have been obliged meticulously to respect the tradition. But were not European Primitives and Buddhists similarly bound, and did they not contrive to circumvent their doctrinal limitations? That the African artists seem hardly to have attempted to conceive the figure afresh for themselves and realize in wood a personal vision does, I think, imply a definite want of creative imagination. Just how serious a defect you will hold this to be will depend on the degree of importance you attach to complete self-expression. Savage artists seem to express themselves in details. You must seek their personality in the quality of their relief, their modulation of surface, their handling of material, and their choice of ornament. Seek, and you will be handsomely rewarded; in these things the niggers have never been surpassed. Only when you begin to look for that passionate affirmation of a personal vision which we Europeans, at any rate, expect to find in the greatest art will you run a risk of being disappointed. It will be then, if ever, that you will be tempted to think that these exquisitely gifted black artists are perhaps as much like birds building their nests as men expressing their profoundest emotions.
And now come the inevitable questions—where were these things made, and when? "At different times and in different places," would be the most sensible reply. About the provenance of any particular piece it is generally possible to say something vague; about dates we know next to nothing. At least, I do; and when I consider that we have no records and no trustworthy criteria, and that so learned and brilliant an archæologist as Mr. Joyce professes ignorance, I am not much disposed to believe that anyone knows more. I am aware that certain amateurs think to enhance the value of their collections by conferring dates on their choicer specimens; I can understand why dealers encourage them in this vanity; and, seeing that they go to the collectors and dealers for their information, I suppose one ought not to be surprised when journalists come out with their astounding attributions. The facts are as follows.
We know that Portuguese adventurers had a considerable influence on African art in the sixteenth, and even in the fifteenth, century. There begins our certain knowledge. Of work so influenced a small quantity exists. Of earlier periods we know nothing precise. There are oral traditions of migrations, empires, and dynasties: often there is evidence of past invasions and the supersession of one culture by another: and that is all. The discoveries of explorers have so far thrown little light on archæology; and in most parts of West and Central Africa it would be impossible even for trained archæologists to establish a chronological sequence such as can be formed when objects are found buried in the sand one above the other. But, in fact, it is to vague traders and missionaries, rather than to trained archæologists, that we owe most of our fine pieces, which, as often as not, have been passed from hand to hand till, after many wanderings, they reached the coast. Add to all this the fact that most African sculpture is in wood (except, of course, those famous products of early European influence, the bronze castings from Benin), that this wood is exposed to a devastating climate—hot and damp—to say nothing of the still more deadly white ants, and you will probably agree that the dealer or amateur who betickets his prizes with such little tags as "Gaboon, 10th century" evinces a perhaps exaggerated confidence in our gullibility.
Whenever these artists may have flourished it seems they flourish no more. The production of idols and fetiches continues, but the production of fine art is apparently at an end. The tradition is moribund, a misfortune one is tempted to attribute, along with most that have lately afflicted that unhappy continent, to the whites. To do so, however, would not be altogether just. Such evidence as we possess—and pretty slight it is—goes to show that even in the uninvaded parts of West Central Africa the arts are decadent: wherever the modern white man has been busy they are, of course, extinct. According to experts Negro art already in the eighteenth century was falling into a decline from some obscure, internal cause. Be that as it may, it was doomed in any case. Before the bagman with his Brummagem goods an art of this sort was bound to go the way that in Europe our applied arts, the art of the potter, the weaver, the builder and the joiner, the arts that in some sort resembled it, have gone. No purely instinctive art can stand against the machine. And thus it comes about that, at the present moment, we have in Europe the extraordinary spectacle of a grand efflorescence of the highly self-conscious, self-critical, intellectual, individualistic art of painting amongst the ruins of the instinctive, uncritical, communal, and easily impressed arts of utility. Industrialism, which, with its vulgar finish and superabundant ornament, has destroyed not only popular art but popular taste, has merely isolated the self-conscious artist and the critical appreciator; and the nineteenth century (from Stephenson to Mr. Ford), which ruined the crafts, in painting (from Ingres to Picasso) rivals the fifteenth.
Meanwhile, the scholarly activities of dealers and journalists notwithstanding, there is no such thing as nigger archæology; for which let us be thankful. Here, at any rate, are no great names to scare us into dishonest admiration. Here is no question of dates and schools to give the lecturer his chance of spoiling our pleasure. Here is nothing to distract our attention from the one thing that matters—æsthetic significance. Here is nigger sculpture: you may like it or dislike it, but at any rate you have no inducement to judge it on anything but its merits.