CHAPTER XII - BREADTH VERSUS DETAIL
Subjectively the painter and the photographer stretch after the same goal.
Technically they approach it from opposite directions.
The painter starts with a bare surface and creates detail, the photographer is supplied therewith.
Art lies somewhere between these starting points; for art is a reflection of an idea and ideas may or may not have to do with detail.
According to the subject then is the matter of detail to serve us. In the expression of character a certain amount of detail is indispensable; by the painter to be produced, by the photographer saved. But detail is often so beautiful in itself! and is not art a presentation of the beautiful, pleads the photographer. And the reply in the Socratic method is: “Look at the whole subject: does the idea of it demand this detail?”
The untutored mind always sees detail. For this reason most education is inductive, but [pg 188] though the process is inductive, the goal is the eternal synthesis. It is the reporter who gathers the facts: the editor winnows therefrom the moral.
The artist must—in time—get on top and take this survey. Looking at any subject with eyes half closed enables him to see it without detail, and later, with eyes slowly opening, admitting that much only which is necessary to character.
The expression of character by masses of black and white proves this. Bishop Potter is unmistakable, his features bounded by their shadows. From such a start then it is a question of procedure cautiously to that point where the greatest character lies, but beyond which point detail becomes unnecessary to character.
The pen portrait of Thackeray by Robt. Blum is a careful delineation of the characteristic head of the novelist set on shoulders characteristically bent forward and the body characteristically tall. What more can be told of Thackeray's [pg 189] personality? Would the buttons and the wrinkles of the clothing help matters! No, as facts they would not, and when art has to do only with character, the simplest statement is the most forcible.
Millet, at one time, was known as “the man who painted peasants without wrinkles in their breeches.” Not because wrinkles were too much for him, nor because they were not thought worth while, but because, in his effort to prune his picture of the unessentials, the wrinkles were brushed aside.
When, however, art has to do with filling an entire space with something, and the clothing occupies a considerable part of it, what shall be done? This changes the details of the question. Yet all portraits that hit hard in exhibitions are those conceived in simplicity, those in which the personality is what stops and holds us.
There are certain large organic lines of drapery which the character demands, but beyond this point opinion divides authoritatively from the complete silence of obliteration to the tumultuous noisiness of “the whole truth”
In the portraits by Carrière all detail is swept away, and the millinery artists are shocked. Simplicity should never compromise texture and quality. This side of the truth cannot prove objectionable.
“You have made my broadcloth look like two-fifty a yard and it really cost four,” was a criticism offered by a young lady who posed in a riding habit. Such practical criticism is [pg 190] frequently necessary to bring the artist down from the top height observatory where he is absorbed with “the big things.”
Breath does not signify neglect of detail or neglect of finish; it means simplification where unity had been threatened. It is seeing the big side of small things, if the small things cannot be ignored.
The lighting of a subject has much to do with its breadth. A light may be selected that will chop such a well organized unit as the body into three or four separate sections, or one that produces an equal division of light and shade—seldom good. Shadows are generally the hiding-places for mystery; and mystery is ever charming. None better than Rembrandt knew the value of those vague spaces of nothingness, in backgrounds, and in the figure itself, a sudden pitch from light and positiveness into conjecture. We hear in photography much of the “Rembrandt-esque effect,” which when produced, proves to be just blackness. There can be no shadow without light, and Rembrandt's effort was to obtain this, rather than produce darkness.
The feeling of light may also be broadly expressed by a direct illumination. Here the shadow plays a very small part, and the subject is presented in its outline. Under such an effect we lose variety but gain simplicity. This brings us close to the region of two dimensions, the realm of Japanese art and mural decoration. The portraits of Manet, the decorations of Puvis de Chavannes, and the early Italians, display the [pg 191] quality of breadth because of the simplicity of lighting which these subjects received.
Breadth in the treatment of the figure may be obtained by graded light. If a shadow be produced at the bottom of the picture sufficiently strong to obliterate both the light and shade of detail, and thence be made to weaken as it proceeds upward and finally give place to light, where light is most needed, great simplicity as well as the element of variety will be the result.
Thus, in the most effective treatment in mural decoration, one sees only the grand forms, the movement, the intention, those things which most befit the inner surface of the building being also those which bear the greater importance. The fact is used as an argument for the assumption that painting should, after all, be an art of two dimensions, length and breadth, reserving thickness and its representation, for sculpture. This robs painting of the quality of natural aspect, except under the single effect of absolutely direct lighting and ignores its development beyond the flatly colored representations of the ancient Egyptians, our American Indians and the Japanese, a development inaugurated by the Greeks and since adhered to by all occidental nations.
The student who goes to nature and sees mass only, discarding all detail, will run the chance of being a colorist as well as a painter of breadth, two of the most important qualifications; for if he refuses to be stopped by detail his intelligence will crystallize upon that other thing which attracts him. He will think the harder upon the [pg 192] simple relations of tones and the exact color. Slowly dexterity will add a facility to his brush and he will, while aiming at character, through breadth, unconsciously introduce characteristic detail. This is the hope of the new method which is now being introduced into the system of public school instruction.
The scheme as developed by Mr. Dow is decorative rather than naturalistic, the aesthetic side with “Beauty,” as the watchword being in greatest point. The filling of spaces in agreeable and harmonious arrangement does not demand strict acknowledgment to natural aspect. Indeed this is denied in most cases where the limitations of decoration are enjoined. With the first principle, truth, upon which all education rests, as the basis of such study, the nature part of this system will fall into its logical channels. If nature's largeness and simplicity contributes to its value, then nature should be consulted when she is large and simple. Studies of trees in gray silhouette, should be made at twilight, either of evening or early morning, when the detail, which is useless to the decorative scheme, is not seen. Under such conditions no slight or sacrifice is necessitated. Nature then contributes her quantity directly and the student has no warrant in assuming to change her. There are times also when the face of nature is so varied that the most fantastic schemes of Notan[15] are observed; a harbor filled with sails and sea-gulls, a crowd of people speckling the shore, the houses of a village dotted over a hillside. Under a direct [pg 193] light these become legitimate subjects offered by nature herself to the scheme which, however, she only now and then honors.
The system therefore accompanies the student but part way and leaves him still knocking at the door of the complete naturalistic presentation of pictorial art, a development which stretches into limitless possibilities by the use of the third dimension.
Work in two dimensions by reason of its greater simplicity should naturally precede the complications involved in producing the completely modelled forms of nature, and therein the argument for its use in the early stages of the student's development is a strong one.
SUGGESTIVENESS.
Breadth, so often accountable for mystery, leads to suggestiveness. It is at this point that graphic art touches hands with the invisible,—where the thing merges into the idea. Here we deliver over our little two by four affair with its specifications all marked, into the keeping of larger hands which expand its possibilities. If then Imagination carries us beyond the limits of graphic art let us by all means employ it. Upon this phase of art the realist can but look with folded arms. The dwellers in the charmed world of Greek mythological fancy came on tiptoe to the borders only of the daily life of that age.
The still-life painter has to do with fact, and for many other subjects also the fact alone is [pg 193] sufficient. It is generally so in portraiture where rendition of externals is attempted, but the portrait may suggest revery and reflection, or, by intimate accessory, provoke a discursive movement in thought.
The realist is a man of drawing and how to do it, of paint and putting it on, of textures and technique; he is a painter; and stops with that. But the maker of pictures would step to another point of sight. He would so aim as to shoot over the hilltop. He would hit something which he cannot see.
Suggestion is both technical and subjective. There is suggestion of detail, of act and of fact. In producing the effect, instead of the detail, of a bunch of grass or a mass of drapery, we substitute suggestion for literalism.
Fortuny, as a figure painter, was master of this art, his wonderful arrangements of figures amongst drapery and in grasses bearing evidence. Here, out of a fantastic crush of color, will be brought to view a beautifully modelled hand and wrist which connect by the imagination only, with the shoulder and body. These however, are ready to receive it and like other parts of the picture are but points of fact to give encouragement to the quest for the remainder. The hide and seek of the subject, the “lost and found” in the line, the subsidizing of the imagination for tribute, by his magic wand stroke were the artifices by which Fortuny coquetted with nature and the public, fascinating the art world of his day.
Fortuny, however, never took us beyond the bounds of his picture. It was his doctrine that avoidance of detail was artful; that to carry the whole burden when imagination could be tricked into shouldering some of it was fool's drudgery. Millet, who was his antipode as a clumsy handler of his tools, declared himself fortunate in being able to suggest much more than he could paint.
In one of the competitions at the Royal Academy in England, the prize was awarded to that rendering of the expression of Grief which showed the face entirely covered, the suggestion being declared stronger than the fact.
In the realm of suggestion however the landscape artist has much the wider range. Who has not experienced the fascination of a hilltop? The hill may be uninteresting—on your side,—but there is another. There is a path winding over it, telling of the passing of few or many; your feet have touched it and imagination has you in her train, and you follow eagerly to the beck of her enchantment.
Suppose the scene at twilight on one of the great plains of northern France where beets are the sole crop. A group of carts and oxen shut out the background and no figures are seen. If however against the sky are the silhouetted forms of two handfuls of beets, the sight of a figure or even a part of him would seem unnecessary to a casual observer who wished to know if there was any one about. These inanimate things moving through the air mean life. The painter has [pg 196] created one figure and suggested the likelihood of others by these few touches. Herein we have the suggestion of a fact. The suggestion of an act, may further be developed by showing the figure, having already finished with the handful, bending to pick up others. Such a position would be an actual statement regarding the present act but a suggested one concerning the former, the effect of which is still seen. If then the figure were represented as performing something in any moment of time farther removed from that governing the position of the beets than natural action could control, he has forced into his figure an accelerated action which ranges anywhere between the startling, the amusing, and the impossible.
The power of implied force or action by suggestion is the basis of the Greek sculptured art of the highest period. Much of the argument of Lessing's elaborate essay on the “Laocoon” is aimed at this point, which is brought out in its completeness in his discussion of Timomachus' treatment of the raving Ajax. “Ajax was not represented at the moment when, raging among the herds he captures and slays goats and oxen, mistaking them for men. The master showed him sitting weary after these crazy deeds of heroism, and meditating self-destruction. That was really the raving Ajax, not because he is raving at the moment, but because we see he has been raving and with what violence his present reaction of shame and despair vividly portrays. We see the force of the tempest in the [pg 197] wrecks and the corpses with which it has strewn the beach.”
In the photographic realm of the nude, this quality is compulsory. We don't want to have offered us so intimate a likeness of a nude figure that we ask, “Who is she, or he?” The general and not the particular suffices; the type not the person. The painter's art contains few stronger touches through this means than the incident of the sleeping senator in Gérôme's [“Death of Cæsar”].
In the suggestion of an idea, graphic and plastic art rise to the highest levels of poetry. The picture or the poem then becomes the surface, refracting the idea which stretches on into infinity.
The dying lion of Lucerne, mortally pierced by the shaft, the wounded lion of Paris, striking under his forepaw the arrow meant for his destruction are symbols memorializing the Swiss guard of Louis XVI, and the unequal struggle of France against Germany in '72.
At the death of Lorenzo the arts languished and Michel Angelo's supine and hanging figures in his tomb are there to indicate it.
MYSTERY.
Suggestion with its phantom guide-posts leads us through its varied mazes to the dwelling-place of mystery. Here the artist will do well to tarry and learn all the oracle may teach him.
The positive light of day passes to the twilight of the moon and stars.
What things may be seen and forms created out of the simple mystery of twilight!
Its value by suggestion may be known technically to the artist, for through the elimination of detail, the work is sifted to its essence and we then see it in its bigness, if it has any, and if not we discover this lack. When the studio light fails our best critic enters and discloses in a few moments what we have been looking for all day long.
There should be in most pictures an opportunity of saying that which shall be interpreted by each one according to his temperament, a little place where each may delight in setting free his own imagination.
To account for the popularity of many pictures in both color and black and white on any other ground than that of mystery seems ofttimes impossible. The strong appeal made to all classes by subjects containing mysterious suggestion is evidenced by the frequency of awards to such in photographic and other competitions.
The student of photography asks if blurred edges, empty shadows and vaporous detail mean quality. They certainly mean mystery, which when applied to an appropriate subject signifies that the artist has joined his art with the imagination of the beholder. He has therefore let it out at large usury.
A cottage near a wood may be a very ordinary subject at three in the afternoon, but at eight in the evening, seen in palpitating outline against the forest blackness or the low toned sky, it becomes an element in a scheme of far larger [pg 199] dimensions. The difference between the definite and indefinite article, when coupled with that house, is the difference in the quality of the art of which we speak.
Mystery by deception is a misguided use of an art quality.
In photography one man delights in the etching point and cannot stop until he has made a net work all over his plate and led us to look at this instead of his picture, which, if good, would have been let alone—a clever device of throwing dust into our eyes. Another produces what appears to be a pencil drawing, and a very good imitation some of them are, but at best a deception. To make something look like something else is a perversion of a brilliant discovery in photographic processes, which offers the means for securing unity (and in this word lies every principle of composition) by adding to or subtracting from the first product.
This may involve the destruction of two-thirds or three-fourths of the plate or it may demand many an accent subtly supplied before unity is satisfied, before the subject is stripped of its non-essentials or before it may be regarded complete. Let such good work go on—and the other sort too, if you will, the stunts, the summersaults and the hoop performances, but in the dignity of photographic competitions give the deceptions, the imitations of other things, no standing or quarter.
No one will deny the interest there is in a sensitive, flexible line and in the rendition of [pg 200] mass by line. But photography is an art dealing with finished surfaces of perfect modelling, and workers in this art should preserve the “nature” of their subject. The man who feels line had better etch or use a pencil.
SIMPLICITY.
Breadth while fostering suggestiveness gives birth to simplicity; a subjective quality.
When applied to pictorial art, simplicity's first appeal is a mental one. We are attracted by neither technique nor color, nor things problematic to the painter; but by his mental attitude toward his subject. If we determine that the result has come of elimination, that to produce it, much has been thrown away and that the artist prefers what he has left at a sacrifice, to what might have been, acknowledgment for this condensation is coupled with respect. There is however a type of simplicity, the Simple Simon sort, or an indisposition to undertake difficult things, which leads to a selection of the easy subject in nature. Having found some modest bit of charm, the Simple Simon turns and twists it to attenuation, with the earnest declaration that there is no greater quality than simplicity; but purposeful emptiness lifts its hands in vain for the baptismal sanctification of the poetic spirit.
Where simplicity really serves the artist in his task is in those cases demanding the unification of many elements.
In painting, Rubens and Turner thus wrought, [pg 201] bringing harmony from an organ of three banks and a score of stops, setting themselves the task of strong men.
Whatsoever subject be projected, the quality of principality takes precedence over all others. This is the first step toward simplicity; some one thought made chief; therefore some one object in the composition of quantities and some one light in the scheme of chiaroscuro dominant. With this determined, the problem which follows is, how shall principality be maintained and to what degree of sacrifice must all other objects be submitted. In the rapid examination of many works of art, those that appeal strongest will be found to be those in which the elements are simple, or, if complex, are governed by this quality through principality.
RESERVE.
Another bifurcation of simplicity is Reserve. In the simple statement of the returning Roman general: “I came, I saw, I conquered,” all that the senate desired to know was stated and it gained force by virtue of what was left unsaid. Anything else might have gratified the curiosity of his auditors, but the man, in holding this secret, made himself an object of interest. Rembrandt has told us that the legitimate gamut of expression lies some distance between the deepest dark of our palette and its highest light. Expression through limitations is dignified, a quality which the strain to fill all limits sacrifices. It is the force quickly squandered by [pg 202] the young actor, who “overacts,” disturbing the balance of forces in the other parts.
Upon the pivot of Reserve the opposing creeds of the Impressionists and Tonists bear with most contention. The former would lash their coursers of Phoebus with unsparing hand from start to finish; the latter prefer the “Waiting Race,” every atom of force governed and in control, held for the opportunity, when increasing strength is necessary. It is the difference between aiming at the bull's-eye or the whole target.
The recent tendency of illustration to produce a result in three or four flat tones is another voice proclaiming for reserve. The new movement in decorative art may rightly claim this acknowledgment to it. In the work of Jules Guérin it is interesting to note how the bit and bridle of these two factors of breadth have been applied to every stroke, now and then only, detail being allowed its say, and in but a still small voice.
With the large number of pictorial ideas now being recast in the decorative formula it is necessary to have a clear notion of the purpose and the limitations of decorative art, that this new art may not be misunderstood nor confounded with the purely pictorial.
Decoration is essentially flat. It represents length and breadth. It applies primarily to the flat vertical plane. It deals with the symbols of form, with fact by suggestion, with color in mass. It substitutes light and dark for nature's [pg 205] light and shade. Conceptions evolved upon the flat vertical plane deal with pictorial data as material for heraldic quartering, with natural fact as secondary to the happy adjustment of spaces. Nature to the decorative mind presents a variegated pattern from which to clip any shape which the color design demands.
The influence on pictorial art of the decorative tendency, has brought much into the pictorial category which has never been classified.
The Rose Croix influence has witnessed its seed maturing into the art nouveau, and what was nurtured under the forcing glass of decoration has suddenly been transplanted into the garden of pictorial art. In consequence it would appear that the constitution of the latter required amendments as being scarce broad enough to accommodate the newer thing. It is difficult, for instance, to reconcile the crowded and spotted surfaces in Mr. Maurice Prendergast's pictures, to the requirements of the balanced conception. It must be recognized however that their first claim for attraction is their color which is usually a harmony in red, yellow and blue, and when the crowds of people or buildings do not form balancing combinations they oft-times so fill the canvas as to leave excellent spaces, more commanding through their isolation than the groups choking the limits of the canvas. More often however these crowds may be found to hang most beautifully to a natural axis and to comply with all the principles of pictorial structure.
In his park scene, showing several tiers of equestrians one above the other, the chief charm is the idea of continuous movement which the scene conveys. The detail, wisely omitted, if supplied would arrest the attention and a challenge on this basis would follow. It would then be found that what we accepted as an impression of natural aspect we would demand more of as a finished picture. It is because it is more decorative than pictorial and because its pictorial parts are rendered by suggestion, that it makes so winning an appeal.
The quaint and fascinating concepts of Mr. Bull in the range of animal delineation are all struck in the stamp of this newer mould, and the list is a constantly increasing one of the illustrators whose work bears this sign.
RELIEF.
The popular notion concerning pictures is that they should stand out; but as has been aptly said, “they should stand in”; so stand as to keep their places within the frame and to keep the component parts in control. A single object straining itself into prominence through the great relief it exhibits, is just as objectionable as the one voice in a chorus heard above the rest.
It is a law of light that all objects of the same plane receive identically the same illuminations. If then, one seems favored, it must be by suppression of the rest. Now and then this is necessary, but that it occurs by this means and not by unnatural forcing must be evident.
It is not necessary for the artist to lift his sitter off the canvas by a forced light on the figure and an intense shadow separating him from the wall behind.
Correggio knew so well to conserve breadth just here. Instead of this cheap and easy relief, he almost invariably chose to offset the dark side with a darker tone in the background, allowing the figure's shadow to melt inperceptibly into the back space. Breadth and softness was of course the result.
Occasionally however a distinct attempt at relief may be witnessed in the work of good painters. Some of Valesquez' standing portraits are expressive of the painter's joy in making them “stand out.” In all these pictures however there are no other objects, no items added to the background from which the figure is separated. The subject simply stands in air. In other words it is an entity and not a composition.
The process technically for the subduing of relief is flattening the shadows, thus rendering the marked roundness of objects less pronounced. The envelopment of air which all painting should express,—the detachment of one object from another,—goes as far toward the production of relief as is necessary.
FINISH.
But the enquiry is naturally made, “if deception is undesirable, should the artist pause before he has brought his work to a complete finish?” Finish is not dependent upon putting in [pg 208] everything which nature contains, else would art not be a matter of selection. Finish, though interpreted singularly by different artists as to degree, is universally understood to mean the same thing. Finish is the expression of the true relations of objects or of the parts of one object. When the true relations or values of shade and color are rendered the work is complete. That ends it. The student for the first year or so imagines his salvation depends on detail and prides himself on how much of it he can see. The instructor insists on his looking at nature with his eyes half closed in the hope that he will take the big end of things. There is war between them until the student capitulates, after which the instructor tells him to go as he pleases knowing with this lesson learned he will not go wrong.
As a comprehensive example of finish without detail, one may take the works of Mauve which aim to represent nature as truly as possible in her exact tints. No one can observe any picture ever painted by this master and not be drawn down close to the ground that he may walk on it or elevate his head into the air and breathe it or feel it possible to send a stone sailing into its liquid depths; but finish! when we look for it where or what is it? At the Stewart Gallery the attendant was accustomed to offer the visitor a magnifying glass with which to examine the lustre of a horse's eye or the buckles upon Napoleon's saddle, in the “Review of Cuirassiers at the Battle of Friedland” by Meissonier. These [pg 209] items are what interested the great detailist and they are perfect; but with all the intense effort of six close years of labor the picture has less real finish than any work ever signed by Mauve. The big thing in finish has been missed and I doubt if any artist or connoisseur has ever come upon this picture, now in the Metropolitan Museum, without a slight gasp at the false relation of color existing between the green wheat, the horses trampling through it and the sky above it. The unity of these elements was the first step in finish and the artist with all his vast knowledge of little things never knew it.
If then, perfect finish is a matter beyond detail, it follows it must be looked for elsewhere than at this end of nature.
The average man soon takes the artist's intention and accepts the work on this basis, thinking not of finish nor of its lack, but of nature; acknowledging through the suggestions of the picture that he has been touched by her.
“During these moments,” says John La Farge in his “Considerations on Painting,” “are not the spectators excusable who live for the moment a serene existence, feeling as if they had made the work they admire?”
The argument then is that the master painter is one who selects the subject, takes precious care that its foundation quantities and qualities are furnished and then hands it over to any one to finish. That it falls into sympathetic hands is his single solicitude.
“It requires two men to paint a picture,” says Mr. Hopkinson Smith, “one to work the brush and the other to kill the artist when he has finished his picture and doesn't know it.”