The reputation of many a preacher, many an orator, depends wholly upon his command of jargon, his ability to utter endless phrases which are either stock ideas, old as the hills, or which sound as if they meant something but on analysis prove quite barren.
II
POST-IMPRESSIONISM
POST-Impressionism means exactly what the prefix means—the art-development following Impressionism. It does not mean a further, or a higher, or a more subtle form of Impressionism, but it means something radically different, it means a reaction from Impressionism.
The evolution of the new movement has been logical and inevitable.
After the Barbizon school with its romantic representation of nature, there came inevitably the realistic painters, headed by Courbet, later by Manet—men who painted things not romantically but realistically, pitilessly, brutally. There was the same rage against these men as against the Cubists today. Both Whistler and Manet were in the Salon des Refuses of 1864.
Along with the men who painted things as they saw them, came naturally men like Monet, Sisley, Pissarro, Seurat, Signac, who tried endless experiments in the effort to paint light as they saw it.
So that the final twenty-five years of the last century were given up in France to attempts to paint things and light as they really are.
After the painting of things and light one would say the art of painting had touched its limits, that there was nothing more to do. But, no, there is the painting of neither things nor light—the painting of emotions—the painting of pure line and color compositions for the sake of the pleasure such harmonies afford—the expression of one’s inner self.
It was while Manet was painting things as they are, and Monet was painting light as it is, that Whistler was painting both things and light but with an entirely different object in view, namely, the production of color harmonies superior to either thing-effects or light-effects.