Cubists and Post-Impressionism

by Arthur Jerome Eddy

Purely creative work is done in a masterly manner—in his best things—by Arthur Davies. It is attempted and quite successfully by Kenneth Miller, to mention only two of many.

To the casual observer Davies may seem to lose himself at times in his theories, to press his dreams and speculations beyond the confines of his art, but on this point the opinion of the “casual observer” is of little value, for Davies’s pictures cannot be casually observed; they challenge the attention of the most serious and repay study. I make no pretense to having fathomed their mystery, to understanding their inner significance, but enjoy and have always enjoyed the marvellously fine way in which they are done, and their rare decorative quality.

Here is a man doing creative work, work in which he plays with and uses nature to attain ends far above and far removed from nature. He is in no sense a Virile-Impressionist, no one would think of classing him as an Impressionist at all. Yet he is not a Post-Impressionist as the term has been defined in this book.

He belongs rather to the class of inspired or poetic painters, a few of whom are with us always, men who neither found nor belong to a “school,” but who express on canvas or in stone their fancies in a way that reminds one of fairy-tales.

Davies may admire much of the work of some of the ultra Post-Impressionists; he likes, for instance, much of Matisse’s work; he may even fancy he has something in common with these men, but he has not. He was painting his pictures long before theirs were very much known, and he would have painted his if theirs had never been produced at all.

Matisse is moved by a spirit fundamentally different from that which animates Davies.

“The Bridge,” by Kroll, is another striking example of American-Impressionistic art. It is one of a series of pictures of lower New York, each painted “on the spot,” some from roofs and high places difficult of access and dangerous.

It is comparatively easy to go out and make a few sketches of portions of a city like New York and then retire to the studio and paint faint and superficial reproductions, such inadequate reproductions as appear on the walls of any metropolitan exhibition; it is quite another thing to plant one’s easel on slippery rocky heights and day after day, in the cold, paint from nature as directly as Monet ever painted and in a much more virile way.