Cubists and Post-Impressionism

by Arthur Jerome Eddy

In both his technic and his inspiration he is very Post-Impressionistic.

In the delightful sweep of his line, and the purely decorative use of color, he departs far from nature.

The attitude of Sargent toward a model or sitter and that of Alexander are diametrically opposed, the one seeks to paint a vigorous characterization of the person before him, the other seeks to create a picture, and to do so by a technic so different from that commonly used it still occasions much of the wonderment it excited years ago.

Some of the portraits by Alexander are conspicuous on the walls of an exhibition for very much the same reasons such a picture as Van Rees’s “Maternity” would be conspicuous.

The landscape and cattle piece by Segonzac are both examples of Virile-Impressionism. But Segonzac has painted many other pictures that are Post-Impressionistic—arbitrary in design and execution, and still others that are both Virile-Impressionistic and Post-Impressionistic, such as his large canvas, “A Pastoral,” shown at the International, wherein the cattle are Virile-Impressionistic creations while the nude figures and the entire scheme are purely Post-Impressionistic.

The two landscapes by Vlaminck and Charmy are good examples of the transition state from Virile-Impressionism to Post-Impressionism.

They are sufficiently close to nature to be Impressionistic in the large sense of the term; at the same time they are so arbitrary and decorative in technic as to be quite Post-Impressionistic. They are about as far removed from the average exhibition of Impressionistic pictures as they are from the creative and abstract art of the Cubists, yet they will hang with either without unduly shocking the spectator’s sense of the fitness of things.

The three Cardoza’s are purely Post-Impressionistic; they are charming examples of what might be called romantic Post-Impressionism as distinguished from the more abstract conceptions of the Cubists; they have no more relation to life than a fairy tale, rather less if anything, for they are primarily decorative rather than significant.