Cubists and Post-Impressionism

by Arthur Jerome Eddy

These are the leaders of Fauvism.

At the exhibition in New York one had the unusual opportunity of seeing in close contact many works of all four. It would be difficult to imagine paintings more different in inspiration and technic. They had but one thing in common—a pronounced reaction from, not to say revolt against, Impressionism, evidenced particularly in the use of color constructively and decoratively rather than imitatively.

Color force is a feature of the new inspiration.

The painters of today have discovered anew the world’s coloring. We now recognize everywhere the power and vivaciousness, the thousandfold freshness, and the infinite changefulness of color. To us colors now talk directly; they are not drowned by covering tints, not hide-bound by a preconceived harmony. An instrument has thus been given, wherein innumerable melodies still slumber.

Color is a means of representation not only of what is colored, but also of the thick and the thin; of the solid and the liquid; of the light and of the heavy; of the hard and of the soft; of the corporeal and of the spacious. Cézanne models with color; with tinted color surfaces he builds a landscape. The proper couching of colored planes can force upon us the impression of depth; colored transitions call forth the impression of ascent and of motion; spots scattered here and there give the impression of sprightly vivaciousness.

Color is a means of expression talking directly to the soul. Deep mourning and soft glowing, warmth of heart and cold clarity, confused dumbness, flames of passion, sweet devotion—all conditions and all outbursts of the soul—what can communicate them to us more forcefully and more directly than a few colors with their effect exerted through the eye? As tones draw us with them without our will and without meeting resistance, so does color subjugate us: now it fills us with deepest sorrow, then again we are all glowing under its influence.

Color is a means of composition. The force of sensuous designation, the expressive power of the soul, both must combine and make for an always new, always original, and always unique harmony. The law of color beauty has not as yet been fathomed by the intellect. It is being created by feeling and by subconscious experience.[18]

“Cézanne, Gauguin, and VanGogh were men of very different minds; but they were alike in this, that they all attempted to subordinate representation to expression, and were all determined to express only their own emotional experience. Cézanne could not content himself with impressionist triumphs of representation. Above all, he revolted from the Impressionist insistence on the momentary aspect of reality. He was, so to speak, a kind of Plato among the artists of his time, believing that in reality there is a permanent order, a design which reveals itself to the eye and mind of the artist, and which it is his business to expose in his work. But this design he was determined to discover in reality itself, not in the works of other artists. His task was enormously difficult because he would take nothing whatever at second hand. Nature must tell him all her own secrets; and he would not listen even to her when she told him commonplaces. He was not interested, so to speak, in her caprices, in her chance effects of beauty that anyone can see. He painted landscape as Titian or Rembrandt painted portraits; searching always for the permanent character of the place, for that which, independent of weather or time, distinguished it from other places. This permanent element he found in structure and mass, but, like Titian and Rembrandt, he would not abstract these from color. For him, as for these masters, structure and mass revealed themselves in color, and all these must be verified by incessant observation.... For him a hill is not a screen for the play of light; it is built up of earth and rock. Nor is a tree a mere rippling surface, but a living thing with the structure of its growth. Everywhere he looks for character; yet he subordinates the character of details to the character of the whole. And the character of the whole means for him its permanent character, which he expresses in a design not imposed upon it but discovered in it, as Michael Angelo discovered the statue in the block of marble.