Cubists and Post-Impressionism

by Arthur Jerome Eddy

What is true of the enjoyment of music should be true of the enjoyment of painting. But with painting, most people insist upon understanding. They will listen to Patti without knowing her language, but they will not look at a painting unless they know the painter’s language.

Why not accept at their face value all pictures that are beautiful in line and color, without bothering about their meaning? Perhaps they have no meaning beyond the vagrant fancy of the artist.

Take the three pictures by Sousa Cardoza. Suppose they have no more significance than so many illustrations to a fairy tale; they are interesting in line and fascinating in color. If the “Stronghold” had been on a Delft platter, or the “Leap of the Rabbit” on a piece of Persian pottery, everyone would have lauded their beauty, and collectors would give ten or twenty times the modest prices of the canvases.

When put to people in that matter-of-fact way the response is almost always favorable to the pictures.

In an interesting monograph entitled “Is It Art?”[39] the writer says:

It will be seen, therefore, that the efforts of these men to give a subjective rendering of actuality results in nothing better than a poorly realized form of objectivity which is as much the creation of the spectator as of the artist, inasmuch as the vaguely adumbrated forms in the picture simply serve as a hint to that reality of which it is a wilfully distorted symbol, and the discovery of the “mustard pot” would scarcely have been possible without the happy cooperation of the title with the spectator’s previous knowledge of the actual appearance of a mustard pot.

Without the intervention of the title and the association of ideas called forth thereby through the memory of past experiences with actuality, these pictures would be totally meaningless even to the most recondite. They would inevitably be reduced to a personal system of shorthand, an individual code, as it were, comprehensible only to the originator.

Regarded from that viewpoint, these enigmatic paintings and drawings may very possibly be altogether successful. At all events it is only fair to assume that these works express to the originator what he intended them to express. But it is quite obvious that they express something quite different to the spectator who has not been initiated into the meaning of this personal form of shorthand, and the appending of an objective title to what is intended as a subjective impression of the actual world hardly help him over the difficulty. On the contrary it takes him just that far away from the impression the artist desires to produce, plunging him deeper into that world of reality out of which he was to be extricated by this new art, and there is no doubt that in the minds of even the most intelligent spectator it only serves to reenforce his conception of reality upon which he is forced to fall back by the objective titles as well as the concrete representations of what is supposed to be a subjective mood.

I think it may safely be said that in no case does this mood manifest itself to the persons to whom it is addressed, although by a process of auto-hypnotism, a certain few no doubt succeed in making themselves believe that they penetrate the real inwardness of these arbitrarily individual mental processes. Granted that these very discerning ones do respond to the real intention of these abstractions it cannot be denied that this work is the most circumscribed in its appeal of anything so far produced in the name of art and, until its working premise is made clearer, its influence must be correspondingly limited. At present it appears to me to be a too purely personal equation to be intelligible to others than the artist himself and therefore, generally speaking, it can not be regarded as art, whatever else it may be. For that that communicates nothing expresses nothing and as the office of art is first and last expression this new form is as yet outside of the domain of art.