He knows how to characterize. Please listen to this about Van Dongen, the Hollander who paints women so luxuriously: Anacreon venu de pays des Kermesses, petit-neveu de Ruben’s, ignorant des mythologies, matelot ivre fournissant une pacotille galant aux sirènes, Van Dongen est un peu tout cela.
I hope I shall never by accident, as I know I shall not by intention, wander into sad village streets of Vlaminck! They are things of astonishing power. The first one I saw made me suffer like a nightmare. Some stern, grief-tempered soul I trust I shall be spared the misery of meeting, looks out of his canvasses. The vision of Vlaminck is hard, cruel, tears the world to pieces. The tragedies that have been written can not equal the imagined terrors of what must go on within those shabby dwellings whose sad exteriors, he doubles, then redoubles, by hard reflection in cold, clear surfaces of ill-kept canals, or lonely rivers.
The water is deep, clean, magnificently reflecting. The sky is angry, threatening, or else profoundly sad, as if from many tears. But the colors are fresh, insistent, ringing, proud. The brushing is joyous. It is sure and powerful. The structural similarity of his pictures is unusual. But his range is slight, and limited. His blues, greens, have primitive simplicity that contrasts with the too sophisticated structure. The inelasticity of melancholy, of depressing winters by sullen unhappy seas of the north that wearily await spring is here.
I found, the other day, a Gauguin, that is magnificently savage. Two standing women; fine, bare, brown bodies, wearing twisted about the waist, one dark blue, the other high, haunting red that keep the key of their flesh. An acrid yellow-green background with a dark, gum-pink hill. Splendid color pattern! There is something about it that renews the senses. I can drink of it with my eyes then feel good. In this same collection there was a luscious autumn by Guillamin. It reminded me of delicate flesh of tropic melons which I have seen but could not name, in lonely islands, by the Carib Sea. A level foreground, delicately tufted; dry, dull orange-yellow; faint, red-touched violet. A line of plaintive trees; one or two green, round, fat, the others faint; fragile ghosts of gold. A sky that balances daintily but deliberately both green and blue; with trailing, regretful clouds of autumn; grey, yellow, violet.
The harsh, quick assertiveness of Matisse was here; large-patterned, aggressive in hue; but strong, resonant.
Toulouse Lautrec has four portraits which are infinitely sophisticated of line, quick of touch, crisp. Memorable work; too disillusioned, but kept carefully in a low key.
Salmon, writing usually in the grand manner of French prose of the past, about men in paint of the present, who do not believe in the grand manner (stage sweat and swagger), nor the great gesture, says startling things. Hear! Hear! Et dans sa demi-retraite André Derain achevant les œuvres peut-être les plus vastes de son temps and so forth. (André Derain putting the finishing touches to works which perhaps are the most vast of the age.) Derain’s figure paintings are unlike his landscapes. The figure paintings are of the past; the landscapes of today.
I recall a canvas by Derain I saw in Paris: A road in the south of France somewhere, magic in simplicity; not easily disentangled charm. I carry it in my memory. It is massive, with God-like mastery of some vast disturbing chaos. Troubling! The world’s new eyes are sometimes things to consider. And with care.
Adonis is dead and the Loves are lamenting!