Artists Past and Present; Random Studies

by Elisabeth Luther Cary

The distrust is not unnatural. To follow the popular taste would lead us into strange errors in our judgments of art, and only rarely would produce a predilection capable of lasting over a generation. How is it, then, that we fearlessly may range ourselves on the side of the public in admiration of Sorolla's art? Because the painter has cast off the slavery of the conventional vision. He sees for himself, the rarest of gifts, and thus can well afford to paint like others. He spends, apparently, but little thought upon his execution, letting it flow easily according to his instinct for the appropriate. It is not a safe example to follow for painters who do not see with unusual directness. Often in searching out refinements of execution the eye discovers refinements of fact in the scene to be portrayed and makes its selection with greater distinction than would be possible at first sight. But Sorolla's prompt selective vision flies to its goal like a bee to a honey-bearing flower. He takes what he wants and leaves the rest with the dew still on it. His forces are neither scattered nor spent. His freshness is overmastering, and with our eyes on his creations we have that curious sense of possessing youth and health and freedom which we get sometimes from the sight of boys at their games. We are cheated into forgetfulness of the world's great age and our own lassitudes and physical ineffectiveness. This illusion is agreeable to the most of us, hence our unreserved liking for Sorolla's art which produces it.

The art of Ignacio Zuloaga, on the contrary, produces the opposite impression of complete sophistication. In place of adolescent exultations and ebullient physical activities, we find in it the strange sorceries of a guileful civilization. There are smiling women with narrowed eyelids and powdered faces, old men practising dolorous rejuvenations, laughter that conceals more than it expresses, motions that are as calculated as those of the dance, serpentine forms, fervid passions, and underneath the sophistries a violent primeval temper. In spite of the flowerlike gaiety of the color in rich costumes, the glint of silver, the sweet cool blues, the pale violets, in the painter's versions of the typical toreador of Spain the types are bold, cruel, and sullen. In spite of the fragility and elegance of the women on balconies under soft laces the prevailing note is that of undisciplined ferocity of emotion. This too is Spain, but not the Spain of the beach and sea life.

The rather numerous examples of what Mr. Christian Brinton has called Zuloaga's "growing diabolic tendency" make it clear that his art holds no place for spontaneity and the innocence due to ignorance, but where he keeps to Spanish subjects his work remains healthy. There is the picture entitled "The Sorceresses of San Milan" in which three old women are seen against a dramatic landscape. These haggard jests of nature bring before us a Spain from which the American finds it impossible not to shrink with horror, but they are rich in dramatic quality and recall the power of Goya to endow the abnormal with imaginative splendor while holding to essential truth. They are diabolic, if you will, but not Mephistophelian. There is the abstract horror in them which we associate with unknown powers of darkness, but not the guile with which we endow a personal devil. In striking contrast to this group are the balcony pictures in which women of ripe aggressive beauty lounge gracefully in the open-air rooms with the same freedom of pose as within doors, haughty yet frank, opulent, languid yet animated, flowers that could have bloomed nowhere else than under a scorching sun.

Then there is the group of dancers and actors and singers in each of which we find the adroit mingling of the artificial with the real, and the appreciation of the fact that with the people of the stage much that is artificial to others becomes their reality. The most vivid of them all is Mlle. Lucienne Bréval as "Carmen." The sinuous figure is wrapped in a shawl apparently of a thousand colors; actually, a strong combination of yellow, green, and red. The skirt which the singer gathers in one hand and lifts sufficiently to show the small foot in its red slipper has a dark vermilion ground on which is a pattern of large flowers of paler vermilion, boldly outlined with blue.

Over it droops the dark fringe of the shawl. A crimson flower is in the dark hair, and the footlights cast an artificial amber glow on the face. This tawny harmony is seen against a background of slightly acid green; at the other side of the canvas is a little table with two men seated at it. They look "made up," in the theatrical sense, and the table looks rather light and rickety; there is one solid natural stage property, the yellow jug on the table with its dull blue figure. The whole life and reality of the picture are in the Carmen smiling and muffled in the curious shawl, as if she were about to move in a fiery dance in which her brilliant wrappings would take a part as animated and vital as her own. No one but a Spaniard could invest a garment with such expressiveness.