Modern Painting

by George Moore

Needless to say that a sky painted in this way does not bear looking into. Close to the spectator it presents the appearance of a pard; but when he reaches the proper distance there is no denying that the colours do in a measure unite and assume a tone more or less equivalent to the tone that would have been obtained by blending the colours on the palette. "But," cry Seurat and Signac, "an infinitely purer and more beautiful tone than could have been obtained by any artificial blending of the colours on the palette—a tone that is the exact equivalent of one of Nature's tones, for it has been obtained in exactly the same way."

Truly a subject difficult to write about in English. Perhaps it is one that should not be attempted anywhere except in a studio with closed doors. But if I did not make some attempt to explain this matter, I should leave my tale of the decline and fall of French art in the nineteenth century incomplete.

Roughly speaking, these new schools—the symbolists, the decadents, the dividers of tones, the professors of the rhythm of gesture—date back about ten years. For ten years the division of the tones has been the subject of discussion in the aesthetic circles of Montmartre. And when we penetrate further into the matter—or, to be more exact, as we ascend into the higher regions of La Butte—we find the elect, who form so stout a phalanx against the Philistinism of the Louvre, themselves subdivided into numerous sections, and distraught with internecine feuds concerning the principle of the art which they pursue with all the vehemence that Veronese green and cadmium yellow are capable of. From ten at night till two in the morning the brasseries of the Butte are in session. Ah! the interminable bocks and the reek of the cigars, until at last a hesitating exodus begins. An exhausted proprietor at the head of his waiters, crazed with sleepiness, eventually succeeds in driving these noctambulist apostles into the streets.

Then the nervous lingering at the corner! The disputants, anxious and yet loth to part, say goodbye, each regretting that he had not urged some fresh argument—an argument which had just occurred to him, and which, he feels sure, would have reduced his opponent to impotent silence. Sometimes the partings are stormy. The question of the introduction of the complementary colours into the frames of the pictures is always a matter of strife, and results in much nonconformity. Several are strongly in favour of carrying the complementary colours into the picture-frames. "If you admit," says one, "that to paint a blue roof with an orange sky shining on it you must introduce the complementary colour green—which the spectator does not see, but imagines—there is excellent reason why you should dot the frame all over with green, for the picture and its frame are not two things, but one thing." "But," cries his opponent, "there is a finality in all things; if you carry your principle out to the bitter end, the walls as well as the frame should be dotted with the complementary colours, the staircases too, the streets likewise; and if we pursue the complementaries into the street, who shall say where we are to stop? Why stop at all, unless the neighbours protest that we are interfering with their complementaries?"

The schools headed by Signac and Anquetin comprise numerous disciples and adherents. They do not exhibit in the Salon or in the Champ de Mars; but that is because they disdain to do so. They hold exhibitions of their own, and their picture-dealers trade only in their works and in those belonging to or legitimately connected with the new schools.

If I have succeeded in explaining the principle of coloration employed by these painters, I must have excited some curiosity in the reader to see these scientifically-painted pictures. To say that they are strange, absurd, ridiculous, conveys no sensation of their extravagances; and I think that even an elaborate description would miss its mark. For, in truth, the pictures merit no such attention. It is only needful to tell the reader that they fail most conspicuously at the very point where it was their mission to succeed. Instead of excelling in brilliancy of colour the pictures painted in the ordinary way, they present the most complete spectacle of discoloration possible to imagine.

Yet Signac is a man of talent, and in an exhibition of pictures which I visited last May I saw a wide bay, two rocky headlands extending far into the sea, and this offing was filled with a multitude of gull-like sails. There was in it a vibration of light, such an effect as a mosaic composed of dim-coloured but highly polished stones might produce. I can say no good word, however, for his portrait of a gentleman holding his hat in one hand and a flower in the other. This picture formulated a still newer aestheticism—the rhythm of gesture. For, according to Signac, the raising of the face and hands expresses joy, the depression of the face and hands denotes sadness. Therefore, to denote the melancholy temperament of his sitter, Signac represented him as being hardly able to lift his hat to his head or the flower to his button-hole. The figure was painted, as usual, in dots of pure colour lifted from the palette with the point of the brush; the complementary colours in duplicate bands curled up the background. This was considered by the disciples to be an important innovation; and the effect, it is needless to say, was gaudy, if not neat.

A theory of Anquetin's is that wherever the painter is painting, his retina must still hold some sensation of the place he has left; therefore there is in every scene not only the scene itself, but remembrance of the scene that preceded it. This is not quite clear, is it? No. But I think I can make it clear. He who walks out of a brilliantly lighted saloon—that is to say, he who walks out of yellow—sees the other two primary colours, red and blue; in other words, he sees violet. Therefore Anquetin paints the street, and everything in it, violet—boots, trousers, hats, coats, lamp-posts, paving-stones, and the tail of the cat disappearing under the porte cochère.

But if in my description of these schools I have conveyed the idea of stupidity or ignorance I have failed egregiously. These young men are all highly intelligent and keenly alive to art, and their doings are not more vain than the hundred and one artistic notions which have been undermining the art-sense of the French and English nations for the last twenty years. What I have described is not more foolish than the stippling at South Kensington or the drawing by the masses at Julien's. The theory of the division of the tones is no more foolish than the theory of plein air or the theory of the square brushwork; it is as foolish, but not a jot more foolish.

Great art dreams, imagines, sees, feels, expresses—reasons never. It is only in times of woful decadence, like the present, that the bleating of the schools begins to be heard; and although, to the ignorant, one method may seem less ridiculous than another, all methods—I mean, all methods that are not part and parcel of the pictorial intuition—are equally puerile and ridiculous. The separation of the method of expression from the idea to be expressed is the sure sign of decadence. France is now all decadence. In the Champ de Mars, as in the Salon, the man of the hour is he who has invented the last trick in subject or treatment.