Twentieth Century Inventions: A Forecast

by George Sutherland

ART AND NEWS.

The production of pictures for the million will be practically the highest achievement of the graphic art in the twentieth century. Many eminent painters do not at all relish the prospect, being strongly of opinion that when every branch of art becomes popular it will be vulgarised. This notion arises from a fallacy which has affected ideas during the nineteenth century in many matters besides art, the mistake of supposing that vulgar people all belong to one grade of society.

Yet every one who knows modern England, for instance, is perfectly aware that the highest standard of taste is only to be found in the elect of all classes of society. After the experience of the eighteenth century, surely it ought to have been recognised that the "upper ten thousand," when left to develop vulgarity in its true essence, can attain to a degree of perfection hardly possible in any other social grade. Is there in the whole range of pictorial art anything more irredeemably vulgar than a "State Portrait" by Sir Thomas Lawrence or one of his imitators?

It was under the prompting of a dread of the process of popularising art that so many eminent painters of the nineteenth century protested against the fashion set by Sir J. E. Millais when he sold such pictures as "Cherry Ripe" and "Bubbles," knowing they were intended for reproduction in very large numbers by mechanical means. From a somewhat similar motive a few of the leading artists of the nineteenth century for a time stood aloof from the movement for familiarising the people with at least the form, if not the colouring, of each notable picture of the year. From small and very unpretentious beginnings, the published pictorial notes of the Royal Academy and other exhibitions of the year have risen to most imposing proportions; and already there is some talk of attempting a few of the best from each year's production in colours.

Half-tone zinco and similar processes have brought down the expenses entailed by reproductions in colour-work, so as to render an undertaking of this kind much more feasible than it was in the middle of the last half-century. "Cherry Ripe" cost five thousand pounds to reproduce, by the laborious processes of printing not only each colour, but almost every different shade of each colour from a different surface.

In the "three-colour-zinco" process of reproduction only three printings are required, each colour with all its delicate gradations of shade being fully provided for by a single engraved block. When machines of great precision have been finally perfected for admitting of the successive blocks being printed from on paper run from the reel without any handling, a revolution will be brought about not only in artistic printing, but even in the conditions of studio work upon which the artist depends for success.

First, the pictorial notes of the year will be brought out in colour; and as competition for the right of reproduction increases, the artists who have painted the most suitable and most popular pictures will find that they can get more remuneration for copyright than they can for the pictures themselves. This has already been the case in regard to a very limited number of pictures; but the exception of the past will be the rule of the future, at least as regards those pictures which possess any special merits at all.

More thought will therefore be required as the motive or basis of each subject; and historical pictures will come more into favour, the affected simplicity and mental emptiness of the plein air school being discarded in favour of a style which shall speak more directly to the people, and stir more deeply both their mental and their emotional natures.

The artist and the printer must then confer. They can no longer afford to work in the future with such disregard of each other's ideas and methods as they have done in the past. It was at one time the custom among painters almost to despise the "black-and-white man" who drew for the Press in any shape or form; but that piece of affectation has nearly been destroyed by the general ridicule with which it is now received, and by the knowledge that there are already, at the end of the nineteenth century, just as many men of talent working by methods suitable for reproduction, as there are painters who confine their attention to palette, canvas and brush.

The printer will now advance a step further, and will invoke the services of the painter himself, even prescribing certain methods by which the Press may be enabled to reproduce the work of the artist more faithfully than would otherwise be possible.