“I’m sorry,” said Mendel. “Talking is no use. I’ve found my way out of as bad times as this, and shall again. It is no good talking. I will sit as silent as the little figures there, and in time I shall know what I must do.”
“You want taking out of yourself,” muttered Logan irritably. “Come and see Thompson’s show.”
As successful artists they entered the gallery self-consciously and rather contemptuously. That did not last long. There were many people sniggering at the Van Goghs and the Picassos, but Mendel’s thoughts flew back to a still-life he had painted of a blue enamel teapot and a yellow matchbox years ago. He had painted them as he had seen them, in raw, crude colour, but the picture had been so derided, and he had been so scornfully reminded that there were no brilliant colours in nature, that he had painted the same subject over again with a very careful rendering of what was called “atmosphere.”
Here were crude colours indeed—almost, in many cases, as they came from the tubes, and as for drawing, there was hardly a trace of it, yet in the majority of the pictures there was a riotous freedom which rushed like a cleansing wind through Mendel’s mind, and it seemed to him that here was the answer to many of his doubts—not a clear vision of art, but a roughly indicated road to it. It was absurd to sit cramping over rules and difficult technicalities when the starting-point of art lay so far beyond them. There was much rubbish in the show, but the works of Cézanne and Picasso were undeniably pictures. They were not flooded with a clear loveliness, like the pictures of Botticelli or Uccello, but they had beauty, and lured the mind on to seek another more mysterious beauty beyond them.
The two friends went through the exhibition in silence. As they left, Mendel asked:—
“Well! what did you think of it?”
“We’re snuffed out,” replied Logan despondently.
“Not I!” cried Mendel. “I’m only just beginning.”
“I don’t understand it yet. It has made my eyes and my head ache. At first it seemed to me too cerebral to be art at all, but there’s no denying it, and it has to be digested. In a way it is what I have always been talking about. It has to do with the life we are living, which may not be much of a life, but it is ours and we find it good. It has not been a plunge into another world, like a visit to the National Gallery, but into some reality a little beyond this extraordinary jumble and hotch-potch of metropolitan life.”
“It is painting,” said Mendel. “That is enough for me. And they are not afraid of colour. Why should they be? The colours are there: why not use them? I’m going to.”