And that striking embodiment of Whisky Bill, a once well-known personage in the American Parisian colony! Several judges have praised the Fraser portrait, which we greatly admire for its excellent qualities, but personally we plump for the head of Whisky Bill, the head of a great violinist and also a profound alcoholist. In Gorky’s Nachtasyl there is an old actor who runs about the play exclaiming: “I have poisoned my organism with alcohol.” We have never seen Whisky Bill, but we are sure from the canvas that he has poisoned his organism with alcohol. Nevertheless, a man who thinks, one who has suffered from the mirage of thirst, not one of the Hals or the Steen jovial drinkers. The spleen of life has killed the ideals of Bill. They are submerged in his melancholy eyes. As for his hair, we might almost compare it to Masson’s engraving of the gray-haired man, Guillaume de Brisacier, after Mignard; but with a difference—the hair is treated more luminously in mass than detail.
There are the usual number of studies from life, of Old Mary Curling Her Hair, a companion piece to the Goose Girl. The most characteristic picture in the Luks collection is an ideal head of Bobbie Burns’s Suter Johnnie. Therein is the synthesis of all the more admirable qualities of Luks: humor, technical audacity, solid modelling, vital color, sweet sentiment, and a searching humanity, all of which combined make a vigorous appeal to the spectator. Luks sometimes plays to the gallery, but at the core he is sincere. His feet are set upon the mountain. He is not pausing to grasp at the flowers or the applause. But do not imagine because he is the smiling George Luks with the Napoleonic brow, round cherubic cheeks, and nimble wit, that he is easy to decipher.
As for The Pawnbroker’s Daughter—she might have stepped out from some old Holland master’s studio. The Dutch strain in Luks and his shrewd Yankee humor are here blended in the happiest manner. The girl is carrying a carafe on a tray. The rich comminglement of tones, the tribal “awareness” of the girl’s glance, her tangled hair, and the smouldering splendor of her garb are indicated without a suspicion of bravura; yet one is conscious of virtuosity, clairvoyance, and sympathetic observation.
There is the reverse of the medal. No man is made all of a piece, and the art of Luks has its seamy side. He displays an infernal impatience, that chief sin of heresiarchs, according to Cardinal Newman. He sometimes takes criticism in no amiable way. And the corollary of impatience is haste in execution. Luks seldom finishes a canvas. He must have five hundred stowed away in his studio. Many are not half-begun. Nevertheless, this rough handling of his material—neither irreverent nor careless—bears special fruits. Some subjects respond instantly to this treatment. Swift, brutal, seldom subtle, though suggestive, his portraits leap from the bare canvas into vital being. In the fury of his execution, when the fit is upon him he could cover miles of walls with figures. This itching of the nerves, this tugging of the muscles, which impels a pianist to play until Jericho falls or his listeners die, is but the special artistic organ of any artist keyed up to the pitch of intensity. Luks is the most normal man imaginable. Full of the kindly sap of life, he too often boasts his powers when he should be making lines and color patches. That is his very human side; “human—all too human”—as Nietzsche would say. Slightly inhuman is his capacity for sustained work—mind you, we don’t say sustained in the sense of sticking at one picture until he has exhausted its possibilities, but a capacity for toil, prolonged, laborious.
This exuberance, this boiling over of energy, these dashes at reality, these slices of life, bold portraits of men and women who dare to live, though only painted, this Human Comedy merely hinted at, are testimonies to the creative and tumultuous powers of a man who is of Rabelaisian energies. The saving fact is that Luks is not old, and knows what he most lacks. To advise him to paint like some one else, to make slim silk purses when he so superbly paints sows’ ears, would be futile. He is not academic. He has a grim vein of irony that spells at a glance the tragi-comedy of life—his Parisian sketch-books would have attracted Daumier—and also a superabounding confidence that sometimes leads its owner into dubious, as well as devious, places.
But he is one of our native, commanding talents, and with study and experience must come the purging of the dross; with his mellowing Luks will take his proper place among his contemporaries, and it will be in the seats of the mighty—or nowhere. The only possible schooling that will hasten this result will be the stern self-schooling of George Luks. But he is just the style of man who may bid criticism go hang and nevertheless win out at the end. Like the turbulent and fleshly Bard of Camden, he can “sound his barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world,” and make of this “yawp” an art extremely personal and arresting.
As a portraitist he has his good days and bad. When he is deeply gripped by his subject he is usually successful. The head of Senator Root was criticised because of a certain hardness and rigidity in texture and pose, but there were critics who declared that the painter’s psychology had revealed the essential Root—austere, profound, Machiavellian statesman and scholar. The self-portrait, like the Smoker of Brouwer, is the record of a passing mood. It is a swift sketch, and is Luks in the heydey of a happy, devil-may-care humor. Truly a ‘human document.’ I admire his landscape, Round Houses at High Bridge. The atmosphere is finely evoked; Luks knows his values. Steam, and again steam, is painted in a delicate scale of pearl-greys.
But even Lux pinxit becomes a long-drawn-out line of light. I bade my hosts good day. “I’ll see you as far as the subway,” said Luks. He accompanied me to the station, where you go down to the train in a lofty elevator, as you do in the gloomy London Underground. I had passed an admirable afternoon with a human painter. Some painters are not human.
XII
CONCERNING CALICO CATS
This is to be a sober Sunday sermon, even though it largely concerns Calico Cats. What is a calico cat? you will ask. The first we ever heard of the strange beast, after the Eugene Field poem, was at a concert of the Philharmonic Society, when Mortimer Wilson conducted a clever orchestral suite in which figured the Funeral of the Calico Cat; that is, a specific cat, one, let it be said in passing, that was quite tiny at the beginning of the music, but grew to monstrous proportions before its interment; a cat that would have put to blush the “Cheshire Puss” of Alice’s in the fable. Cats in calico may be seen on the streets any Gotham summer day, but a calico cat—what in the world may that be? The simulacrum of a feline, an eidolon, such as Mr. Howell once described? We can’t ask Mr. Wilson, because he might refer us to his charming score, which speaks for itself. Verhaeren, the Belgian poet, the greatest living poet at the time of his death at Rouen, with the solitary exception of Gabriele d’Annunzio, Emile Verhaeren has written about “Cats of ebony, Cats of flame,” but, manifestly, a cat can’t be both flaming and calico. We must turn to that lover of cats, Charles Baudelaire, who wrote sonnets to his cats as others have penned praises of their mistresses’ eyebrows. He discovered to France the genius of Richard Wagner and the genius of Edouard Manet, not to mention Poe’s. Jules Claretie relates that Baudelaire said to him, with a grimace: “I love Wagner; but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung by his tail outside of a window, and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws. There is an odd grating on the glass which I find at the same time strange, irritating, and singularly harmonious.”