The meaning of pictures

by John C. Van Dyke

And the audience that sees has something to say about what the painter shall paint. It creates in large measure the demand which the artist supplies. I am aware that oftentimes the contrary is maintained and it is asserted that the artist sets the pace and directs the public taste. Sometimes he does, but he is influenced more or less by his audience. The demand for work has always come from those who could pay for it, and the patron usually insists upon having his views incorporated in the work. The history of painter and patron in the past rather confirms this. No doubt Michael Angelo had some contempt for the art views of Julius II., but he painted the Sistine ceiling as the Pope requested. And probably Rubens thought his Jesuit patrons in Flanders an ignorant pack of priests, but he painted the themes and subjects they designated. The subject—aye—there’s the rub! For the public will have it and the painters will hate it—that is to say, some of the modern painters have come to hate it apparently for no other reason than that the public likes it. Of recent years there has arisen a cry of “art for art’s sake”—that is to say, art in the form, color, and workmanship, but not in the thought or subject—and many artists have given their unqualified support to the dogma. In upholding the charm of the decorative they are prone to deny charm to anything and everything else. Form and color, they alone make a picture, and all else is philistine sentiment—the very leather and prunello of art.

It is not to be denied that this contention of the painter is right enough so far as it affirms the importance of the decorative. Form and color do make art, and that too with slight reference to subject-meaning; but we may question the assumption that there is no other form of art, and that the subject and what art may mean to us are matters of no importance. We have already considered the different kinds of painting that are produced by painters who think and paint in different ways. “Art is in the look,” says Whistler; “No, it is in the thought,” says Millet; Vibert in his pictures seems to believe it is the subject that counts; and if Meissonier were alive he would certainly insist upon it that art consists in realizing the model—in painting a boot you could pull off or a spur you could put on. But it must be apparent to you that each one of these men, while exploiting his own preference, is possibly exploiting his own limitation. No doubt each one of them believes there is nothing to be seen beyond where he has travelled.

But there is something too much of “my way is the only way” in these views of painting. Not perhaps too much for the men themselves, because a person usually succeeds better who believes implicitly in himself and is convinced by his own convictions; but too much perhaps for those who have nothing to do with production, who have to do only with the enjoyment of things produced. Individually we may be willing to admit that neither the subject nor the realistic portrayal of nature interests us so much as the look of a picture and what it may express in thought or sentiment; but it would be idle for us to ignore the fact that four-fifths of the people who are looking at pictures are interested only in subject and that perhaps two-thirds of the painters who are painting them are intent only upon doing something realistic. It is possible to influence and persuade these many dwellers in Philistia, if you choose so to regard them, but they cannot be pushed aside contemptuously.

And sometimes the persuasion of the artist is in direct defiance of the rational. The “no-subject” cry of some present-day writers of fiction will perhaps illustrate this. What shall we say, for instance, to the extravagance of those who tell us that in writing nothing which teaches, argues, or expounds is “literature”; that “literature” consists in the writing of something clever about nothing, and that when the thing said becomes of importance the work ceases to be literary. The inference is, of course, that history and essay step down and out in favor of poetry and fiction; that Richard Le Gallienne’s sensuous cadences and Henry Harland’s delightful ping-pong conversations are “literature”; but not Macaulay’s history and De Quincey’s essays. Are we to believe that there is no art in Bossuet’s oration over the great Condé because it preaches; no art in Taine’s philosophy because it teaches? It is true enough that there is art in the skilful use of the adjective, in the glow of words, and in the slip of sentences; but why is there not art also in the handling of an idea, in the development of a subject, in a point of view? Why is it necessary to let the sense out of everything before it becomes artistic? Practically it is not possible to separate the mental from the mechanical. The mind guides the hand, and both are but manifestations of an individuality. How shall you distinguish Shakespeare the thinker from Shakespeare the dramatic writer? How shall you separate emotional thinking from its sequence, enthusiastic craftsmanship? People are not convinced by the argument for art in the method but not in the mind or the material.

Mr. Whistler, speaking for painting, is scarcely less extravagant than the writers. “As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight, and the subject-matter has nothing to do with the harmony of sound or of color. Art should stand alone and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like.” Thus Mr. Whistler; and again there is a measure of pungent pertinence in the remark. Painting should appeal primarily to “the artistic sense of eye,” but not necessarily to that alone. There is no reason why it should not have a meaning and express a feeling or a sentiment about something besides form and color. Even music appeals to something more than the ear. It suggests a feeling, an association. If it be true that it has no idea or sentiment, why do we grow sad over Siegfried’s Death March, or elated over that last upward burst of song in the dungeon scene from “Faust”? Why do we become emotional or sentimental or romantic over a symphony by Beethoven? If we wish meaningless sound we must take the æolian harp or the hum of the wind through pine needles or the roar of the sea breaking on the beach; and perhaps each of these seems beautiful to us largely because it suggests something like a human moan or wail.

Just so there may be a suggestion or meaning behind the most decorative of pictures. Every picture, if it be coherent at all, illustrates, represents, or expresses some fact, thought, or feeling. However shadowy the trees of the no-subject artist, however vague and ghost-like the figures of a symphonist in paint, we see and recognize the trees and the figures. The lines, lights, and colors are so placed that they illustrate subjects, namely, trees and figures; they convey to us a meaning, and if they are so indefinite that we cannot distinguish trees from figures, rocks from grass, or water from sky, then the picture is not a picture, but merely a dash of variegated colors. Two dead fish upon a plank and behind them an iron pot—the picture that Vollon has painted for us—has, as a picture, perhaps as little subject about it as the most confirmed modern could desire; yet it is no less a subject. We recognize the pot, the plank, the fish readily enough. Smear the canvas so that we have only streaks of gray and black, and the subject is gone and with it the picture. It is then only a medley of pigment which may be rather interesting as a color-spot, but is no more of a picture than so much color rubbed on the panel of a door.

Mr. Whistler may call one of his small canvases of the open sea a symphony in blue or gray or catalogue it by any other fantastic name he chooses; but the fact remains that his few touches of the brush give us not only the form and color of the sea, but suggest to us the great ocean tossing after storm—rolling moodily under gray skies. The painter intended that such a meaning should be suggested. If he had not defined his sea and sky so that we could recognize them his canvas might still be a pretty piece of blue and gray, and it might be a “symphony”; but it would not be a picture. It would not picture anything; it would be merely pigment again.

And even an art-for-art’s-sake devotee might wonder why Mr. Whistler should fight wind-mills about “devotion, pity, love and patriotism” in pictures. Are the altar-pieces of the early Italians the worse for being filled with what people choose to think true “devotion”? Would the pictures by Filippino or Botticelli be the better if the pietistic sentiment were eliminated and a smiling Froufrou took the place of the sad-faced Madonna? Consider for a moment that splendid family group kneeling in the altar-piece of the Pesaro family by Titian, and then ask yourself if the suggestion of devotion here is any more objectionable than the spirit of frivolity or gayety in a scene from the ballet by Degas. Some years ago there was a rather interesting picture by Dagnan-Bouveret in the Salon, called “The Conscripts”—a picture showing a squad of youths marching down the street to the sound of drum-beats, with the tricolor flying over their heads. The sentiment of it was undoubtedly patriotic, and crowds stood about it day by day as long as the exhibition remained open. Would Mr. Whistler condemn it for either its patriotism or its popularity? If so, why not the “Surrender at Breda” by Velasquez? That, too, smacks of military glory, and I doubt not had its crowds of Spaniards staring at it in the past as Dagnan-Bouveret’s picture in the present. And why not put Rembrandt’s “Night Watch,” and Frans Hals’s Shooting Companies at Haarlem in the same pillory? They are full of uniforms, flags, drums and guns, and they are stuffed with patriotism, civic pride and burgher conceit; but, oddly enough, we find no painter-writer abusing them on that account. Why? Because they are not lacking in decorative quality; they are superb as form and color.

So it seems then that Velasquez, Frans Hals, and Rembrandt shall go scot-free for perpetrating what is adjudged little short of a crime in Sir John Millais and George Boughton. Which is it, then, the presence of the devotional and the patriotic or the absence of the decorative that really excites the wrath of the Whistlerians? Possibly what their spokesmen meant to say was that in modern painting there is too much insistence upon the theme, the subject, the story told; that artistic qualities of form and color are ignored, pushed aside, overlooked in favor of the incident set forth; that painting is not a mere vehicle for illustrating poetry, fiction, religion, or history; that it has qualities peculiarly its own, which are entitled to quite as much consideration as the thought or theme which may be illustrated. And all of that would be true enough. The decorative phase of art is quite as important as the illustrative, but why are not both important? Why and how do they conflict with one another?