Note.—At least one French artist of great merit was un-represented at the Post-Impressionist Exhibitions—Georges Rouault, a fellow pupil with Matisse of Gustave Moreau. He stands alone in the movement as being a visionary, though, unlike most visionaries, his expression is based on a profound knowledge of natural appearances. The profile here reproduced (see Plate) will give an idea of his strangely individual and powerful style. (1920.)
DRAWINGS AT THE BURLINGTON FINE ARTS CLUB[49]
THE Burlington Fine Arts Club have arranged a most interesting collection of drawings by dead masters. Abandoning the club’s usual method of taking a particular period or country, the committee have this time allowed their choice to range over many periods and countries, excluding only living artists, and admitting one so recently dead as Degas. This variety of material naturally stimulates one to hazard some general speculations on the nature of drawing as an art. “H. T.,” who writes the preface to the catalogue, already points the way in this direction by some obiter dicta. He points out that the essence of drawing is not the line, but its content. He says:
A single line may mean nothing beyond a line; add another alongside and both disappear, and we are aware only of the contents, and a form is expressed. The beauty of a line is in its result in the form which it helps to bring into being.
Here the author has undoubtedly pointed out the most essential quality of good drawing. I should dispute, rather by way of excessive caution, his first statement, “A single line may mean nothing beyond a line,” since a line is always at its least the record of a gesture, indicating a good deal about its maker’s personality, his tastes and even probably the period when he lived; but I entirely agree that the main point is always the effect of two lines to evoke the idea of a certain volume having a certain form. When “H. T.” adds that “Draughtsmen know this, but writers on art do not seem to,” he seems to be too sweeping. Even so bad a writer on art as Pliny had picked up the idea from a Greek art critic, for in describing the drawing of Parrhasios he says:[50]
By the admission of artists he was supreme in contour. This is the last subtlety of painting; for to paint the main body and centres of objects is indeed something of an achievement, but one in which many have been famous, but to paint the edges of bodies and express the disappearing planes is rare in the history of art. For the contour must go round itself and so end that it promises other things behind and shows that which it hides.
This is an admirable account, since it gives the clue to the distinction between descriptive drawing and drawing in which the contour does not arrest the form, but creates plastic relief of the whole enclosed volume. Now, this plastic drawing can never be attained by a mere description of the edges of objects. Such a description, however exact, can at the utmost do no more than recall vividly the original object; it cannot enable the spectator to realise its plastic volume more clearly than the original object would. Now, when we look at a really good drawing we do get a much more vivid sense of a plastic volume than we get from actual objects.
Unfortunately this is a very severe test to apply, and would, I think, relegate to an inferior class the vast majority of drawings, even of those in the present exhibition. The vast majority of drawings even by the celebrated masters do appeal mainly by other more subsidiary qualities, by the brightness of their descriptive power, and by the elegance and facility of their execution. There is an undoubted pleasure in the contemplation of mere skill, and there are few ways of demonstrating sheer skill of hand more convincingly than the drawing of a complex series of curves with perfect exactitude and great rapidity. And when the curves thus brilliantly drawn describe vividly some object in life towards which we have pleasing associations we get a complex pleasure which is only too likely to be regarded as an æsthetic experience when in fact it is nothing of the kind.