The Whistler book

by Sadakichi Hartmann

The various aspects of electrical illumination, gaslight, flashlight effects, searchlight, etc., no doubt can be solved pictorially, but they should never be applied unless the character of the picture absolutely demands them.

Tone is the ideal of the modern painter. It is his highest ambition. It is the powerful subduer of all the incongruities of modern art.

But what painters strive for, in most instances are merely fragmentary accomplishments. It is not tone in the large sense as the Old Masters understood it. To Titian and Rembrandt and Velasquez "tone" meant a combination of all pictorial qualities, the contrast of colour, the balance of lighter and darker planes, the linear arrangement; all these together produced tone. They do not sacrifice form or detail, correct drawing, the physiognomy of the faces and the idea and conception of the picture to it.

Do not misunderstand me. Tone is desirable; no picture should be without it. But it is merely one of the elements that enter into the making of a picture, and not the whole thing. There are light tonalities as well as dark tonalities. A Renoir is as much in tone as a black-in-black Tissot.

What tonal painters see in tone is merely the appearance of old age. The Old Masters have become famous, and the public has acquired a certain predilection for dark-toned pictures. The modern painters try to reproduce it, overlooking (perhaps wilfully) that the dark tonality is entirely an artificial product, caused by dirt and dampness, the chemical action of light, and the gradual change of colour, oil and varnish.

The Old Masters painted in a low key, but they probably never thought that some day their pictures would look as they do now. The modern painters try to produce a quality that has nothing to do with art, they cater to the taste of certain art patrons that have a liking for old-looking things.

In portraiture the simplest scheme will always be most certain of success. Variety is desirable, but no exaggeration or strained effects. Of all modern painters Whistler and Carrière seem to have excelled in conquering the modern limitations of light and shade composition and making the most of them. They have enveloped their figures in clair-obscure that is uncertain in form, mystic in tendency, but suggestive of atmosphere, depth and space, some grey or dark interior filled with struggling shadows, capricious gleams of light and tonal gradations, tantalizing in their subtlety and power of suggestion.

All sharp lines are dissolved, each detail vanishes with soft delicacy into the other and their light, falling from some unknown source, quivers like a soft chord through the twilight.

The "Mother and Child" of Carrière has but little of the robust yet sweet and seductive charm of the Madonna pictures. Its glimmer of light is sad and dreamy, as if it were woven out of grey monotonies of everyday life. And in Whistler's "Sarasate" we see in the plastic, but solitary light passage, on face and shirt front a symbol of all the glamour of romance and poetry that light can yield in our prosaic age. Whistler translated all objects into flat surface planes, and, in that way, sacrificed more to the realization of tone than any other painter. His fragmentary visions are almost colourless but never give the impression of monochrome. Looking at one of his enigmatic figures receding into vague shadows, a strange association of thought occurs to me: I see in one of the sunless courtyards of the Escurial the dark figure of a woman standing near a fountain and holding a red rose in her hand. At one of the palace windows is seen the proud face of Velasquez, gazing absent-mindedly upon the scene. And the wind ruffles the flower, carries one petal after another and scatters them upon the surface of the water. Is this dark silent woman the personification of Whistler's muse, and does she tell us that the splendour of light and shade composition of the Old Masters has faded, that we know nothing of its fervour that rose from the depths of a more picturesque age, and that all we can do is to scatter a few colour notes across the darkness of space? For the jubilant and passionate note is altogether missing in Whistler's art, though it can claim profundity and some dreaminess.