He needs only a small sheet of paper to give us the meaning of the “Erdgeist”; we see a body of a woman who rises out of the vast form of the All-Mother, carrying in her arms man and woman. Only the head of the unfolding mother with its mysterious smile is drawn in what we are accustomed to think of as drawing. There is the story, interpret it as you will; Erda—Amida—Ceres—Mary—the choice is a matter of time and temperament. The meaning is the same and Gibran is dealing with fundamentals.
But in the portrayal of the idea he is scrupulously faithful to the perfection of his technique. Thus beauty is the final arbiter upon the destiny of his production. He creates with intuitive feeling then shapes his work into unity with the power of thought, but both these impulses are guided and guarded by a profound love and appreciation of the beautiful which enables him to portray that which he has to say as simply and as sincerely as it is possible for him to do so. It is this quality of instinctive simplicity which makes his painting so clearly akin to the art of the sculpture, for the sculptor, unless in relief, cannot deal with anything other than the essential idea and the beauty of form. In sculpture there are no accessories of background, no gradations of colour values to attract the eye and deflect the mind from thought. Very few painters have been able to express the essentials of life in painting. Da Vinci attempted it but he was lured away from the quest by his love of subtleties, and pupils like Luini or Sodoma expressed the subtleties but failed to grasp the inner meaning which held Da Vinci to his perpetual quest.
The art of Gibran is symbolic in the deepest meaning of the word because its roots spring from those basic truths which are fundamental for all ages and all experiences. He senses the meaning of the earth and her productions; of man, the final and the consummate flower, and throughout his work he expresses the interrelating unity of man with nature. He shows us Man evolving out of the beast in a struggle with another centaur; he portrays the recumbent Mother crouched against a centaur who holds the child in his arms—the child who is already one step beyond, a conception closely parallel to that of Nietzsche. In yet another picture he shows us Man driving or being driven by a horse, divinely frenzied.
His centaurs and horses have a charm beyond their natures so that they are never wholly animal in character. They have a grace which is reminiscent of the Chinese statuettes of horses, with their square nostrils and delicate hoofs, hoofs that paw the air rather than the ground and stamp upon the mind the finest qualities of a horse, its fleetness, swiftness and strength. So that in regarding these centaurs we sense the beast that is yet man and again that man which is and must be animal; we become conscious of that evolution upwards which is in itself a miracle, although there is a barrier which will for ever prevent man from clutching the stars.
The picture of the flying figure suggests the sweeping onrush of the winged victory, man’s supreme aspiration; it is symbol of the divine force which impels man for ever onward to higher levels of evolution. The study of the human body in flight has been a source of inspiration to almost every artist; in the Palazzo Ducale at Venice for instance, Tintoretto has introduced a multitude of flying figures into his great ceiling painting of “Venice as the Queen of the Adriatic.” But in all these studies there are certain distortions of the human body. These forms are either too aspirant or too convulsive so that one is unpleasantly reminded of the muscular sensations of cramped arms and benumbed legs.
In the Sistine Chapel however, the great patriarchal paintings of the Jehovah creating the world, dividing the waters of the earth or sweeping through space to touch the finger of the recumbent Adam, are all so balanced and so benignly reposeful that they convey not only a sense of flight through space but the impression of the very weight of space which is able to sustain these moving bodies.
Gibran’s studies of movement are akin to those of Michelangelo because he has arrived at a unity of thought and representation. Not only is he the master of the symbolic idea which he expresses but he has attained the technical grasp upon his material. Hence we are not disconcerted by false conceptions of the human body or erroneous perspectives.
His paintings are mostly wash drawings and only here and there does his pencil co-operate with his brush to suggest and complete the theme. The level of his painting is very delicate—plane suggesting another plane in the most subtle gradation so that at first there seems to be but little colour and then comes a swift realization that it is all colour—only imperceptibly diffused. In one or two of the studies like the sombre picture of the man with the cap, more vivid reds and blues are introduced and a certain greenish blue, wholly of the East, reappears constantly in his studies of definite types. But in his more profound interpretative work, the gradation of colour is delicate in the extreme. He uses colour to reveal his form unlike many painters who lose their sense of form in the pursuit of colour; that is another reason why his paintings are so suggestive of the art of the sculptor.
This impression is conveyed most powerfully in the study of a woman’s head, the frontispiece to this volume, a painting which is the most complete exposition of the art of Gibran. The head is thrown back and seems to rest upon a white background that is yet not exactly white; it is the colour of the sea at an infinite distance when colour is no longer colour but merely light. The head, lying upon this luminous ground is so delicately delineated that the throat veins almost quiver and the pale lips are about to move. And as we look upon the fine profile, the sensitive, highly arched nose and the tender, compassionate mouth, it seems as if this woman’s head had arisen out of those deeper waters which we call the sea of memory, as if indeed
“Our souls have sight of that immortal sea from whence we came.”