Twenty Drawings

by Unknown

There is little drawing as we are accustomed to think of drawing, but the painting is modelled in colour and is akin to the interpretation of a sculptor who usually seeks the greater freedom which larger material begets. That something flowing which alone makes the earth other than a piece of stone is revealed in almost all his work. It is the very soul of sculpture and he is but expressing it in kindred form.

Gibran is an interpreter of “the heavens above and the earth below.” He recalls like a fleeting memory, the meaning of the great clouds which swept like a flock of storm gulls before the bewildered eyes of primitive man, but he has likewise sounded the pit of agony into which the soul descends during the crucifixion of its development. For Gibran is not alone interested in the story of man, he is interested in the history of life; he is not concerned merely with its portrayal, he shares its struggle. He is impelled by that force which lies beyond all things animate and inanimate—that force which produces, destroys and recreates with the same intensity, the same purpose and always to his eyes, with the same succession of beauty.

Therein lies the reason why his work is of today with its unrest and grouping in spite of its intuitive simplicity in the use of symbolic material of the past. It is of today because we are seeking to infuse a new meaning into life whereby we can accept the bitter in order to gain the sweet; we are endeavouring to come to terms with the ancient symbols and although the concepts which Gibran portrays are as old as Cronos, they are also as modern as the interpretative spirit of our age. His art arises out of the past but its appeal is to the thinking minds of today and it foreshadows a trend in the creative work of the future.

The tryptich of the crucifixion in this series of drawings shows at once how the symbol of the Christ between the two thieves can be used either to express the complete religious and mythological conception, as it would have been used by the Primitives in some large fresco, and how the same idea can be conveyed on a small sheet of paper by one who understands the inner meaning and is able to put it forth as a representation of the conflict of every self-conscious being. In this drawing a man rests upon the shoulders of two companions. There are no religious accessories either of halo or stigmata with which to associate or localize the conception and yet the story of the crucifixion is completely portrayed.

It is in this absolute simplicity of idea and intuitive revelation coupled with an instinctive grasp of the beauty of form, that Gibran attains the consummation of his powers and commands a respect meritorious of the classic. For amidst the deluge which has overwhelmed our world of art, when Cubists collide with Vorticists and both are submerged by the onrushing of the Orphicists—when school and type arise and as swiftly decline in the quest of the new and the age is seeking a picture of its soul in barbaric imitation of genuine barbarism, it is of inestimable value to come upon an artist who is fulfilling himself in his work apart from any claptrap of modern devices. Gibran has not gone to strange lands to study the new but he has walked the silent path of the meditative creator and he has brought out of his own depths these eternal verities of the history of man’s inner life. He has recreated the symbolic incarnation of the All-Mother—he has divined the flying wish of humanity and he has laid bare and retold the story of the Passion.

In the poetic revelation of these psychologic conceptions of humanity he exhibits a world of consummate beauty to the younger artists of America whose life he has chosen to share. He is expressing the vast, the infinite forms of the ever fluid past and is showing us how these imperishable memories can stimulate the art of the future.

Only in the acceptance of this infinitely varied racial history as a living part of the present, will America prepare herself for the eventual renaissance of the arts and as a forerunner of this renaissance, Gibran will occupy a similar position to that of Giotto and Ghirlandaio in relation to the Italian Golden Age. The painters of the Renaissance showed the world that the human being could be portrayed as if he were divine. But to those who preceded the Renaissance the “as if” did not exist. To them—as to Gibran, human life is divine. The body reflects and represents the spirit, and art arises out of the interplay between the inner and the outer world.

It is a fact that in painting as well as in poetry, we are standing today on the tiptoes of expectation, awaiting the fusion of a closer union between the old world and the new. We are no longer bounded by New England conceptions of the poetical on the one side and by the various quasi-tragic representations of the Last of the Mohicans as a basic expression of American art on the other. In the anticipation of the eventual renaissance of the world, we in America can lend ourselves to study those who are its precursors.

For Gibran belongs to that group of artists whose message always heralds a period of transition and whose voice challenges the present to a recapitulation of its standards.

There is a tradition so old that its origin is lost in the mists of antiquity where it is acclaimed as the symbol of our common ancestor Adam. Its sign signifies “Dum voluit spiritus Mundi.” Out of the illimitable past—illuminating the East, touching in turn Greece, Italy, Flanders, Germany, France and Spain,—so passed the great creative spirit in the world of art; what if this same illuminative spirit should be in turn approaching our shores, provided that we are receptive enough to understand and to assimilate its fundamental message.