Modern Painting, Its Tendency and Meaning

by Willard Huntington Wright

VII

THE NEO-IMPRESSIONISTS

THE Impressionists, although they turned their backs upon casual selectivism and branched out into analytic research, had—contrary to the generally accepted opinion—no precise and scientific method of colour application. This came later with the advent of a group of painters who have been called, in turn, Pointillists, Divisionists, Chromo-luminarists and Neo-Impressionists, but who chose to regard themselves only as the last of these four designations. And there is perhaps more logic in this nomenclature, for it is not limited technically; it contains no claim to achievement as does Chromo-luminarism; and it suggests this new school’s consanguinity with the movement out of which it grew. With Delacroix’s Journal, the pictures of Claude Monet and Chevreul’s pioneer treatise on colour, De la Loi du Contraste Simultané des Couleurs, the Neo-Impressionists evolved a coldly scientific method of technique. By carrying a simple premise to its ultimate conclusion, regardless of everything save the exacting demands of logic, they endeavoured to heighten the emotional effect of the Impressionist vision. In this movement, as in other similar ones, can be detected the spirit which animates the ardent visionary when he contemplates a novel method—the spirit which invites him to go to even greater extremes. In it there is as much enthusiasm as serious purpose, as much of the essence of youth as of the arriviste. In no instance has such a spirit led to significant results; and the Neo-Impressionists prove no exception. In looking too fixedly at means, they lost sight of their ends. Their début took place at the last concerted exhibition of the Impressionists in 1886 where the canvases of Seurat and Signac were hung beside those of Cassatt, Bracquemond, Morisot, Camille and Lucien Pissarro, Gauguin, Guillaumin, Redon, Schuffenecker, Tillot, Degas, Forain and Vignon. Here was seen for the first time the logical extension of the earlier methods of Monet and Pissarro.

Georges Seurat had once been a good student at the Beaux-Arts, but his quick, precise and questioning intelligence had saved him from falling under the professorial injunctions. Most of his studying was done in the art museums where he contemplated for long the old masters. Here he discovered that “there are analogous laws which govern line, tone, colour and composition, as much with Rubens as with Raphael, with Michelangelo as with Delacroix: rhythm, measure and contrast.” (By rhythm, measure and contrast he meant curved lines, space and opposition.) Still searching for the secrets of art he studied the works of the Orient and the writings of Chevreul, Superville, Humbert, Blanc, Rood and Helmholtz. Then, by analysing Delacroix, he found substantiation for his discoveries. The result of this study was, as Signac tells us, his “judicious and fertile theory of contrasts.” From 1882 on he applied it to all his canvases. The theory in brief was to use scientifically opposed spots of colour of more or less purity. This method he might have learned direct from the first modern French master, for in that artist’s Journal are discussed at length colour division; optical admixture; the dramatic unity of colour, line and subject; and the juxtaposition of complementaries for brilliancy.

Paul Signac’s evolution was different. He had first been under the influence of Pissarro, Renoir, Monet and Guillaumin, and though being a zealous pupil of their methods, he knew little of their motives. It was only after he had observed the interplay and contrast of colours in nature that he sought explanation in the works of his masters, the Impressionists. Failing, he turned again to nature. In copying it, he discovered that in the gradation from one colour to another, let us say from blue to orange, the transition was always muddy and disagreeable when mixed on the palette, although if distinct spots of these two colours were juxtaposed in alternating ratio, the modulation would be smooth and clean. This observation impelled him to seek a method whereby this “passage” could be highly clarified. Consequently he completely divided the Impressionists’ spots so that each individual touch remained pure and at the same time left patches of the white canvas showing for purposes of brilliancy. His next step led him to Chevreul whose theory of complementaries he committed to memory. His technical education he now deemed complete.

Seurat and Signac first met at the Salon des Artistes Indépendants in 1884, and their discoveries were at once mutually appropriated. Signac’s colour divisions, combined with Seurat’s more scholarly equilibrium of elements, formed the nucleus from which evolved the Neo-Impressionists who later repudiated Impressionism, using it only as the point from which they leapt off into a morass of set formulas. It was a laudable desire on the part of these new men, especially of Seurat, to try to snatch from a purely inspirational school its halo of mystery and to place painting methods on a sound rationalistic basis. But while they were right in believing a picture should be more than the visual accompaniment to sentiments, they should have gone deeper than the mere exterior of painting. For example, they should have tried to see in what plastic way their colour theories could be used, instead of limiting themselves to the synthetic unity of æsthetic illustration. And they should have tried to make a form-producing faculty of their light instead of introducing into it another poetic element in the shape of dramatic line. But they were more concerned with the clothes in the wardrobe of art than in its body. Their painting, as a result, was without sustaining structure.

With the Impressionists, as with all significant art movements, the desire for change and for higher emotional power came first: the method came later. With the Neo-Impressionists this order was reversed. Their canvases for this reason are less emotional than those of their forerunners. By limiting their palettes to certain pure colours they restricted their diversity of interest. Even their aim at a scientific art has gone far of the mark because their science was in many instances faulty. By conditioning their methods on the observations of inaccurate writers they were able to progress only so far as these observations went. Chevreul is far from authoritative today: in fact there is no comprehensive scientific work on colour in existence. Tudor-Hart, the greatest of all colour scientists, has blasted many of the older accepted theories of such men as Helmholtz, Rood and Chevreul, and his experiments have shown conclusively that many of their postulates are unreliable. The Neo-Impressionists were unaware of Chevreul’s errors, and their minds were too literal to enable them to make new and more advanced observations in the realm of colour. The meagre attention paid them is not due to their novelty, but to the fact that they have done nothing the Impressionists did not do better. They are like a cartridge which, having all the combustible ingredients, fails to explode because it is wet.

The Neo-Impressionists may, in refutation, point to music as a scientific art. But it must be remembered that taste brought about the construction of chords and that the mathematical explanation came later. The primitive peoples who found an æsthetic pleasure in broken-up major chords were ignorant of nodal points and the laws of vibration. The early Assyrians had a pipe of three notes, C, E and G, perfectly attuned, yet they were ignorant of the science of harmony. Taste in the arts has always come first: science follows with its interpretations. The Impressionists, through instinct, created their marvels of light and atmosphere. Afterward the science of optics explained their efforts. Personal taste was their only criterion, and no books could have taught them their lesson, because their methods were so plastic that whatever was to them artistically consistent was right. Had they been familiar with science, it still would have remained to be applied: and it is only by the superimposition of taste that knowledge in the artist becomes pregnant. The Divisionists, by making a hard and fast code of science, enslaved themselves to the demands of theories. The functioning of their tastes was nullified. They therefore fell short of art.

In Signac’s book, D’Eugène Delacroix au Néo-Impressionnisme, are explained many points of divergence between this school and that of the Impressionists. The difference of the two methods may be exemplified by describing the manner in which each approached a landscape wherein the grass and foliage were partly in shadow and partly in sunlight. In such a landscape the artist’s eye records a fleeting, dimly-felt impression of red in that part of the green of the shadow which is nearest the light region. The Impressionists, satisfied with having experienced this sensation, hastened to put a touch of red on their canvas, while the actual colour in nature might have been an orange, a vermilion, or even a purple. In this haphazard choice of a red Signac detected slovenliness. He says that the shadow of any colour is always lightly tinted with the colour’s complementary; that if the light is yellow-green the shadow will be touched with violet; if orange, the shadow will contain blue-green. Had the Impressionists known this fact and cared to use it, says Signac, they could have made their pictures scientifically correct by posing the exact complementary of light in their shadow. And he adds that it is difficult to see in just what way this process would have harmed their work.

It is, however, not so difficult as he imagines. If, in copying nature by a strictly scientific vision as the Neo-Impressionists advocate, we closely study the light, we will discover not only that a local colour is modified by the colour of the sun’s rays, but that an added suite of colours is introduced by the absorption of some of the object’s particles, by the encompassing air, and by the circumjacent reflections. We may have (1) the local colour which, let us say, is green, (2) the colour of sunlight, (3) the colour caused by atmospheric conditions, (4) the reflection of sky, and (5) the reflection of the ground. Furthermore, if the object has any indentures their shadows will lower to a limited degree the whole tone of the object. At the least calculation then we have (1) green, (2) yellow-orange, (3) any colour in the cold region of the spectrum, (4) blue or violet, and (5) green, brown, Venetian red or any colour in the warm region of the spectrum:—all of which colours change and shift unceasingly, dependent on the density of the air which obscures, to a lesser or greater degree, the sun’s rays and hence changes the reflection from sky and ground, thereby modifying the local colour. Thus it is impossible when copying nature even to determine the colour of its lightened parts. And if a colour premise cannot be established, it is obviously impossible to find its exact complementary.