All this theorising would be important for the dramatic illustrators were it entirely true. But while a line placed horizontally may represent calm, the same line made perpendicular or laid at an angle of forty-five degrees will also produce calm. The straight line varies so little in its significance, no matter at what angle it is placed, that its direction is negligible from an emotional standpoint. The degree of curve in a line is its emotional element, and only when varying curves come in contact is the highest formal emotion obtained. The straight line is the lifeless, the static, the immobile. As such it can serve only as a foil to the curved line, for it is the straight that makes the curved of value. Their theory concerning hot colours and high tones is sounder than their linear theory; but in copying a joyous landscape is one not forced to put on high tonalities and hot colours, since it is in seeing these high values that we experience the sensation of joy? And is it not from the low values in nature that we receive our sensation of sorrow? One may accentuate the colours and tones, but if they are too strongly intensified they will approach the other extreme and produce dead and mournful landscapes. This accentuation the Neo-Impressionists carried to the limit permitted by their pigments. Their ideas of line and of joyous and sombre colours are undoubtedly of value if profoundly and extensively comprehended and properly applied. But, in order to become significant, line must only delimit organisation and become volume; and colour, instead of merely producing joy and sorrow, must bring about form. Then again, there is that world lying on the further side of flatness which must be explored.
With all their theorising and attempts to obtain brilliancy, the Neo-Impressionists produce only grey work. From the first these artists were too coldly intellectual, and it matters little whether their science was right or wrong when we contemplate their pictures. Were their science perfect they could never have created art which goes beyond the arabesque and the poetry of arrangement, for they were not fundamental even in their aims. They have all painted different subjects in slightly varying manners, but, apart from Seurat’s, all their canvases have these things in common: a uniform range of colour, a set method of technique, and the hard and “noisy” contrasts which in their larger works produce a veritable din. Those of the Neo-Impressionists who are still living claim to have completed Cézanne, Pissarro and Delacroix, to have perfected a method, to have expanded logically the Impressionists to something worth while, to be in accord with Rood and Chevreul, to have brought great harmony into painting, to have taken painting into the pure realms of poesy and symphonic musical composition. Alas, that their claims have no substantiation in our receptivities!
| UN DIMANCHE À LA GRANDE-JATTE | SEURAT |
Seurat, the founder, was the only genuinely artistic man of the movement, and an early death denied him his chance to develop. Though seduced by too exacting a process, he has nevertheless given us some sensitive and delicately beautiful canvases. Le Chahut, Le Cirque and Un Dimanche à la Grande-Jatte are saturated with light, and in them is an undeniable order of parallel lines. His colours were never as harsh and acid as those of his confrères, and his pictures have a blond tonality which the other men of the movement entirely lack. His crayon drawings, from the standpoint of tonal experimentation, are interesting and seem almost like paintings. He had a great talent, and had he lived we might have expected great things from it. He was more vitally interested in style than in technical methods, and in his conclusions stemmed directly from Delacroix. His spottings were much smaller and more effective than those of the other Pointillists. His desire was to express an idea through the medium of nature, not to copy nature in order to relate the sensation it gave the artist. His painting was synthetic. All details and accidents of colour and silhouette he set aside as useless. His is an art of parallels and analogies, of sensitivity and analysis; in fact, it has all those qualities which, were they present in greater strength, would produce significant pictures. He was of one piece; and his development, once he had begun to paint, was an even one toward a definite goal. In him, alone of the members of the group, we find an artist and not an illustrator. Those who liken him to Aubrey Beardsley have less reason for their comparison than the ones who see parallels between Gainsborough and Renoir. Compare the quoted remarks of Seurat concerning tone, line and colour with Signac’s summing up of his method, and the temperamental differences between the artist and the scientist will at once be seen. Signac says his method is “observation of the laws of colour, the exclusive use of pure tints, the renunciation of all attenuated mixings, and the methodical equilibrium of elements.”
One of the most noted followers of the Neo-Impressionistic methods was the Hollander, Vincent van Gogh. Although generally considered in critical essays as an unrelated phenomenon in the art heavens, he is closely allied to Signac and to Delacroix through Seurat. He adopted painting, one is inclined to believe, because his verbal eloquence was inadequate to bring the Belgian miners to repentance. He had studied for the ministry, but like most men who, finding themselves strictly limited in one vocation, essay another, he found himself equally limited in his second. He drifted back to Holland and began to study painting in the studio of Mauve, a relative of his by marriage. His ardent, even flamboyant, desire to do good to everyone who crossed his path needed an outlet, and he found an emotional substitute for pamphleteering in the physical and mental exertion of painting. In this work he could preach unchecked, secure from arrest. He loved Millet because Millet loved the down-trodden. He loved Delacroix because of that artist’s dramatic inspiration. He loved Daumier because he imagined he saw in Daumier a satire on the beast in man. He loved Monticelli because in that Provençal he sensed a wild gypsy mind and a kindred unrestraint in the use of colour. And he loved Diaz because Diaz was a poetic woodman.
Before coming to Paris Van Gogh had studied in the Antwerp Academy, and while in the French capital he met and was influenced by Pissarro. Here he also became acquainted with Bernard and Gauguin, adopting the Divisionistic methods from Seurat. He used only pure colours on his palette and mixed them only with white and black. Later he went to Arles where in two years, from 1887 and 1889, he painted the great bulk of his work, averaging four canvases a week through sickness, drink, insanity and disease. In him we have a perfect example of just how little can be done with pure enthusiasm unorganised by intellectual processes. His pictures display an entire lack of order, whether it be of colour, line or silhouette: there was never any form in them. His work is plainly the labour of the fanatic who, in a fury of pent-up desire to express himself, suddenly seizes a palette and brush and applies colours almost at random. Indeed, some of his pictures were completed in a few minutes. Even many of those in which the symbology had to be thought out at length, were painted in an hour.
That Van Gogh was an illustrator is undeniable; but he was an illustrator of the abstract gropings of an unbalanced mind avid for dramatic emotions, rather than of exterior nature. His landscapes seem to portend the calm before some great upheaval, or to express a supernatural energy poised for an act of total annihilation. In them there are frenzied lines running zigzag and at random, and rolling clouds of purple and lurid yellow hanging over raucously bright roofs. His portraits remain with us as memories of a feverish nightmare. They are too hollow and immaterial to appear even as a depiction of form. His colours carried out this feeling of dramatic terror, and because they were not harmonised with either line or tone, they became all the more chaotic. He never kept to the spots that Signac and Seurat had given him. His impatience was too great; the fire burned too furiously. He elongated them into strips like straw, and they give his work the appearance of haystacks. He covered with one stroke more space than Seurat covered with twenty strokes.
This has been called his own apport to art. In Gauguin, however, the same stroke is used, not so heavily loaded with pure colour, to be sure, but just as long. But in Gauguin the strokes are less noticeable because they all have an analogous direction. With Van Gogh they rush wildly about, now one way, now another, sometimes covering the canvas entirely, sometimes separated to let the white show through. This separating was not done for the same reasons as in Signac, but because Van Gogh’s impatience was too great to permit him to go back and cover. His figures are outlined in broad black or coloured lines, and colours are juxtaposed with their complementaries. In a Portrait d’Homme, done in 1889, the background is laid in with a bright green over which are superimposed polka-dots of pure vermilion surrounded by a darker green, the whole striped with yellow and light vermilion flourishes. On this is a yellowish face whose pompadour hair is made of black, vermilion and light violet. The collar is light green, red and blue; the striped cravat, red and white; the coat, violet and green; the shirt, pure green outlined in pure lake, with orange buttons on it; and the picture’s inscription—Vincent, Arles, ’89—is signed in vermilion. In this painting is evidenced his impetuous method. He seemed to feel that the greater the exertion, the greater the relief from that repressed passion which egged him on to action.