Picabia, despite his popularity, is but a second-rate Cubist. He was quick to grasp the fact that the Cubists were working away from illustration, and attempted to step beyond them. Where they had endeavoured to bring about the precise stylisation of form, he merely dealt in ribbon-like patches of colour which were without contour, shape, proportion or volume. His canvases wherein many of these strange amorphous hachures are grouped, have a highly bizarre appearance but are only remotely intelligible. He used almost monochromatic schemes, as did his master Picasso, and continued this style of work until his fellow Cubists, by diligent research and serious study, had approached the abstract appearance of his surfaces. Picabia then found a new impetus in the works of the Futurists—an impetus toward movement expressed, not by bodies, but by line. This Futurist influence resulted in his making flat pictures of many sharply defined silhouettes tinted red, green, blue and grey. His lines serve only to accentuate the chaos of his ensemble, for in his work there is no definite conception of the whole.
Cubism’s possibilities as a dynamic illustrative art have never been adequately exhausted, and, since the angular mode is rapidly disappearing as a result of newer and more vital visions, they probably never will. Picasso was its high priest up to two years ago, at which time colour, coming back on the wave of a counter-revolution, threw most of the Cubists into its application. Robert Delaunay was responsible for this reaction. Early in 1912 he came forward with a very large canvas entitled Ville de Paris, whose surface was broken up into many angular planes after the Cubist fashion. But instead of depicting forms and formal relations, the picture was painted in greys and high colours solely as a means of surface filling. Its contours recalled El Greco despite their being disguised by triangular dislocations. The picture represented three mammoth Graces standing before a distant Paris landscape, and so transparent and ethereal was it that it seemed as though a breath could have dispersed it into mist. It possessed the delicate loveliness of a butterfly, and the eye, in running over its glittering and pretty array of colours, was fascinated as in the contemplation of a kaleidoscope. But the canvas, while provoking a distinct visual pleasure, failed to arouse any æsthetic enjoyment.
Delaunay’s L’Équipe de Cardiff the following year was equally unemotional. Fundamentally this picture was the same as his Ville de Paris, though treated differently as to surface. The same up-shooting type of svelte beauty as formerly bodied forth in his three Graces was here repeated in the bodies of the athletes, but there was in addition a very slight surface rhythm; and the colour, because its application was broader, had a greater fascination. In his Ville de Paris, not daring to paint a naturally drawn nude with the colours his sense of prettiness and ornament dictated, he fragmentised the surface by luxating the lines. Thus, while the sensitive contour was retained, the picture appeared as if viewed through a polygonal prism. In the second canvas this artifice for the sake of charm was discarded. The players were dressed in solid colours of bright pigment; the sky was blue-violet; the Eiffel tower, eminently appreciable, stood to the right; down the centre of the canvas was a large affiche in yellow; and overhead soared an aeroplane. The transition from a hackneyed theme to a modern one was the result of the artist’s desire to pass beyond the methods of the day to more vigorous ones.
Before Delaunay’s decisive work was done he had been influenced by the Neo-Impressionists, Cézanne, the Cubists and, in his two mentioned early works, by the Impressionists. Indeed these pictures are the expression of Impressionist methods broadened and extended to suit the dimensions of his canvases. His cityscapes with the Eiffel tower as the principal object are interesting though not profound, and such canvases as the Route de Laon and Les Tours are so dainty they seem breathed onto the canvas. He is essentially a decorator in that he works always in two dimensions. This surface quality enters into all art, but in itself it is never significant. Only when it is a result of ordered plasticity does it have power to move us. In Delaunay, however, there exists no fundamental order. Consequently his power is strictly limited. His desire is to make decoration which will be profound, instead of profound composition which will result in decoration. By thus reversing the natural order, effects are considered before causes; and only by the dynamism of causes can we be made to feel beauty. Beauty such as his is merely prettiness: it is only the objective mask of beauty, and is of no more æsthetic importance than a view of nature. The true beauty of a work of art is subjective; it is the effect of one’s having sensed the accumulated and sequential aspects of co-ordinated expression. Herein lies the difference between æsthetic emotion and the pleasure aroused by a sunset, a stage setting or a dramatic story. When one is able to penetrate finally into art, neither dolour nor depression results, but always a feeling of exultation and joy, for by one’s intellectual comprehension one has been physically aroused by a dynamic force, not merely moved by a scene or story which sets in motion the associative processes.
To the inadequate comprehension of this psychological truth is attributable the failure of the Cubists and of Delaunay. The latter strove to preserve the individuality of his work under the name of Orphism, and later under the designation of Simultaneism. But his temperamental kinship to Picasso and the Cubists is too obvious to be denied by nomenclature. Even his latest work, while more abstract and more luminous, is at most secessionistic. His canvas hung in the Salon des Indépendants in 1914 was Cubism translated into light colours and twisted into curves and circles. Delaunay’s wife, Madame Delaunay-Terk, follows him closely in inspiration and application, but her pictures are less ordered than his. The American, Bruce, once an imitator of Matisse and later of Cézanne, has joined the Simultaneist ranks; and Frost, another American, is an ardent disciple of Delaunay. The orthodox Cubists had passed colour by, but its reappearance in the Orphists-Simultaneists was a significant augury. Though it was not understood by them as an element capable of organic functioning, its mere presence was an inspiration and a call to all genuine artists to penetrate its meaning in relation to the intensification of form.
XII
FUTURISM
THE dramatic enhancement of painting by line so well understood by the ancients, and the literary intensification of subject-matter by colour foreshadowed by the primitives and made more conscious by Delacroix, reached their highest development in the theories of Kandinsky and the Futurists. With Delacroix’s comments concerning the harmonising of line and colour with subject and Seurat’s and Signac’s subsequent addenda to these comments, began scientific observation in painting. So long as these theories remained secondary to the great truths of composition they were admissible, because they had to do only with the unimportant ornamentation of an æsthetic organisation. But when, as in Kandinsky and the Futurists, they became the all in all of the artist’s ambitions, they ceased to produce painting, and gave birth only to bad music, as in the Russian, and to bad poetry, as in the Italians. But while the Futurists’ work had little to commend it to the discriminating spectator, their ideas were interesting and inspiring, and it is from their manifestos that has come what little influence they have exerted. Their pictures are neither pretty nor agreeable, while Kandinsky’s, to the contrary, possess dainty and pleasing traits. In both cases the pictures are puzzles to be deciphered at length: they are expressions of moods brought about by half veiling reality and by making symbolically concrete an abstract force or cause.