Modern Painting, Its Tendency and Meaning

by Willard Huntington Wright

XV

CONCLUSION

IN conclusion there are several points which require accentuation if the significance of modern painting is to be fully grasped. There have been three epochs in the visual arts. The first was the longest, and extended through more than two centuries. The last two epochs have required less than a hundred years for their fulfilment. Each epoch dealt with a specific phase of painting and developed that phase until its possibilities were exhausted. The ultimate aim of all great painting was purification, but before that could come about many theories had to be tested; many consummations had to take place; many problems had to be solved. The laws of formal organisation were first discovered and applied with the limited means at hand. Then came experimentation and research in the mechanics of expression—the search for new and vital methods wherewith these principles of composition might be bodied forth more intensely. Later the functioning properties of colour were unearthed and employed. In the course of this evolution many irrelevant factors found their way into painting. The men of the first epoch used primitive and obvious materials to express their forms. When the new means—means inherent in painting—were ascertained, it was necessary to eliminate the former media. The subject-matter of painting—that is, the recognisable object, the human obstacle—had to be forced out to permit of the introduction of colour which had become an inseparable adjunct of form. To effect the coalition of pure composition and the newer methods was a difficult feat, for so long had the world been accustomed to the pictorial aspect of painting, that it had come to look upon subject-matter as a cardinal requisite to plastic creation.

The first epoch began with the advent of oil painting about 1400, and went forward, building and developing, until it reached realisation early in the seventeenth century. Knowing that organised form is the basis of all æsthetic emotion, the old masters strove to find the psychological principles for co-ordinating volume. Their means were naturally superficial, for their initial concern was to determine what they should do, not how they should do it. In expressing the form they deemed necessary to great art they used the material already at their disposal, namely: objective nature. They organised and made rhythmic the objects about them, more especially the human body which permitted of many variations and groupings and which was in itself a complete ensemble. And furthermore they had discovered that movement—an indispensable attribute of the most highly emotional composition—was best expressed by the poise of the human figure. Colour to these early men was only an addendum to drawing. They conceived form in black and white, and sought to reinforce their work by the realistic use of pigments. That colour was an infixed element of organisation they never suspected. Their preoccupation was along different lines. The greatest exponents of intense composition during this first epoch were Tintoretto, Giorgione, Masaccio, Giotto, Veronese, El Greco and Rubens. These men were primarily interested in discovering absolute laws for formal rhythm. The mimetic quality of their work was a secondary consideration. In Rubens were consummated the aims of the older painters; that is, he attained to the highest degree of compositional plasticity which was possible with the fixed means of his period. In him the first cycle terminated. There was no longer any advance to be made in the art of painting until a new method of expression should be unearthed. However, the principles of form laid down by these old masters were fundamental and unalterable. Upon them all great painting must ever be based. They are intimately connected with the very organisms of human existence, and can never be changed until the nature of mankind shall change.

After Rubens a short period of decadence and deterioration set in. The older methods no longer afforded inspiration. About the beginning of the nineteenth century the second cycle of painting was ushered in by Turner, Constable and Delacroix. These men, realising that until new means were discovered art could be only a variation of what had come before, turned their attention to finding a procedure by which the ambition of the artist could be more profoundly realised. This second cycle was one of research and analysis, of scientific experimentation and data gathering. To surpass Rubens in his own medium was impossible: he had reached the ultimate outpost of æsthetic possibilities with what materials he possessed. The new men first made inquiry into colour from the standpoint of its dramatic potentialities. Naturalism was born. While Delacroix was busy applying the rudiments of colour science to thematic romanticism, Courbet was busy tearing down the tenets of conventionalism in subject-matter, and Daumier was experimenting in the simultaneity of form and drawing. Manet liberated the painter from set themes, and thereby broadened the material field of composition. The Impressionists followed, and by labourious investigations into nature’s methods, probed the secrets of colour in relation to light. The Neo-Impressionists went further afield with scientific observations; and finally Renoir, assimilating all the new discoveries, rejected the fallacies and co-ordinated the valuable conclusions. In him was brought to a close the naturalistic conception of painting. He was the consummation of the second cycle. During this period the older laws of composition were for the most part forgotten. The painters were too absorbed in their search for new means. They forgot the foundations of art in their enthusiasm for a fuller and less restricted expression. The essential character of colour and light and the new freedom in subject selection so intoxicated them that they lost sight of all that had preceded them. But their gifts to painting cannot be overestimated. By finding new weapons with which future artists might achieve the highest formal intensity, they opened up illimitable fields of æsthetic endeavour: they made possible the third and last cycle which resulted in the final purification of painting.

Of this cycle Cézanne was the primitive. Profiting by the Impressionist teachings, he turned his attention once more to the needs of composition. He realised the limitations of the naturalistic conception, and created light which, though it was as logical as nature’s, was not restricted to the realistic vision. Colour with him became for the first time a functional element capable of producing form. The absolute freedom of subject selection—a heritage from the second cycle—permitted him extreme distortions, and with these distortions was opened up the road to abstraction. Matisse made form even more arbitrary, and Picasso approached still nearer to the final elimination of natural objectivity, though both men ignored colour as a generator of form. They carried forward the work of Cézanne only on its material side. Then Synchromism, combining the progress of both Cézanne and the Cubists, took the final step in the elimination of the illustrative object, and at the same time put aside the local hues on which the art of Cézanne was dependent. Since the art of painting is the art of colour, the Synchromists depended entirely on primary pigment for the complete expression of formal composition. Thus was brought about the final purification of painting. Form was entirely divorced from any realistic consideration: and colour became an organic function. The methods of painting, being rationalised, reached their highest degree of purity and creative capability.

The evolution of painting from tinted illustration to an abstract art expressed wholly by the one element inherent in it—colour, was a natural and inevitable progress. Music passed through the same development from the imitation of natural sounds to harmonic abstraction. We no longer consider such compositions as The Battle of Prague or Monastery Bells æsthetically comparable to Korngold’s Symphonietta or Schönberg’s Opus II. And yet in painting the great majority confines its judgment to that phase of a picture which is irrelevant to its æsthetic importance. So long have form and composition expressed themselves through recognisable phenomena that the cognitive object has come to be looked upon as an end, whereas it is only a means to a subjective emotion. The world still demands that a painting shall represent a natural form, that is, that the basis of painting shall be illustration. The illustrative object was employed by the older painters only because their means were limited, because they had no profounder method wherewith to express themselves. And even with them the human body was deliberately disproportioned and altered to meet the needs of composition. When the properties of colour began to be understood, the older methods were no longer required. Colour itself became form. But so deeply rooted was the illustrative precedent that no one painter had the courage to eliminate objectivity at one stroke. Cézanne took the first great step; Matisse, the second; Cubism the next; and Synchromism the final one.

So long as painting deals with objective nature it is an impure art, for recognisability precludes the highest æsthetic emotion. All painting, ancient and modern, moves us æsthetically only in so far as it possesses a force over and beyond its mimetic aspect. The average spectator is unable to differentiate his literary and associative emotions from his æsthetic ecstasy. Form and rhythm alone are the bases of æsthetic enjoyment: all else in a picture is superfluity. Therefore a picture in order to represent its intensest emotive power must be an abstract presentation expressed entirely in the medium of painting: and that medium is colour. There are no longer any experiments to be made in methods. Form and colour—the two permanent and inalienable qualities of painting—have become synonymous. Ancient painting sounded the depths of composition. Modern painting has sounded the depths of colour. Research is at an end. It now remains only for artists to create. The means have been perfected: the laws of organisation have been laid down. No more innovatory “movements” are possible. Any school of the future must necessarily be compositional. It can be only a variation or a modification of the past. The methods of painting may be complicated. New forms may be found. But it is no longer possible to add anything to the means at hand. The era of pure creation begins with the present day.

Those who go to painting for anecdote, drama, archæology, illustration or any other quality which is not strictly æsthetic, would do well to confine their attention and their comments to the academicians of whom there is and always has been an abundant supply. Let them keep their hands off those artists who strive for higher and more eternal manifestations. The greatest artists of every age have never sought to appeal to the lovers of reality and sentiment. Nor have they wished to be judged by standards which considered only verisimilitude and technical proficiency. It is the misfortune of painting that literary impurities should have accompanied its development, and it is the irony of serious endeavour that on account of these impurities there has been an indefinite deferment of any genuine appreciation of painting. It is difficult to convince a man who has not experienced the great æsthetic emotions which art is capable of producing, that there is an intoxication to be derived from the contemplation of art keener than that of association, sentiment or drama. Not knowing that greater delights await him once he has penetrated beneath the surface, he has doggedly combated every effort to eliminate the irrelevant accretions. But if painting was to reach its highest point of artistic creation, its realistic aspect had to go. When colour became profoundly understood, no longer could the artist apply it according to the dictates of nature. It lost its properties as decoration and as an enhancement of the naturalistic vision. Its demands freed the artist from the tyranny of nature. In becoming pure, painting drew further and further away from mimicry; and the superficial lover of painting, enslaved by the ignorant and rigid standards of the past, protested with greater and greater vehemence.