LES FEMMES D’ALGER DANS LEUR APPARTEMENT
DELACROIX
The nineteenth century opened with French art in a precarious and decadent condition. To appreciate the prodigious strides made by Géricault and Delacroix, even by Gérard and Gros, one must consider the rabid antagonism of the public toward all ornament and richness in painting and toward all subject-matter which did not inspire thoughts of inflexible simplicity. This attitude was attributable to the social reaction against the excesses of the voluptuous Louis XV. Vien it was who, suppressing the eroticism of Boucher, instigated the so-called classic revival founded on Græco-Roman ideals. The public became so vehement in its praise of this hypocritical and austere art, that Fragonard, that delicious painter of boudoirs, was dismissed as indecent. Even the demure Greuze, who tried to rehabilitate himself by making his art a vehicle for a series of parental sermons, died a pauper. He too lacked the aridity requisite for popular taste. Chardin, the Le Nains and Fouquet were set aside: they were considered too trivial, too insufficiently archæological. Watteau’s canvases were stoned by Regnault, Girodet and the other pupils of David. Lancret, Pater, Debucourt, Olivier, Gravelot, La Tour, Nattier and others met similar fates at the hands of the new classicists.
Such men as these could not find approbation in a public which demanded only allegorical, political and economic art. But David met all its requirements. He represented the antithesis of the sound freedom of the French temperament; and forthwith became the Elija of the new degeneracy. He apotheosised all that is false and decadent in art. But the adulation of him was short-lived. The French imagination is too fecund for only thorns. Ingres superseded him. This new idol, going to the Greeks for inspiration, made David fluent and charming. He studied the Italian primitives and simplified them with Byzantine and Raphaelic addenda. He had a genuine instinct for silhouette entirely lacking in his forerunner, and soon struck the first blow which marked the disintegration of David’s cult.
Gérard and Gros took a further step by loosening slightly Ingres’s drawing; and Géricault and Guérin completed the disruption of the David tradition. Géricault’s Radeau de la Méduse brought its young and highly talented creator immediately into the public gaze, not only because of its implied blasphemy in deviating from the méthode David, but because the tragedy of its subject was still fresh in the national mind. Was this a clever device on the part of the painter to circumvent hostile criticism by clothing his innovations with a sympathetic theme? Perhaps; but the picture’s value to us lies in that it foreshadowed the new idea in art. It forced the gate which made easier Delacroix’s entrance several years later.
In retrospect the reaction against an established order appears simple, but the world’s innovators have required for their task an intellectual courage amounting to rare heroism. Heretics are regarded as dangerous madmen, and generally their only reward is the pleasure of revolt. The credit for greatness falls on those later men who avail themselves of the principles of past reactionary enterprise. So much of the energy of pioneers is spent in combating hostile criticism and indifference, that their fund of creative force is depleted. This was true in the case of Delacroix. Like all the greater painters he was self-taught. The essence of knowledge is untransmittable. True, he occasionally visited the studio of Guérin, but his real education came from the Louvre where he copied Veronese, Titian and Rubens. His insight was keen but not deep, and at first he did little more than absorb the surface aspects of others, though he did this with intelligence. Later, by devious steps both forward and back, he became the bridge from the eighteenth century to Impressionism, just as Cézanne became the stepping stone from Impressionism to art’s latest manifestations.
In 1822 Delacroix exposed his first canvas, Dante et Virgile aux Enfers, one of the finest début pictures ever recorded. Superficially it is his most obvious influence of Rubens whom he deeply respected; and in it are also discoverable the exaggerations and disproportions of Michelangelo. Thiers lauded it, and so great was its popularity that the government bought it for 2,000 francs. Rubens still held him firmly two years later in the Massacre de Scio, although there were in the picture indubitable indications of the advent of Venice. This picture was to be hung in the famous Salon of 1824, where Lawrence, Bonington, Fielding, and Constable (who were to have such a great influence on his later work) exposed. The Massacre de Scio was ready for shipment when, just before the vernissage, Delacroix saw a canvas by Constable done in the divisionistic method. At once he felt the necessity for colour expression, and going home he entirely repainted his picture.
This was the turning-point in his art. He had admired the green in Constable’s landscape, and had spoken of it to the other. Constable explained that the superiority of the green in his prairies was due to the fact that he had composed it with a multitude of different greens. Here Delacroix’s keen perception got to work. In his Journal he wrote: “What Constable says of the green of his prairies can be applied to all the other tones as well.” By this method, primitive as it seems today, he beheld a way of augmenting the dramatic significance of his conceptions. The next year, 1825, he went to London to study the English painters at closer range. There he learned much from Bonington, as he did from Constable, and in one of his letters he wrote: “Grey is the enemy of all painting.... Let us banish from our palette all earth colours.” And later he forecasted the Impressionistic methods by writing: “It is good not to let each brush stroke melt into the others; they will appear uniform at a certain distance by the sympathetic law which associates them. Colour obtained thus has more energy and freshness. The more opposition in colour, the more brilliance.”
Delacroix’s intelligence, reconnoitring along these lines, formulated other principles. Among many observations concerning colour, he wrote: “If to a composition, interesting in its choice of subject, you add a disposition of lines, which augments the impression, a chiaroscuro which seizes the imagination, and a colour which is adapted to the characters, it is then a harmony, and its combinations are so adapted that they produce a unique song.... A conception, having become a composition, must move in the milieu of a colour peculiar to it. There seems to be a particular tone belonging to some part of every picture which is a key that governs all the other tones.... The art of the colourist seems to be related in certain ways to mathematics and music.” That he believed in the exact science of colour is further attested to by the fact that he made a dial on which noon represented red, six o’clock green, one o’clock blue, seven o’clock orange—and so on through the hours with the opposition of complementaries.
Evidences of these experimentations are dimly discerned in a number of his minor canvases done between 1827 and the Revolution. In 1832, after he had painted the admirable La Liberté Guidant le Peuple sur les Barricades, he visited Morocco. Before this event his work had contained many of the elements of sumptuousness and sensuality; but in this eastern land his colour reached maturity. Studying the productions of the native crafts in their relation to colour, he dreamed of making pictures as variegated as rugs and vases. In this he was trespassing on the precincts of Veronese who had made pictorial use of the products of the Orient and of Africa. On his return he painted Les Femmes d’Alger dans Leur Appartement. This picture, one of his best, embodies most of his colour theories. In it we find cold shadows opposed to hot lights, and the contiguous placing of complementaries.
LES FEMMES D’ALGER DANS LEUR APPARTEMENT
DELACROIX
Delacroix looked upon himself as a colourist. But while his theories were in the main sound they did not go far enough. They were important only as a starting point. His colour is hardly noticeable today, and in no wise does it sum up his artistic interest for us. Gauguin once said that we get Delacroix’s full significance in black-and-white reproduction. This comes perilously near being true. Today his pictures appear as devoid of brilliancy as those of the Venetians. Yet, when he first exhibited, he was reproached for his raucous tones. The critics called his Massacre de Scio the “massacre of painting,” and added, “il court sur les toits.” His men and women, the shadows of whose flesh were coloured with blues and greens, were stigmatised “corpses,” and he was accused of having used the morgue for his studio.
All this mattered little. Delacroix’s real significance as an artist lay in his drawing which was his greatest asset. What raised him above the general run of painters, baroque and otherwise, was his slight talent for composition. Often in his Journal he speaks of the “balance of lines.” He knew that with the masters of the Renaissance it was common property, and that modern painting had lost it; and he strove to reintroduce it into art. But he never got beyond the simplest synthesis of the least compounded of Rubens’s figure pieces. For instance, in the Bataille de Taillebourg—an excellent example of his dramatic method—it will be noted that the canvas opens at the bottom-centre to form a triangle of struggling forms, and that in the breach thus made the rearing charger looms white. The identical composition can be found in La Justice, La Liberté, the Janissaires à l’Attaque, La Lutte de Jacob avec l’Ange, the Enlèvement de Rébecca and the Entrée des Croisés à Jérusalem. In this last canvas, his most masterful, the triangle is complicated by a curved line running inward from the centre. This picture recalls, almost to every detail, Rubens’s The Adoration of the Wise Men of the East, in the Antwerp Museum. However, it marks a great progress from the symmetricality of his toile de début, and though in it Rubens is consciously imitated—if not indeed plagiarised, Delacroix gets nearer to the spirit of Veronese than to that of the Flemish master.
Among the paintings wherein the simple, three-sided composition does not appear, the most notable are his animal pictures (in which he substituted the S design) and those canvases in which his momentary admiration for others (as for Veronese in the Retour de Christophe Colomb, and for the Dutch in Cromwell au Château de Windsor) made him forget himself. Even this primitive comprehension of linear balance had passed out of French painting with the death of Poussin, and its reapparition in Delacroix is analogous to the impetus toward rhythm which was given to the stiff Byzantine painting of Venice by Nicolo di Pietro and Giovanni da Bologna in the fourteenth century.
In Rubens we find turbulent movement, as great as in life itself, organised in such a way that all the emotions, exalted, depressive, dramatic, are expressed. But in Delacroix there is merely co-ordinated action. And this action, even in the busiest centres of his canvases, is more suggestive of unrest than of movement. However, the real cause for his failure to express a spirit as modern as Rubens’s lay in his inability to understand the opposition in rhythmic line-balance of three dimensions which is to be found in even the slightest of Rubens’s canvases. His details are always interesting, but he never succeeded in welding them into a sequacious and interrelated whole. His high gift of invention was inadequate equipment for so difficult a feat. Compare Rembrandt’s exquisite bathing girl in the London National Gallery and Delacroix’s La Grèce Expirant sur les Ruines de Missolonghi. In technical treatment these two paintings are not unlike, but the scattered feeling and lack of plastic concentration in the latter emphasises the superior force of the Dutchman.
Delacroix’s work fell between flat decoration and deep painting. Although in his small drawings and details he exhibits a genuine feeling for volume, as his Lion Déchirant un Cadavre shows, his constant refinements of reasoning nearly always resulted in his form being flattened out until it sometimes became commonplace. Simple balance of line defined the limits of his ability for organisation. If he had carried out in other pictures the compositional elements of his Piéta, which had distinct movement, his work would have taken a higher place in the history of art. In many canvases his seeming fullness of form is only a richness of line—a richness, however, which had seldom been found in painting since Masaccio. This voluptuousness in Delacroix (analogous to Wagner’s music) results from the balance of large dark and light masses—the fullness of chiaroscuro. It is particularly appreciable in La Justice de Trajan, La Captivité de Babylone, Repos (reminiscent of Goya’s La Maja Desnuda) and his animal compositions.
Delacroix’s greatest deficiency lay in his inability to recognise the difference between the inventive intelligence and the imaginative instinct. Had he understood this he could have seen that his limitless ambition was incommensurate with his comparatively small capabilities. But his mind was not sufficiently open. In fact his viewpoint at times was a petty one. Even his patriotism was chauvinistic. He was rabidly anti-Teutonic and attempted to compress all the great masters of art into the French mould. He inveighed against style in painting because France had always been barren of it. He pretended to detest Wagner, his musical prototype, and ignoring the latter’s dramatic undulations, criticised him severely for his methods. Beethoven was too long for Delacroix, and Il Trovatore too complicated. However, he had a profound admiration for Titian and Mozart; and in these preferences we have the man’s psychology. Both were great classicists, but both lacked that genuine and magistral fullness which was the propre of Beethoven and Michelangelo.
Delacroix’s thoughts were on deep things rather than deep in themselves. Among the romanticists he was at home: all his life Byron and Walter Scott provided him with themes. And though he had sufficient foresight to see the hopeless trend of the painting of his day, and combated it, he did not advance. His muse was the corpse of Venetian art. He was the brake which put an end to the reactionary tendencies of art. His discoveries did not reach fruition until Impressionism, twenty years after his death.
In all his struggles destiny seemed to conspire to bring about his fame. In 1824, the very year he brought colour into his painting, Géricault, who gave promise of outstripping him, died. Constable and Turner came forward with their achievements. David’s influence had died out, and the painter himself was an exile in Brussels. Fromentin tells us that Géricault helped paint Delacroix’s first canvas. Certain it is that several of the great Englishmen painted some of his second. This, no doubt, taught Delacroix much. In 1827 the government ordered Justinien Composant les Institutes. All France rallied round his standard. He was decorated by Louis Philippe; and at the age of thirty he was proclaimed a great master by one of the leading critics of the day.
From the first he had had the backing of men respected as authorities. But though they helped make his position tenable, they obfuscated his true significance by their purely literary appreciations. Gautier, Dumas, Baudelaire, Stendhal and Merimée—there was none whose temperament was not either romantic or idealistic. They could not see that, though he strove with them for modernity of expression, his language was unmodern. However, Ernest Chesneau, Théophile Silvestre, Eugène Véron and C. P. Landon have all given us side-lights on his methods, and, in this, their expositions are of value.
But, though the men of letters did not understand him thoroughly, several of his fellow painters recognised his eclecticism. Among them was Thomas Couture who, in his highly instructive booklet, Méthodes et Entretiens d’Atelier, had the audacity to point out the painter’s selective habits. In the main his charge was just. Delacroix’s first canvas contains influences of both Rubens and Michelangelo. His second picture echoes Rubens, the Venetians and Goya. Later came more prominent evidences of Titian and Veronese. Delacroix was museum-bred. He absorbed impressions avidly, and did his best work only after he had undergone an intellectual experience. Had his art been truly expressive of all that was within him, he would have been in turn—diluted, to be sure—a Giotto, a Caravaggio, a Rubens, a Rembrandt. He felt the call of these men, but instead of halting at appreciation, he tried to use them. But the old masters, like the lords of the earth, are not amenable to high-handed demands.
The diversity of his pursuits, which sprang from a desire to compete with Leonardo da Vinci, smacks of the dilettante. His great mistake was that he did not separate his capabilities from his desires. Had he done so he would have produced small figure pieces of gem-like richness and voluminous composition. Enthusiasm is not the proper equipment for extended labour. It burns out too soon, and is kept alive only by quick and brilliant results. For this reason his pictures are viewed to better effect framed and in galleries than as mural decorations. In trying to paint monumental subjects on extensive canvases he lost that spirit of organisation which would have been his on more limited surfaces. One of his finest expositions of colour, La Lutte de Jacob avec l’Ange, in a chapel at Saint Sulpice, is ineffective because its surface is too large for his treatment of the theme. Delacroix in reality was a painter of still-life in the broad meaning of the term, just as Rembrandt and Cézanne were still-life painters. He failed in the accomplishment of his larger programme because his vision was too restricted to permit him to weld his details into great ensembles, as Rubens did. His ambition outstripped his power, and strive as he might, he could not make up the discrepancy by reasoning. Undoubtedly he sensed his own weakness, for all his days he was in continual pursuit of system. System was to him what law was to the old masters. Herein he was reflecting the rationalistic philosophers of his day who substituted theory for observation.
Were all Delacroix’s paintings destroyed and his Journal and drawings saved, his apport to art would be but imperceptibly decreased. We should still possess his linear compositions and his colour theories—his two significant gifts to modern art. Without the liberation of draughtsmanship expressed in the former, Courbet’s struggle would have been more difficult, and rhythm in drawing would have had to wait for another resuscitator. Without his colour theories Impressionism would have been postponed for half a century; Van Gogh could not have done his best pictures; and the Pointillists, with their system of complementaries, might never have existed. Delacroix was the first to speak of simultaneity in painting, on which phrase has recently been founded a school; and he sketched a dictionary of art terms and definitions which even now, after fifty years, is far more intelligent than present-day academic precepts.
Let us regard Delacroix as a great pioneer who fought against the zymotic formalism of his day and by so doing opened up a new era of expression. He is the link in the chain which holds the brilliant gems of painting. If he himself fell short of genius, he nevertheless fulfilled a destiny which intrinsically is in many ways more fine: he made genius possible for those who were to come after him.
The other man who contributed vitally to modern colour theories was J. M. W. Turner, born in 1775, one year before Constable. Like Delacroix he had ardent and influential defenders; and the coincidence is emphasised by the fact that between these two great colour innovators there existed a striking thematic similarity. Ruskin took care that Turner should taste those beneficent honours which the world generally withholds from a painter during his lifetime. He accomplished this feat by praise which was largely enthusiasm and by criticism which spelled partiality. But a panegyric not founded on accuracy and authenticity defeats its own object in the end. Turner himself remarked that Ruskin discovered recondite points in his painting of which he, as the artist, was ignorant. This might have been true, or it might have been sarcasm. But whether Ruskin or Turner knew more about the latter’s art, the fact remains that the author of Modern Painters overestimated the painter for a reason totally inapposite to æsthetic consideration:—the almost photographic perfection of his canvases. Later, when the spirituel Whistler tarnished this English didactician’s reputation for infallibility, the latter’s pronunciamentos were questioned, in some quarters ridiculed. And Turner, accepted because of Ruskin’s assurances, became suspect.
But no amount of effulgent literary criticism can obscure the authentic accomplishments of this poor barber’s son. Turner’s contributions to the colour methods of the eighties were too large, and his imitators too bold, for the fact to be longer ignored. In his Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus, The Fighting Téméraire and especially in Rain, Steam and Speed, he had begun to divide the surfaces of his objects into minute touches of different colours—not, perhaps, for the purpose of heightening the emotional qualities of the paintings as a whole, but for the primitive reason that the device gave accuracy to them as representations of nature. These pictures Monet and Pissarro studied closely during the Franco-Prussian War, and there is no doubt that the result of this study determined the direction taken by the Impressionists. Turner’s earlier pictures had been too sombre to meet the demand for brilliancy in that first great modern school, and the canvases in which his vision of sunlight began to take form had not yet been painted. These later pictures, with their light tonality and their full use of misty blue and gold, had a further influence on the Impressionists’ conception of colour.
When Monet and Pissarro went to London in 1871 they had been habituated to the use of broad flat tones, and were astonished at Turner’s extraordinary snow and ice effects which were obtained by juxtaposing little spots of diverse colour and by the gradating of tones. On their return to France they both made use of this striking artifice, and developed it, in conjunction with Delacroix’s theories, into what later an unknown humorist of the Charivari named Impressionism. This process was given further impetus by another Frenchman, Jongkind, called the European Hiroshige. There is more than a superficial analogy between Jongkind and Turner; and the Impressionists, first under the influence of Corot and Courbet, found the effects they sought by using the purity of Turner with the facture of Jongkind. It was thus they were brought back to the theories of Delacroix which they had partially abandoned. This return had a profound raison d’être, for between the last phase of Delacroix and the later sketches of Turner there is a similarity which was apparent even to their contemporaries. But though the resemblance was as pronounced as that between Turner and the Impressionists, the eulogists of that movement chose to ignore and, in some cases, to deny it.
This new method of using colour did not constitute the only debt the Impressionists owed Turner. They also found in him an added inspiration toward freedom of arrangement and unconventionality of design. The landscape painters before Turner’s day conceived their out-of-door pictures in more or less definite moulds. A tree in one man’s canvas, being an idealistic conception, was difficult of differentiation from a tree in another’s. All their pictures were permeated by the same motif. But Turner, along with Constable and Bonington, began putting character into landscapes. As a consequence their pictures exuded a new freedom of arrangement.
To appreciate Turner fully we must overlook his astonishing ability for transcription—a heritage from his architectural days—and consider him as a man who loved nature so ardently that it was impossible for him to approach it intellectually. His sketches, both in water-colour and oil, were, unlike those of the Impressionists, rarely done in the open. He conceived them in pencil, wrote upon his clouds, trees and stones the colours he saw in them, and later, in the solitude of his studio, “worked them up.” Had the Impressionists, after their frenzied séances before models, taken their canvases home, organised and modified them, they would no doubt have produced greater net results artistically. Organisation, in its finest sense, comes only through contemplation and reflection; and while Turner did not possess the genius for rhythm in any of its manifestations, he nevertheless realised that mere truth does not make a picture. The Sun of Venice Going to Sea is as excellent as anything Monet or Sisley has ever done. In Turner there is a feeling for the grandiose such as few moderns possess. Did this gift come from Claude whom he delighted in imitating? Even Constable spoke of a Turner canvas as the most complete work of genius he ever saw. But this was the beau geste of a contemporary who wished to appear broad-minded. The truth lay further down the slope. Turner undoubtedly showed genius in his competent copying of even the most insignificant of of nature’s accidents. The composition of The Devil’s Bridge is the foundation on which are built many of Monet’s pictures; and the Rain, Steam and Speed canvas can hang beside La Gare St. Lazare without loss to either.
Delacroix re-established an Italian mode of expression and tried to make of it a modern language. Turner, in a new language, spoke of ancient things. But Courbet ignored all method, and withal became the father of latter-day art. In him was the embryo of that distinctly modern spirit which demands visible proof before believing. Like William of Orange, he arose triumphant above every opposition. His art stemmed temperamentally from the Dutch and Spaniards, for while he imitated no one, he was unconsciously influenced by many. So complete was his assimilation of great men that in his expression they all had a place. He himself says that he studied antiquity as a swimmer crosses a river. The academicians were drowned there. So was Delacroix. Courbet learned in his passage that in adaptation is the confession of sterility. But though he avoided paraphrasing and copying the old masters, we find throughout his life recurring traces of Van Dyke, Zurbarán, Delacroix, Rembrandt, El Greco, Géricault, Ribera, Velazquez and that little known Valencian master, Juan de Juanes.
Courbet was considered an ignorant, vulgar and brutal peasant. But this judgment was the outgrowth of public miscomprehension rather than of any authentic evidence in the man himself. Courbet was the epitome of that unstudied naturalism which is antipodal to the hypocrisies of society. France, during his day, was governed by the dictates of theatricalism. Its ideals were those of Renaissance Italy, and its artistic attitude reflected a refinement of vision approaching decadence. Courbet’s deportmental crudities alone were a source of antagonism, and when to these were added scorn and indifference the hostility against him became violent. But temperamentally he was aristocratic. The peasant mind is fundamentally traditional: Courbet was violently revolutionary. Nor did he lack fineness of mind. His early portraits embodied the subtleties of modelling in Rembrandt as well as the extraordinary niceties of characterisation in El Greco. The compositions of his pictures alone belie any coarseness of fibre in the man. They are founded on a weakened S which, since the decay of Byzantine art, had done valiant service for the most exalted painters such as Rubens and Tintoretto. This compositional figure appears, either exact or varied, in his Le Combat de Cerfs, Le Retour de la Conférence, Chien et Lièvres, and L’Enterrement à Ornans.
Courbet’s reputation for vulgarity was derived more from his lack of facile fluency, so common in the French tradition, than from a basic understanding of the structural synthesis of his work. And this misconception of him was aggravated by his being the first painter unwilling to accept praise as the public chose to dole it out. He was a self-advertiser, and such men as George Bernard Shaw are but echoes of his methods. He pushed his way to the front unceasingly, and continually theorised as a means of silencing his adversaries. He regarded all public demonstration as blague, and later in life carried this attitude into politics. Whistler, his pupil, was quick to sense the advantage of his teacher’s methods; and it is the irony of fate that this ineffectual American was believed and respected while Courbet was abused and ridiculed and forced to die in exile. He had carried his assaults too far. “To be not only a painter but a man,” he wrote at one time. “To create a living art—this is my aim.” It is a masterly statement of his real ambitions. He was intensely interested in life, as were Rubens and Cellini. “You want me to paint a goddess?” he exclaimed. “Show me one!” In this mot he summed up the very spirit of modern times. It expressed the new realism found in such widely separated men as Dostoievsky, Zola, George Moore, Conrad, Andreiev, Theodore Dreiser, Gerhart Hauptmann, Richard Strauss, Debussy, Korngold, Sibelius, Manet, Renoir, Sorolla and Zorn.
It is strange how Courbet, so far removed from the French temperament, should, at the crucial period of his life, have reverted to a French gesture by refusing the cross of the Legion of Honor. But in that famous letter of rejection, written in a café and mailed with a grandiloquent toss in the presence of Fantin-Latour, he summed up aptly the man of genius who, though avid for honour, throws it away at the moment of attainment. Not even Napoleon was more concerned with the thoughts of posterity than Courbet, and some of the artist’s letters are not dissimilar in tone to the bombastic manifestos of certain ultra-modern schools. At the time of his first exhibition he wrote to Bruyas: “I stupefy the entire world. I am triumphant not only over the moderns but the ancients as well. Here is the Louvre gallery. The Champs Elysées does not exist, nor the Luxembourg. There is no more Champs de Mars. I have thrown consternation into the world of art.” This spirit of monumental self-confidence, so startling to a generation whose taste was measured by the decadent poetry of Beaudelaire, brought frantic sarcasm hurtling about his head. This troubled Courbet little. He valued friendships only in so far as they were useful. It was Meissonier who said in a Paris salon, when standing before the famous Femme de Munich which Courbet had painted in a few hours for Baron Remberg: “It is no longer a question of art, but of dignity. From now on Courbet must be as one dead to us.”
Charles Beaudelaire, who helped fight the battle for Wagner, Poe, Delacroix, Manet and Monet, tentatively praised him at first, but later allied himself with the public and became his bitterest assailant. It was not surprising. A poet so superficial as to call Delacroix “a haunted lake of blood” could not be expected to appreciate the terre à terre qualities of this master of Ornans. And Courbet was so little French that he was incomprehensible to his national contemporaries. He disclaimed all tradition, swore he had no forerunners, and struck blindly into the unknown. For a man without genius this would have been fatal, but, after all, only a genius would attempt such things.
Courbet was disgusted with the allegory and romance of his time. His nature cried aloud for a pose that was natural, for a landscape that resembled the out-of-doors, for objects in which life was discernible. Consequently the critics and painters of his day put him aside either indifferently or insolently. They could not understand a work of art which did not delineate a literary episode or in which the postures were not taken direct from the theatre. Courbet needed no literature to paint great pictures. He went straight to nature, and his compositions grew out of his sheer enjoyment in visible objects, whether they were dramatic or not. To the public his pictures appeared ugly, even repellent. Here was a man who painted a funeral realistically—Dieu m’en garde! With only the example of canvases filled with familiar gods and goddesses and melting nudes in golden pink, he dared set forth, in a sacred theme, peasants’ faces and peasants’ shoes, cloudy skies, and holes in the brown earth. To those who had come to look upon art as something ethereal and evanescent, L’Enterrement à Ornans was more than blasphemy. It was this picture, falling like a bomb into the midst of the vagaries of his time, that sounded the death knell of romanticism. It was the last spade of earth on the graves of the classicists. The mere picture was sensation enough, but Courbet was not content to let the matter rest there. At the time of his exhibition in 1855, held in a barrack of his own building on the Rond Point de l’Alma, he wrote a defensive and provocative preface to his catalogue. In it he proclaimed himself not only the first realist, but realism itself.
L’ENTERREMENT À ORNANS
COURBET
Géricault’s Radeau de la Méduse and Delacroix’s Dante et Virgile aux Enfers were acceptable to the public, the one because of its dramatic interest, the other because of its literature. But L’Enterrement à Ornans entirely lacked the popular qualities of these two other pictures. It was full of rugged and hardy precision. Its insolent ugliness of subject-matter and its implied indifference to all tradition, seemed to express the quintessence of artistic degradation and sordidness. At first view the picture appears to have been inspired by El Greco’s Obsequies of the Count of Orgaz, but it is more likely that these peasants of Ornans, each a notable of the town, with their indifferent expressions and awkward gestures, were attributable to The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew of Ribera and La Folle of Géricault, rather than to the master of Toledo. But that the Spanish helped paint it is evident: some parts of the landscape are taken bodily from their canvases. Meier-Graefe states that this funeral picture, like most of the representative pictures of the nineteenth century, is not representative of the artist himself. But did Meier-Graefe understand more profoundly the synthesis of composition found in individual painters, he would have seen that here was the famous S composition which was used throughout the painter’s life. Instead of being set on end, as was the practice of the Italians, it is used laterally and extends from left to right in depth.
In colour also this picture is representative of Courbet, for it shows his limitations in that medium. Delacroix brought a new palette to painting, but could not use it. Courbet contented himself with a palette as meagre as that of Caravaggio and Guercino. And yet, though colour has come latterly to mean tactile form in its highest sense, this black canvas, when placed beside either an Ingres, a David, a Delacroix or a Gérard, appears less flat and inconsequential than the latter. The form is even suggestive of Rembrandt, Giotto, Cézanne and Renoir.
Champfleury was the only friend of Courbet who dared defend him. Delacroix was set against him, and the critics, without understanding him, obscured the true importance of his art by talking of his want of transcendentalism and sentiment. Especially were his landscapes the butt of their ridicule, for painters up to that time had made use of conventional arrangements of dainty trees copied for their drawing and tone. In Courbet all this was changed. He organised landscapes as he did still-lives and nudes. Objects, as such, meant nothing to him. In this he struck a new and modern note which the good people of his day considered not only bad art but a slur upon the spiritual meanings of nature. Even in Les Baigneuses, where the figures are unimportant, the trees are superb. In La Grotte he went further, for here the figure was part of the whole. His paintings of the hills about Ornans had a movement which gave off a sensation of weight entirely new in painting. In Les Grands Châtaigniers he reached his apogee in landscape painting. This picture is greater than those of any of the Englishmen.
Though many critics have written that Millet influenced Courbet, the reverse is the truth. The former’s life work was largely a repetition of the lights and darks found in Courbet’s earlier pictures. Les Casseurs de Pierres is far greater than anything Millet has ever done, despite the vast popularity of such purely sentimental pictures as The Angelus and The Man with the Hoe. Courbet could never have been satisfied with the angularity and absence of rhythm in the other’s work. In Millet’s best canvases one finds at most only a parallelism of lines, and in his lesser pictures even this amateurish attempt at organisation is lacking. But in Les Casseurs de Pierres the arrangement is one which recalls the competency of linear balance and development in Tintoretto’s Minerva Expelling Mars.
When Courbet entered painting, he had neither prejudices nor a parti pris. He tested his ability before engaging his full complement of resources. Though untutored, he had that cast of intelligence which no amount of study can produce and no amount of adverse criticism influence. Delacroix, on the other hand, was the archetype of the highly cultured and educated man. He foresaw the necessity for radical reform, but was unable to bring it about significantly. Courbet instinctively projected himself into that void at the brink of which tradition halts and the unknown begins. And because he was a man of genius he did not return empty-handed.
The art of Courbet was too aristocratic to be appreciated. Not aristocratic in the Delacroix sense, but isolated and superior. Rejecting the colour discoveries of his day, he created his own materials. Delacroix foreshadowed the medium which was to serve as a vehicle for the achievement of future generations, but it was Courbet who brought to art a new mental attitude without which there would be no excuse for modern painting. By turning men’s thoughts from ancient Italy to the actualities of their own day, and by expelling the literary canvas from art, he left those who came after him free to evolve a medium which would translate the new vision. Delacroix’s heritage to art was intellectual, Courbet’s dynamic. And though objectively the work of Courbet is the uglier and less gracious, in it there is more of the sublime. But both men are indispensable, and have a just claim to the eternal respect of posterity.
The construction of form as voluminous phenomena—that integer of modern painting which was lacking in Delacroix, Turner and Courbet, but which has become one of the leading preoccupations of present-day artists—was introduced by Honoré Daumier. This painter who, unlike his three great contemporaries, fought for the pure love of the fight, was celebrated as a caricaturist at twenty-five. Such fame was warranted, for he was unquestionably the greatest and most trenchant caricaturist the world has ever produced. From 1835 to 1848 he made capital of all those many catastrophes which overtook France. Only the curtailing of the freedom of the press on December 2, 1848, put an end to his career as publicist. This culmination of his editorial activities was a beneficial thing for both Daumier and the world, for it permitted him freedom to devote himself wholly to the development of the larger side of his genius. He endeavoured to interest his friends in his painting; but too long had he been known as a critic of current topics for them to look with serious eyes upon his more solid endeavours.
But though neglected by his friends, Daumier holds a position of tremendous importance in relation to the moderns. His work developed along lines unthought-of by either Delacroix or Courbet. Even his cartoons were more than clever pictorial comments on national events. Intrinsically they were great pieces of rugged flesh which had all the appearance of having been chiselled out of a solid medium with a dull tool. The richness of his line is as complete as in Rembrandt’s etchings; and his economy of means reached a point to which painters had not yet attained. His significance, however, lies more especially in his new method of obtaining volume than in the flexibility of his line drawings. He built his pictures in tone first. The drawing came afterward as a direct result of the tonal volumes. This new manner of painting permitted him a greater subtlety and fluency than Courbet possessed. In fact, Daumier’s comprehension of form in the subjective sense was greater than that of any Frenchman up to his time. Compare, for instance, Daumier’s canvas, Les Lutteurs, with Courbet’s picture of the same name. The massiveness of the one is monumental. One feels the weight of the two struggling men, heavy and shifting, clinging and panting. They are modelled by a craftsman who can juggle deftly with his means. In Courbet’s picture the figures are seen carefully copied in a strained pose by one who has not the complete mastery of his tools. In Daumier’s picture we also sense that elusive but vital quality called mental attitude. Superficially it is almost indistinguishable from its negation, but to those who know its significance, it is of permeating importance.
Contour and shading to his forerunners had meant two separated and distinct steps in the construction of form. Daumier created both qualities simultaneously as one emotion. Depth with other painters was obtained by carrying their figures into the background by the means of line and perspective. With Daumier it meant a plastic building up of volume from the background forward. The feeling we have before his canvases that we are looking at form itself and not merely an excellent representation of it, is as strong as it is in a greater way when we stand before a Leonardo da Vinci. In this he gave proof that he was a draughtsman in the most vital sense. Unless he had felt form uniquely, Le Repos des Saltimbanques and Le Bain would have been impossible of creation. This last picture sums up what Carrière aspired to but failed to attain.
LE BAIN
DAUMIER
Recalling the great masters of form we instinctively visualise Michelangelo first. For this reason perhaps Michelangelo is regarded the major influence in Daumier. “Il avait du Michel Ange dans la peau,” say the French: and certain it is that Daumier’s colossal simplicity and feeling for tactility were derived from the Renaissance master. But only in one picture, a composition called La République—1848, do we find any direct and conscious influence. Frankly this is but a modernisation of one of the sibyls on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The truth is Daumier is more akin to Rembrandt than to Michelangelo. But there is in him none of the conscious copying of Rembrandt that we find, for instance, in Joshua Reynolds. The latter, admiring Rembrandt, essayed to equal his power by imitating his externals with academic processes. Daumier, temperamentally affiliated with his master, went deeper. Putting aside the results of Rembrandt’s final brush strokes, he studied the very functioning procedure of his art. Both used the human figure as a terrain for the unceasing struggle of light against dark. In the process of painting the infinite play and by-play of opposed values on a given theatre, they produced form as an inevitable result.
A critic has stated of Daumier: “He left hardly anything but sketches, splashes of colour that resolve themselves into faces....” It is said without attempt at profundity. Nevertheless the remark unsuspectingly touches the crucial point of Daumier’s significance. The very resolution of those “splashes of colour” into faces is the prefiguration of the modern conception of form. In this particular Daumier, even more than Rembrandt, was the avant-courier of Cézanne. This latter artist, through his concern with the play of one colour on another, gave birth to form more intensely than did either of the older men. Too much stress cannot be laid on Daumier’s contribution to modern painting. By regarding the two drawings, La Vierge à l’Écuelle and Renaude et Angélique—the one by Correggio in chalk, the other by Delacroix in water-colour—we perceive the attainment of form by less profound methods. But neither possesses the significance of Daumier’s work.
Of Daumier’s colour little need be said. At times it emerges from its sombreness and blossoms forth in all the hot softness of now the Venetians, of again the Spaniards; but compared with the artist’s genius for plastic form it is of subsidiary importance.
Although the inception of Daumier’s greatness can be traced to Rembrandt, he reacted to many influences. Suggestions of Monnier and Granville are to be found in his work. Decamps’s Sonneurs de Cloches was studied by him and emulated. His simplifications stemmed from Ingres, and his caricature of Guizot had the same qualities as that master’s portraits. Delacroix also had some trifling influence on him in such paintings as Don Quichotte. But Daumier’s influence on others is more direct and far-reaching than his own garnerings of inspiration. He foreshadowed the formal abbreviations of Toulouse-Lautrec, Forain and Steinlen, and he affected, more than is commonly admitted, the works of Manet, Degas, and Van Gogh. In his sculptured pieces, Ratapoil and Les Émigrants, he paved the way for Meunier and Rodin. Even such minor men as Max Beerbohm learned much from him without understanding him. And apart from the vital new methods he brought to painting, the originality of his subject-matter led modern men to copy him thematically. Le Drame fathered a whole series of Degas’s paintings.
Daumier is only beginning to receive the intelligent appreciation which in time may engulf his eminent contemporary, Courbet. For if choice there is between the intrinsically artistic achievements of the painter of L’Enterrement à Ornans and the creator of Silène, the preference rests with Daumier.
The forces underlying the development of genius, working in conjunction with the right circumstances, produce the fertilising methods which nature uses to bring about a final flowering of a long period of intense germination. Before the greatest eras of all art the battles have been fought and won. The descendants of the pioneers become the introspective and creative souls who open, free from the stain of combat, to the sun of achievement. Delacroix, Turner, Courbet, Daumier—these are the men who cleared the ground and thereby made possible a new age of æsthetic creation. To Delacroix belongs the credit for giving an impetus to the vitalisation of colour, and for freeing drawing from the formalisms of the past. Turner raised the tonality of colour, and introduced a new method for its application. Courbet heightened uniformly the signification of objects in painting, and handed down a mental attitude of untraditional relativity. And Daumier conceived a new vision of formal construction. These men were the pillars of modern painting.
The purely pictorial has always been relished by the public. The patterns of the mosaicists and very early primitives, the figured stuffs of the East and South, the vases of China and Persia, the frescoes on the walls of Pompeii, the drawings and prints of old Japan—all are examples of utilitarian art during epochs when the public took delight in the contemplation of images. Even the delicate designs on Greek pottery, the rigid and ponderous arts of architectural Egypt and the drawings and adorned totem poles of the North American Indians are relics of times when the demand for art was created by the masses. For the most part all these early crafts were limited to simple designs, wholly obvious to the most rudimentary mind. The ancients were content with a representation of a natural object, the likeness of a familiar animal, the symmetry of an ornamental border, an effigy of a god in which their abstract conceptions were given concrete form. At that time the artist was only a craftsman—a man with a communistic mind, content to follow the people’s dictates and to reflect their taste. Art was then democratic, understood and admired by all. It did not raise its head about the mean level; it was abecedary, and consequently comprehensible.