Queer Thing, Painting - Forty Years in the World of Art

I.

QUEER THING, PAINTING

IT WOULD BE EASY TO PILE UP STATISTICS AS TO THE MONEY value of the art-works in the United States. Turning to Europe and merely estimating the value of the works there would take us beyond the statistician’s wildest dreams—even in these days of astronomical figures. With one of our collectors paying over a million dollars for a Raphael, what do the pictures in the National Gallery, the Louvre, the Uffizi, the Vatican, the Hermitage, the Prado, and the rest foot up to? And the price paid for that Raphael (one determined on cool business principles of supply and demand) sinks into insignificance beside the sum mentioned by one of our museum officials for the Hermes of Praxiteles: a hundred million dollars.

The question was whether the Greek government, to replenish its treasury, would consider an offer for the statue. You weren’t in earnest, of course, in talking of that hundred million, I said. Yes, I was, and that’s the sum I actually proposed to them. And for that one work, with its importance, its history, its prestige, I am sure a national subscription here would have brought the money. Perhaps it would, in those pre-depression days, when nothing seemed impossible. But cut that astonishing figure down to any reasonable fraction of it and then see where you arrive, in calculating values for the other sculptures throughout the world by the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Gothic men and those of the Renaissance.

How much for a Michelangelo? How much for an ensemble of sculpture and architecture by him if, as reported, we paid ten thousand dollars for a bit of paper on which he had made a mere preliminary study? And it was a good buy—at any price.

I could go on. I could give you a sardonic little poem by Georges Rouault in which that admirable painter proposes to pay France’s war debt to this country by taking down Notre Dame, stone by stone, and setting it up on the banks of the Mississippi. But the humor with which he presents his suggestion does not sufficiently disguise its ghastliness for me to start estimating whose side of the ledger would be that of the creditor after such an operation—a fatal one for the honor of both parties, if such a blasphemy were ever attempted.

Let me take up one more case, however. To this array of dollars (apparently as useless and as vulgar as most of such imaginings), this concrete instance may give a bearing on certain questions that are both mysterious and urgent. The newspapers were playing up the contrast, some time ago, between the insured value of a collection of paintings by van Gogh—a million dollars, and the amount that the painter received throughout his lifetime for all the pictures he ever sold—about a hundred dollars. To be sure he didn’t sell many, but then, too, the collection I speak of was very far indeed from containing his whole work which—had he sold it all in his day—would have fetched the merest pittance. Canvas and stretchers can always be turned into a little money, for other painters can use them again, but the price of them would have been about all that the van Goghs would have brought, down to the time of his death, and afterward.

Please do not think that I am working toward an appeal to pity the poor artists. I have no pity for them; they are happy men—as long as they can be artists. When they sell out, they deserve no pity either, whether they collect their pieces of silver or whether they remain poor, which most of them do. As I have shown elsewhere, their descent is so gradual that if they are ever conscious of it at all, it is only when they make some chance confrontation of the idealistic strivings of their youth with the things of their later life.

No, the question is as to what they strive for, why the world sets the fantastic price I have hinted at on their production, and how it is that uncounted thousands of men throughout the world today are racking their brains, and eking out the last of their resources in order to make one more, and still one more try for the great prize of producing art.

What is the use of it? In earlier centuries the answer was easy—or seemed so. The great frescoes in the churches were the Bible of the poor, who could get the sacred story from them—get their religion from them—as no preacher (save one equal in genius to Giotto, for example) could give it. And Leonardo tells explicitly that the value of a portrait of your father lies in the fact that you can still see his beloved features when he is gone, or that if you are not able to be in the country, the painter can give you a picture of its woods and skies. And so on.

But today the poor can read, so we need no longer paint their Bible on the walls; the photographer gives you a dozen likenesses of your father for a thousandth part of the price that a crack portrait-painter would charge for one—which, today, would probably be vastly inferior, in the matter of vitality and character, to a Kodak snap, while a visit to any movie house will give you all kinds of landscape, summer or winter, native or exotic, and with effects of light and movement that a painter could not achieve in a lifetime.

And yet he keeps on with his work. Queer thing, painting, as Turner said at the end of a Royal Academy banquet, a hundred years ago. There had been long speeches about the history of art, the theory of art, the future of art, and who knows what more, but those three words of the famous landscapist, with their implied statement that art is not a finite but an infinite thing, get deeper into the matter than all the erudition that was poured forth by those orators, their predecessors and successors, in treating the theme.

It is always the artists who get deepest into the questions of art. Why shouldn’t they? They think of it morning, noon, and night, waking and sleeping (literally), while other people consider it only once in a while. So that if we want to get light on this enigma of art, and our evolving conception of its value and meaning, the men to talk to about it are the artists.

I have had exceptional opportunities to do that, and I set down here some recollections of people in the art world whom I have known, how they acted, and how they thought. If a mere tithe of the pleasure and profit I have gained from them and their work is transferred to the reader of these pages, I shall be happy to have written them.

Yet I am venturing to believe that there is more to our question than one of pleasure, even if, in order to avoid argument, people offer that explanation for their conduct. Buying pictures is a matter of habit: you begin, as you do with smoking or drinking, and then you find it’s just too hard to leave off. That was the analysis, more than once offered to questioners by John Quinn, who will re-appear in these pages. He had risen to a position of great eminence as a lawyer, and was a power in finance and public affairs, national as well as local. To the men he lunched with daily at the Bankers Club he was the crafty strategist of legal and political campaigns, the hard bargainer, the dangerous fighter, or again the man of unaccountably correct hunches as to the action of a senator or a financier, a diplomat or a judge.

Doubtless it was for Wall Street associates that he made up the explanation as to his collecting. Had he gone in for Old Masters, like the other lords of his realm, no explanation would have been needed. Such things were a natural and proper appurtenance of wealth—a good investment, if nothing else—one of the safe titles to prestige during one’s lifetime and—properly handled—the monument more enduring than bronze after one’s death.

But Mr. Quinn’s sole interest in buying went out to the things of his own day, not at all to the classics, which he studied at the museums. When a great exhibition of the earlier Italians was on in New York, he said it had no business to be here—that the place to see such things was in Italy, and that the time to see them was the time when they were done, when they were the living voice of their people.

So that this man, with his enormous reading, experience, and influence, brings us once more to the idea of art as an index to life. And I do not mean a sort of table of contents at the end of a book. When I use the word index, I use it as denoting an element necessary to the proper functioning of society, but one which also acts as a tell-tale, a characterization of the whole. Thus the eyes and the mouth of a man are an index to the workings of his entire system and mind, even while performing their very important services of seeing and speaking.

It is so with art: a vital part of the world’s activity at any time, it is also the best means of knowing the whence and whither of things. Everyone recognizes this to be the case with the older arts. They tell us not only of the glory that was Greece, but why and how the country achieved its position. In this respect mankind does not change. It is writing its meanings into the art of our day as fully and as forcibly as ever a period did. It is also writing them just as clearly and legibly. The future will read them with the sureness that we have in reading the significance of a Gothic cathedral. If we are not getting the benefit of such knowledge at present (the time of all times, when a comprehension of our day would be most useful), the fault lies with ourselves. Any aid to such understanding is of value, and I repeat—the men who know best what they are doing are the artists themselves. Not one of them, to be sure, can see the period as a whole, but each of them accounts for some part of it.

How thoroughly the course of art indicates the course of life as a whole has been clear to me for many years. Having discovered this, as has many another person, from a series of experiences, I cannot do better than relate them here. The earliest of them goes back to the first significant contact with pictures that I can remember. I had always enjoyed them and, living near the Metropolitan Museum, as I did when a boy, I had spent no small part of my spare time in looking at its collections. But until 1895 they did not begin to take on the importance for me that they have since had.

I can date the change in my outlook so accurately because the year was written with my name on the fly-leaf of a book I was given at the time. That book, The Count of Monte Cristo, thrilled me as no other had done before. There were grand passages of excitement in Huckleberry Finn, which had been my favorite work for a long time (and remained so for even longer), but the adventure of Monte Cristo, sustained through those four volumes, was new to me. And then, with the Count, one made acquaintance with a superior being. Though I never hoped to meet such a paragon of courage, wisdom, and charm in actual life, he was real to me; and at least I could, after a fashion, set my own course along the lines he indicated. This may seem foreign to the account of a decisive contact with the art of painting, but presently you will see what the connection was.

Near the house of my grandparents in Philadelphia there had lived another German-American family named Eble. My father kept up a warm friendship with one of the boys, his schoolmate, who was to become a dealer in antiques. His shop was a palace of magic to me in my childhood, and kind Mr. Eble was untiring in answering my questions; indeed, he loved to discourse on his treasures (very real ones they were, too) with the numberless visitors, often learned ones, who came to him. His last shop, on Forty-second Street near Sixth Avenue, must linger on for many a New Yorker as a grateful memory.

On one occasion I asked Mr. Eble about a couple of old Dutch pictures he had hanging on his wall: a church interior such as Pieter Neefs used to paint and a portrait of a man, something like a van Moor. I knew such works, in a way, by examples of those masters I had looked at in the Museum. Not that I had looked at them very much: I didn’t see why anybody should. They were not interesting like The Hunter’s Story and The Poacher’s Death, on the one hand, or beautiful like Graziella, a Girl of Capri and Haidee, after Lord Byron, on the other. Even interesting or beautiful paintings could not compare in my esteem with those of military scenes; later on, when I started to copy at the Museum, one of my first attempts was a figure from Detaille’s Defense of Champigny. These pictures have since gone into a well-deserved limbo, all save Graziella; there I can still see the same beauty in the model that I used to see, although the picture is as poor as the rest. But in my childhood all New York, except for the few people able to distinguish between the subject of a picture and its art, would have preferred the works I have mentioned to the two at the shop of Mr. Eble.

I did not expect him to possess such grand things as the ones I liked at the Museum, but I did ask why people bought the kind he had. The old gentleman very deliberately took a half-smoked cigar from a tin box, into which he had put it to go out quickly when a customer called (his endless generosity to needy persons made him economical about luxuries), and, apparently reflecting as his vigorous puffs got the old soldier into action again, he gave me an answer suitable to the understanding of a ten-year-old.

Well, you see, I’m an antiquary. Everything here is very old. Take those swords: they are of the seventeenth century. Suppose a man had those on his wall, and those Delft jugs that have such a nice blue, and that fine tapestry: he would want pictures that went with such things, and so he might buy these, for they are of just the same time.

As people did things for all sorts of strange reasons, I was willing to let them go their own way again in this instance, even though it seemed a poor way, when things as wonderful as pictures were concerned. From that day my name for works in the Marquand and other galleries at the Museum where the old brown paintings hung was Mr. Eble’s pictures, and I called them that for years.

One Saturday afternoon in 1895 (to get back to Monte Cristo), having seen my fill of the works I liked, I decided, listlessly, to take a stroll through the rooms of antiquarian stuff. On the frame of a portrait there I read the name Rembrandt, and I knew I had seen it somewhere before. Soon it came back to me: to give an idea of the Count’s fortune, Dumas had had him buy a Rembrandt that the French government had wanted to acquire for the Louvre but had been unable to afford.

I stared at the canvas. It was one of Mr. Eble’s pictures, just like the rest; yet Monte Cristo, the ineffable and infallible, had paid a vast sum for such a thing. He was not a man to be moved by such a consideration as matching the period of old swords or old pots; his lofty mind would demand only the fine things of art. Yet he had bought one of these dull pictures. Something was wrong; two and two no longer made four.

Diligent thinking on the problem for several days brought me to a new possibility: that I had missed something in the picture, that it was not the stupid thing I thought. Saturday was the first day when I could go and see, but when I stood before the Rembrandt again, it was quite as bad as before. If I remember accurately, that mental tussle kept up for over a month; perhaps two months. At the end of that time my repeated seeing of the picture and the ones around it had brought about the usual result: I realized that they were great. And I believe that never since that time have I taken my lack of understanding as proof that a given picture was bad. Years afterward, when I was having the worst sort of time with the modern things that I came on in Paris, instead of slamming the door on such heresies, I was willing to wait till I could see whether the qualities people claimed for them really existed.

I insist that they were no more a break with the Whistler-Sargent ideal of my training in art school than the Rembrandt was from the soft foolishness of the pictures one saw in the window of every dealer along Fifth Avenue from Twenty-first Street to Thirty-fourth, in people’s homes (through photographs if they could not own originals), and in the Museum, where the examples before referred to were so far from being the exception that, save for a few works of the Barbizon School, almost the only valuable possession of the nineteenth century galleries (as I see them now) was the pair of canvases by Manet.

My liking for these came about in a way that almost paralleled my acquaintance with Rembrandt. While I was working on the copy of the Detaille figure that I mentioned previously, a group of young people entered the gallery. Conducted by a teacher who was lecturing on the collections, they stopped before The Boy with the Sword by Manet, which hung directly alongside the work I was engaged on. It was a canvas that I had found empty and uninteresting on the few occasions when I had looked at it, so that—compelled to hear the remarks of the speaker—I was astonished to hear him praise it very highly. Noticing the very modish dress of the gentleman and being suspicious of sartorial display, I set him down, mentally, as a person who made his society manner take the place of knowledge of art. I was sorry for the students who were being misled by such a preceptor. Finally he said, And don’t you see that this and the other Manet are the only pictures here that could hang with the Old Masters, while this [pointing to my Detaille] and everything else in the room are just so much claptrap?

That was too much. I went over to an attendant to vent my indignation over such words. I asked if he knew what school those young people came from, having a vague notion that it was my duty to write to the head of it and expose the unworthiness of the guide to whom the students were intrusted. The attendant did know the school, the Pennsylvania Academy. He brings a group of students over from Philadelphia every year to see the Museum; he’s one of their teachers. His name is William M. Chase.

If my shock was not as great as when I found myself at odds with my beloved Monte Cristo, I was a badly shaken boy none the less. Mr. Chase was one of the famous artists of America; there was a picture by him in the Museum—one that I still look on with deep respect—and at that time, anybody whose work hung in the Museum was an immortal.

The process of coming to like the Manet was not as long and bewildering as my study of the Rembrandt had been. For one thing, having to make amends for my bad judgment about Mr. Chase himself, I set out to apply his test of comparison with the Old Masters. Rather soon I discovered among them a work that did indeed have a great likeness to the Boy with the Sword: the portrait of the young prince by Velasquez. And I discovered, also, that the Detaille and similar works did really fall far below the standard of the things I was later to call classic.

If it was only after a long time that I was to realize what an abyss separates the two types of art, I had already learned two big lessons: that there are things whose merit is so great that it will come into people’s consciousness even after centuries (and despite early misunderstanding); also, and this turned out to be even more important, that men in our own day could achieve such quality again.

At the time of the Manet episode I was not ready to see what I have called its more important aspect. My main preoccupation was getting time to paint—first when I was a college student, then when I started to make a living. The purpose of the painting did not matter, nor did I have any idea about the phases of art having a quality peculiarly vital in a given time. Not since Durand-Ruel brought the first Impressionist exhibition to New York in 1885 had there been anything to face people with the issue of a modern genius. So that when I finally went abroad and saw things of a vintage twenty years later than any I had known at home, I could accept George Moore’s words about the shriek of the decadent.

He wound up his article, dating from 1892 or shortly before, with a statement that France had at last entered on a period of artistic decadence, and said, finally, for many a year nothing will come to us from France but the bleat of the scholiast. He was right in seeing both school-men and decadents as expressions of artistic poverty; he was wrong in taking Seurat as his illustration of the point—which he did in the body of the article.

Brilliant as he was, and courageous in his defense of the great men of the previous generation, he had lost touch with the evolution of painting. There was excuse, then, for an American living so much further away from the center of that evolution, if he had no idea of the great movement of modern art—of which, indeed, no single example was to be seen west of the Atlantic.

To be sure, a strong philosophic mind might have deduced the theory of change, and realized that so powerful an impetus to thought as the whole nineteenth century had given was not to come to an end overnight. (There just occurs to me a new example of the way things move: Mark Twain’s observation that an American in Heaven could no more converse with his ancestors of five or six centuries ago than with the Chinese—so completely has the English language been remade. One may add, even, that writings of the eighteenth century contain endless pitfalls for us today because of the way words have assumed different meanings.)

But of all such problems I was blissfully unaware when I started out for Europe and the Old Masters. It was bliss indeed to see the great works, and I should not have known what was meant had anyone told me that my real study in Europe lay elsewhere—with the new things instead of the old. My first contacts with the great moderns or near-moderns went off very well. In fact it may be of use to tell how I formed acquaintance with Cézanne and van Gogh—not as proof of any special perspicacity or open-mindedness of mine (I have little of those valuable qualities, as I well know), but because of my ready acceptance of the two men illustrates the way in which a grounding in the great work of earlier times carries one on to understand the great work of a later time.

At an exhibition of modern art in Dresden, I came on a picture that appealed to me strongly. In the diary I kept at the time I noted down superb work by Buzenne (?), the question mark meaning that I was not sure of the name. I had no catalogue and the spelling I used was the best I could do in reading the signature in the paint. It was many years afterward that the sight of a similar work led me to look up that notation, when I found that my Buzenne was Cézanne, and I had the satisfaction of knowing that I had first liked the great man for his art alone, and not for his fame, which was unknown to me.

The same is true in the case of van Gogh. Painting in Holland for a time, I found myself going out of my way, on returning from my studio every evening, in order to take a street where I could see again certain drawings in the window of a bookshop. Finally I went in and inquired the name of the artist. I was told that it was van Gogh, which left me not much wiser than I had been, since no mention of his genius or even his existence had yet reached me.

I insist that the constant mention of myself in these pages does not make autobiography of the present writing. I am sure that my experience is similar to that of numberless other people, so that what we are engaged on is not the evolution of an individual, but the characterizing of a period—indeed of certain elements of the mind that are found in all periods.

One of these that has been greatly to the fore in our time is the peculiar value of what is modern, the problem that has not been solved previously. To realize this is also to comprehend that relationship between art and life that is so troublesome. Just as the artist gets the clue to his success from great men of the past, men who faced totally different conditions, so in our present-day need to distinguish between authority and tyranny, for example, or between freedom and chaos, we scan the centuries behind us for a basis of judgment on the course ahead. And in doing that, there is no state of mind so exigently demanded as the non-partisanship—to use Hamerton’s fine word—with which the best students of art allow the works to speak for themselves, instead of trying to make them conform to a preconceived pattern.

The latter process is that of the mind nowadays called academic; and it is the opposite tendency, loosely designated as modern, which has been more and more in the ascendant. Twenty years ago the word modern was, on the contrary, a signal for doubt, if not hostility. The reason for the change is that we are coming to grasp the fact that a thing which is genuinely modern expresses some permanent idea, however new the form in which that idea is clothed. Soon the new and the old are as unshakably linked as were those pictures by Manet and Velasquez that connected themselves for me so surely when I was a boy. From a piece of visible logic like this, one goes on, step by step, with each succeeding problem.

For some people, the progression will be swifter than for others, but that is not the essential matter. Nor is it connected with the ultimate exhaustion, in almost all cases, of the power to make new advance. That is as much a phenomenon of our mental as of our physical make-up. What is important is a willingness to recognize that past judgments are not final—and to go on to better ones. Modern art, had it no other claim to gratitude, must at least be credited with having taught us the necessity of such openness of mind. Modern life with its terrifying and grandiose possibilities can be dealt with successfully only if we approach it in the same spirit as we have learned to apply to art. And, as we have again and again found that the best of modern art and the best ancient art confirm each other reciprocally, so we shall unquestionably see that the solution of our political, social, and ethical problems will be in accord with the essential findings of earlier thought.

The big difficulty is to see the relationship between old problems and new, whether in the field of art or in the field of affairs. Henri Matisse, in the one piece of writing I know by him, affirms that there is no new truth, that what we speak of so is only the fresh application of ideas long since accepted. Thus, he says, the inventors of the airplane did no more than make use of principles perfectly well known before, but neglected by the less fortunate workers at the problem of aviation.

It was all very well for Matisse to put such wise thoughts into words—running to a good number of pages. I simply could not see—thirty years ago—that they did anything to clear up the mystery of his work, or what my friends the Steins and others could see in such pictures. In Paris the general word for these artists was les fauves, the wild beasts, and I was not far from agreeing with it.

The fact that I had liked Cézanne and van Gogh immediately, and that I had felt Picasso’s extraordinary quality the first time I saw his work was of small importance. All three represented earlier conceptions of picture-making. Cézanne was for me a continuator of the Impressionist formula in which he had grown up: I did not see the new values of form and structure he had attained. Van Gogh was accessible enough also in his carrying the painting of light to new intensities, though I did realize much of the poignancy of his expression. Picasso was still preoccupied with earlier arts—Greco, Puvis de Chavannes, Toulouse-Lautrec. All three men were therefore easily connected with what I already knew. Matisse was of the present, and I fought it in my mind, though in the one thing I wrote at the time, I went no further than a statement of conditions in that thrilling Paris of 1907.

Month after month of my first entire year there, I kept up a bitter struggle with the problem. If the new things were right (Picasso was doing them too by that time, under the influence of Negro sculpture) then, I thought, my beloved Old Masters were wrong. A further conclusion, less important for the world, but a more important one for me, would have been that my whole preceding work had been misdirected. I had paid high for it in money and effort; one does not easily give in under such circumstances, as, at later times, I often told people who did not have at stake the thing that such a decision meant to a young painter: for him the whole of success or failure hung on the issue.

That sounds like putting the thing in a pretty serious way—but I was not wrong to take it so. What was a mistake was to think that a break with the past was even possible, or that any credible person considered such a thing. To be sure the Futurists, a few years later, used such words as Destroy the museums, but even they meant no more, than destroy the tyranny of outworn forms. Their ideas were weak enough, and the expression of them was worse, but at no time did they say that the ancient things were bad in themselves; they were merely bad in their effect, when people used them as blinders to shut out the living present. I was not guiltless on that score myself, having concentrated on the museums with all the hunger for them I had stored up in America, and with only a dawning realization that work entirely comparable to that in the museums was being produced right around me.

By comparable, I naturally mean to refer to its importance, for in superficial aspect it was different enough. What the wild beasts had torn away was the outer husk of material imitation, the thing that the photograph could give. Matisse and the rest saw that what is merely the reproduction of appearances can be left to the camera, now that the world has that invaluable instrument to do the work that the painters of former periods were supposed to do. Freed from such irrelevant demands, they had gone on to investigations of form, color, and expression, and with such speed that people who had not had opportunity to see their work regularly were left breathless when confronted with it.

That was my own state and, like other people, I could be helped only by repeated contacts with the new art. As, with those people—or all among them save those who were determined not to see—exposure to fine things meant surrender to them. Since in my case this was not passive surrender, nor the effect of either pressure or blandishments, the conclusion I find inescapable is that works of art really possess certain qualities which, given a fair chance, will bring about similar impressions in everyone at all prepared to receive them. (When people are insufficiently prepared, we know that the most elementary form of representation fails of recognition. Certain African natives claimed that photographs of themselves were not