Modern Painting (Illustrated Edition). S.S. Van Dine

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ