Modern Painting, Its Tendency and Meaning

realistic conception in painting. By this final development of naturalistic means unlimited opportunities for achievement were offered. Impressionistic methods are now employed by a

ections and distributions on an object or a landscape. Therefore, it is the restricted study of the disappearance of the local colour in a model, and of the luminosity and divergencies of tones to be found in shadow. It approximates to a nature which becomes, for the moment, a theatre of chromatic light sensations. Subject-matter gave the Impressionists no concern. They advanced materially on the spirit in Manet which led him to paint

his vibration they were necessitated to use nature's methods: they broke up surfaces into sensitive parts, each one of which was a separate tint. There are no broad planes of unified colour in nature. In each natural atom are absorption and reflection; and the preponderance of either of these two attributes results in a specific colour. Before the advent of this new school painters had made warm or cold green by combining green with yellow ochre or raw sienna, or by the admixture of blues and purples. But the Impressionists laid on these colours, pure or modified, side by side, and let the eye do the work of blending. They discovered not only that in green the shadow is tinged w

m colours for the balance of lines which the older painters had used. They copied the tints they found in nature after analysing nature's processes, in order to arrive closer to its visual effect. In one way they almost achieved colour photography, for their study, in its narrow character, was deep, and their vision was highly realistic. But whereas they depicted nature, they could call it up only in its instantaneous aspects. In this ephemerality alone were they impressionists; indeed, their methods were the most exact and probing of any painters of that time. Each hour of the day raises or lowers the colou

the efforts of preceding painters, but here for the first time was a plasticity of method which moulded itself like putty with the slightest change of illumination. Preoccupation in this new compositional element made its users forget, for the time being, the older precepts for obtaining composition. This forgetfulness however was not due entirely to exuberance over a novel procedure. The painters antecedent to Delacroix had used landscape as unimportant backgrounds for figures, and there was no

e that of a Rubens or a Tiepolo. They were too avid for genuine novelty to content themselves with slight innovation; and they were too modern to derive satisfaction from the stereotyped teachings of an antiquity whose tones were unemotional and whose themes were hackneyed. The spirit of servility which is willing to learn second-hand lessons and adopt indoor conceptions spelled decadence to them. Their attitude was a healthy and correct

motion in all serious painters that intellectual process which eventually would begin with foundations and build upward. Impressionism was the undeniable implication that the possibilities of the older art methods had been exhausted, and that a substitution of a new method, however fragmentary, was of greater importance than the sycophantic imitations of an unapproachable past. Beneath this attitude we feel the broadness of mind which, when a mistake has been made, does not ignore causes but attaches to them different interpretations in an effort

direction, poetised the charm of the hills and forests about Fontainebleau, the painting of the out-of-doors was liberated both as to purpose and to freedom of arrangement. The object of Turner's work had been to astonish and charm the spectator with nature's vastness and complexity. But, with the men of 1830, landscape art took on softness, introspection, stillness, solemnity. In fine, it became more intimate. Each tree and stone hid a nymph; each stream and hill, a mystery. With the Impressionists all this was changed. They had seen and admired the work of Manet. They applauded his reactions against studio lighting

lined it was he who first developed it to its ultimate consequences. Pissarro, compared with Monet, was conservative, and his practicality did not permit him so great an élan. His canvases beside those of Monet's appear almost tentative, and the greys he had adopted from Corot never entirely forsook him. Both these painters went to London during the Franco-Prussian War, and we may take it for granted that the w

; formerly restaurant keepers and bricklayers had been the only buyers of their work. The popular press softened its criticisms and in many instances went so far as to defend their pictures. As a result of these numerous indications of a growing approval among connoisseurs, the public, that almost immovable mass of reactionary impulses, began to look with favour on the new works it had so recently ridiculed. The great majority of people had cared only for such canvases as those in which the intellect might jump from one familiar object to another, recognising it wholly, comprehending i

is no nearer a comprehension of rhythmic ensembles-perfectly synthesised form in three dimensions-than it was during the Renaissance. The two major requisites to an understanding of the formal relations in momentous art are a highly developed sensitivity and an active intelligence. An eye and a nervous system are not enough. Society as a whole may, after a long course of training and sedulous study, reach that perceptive point where it can grasp the simple ?sthetic hypothesis founded on two dimensions. But such a hypothesis is but a beginning. It embraces only the rudimentary ?sthetic organisati

eneral. No line was accentuated above another. There were no modifications to achieve vastness or splendour. Impressionism was the unadulterated reproduction of atmosphere, the smile or frown of a mood in nature. It is small wonder that the un?sthetic found it obscure: in it there was too much rapture, too much frankness, too much exultation in mere living, and too little restraint. It was the false dawn in the great modern Renaissance of colour-the most ecstatically joyful style of painting th

ued by sunlight or another by mist, mankind is, after all, so similar in externals, that one individual's slight departure from a predecessor, or his trifling deviation from a contemporary, is of little moment. The true key to a man's genius lies in his ability to organise as well as, or better than, others. The compositional figure on which he builds will alone give us the substance of his character. We are all capable of receiving sensations: we have our personal likes and dislikes for subjects, even for actions and smells. But these choices are the outgrowths of our instincts, mere habits of association. In nowise are they fundamental. They are the physiological recognition of pleasant or unpleasant impressi

easing and thankless labours; gaunt trees which epitomise the decay of the year. His technique is not dissimilar to that of Jongkind, and his drawing is allied to the construction found in the Dutch landscapists of the early nineteenth century rather than in those of his own group. That he was the transition from Jongkind to Monet is a plausible contention; in him are found qualities of both these other painters. But he was too conscientious ever to attain to the technical heights Monet reached. If one aspires to innovation of means, graphic traits have to be sacrificed: steps must be taken in

n offshoot, and a weak one, of the great Titian. Watteau and Boucher come to us direct out of the corners of Rubens's pictures. Daumier and Courbet, temperamentally unrelated to the French tradition, stem from the Dutch and the Spaniards. Cézanne emanated from the Dutch and the Italians via Impressionism. Matisse's procedure is little more than a modification of that of the Persians and the early Italians. Cubism was imported from Spain by a Spaniard. Futurism is strictly Italian: there is not a French name among its originators. Synchromism was brought i

t they are more than that. The figures have no other significance than that which attaches to a vase or a landscape. "Facial expression," "sympathetic gestures," the "appeal"-all are absent from them. In these pictures the costume plays the hero's part. La Japonaise is representative of that treatment of subject wherein the figure is only an excuse for a pattern of colour. Th

housand touches, were laid on silhouetted forms. His boat pieces in the Caillebotte collection in the Luxembourg gallery, appear, in their simplicity and breadth of treatment, like the unfinished underpainting of a Turner or a Rembrandt. Much of the bare canvas is visible; and in them one feels the presence of the experimenter. At this time the war drove Monet to London, and his exile proved a salutary one. On his return his pictures bloomed w

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p to the right; but seldom is it curved as in the more advanced drawings of Hiroshige or Hokusai. His kinship to the Japanese is, after all, a natural one, for the temperaments of France and Japan are as similar as is possible between east and west. The Japanese artists presented atmospheric conditions by means of gradating large colour planes into white or dark. The consequent effects of rain, snow, wind and sun are as vivid as Monet's, but they differ from the Frenchman's in that they are concerned principally with nature's decorative possibilities. Monet adheres to graphic transcription for the purpose of presenting the dynamics of a mood-producing phase of n

g strokes in order to achieve transparency and vastness. The water, in the former, is painted with long curved strippings to give the wave effect, as in Courbet's La Vague; and, in the latter, ripples are formed by minute touches. Monet's architecture is often built up with colour-spots as a man lays bricks; and the cliffs in the Falaise à étretat are corrugated in exactly the same way the strata lie i

these men present only the husk of reality. Monet, to the contrary, experienced and expressed nature's ecstasy. He is like a string which vibrates to any harmony: Martin is little more than an eye. Both finished their work in the open; and both stippled. But here the parallelism ends, for where Monet completed the effects of the Japanese, Martin only took l

n series are also widely known. These represent acute observation and an implacable inspiration to work, for they had to be finished simultaneously. Their accomplishment was a stupendous tour de force. At sunrise Monet would go forth with twenty blank canvases so that the changes of sunlight and mist might be caught from hour to hour. They seem infantile to us today-these imitations of the subtleties of lig

s and with a family to care for, he joined the ranks of Pissarro, Monet, Guillaumin and Bazille. He had talent and an accurate eye, and his earlier academic work, done in the sixties, served as a practical foundation. After he had adopted the more modern technique of Pissarro and Monet, he was prepared for the achievement of new art. If we h

concentration and precision which the Englishman fell short of. His nature was less akin to these Impressionists than to the Turner of wide and open skies, of the softness and dreaminess of summer, of that perfect satisfaction which is conten

o in the Académie Suisse, he adopted their lighter and more joyous colour schemes. There is a canvas in the Caillebotte Collection in the Luxembourg which, in its broadness of treatment and extensive planes, suggests Gauguin both as to gamut and conception. Guillaumin was the most masculine talent of the early Impressionist group. He cared less for the transient views of nature than for its eternal aspect. His colour, by its liberality of application, counts more forcibly than that of Pissarro, Mon

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evolution of new means. The artists who fathered it were, except in one instance, men whose enthusiasm outstripped their abilities as composers. Their greatest good lay in that they turned the thoughts of painters toward colour, and outlined, summarily to be sure, the uses to which this new and highly intense element might be put. They expressed just what their desires permitted them:-nature in all its visible changes. Those exquisite moments of full sunlight on land and water, of cloud shadows over the hills, of the warm brilliancy of a blue sky on t

scant heed to scholastic drawing, translated Daumier's doctrine of form into light, and like Manet painted for the joy of the work. As experimenters they were valuable; but their pictures, to those unsentimental persons whose appreciations of art are wholly ?sthetic, mean little more than records of how a cabbage patch appears at sunrise, a lily pond at midday, or a country lane at twilight. The Impressionists did not amalgamate and express the dreams of their forerunners. They were one of those transitional gen