Modern Painting, Its Tendency and Meaning

ions. Renoir first appeared with a rhythmic line-balance which first grew luminous, then voluminous, until it blossomed forth into his full form and line and colour. Sometime

as another step toward a unique vision. Then came Manet who, forgetting composition, exalted the documentary freedom of Courbet and began the study of light. He, also, was a continuation of the modern art impulse, but in his struggle for the new he forgot the foundations. The Impressionists accepted passively all that had come before. They raised colour to an important place in painting and brought it to the consideration of all artists by showing its potency in the production of intense emotion. Renoir used their inspiration; reverted to the past through Delacroix, Courbet and Daumier; combine

croix. He was one of those painters who, content to remain stagnant, employ the qualities which have been handed down to them and breathe into old inspirations the flame of individual idiosyncrasy. He was a man who impressed everyone by the strength of his personality and by the power of his caustic wit. In his youth he travelled in Italy and America and went to school, not for artistic training, but merely as a concession to the conventions of the day. He c

his every subject this disgust with life's hypocrisies. Even in his prancing ballet figures, though they are in full light and amid joyous settings, one senses the satire which led to the depiction of their apparent sans-souci. One reads in them the sordid misery of their home life, the long trying hours of muscular strain, and the deceit of their simulated smiles. His synthetic figures-synthetic in that they were without details and accidents of contour which would det

s of weight on springs. Monet, on the one hand, caught the ephemeral effect of light on nature: Degas, on the other, recorded the fleeting movement of objects, that is, the physical poise of a granted image, not the ?sthetic poise which transmits itself to our subjectivities. He surprised the actional segment which epitomises the entire cycle of movement. Everything he touches becomes as charming and interesting as a wellstaged scene. His sympathies with the Impressionist colour methods and his manner of handling his ma

n Degas we find it exemplified; and by studying him we may discover its exact limitations. "Artistic" commonly refers to paintings in which the exactitude of drawing is lost in a nonchalant sensibilité, and in which the matière takes on a seductive interest merely as a stuff or a substance, the love of which lies deep in the most intellectual of men. The tactile sense will be found at the roots of the average person's idea of an "artistic" work. This desire for superficial and material beauty, as of a rare

ssion for the model, and that all enthusiasm should come only from the progressing work itself. His arrangements are wholly natural ones, and we feel that no studio posing has gone into their making. In this naturalistic attitude he was continuing the modern spirit of arbitrary subject selection found in Courbet, Manet and Pissarro. But where these men painted with colour, Degas only tinted his drawings. Consequently his colour, as well as composition,

à LEUR TOI

fe meant to him a pageant, neither moral nor immoral, but real, and as such interesting. If in what he tells us there seems a bit of the cynical indifference of a mind too fully disillusioned, it never obtrudes itself. He himself might have been surfeited and bitter, but his work contains only the barest hint of his temperamental retrospection. His comprehension of

ed. In his work are specific members of the demi-monde, marionettes who have all the accentuated vices, vulgarities, fatigues and pretensions of their trade. In their faces, moulded by unrestrained indulgences, joys and sorrows, we can read their innermost hopes and aspirations. We can reconstruct their entire day's activities. In order to study his characters Lautrec went to the milieu where gaiety was unchecked, where the denizens of the under-world-those unreal beings who

the pride of race and dignity of class tumbled from its pedestal in this young artist. He had worked in the schools of Bonnat and Cormon, had met and admired Forain, and had finally been revealed to himself by Degas who led him to the theatre. He drank much, one suspects, to forget his deformity, just as Van Gogh drank to forget disease. He sought solace in the ephemeral, visionary life

the artist's love for grotesque and beautiful abstract form. There is more than balance here: there is the rudiment of an instinctive composition which Degas never had. Beside this picture the Café-Concert seems flat silhouette, sprightly and entertaining, but far from profound. The nucleus of composition can be found in all of Lautrec's best canvases, especially those he painted after his return from Spain. Toward the end of his life he worked, for the most

s his great adventure; his art was merely his diary. He is a historian of the theatre of his time and has left salient portraits of Loie Fuller, Polaire, Sarah Bernhardt, Mounet-Sully, Yahne and Anna Held. His types of the raptorial woman of the past-the kind that today is found in the hidden corners of Les Halles, at the fortifications and about the "Rue de la Joie"-are as real as the female characters of Balzac, Daudet, Augier and Prévost. They live in his pictures because one feels that they once wer

picting objectively their photographic impressions of the dance. The artists who penetrated to the fundamental causes of rhythm used the dance only arbitrarily, whereas the superficial painters of the past saw in it merely the mosaic, the pattern, the arabesque. They thought that in portraying the dance literally they would arrive at its motive significance. But in this they failed. Had they done their figures in clay or stone they would have approached nearer their desire. But even this more masculine medium has, with few exceptions, resulted in failure. The dancing girls in the Grottoes of Mahavelipore

Teutonic blood in Spain, and Goya, while being far the greater artist even in his slightest etchings, is the nearest approach to Legrand in the treatment of themes. Goya paints moral decay with disgust and genius, whereas Legrand, with his slight gropings after order of a surface variety, glories in it as in a pursuit, and paints it with a leer. The Spaniard uses it as a temperamental means. The Frenchman, whose whole talent lies in a formula

rostitution, religion, the theatre and the tawdry Bohemianism of Montparnasse. With a few straight and fluent strokes of the pencil he builds up a type of the blustering parvenu Jew, the mercenary picture dealer, the childish and vain actor who is avid for praise and obsessed with his vocation. Forain calls the actor a "M'as-tu-vu?" and depicts him as with that phrase ever on his lips. Baudelaire Chez les Mufles is one of the world's greatest monuments to human hypocrisy. A chlorotic bourgeoise is standing in the centre of a small gathering reciting Baudelaire's verses. Around her are grouped types of self-satisfied and vicious masculinity, all pretending, like the speaker herself, to be feeling dee

ch considerations have nothing to do with ?sthetic emotion. No matter how much we may eulogise such painters-for they must be judged by their own standard rather than by a criterion set by a Rubens-our praise will never place them in the rank of plastic creators. They will ever remain in the realm of nearly perfect workmen with literary

acious surfaces of things and strove to reproduce the undercurrents which lie at the bottom of human actions and reactions. Its mere prettiness was supplanted by subcutaneous characteristics. It sought for motives rather than emotions, for causes rather than effects. It became critical where once it had been only photographic. From Degas, Lautrec, Legrand and Forain comes directly the best