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OUR AMERICAN "OLD MASTERS"

BY CHARLES L. BUCHANAN

IN AN age, the dominant characteristic of which is a premature and over-precipitant preoccupation with novelty for the sheer sake of the novelty and quite regardless of intrinsic qualifications, the sensitive respecter of beautiful things is inclined, perhaps, to accord a dispro portionate amount of importance to established and commonly accepted reputations at the expense of a just regard for contemporary artistic achievement. The supreme difficulty confronting the honest worker in and recorder of artistic activities is the difficulty of maintaining an equitable balance between a too comfortable acquiescence in the old, a too indiscriminating indorsement of the new. One's inclination is almost uncon trollably in the direction of one extreme or the other at the expense of a normal middle-ground. Those of us that are disturbed and irritated by the over-emphasis laid by shallow and ignoble minds upon inconsequential and meretricious effort, those of us that cannot ease our bewilderment at the spectacle of the palpably counterfeit winning acceptance over the legitimate, are, perhaps, over-inclined to believe that there is an indefinable something inherent in precedent that lends it both a perpetual potency of appeal and, what is more to the point, a kind of excellence, unassailable in its supremacy, that may serve as a fixed standard by which we may compare, to its disadvantage, the lesser work of art. We should like to give the lie to those gentlemen of impetuous and excessive inclination, our radical reviewers, suspecting them, as we so often do, of an innate incapacity for fine feelings, loyalties and consistencies of opinion. should like to insist upon the invul

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nerableness and integrity of some past accomplishment particularly lov able to us. It is natural that we should do this. To the intense lover of lovely things the attitude of reverence is so precious a sensation that it is not easy to subject to a close and searching scrutiny work upon which Time appears to have set a permanent mark of approval.

All the more reason why we must force ourselves to this task. In the present instance, I have in mind. those of our dead painters that are accorded conventional recognition, too often, I suspect, from the mere reason of their being dead, and not, as we should like to believe, because of their incontestable merit. What the verdict of fifty years from now will be on Inness, Martin, Wyant, Homer, Blakelock,* Twachtman, Fuller and Ryder, we can, of course, have not the slightest idea (and we might be considerably unhappy if we knew), but, very gradually, revaluations are taking place, and it is certain that the old, easy acquiescence in a wholesale, take-it-for-granted indorsement of these men is over and done with for all time. We have begun to pick and choose, to encourage close discriminations, to formu. late, in other words, something approximating a fixed scale of values.

The common comprehension has more or less unreservedly accepted the general impression that these men achieved a degree of excellence far and away beyond the work of

our

contemporary painters. This

*In view of the lamentable fact that Blakelock's powers have been irreparably impaired by disease, the writer feels justified in including him in the present article.

point of view, however popular it may be, is open to argument. Two of them, Inness and Winslow Homer, represent, it is true, a breadth of outlook that no contemporary effort parallels. We are not premature in according them an exclusive position, unassailable and unique. They merit a special consideration, for they are, very probably, the two greatest painters this country has produced. It is with those painters with whom they are commonly, and perhaps somewhat carelessly, associated that we are at present concerned.

Let us unburden ourselves, in so far as it is humanly possible, of preconceived points of view, prejudices, bits of information unthinkingly accepted into the system, and let us walk together through an average collection of American paintings. The press has probably ignored it, largely, I suppose, because it is an American collection. If, however, it does happen to supply you with a couple of perfunctory paragraphs devoted to the affair, you will probably find that the prestige of the written word has been utilised to call your attention to the beauties of some particular Inness, Wyant or Martin, names you have had dinned into your consciousness ever since you were born. Tryon, Dearth, Weir, Lawson and Murphy may be beautifully in evidence, but your at tention is not directed to them, your attention is directed to Inness, Wyant and Martin.

So far, so good. But now comes the rub. (And mind you this is not prejudice airing itself; it is the concentrated essence of innumerable disappointments.) You stand, for example, before a Wyant. Your susceptibilities are tuned for joyous reactions. You have fed on imaginary Wyants, conjuring miraculous previsionings out of your hero worship. Well, what happens? Four times out of five you experience a palpable

shock. The thought riots through your sensibilities, "Good heavens! this can't be Wyant!" Six or eight or ten canvases rebuff you in similar fashion, and you have reached a sort of comatose, don't-care-a-hang attitude toward the whole affair, when traditional opinion revives your debilitated enthusiasm with the assurance that these are wretched examples of Wyant-oh, no! these are not the real things at all! Mr. So and So's Wyants or Mr. Somebody Else's Wyants!-those are the Wyants! A little later you draw up before an Inness. (We are talking now of bad Innesses, not good ones.) You do so wish you could possess an Inness. You have seen photographs of Inness's pictures, and they are indisputably head and shoulders above anyone else's pictures. But something seems to have got out of gear. Figuratively speaking, you rub your eyes and polish up your sensibilities. What is wrong? Is this the famous Sunshine and Clouds you have so long deferred to in your valuations of American painting? Here are

tones hard as nails and absolutely artificial. Here is an utter absence of that envelope of atmosphere that you cannot help associating with the legitimate trend of modern landscape painting. Undeniably a mediocre picture. You may say "rather a big conception," but of charm there is very little, if any at all. Traditional opinion bobs up again. It tells you that this is no representative Inness. It says, "Oh! my dear fellow, I wish you could see the Innesses I have seen! Take your breath away! Halsted's for instance, those were the cream; I helped him select them." A little later you stand before a Homer Martin, consisting of a couple of dreary tones for shore and sky, and a few scrawny figures. The Mussel Gatherers. Somebody says to you, "I'm one of those persons that believe Homer Martin couldn't paint a bad picture."

You

are tempted to believe he never painted more than two or three good

ones.

Now here is the point. You approach this trio of American painters with every instinct in you keyed to an hospitable, enthusiastic pitch of expectancy. You do not question their sovereignty until they have repeatedly betrayed your trust. You hope, perhaps, to possess a Wyant, an Inness, a Martin. You go through the dispiriting drudge of your days with their images beckoning you. You encounter years of disillusion. You administer tonics to your credulity and your optimism. But alas! a time comes when you suddenly find yourself face to face with the awesome issue: Do these legendary Innesses, Wyants and Martins really exist? Are they not, perchance, selfcreated illusions, bred a bit on personal affection and the legitimate but sometimes overworked prestige of the heretofore?

What is the answer to all this? Irreverence on my part? No, a thousand times no! I venerate these men deeply, consistently, but I do not hesitate to say that from a technical standpoint they are often inadequate -infirm was the word I had origi nally intended. Nor can there be the slightest doubt that their work, when judged from the standpoint of a sheerly sensuous loveliness, falls far short of the best work being produced in our immediate time by such painters as Hassam, Tryon, Murphy, Lawson and Weir. Notice, for example, the curious fact that whereas you can gain no impression whatsoever of the textural beauty of a Weir, a Hassam or a Murphy from a photographic reproduction (the whole spirit of the picture eliminated, as a matter of fact, and nothing but the dry husk of line remaining), yet nine times out of ten you gain an enjoyment, a quiver of expectancy, so to speak, out of a photographic reproduction of an Inness, a Wyant, a Mar

tin (Wyant and Martin particularly so) that is rebuffed and permanently disappointed when you come face to face with the original. Of course, too much must not be argued from this highly suggestive and, I believe, incontrovertible fact, but it would certainly seem to indicate a lack in the painting of these men of those beauties and legitimate gratifications inherent in an adroit manipulation of their material. To my taste, I find this to be the case. I am never satisfied by the sum-total of a Wyant or a Martin as I am by an Inness, a Winslow Homer, a Tryon or a Murphy. I think the genesis of this resides in the fact that what an Inness, a Homer, a Murphy set out to accomplish, they accomplish without faltering, without lopsidedness, presenting us at the end with that perfect fusing of components, that miraculous equilibrium that marks the superior achievement. This ac complishment does not always characterise the work of Inness, but, at his greatest, the grandiose conception, the prodigious panoramic ecstasy is revealed to us superbly, satisfyingly, poised in perfection. Martin, on the other hand (a painter somewhat similar to Inness in bigness of outlook-the cosmical visioning, so to speak) seldom achieves the inspirational poise of inevitability. Subject to revision (as all honesty of opinion must be), I would call him a stammerer, as it were, in his medium of expression, not infirm, as I often feel Wyant to be, but ungainly through the possession and the exercise of a fine, noble strength uncoordinated. It is by what he attempts rather than by what he achieves that Martin excites our good wishes; but, alas! there is a special hell in art paved with good intentions. Martin has good intentions, but, as some one says somewhere about nature, he cannot carry them out. His vision may be Homeric; his handling is too often atrocious. He stumbles over

the wide and windy spaces of the world with huge, inaccurate footfalls. The strength of his inspiration is the strength of a veritable Samson of paint, muscle-bound, ungainly of limb and uncertain like some blindfolded thing of his very direction. His palette is unfortunate when it permits itself in its higher register a kind of vanilla yellow and a blue too fluent, too voluble, however justified by nature, to carry a conviction to us of its integrity when reproduced on canvas. In his lower keys (The Mussel Gatherers, for example) we are confronted by a positive muddiness from which beauty is surely expelled, however, a certain sombreness and severity may afford a partial impression of greatness. Stand before the Newport at the Lotus Club (hung in so close a proximity to an example of that somewhat analogous but far firmer and sturdier painter, Winslow Homer), and ask yourself if something I care not one whit how indefinable, how infinitesimal that something be-does not offend your sense of the fitness of things, does not intrude a barely perceptible but none the less potent insinuation of discrepancy upon you. And the answer will be found, I think, in the incompatibility of the colour scheme and the handling of the paint with so big a conception of low tides, a lank, surly shore and the salt smack of the marshes. I would call particular attention to The Sun Worshippers as an example of that curious and irreconcilable combination we find in Martin of a so great greatness, a so deplorable deficiency. Writing of this picture, a critic of American painting has this to say: "The reproduction fails to suggest adequately the golden glory of the evening sky and the softness of the silhouette of the brownish trees. Hence it missed somewhat the suggestion of the original, as of time-tried creatures, warped by fate, bending in adoration

and supplication before the majesty of the universal." Opinions differ, do they not? I am not alone in finding this picture distinctly unpleasant, I had almost said offensive. I am not alone in seeing no beauty in a colour scheme blatant rather than beautiful, and I can find no loveliness whatsoever in these clumsily deformed trees. There is a kind of beautyperverted beauty, if you will-inherent in a characteristic ugliness (the older masters instinctively divined this secret), but it must be ugliness dexterously dominated by technical efficiency. In Martin we find the ugliness, but we do not often find the technical efficiency. I cannot think, at the moment, of an instance in Martin where he copes successfully with that most difficult problem of the landscape painter, the adroitly beautiful handling of the complicated anatomy of trees. The famous picture up at the Metropolitan, View on the Seine or The Harp of the Wind, as it was originally named, supplies us with an example of this chronic incapacity. It is perhaps Martin's finest picture (the Westchester Hills I do not know), and I am second to none in my admiration of its fluent if somewhat too mellifluous quality of paint and simulation of atmospheric vitality, but I nevertheless cannot persuade myself that either its colour scheme or the draughtsmanship it exhibits is of that kind of impeccable and ultimate assurance that we find in the work of Homer, Inness and Murphy. From the human standpoint I would rather pin my faith to Martin than to any painter this country has produced; for the evidence would seem to indicate the possession on his part of a degree of gracious cultivation, both intellectual and spiritual, that is mostly lacking in the practitioners of the art of painting. What their associates and biographers mistake for cultivation is usually merely a kind of clairvoyant shrewdness of the

senses, an aboriginal acuteness, a rough poetry, a sort of unsophistication, absolutely essential, no doubt, to the painting of landscape, but somewhat monotonous socially. Curiously enough, some of the greatest artists the world has ever known have been ignoramuses. (Why does Nature choose such incongruous mediums for the transferrence, hint by hint, of her miraculous beauty?) Whistler seems to have been the most successful instance of an artist that lived charmingly and painted charmingly. In some ways, perhaps the noblest, richest temperament in American painting, Martin progressed from the parochial simplicities, the earnest, reproductive fidelities of the Hudson River School into a cosmopolitanism of vision eminently fine, if not with the highest kind of fineness, yet commendably so. Under the delicately quickening influences of the French environment (at a time when the dominant tend. ency of modern landscape in the direction of higher, keener perceptions of light was projecting itself into the consciousness of every artist), Martin developed from the painter of the banal and archaic vulgarities of On the Hudson to painter of creamy skies and golden, opalescent sands, delicious often from the sheer copiousness of the paint, if unconvincing somewhat. There is the word I have been seeking-unconvincing, the thing the superlative artist never, never is. Martin's conception of things (tremendous!) and his ability to consummate his conception remained (tragically, for all we know) irreconcilable.

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I have always considered it expedient to study a man's art in the light of the concrete facts of his life. To the High Priests of Art for Art's sake this will, no doubt, subject me to criticism. I am convinced, however, that a man's art is part and parcel of the events of his physical ex

istence, warp and woof, so to speak, of quotidian cares, infirmities and disadvantages. I am often tempted to believe that Wyant's art was the inevitable reflex of a strength depleted by early privation and hardships. I remember once hearing George Bellows refer to him as the most over-rated reputation in American painting. I agree with this estimate, but I do so full of pity for the primitive fineness of feeling inherent in Wyant's work. My attitude toward him is similar to my attitude toward MacDowell. Both men apparently possessed a keen kind of sensitiveness, a reticent, delicate kind, and both men suffered, no doubt, from an unresponsive environment. (The old, sad story!) Wyant in his later years, so I am told, was infirm mentally. An instinctive sensitiveness imagines the rebuffs he must have encountered, the lonely hurt of desires unsatisfied, of desires never to be realised. But affection is for the man; as artist, both men fall short of that superior force, that cogency of appeal characteristic of the superlative achievement. We are likely to be overlenient in our appraisal of their sheerly artistic values. A watercolour of Wyant's is as satisfying, to all intents and purposes, as one of his oils. A black and white would have served the purpose equally well. We are fascinated by Wyant's point of view as we remember it in our consciousness, but we are unsatisfied by it when he presents it to us on canvas. The reticence of his colour scheme and compositional sense does not seem, as in the case of Corot, to be the result of temperamental continence and conscious selection, rather do we suspect it to be the result of an inherent incapacity. The least ample and sumptuous of American landscape painters, we are likely in our preoccupation with his "tender lyricism" (that stereotyped phrase so often applied to him) to

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