Page:EB1922 - Volume 32.djvu/24

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8
PAINTING


which have moved him. The variety of line and colour in nature, joined to the artist's personality, will produce a decorative com- position. This neo-realism (as Ginner calls it) is based on the attitude of Cezanne and Van Gogh towards nature; but gives an English turn to that attitude by emphasizing the part played by nature as compared with that of the artist. The French point of view is more evident in the work of the London group. Some of its members are still slaves to a French formula; others have based on French teaching a more individual art, notably W. B. Adeney, F. J. Porter, Roger Fry and Duncan Grant, whose sense of colour gives his art characteristic quality. C. R. W. Nevinson, having explored in turn impressionism, futurism and cubism, subsequently abandoned the geometric convention which marked his war paintings, to reveal the academic art masked by his previous experiments.

Vorticism. Distinct in character is the vorticist movement, with which Nevinson was once associated. This had its origin in 1913 among certain members of the Camden Town group, and had as its leading figures the painters Percy Wyndham Lewis, Cuthbert Hamilton, Frederick Etchells, Edward Wadsworth and William Roberts, the poet Ezra Pound, and the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891-1915). Like futurism, it holds that modern art must be based on the character of modern indus- trial civilization, whose features are complexity and dominance of the machine; and since England is preeminently the type of the modern industrial country, this art will be an English art. But it rejects futurism as merely the cinematographic representation of a series of impressions; and joins the modern movement as a whole in basing itself on tradition, and claim- ing that the artist's work is not to copy nature, but to create new realities. Every phase of emotion has its appropriate means of expression in some particular form of some particular material, whose appeal is direct and not by association or allegory. These forms take shape and proceed out of the artist's " vortex " (hence the name of the movement), which is a general conception of relations in the universe through which ideas pass and take concrete shape, just as the general equation of a circle in analyti- cal geometry becomes one particular circle when definite quan- tities are substituted for the algebraic symbol. In 1920 the vor- ticist movement issued in a "secession from the London group to form the X group. But though mainly composed of vorticists, its first exhibition showed some modification if not in doctrine, yet in practice. The earlier vorticist work was geometric and abstract, and owed much to cubism. Hamilton still represented this phase in 1921; but others had turned in the direction of ex- pressing the structure and essential character of natural forms in the way exemplified by the work of Wyndham Lewis. Much of the interest of the earlier vorticist painting lies in disentangling in sequence the elements from which it is constructed; and to this extent it is descriptive and literary. Otherwise, though sometimes showing new and interesting combinations of shapes and colours, it presents only a barren world of geometrical forms.

Modern German Painting. In Germany the modern move- ment has been mainly inspired by that side of modern French art represented by Matisse and Derain. Cubism has not gained a real footing there; though the Russian Jew, Marc Chagall, shows cubist influence in the sharply defined planes and angular design of his fantastic, vividly coloured, decorations; and Lyonel Feini- ger has adopted the cubist method of extension and development of planes. Arbitrary distortion and writhing arabesque are more congenial means of expression in an art always tending towards the romantic and symbolic; native influences, such as Hans von Marees and the Munich decorative school, joined to the study of El Greco and Matthias Griinewald, have paved the way for an expressionist art in the fullest sense of the term one which gives vent to every kind of emotion with unrestrained and brutal vehemence. A mystical temper and a mass of confused aspira- tions induced by the war have stimulated this development ; but the movement was in being before the war, chiefly under the lead- ership of Wassily Kandinsky (b.i866, at Moscow), a prominent member of a Munich group of painters, poets and musicians, whose aim was the expression through art of the "innerer Klang "

the soul of nature and humanity. According to Kandinsky, colour and form have the power of producing spiritual vibrations quite apart from their ordinary meaning and associations; and a picture consists of an arrangement of form and colour whose spiritual values are in harmony, and unite to express the artist's spiritual conceptions. Thus painting ceases to have representa- tion as its purpose, and becomes analogous to music in its rhyth- mic arrangements of forms and colours. These may be borrowed from nature, but must have no external associations and may be freely adapted and distorted to suit the artist's aim. Thus Kandinsky has points of contact both with the symbolistes and cubists; but he criticizes the latter for reducing the construction of a picture to rules and formulas, and for paying over-much attention merely to representing three-dimensional form. Kandin- sky's own work has become increasingly abstract in character and consists of some early flat decorations, combining Russian and Munich influences; a group of more or less direct impressions of nature, inspired by Matisse; " improvisations " which repre- sent spontaneous expressions of inner character; and " composi- tions " which express a slowly formed and mature spiritual feel- ing. His most important disciple is Franz Marc (1880-1916), whose animal compositions boldly designed in arbitrary colour are his most typical work. Less abstract but more brutal is a group which has come into special prominence during and after the war. Most prominent of these is Oskar Kokoschka (b.i886, in Austria), whose early work showed the free distortion, sharp contrasts of light and shade, bold contours, and thick impasto worked into arabesques, by which he conveys his excited and very personal vision. In his later work emphasis by these means is even more emphatic and merciless. The heads of his figures are balanced on tiny bodies, bizarre monsters are introduced, and the paint is literally thrown on the canvas, with great chan- nels made therein to mark the dominant lines of the design. Painters of similar tendencies are Emil Nolde, Karl Hofer, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. The last, under the influence of negro sculpture, has become a coarser Matisse. The influence of an earlier generation of Frenchmen is seen in Max Pechstein, whose work owes much to Gauguin, and in Albert Werszgerber and Carl Caspar, both of whom base their design and use of colour on Cezanne. Edward Munch (b.i862, in Norway) stands somewhat apart in his combination of realism, fantasy and power of monu- mental design derived from Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec and Seurat, which excited violent controversy in Berlin when first exhibited, and led to the split in the Kunstverein there which marks the rise of the modern movement.

Modern Russian Painting. In Russia the influence of French art has been no less marked than elsewhere, but has taken pecu- liar and characteristic shape. Towards the end of the igth cen- tury Western and in particular French influence was represented by the realistic historical painters such as Ilya and Repin and a group of plcin-air landscape painters. In reaction against their naturalism a decorative school developed, corresponding some- what to the English Pre-Raphaelites, basing its work on old Russian art, and represented by Vassily Surikov (1848-1916) and Victor Vasnetzov. Of this reaction the modern movement is really a development. One form it has taken is represented by Mikhail Vrubel (d.iqio), whose mystical symbolism recalls that of Gustave Moreau in its search to express things of the spirit in pictorial form; while Petroff-Wodkin is nearer to the French fauves in his simplified and distorted nudes and arbitrary use of colour. More important is a Petrograd group, consisting of historical painters whose aim is to reconstruct in decorative form a past epoch, not from living models dressed in costume of the period, but from the close study of every form of contemporary record. Thus, the movement is primarily intellectual and literary and has produced an art which, for all its refinement and delicacy, is inclined to be precious and a mere rechauffe of already-used material. Within the movement one group looks to the West. Alexander Benois has concentrated on the age of Louis XIV.; Konstantine Somov, the most charming and individual of all, upon the period of 1830; and Eugene Lanceray upon the court of Elizabeth and Peter the Great. Stelletsky and Count Koma-