Post-Impressionism, Cubism, And Futurism

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

In the closing years of the nineteenth century, then, Gauguin appeared to Paris, not only as the inventor of a new style of picture, but also as the protagonist of a new mental attitude towards life and art. At that period there was a certain lassitude among the highly cultured, expressed by the term fin de siècle—and it was not difficult to make out a case for regarding modern civilization as a disease. There is much in city life that is repugnant to some temperaments, and the yearning for simplicity among artists had its parallel in the ‘back-to-the-land’ movement in politics. The argument put forward by a new generation of artists was this: ‘If modern life is diseased, modern art must be diseased also. We can only restore art to health by starting it afresh like children or savages.’ Thus began the reaction against the complexity of neo-Impressionist painting, and this movement, chiefly influenced by the example of Gauguin, gave birth to a group of painters known in Paris as the fauves (i.e wild beasts). This Fauviste movement was an extreme emotional reaction against the cold intellectual tendencies of hyperscientific painting. In so far as these ‘wild beasts’ painters sought to make painting simpler and less complicated, it may be argued that they were moving in a right direction. A similar reaction in England, fifty years earlier, had led Holman Hunt and Millais to go back to the painters before Raphael for qualities of line and color which they though desirable. But the French painters, in their rage against civilization, went much further back: one by one all the Old Masters were swept away by revolutionaries who sought inspiration from the rudimentary art of savages and barbarians. Forcible, childlike scrawls began to appear in Paris exhibitions, and these paintings were based not so much on my new view of Nature as on the savage art of Polynesia and Central Africa. The rough-hewn intensity of negro carvings excited jaded minds which were satiated with the plastic perfection of the sculpture of Michael Angelo.

The passion for simplicity and the desire to secure a maximum of expression with a minimum of means—which are the chief virtues of the Fauves—are found in the highest degree in the work of Henri Matisse, who is generally regarded as the leading exponent of this school. Born in the North of France in 1869, Matisse as a young man made a great reputation among connoisseurs by the extraordinary power of his drawing. Beginning as an almost academic draughtsman, influenced at first by Impressionism and then by Gauguin, painting landscapes, figures, and still-life, the art of Matisse has passed through a number of phases, each of which has had offshoots in a band of imitators. If Gauguin has been the most lasting influence, Matisse is in no sense an imitator of this master. Though he retained the high-keyed Impressionist palette of bright, clean colors, Matisse abandoned the mosaic method of painting, using a sweeping brush and large planes of color to fill in the masses of what are essentially linear designs. Many of his drawings are wonderful in their summary expression of form and movement, but while in his pictures we admire the masterly sureness and simplicity of his drawing, we are often bewildered by his wilful distortion of natural form.

One of his defenders has sought to explain that Matisse exaggerates deformity in a model by a temperamental necessity which pushes him to affirm a truth without discretion to the point of paradox. Most people will find it difficult to accept a passion for realism as a reasonable explanation why an artist should present the calf of a leg as having a greater circumference than a thigh! On the other hand, decorative intent is patent in all the pictures of Matisse, and we frequently find that distortions of form are used to help and emphasize the rhythm and equilibrium of the linear pattern; accordingly it seems more reasonable to conclude that these distortions are wilful, not accidental, and that the painter subordinates natural representation to formal design, and desires us to admire his pictures, not because they are ‘true,’ but because he has created a pattern of line and color which should appeal to pure aesthetic sensibilities. Matisse is historically important, therefore, as a pioneer of the doctrine that mere ‘actuality’ is unimportant to pictorial art. He may also be regarded as the introducer of ‘shock tactics’ into art. Even if we dislike his pictures, we find it difficult to forget them, because they make so forcible an impact on our vision. His ‘Head of a Woman’ is an example of the powerful effect he achieves with the utmost simplicity and economy of means.

Post-Impressionism, Cubism, And Futurism (continued)