Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1909 (Heft 28))

romance has faded out of it. In its stead we have the poetry of lighting that
the days and hours bring to a single scene, as Monet has so loyally demonstrated
in his series of haystacks, poplar trees, and the Rouen Cathedral. Whether
these high-pitched light and color notations are a fair equivalent for the sudden
spiritual light bursts that quiver through the gloom of medieval art, future art
historians will decide.
The modern painter, treating different pictorial motives than his predeces-
sors, felt the need of a new technique. The impressionist prefers to suggest
form rather than to actually draw it, he desires to envelop figures and objects
in space and atmosphere. A blurred definition ensues, in which the minutiae
and subtleties of line are often lost. To accomplish this aim he invented a
looser and more broken touch that neglects drawing (unless the painter posses-
ses the sense of plasticity to a marked degree) and the old standards of com-
position.
But why this revolution of facture, this strange technique of squeezing on
color thick, giving the canvas a tapestry or mosaic effect. Is it solely for the
purpose of letting the eye look at the picture from a distance, to mix and melt
the colors together on the canvas, and thereby give an effect of more air, more
light, and truth. Were these effects not possible with a smoother surface and
more uniform continuity of texture!
The paintings of Franz Hals and Goya, the foremost representatives of
bravura brushwork, look smooth in comparison with an impressionist canvas.
Monet’s large flowing touches recall Velasquez. Even Monet’s earlier work in
small broken touches was still related to the cross hatchingof pastel and stippling
of water-colors of Watteau and his followers. Only gradually the painters began
to lay the paint on thicker and thicker until the texture had an actual structural
tendency, as in many of Segantini’s works. Also Rembrandt at times encrusted
his canvas a quarter of an inch thick with color to imitate jewelry and strongly
illuminated objects. Among modern painters, Monticelli and Ryder use a
rough dough-like impasto, and Mancini while painting his shadows very thinly,
models the lighted form with paint like a sculptor. With these painters it is
merely a vehicle of momentary inspiration. They do not proceed scientifically.
With the impressionist the regulated patch or stroke of plastic color, laid one
beside the other, has become a professional mechanism, just as the smooth
brushmarks must have been to a Guido Reni or Andrea del Sarto.
I believe, that the artists individually have very little to do with the new
development. It is nothing but a natural consequence of the modern tendency
of art. And even as great an artist as Segantini deceives himself when he makes
the statement that “this secret of technique, nowadays an approved fact, had
been perceived by painters of all times and all countries (the first of whom was
Beato Angelico) and that it came to him through his loving and earnest study
of Nature, and as something personal and individual.”
Modern art prefers to be realistic. And in this ardor to express the fleet-
ingness of things just as the eye sees them, artists have turned scientists (or at
least try to see objects in a more scientific way), and for this purpose selected and