International studio (26.1905)

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OME RECENT WORK OF DE WITT
M. LOCKMAN
The way to resumption, according to a
secretary of the National Treasury, was
to resume. By the same token, the way to compo-
sition, according to some painters, is to paint. Sim-
ple as it sounds, this opinion is not held unani-
mously. For that matter, what opinion is? Even
the Supreme Court commonly divides of late at the
ratio of five to four. But opinions on art handed
down by artists are always interesting.
Mr. De Witt M. Lockman, several examples of
whose work we take pleasure in presenting to the
notice of our readers in this issue, is a painter who
is more addicted to the brush than to theory. If you
were to ask him after the manner of the catechism
what was the chief end of painting, it would mean
that you had called him up on the telephone with-
out any previous meeting. Face to face with him
you would be more likely to talk, as Benedick says,
like an honest man and a soldier. Not that Mr.
Lockman has no theories. There never was a
painter—and we take the part of Sir Oracle here
without apology—there never was an
artist, whatever his medium, who
lacked a theory, even if it were no
more than that he had none. And, to
be quite downright, it is in this latter
category that we must, at least at first
blush, ticket Mr. Lockman. "I don't
set out to do anything," he will say
if driven to the wall without quarter,
"I just paint."
If a fireman were to declare that he
did not try to put out fires, he merely
turned on the hose, we might feel for
a moment unsafe in our houses. But
in one way or another this is the real,
situation. The appeal to breakfast is
a puzzle to no one, blessed with good
digestion and a well-ordered evening.
Yet most of us would be hard put to sit
down to our coffee and expound its
significance. Though we might per-
haps discourse upon its justification
and meaning, no two messmates would
agree. Art is as necessary to happy
days as breakfast, or ought to be.
Some people, to be sure, as was re-
cently disclosed of a part of the school
children of New York, get along with-
out breakfast. Let us not beg the
question by citing exceptions. If break-

fast is a necessity, it is also, like other necessities,
a mystery; and a mystery is a thing no thinking
man can let alone.
So it happens that we have theories about art.
For if art is, as the pundits tell us, interpretation,
and interpretation, in its last analysis, selection
among mental impressions, this could hardly be
otherwise. If we pick and choose we have prefer-
ences, and if we have preferences we have ideas,
and then, as Henry James's people have a habit of
saying, there you are. Here, too, are two birds
killed with one stone: for if three or more people
have ideas, it is an even guess that they have two or
more different opinions. We are bound, then, to
defer to Poor Richard, who said that many weighty
discussions can be summed up thus: It is so; it is
not so. And after seeing Mr. Lockman's work, we
may well be prepared to doubt whether he does not
set out to do something when he just paints.
Perhaps the fact is, and the point personally is
neither so indeterminate nor so irrelevant as it
might seem, that Mr. Lockman is rather inclined to
paint and paint than to paint and talk about it.
Yet in the face of this, one has to admit that he talks

BY DE WITT M. LOCKMAN

PORTRAIT OF MRS. B.

XXXI