International studio (39.1909/1910(1910))

Leon Dabo

painting than any one since Whistler; they have
endowed color with new attributes, hitherto accord-
ed to poetry and music alone. In them color stirs
sentiments and emotions in much the same manner
as do music or poetry or rare perfumes, and their
whole art is an endeavor to evoke these sentiments
and emotions in others. Needless to say, this is an
art that is for the few only, while the multitude revel
in their orgies of unrelated primary colors served up
with an anecdote on the side. In this country
we have so far progressed little beyond the much-
applauded patriotic demonstration in red, white
and blue, and the Star-Spangled Banner Period of
American art is still upon us.

It is, therefore, not surprising to find the work of
Leon Dabo, which reflects something of this new
tendency toward abstract color, meeting with such
scant approval among his own compatriots, who
will no doubt acclaim him in due time, when he has
been sufficiently feted, and honored, and medaled
abroad. A few more Queen's garden parties and
he will be a famous man in America. In the
meantime he is what he is: a landscape painter to
whom landscape painting is only a pretext for
beautiful color arrangements that have little or
nothing to do with this or that locality. To be
sure, most of his canvases have some such definite
title as The Hudson Dawn or The Weehawken
Basin, which is Mr. Dabo's little concession to the
matter-of-fact mindedness of a certain part of the
public. These expansive vistas of shimmering,
opalescent water, dotted here and there with sultry
moving sails, are rather the Terra Incognita of the
spirit than any particular place on the map of your
memory. However, like the work of all true artists,
the subject matter of Leon Dabo's paintings, in so
far as he permits himself any subject at all in his
work, is intimately related to the simple events of
his own life—his days in the country, his morning
and evening trips on the Hudson River and his
walks along its shores. Occasionally there is a
somewhat more specific suggestion of these scenes
in a canvas wherein he has been strongly moved
by some particular aspect of the lower part of the
East River, with its warehouses and barges, as seen
at dusk, with its many twinkling, glimmering lights,
or in the rosy effulgence of early morning, when the
sun comes up behind the Brooklyn Bridge like a
mighty red shield, and the little ferries bustle back
and forth, fretting the water in their wake, and the
golden dome above Park Row glows amber against
the eastern sky. Or perchance it is the Weehawken
Basin, full of ships with their tangle of spars and
rigging, or Twenty-third Street, with its multitude

LX

of burning lights, as seen from Hoboken—of these
and other places familiar to the New Yorker and
the Jersey commuter one may find fugitive sou-
venirs in the paintings of Mr. Dabo.

Within these apparently circumscribed limits he
finds a rich field for the adequate expression of his
peculiar talent. He loves the water as seen at
dawn, shrouded with a floating, moving veil of
mist, or as seen toward evening when the faint,
disappearing shafts of light find their fellows in
the broad expanse of calm river or mirrorlike
bay.

He, too, has made excursions into that mys-
terious realm of nocturnal shadows, first explored
and made known to the world by Whistler, and in
his paintings of night Leon Dabo has contributed
to the world's art a few memorable canvases.
And now and then, at rare intervals, there have
appeared from his facile and indefatigable brush
occasional mementos of the land, such as a few snow
scenes that linger in the memory by reason of their
crystalline, jewel-like beauty, presenting the glitter-
ing splendor of winter as but few have done.

His work represents a singleness of idea and
manner to a degree unusual in modern art—the
representation of the ever-shifting and infinite
nuances of light and color as shown at all hours of
the day on the river front, and a multitude of
variations on this same theme—that is: light,
especially light playing upon the surface of bay or
river. This may be called the Dabo manner. Of
necessity a certain monotony ensues by reason of
this constant repetition of the same theme and
occasionally, in his nodding moments, he lapses
into a mannerism that verges dangerously close on a
formula. But few painters working to-day with
a purpose as clearly preconceived as is his could
show a greater number of canvases in which this
intention has been carried out more consistently
and with greater variety and interest, and his
finest achievements are so far superior to anything
of a similar character being done in this country
that they give him a unique position among con-
temporary American landscape painters.

Though an avowed disciple of Whistler, he is by
no means a slavish imitator of this master. Whis-
tler sacrificed form for tone and Mr. Dabo sacrifices
form for light and atmosphere, while seldom, if
ever, forgetting tone, wherein lies both his difference
and his similarity to the master. His art has been a
gradual evolution from the tight and commonplace
academic work of his early years to his impression-
istic studies of light and atmosphere, ending with
his researches into the significance and relation of