International studio (44.1911)

THE STUDIO

The paintings of william
NICHOLSON.
The artist who makes up his mind to break
away from the customary conventions of his time
and to choose his own way in the practice of
his profession must be a man with more than
ordinary force of character. He must lack neither
courage nor the capacity for dogged perseverance;
he must be able to withstand rebuffs, and to remain
unmoved by misunderstanding or misrepresentation
of his aims; he must have the power to continue,
uninfluenced by opposition, in the direction he has
marked out for himself, and to refuse to make
concessions to professional clamour or popular
demand. He must, in a word, be a rather rare
type of individual with special strength of con-
viction and a definite ability to fix his mind upon
what he conceives to be the right course for him to
follow.
For the modern artist is not willingly allowed to
be independent either by his professional brethren
or by the public to whom necessarily his appeal
has to be made. The art world is divided to-day
into schools, each of which has its own small group
of exponents and its own particular following, and
the man who does not

with dogged perseverance in the assertion of his
own beliefs a real command over the mechanism
of his art he may compel the art world to accept
him as a person mistaken, perhaps, but still of
such dominant ability that he cannot conveniently
be ignored. Force of character, backed up by
technical skill of a high order, will gain for an artist
a position in which he will receive at least a
measure of consideration, a position for which he
will have to fight hard, but one in which, when he
has once arrived, he will be quite reasonably
secure; the technical skill, however, is a necessity,
because without it he will not be able to convince
people that the ideas he wishes to convey have any
definite claim to attention.
The strong man, the fighter who will make no
compromises and whose sense of his own importance
is properly developed, can impose himself on the
art world and beat down opposition. He can
secure acceptance and make his influence felt, but
he can only do this by proving beyond all dispute
that he is armed at all points and that there are no
weak places in his equipment. In his progress he
will go through several stages : at first he will be
despised because he has not come out of any of
the recognised pigeon-holes in which modern art is

attach himself to any one
of these schools runs the
risk of being treated as a
sort of outcast whom no
one will accept and for
whom there is not a good
word to be said. Every
school is suspicious of him
because his independence
implies, as they assume,
a certain contempt for the
authority they claim, and
every faction of the public
is opposed to him because
his work has not the tricks
of expression and the man-
nerisms of handling which
they have been taught to
regard as essentials in artis-
tic performance.
But there is just the
chance that if he combines
XLIV. No. 173.—July 1911.

“CUPIDS FIGHTING FOR A ROSE” BY WILLIAM NICHOLSON
fBy special permission)


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