International studio (44.1911)

The Royal Academy Exhibition, 1911


“TULIPS AND bowl” BY WILLIAM NICHOLSON
(By special permission.—See preceding article)

The royal academy exhi-
bition, 1911.
We seem to be approaching the time
when such a thing as a really bad painter will be
absolutely unknown. The multiplication of art
schools and the systematising of methods of pictorial
practice have so raised the standard of technical
accomplishment that painting nowadays is a very
different matter from what it was a few years ago.
Executive cleverness has become quite common,
the skilful management of materials is the rule
rather than the exception, and the ingenious
application of devices of craftsmanship, which was
once the mark of the specially gifted artist, is now
a sort of trick that every student learns. The
ability to paint is no longer the hard-won possession
of the few, it is an inevitable acquisition from
which hardly any one is able to escape.
This, at all events, is the suggestion conveyed
by the present exhibition of the Royal Academy,
'bhe collection of pictures there is really wonderful
in its revelation of the mechanical capacity possessed
by the rank and file of our present-day artists; it
is so level, so precise in its maintenance of a certain
standard of proficiency, that the presence of one
downright bad canvas—though that, it must be
admitted, is not by a British artist—comes almost
as a relief. Good drawing, clever brushwcrk,

imitative skill of the most
complete kind are all offered
in full measure, and if these
were all the qualities neces-
sary to give perfection to an
exhibition the millennium
might be regarded as already
with us—despite the one bad
picture.
But, unfortunately, some-
thing more than mechanical
perfection is required to make
a show either important or
interesting. A picture can
be very well painted and yet
be a deadly dull thing, and
an exhibition can be full of
well-painted pictures and yet
bore the visitor unutterably.
If in a gathering of works of
art there is an absence ot
ideas, a want of intelligent
understanding of the real
purpose of artistic effort, that
gathering will be futile and
unsatisfactory even if it abounds with examples of
clever workmanship. It will cause regret rather
than pleasure, regret that so much excellent training
and so much practical skill should have been wasted
and that such a vast amount of conscientious
labour should have been expended to no worthy
purpose.
This suggestion also comes from the Academy
exhibition. It does abound with examples of
practical skill, and it does induce a feeling of regret
that this skill should have been employed so
unprofitably and with so little sense of artistic
responsibility. The show, in fact, is wearying
because almost every one who has contributed to it
has taken the greatest possible pains to be entirely
ineffective. The fashion of the moment dictates
avoidance of subject as the duty of every artist;
the literary picture, that is the picture which in-
cludes some idea beyond the merely capable laying
on of paint, is anathematised as evidence of a falling
away from the right faith, and therefore search for
subject is forbidden to the painter who is on the
lookout for pictorial material. But as he must
have some sort of motive for his pictures, some
sort of foundation for his brush gymnastics, he is
told to choose something from his immediate sur-
roundings—the more obvious it is the more suit-
able it is considered to be—and to paint it exactly
as he sees it. He must be audaciously common-

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