International studio (45.1912)

Reviews and Notices

must be judged in accordance with their professions
and their abilities. We have always endeavoured
in The Studio to take the artist’s own standpoint,
to find out his aims and his individual means of
expression, and we can in some respects sympathise
with the point of view taken by Mr. Hind in his
work. But we cannot excuse in a painter incom-
petence, or the adoption of a pose in direct
antagonism to the commonest necessities of
his art. Painting, like literature and music, is
allied to language, and coarse and inadequate
expression is no more permissible in the one than
in the others. Mr. Hind contends that beauty is
not the aim of art, and, from the choice of illustra-
tions which appear in his book, it might readily be
imagined that he believes ugliness or deformity to
be so. The perception and expression of truth in
some one or more of its varied aspects is the great
objective, and it is in that respect that the Post
Impressionists so generally fail. We are told that
Matisse “ paints his sensations ... to state that
sensation he will use drawing and colour arbitrarily,
caring little for accuracy and less for realism, so
long as his emotion is expressed. His aim is to
approach a fresh canvas as if there were no past in
art, as if he is the first artist who has ever painted.”
In those few words Mr. Hind sums up the leading
productions of the school. The pity of it is that
the painters’ sensations have in them so little that
is worthy of recording, and their methods of ex-
pression are so manifestly crude. But as the
apostles of what may not without reason be called
the apachism of art appear to pride themselves on
this want of refinement, this crudity of expression,
there can be but little more to be said of their
productions at the present time.
A striving to get away from the banality of the
great mass of modern painting is in itself a legitimate
effort, and it may be that much of what has been
attempted by the Post Impressionists comes from
a desire of attainment in that direction. To evoke
a new expression of art is not in itself a thing to be
condemned. The present unrest may eventually
result in some notable achievement, and it may
possibly happen that good will eventually come
from the bouleversement of art ideas that the present
movement has occasioned. But we may be quite
sure that should some new and great genius arise
from the ashes of the present-day incompetence,
whether real or assumed, of Post Impressionism,
he will be utterly guiltless of any charge that might
be brought against him of crudity in thought and
lack of expression, or of want of facility and power
in execution.

Irish Ecclesiastical Architecture. By Arthur
Champneys. (London: G. Bell and Sons.) 31J. 6d.
—Mr. Champneys has here done for Irish
Gothic what Mr. Blomfield, for instance, has
done for English Renaissance. Despite a some-
what disjointed style, which is not altogether
worthy of his wide knowledge or of his subject,
the author has done everything to make his book
exhaustive. True that the title is perhaps a little
misleading, for the subject-matter is strictly limited
to Irish Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, and no
more than a paragraph or two is given to anything
built after 1500. But within these limits Mr.
Champneys has shown himself a master. The
illustrations which he has collected are quite
admirable—very numerous and exceedingly well
chosen. The discussions of such controversial
points as the real significance of round towers, or
the claims of Ireland to possess in the true sense
a national style of architecture, are distinguished
alike for their fullness and their impartiality.
There is a useful bibliography, with many of those
references to periodicals which are so valuable to
the student, and almost a plethora of notes and
appendices.
Training of the Memory in Art. By Lecoq de
Boisbaudran. Translated from the French by
L. D. Luard. (London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd.)
65. net.'—In this book are included three pamphlets,
“The Training of the Memory in Art,” “A Survey
of Art Teaching,” and “Letters to a Young Pro-
fessor—Summary of a Method of Teaching Draw-
ing and Painting,” written by Horace Lecoq de
Boisbaudran, an artist and art teacher who ap-
proached educational questions from an unusually
original and intelligent standpoint. Although
his name as a teacher is hardly known in this
country, he had for some thirty years in the middle
of the nineteenth century a very considerable
influence over art education in France, and some
of the most eminent of the French artists of our
time received from him the best part of their
training. The foundation of his method was to
develop from the first the faoulties of observation
and memorising possessed by the students who
came under his direction, and to show how
these faculties could be educated and brought
under control. The precepts of de Boisbaudran
can be heartily commended to the attention
of every teacher who is anxious to make the
best of the material with which he has to
deal; they point the way to far better results
than are attainable under any other teaching
system.

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