International studio (49.1913)

The French Institute and “American" Art

of ten selected architects accounted the leaders in
their profession in France, while the exhibit of
paintings will consist of canvases by ten of the
best painters of the present day.
As will be seen by this general outline, the
French Institute has now passed the experimental
stage and is now firmly implanted in American
soil as an agency for the spreading of that most
cosmopolitan gospel which is art.
When the program of the French Institute was
first announced, there was a tendency on the part
of certain commercial interests making a business
of art, to oppose and discredit the new movement
on the ground that French art needed no fostering
in this country, while American art did. It was
very platitudinously asserted that the spreading of
a knowledge of French
canons of art in this coun¬
try would be detrimental to
“the awakening of an art
impulse in America.”
One trade publication,
imagining the “business of
art” or the art business in
danger, and feeling itself
threatened in the pocket¬
book, deliberately charged
the French Institute with
intent to rob the American
“art worker” of the coveted
trade of newly-rich Ameri¬
cans whose eyes were just
opening to American art.
Needless to say, this alarm
on the part of these trades¬
men is entirely unfounded.
The French Institute has
absolutely no commercial interests to advance
and its work here is purely of an altruistic and
missionary character. Its purpose is to quicken
the appreciation of French art, not among the
wealthy, who already possess a general famil-
iarity with French artistic expression through
travel, but among the wage earners to whom the
opportunity to visit the Louvre and other French
treasure houses is denied.
To say that French art should be prevented
from invading those confines of America where it
is not already known, is to say that beauty should
be prevented from penetrating our borders. Two
thousand years ago, when the artists of one coun-
try were of necessity compelled to limit their
horizon to the things and people accessible by
ox-cart travel, art was circumscribed and took on

the characteristics of certain localities. Athens
was terra incognita to Thebes, and Babylon held
no intercourse with Rome. To-day, however, one
thousand miles are as one, and the processes of
reproduction have reached such perfection that
the art of Paris or Vienna or Stockholm can be
known pictorially in New York, or Melbourne or
Cape Town in a few weeks’ time. A country that
would quarantine itself against the art of the rest
of the world would find itself plunged into the
darkness of the Middle Ages, because art is in a
great measure imitative and adaptative.
Fundamentally, art is universal, since the
objects it portrays are universal. A rose may be
painted by seventeen different artists, from seven-
teen different countries, but the work of not one
of the seventeen can be char-
acteristic of either France or
America or China; it will be
characteristic of the garden
and representative of nature.
The mistaken zealots who
prate of American art can
have in mind, properly
speaking, only totem poles
or Navajo blankets. There
was a Greek art and an Egyp-
tian art, but already in the
fifteenth century frontiers
were obliterated and the art
of the period comes to us as
the art of the Renaissance,
not as the art of Italy or
France or Spain or Flanders,
although in all four of these
countries a strong creative
impulse was being felt, each
distinct in its way but all homogeneous as to
character and tendency.
The Popes, the Medicis, the Dukes of Bur-
gundy, the Kings of France or of Spain who were
the art patrons of that wonderful period, did not
attempt to nationalize art.
The French court had as many Italians among
its artists-pensioners as it had Frenchmen, and the
Pope Leo X did not attempt to have the tapes-
tries of the Vatican woven in Rome, but sent to
Brussels for them. Raphael, Velasquez, Rem-
brandt, Meissonnier, Whistler belong to the
world and not only to Italy, or Spain, or Holland
or France or the United States.
There is neither American art nor French art—
there is only art—and Sargent is as hospitably
received in the Luxembourg as Corot in the


PORTRAIT OF GEORGE ENGRAVED BY
WASHINGTON LEFORT

XVI