International studio (57.1915/1916)

The Gospel of Jerome Myers

THE END OF THE WALK (OIL PAINTING) BY JEROME MYERS


and Cabanel, when the gospel of painting was
concerned primarily in inculcating a superficial
delicacy of manner and vacuity of material that
bore no relation to life, and as a student he re-
volted from what he felt to be the impotent
academicism of that teaching. Later he grav-
itated to the lower east side of New York City,
and, although ignorant both of its language and
of its customs, the immediate terms of its life
appealed to him with a somewhat special em-
phasis. Intuitively he has given expression to the
spiritual values of its people, and in his beautiful
drawings, his paintings and the characteristic
etchings that he has recently done, is to be found
the soul of the countless millions in whom America
discovers fresh material for the assimilation of a
new order. In this Jerome Myers has approached
the attitude of the old masters, particularly of
Rembrandt, who unconsciously rendered im-
mortal the phase of life with which he was most
familiar, content to express in the simplicity of
its own terms that which he cared for most. It
was with this feeling at heart that Jerome Myers
turned to the East Side and found there a wealth
of material contemptuously overlooked by the
formalists, whose interest was directed not to
life but toward a style.
The need for a medium of expression in which
he could attain freedom and fidelity led him to
the use of the pure, fluid line, with which he was
enabled to faithfully record his impressions of the
simple and yet complex stream of life about him.
In a period when the stress of art was upon the
artificial, and the technique of expression was
regarded as the ultimate reality to which the

material of art was forced to conform, he per-
ceived that technique and expression are both
implicit in the subject, and that an intense love
of life itself is the surest progenitor of a sense of
its beauty. Certain essential qualities in his art
are the result of this point of view; an obvious
freedom from mannerism, a deep sincerity that
underlies the deft sureness of his line, a superb
virility in its intensely objective force. He re-
fuses to arrange life in the terms of the studio,
but takes it as he has found it, without trans-
position, seeing in the very element of its com-
monplaceness the quality of its romance.
His choice of subject is in itself significant,
especially since in point of temporal primacy he
has been the prophet of democracy in our graphic
art. The fundamental distinction between life
in America and the life of any other country lies
in our democracy, a force spiritual rather than
political, conditioned inevitably bv the economic
pressure of traffic, which has attracted the
millions who have come to our shores, led by the
prospect of a finer, freer life, and the lure of greater
gain. For the individual contemporary existence
has substituted the mass, labouring, hoping, strug-
gling to achieve a destiny that as yet is un-
realized. This dynamic force has brought forth
a new beauty, inchoate and formative, seeking
expression in its own terms; it was in this that
Whitman and Verhaeren found the inspiration of
their poetry and Meunier that of his sculpture,
and in the drawings'and etchings of Jerome Myers
it has had its finest rendition in the graphic art of
America. In New York, pre-eminently the melting
pot of all the races, the combat between the old

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