International studio (58.1916)

Cosmopolitan Carnegie

galleries of the Institute you pay grateful tribute
to the power of organization in art. This sense
of system, of good lighting, appropriate back-
grounds, and adequate space between each can-
vas represents the flower of co-ordinated effort.
Art can assuredly suffer from over organization,
yet visitors to the Carnegie Institute can but
recall with a measure of commiseration the im-
pression of chaos that not infrequently charac-
terizes the walls of the National Academy of
Design, or the dingy
dignity so typical of
the interior accom¬
modations of the Penn¬
sylvania Academy of
the Fine Arts.
The major portion
of this season’s offer¬
ing at the Carnegie
Institute consists of
the two French col¬
lections which figured
at San Francisco, the
French Retrospective
Collection and the
French Contemporary
Collection, the latter
of which having mean¬
while been shown with
conspicuous success
under the auspices of
the Albright Gallery,
Buffalo. Already ade¬
quately reviewed in
connexion with the
Panama-Pacific Expo¬
sition, it is a pleasure
to testify that the art
of this typically sen¬
sitive and logical nation improves upon suc-
cessive acquaintance. A large proportion of
these canvases have been included for official
and educational reasons, it being the inten-
tion of the authorities to illustrate in the Re-
trospective Collection the general development
of French painting from 1870 to 1910. And still
despite a certain amount of not particularly in-
spiring pabulum the main formative influences
have by no means been lost sight of. Manet,
Degas, Renoir, Puvis de Chavannes, Cezanne,
Gauguin, and Toulouse-Lautrec each find place
in an ensemble which is not without its panoramic

battle pieces and obvious appeals to less heroic
sentiment.
Manifest leaders in the field of contemporary
aesthetic endeavour, the Frenchmen combine on
fairly even terms a patent regard for academic
precedent with an acquisitive modernism which
seems ever ready for new pictorial or plastic con-
quests. You have but to stroll through the gal-
leries in order to realize how reserved and tra-
ditional is Manet’s Le Balcon, once so vehemently
execrated, and when,
on the same wall, you
encounter Gauguin’s
Frieze so eloquent of
tropic intensity bal-
ancing a pellucid panel
by Puvis, you are
moved to wonder why
the former was rated
an outcast and a bar-
barian. It is indeed
much the same
throughout the rooms
devoted to the re-
sourceful Frenchmen.
The fecund Besnard
searching for fresh
motives in sun-scorch-
ed India renders his
dancers, Brahmins, or
bracelet vendors with
a magnificently dis-
ciplined vigour, while
the vibrant murals of
Maurice Denis hark
back in more than
subject matter to the
rich fancy of the
Renaissance and the
far-off radiance of the Hellenic archipelago.
To pass from the French section to the Belgian,
which includes a scant handful of canvases by
certain of the leading contemporary men, is to
exchange tradition and invention for direct,
robust contact with reality. Home lovers for the
most part these painters have neither wandered
from the compact country of their birth nor
strayed into the realm of theoretical abstraction.
Albert Baertsoen, Victor Gi soul, and Henrr Cas-
siers each illustrate different aspects of their once
serene and industrious, now scourged and dis-
traught land. Glimpses of the grim profile of


French Contemporary Collection, Carnegie Institute, 1916

SACRED HEART

BY GEORGES DESVALLIERES

CV1