International studio (58.1916)

Paint and Progress

of every other kind of contemporary American
painting is a condition essential to the saving
of our souls. I believe that there are painters
in this country to-day of a supreme excellence
whose work we need not dismiss merely because
it is diametrically opposed to the kind of paint-
ing on view at the Forum Galleries. I believe
that the painting I have in mind is infinitely
truer to our native spirit and our native point of
view (if this be adjudged an advantage) than its
various detractors would have us believe. And
if I were to allow myself the indiscretion of proph-
ecy I should be tempted to suggest that the
kind of painting I have in mind will possess a
prestige and a market value long after the theo-
retical complicatedness of much of to-day’s paint-
ing has gone into the great cosmical discard. But
your progressive in paint will have none of this
sort of thing; he dismisses it as a mere repaint-
ing of the history of paint, a kind of outmoded
dry-rot, so to speak; and just here I think we
touch upon the dominant weakness of much of
the modern attitude.
The painter is, of all the workers in art, the
one most prone to an abuse of his liberty. His
organism is apparently over-susceptible to the
insidious germs of a false emphasis, a fictitious
freedom. Discipline has not been compulsorily
imposed upon him to the extent that in the very
nature of the case it is imposed upon the musi-
cian, the architect, and the conscientious worker
in words. Of all the arts (I do not even exclude the
fallen sister, histrionics) his art is the art most
hospitable to the exploitation of the ultra, the
bizarre, the extravagant and the sophistical.
Small wonder that the art of painting has fallen
victim to the fallacy of progress to an extent un-
equalled in the other arts; small wonder that it
has made a fetish of method at the expense of
matter as though method were in itself a desir-
able end. Personally, if I were to venture an
opinion upon the validity of contemporary art,
I should be inclined to condemn it for the em-
phasis that it places upon originality of form at
the expense, too often, I think, of a commen-
surate significance of substance. We encounter
this instability of judgment in painting to an
extent that we encounter it in no other branch
of aesthetics. We cannot always feel that the
developments of contemporary art are authentic,
inevitable developments; and if a development
in art, however beautiful in itself, is not an abso-

lutely imperative adjunct to the proper expres-
sion of the idea it is inherently false, shallow and
inconsequential. When Mr. Hassam, for exam-
ple, exploits a new manner as he does in the
recent exhibition of the “Ten American Painters,”
we may admire the dexterity and the impersonal
beauty of his work without its for a moment con-
vincing us that it is either necessary or genuine.
In other words, we do not feel that Mr. Hassam
painted these pictures in this manner because
something in Mr. Hassam that could only be
expressed in this manner demanded expression.
Instead, we can see his doing this sort of thing
merely because somebody else is doing it and be-
cause he thinks it is the thing to do. And just
here a little plain speaking may not come amiss.
If the painter of to-day would give a little
serious, intelligent consideration to the activities
of arts other than his own, he would perhaps rea-
lize the sorry spectacle that is presented by his
irrational, bigoted and passionate pre-occupation
with the fetish of modernism. It is impossible
to escape the conviction that so much forced
draught is symptomatic of an unstable artistic
morale. An open-mindedness as regards Miss
Amy Lowell, for example, does not prevent us
from enjoying the work of Masefield, Yeats or
Rupert Brooke when they write in the accepted,
long standardized forms of English verse. We
can indorse the later Dubussy {La Mer, for in-
stance) without having to deny ourselves Percy
Grainger’s Shepherd’s Hey or Irish Tune from
County Derry. But it seems that if we are to
escape a veritable ostracism among the advance
guard of palette and brush we must permanently
forsake a kind of painting superlatively repre-
sented by Mr. Dewing, Mr. Murphy, Mr. Tryon
and Mr. J. Alden Weir. I have no hesitancy in
denouncing this point of view for absolute, down-
right nonsense. One would think from the fine
degree of intolerance evinced for this latter type
of painting by your progressives that the artist
is under an obligation to create new forms despite
the fact that the inherent predisposition of his
mind may achieve its perfect fulfilment in what
you may call a conventional medium. Nothing
could be further from the truth. The artist’s
form is conditioned only by what he has to say;
and it is what he has to say that counts. Em-
phasis must be laid upon this point. If Mr. Leo
Ornstein had been able to express his Wild Men’s
Dance in the idiom of Beethoven he would have

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