International studio (58.1916)

Paint and Progress

deen guilty on his own confession of a blatant
dishonesty if he had refused to do so. He is
involuntarily impelled to formulate the idiom of
Leo Ornstein merely because he cannot say what
he has to say in any other medium. Likewise
when J. Francis Murphy attempts to place
our American autumn on canvas we are con-
vinced that he has chosen precisely the medium
best suited to an exploitation of his theme. We
do not condemn his method merely because it is
a method that has been utilized by an older gen-
eration of painters, any more than we deny
the genius of Rupert Brooke merely because it
expresses itself in the stereotyped form of the
sonnet. Modern painting, I venture to believe,
has brought certain interesting attitudes of mind,
certain exquisite dexterities of vision into art,
but it has not eliminated those methods which
have proved themselves supremely appropriate
for the expression of other equally valuable and,
I even dare to say, indispensable points of view.
In the other arts, the normal inter-relationship
between the means of expression of a hundred
years ago and the means of expression of to-day
is accepted as a matter of course. In any large
and dominant moment in literature and in music
we discover an unmistakable similarity of treat-
ment, we find the poet and the musician agreed
upon certain fundamental simplicities of method,
manner and material. The art of these supreme
moments is, in so far as it is possible to define it,
an attempt to fix a mood or to glorify a deed in
a manner as direct as possible and as free as pos-
sible from the contaminating infirmities of tem-
poral idiosyncrasy. But with the best intentions
in the world we cannot help but feel that the paint-
ing of to-day is mostly a mechanical, premeditated
and very self-conscious sort of an affair. We can
hardly help but feel that this painting is too often
the painting of sophistication. We can hardly
help but feel that so much of argument and theory
must inevitably count against the producing of a
legitimate, spontaneous art. Art has never spent
much time in theorizing and proclaiming its in-
tentions, it has just simply expressed itself.
She ley, Keats, Schubert, Chopin, Corot, Manet
(if I may be forgiven this rather puerile group-
ing) were probably no more conscious of their
aestheticism than the ordinarily healthy human
being is conscious that he has a liver. Of course,
too much must not be argued from a point like
this. Some of us have assumed, in default of a

more accurate definition, that we might not inap-
propriately consider art an adroit and exquisite
representation of the common joys, sorrows and
visions of humanity. But in recent years an un-
mistakable tendency in art toward a greater
reliance upon, a gradual amalgamating with
matters beyond and, we had supposed, outside
itself has become manifest. Whether our age
stands upon the threshold of a new epoch where-
in science rather than what we have called art
shall minister to and express our emotion is a
question which I am utterly unable to answer.
Perhaps it is a confession of intellectual incom-
petency, but I honestly believe the question is
unanswerable. Mr. Wright offers us an infallible
means for finding out just where we are at: “I
have posed a rationale of valuation,” says Mr.
Wright. “My principles are based on the quick-
ening ideals of all great art and, if properly un-
derstood, they will answer every question which
arises in the intelligent spectator when he stands
before a piece of visual art, be it a Byzantine
mosaic, a complicated organization by Rubens, a
linear arrangement by Picasso, or an utterly
worthless anecdote in paint by an English acad-
emician.” I think that we must admit that this,
as our admirable vernacular has it, is rather a
large order. Unfortunately for our peace of
mind Mr. Cortissoz, a man of considerable pres-
tige, gracious humour and wholesome sensibilities,
tells us that all the things Mr. Wright is so in
favour of are quite inconsequential. We are also
told by Mr. Wright that art must be purged of
the old fallacy of representation in order to func-
tion properly; that, in other words, painting
should be and does aspire to the abstract perfec-
tion of music. But just here a suggestion may
be recorded. The substance of music, sound, is
in its very nature a something as indefinable and
intangible as a wind, an instinct or a perfume,
whereas the substance of painting is a visible
world, a world whose concrete line and bulk pos-
sess an objective stability. It is not inconceiv-
able that the painting of the future will repudiate
reproduction and exclusively adhere to an ab-
stract decorativeness. But until art and life shall
irrevocably sever relationship we must assume
that painting may not emancipate its vision so
exclusively from the facts of existence that it
shall cease to convey something approximating a
comprehensive visualization of their fundamental
aspects. Moreover it is difficult to understand

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