International studio (81.1925)

mceRriACionAL

column under Aim: "Donnez a la couleur le plus
d'eclat possible." One rubs one's eyes. Is it pos-
sible that this man knows Delacroix? Or has he
merely rummaged in the Journal for useful quo-
tations? But no, in face of the decorations for the
Chapelle des Saints-Anges in Saint Sulpice, he has
the courage to exclaim: "La couleur pour la
couleur, sans autre pretexte!" Color for color's
sake, what does it mean? Behind the Simon-pure
Whistlerian cry of art for art's sake there is at
least a concept, a revolt against the superficial
morality painting fathered by a Ruskin. But
this, and from one of Ruskin's soi-disant disciples.
The Beatitudes, after all, have a meaning. They
have been and can again be translated into terms
of art. But color? What has that to do with art
more than the canvas on which it is smeared, the
brush or palette knife used to lay it on? Here is
Signac's reply, his credo: "Les Neo-Impressionistes
s'efforcent d'exprimer les splendeurs de lumiere et de
couleur qu'offre la nature, et puisent a cette source
de toute beaute les elements de leurs oeuvres. . . ."
Light, the source of all beauty. What would the
old man have said to that?

Granted such an esthetic, the wildest judg-
ments are possible. Or rather, all judgment is
suppressed. Men are swallowed up in schools.
True, there are Delacroix and Constable, but
chiefly because they invite quotation. And, in
the same breath, there is Turner. One hears
Renoir's explosion: "Turner, vous appelez ca 'lumi-
neux,' vous? Ces couleurs toutes pareilles a celles
dont les confiseurs se ser'vent pour colorer leurs
nougats et leurs acidities! C'est bien la mime chose,
allez! que lorsqu'il peignail avec son cbocolat!" But
then Renoir himself was only one of ces impres-
sionistes who broke the rules. And the Neo-
Impressionists included, alongside of Cross, Luce,
van de Velde, Van Rysselberghe, Angrand and
Signac himself, all unaware of the strangeness of
the juxtaposition, one Georges Seurat.

So much for Signac. Having staked his pennies
on a theory, he flattered himself into a belief that
a school could be built thereon. He was not dis-
appointed. A school was built. But the theory
took its revenge. The existence of that school,
and his own position in it as co-founder, blinded
him to the fact that an artist had come out of it.
He swapped the achievement of a Seurat against
the sterility of Neo-Impressionism.

With the next generation behold a complete
revolution. In contrast with Signac, who had
striven to elevate color to the rank of a cardinal
esthetic principle, the approach of a man like
Lhote is almost entirely formal. For him, Seurat
is above and before all a "constructeur," one of

the master builders who undertook the job of
reassembling the materials scattered by Impres-
sionism into an habitable edifice. There were three
in his opinion and his definition of their roles can
hardly be bettered: "Renoir, le mailre-macon,
joyeux, logique et sain; Cezanne, le grand arcbitecte,
possedant les secrets de la matiere et tragant sur le
modele de I'Univers le plan du temple nouveau;
enfin Seurat, le theoricien precis, le delicat et subtil
ornemantiste, le createur des plus legeres et des plus
nouvelles abstractions picturales." This is excellent
and there are other passages in his little book that
are no less brilliant. His statement of the early
Impressionist viewpoint, for example, no Ionger
interested in objects, but in "ce qui existe entre les
objets, la fusion, la confusion des objets," a pre-
occupation which was to lead, much sooner than
he admits, to a heightened appreciation of the
interrelation of objects and so back to the object
itself. Or his analysis of the pictures; of the
"Grande Jatte," where he speaks of the marvelous
manner in which "les deux techniques les plus
opposes, le statique du quattrocento et le dynamisme
impressioniste, s'accordent merveilleusement;" of
the "Cirque," in which he points out how Seurat
makes every smallest element, even a whiplash,
an important element in the design.

But even in the hands of a commentator as
brilliant as Lhote, Seurat is not quite at home.
He has, it seems, a fatal attraction for painter-
critics who admire him for ulterior motives. One
remembers the story, so fashionable a few years
ago, of the exquisite who went into raptures before
a Greco, because, he said, it reminded him so
much of Cezanne. In somewhat the same manner
Lhote admires Seurat because he reminds him of
Picasso. The proviso would be unimportant if it
did not lead to a falsification of values. So long
as Lhote is analytic, he is impeccable. He has
the keenest possible appreciation of what Seurat
is doing and his flashlight phrases throw into sharp
relief the technical processes that underly the
major works. But for their justification, when he
comes to consider the essential quality of the
complete work of art, he balks and seems to point
onward to the Cubists as though Seurat were but
a prophecy of an art to come. Seurat, in Lhote's
view, had done his work in taking certain elements
trom. nature and raising them onto an abstract
plane. It remained for the Cubists to prove their
faith en la seule technique capable de porter au plus
haul degre d'epuration les matieres que d'autres,
moins desinteresses, s'amusent encore a caresser
coupablement."

There then one lias the two conflicting views
of Seurat, stated at some length for the reason

MAY 1925

one fifteen