Studio: international art (40.1907)

Gaston Hochard

“ EN PROVENCE: l’ORCHESTRE D’ENFANTS ”

outset all new inventions are bound to upset our
arts, which are essentially conservative, and also our
artists, ever hostile to progress and to the interpreta-
tion of beings and things around them, the
picturesque aspects of which they refuse to see.
At the present moment everyone is attacking auto-
mobilism, which, nevertheless, can be most enjoy-
ably expressed, lending
itself to artistic treatment
most successfully by reason
of the variety of scene and
episode it commands.

Let us look around us,
not only among the half-
asleep provincial cities, but
among the great fashion-
able metropolitan centres
like London, Paris, or
Rome. Can we say that
all this daily life strikes
us as having no interest
for the artist’s eye? Are
we content that the kodak
alone shall be left to
register all the physiogno-
mical details of the swift-
moving life of to-day ? If
so, it is, frankly, a pity,
and most regrettable from
every point of view.

2 16

Outside military life,
which boasts a few master
painters, and the world of
fashionable “feminism,”
which has a few more,
the pictorial art of our time
really takes no pains to
note and to preserve the
memory of the city events,
the social ceremonies, the
fetes, the amusements, the
sports which regale our
eyes, and for that reason
deserve to be aesthetically
expressed in durable
works, as was done in
the eighteenth century
by so many ingenious
masters of colour and de-
sign. The subject of the
indifference of painters
with regard to their own

BY GASTON HOCHARD

day deserves to be treated
deeply and seriously in a
special article, which should deal with the question
in a critical spirit at once psychological and philo-
sophical. The subject lends itself to such treat-
ment, and it should be fascinating by reason of the
mystery it would reveal and clear up.

* * *

I was thinking of all this recently when looking

“EN VILLAGE: LES AUTORITES ”

BY GASTON HOCHARD