Studio: international art (57.1913)

Anders Zorn

A NDERS ZORN’S RECENT PAINT-
A INGS AND SCULPTURE. BY
J. \. DR. AXEL GAUFFIN. (Translated
by Edward Adams-Ray.)

It has fallen to the lot of Anders Zorn to have
progressed through one of the most self-evident
courses of development, and to have experienced
some of the most rapidly won recognition known
in the history of art. The whole of his work
possesses something of that quality, captivating to
the outward sense, which is spontaneous in its direct
attractiveness and is founded on a phenomenal
skill that fetters the beholder in chains of wonder
and admiration. He is the Aladdin of art—I
think the phrase has been employed before, for
it springs unbidden to one’s lips in the presence of
this man.

But Aladdin never reached old age.

It is difficult, at least, to imagine that
son of fortune with a wrinkled brow
and venerable, silver-white beard.

Zorn has passed his tenth lustrum
but, in many respects, he is still the
same as he. was twenty years ago.

In this fact lie both the greatness
and the limitations of his art. With
extraordinary vitality his brush still
conjures forth new daughters of the
land of beauty which he has laid
beneath his sceptre. But this crea-
tive act is repeated so often that I
should not be surprised if a looker-
on felt himself tempted to ask:

“ Well-? ” And yet there is

something so inherently natural in
Zorn’s art. This genius of the nude,
who stands unparagoned in the realm
of modem painting, has become
what he is by the absolute honesty
with which he has pursued his aim,
the open worship he has practised of
the naked woman. He can go to a
painting with the resolution to make
this time a great composition—“ une
grande machine,” as they say in Paris.

But when he sees his model before
him in all her naked grace, he bends
the knee once more at that in-
exhaustible source of beauty, the
human body. But it is not a bend-
ing of the knee in the presence of
the unattainable. It is just a thanks-
giving that this wonder exists,

LV1I. No. 236.—November 1912

that it is of the earth, tangible and attainable,
a consolation and a source of enjoyment for
man. And the beauty he reproduces is mundane.
He models the torso with a marvellous solidity, as
a symbol of the fullness and richness of life ; he
touches caressingly the fine meshwork of the skin ;
he falls into an ecstasy when he finds a new light,
a new tone, some unimagined delicacy, where the
sun-mist of the atmosphere, or the half-open door
of the timbered house throws its shifting shadow
of blue or green.

At the exhibition of Zorn’s pictures which opened
about the middle of September in the rooms of the
Konstforening at Stockholm, and in which he
brought together a number of his canvases painted
during the last few years, one of the most apparent
features was the evidence it gave of his return to
that blonde, open-air painting by which he first