DOI Heft:
No. 270 (September 1915)
DOI Artikel:Cournos, John: Three painters of the New York School
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.21213#0261
Three Painters of the New York School
love. This man is an individual, yet a type. You
and I have met him somewhere. It is his eyes
that grip you. In them lies the sadness of all the
stokers of the earth since men began to work at
furnaces. Mr. Henri himself would call this portrait
“ a statement of life.” And like every effectual state-
ment it is its own comment.
Mr. Henri has put a number of laughing boys on
canvas, but the jolliest youngster of all, Jopie van
Slouten, he has painted in Holland. Surely in this
case the artist blew breath into his paint, and the
result is a live, laughing boy, whose little body is
shaking, and fairly bubbling over with mirth. It
is amazing that a child’s momentary mood should
have been caught so successfully with the brush.
It is not mere virtuosity that makes this a brilliant
canvas. Indeed, Mr. Henri abhors the art that
consists of tricks with the brush, and he asks for
sincerity rather than dash.
If the New York group has in Mr. Henri a fine
versatile painter and a valiant champion of its
principles, it owes much of its distinction to Mr.
George Luks, a master of genre without equal in
his country. Because of his intensely sympathetic
outlook on humanity, his art, like Millet’s, has
been called democratic, but as its conceptions are
dignified and its technique broad and refined, it
cannot but please even those who consider art a
thing essentially aristocratic. Indeed, his strength
lies in the fact that he achieves his result neither
by what R. L. Stevenson called “ a brutal assault
on the feelings,” nor by story interest as in the case
of Josef Israels, who, in the words of Henley,
“ makes no secret of his design on your tears, and
asks you to sit down and have a good cry with
him.” Luks is less blunt, more subtle in his
psychology. He makes his appeal through sheer
character and through his vigorous presentation of
character in the painter’s sense. His method,
perhaps, resembles Millet’s. It is likely that if
Millet painted streets and cafes instead of meadows
and peasants’ huts, he would have painted them
very much as Luks paints them.
Luks’s best pictures reveal not alone the artist’s
joy in life, but in his material. The smell of paint
to him is as the smell of powder to the true
soldier. He revels in it—to him “painting is
colour ”—and, notwithstanding this avowal, he
employs colour and drawing only as a means to an
end,, as a medium for the interpretation of character.
The artist, who was the first to paint the “ East
Side” of New York, is happiest when he paints the
humble men and women of the slums, with hearts
under their rags and the pathos of human frailty in
their eyes—“ the eyes of the poor,” but not in the
Baudelairian sense. To be a poet of the poor and
yet not be sordid is something of an achievement.
There is The Spielers, Luks’s most admired picture.
It is a joyous canvas, a picture to live with. For
all their ragged attire, the two little maidens, lock-
ing their hands together, are as happy as princesses.
Beneath their rags, their young bodies are respond-
ing for that brief moment to a single emotion, to
the unswerving, unalterable law of rhythm which
acknowledges neither poverty nor wealth. The
action is unmistakable ; the very hair of the flaxen-
haired one seems to be fairly dancing and streaming
with the generous movement of the body. The
sense of light, warmth and joy consistently per-
meates the entire canvas, and there is a kind of
suppressed opulence in its colour. Those who will
see a suggestion of Whistler in the soft, mellow
quality of the painting can hardly fail to note one
significant distinction. The dominating note of
The Spielers is movement. Whistler, on the other
hand, was a master of repose; his figures, subtly
beautiful and dreamlike, have too often the sense
of arrested action as though they were dimly con-
scious that a great artist was painting them.
Nearer the Whistlerian mood and yet a document
so intensely human and belonging definitely to its
author is The Little Grey Girl. Though it forms
a temperamental contrast to The Spielers, it is not
less lovely in its own fashion. Here we have the
241
“a stoker ”
BY ROBERT HENRI
love. This man is an individual, yet a type. You
and I have met him somewhere. It is his eyes
that grip you. In them lies the sadness of all the
stokers of the earth since men began to work at
furnaces. Mr. Henri himself would call this portrait
“ a statement of life.” And like every effectual state-
ment it is its own comment.
Mr. Henri has put a number of laughing boys on
canvas, but the jolliest youngster of all, Jopie van
Slouten, he has painted in Holland. Surely in this
case the artist blew breath into his paint, and the
result is a live, laughing boy, whose little body is
shaking, and fairly bubbling over with mirth. It
is amazing that a child’s momentary mood should
have been caught so successfully with the brush.
It is not mere virtuosity that makes this a brilliant
canvas. Indeed, Mr. Henri abhors the art that
consists of tricks with the brush, and he asks for
sincerity rather than dash.
If the New York group has in Mr. Henri a fine
versatile painter and a valiant champion of its
principles, it owes much of its distinction to Mr.
George Luks, a master of genre without equal in
his country. Because of his intensely sympathetic
outlook on humanity, his art, like Millet’s, has
been called democratic, but as its conceptions are
dignified and its technique broad and refined, it
cannot but please even those who consider art a
thing essentially aristocratic. Indeed, his strength
lies in the fact that he achieves his result neither
by what R. L. Stevenson called “ a brutal assault
on the feelings,” nor by story interest as in the case
of Josef Israels, who, in the words of Henley,
“ makes no secret of his design on your tears, and
asks you to sit down and have a good cry with
him.” Luks is less blunt, more subtle in his
psychology. He makes his appeal through sheer
character and through his vigorous presentation of
character in the painter’s sense. His method,
perhaps, resembles Millet’s. It is likely that if
Millet painted streets and cafes instead of meadows
and peasants’ huts, he would have painted them
very much as Luks paints them.
Luks’s best pictures reveal not alone the artist’s
joy in life, but in his material. The smell of paint
to him is as the smell of powder to the true
soldier. He revels in it—to him “painting is
colour ”—and, notwithstanding this avowal, he
employs colour and drawing only as a means to an
end,, as a medium for the interpretation of character.
The artist, who was the first to paint the “ East
Side” of New York, is happiest when he paints the
humble men and women of the slums, with hearts
under their rags and the pathos of human frailty in
their eyes—“ the eyes of the poor,” but not in the
Baudelairian sense. To be a poet of the poor and
yet not be sordid is something of an achievement.
There is The Spielers, Luks’s most admired picture.
It is a joyous canvas, a picture to live with. For
all their ragged attire, the two little maidens, lock-
ing their hands together, are as happy as princesses.
Beneath their rags, their young bodies are respond-
ing for that brief moment to a single emotion, to
the unswerving, unalterable law of rhythm which
acknowledges neither poverty nor wealth. The
action is unmistakable ; the very hair of the flaxen-
haired one seems to be fairly dancing and streaming
with the generous movement of the body. The
sense of light, warmth and joy consistently per-
meates the entire canvas, and there is a kind of
suppressed opulence in its colour. Those who will
see a suggestion of Whistler in the soft, mellow
quality of the painting can hardly fail to note one
significant distinction. The dominating note of
The Spielers is movement. Whistler, on the other
hand, was a master of repose; his figures, subtly
beautiful and dreamlike, have too often the sense
of arrested action as though they were dimly con-
scious that a great artist was painting them.
Nearer the Whistlerian mood and yet a document
so intensely human and belonging definitely to its
author is The Little Grey Girl. Though it forms
a temperamental contrast to The Spielers, it is not
less lovely in its own fashion. Here we have the
241
“a stoker ”
BY ROBERT HENRI