A Live Exhibit at the Art Institute: Visitors’ Opinions Strong

The post-impressionist exhibition [the Armory Show], whatever its faults and merits, is at least a live wire. Every visitor has a strong opinion regarding the radicals there represented, and the amount of literature they have inspired would fill a bandwagon. Indeed, the cause has been pushed enormously by this literature. The propagandists have been eager, enthusiastic, possessed of new ideas, eloquent in praise of youth, rebellion, progress, change, and other highly popular watchwords; while their opponents have been on the defensive, have had to stand by the orthodox guns of art, always a less graceful attitude than the gallant charge. 

This column has quoted from various writers and talkers who march with the aforesaid charging squadron, and this week, in a praiseworthy effort at supernal justice, it has sought to give space to arguments on the other side. But, alas, the conservatives have little to say, and they can’t keep their tempers long enough to say it. Like Kenyon Cox, who was recently interviewed by the New York Times, they cry out that the post-impressionist movement does not exist; or, like Royal Certissoz [sic Cortissoz], who opens the April Century, they denounce it in good set terms, and pronounce its leaders crochety, egotistic, insane, and various other things which no good artist ought to be.

No, the conservatives are not quotable—that’s always the trouble with conservatives. This fact need not lessen the righteousness of their cause, but it does lessen its interest. So we shall have to take them for granted, so to speak, and merely preserve that highly superior pose, a judicial attitude, abstaining from indecorous cheers as the enemy advances and from counting breaches in the wall before they are made.

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Compared with the New York exhibition, this is limited. The radicals overbalance the rest, and one misses the retrospective exhibition by which Mr. Davies and the other leaders of the new association sought to express their idea of the artistic succession through the nineteenth century—an order of masters which, beginning with Ingres, included Goya, Corot, Daumier, Courbet, Chavannes, Manet, Monet, Maris, Whistler, and others. Of these we have only the two exquisite Ingres drawings, which no one should miss in the central hall, and two Whistlers—one the curious, early, Ingres-like “Andromeda” and the other a more familiar portrait, a beautiful example.

Also in New York the show was so large as to seem generously hospitable and all-inclusive. There was a good deal of sculpture, and many of our young compatriots showed large, ambitious works in one art or another, or a group large enough to familiarize one with their ideas. One misses especially Arthur Putnam’s wonderful bronze pumas, W. J. Glackens’ family group portrait, John Marin’s bold water colors of the lofty Woolworth building, and the varied group of pictures by A. Walkowitz. Also the foreign water colors, drawings, and lithographs, interesting as they are, show many important omissions.

But, forgetting the losses, let us go through the galleries in search of, not eccentric things, but things expressive, personal, beautiful things which for one reason or another have style. If we begin with gallery 52, devoted to the three dead masters of post-impressionism (atrocious name!) we must pause before Cézanne’s “Woman with a Rosary” and his superb dark “Landscape” (No. 49), two pictures which indicate the man’s power of simple, concise, elemental expression, his way of plucking the heart out of his subject and discarding the rest. 

Van Gogh’s genius is shown in more varied phases, but it seems most potent and personal in the self portrait, the large windmill landscape “Montmartre,” the study of curving masses of rock called “Hills at Arles,” and some of the small still life pictures. The patterned “Ball at Arles,” the green “Woman Reading,” and the “Young Woman” portrait seem more experimental. Of Gauguin perhaps the finest examples are two small watercolors—the “Tahiti Landscape,” (146) and the “Woman Stooping.” However, the larger things, mostly oils, have a weird fascination, and certain ones beauty of color. Savage types and superstitions are suggested with singular power in “The Spirit of Evil,” the “Tahitian Scene,” and “Faa Iheihe”—never romanticized or disguised by racial prejudice. Here was a Frenchman whose mind achieved an uncanny union of Parisian sophistication with the direct visioning of a Tahiti savage, a union strange and illuminating but by no means sweetly pleasant.

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As a collateral descendant of these men Odilon Redon may be next in order. Here is an intensely imaginative artist whose symbolism is lighter, less savage, than Gauguin’s, and whose style—his feeling for color, subject, etc.—is far less stern, more delicate, than Cézanne’s or Van Gogh’s. He is indeed singularly original; those thirty-six pictures in color and numerous lithographs are a sensation quite new and fine.

In France Redon’s admirers call him “notre grand solitaire.” Like Ryder in America, he is a recluse, who has developed his ideas from within, traveling little, and noting little the affairs of the world without. The poet Mallariné [sic Mallarmé], whom he has outlived, was his friend, and in the quality of their minds and works there is much in common. André Salmon writes in L’Art Décoratif: “Strange that these two men, the one fleeing from the Parnassians and the other from the Impressionists, should yet have dominated from far above the art of their epoch, even while they cared little for its immediate manifestations.” 

Like his friend, Redon is a dreamer of delicate dreams, which his style captures so lightly as not to bruise their butterfly wings. His dreams are symbols of life and death and of all beautiful and exalted human experience, so that when he paints a bowl of flowers it seems abloom with the joy of the world, and a little head of an old man is mysterious with the wisdom of the ages. Pegasus, Phaeton, Apollo appeal to him as types of souls who aspire, and he paints their pathetic little efforts to ride free of earth and go charioteering through heaven—paints them not in a spirit of blatant triumph but of beautiful tragic endeavor. 

He draws pale profiles against the fleeting glory of flowers on the deeper glory of night, he shows people embarking in strange ships for unearthly shores, he pictures Silence with fingers on lip, or the bowed and stricken Ophelia, or Orphus [sic Orpheus] lying garlanded in death, or an enigmatic Christ himself, musing on present the ineffable flashing grace of butterflies on the wing. But through all these proud symbols he never fails to suggest also the deeper mystery, the higher poetry of our inexplicable existence. His colors, gay or pale, are but the garment, his style but the instrument of his imagination. “The spirit of dream, that iridescent marsh flower,” as he calls it, is the light that guides him.

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From this ineffable dreamer to his fellow countrymen in the large east gallery is a long step. It is one of the absurdities of modern classification that the delicate Redon and the blatant Matisse should be bundled roughly together under the same absurd, generic title as “post-impressionists.” If Matisse has admirers in these woods, let them rush to his defense; the present critic, while acknowledging his ability, cannot believe in his sincerity, but finds him an intolerably egoistic bore. 

The finest thing in this room is not French but German. Wilhelm Lembruck’s [sic, Lehmbruck] erect statue of a young girl, which is of an almost Greek simplicity and beauty. Nor would I ignore his kneeling figure, though its deliberate attenuation is somewhat overemphasized. In Brancusi’s heads the overemphasis is carried to a point which tempts the caricaturist. An interesting bit of wood carving by Gauguin is more Alaskan than Tahitian, as if he had been inspired by one section of a totem pole. But there is little sculpture here; its bulk proved too great an obstacle. 

Of the pictures in this room the large decoration and small pictures by Maurice Denis, already commented on, are an interesting and personal note. Emilie Charmy’s violent landscapes are strongly interpretive of certain dramatic aspects of nature, and Albert Marquet’s gray canvases “Hamburg” and “Inundation” have a stern power. Jules Flandrin’s “Venice,” Pierre Laprade’s “Yellow Roses,” and Georges Roualt’s water colors are all alluring in different ways. But I am not quite captured by “The Two Friends” of Alexander Blanchet, still less by the blocky animals and landscapes of Dunoyer de Segonzac. 

Of the cubists, who are gathered together in gallery 53, enough—nay, perhaps too much—has already been written. The chief difficulty with these gentlemen is one which they would deny with scorn, one which they abhor in those ornaments of dark ages, the story telling pictures of half a century and more ago. They are too literary, too bent on telling a story, even though the terms in which they tell it are new and different. There is nothing so dangerous as a theory of either art or life, for both art and life are bigger than any theory which can be made to contain them; they break through its barriers and prove it ridiculous. 

These cubist pictures are all theory; they are so completely the product of a theory that there is little picture left. They try to tell the story of a nude lady coming downstairs, or a draped one playing the piano, or a prince talking to a mute; and the result is that the picture quality is as completely forgotten as it was by that immortal who painted “Breaking Home Ties.” Both these extremists miss the point; they try to express the pictorially inexpressible. And so these canvases of Messrs. Picabia, Picasso, Sousa Cardozas [sic Souza Cardoso], and the rest are probably of no more permanent value than the aforesaid domestic scene. 

However, as experiments in a new and untried field they are interesting. They may be the first dim gropings toward an art of pure color which may delight the twenty-first century as symphonic music delights us. This possibility should make us hesitate to deny them place and space and a due degree of respectful consideration. After all, the future will not be ours, incredible, impossible as the fact is. 

The English and American galleries remain to be considered next week. Also the water color exhibition, which is rather mild this year.

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The exhibition of sixty-eight pictures by Pauline Palmer, which occupies one of the Antiquarian galleries, is something of a surprise even to her best friends. The vitality and variety of her work is extraordinary, indicating a truly amazing development during the last few years. 

The exhibition includes portraits, figure subjects, and Italian scenes. “The Winter Girl” is an admirable study of a child, saved from merely clever realism by its sympathy, its expression of childish wistfulness. The “Portrait of My Mother,” “Old Rose and Silver,” and the St. Louis prize picture are also finely incisive studies of different types; and in “The Pride of the Family” the rosy peasant baby is marvelously, adorably infantile. 

Some of the street scenes and mural scenes are altogether delightful. “Under the Arches in Sunny Italy” is a beautiful expression of the scene’s harmony of blue water and white columns, and the little figures and gay baskets give perfect balance to the composition. Two or three silvery Verona scenes, two from Porto Fino, one of San Fruttuoso, and two or three of Venice are painted in a spirit of gay sympathy with the life and color of the ever moving panorama, and technically they are singularly fluid and lucent. And some of the tiny pictures are too fine to be neglected; “On the Beach” especially is a delicious little figure study, and the small Italian street scenes of vital quality are too numerous to mention. 

This exhibition gives Mrs. Palmer a strong push forward to a high place among American painters. 

An exhibition of fourteen paintings by Childe Hassam will open tomorrow at O’Brien’s. Mrs. Blair’s beautiful interior of a girl at a piano is included, and other examples of unusual importance, which will be reviewed next week. 

At Field’s gallery an exhibition of ten American painters will open tomorrow. Colin Campbell Cooper, John F. Carlson, Guy C. Wiggins, and Edmund W. Greacen are among the artists represented. 

At Moulton & Rickett’s will be shown some western landscapes and marines by James E. McBurney of California.

The death in Paris last week of L. M. Boutet de Monvel, the famous French painter and illustrator, will be a grief to his numerous Chicago friends. Fifteen years or more ago M. de Monvel visited Chicago and painted a number of exquisite portraits of children, winning the hearts of young and old by his many genial qualities. For some years he has been an invalid, and thus he was unable to complete his Joan of Arc decorations for the church at Domrémy. Of these large panels the Art institute now owns one.