SHOCKS IN ART

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1012, 30 December 1910, Page 3

SHOCKS IN ART

I "POST-IMPRESSIONISTS" IN LONDON. INTERESTING REVIEW. Only .the faintest echoes of the great movement that has transformed and to a certain extent disintegrated French art during the last twenty years had been heard in London, except in the narrow circle of the initiated. (writes "P.G.K" in somo interesting notes in the "Daily Mail" to hand this week) when the announcement was made that an exhibition of post-impressionist art was to, bo held this autumn at the Grafton Galleries. The great moment has arrived. , What has been slowly instilled during twenty years into the far mors rcceptivo mind of the Parisian, burst upon London with a sudden rusli liko a flood through the. opened sluice-gate. Intellectual London is suddenly .provided with an altogether unprecedented artistic sensation —and unintelleetual London will no doubt- be at-

tracted by curiSsity, will laugh and mock and-jeer at that which is absurd together with what is merely misunderstood. ' ■ Post-Impressionism originated in the growing conviction among a few artists trained ill the Impressionist Schcol that the imitation of nature in paint, based on the subtle analysis of light, interfered with the solution of the far more important artistic problem of expressing the emotional significance of the visual world. This solution was to be found' in a more synthetic method. Their simplification of nature and their symbolic use of colour are really ail admission that nature cannot , be mirrored by pigment, and at the.same time a bold assertion that art has a nobler function than the mere, holding up of a mirror to nature. The foundation of their principlo is to be found in the emphatic design and abstention of the tise of chiaroscuro that led Manet to be regarded by his contemporaries as a revolutionary. At the present Wxhibition, where ho.is rightly included as the fountain-head of Post-impressionist art,

he appears—a classic I Gauguin, Cezanne, Van Gogh, who. are the leaders of the new school, have gone so much further as to make the work of Manet almost look conventional. And these' leaders, whose art is the outcome of, n, sound logic, -.are moderate compared with their more youthful followers. THE EXTREMISTS. ' Of these.extremists Henri-Matisse is, perhaps, He can only be defended by sophistical argument, and not .by logic. . To say that his ."woman with the green eyes" is exactly the sort of . tiling that would bo painted ■ by: a child of six, if it were, placed in possession of a full palette aiid asked to paint a head and bust of a' woman, is only stating the obvious. Assuming that Henri-Matessi is really serious—which it is pardonable to doubt —one can only explain his perversity in this way: in carrying the striving for supreme simplicity and synthetic summing-up beyond reasonable limits he has come to tho conclusion that it must be safest to rely upon the naive visualising of a child that has not yet been taught to see nature in o. certain manner. "Surely," ho would argue, "those elements in the appcaranco of tilings which would first strike .the uneducated-, cj'e. of a child must the .very elements which are really essential. Let us, therefore, try to rid our mind of all laboriously acquired knowledge and prejudice, and look upon iiiature.with:.the child's, ingenuousness." But lot this principle be applied to other , forms of . art I , Literature would , have to stop at' nonsense verses and .music, at simple nursery songs. There is much at" the, Galleries that deserves -the most serious consideration, and much that apparently verges on imbecility. But even the worst of it is stimulating and vastly preferable—not for permanent possession, but for tho-'. amusement of an hour—to the dull level of thoughtless mediocrity that prevail? at ' most of our exhibitions. Lest ' tho sudden shock of ,the extreme manifestations', of modernism be too much for tho so to

whom this phase of art is terra incognita, let tiiem begin with tho exceptionally interesting display of M. Jules Flandrin's. paintings at the Stafford Gallery in Duke Street, St. James's. M. Flandrin's 'sympathies aro with tho Post-Impressionists, but he belongs to tho moderate section, and would probably be deemed a reactionary by his more advanced brothers of the brush. Familiarity his pictures will lead to a bettor understanding of tho aims of Post-Impressionist art.