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The Last Phase of Impressionism Author(s): Roger E. Fry Source: The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, Vol. 12, No. 60 (Mar., 1908), pp. 374-376Published by: The Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/857422Accessed: 13-04-2015 19:52 UTC

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This content downloaded from 143.106.1.138 on Mon, 13 Apr 2015 19:52:40 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Notes on Various Works of Art entire mass of the scaffolding, are raised by special screws, and can be lengthened by means of joining fresh trunks of the U-shaped irons at the base. These screws in their turn are most simply worked by screw-bolts and nuts, and the height can be regulated to a nicety by merely a greater or lesser number of revolutions. The actual extent of the hoisting of the scaffolding is generally limited to one metre and a half (a little less than 5 feet) at a time, and it is calculated that about twenty-six hoistings will be required to reach the actual bell- chamber. Every time that the hoisting has to be done eight men are told off for the job, which takes about an hour to do ; and in order to ensure absolute exactitude in timing the manoeuvre an electric bell is rung on each of the four sides of the tower at the same moment.

The advantages of this movable scaffolding are many. The work can be continued in wet weather as well as in dry; the workmen are protected

during the summer from the sun's rays; the drawback of pulling down and re-erecting the roof every time a higher elevation is required is obviated; the brickwork is no sooner completed than it is at once exposed to the air-an exposure that will help to wear off the brand-new look of the walls ; no pressure is exerted either within or without on the building, and all risk of accidents is done away with. An electric lift inside the tower carries up the building materials, and there is some idea that this lift will be left for the con- venience of visitors when the work is done.

The height of the completed Campanile, with the bell-chamber and the steeple on the top, has to reach an altitude of ioo metres. As it stands at this moment the height attained is 17 metres; it is calculated that some 3 metres are added every month, and at this rate the chief engineer is hopeful that in 191o the work will be accomplished and the Campanile finished. ALETHEA WIEL.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR THE LAST PHASE OF IMPRESSIONISM

To the Editor of THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE. SIR,-As a constant reader and frequent admirer

of your editorials on matters of art I should like to enter a protest against a tendency, which I have noticed, to treat modern art in a less serious and sympathetic spirit than that which you adopt towards the work of the older masters. This tendency I find particularly marked in an article with the above heading. The movement which is there condemned, not without a certain com- placency which to me savours of Pharisaism, is one that surely merits more sympathetic study. Whatever we may think of its aims, it is the work of perfectly serious and capable artists. There is, so far as I can see, no reason to doubt the genuine- ness of their conviction nor their technical efficiency. Moreover in your condemnation you have, I think, hit upon an unfortunate parallel. You liken the pure Impressionists, of whom we may take Monet as a type, to the naturalists of the fifteenth century in Italy, and these Neo-Impres- sionists to the ' now-forgotten Flemish and Italian eclectics.' Now the eclectic school did not follow on the school of naturalism; there intervened first the great classic masters who used the materials of naturalism for the production of works marked by an intense feeling for style, and second, the Man- nerists, in whom the styles of particular masters were exaggerated and caricatured. The eclectics set themselves the task of modifying this exaggera- tion by imbibing doses of all the different manners.

Now these Neo-Impressionists follow straight upon the heels of the true Impressionists. There has intervened no period of great and then of exaggerated stylistic art. Nor has Impressionism any true analogy with naturalism, since the natur-

alism of the fifteenth century was concerned with form, and Impressionism with that aspect of appearance in which separate forms are lost in the whole continuum of sensation.

There is, I believe, a much truer analogy which might lead to a different judgment. Impressionism has existed before, in the Roman art of the Empire, and it too was followed, as I believe inevitably, by a movement similar to that observable in the Neo- Impressionists-we may call it for convenience Byzantinism. In the mosaics of Sta Maria Mag- giore as elucidated by Richter and Taylor ('The Golden Age of Classic Christian Art') one can see something of this transformation from Impres- sionism in the original work to Byzantinism in subsequent restorations. It is probably a mistake to suppose, as is usually done, that Byzantinism was due to a loss of the technical ability to be realistic, consequent upon barbarian invasions. In the Eastern Empire there was never any loss of technical skill; indeed, nothing could surpass the perfection of some Byzantine craftsmanship. Byzantinism was the necessary outcome of Impres- sionism, a necessary and inevitable reaction from it.

Impressionism accepts the totality of appear- ances and shows how to render that ; but thus to say everything amounts to saying nothing-there is left no power to express the personal attitude and emotional conviction. The organs of expression-- line, mass, colour-have become so fused together, so lost in the flux of appearance, that they cease to deliver any intelligible message, and the next step that is taken must be to re-assert these. The first thing the Neo-Impressionist must do is to recover the long obliterated contour and to fill it with simple undifferentiated masses.

I should like to consider in -this light some of 374

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Letters to the Editor the most characteristic painters of this movement. Of these M. Signac is the only one to whom the title Neo-Impressionist properly applies. Here is a man feeling in a vague, unconscious way a dis- satisfaction at the total licence of Impressionism, and he deliberately invents for himself a restraining formula-that of rectangular blobs of paint. He puts himself deliberately where more fortunate circumstances placed the mosaic artist, and then he lets himself go as far in the direction of realistic Impressionism as his formula will allow. I do not defend this, in spite of the subtle powers of observation and the ingenuity which M. Signac displays, because I do not think it is ever worth while to imitate in one medium the effects of another, but his case is interesting as a tribute to the need of the artist to recover some constraint : to escape, at whatever cost, from the anarchic licence of Impressionism.

Two other artists, MM. C6zanne and Paul Gauguin, are not really Impressionists at all. They are proto-Byzantines rather than Neo-Impres- sionists. They have already attained to the contour, and assert its value with keen emphasis. They fill the contour with wilfully simplified and unmodulated masses, and rely for their whole effect upon a well- considered co-ordination of the simplest elements. There is no need for me to praise C6zanne-his position is already assured-but if one compares his still-life in the International Exhibition with Monet's, I think it will be admitted that it marks a great advance in intellectual content. It leaves far less to the casual dictation of natural appearance. The relations of every tone and colour are deliber- ately chosen and stated in unmistakable terms. In the placing of objects, in the relation of one form to another, in the values of colour which indicate mass, and in the purely decorative elements of design, C6zanne's work seems to me to betray a finer, more scrupulous artistic sense.

In Gauguin's work you admit that 'some trace of design and some feeling for the decorative arrange- ment of colour may still be found,' but I cannot think that the author of so severely grandiose, so strict a design as the Femmes Maories or of so splen- didly symbolic a decoration as the Te Arii Vahindi deserves the fate of so contemptuous a recognition. Here is an artist of striking talent who, in spite of occasional boutades, has seriously set himself to rediscover some of the essential elements of design without throwing away what his immediate pre- decessors had taught him.

And herein lies a great distinction between French and English art (I am speaking only of the serious art in either case), namely, that the French artist never quite loses hold of the thread of tradi- tion. However vehement his pursuit of new aims, he takes over what his predecessors have handed to him as part of the material of his new formula, whereas we in England, with our ingrained habits

of Protestantism and non-conformity, the moment we find ourselves out of sympathy with our imme- diate past, go off at a tangent, or revert to some imagined pristine purity.

The difference is one upon which we need not altogether flatter ourselves; for the result is that French art has a certain continuity and that at each point the artist is working with some surely ascertained and clearly grasped principles. Thus Cezanne and Gauguin, even though they have disentangled the simplest elements of design from the complex of Impressionism, are not archaizers; and the flaw in all archaism is, I take it, that it endeavours to attain results by methods which it can only guess at, and of which it has no practical and immediate experience.

Two other artists seen at the International deserve consideration in this connexion : Maurice Denis and Simon Bussy. Against the former it might be possible to bring the charge of archaism, but he, too, has taken over the colour-schemes of the Impres- sionists, and in his design shows how much he has learned from Puvis de Chavannes. His pictures here are not perhaps the most satisfactory examples of his art, but any one who has observed his work during the past five years will recognize how spontaneous is his sense of the significance of gesture: how fresh and genuine his decorative invention.

M. Bussy is well known already in England for his singularly poetical interpretation of landscape, and though at first sight his picture at the Inter- national may strike one as a wilful caprice, a little consideration shows, I think, that he has endea- voured to express, by odd means perhaps, but those which appeal to him, a sincerely felt poetical mood, and that the painting shows throughout a perfectly conscientious and deliberate artistic pur- pose. Here again the discoveries of Impressionism are taken over, but applied with quite a new feeling for their imaginative appeal.

I do not wish for a moment to make out that the works I have named are great masterpieces, or that the artists who executed them are possessed of great genius. What I do want to protest against is the facile assumption that an attitude to art which is strange, as all new attitudes are at first, is the result of wilful mystification and caprice on the artists' part. It was thus that we greeted the now classic Whistler ; it was thus that we expressed ourselves towards Monet, who is already canonized in order to damn the 'Neo-Impressionists.' Much as I admire Monet's directness and honesty of purpose, I confess that I see greater possibilities of the expression of imaginative truth in the tradition which his successors are creating,

I am, Sir, etc., ROGER E. FRY.

[Our contributor writes: 'I cannot express regret for the article of which Mr. Fry complains,

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Letters to the Editor if only because it has elicited such an illuminating reply from him. If, as he suggests, an avowed preference for modern artists other than "Neo- Impressionists" or "proto-Byzantines" constitutes Pharisaism, well, I must accept the compliment. A large portion of his letter, however, is devoted to the defence of artists and pictures that my article did not criticize or mention. It is needless, there- fore, to discuss Mr. Fry's views (even if I differed materially from him, which I do not) as to MM. C6zanne and Simon Bussy, or as to certain pictures by M. Gauguin which are not exhibited at the New Gallery. We may thus concentrate attention upon MM. Signac and Maurice Denis, for M. Matisse seems beyond help even from Mr. Fry's scholarly eloquence. It will be enough to urge against both the lack of that "fullness of content" on which Mr. Fry himself has written so well in the intro- duction to his edition of Reynolds's " Discourses." Even Mr. Fry could hardly defend M. Signac's landscapes on this count; and the panels of M. Denis are in no better case. The figure of St. Cecilia, for example, has possibly the naivete of a convent schoolgirl's ideal music-mistress (whose one failing is faith in the village dressmaker), but no more, and the other symbols of humanity with which he covers his canvas are, if possible, even less significant. No doubt the effort of combining materials borrowed from so many sources into a coherent and not ill-coloured whole may have been considerable, but that is no proof of excel- lence. Art is a matter of results, not of the labour involved in seeking them; and the few men who have had something to say are justly valued more than the many who, often with much elaborate rhetoric, have spent their lives in saying nothing at all. If MM. Signac and Maurice Denis had anything to say that was worth saying, we could forgive almost any failing in their method of expression.

'All sensible critics will agree with Mr. Fry that a return to a more severe formula of design (whether Byzantine or not) is eminently desirable-nay, absolutely necessary-in the interest of our artistic health. Yet such a formula by itself is useless. Only when it is vitalized and inspired by some adequate motive can a formula become the foundation of a work of art. Without such a motive, the noblest formula in the world is like an inflated bladder which a pin-prick of honest criticism will burst.']

THE WALKER-HENEAGE PORTRAITS To the Editor of THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE. DEAR SIR,-In connexion with the most inte-

resting article on the four Walker-Heneages (Sir Joshua's), I feel very sorry that I was unable some years ago to find time to search the whole of England to discover the whereabouts of portraits now belonging to branches of families bearing

other names. I did the best I could by noting the existence of these pictures, without being able to say who owned them. May I be permitted to atone for my neglect by stating a few facts that will, I believe, add interest to these four pictures ? The two ladies must have been painted before they married. The eldest daughter, Mary, died un- married in 1775. The second, Dyonisia, married the Rev. Theophilus Meredith, of Ross, in 1772. The third, Cecil Ann, married Lieut.-Col. Thomas Calcraft in 1764. Their brother, John Walker, who took the name of Heneage, married Arabella, daughter of Jonathan Cope, and died childlesss in

80oi. The Captain Walker who sat in 1758 must have

been the third son, Colebrooke, as the second son, James Britton Walker, was killed at St. Cas in 1754. Captain Thomas Calcraft, who also sat in 1758, became Lieut.-General November 20, 1782, and his only son, John, became General August 12, 1819, and died unmarried in 1830. Mrs. Walker (the mother) was Dyonisia, daughter of James Colebrooke and sister to Sir James and Sir George Colebrooke.

Her husband, John Walker of Lineham, died April 27, 1758, a little while before the pictures were painted. Yours faithfully,

ALGERNON GRAVES. 42 Old Bond Street,

4th Feb., 1908. DUBLIN MUSEUM

To the Editor of THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE. DEAR SIR,-To bring students into closer touch

with this museum, I am offering prizes for draw- ings from objects in our collections to students of the Metropolitan School of Art. The competing work must be done within the year commencing the Ist of April next. You will greatly oblige me by communicating this matter to your readers.

Yours faithfully, G. N. COUNT PLUNKETT,

Director. Kildare Street, Dublin,

Ist Feb., I9q8. ART AT THE FRANCO-BRITISH

EXHIBITION To the Editor of THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE. SIR,-As it appears to be generally supposed that

the Fine Art Section of the Franco-British Exhibi- tion will permit of the representation of artists on a large scale, it is as well to state, for the information of those interested, that this is altogether erroneous, the space being, in fact, extremely limited.

The Art Building has been equally divided be- tween France and Great Britain. In the British Section there is room to hang only about 400 oil paintings and 400 water colours, and there will

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Article Contentsp. 374p. 375p. 376

Issue Table of ContentsThe Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, Vol. 12, No. 60 (Mar., 1908), pp. i-iv+330-397Volume Information [pp. 391-397]Front Matter [pp. i-iv]Exhibitions Open during MarchA Greek Statue from Trentham [pp. 330-333+335]Turner's Path from Nature to Art [pp. 335-337+340-342]Notes on English Artists II-Turner's Lectures at the Academy [pp. 343-346]The Painters of North Italy [pp. 347-349]Two Landscape Drawings by Rembrandt [pp. 349-351+353+355]Stephen H., Medallist and Painter [pp. 355-357+360-363]The Rose-and-Crown Hall Mark of Norwich Plate [pp. 363-366]Early Stained Glass and Romanesque Architecture at Rheims [pp. 366-369]Notes on Various Works of ArtThe Origin of Three Pictures by Cuyp [pp. 372-373]The Campanile of S. Mark's and Its Scaffolding [pp. 373-374]

Letters to the EditorThe Last Phase of Impressionism [pp. 374-376]The Walker-Heneage Portraits [p. 376]Dublin Museum [p. 376]Art at the Franco-British Exhibition [pp. 376-377]

Art Books of the MonthSculptureReview: untitled [p. 377]Review: untitled [p. 377]Review: untitled [pp. 377-378]

PlateReview: untitled [p. 378]Review: untitled [pp. 378-379]

Painting and EngravingReview: untitled [pp. 379-380]Review: untitled [p. 380]Review: untitled [p. 380]Review: untitled [p. 380]Review: untitled [p. 380]Review: untitled [p. 381]Review: untitled [p. 381]

MiscellaneousReview: untitled [p. 381]Review: untitled [pp. 381-382]Review: untitled [p. 382]Review: untitled [p. 382]Review: untitled [p. 382]Review: Small Books and Pamphlets [pp. 382-383]

Art in France [pp. 383-384]Art in Germany [pp. 384+387]Art in AmericaTwo Works Formerly Attributed to Herri Met de Bles [pp. 386-388]The Art of William Blake and a Recent Book [pp. 388-390]Rembrandt and Mountains [p. 390]

Back Matter