Manet and the Post-Impressionists

"HONORARY COMMITTEE
THE RT. HON. THE EARL OF PLYMOUTH, P.C., C.B.
THE RT. HON. LORD RIBBLESDALE, P.C., J.P.
THE RT. HON. LEWIS HARCOURT, M.P., P.C.
SIR CHARLES HOLROYD
(Director of the National Gallery.)
SIR EDGAR VINCENT, K.C.M.G.
CLAUDE PHILLIPS, ESQ.
(Keeper of the Wallace Collection.)
HERBERT COOK, ESQ., F.S.A.
JAMES PATON, ESQ.
(Director of the Glasgow Art Gallery.)
JAMES CAW, ESQ.
(Director of the Scottish National Gallery.)
WHITWORTH WALLIS, ESQ., F.S.A.
(Birmingham Art Gallery.)
COUNT KESSLER
PRINCESS VON WREDE
MADAME COHEN GOSSCHALK BONGER
WALTER BUTTERWORTH, ESQ.
CLIVE BELL, ESQ.
M. PAUL LEPRIEUR
(Keeper of the Louvre Pictures.)
LE COMTE ROBERT DE MOTESQUIOU-FEZENSAC
M. ALPHONSE KANN
M. THÉODORE DURET
M. BERNHEIM JEUNE
M. AUGUSTE PELLERIN
M. OCTAVE MIRBEAU

*The ladies and gentlemen on the Honorary Committee, though they are
not responsible for the choice of the pictures, by lending their names have
been kind enough to give this project their general support.


EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

ROGER FRY, ESQ.
LIONEL CUST, ESQ., M. V. O.
(Keeper of the King's Pictures.)
PROFESSOR HOLMES
(Director of the National Portrait Gallery.)
LADY OTTOLINE MORRELL
LORD HENRY BENTINCK
DR. MEYER RIEFSTAHL (MUNICH)
ROBERT DELL, ESQ. (PARIS)

Secretary.
DESMOND MACCARTHY, ESQ."

10am - 6pm

Nr. of pages: 38 [PDF page number 48].
Holding Institution: online: archive.org

1

[no author]: The Post-Impressionists, p. 7-13

"THE POST-IMPRESSIONISTS

THE pictures collected together in the present Exhibi-
tion are the work of a group of artists who cannot be
defined by any single term. The term "Synthesists,"
which has been applied to them by learned criti-
cism, does indeed express a quality underlying their
diversity; and it is the principal business of this
introduction to expand the meaning of that word,
which sounds too like the hiss of an angry gander
to be a happy appellation. As a definition it has
the drawback that this quality, common to all, is not
always the one most impressive in each artist. In
no school does individual temperament count for more.
In fact, it is the boast of those who believe in this
school, that its methods enable the individuality of the
artist to find completer self-expression in his work than
is possible to those who have committed themselves to
representing objects more literally. This, indeed, is
the first source of their quarrel with the Impressionists:
the Post-Impressionists consider the Impressionists
too naturalistic.
Yet their own connection with Impressionism is
extremely close; Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh all
learnt in the Impressionist school. There are pictures
on the walls by these three artists, painted in their
earlier years, which at first strike the eye as being more
impressionist than anything else; but, nevertheless,
the connection of these artists with the Impressionists
is accidental rather than intrinsic.
By the year 1880 the Impressionists had practically
won their battle; nor is it likely any group of artists
will ever have to fight so hard a one again. They have
conquered for future originality, if not the right of a
respectful hearing, at least of a dubious attention. By
1880 they had convinced practically everybody whose
opinion counted, that their methods and ideas were at
any rate those of artists, not those of cranks and charlatans.
About this date the reaction against Impressionism,
which this Exhibition represents, began to be distinctly
felt. The two groups had one characteristic in
common: the resolve of each artist to express his own
temperament, and never to permit contemporary ideals
to dictate to him what was beautiful, significant, and
worthy' to be painted. But the main current of Im-
pressionism lay along the line of recording hitherto
unrecognised aspects of objects; they were interested
in analysing the play of light and shadow into a multi-
plicity of distinct colours; they refined upon what was
already illusive in nature. In the pictures of Seurat,
Cross, and Signac here exhibited, this scientific interest
in the representation of colour is still uppermost; what
is new in these pictures is simply the method of
representing the vibration of light by painting
objects in dots and squares. The Post-Impressionists
on the other hand were not concerned with re-
cording impressions of colour or light. They were
interested in the discoveries of the Impressionists only
so far as these discoveries helped them to express
emotions which the objects themselves evoked;
their attitude towards nature was far more independent,
not to say rebellious. It is true that from the earliest
times artists have regarded nature as "the mistress of
the masters"; but it is only in the nineteenth century
that the close imitation of nature, without any conscious
modification by the artist, has been proclaimed as a
dogma. The Impressionists were artists, and their
imitations of appearances were modified, consciously and
unconsciously, in the direction of unity and harmony;
being artists they were forced to select and arrange. But
the receptive, passive attitude towards the appearances
of things often hindered them from rendering their real
significance. Impressionism encouraged an artist to
paint a tree as it appeared to him at the moment
under particular circumstances. It insisted so much
upon the importance of his rendering this exact
impression that his work often completely failed to
express a tree at all; as transferred to canvas it was
just so much shimmer and colour. The "treeness" of
the tree was not rendered at all; all the emotion and
associations such as trees may be made to convey in
poetry were omitted.
J
This is the fundamental cause of difference between
the Impressionists and the group of painters whose
pictures hang on these walls. They said in effect to
the Impressionists: "You have explored nature in
every direction, and all honour to you; but your
methods and principles have hindered artists from
exploring and expressing that emotional significance
which lies in things, and is the most important subject
matter of art. There is much more of that significance
in the work of earlier artists who had not a tenth part
of your skill in representing appearance. We will
aim at that; though by our simplification or nature
we shock and disconcert our contemporaries, whose
eyes are now accustomed to your revelations, as much
as you originally disconcerted your contemporaries by
your subtleties and complications." And there is no
denying that the work of the Post-Impressionists is
sufficiently disconcerting. It may even appear ridicu-
lous to those who do not recall the fact that a good
rocking-horse often has more of the true horse about it
than an instantaneous photograph of a Derby winner.
The artists who felt most the restraints which the
Impressionist attitude towards nature imposed upon
them, naturally looked to the mysterious and isolated
figure of Cézanne as their deliverer. Cézanne him-
self had come in contact with Manet and his art is
derived directly from him. Manet, it is true, is also
regarded as the father of Impressionism. To him Im-
pressionism owes much of its power, interest and
importance. He was a revolutionary in the sense that
he refused to accept the pictorial convention of his
time. He went back to seventeenth-century Spain
for his inspiration. Instead of accepting the convention
of light and shade falling upon objects from the side
he chose what seemed an impossibly difficult method
of painting, that of representing them with light falling
full upon them. This led to a very great change in the
method of modelling, and to a simplification of planes in
his pictures which resulted in something closely akin to
simple linear designs. He adopted, too, hitherto un-
known oppositions of colour. In fact he endeavoured
to get rid of chiaroscuro.
Regarded as a hopeless revolutionary, he was natura[ll]y
drawn to other young artists, who found themselves in
the same predicament; and through his connection with
them and with Monet he gradually changed his severe,
closely constructed style for one in which the shifting,
elusive aspects of nature were accentuated. In this
way he became one of the Impressionists and in hi^
turn influenced them. Cézanne, however, seized upon
precisely that side of Manet which Monet and
the other Impressionists ignored. Cézanne, when
rendering the novel aspects of nature to which
Impressionism was drawing attention, aimed first at a
design which should produce the coherent, architectural
effect of the masterpieces of primitive art. Because
Cézanne thus showed how it was possible Lo pass from the
complexity of the appearance of things to the geo
metrical simplicity which design demands, his art has
appealed enormously to later designers. They recognise
in him a guide capable of leading them out of the cul de
sac into which naturalism had led them. Cézanne himself
did not use consciously his new-found method of expres-
sion to convey ideas and emotions. He appealed first and
foremost to the eye, and to the eye alone. But the
path he indicated was followed by two younger artists,
Van Gogh and Gauguin with surprising results. Van
Gogh's morbid temperament 'forced him to express
,in paint his strongest emotions, and in the methods of
Cézanne he found a means of conveying the wildest
and strangest visions conceived by any artist of our
time. Yet he, too, accepts in the main the general
appearance of nature; only before every scene and
every object he searches first for the quality which
originally made it appeal so strangely to him: that he
is determined to record at any sacrifice.
Gauguin is more of a theorist. He felt that while
modern art had opened up undiscovered aspects of
nature, it had to a great extent neglected the funda-
mental laws of abstract form, and above all had failed
to realise the power which abstract form and colour can
exercise over the imagination of the spectator. He
deliberately chose, therefore, to become a decorative
painter, believing that this was the most direct way of
impressing upon the imagination the emotion he wished
to perpetuate. In his Tahitian pictures by extreme
simplification he endeavoured to bring back into modern
painting the significance of gesture and movement
characteristic of primitive art.
The followers of these men are pushing their ideas
further and further. In the work of Matisse, especially,
this search for an abstract harmony of line, for rhythm,
has been carried to lengths which often deprive the
figure of all appearance of nature. The general effect
of his pictures is that of a return to primitive, even
perhaps of a return to barbaric, art. This is inevitably
disconcerting; but before dismissing such pictures as
violently absurd, it is fair to consider the nature of the
problem which the artist who would use abstract design
as his principle of expression, has to face. His relation
to a modern public is peculiar. In the earliest ages of
art the artist's public were able to share in each successive
triumph of his skill, for every advance he made was
also an advance towards a more obvious representation
of things as they appeared to everybody. Primitive
art, like the art of children, consists not so much in an
attempt to represent what the eye perceives, as to put
a line round a mental conception of the object. Like
the work of the primitive artist, the pictures children
draw are often extraordinarily expressive. But what
delights them is to find they are acquiring more and
more skill in producing a deceptive likeness of the
object itself. Give them a year of drawing lessons and
they will probably produce results which will give
the greatest satisfaction to them and their relations;
but to the critical eye the original expressiveness will
have vanished completely from their work.
The development of primitive art (for here we are
dealing with men and not children) is the gradual ab-
sorption of each newly observed detail into an already
established system of design. Each new detail is
hailed with delight by their public. But there comes a
point when the accumulations of an increasing skill in
mere representation begin to destroy the expressive-
ness of the design, and then, though a large section of
the public continue to applaud, the artist grows uneasy.
He begins to try to unload, to simplify the drawing and
painting, by which natural objects are evoked, in order
to recover the lost expressiveness and life. He aims at
synthesis in design; that is to say, he is prepared to
subordinate consciously his power of representing the
parts of his picture as plausibly as possible, to the
expressiveness of his whole design. But in this retro-
gressive movement he has the public, who have become
accustomed to extremely plausible imitations of nature,
against him at every step; and what is more, his own
self-consciousness hampers him as well.
The movement in art represented in this exhibition
is widely spread. Although, with the exception of the
Dutchman, Van Gogh, all the artists exhibited are
Frenchmen, the school has ceased to be specifically a
French one. It has found disciples in Germany,
Belgium, Russia, Holland, Sweden. There are
Americans, Englishmen and Scotchmen in Paris who
are working and experimenting along the same lines.
But the works of the Post- Impressionists are hardly
known in England, although so much discussed upon the
Continent. The exhibition organised by Mr. Robert
Dell at Brighton last year has been our only chance
of seeing them. The promoters of this exhibition
have therefore thought it would be interesting to
provide an opportunity for a greater number to judge
these artists. The ladies and gentlemen on the
Honorary Committee, though they are not responsible
for the choice of the pictures, by lending their names
have been kind enough to give this project their
general support."

"The Post Impressionists, p. 7-13
"Bronze and Pottery" (End Gallery), cat. no. 1-22, p. 36-38

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Other Mediums listed