Now a fact quite understood and appre ciated by painters is that a painting should not confine itself -to an undue influence of light, and paint anything provided 'it is clear.) Compose, construct, plan large decorative sur faces, balance beautiful quantities, reduce to a proper sense of proportion, thought and sen timent, even a dream, a poem, a symbol, such was the program the followers of the mas ters of 1874 to 1880 outlined. In this eminent role is one of the most famous painters, so misunderstood to-day — Paul Cezanne. Cezanne felt that after such prodigious labor of analysis it was essential to establish a synthesis and re compose after having dissociated. In the quietude of his little home at Aix-en-Provence, Cezanne worked incessantly; according to him impressionism was only a means toward an end — composition and style were his aim, his ultimate goal. This was what he taught to the younger school and it earned for him the repu tation of being a artist so different were his pictures to the easy and anecdotic art then prevalent in the salons. Gauguin yid, garized the Cezanian composition and contrib uted, like his master, to the substitution in the minds of their followers of the sense of the actual for that of the ephemeral. Similarly a curious and refined creator, Gustave Moreau, formed quite an elite of colorists: Desvallieres, Piot, Rouault, Flandrin, Evenepoel, Matisse, Lehmann, Marquet, Braut, Guerin, Manguen, Milcendeau, Bussy, in whom he inculcated a taste for culture and a love for the -masters of the museum. The influence of the myste rious harmonist Odilon Redon should likewise not be overlooked. Thus, briefly summed up, we have the influences which manifested them selves in France on the colorists who exhibited at the Independent Salon and the Salon d'Ats tOmne, while at the official salons the deplorable academic traditions prevailed.
Excesses, incoherenees and -exaggerations took place; we witnessed. the "fames" who de veloped to the point of absurdity the theory of their masters. We also saw the celebrated cubists who likewise carried to the extreme the conceptions of Cezanne. The general princi ples underlying cubipn are quite acceptable and even laudable — it is the result which shocks us. The cubist's conception — and it is his right — is to react against ephemeralistrk against phenomenalism, against form diluted in the air, against volatilized volumes. They desire a return to the constructive school but their error lay in the fact that their constructions were too schematic, based too much on cones and cylindrical cubes. On the other hand tired of the subjects treated on the canvasses displayed in the salons they tried to make of the subjective such a role as to cause it to be preponderating. The greatest mistake these young artists made consisted — by a quite understandable horror of the literal reproduction of an object resolutely turning their back on nature. Now it cannot be too often repeated that an artist can produce nothing of worth without invoking nature. It is not a question of servile copying, of making a "double," but of interpretation the prism of sensibility. Once an
artist endeavors to alienate himself fsom nature, from which he derives an inexhaustible source, an infinite repertoire of forms, rhythms, volumes and colors, he risks becoming en tangled in the phantasms of the abstract, that is to say of the misshapen and the void. What after all are the real theories of the cubists? Our object, they say, is to paint things not as they appear to the eye but as they are seen in the mind, not as one would like them to be but as one knows them to exist, Now how does one know what an object is? By its reality, by its synthesis of volume, under several angles at a time, by its cubic form. Therefore, in order to render decipherable this synthetic form, necessarily complex, it is incumbent to simplify it, reduce it to its principal elements, and in this way arrive at a geometrical figure which presents the aspect of a sketch by a care ful student of the gcole des Beaux Arts— while pretending it to be a synthesis of a part of creation. The cubists desire that the paint ing shall not reproduce the flat, superficial and literal reality, shall no longer be a reoctition of the monotonous exhibits in the world's gal leries, but suggest, by simplifications of simul taneous imbroglios, the' voluminous objectivity of beings and things. The extraordinary part of this doctrine is that, promulgated by young en thusiastic artists who preferably employ the language of the philosophers, follow the tenets of mathematicians and juggle with Euclid, Descartes and Bergson, the sum total of their striving results in the production of works com parable to a schoolboy's efforts. Octave Mir beau once compared them to a manufacturer of modern furniture who in his endeavor to make something •really striking in the way of complete ornamentation finished by producing —quite unconsciously —a piece of furniture of a Louis XVI simplicity. The cubist, like a beginner or a schoolboy, draws a tree or a human being in a pentagon, a hexagon, a cube or a square.
Is this laughable? Not particularly. These innovative ,artists are sincere. That a few "farceurs" (humbugs) are to be found in their ranks no one will dispute, but the majority of the cubists are honest and in the belief of their principles. There does not exist in the whole history Of art another example of such a collective mystification as that in novated by the cubists. They wish to render visible at one and the same time the side one sees and that which is unseen. We can reply to, them: "Reveal that which we do not see, express the invisible, the inner and profound reality of beings and objects, is verily the goal to which all artists should aim." The painter's mission is above- all to show us a landscape— not merely a corner of a field or a part of a tree, but by his latent poesy,. his very soul, transports us to the country itself. In this respect we have Amiel's famous phrase "le pay sage est un etat de Tame" ("the landscape is a state of the soul").