| Let art take on a new dimension at this moment, I do not believe it; and yet, that it evolves, I believe it. The abuse, which by the processes of imitation, has been carried out in these last years by the Impressionist vision, has determined a legitimate reaction, which is beginning to become clearer, in favor of character and style, forgotten for too long. . I am particularly convinced that the imagination will regain its rights. We are already astonished at the singular contempt in which our elders held it: they regarded it as a purely literary faculty, while it is the universally creative force, and wrongly abandoned it to the poor people of the School.
So I thought that Impressionism will soon have lived. It is more than the exploitation of a formula instead of corresponding to the expression of a feeling. From the annotation of fugitive appearances Monet and Sisley drew all that could be drawn. But rarely an effort of art remains unproductive. For me, painters must not persist in remaining specialized workers in their technical work: they can thus be inspired by this love of the trade, bequeathed to us by Impressionism, no longer to fix fleeting impressions, but to illuminate for a moment the eternal character of things.
Whistler and Fantin, the one with more aristocratic artists, the other more subject to the teaching of the masters, have shown us that there is exquisite intimacy, tender melancholy and refined under the apparent reticence of modern feelings. They made us see, especially the first, that the sober gestures, without dramatic nobility, of our contemporaries could be elevated to the grandest style.
Particularly profound and lasting is the influence of Gauguin, who, boldly going back to primitive sources, has translated, with a sovereign will, into decorative harmonies, compositions of the highest style where triumphs in a pantheistic synthesis the lush life of nature.
Close to this prodigiously conscious artist appears this admirable intuitive: Cezanne. By dint of sincerity, and by the intensity of his emotion, Cezanne felt the beauty which emerges from the forms, and, without correcting them, without arranging them, according to the arbitrary and, in a most admirable fantasy of a Poussin, he expressed tacit pride and the natural style of things. He must remain an isolated. His pupils could only provide by the most vain manual skill a very personal vision which can not be reduced to a formula. The masters I think most often are the Eastern hieraticists; the primitives; Angelico, Botticelli and Titian among the ancients; Delacroix, Ingres and Gauguin among the moderns.
I do not expect everything from nature. I see in her a dictionary - according to a famous word - an inexhaustible source of emotion. She offers them pell-mell; it is up to us to coordinate them, to synthesize them by line and color. It is up to the art historian to appreciate the part of intuition and the part of consciousness that we put into our work. |