Since Cézanne | Page 8

this is about as much as at the moment can be
claimed for either of these masters. Both Renoir and Degas lived well
on into the period of which I am writing; but though both were admired,
the former immensely, neither up to the present has had much direct
influence on contemporary painting.
From 1908--I choose that year to avoid all risk of ante-dating--there
existed side by side, and apparently in alliance, with the Fauves a
school of theoretical painters. Of Cubism I have said my say elsewhere:
if I have some doubts as to whether, as a complete theory of painting, it
has a future, I have none that what it has already achieved is
remarkable. Also, I recognize its importance as a school of experiments,
some of which are sure to bear fruit and leave a mark on history. Of the
merits of many of its professors I say nothing, because they are
manifest and admitted. Picasso stands apart: he is the inventor and most
eminent exponent, yet I refuse to call him Cubist because he is so many
other things. Braque, who at present confines himself to abstractions,
and to taste and sensibility adds creative power, is to my mind the best
of the bunch: while Léger, Gris, Gleizes, and Metzinger are four
painters who, if they did not limit themselves to a means of expression
which to most people is still perplexing, if not disagreeable, would be
universally acclaimed for what they are--four exceptionally inventive
artists, each possessing his own peculiar and precious sense of colour
and design.
But besides these pure doctrinaires there were a good many painters
who, without reducing their forms to geometrical abstractions, by
modifying them in accordance with Cubist theory gave a new and
impressive coherence to their compositions. Of them the best known, in
England at all events, is Jean Marchand, whose admirable work has
been admired here ever since the Grafton Galleries exhibition of 1912.
Lately he has moved away from Cubism, but has not become less
doctrinaire for that. Indeed, if I have a fault to find with his grave and
masterly art it is that sometimes it is a little wanting in sensibility and

inspiration. Marchand is so determined to paint logically and well that
he seems a little to forget that in the greatest art there is more than logic
and good painting. It is odd to remember that Lhote, who since the war
has been saluted by a band of young painters (not French for the most
part, I believe) as chief of a new and profoundly doctrinaire school
which is to reconcile Cubism with the great tradition, stood at the time
of which I am writing pretty much where Marchand stood. His
undeniable gifts, which have not failed him since, were then devoted to
combining the amusing qualities of the imagiers (popular print-makers)
with the new discoveries. The results were consistently pleasing; and I
will here confess that, however little I may like some of his later
preaching and however little he may like mine, what Lhote produces in
paint never fails to arrest me and very seldom to charm. Herbin, who
was another of those who about the year 1910 were modifying natural
forms in obedience to Cubist theory, has since gone all lengths in the
direction of pure abstraction: his art is none the better for it. Valloton,
so far as I can remember, was much where Herbin was. Now
apparently he aims at the grand tragic; an aim which rarely fails to lead
its votaries by way of the grand academic. Perhaps such aspirations can
express themselves only in the consecrated formulæ of traditional
rhetoric; at all events, the last I saw of Valloton was furiously classical.
[D] And for all that he remains, what he was in the beginning, an
Illustrator.
[Footnote D: His exhibits in the _salon d'automne_ of 1921, however,
suggest that he has come off his high horse.]
To me these artists all seem to be of the first generation of Cézanne's
descendants. About the dates of one or two, however, I may well be
mistaken; and so may I be when I suppose half a dozen more of whose
existence I became aware rather later--only a year or two before the
war, in fact--to be of a slightly later brood. For instance, it must have
been at the end of 1912, or the beginning of 1913, that I first heard of
Modigliani, Utrillo, Segonzac, Marie Laurencin, Luc-Albert Moreau
and Kisling, though doubtless all were known earlier to wide-awake
men on the spot. None of them can fairly be described as doctrinaire:
by that time an artist with a pronounced taste for abstractions betook
himself to Cubism almost as a matter of course. All owe much to
Cézanne--Utrillo