Since Cézanne | Page 9

least; Modigliani and Marie Laurencin owe a good

deal to Picasso's blue period; while Luc-Albert Moreau owes
something to Segonzac. Of the two first Modigliani is dead and Utrillo
so ill that he is unlikely ever to paint again. [E] A strange artist, Utrillo,
personal enough, just as Modigliani was handsome enough, to satisfy
the exigences of the most romantic melodrama, with a touch of
madness and an odd nostalgic passion--expressing itself in an
inimitable white--for the dank and dirty whitewash and cheap cast-iron
of the Parisian suburbs. Towards the end, when he was already very ill,
he began to concoct a formula for dealing with these melancholy scenes
which might have been his undoing. His career was of a few years only,
but those years were prolific; beginning in a rather old-fashioned,
impressionistic style, he soon found his way into the one he has made
famous. To judge his art as a whole is difficult: partly because his early
productions are not only unequal to, but positively unlike, what he
achieved later; partly because many of the Utrillos with which Paris is
overstocked were painted by someone else.
[Footnote E: With great pleasure I contradict this. According to latest
reports Utrillo is so far recovered that before long he may be painting
again.]
Perhaps the most interesting, though neither the most startling nor
seductive, of this batch is Segonzac. Like all the best things in nature,
he matures slowly and gets a little riper every day; so, as he is already a
thoroughly good painter, like the nigger of Saint-Cyr he has but to
continue. Before nature, or rather cultivation, with its chocolate
ploughed fields and bright green trees, as before the sumptuous
splendours of a naked body, his reaction is manifestly, flatteringly,
lyrical. He might have been a bucolic rhapsodist had not his sensibility
been well under the control of as sound a head as you would expect to
find on the shoulders of a gentleman of Gascony. His emotions are kept
severely in their place by rigorous concentration on the art of painting.
Nevertheless, there are critics who complain that his compositions still
tend to lack organization and his forms definition. And perhaps they do
sometimes: only in these, as in other respects, his art improves steadily.
[F]
[Footnote F: _Salon d'automne_, 1921: It has again made a big stride
forward. Segonzac is now amongst the best painters in France.]
"Sa peinture a une petite côté vicieuse qui est adorable"--I have heard

the phrase so often that I can but repeat it. Marie Laurencin's painting is
adorable; we can never like her enough for liking her own femininity so
well, and for showing all her charming talent instead of smothering it in
an effort to paint like a man; but she is not a great artist--she is not even
the best woman painter alive. She is barely as good as Dufy (a
contemporary of Picasso unless I mistake, but for many years known
rather as a decorator and illustrator than a painter in oils) who, while he
confined himself to designing for the upholsterers and making
"images," was very good indeed. His oil-paintings are another matter.
Dufy has a formula for making pictures; he has a _cliché_ for a tree, a
house, a chimney, even for the smoke coming out of a chimney. In this
way he can be sure of producing a pretty article, and, what is more, an
article the public likes.
Very different is the art of Kisling. Rarely does he produce one of those
pictures so appetizing that one fancies they must be good to eat. What
you will find in his work, besides much good painting, is a serious
preoccupation with the problem of externalizing in form an æsthetic
experience. And as, after all, that is the proper end of art his work is
treated with respect by all the best painters and most understanding
critics, though it has not yet scored a popular success. "Kisling ne triche
pas," says André Salmon.
The war did not kill the movement: none but a fool could have
supposed that it would. Nevertheless, it had one ghastly effect on
contemporary painting. When I returned to Paris in the autumn of 1919
I found the painters whom I had known before the war developing,
more or less normally, and producing work which fell nowise short of
what one had come to expect. I saw all that there was to be seen; I
admired; and then I asked one who had already, before the war,
established a style and a reputation--I asked Friesz, I think--"Et les
jeunes?" "Nous sommes les jeunes" was the reply. Those young French
painters who should have been emerging from the ruck of students
between 1914 and 1919 had either been killed, or deflected from