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SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE

VOL. L

JULY, 1911

NO. 1

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THE SUBJECT IN ART

By Kenyon Cox

HE idea that the subject of a work of art is of no importance whatever has been taught us so thoroughly and has become so ingrained in us that it seems almost necessary to apologize for mentioning such a thing at all to a modern audience. We have been so deeply impressed with the truth-for it is a truth as far as it goes-that it is the amount of art contained in a given picture which counts, not the matter on which that art is expended, that we have concluded that any subject will do as well as any other, and that there are no distinctions of subject-matter worth considering. We have so completely learned that a still-life by Chardin may be better than an altarpiece by Carlo Dolci that we have forgotten to ask whether it can be as good as Titian's "Entombment.”

One may be quite prepared to admit that the old rigid categories, by which a history painter was always superior to a genre painter and any figure painter was the better of any landscape painter, were a trifle absurd. One may feel that the French Academicians, admitting Watteau to their membership only under the slighting title of "Peintre des Fêtes Galantes," were belittling a greater man than any of themselves. One may welcome the modern conquest of freedom of choice as a salutary victory for common-sense a victory which was, after all, only a reconquest; for the old masters made no distinctions or specialties, every master being simply a painter, and painting what came his way, from an altar-piece to a sign-board. Yet a distinction as to nobility of subject-matter will still subsist. Some subjects will permit and demand the exer

VOL. L.-I

cise of greater powers than others, and are, in so far as they do this, nobler subjects. A man may paint a jug, a loaf of bread, and a dish of grapes, and may show, in doing so, such delicate perception of gradations of light, such fine sense of color, such mastery of surfaces and textures, above all, such a modest and pure spirit, as shall mark him a true artist and make him forever admirable and lovable. But he cannot put into the rendering of such a subject the lofty powers of design and drawing that make the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel one of the wonders of the world. You cannot make a Michelangelo out of a Chardin, and you cannot exert the powers of a Michelangelo on the subjects of Chardin. It may be better to succeed with Chardin than to fail in attempting to be a Michelangelo, but the powers exercised by Michelangelo, and the subjects which permit of the exercise of such powers, are eternally the nobler and the more important.

The modern view was admirably expressed in a favorite saying of the late Augustus Saint-Gaudens which has been frequently quoted. "You may do anything," he used to say, "it is the way you do it that counts." As he meant it, the saying is a true one, for he did not mean that if you do a thing cleverly enough, with great technical skill and command of material, that alone will make it a great work of art. He included sincerity, nobility of temper, high purpose, a love of beauty and a love of truth, among the elements of "the way you do it"; and he would have placed mere virtuosity, however excellent a thing in itself, far below these qualities in his scale of values. He would have been the first to admit that there is a sense in which the reverse of Copyright, 1911, by Charles Scribner's Sons. All rights reserved.

his proposition is equally true. If the thing done be noble it does not matter how it is done. If the picture or the statue have dignity of conception and grandeur of mass and line, if it conveys to you a sense of imaginative grasp on the part of the artist, if it arouses emotion and elevates the mind, it may be raggedly-almost clumsily-executed; it may be entirely devoid of surface charm and technical dexterity and be none the less a work of the highest art.

It will not be badly executed, for the feeling of the artist, however right and noble, can only be expressed by technical means, and the means used must, necessarily, be right means for the purpose of such expression. If he has conveyed his meaning it is certain that he has sufficiently mastered the language by which such meanings may be conveyed. But it is by what he has said and done that you judge him. How he has said and done it may be a question of great and absorbing interest to other artists and to special students of art, but is, after all, a subsidiary question to the world for whom he works.

I can think of no better instance of what I mean than the earliest of Jean François Millet's great series of peasant pictures, "The Sower," now in the Vanderbilt Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of New York. Before he created it Millet had painted a number of charming little pictures of nude female figures, admirably executed, supremely able in their way, by no means to be despised, but not what he wanted to do-not the expression of his greatest powers. He wanted to paint an Epic of the Soil, and the first book of it was the sowing of the seed. The brilliant technical method of his earlier work was not suited to his present purpose; it was too suave, too rich, too easy, to give the impression of rugged strength and simplicity that he wished to convey. He had to invent a new handling and a new technical manner, which he afterward developed to such perfection that, in his later works, his mere painting is as wonderful as his grand design and powerful drawing. But in this first essay in the new manner he is a little awkward, almost fumbling and clumsy. It does not greatly matter. The largeness of silhouette, the august grandeur of movement, the nobility of conception carry it off. The thing done is fine, and any rudeness in

the manner of the doing becomes a matter of relatively little importance.

This may seem like a question of treatment rather than a question of subject, but it is not entirely so. The two things are intimately related. Millet could not have given the same effect of nobility if his subject had not been intrinsically noble. Doubtless so great an artist was able to elevate any subject by the largeness of his treatment, and the "three pears on a plate or table" may well have been, for a painter, such a revelation of his power as our own Wyatt Eaton found them. Nevertheless, if Millet had painted nothing but a series of such subjects he would not have been the great master we know, and some of his highest powers would never have been exercised.

The highest subject for the exercise of the greatest powers of a painter is the human figure, nude or so draped as to express, rather than to conceal, its structure and movement-the subject of the Greeks and of Michelangelo-and this is the subject of all Millet's work. After the early days he seldom did an entirely unclothed figure, though his "Goose Girl Bathing" is one of the most wonderful and beautiful things in the world, but it was the nude he was continually striving to express. In the costume of his peasants he found long-used garments taking the form of the body, becoming almost a part of it, as he said to Eaton, and "expressing even more than the nude the larger and simpler forms of nature."

The human figure, its bulk and form and action, that was the subject of all his works, but the more specific subjects of the separate pictures were equally noble and universal. Doubtless the academic makers of categories would not have seen or understood this. They would have classed him as a painter of peasants with Jan Steen or Ostade. But Millet has painted nothing trivial or unimportant, no smokers or cardplayers, no drinking in taverns or dancing in rings. Every one of his great pictures has a subject as old as mankind, a subject of immense and eternal import to the race. Ploughing and sowing and reaping, the hewing of wood and the drawing of water, carding and spinning and the making of garments, things in which all mankind is interested and in which the bulk of mankind always has been and always will be occupied,

these are his subjects. Shepherds have to choose such subjects as are suited to watched their sheep from the time before his powers and give greatest scope for the Abraham was, as Millet's shepherds watch development of the qualities he possesses. theirs, and mothers have fed their young or He may paint genre or landscape or portrait assisted "The First Steps" since the Gar- or still-life and be a true artist whose work den of Eden. Fortunately for his purpose, the world will cherish, for the powers neces

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the life of the tillers of the soil had changed but little and machinery had not yet invaded the fields, and he was able to find in the daily life of the people about him subjects truly typical of the history of humanity-subjects much more essentially and eternally classic than the straddling Greek and Roman warriors of those who arrogated to themselves the title of classicists. I would by no means intimate that it is the duty of every artist to attempt subjects of the highest class. It is rather his duty

sary to success in any of these fields are as rare as they are truly admirable. Still, it is not true that all subjects are alike, or that success with one kind of subject is as good as success with another. One may sincerely admire Frans Hals and be sincerely glad that he painted what he could do so well instead of trying to do that at which he would certainly have failed; one is not, therefore, ready to rank him with Michelangelo and above Raphael. One may derive unalloyed pleasure from the marvellous skill of Vollon

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and yet be certain that the art of Millet is of a higher kind. The different kinds of merit proper to the different kinds of subject can never be quite perfectly united -there must always be some sacrifice, somewhere-but now and then, in the works of the greatest masters, so much of technical beauty and perfection is found united to so much of grandeur of conception and largeness of style that we may receive from one work the largest possible sum of enjoyment. These are the world's unapproachable masterpieces.

But if the modern world has come to think any subject as good as any other it has made one very curious exception to the rule. It has come to think what it calls "the literary subject" an actual drawback, and to consider that the presence, in a work of art, of what is called a "story" is of itself enough to relegate that work to an inferior rank. Yet how such an opinion can have been arrived at, in view of the history of art in all ages, is the greatest of puzzles. For art, from its beginnings among the cave men, has always told stories; and its twin

purposes of illustration and of decoration have always gone hand in hand, illustration being generally, in the mind of the artist as in that of his audience, the more important of the two. The Assyrian celebrated the prowess of his kings in hunt or in battle and the Egyptian recorded the whole life of the people upon the walls of royal tombs. The art of Greece told the story of its gods and heroes on every vase and on every temple front, and the pediments of the Parthenon recounted the legends of the birth of Pallas and of the founding of Athens.

In like manner the art of the Renaissance occupied itself, almost exclusively, with the sacred story of the Old and New Testaments or with the legends of the saints, from the time that Giotto painted the life of Francis at Assisi and the life of Christ in the Arena Chapel until Raphael spread his "Bible" upon the vaultings of the Loggia of the Vatican. The greatest work of its mightiest master, the most sublime and awe-inspiring creation of all art, was nothing else than the story of the Creation and the Fall of Man, so told, with such clarity

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and such power, as never story, before or since, was told in colors. Even the Venetians, those lovers of the sumptuous and the decorative, the creators of what we know as genre, could not get on without a story to tell, and when the story seems absent to us it is because it has been lost, not because it was not there. Titian's enigmatic picture which is traditionally known as the "Sacred and Profane Love" is now said to represent "Medea and Venus," and Giorgione's "Partie Champêtre" and "Soldier and Gypsy" are thought to be illustrations of this or that Italian novel.

later master, Rembrandt. It is a commonplace of criticism that Dutch art told no stories, and that the Dutch burghers, for whom it was created, asked nothing of it but the portraiture of themselves and their wives or of their daily life and their tame and comfortable country. The artist who attempted more did so at his peril, and Ruysdael paid for his love of rocks and water-falls, as Rembrandt paid for his love of stories, with poverty and discouragement. Yet Rembrandt was always telling stories. His public did not want them; it wanted nothing of him but portraits that should It may be that in these later instances the be like; and when his portraits ceased to story was a concession to the demands of be neat and obvious likenesses it wanted the public, and that while the ostensible nothing of him whatever. Yet he painted subject was the temptation of Medea by stories over and over again, his etchings are Venus the real subject was the contrast be- filled with stories, and, more than all, his tween a nude figure and a draped one. It drawings, which the public never saw, are may be that Giorgione would have been one long series of illustrations. He was equally content with his idyllic dreams had haunted with stories from which he could they no definite context in his mind or in not escape, and to which he returned again the minds of those for whom he painted. and again, illustrating their every phase It certainly was not so with the earlier mas- and turning and twisting them in every asters, and as certainly it was not so with that pect. There is the story of Lot, the story

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