Adventures in the Arts: Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets — John Shaqi
Adventures in the Arts: Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and PoetsHartley, Marsden
History
Adventures in the Arts: Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets
Hartley, Marsden
Art; Literature, Modern -- History and criticism; Vaudeville
With the work of Theodore Robinson, there comes a wide divergence of
feeling that is perhaps a greater comprehension of the principles of
impressionism as applied to the realities involved in the academic
principle. One is reminded of Bastien Le Page and Leon L'Hermitte, in
the paintings of Robinson, as to their type of subject and the
conception of them also. That he lived not far from Giverney is
likewise evident. Being of New England yankee extraction, a Vermonter
I believe, he must have essayed always a sense of economy in emotion.
No one could have gone so far as the then incredible Monet, whose
pictures wear us to indifference with vapid and unprofitable
thinking. What Monet did was to encourage a new type of audacity and a
brand-new type in truth, when no one had up to then attempted to see
nature as prismatical under the direct influence of the solar rays.
All this has since been worked out with greater exactitude by the
later theorists in modernism.
While Van Gogh was slowly perishing of a mad ecstasy for light,
covering up a natural Dutch realism with fierce attempts at prismatic
relationship, always with the rhythms in a state of ecstatic
ascendency; and Seurat had come upon the more satisfying pointillism
as developed by himself; somewhere in amid all these extravagances men
like Robinson were trying to combine orthodoxy of heritage and
radicalist conversion with the new and very noble idea of
impressionism. That Robinson succeeded in a not startling but
nevertheless honorable and respectable fashion, must be conceded him.
I sometimes think that Vignon, a seemingly obscure associate of the
impressionists, with a similar impassioned feeling of realism, outdid
him and approached closer to the principles as understood by Pissarro:
probably better by a great deal than Monet himself, who is accredited
with the honor of setting the theme moving in a modern line of that
day. And Pissarro must have been a man to have so impressed all the
men young and old of his time. After seeing a great number of Monet's
one turns to any simple Pissarro for relief. And then there was also
Sisley.
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