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 passing of this rare artist during the late summer months,[2]
we are conscious of the silencing of one of the foremost lyricists in
painting, one of the most delicate spirits among those who have
painted pictures so thoroughly replete with charm, pictures of such
real distinction and merit. For of true charm, of true grace, of true
melodic, Redon was certainly the master. I think no one has coveted
the vision so much as, certainly no more than, has this artist,
possessed of the love of all that is dream-like and fleeting in the
more transitory aspect of earthly things. No one has ever felt more
that fleeting treasure abiding in the moment, no one has been more
jealous of the bounty contained in the single glancing of the eye
upward to infinity or downward among the minuter fragments at his
feet.
[Footnote 2: Of 1917.--Ed.]
It would seem as if Redon had surely walked amid gardens, so much of
the morning is in each of his fragile works. There seems always to be
hovering in them the breath of those recently spent dawns of which he
was the eager spectator, never quite the full sunlight of the later
day. Essentially he was the worshipper of the lip of flower, of dust
upon the moth wing, of the throat of young girl, or brow of young
boy, of the sudden flight of bird, the soft going of light clouds in a
windless sky. These were the gentle stimulants to his most virile
expression. Nor did his pictures ever contain more; they never
struggled beyond the quality of legend, at least as I know them. He
knew the loveliness in a profile, he saw always the evanescences of
light upon light and purposeless things. The action or incident in his
pictures was never more than the touch of some fair hand gently and
exquisitely brushing some swinging flower. He desired implicitly to
believe in the immortality of beauty, that things or entities once
they were beautiful could never die, at least for him. I followed
faithfully for a time these fine fragments in those corners of Paris
where they could be found, and there was always sure to be in them,
always and ever that perfect sense of all that is melodic in the
universe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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