PAINTING

Evening Post, Issue 20, 23 July 1935, Page 13

PAINTING

THE NEW BEffAISSANCE

REVOLUTION IN ART.

In his third W.E.A. lecture on "Contemporary Art" at the Trades Hall on Tuesday evening, Mr. E. C. Simpson, B.A. -dealt in an interesting manner with the renaissance which took place in painting at the beginning of the present century, and explained how the work of Cazanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh was revealed and brought into its inheritance by Le Fauvres. . In their own day they were unknown and their influence was only being felt at the present.time. There was scarcely a young painter in the world of art today who had not gone to Cazanne for counsel, and there had never been an artist since the time of Rubens who had had such an influence as Cezanne. Through his work he had been able to awaken a tremendous interest among other painters in the magnificent rhythm found in all his pictures, and he had filled them with a desire to imitate his style. He used landscape as a primitive essay on the general and permanent architecture of the world. The precise contours of Southern France defined for him the country in which the bony skeleton of the earth declared itself so clearly. Cezanne said that "painting according to nature was not to copy natureit was to realise feelings"—and his choice fell on few objects. He disengaged from them the mean which expressed them all, and seized upon some object with no thought of its ugliness or beauty. He made no effort to interest or .please, but transported visible life to life of the spirit with sober splendour. Cezanne's painting, said the lecturer, was the result of the study'of internal structures, and he saw nothing in nature except planes. He borrowed from mathematical language the purest symbol he could find to express his meanings, and brought all aspects of nature within the cube, the cone, and the cylinder. Cezanne came at a very crucial time in pur history, immediately after the impasse of materialism at the end of the Nineteenth Century, and at the most complete social breakdown since the end of the- ancient world. Consequently his work appeared like a refuge—roughly but solidly built. Mr. Simpson showed some fine examples of Cezanne's work on the screen, and then went on to deal with the art of Seurat, who was another great precursor of contemporary art. Seurat began with a theoretical study of the laws of pictorial harmony and contrast and made hundreds of charcoal drawings from nature. He worked on experimental lines and eliminated all spontaneity and all records of mechanical vision. - He attacked the problem of retaining stability and serenity and yet symbolising gaiety and movement by linear rhythms. The lecturer showed a number of slides to illustrate his various points, and then dealt with Cubism in modern art. CUBISM. Mr. Simpson stated that cubism was started in 1908 by Picasso and Brague, the former being.a Spaniard who was familiar with Mohammedan art. He had a dominating mathematical instinct, and music and instruments were •the passion of his leisure hours. Picasso gave the world a new art form and emphasised the;planes which Cezanne had used to express form, painting the planes for their own sakes. "Cubism," said the speaker, "is a classical procedure which takes the object as a point of departure and abstracts: from it inherent straight lines and curves, surfaces and solid forms. The result is a work giving true pleasure and in no way depending on the representation of the object, which is not relative to its use or associations. The difficulty in. sensing cubism is the universal attempt to 'read' 'pictorial' quality into the picture. It is not a naturalistic puzzle, for all there is in the picture is what strikes the eye. Looking back to Cezanne, the cubists found that he, by his representational symbols, could achieve more than they. Mr. Simpson explained the importance of "recession" in connection with this form of art, and stated that there was now a trend away from the austerity of cubism. ' He considered that it was useless to decry distortions, which had. spread over all European art today. Creative genius was not caprice, and cubism was a sincere attempt to express new. perceptions instinctive to the new age. The use of distortion was deliberate and for a definite purpose, which was always exaggeration. The artist's right to a deviation from natural aspects was justified if he realised some deeper formal value. Distortions in art must be judged solely from the standpoint of artistic loss or gain and were justified by success.

Referring to the art of Gaugin and Van Gogh, Mr. Simpson stated that they were not temperamentally equipped to take part in the real artistic movement of their day. ■ They converted the vocational concept of the artist to a standard of fanaticism that society had no right to demand or even tolerate. Their work was personal, while the other artists dealt with were distinctive but impersonal.. "Expressionism was twofold," concluded the lecturer, "human and universal, and the artist expressed himself only when he had been moved by something felt under the surface of nature or life, and the two sources were one,. The distinguishing mark of the genuine artist was that he was trying to express something through himself, rather than trying to express himself through something."

Mr. Simpson was accorded a hearty vote of thanks for his informative lecture. Tonight he will give a further and final lecture on "Painting."