12. Kubin, Munch, And Gauguin: Masters Of Hallucination
I
Because it is a simpler matter to tell the truth than casuists admit I shall preface this little sermon on three hallucinated painters by a declaration of my artistic faith.
I believe in Velasquez, Vermeer, and Rembrandt; the greatest harmonist, the greatest painter of daylight, and the profoundest interpreter of the human soul--Rembrandt as pyschologist is as profound as Beethoven.
The selection of this triune group of genius, one Spaniard and two Dutchmen, doesn't mean that I'm insensible to the purity of Raphael, the rich colouring of Titian, or the giant power of Michael Angelo. Botticelli is probably, so Mr. Berenson thinks, the most marvellous draughtsman thus far produced by European art (we can still go to old China and Japan for his masters), and who shall say him nay? Ruskin, on the strength of one picture, averred that Tintoretto was the greatest of painters. For William Blake, England's visionary painter, Rubens was an emissary from Satan let loose on this sinful globe to destroy art. And Leonardo da Vinci--what of that incomparable genius?
After Haarlem and Frans Hals you may realise that Manet and Sargent had predecessors; after a visit to The Hague the View of Delft may teach you that Vermeer was an Impressionist long before the French Impressionists; also that he painted clear light as it never before was painted, nor since. As for Rembrandt, the last word will never be said. He is the eternal Sphinx of art, whether as portraitist, landscape painter, etcher, or revealer of the night side of life, of its bestiality, madness, cruelty, and terrific visions. But Velasquez and Vermeer are more sane.
Anything I may write of Kubin, Munch, and Gauguin should be read in the light of my artistic credo. These three names do not swim in main currents, rather are they to be found in some morbid morass at the equivocal twilight hour, not the hour exquisite, but that indeterminate moment when the imagination recoils upon itself and creates shadows that flit, or, more depressing, that sit; the mood of exasperated melancholy when all action seems futile, and life a via crucis. Nor is this mood the exclusive possession of perverse poets; it is an authentic one, and your greengrocer around the corner may suffer from its presence; but he calls it the blues and resorts to alcohol, while the artist, ever conscious of the "values" of such a psychic state of soul, resorts to ink or colour or tone (not always despising wine).
This Alfred Kubin has done; with his etching-needle he has aroused images from the plate that alternately shock and exalt; occasionally he opens the valves of laughter for he can be both witty and humorous. His Slavic blood keeps off the encroaching danger of himself taking his own work too seriously. I wish his German contemporaries boasted such gifts of irony. Kubin is a Bohemian, born in 1877, the son of an Austrian Army officer. His boyhood was given over to caprice, and he appears to have passed through the various stages familiar in the career of romantic pathological temperaments. Disillusionment succeeded disillusionment; he even contemplated Werther's end.
He found himself in Munich at the beginning of this century with a slender baggage of ideals, much scorn of life, and a determination to express his tortured and complicated personality in art. No matter what comical old women professors (in trousers) tell you of "objective art" and the superior advantage of drawing from plaster casts, that is the ultimate aim of an artist (naturally I don't refer to fashionable face painters, who make a lucrative trade of their slippery paint). Nevertheless, a more rigid discipline might have smoothed the way for Kubin, who has not yet mastered the tools of his art. He has always practised his scales in public.
A man's reading proclaims the man. Kubin's favourite authors for years were Schopenhauer and Mainländer, the latter a disciple of the mighty Arthur and one who put into practice a tenet of his master, for he attained Nirvana by his own hand.
Now, a little Schopenhauer is an excellent thing to still restless, egotistic spirits, to convince them of the essential emptiness of life's coveted glories; but a surfeit of Schopenhauer is like a surfeit of lobster--mental indigestion follows and the victim blames the lobster (
i. e., life) instead of his own inordinate appetite. Throughout Kubin's work I detect traces of spleen, hatred of life, delight in hideous cruelty, a predisposition to obscurity and a too-exclusive preoccupation with sex; indeed, sex looms largest in the consciousness of the new art.
To burlesque the human figure, to make of it a vile arabesque, a shameful sight, is the besetting temptation of the younger generation. Naturally, it is good to get away from the saccharine and the rococo, but vulgarity is always vulgarity and true art is never vulgar. However, Kubin has plenty of precedents. A ramble through any picture-gallery on the Continent will prove that human nature was the same five hundred years ago as it was in the Stone Age, as it is to-day, as it always will be. Some of Rembrandt's etched plates are unmentionable, and Goya even went to further lengths.
Now, Kubin is a lineal descendant of this Spaniard, minus his genius, for our young man is not a genius, despite his cleverness. He burlesques the themes of Goya at times, and in him there is more than a streak of the cruelty which causes such a painful impression when viewing the Proverbs or the Disasters of War.
Kubin has chosen to seek earlier than Goya for his artistic nourishment. He has studied the designs of the extraordinary Pieter Breughel, and so we get modern versions of the bizarre events in daily life so dear to old Pieter. On one plate Kubin depicts a hundred happenings. Cruelty and broad humour are present and not a little ingenuity in the weaving of the pattern. He, too, like Breughel, is fond of trussing up a human as if he were a pig and then sticking him with a big knife. Every form of torture from boiling oil to retelling a stale anecdote is shown. The elder Teniers, Hieronymus Bosch, Breughel, Goya, and among later artists, Rops, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Aubrey Beardsley, are apparent everywhere in Kubin's work. Neither is Rembrandt missing.
Beardsley is, perhaps, the most marked influence, and not for the best, though the Bohemian designer is a mere tyro when compared to the Englishman, the most extraordinary apparition in nineteenth-century art.
Kubin has illustrated Poe--notably Berenice; of course the morbid grimace of that tale would attract him--Gerard de Nerval's Aurelia, Märchen by W. Hauff, and his own volume of short stories entitled, Die andere Seite, written in the fantastic Poe key and with literary skill. The young artist is happy in the use of aquatint, and to judge from his colour combinations one might call him a rich colourist. Singularly enough, in his woodcuts he strangely resembles Cruikshank, and I suppose he never saw Cruikshank in his life, though if he has read Dickens he may have. In his own short stories there are many illustrations that--with their crisp simplicity, their humour and force--undoubtedly recall Cruikshank, and a more curious combination than the English delineator of broad humour and high animal spirits and the Bohemian with his predilection for the interpretation in black and white of lust, murder, ghosts, and nightmares would be hard to find. Like Rops, Kubin is a devil-worshipper, and his devils are as pleasant appearing as some of the Belgian's female Satans.
I've studied the Sansara Blätter, the Weber Mappe, and Hermann Esswein's critical edition of various plates, beginning with one executed when Alfred was only sixteen; but in it may be found his principal qualities. Even at that age he was influenced by Breughel. Quaint monsters that never peopled our prehistoric planet are being bound in captivity by dwarfs who fire cannon, stab with lances, and attack enemies from the back of impossible elephants. The portrait of what Kubin calls his muse looks like a flamingo in an ermine skirt posing previous to going to jail. Then we see the shadow, a monstrous being pursuing through a lonely street at night a little burgher in a hurry to reach his bed. The "shudder" is there. Kubin has read Baudelaire. His Adventure resembles a warrior in No Man's Land confronted by a huge white boa-constrictor with the head of a blind woman, and she has a head upon which is abundant white hair. Puerile, perhaps, yet impressive.
I shall skip the numerous devil's laboratories wherever people are being stewed or sawn asunder, also the scenes of men whipped with leather thongs or broken on the rack. One picture is called The Finger. An aged man in night-dress cowers against the wall of his bedroom and gazes with horror at an enormous index-finger which, with the hand to which it is attached, has crawled across the floor as would a devilfish, or some such sort of monster. The finger threateningly points to the unhappy person. Unquestionably it symbolises a guilty conscience. Franz von Stuck has left his impression on Kubin. He portrays mounds of corpses, the fruit of war, which revolt the spectator, both on account of the folly and crime suggested and the morbid taste of the artist.
Kubin's Salome is the last word in the interpretation of that mellifluous damsel. It is a frank caricature of Beardsley, partially nude, the peculiar quality of the plate being the bestial expression of the face. No viler ugliness is conceivable. And, according to Flaubert, who created the "modern" Salome, she was fascinating in her beauty. I fancy foul is fair nowadays in art. Never before in its history has there been paid such a tribute to sheer ugliness. Never before has its house been so peopled by the seven devils mentioned in the Good Book.
In the domain of fantasy Kubin is effective. A lonely habitation set in nocturnal gloom with a horde of rats deserting it, is atmospheric; two groups of men quarrelling in sinister alleys, monks of the Inquisition extinguishing torches in a moonlit corridor, or a white nightmare nag wildly galloping in a circular apartment; these betray fancy, excited perhaps by drugs. When in 1900 or thereabouts the "decadence" movement swept artistic Germany, the younger men imitated Poe and Baudelaire, and consumed opium with the hope that they might see and record visions. But a commonplace brain under the influence of opium or hasheesh has commonplace dreams. To few is accorded by nature (or by his satanic majesty) the dangerous privilege of discerning là-bas, those visions described by De Quincey, Poe, or De Nerval. Alfred Kubin has doubtless experienced the rapture of the initiate. There is a certain plate in which a figure rushes down the secret narrow pathway zigzagging from the still stars to the bottommost pit of hell, the head crowned as if by a flaming ecstasy, the arms extended in hysteria, the feet of abnormal size. A thrilling design with Blake-like hints--for Blake was master of the "flaming door" and the ecstasy that consumes.
A design that attracts is a flight of steps feebly lighted by a solitary light, hemmed in by ancient walls; on the last step lurks an anonymous person. A fine bit of old-fashioned romance is conjured up; also memories of Piranesi.
The drowning woman is indescribable, yet not without a note of pathos. Buddha is one of the artist's highest flights. The Oriental mysticism, the Kef, as ecstasy is called in the East, are admirably expressed. His studies of deep-sea life border on the remarkable. I have seldom encountered such solicitude for exact drawing, such appreciation of the beauties of form and surface colouring, as these pictures of shells, sea flora, and exotic pearls. The Cardinal series must not be forgotten, those not easily forgotten portraits of a venerable ecclesiastic.
It is difficult to sum up in a brief article all the characteristics of this versatile Bohemian, as it is difficult to find a picture that will give a general idea of his talent. I select the Nero, not because it exhibits any technical prowess (on the contrary, the arms are of wood), but because it may reveal a tithe of the artist's fancy. Nero has reached the end of a world that he has depopulated; there remains the last ship-load of mankind which he is about to destroy at one swoop. The design is large in quality, the idea altogether in consonance with the early emotional attitude of Kubin toward life.
II
Edvard Munch, the Norwegian, is a much bigger man and artist. The feminine note, despite his sensibility, is missing. He has control of his technical forces and he never indulged in such nervous excesses as Kubin. Besides, he is sincere, while the other is usually cynical. He deals with the same old counters, love and death, debauchery and consequent corruption. He is an exponent of feverish visions, yet you never feel that he is borne down by his contact with dwellers on the threshold. A border-lander, as is Maurice Maeterlinck, Munch has a more precise vision; in a word he is a mystic, and a true mystic always sees dreams as sharp realities.
It was Mr. Saintsbury who first called attention to the clear flame of Flaubert's visions as exemplified by his Temptation of St. Anthony. So Munch, who pins to paper with almost geometrical accuracy his personal adventures in the misty mid-region of Weir. And a masculine soul is his. I can still recall my impressions on seeing one of his early lithographs entitled, Geschrei. As far as America is concerned, Edvard Munch was discovered by Vance Thompson, who wrote an appreciation of the Norwegian painter, then a resident of Berlin, in the pages of
M'lle New York (since gathered to her forefathers). The "cry" of the picture is supposed to be the "infinite cry of nature" as felt by an odd-looking individual who stands on a long bridge traversing an estuary in some Norwegian harbour. The sky is barred by flaming clouds, two enigmatic men move in the middle distance. To-day the human with the distorted skull who holds hands to his ears and with staring eyes opens wide a foolish mouth looks more like a man overtaken by seasickness than a poet mastered by cosmic emotion.
In 1901 I visited Munich and at the Secession exhibition at the Glass Palace I saw a room full of Munches. It was nicknamed the Chamber of Horrors, and the laughter and exclamations of disgust indulged in by visitors recalled the history of Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe and the treatment accorded it by Parisians (an incident utilised by Zola in L'Oeuvre). But nowadays, in company with the Neo-Impressionists, the Lampost Impressionists, Cubists, and Futurists, Munch might seem tame, conventional; nevertheless he was years ahead of the new crowd in painting big blocks of colour, juxtaposed, not as the early Impressionists juxtaposed their strokes of complementary colour to gain synthesis by dissociation of tonalities, but by obvious discords thus achieve a brutal optical impression.
His landscapes were those of a visionary in an Arcadia where the ugly is elevated to the tragic. Tragic, too, were his representations of his fellow men. Such every-day incidents as a funeral became transfigured in the sardonic humour of this pessimist. No one had such a quick eye in detecting the mean souls of interested mourners at the interment of a relative. I possess an original signed lithograph called, The Curious Ones, which shows a procession returning afoot from a funeral. Daumier, himself, could not beat the variety of expressions shown in this print. The silk hat (and Goya was the first among modern artists to prove its value as a motive) plays a rôle in the Munch plates. His death-room scenes are unapproachable in seizing the fleeting atmosphere of the last hour. The fear of death, the very fear of fear, Maeterlinck has created by a species of creeping dialogue. (The Intruder is an example), but Edvard Munch working in an art of two dimensions where impressions must be simultaneous, is more dynamic. The shrill dissonance in his work is instantly reflected in the brain of the speaker. In his best work--not his skeletons dancing with plump girls, or the youthful macabre extravagances after the manner of Rops, Rethel, De Groux, or James Ensor--he does invoke a genuine thrill.
Psychologic, in the true sense of that much-abused word, are his portraits; indeed, I am not sure that his portraits will play second fiddle to his purely imaginative work in the future. There is the Strindberg, certainly the most authoritative presentment of that strange, unhappy soul. The portraits of Hans Jäger, the poet (in oil), the etched head of Doctor A., the etched head of Sigbjorn Obstfelder, poet who died young, as well as the self-portraits and the splendidly constructed figure and eloquent expression in the portrait of a woman, an oil-painting now in the National Gallery, Christiania, these and many others serve as testimony to a sympathetic divination of character. His etched surfaces are never as silvery as those of Anders Zorn, who is a virtuoso in the management of the needle. Not that Munch disdains good craftsmanship, but he is obsessed by character; this is the key-note of his art. How finely he expresses envy, jealousy, hatred, covetousness, and the vampire that sometimes lurks in the soul of woman. An etching, Hypocrisy, with its faint leer on the lips of a woman, is a little masterpiece. His sick people are pitiful, that is, when they are not grotesque; the entire tragedy of blasted childhood is in his portrait of The Sick Child.
As a rule he seldom condescends to sound the note of sentimentality. He is an illustrator born, and as such does not take sides, letting his parable open to those who can read. And his parable is always legible. He distorts, deforms, and with his strong, fluid line modulates his material as he wills, but he never propounds puzzles in form, as do the rest of the experimentalists. The human shape does not become either a stovepipe or an orchid in his hands. His young mothers are sometimes dithyrambic (as in Madonna) or else despairing outcasts. One plate of his which always affects me is his Dead Mother, with the little daughter at the bedside, the cry of agony arrested on her lips, the death chamber exhaling poverty and sorrow. By preference Munch selects his themes among the poor and the middle class. He can paint an empty room traversed by a gleam of moonlight and set one to thinking a half day on such an apparently barren theme. He may suggest the erotic, but never the lascivious. A thinker doubled by an artist he is the one man north who recalls the harsh but pregnant truths of Henrik Ibsen.
III
Every decade, or thereabouts, a revolution occurs in the multicoloured world of the Seven Arts; in Paris, at least a half dozen times in the year, a new school is formed on the left bank of the Seine or under some tent in the provinces. Without variety--as well as vision--the people perish. Hence the invention known as a "new art," which always can be traced back to a half-forgotten one. After the hard-won victories of Impressionism there was bound to ensue a reaction. The symbolists crowded out the realists in literature and the Neo-Impressionists felt the call of Form as opposed to Colour. Well, we are getting form with a vengeance, and seldom has colour been so flouted in favour of cubes, cylinders, and wooden studio models and muddy paste.
Paul Gauguin, before he went to the equator, saw the impending change. He was weary of a Paris where everything had been painted, described, modelled, so he sailed for Tahiti, landing at Papeete. Even there he found the taint of European ideas, and after the funeral of King Pomaré and an interlude of flirtation with an absinthe-drinking native princess, niece of the departed royalty (he made a masterly portrait of her), he fled to the interior and told his experiences in Noa Noa, The Land of Lovely Scents. This little book, illustrated with appropriate sketches by the author-painter, is a highly important contribution to the scanty literature dealing with Gauguin. I've read Charles Morice and Emil Bernard, but beyond telling us details about the Pont-Aven School and the art and madness of gifted Vincent Van Gogh, both are reticent about Gauguin's pilgrimage to the South Seas. We knew why he went there, now we know what he did while he was there. The conclusion of the book is illuminating. "I returned to Paris two years older than when I left, but feeling twenty years younger."
The cause of this rejuvenation was a complete change in his habits. With an extraordinary frankness, not at all in the perfumed manner of that eternal philanderer, Pierre Loti, this one-time sailor before the mast, this explosive, dissipated, hard-living Paul Gauguin became as a child, simulating as well as could an artificial civilised Parisian with sick nerves the childlike attitude toward nature that he observed in his companions, the gentle Tahitians. He married a Maori, a trial marriage, oblivious of the fact that he had left behind him in France a wife and children, and, clothed in the native girdle, he roamed the island naked, unashamed, free, happy. With the burden of European customs from his shoulders, his almost moribund interest in his art revived. Gauguin there experienced visions, was haunted by exotic spirits. One picture is the black goddess of evil, whom he has painted as she lies on a couch with a white background, a colour inversion of Manet's Olympe. With the cosmology of the islanders the Frenchman was familiar.
He has, in addition to portraying the natives, made an agreeable exposition of their ways and days, and their naïve blending of Christian and Maori beliefs. His description of the festival called Areosis is startling. Magical practices, with their attendant cruelties and voluptuousness, still prevail in Tahiti, though only at certain intervals. Very superstitious, the natives see demons and fairies in every bush.
The flowerlike beauty of the brown women comes in for much praise, though to be truthful, the ladies on his canvases seem far from beautiful to prejudiced Occidental eyes. This Noa Noa is a refreshing contribution to the psychology of a painter who, in broad daylight dreamed fantastic visions, a painter to whom the world was but a painted vision, as the music of Richard Wagner is painted music overheard in another world.
"A painter is either a revolutionist or a plagiarist," said Paul Gauguin. But the tricksy god of irony has decreed that, if he lasts long enough, every anarch will end as a conservative, upon which consoling epigram let us pause.
If I were to write a coda to the foregoing, loosely heaped notes, I might add that beauty and ugliness, sickness and health, are only relative terms. The truth is the normal never happens in art or life, so whenever you hear a painter or professor of æsthetics preaching the "gospel of health in art" you will know that both are preaching pro domo. The kingdom of art contains many mansions, and in even the greatest art there may be found the morbid, the feverish, the sick, or the mad. Such a world-genius as Albrecht Dürer had his moment of "Melencolia," and what can't you detect in Da Vinci or Michael Angelo if you are overcurious?
"Beauty," like that other deadly phrase, "beautiful drawing," is ever the shibboleth of the mediocre, of imitators, in a word, of the academy. These men of narrow vision pin their faith to Ingres (which is laudable enough), but groan if the "mighty line" of Degas is mentioned; yet Degas, a pupil of Ingres, has continued his master's tradition in the only way tradition should be continued,
i. e., by further development and by adding an individual note. Therefore, when I register my overwhelming admiration for Velasquez, Vermeer, and Rembrandt I do not bind myself to close my eyes to originality, personal charm, or character in the newer men. There is no such thing as schools of art; there are only artists.