ART
Modern Primitives
Les Maitres Populaires de la Rialiti is the title of one of the most interesting exhibitions at present on view in Paris. The -painters whose works are to be seen in it are, with one exception, men who have had no training in art and have forged for themselves a weapon for expressing what they had to say.to the world. The one exception is Utrillo, who, being the son of a painter and from his childhood in touch with those who could teach him the elements of his art, has no business to be there at all. The others are by profession a prize-fighter, an employee in the postal service, a cook, a printer, and so on. The one famous name in the show is that of the Douanier Rousseau, but the rest, apart from Bauchent who is familiar as a designer of decor for the Russian Ballet, are little known in England.
At first sight it would seem that this would be a favourable place to seek for signs of the great communal art which it is to be hoped will gradually spring from the people. Here at any rate is an art which expresses the aspirations of some sections of the working classes, and we might therefore expect it to open up a glimpse of something vitally new and productive. Instead we find -a series of paintings of great charm and with intense individuality, from which, however, no new movement could ever spring.
The failure of these artists—failure that is to say from the point of view of the future—is due to the fact that they have not the optimism which comes from the consciousness that the future belongs to them and-to their class, but live separate and private lives, isolated individuals, entirely unaware of the importance of the events going on around them. They are in fact, proletarians, but none of them is apparently conscious of the significance of their position. The result is that their art cannot reflect a new movement or express the progressive aspirations of their class, to the cause of which they do not contribute. Instead their art is private and personal, and far from leading up to anything new, is only one of the most revealing signs of the present stage of society.
The effect of this situation on these paintings usually takes one of two forms. Either the artists cultivate a dreamland into which they escape from the grimness of their everyday life, or they comment naively and personally on their immediate surroundings. To the former type belong Rousseau when he is painting his jungle scenes, based on reminiscences of his youth ; Bauchent when he retells the stories of classical mythology or history ; Seraphine, the mystical Catholic cook, whose flower paintings recall those of Odilon Redon at the opposite end of the scale of sophistication. The other group bears a slightly closer relation to a possible communal art of the proletariat, since its members are at least in contact with the world around them, even if their view of it is restricted and individualistic. Painters of this type probably have to start by painting the things around them, and these artists may therefore represent the very first struggles of proletarian art to conscious- ness. When Bombois paints scenes in his native village, or Rimbert the streets in his part of Paris, one can imagine them going on to paint the people who live in those streets and then to other and more generally significant themes. Moreover, these two artists paint these subjects with great directness, unlike Vivin who can turn even the commonest Parisian scene into a sort of dream painting. There is therefore perhaps some germ of a new art in this group, though it is hardly possible that in the present circumstances any of them should develop rapidly enough to contribute to the movement which is growing up elsewhere in a quite different way.
At the artistic level these artists also suffer from a great disadvantage. Their technical naivete results in their only having a weapon to express extremely simple facts and ideas. But signifi- cant facts about the world are complicated, and, even if the artist has the imaginative power to conceive a painting on, say, Guernica, he will only be able to give complete expression to his idea if he is master of the technique of figure drawing and large-scale composition. It is no doubt true that had their message been more certain and important they would have found a means of conveying the gist of it, but even in this case their lack of any contact with the accumulated store of knowledge about the arts would have seriously hindered
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