ART.
POST-IMPRESSIONISTS AND RENOIR.
THE LEFEVRE GALLERIES, lA KING ST., Sr. JAMES'S.
THE examples of the work of Gauguin, Van Gogh, Toulouse- Lautrec and Renoir, which have been collected by Messrs. Lcfevre and Mr. Alex Reid, are so many more nails in the coffin of Academic Ridicule. Of course, we know that that old gentleman is buried alive, or rather, he has a sort of after- life ; he goes on kicking against the coffin and its nails like a wasp after it is cut in half. But he is growing weary, and is
in truth being supplanted. There is already an academic Post-Impressionism. So the world goes on ; masters and followers making a tradition ; masters, and a new tradition ; and, of course, it is only the masters who are really in the tradition, the great and eternal purpose of all artists : their own exprertion of their own reactions to whatever moves them.
There can be no serious question but that the four painters whose works are exhibited at the Lefevre Galleries belong to that tradition, which does not mean that we are bound to like them. We needs must recognize the highest when we see it ; but it was a great man talking nonsense when it was said that we needs must love it. True, we must love only the highest, but we cannot love all the highest.
Even so, I cannot believe that anybody who is not deliber- ately shutting out that which does not fit in with his theories can fail to love the little room upstairs. The three Gauguins are masterly and original in design, and glow with the genuine Gauguin colour. They are not jumbles of gorgeous colours like so much that is falsely admired for its colour, but each colour enriches and enhances every other. Take away the small note of red in the fruit high upon the tree and the whole work suffers. Fierce and emotional though his painting is, Gauguin's effects are most subtle. He illustrates triumph- antly the neglected truth that strength and refinement are not necessarily irreconcilable.
The work of Toulouse-Lautrec is so forcibly effective psycho- logically that his great qualities as a draughtsman and colourist are overlooked by the superficial. What a wonderful economy of modelling there is in L'Homme Canon, and yet how splendidly fat he is. An effect of enormous mass has been obtained almost entirely by the use of line. And what a beautiful and significant pattern of green and yellow and a strange red has he made in Le Regisseur! The Bords du Rhone it Arles and L'Ii6pital d'Arles of Van Gogh's have all the best qualities of his burning and passionate interest in the organic growth of things. In spite of the great sense of recession in the latter picture, the quality of his paint and the perfect relations of his colour have kept the picture together on the surface. It is Van Gogh's solution of the problem of reconciling surface unity with the sense of four dimensions.
I am uncertain of my feelings about Renoir. In the Spectator for July 14th I expressed the hope that my momen- tary falling out with Renoir was the result of liver and the heat wave. The heat wave has gone, and I am in the best of health ; but I do not love Renoir again. I only recognize that he is of the highest.
The Portrait of Mademoiselle Samary is exquisitely beautiful, tender in colour and delicate in construction. The rest, as it is said, left me cold. Is it not better that the critic should admit his failures than that he should pretend that his feelings always follow his intellectual judgments ?
ANTHONY BERTRAM.
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