Читать книгу Cubists and Post-Impressionism онлайн

20 страница из 70

Millet is a good illustration of the painter to whom “subject” was everything, and technic of quite secondary importance. I think it is generally conceded that as a painter, a master of technic, he did not rank very high, but he had a faculty for painting subjects, scenes from life, that grip. As a painter Whistler was incomparably superior to Millet, but just because he was a great master of technic and quite indifferent to the story-telling side of his pictures he did not become so popular.[6]

There are many actions and reactions in art, many evolutions and involutions, but the great rhythmical sweep of the pendulum is from, let us say, studio-art to nature-art, and back from nature-art to studio-art.

From works of observation to works of imagination, and back from the use of the imagination to the use of observation.

For a time men work feverishly in the seclusion of their closets painting, writing, modelling, composing beautiful things, pure products of their imaginations, then comes the reaction and they feel the need of renewing their vigor by touching heel to earth. They draw aside their curtains, throw open their doors and go out into the sunlight to breathe the fresh air and gain new inspirations from contact with nature.