The International Studio Volume 66 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1919 edition. Excerpt: ...critics and defies classification. It may be too that because he did not follow strictly the code of his school that he produces a masterpiece--and incidentally a new movement. New art movements, forsooth How they sprout, develope, multiply, divide, and finally dwindle into dead roots. Genius alone remains. Indeed, despite the movement that gave him birth and not by reason of it, the great artist survives. Here, for instance, are the different revolutionary movements that followed the French Impressionist school of 1870: there were, to begin with, the Post-impressionists and the Neo-impressionists, who were followed and swallowed by the Divisionists, the Pointillists, the Intimists, the Cubists, etc. And they all, we are told, aim more or less at truth to nature; they all try to surprise nature in her neglige, as it were, and they shun her in her make-up. Hence the research magnificent that they institute into the colours of light and the colours of shadow--hence the shadow painted in various colours, the colour in various lights, detecting purple in grey, yellow in green, etc.--catching nature in her various sleight-of-hand tricks, following her in her lightning changes to the very end in the hope of getting at the heart of the reality of her being. But every time a new trick is detected a new tone is invented for it and a new movement is born. Which sends the critics to their manuals for a name, a label, a new classification. After all, it is genius that counts. And individual genius in an artist is worth a world of polychromic beauty and another world of chiaroscuro schemes. What does it, therefore, matter if Cezanne was an Impressionist or a Postimpressionist? "He expressed in terms of colour the eternal variety of things";...