Arts: Painter vs. Draughtsman The Future of Painting–What Ingres Said

Painter vs. Draughtsman The Future of Painting—What Ingres Said

Willard Huntington Wright, American esthete and critic, offers an ingenious interpretation and forecast of modern art, in his latest pamphlet.*

His thesis is that modernist painting, about which both laity and the profession rage, is not painting at all. It is ” the art of color ” and has developed by a historical accident through the medium of oil, pigment and canvas, to which it bears no essential relation. The true, traditional painting is pictorial draughtsmanship. Its tools are line and mass, black, white and gray. Its function is decoration in public and private buildings. It reached its apex in Rubens (1577-1640), and since then no fundamental advances have been made — merely improvements in method, conquests of technical problems, emotionally impotent. To the great masters of the Renaissance, says Wright, color was incidental—laid on after the design was structurally complete. Their works are as intelligible in black and white reproductions as in the original.

But Turner in England, Delacroix in France, reacted against the orthodox tradition. They were dimly aware of the uses of color, and, though they probably would not recognize their spiritual descendants, they fathered the long line of impressionists, neo-impressionists, pointillists, postimpressionists, cubists, orphists, synchromists and what not, whom the 19th and 20th Centuries spawned. Modernist art is not yet aware of itself. The academic painters are in it only an insolent and half-baked challenge in their own medium. The modernists think they are destined to supplant the older school entirely. Neither is right, and when a true understanding of their respective purposes is spread abroad, the antagonism will vanish.

The color art of the future will abandon pigment and concern itself exclusively with light and vibration. It will bear a closer relation to music and drama than to painting. It will be a highly stimulating, spectacular and temporary species of entertainment, responding to the intenser physiological and emotional needs of the modern machineage. The color organ experiments of Wallace Rimington, Scriabine and Thomas Wilfred are partial, but limited, steps in this direction.

Mr. Wright’s argument is cleverly sustained, though at times loose and mystical in diction. Like all large generalizations, it is too much simplified, and some pertinent questions might well be asked. What would Titian, Hals, Vermeer, Velasquez— colorists extraordinary—have said to the charge that color was only an incident to their art? Probably they would have replied in words not dissimilar to those of Ingres, when a visitor to his studio asked: ” Does M. Ingres, the celebrated draughtsman, live here ? “

” M. Ingres, the celebrated painter, lives here!” shouted the great man as he slammed the door.

*THE FUTURE OF PAINTING—Willard Huntington Wright—Huelsch ($1.00).