Art: Faces

(See front cover)

It is a truism that hands are as expressive as faces and it is true that they are a more certain means of identification. Nonetheless, because it is easy to see, a face is the more convenient link between a person and his name. So convenient indeed that it is regarded as the index, not to a person’s name alone, but even to his character; faces, in fact, are almost always mistaken for persons. Hence when a proud man wishes to leave something of his pride, after death, above the humble dust; when a famed man wishes to allow his admirers to satisfy their appetites for adulation; when a rich man wishes to indicate the extent of his domain and the individualities of its proprietor; such a person requires a portrait painter to come into his attendance and to reproduce, upon canvas, a face, in light and shade.

The function of the portrait painter, as distinct from that of the painter, can be thus explained. It is his business not only to produce a work of art but to produce a likeness that satisfies the sitter or the sitter’s advisors. Few portrait painters can achieve the two things simultaneously and those who can quickly become popular; their popularity grows larger like a snowball.

Whom, for example, would a very wealthy and impudent plutocrat of Milwaukee ask to paint his features, should he want this done? He would ask Sir William Orpen, Sir John Lavery, Augustus E. John, or Ignacio Zuloaga: these, with a few others of less consequence, from a small group whose prices, higher than those of other portrait painters, average about $10,000.* Had the plutocrat desired last week to have his portrait painted, he would, if alert, have sent a cable to Augustus John for Painter John, after a frantic scurrying departure, was on his way to the U. S. while the rest were far away. Had he received such a request Painter John would doubtless have torn it into many pieces.

Ever since he left the Slade School, in London, many years ago, Painter John has been careless of the feelings of the people whom he paints or the people who talk about paintings. When he painted Lloyd George, a fellow native of Wales, the statesman sadly sputtered: “That is the picture of a Welshman at his worst!”

When he exhibited first at the English Art Club, at about the same time as Sir William Orpen, critics snarled at him for selecting “ugly subjects.” Disregarding the absurd grounds for their quarrel, the critics were probably wrong. Painter John was not disturbed at their objections. He became a teacher of art at the Liverpool University School of Art from which he soon disappeared to live among gypsies while painting pictures of them.

After the War, Augustus John was an artist of great personal as well as esthetic eclat. He was elected to the Royal Academy whereupon he increased his reputation for daring independence by sending a picture to the Academy Exhibition which he followed up with this remark: “I never asked them to admit me. I never sent them a picture until after they elected me.”

If he was not properly elated by his election to the Royal Academy, Augustus John was certainly disgusted by another incident which likewise did much to enlarge his fame. He had painted a picture of famed Lord Leverhulme, soap tycoon. When Lord Leverhulme went to put this portrait in his safe, he found that the canvas was too big to fit. Therefore he ordered the head and neck to be cut off, had the rest labelled “the remainder of the portrait painted by Augustus John,” and entrusted it to a servant who, through an idiotic mistake, mailed it to the artist. Said Augustus John: “The grossest, most deliberately gratuitous insult I have ever received.” The students at the Slade School marched through the streets of London, carrying headless effigies of Lord Leverhulme which they burned. All over Italy, artists, dealers, masons, picture packers, illustrators—everyone who had anything to do with “art”—declared a 24-hour strike to indicate their horror at so grotesque a vandalism. Grandly and sheepishly, Lord Leverhulme offered a public apology. The incident did not improve Painter John’s opinion of soap manufacturers; had the plutocrat who addressed a request to him last week been such a one, Augustus John would doubtless have roared as he tore the message into shreds.

In point of fact, Painter John was coming to the U. S. to portray Alvan Tufts Fuller, Governor of Massachusetts, together with his wife and four children. The portrait, if typically successful, would doubtless be bright in color, not too careful in detail; it would be possible to recognize in its style the influence of Gaugin and more especially Cezanne. The canvass would be notable for a certain quality of excitement combined with certainty of technique.

Most unfashionable painters feel and express disdain for fashionable portrait painters. This disdain is in many cases justified because many fashionable portrait painters are ridiculous fakes. Disdain is not usually felt for Sir William Orpen with his careful, photographic half-tones, sometimes so emphasized that his faces are overmodeled. Among the most prolific of painters, he held, in 1918, a vast exhibition of War-paintings, of which he gave a large number to the British nation. He has written books as well as painted pictures, but less ably.

Sir John Lavery’s portraits are distinguished by concentration upon pattern and composition and by a unique green which he uses in his flesh tints. Lavery has painted the British Royal family with notable success; a man of strong and erratic enthusiasms, he last week proposed to portray Prize-fighter Gene Tunney whom he met at a banquet. “He is the favorite of the Gods,” exclaimed Sir John, “Someone … I myself . . . should paint him for the Royal Academy.”

Unlike these two Englishmen is Zuloaga, called the modern El Greco, the modern Goya, and other foolish titles. A bald and portly Latin with a bushy moustache which grows lighter in color and smaller with the years, Zuloaga is spectacularly and entirely Spanish. His work, though loud, is sound. Like many fashionable artists, he has ingratiating traits of personality which cause his patrons to regard him as a gentle and delectable monster. When he exhibited in the U. S. four years ago, he sold $100,000 of paintings on the first day of the show and Governor Fuller outdid himself in buying one small canvas for $35,000. As Orpen, British in his diversions as he is in his paintings, plays cricket in his spare moments, Zuloaga’s sport is the sport of Spain. He was a bullfighter once and it was after the warm afternoon many years ago when a bull who had gored the young matador stood beside him to be killed, his nose pushed with a gesture of ignorant apology against the man’s bloody shirt that Zuloaga chose a weapon lighter than the sword.

But none of these three has succeeded in maintaining as has Augustus John, a triple allegiance with fashionable public, ultra-modernists and academicians. It is undeniable that no U. S. artist is included among the world’s most popular portrait painters. Thirty years ago, Eastman Johnson and Daniel Huntington, painters of highly unequal merit, were accustomed to use their brushes, as though they had been valets’ whiskbrooms, upon the handsome exteriors of fashionable people in Manhattan and elsewhere. Knoedler’s Gallery is largely responsible for the change. Since the time when its senior partner began to import the work of foreign celebrities, native workmanship became less socially desirable. U. S. persons, having arrived at the pinnacle of pretension which permits them to order portraits, would prefer to have themselves painted by a portrayer of dukes or princes. Hence U. S. portraitists, able though they may be, are not so avidly patronized that their prices approach those of the most famed Europeans. George Benjamin Luks, Eugene Edward Speicher, Wayman Adams, and Leopold Seyffert probably have all the portrait work they want to do, but they do not get $10,000 apiece for their pictures.

Because no person will agree with another person’s view of him, few persons are satisfied with their portraits. John Davison Rockefeller expressed delight at seeing Sargent’s portrait of him but Calvin Coolidge, when he had been painted by Philip Lazlo, sent for the artist to come and finish one of his hands. What emotions of embarrassment, scorn, amusement and despair Painter Lazlo must have concealed in the letter which he addressed to the President to inform him that the hand was finished.

*Ten years ago the standard “top price” was about $5,000.