ORDER AND AUTHORITY

I

M. Andre Lhote is not only a first-rate painter, he is a capable writer as well; so when, some weeks ago, he began to tell us what was wrong with modern art, and how to put it right, naturally we pricked up our ears.  We were not disappointed.  M. Lhote had several good things to say, and he said them clearly; the thing, however, which he said most emphatically of all was that he, Andre Lhote, besides being a painter and a writer, is a Frenchman.  He has a natural taste for order and a superstitious belief in authority.  That is why he recommends to the reverent study of the young of all nations, David—­David the Schoolmaster! Merci, we have our own Professor Tonks.

Not that I would compare David, who was a first-rate practitioner and something of an artist, with the great Agrippa of the Slade.  But from David even we have little or nothing to learn.  For one thing, art cannot be taught; for another, if it could be, a dry doctrinaire is not the man to teach it.  Very justly M. Lhote compares the Bouchers and Fragonards of the eighteenth century with the Impressionists:  alike they were charming, a little drunk and disorderly.  But when he asserts that it was David who rescued painting from their agreeable frivolity he must be prepared for contradiction:  some people will have it that it was rather the pupil Ingres.  David, they will say, was little better than a politic pedagogue, who, observing that with the Revolution classical virtues and classical costumes had come into fashion, that Brutus, the tyrannicide, and Aristides, called “the just,” were the heroes of the hour, suited his manners to his company and gave the public an art worthy of highly self-conscious liberals.  The timely discoveries made at Herculaneum and Pompeii, they will argue, stood him in good stead.  From these he learnt just how citizens and citizen-soldiers should be drawn; and he drew them:  with the result that the next generation of Frenchmen were sighing: 

    Qui nous delivrera des Grecs et des Romains?

Whoever may have rescued European painting from the charming disorder of the age of reason, there can be no question as to who saved it from the riot of impressionism.  That was the doing of the Post-Impressionists headed by Cezanne.  Forms and colours must be so organized as to compose coherent and self-supporting wholes; that is the central conviction which has inspired the art of the last twenty years.  Order:  that has been the watchword; but order imposed from within.  And order so imposed, order imposed by the artist’s inmost sense of what a work of art should be, is something altogether different from the order obtained by submission to a theory of painting.  One springs from a personal conviction; the other is enjoined by authority.  Modern artists tend to feel strongly the necessity for the former, and, if they be Frenchmen, to believe intellectually in the propriety of the latter.