The Painter and the Dynamo

JOHN PEALE BISHOP

The Art of Fernand Leger and Its Relation to the New Aesthetics of the Machine

IT is very difficult for an American to attend seriously to the new Aesthetics of the Machine. The sound of riveting is too loud in his ears for him to hear the manifestoes with any distinctness. Besides, the Italians, who are most eloquent on the subject, seem to write very badly and to employ too many classical allusions. Signor Enrico Prampolini appears to have turned to the Machine chiefly as a substitute for Ovid's Metamorphoses; Signor Marinetti, in his now almost forgotten manifesto, could find no better comparison for a racing automobile than the Victory of Samothrace.

It is only fitting that Futurism, with its insistence on the aesthetic possibilities of mechanical forms and speed, should have originated in Italy—a nation which, lacking coal, is not in the slightest danger of becoming industrially powerful. Besides, if, as the modem artist assumes, the Renaissance was not so much a new birth as a luxurious decay, destroying the free invention of the artist and substituting sentimental description for the delighted employment of color and form, it is Italy that is most encumbered by the dead and magnificent Rinascimento. Living among museums, the Italians regard our factories with an almost mystical sentimentalism; knee-deep in the dust of the past, they are consumed of nostalgia for the present. The result is that their work exhibits the exact opposite of the fine qualities of a machine—it is loose in structure, uselessly distorted, sentimentally soft.

Yet to deny the right of the artist to avail himself of the plastic elements introduced into modem life by machinery is absurd. It is impossible to say at a given point that all the possible means of aesthetic expression have been used, and that no new element is to be admitted. The plastic elements of machinery exist, like any other, to be used by the painter as a means to his own ends.

The Machine as an Aesthetic Impulse

BUT, if a painting is to present the aesthetic equivalent of a machine, it is only reasonable to ask that it should preserve the admirable qualities of the machine. That is to ay, it should be hard, assertive, unsentimental, and organized with the utmost economy. Instead of disorder, there should be order. These are exactly the qualities to be found in the paintings of Fernand Leger. If the locomotive and the turbine have aesthetic values, they will be justified in his canvases, or not at all.

For, as he himself has said, " If an artist is to achieve power and intensity, if he wishes to equal in his work the beautiful objects which industry creates daily, he, too, must concern himself with geometric problems, the relation of volumes, the relation of lines, both curved and straight, and the relation of colors. We are no longer Impressionists at the mercy of a subject, of an instinct, or a brush. We must organize our canvases like any other man in a life organized in the intellectual order; that is to say, we must employ the utmost knowledge of the means at our disposal in order to obtain the maximum result".

In all this, there is no effort to advance mechanical forms at the expense of any other. There are other stops to his recorders; and if one is to pluck out the heart of his mystery it will be found rather in his desire to live completely in his age. That time he sees set off from the past chiefly by the violence of its contrasts and by the dominance of the mechanical element. For not only has machinery altered the visual aspect of things, broken surfaces into contrasting fragments; multiplied and sharpened angles, executed whole cities on a geometric design; it has profoundly altered human values. It has introduced a. new ideal of perfection in human conduct, an ideal of no motion lost, of no wasted effort; a mechanical ideal under which the soldier becomes a number on a tag, the workman a mere unit of production, the sentient man a device to be used, unsentimentally, like any other cog or wheel.

We have, therefore, in Léger's canvases not only propellers and turbines painted for sheer pleasure in their own beauty, but a constant play of invention which in its way also celebrates a mechanical age. When the machines are beautiful in themselves; when the subject has its own beauty, it is set down with only so much play of the fancy as will redeem the canvas from monotony. Otherwise, such liberties are taken as the fine painters of the past have always taken with their subjects, before the search for similitude and sentimental description set in, at the end of the eighteenth century.

The Vitality of Mechanical Symbol

FERNAND LEGER, wesee, turned originally to machinery to avoid the distortion of the human form, believing that mechanical forms were more readily adaptable to a geometrical pattern. But now, when men and women appear in his canvases, they too take on a mechanical air, so far have they been changed in his eyes by the industrial order of things.

"All my paintings are composed by arranging plastic contrasts: by the opposition of flat to modelled surfaces, the opposition of pure and characteristic color to neutral tones. I only utilize the visual values of the moment. We live in an epoch of contrasts, and I wish to live at the height of my epoch." After the mechanical element, it is the orchestration of contrary and strongly opposing values which provides Leger with the greatest excitement His interest is aroused not alone by the sharp lines of a gaudy billboard cutting the soft green of a landscape, the stiff black lines of the men against the delicate colors and flowing textures of women; he has seen also, during the war and the questionable peace that has followed it, the incessant, brutal shock of life and death in hourly contact. The approximate date of any canvas may be determined by its use of contrary values. The influence of Cezanne is evident in the paintings made ten years ago— in the drifting of the colors, the blurring of contours, in a certain smokiness in the pervading air. From that time there has been a continual progress toward a harder line, a cruder, clearer color, a more violent juxtaposition of curves and angles, of grey against vivid tones.

The Effectiveness of Ironic Contrast

THIS sense of surprise through contrast is a continuous element of modern art: it is to be seen in the alternation of the present and the past, the confusion of languages in Ezra Pound's Eight Cantos; in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with its lack of transitions and the simultaneous presentation of present-day London and the legendary world of the Fisher King; and in, say, the Episode of the Sirens in James Joyce's Ulysses, where the distinction is lost between actual events and the phantasmagoria of the drunken mind. In the paintings of Fernand Leger fantastic colors are applied to forms derived from the apparent world, and machines, streets and geometrical buildings alternate with patterns of pure invention. And always there is the surprise of color used arbitrarily to heighten contrast or simply to fulfil the need of untrammeled imagining. Cylindrical forms are modelled in a single color—from the darkest of rich blues to a blue so thin that it is perceived as grey—and accentuated by a flat background in a dull blood color or crude yellow; behind the wheels and pistons are other, purely subjective designs, derived from the painter's brain and only in the composition related to the forms of the objective world.

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The Two Methods of Leger's Art

THERE is a distinction of aim between those paintings like the Mother and Child, exhibited at the Salon d'Automne, and the abstract panels which occupied the place of honor at the Salon des Independants. The former exist for their own sake; in them the painter has attempted to isolate and intensify his most personal qualities and every means possible is used toward that end—arrangement of contrasts, multiplication in variety, violent color and assertive form. In the latter, which are painted in fresco tradition, everything is relative. They are intended to be used in relation to architectural designs, on the façades of buildings or the walls of railway stations, relieving the dead surfaces with the delicate colors of a child's paint box and with unobtrusive forms. Strictly impersonal, they have, intentionally, none but a decorative value. The composed canvases are to force themselves upon us with the rude insistence of the Sacre de Printemps of Stravinsky. But these subdued arrangements of paler color are a distraction and a quiet compensation for the shrieking of the locomotive and the grinding of the wheels, modernity's discordant clamors.

If I have dwelt overlong on the "ideas" from which these paintings proceed, it is only because they are at present the most successful attempts to authenticate these ideas through color and form. There is no suspicion of description, either sentimental or cerebral, in Léger's art. It depends for its interest purely upon its intensity as plastic expression; its value lies not in its subject matter, but in the way in which that subject matter is combined with a subjective vision. Like nearly all the significant works of the contemporary spirit, it moves half way between reality and an unreal dream. His streets are filled with familiar forms and unknown colors; his pistons slide not in factories but among fantastical shapes of the mind.

The Eternal Timeliness of Genius

THESE paintings have a contemporaneous interest. And yet, almost inevitably, they remind me of certain Italian primitives in the Academia at Venice, paintings on wood, where there is to be found a similar strictness in arrangement, the same insistence on geometrical form and definite line, the same inventedcolor and bold delight in placing mothgreen on fuchsia pink, glistening white against profound blue. If by contrast the paintings of Léger seem immeasurably brutal and hard, it is to be remembered that the Italians were impelled by the necessity of relating the figures of peasant life to the sweet mystery of the mediaeval Church; the problem of the modem is to adjust the individual man to the mechanical forces which surround him. And the conflict of the body and the spirit had not the bitterness, the utter mercilessness which marks the struggle between our flesh and nerves with the machine.