24 2 PAINTING 



is conventional and arbitrary, his outline heavy and emphatic, his treatment of the 

 human form synthetically simplified.; 



Vincent Van Gogh, who is in many ways the most interesting figure of this group, 

 was born at Groot Zundert, in Holland, in 1853, the son of a Lutheran clergyman. 

 He began life as a salesman at Goupil & Co.'s, the well known art dealers, 

 then went to England as a teacher, and returned to Holland in 1877 to 

 study theology. Impatient of the narrowness of the school teaching, and impelled 

 by real religious ardour, he took up missionary work among the rough miners at Boringe 

 in Belgium. It was in this milieu that he began to practice drawing, and on his return 

 to his parents in 1881 he was sent to his brother-in-law Anton Mauve to receive in- 

 struction in painting. His passionate impulsiveness and restlessness made him again 

 impatient to work independently, but four years later, recognising the disadvantages 

 of insufficient training, he submitted himself for a few months only to the dis- 

 cipline of the Antwerp Academy. 



In 1886 he went to Paris, where he entered the circle of the Impressionists and 

 became friendly with Gauguin. In the next year Van Gogh went to Provence, and 

 induced Gauguin to join him at Aries for the purpose of collaboration. The two 

 artists, united only by their revolutionary tendencies, were wholly at variance in their 

 disposition. Frequent quarrels between them reached their climax when Van Gogh 

 attacked Gauguin with a razor and subsequently in a fit of remorse mutilated himself 

 and was taken to a lunatic asylum. He had many lucid intervals and continued to 

 paint with unabated enthusiasm. In 1889 he was taken charge of by Dr. Gachet, 

 at Anvers-sur-Oise, in whose garden he shot himself on July 28, 1800. 



Van Gogh's undisciplined, erratic, tragic life is reflected in his art. Of his absolute 

 sincerity, of the intensity of his emotions, there can be no doubt. That his' frenzied 

 brushv/ork, his furious hatchet strokes of paint, his concentration upon the essential 

 significance conveyed to him by each subject, served their purpose is equally certain. 

 But not only are his paintings marred by an absolute contempt of surface quality and 

 of what is commonly called beauty, but both his conception and his execution fre- 

 quently, and especially in his later work, suggest an unhinged mind. His insanity 

 in itself is no excuse for condemning his best work, which has qualities that entitle Van 

 Gogh to a position among the great artists of the nineteenth century. 



In the art of Cezanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh, who have already been called 

 the " old masters " of the new movement, is to be found the germ of all the later de- 

 velopments. It is extremely difficult to draw a line of division between 

 The later those recent attempts that are based on the confusion of art with science, 



r'ost'ltnpres' , , . , , . ,, .. 11 



slonlsts. but which are nevertheless the outcome of honest conviction, and those 



which are either the expression of insanity or at least abnormality, or those 

 which owe their origin to mere fumisteric and sensationalism. What they all have in 

 common is contempt of mere representation of natural facts. At the second Post- 

 Impressionist exhibition, held in London at the Grafton Galleries in 1912, Henri Matisse 

 and P. Picasso represented the extremes to which art may be led by the application 

 of these new principles. Matisse, an artist of immense ability, endowed with a rare 

 sense of rhythm in line and colour, can scarcely be taken seriously in his grotesque 

 contortions and simplifications. He tried to look upon nature with the unsophisti- 

 cated eyes of a child, and his paintings, whilst betraying the experienced hand that 

 simulates incapacity, too often succeed in suggesting the achievement of the nursery. 

 Picasso, the head of the so-called " Cubist " school, has in his latest phase cut 

 entirely adrift from anything that approaches recognisable representation. His 

 Cubism recent pictures are merely indescribably tangled geometrical diagrams. 

 Cubism is supposed to be based on searching for the volume of objects 

 and to " render unspeakable cosmic sympathies perceptible "; but it is really the 

 outcome of an absolute misconception of the function of art. Even if it be taken for 

 granted that the advanced Post-Impressionists are sincere and actually feel the qmo- 

 tions they try to express, this alone does not constitute art. The purpose of a work 



