ART.
THE ACADEMY,—III.
MERE TECHNIQUE.
THERE has been going on what the papers call a Revulsion of Public Feeling in the matter of technique. It was but yesterday that the correct public form for speakers about painting was to deprecate "Mere Technique," surmised by the hearers to be something French and soul-destroying. In the days when English painters were not ashamed of being masters of their craft, when Gainsborough painted his Musidora and Turner his Shipwreck, there was naturally no such cant about techniaue, or, as it was called then, execution.
Those painters did not find it incompatible with the possession of a heart to have an eye and hand as well, and the paint on Musidora's leg or Turner's ship was as beautiful as the paint on a gold chain by Velasquez or Lorenzo Lotto. The fashion of scouting technique arose from a particular disability of the pre-Raphaelites. Endowed with faculties of imagination, design, and, up to a certain point, drawing, they embarked on oil-painting not only with a sham system of modelling, but with several unfortunate techniques. The most unfor- tunate was borrowed from water-colour, and consisted in thin pencillings of colour over a white ground.
But all this preaching has done its work on the restless spirit of fashion. The mysterious, dangerous something, suppcsed to have been invented in recent years in Paris, has exercised the charm of a forbidden fruit. In the fanciful works of the realists, in the revelations of improving novelists, no life is complete without an experience in Parisian studios of two things, vice and technique, alike unknown in this country of ours. They reflect a lurid light upon one another, and you picture the artist devoting the hours he can spare, say from the consumption of absinthe, to the exciting practice of technique. The lady novelists have not yet estimated for us how many home-grown students go wrong upon sherry and bitters, or destroy their nerves upon tea ; but the awful truth as to technique, is that there is rather more of it on this side than on the other, and that a single study from the cast by a blameless Academy student, contains more technique than twenty equally bad school studies in Paris ; indeed an Academy study in crayon is very nearly that impossible thing, "mere technique," throughout. In good drawing, of course, there is no such thing. Mere technique, if it meant anything, means passing off a carica- ture of your teacher's execution in place of an account of something seen. The right word for this is shoddy technique, and the ordinary Parisian shoddy is no better than the London article. One is more laborious, the other more flashy, but it is just as much a pretence to stipple brain- lessly, which is the old shoddy, as to splash brainlessly, which is the new. One apes fraudulently the patience of the master, the other his brilliance. Any real way of looking at things introduced into the schools, like the method of M. Carolus Duran, is rapidly converted by teaching middlemen into a shoddy technique for the average artartudent.
At home, however, the superstition has grown, and there has been a natural anxiety to discover and admire examples of this famous technique. Grave gentlemen, who a year or two back frowned their brows and pursed their lips in the then correct attitude at the sound of the word, are now to be seen anxiously beating the galleries for pictures with "technique" in them, ready with the now correct admiration where they are found. The simple truth is that changes in technique have had a very small part in modern painting. Carolus Duran's technical innovations were small ; his attempt was to formulate for school purposes Velazquez' manner of seeing things, and a way of seeing is not a technique. Degas and Whistler have rendered new aspects of things; their technique is classic. The only important new sect is that of the broken-handling painters, and their technique also reposes on a truth of aspect, which they incline to caricature. Im- pressionism, once more, is not a technique; it is an allowance for the effect of focus and attention on the field of vision. Bat the critics were on the look-out for the much-talked- of modern technique, and appear to have found it. A master whom the art students in Paris never attempted to learn from, Degas, was hooted on his appearance in London. The shoddy article, the clever chic and pretence of drawing of Jules Clieret, is received with acclamation. So the popular mini, left cold by Whistler, now grows almost tepid over, for an example, Mr. Brangwyn. The gentle Standard even tells us of Mr. Brangwyn's and Mr. Cayley Robinson's pictures (Nos. 605 and 612 in the present Academy), that here is very modern sensitiveness of technique. These things are in the vanguard of the artistic forces of the day."
Modern they certainly are, but whether sensitive or in the vanguard of the artistic forces of the day admits of question. What is this mysterious affair, technique ? It is not exactly simple, it is duplex ; but no mystery if we do not mix it with the process of seeing, which results in an image, and the process of designing, which results in a picture, but neither of which is technique. Technique is the last, the physical step which ends each of these processes, each of these two games which make up pictorial imagination, and which the painter must carry on side by side. This last physical step on the decorative or designing side—the side that allies drawing to music, to dancing, to abstract pleasant lines and patches—is the getting of a pleasant consistency and surface in the paint. The choice of patterns is not technique,—that is design. The choice of colours is not technique,—that is design. Technique is the laying-on with the hand of a good coat of paint, like a house-painter, though with a variety again dictated by the sense of design. This side of technique is known as Quality. It is the physical magic that makes paint delightful for itself. The last physical step on the other side —the expression of a thing seen—is the fitting of those more or less fluid pastes and glazes to this expression without injuring their own beauty, and also the choice of size, shape, direction and attack of the touch, since these may all be used as expressive elements in drawing. This latter part of expres- sive technique is what is known as Handling. Handling and expressive technique generally, it will be seen, slides into vision more indivisibly than decorative technique into design; for good handling is not playing about with a brush—that would ba decorative technique—it is the last step in drawing. The most obvious case of handling is the use of brush-marks to indicate vigorously the direction of forms.
We are now in a position to decide between good and bad technique. The two glaring cases are the converse of one another. One is the use of a degraded decorative technique as a pretence of expressive technique. The other is the degradation of a device of expression into decoration. An example of the first is what is known in England as "finish." A smoothly enamelled augace is a pleasant quality in paint, but it ought not of itself to pass muster for complete structure in drawing. It is most often to be found licked over a complete absence of structure, or imperfect and feeble structure. A sketch by Mr. Sargent is more finished than a portrait by Mr. Richmond, because it is more vital. An example of the other kind of bad technique is the stipple, which originally was a network of expressive handling, but has come down in the world till it is merely a decorative .preference for a kind of rash. The newer fashionable examples give us what looks like vigorous handling, dexterous brush-work, all expressing nothing, or expressing, by painting across the forms "dexterously," the exact opposite of the fact.
It is because I find more of this than of sensitiveness in Mr. Brangwyn's picture that I cannot agree with the critic of the Standard. The history of Mr. Brangwyn's manner is interesting. Underlying it at some removes is the aspect of things that was the patent of Bastien Lepage, photographic flat forms represented by drawing in sharp definition and squarish planes. This was Mr. Brangwyn's first manner, with black colouring. Suddenly he borrowed the Glasgow palette and handling. The planes in this manner had been ovalised by a hand that found the oval easier than the square, the paint also, like the drawing, became fatter, and a remarkable decorative colour took the place of greys. This manner of painting Mr. Brangwyn, a man of great adaptive ability, took up at its most caricatured pitch, and his Rest is the result. In the background one finds not unpleasant patches of colour and an agreeable texture. In the flesh-painting it is rather his original colour-sense that speaks, and leaves it blackish. In the draperies we find the famous "technique," a great deal of brush - work, but not handling, for it cannot be said to be expressive. The general effect is no doubt much more taking than the complete absence of decorative intention in the mass of pictures exhibited. Best has the pictorial elements of space-disposition, relief of important forms by tone, colour patchwork. But two things it is not. It is not impressionistic, for it springs from no close inspiration of nature ; and it is not exemplary technique, because the technique has an appearance of expression without being really expressive. Mr. Cayley Robinson's picture is an equally conventional kind of picture-making. its analogue is the work of Mr. Holman Hunt.
It might be amusing to examine at length the freaks of the painter who takes it into his head to have " handling " with- out a notion of its use. Certain eminent painters laboriously build up a structure in some material with the effect of ripples and worm-casts on sand, and over this they pass a wash of colour. The roughness obtained isr admired by people who detest vigorous painting close modelled on vital fact.
But it would be waste of time to go into all this. A more important point remains, —that of consistency of technique. This may be illustrated from the picture by the President, called Flaming June. Sir Frederic Leighton usually shows us a consistent if insipid execution. A de- parture from his practice is the more instructive. Con- sistent technique rests on coherent pictorial ideas, and Sir Frederic's is of its kind coherent. His idea is, "I will retain as vital elements in my work only drawing and modelling, subordinating even these to the rhythms / admire in Pheidian sculpture. The rest shall be in the very loosest relation to nature. There shall be no natural lighting, no values. I shall therefore be free to determine the colour purely by my judgment of what is bright and pretty." That is an intelligible line to take, but it must be held to, with no outbreak into realism by patches. See the effect of such a sudden break-out. In Flaming June, which has n,o pretence to being a real effect, there is at one point a realistic effort in the track of light over the sea. The incoherence of vision is followed by disturbance of technique. At this point the thin execution is varied by a pile of paint, what Mr. Spielmana calls "rich impasto." The result is paintiness, by which I mean that an interruption in techniques reduces us to n sensation of paint and canvas. The physical texture of a picture may be coarse and apparent, but so long as it is con- sistent the sensation runs along parallel with the perception of the scene. But if on a wrought tapestry one were to paint a figure solidly, the sensation of the opposed techniques would destroy the continuity of picture. The most beautiful tech- nique in oil-painting proceeds from transparent shadows to gradually loaded lights, but the procedure must apply throughout. The local pile of paint is another thing.
One word more. Since technique properly follows on vision, common vision will have its perfect technique, as well as beautiful vision. Mr. Brett's technique is an honest and perfect technique, for his trivial view of the world. So is Mr. Tadema's. No mistake could be greater than to suppose that a change of technique is what is wanted to make these skilful craftsmen into great painters. Their mind and eye are fitted) with an execution like a glove. D. S. M.
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