POST IMPRESSIONISM

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POST IMPRESSIONISM

PAINTING

In 1882, just before his death, Manet was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honor by the French government. Four years later, the Impressionists, who had been exhibiting together since 1874, held their last group show. These two events mark the turn of the tide-Impressionism had gained wide acceptance among artists and the public, but by the same token it was no longer a pioneering movement. The future now belonged to the "Post-Impressionists."

Taken literally, this colorless label applies to all painters of significance since the 1880s; in a more specific sense, it des­ignates a group of artists who passed through an Impression­ist phase but became dissatisfied with the limitations of the style and went beyond it in various directions. As they did not share one common goal, it is difficult to find a more de­scriptive term for them than Post-Impressionists. In any event, they were not "anti-Impressionists." Far from trying to undo the effects of the "Manet Revolution," they wanted to carry it further; Post-Impressionism is in essence just a later stage-though a very important one-of the develop­ment that had begun in the 1860s with such pictures as Manet's Luncheon on the Grass.

CEZANNE. Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), the oldest of the Post-Impressionists, was born in Aix-en-Provence, near the Mediterranean coast. A man of intensely emotional temper­ament, he came to Paris in 1861 imbued with enthusiasm for the Romantics; Delacroix was his first love among paint­ers-he never lost his admiration for him-and he quickly grasped the nature of the "Manet Revolution." After passing through a "Neo-Baroque" phase, Cezanne began to paint bright outdoor scenes, but he never shared his fellow Impressionists' interest in "slice-of-life" subjects, in move­ment and change. About 1879, when he painted the Self-Por­trait in our figure 941, he had decided "to make of Impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of the museums." His Romantic impulsiveness of the 1860s has now given way to a patient, disciplined search for harmony of form and colour: every brushstroke is like a building block, finely placed within the pictorial architecture; the balance of "two-D" and "three-D" is less harsh than before (note how the pattern of wallpaper in the background frames the rounded shape of the head); and the colors are deliberately controlled so as to produce "chords" of warm and cool tones that reverberate throughout the canvas.

In Cezanne's still lifes, such as Still Life with AppLes, this quest for the "solid and durable" can be seen even more clearly. Not since Chardin have simple everyday objects assumed such importance in a painter's eye. Again the orna­mental backdrop is integrated with the three-dimensional shapes, and the brushstrokes have a rhythmic pattern that gives the canvas its shimmering texture. We also notice an­other aspect of Cezanne's mature style that is more conspic­uous here than in the SeLf-Portrait and may puzzle us at first: the forms are deliberately simplified and outlined with dark contours; and the perspective is "incorrect" for both the fruit bowl and the horizontal surfaces, which seem to tilt upward. The longer we study the picture, the more we realize the rightness of these apparently arbitrary distortions. When Cezanne took these liberties with reality, his purpose was to uncover the permanent qualities beneath the accidents of appearance (all forms in nature, he believed, are based on the cone, the sphere, and the cylinder). This order underly­ing the external world was the true subject of his pictures, but he had to interpret it to fit the separate, closed world of the canvas.

To apply this method to landscape became the greatest challenge of Cezanne's career. From 1882 on, he lived in iso­lation near his hometown of Aix-en-Provence, exploring its environs as Claude Lorraine and Corot had explored the Roman countryside. One motif, the distinctive shape of a mountain called Mont Sainte-Victoire, seemed almost to ob­sess him; its craggy profile looming against the blue Medi­terranean sky appears in a long series of compositions, such as the very monumental late works. There are no hints of human presence here-houses and roads would only disturb the lonely grandeur of this view. Above the wall of rocky cliffs that bar our way like a chain of fortifications, the mountain rises in triumphant clarity, infinitely remote yet as solid and palpable as the shapes in the foreground. For all its architectural stability, the scene is alive with movement; but the forces at work here have been brought into equilib­rium, subdued by the greater power of the artist's will. This disciplined energy, distilled from the trials of a stormy youth, gives the mature style of Cezanne its enduring strength.

SEURAT Georges Seurat (1859-1891) shared Cezanne's aim to make Impressionism "solid and durable," but he went about it very differently. His career was as brief as those of Masaccio, Giorgione, and Gericault, and his achievement just as astonishing. Seurat devoted his main efforts to a few very large paintings, spending a year or more on each of them: he made endless series of preliminary studies before he felt sure enough to tackle the definitive version. This painstaking method reflects his belief that art must be based on a system; like Degas, he had studied with a follower of lngres, and his theoretical interests came from this expe­rience. But, as with all artists of genius, Seurat's theories do not really explain his pictures; it is the pictures, rather, that explain the theories.

The subject of his first large-scale composition, The Bath­ers is of the sort that had long been popular among Impressionist painters. Impressionist, too, are the brilliant colors and the effect of intense sunlight. Otherwise, however, the picture is the very opposite of a quick "impression"; the firm, simple contours and the re­laxed, immobile figures give the scene a timeless stability that recalls Piero della Francesca and shows a clear awareness of Puvis de Chavannes. Even the brushwork demonstrates Seurat's passion for order and permanence: the canvas surface is covered with systematic, impersonal "flicks" that make Cezanne's architectural brushstrokes seem temperamental and dynamic by comparison. .

In Seurat's later works such as Invitation to the Side Show (La Parade), the flicks become tiny dots of brilliant colour that were supposed to merge in the beholder's eye and produce intermediary tints more luminous than those obtain­able from pigments mixed on the palette. This procedure was variously known as Neo-Impressionism, Pointillism, or Divi­sionism (the term preferred by Seurat). The actual result, however, did not conform to the theory. Looking at Invitation to the Side Show from a comfortable distance (seven to ten feet for the original), we find that the mixing of colours in the eye remains incomplete; the dots do not disappear, but are as clearly visible as the tesserae of a mosaic. Seurat himself must have liked this unexpected ef­fect-had he not, he would have reduced the size of the dots-which gives the canvas the quality of a shimmering, translucent screen.

In Invitation to the Side Show, the bodies do not have the weight and bulk they had in The Bathers; modeling and fore­shortening are reduced to a minimum, and the figures ap­pear mostly in either strict profile or frontal views, as if Seurat had adopted the rules of ancient Egyptian art.

Moreover, he has fitted them very precisely into a system of vertical and horizontal coordinates that holds them in place and defines the canvas as a self-contained rectilinear field. Only in the work of Vermeer have we encountered a similar "area-consciousness".

The machinelike quality of Seurat's forms, achieved through rigorous abstraction, is the first expression of a pe­culiarly modern outlook leading to Futurism. Seurat's systematic approach to art has the internal logic of modern engineering, which he and his followers hoped would transform society for the better. This social conscious­ness was allied to a form of anarchism descended from Courbet's friend Proudhon, and contrasts with the general political indifference of the Impressionists.

VAN GOGH. While Cezanne and Seurat were converting Impressionism into a more severe, classical style, Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) pursued the opposite direction. He believed that Impressionism did not provide the artist with enough freedom to express his emotions. Since this was his main concern, he is sometimes called an Expressionist, although the term ought to be reserved for certain later painters. Van Gogh, the first great Dutch master since the seventeenth century, did not become an art­ist until 1880; as he died only ten years later, his career was even briefer than that of Seurat. His early interests were in literature and religion; profoundly dissatisfied with the val­ues of industrial society and imbued with a strong sense of mission, he worked for a while as a lay preacher among poverty stricken coal miners. This same intense feeling for the poor dominates the paintings of his pre-Impressionist pe­riod, 1880-85. In The Potato Eaters, the last and most ambitious work of those years, there remains a naive clumsiness that comes from his lack of conventional train­ing, but this only adds to the expressive power of his style. We are reminded of Daumier and Millet, and of Rembrandt and Le Nain. For this peasant family, the evening meal has the solemn importance of a ritual.

When he painted The Potato Eaters, Van Gogh had not yet discovered the importance of color. A year later in Paris, where his brother Theo had a gallery devoted to modern art, he met Degas, Seurat, and other leading French artists. Their effect on him was electrifying: his pictures now blazed with colour, and he even experimented briefly with the Divi­sionist technique of Seurat. This Impressionist phase, how­ever, lasted less than two years. Although it was vitally important for his development, he had to integrate it with the style of his earlier years before his genius could fully unfold. Paris had opened his eyes to the sensuous beauty of the vis­ible world and had taught him the pictorial language of the color patch, but painting continued to be nevertheless a ves­sel for his personal emotions. To investigate this spiritual re­ality with the new means at his command, he went to Arles, in the south of France. It was there, between 1888 and 1890, that he produced his greatest pictures.

Like Cezanne, Van Gogh now devoted his main energies to landscape painting, but the sun-drenched Mediterranean countryside evoked a very different response in him: he saw it filled with ecstatic movement, not architectural stability and permanence. In Wheat Field and Cypress Trees, both earth and sky show an overpowering turbu­lence-the wheat field resembles a stormy sea, the trees spring flame like from the ground, and the hills and clouds heave with the same undulant motion. The dynamism con­tained in every brushstroke makes of each one not merely a deposit of colour, but an incisive graphic gesture. The artist's personal "handwriting" is here an even more dominant factor than in the canvases of Daumier. Yet to Van Gogh himself it was the colour, not the form, that determined the expressive content of his pictures. The letters he wrote to his brother include many eloquent de­scriptions of his choice of hues and the emotional meanings he attached to them. Although he acknowledged that his de­sire "to exaggerate the essential and to leave the obvious vague" made his colours look arbitrary by Impressionist stan­dards, he nevertheless remained deeply committed to the vis­ible world.

Compared to Monet's The River, the colors of Wheat Field and Cypress Trees are stronger, simpler, and more vibrant, but in no sense "unnatural." They speak to us of that "kingdom of light" Van Gogh had found in the South, and of his mystic faith in a creative force animating all forms of life-a faith no less ardent than the sectarian Christianity of his early years. The missionary had now become a prophet. We see him in that role in the Self-Portrait, his emaciated, luminous head with its burning eyes set off against a whirlpool of darkness. "I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize," Van Gogh had written, groping to define for his brother the human essence that was his aim in pic­tures such as this. At the time of the Self-Portrait, he had already begun to suffer fits of a mental illness that made painting increasingly difficult for him. Despairing of a cure, he committed suicide a year later, for he felt very deeply that art alone made his life worth living.

GAUGUIN AND SYMBOLISM. The quest for religious experience also played an important part in the work-if not in the life-of another great Post-Impressionist, Paul Gauguin (1848-1903). He began as a prosperous stockbroker in Paris and an amateur painter and collector of modern pic­tures. At the age of thirty-five, however, he became con­vinced that he must devote himself entirely to art; he abandoned his business career, separated from his family, and by 1889 was the central figure of a new movement called Synthetism or Symbolism.

Gauguin began as a follower of Cezanne and once owned one of his still lifes. He then developed a style that, though less intensely personal than Van Gogh's, was in some ways an even bolder advance beyond Impressionism. Gauguin be­lieved that Western civilization was "out of joint," that indus­trial society had forced people into an incomplete life dedicated to material gain, while their emotions lay ne­glected. To rediscover for himself this hidden world of feel­ing, Gauguin left Paris for western France to live among the peasants of Brittany. He noticed particularly that religion was still part of the everyday life of the country people, and in pictures such as The Vision After the Sermon (Jacob Wres­tling with the Angel), he tried to depict their simple, direct faith. Here at last is what no Romantic painter had achieved: a style based on pre-Renaissance sources.

Modelling and perspective have given way to flat, simplified shapes outlined heavily in black, and the brilliant colours are equally "un-natural." This style, inspired by folk art and me­dieval stained glass, is meant to re-create both the imagined reality of the vision, and the trancelike rapture of the peasant women. Yet we sense that Gauguin, although he tried to share this experience, remains an outsider; he could paint pictures about faith, but not from faith.

Two years later, Gauguin's search for the unspoiled life led him even farther a field. He voyaged to Tahiti as a sort of " mis­sionary in reverse," to learn from the natives instead of teach­ing them. Although he spent the rest of his life in the South Pacific (he returned home only once, in 1893-95), none of his Tahitian canvases are as daring as those he had painted in Brittany. His strongest works of this period are woodcuts; Offerings of Gratitude again presents the theme of religious worship, but the image of a local god now re­places the biblical subject of the Vision. In its frankly "carved" look and its bold white-on-black pattern, we can feel the influences of the native art of the South Seas and of other non-European styles. The renewal of Western art and West­ern civilization as a whole, Gauguin believed, must come from "the Primitives"; he advised other Symbolists to shun the Greek tradition and to turn instead to Persia, the Far East, and ancient Egypt.

The idea of primitivism itself was not new. It stems from the Romantic myth of the Noble Savage, propagated by the thinkers of the Enlightenment more than a century before, and its ultimate source is the age-old tradition of an earthly paradise where human societies once dwelled-and might perhaps live again-in a state of nature and innocence. But no one before Gauguin had gone as far to put the doctrine of primitivism into practice. His pilgrimage to the South Pacific had more than a purely private meaning: it symbol­izes the end of the four hundred years of colonial expansion, which had brought the entire globe under Western domina­tion. The "white man's burden," once so cheerfully-and ruthlessly-shouldered by the empire builders, was becom­ing unbearable.

THE NABIS. Gauguin's Symbolist followers, who called themselves Nabis (from the Hebrew word for "prophet"), were less remarkable for creative talent than for their ability to spell out and justify the aims of Post-Impressionism in theoretical form. One of them, Maurice Denis, coined the state­ment that was to become the First Article of Faith for modernist painters of the twentieth century: "A picture-be­fore being a war horse, a female nude, or some anecdote-is essentially a flat surface covered with colors in a particular order."

VUILLARD. Oddly enough, the most gifted member of the Nabis, Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940), was more influenced by Seurat than by Gauguin. In his pictures of the 1890s­mainly domestic scenes, small in scale and intimate in effect, like the Interior at l'Etang-la-Ville - he combines into a remarkable new entity the flat planes and emphatic contours of Gauguin with the shimmering Divi­sionist "colour mosaic" and the geometric surface organization of Seurat. This seemingly casual view of his mother's corset-shop workroom has a delicate balance of "two-D" and "three-D" effects and a quiet magic that makes us think of Vermeer and Chardin. Such economy of means became an important prece­dent for Matisse a decade later. By then, how­ever, Vuillard's own style had grown more conservative. He never recaptured the delicacy and daring of his early canvases.

PUVIS DE CHAVANNES The Symbolists also discovered that there were some older artists, descendants of the Ro­mantics, whose work, like their own, placed inner vision above the observation of nature. Many of them, as well as other Post-Impressionists, took their inspiration from the classicism of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898), a fol­lower of Ingres who succeeded in becoming the leading mu­ralist of his day. Rejecting academic conventions, he sought a radical simplification of style, which at first seemed anach­ronistic but was soon hailed by the critics and artists of all persuasions. The effectiveness of the murals he executed in the 1880s for the museum at Lyons depends in large part on Puvis' formal devices: the compressed space, schematic forms, and restricted palette, which imitates in oil the chalky surface of old frescoes. The anti-naturalism of his style emphasizes the allegorical character of the scene, lend­ing it a gravity and mystery absent from other decorative paintings by his contemporaries. Anecdotal interest is re­placed by nostalgia for an idealized, mythical past. The stiff, ritualistic poses serve both to freeze time and to convey a poetry that is at once elegiac and serene. Puvis' economy of means was intended to present his ideas with maximum clarity, but it has just the opposite effect: it heightens their suggestiveness. His popularity resulted precisely from this ambiguity, which permitted a wide variety of interpretation. Symbolists from Gauguin through the young Picasso could thus claim him as one of their own; nevertheless, he vehe­mently protested any association with the Symbolist move­ment, although he reciprocated a mutual admiration with the English Pre-Raphaelites.

MOREAU. One of the Symbolists, Gustave Moreau (1826­-1898), a recluse who admired Delacroix, created a world of personal fantasy that has much in common with the medi­eval reveries of some of the English Pre-Raphaelites. The Ap­parition shows one of his favourite themes: the head of John the Baptist, in a blinding radiance of light, appears to the dancing Salome. Her odalisque like sensuousness, the stream of blood pouring from the severed head, the vast, mys­terious space of the setting-suggestive of an exotic temple rather than of Herod's palace-summon up all the dreams of Oriental splendour and cruelty so dear to the Romantic imagination, commingled with an insistence on the reality of the supernatural.

Only late in life did Moreau achieve a measure of recog­nition; suddenly, his art was in tune with the times. During his last six years, he even held a professorship at the conserv­ative Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the successor of the official art academy founded under Louis XIV. There he attracted the most gifted students, among them such future modernists as Matisse and Rouault.

BEARDSLEY. How prophetic Moreau's work was of the taste prevailing at the end of the century is evident from a comparison with Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898), a gifted young Englishman whose elegantly "decadent" black-and­ white drawings were the very epitome of that taste. They include a Salome illustration that might well be the final scene of the drama depicted by Moreau: Salome has taken up John's severed head and triumphantly kissed it. Whereas Beardsley's erotic meaning is plain-Salome is pas­sionately in love with John and has asked for his head because she could not have him in any other way-Moreau's remains ambiguous. Did his Salome perhaps conjure up the vision of the head? Is she, too, in love with John? Neverthe­less, the parallel is striking, and there are formal similarities as well, such as the "stem" of trickling blood from which John's head rises like a flower. Yet Beardsley's Salome cannot be said to derive from Moreau's. The sources of his style are English-the graphic art of the Pre-Raphaelites-with a strong admixture of Japanese influence.

REDON. Another solitary artist whom the Symbolists dis­covered and claimed as one of their own was Odilon Redon (1840-1916). Like Moreau, he had a haunted imagination, but his imagery was even more personal and disturbing. A master of etching and lithography, he drew inspiration from the fantastic visions of Goya as well as Roman­tic literature. The lithograph is one of a set he issued in 1882 and dedicated to Edgar Allan Poe. The American poet had been dead for thirty-three years; but his tormented life and his equally tormented imagination made him the very model of the poete maudit, the doomed poet, and his works, excellently translated by Baudelaire and Mallarme, were greatly admired in France. Redon's lith­ographs do not illustrate Poe; they are, rather, "visual poems" in their own right, evoking the macabre, hallucinatory world of Poe's imagination. In our example, the artist has revived a very ancient device, the single eye representing the all-see­ing mind of God. But, in contrast to the traditional form of the symbol, Redon shows the whole eyeball removed from its socket and converted into a balloon that drifts aimlessly in the sky. Disquieting visual paradoxes of this kind were to be exploited on a large scale by the Dadaists and Surrealists in our own century.

TOULOUSE-LAUTREC. Van Gogh's and Gauguin's discon­tent with the spiritual ills of Western civilization was part of a sentiment widely shared at the end of the nineteenth cen­tury. A self-conscious preoccupation with decadence, evil, and darkness pervaded the artistic and literary climate. Even those who saw no escape analysed their predicament in fas­cinated horror. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, this very aware­ness proved to be a source of strength (the truly decadent, we may assume, are unable to realize their plight). The most remarkable instance of this strength was Henri de Toulouse­Lautrec (1864-1901); physically an ugly dwarf, he was an artist of superb talent who led a dissolute life in the nightspots of Paris and died of alcoholism.

He was a great admirer of Degas, and his At the Moulin Rouge recalls the zigzag form of Degas' The Glass of Absinthe. Yet this view of the well-known nightclub is no Impressionist "slice of life"; Toulouse-Lautrec sees through the gay surface of the scene, viewing perform­ers and customers with a pitilessly sharp eye for their char­acter (including his own: he is the tiny bearded man next to the very tall one in the back of the room). The large areas of flat colour, however, and the emphatic, smoothly curving out­lines, reflect the influence of Gauguin. Although Toulouse-Lautrec was no Symbolist, the Moulin Rouge that he shows here has an atmosphere so joyless and oppressive that we have to wonder if the artist did not regard it as a place of evil.

ENSOR. In the art of the Belgian painter James Ensor (1860-1949), this pessimistic view of the human condition reaches obsessive intensity. The Intrigue is a grotesque carnival, but as we scrutinize these masks we become aware that they are the mummers' true faces, revealing the depravity ordinarily hidden behind the facade of everyday appearances. The demon-ridden world of Bosch and Schon­gauer has come to life again in modern guise.

MUNCH. Something of the same macabre quality pervades the early work of Edvard Munch (1863-1944), a gifted Nor­wegian who came to Paris in 1889 and based his starkly ex­pressive style on Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, and Gauguin. The Scream shows the influences of all three; it is an image of fear, the terrifying, unreasoned fear we feel in a nightmare. Unlike Fuseli and Goya, Munch visualizes this experience without the aid of fright­ening apparitions, and his achievement is the more persua­sive for that very reason. The rhythm of the long, wavy lines seems to carry the echo of the scream into every comer of the picture, making of earth and sky one great sounding board of fear.

KLIMT. Munch's works generated such controversy when they were exhibited in Berlin in 1892 that a number of young radicals broke from the artists association and formed the Berlin Secession, which took its name from a similar group that had been founded in Munich earlier that year. The Se­cession quickly became a loosely allied international move­ment. In 1897 it spread to Austria, where Gustave Klimt (1862-1918) established the Vienna Secession with the pur­pose of raising the level of the arts and crafts in Austria through close ties to Art Nouveau, called in Germany and Austria Jugendstil-literally Youth Style. The Kiss by Klimt expresses a different kind of anxiety from Munch's

The Scream. The image will remind us of Beardsley's Salome, but here the barely suppressed eroticism has burst into desire. Engulfed in mosaic like robes that create an illu­sion of rich beauty, the angular figures steal a moment of passion whose brevity emphasizes their joyless existence.

PICASSO'S BLUE PERIOD. Pablo Picasso (1881-1974), coming to Paris in 1900, felt the spell of the same artistic atmosphere that had generated the style of Munch. His so­ called Blue Period (the term refers to the prevailing color of his canvases as well as to their mood) consists almost exclu­sively of pictures of beggars and derelicts, such as The Old Guitarist -outcasts or victims of society whose pa­thos reflects the artist's own sense of isolation. Yet these figures convey poetic melancholy more than outright despair. The aged musician accepts his fate with a resignation that seems almost saintly, and the attenuated grace of his limbs reminds us of EI Greco. The Old Guitarist is a strange amalgam of Mannerism and of the art of Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec (note the smoothly curved contours), imbued with the personal gloom of a twenty-two-year-old genius.

ROUSSEAU. A few years later, Picasso and his friends dis­covered a painter who until then had attracted no attention, although he had been exhibiting his work since 1886. He was Henri Rousseau (1844-1910), a retired customs collec­tor who had started to paint in his middle age without train­ing of any sort. His ideal-which, fortunately, he never achieved-was the arid academic style of the followers of Ingres. Rousseau is that paradox, a folk artist of genius. How else could he have done a picture like The Dream? What goes on in the enchanted world of this canvas needs no explanation, because none is possible. Perhaps for that very reason its magic becomes believably real to us. Rous­seau himself described the scene in a little poem:

Yadwigha, peacefully asleep Enjoys a lovely dream:

She hears a kind snake charmer

Playing upon his reed.

On stream and foliage glisten

The silvery beams of the moon.

And savage serpents listen

To the gay, entrancing tune.

Here at last was an innocent directness of feeling that Gau­guin thought was so necessary for the age. Picasso and his friends were the first to recognize this quality in Rousseau's work. They revered him as the godfather of twentieth-cen­tury painting.

MODERSOHN-BECKER. The inspiration of primitivism that Gauguin had traveled so far to find was discovered by Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) in the small village of Worpswede, near her family home in Bremen, Germany. Among the artists and writers who congregated there was the Symbolist lyric poet Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin's friend and briefly his personal secretary. Rilke had visited Russia and been deeply impressed with what he viewed as the purity of Russian peasant life; his influence on. the colony at Worpswede certainly affected Modersohn- Becker, whose last works are direct precursors of modern art. Her gentle and powerful Self-Portrait, painted the year before her early death, presents a transition from the Symbolism of Gau­guin and his followers, which she absorbed during several stays in Paris, to Expressionism. The colour has the intensity of Matisse and the Fauves. At the same time, her deliberately simplified treatment of forms parallels the experiments of Picasso, which were to culminate in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

SCULPTURE

MAILLOL. No tendencies to be equated with Post­-Impressionism appear in sculpture until about 1900. Sculp­tors in France of a younger generation had by then been trained under the dominant influence of Rodin, and were ready to go their own ways. The finest of these, Aristide Maillol (1861-1944), began as a Symbolist painter, although he did not share Gauguin's anti-Greek attitude. Maillol might be called a "classic primitivist"; admiring the simplified strength of early Greek sculpture, he rejected its later phases. The Seated Woman evokes memories of the Ar­chaic and Severe styles rather than of Phidias and Praxiteles. The solid forms and clearly defined volumes also recall Cezanne's statement that all natural forms are based on the cone, the sphere, and the cylinder. But the most notable quality of the figure is its harmonious, self-sufficient repose, which the outside world cannot disturb.

A statue, Maillol thought, must above all be "static," struc­turally balanced like a piece of architecture; it must represent a state of being that is detached from the stress of circum­stance, with none of the restless, thrusting energy of Rodin's work. In this respect, the Seated Woman is the exact opposite of The Thinker. Maillol later gave it the title Mediterranee-The Mediterranean-to suggest the source from which he drew the timeless serenity of his figure.

MINNE. Kneeling Boy by the Belgian sculptor George Minne (1866-1941) also shows a state of brooding calm, but the haggard, angular limbs reflect Gothic, not clas­sical, influence, and the trancelike rigidity of the pose sug­gests religious meditation. The statue became the basis for a fountain design with five kneeling boys grouped around a circular basin as if engaged in a solemn ritual. By treating the figure as an anonymous member of a rhythmically repeated sequence, Minne heightened its mood of ascetic withdrawal.

LEHMBRUCK. Minne's art attracted little notice in France, but was admired in Germany. His influence is apparent in Standing Youth by Wilhelm Lehmbruck (1881­1919); here a Gothic elongation and angularity are conjoined with a fine balance derived from Maillol's art, and also with some of Rodin's expressive energy. The total effect is a loom­ing monumental figure well anchored in space, yet partaking of that poetic melancholy we observed in Picasso's Blue Pe­riod.

BARLACH. Ernst Barlach (1870-1938), another important German sculptor who reached maturity in the years before World War I, seems the very opposite of Lehmbruck; he is a "Gothic primitivist," and more akin to Munch than to the Western Symbolist tradition. What Gauguin had experienced in Brittany and the tropics, Barlach found by going to Russia: the simple humanity of a pre-industrial age. His figures, such as Man Drawing a Sword, embody elementary emotions-wrath, fear, grief-that seem imposed upon them by invisible presences. When they act, they are like somnam­bulists, unaware of their own impulses.

Human beings, to Barlach, are humble creatures at the mercy of forces beyond their control; they are never masters of their fate. Characteristically, these figures do not fully emerge from the material substance (often, as here, a mas­sive block of wood) of which they are made; their clothing is like a hard chrysalis that hides the body, as in medieval sculpture. Barlach's art has a range that is severely restricted in both form and emotion, yet its mute intensity within these limits is not easily forgotten.