ART CHRONICLE
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finality, the poised strength of his 1911-13 work-just as Picasso's art
between 1914 and 1925, while manifesting its own kind of perfection,
rarely attains the transcendent perfection it knew before. The same is
doubly, triply true in Braque's case, though he did experience a partial–
very partial-recovery between 1928 and 1931 or 1932.
The four years from the middle of 1910 to the middle of 1914 were
the special ones, then. But just what made them so exceptionally favor–
able to painting? A trio of geniuses, born within a year of one another,
were in their early thirties- but Matisse, who was approaching his peak
during the same period, was then in his forties. More of the answer
may be given by something that extends far beyond the individual cir–
cumstances of the artists involvcd. In France, and elsewhere, the gencr–
ation of the avant-garde that came of age after 1900 was the first to
accept the modem, industrializing world with any enthusiasm. Even
poets-thus Apollinaire-saw, at least for a moment, aesthetic possi–
bilities in a streamlined future, a vaulting modernity; and a mood of
secular optimism replaced the secular pessimism of the Symbolist gen–
eration. This mood was not confined to the avant-garde; here, for
once, the latter had been anticipated by the philistines; but the avant–
garde was drawing the aesthetic conclusions at which the philistines
balked. Nor was painting-and sculpture-the only department of culture
to benefit by this. Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Proust, Mann, Valery, Rilke,
George, Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Freud, Dewey,
Wittgenstein, Husserl, Einstein all developed or matured in the years
of that same mood, which underpinned even those who rejected it. But
professional tradition in painting, having long been distinctively secular
(what great painter since EI Greco was fundamentally a religious man?),
now received new and, perhaps, special confirmation from its public,
and felt itself to be more in the truth than ever before.
Whatever the reason, it came about that one of the greatest of all
moments in painting arrived on the crcst of a mood of "materialistic"
optimism. And of all the optimists, materialists, and yea-sayers, none
was, or has remained, more whole-heartedly one than Fernand L,eger.
He has told us about, and we see, his enthusiasm for machine forms.
And we also seem to see in his art all the qualities conventionally asso–
ciated with "materialism"; weight, excessive looseness or else excessive
rigidity of form, crassness, simplicity, cheerfulness, complacency, even
a certain obtuseness. But what a mistake it would be not to see how
much else there is in this art, which has succeeded better, I daresay,
than any other in making the rawness of matter wholly relevant to
human feeling.
