ART AND LITERATURE
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1883, were working productively and with great originality. But they were
no longer young radicals in 1896, and although they were still regarded as
daring, outre, and forward-looking, their art attracted a significant, if small,
following of international collectors. Impressionism also attracted a larger
following of admirers, particularly among artists. By 1896, "the new paint–
ing," as Impressionism first was called, was well on its way to becoming a
vast, liberating international movement, as widespread and pervasive as the
Gothic style had been in its day and carrying with it, as Gothic naturalism
did, a sense of freshness and newness.
In the late 1880s and early '90s, younger artists had already begun to
challenge Impressionist ideals. Symbolists, such as Paul Gauguin and
Vincent Van Gogh, replaced the realist aspirations of their seniors with an
effort to put color and i.magery wholly in the service of mood and emo–
tion, while their younger colleague Georges Seurat, at the opposite end of
the emotional spectrum, struggled to translate perceptions into economi–
cal forms, dispassionately evoked by "scientifically" disposed touches of
pigment. But by 1896 the ranks of the Post-Impressionists had been
thinned. Gauguin, aged forty-eight, had returned to Tahiti the previous
year and would remain there until his death. Van Gogh and Seurat had both
died as young men in their thirties, Van Gogh in 1890, Seurat in 1891. As
for the next generation, whose names have become synonymous with
modernist art: in 1896, Henri Matisse, who at twenty seven had been
painting for six years, undertook his most ambitious work to date, a large
canvas of a dinner table laden with crystal, wine carafes, fruit bowls, and
candelabra, wi th an attendant servant. It is a labored, gli ttering picture that
is at once inherently conservative and points to the most startling of his
later concerns . In 1896, a twenty year old Brancusi was still in Romania,
the star pupil of a traditional academy of Arts and Crafts. Pablo Picasso and
Georges Braque were teenagers, Picasso absorbing traditional academic art
training and Braque, to the despair of his family, failing to be good at any–
thing at school, including drawing.
On this side of the Atlantic in 1896, modernist painting had not yet
taken root, which is not to deny that first-rate artists were at work here–
the realists Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer, the mystical Albert
Pinkham Ryder, for example. A tame, domesticated version of American
Impressionism had begun to flourish, although its "real" practitioners,
artists who participated in the struggles of "the new painters," the expa–
triates James McNeill Whistler and Mary Cassat, were still in Europe.
Except for a few enlightened collectors, American taste was conservative.
If you could afford it, you had your portrai t painted by John Singer Sargent
and you collected old masters.
An
adventurous generation of American
painters was still
in
the future. Marsden Hartley was nineteen and had just
begun weekly art classes in Cleveland;John Marin was twenty-six, working
