Arts and Letters

Frank Jewett Mather was born at Deep River, Connecticut, in 1868. He died, in his eighty-sixth year, at Princeton, where he had been director of the university's Art Museum and Marquand Professor of Archaeology and Art. A graduate of Williams College, he had studied for several years at the University of Berlin and later in Paris, and, before taking up teaching, he had become well-known in New York as the art critic of the literate old Evening Post. Among his many books were the popular History of Italian Painting, dedicated to Bernard Berenson, our fellow member—world-famous in his ninetieth year and as active as ever—Western European Painting of the Renaissance, Modern Painting, Concerning Beauty, and the two volumes of essays called Estimates in Art.

Another small book, The Collectors, was a group of short stories, tales of lost madonnas and suddenly discovered works of art that sometimes separate lovers or bring them together. With their settings in junk-shops and auction-rooms, Florentine villas and castles in Spain, the tales not only celebrate interests that Mather and Berenson shared in life but introduce the characters of these two art critics. Berenson's integrity and "melancholy gravity" appear in the figure of Anitchkoff, already uniquely known at thirty-five, while Mather, behind another mask, defined his own ambition, or so at least the reader is permitted to feel. This is "the creation of a criticism learned and judicious in substance but impressionistic in form," a phrase that fairly described Mather's work but failed to justify it in the eyes of the unceremonious Albert C. Barnes. In Art and Education Barnes attacked not only Mather but his great rival and friend Berenson as well, accusing them both of sentimentality, an obsolete psychology, and a useless and obstructive approach to plastic art. Absorbed in literature, he said—tempered with archaeology—they were something less than perfunctory in their treatment of design and their regard for plastic considerations, a charge which parallels that of the "new critics" in the literary sphere against any concern with anything but texture and structure. Mather must have felt that the right procedure, for those who cannot follow this line, is to accept the charge and pursue one's way, surer than ever that criticism is a pluralistic world and that art can be better seen in a wider connection.

No doubt, in a measure, Mather deserved the censorious Barnes's disesteem, and in fact he was well aware of his limitations. He said he was appalled in 1908 by Leo Stein's portable gallery in Florence of Gauguins, Cézannes, and Matisses, and he never entirely overcame his belief that modern art, so called, would be looked back upon as a passing fashion. He spoke of it as "barbarous and untidy" in one of his essays, and this turned against him certain minds for which art began with the Armory Show and which had no interest in anything that Mather relished. But even for these minds he should have shared the immunity of Berenson, who was scarcely more responsive than he to contemporary art, who rarely discussed it in his own work and refused to wander, as he said, outside his chosen parish, Italian painting. Mather's own early associations had been mainly with teachers and scholars; he was a special friend of Irving Babbitt, with whom he had tramped in the Berkshires and the Apennines later; and he had been associated in New York with the circle of Brownell and Kenyon Cox, who were drawn to the aesthetic qualities that lend themselves to teaching. Suspicious of emotion and spontaneity, along with the American facility in praise, they did not respond to the "bewildering transformations" that, as Mather observed, could not be taught at all; and, bred in "a grim and humorless aesthetic," as he said he had been, he was somewhat disposed to accept their academic views.

But what characterized Mather was the extent to which he broke away from them, attracted as he was to the "disorderly geniuses," anathema to the older men, who were the great enemies of indifference and stupidity to him. He wrote very finely and freshly on El Greco and Goya. For the art critics whom he had known, art had nothing to do with life, and Mather felt he owed much to Babbitt for taking art out of a vacuum and relating it to the general concerns of living. But he reacted against Babbitt as well, and against the cult of discipline that led Babbitt to use art and literature as means, not ends—enjoying for himself "the pleasanter by-products of error" and finding his Humanist master also grim. Mather was a humanist in the older sense—the kind that is spelled with a small "h"—a respecter of impulse along with discipline, indulgent to his erring kind, with an educated palate for all the good things of life. He had the gusto of the men of letters who were commoner before the "seven devils of war, woe, hatred, and murder drove forth the gentler arts from the House of Life," as another of our members said after the First World War; and this led him to revolt against the control of art by "the professors"—delightful to them but fatal to the wilding, art (to paraphrase a line from his Modern Painting). What did it matter that he failed to grasp the later phase of art to which, luckily, so many others have been able to do justice? In his histories of nineteenth-century art, Venetian art, Italian art, he wrote intelligently, happily, with a pleasure one shares; while he had a special feeling for the brief history of American art from the times of Gilbert Stuart to Arthur B. Davies. He was perhaps the first to express a belief with which many have agreed that Thomas Eakins, Ryder, and Winslow Homer were more important painters than Sargent and Whistler; but he would not have argued the point, for he was the least contentious of men and one of the most reasonable, humane, and open-minded. He was a discriminating, learned, and witty writer, all the more to be cherished at a time when the beautiful art of criticism has been so largely changed into a dismal science.