Arts and Letters

Some members of this Academy have spent so many years in Europe, going there early for the supposed advantages of the schools, that they are almost accounted Europeans.

It was indeed thought, fifty years ago, that one had to go to Europe to get an education in the Fine Arts. So it is not strange that Sargent, Whistler, Pennell, and Henry James spent the greater part of their lives in Europe.

These men were all intensely American. We know that Whistler, Sargent, and Pennell were, and I have no doubt that Henry James was. A good many Americans sympathized with his magnificent gesture towards the mother country England during the war. It is perhaps just the thing an artist would do!

There is a deeply rooted belief in the minds of many that, we being a "new country," the arts of painting and music are undeveloped here. But we are not a "new country," in the sense of civilization, for ours is as old as Europe's to the last tick of the clock. We inherit the traditions of our forbears; their achievements belong to us as much as they belong to Europe, for we are Europeans; our languages in the Americas are European languages; our art is European, wholly European, and can nowise be anything else.

A very able librarian organized and built up a splendid library in Newark. He was engaged in other cultural activities and gave exhibitions of paintings—native art. He came to the conclusion, actually knowing nothing about painting, that the most important contribution to American Art was made by the obscure and untrained painters and print makers, mostly lithographers, though there were some wood blocks—often printed in color. In this way he made his contribution to modernistic obscurantism, and whether he knew it or not he helped to foster the cult of the incompetent, now known as the Ellis Island School. Cortissoz had years ago called these European absurdities Ellis Island Art. It is now a school and it tears down, or rather tries to tear down, all of the older established art, quite like the Italian futurist who decided that the only way to progress was to burn down all of the European Art Museums. They point to a French caricaturist and distortionist who painted very few canvases, but who made literally thousands of caricatures and drawings, as the greatest artist of the nineteenth century. It is so easy to make the caricatures and distortions that they are still doing it, but not one of them can do a competent technical performance in painting, let us say in bad smooth painting, like a Bouguereau, for Bouguereau, however bad as an artist, was a competent and sound technician in bad smooth painting; not that I think for one minute that bad smooth painting is any worse than bad rough painting; the so-called strong painting with the coarsest texture is just as bad if not worse, as it is more confusing to the eye at the first glance. However this may strike you, I think that this man and his like—he has left some understudies—having carefully confused the issue at the start, are responsible for the mural decorations that have just been put up in a public building in Detroit, the native city of Gari Melchers, to whom I am to pay this short tribute here today.

This distinguished member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters might almost be accounted a member of that group of famous men of whom I spoke at the beginning, but he like Pennell came back to America in 1914 and spent the last twenty years of his life here. For he was an American; his father Joseph Melchers came from the stock that has given us some of the very best Americans, one of the German revolutionists of 1848. A sculptor and decorator, he made his way to Detroit, married an American, settled in the small town and taught in the early Art Schools.

Gari Melchers was born in Detroit August 11th, 1860. His unusually wise father sent him to Europe at the age of seventeen, so that he might have all the advantages he himself had enjoyed. Wise—he had been in the Paris schools—he sent his boy to Düsseldorf.

It was thought absolutely essential to begin early in life to study the Fine Arts. As we glance backward, there was the boy Van Dyck, the most striking instance of beginning early, and one of the finest examples of fruition. He was apprenticed to a painter in an Antwerp studio at the age of ten, which means, though not actually, that he was a pupil of Rubens at that early age and as he became later in fact.

No other American painter except John Sargent, who was born in Florence, had earlier privileges of study in what was then considered, if not now, the best of the European schools and in the art centers of Rome, Paris, Munich, and Düsseldorf—to name them in their rank of that period. The schools of London were just as good, no doubt better than any, but London was not the fashion in art schools for some obscure reason. There was that persistent patter about the Latin race though there never was any such race in the world. The whole modern movement of that time in painting was due to English artists, Constable, Girtin, Turner, Bonington, and all the English water color painters who were the first to work out of doors with a clear palette; the very medium called for clarity with its white paper, and no oil and varnish to turn dark brown. It was not French, it was English, but the French profited and learned from it. The so-called Barbizon or French school of 1830 was due entirely to John Constable. Equivalent and contemporary to what Wordsworth and the English poets did with words and a clear and simple vision in looking at nature, it was another new note of clarity and truth.

You cannot account for fashion, or any of the present vagaries in the arts. If we could we should all of us be able to tell you why a Mexican is permitted to put up in a public building in Detroit the most astonishingly distortionate mural decorations—to use a polite euphemism to so describe them.

If I again use this dark shadow in this paper it is to contrast with the bright geniality and unusual humanity, amounting to popularity among his fellows, of this good painter and essentially kindly man. To come to his career, and the wisdom on the father's part that sent his son of seventeen to the fine old town of Düsseldorf where the boy was as well grounded in the rudiments of his art as he could have been anywhere. If it were all to do right over again, could it be done better? It was better than Paris! Now you would hold him here!

Today, coming back to mere fashion and caprice in the arts, there is nothing so dead as the Düsseldorf school, unless it may well be Munich. Rome is dead enough and Paris is going on the way.

Paris, fifty years ago, where the young man next took up, his always serious study, was a very different place from the Paris of today. You could not then take your visiting card and affix it to a plain panel in the Autumn Salon, make a few free brush marks around it with the primary colors, and be acclaimed a genius who invents his own forms and has no need to look at poor old Nature. As always, you were surrounded with poor painting—the Paris Salon always was and continues to be the largest and worst exhibition in the world; the Autumn Salon is more shocking but actually no worse. But there was good painting being done, the French themselves little suspecting it, any more than they suspected or supported their two great men of 1830—Corot and Millet. The one sold his first picture at the age of fifty-five, his old father's surprise in an extant letter is on record; and had it not been for the Boston painter, William M. Hunt, the other would have starved to death.

Good painting was being done by a Dutchman, Jongkind; the American, Whistler; a South American, Pissarro; an Englishman, Sisley; and notably by several Frenchmen. French painting was at its best but it took the French over forty years to find it out, just as it took them fifty years to find out that Corot was a figure painter, and one of their best figure painters. You may not have noticed, but it is none the less a fact, that Whistler and Sargent are now claimed by the British school, as Sisley and Pissarro are claimed and listed as French.

The father's sound sense and good judgment bore fruit in the fact that this young man just of age had his first success, and was noticed and rewarded in Paris. This almost immediate recognition marked him as a painter of large achievement. It was official to be sure, but possibly nowhere else could he have had just that stamp put upon his work.

It should not be forgotten that a young man growing up and making his first successes in a city that was a world center had the advantage of making pleasant contacts with other artists, absorbing their enthusiasms and ideals. Out of something of this kind came the admirable art motto "Waar en Klaar" (true and clear), that he put over his studio door in Holland.

Truth and clarity ever bear away the victory. It makes one think at once of the many fine portraits by Frans Hals made at Haarlem, not far away. In fact nothing in the way of fine private and public collections was far away from this little town on the North Sea where Melchers was to paint many of his best canvases in the old small simple churches, and where he was to spend his last pleasant summer—at work.

There can never have been many young men who had such free contact with the masterpieces. In looking at those of Hals, he must have thought that their very name was lucidity; and so true are they that no one ever thought of a mere question of their truth.

He was in the birthplace of painting in oil, the principal medium of expression for the painter ever since the days of van Eyck. He could read his Fromentin, Maîtres d'Autrefois, and about that other great Dutchman who had done his life's work in Amsterdam not far away. Whatever other qualities you may write or read into Rembrandt, and with which we would no doubt all of us agree, in "Waar en Klaar" Hals has never been surpassed. As Fromentin very truly says, "Nobody ever painted more easily or better, and nobody ever will."

This was in effect the art creed of Melchers, and that he followed it throughout a long life was apparent in the splendid exhibition of his work held here in the Academy of Arts and Letters. He has pictures that hang permanently in most of the Museums of the world. No one has perhaps received more medals and honors than he. He lived in Holland, Germany, Italy, France, and America over extended periods. He made various visits to America to do portraits, and to make mural paintings in the Library of Congress and at the World Fair in Chicago before coming here to live permanently in 1914.

He was tolerant of men and manners, most tolerant of his fellow artists and only intolerant of sham, mildly impatient of the insincerity of many if not most of the modernistic canvases, which he knew would not last out another decade. He was very appreciative of other living painters' work. He greatly admired John Twachtman, J. Alden Weir, and Eakins, to mention his American contemporaries only. He had many friends in France and Germany amongst the painters and greatly admired the work of the good painters of the period.

Being an honest and masculine man himself, his humanity was only impatient with the incompetent. Even at that he was more patient than most good men are. He felt keenly the misfortunes of his fellows and willed that his estate finally be dedicated to the Artists' Fellowship fund.

As surely as there are various kinds of bad painting there are various kinds of good painting. As I see it I am to speak in appreciation of the kind of good painting that Melchers did. No involutions, no circumlocutions, no abstractions, far, very far from any distortions. Frank, masculine, and direct, well composed and constructed, a natural and very true clear color scheme, often in a cool suite of greys, and a fine grey picture is as much of an achievement as a most gorgeously colored one,—true, clear, and cool like a Vermeer.

Every true aesthetic is an implication of nature. Something of nature is inevitable in any painting that is not a geometrical abstraction. If music is sublimated mathematics, should one begin by the study of cacophony though it be a recognized part of a musical composition? And in the most important language in the modern world, with the most splendid literature in any one language known to man, should one begin by studying the obscure dialect of the North American Indians? The absurdity of the cult of the incompetent is brought out into the full light of day when we contrast the results of that cult with the achievement of Melchers.

To sum up, his work was so sound and sane and clear that if we could come back and look at these pictures three hundred years from now (we are that distance away in time from the great Dutch masterpieces) we should see them as they are today; and I will end by saying that his very last picture was one of the very best canvases that he ever did; and a fine performance for any painter anywhere.

He must have firmly believed in Menzel's dictum on the encouragement of Art—for it is the classic answer to those who think that mere money and museums can help Art, "You may help artists in many ways but only artists can help Art."