by Unknown
In no time her expedition has vanished beyond the impenetrable curtain of darkness that falls just outside the range of the dinner party’s winking lamps. But a few minutes later a searchlight from the shore picks it up, and there she is, riding a surf board—the pale gleam of her silken gown somehow heightening the immense isolation of that tiny, defiant, Luciferian figure picked out of the universal blackness, a rebel finding in the strange, mutinous craft with which she rides the midnight waters a more magic carpet than ever her grandpa’s looms turned out in Amsterdam.
As the passing comet streaks out to sea, there is a very rustle of appreciation, of enjoyment, of relish, of envy, from the startled fringe of watchers on the shore. Myself, being at once faithless and incorrigibly reportorial, somehow find time to note that among those watchers none is so lovely as Irene Castle, standing on a high rock like a blue and silver figurehead on some gallant galleon. Does she know, I wonder, that she can put on a little summer something and still make every other woman within range seem dowdy? Probably. Then why that furrow of discontent? Ah, yes, it is not she, but someone else, out on that surf board.
Someone is singing. Grace Moore, perhaps. No, that exquisite voice is momentarily stilled—a large body of prima donna, entirely surrounded by beautiful young men. No, this time the voice issues from the vast, virile bulk of Elsa Maxwell, which is crushing a nearby rock. In her fine, unabashed baritone, she is singing snatches of songs she doesn’t quite know, but somehow always coming out on top.
“Here am I, with all my breeches burned—”
Thus her voice assaults the night. A bitter young woman whispers a running fire of musical criticism in my ear.
“That,” she remarks sourly, “must have been the largest conflagration since the Chicago fire.”
And so on, and so on. Have I given you any notion of what Antibes is like? Do you think you would find it pleasant? Or perhaps just a trifle exhausting?
Anyway. I must run now. I am taking the next train to Vermont.
AN AMERICAN MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
ALFRED H. BARR JR.
FROM NOVEMBER 1929
For many years, certainly since the riotous, epoch-making Armory Exhibition of 1913, an increasing number of people have thought and talked about and set their hearts upon a museum of modern art in New York. Urgent editorials have been written, excellent dinners eaten, and fulminating speeches delivered, but until this autumn no positive, large-visioned effort has been made to bring about a public institution which might give New York a consistently adequate idea of modern art. Tentative experiments have been tried such as the extreme leftward exhibitions of the heroic Société Anonyme, the Whitney Studio Club, and the Gallery of Contemporary Art at Washington Square College. But these, worthy as they are, have lacked scale and resources and the capacity for growth.
The Metropolitan Museum, New York’s single important public art gallery, has only at times been persuaded to touch, a little gingerly, the less controversial phases of modern art. This reluctant policy has induced facile critics to call—or cat-call—the Metropolitan a mausoleum. Apparently they forget those remarkable achievements which at times have put the Metropolitan ahead of other great museums. Long before the Louvre or any other European gallery had recognized Manet’s existence as an artist the Metropolitan had acquired two of his paintings. Before the Luxembourg could tolerate the post-impressionists, indeed while Paris was still debating over Claude Monet’s art, the Metropolitan had purchased a Cézanne. But these bold steps were taken, alas, long ago, before the war. Since then the inadequate French exhibition of 1921, the Bellows Memorial Exhibition, and the recent “modernistic” decorators’ show have been the only events at the Metropolitan which might be called modem.
• • •
Meanwhile, museums throughout Europe and America have left New York far behind. Little German industrial towns such as Halle and Erfurt, Essen and Mannheim, Russian cities such as Witebsk and Kharkov, have galleries devoted primarily to modern art. Tourists who visit Utrecht or Novgorod, Bremen, Strasbourg, Prague, Hanover, in search of the quaint and picturesque are surprised to discover rooms in public museums which are alive with an emphatically contemporary atmosphere.
And in our own country are Worcester with its Gauguins and Dufresnes, Detroit with its Matisses and Chiricos and its splendid modern German collection. Brooklyn, without the means to purchase extensively, has given temporary space most courageously and generously for all phases of modem art from impressionism to sur-réalisme. The Los Angeles Museum, through the Preston Harrison gift, confronts its citizens with Dufy’s wit, Picasso’s abstractions, Derain’s power. Columbus, with Ferdinand Howald’s encouragement, prides itself on its Demuths and Marins.
More enviable still to the poor New Yorker are the Birch-Bartlett and Martin Ryerson rooms in the Chicago Art Institute. Here are magnificent Van Goghs, Seurat’s La Grande Jatte, Cézanne’s greatest still-life, works of the first rank by Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Rousseau, Segonzac, Utrillo, Picasso, Lhôte and others.
Yet even more pertinently important are the modern collections of New York’s peers—the great “world-cities”. Berlin, Paris, London, Moscow, Amsterdam, Munich, while they force us to most uncomfortable comparisons, also offer us valuable suggestions. The Louvre, the National Gallery at Trafalgar Square, the Rijksmuseum, the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, these, like the Metropolitan, are great historical museums, national collections of supreme importance. But they differ in one essential from New York’s institution: they do not even pretend to any interest in modern art. Their function is to preserve the past rather than to explain the present. But in addition to these shrines of the traditional there are in all of these cities separate institutions with distinct organization, staff and buildings, which are given over specifically to modern art.
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Berlin has its National-Galerie in the former Crown Prince’s Palace where the abstract impressionists, Kandinsky and Klee, and the cubists, Picasso and Feininger, prove their victory over popular contempt. Moscow has three or four museums of modern art both native and “western”. In the latter, housed in the Tchukine and Morosov Palaces, may be seen the greatest collection of modern French painting in the world, including, one may remark in passing, twenty Cézannes, sixteen Gauguins, nine Rousseaus, thirty-five Matisses, a dozen Derains and fifty-five Picassos. Even in placid, conservative Munich, one can leave the Alte Pinakothek to visit the Neue Staats-Galerie where, among a half-dozen Van Goghs, is the most famous of his Sunflowers.
Another and equally fine version of the Sunflowers has found a permanent home in an even more surprising place, the Tate Gallery of London—surprising, that is, to Americans who tend to consider the Tate sacred to the memory of Turner, Watts and Sir Frank Dicksee, R. A. Yet one may leave the Pre-Raphaelites, pass through a magnificent room of Daumier, Manet, Degas, and Renoir, into a shrine where hangs one of the greatest modern paintings, Seurat’s La Baignade, surrounded by first-rate Cézannes, Matisses, Bonnards, Utrillos.
But of all these stimulating modern galleries, the oldest, the most famous and for us the most significant is the Luxembourg, for it was founded in order to solve a problem very similar to that which confronts New York. Neither the Louvre nor the Metropolitan can afford to take a chance of being wrong. But the Luxembourg does not pretend to confer any final sanction upon its painting and sculpture, which is, all of it, tentatively exhibited. If the work of art survives time’s criticism, it may go, ten years after the artist’s death, into the Louvre or it may be discarded as unworthy of remaining permanently public property. But during this process of trial and error, or critical selection, even those works which may prove of transitory importance remain constantly visible to the generation which created them and admires them. It is then a principle of acknowledged fallibility upon which the Luxembourg is founded, though unfortunately it has been hampered by politic timidities and inadequate financia
l support, so that it has not always been able to realize the latitude of taste which the principle permits.
It is, nevertheless, with an ideal Luxembourg in mind that seven enthusiastic and influential American men and women have organized themselves into a committee which, during the past few months, has made remarkable progress toward the foundation of a Museum of Modern Art.
The committee, fully realizing the difficulties of their project, have decided that for the first two years the new museum should function as a series of the finest possible loan exhibitions.
These loan exhibitions will be held on the twelfth floor of the Heckscher Building, on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, where the new galleries will be opened early in November.
The exhibitions will cover a wide range of modern activity. American art will of course be emphasized, together with French, from which most modern art throughout Europe and America derives. But painting and sculpture from Germany, England, Mexico, Russia, and other countries will also be included. The work of living men will form the majority of exhibitions but will not exclude occasional homage to the past.
Fifty years ago one of the greatest of all French painters died, Honoré Daumier. Long neglected, and even now too little known, he will be honoured by a memorial exhibition.
The first, and perhaps, intrinsically, the most important exhibition at the new museum will be devoted to four of the founders of that great period of European Art, which began about 1875. Cézanne and Seurat, Van Gogh and Gauguin, are great springs at which hundreds of subsequent and lesser men have drunk. Cézanne and Gauguin died about 1905, Van Gogh and Seurat as long ago as 1890. The first three are known the world over; their work has borne the brunt and reaped the glory of that remarkable revolution ineptly labeled Post-Impressionism. The fourth, Georges Seurat, has suffered even longer neglect having at first been pigeon-holed with faint praise for his invention of the “pointilliste” or “spot” technique. During the last fifteen years we have begun to recognize his importance as a very great master of composition, disciplined, classical in the essential meaning of the word, [his work possessing an] extraordinary poise and simplicity of vision which are peculiarly his. Today Seurat’s seven masterpieces are divided among the museums of Paris, London, Chicago, and The Hague, and the collections of three very foresighted connoisseurs. Of these scant seven, La Parade, will hold the place of honor in the first exhibition of The Museum of Modern Art.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The seven members of the organizing committee, which is shortly to be considerably augmented, are:
Miss Lizzie Bliss
Mrs. W. Murray Crane
Mr. Paul J. Sachs
Mrs. Cornelius J. Sullivan
Mr. Frank Crowninshield, Secretary [Editor of Vanity Fair]
Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Treasurer
Mr. A. Conger Goodyear, Chairman
THE EXTREMELY MOVING PICTURES
THOMAS MANN
FROM DECEMBER 1929
I have sometimes thought in my capacity as a literary man of making a precise statement of my views about motion pictures, but that must be reserved for more leisurely days. To-day I will say only this much: during the last few years my interest in this modern form of expression has become a real obsession, in fact it has even assumed the character of a gay passion.
I frequently go to motion picture theatres and for hours I do not tire of these spectacles spiced with music. I enjoy equally travel and animal pictures; the living newspapers called “news reels” interest me; occasionally, some tricky bit of comedy or other amuses me or a gripping bit of knavery intrigues me; I become absorbed in a touching love story, when the actors are convincing, good to look upon, and agreeable personalities; film actors may be vain, but they are seldom unnatural. So far as the story is concerned, even if it be silly in the extreme, it nearly always has other values to offset the poverty or sentimentality of the plot. Its details and incidents are so real, so true to life, that the human element, in a hundred single flashes, triumphs over the childish incredibility of the story as a whole.
I spoke of a “form of expression”, for—if you’ll pardon me—I believe that motion pictures have little to do with art, and I consider it a mistaken idea to approach them with criteria taken from the sphere of art. This is the critical attitude adopted by those humanistic, conservatively attuned souls, who then contemptuously and sadly turn away from the motion picture as from a low and wildly democratic mob entertainment.
For my part, I am contemptuous of the films too, but I love them. They are not art, they are life and actuality. Their effect in their ever-moving silence is crudely sensational in comparison to the intellectual effect of art, but it is real. It is the effect which life and actuality have on the passive observer, assuaged by the comfort of his surroundings and the attendant emotional encouragement supplied by the music. Just tell me why people always cry at the moving pictures, or rather bawl like servant girls? I went to see the opening of The Big Parade not long ago. Olaf Gulbranson, the caricaturist, was there too. I met him in the lobby. That jolly, muscular Norseman was bathed in tears; “I haven’t dried myself yet,” he said, excusing himself. Side by side we stood there for a long time with moist eyes, sniffling like children. Is that the state of emotion in which one takes leave of a work of art, turns one’s back on a painting, puts down a book, or departs from the theatre? It’s true, old gentlemen weep, when O alte Burschenherrlichkeit is sung in Old Heidelberg, but they are not moved to tears by Shakespeare, Kleist, or Hauptmann. Art is of a colder sphere, say what you will. It belongs to the world of intellect and high interpretation; the world of style, the world of letters, of creations of the most intricate and exalted kinds; the objective world, the world of understanding (“For it comes from understanding,” says Goethe). Art is significant, aristocratic, chaste, and sensitive. Its vibrations, passing through the medium of the creator, are finely tempered; in the presence of art one moves carefully, conscious of its majesty. How different is the screen! Here we watch two lovers, ravishingly good-looking young people. They are in a real garden with waving grass, parting forever to an accompaniment of the most ingratiating music obtainable. Who could resist so definite an onslaught upon the emotions? Who wouldn’t let the insistent tears flow on? For this material has passed through no medium. It lies at first hand—a warm and hearty hand. It works like onions and garlic. My tears trickle in the darkness; in dignified secrecy I flick them off with my first finger on my cheek.
For the rest and in particular, motion pictures have nothing to do with the drama. They tell the stories in pictures; the visible presence of the characters does not prevent their spirit, their best effects, from being epic; and if the motion pictures touch poetry at any point, it is here in their actuality. They are much too real to be theatre.
Stage settings are calculated on the basis of an intellectual illusion: you see what you are supposed to be thinking about. Beholding the lush and soothing scenery of the screen, you think about only what you see. Neither have the human figures of the picture the bodily presence and reality of the interpreters of dramatic rôles. They are living shadows, and so they will always remain, static and unchangeable, like the characters in a story book. Even the voice which has come to the screen by way of the talking pictures, is essentially mechanical.
As an author, I have not had that fabulous luck with the motion picture magnates that one reads about every day in the newspapers and magazines. They made a picture of my novel, Buddenbrooks—it was not very satisfactory to those who liked the book, however. . . . But I have tasted blood. And—although I refrain from making a definite statement—it is not impossible that I may become, one of these days, a member of that gilded group, writers for the motion pictures, who (I have heard) live so delightfully in jewelled boudoirs and think only in the superlative. I have in mind now a story of mine which should find a happy home in Hollywood, since it abounds in charm, and
has as one of its leading rôles that of a lovable dog.
But whether or not we, as authors, share personally in the triumph of the motion pictures we cannot—we dare not—quarrel with them; they are too permanent, too specialized, too securely moulded to their own triumphant pattern. It would be as reasonable to criticize the tides of the sea, or to belittle Mount Everest because it is not heaven.
I should like—as I observed at the beginning of this article—to examine more thoroughly my feelings about the motion pictures, and to disclose them more fully. I should like to do this, and—in a more leisurely moment—I shall. But there is no time now, for I am on my way to see a new film.
1930s
A STOCK MARKET POST-MORTEM
DAVID CORT
FROM JANUARY 1930
What distinguished the recent collapse of the stock market from other American panics, multiplying the total hysteria but deadening the individual shock, was that it was a thoroughly democratic affair: everybody was in it. All the disgrace in a bourgeois country of being bankrupted was eliminated by the fact that almost everybody else was being bankrupted simultaneously. Other panics have been professional: a movement in stock values, supported in the main by professional traders, to correspond with an imminent or indicated shift in the nation’s industrial status. Thus, the recessions after the Civil War, at the opening of the World War, at the beginning of the twentieth century.
But this latest show, in addition to being everyman’s party, had nothing whatever to do with any industrial condition, commodity or inventory inflation, war or politics. It was, so far as the eye can yet see, an event all by itself, with no beginning and only a middle and end, an event suspended in mid-air and admirably suited to observation and rationalization to prove anything at all.