"Blue Four"

/-"Blue Four"

Feininger, Jawlensky, Kandinsky, Klee--they are blue.* Last week, they exhibited in the Daniel Gallery, Manhattan. Thither went some who were informed, some who were curious. "Why," asked the latter, "are they blue? Why do they call their pictures, Dynamism, Abstraction, Mystic, Musical, Choral, Life, Silence?" "To have names," wearily, kindly, replied the informed.

Scarcely satisfied, the curious turned to see what answer the fingers of Feininger, Jawlensky, Kandinsky, Klee had written on the walls. They saw a picture which, so it seemed to them, could be nothing but a pathologist's graph of a difficult neurosis (The Ray--Kandinsky) ; a lithograph of the wedding of debauched parallels (The Cloud-- Feininger) ; a diagram of the unfortunate encounter of a cloud of locusts and a windmill (Abstraction--Jawlensky) ; the furious attempt of a carburetor to become a French horn (Mathematic Vision--Klee). Some of the curious, appalled, then took themselves off, hand to head; others marshaled their faculties.

Clearly, they saw, these pictures could not be measured against tradition. The eye sees a head, a landscape, a pattern of concrete objects. All traditional Art, admitting as important this thing seen, accents the reaction of the artist to what he sees, recognizes as an accidental requisite to the presentation of subject and the personality of the artist, the element of style--form, line, color. The artist, running at tradition's stirrup, has employed style as a thrilling, necessary but irrelevant mechanism for the exaltation of personality, of subject; yet it is only by virtue of this mechanism that he is an artist at all. He succeeds or fails merely in the extent of his command over it. If line, color, form, alone are Art, say such moderns as the Four Blue Ones, the intrusion of anything else is corruption. As a sonata is composed of a series of audile sensations called chords, a painting is composed of a series of visual sensations. Artists should put down lines, lay on colors, with the simple purpose of giving the eyes an adventure instead of the complicated purpose of doing this while pretending only to show how Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire* looked at 43, or the arrogance of a stern Dutch captain in a gold helmet./-

When a fastidious observer appraises a Madonna by one of the Italian primitives, he takes pleasure, not in the childishly-drawn, insipid features of the holy woman, but in the exquisite ellipse of the head, the halo. The egg of a hen is also an exquisite ellipse. Which is more beautiful-- the Mother of God, or a smooth egg? "The Mother of God," answer Feininger, Jawlensky, Kandinsky, Klee; for no egg, were it equivocal as Humpty-Dumpty, could interest the eye by such interrelated curves as can a woman's face. How much more do these curves interest when they exist for themselves alone ? ''Let the meticulous observe," they say, "that painting, like music, can be an immaculate Art;" and they point to their graphs, parallels, locusts, wind mills, carburetors.

*They exhibited together in Germany; a German critic bracketed them in the phrase "The Blue Four. *By Gainsborough (TIME, Jan. 26). /-By Rembrandt.