Marsden Hartley

With the passing of this rare artist during the late summer months,[2] we are conscious of the silencing of one of the foremost lyricists in painting, one of the most delicate spirits among those who have painted pictures so thoroughly replete with charm, pictures of such real distinction and merit. For of true charm, of true grace, of true melodic, Redon was certainly the master. I think no one has coveted the vision so much as, certainly no more than, has this artist, possessed of the love of all that is dream-like and fleeting in the more transitory aspect of earthly things. No one has ever felt more that fleeting treasure abiding in the moment, no one has been more jealous of the bounty contained in the single glancing of the eye upward to infinity or downward among the minuter fragments at his feet.

[2] Of 1917.—Ed.

It would seem as if Redon had surely walked amid gardens, so much of the morning is in each of his fragile works. There seems always to be hovering in them the breath of those recently spent dawns of which he was the eager spectator, never quite the full sunlight of the later day. Essentially he was the worshipper of the lip of flower, of dust upon the moth wing, of the throat of young girl, or brow of young boy, of the sudden flight of bird, the soft going of light clouds in a windless sky. These were the gentle stimulants to his most virile expression. Nor did his pictures ever contain more; they never struggled beyond the quality of legend, at least as I know them. He knew the loveliness in a profile, he saw always the evanescences of light upon light and purposeless things. The action or incident in his pictures was never more than the touch of some fair hand gently and exquisitely brushing some swinging flower. He desired implicitly to believe in the immortality of beauty, that things or entities once they were beautiful could never die, at least for him. I followed faithfully for a time these fine fragments in those corners of Paris where they could be found, and there was always sure to be in them, always and ever that perfect sense of all that is melodic in the universe.

I do not know much of his early career as an artist. I have read passages from letters which he wrote not so long ago, in which he recounts with tenderness the dream life of his childhood, how he used to stand in the field for hours or lie quietly upon some cool hill shaded with young leaves, watching the clouds transforming themselves into wing shapes and flower shapes, staining his fancy with the magic of their delicate color and form—indeed, it would seem as if all things had for him been born somewhere in the clouds and had condescended to an earthward existence for a brief space, the better to show their rarity of grace for the interval. Although obviously rendered from the object, they were still-lifes which seemed to take on a kind of cloud life during the very process of his creation. They paid tribute to that simple and unaffected statement of his—"I have fashioned an art after myself." Neither do I know just how long he was the engraver and just how long he was the painter—it is evident everywhere that his line is the line of the fastidious artist on steel and stone.

Beyond these excessively frail renderings of his, whether in oil or in pastel, I do not know him, but I am thinking always in the presence of them that he listened very attentively and with more than a common ear to the great masters in music, absorbing at every chance all that was in them for him. He had in his spirit the classical outline of music, with nothing directly revolutionary, no sign of what we call revolt other than the strict adherence to personal relationship, no other prejudice than the artist's reaction against all that is not really refined to art, with but one consuming ardor, and that to render with extreme tranquillity everything delicate and lovely in passing things. There is never anything in his pictures outside the conventional logic of beauty, and if they are at all times ineffably sweet, it is only because Redon himself was like them, joyfully living out the days because they were for him ineffably sweet, too. Most of all it is Redon who has rendered with exceptional elegance and extreme artistry, the fragment.

It is in his pictures, replete with exquisiteness, that one finds the true analogy to lyric poetry. This lyricism makes them seem mostly Greek—often I have thought them Persian, sometimes again, Indian; certainly he learned something from the Chinese in their porcelains and in their embroidery. I am sure he has been fond of these outer influences, these Oriental suggestions which were for him the spiritual equivalent from the past for his spontaneous ideas, for he, too, had much of all this magic, as he had much of the hypnotic quality of jewelry and precious stones in all his so delicate pictures, firelike in their subtle brilliancy. They have always seemed to contain this suggestion for me: flowers that seemed to be much more the embodiment of jades, rubies, emeralds, and ambers, than just flowers from the common garden. His flamelike touches have always held this preciousness: notations rather for the courtly robe or diadem than just drawings. All this gift of goldsmithery comes as one would expect, quite naturally, from his powers as an engraver, in which art he held a first place in his time and was the master of the younger school, especially in Belgium and Germany. Of all the painters of this time it is certain he was first among them essaying to picture the jewelled loveliness of nature; it is most evident in La Touche who was in no way averse to Renoir either, but Redon has created this touch for himself and it is the touch of the virtuoso. Perhaps it would have been well if Moreau, who had a sicker love of this type of expression, had followed Redon more closely, as he might then have added a little more lustre to these very dead literary failures of his.

I cannot now say who else beside Ferdinand Khnopff has been influenced greatly by him, but I do know that he was beloved by the more modern men, that he was revered by all regardless of theories or tenets, for there is in existence somewhere in Paris a volume of letters and testimonials celebrating some anniversary of Redon in proof of it. And I think that—regardless of ideas—the artist must always find him sympathetic, if for no other reason than that he was the essence of refinement, of delicacy, and of taste. When I think of Redon I think of Shelley a little, "he is dusty with tumbling about among the stars," and I think somewhat, too, of some phrases in Debussy and his unearthly school of musicians, for if we are among those who admire sturdier things in art we can still love the fine gift of purity. And of all gifts Redon has that, certainly.

His art holds, too, something of that breathlessness among the trees one finds in Watteau and in Lancret, maybe more akin to Lancret, for he, also, was more a depicter of the ephemeral. We think of Redon as among those who transvaluate all earthly sensations in terms of a purer element. We think of him as living with his head among the mists, alert for all those sudden bursts of light which fleck here and there forgotten or unseen places, making them live with a new resplendency, full of new revealment, perfect with wonder. Happily we find in him a hatred of description and of illustration, we find these pictures to be illuminations from rich pages not observed by the common eye, decorations out of a world the like of which has been but too seldom seen by those who aspire to vision. Chansons sans paroles are they, ringing clearly and flawlessly to the eye as do those songs of Verlaine (with whom he has also some relationship) to the well-attuned ear.

He was the master of the nuance, and the nuance was his lyricism, his special gift, his genius. He knew perfectly the true vibration of note to note, and how few are they whose esthetic emotions are built upon the strictly poetic basis, who escape the world-old pull towards description and illustration. How few, indeed, among those of the materialistic vision escape this. But for Redon there was but one world, and that a world of imperceptible light on all things visible, with always a kind of song of adoration upon his lips, as it were, obsessed with reverence and child wonder toward every least and greatest thing, and it was in these portrayals of least things that he exposed their naked loveliness as among the greatest. Never did Redon seek for the miniature; he knew merely that the part is the representation of the whole, that the perfect fragment is a true representative of beauty, and that the vision of some fair hand or some fair eye is sure to be the epitome of all that is lovely in the individual.

We have as a result of this almost religious devotion of Redon's, the fairest type of the expression of that element which is the eye's equivalent for melodious sound. In his pictures he perpetuated his belief in the unfailing harmony in things. Either all things were lovely in his eye, or they are made beautiful by thinking beautifully of them. That was the only logic in Redon's painting. He questioned nothing; he saw the spiritual import of every object on which his eye rested. No one shall go to Redon for any kind of intellectual departure or for any highly specialized theory—it is only too evident from his work that he had none in mind. He had, I think, a definite belief in the theosophic principle of aura, in that element of emanation which would seem sometimes to surround delicate objects touched with the suffusion of soft light. For him all things seemed "possessed" by some colorful presence which they themselves could in no way be conscious of, somewhat the same sort of radiance which floods the features of some beauteous person and creates a presence there which the person is not even conscious of, the imaginative reality, in other words, existing either within or without everything the eye beholds. For him the very air which hovered about all things seemed to have, as well, the presence of color not usually seen of men, and it was this emanation or presence which formed the living quality of his backgrounds in which those wondrous flowery heads and hands and wings had their being, through which those dusty wings of most unearthly butterflies or moths hurry so feverishly. He has given us a happy suggestion of the reality of spiritual spaces and the way that these fluttering bodies which are little more than spirit themselves have enjoyed a beauteous life. He was Keats-like in his appreciation of perfect loveliness, like Shelley in his passionate desire to transform all local beauty into universal terms.

No one will quarrel with Redon on account of what is not in him. What we do find in him is the poetry of a quiet, sweet nature in quest always of perfect beauty, longing to make permanent by means of a rare and graceful art some of those fragments which have given him his private and personal clue to the wonders of the moment, creating a personal art by being himself a rare and lovely person. He remains for us one of the finest of artists, who has reverted those whisperings from the great world of visual melody in which he lived. It was with these exquisite fragments that he adorned the states of his own soul in order that he might present them as artist in tangible art form. We are grateful for his lyricism and for his exquisite goldsmithery. After viewing his delicately beautiful pictures, objects take on a new poetic wonder.