The Masses (periodical)/Volume 1/Number 1/Impressions of Our Artists
Impressions of Our Artists
By Grace Potter
OH, yes, you know Cesare, you say, as soon as his name is mentioned. He's the man who illustrates all the funny places and ridiculous people that McCardell grinds out "humor" about in the Metropolitan section of the Sunday World. Of course, you know Cesare!
Hush! Maybe, you don't, after all.
Look at this picture, "The Masses." It's the people down on the Eastside. An eviction over there in the corner. See that woman's face looking up into your eyes from the foreground. YesIt is a woman. But, oh, what has life done to a human being to put such a look into eyes. You have an uncomfortable feeling that some way you are to blame. You begin to think and question.
That's the real Cesare, the man who disturbs you. The man who makes your soul uneasy. The man who makes you think you have a responsibility beyond your own bread and butter. When Herbert Everett, who used to be editor of Van Norden's Magazine, and then had to be something else, because they didn't want any Socialists fooling around a perfectly good publication—well, when Mr. Everett saw Cesare's picture of "The Masses," he went off and looked out of the window a few minutes. Then he came back, he said: "I could make a poem about that." So he did. If you like to be amused only, go look at what the the Sunday World Cesare does. If you like to be disturbed, and have the weeds and things pulled out of your soul so that the flowers can grow there, better look at what our Cesare does. We expect a good many things from him in the future issues.
Charles Winter is an artist who turns out covers to order for the Cosmopolitan and Collier's to the tune of about four hundred dollars apiece. Never knew there was such a lot of money anywhere, did you? There's more about him that's like that, too. The Montrose Art Gallery has exclusive right to exhibit his stuff—oh, pardon me, Mr. Winter. Maybe painters don't call their work "stuff" as writers do. Well, anyway, his pictures are shown in that perfectly wonderful high-sounding place and no one else can't exhibit 'em at all, at all. Would you ever have thought he would have done anything for a Socialist publication?
Now listen. He works like that just' enough to make money so that he can be the ideal artist most of the time. And if you look at our cover now, a mere sketch, Winter calls it, and the cover of our next issue—the finished product—you will see that his ideal is your and my ideal—Socialism.
Frank Van Sloun, who did the poster which advertised the magazine, has a "Portrait of an Actor" now at the Corcoran Art Gallery. It was on exhibition at The Academy last year. A newspaper person who went to Mr. Van Sloun to get a story not long ago, asked him if he made his living by magazine illustrations.
"No, oh no!" said Mr. Van Sloun, swooping down long lines of gray-white on the gown of a lady in the picture he was working on.
"Do you fill orders for partaits then?" asked the newspaper person.
Mr. Van Sloun stopped swooping just a minute, but held his paint brush suspended in air and looked long at his picture. "I'll take an order—" he agreed with faint interest.
"No, no," hastened the newspaper person. "I mean, how is it you make your living by your art?"
Mr. Van Sloun showed genuine interest this time, though he began at the lines on the lady's gown again. "I don't know myself," he said, with quaint impersonal whimsicality. "I often wonder how I do it." And he looked crtitcally at the paint on his palette, and began a mixing process that seemed to take up most of his attention.
"Well—well" The poor newspaper person was after "a story," and it didn't seem to be coming readily. "Do you try very hard for success?" the newspaper person trailed off at gentle Mr. Van Sloun's astonished vehemence.
"No, no, oh, not at all," he said. "Success isn't worth trying for. Many artists who spend their lives trying to get it and who make lots of money by their pictures, find out that it wasn't worth while at all." Then he turns his attention again to his canvas, and with his head turned at an angle and his thumb gripping tight his palette, he becomes very absorbed in his work and forgets the newspaper person who wanders about the place, looking at the portraits and etchings that adorn the studio. And when two complete tours of inspection have been made, the newspaper person slipped out quietly. "It would be too bad," said the newspaper person, telling me of the visit, "to make a man talk about himself when he'd rather paint. So I didn't get my story."
Mr. Berlin is a young artist, who, born in New York, began to travel a few years ago to find the phases of nature which interested him most. Nova Scotia's rugged sea coasts, shipyards with men at work on the boats, the blue, blue sea piled to the blue, blue, sky, and flecked with dancing gold lights—he has many pictures like that.
Brittainy stopped his seeking next, and he has a large collection of street scenes there with the quaint Breton people, ripe with color, wandering peasant-fashion through them all. He has etchings of Florence, too. They are dim, and Italian, and yet vivid enough to make any traveller think-instantly of folk-songs and spaghetti, art galleries and lovely, dirty, brown babies.
Many of these pictures are to be shown next month at the Haas Art Gallery, Fifty-ninth street and Sixth avenue.
Mr. Berlin is going to do New York street scenes this year. He did for us the picture in Fulda's story.
Mr. Nutting, who has illustrated the Tolstoy article, is an editor of one of the popular magazines, although holding a degree in mechanical engineering from Purdue University, where he graduated four years ago. He very emphatically and modestly denies the accusation that he is an artist and unassumingly declares that his artistic work is just a hobby. "Oh, no, I don't earn my living at it," he said. "I couldn't. It's too much of a risk." But when the pressure becomes too great, occasionally, he draws a picture or rushes off to Europe on a cattle boat.
His sketch illustrating Tolstoy's forceful article has something of the pathos and dignity of a Millet about it. It is as simple in execution as Tolstoy's own work.
It seems rather a pity that Mr. Nutting should only do artistic work on the side. Doesn't it seem a shame to waste all that perfectly good talent? Can't we hope to see him some day leave the ranks of the non-combatants? He says his artistic work is only to fill in the chinks—but, "Must it be so?"
"Tell me the story of your life!"
With an owlish solemnity equal to my own, he replied:
"I was born in Illinois, studied in Paris,"
But the rest doesn't matter—at least not yet? A man must be dead at least fifty years before we can take a human interest in these dry facts of his early life.
"I would rather draw political cartoons than anything else;" said Mr. Young. "I believe in the picture with a purpose. There must be a vital idea back of every drawing that is really worth while. I have no patience with these so-called artists who expect intricate technicality to make up for a lack of ideas. In fact, I don't believe in technique at all.
"Real art is, in the last analysis, simply self-expression. Socialism always has been and I suppose always will be the keynote of my work. To me it is the culmination of all radicalism and the thought back of most of my drawings. I have been very fortunate in being allowed considerable freedom in this direction even when employed by capitalist papers. But you see," he concluded naïvely, "I made that a condition of my work."
He summed up the purpose of his work in the following words—simplicity and strength. The proud possessor of an idea must present it simply and with sufficient force to make it comprehensible to the proletarian for whom Mr. Young states that all his work is done. "It is the working man, seated by his lamp in the evenings in his shirt sleeves pouring over the evening paper for whom I make my drawings." There was no affectation, no posing, nothing but the most virile and yet child-like simplicity here. Strength and simplicity are, he says the keynote of all good work.
And that was the strongest impression of the interview, as it was of the studio, as it is of his work, as it seems to be of the man himself—strength and simplicity.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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