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Before his vision of the external world, especially before what we are pleased to call Nature, Friesz has a reaction as delicate and enthusiastic as that of an English poet. Only, unlike most English painters, he would never dream of jotting it down and leaving it at that. Such hit-or-miss frivolity is not in his way. He is no amateur.
In very early days Maurice Denis was by some reckoned a chief, the equal almost of Matisse; but through sloppy sentiment he fell into mere futility, and by now has quite dropped out. Friesz, on the other hand, has gone ahead, and is to-day one of the half-dozen leaders: I shall have a good deal to say about him in a later part of this book.
In that way they become officers in the kingdom of the mind, or, to use a humbler and preferable term, essential instruments of culture. Friesz is a painter who has "come on" visibly since the war.
Matisse, to whom, not fifteen years ago, I saw a picture of his attributed by a competent amateur who was the friend of both. Friesz has an air of being more professional than any other artist of this first rank for Marchand, I think, is not quite of it. Indeed, for a moment, Friesz may appear alarmingly professional.
But, though he offers the sensitive amateur an unusually generous allowance of the amateur's most delicate pleasure, Friesz is, above all, a painters' painter. He has been called a theorist. And, because he is a painter of exceptionally good understanding, who thinks logically about his art and can find words for what he thinks, I suppose the appellation is admissible.
The exhibition is fairly representative of Friesz's later work; and if it cannot be said quite to summarize a stage of his career, at least it is a milestone. Friesz has arrived: that is to say, what he has already achieved suffices to affirm the existence of a distinct, personal talent entitled to its place in the republic of painting. At that point we leave him.
The great modern painters Derain, Matisse, Picasso, Bonnard, Friesz, Braque, etc. were firmly settled on their own lines of development before ever Jazz was heard of: only the riff-raff has been affected. Italian Futurism is the nearest approach to a pictorial expression of the Jazz spirit. The movement bounced into the world somewhere about the year 1911.
I feel sure that those who would place him amongst the masters of the movement Matisse, Picasso, Derain, Bonnard, and Friesz mistake; for, with all his charm and originality, he was too thoughtless and superficial to achieve greatly. He invented something which he went on repeating; and he could always fascinate simply by his way of handling a brush or a pencil.
I saw all that there was to be seen; I admired; and then I asked one who had already, before the war, established a style and a reputation I asked Friesz, I think "Et les jeunes?" "Nous sommes les jeunes" was the reply.
Very much the same might be said of the decorations I have in mind. It is clear that Friesz plotted and reasoned with himself until he had contrived a method of matching means with ends.
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