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And I believe it is in revolt against, perhaps in terror of, this profoundly un-French spirit that the younger Frenchmen are seeking shelter and grace under the vast though unconscious nationalism of Derain. For the French have never loved Cubism, though Braque uses it beautifully. How should they love anything so uncongenial to their temperament?
However we may call it, what I mean is the one thing at all worth having which the Greeks had and the Byzantines had not, which Raphael possesses more abundantly than Giotto. In Derain this sense is alive and insistent; it is urging him always to capture something that is outside him; the question is, can he, without for one moment compromising the purity of his art, obey it? I do not know.
In France, where even amateurs of painting enjoy a bit of rhetoric, for two or three days after the death of Renoir one could not be long in any of their haunts without being told either that "Renoir est mort et Matisse est le plus grand peintre de France" or that "Renoir est mort et Derain," etc.
After all, Racine did this, and Molière and La Bruyère and Watteau and Chardin and Renoir. It is in the French tradition to believe that there is a beauty common to life and art. The Greeks had it, so runs the argument, and the Italians of the high renaissance, but the English poets tended to sacrifice art to beauty, and the moderns so Derain may think sacrifice beauty and grandeur to discretion.
Derain is the chief of the new French school a school destined manifestly to be less cosmopolitan than its predecessor. The tendency towards nationalism everywhere is unmistakeable a consequence of the war, I suppose. It is useless to deplore the fact or exult in it: one can but accept it as one accepts the weather.
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.
It is more than disquieting, it is alarming, to detect symptoms of the disease this distressing disease of Wilcoxism in The Athenæum itself. Yet I am positive that not long since I read in this very paper that Mr. Wyndham Lewis was more than a match for Matisse and Derain; and, having said so much, the critic not unnaturally went on to suggest that he was a match for Lionardo da Vinci.
This is as true of Picasso as of Derain: only, Picasso's prodigious inventiveness may sometimes give the impression of a will to surprise, while his habit of turning everything to account certainly does lead him to cast an inquisitive eye on every new manifestation of vitality.
I would like to lay stress on the words "power" and "French," because I do not wish to say, what may nevertheless be true, that Derain is the greatest painter in France, or seemingly to forget that Picasso's is the paramount influence in Europe.
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