sionist phase, he became in Brittany the centre of the famous Pont Aven group, and there developed the theory of synthesis which was to govern all his later work. In 1891 he went to Tahiti and, except for a brief return to France, spent the rest of his life there. Admiration of the primitive was at the base of Gauguin's art. Rejecting impressionism as a mere reproduction of nature not inspired by thought, he held that study of nature awakes emotions in the artist which he has to express by bringing into organized relation symbols, consisting of forms and colours, supplied by nature. Primitive art alone, he considered, proceeds from the spirit, and uses rather than mimics nature; and he justified going to Tahiti on the ground that there only was his imagination sufficiently stirred by nature. Though the colour and forms in his pictures might not actually exist in nature, he claimed them to be the pictorial equivalent of the grandeur, profundity and mystery of Tahiti. His latest work most completely embodies this conception of art in its design based on boldly simplified contours enclosing areas of rich purples, greens, reds and oranges. To the end Gauguin's colour showed impressionist influence. Otherwise his art is primarily decorative, with colours keyed to express the painter's mood, and shows a less passionate search for solidity than Cezanne's. His symbolism, though not primarily literary, towards the end moved somewhat in that direction.
Akin to Gauguin in his outlook and use of colour is Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890). Born in Holland, his early work shows the influence of the Hague School; association with the impres- sionists in Paris led to his settling down at Aries to the use of heavy masses of vivid colour arranged indefinite patterns, em- phasized by black outlines and writhing arabesques of paint. A passionate lover of nature and a mystic and idealist by tempera- ment, Van Gogh believed that the artist's creative power was given to him to make men happy. Vehement personal passion is the note of his work. His colour ultimately became quite non- naturalistic, and was solely directed towards expressing his emo- tions; and his surface texture was designed to increase the arresting, disquieting quality of his work. The third dimension did not play a dominant part in Van Gogh's work. His design, in which decorative simplification became increasingly marked, shows very strongly the influence of Japanese art.
Symbolism and Fauvism. The characteristic elements of the preceding group of painters rejection of naturalistic representa- tion, emphasis on solidity and structure, organized design, and the symbolic use of form and colour are united in varying degrees in the work of their successors. The influence of Cezanne, which has modified or supplanted that of others, took some time to develop, and the first well-marked group to appear was that round Gauguin at Pont Aven. Among these was Paul Serusier (b.i864), who was one of the first to formulate a doctrine based on the ideas of Gauguin, Cezanne and Odilon Redon. He drew round him a group of symbolistes which included Maurice Denis (b.iSyo), Pierre Bonnard, K-Xavier Roussel and Edouard Vuillard. This doctrine declares that a work of art must aim at the expression of an idea. Since it uses form for this purpose, it must be symbolic; and since the form has to be organized, it must be synthetic and decorative. At the basis of this is a belief in correspondence between external forms and subjective states not, however, by association but direct. Serusier and Denis have given these ideas a mystical and religious application . largely under the influence of the quattrocento Italians. In Bonnard (b.i867) and Vuillard (b.i867), however, the purely decorative element is uppermost, in a graceful and refined but over-precious treatment of material drawn from everyday life, influenced by Japanese art, and marked by elusive and delicate harmonies of green, blue, rose and yellow combined with grey. Closely akin to this symboliste group is another whose best-known members were pupils of Gustave Moreau. The religious symbolic pictures of Georges Desvallieres (b.i86i) are characterized by the use of arabesque and rich exotic colour; the more realistic art of Charles Guerin (b.i874) by its decorative aim and search for tonal rather than linear unity. The influence of Moreau, modi- fied only by the pupil's own temperament, is well seen in the fantastic, savagely distorted nudes, and mysterious, sombre
landscapes of Georges Rouault. Far better known is his fellow- pupil Henri Matisse (b.i86g), who represents the expressionist side of symbolism in its most extreme form. Academic and neo- impressionist phases never obscured his very personal use of line and colour whose decorative quality relates him to the Chi- nese and Japanese. His arbitrary distortions of the human figure, partly based on the study of negro art, marked a stage towards the abstract, non-representative art of the cubists. These distortions, his apparently anarchic design and his colour earned for Matisse the title of " Chef des Fauves," though he has not formed the centre of a well-marked group, despite his wide influence. It is difficult to acquit him of sometimes painting pour epatcr les bourgeois; but his latest work, while retaining deli- cacy and sensitiveness, shows increased discipline and restraint. Both in his drawing and painting Matisse is notable for his use of a pure unaccented contour, which nevertheless generates solid form. Somewhat the same power is seen in the Italian painter and sculptor Amedee Modigliani (1884-1920), though he is far more mannered than Matisse and lacks his feeling for colour.
Kecs van Dongen (b.i&Tj, in Holland) mingles the influence of Matisse with that of Toulouse-Lautrec, and mainly shows the application of a.fauvisle recipe to the painting of fashionable Pari- sian society. Different from the symbolistes smdfauves, but equal- ly a reaction against impressionism, are the painters who return to the outlook and methods of the quattrocento Italians. Among these are Jean Frelaut (b.i879), notable for his sincere, thoroughly realized interpretations of the country and people round Mor- bihan in Brittany; and Felix Vallotton (b. 1865, at Lausanne), whose angular, precise contours and definite colour pattern relate him to the primitives, and have won him the nickname of the Cabanel of the Salon d'Automne. This Pre-Raphaelite tendency is represented in England by Joseph Southall, head of the Birmingham School of Art, whose work is akin to that of Benozzo Gozzoli; and by Henry Lamb, Stanley Spencer and Gil- bert Spencer, who in 1921 were the most prominent of a group of younger men in London of undoubted sincerity but inclined at times to use a rather elementary formula. Their work is also interesting as illustrating a tendency in British art towards deco- rative design suitable for mural painting. Similar, though more academic in outlook, is Eric Kennington, whose war paintings attracted much attention, their sentimental interest obscuring their mannered draughtsmanship and pretty colour.
Cubism. To all the manifestations of the modern movement so far considered cubism is a marked contrast. It was a reaction not only against impressionism but against fauvism, and stands for the introduction of order and discipline into painting. So much was this the case that some opponents of the movement professed to see therein p, return offensive of the academics. It owes its name and in part its origin to Matisse, from whose association with Picasso and others the movement took shape in 1908. This group coalesced with another working on similar lines, and repre- sented by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, to win cubism its first public victory in the Salon d'Automne of 1913. To the influence of Cezanne and Seurat, which was mainly behind the movement, was joined that of Negro and Polynesian art, in which the cubists found a simplification of the human form emphasizing its bulk and solidity, and 'a complete disregard of normal ap- pearance in the effort to express a conception. The central point of cubism is its entire rejection of the reproduction of natural appearance, which, cubists hold, merely serves to awaken in the artist emotions which he expresses by a series of abstract forms, ordered and arrayed by his will. Thus cubism aims at creating a kind of visual music. In its most austere form it avoids curved lines and colour as pretty and sentimental; and even holds that a picture is not a decoration since that term implies dependence upon external objects. From the first, great emphasis was laid on the expression of volume and its arrangement in space. This aroused difficulties, which have separated the cubists into distinct groups. The representation of a third dimension introduced an element of resemblance to nature. Some painters accepted this, so that their pictures are little more than arrangements of realis- tically painted cubes and cylinders: others rebelled against such
