Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [161]
His enjoyment did not diminish when he found himself among the works of European moderns loosely cataloged as “post-impressionist.” He was blind to a piece of pure abstraction by Wassily Kandinsky, but responded happily to the dreamy fantasies of Odilon Redon and the virtuoso draftsmanship of Augustus John, as well as to Whistler, Monet, Cézanne, and other acknowledged revolutionaries.
Then came the slap in the face that was Matisse. More vituperation had been directed at this painter, in reviews of the show so far, than at any other “Cubist”—a term that actually did not apply to him, but nevertheless was used as an epithet. Roosevelt gazed at his “Joaquina” and found its cartoony angularity simply absurd. Beyond loomed a kneeling nude by Wilhelm Lehmbruck. Although obviously mammalian, it was not especially human; the “lyric grace” that had made it the sensation of a recent exhibition in Cologne reminded him more of a praying mantis.
A phrase he had recently tried out on Henry Cabot Lodge, in a letter complaining about political extremists, came to mind: lunatic fringe. It seemed even more applicable to the French radicals who now proceeded to insult his intelligence, as if he and not they were insane: Picasso, Braque, Brancusi, Maillol. He boggled at Marcel Duchamp’s Nu descendant un escalier, a shuttery flutter of cinematic movement propelled by the kind of arcs that American comic artists drew to telegraph punches, or baseball swings. If this was Cubism, or Futurism, or Near-Impressionism, or whatever jargon-term the theorists of modern art wanted to apply to it, he believed he had seen it before, in a Navajo rug.
At least Duchamp had had the decency not to flaunt sexual organs. Roosevelt noted no e on the end of Nu in the painting’s title (helpfully lettered onto the canvas), and decided in the face of general opinion to translate it as “A Naked Man Going Down Stairs.” Nakedness seemed to be a motif of the show’s remaining galleries, so much so that he elected to ignore a walking nude by Robert Henri that verged on the anatomical, and a frankly lesbian study by Jules Pascin that had three girls preparing to have sex on a bed, limbs intertwined, lips caressing a proffered nipple.
As James Bryce, the outgoing British ambassador in Washington, noted, Roosevelt “wouldn’t always look at a thing.”
HOWEVER, IN HIS SUBSEQUENT review, modestly entitled “A Layman’s Views of an Art Exhibition,” he declined to be as outraged as most professional critics. His tone in confessing his inability to appreciate much of what he had seen was at first almost wistful, as if to acknowledge that the new century had begun to bewilder him. But if the law of evolution was applicable to artists, those fittest to survive were not the ones who mutated most startlingly. “It is true, as the champions of the extremists say, that there can be no life without change, and that to be afraid of what is different or unfamiliar is to be afraid of life. It is no less true, however, that change may mean death and not life, and retrogression instead of development.”
He thought that there was life, and much “real good” in the work of the two emergent American modernist schools, “fantastic though the developments of these new movements are.” Personally, he preferred the nationalistic realism of the Ashcan artists to the violent expressionism of a Marsden Hartley. If the former group was popularist, it was at least all-American, and relatable to Progressivism, as were the new sociological novels of