Mother's Chronicles (Book 2)

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"Knew a Painter"

Thus Mirra Alfassa and Henri Morisset were married on October 13, 1897.

They went to live at N°15 Rue Lemercier.

A different life began for Mirra.

Not only the life of a housewife, but the life of an artist as well. Mirra plunged into the world of art and artists. For ten years she was to know this life intimately.

Once, in 1951, someone asked Mother why modern art was so ugly. In reply, Mother, in her inimitable way, told us the following story.

"I knew a painter who was a student of Gustave Moreau's." Gustave Moreau (1826-98) had his first success in the Salon of 1864; he, Puvis de Chavanne and Redon are considered as the principal exponents of Symbolism in painting.

Puvis de Chavannes' (1824-98) style was marked

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by a classical serenity and balance; it flowered in his numerous oil paintings. His mural paintings were distinguished for their harmony of composition and sober colours. Interestingly, at the Congress of the History of Religion held in Paris in August 1900, when Swami Vivekananda gave his lecture in the Sorbonne's great amphitheatre, he had as backdrop The Sacred Grove, a mural by this artist. The painting had received high praise from Mother.

Matisse, the leader of the 'Fauve' group, Marquet, Rouault, Desvallière were some of the students in Moreau's studio. Redon, Dali and a few others were greatly influenced by Gustave Moreau.

Mother said: "I knew a painter who was a student of Gustave Moreau's, truly he was a very good artist, he knew perfectly well his technique, but then ... he went hungry, he did not know how to make both ends meet, and he lamented. One day, a friend, wishing to help him, sent him an art dealer. When the dealer entered his studio, the poor man said to himself, 'Here's my chance, at last,' and showed him the best of his works. The art dealer pulled a long face. He looked about, he prowled about, and began to

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rummage in every corner, when he suddenly found. . . . Ah! I must explain to you," sighed Mother; for most of us there were such ignoramuses that Mother had to go into the details of every subject to give us a glimmer of understanding. So then Mother explained that an artist after his day's work has a mixture of colours left over on his palette. As these colours cannot be used the next day, for they get dry, the artist scrapes off all these colours with a spatula and plasters them on a canvas. As a good many colours are all mixed up, the picture that emerges is most unexpected. Mother took up her story once more. "In one corner stood such a canvas, on which the artist used to put his palette-scrapings. The dealer suddenly comes across it and cries out, 'Here! You are gifted, my friend, this is a miracle, it is this that must be shown! Look at this richness of hues, this variety of forms, and what an imagination!' The poor hungry man said timidly, 'But, Mister, these are my palette-scrapings!' And the art dealer came down upon him, 'Silly man, you shouldn't speak so!' And he added, 'Give it to me, I take it upon myself to sell it. Give me as many as you wish — ten, twenty, thirty a month —I'll sell them all and

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make a name for you.' Well, as I was saying, his stomach was clamouring; he wasn't happy, but said, 'All right, take it, I'll see.' Then the landlord comes demanding the rent; the paint-man comes demanding payment for the previous unpaid bill; the purse is as empty as can be, so what is to be done? Well, he did not exactly make pictures with palette-scrapings but made something that gave imagination a wide scope — where the forms weren't too clear-cut, where the colours were all mixed up and brilliant and one didn't know too well what one was seeing —and as one didn't know what one was seeing, people who understood nothing of the matter would exclaim, 'How beautiful!' That's what he used to give to his art dealer. He never made a name for himself with his painting, which was really very fine —truly fine, he was a very fine artist —but he gained a world-wide reputation with those horrors! It happened right at the beginning of modern painting, way back at the Universal Exhibition of 1900. Were I to tell you his name you would all recognize him."

Mother then proceeded to give us a little background history of art. With Mother we got a rounded education.

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"The story began with . . . the one who did still life and whose plates were never round . . . Cezanne! He started it off. . . ."

Mother pondered a little, then added: "It must be said that the art about the end of last century, the art of the Second Empire, was bad. This was the era of businessmen, specially the era of bankers, of financiers; and the taste, precisely, had gone down very low."

If we walk down the road of History and halt at the European 'Inn of the 1800s,' we can watch the road and see the march of Time. Shall we?

There goes Napoleon Bonaparte. From being the First Consul of the First Republic —established after the French Revolution of 1789 which abolished monarchy —he has crowned himself Emperor in 1804. Emperor Bonaparte's armies run all over Europe; and Napoleon sows everywhere the new ideas that had sprouted with the Revolution: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. But his astuteness is not limited to the battlefield only. He is a great codifier. He gives France its Common Law, its prefects (the chief administrative officers of French departments), its universities and Audit Office, founds the Bank of France, and so forth.

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All these institutions stand right up to this day, testifying to the broad range of Napoleon's genius. We may say, in a word, that Napoleon is the bringer of Order to his country, the giver of Law.

Law paves the way for her sister, Science.

Science rides triumphant. "Horses of steam were bitted and the lightnings made a team to draw our chariots,"¹ to borrow from a poem of Sri Aurobindo's.

This is the age of Positivism. Science is cold denial. From her "searching gaze mysticism shrank out-mystified."¹

One dreamed and saw a gland write Hamlet . . .

A committee of hormones on the Aegean's brink

Composed the Iliad and the Odyssey.

A thyroid, meditating almost nude

Under the Bo-tree, saw the eternal Light . . .

A brain by a disordered stomach driven

Thundered through Europe, conquered, ruled and

fell . . .

Thus wagged on the surreal world, until A scientist played with atoms and blew out The universe before God had time to shout.²

1.A Vision of Science.

2.A Dream of Surreal Science.

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For the meantime Great Britain's star is on the ascendancy. The British spread the ideal of commercialism. Utilitarianism rules the waves.

In the wake of science's triumphant march comes a rapid industrialization. Pretty soon the merchant middle class amasses fortunes. And art, catering to the demand of the new industrial bourgeoisie, the nouveau riche which wants a status symbol, becomes "entirely commercial, obscure and ignorant from the beginning of the last century to its middle," as Mother told us one day in 1953. "It became very commercial and completely removed from the true sense of art."

In France it was during the Second Empire that important banks like Crédit Lyonnais and Société Générale were founded (1860s) and the telegraph began to function; new department stores such as the Bon Marc he sprang up in Paris. The rise of Paris as a capital of luxury and fashion was seen to denote the Empire achievements. But the construction of the Suez Canal in 1869 by Ferdinand de Lesseps was actually the crowning glory of the Second Empire. However, it may not have been its luxury and fashion that had attracted Mira Ismalun to Paris. In all likelihood its attraction

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lay elsewhere: Paris had become the cultural centre of Europe. This was celebrated by the Universal Exhibitions in 1867 and 1889, the year the Eiffel Tower was built, and Buffalo Bill came to Paris and little Mirra met her Red Indian friend.

Nevertheless, as the new captains of industry pressed on with their technical progress, the quickening pace of industrialization tore apart the balance between city and country. Uprooted people flocked into the towns. Industrial society created new working proletarian masses who stormed the barricades. The Franco-Prussian war in 1870 was followed by the Siege of Paris in which 36,000 people died of famine. On its heels came the Commune Uprisings of 1871, during which 30,000 people were executed.

By this time revolt was brewing among the writers and the artists against this age of intense bourgeoisie and utilitarianism. So now, Europe, with its resources depleted, looked to its art and literature to show the way.

In France, it was painters such as Corot, Millet and the Barbizon School who left the ravaged and overpopulated cities for the countryside. Landscape

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painting took on a new role and the Impressionists set out to thoroughly explore the subject. Breaking through the opaque surface of things, they proclaimed the supremacy of light. Monet and Degas rid their pictures of any literary meaning, thus smashing the accepted convention that all art should have a strong narrative content. To the Impressionists it was not form or content that mattered, but light. Light that spans eternity.

It was with their first group show in Paris in 1874 that the great names of Degas, Monet, Pissaro, Renoir and Sisley became known to the French public.

Generally speaking, the mid-nineteenth century in France was itself an era of great change. Revolution was in the air.

While the artists were bringing about a revolution in artistic approach and technique, the writers and poets in their turn were revolutionizing literature. The first half of the nineteenth century was the era of Alexandre Dumas, of Victor Hugo and Flaubert; the second half was dominated by Guy de Maupassant, Jules Verne, the father of science fiction, Emile Zola, famed for his I accuse letter—to name but a few. They

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enriched the French language so much that it became, in Sri Aurobindo's words, "the greatest store-house of fine prose among the world's languages." The poet Charles Baudelaire was followed by Stéphane Mallar-me who was the founder of a new trend of poetry, impressionist and symbolist, himself followed in varying degrees, and not by any means in the same way, by Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, both of them poets of great fame.

A fresh spirit was abroad.

The very atmosphere was surcharged with a revolt against the old classical values —the legacy of the Renaissance and the Baroque.

As a matter of fact, Hugo, Baudelaire, Zola had all leapt to the defence of Manet when he was attacked from all sides for his revolutionary painting. Baudelaire's critical work L'Art romantique (1868) is considered the fountainhead of modern artistic sensibility. Zola had actually met Manet in 1866 and had immediately set about championing the Impressionist cause. In his novel L'Euvre, one of the principal characters is an amalgam of Manet and Cezanne.

The First Impressionist Group Exhibition, held

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on April 15, 1874, at the studio of the photographer Nadar, on the corner of the Boulevard des Capucines, was the first warning blow against the establishment. There were thirty exhibitors.

The battles the Impressionists fought in their time were the major battles of modern art —to break through the prejudices and assumptions of socially accepted art.

As Mother said, "The art of the Second Empire was bad. This lasted till about the end of the last century, round about 1875. Afterwards the reaction set in. Then there was an entire period which was most beautiful (I am not saying this just because I myself used to paint!), but all the artists I knew then were true artists, they were serious and did wonderful things. It was the era of the Impressionists; it was the era of Manet, it was a brilliant era, they did beautiful things."

Yes, they left us the marvellous, light-soaked shimmering visions of landscape that never seem to dim in their brilliance.

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