" From El Greco springs Goya and the Spanish influence
on Daumier and Manet. When it is remembered that, in the
meantime, Rembrandt and his contemporaries, notably Brouwer, left
their mark on French art in the work of Delacroix, Decamps and
Courbet, the way will be seen clearly open to Cezanne and
Gauguin.
The phrase "symbolist tradition" is not used to express any
conscious affinity between the various generations of artists. As
Kandinsky says: "the relationships in art are not necessarily
ones of outward form, but are founded on inner sympathy of
meaning." Sometimes, perhaps frequently, a similarity of outward
form will appear. But in tracing spiritual relationship only
inner meaning must be taken into account.
There are, of course, many people who deny that Primitive Art had
an inner meaning or, rather, that what is called "archaic
expression" was dictated by anything but ignorance of
representative methods and defective materials. Such people are
numbered among the bitterest opponents of Post-Impressionism, and
indeed it is difficult to see how they could be otherwise.
"Painting," they say, "which seeks to learn from an age when art
was, however sincere, incompetent and uneducated, deliberately
rejects the knowledge and skill of centuries.
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