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THE GRAMMAR OF COLOR AND FORM
THE HISTORY OF IMPRESSIONISM.
By John Rewald. Simon and Schuster
(for The Museum of Modern Art).
$10.
ON THE SPIRITUAL IN ART.
By Wassily Kandinsky (translated by Hilla
Rebay). Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (for The Museum
of Non-Objective Painting).
$4.50.
HENRI RousSEAU.
By Daniel Catton Rich. Second Edition, Revised.
Simon and Schuster (for The Museum of Modern Art).
$2.75.
I
MPRESSIONISM has proved itself the most consequential of the efforts
of the nineteenth-century painters to reorganize the data of vision–
consequential not because of the validity, or even the consistency, of its
theories, but rather because of the talents it enlisted. In fact, one of the
problems of art history has been to define Impressionism as a method, not
merely as a sequence of events.
If
we choose to call Monet, Sisley, and
Pissarro Impressionists, Degas, Manet, and Cezanne are not Impressionists
at all.
We had better admit at once that the strength and the weakness of
Rewald lie precisely here; that he, of all writers on Impressionist painting,
has willingly renounced the attempt to define Impressionism inclusively
and h as, instead, compiled the fullest, most orderly, most particular
record of Impressionist painting between 1855 and 1886. To Rewald
history is not an art, not criticism; it is science, and the successful his–
torian in his opinion is the one who remains so close to his texts that he
thinks only in the directions they permit. By this scrupulously docu–
mented record, then, we know what paintings by Manet the Salon
"refused," what Monet and Renoir found together at Argenteuil, exactly
what Louis Leroy printed in his famous
Charivari
article on the "Im–
pressionists" on April 25, 1874.
If
a few of the reproductions in color
are acid or hot, the illustrations are innumerable and considerately inte–
grated with the record itself.
All this is u seful; in fact indispensable. No longer shall we have to
depend upon the letters collected by Venturi, the reminiscences of
Duret or Uhde, or the woman's-clubbish evasions of E. A. Jewell. We
shall not so readily do without Wilenski's
Mcdern French Painting,
which, however incoherent or arbitrary, has the venturesome insights
against which Rewald has academically protected himself. Wilenski
may be cavalier in handling his documents, but within his larger social
contexts he suggests more forcefully than Rewald that the technical
and aesthetic revolt of the Impressionists against the Salon and the
Ecole des Beaux-Arts, for example, is a repudiation of the bourgeoisie.
And we shall return to Roger Fry for his summary judgment that, in
effect, Impressionism implied two changes in painting: "one the result
of looking at things from unfamiliar aspects, the other the result of
