ART CHRONICLE
THE CRI SIS OF THE EASEL PIC TURE
The easel or cabinet picture-the movable picture hung on
a wall-is a unique product of Western culture and has few counter–
parts elsewhere. The form of the easel picture is conditioned by its
social function-that is, to hang on a wall-and to realize this we have
only to compare its principles of unity with those of the Persian miniature
or Chinese hanging painting, neither of which seems to isolate itself
quite as much as the easel picture does from its architectural surround–
ings. Nor does either show so much independence of the demands of
decoration. Traditionally, the Western easel painting subordinates dec–
orative to dramatic effect, cutting the illusion of a boxlike cavity into
the wall behind it and organizing within this cavity the illusion of forms,
light, and space, all more or less according to the current rules of
verisimilitude. When, as Manet and the Impressionists began doing, the
artist flattens this cavity out for the sake of decorative structure and
organizes its elements in terms of flatness and frontality, the easel pic–
ture begins to feel itself compromised in its very nature.
The evolution of modern painting from Manet on has subjected
the traditional cabinet picture to an uninterrupted process of attrition.
Monet and Pissarro in particular, though less revolutionary in other
respects, attacked the easel picture's essence by the consistency with
which they applied their method of the divided tone, whose operation
had to remain the same throughout the picture, requiring every part
of the canvas to be treated with the same emphasis of touch. The
product of this was a tightly covered, evenly and heavily textured rec–
tangle of paint that muffled contrasts and tended-but only tended-to
reduce the picture to a relatively undifferentiated surface.
The tendency initiated by Pissarro and Monet did not work itself
out coherently in time. Seurat pushed divisionism to its logical conclu–
sion and applied the divided tone much more inflexibly and mechan–
ically than they, but his concern with clarity of design and contrasts
of light and dark sent him in the opposite direction, and while he made
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