FROMENTIN AS A CRITIC
the artist is given to paintings that he rejects. Rembrandt, according
to Fromentin, is a dual personality with conflicting aims that intro–
duce fatal errors into
his
work. He is typical of the interior, more
modern man and his example poisons art. Rubens, too, was born
with polar possibilities; even his teachers, Van Noort and Van Veen,
represent opposite tendencies in the human being as well as in all
culture, the first more spontaneous and hearty, a representative of the
indigenous Flemish character; the other cultivated, academic and
self-conscious. Rubens was able, however, to fuse the two successfully,
giving to the native exuberance of one the harmony which in the other
was thin and uninspired, without sap. But Rembrandt, who was no
less gifted than the Flemish artist, retained side by side in his work
the antagonistic components of his nature; he wished to be both
realist and idealist, the painter of the visible and the invisible. Where
these appear separately, the results are the greatest masterpieces.
Where he brings them together in a single work, .as in
The Night
Watch,
the painting is a failure. In only a few paintings, like
The
Syndics,
are these opposites successfully combined.
Whatever we may think of this judgment of Rembrandt, the
most debated and disturbing in the book, it is also an element of art
in Fromentin's writing. It is as if Fromentin, having avowed his cult
of Rubens in the first part, found it necessary to introduce and to
play up as the major
motif
in the second part an opposite pattern
of artistic personality, which in turn strengthens by contrast the
intensity of his image of Rubens. Duality against unity, subjective
against objective, the hidden against the open, the style of mystery
and vague emergence in light and shadow against the style of cli–
mactic drama in clear daylight. And in complementary reversal of
these contrasts, the lesser Dutch masters-individual and charming
figures-are opposed to Rubens' minor Flemish contemporaries and
followers, who are dull satellites rather than small independent
planets. Again, in the last section, turning to the Flemish primitives
of the fifteenth century, Fromentin isolates Van Eyck and Memling
as antithetic personalities, embodiments respectively of the material
and the spiritual, and reduces the rest of early Flemish painting
to an incidental accompaniment of these two masters.
One should not suppose therefore that all the analyses and
judgments made within this antithetic framework are necessarily
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