PARTISAN REVIEW
What are these rules that Rembrandt fatally disobeys?
It
is
interesting for Fromentin's conscience that they not only command
conformity as rules, but are themselves rules of conformity.
If
you
paint reality, stick to reality; if you paint the visionary, stick to the
visionary. Do not mix the two in the same work. But above all, con–
form to your theme.
If
it is a portrait, be faithful to the sitter;
if
it is a secular world, let it be recognizable as such in the costumes,
the gestures, the proportions and the setting.
The Night Watch
is not
religious or heroic; why then the disorder and fantastic gloom in a
sober bourgeois .assembly? With its shadows and lights, the picture
is a mystification, not a transfiguration of reality.
All this sounds very sensible; we have heard it often in explana–
tions of other failures of great artists. There is always in such works
a major incompatibility between two aspects.
What makes us doubt Fromentin's reasoning in this case is that
we have found in other great works a similar striving to unify the
seemingly incompatible, to make the supernatural natural, and the
natural unreal, to unite movement and stability, the surface pattern
and depth. Indeed Fromentin discerns such oppositions in Rubens
without asserting a problem. He hesitates, it is true, before the
Martyrdom of Saint Livinus,
with its paradoxical contrast of the
violent and the saintly; but here he doesn't see that for the Baroque
artist suffering, glory and ecstasy merge into one.
As
for the rules of color disregarded by Rembrandt, we recognize
that they are the requirements of a particular style or tradition of
which Fromentin is the .an.'{ious guardian against the heretics in his
own day. His demand that the local color persist in light and in
deepest shadow would be meaningless in an art unconcerned with a
natural illumination; and even where sunlight is primary, as in Im–
pressionism, there are great works that violate this rule and build
upon the violation a novel beauty, not to mention a more precise
suggestion of reality. It is surprising that in spite of his knowledge
of history and of the marvellous variety of styles practiced with
great art in different times and places, and in spite of his conviction
that the man is the source of expression, inventing his appropriate
means and fashioning his own kind of unity, Fromentin should
wish
to impose the conventions of his school as the prerequisite of all good
art. This is the most common and inexpugnable error of criticism;
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