FROMENTIN AS A CRITIC
and it turns up among those who have denounced
it
most firmly.
However, there is more to be said on this point about nature
as a norm. For the modem artist, it is a monstrous philistine error.
Yet in demanding conformity to nature, Fromentin was not an obtuse
academician. It is too easy today to feel superior to the naturalistic
requirements of the old schools as wholly external to art. But I am
sure that the great artists of the nineteenth century who believed
that painting was in principle a harmony of colors and forms and
who despised the vulgar delight in exact resemblance, would not have
recognized their principle in twentieth century art and would have
been shocked by the modern distortions and indifference to nature.
Not very long ago, Cezanne admired the painting of Monet, but
found Gauguin's insufferably stylized and fiat. The power of repre–
sentation was regarded by Delacroix too as a high and necessary gift
of art. In an essay on Gros he dwells especially on the latter's realism
as an admirable trait; his evocation of the battlefield is for Delacroix
a great original accomplishment.
If
he finds fault with some of
Gros' best pictures, it is because of incongruities of perspective in the
different planes. Given the representation of figures in perspective
space, artistic harmony demanded an accord of the represented world
no less binding on the painter than the accord of lines or of neigh–
boring tones on the surface of the canvas. Perspective, light and shade
and the natural articulation of bodies were more deeply involved in
the aesthetic norms of their painting than the artists themselves were
aware. The so-called "values"- ·a scale of relative brightness of
tones-were studied both as a means of illusion and as the source of
a special beauty of coloring. In Fromentin, as in other writers, we
miss some clarity about the relation between these two aspects, the
difference between the values as rules governing the correct repre–
sentation of atmosphere and light by the choice of tones that take
their proper place in the three dimensional depth, and the values as
artistic, quasi-musical elements forming a system of tones harmonized
through a scale or order of luminosities; the latter may occur in a
style which does not undertake to represent atmosphere or a natural
illumination. We sense vaguely in the requirement of truth to nature
-and this requirement was formulated none too carefully or log–
ically-an underlying principle of harmony and a search for order
as
in
abstract art which, in making coherent structure alone the
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