PARTISAN REVIEW
a tenacious memory of past impressions, and he believed, too, that
fantasy and imagination are better than memory. His painting was a
compromise between the desire for an exotic image and the require–
ment of a directly experienced world as the theme of an objective
art. In North Mrica where he found the subjects of most of his works,
he could dwell for a while
in
a more primitive nature, rich
in
poetic
occasions and inhabited by a passionate people more vehement and
robust than himself; it was at once remote and yet available
to
a
traveller's eye. But Fromentin's habit of detached observation as a
source of nuances and finesse meant already a weakening of the ardor
that makes Delacroix's African scenes unmistakably romantic. The
tonality of revery replaced the tones of passion. In Mrica one of
Fromentin's proud discoveries was that the color of this semi-tropical
region was essentially gray.
He discovered also that it was a classic world in its precise, stable
landscape forms and the nobility of the desert peoples, who were
more like the Homeric than the Biblical heroes. But
his
search for a
calm expression was qualified by an equal love of the sensitive pic–
turesque touch and the atmospheric tone. His work is involved there–
fore in a common dilemma of refined, undecided artists of
his
age,
the alternatives of color and line; he dreams of their synthesis, like
the mad Frenhofer in Balzac's
Unknown Masterpiece.
Fromentin
avows this aim in his novel when he describes a portrait of the heroine
exhibited in the Salon: it is both sharp and vague, outlined yet
nuanced in color. This is not an impossible ideal; it was shared by
Whistler and Fantin-Latour; Cezanne and Seurat in different ways
succeeded in fusing the apparent opposites. But Fromentin was unable
to transform as was necessary the two opposed elements of his prob–
lem; he wished to unite them while maintaining the established char–
acter of each. As a painter he belongs to a familiar type of highly
cultured academic artist of the nineteenth century, too sensitive to
yield to the vulgarities of official or public taste, too talented to be
merely the preserver of a tradition, but also too reticent or weak in
conviction to follow his impulses to the end, and therefore creating
an art which has its undeniable individuality, but lacks that decided
natural flow of the spirit and the hand which we recognize in works
of greater power. Two friends of Fromentin, Puvis de Chavannes and
Gustave Moreau, also belong to this class of noble academicians.
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