FROMENTIN AS A CRITIC
which owes both its strength and weakness to the complex stresses of
personal needs. We learn from these pages of Fromentin how difficult
is insight into a new contemporary art, especially if it belongs to a
generation younger than one's own.
It is a commonplace of criticism that the key to past
art
is con–
temporary art and that only those who respond to the new can judge
the older works well. This is the reverse of the classic teaching that
only the frequentation of the old masters enables one to judge the new.
One can think of excellent minds, Burckhardt and Winckelmann, who
wrote understandingly of past art, while neglecting or misjudging the
works of their own age. Great critics of contemporary art are no less
rare. Baudelaire is the outstanding example of a critic inspired by
a passionate admiration for living artists; but his chief love, Dela–
croix, was twenty-two years older than himself (like Picasso for a
writer born after 1900 ), and his longest critical study is of Guys,
his senior by sixteen years. For the greatest painter of his own
generation, Courbet, he had only grudging praise; and if he rec–
ommended a younger artist, Edouard Manet, it was for the modernity
of
his
themes and for qualities of imagination that this pioneer of
Impressionism hardly possessed-one should look at Manet's litho–
graphs for Poe's
Raven
to see how far of the mark was Baudelaire's
conception of Manet. To perceive the aims of the art of one's own
time and to judge them rightly is so unusual as to constitute an act of
genius. Baudelaire was able to rise above his theories and admire what
was in 1859 an ultra-realistic art-the landscape sketches of the
young Boudin, recording a precise moment of the day and the weather,
poetically, it is true, but with an aim conflicting with the critic's prin–
ciples. His reservations before those pastels of Boudin, which he
thought had yet to be elaborated
imaginatively
into pictures, antici–
pated Fromentin's view of Impressionism as an
art
which confused
the sketch and the finished work. The two great critics, who had both
begun with a review of the Salon of 1845 and a love of Delacroix,
came eventually to a similar judgment of the Salon art of the 1860's
as decadent, ruined by cleverness, illusionism and themes of curiosity.
In supporting Manet as an original modern spirit, above the vulgarity
of his age, Baudelaire classed him, however, as "the first in the de–
crepitude of his art."
With all its prejudices and errors, Fromentin's book remains
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