ART AND REVOLT
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mto the unity of a grand style. Sculpture does not reject imita–
tion, which on the contrary it needs. But it does not primarily seek
imitation. What it seeks,
in
its great periods, is the typical gesture,
the expression or look which will recapitulate all the gestures and
all the looks in the world. Its purpose is not to imitate but to stylize,
and to imprison in a significant expression the passing fury of the
body or the infinite pliability of attitudes. Only then does it erect,
on the pediment of tumultuous cities, the model, the type, whose
immobile perfection will quiet, for a moment, the incessant fever
of men. The lover deprived of love will then be able to wander
among the Greek Kores and grasp that which, in the body and
face of women, survives all degradation.
The principle of painting is also in a choice. "Genius itself,"
writes Delacroix, "reflecting on its art, is nothing but the gift of
generalizing and choosing." The painter isolates his subject, which
is the first way of unifying it. Landscapes flit by, disappear from
memory or destroy one another. This is why the landscape painter
or the painter of still IiIes isolates in space and time that which,
normally, changes with changing light, loses itself in an infinite per–
spective or vanishes under the impact of other values. The first step
of the landscape painter is to make the various parts of his picture
agree with each other. He eliminates as much as he selects. Similarly,
the painting of subjects isolates, in time as well as space, an action
which normally loses itself in another action. The painter then pro–
ceeds to immobilize his subject. The great creators are those who,
like Piero della Francesca, give the impression that this fixation has
just been accomplished, that the projector has just stopped turning.
All their figures then give the impression that, by the miracle of art,
they continue to be alive while ceasing to be perishable. Long after
his death, Rembrandt's philosopher continues to meditate, between
light and shadow, on the same question.
"How empty a thing is painting, which pleases us by its re–
semblances with objects that cannot please us!" Delacroix, who
cites this famous phrase of Pascal, writes "strange" instead of
"empty," and with good reason. These objects cannot please us
because we do not see them; they are buried and negated in a
perpetual becoming. Who looked at the hands of the whipper dur–
ing the flagellation, or at the olive trees on the way of Calvary?
