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PARTISAN REVIEW
cend them. He can only imitate the manner of Rubens or Rem–
brandt, but he cannot finally turn them to purposes of his own . The
bravura brushwork remains empty, the mark of a sublime hand
checked by a timid psyche.
The Fragonard of the pastoral idylls -
The Fete at Saint Cloud,
Blindman's Bluff, The Island of Love, The Little Swing (The Swing
unfor–
tunately remained in London, in the Wallace Collection), and most
particularly in the famous Louveciennes paintings, "The Progress of
Love," on permanent view at The Frick Collection in New York-is
still the best and the most representative of his age. In these he
achieves a deep, vast, atmospheric space, full of dynamic movement
and sudden darkness and illumination, that seems to bear within it
memories of the baroque and anticipations of romantic landscape .
Toward the end of his career, after Madame du Barry rejected
"The Progress of Love" for the neoclassical style then coming into
vogue, he tried his hand at a more "realistic" mode and produced
Le
Verrou,
in which a young man inflamed with passion bolts the door so
that he may possess his anxious but fast-melting lover. With its sober
palette and seamless finish, the picture seems a little like trying to
turn an Ernst Lubitsch movie into
The Postman Always Rings Twice.
It
finally can't stand up against either Fragonard's earlier idylls or
The
Oath of the Horatii,
in which a new hard-edged clarity bespeaks a new
hard-edged ideology.
There is something finally depressing about Fragonard. The
erotic works, such as
La Chemise enlevee
or
Le Feu aux poudres,
seem in–
consequential, footnotes, despite their charm, to Titian and Ru–
bens, lacking their grandeur and large energy.
Thefigures defantaisie
strike me for the most part as slapdash psychological blanks,
although their sheer painterly deftness keeps them alive. Fragonard
was so prolific, so talented, and so basically unrealized-although to
say so presupposes some inner core of "genius" that went to waste. I
suspect finally that there wasn't much "there" there. Contemporary
witnesses mention his modesty, diffidence, self-doubt, but this clearly
isn't Cezanne's famous self-doubt, which got into his paintings, and
which changed the course of art. Fragonard finishes something, it's
true, but it's more of an emptying out than a fulfillment. He lacks
even the valedictory "poetry" of Watteau; there is no vaguely
metaphorical hint, for instance, in
The Island
oj
Love,
of an historic
order on the verge of collapse . Without content-and I don't mean
anything propositional, anything paraphrasable-without feeling or
emotion that goes beyond the pleasure of the eye, or for which the
