Style in Criticism
Characteristics of French Art. By Roger Fry. (Chatto and Windus. 12s. 6d.) IN French painting Mr. Fry has found a subject perfectly suited to him. His intense liking for everything French puts him in complete sympathy with the artists whom he discusses, and this gives a peculiar flavour to his style which is lacking when he is dealing with painters for whom he has only a pro- found admiration. His appreciation of Chardin is written con amore and in a style which he has never equalled even when dealing with his gods, the great Italian masters.
But if Mr. Fry's subject is naturally suited to his outlook it has also affected his method of criticism. French art cannot be wholly explained on the grounds that the artist starts with a " passionate apprehension of form." Such an idea may sometimes be useful as an approach to the more abstract Italian painters (Masaccio, for instance, though even there how often it breaks down !) but in front of Watteau, Fouquet, Claude or even Poussin it is almost entirely irrelevant. It is evident that all these artists were originally impelled to the act of artistic creation by some other urge, however perfectly they may attain to formal splendour during the process of creation. Mr. Fry, therefore, finds himself obliged to .fall back in many places on a kind of criticism which, compared with what he was writing ten years ago, seems old-fashioned and traditional. Consider, for instance, his analysis of Chardin's Benedieird
" The mother, as she helps the children, looks up suddenly to see whether the younger child Is Baying her grace in the proper spirit of reverence. The girl has just the puzzled, anxious, deprecating gesture of a child who half-fears she has got into trouble—the older girl looks down at her with the exact air of self-righteous superiority from which all younger children suffer."
It is, indeed, a new move for Mr. Fry to admit that this sort of analysis is relevant in criticism, but clearly such a painting as a Berildicild cannot be fully enjoyed unless it is considered from this point of view as well as from that of design and colour.
It is not, however, clear that Mr. Fry does not think it a slight admission of inferiority for French painting that it requires such an approach. In a brilliant piece of analysis in the first chapter of the book Mr. Fry compares the methods by Jacopo della Quercia and a fifteenth-century Burgundian sculptor in treating the theme of the Madonna and Child. He gives the Burgundian artist credit for a wittier insight into the psychological aspect of the subject, but he seems really to consider the Italian the greater artist. His justification for this opinion appears to be that della Quercia has concentrated more deliberately than the Burgundian on the attainment of plastic unity. This is an interesting and relevant point of difference between the methods of the two artists, but it is by no means obvious that it proves any superiority in the Italian. I would suggest that it does not matter what stimulus originally moves the artist to create provided that the final work is formally satisfying. Bruegel was less consciously interested in composition than Poussin, but his Snow. Scene is
no less superb a design and no less a pure work of art than Poussin's Phocion.
Mr. Fry builds his book round the interaction of two oppo- site tendencies in French art : the alertness of the French in their reaction to everyday life, and their love of logical argu- ment. He shows by subtle analysis that the former tendency characterizes mediaeval French art, that the latter comes in with Poussin, and that both are evident in the eighteenth century. The Romantic movement he rightly shows to be a unique occurrence in French art and fundamentally un- French in character. Only the nineteenth-century painters from Courbet onwards returned to the true national tradition.
ANTRONY BLUNT.
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