Art
Austerity in Paint
FRENCH painters have always varied in the importance which they attributed to the value of texture and of the actual quality of paint. In the seventeenth century Poussin, in his later and more austere period, set the fashion against such frivolities and it is only when he is caught off his guard that he exploits the sensuous qualities of pigment, usually in some detail of still-life or landscape. With the beginning of admiration for the Venetian and Flemish painters in the next generation artists took a more generous view. Their new models caused them to reject the theory that painting appeals essentially to the mind, and to maintain instead that it should, first and foremost, attract the eye. With such an attitude they naturally welcomed a greater voluptuousness of oolour and a greater richness of texture, and they found both to perfection in the painting of Watteau, the supreme master of non-intellectual painting. The artists of the later eighteenth century were divided into two camps. The grand-manner historical painters who believed themselves to be carrying on the tradition of Poussin took a high line and scorned everything which did not appeal to Reason. Hence those acres of monotony which now adorn the Palace at Potsdam and most French provincial galleries. The decorators like Boucher were more self- indulgent, though their haste in execution prevented them from attaining real succulence. Chardin invented a personal technique by which he produced what is in its way the most lovely matiere into which paint has ever been whipped. But his colour is so restrained that his paintings have a kind of personal austerity. Fragonard, the last expression of the Ancien Regime, returned wholeheartedly to richness of both colour and pigment, heightened by his astonishing facility.
The nineteenth century opened gloomily with the revolu- tionary austerity of David which the classically-minded Ingres carried on after him. The Romantic painters reacted, but their leader, Delacroix, was so concerned with richness of colour that he neglected texture.
The variations of opinion on this matter since Romanticism tan be well seen in the pictures now on exhibition at the French Gallery in Berkeley Square, which cover the period from Courbet to the present day. Courbet himself, as we should expect from his generally serious outlook and his avoidance of frivolous subjects, is in favour of a sober, restrained technique, and the self-portrait in the present exhibition (3) is typical of him in this way, though it shows none of his best qualities. Manet tended in his later days to enjoy playing about more and more with paint and in the unfinished portrait of Carolus Duran (9) we see him at his flashiest. The Impressionists proper, Monet, Pissarro and Sisley, were primarily interested in unexpected effects which appeal to the eye and consequently colour and texture were both to them qualities of the highest importance, though their successor Seurat showed that their methods were compatible with the highest austerity. Of all nine- teenth-century artists Renoir indulged most frankly in the sensuous qualities of paint, and nothing can go beyond his Algerian landscape (19) for sheer richness. Cezanne was never wholeheartedly voluptuous, but even in a late landscape like the Sous Bois (1) he proves himself to have a profound knowledge of what paint can do. After 1906 a period of the grimmest austerity set in and even artists like Picasso, who have a natural tendency toward the pretty (La Belle Hollandaise), deliberately reduced painting to the barest essentials. The superb Study of a Head (16) from the Negro period achieves its effect entirely without the help of any sensuous attraction. But the intellectualism which led to Cubism did not last and since the War artists have allowed themselves again to exploit the texture of paint. The Vlaminck Still-Life (23) and the later Derain Still-Life (6) are examples of this relaxation. But perhaps we are soon due for another period of austerity.
ANTHONY BLUNT,
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