TAINE'S CRITERIA 243 



Nature no longer offered appearances to imitate, but principles to 

 parallel.' 3 



'As the poem, play, or novel depends for its final principle of 

 form on the prevailing conception of the essential structure that 

 integrates an event or cluster of events in actuality, so the form of a 

 picture depends always on a similar conception of the structure that 

 integrates visual experience "in nature". The spontaneous integrity 

 and completeness of the event or thing seen guides the artist in 

 forming the invented event or object that is the work of art.' Thus, 

 because 'the integrity of objects in nature' is realized, 'The best 

 modern pamting, though it is mostly abstract painting, remains 

 naturalistic in its core, despite all appearances to the contrary. It 

 refers to the structure of the given world both outside and inside human 

 beings. The artist who, like the Nabis, the later Kandinsky, and so 

 many of the disciples of the Bauhaus, tries to refer to anything 

 else walks in a void.'"^ 'Structure' and 'principles' here are close in 

 meaning to Taine's 'ideal', and the ultimate criterion of value, 

 even for many of the more extreme forms of modern art, may still 

 be their combination of concreteness and universality. 



NOTES 



1 Cf. Rudolf Arnheim on the element of abstraction found even in representa- 

 tional art: '. . . the form element which is so prominent in highly abstract art 

 is indispensable and exactly of the same kind in any naturalistic representation 

 which deserves the name of art'. 



'The two types of representation are nothing but the extreme ends of a 

 scale which allows all possible styles of art to be arranged in a sequence leading 

 from the pure ornament through all degrees of abstractness to extreme realism.' 

 ('Perceptual Abstraction and Art', p. 74.) 



2 'The Role of Nature in Modern Painting', Partisan Review, January 1949, 



P- 79- 



3 Ibid., p. 81, our italics. 



'^ Ibid., our italics. 



