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Impressionism is the
most important thing that has happened in European art since the
Renaissance, the visual modes of which it supplanted. From it virtually
all subsequent developments in painting and sculpture have stemmed, and
its basic principles have been reflected in many other art forms. For a
conceptual approach, based on ideas about the nature of what we see, it
substituted a perceptual one, based on actual visual experience. For a
supposedly stable reality, it substituted a transient one. Rejecting the
idea that there exists a canon of expression for indicating moods,
sentiments and arrangements of objects, it gave primacy to the
subjective attitude of the artist, emphasizing spontaneity and immediacy
of vision and of reaction. Formulating a doctrine of 'realism' which
applied as much to subject matter as to technique, it eschewed the
anecdotal, the historical, the romantic, concentrating on the life and
phenomena of its own epoch. Escaping from the studio, the Impressionists
laid great emphasis on painting in the open air, in emotional contact
with the subject which was engaging their attention. When painting in
this way - and even in the studio, when the necessity to capture the
impression of the subject they were painting was equally dominant - they
evolved a technique dictated partly by the haste demanded, partly by the
necessity to achieve perceptual reality. They eliminated black shadows
and outlines which do not exist in nature; shadows were painted in a
colour complementary to that of the object. They used a rainbow palette
and experimented with various techniques of broken colour.
Impressionism was one of the first art movements to be linked with a
sell-conscious group; its practitioners held a number of exhibitions and
intermittently acted in unity. But in fact they were very different in
their personalities and in their art; it is dangerous to dramatize their
achievements by seeing them merely as idealistic revolutionaries
reacting against an artistic establishment. That they seemed
occasionally to be so was not integral to their achievement, and has
little to do with their status as the first modern artists.
Impressionism was born in a certain social and cultural context, which
was responsible for shaping its forms and determining its ideology. Most
of its practitioners had grown up under the not so distant shadow of the
Revolution and of Napoleon; they themselves lived through '48, the Coup
d'Etat, the Second Empire, the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune,
dying under the Third Republic. The background to their lives was one of
constant political turmoil, with which they were necessarily involved.
Mostly they were committed, with varying degrees of intensity (Pissarro
was probably the most politically aware, and he was more of an anarchist
than anything else!, to the left. But whether they wanted to or not, the
temper of the times identified them with it: to be a revolutionary in
art was to be a revolutionary in everything, and the denigratory
adjectives which their enemies chose to describe their work showed that
this was taken to include morality as well as politics.
The enemies of the Academie were inevitably enemies of the
Establishment, and though none of them professed the bellicose
sentiments of Courbet, they were all suspect. By the middle of the
century an implicit alliance had been established between Bohemia and
the Left -an alliance which, as the events of i Qlifi proved, subsists
into the late twentieth century. Those who fail to comprehend a new art
style see in it a threat not only to society, but also to the inner
certainties of the ego.
There was not much that was subversive in the personal lives of the
Impressionists; on the whole they were pillars of domestic rectitude.
And it would be entirely wrong to visualize them, even in their purely
professional context, as indolent dependents on the whims of creativity
or the fluctuations of inspiration. Their output was prolific -
sometimes even unfortunately so. They rose early and set off, their
easels on their backs, through the countryside, along the banks of the
Seine, or through the streets of Paris, looking for suitable sites,
likely landscapes, appropriate scenes. Or they laboured in their studios
as long as the light lasted.
They were sensitive to public reaction and did all they could to
manipulate it in their favour. They were, almost without exception,
anxious to be successful, in the most traditional, conventional way.
They grew up in the Paris of Balzac and came to maturity in the Paris of
Zola, seeing its transformation under the guidance of Baron Haussmann
from an archaic tangle of great palaces and untidy warrens into the
luminous city of broad boulevards, luxurious hotels and verdant parks
which, by choosing them so frequently as the subject matter of their
paintings, they were to immortalize. For, despite the obvious evils of
the nineteenth century, its latter half saw an immense improvement in
the amenities of life, and nowhere was this more apparent than in the
French capital. Life was easier for a large number of people than ever
it had been. Social intercourse was more relaxed, and though cafes, for
instance, had always played some part in the cultural life of Paris, in
the nineteenth century they assumed a significance which they have never
since lost. They provided an invaluable meeting-place for men of similar
ideas, where the most fruitful and significant forms of contact could be
established, theories propounded, programmes worked out. Cafes were of
seminal importance in the creation of artistic groups - and it must not
be forgotten that such groups were a comparatively new phenomenon in
art, peculiar to the nineteenth century (but not of course to France, as
the Nazarenes and the Pre-Raphaelites prove1:. The history of French art
during most of the nineteenth century could be written in terms of
cafes; the Brasserie Andler, where Courbet used to preside; the Cafe
Fleurus, with panels decorated by Corot and others; the Cafe Taranne,
patronized by Fantin-Latour and Flaubert; the Nouvelle-Athenes, where
Manet, Degas, Forain and Lamy were often to be found; the Cafe Guerbois,
which more than any other place could claim to have been the birthplace
of Impressionism.
These changes in the landscape of French and especially Parisian life
were closely linked to social changes. The industrial revolution
generally, and in particular the real-estate boom in Paris consequent
upon the policies ol" Napoleon III, had created an immense amount of new
wealth, most of it possessed by newcomers to affluence. Unversed in the
older traditions of patronage, it was they who were largely responsible
for the sudden emergence in the nineteenth century of the art dealer.
Till then art dealing had been a haphazard business, more highly
developed, for historical reasons, in Holland than elsewhere. But by the
1860s a new breed had emerged in all the European capitals. Housed in
prestigious premises, able, and indeed eager, to advise and direct both
artists and customers, acting as impresario, accountant and public
relations officer combined, the dealer provided a new and significant
service. He liberated artists from their dependence on the annual
offical Salon; he opened up new outlets; without him the avani garde
would never have existed. This effective influence was especially true
for Impressionism, which owes an incalculable debt to the perspicacity,
good sense and loyalty of Paul Durand-Ruel and Ambroise Yollard, the
movement's main dealers.
The art market was, in fact, expanding at an unprecedented rate - not
only because there was more money about. Education was improving: the
application of the steam engine to the printing press led to a
proliferation of cheap books, and to the emergence of a multiplicity of
journals and newspapers. The invention of lithography, the production of
cheap chromo-lithographic prints, advances in the techniques of
producing line blocks - leading eventually to the application of
photographic processes -all produced a growth of visual sophistication
and of knowledge not only about the art of the past, but about that of
the present. An inevitable concomitant was that much more was written
about art than ever before. The art historian and the critic emerged as
figures of significance. The latter, of course, was especially important
in the context of contemporary art. The public was hungry for guidance,
and it is probable that current exhibitions in the Paris of the 1870s
received more coverage than they did in Paris of the 1970s. Even hostile
criticism was probably better than none, though it is now becoming
increasingly apparent that hostility to the Impressionists was by no
means universal. The support of Zola, even though based at times on
erroneous assumptions, was invaluable.
Further, Impressionism also owed its historical validity to the
fact that it reflected the profound changes taking place in the
whole of European culture. The colour theories of the polymath
chemist Eugene Chevreul (1786-1889; had been published before
the Impressionists began to paint, though it would seem that
they did not really begin to apply them until the 1880s, in
conjunction with associated discoveries made by Helmholtz and
Rood. The more significant point is that the scientists and the
artists were moving in the same direction, towards a realization
that colours were not, as Leonardo and Alberti had believed,
immutable realities but depended on individual perception, that
they were part of the universe of light, one of the elementary
dimensions of nature. Unlike the traditionalists in both fields,
the new breed of scientists and artists could no longer believe
in the existence of a permanent, independent,
unchangeable reality which could be controlled by perspective or
Newtonian physics - a hypothesis which had done much to allay the
anxieties of Western man since the Renaissance.
Unconsciously, they were moving towards a concept of the nature of
-matter which was to find expression half a century later in the
discoveries of Einstein. In this context their concern with time - this
is, of course, especially true of Monet, who eventually endeavoured to
relate light, time and place in a sequence of serialized images of
cathedrals and lily ponds -is especially significant. The advent of the
machine, with its fixed temporal rhythms and the demands it made on its
users to comply with them, had fostered an obsessive concern with time,
symbolized by the vast proliferation of clocks in public places wiiich
took place after about 1840, by the emergence of history as a dominant
discipline, and by the appearance of systems such as the Darwinian and
the Marxist which were essentially time-orientated.
But if time and light were one series of preoccupations which affected
the nature of Impressionism, speed, the combination of time and space,
was another. Till the popularization of the railway engine in the 1830s
and 1840s, nobody had experienced travelling at more than about 15 miles
an hour. To see objects and landscapes from a train travelling at 50 or
60 miles an hour emphasized still further the subjective nature of
visual experience, underlying the transitory, blurring the precise
outlines to which post-Renaissance perspectival art had accustomed the
artist's eye, and unfolding a larger, less confined view of landscape.
Even the increased ease of transport was significant. The Impressionists
opened up the South of France as a source of inspiration; they travelled
more extensively than any other group of artists had been able to in the
past; their work was nourished by a greater variety of landscape.
There were other technological discoveries of their time which
influenced them. Chemistry was extending the range and improving the
quality of pigments available to the artist (chemical pigments are purer
and more stable than their organic equivalents); paper and other
materials were cheaper and generally better. Most important of all,
however, was the influence of what had originally been called 'the
pencil of nature' - the camera. Its impact on art generally, and on
Impressionism specifically, was enormous.
In the first place, the camera then had none of the pejorative
'mechanical' associations with which it was later to be endowed. In 1859
the Salon included a photographic section, and in 1862, after a
prolonged legal battle, the courts declared photography an art-form -
much to the chagrin of Ingres. His reaction was understandable: the
camera was to abrogate one of the, admittedly minor, functions with
which artists-especially of his type - had always been entrusted: as
documenters of events and appearances; the result, of which the
Impressionists must have been half-consciously aware, was to allow
painting to be itself, to emancipate it from the necessity of referring
to a concept of external reality as an inescapable criterion. Art had
achieved a self-sufficiency.
But the Impressionists - and in this they were not unique: many of their
more academic contemporaries had come to the same realization — were
aware that photography had made an important contribution to the
painter's technical armoury. It enabled him to get a steadier and more
continuous look at appearances; it permittrd analyses of the nature of
structure, and of movement, of a kind which had never been possible
before. Photography and the new art were natural allies: the first
Impressionist exhibition was held in the premises just vacated by Nadar
(Felix Tournachonj, photographer, cartoonist, writer and balloonist.
Much of Eadwcard Muybridge's work in the photographic analysis of
movement was carried out in France, where he had worked in collaboration
with the painter Meissonier, and it was widely known and discussed in
artistic circles. Himself an ardent photographer, Degas saw the
publication of Muybridge's instantaneous photographs in La Nature in
1878, and thereafter followed his work closely (A. Scharf, "Painting,
Photography and the Image of Movement1 in The Burlington Magazine, civ
1962. pp. 186-95), not only being influenced by it in a general way, but
making drawings and sculptures from some of the plates in Muybridge's
Animal Locomotion.
In his work on Degas, Manet, Morisot, Paul Valery summed up some of the
perceptual consequences of this new technical 'eye': 'Muybridge's
photographs revealed all the mistakes which painters and sculptors had
made in depicting, ibr instance, the movements of a horse. They showed
how creative the eye is, elaborating on the data which it receives.
Between the state of vision as mere patches of colour and as things or
objects, a whole series of mysterious processes take place, imposing
order on the jumbled incoherence of mere perception, resolving
contradictions, reflecting prejudices which have been formed in us since
infancy, imposing continuity, connection, and the systems of change
which we classify as space, time, matter, and movement. That is why the
horse was supposed to move in the way the eye seemed to see it, and it
might be, if that old-fashioned method of representation was studied
with enough percipience, we might be able to discover the law of
unconscious falsification which enabled people to picture the positions
of a bird in flight or a horse galloping, as if they could be studied at
leisure.'
Implicit in Yalery's notions are many of the aims and preoccupations of
the Impressionists. Moreover, the vision of the camera incorporated that
very element of immediate spontaneity which had become such a
desideratum. It froze gestures, immobilized a movement in a street,
fixed for ever a dancer's pirouette. It conveyed a form of truth: it was
real, and the Impressionists were above all else Realists - not only in
their choice of subjects from everyday, ordinary life and everyday,
ordinary people, but in their determination to be visually sincere, not
to vamp up the things they saw, not to paint them as they thought they
were, but as they actually were. Zola, writing in 1868 about Monet,
Bazille and Renoir in his Salon, called them Aclualistes: "Painters who
love their own times from the bottom of their artistic minds and hearts.
. . . They interpret their era as men who feel it live within them, who
are possessed by it, and happy to be so. Their works are alive because
they have taken them from life, and they have painted them with all the
love they feel for modern subjects.'
The vision of the camera was an enormous incentive in this direction.
And it influenced not only the Impressionists' attitudes but their
style.
Time and time again the composition of their paintings imitates, or is
influenced by, the arbitrary, unselective, partly random finality of the
photograph. No longer is there the academic insistence that the subject
should be coherent, complete and seen from a compositionally convenient
viewpoint. The unity is now in the painting, and in the elements which
compose it. Figures may be truncated, poses awkward and ungainly,
movements arrested. Chance has entered into painting, to be controlled,
manipulated, but slill to retain a dominance which it can never lose.
It would, of course, be absurd to see Impressionism purely as the
by-product of social, scientific and historical factors. It was rooted
firmly in the stylistic evolution of art. Always we are tempted to
over-dramatize history, and though Impressionism was indeed the nucleus
of the new and the revolutionary, we see it now as more closely related
to the art of its own time than the simplifications of criticism once
seemed to demand. The Pre-Raphaelites, for instance, though they adopted
a different technique, were equally concerned with visual and social
realism; the cult of 'sincerity' was widespread, and had been formulated
by Ruskin; the academic Meissonier's light, nervous brush-stroke was not
unlike the jacture of many of the Impressionists in the later 1860s, and
round about this period Millet's paintings began to palpitate with a
hitherto unfamiliar light.
Though they rejected official art, the Impressionists owed an allegiance
to some of their immediate predecessors. Manet's teacher Thomas Couture,
though apt to paint pictures of decadent Romans, suggested that artists
of the future might find as appropriate themes workers, scaffolding,
railways (Methodes el eniretiens d'ateim, Paris, 1867. p. 254) and there
was a whole tradition - of what might be called potential avant-garde
painters which contributed significantly to the techniques and ideology
of Impressionism. Delacroix, with his romantic fervour and liberated
attitude towards colour, was an obvious idol. So too was Courbet, who
once said 'Realism is Democracy in art", and whose life¬style as well as
his actual work had a very marked influence, especially on Pissarro and
Cezanne.
The real achievement of the Impressionists is that they gave coherence
and lbrm to tendencies which had for some considerable time been latent
in European art. Turner and Constable, for instance, whose influence is
discussed later, had been concerned with main of the same problems about
light, colour and the approach to a 'realistic' interpretation of
landscape. The whole of the Barbizon school had been painting out of
doors (au plein air) since the 1840s, even though they usually completed
their paintings in the studio. Narcisse-Virgile Diaz (1807-1876) had been
one of the most forthright opponents of 'the black line' in painting, and
his exercises in capturing the effects of sunshine coming through the
dark greens of the forest, all expressed in a heavy impasto, contained
obvious elements of impressionism. It was he who, meeting Renoir painting
in Fontainebleau, said, "Why the devil do you paint so black?" - a
remark which had an immediate effect on the younger artist's palette -
and who, incidentally, allowed Renoir to buy painting materials on his
account. Theodore Rousseau (1812-67), who expressed the ideal 'always to
keep in mind the virgin impression of nature", carried an interest in
the rendering of atmospheric effects to
a point where it came close to Monet. The sense of poetry, the
compulsion to reproduce scrupulously what he saw, and the light silvery
tonality of Corot (i796—1875) had an obvious impact, and the luminous
Northern seascapes of Eugene Boudin (1824-98), with their vivacious
directness, their creamy impasto and their radiance, made it almost
inevitable that, though not an 'official' Impressionist, he should
participate in their first group show.
There were other artists outside of France who anticipated
Impressionism, or followed similar lines of approach. Outstanding among
these are the Germans Adalbert Stifter (1805-68), who was also a poet
and stumbled almost accidentally on those qualities of visual sincerity
and spontaneity typical of the movement, and Adolf Menzel (1815-1905),
whose mastery of light was only appreciated after his death. The
Dutchman Johan Jongkind (1819—91) was virtually a Parisian, and though
he did not practise plein-air painting, he was obsessed with
representing in his works not what he knew about the subject, but what
appeared to him under certain atmospheric conditions. It is interesting
that in an article in L'Artiste in 1863, the critic Castagnary said of
him: 'I find him a genuine and rare sensibility. In his works everything
lies in the impression [my italics].'
The art of the past was revealed to painters of the mid-nineteenth
century in a way which would have been impossible before. Till the 1840s
museums and art galleries were few and far between, but between then and
the end of the century they proliferated at an extraordinary rate.
Sisley, Monet and Pissarro saw the works of Turner, Constable and others
in London's National Gallery, which was then only a few decades old.
Every provincial city of importance acquired its cultural institutions,
and, in ever-increasing numbers, works of art which had once belonged to
private collectors found their way into public collections, where they
were described and analysed by critics as perspicacious as the painter
Eugene Fromentin and others. It was through these innovations that the
Impressionists became conscious of, and reacted to, a whole range of old
masters, from the early Renaissance painters to Dutch landscapists such
as Ruysdael, all of whom gave sanction to their visual explorations and
enlarged their range. The Louvre, of course, had been in existence for
some time as a public gallery, and its treasures had been greatly
enlarged by Napoleon. But even here an important innovation took place
in the 1830s, under the reign of Louis-Philippe, when in consequence of
that monarch's dynastic preoccupations with Spain, the gallery acquired
an important collection of paintings by hitherto little-known artists
such as Velazquez, Ribera and Zurbaran, all of whom were to have an
enormous impact on the painters of the 1870s. In 1851 Napoleon III
reopened the newly rearranged galleries, which had been enhanced by the
addition of the Rubens Medici cycle. Despite the contrary image of him
which has grown up, Napoleon Ill's administration of the governmental
Beaux-Arts department was far more enlightened and progressive than
anything else of the same nature in Europe. Special copying facilities
were provided at the Louvre, the Palais du Luxembourg was given over to
contemporary art, and it was, after all the Emperor himself who
initiated the Salon des Refuses in 1863.
Another new set of influences came from outside Europe. As far back as
1856 Japanese art had started to infiltrate into Paris, and six years
later Madame Soye, who had lived in Japan, opened a shop, 'La Porte
Chinoise', in the Rue de Rivoli; the simple colours and summary
treatment of light and shade which were to be seen in the prints of
Hokusai and others began to have their effect on a number of artists
including Whistler, Rousseau, Degas, and later Van Gogh and Gauguin.
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Manet Edouard
Le Dejeuner sur I'herbe
Olympia
Music at the Tuileries
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Edouard Manet (1832-83), too, was intrigued and influenced by this
revelation from the East, but that is not surprising, for though the
accidents of history forced on him the role of the great innovator, and
the mailre d'ecole of Impressionism, few painters have paid more
attention to the art of the past and of their own time. His most famous
painting, Le Dejeuner sur I'herbe (d'Orsay) of 1863, which when it was
exhibited at the Salon des Refuses aroused a storm of ridicule and
controversy (which effect may not have been entirely foreign to his
intentions), was based on a Giorgione and on a Renaissance print of a
painting by Raphael; the equally controversial Olympia (d'Orsay) was
clearly painted under the direct influence of Titian, and many of his
compositional themes were borrowed from his contemporaries, especially
Monet and Berthe Morisot. Popular prints also provided for him a
frequent repertory of imagery, and the kind of subject he so often
chose, rag-pickers, barmaids, actors, crowds enjoying concerts, were the
staple of many illustrated magazines of the period. He was an assiduous
frequenter of museums in the Low Countries, Austria, Germany and Italy
as well as France and Spain, and it was the influence of Velazquez and
Goya which informed those of his early paintings - often with the
appropriate Hispanic theme - such as Lola de Valence (d'Orsay) which had
a modest popular success, based on the same wave of public interest in
the peninsula which Bizet so successfully exploited in Carmen.
Almost in spite of himself, Manet had become to the young artists of the
Cafe Guerbois and the Atelier Gleyre a symbol of revolt, a Robespierre
of art. It was his subject matter which appealed at least as much as his
free and inventive technique. Music at the Tuileries, painted at about
the same time as Le Dejeuner, emphasized the quality of direct
observation of an ordinary urban event, packed though it is with
portraits of the painter's friends, and related though it probably is to
an engraving of a military band recital which appeared in the magazine
L'Illustration.
Towards the end of the 1860s, however, Manet began to paint in the open
air, and he transferred his attention from exploiting to exploring the
effects of light and colour. But he was never entirely to lose the sharp
contrasts of light and shade, the sensuous brushwork, the feeling of
drama, the flattened volumes which he had derived from the Spaniards,
and which are to be seen so vividly present in the Eva Gonzales Painting
(National Gallery, London). His sense of the discipline of art persisted
despite the freedom which his painting acquired as he came into closer
contact with the work of his admirers (he did not participate in the
Impressionist exhibitions), especially Monet and Renoir, to whom,
paradoxically, he owed so much. This contact was most fruitful between
1874 and 1876 when he worked with them at Argenteuil, where he painted,
among many other similar themes, the Boating, now in the Metropolitan
Museum, New York. Here, despite the limpid colour, the free handling and
sense of spacious luminosity, there is a sense of linear control, a
complex handling of the compositional elements. Here, and in the
Waitress of 1878, the structure is intellectual, the handling
instinctive. The same is true of the Bar at the Folies-Bergere, painted
a year before he died and at a period when he was already suffering from
the locomotor ataxia which killed him. The complexity of the subject
matter, the manner in which it is composed, the sense of space and
volume, the ingenuity of the perspectival effects, recall Music at the Tuileries, but here there is an added richness, a magisterial certainty
and richness of vision lacking in the earlier work.
The vibration of colour, the nature of light, the ability to capture at
the moment anonymous figures, trapped between reality and its shadows -
all these were Manet's constant concern, and he brought to their
realization techniques which were very much his own. The light passages
in his works were the dominant ones, brushed in with flowing, 'fat'
paint; into this paint, while it was still wet, were worked the darks
and the half¬tones. In a way it almost simulated the fresco techniques
of the early Italians, producing just that sense of limpid freshness
which they share with Manet. He was the most revolutionary of
traditionalists, the most traditional of revolutionaries.
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Morisot Berthe
The Cradle
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The relationship between Manet and
Berthe Morisot (1841-95) was close,
and a good deal more complex than is often surmised. The
great-granddaughter of Fragonard, she was born into an affluent banking
family, and her mother created one of those cultural salons so typical
of the Second Empire. Berthe Morisot began to study painting at the age
of fifteen under Joseph-Benoit Guichard, and then under Corot, one of
the habitues of her mother's salon. She worked with Corot until 1868,
when she first met Manet, who had been very much taken by a painting,
Paris Seen from the Trocadero (Ryerson Collection, Chicago), which she
had exhibited at the 1867 Salon. Not only did Manet praise its freshness
and delicacy, its low-toned Whistlerian harmonies; he carried flattery
to the point of imitation by using the theme and many of the
compositional elements which it contained in the View of the Paris
World's Fair (Nasjonalgalerie, Oslo) which he painted in the same year.
It was inevitable that an artist with Morisot's particular sensibilities
should have fallen under Manet's influence, and for several years she
worked in his studio, as his pupil and his model (she eventually married
his brother Eugene). His most famous portrait of her is in The Balcony (d'Orsay),
of 1869, in which her dark, smouldering, almost Pre-Raphaelite,
intensity provides a piquant foil to the pert attractiveness of the
violinist Jenny Glaus.
In the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874 Morisot showed The Cradle
(d'Orsay), in which the visual drama of the composition — with its
strong counterpoint - emphasizes the delicacy of the paint and the
lyricism of the subject matter, even though the main element, the baby,
is technically unconvincing. A comparison with the portrait of her
mother and younger sister Edma, painted some four years earlier
(National Gallery of Art, Washington), shows how far she had moved
towards a greater lightness, a keener sense of tonal recession, a crisp
delicacy of touch. More consistently than any other of his students, she
preserved Corot's silvery iridescence, and it was this quality, allied
to an almost uninhibited and uncontrolled distribution of brush-strokes,
which created her personal style and explains the undoubted influence
she was to have on Manet, exorcizing the darkness and chromatic
inhibitions which characterized his work after the early 1870s. In her
In the Dining Room (National Gallery of Art, Washington) of 1884, for
instance, the strokes which make up the door of the cupboard, the maid's
apron, the floor and the glass in the window are virtually free
gestures, visual abstractions, through which shapes and forms emerge as
from a mist.
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Monet
Claude
On the Beach: Trouville
Gare Saint-Lazare
Women in the Garden
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Both as a person and as a painter
Claude Monet (1840-1926) was very
different from Manet. Less detached, less diffident, he was committed by
his nature, by economic necessity - and by a kind of professionalism
which, one feels, Manet would have disdained as being not quite comme il
faut — to vigorous exploration of the substance and nature of his art.
Perhaps this is what Zola meant: 'He's the only real man in a crowd of
eunuchs' (though that remark, like so many things Zola said about art,
was not really true, even though compelling). A provincial, born in Le
Havre, with ferociously precocious talents, Monet eventually became more
peripatetic than any of his colleagues, and his subject matter covers a
remarkably wide range of places and themes. Boudin and Jongkind had been
early influences on him, and though he deferred to Courbet, he did not
imitate him. At the studio of Charles Gleyre he met Bazille, Renoir and
Sisley, and he subsequently underwent the virtually obligatory
experience of Fontainebleau. But though he had produced by this time
some three hundred paintings, and had been accepted in the Salon, he was
plagued by economic and psychological stress, and at the age of
twenty-six tried to commit suicide (the psychological disturbance common
to many of the Impressionists has not received the attention it perhaps
merits).
It was not, however, until Monet came to London in 1870 that his art
really jelled. Although he professed to dislike Turner's 'exuberant
romanticism', and denied in later life that Turner had any influence on
him, it is impossible not to see in his use of aerial perspective, his
treatment of wide reaches of landscape and of sea, even his concern with
the transient, amorphous effects of fog, steam and clouds, something of
the influence of the English landscape artists. Then there was the
actual quality of London's light, which had so intrigued Whistler: mist
on the Thames, with the great buildings and bridges swimming out of it;
the green reaches of the parks; the constant mutations of atmosphere.
Pissarro explained it well some thirty years later in a letter to
Wynford Dewhurst, who was writing a book, published in London in 1904,
Impressionist Painting: 'Monet and I were very enthusiastic over London
landscapes. Monet worked in the parks, whilst I, living at Lower
Norwood, at that time a charming suburb, studied the effect of fog, snow
and springtime. We worked from Nature, and later on in London Monet
painted some superb studies of mist. We also visited the museums. The
watercolours and paintings of Turner and Constable, the canvases of Old
Crome, have certainly had an influence on us. We admired Gainsborough,
Reynolds, Lawrence etc., but we were struck chiefly by the landscape
painters, who shared more in our aim with regard to plein air, light,
and fugitive effects. Watts and Rossetti strongly interested us among
the modern men. About this time we had the idea of sending our studies
to the Royal Academy. Naturally we were rejected' (pp. 31-32).
A visit to Holland, itself part-ancestor of the English tradition,
confirmed Monet in his already obvious concern with light and
transience, and some encouragement had come from the fact that Durand-Ruel
bought his On the Beach: Trouville. A fruitful stay at Argenteuil
brought him into closer contact with Manet and Renoir, confirming his
instinctive belief that Impressionism provided the appropriate framework
for his creative intentions. To the exhibition of 1874, which owed a
great deal to his initiative, he sent five paintings -including Autumn
at Argenteuil and Bridge at Argenteuil - and seven pastel sketches. He
continued his association with the movement until the fifth exhibition,
to which he refused to send anything. In 1876 he began a series of
paintings of the Gare Saint-Lazare which, in their subject matter, their
luminous treatment of the effects of atmosphere and steam, their lightly
adumbrated but unifying structures, may well be thought of as the most
'typical' of all Impressionist paintings.
A steady, persistent worker, independent of the necessity of waiting on
'inspiration', agonizing over every picture he started, Monet found a
prop for creativity in serialism, the creation of sets of works all
using the same motif; and so virtually stumbled on one of his most
original contributions to the language of contemporary art. Quite apart
from the technical use of the system, which has been of such value to
later painters, he proved and emphasized that a whole range of equally
'real' paintings could be made of the same subject, each varying
according to the quality of the light and the time of day. At first
rather haphazard - as in the Gare Saint-Lazare series, and the views of
Westminster Bridge - they became more purposeful with the Poplar series
and that devoted to the facade of Rouen cathedral, culminating in the
Nympheas series, the most remarkable attempt art had ever made to paint
the passage of time.
Unlike Manet, he paid little attention to the old masters, being
influenced rather by his contemporaries. In Women in
the Garden
(1866-67), and even more in later works, he evolved a method of
depicting form by accumulating a mass of brush-strokes which are
reconstructed and completed by the spectator to produce the effect he is
suggesting. This again was a vital new element in art: the realization
that the viewer has to participate, that he has to build his
understanding of a painting, just as he 'reads' a landscape. This
attitude was essential to the future of art. It was only because Monet
destroyed the old limited, arbitrary concept of immutable form that the
painters of the twentieth century were able to build new visual
structures.
|
Sisley Alfred
Floods at Port-Marly
Canal Saint-Martin
|
Of
Alfred Sisley's contributions to the seventh Impressionist exhibition
of 1882 Eugene Manet said that they were the most consistently coherent
of the whole group, and it would be difficult to pick on a painter more
typical of the movement as a whole. Born in Paris of wealthy English
parents, Sisley's (1839-99) career was socially and economically almost
the exact reverse of that of his colleagues. Encouraged to become a
painter by his father, he began his career cushioned by affluence, and
his appearance at Gleyre's studio was that of a young dandy. Leaving
there in 1863, at the same time as Bazille, Monet and Renoir, he worked
with them, exploring the landscape of the forest of Fontainebleau and,
like them, concerned himself with the shimmer of light on leaves and the
analysis of shadow, painting, with similar fervour, the glades which had
bewitched Daubigny and Courbet in the 1850s.
This was to be his familiar, beloved landscape; short visits to Brittany
and England (Molesey Weir) were the only occasions when he left the Ile-de-France.
Nor did he - unlike Renoir - go far beyond a dedication to landscape,
nor yet, unlike Monet, concern himself with the transformations effected
by time. The figures (as in the magical Misty Morning) are perfunctory.
These limitations were self-imposed, but their rigour was probably
reinforced by his lack of success. Although he succeeded in getting a
painting into the Salon of 1866, Sisley was subsequently rejected, a
situation compounded in difficulty by the economic ruin of his father as
a consequence of the Franco-Prussian war. Poverty was to be his constant
irritant; his outstanding virtue, modesty, he cultivated almost to the
point of converting it into a vice. Yet he was singularly dedicated to
achieving his own, admittedly limited, form of perfection, and his
paintings, at their best, have a clarity, a brilliance and a sense of
aesthetic honesty which are infinitely compelling. Nobody could better
him in achieving the balance between form and the light which irradiates
it, so that the one is never dissolved in the other.
The transition
between water, trees, building and cloud-flecked sky in Floods
at Port-Marly
is symptomatic of his consistent tonal mastery, and the way in which he
conveys a sense of almost palpable atmosphere. Remarkable rather for the
delicacy of his perception than for the dynamism of his imagination,
Sisley frequently manifests a certain dullness of composition, as
evinced for instance in the Canal Saint-Martin, where the great weight
of the barges grouped at the intersection of the horizontal and vertical
extreme and mean ratios is mechanically balanced by the two masts
accentuating the gap between the distant houses. But the treatment of
the surfaces, the movement of the water, the radiance on the distant rooftops, and the texture of the canal wall are all rendered
exquisitely. Sisley's was a kindred spirit to Corot's in the previous
generation. The worst that can be said of him is that his pictorial
reticence has been taken as a prototype by innumerable lesser talents,
whose amateur enthusiasms have found in his paintings the justification
for their own creative inanity.
|
Bazille Frederic
|
Over the work of another member of the Gleyre quartet hangs the enigma
of premature death.
Frederic Bazille
(1841—70), arriving in Paris from
Montpelier in 1861, was supposed to divide his time between studying
medicine and studying art, but it was the latter which obsessed him, and
he became entirely committed to the emergent principles of
Impressionism. With Monet and the rest he painted at Chailly in the
forest of Fontainebleau, and also spent some time in that other habitat
of young painters, the Normandy coast. From a letter which he wrote to
his parents at this time we can get some idea of the atmosphere of the
time: 'As soon as we arrived at Honfleur we started to look for suitable
landscape subjects. They were easy to find, for the country here is
heaven. It would be impossible to find anywhere richer meadows or more
beautiful trees. The sea - or rather the Seine, as it broadens out
-provides a marvellous horizon to the masses of green. We are staying in
Honfleur itself at a baker's, but we eat at a farm on the cliffs above
the town, and it's there that we do our painting. I get up every morning
at five, and paint all day till eight in the evening. However, you
mustn't expect me to bring back a lot of good work. I'm making progress;
that's all I want. I hope to be satisfied with myself after three or
four years of painting. Soon I'll have to go back to Paris and apply
myself to medicine, a thing which I abhor' (G. Poulain, Bazille et ses
amis, Paris, 1932, p. 40). Progress he did make, despite some hesitancy
(a weakness which always seems to affect artists whose economic
circumstances absolve them from complete dependence on their work) and
an inability to free himself from those Ingres-like conventions of
academic precision which had characterized his training. They are
apparent in The Family Reunion, painted on the terrace of the Bazille
home at Montpellier. But other things are also evident in this moving
work: a clarity of vision, a simplicity of conception heightened by the
bright, luminous colours, and a spontaneity, which are characteristic of
youth. Three years after painting this picture, and shortly after his
famous group portrait of 1870 painted in his studio (the figure of
himself in it was painted by Manet) had been rejected by the Salon, he
was killed in action at Beaune-la-Rolande.
|
Caillebotte Gustave
Paris Street
|
Bazille had been a great help to his friends, providing not only
admiration — even hero-worship — but also money. In 1869, when Monet was
experiencing more than his usual difficulties, for instance, Bazille
bought his Women in the Garden for the obviously philanthropic price of
2,500 francs. In both these respects his place in the group was taken by
Gustave Caillebotte (1848—94), an engineer specializing in
boat-building, who had met Monet at Argenteuil, where they were
neighbours. A simple, intelligent, warm-hearted bachelor, Caillebotte
was already an amateur painter, but the work of his new friends came to
him with the force of a revelation, and by 1876 he was exhibiting at
their group exhibitions. His talents were not enormous, but they were
real, and though his portraits betray the influence of Degas, there was
something very personal about his views of Paris and the villages of the
Ile-de-France, and even more so about his paintings of working-class
life and activities [Workmen Planing a Floor, d'Orsay).
But Caillebotte's importance cannot be estimated purely in terms of his
work. He was above all a friend, un bon copain, helping to the utmost of
his resources Monet, Renoir, Sisley and the rest, acting as an adviser
and an organizer, and taking upon himself most of the responsibility for
arranging at least three of the group exhibitions. At the age of 27 he
made his will, naming Renoir as his executor and stipulating that enough
money should be taken from his estate 'to arrange under the best
possible conditions, an exhibition of the painters who are called Les
Inlransigeants or Les Impressionnistes'. In the event this was not
necessary, for by 1894 the Impressionists had secured a fair degree of
recognition. And yet, although he left his collection of 65 paintings by
the Impressionists to the State, it was only after three years of
agitation that the authorities consented to accept 38, and these did not
enter the Louvre till 1928. It is typical of Caillebotte's nature that
he consistently bought from his friends those paintings which they found
most difficulty in disposing of. And it is those pictures which, of
course, now are often recognized as their most important.
|
Pissarro Camille
Place du Theatre Franqais
The
Little Country Maid
|
Camille Pissarro (1830—1903) was a movement in himself, and though
he was by no means the greatest of the Impressionists, the movement as
such owes more to him than to any other of its members. An able and
coherent theorizer, a persistent stylistic explorer, a born teacher —
his pupil Mary Cassatt said that he could have taught the stones to draw
correctly - he was friend and counsellor to his associates; even the
usually uncommunicative Cezanne once confessed, 'He was like a father to
me. He was the sort of man you could consult about anything — a sort of
God the Father.' He digested the discoveries of others; he expressed
them in an understandable and engaging, but seldom very dramatic, style;
he ensured the transmission of the Impressionist legacy to its
inheritors; and Gauguin was to acknowledge, 'He was one of my masters,
and I shall never deny the fact.' At those moments when the very
existence of the group seemed threatened by the actual or imminent
defection of members, Pissarro held it together; he contributed to all
eight exhibitions, and accepted with equanimity the condescension, or
even contempt, with which some of his contemporaries regarded him once
they had tasted the fruits of success.
Born in the Virgin Islands, where his father, a Frenchman of
Portuguese-Jewish descent, was a successful trader, he came to Paris in
1855, determined to become a painter. He admired Delacroix, took lessons
from Corot, who was to be a major influence on his early work, and
became a pupil at the Academie Suissc, an establishment opened by a
former model, where students could draw and paint from the life without
any formal tuition. There his work — combining at this time something of
Courbet's sense of compositional drama with the limpid luminosity of
Corot — greatly impressed the young Monet. For the next two decades
their careers were to be closely intertwined, and together they moved
towards the techniques and attitudes of Impressionism. On the outbreak
of war in 1870 they both moved to England, to which Pissarro was to
return at regular intervals. They found London and its neighbourhood a
rich source of subject matter, and, even more to the point, it was there
that they met Durand-Ruel, who was to become the 'guardian angel' of
Impressionism.
On his return to Paris Pissarro discovered that most of his 1,500
canvases (this gives some idea of his output) left at his studio at
Louveciennes had been destroyed, though one interesting survivor is the
painting of that district which he must have painted shortly before
leaving. Despite — or perhaps because of— near-poverty and despite
failing eyesight, he painted with prodigious energy, torn often enough
between what to him were the conflicting claims of mass and luminosity,
sometimes close in feeling to Monet, sometimes inclining to the plastic
preoccupations of Cezanne, and in doing so influencing both. By the
1880s, however, he was becoming increasingly aware of the structural
problems which Impressionism seemed to sidetrack and, seduced by all the
talk going on in studios about the theories of light and colour
propounded by Rood, Helmholtz and Chevreul, he fell under the influence
of Seurat with his belief in 'scientific' painting and his fond hope
that he had discovered a technique for representing visual truth. For
some five years Pissarro produced a series of Pointillist paintings
based on the divisionist technique of tiny dots of pure colour, but he
found this too rigid in the long run, and by 1890 had returned to his
earlier style.
In 1892 he held a very successful one-man exhibition at
Durand-Ruel's; he had found himself. He divided his time between Paris
and Eragny, which had provided the subject matter for most of his
Pointillist landscapes. In the city he concentrated mostly on fairly
large urban views - such as the Place du Theatre Franqais of 1898 -
usually painted with an aerial perspective, in which he showed a
remarkable ability to control complex subject matter, relate figures to
their environment, maintain a sense of movement, and yet preserve a
technical vivacity as convincing as that which informed the landscapes
of his youth. Complementary to these, and usually painted in the
country, were the landscapes, interiors, portraits and the like which
expressed the intimiste side of his personality. In the 1880s he painted
tender portraits of his son Felix, and of another son sitting with
The
Little Country Maid. A catalogue raisonne of his works, compiled in 1939
by his son Lucien, lists some 1,664 paintings, and when one adds to
these those destroyed in 1870 it is possible to get some notion of his
output.
|
Renoir Pierre-Auguste
Sisley and his Wife
The Box
The Umbrellas
The Large
Bathers
|
Probably today the most popular of all the Impressionists - though in
fact he was by no means one of the most doctrinally committed —
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841—1919) displayed consistently in his works that
sense of visual hedonism, that naturalness, that delight in spontaneous
feeling which tend invariably to be associated with the movement. Devoid
of dogmatic commitments, presenting himself as a creature of instinct,
he once attributed to his generative organ the source of his creative
powers. But this bit of braggadocio is balanced, if not explained, by a
suggestion of melancholy, a certain appearance of anxiety which
characterize the photographs and portraits of him which still exist.
The son of a tailor, Renoir made his first venture into art as a painter
of flowers on porcelain, and it is difficult to disregard the theory
that this influenced his subsequent development. Throughout most of his
career his work possessed a decorative quality which allies him to those
artists of the eighteenth century, such as Boucher, whose main
activities were directed towards the provision of objects for the luxury
trade. Indeed, the current prices paid for his works suggest that even
today his appeal to the devotees of conspicuous expenditure is a
powerful one.
While working in the studio of Gleyre Renoir came into contact with
Monet, Bazille and Sisley, and by the later 1860s had started producing
works which, though clearly influenced by both Courbet and Manet, still
showed an intensely personal idiom. Many of these earlier works were
street scenes, or interiors such as the very complex Sisley and his
Wife. He was already concerned with the creative qualities of light,
with the solidity of shapes and with the ambiguities of colour. But it
was not until he spent some time with Monet at Bougival between 1867 and
1869 that he really began to experiment with these qualities in a free
and dynamic way. His paintings of La Grenouillere, a popular bathing
resort on the Seine, are exercises in the representation of light,
reflections and movements on water, expressed in rapid, freely applied
brush-strokes.
Renoir always, however, had a nagging preoccupation with the human
figure, and his concern was largely with employing in its interpretation
that chromatic analysis and luminous transfiguration which could so much
more easily be applied to landscape. That he achieved this transference
was, in effect, his greatest personal contribution to Impressionism, and
it was already becoming apparent in works such as the Odalisque which he
exhibited at the Salon in 1870. Economic necessity impelled him to
constant activity, and to any outlet, though after renting a studio in
Montparnasse in 1872, where he produced more Parisian street scenes and
landscapes of the Ile-de-France, he was taken up by Durand-Ruel. He was
largely responsible for the hanging of the Impressionist exhibition of
1874, at which he exhibited seven canvases, including The Box, one of
his most brilliant transfigurations of the human presence, and The
Ballet Dancer.
This exhibition was his major break-through, and during the next few
years he produced some of his most memorable paintings, in which his own
particular feeling for the play of light on people and objects was
linked to a remarkable sureness of composition and feeling for the
plastic qualities of the human form. Mostly he concerned himself with
urban pleasures, with the life of the people, with the diffused Parisian
gaiety of what future generations would remember wistfully (and perhaps
inaccurately) as la belle epoque. Typical of this phase was Moulin de la
Galette, which was exhibited at the third Impressionist exhibition in
1877. The glowing Chinese lanterns, the opalescent distances, the sense
of vivacity seem to illuminate the canvas from within itself. But more
remarkable even than the Watteauesque fervour of the handling is the way
in which a vast and intricate composition including scores of people
(several of them were portraits of his friends, Frank-Lamy, Lhote,
Cordey and Riviere), and an infinity of poses and directions, has been
welded, partly by light, partly by structure, into an ingeniously
convincing unity.
But all the while Renoir's instincts were pulling him in a different
direction. Above all else a professional, he was not uninterested in
official recognition, and though this may not have been the determining
factor in the change which started to take place in his art in the late
1870s, it must have had something to do with it; in any case it led him
away from the group as such, and he only once again participated in one
of their exhibitions, and that at the request of Durand-Ruel. It is
significant that his portrait of Madame Charpentier and her daughters,
painted in 1878, had a great success in the Salon of the following year.
'Renoir has had a big success at the Salon; I think he is now really
launched, which is a good thing, as poverty is hard,' wrote Pissarro
with his usual generosity.
The simple triangular composition of the main figures, balanced by the
table and chair at one corner, the prostrate dog at the other, bespeaks
a more ordered spontaneity than had hitherto been apparent in his work,
and these intimations of a new austerity are reinforced by a certain
chromatic rigour.
In 1881 Renoir visited Algiers, and in the following year Italy, where
he discovered in the works of Raphael intellectual precedents for
continuing in the direction along which his painterly instincts led.
Still using light as the unifying element in his paintings, he now began
to prefer an Ingres-like definition of outline, a more static and
overtly geometric form of composition, a less spontaneous brush-stroke,
and a colder palette. At the same time, however - although by now he
seemed to have become incapable of escaping from a stereotyping of faces
- his conception of the subjects which he painted was amazingly fresh
and vivid. Nothing could display this more convincingly than the street
scene in the National Gallery, London, entitled The Umbrellas. This work
seems snapped, as it were, in a moment of time, full of delicious
trepidations; and its elements of conscious contrivance, the blueish
tonality, and the series of parallel lines which govern its composition,
do nothing to impair its documentary vivacity. This is all the more
remarkable in that a careful analysis of the painting shows that it was
painted over a considerable period and was extensively recast. The two
little girls and the lady behind them show strong indications of
Renoir's earlier style, and are slightly out of harmony with the general
feeling of the whole painting. Indeed, there is evidence of extensive
retouching, and the portions of the canvas turned over the stretcher
show that the original composition was a good deal larger (see Martin
Davies, National Gallery Catalogue: French School, London, 1946, no.
3268), and contains elements of a girl's purplish skirt, a gloved hand
and the lay-in of part of a face.
This painting seems to mark a withdrawal into a cerebral as opposed to a
sensuous style (in Renaissance terms, a move away from Venetian towards
Florentine affiliations). But this tendency was soon reversed - as if it
had been his deliberate intention to reculer pour mieux sauter - and at
the point at which he started to emerge from it he produced The Large
Bathers (Philadelphia), which may be considered the last great exercise
in the Renaissance tradition, tempered, nevertheless, by those
perceptual sensibilities which the Impressionists were exploiting with
such vigour.
Now gradually becoming more and more successful - and, as a consequence
of this and the increasing felicity of his family life, more relaxed -
Renoir was able to devote more attention to painting for pleasure. He
had always tended to choose popular subjects, and by the late 1880s was
concentrating more and more on inlimiste subjects -portraits of his wife
and children, vases of flowers, the delights of domesticity, the
diffused hedonism of the good life - and hinting too — especially in the
series of paintings of Gabrielle, a servant-girl who became an integral
part of his iconography — at the pleasures of the bed as well as of the
table and the fireside.
Hkfacture became progressively looser, large surfaces of the canvas
being dissolved in swirling maelstroms of iridescence, through which the
forms emerge modelled in white highlights, silver greys and coppery
reds.
Though he was to transfer much of his interest in volume to his
sculpture, it never vanished in his paintings, where it always provided
a centre of interest and point of visual reference. His late works, like
Shepherd Boy, glow constantly with an almost unbearable ruddiness; they
seem on fire, and the whole of this last phase of his oeuvre is patient
of many explanations. The two most obvious are that age and growing
infirmity (he suffered from rheumatoid arthritis) weakened the control
his hands could exercise over his brush, and that those changes in sight
which come with senescence — and which influenced other great colourists
such as Turner - impaired his chromatic sensibilities. There is also the
fact that he spent more time in the South of France, painting in its
sun-drenched roseate landscape. But whatever the cause, and however
slight and evanescent some of these works may be, their freedom, their
'coarseness', their dependence upon the gesture of the hand, help to
explain how some see in them the antecedents of the Abstract
Expressionism of the 1940s and 1950s
consistent aesthetic dogma which it never possessed. After all, Manet
was its leader in spite of himself, and throughout most of his career he
was closer stylistically to Degas than to most of his colleagues who
practised the more overt mannerisms which the movement was supposed to
sanction. Cezanne, who according to one reading of art history finally
destroyed Impressionism, exhibited at two of its group exhibitions (and
would probably have liked to have done so at more); Degas, who was,
according to the judgments of the time, a 'better' painter, exhibited at
seven. They were in fact poles apart, and it was almost one of the
accidents of history that they appeared to subscribe to a common
allegiance.
|
Degas Edgar
The Cotton Exchange
At the Races
The Dance Foyer
Woman Combing her Hair
|
Edgar Degas (1834-1917) was by instinct, by upbringing
and by choice, a Baudelairean dandy, in his life as well as his art.
Throughout his career his paintings, drawings and sculpture were marked
by a kind of detached, almost masochistic, purity. He is the uninvolved
spectator who describes young Spartans at exercise (National Gallery,
London, 1860) and a bored, disillusioned couple sitting moodily over
their absinthe (d'Orsay, 1876) with the same dispassionate eye. The
subjects, of course, are widely different: the one looks back to David,
the other forward to Toulouse-Lautrec. The styles are dissimilar: the
one has the clear outlines of a Florentine painting, the other the free,
spontaneous handling of one who has experienced, even though he has not
been swept away by, the discoveries of Impressionism. But both are cool,
in our contemporary sense.
Like Berthe Morisot the member of a banking family, Degas started off at
the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and had an early and rewarding experience of
Italy, where he made meticulous copies of works by Leonardo, Pontormo
and others. It was during this time that he acquired his remarkable
gifts as a draughtsman in the classic tradition, gifts which were to
characterize all his later work and were the sources of his greatness
and of his weakness. It is an interesting comment on his attitude
towards the art of his time that he saw nothing inconsistent in
exhibiting one of the major products of this period of his development,
the young Spartans (the National Gallery title, Young Spartans
Exercising, is a little coy; Degas called it Petitesfilles spartiates
provoquant des garqons), at the Fifth Impressionist Exhibition in 1880.
Appropriately enough he met Manet while copying a Velazquez in the
Louvre. They became close friends, artistic allies. Degas went in the
following year for a short visit to the United States, where he painted
The Cotton Exchange in New Orleans (Musee des Beaux-Arts, Pau) which
embodied the qualities his painting had acquired at the moment when he
made contact with Impressionism. Many of them already exemplified
characteristics which the group was already elevating into doctrines:
the sense of actuality; the social realism of the subject matter; the
instantaneity of the moment at which the brokers are 'snapped' (the
camera was to have a more definitive influence on Degas than on any
other of the group); the sharpness of the underlying draughtsmanship;
the way in which an apparently haphazard grouping of figures masks a
sophisticated and ingenious composition. The painterly technique is
still basically traditional, close in fact to the early Manet, but under
no circumstances could this have been mistaken for an 'academic'
painting.
The perspective angle is unusual and emphasizes the compositional motif
of the diagonal wedge of figures which vanishes away into the distant
corner of the room. This delight in the difficult was always to remain
one of the main characteristics of Degas's work. An even more impressive
example, of the same period, is At the Races (d'Orsay), painted between
1869 an 1872; here the angle from which he sees the horses, the course
and the stand involves such technical expertise that one is immediately
reminded of those Renaissance masters such as Uccello and Mantegna, who
also set themselves perspectival problems of dazzling complexity. In
this work another of his favourite devices is apparent - the pushing to
the edges of the canvas of large sections of the composition, so that
they are occasionally cut off, as in a photograph, and the spectator's
imagination becomes engaged in visualizing their continuance into his
own spatial ambience. Degas canonized the casual, conferring on the
moment of observation a sense of perpetuity which it had never known in
art before. At the same time he was the greatest portraitist that the
movement produced. Renoir, for instance, was a facial mannerist who made
everybody look vaguely alike. Perhaps this effect arose because
portraits demand a certain structural emphasis if they are to be
anything more than a pretext for the exercise of certain painterly
preoccupations -the sitter being no more intrinsic to the totality of
the painting than an apple to Cezanne, or a guitar to a Cubist. But
Degas was a living camera, noting and recording, sometimes with
insouciance, sometimes with tenderness, as in the Head of a Young Woman
(d'Orsay, 1867), sometimes with deep psychological insight.
Linda Nochlin has suggested this most convincingly in relation to The
Bellelli Family of 1860—62: 'While Bazille, in his representation of the
upper middle class, has firmly rejected the aura of sentimentality or
nostalgia that sometimes seems inherent in the theme of the family,
transforming his subject into a motif modern in both emotional tone and
pictorial structure, Degas has gone one step further, making his family
portrait The Bellelli Family an occasion for the dispassionate and
objective recording of subtle psychological tensions and internal
divisions in the representation of a refined group from the Italian
minor aristocracy. Once again the implications are built into the
pictorial structure; there is no meaningful anecdote to serve as the
"purpose" of the picture as there is in most contemporary English work
representing a family of a similar class in a situation of overt
external and internal disruption.'
Few artists have had a keener sense of pictorial structure than Degas.
The spontaneity of his works is an illusion - albeit an infinitely
satisfying one. Their compositional logic is absolute, and his treatment
of reality is always subordinate to the need for total representation.
It was here that he parted most decisively from Impressionism, and most
clearly showed himself to be a classicist working within a romantic
framework. To the first Impressionist exhibition he sent ten paintings,
including The Dance Foyer (d'Orsay), and continued to show at all the
subsequent exhibitions. Impressionism had contributed much to his
technical armoury. He had come to it as one dependent, in the tradition
of Ingres, on a linear perfection which had been hammered out in his
drawing sketchbooks. It gave him a new sense of the value of light as a
means of adding volume, vibration and the suggestion of a dimension more
profound than that provided by traditional perspective. His paint was
always thin; it never had the crusty quality which characterized the
technique of Monet or Pissarro. His forms were never dissolved in light;
they were accentuated and moulded by it.
Apart from portraiture, the subject matter of Degas's work is of
considerable interest and significance. The early classical themes were
succeeded by a series devoted to race-courses, ballet, opera, theatre
(The Rehearsal) — the favourite relaxations of polite society, as
opposed, for instance, to the more plebeian entertainments which Renoir
chose to depict. In the 1880s, however - at a period when he was
increasingly coming to rely on pastel as a medium to provide just those
elements of spontaneity and vibrancy which he so relished - Degas turned
his attention to the intimacies of womanhood, with an almost revengeful
acuity of observation, delighting in the most apparently graceless poses
and undignified actions. But, unlike the boudoir paintings of the
previous century, they were entirely without salacity, and they were the
harbingers of one of the dominant themes of late nineteenth-century art.
They were inspired partly by that late Romantic fascination with the
sordid - the nostalgie de la boue - which Baudelaire had first brought
out into the open; but to a much greater extent they were a by-product
of attitudes which characterized the whole Impressionist ideology. They
were sincere, they were real, and above all else they were totally alien
to anything artists had done before, so that they could be approached by
eyes innocent of accepted conventions. They had no precedents and were
therefore endowed with a visual honesty which had become indispensable
to living art: a work such as Woman Combing her Hair is a genuinely
fresh departure.
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Cassatt Mary
Girl Arranging Her Hair
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Another recruit to Impressionism from the world of
banking was
Mary Cassatt (1845-1926) who was born in Pittsburgh, of
French descent. Trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in
Philadelphia, she came to Europe when she was twenty-one and imposed on
herself the same rigorous study of the masters of drawing — especially
Correggio and Ingres - which Degas had undergone. Perhaps this is why he
was so impressed by one of her paintings at the Salon of 1874, and from
that moment a close bond was established between them. Although she was
never actually his pupil, her work was influenced by his in very much
the same way that Berthe Morisot's was by Manet. But Mary Cassatt had an
individuality of her own, cultivating intimate domestic themes with a
sensitivity and charm which allow one to accept the analogies drawn
between her and Henry James. She came into her own as a maker of prints
— a medium with which most of the Impressionists, especially Degas and
Pissarro, toyed at one time or another — being especially successful
with soft-ground etching, and showing very clear evidence of the
influence which Japanese art exerted on her. Of some importance was the
extent to which she was responsible for transmitting Impressionism to
the United States, thereby not only opening up a new and avid market,
but also influencing the work of painters such as Theodore Robinson,
Ernest Lawson and Arthur Clifton Goodwin.
Paul Cezanne, like Degas, reacted significantly to and against
Impressionism; and there was something complementary in their reactions.
Whereas the one turned to linear structuralism, extended and diffused by
the interplay of light and shade, the other introduced into his work a
light which is reinforced by chromatic masses and itself enhances them.
Both were concerned with new concepts of space, which were eventually to
revolutionize European art, but Cezanne went a good deal further in this
direction than Degas by controlling perspective in several directions,
and so opening up an entirely new synthesis of visual expression. As he
himself once said, 'I shall always be the primitive of the path I
discovered.'
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Cezanne Paul
Chestnut Trees at the Jas de Bouffan
Mont Sainte-Victoire
Card Players
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Paul Cezanne (1839—1906) was born and died in Aix-en-Provence (he was another
Impressionist from a banking family) and had the advantage of having
Zola for a schoolfellow. In 1861 he persuaded his family to let him come
to Paris, where he worked intermittently for a while at the Academie
Suisse, but there he was discontented, aggressive, moody, rinding little
to admire either in the work of his contemporaries or in his own. He had
a passion for violent, erotic painting, in muddy colours, which owed
more to Delacroix than anyone else, though there were suggestions of the
influence of Courbet. He seemed constantly at this time to oscillate
between strangely adolescent dreams — A Modern Olympia of 1870, which
could be seen either as a snide comment on Manet or as a sexual fantasy,
is typical — and half-hearted essays in direct observation. It was not
that he was out of contact. In the course of his intermittent visits to
Paris he haunted the Cafe Guerbois. He had had work in the Salon des
Refuses, and submitted regularly, but unsuccessfully, to the Salon. He
picked up ideas from the Impressionists, but his adherence to them
sprang rather from a generalized feeling of revolt against the system,
than from any deep feeling of allegiance.
When he was thirty-three, however, a change took place which may well be
connected with the fact that he achieved a large degree of emotional
security through the stabilization of his relationship with Marie-Hortense
Fiquet, a young model, who bore him a son in that year. Of more
immediate relevance was his settling for two years in Auvers-sur-Oise,
where he worked with Pissarro. This was precisely the kind of experience
he needed. Instead of the confused and sometimes contradictory titbits
of doctrine and theory which he had picked up from the cafes of Paris,
he was presented, in a suitable environment, with the practical
demonstrations of an artist who not only knew what Impressionism was
about, but had reduced it to a coherent, transmissible formula. The
effect on Cezanne was immediate. He began to observe directly from
nature; he began to achieve that optical fusion of tones which was one
of the emancipating discoveries of the movement. His palette lightened,
and though his paintings were never to reach out for that documentary
quality which Pissarro, Monet, Renoir and Degas often achieved, they
were to be free from their earlier iconography of violence.
During the next four years his relationship with official Impressionism
(if the phrase is not self-contradictory) was to be close, and he
exhibited at the exhibitions of 1874 and 1877. To the former he
contributed three works including Man with Straw Hat, in which he
realized his objective of an almost palpable solidity of form, achieved
through compositional simplicity, the colour reinforcing and
complementing the unity of the painting rather than being a mere gloss
on its form. Whereas with most other Impressionists the forms seem to
swim towards the spectator through a mist of light, with Cezanne, even
at this stage, the light seems to emerge from the forms; and, when he
said 'Light devours form; it eats up colour', it was almost a complaint.
He possessed that sense of innocence when confronted with his subject
matter which a painter like Degas could only achieve by the most
complicated means. What Cezanne always represented was his own personal
reaction to what he saw - a kind of psychological realism.
But all the time something else was fretting him: the oft-repeated
desire to create a synthesis of Renaissance discipline and Impressionist
truth - to 'redo Poussin after nature', and 'make Impressionism
something solid and durable like the Old Masters'. What he really wanted
was to organize into a solid structural role all those visual elements
which could be rendered truthfully only by Impressionist techniques. A
lot of nonsense has been written on this score, and Clement Greenberg's
warning is especially relevant: 'The Impressionists, as consistent in
their naturalism as they knew how to be, had let nature dictate the
over-all design and unity of the picture, along with its component
parts, refusing in theory to interfere consciously with their optical
impressions. For all that, their pictures did not lack structure;
insofar as any single Impressionist picture was successful it achieved
an appropriate and satisfying unity, as must any successful work of art.
(The over-estimation by Roger Fry and others of Cezanne's success in
doing exactly what he said he wanted to do is responsible for the cant
about the Impressionists' lack of structure; in its stead the
Impressionists achieved structure by the accentuation and modulation of
points and areas of colour and value, a kind of 'composition' which is
not inherently inferior to or less 'structural' than the other kind.) .
. . Cezanne still felt that [the motif] could not of its own accord
provide a sufficient basis for pictorial unity; what he wanted had to be
more emphatic, more tangible in its articulation and therefore,
supposedly, more 'permanent'. And it had to be read into nature' (Art
and Culture, London, 1973, p. 51).
The changes which his art underwent during the next twenty years, and
which were to link the world of the Impressionists with the world of
Braque, Leger and Ozenfant, were all motivated by his passionate desire
to create a new classical syntax with the vocabulary of Impressionism.
Sometimes external factors intervened - especially in regard to his
landscapes. The change of locale from the small cosy villages of
Pontoise to the larger, exaggerated reaches of the South, with its
strong all-pervasive light, its great distances apparent to the eye, its
chequered fields and intersected mountains, pushed him even farther into
a more ruthless investigation of the mechanics of composition than any
of his contemporaries had undertaken. He followed two different
approaches, which coincide exactly with those Cubism was to use in the
first two decades of the twentieth century. In paintings such as
Chestnut Trees at the Jas de Bouffan (1883) or the Mont Sainte-Victoire
of the same year, a process of synthesis is adopted: large and small
cubes of form and colour are massed together to create the image. In
others - and here again the persistent preoccupation with Mont Sainte-Victoire
serves as a touchstone — an analytical approach predominates: forms are
extracted from what is seen, volume is dissociated at certain dramatic
points around which a new structure is formed. The whole canvas is in
movement as the tesserae of paint flicker between their surface
impression and the image they create. In all his landscapes the sense of
space is emotive rather than descriptive, so that at the great distances
at which he sometimes paints Mont Sainte-Victoire, one can sense, though
one cannot see, the intervening areas.
The organization of volumes around a culminating point is very evident
in Cezanne's portraits too, such as that of Chocquet (1877), where each
part of the sitter is divided into units of coloured volumes which are
put together to create the totality of the image. Later, however,
especially in the series of Card Players, he seemed almost to extend his
volumetric passion to Euclidean proportions: each part of each figure is
expressed in terms of cylinders or cubes, but the process is never
pushed to its logical limits, and the pleats in the clothes, the pipes,
the faces, the background have a Courbet-like lusciousness which
counteracts the stringency of the modelling. 'If you paint you can't
help drawing as you do it', he once said to Emile Bernard, and it is
difficult at times not to feel that the whole of his creative outlook
was orientated to the still-life, a world which lent itself perfectly to
displaying that solidity, that rotundity which so enraptured him. His
fruit has the eternal quality of the vegetation in a seventeenth-century
nature poem by Herrick or Traherne; but this is because his paintings
are autonomous objects, and the elements which constitute them are valid
for no reason other than that they are in them. The apples and oranges
are in the painting; the painting is the apples and oranges.
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Liebermann Max
The Dunes at Noordwijk
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It was Cezanne more than anybody else who transmuted Impressionism into
a mode of vision and a technique which would reach far beyond the limits
of the nineteenth century, a fact which has led to a good deal of
near-hysterical and certainly uncritical adulation, for, ironically
enough, his art has also spawned a vast amount of flaccid academicism
quite alien to his own ideas.
Monet neatly summed up the later development of Impressionism in 1880
when he said that what had once been a church was now a school, and as a
school it spread rapidly, becoming, in each country it reached, first a
suspect revolutionary art form, and then after a few decades a moribund
official idiom. And in all cases it was the earliest protagonists of the
style who were the most vital. In Germany
Max Liebermann (1847-1935) and
Max Slevogt (1868—1932); in what is now Yugoslavia Ivan Grohar
(1867-1911) and Matej Sternen (1870-1949) were typical of a generation
which adapted Impressionist techniques and attitudes to a national
style. Whole groups grew up - in Amsterdam, for instance -dedicated to
the propagation of the new gospel. With England the links had always
been close: there were the influence of Whistler who had been marginally
connected with the movement, the writings of George Moore and above all
else the fact that from 1865 till 1892 Alphonse Legros — who although
not himself an Impressionist, had been a friend of Manet, and in close
contact with the influences which created the movement -taught first at
what is now the Royal College, and then at the Slade. It was the latter
institution which spawned the New English Art Club, whose leaders,
Steer, Tonks, Orpen, McEvoy and John, were all indebted to Impressionism
for that liberating impulse.
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Seurat Georges
Signac Paul
Segantini Giovanni
Previati Gaetano
Vincent Van
Gogh
Houses with Thatched Roofs
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Impressionism in fact had revolutionized art, and indeed the word was
used, admittedly rather loosely, to describe literary and musical
movements. But it was its developers rather than its imitators who were
most vital, and Cezanne was not alone. In 1884 there was founded in
Paris a Societe des artistes independants, most of whose members were
self¬consciously dedicated to renovating Impressionism by adding to it
the systematic qualities which they thought it lacked. They set out to
provide a doctrinal framework for future developments which would give
light a structure based on small points of pure colour, applied in such
a way as to fuse when perceived by the beholder. The outstanding figure
of Pointillism was
Georges Seurat (1859-91) who had, significantly,
studied under Henri Lehmann, the pupil of Ingres. Always intent on
returning to those schemata which orthodox Impressionism had set out to
destroy, he even went on in the later stages of his career to attempt to
devise modes for expressing emotion and feeling, very much in the same
way as the Carracci had some centuries earlier. His subject matter was
resolutely in the Impressionist tradition — landscapes and popular
entertainment — and his paintings radiate a lyricism which has little
apparent connection with the austere aesthetic ideology they are
supposed to exemplify.
It was inevitable that so beguiling a doctrine should attract disciples;
in France Seurat's ideas were followed by artists such as
Paul
Signac
(1863-1935) Henri-Edmond Cross (1856-1910) and Maximilien Luce (1858-1941); outside France it was especially effective in Belgium, where
through Theo van Rysselberghe (1862-1926) and Henry van de Velde
(1863-1957) it not only created a new group, 'The Society of Twenty',
but also contributed a great deal of stamina and inspiration to the
rather eclectic manifestations of Art Nouveau. In Italy too, where
Impressionism itself had had little effect, it was enthusiastically
received, though given a literary and naturalistic colouring, in the
works of
Giovanni Segantini (1859-1899) and
Gaetano Previati
(1852-1920),
who transmitted its attitudes to the Futurists.
Neo-Impressionism is clearly the ancestor of most subsequent hard-edge
art from Braque to Stella, and in this sense it represents one of the
dominant voices in the dialogue of painting. But the other, the 'soft',
also stemmed from Impressionism. The importance of creative sincerity,
the ability to express emotional reactions freely, to surrender to the
instinct of the hand, and a realization of the emotive as well as the
descriptive and analytical use of colour - all these are qualities which
led through
Vincent Van
Gogh, on whom the works of the Impressionists had a
liberating and crucial effect, to the
Fauves and on to the
Abstract Expressionists.
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