Painting

XI

Development of Impressionism

In turning to everyday subject matter, the mid-19th-century realist artists set a precedent for the next generation of the French avant-garde. Édouard Manet was the major innovator of the 1860s, and his style was a precursor of impressionism. Like Courbet, Manet found many of his subjects in the life around him: Parisians at ease in restaurants, in parks, or boating. Manet also borrowed themes and compositions from earlier masters—Velázquez and Goya—and reworked them in accordance with contemporary life, in his own style, flattening the figures and neutralizing the emotional expressions. For these and other innovations, such as his free, sketchy brushwork and broad patches of color juxtaposed without transition, he is often referred to as the first modern painter.

The most brilliant master of line in the late 19th century was Edgar Degas, who favored subjects in movement, as though caught by a candid camera. While the immediacy of his approach and his interest in painting contemporary life allies Degas with the impressionists, he differed from them in several ways. He did not dissolve form as radically as they did and he was more concerned with painting figures in interiors than landscapes. Degas's style of composition was influenced by photography and by Japanese prints, which were then being widely circulated in Paris and were very popular with many artists of the day. Although his paintings of ballet dancers, musicians, laundresses, and bathing women appear casual and unstudied, the compositions, with their oblique views and asymmetrical balance, were in fact carefully calculated. Degas's portraiture is also unique in its integration of figures with their settings and in its revelation of personality. A master of many techniques, Degas is particularly noted for his use of pastels (powdered pigments mixed with gum; see Crayon), with which he achieved unusually rich effects by roughly hatching one layer of intense color over another.

The impressionist style was evolved by painters who were increasingly interested in studying the effects of light on objects—how light colors shadows and dissolves objects—and in transferring their observations directly to the canvas. Their disregard for exact details of form and their use of small, separate touches of pure color—techniques in complete contrast to the prevailing academic style—aroused the animosity of both the critics and the public. Nearly 20 years elapsed before Claude Monet, impressionism's leading exponent, achieved recognition. Monet's chief interest was landscape, which he rendered in all kinds of weather and in various seasons; he captured the sparkling effects of sunlight on trees in springtime and the drab light of winter on snow-tracked ground. In his late years, Monet devoted himself to painting the exquisite gardens and water lily ponds he had created at his home in Giverny; their forms became increasingly evanescent as he translated them into the shimmering play of light and color.

Camille Pissarro was also one of the creators of impressionism, as was Pierre Auguste Renoir. Pissarro's favorite motifs were landscapes, river scenes, views of Paris streets, and figures of peasants at work. Renoir's interests were similar to those of both Monet and Pissarro, but he also did a great number of portraits and figure paintings; his many studies of female nudes, with their pearlescent skin tones, are particularly famous.

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Frequently, the impressionists worked outdoors side by side, as was often the case with Renoir and Monet. In 1869, for example, they both did renditions of La grenouillère (The Frog Pond); Monet's hangs in the Metropolitan Museum, Renoir's in the National Museum, Stockholm. In the early 1870s a similar relationship existed between Pissarro and Paul Cézanne; Pissarro did not dissolve forms as radically as did the other impressionists, and this may have persuaded Cézanne to work with him, for Cézanne's interests were to lead him in other directions. While the impressionists were occupied with rendering the transitory, such as the changing effects of light, Cézanne was concerned with the eternal aspects of nature and thus sought its structural principles, as in his numerous late canvases of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Painted during the last years of his life, these studies are the result of Cézanne's attempt to render the color and volume of a mountain form seen from a distance. Cézanne's concern for geometric form was a major influence on the development of cubism.

XII

Postimpressionist Movements

For a brief period in the 1880s Pissarro was drawn to a new technique, an outgrowth of impressionism developed by Georges Seurat, known as divisionism or pointillism. Seurat and his neoimpressionist followers modified the loose brushstrokes characteristic of impressionist style into precise dots of pure pigment, juxtaposing tiny areas of complementary colors on the canvas surface. Seurat's theories were derived from his readings in 19th-century scientific and aesthetic texts on color. The result of his painstaking technique is supremely visible in one of his most spectacular works, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte (1884-1886, Art Institute of Chicago).

Three major artists of the late 19th century showed influences of impressionism in their early works but went on to develop distinctively individual postimpressionist styles: the Dutch-born Vincent van Gogh and the French artists Paul Gauguin and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Van Gogh, like Pissarro, experimented briefly with color division. Typical of his developed style, however, was the use of pure color applied thickly in flickering strokes, conveying intense emotional expression. Many of his canvases, especially those of wind-tossed cypress trees and wheat fields under stormy skies, are expressions of his own moods as reflected in the forces of nature. Van Gogh's style greatly influenced the northern European painters who in the early 20th century developed expressionism.

The work of his colleague Gauguin also displays distortions of line and color, but it is quite different from van Gogh's, being symbolic rather than expressionistic. Areas of flat, bold colors form decorative patterns, heavily outlined. Gauguin was the central figure of a new movement known as synthetism or symbolism (see Symbolist Movement); his immediate followers, a group active during the 1890s, were called the Nabis.

In still another direction, Toulouse-Lautrec was largely a painter of people, choosing as his subjects cabaret singers, dance-hall performers, and prostitutes; these figures were an expression of the social decay of Paris in the so-called Gay Nineties. Like many artists—such as Manet, Degas, and the American Mary Cassatt—he was influenced by the flat style and seemingly casual composition of Japanese prints. Toulouse-Lautrec's excellent sense of line is seen also in his drawings and color lithographs; he contributed greatly to this last medium, particularly with his posters for the Moulin Rouge and other Parisian places of entertainment. See Postimpressionism.

XIII

20th-Century Painting Before World War II

The art of the 20th century includes many movements and styles. Before World War II some of the styles that originated in Europe were fauvism, expressionism, cubism, futurism, constructivism, neoplasticism, dada, and surrealism; artists in the United States developed the styles synchronism and precisionism. See Modern Art.

A

Fauvism

At the turn of the century, artists in both France and Germany were interested in aboriginal art. Gauguin, for example, searched for the so-called primitive, first in Brittany and later in the South Seas. His mode of decorative color patterning and his theories influenced a later group of painters who came to be known as the fauves (“wild beasts”); their leader was Henri Matisse. Other fauves were André Derain, Georges Braque, and Maurice de Vlaminck, who claimed to have been among the first European artists to discover African sculpture. See African Art and Architecture; Fauvism.

B

Expressionism

Expressionism is the name given to a movement involving artists more concerned with recording subjective feelings and responses, via distortions of line and color, than with the faithful representation of outer reality. In Germany the movement encompassed two groups. The young artists active between 1905 and 1913 and known as Die Brücke (The Bridge) were, like the fauves, inspired by African art and carried its boldness and power into their own work (see Brücke, Die). Members of the group included Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Erich Heckel, and Emil Nolde. Portraying the sufferings of humanity, they worked in a style somewhat resembling fauvism, but with the added ingredient of angst (anxiety). The early, emotionally charged work of the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch was well known in Germany and greatly impressed Die Brücke artists. Somewhat later, in 1911, Franz Marc and the Russian-born Wassily Kandinsky organized the other phase of German expressionism, Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), in Munich; they were inspired by aboriginal art, fauvism, and folk art, and their expressionism evolved toward a semiabstract mode of painting (see Blaue Reiter, Der). Major Blaue Reiter artists were August Macke, Gabriele Münter, the Swiss Paul Klee, and the Russian Alexei von Jawlensky.

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