The Impressionist Revolution - Monet to Matisse at DMA

 For those who follow this blog and my quilt blog, you will know that I LOVE Monet.  When this new exhibit was announced, I instantly wanted to see it and cannot believe it has taken me two months to do so.  At any rate, today is the day and you know the drill - I'm going to educate you against your will as this is how I remember and learn.  If you only wish to look at the pics - go for it - they are amazing and these are some of the greatest artists in my humble opinion.  It is the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition and this is a fitting celebration for it.  The core members of the Impressionist movement included Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and Berthe Morisot.  They set the foundation which following generations of avant-garde artists reacted, from Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh to Piet Mondrian and Henri Matisse.  Come along with me today and see how many you recognize BEFORE reading to see.  I'll place the pictures first this time.

So - how did it all get started?  In 1874 an artist's collective that called itself the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, Etc. opened the first of what became eight group shows held over the course of twelve years.  The participants in each exhibition varied, and, beyond a shared rejection of artistic tradition, so did their subjects and approaches.  What unified these independent artists we now call the Impressionists was the desire to publicly exhibit their work.  Read that again --- all they wanted to do was exhibit.  Seems innocuous enough.  However, the only public exhibition venue for living artists in 19th-century Paris was the annual Salon organized and juried by the state-run Academy of Fine Arts.  Artists who diverged from Academic tradition (the styles and subject matter favored by the Academy) frequently experienced rejection and were left with no other avenues to garner critical and financial success.  By organizing their own exhibitions, the Impressionists bypassed the official system, an act that was as rebellious as it was entrepreneurial.  Despite the artists' efforts, the Impressionist exhibitions scandalized the Parisian public and were generally considered a failure.  Apart from a few forward-thinking critics and collectors, there was little appreciation or market for this subversive artwork until well after the last show in 1886.  Read that again --- Subversive.  Oh how I laugh when you think of what is subversive today.  Okay - here we go and I love this first one.

Here is a name I haven't mentioned yet.  However --- he, too, was very much a rebel.  This is Lise Sewing by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.  He was 25 years old when he made this painting of Lise Trehot.  From 1866 on, he painted her at least 12 times until their romantic and professional relationship came to an end in 1872.  Lise Sewing is not a traditional portrait.  Rather than facing the viewer in a formal pose, Lise is shown in profile, absorbed in her sewing.  The composition, subject, and loose paint application reflect the influence of older avant-garde artists that Renoir admired, such as Gustave Courbet and Camille Corot.  Although today Renoir is closely associated with the Impressionist movement, his works were only shown in four of the eight exhibitions.

The light in the next work is fascinating to me.

Yes, this is by Claude Monet in 1871 and entitled The Pont Neuf.  Images of city life captured in oil paint in a loose, sketchy style, as seen here, were a novelty in 1870's France.  Monet chose the bustling inhabitants of Paris as his subject, emphasizing the blur of people, carriages, and boats coming and going through his use of rapidly applied brushstrokes and unfinished forms.  This approach defined the Impressionist movement Monet helped launch just a few years later.  It rebelled against the naturalistic style and more timeless, picturesque subjects favored by art critics and collectors at the time.  Here, Monet reveled in evoking the look and feel of modern life on a cold, rainy day.  Yep, truly subversive stuff here.

By the mid-1800s, there was a growing demand for artists to paint the everyday life of ordinary people rather than the biblical of mythological subjects championed by the French Academy of Fine Arts.  Following the example of Realists like Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet, the younger generation of Impressionists shared a passion for capturing modern life in all its realities, from the spectacular to the mundane, in an equally modern style.  The industrialization that was rapidly changing both city and country provided the Impressionists with endless inspiration, as did the growing middle class it spawned.  In the artists' paintings, speeding carriages, iron bridges, and steam-powered transportation punctuate Parisian vistas and lush meadows.  Intimate scenes of middle-class domesticity, leisure activities, and urban entertainment are elevated to the status of high art.  Even the tradition of the classical nude was subverted into a modern bather.  The artists' daringly cropped scenes and surprising perspectives lend their paintings the casual immediacy of a snapshot.

Guess who?  Hint - it's a self-portrait.

Unlike the younger Impressionists, Pissarro didn't start painting cityscapes until late in his life, when a chronic eye disease made painting outdoors difficult.  He began renting hotel rooms in large French cities and used them as his studio.  He probably made this self-portrait in a room of the Grand Hotel du Louvre in Paris, overlooking the Place due Theatre Francais.  The view glimpsed through the window behind him is likely what is seen in the next painting.

In a series of 15 works of the same subject, he portrayed the effect of different light and weather on the scene.  Here, the wide Parisian plaza is shrouded in wintry fog painted in hazy pink and purple hues.  Pissarro used the perspective of the hotel's second floor to his advantage, adopting a bird's-eye view to capture the dynamism of the modern city.  Sketchy brushstrokes convey the movement of horse-drawn carriages and pedestrians on the street below.

The Seine at Chatou, 1874.  Do you know the painter?

In this plein-air (outdoor) painting, Renoir depicts the River Seine in Chatou, a Parisian suburb.  With the construction of railways, like the one seen here in the middle distance, urban dwellers could travel by train to the countryside to escape the city and participate in outdoor recreation.  Boating was a popular leisure activity and one of Renoir's favorite subjects to paint.  As viewers, our vantage point is in the middle of the water, possibly from the perspective of someone on a boat or dock.

Next up - someone I have posted about several times before (HERE and HERE).

River Bank in Springtime by Vincent van Gogh, 1887.  Van Gogh arrived in Paris in 1886 just in time to visit the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition.  Exposed to French avant-garde painting for the first time, he rapidly absorbed Impressionist subjects and painting techniques.  In this painting of the banks of the Seine, Van Gogh experimented with applying pastel hues in loose, broken brushstrokes.  He was particularly drawn to the color theory of contrasting complementaries, seen here in the predominantly green color scheme framed by a red border and enlivened with strokes of pink.

The Impressionist's radical approach extended beyond their subjects to their techniques and materials.  Fueled by technological advances, such as the invention of the resealable metal paint tube and the expansion of railways, nearly all the Impressionists took their canvases outdoors to record the sensation of light and movement, whether in and around France's capital or further afield to its coasts and southern regions.  To capture such fleeting effects, they rapidly applied bright pigments on light-hued grounds (preparatory layers) in broken, textured brushstrokes.  They experimented with cutting-edge color theories, such as painting contrasting complementary colors side by side to boost each color's vibrancy, and they avoided black and gray in their depiction of shadows and volume.  They also chose not to apply shiny varnish, which was traditionally the final step that signified a finished oil painting.  The Impressionists' vivid colors and dissolving forms stunned a contemporary viewers, who were accustomed to the slick realism and earth-toned palettes of Academic paintings shown at the Paris Salon.  Most critics and collectors saw Impressionist paintings as clumsy and sketch-like at best, and garishly ugly at worst.

Back to the art - I am not a still life fan.  However, a few do pull me in.  This is one of them.

Still Life, Tea Service, 1872 by Claude Monet.  Though known for his landscapes, Monet was also a remarkable still-life painter, especially during his early career.  Completed two years before the first Impressionist exhibition, for which he was a key organizer, this image of a porcelain tea service and sage plant demonstrates his remarkable ability to render textures.  The velvety sage leaves contrast with the matte tablecloth, the slick red lacquered tray, and the shine of the blue-and-white china.  The reflections on the spoon, linen, and ceramics reveal Monet's lifelong fascination with the way light interacts with various surfaces.

I was fortunate to attend an exhibition of Monet alone several years ago in Fort Worth.  Here is the LINK to that wonderful time with friends and much more information on Claude Monet.    The above painting is The Seine at Lavacourt, 1880.  Monet painted this large panorama while living in Vetheuil, northwest of Paris.  Produced expressly for submission to the state-sponsored Salon of 1880, it wasn't executed outdoors by in the studio, and it was based on several earlier versions of the same subject.  Monet had not tried to exhibit at the Salon since 1870, but he sought alternatives to what he saw as lackluster performances at the Impressionist exhibitions.  Of the two paintings he submitted in 1880, only this one was accepted.  Monet's fellow Impressionists regarded his participation as a betrayal of the independent stance they had taken six years earlier.  Nevertheless, his strategy worked - this was the first of Monet's works to be praised by both liberal and conservative art critics in the press.

I'm sure you've seen the next two before - 

The Water Lily Pond (Clouds), 1903.  Monet is inextricably linked to Giverny, a town outside Paris where he moved in 1883.  While his initial effort was the cultivation of a flower garden, he began creating a Japanese-style pond in the 1890s.  The colorful and exotic water lilies Monet planted there became his primary subject in the last two decades of his life.  While earlier works often featured an arching footbridge, over time the subject became the surface of the water, at once a mirror of the world above and a window into the world below.  Monet's early water lily paintings featured more conventional depictions of space, with details like a horizon line or grassy bank that oriented the viewer.  As time went on, he abandoned solid ground in favor of  immersive watery scenes.  At first, the horizon line of the water landscapes crept to the very top of the canvas.  The extraordinary illusionism of the reflected clouds in this painting caused those attending an auction in 1917 to think that the canvas was hanging  upside down.

Eventually, there was no horizon line at all, as seen here in Water Lilies by Claude Monet, 1908.   .  In later works like this one, Monet's technique approached abstraction as water lilies gave way to gestural strokes of shimmering color.

Virtually all the Impressionists experimented with the traditional genre of still-life painting at some point in their careers as noted above with Monet.  None were more dedicated, however than Paul Cezanne, whose name today is almost synonymous with the genre itself.  Arrangements of humble kitchen items such as carafes, bowls, fruit, and tablecloths provided him with endless opportunities for pure formal experimentation with color and line.  Cezanne frequently composed his still lifes against the backdrop of patterned wallpaper in a witty play between what is perceived as "flat" or three-dimensional, between what is "real" and what is painted decor.  Paul Gauguin and Camille Pissarro, both close friends of Cezanne, experimented with different aspects of his radical approach to rendering depth and volume through the mundane subject of household items set against patterned wallpaper.

As I shared above, still lifes are not my favorite, and to be totally honest, neither is Cezanne as a result of that.  However, in all things there are exceptions and I do love this one.  Still Life with Carage, Milk Can, Bowl and Orange, Paul Cezanne 1879-1880.  Cezanne created this still life as he began moving beyond the Impressionists' desire to paint the transitory effects of light.  Seeking to capture the essential form and mass of his subjects, he developed an innovative approach to depicting space.  The small parallel brushstrokes of gradually shifting colors that he applied to construct each object, whether flat wallpaper or a three-dimensional tabletop, challenge our logical understanding of depth and volume.  Background is merged with foreground, and details like the floral design on the wallpaper take on the same dimensionality as the orange on the table.

Now - for a new technique.  Mister laughs because I call this the "dot painting."  Georges Seurat revealed the shocking new style he invented, and kept secret, in his monumental painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (shown in small image here).  Where as the Impressionists explored color and optical theories intuitively, Seurat transformed them into a science.  The result was a technique he called Chromo-Luminarism which is better know today as Pointillism or Neo-Impressionism.  Instead of mixing colors on his palette, Seurat placed individual points of brilliant color side by side that, when seen from a distance blend in the viewer's eyes.  His aims were to create a truer representation of we optically experience light and, in the process, restore the compositional stability that many felt had been abandoned by the Impressionists' emphasis on spontaneity.  Seurat's debut of Pointillism in 1886 at what would be the last Impressionist show provoked ridicule from critics and confounded exhibition visitors.  Within the Impressionist circle, artists were split.  Many saw the potential and experimented with the style, but most moved on quickly from its slow and laborious technique.  Still, others saw it as the death knell of Impressionism and left Paris in search of a new direction for modern art.

Comblat-le-Chateau, the Meadow (Le Pre), Opus 161, Paul Signac, 1887  Signac painted this landscape during the first crucial years of the Neo-Impressionist movement.  He was working at that time directly under the influence of Georges Seurat and had enthusiastically adopted his painstaking Pointillist technique.  By juxtaposing small dots of unmixed colors, Signac created an atmospheric and stylized depiction of what he described as a "fairy-tale valley" in the Auvergne region of south-central France.

Georges Seurat's debut of Pointillism in 1886 created a backlash within the avant-garde art scene.  Many artists with roots in Impressionism, including Paul Cezanne, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin led a younger generation of artists in developing new styles that prioritized emotions, ideas, and personal expression over purely optical impressions.  Anti-naturalistic colors, exaggerated forms, and symbolic subjects characterize the work of the artists we now call the Post-Impressionists.  Though aspects of his theories and lifestyle are problematic, Gauguin was instrumental in this shift.  He sought to restore a sense of authenticity to art making by stripping away Western pictorial conventions like linear perspective and modeling.  He left Paris in search of "uncivilized" subjects, first in France's remote regions and later in its colonies, that would embody the "primitive" quality he sought in his art.  Van Gogh, Emile Bernard, and Paul Serusier are among those who followed this example.  The Synthetic style Gauguin developed with Bernard, which emphasized the role of memory, imagination, and abstraction, would have a profound impact on Van Gogh and the young group of artists in the late 1880s.  

In 1888 the young painter Paul Serusier traveled to the Breton village of Pont-Aven to join the community of artists that had gathered around Paul Gauguin.  While there, Gauguin instructed him in the creation of a small abstracted landscape where color and form were freed from their roles as descriptors.  Once Serusier returned to Paris, this vibrant sketch, The Talisman, prompted the formation of a brotherhood of artists dedicated to spiritual and person expression through color and line.  They called themselves the Nabis, the Hebrew word for "prophets."  Nabis members included Serusier, Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, and Felix Vallotton.  Their individual styles and motifs vary from intimate scenes of domesticity to mystical dreamscapes.  Nevertheless, the Nabis jointly rejected illusionistic representation in favor of emphasizing a paintings decorative qualities.  As Denis famously quipped, before it is a horse or a nude, a picture "is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order."

Woman at Her Toilette, Louis Anquetin, 1889.  This painting boasts a bold new style called Cloisonnism that Anquetin invented with his friend Emile Bernard.  Imitating medieval stained-glass windows, cloisonne enamel, and Japanese woodcut prints, Cloisonnism features flat areas of solid color enclosed by sinuous outlines, such as the green contour that encircles the woman's smooth white skin.  The painting's modern approach also extends to its subject.  Though images of women dressing are traditional within European art, the figure's direct gaze, pronounced makeup, and parted lips suggest she's a courtesan, a sex-worker who catered to upper-class patrons.

Sheaves of Wheat, Vincent van Gogh, 1890.  Throughout his career, Van Gogh considered himself an Impressionist as he faithfully recorded his sensations before nature.  At the same time, he experimented with newer avant-garde styles, such as the Synthetic approach developed by his friends Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard that exaggerated form and color to convey meaning.  Working in isolation in southern France, Van Gogh developed a unique voice.  Sheaves of Wheat was painted during the final months of his life.  It captures harvested wheat, one of Van Gogh's favorite motifs.  Applying gold and violet hues in thick, expressive brushstrokes, he tried to express the comforting feeling of eternity that he experienced as he observed nature's endless cycles.  Look closer and notice those brushstrokes.

I'm sure that artists had a vast quantity of sketches - ideas that never really became a painting.  Whether they knew that someday someone would find them and exhibit them is a whole different matter.  Would they like it?  Who knows.  This is Cafe Terrace on the Place du Forum, Vincent van Gogh, 1888.

The radical aesthetics and groundbreaking subjects launched by the Impressionists, and the Post-Impressionists who followed, set the trajectory for the development of contemporary art in the 20th century.  Large retrospectives of the work of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cezanne, Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin held in Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna, Dresden, and Berlin int he first decade of the 1900s contributed to the dissemination of their collective styles and theories across Europe.  Younger generations of avant-garde artists actively engaged with the previous artistic movements' core tenets, directly or indirectly, whether adopting or rejecting them.  Almost every stylistic breakthrough from this period - Cubism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Futurism, Abstraction - had its roots in the Impressionists' subversion of traditional Academic values, from the subject depicted to the finish of the brightly colored surface.  

Farm Near Duivendrecht, in the Evening, Piet Mondrian, 1916.  Piet Mondrian is best known today for his geometrically abstract grid paintings.  His early works, however, show the influence of both Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.  Mondrian returned to the farm depicted here repeatedly, capturing the quality of light and reflections on the river at different times of day, like Claude Monet.  Nevertheless, the stylization of the houses and trees as well as the flat patches of expressive colors reveal the impact of Post-Impressionism, especially the works of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cezanne.  Mondrian encountered both artists' works in retrospectives that were held in Amsterdam n 1905 and 1909, respectively.  

Well, I'm still not a fan of still-lifes, but this show was from Monet to Matisse, so I guess I'll share one of his.  This is Still Life:  Bouquet and Compotier, Henri Matisse, 1924.  Beginning in the early 1900s, Matisse began making floral still lifes, an interest he maintained for the rest of his life.  Like Paul Cezanne, whom he deeply admired, Matisse used the genre of still life as the constant for his formal experimentation with decoration and abstraction.  Here, the painted standing screen, tablecloth, and compotier (fruit bowl) are all studio props that reappear in other paintings.  Cezanne's still lifes also  provided the model for Matisse's ambitious play with spatial ambiguity.  In this work, he challenges our perception of the relationship between flat, painted patterns and three-dimensional objects, such as the standing screen in the background and the section of wall visible at right.

Well, that's pretty much the end of my education for today.  I learned so very much and find myself falling more and more in love with art history.  It is simply fascinating to me.  Throughout this day, the rain has just been coming down - here at the museum, the courtyard is movie worthy.  (Psst - we're not done as we went to a couple more exhibits, but I only have a few more pics.)

This is Untitled (Sahara), Kevin Beasley, 2016.  It consists of resin, house dresses, pants, bandanas, kaftans, an altered pillowcase, an altered women's sweater, T-shirts, and wood.  Crazy, right?

One final share --- LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this light.  It is motion sensitive and changes as we walk past.  Very cool.  And that's it.  Whew, right?  See ya around as we embrace the beauty around us.