Chapter 19
First Impressions: Impressionism
In This Chapter
Breaking up light
Catching up with the high-speed brushstroke
Examining the evolution of Impressionism
Paintings by Monet, Renoir, and Degas brighten people’s homes, dress up their offices, cheer them in hospitals, and inspire vacations to France. Postcard copies of their paintings occasionally greet people in their mailboxes. You can even find Renoir wrapping paper and Degas paper plates!
Impressionism is the most popular art movement of all time. Collectors will pay $50 million to own an original Monet or Renoir, yet when their paintings first came on the market in 1874, most people wouldn’t pay $10 for one.
Why is Impressionism such a hit more than a century after the style exhausted itself in France? Partly because Impressionism’s rapid stroke, feathery style, and bright-as-spring colors make most of the paintings as refreshing and invigorating as a pleasant May day. Entering an Impressionist gallery in a museum is like walking into an eternal spring.
Despite all these positives, the term Impressionist was originally intended as an insult. It meant that the paintings looked unfinished and that the artists were too lazy to refine their brushstrokes. Colors dissolve into each other in Impressionist art, and images blur a bit like an action shot in photography. But there’s a point to the soft focus. Impressionist artists were interested in the interplay of colors and light more than the precise contours of people and things. They wanted to capture the fleeting quality of life: impressions, glances, gestures, a pleasant stroll in the sun. The soft focus gives people the sense of a lovely impression caught before it slips away.
As the heirs of Realists like Gustave Courbet and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, most Impressionists preferred to paint from real life en plein air (in the open air, or outside). The invention of the tin paint tube in 1841 made oil paint available to artists in easy-to-use tubes, which made outdoor painting more convenient. To capture fleeting moments on canvas, the Impressionists had to paint fast and use loose or sketchy brushstrokes. They needed to make each dab of paint work double-time and suggest more than it portrayed. They succeeded. You can practically feel the sunlight radiating from their canvases and the breezes whispering through the scenery.
Often, people see Impressionist works as merely pretty, but early paintings by Manet and some other Impressionists had shock value — both in how they were painted and what they occasionally portrayed (train stations, night clubs, entertainers). Manet and Degas painted numerous images of people who seem to be alienated and depressed by the so-called “progress” of capitalism.
Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro, on the other hand, were more interested in capturing beautiful moments and in the changing effects of light on landscapes than in reforming society. All of them were children during the revolution of 1848. During the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) and the Paris Commune (1871), Monet and Pissarro fled to England, Degas joined the National Guard, and Renoir served in the Tenth Calvary Regiment of the French Army. If they had a message, it was that life is beautiful, every fleeting second of it.
In this chapter, I examine the art and painting techniques of the greatest Impressionist painters: Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, and Berthe Morisot.
M & M: Manet and Monet
Impressionism began to take shape in the 1860s on the canvases of Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. But the actual birth, if a delivery date can be pinpointed, was probably the summer of 1869 when Monet and Renoir painted views of a swimming resort at La Grenouillère on the Seine. That summer, they learned to catch the transitory moods of nature with quick, suggestive brushstrokes. It was here that the broken-brushstroke style (painting in flecks of color) became a standard characteristic of Impressionist art. The movement didn’t yet have a name — that came five years later when a critic attacked one of Monet’s early paintings: Impression — Sunrise.
Monet and Renoir pioneered this new art style by borrowing and adapting techniques that Manet had developed a few years earlier. In the following sections, I fill you in on Manet and Monet; I cover Renoir later in this chapter.
Édouard Manet: Breaking rules to free the artist
The classically trained Édouard Manet (1832–1883) straddled Realism and Impressionism. He influenced the Impressionists and was, in turn, influenced by them. In the 1860s, the Impressionists began meeting near Manet’s studio at Café Guerbois (not far from the famed Bohemian hangout Montmartre). He was the unofficial head of the twice-weekly meetings, which included Monet, Renoir, Degas, Alfred Sisley, Émile Zola, and sometimes Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, and others.
What was the bridge between Realism and Impressionism? It was Manet’s new approach to painting, his innovations with color and brushwork.
Earlier artists began painting their canvases with a layer of dark, usually brown, paint and then built layers of paint on top of it. Of course, they had to wait for each layer to dry before adding the next one. Finally, they glazed the painting to give the surface a smooth finish. This process could take weeks or months. The advantage of painting in layers is that you can home in on the right color, gradually refining, layer after layer, until it’s perfect. Obviously, the models couldn’t pose all that time. So painters frequently added layers without the model being present.
The Impressionists, most of whom worked outdoors from life, adopted Manet’s alla prima (“at once”) technique. Without it, they couldn’t have painted fast enough to capture the shifting effects of light.
Manet didn’t invent alla prima painting. Many of the old masters, such as Matthias Grünewald, Caravaggio, and Frans Hals, used it in conjunction with other techniques. Manet’s innovation was to use it exclusively, eliminating the need for the slow buildup of layers of paint.
|
Figure 19-1: Manet’s Olympia is a mid-19th-century example of shock art. |
|
Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY
Manet was a great innovator. Even when he painted conventional subjects, like a picnic or a female nude, he did it unconventionally. The Impressionists appreciated his fresh approach; the public didn’t. Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass, which depicts a midday picnic with two conservatively dressed men sitting beside a stark-naked woman, outraged and alienated the public. Although there’s no erotic behavior, the woman’s casual, public nudity shocked people. One critic called it “a shameful, open sore.” Critics also attacked Manet’s brushwork, his color-patch technique. The Salon of 1863 rejected the painting, but it was included in the Salon des Refusé exhibition (see Chapter 18), held the same year for works that the Salon rejected.
The Salon of 1865 accepted Manet’s Olympia, which caused an even bigger scandal than Luncheon on the Grass. Manet obviously intended the painting to shock. Everything about it is a radical break from the norms of European art. He chose to call the painting Olympia because it resembles the names adopted by Parisian brothel prostitutes who liked to use exotic pseudonyms. Concubines had been painted elegantly before — Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’s The Great Odalisque (see the color section) is an example — but Manet’s painting made people feel as though they’d been dragged into a brothel. It was as if a prostitute were advertising herself on his canvas. The painting was too real.
Claude Monet: From patches to flecks
The new style of Claude Monet (1840–1926) came from a shift in focus. He looked at the colors of objects instead of the objects themselves. He advised another painter:
When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you — a tree, a house, a field. . . . Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape.
He believed that people should always judge based on first impressions, before getting to know something or someone. Becoming familiar with an object or a face falsifies it. You get the gist of what you see — a blue car, a red house, or a man’s double chin — so your eyes don’t search out details. You settle for an approximation. But the first time you encounter a face or place, you examine it thoroughly. “Ah, her eyes are green with flecks of blue; the window has a Z-shaped crack in it.” To notice the color components of an object, Monet had to stop seeing the object and focus on the color.
In the second half of his long career, Monet painted series of the same scene captured at different times of day. Some of these paintings are like pictorial clocks, especially the haystack series. You can tell the time by the light and shadow on the hay bundles (as in Haystack, End of Summer, Morning and Haystack at Sunset, Near Giverny).
Most of the Impressionists bypassed the juried Salon exhibitions and held their own unjuried exhibitions (in which all entries are accepted), which gradually eroded the Salon’s control of taste. The first independent (Impressionist) exhibition was in 1874. Among other works, Monet showed Impression: Sunrise. The name inspired one critic to condemn all the paintings in the show for being “impressionistic” or incomplete. Although it was intended as an insult, most of the artists liked the label, so it stuck.
Springtime (a.k.a. The Reader; see the color section) is a painting of Monet’s wife Camille reading a book in a meadow. Camille’s softened beauty blends gently with the landscape so that she seems to be one with her surroundings. Other than that, the painting has no obvious symbolism or message. But it leaves a lasting poetic impression, which may be more enduring than any message. The painting is simply a lovely moment captured on canvas before it fades forever. Camille died at the age of 32, seven years after Monet painted Springtime.
In Springtime, Camille is reminiscent of Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers (see Flora in the color section). The dappled sun on her dress resembles the smudges of white flowers beside her, connecting her to the landscape like a goddess of nature. In any case, she creates an otherworldly impression and seems to float on the feathery lawn like a sun-streaked cloud. If you focus closely on the lawn, you can see how color was more important than shape to Monet. One brushstroke signifies a clump of grass. He painted the color of an area of grass, not the shapes of individual grass blades or grass clumps.
Look closely at how Monet constructs Camille’s dress and bonnet from masses of pinks, grays, and white that merge into the flowing shape of the fabric. You may suspect that Monet drifted from his ideal of ignoring the object and focusing on its colors while painting Camille’s face. Compare the flurry of brushstrokes in the upper-right quarter of Springtime with the brushwork on his wife’s face. Up close, the frenzied strokes of the upper-right quadrant look like a whirlwind of leaves, while the paint on Camille’s face is laid down delicately and slowly. In fact, you can barely see the strokes. Also the brushwork on the dress differs from that of the rest of the painting. Monet uses caressing sweeps of color to delineate the fabric as if his brush were guided by his tender feelings for his wife.
In 1883, Monet rented a house at Giverny, about 50 miles west of Paris, near the Normandy border. By the 1890s, he was wealthy enough to buy the house and 5 acres of land around it, which he transformed into gorgeous gardens. Some of Monet’s most celebrated paintings are of these gardens and the lily pads on the property pond. Monet did 250 versions of water lilies on huge canvases. His greatest water lily paintings hang in oval-shaped rooms in the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris.
Pretty Women and Painted Ladies: Renoir and Degas
In this section, I examine the paintings of Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas, both of whom focused largely, although not exclusively, on the female.
Pretty as a picture: Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) painted happy people in pretty places. He said, “For me a picture should be a pleasant thing, joyful and pretty — yes, pretty! There are quite enough unpleasant things in life without the need for us to manufacture more.” His fortes were lovely female faces and forms; sunlit meadows; gardens; and summery, open-air cafés.
Early Renoir
The early work of Renoir (from 1860 to 1868), like his At the Inn of Mother Anthony, shows the influence of Gustave Courbet (see Chapter 18). But Renoir soon abandoned the natural browns and tans of Courbet’s earthy style and developed his bright and happy “rainbow palette.” In 1869, while painting with Monet at La Grenouillère, Renoir invented the dappled-light effect that he used so effectively throughout his career.
Dance at the Moulin de la Galette (see the color section), which was exhibited in the Third Impressionist Exhibition in 1877, is one of Renoir’s most celebrated masterpieces. The Moulin de la Galette was a Parisian dance hall in Montmartre, which was still a rural district in the 19th century. The Moulin’s specialty was pancakes (galettes) — thus, its name. Working-class people and artists mingled there at Sunday afternoon dances, one of which Renoir captured on his 1876 canvas. Several of Renoir’s regular models appear in the painting, and some of his close friends are seated at the table in the foreground. Sunlight filtering through the surrounding trees bathes the gay company in dappled light, lending a breezy look to the scene, which gives it both immediacy and the feeling of an unending summer.
What makes Dance at the Moulin de la Galette an Impressionist painting, besides the fact that Renoir painted it? It has a snapshot feel — a slice of life has been captured on canvas before the scene shifts. The dappled light on the faces and clothes, and the quick brushstrokes and sketchiness of the painting give Moulin de la Galette its distinctive Impressionistic look.
Impressionism’s midlife crisis: It may have hit Renoir hardest
Between 1881 and 1885, the whole Impressionist movement had a midlife crisis (art historians call it the “crisis of Impressionism”). Most of the artists felt that their early works were superficial — they had captured life’s glimmering surface but hadn’t probed its depths. The artists began to develop their styles independently of one another. Monet continued in the same direction, probing the nature of light and going deeper into mist and color. Pissarro moved away from intuitive Impressionism toward the scientific study of light with Seurat (see Chapter 20). Degas zoomed in on his subjects, making more intimate portraits, and showing less blurry Impressionistic backgrounds (see the following section). Manet, on the other hand, became more Impressionistic.
Initially, Renoir was pleased that Impressionism freed painting from meaning. He said, “I am at liberty to paint flowers and call them simply flowers.” But by 1881, he felt boxed in by the movement that had freed his brush. He said he’d “wrung it dry.” Like the other members of the group, Renoir wanted his art to grow up. Instead of focusing on fleeting moments, he wanted to make a lasting impression. So he went to Rome to absorb Renaissance and ancient Roman painting — art that had endured for centuries. He was particularly influenced by Raphael. Afterward, his figures became much more solid. But his backgrounds remained Impressionistic. Some critics have said his mature paintings look like Raphael’s work in Impressionist settings. The contrast between solid figures and soft, feathery backgrounds is the trademark of Renoir’s mature style.
The influence of Raphael (see Madonna with a Goldfinch in the appendix) is evident in Renoir’s The Bathers, painted between 1885 and 1887, and in Dance at Bougival, painted in 1883. The latter work shows the kind of cafés Renoir had always loved to paint, brimming with joi de vivre, but now the foreground dancers are sharply defined. The background, however, is still a poetic, Impressionist blur.
The dancers of Edgar Degas
Unlike Monet and Renoir, Edgar Degas (1834–1917) was classically trained, studying under a pupil of Ingres. His early works were historical paintings, inspired by the Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix (see Chapter 17).
After meeting the Impressionists in the late 1860s, Degas turned his attention to painting first horseracing events, then ballet and theater scenes. His most famous works are of ballerinas rehearsing, stretching, scratching, and occasionally dancing. Although he participated in all the Impressionistic Exhibitions between 1874 and 1880 and used many Impressionistic painting techniques, he rarely painted en plein air like his colleagues; Degas preferred the artificial light of the theater to natural lighting. But, like other Impressionists, his paintings look like snapshots of life’s passing moments.
But Degas’s snapshots aren’t as spontaneous as they appear. He made many preparatory sketches, testing different angles and ways of framing his subjects, before creating a painting. He said, “No art is less spontaneous than mine.”
After the crisis of Impressionism in the early 1880s, Degas’s style changed. He continued painting the same subjects, but he caught them in intimate close-ups and seemingly off-guard. He cut out most of the background to focus on the subject. Furthermore, he frames the women at odd angles, which makes the scenes seem a little wobbly, like an off-balance ballerina. Viewing the dancers from oblique angles gives the viewer the impression that he’s sneaking a peek at them around a corner. Degas said he wanted to depict “a human creature preoccupied with herself. . . . It’s as if you looked [at them] through a keyhole.”
Degas also began painting female nudes bathing, wringing out a sponge in a tub, drying off, and so on. Again, he uses the peering-through-a-keyhole approach. The bathers’ positions are completely naturalistic, as if the women didn’t know they were being painted. Often, the viewer can’t see their faces (see The Tub in the appendix).
In Blue Dancers (see the color section), Degas blends the background into a mosaic of soft colors: blues mingling with purples, glittering greens that look like sun-dappled leaves, rougelike pinks, and glowing golds. The dancers’ identities don’t matter. Their faces are either turned away from us or in shadow. This is a painting about interacting colors and forms. The subject of the painting (the dancers), though not secondary, is so interfused with the qualities of color and form that it can’t be separated from them. Like Monet and Cézanne (see Chapter 20), at this point of his career Degas was moving toward abstraction.
Morisot and Cassatt: The Female Impressionists
Painting was still a man’s world in the late 19th century. Even women of talent were discouraged from becoming artists. Those who did often put away their brushes after marriage to raise families. The French painter Berthe Morisot (1841–1895), who married Manet’s brother Eugéne in 1874, and the American Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) were exceptions. Berthe Morisot’s sister, Edma, was also a talented painter, but she quit art after marrying. Even Mary Cassatt temporarily gave up painting to take care of her ill sister. Morisot, on the other hand, had children but never stopped painting.
Cassatt, the daughter of a wealthy American businessman (who discouraged her from painting and refused to pay for her art supplies), helped introduce the United States to Impressionism. U.S. museums were the first to add Impressionist paintings to their collections. Also, Cassatt’s wealthy friends purchased Monets, Manets, Cézannes, and Cassatts for their private collections. Although the French public slowly learned to appreciate Impressionism, with Americans it was love at first sight.
Mary Cassatt
At the age of 16, Mary Cassatt began studying painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Unhappy with her chauvinistic professors, she set off for Paris after the Civil War to teach herself in the museums of Europe. In 1872, she met Camille Pissarro, who taught her Impressionism. Cassatt said Pissarro was such a great teacher that “he could have taught stones to draw correctly.” Cassatt is best known for her sensitive paintings of mothers and children, but she painted other subjects, too.
Cassatt fled France for the duration of the Franco-Prussian War and painted at home. One of the greatest paintings she did at this juncture is the unfinished Portrait of Mrs. Currey: Sketch of Mr. Cassatt. Mrs. Currey was the Cassatt family’s mulatto servant. The painting is a powerful character study and, whether intentional or not, a compelling portrait of late 19th-century society in the United States. The image of the warm, vivacious, and mysterious servant rises out of a sketchy, upside-down portrait of Cassatt’s father (he kept snoozing while posing for his portrait). The fact that the servant and master are connected at the neck adds a symbolist or surreal dimension to the painting. Each face seems to be a dream or nightmare of the other. The servant is higher on the social scale of the painting than the rich, but ghostly, businessman. When Mary Cassatt returned to France after what she considered a dreary sojourn in the States, she gave the unfinished painting to the servant rather than to her father.
Although Portrait of Mrs. Currey: Sketch of Mr. Cassatt is not one of Cassatt’s Impressionist works, the painting suggests that she was moving in an Impressionist direction before she began studying with Pissarro in 1872.
Berthe Morisot
Like Cassatt, Berthe Morisot’s main subjects were other women and sometimes children. Morisot added a feminine softness and a brooding sadness to the Impressionist oeuvre. Her paintings are as pretty as Renoir’s, but hardly as happy. There are no bustling cafés or summer dances. The women are often alone, their features more indistinct than in most other Impressionist paintings. Often, the viewer seems to be peering at the women through translucent glass. Most of the women seem weighed down by silent burdens. Their melancholy contrasts with the sun-drenched landscapes that Morisot often places them in. This contrast is evident even in some of her brightest canvases, such as Chasing Butterflies, in which a woman carrying a butterfly net searches wearily for a butterfly. Morisot paints a fine film of nostalgia or sadness over these scenes of innocence. Perhaps that fine film was Morisot’s own sadness.
Morisot takes the viewer to a dance in At the Ball (see Figure 19-2), but she doesn’t show us anyone dancing. Instead, she focuses on a lovely young woman holding a gorgeous fan and waiting to be invited onto the floor. The woman can’t do the asking — women, regardless of social class, had to play the role men assigned to them. Fortunately, Morisot was an exception and carved her own destiny.
|
Figure 19-2: At the Ball paints a poignant picture of womanhood in the 19th century. |
|
Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY