Chapter 20
Making Their Own Impression: The Post-Impressionists
In This Chapter
Understanding Post-Impressionism
Reading between the brushstrokes
Scoping out Symbolist sculpture
Impressionism’s loose approach freed the next generation of artists to be even more experimental with color, form, and subject matter. The Post-Impressionists didn’t rebel against Impressionism as the Realists had rebelled against Romanticism and Neoclassicism. They simply extended Impressionism in new directions.
You’ve Got a Point: Pointillism and Georges-Pierre Seurat
Georges-Pierre Seurat (1859–1891) felt that Impressionism was too intuitive. He wanted to explore the nature of color and light scientifically and apply it to his art. Through his studies, he developed the style of Pointillism (a.k.a. Neo-Impressionism or Divisionism), constructing a painting out of dots of color. I discuss Seurat’s technique and the color theory behind it in Chapter 29, but the basic idea is that a grid of closely spaced colored dots expands into a fuller bouquet of hues when seen by the eye.
Seurat’s scientific system of painting attracted other artists, including the Impressionist Camille Pissarro, as well as Paul Signac, Henri-Edmond Cross, and Maximilien Luce.
One of Seurat’s greatest paintings is The Circus (see Figure 20-1), painted the year he died. The dots give it an airy lightness, but also a static feel (perhaps because the grid of dots has a vague resemblance to television noise). Seurat said his goal was to “Make modern people . . . move about as if on friezes, and place them on canvases organized by harmonies of color, by directions of the tones in harmony with the lines, and by the directions of the lines.”
The limited color palette — red, brown, yellow, blue, and white — distributed evenly in The Circus enhances the feeling of rigidness. But the leaping acrobats and arabesque shapes energize the painting. Surprisingly, the animation and rigidity don’t neutralize each other — instead, they reinforce one another. The painting has a stop-action feel, like a carrousel frozen in the middle of a spin. Critics had claimed that early Impressionism amounted to a “tyranny of the eye,” in which artists stopped arranging and making choices, and just recorded as fast as possible the impression they saw. Seurat and other Pointillists protected themselves from this charge by using geometric shapes and stylish lines to highlight the artificiality of their scenes. In The Circus, the clown’s sweeping cape seems to set off all the other curves and swoops that give the scene a swirling sense of energy. The application of color also shows great planning and thought. The broken brushstrokes of Monet and Renoir give way to countless dots of brilliant color painstakingly organized into a harmonious whole.
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Figure 20-1: The Circus is an example of Seurat’s scientific approach to painting: Pointillism. |
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Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY
Red-Light Art: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) was a master at delineating character in nightlife scenes: cabarets, circuses, bars, and brothels. Artificial lights gleam revealingly on the faces and bodies of the characters he paints, exposing lines and details that sunlight would hide.
Toulouse-Lautrec was also a highly gifted caricaturist and lithographer. The stylized posters he made for cabarets are works of high art themselves. Everything Toulouse-Lautrec touched turned to art. His stunted legs, which made him look dwarflike, kept much of life out of his reach. Art brought the world to him. Even when he was drinking at a cabaret (one of his favorite pastimes), he sketched the people with whom he chatted and laughed. The next morning, he’d transform the best sketches into paintings.
Many of his paintings could be called high-end caricatures. But instead of looking like caricatures drawn by an artist, the people in the paintings make caricatures of themselves. Often they appear to be wearing a mask. Or perhaps their faces are masks, figuratively speaking. He spotlights some of the characters in At the Moulin Rouge to suggest that they’re always on stage, that their lives are an act.
At the Moulin Rouge depicts Montmartre nightlife in the 1890s as an ongoing cabaret. First, you notice the flaming-red lipstick and pasty faces. Then you notice the top-hatted men surrounding a hard-faced procuress and an orange-haired prostitute. As your eyes sink into the picture, you see that even the background figures are more than local color. Each person has a distinct personality. Toulouse-Lautrec was a Montmartre fixture, so he included himself in the painting; he’s the little guy in the bowler hat standing beside the tallest man in the bar.
Toulouse-Lautrec liked to place his subjects in environments that made them uncomfortable (perhaps that’s why he placed himself next to the tall guy). Their awkwardness helped to unmask them. In such settings, the artist could sum up any character with a few well-chosen lines.
Tracking the “Noble Savage”: Paul Gauguin
Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) was inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s back- to-Eden philosophy: “Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.”
Gauguin tried to return to a primitive state through art and to find the proverbial “noble savage” or natural person. He said everything in Europe is “artificial and conventional. . . . In order to do something new we must go back to the source, to humanity in its infancy.” Eventually, his quest to shed civilization and become a noble savage took him to Tahiti. But first he sought primitivism in rural France.
Brittany paintings
In 1886, Gauguin moved to Pont-Aven, Brittany, hoping to find primitivism among the ancestors of the ancient Celts (the Bretons). Instead, he found that even the rural Bretons were socialized.
Gauguin, who had studied under Pissarro and began his painting career as an Impressionist, abandoned Impressionism in Brittany. He created a new movement called Synthetism (also known as Symbolism) by building on Cloisonnism, a style invented by his friend Émile Bernard and Louis Anquetin in about 1887. In Cloisonnism, large patches of vivid color are painted on the canvas and then bordered by thick, black lines like in stained-glass windows, except each patch is one color, with a minimum of shading.
Gauguin used Cloisonnism in his turning-point painting The Vision after the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel). In this mystical work, praying Breton women, some with eyes shut, envision the holy wrestling match between Jacob and the angel, which their priest has just described to them in church. The battle takes places on an otherworldly red carpet spread over the landscape (in one large color patch), around which the women gather like sports spectators. The color units that make up this painting are as separate as puzzle pieces or the patches of a quilt.
The psychological side of the painting is even more revolutionary than the technique. Gauguin weds two worlds in one work: the physical reality (the women in their Breton dresses) and the psychological reality (a picture of the women’s collective vision). In a letter to Vincent van Gogh, Gauguin said, “I believe I have achieved in these figures a great rustic and superstitious simplicity.” He had, in fact, discovered a way to reveal the inmost, unfiltered thoughts of people. By using flattened perspective and Cloisonnism, he was able to harmoniously splice people’s inner visions with the world around them. Gauguin took his discovery even further in Tahiti, for which he set sail in 1891, having sold most of his paintings to fund the trip.
Tahiti paintings
Tahiti didn’t fulfill Gauguin’s dream of finding the “noble savage.” When he arrived, he discovered that thousands of European expatriates had already turned the island into an extension of Europe.
But in his work, Gauguin was able to use the contrast between what he’d hoped for and what he found. He juxtaposed the two realities, making them confront each other on adjacent picture planes. Often, he placed a primitive scene in the foreground and images or symbols of the civilized world in the background, and then flattened the painting (eliminating perspective and most shading) so the background would encroach on the foreground, peer over its shoulder, and infect it.
Sometimes these back-to-back planes contrast primitive innocence and jaded civilization, as in Savage Tales (1902), which exudes mystery, suspense, and exotic danger. Two seated, nearly naked Tahitian girls dominate the foreground. They look about suspiciously, but in the wrong direction. Behind them (in the claustrophobic, looking-over-your-shoulder background), a demonic, green-eyed man in a blue gown contemplates the girls. Gauguin gave this demon hot-red hair, cloven feet, and the face of his friend Meijer de Haan. Perhaps Meijer de Haan is Gauguin’s alter ego, at least in the painting. Ironically, Gauguin felt that plunging into the savage side of man’s nature (acting like the demonic man) was a way of purging the degenerative effects of civilization. He said, “To me barbarism is a rejuvenation.”
Gauguin’s manipulation of traditional perspective and his expressive use of color had a major influence on late-19th- and early-20th-century art movements, especially Fauvism and Expressionism (see Chapter 21) and the Nabis (Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, and Paul Sérusier, who called Gauguin their spiritual father). Also, in 1901, Picasso encountered several Gauguin paintings at a friend’s house, and they inspired him to launch into his Blue Period (see Chapter 21).
The Fauves (see Chapter 21) were influenced by Gauguin’s loud colors and shocking color contrasts: chartreuse next to blues, hot reds, oranges, and yellows that often seem to burn each other.
Painting Energy: Vincent van Gogh
The Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) only painted for ten years, from 1880 until his death in 1890. But in that time, he produced over a thousand paintings, 70 of them in the last 70 days of his life. (Feeling like a slacker in comparison? Me, too.) Van Gogh was driven by a spiritual quest to create art. Even though he is said to have only sold one painting in his lifetime — and that one was sold toward the end of his life — nothing could douse the fire of his drive.
He trained to be a preacher, but his superiors fired him for being too committed. His empathy for the poor miners in his parish (he provided them with blankets and cared for them when they were ill, for example) was viewed as too unconventional. In despair, van Gogh turned to art, channeling the same commitment into teaching himself to draw and paint. Within a year, he wrote joyfully to his brother Theo, telling him that he’d at last found a vocation in which he could do his fellow man some good.
Some of van Gogh’s early paintings are of Belgium coal miners from the region where he had preached. The Potato Eaters shows a humble mining family eating their spare diet of potatoes. The shacks that mining families lived in were often supplied by the mining companies that exploited their labor. This painting inspired the Expressionist painters of the early decades of the 20th century because form (the miners’ faces and bodies) takes a backseat to expression. The miners’ feelings are so strong that they distort their careworn faces and speak through their exhausted bodies. In a letter about the painting to Theo, Vincent van Gogh said, “If a peasant painting smells of bacon, smoke, potato steam, fine — that’s not unhealthy . . . a painting of peasant life should not be perfumed.”
In his early career, van Gogh copied paintings by the French Realist painter Jean-François Millet, a member of the Barbizon school (see Chapter 18). Van Gogh believed that Millet had come closer to capturing the spiritual essence of landscapes than the Impressionists.
But van Gogh read into the landscapes that he painted even more than Millet had. For van Gogh, nature brims with a turbulent, underlying spiritual force. Sometimes in his eagerness to get at this force (or free it from the material forms that restrain it), van Gogh made the scenery swirl and rage like a stormy sea. At other times, perhaps when van Gogh’s mind was more at peace, he produced paintings filled with a religious light that appears to radiate out of the landscape, as in The Sower (see the color section). In this painting, the sun rays are as richly textured as the golden wheat field that it sinks into. They seem part and parcel of the same elemental glory, as does the laborer who is haloed by the radiant landscape. In van Gogh’s view, the humble sower gives life by feeding us. For more on van Gogh’s style, see Chapter 29.
Love Cast in Stone: Rodin and Claudel
Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) is often said to be the greatest sculptor since Michelangelo and is often called his equal. Like Michelangelo, Rodin made every part of the body speak in his sculptures. Other people think that Rodin couldn’t have achieved the level of fame he did without his assistant and lover, Camille Claudel (1864–1943). They contend that he not only found inspiration in Claudel’s muse-like support and love, but also assimilated or stole many of her ideas and that she carved parts of his sculptures. It’s possible.
Rodin and Claudel’s collaboration lasted 15 years, and Claudel, who began as Rodin’s student, became a great sculptor in her own right. Comparison of their independent and collaborative work indicates that they did swap creative ideas — and maybe more. After Rodin rejected her in 1898, Claudel pursued an independent career — but it was a career cut short by mad- ness and a growing sense of persecution, possibly triggered by Rodin’s rejection.
Auguste Rodin
Both Rodin and Claudel are sometimes classified as Symbolists, though Rodin didn’t like the label. Rodin’s most famous works are The Thinker (see Figure 20-2), The Kiss, The Monument to the Burghers of Calais, The Monument to Balzac, The Age of Bronze, and the unfinished The Gates of Hell. The Thinker was originally intended to be a small statue made to fit at the top of the doorframe of The Gates of Hell. Rodin decided to take The Thinker out of Hell (after all, the Inferno is no place for contemplation) and make him a full-size statue and a man of this world.
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Figure 20-2: Rodin’s The Thinker is probably the most celebrated statue since Michel-angelo’s David. |
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Vanni / Art Resource, NY
The Thinker became so down-to-earth that he showed up in American living rooms once a week during the late 1950s and early 1960s. The popular TV sitcom The Many Loves of Doby Gillis opened with Doby ruminating beside The Thinker. Doby always adopted The Thinker’s pose. But Doby was a comic — The Thinker isn’t. In fact, the figure looks stressed. Rodin understood the relationship between mental stress and the body long before the adverse affects of stress on the body were discovered in the 1920s. Rodin’s Thinker thinks with his whole body. You can see his thoughts in his muscles and tendons. Rodin, who said “Every part of the human figure is expressive,” made The Thinker’s mind as naked as his flesh.
But who is The Thinker, and what’s he thinking so hard about? The Thinker represents everyone, pondering the meaning of life or how we’re going to pay a bill or meet a deadline. Maybe he’s wondering what he’s going to have for lunch. In any case, his whole body is wondering with him.
The Kiss also grew out of The Gates of Hell. Perhaps Rodin decided that the couple’s kiss was too tender for hell — better to let them smooch aboveground. Rodin anchors their bodies to a hard rock which helps to soften their smooth marble flesh by contrast. The fact that the couple is glued to the stone, unable to progress to the next stage of passion, makes The Kiss even more poignant. The lovers can never achieve complete fulfillment. Their yearning is eternal (which may be why Rodin originally planned to stick them in hell). Today the statue has become a universal symbol for sensual love. Rodin completed The Kiss the year he broke up with Camille Claudel.
Camille Claudel
Claudel’s Vertumnus and Pomona, carved in 1905, is based on the Roman myth of the wood nymph Pomona, who was immune to love. (The poet Ovid recounts the story in his Metamorphosis.) Pomona only loved her job, pruning fruit trees and grafting new branches on old trees. In the sculpture, she’s surely a stand-in for Claudel — Pomona’s pruning knife representing Claudel’s sculpting tools (chisels and rasps). With her knife, Pomona helps trees grow and bear fruit; with her chisel, Claudel brings stone to life.
Vertumnus (who represents Rodin), the god of orchards, seasons, and changes, falls in love with Pomona. At first she’s cold, so Vertumnus works on her. As the god of changes, he’s a master of disguises. He sneaks into her presence by posing as a fellow tree pruner, and then as an old woman. The old woman teaches the virginal Pomona that men and women must graft together like the trees to produce fruit. At that moment, the old woman transforms into Vertumnus, and Pomona melts with desire. In Claudel’s stone version of the myth, the slender lovers embrace and Pomona leans her cheek on Vertumnus as if grafting herself onto him. This poignant portrait of love, carved eight years after their breakup, suggests that Claudel’s love for Rodin never waned. She had grafted herself onto him and couldn’t live sanely without him.
The Mask behind the Face: James Ensor
The Belgian artist James Ensor (1860–1949) is one of the founders of Les XX (The Twenty), a Belgium-based international movement that linked all the arts to create a united front against bourgeois values. The group staged international exhibitions that featured not only their own works but paintings by the American painters John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler, French artists Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne, and many others. Les XX also hosted readings by great Symbolist poets like Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine, as well as musical performances to celebrate composers they felt in tune with like Claude Debussy and Gabriel Fauré.
One of Ensor’s most famous and challenging paintings is Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889. He painted the work in 1888; it was intended to be a mock prophecy, a schedule for the Second Coming. The thick crowd of the faithful carries Jesus through the streets like a trophy. In medieval religious processions, people shouldered images of Jesus or saints through densely crowded streets, but in a spirit of reverence. Here the entire mob is dressed for a masquerade. But the masks appear to be their real faces. Perhaps it’s their faith that’s a masquerade. The red banner over the crowd states “Vive La Sociale,” which translates to “Long live the welfare state.” On the right, someone holds up a red sign that translates, “Long live Jesus, king of Brussels.”
The Hills Are Alive with Geometry: Paul Cézanne
Like Gauguin, Cézanne (1839–1906) began as an Impressionist, or maybe a pseudo-Impressionist. He exhibited in the first and third Independent Exhibitions of Impressionist Painters (see Chapter 19), but early on he believed that Impressionist paintings were too airy and superficial. He said, “I wanted to make of Impressionism something solid and enduring, like the art in museums.” Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas developed the same view after the Impressionist “Crisis” in the 1880s (see Chapter 19). Instead of fleeting, light-as-air impressions, Cézanne chose to make forms look solid; he did this by rendering them with thick slabs of color instead of flecks of paint. Also, he wasn’t interesting in chasing motion with quick flicks of his brush, but in painting solid things anchored firmly to the ground.
Cézanne’s solidness was based on geometry. He believed that everything is built on fundamental geometric forms: cylinders, cubes, cones. His goal was to break down objects and people into their underlying geometry (a goal that Picasso would share a few years later).
Although Cézanne gave Mont Sainte-Victoire (1902–04) a pale, watercolor appearance, it still has a solid feel. The color patches on the ground in front of the mountain look like small cubes of color. The mountain, too, appears to be comprised of blue and green crystal cubes. Cézanne repeated the color palette of the mountain in the sky, but with bigger color slabs. By repeating and interweaving yellows and greens (analogous colors) on the ground and blues and purples in the mountain and sky, Cézanne created color harmonies that seem like the visual equivalent of music. Speaking of repetition, Cézanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire more than 60 times between 1870 and 1906, the year of his death. Mont Sainte-Victoire (1902–04) (shown in Figure 20-3) is one of the last versions of the mountain he painted.
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Figure 20-3: Cézanne’s favorite model was a mountain called Mont Sainte-Victoire, located near Aix-en-Provence where the artist was born and died. |
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The Philadelphia Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY
Art Nouveau: When Art and Technology Eloped
Art Nouveau (New Art) grew out of a combination of influences:
William Morris’s Arts and Crafts Movement (see Chapter 18)
Flat, colorful, and stylized Japanese prints that appeared in Europe in the mid-19th century
Symbolism
The biggest names in Art Nouveau were
Henry Van de Velde, a Belgian architect
Victor Horta, a Belgian architect
Hector Guimard, a French architect and furniture designer
Émile Gallé, a French glassmaker and cabinetmaker
Louis Comfort Tiffany, an American stained-glass maker
Van de Velde and Horta seem to have invented Art Nouveau, which was originally called le style Belge (the Belgian style).
Art Nouveau wasn’t a painting style, but a decorative-arts, architecture, and graphic-arts (poster) style. From Belgium, it spread like a fashion craze across Europe and the United States in the 1890s. The movement endured until about 1915.
The Nouveau look is a confection of exotic yet natural curves: graceful arabesques; undulating, organic lines; twisting tendrils and flowers; and curvaceous female forms. Symmetry is an Art Nouveau no-no. Art Nouveau artists always take their designs from nature and then stylize them. The left and right sides of a design shouldn’t match, but they should blend as gracefully as climbing ivy.
The products that modern technology churned out in the 1890s worked well, but they weren’t pretty. The goal of Art Nouveau was to prettify them, transform blasé functional products — from staircases to teacups — into high art. These objects didn’t merely get facelifts. Industrial Age products were naturalized (that is, they were given flowing, organic shapes).
Nouveau artists also strived to raise the status of the decorative arts. “Decorative art should be everywhere” was the movement’s guiding principle. This Art Nouveau agenda was carried out with mind-boggling efficiency all across Europe, transforming everything it touched. It spread from Horta and Van de Velde’s architecture in Belgium to the Paris subway stations (Hector Guimard made some Métro entrances into Art Nouveau monuments) and Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) public toilets in Vienna (see Figure 20-4). The whole world was becoming beautiful.
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Figure 20-4: Wilhelm Beetz designed the Jugendstil underground toilet in Vienna’s first district. |
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Andreas Ceska
Fairy-Tale Fancies and the Sand-Castle Cathedral of Barcelona: Antoni Gaudí
Whether the playfully organic style of Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926) is Art Nouveau or not is debatable. Gaudi is hard to fit in one art-history box; part of him always slips out. In any case, Gaudí’s aversion to squares and symmetry and his love for the fanciful and organic is apparent in all his architecture, from Casa Milà and Casa Batlló (see Figure 20-5) in downtown Barcelona to his unfinished cathedral La Sagrada de Familia, which looks like a melting sand castle with soaring Neo-Gothic spires capped by colorful treetop ornaments.
The moment you enter Casa Batlló you can see why many people call Gaudí’s idiosyncratic style Art Nouveau. Your eyes are greeted by stairwells that look like wooden waves rolling down the steps, doors with curved windows and panels cut into them, and sculpted bulges that make the woodwork appear to be breathing. The off-white, wave-shaped domed ceilings look like the inside of mushrooms. But Art Nouveau is a surface art — it doesn’t penetrate to architectural structures. With Gaudí, on the other hand, organic lines and shapes are more than window dressing — they’re the essence of his structures that seem to grow artfully out of the landscape. As you wander through Casa Batlló or Casa Milà, the spaces around you seem to flow with you.
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Figure 20-5: Gaudí’s Casa Batlló is a five-story archi-tectural wonderland. |
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Courtesy of Spanish National Tourist Office
Throughout most of his professional life, Gaudí also worked on the cathedral La Sagrada Familia, the splendor and spiritual heart of Barcelona. The structure was incomplete at the time of his death in 1926.