Impressionism – Landscape of Pleasure (1870 -1880)

One of the purposes of art is to reconc­ile us with the world; this is done thru our contemplation with nature. Artists have offered us a glimpse of the universe, of nature and it is full of meaning. (Watteau) In the past, this pleasure belonged to aristocracy. People gathered in the open air, in nature formally dressed or nude. The poor labored in the fields. Man is the presence of nature..it’s opposition. But nature was now friendly. (Manet) After the French revolution there was a new class..the bourgeoisie (the middle class, typically with reference to its perceived materialistic values or conventional attitudes.)

They wanted to show how they lived, and painting could document and celebrate that.

The first Impressionist exhibition was in 1874. They were many different artists who saw the world in very different ways but they had things in common: it was the feeling that the life of the city and villages, the cafes and the salons and the boulevards and the sea sides could become a vision of Eden, an untroubled sense of beauty and wholeness.

Younger artists were challenging impressionist’s love of spontaneity. To the impressionists, “view” was one thing at a given moment in time, the effect of light and color that was fleeting. a landscape painting should only have take as long to paint it as it took to see it. No rules or systems..just what the eye could see and the brush strokes used. It was popular because of that…it was accessible to everyone.

The greatest painter among the impressionists was Georges Seurat. He was prodigy; he was only 32 when he died. Few artists find their style so young. His style was based on the dot. The other painters of this time used brush strokes, fat and thin, streaky, thick, always unpredictable but Seurat wanted something more stable. His style had to do with the ideas of molecules and particles, with color analysis and visual perception, that color was matter of interaction. His style was called Pointillism. It was suited to calm subject matter better than agitated. It was best suited to landscape.

Port of Gravelines Channel looks simple but it relied on an underlying system. It is the analysis of light and the subtle yet purposeful use of color.

A Sunday afternoon on the island …very large painting 10 by 70 feet! He wanted to paint modern life, arranged in harmonies of light, colors and lines. There are elements that are linked and repeated; the monkey’s tail and the dandy’s cane. Some of the figures are repeated. His figures are like toys and are mechanical. His saw the world in a modern way, he had analytical awareness, the subject had to be broken down.

Claude Monet would come to the same conclusions but by a different route. He then started to paint the same motif over and over again. He got this idea from Japanese prints, which were very popular in Paris. In 1891 he exhibited 15 views of his haystacks. They were shapeless but were receptacles of light. They were painted at different times of the day in different weathers. Monet went on to paint gothic cathedrals as if they were haystacks. He made 20 paintings of the same façade, under different conditions of light. They were drippy like ice cream, they were incrusted with paint. The act of seeing the view was important not just the view. It should never be fixed….always changing like the minutes and hours of the day. The garden and its pond were another subject matter that he would focus his attention. He could control the paintings and the subject matter…he built the garden and it’s ponds and created this living subject. The paintings themselves were flat, like a skin. Monet merged the foreground and the background. They were infinite and were the beginning of modernism.

Cezanne spent most of his life in the south of France, as a recluse, he hated to theorize about his work, never wrote letters but is one of the rare artists who influenced everyone. (Especially the cubists..more to come.) His apples are solid. He painted landscapes, urban scenes, portraits and intimate domestic scenes, where the backgrounds, colors and painting style usually took precedence over the subject.

Besides Van Gogh, the artist who introduced the idea of symbolic color was Paul Gauguin. He was a banker and gave up his career to paint. He traveled around France and then escaped to Tahiti. (He was also a close friend to Picasso) He embraced the fantasy of the Noble Savage. He wanted his paintings to be moral fables. It was not his subjects but his colors that pointed to the future. They were brilliant, moody and intense. His colors were symbolic and were full of feeling and emotion.

Color was the sign of vitality, of well being and energy. What came out of those ideas was Fauvism . It means Wild Beast. This movement only lasted 3 years but produced significant painters: Matisse, Derain, Dufy, Braque and Vlaminck. They used bright colors, distorted drawing, and crude surfaces. Derain’s Turning Road was an all out assault on the senses 100 years ago. German expressionism would follow. But in southern France the work was optimistic and sensual and the color had spirit. Fauvism was the first avant garde art movement of the 20th Century and started from the idea of the Impressionism not to paint what the painter sees, but to use colors to express a feeling or impression.

Matisse liberated color. He was born in 1869 and died in 1954. He lived through wars and political trauma but never made reference to that in any of his paintings. He produced works of comfort, refuge and balance. There is no conflict, which existed, in so much modern art. He did not violently reject the past; his work was grounded in tradition. In The Open Window his color broke free. It was distorted and keyed up, all the elements are heightened. People were offended by this discordant color.

Matisse painted 2 murals for a Russian businessman; The Dance and Music. MUSIC is primitive and un-settling, five naked pre-historic men, it is long way from the musicians of the day. They are primative and their instruments are too. He has included the elements of earth, sky and body and the color has a riveting presence. The DANCE is the image of physical ecstasy. The figures are reminiscent of Greek vases, they represent motion as ancient as dance itself. Matisse loved pattern, he reproduced tapestries, embroideries, awnings and bright clutter. He loved Islamic patterns.
In RED STUDIO he wants to bring you into the painting, to make you fall into it, but it is flat. The color is beyond ordinary experience. There are patterns and possible windows, openings to more flat spaces. The painting refers to itself. Matisse said that he wanted his art to have the effect of a good armchair on a tired businessman. His paintings are interiors and come from a place of security.

The Nabis (a title taken from the Hebrew and Arabic term for “prophets”) were a Symbolist art cult founded by Serusier, consisting of artists he met while studying at the Academie Julian in the late 1880s, including Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Edouard Vuillard, and Felix Vallotton.
Their central tenets were more conceptual than standardized; Serusier felt that artists could serve as “high priests” and “seers” of invisible truth.[MOU9] It followed that member’s styles were fairly divergent from one another, while sharing a few important similarities—harmonious formal elements, for instance, and a dedication to the revitalization of painting as an art form, which they viewed as having been diluted by their somewhat fluffy Impressionist predecessors.

Small natural scenes of domestic life stirred Bonnard. Very mundane but some quite intimate parts of our lives. He was known especially for the stylized decorative qualities of his paintings and his bold use of color. He painted landscapes, urban scenes, portraits and intimate domestic scenes, where the backgrounds, colors and painting style usually took precedence over the subject.