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I of Impressionism that the English critic Roger Fry, who ways that could only distress a Europe imbued with the
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was among the first to take a comprehensive look at these nineteenth-century p<;:>sitivist belief in ever-accelerating
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developments, could do no better than sum them up) in progress driven by sdence and industry. Change was rapid
!I:, 1910, with the vague designation "Post-Irnpressionisml; indeed at this time, but not always progressive. As indus
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The inadequacy of the term is borne out by the fact that, trial waste combined with expanding cqmmerce to destroy
unlike Impressionism) it did not become widely used untlil tl1e unspoiled rivers and meadows so often painted by
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;' , a quarter-century after the first appearance of the artistic Monet, the master withdrew ever deeper into his "harem
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phenomena it purported to describe. Among other things, of flowers" at Giverny, a "natural" world of his own cre
it implies that Impressionism was itself a homogeneous ation that was inextricably bound up with his late painting.
style, when in fact it covered a highly diverse range of _As rising socioeconomic expectations throughout industri
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artistic sensibilities. In reality, the Post-Impressionists were alized Europe met witl1 conservative backlash, the clash of
schooled in Impressionism and many of them continued to ideologies brought anarchist violence. As scientists broke
respect its exponents and share much of their outlook. down the theories of classical science, a new physics, chem
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I ', !:_!i, cezanne, fqr example, who could not abide the paintings istry, and psychology emerged. The radical philosopher
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of Paul Gauguin, always admired the work of Monet. Friedrich Nietzsche announced the death of God and
Gauguin, on the other hand, learned to paint in part from sharply criticized the moral outlook associated with tradi
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the Impressionist Pissarro and, like most of those in his cir tional religion. This in turn provoked new debates con
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cle, came to regard cezarme as an almost legendary figure, cerning the role of religion and religion-inspired morality.
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even collecting his paintings. Yet both artists are considered The most advanced artists of the period found little to sat
key Post-Impressionists. Despite its shortcomings as a term, isfy their needs in the optimistic utilitarianism that had
! Post-Impressionism has become a convenient label for an dominated Western civilization since the Enlightenment in
I,I innovative group of artists working in France in the late the eighteenth century. Gradually, tl1erefore, they aban
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And it does high doned the Realist tradition of Daumier, Courbet, ar1d
I' light the one element that Seurat, Cezanne, Gauguin, and Manet (see chapter 2) that had opened such a rich vein of
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Van Gogh all had in common-their determination to aesthetic exploration, culminating in the Impressionism of
'I artists set about organizing their independent exhibitions. more shocking than Impressionism in their violation of
Renoir, Monet, and Degas, as we have seen, were all be both academic principles and the polished illusionism
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.i' ' ginning to reconsider their painting in the light of their
own altered consciousness. The- Impressionists were far
desired by eyes now thoroughly under the spell of photo
graphy. And so, just as Monet and Renoir were beginning
I from mindless or uncritical portrayers of bourgeois ease to enjoy a measure of critical and financial success, tl1e
I and pastoral pleasures, as they_ have sometimes been called; emerging painters who inspired the term Post-Impressionist
these artists were all vibrantly in tune with their times and reopened the gap-wider now than ever before-that
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3.1 Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande)affe, 1 884-86. Oil on canvas, 6'9W X 1 0' 1 !4' 12.1 X 3 . 1 m).
The Art Institute of Chicago.
separated the world of avant-garde art from that of society of the critics Charles Blanc and David Sutter, and the sci-
at large. W hatever their differences, the Post-Impressionists '" eutific treatises of Michel-Eugene Chevreul, Ogden Rood,
all brought heightened tension and excitement to art by and Charles Henry. These researches in optics, aesthetics,
reweighting their values in favor of the ideal or romantic and color theory studied, among other phenomena, the
over the real, of symbol over sight, of the conceptual over ways in which colors affect one another when placed side
the perceptuaL Less and less were perception and its trans by side. According to Chevreul, for example, each color
lation into art seen as an end unto themselves; rather, they will impose its own complementary on its neighbor: if red
became a means toward the lmowledge of form in the serv is placed next to blue, the red will cast a green tint on the
ice of expressive content. In arriving at the antinaturalism blue, altering it to a greenish blue,1 while the blue imposes
that followed, artists depended upon and counterbalanced a pale orange on the red. Although the rational, scientific
the dualities of mind and spirit, thought and emotion. basis for such theories appealed to Seurat, he was no cold,
methodical theorist. His highly personal form of expression
The Poetic Science of Color: evolved through careful experiments with his craft.
Working with his younger friend Paul Signac he sought to
Seurat and the Nee-Impressionists
combine the color experiments of the Impressionists with
Trained in the academic tradition of the Paris :Ecole des the classical structure inherited from the Renaissance,
Beaux-Arts, Georges Seurat (1859-91) was a devotee of employing the latest concepts of pictorial space, traditional
classical Greek sculpture and of such classical masters as illusionistic perspective depth, and recent scientific discov
Piero della Franccsca (see fig. 1.3), Poussin, and Ingres (see eries in the perception of color and light.
fig. 1.13). He also studied the drawings of Hans Holbein, It is astonishing that Seurat produced such a body of
Rembrandt, and Millet, and learned principles of mural masterpieces in so short a life (he died at thirty-one in a
design from the academic Symbolist Pierre Puvis de diphtheria epidemic). f-Iis greatest work, and one: of the
Chavannes (sec fig. 3.13). He early became fascinated by landmarks of modern art, is A Sunday Afternoon on the
theories and prin_ciples of color organization, which he Island ofLa GrandeJatte (fig. 3.1). Known as La Grande
studied in the writings and paintings ofDelacroix, the texts Jatte) it was the most notorious painting shown in the ast
CHAPTER 3 : POST-IMPRESSIONISM 47
of the eight Impressionist exhibitions, in 1886. Seurat complementary colors-red and green, violet and yellow,
worked for over a year on tllls monumental painting, blue and orange,...a
.-- nd with white. Various names have
preparing it with twenty-seven preliminary drawings (fig. been given to Seurat's method, including Divisionism
3.2) and d1irty color sketches. Seurat's hauntiugly beauti (Semat's own term)) Pointillism, and Nco-Impressionism.
ful cont6 crayon drawings reveal his interest in masters <?f Despite their apparent uniformity overall, on close inspec
black and white from Rembrandt to Goya. He avoided tion the "dots" vary gready in size and shape and are laid
lines to define contours and depended instead on shading down over areas where color has been brushed in more
to achieve soft, penumbral effects. In the preparatory broadly. The intricate mosaic produced by Seurat's
works for La Grandf ]atte, ranging from studies of indi painstaldng technique is analogous to the actual medium of
vidual figures to oils iliat laid in most of ilie final composi mosaic; its glowing depth of luminosity gives an added
tion, Seurat analyzed, in meticulous detail, evety color dimension to color experience. Unfortunately, some of the
relationship and every aspect of pictorial space. His unique pigments he used were unstable, and in less than a decade
color system was based on the Impressionists' intuitive oranges had turned to brown and brilliant emerald green
realization tlu1.t all nature was color, not neutral tone. But had dulled to olive, reducing somewhat ilie original chro
the Impressionist painters had generally made no organ matic impact of the painting.
ized, scientific effort to achieve their remarkable optical In La Grande ]atte Seurat began wiili a simple contem
effects. Their technique involved the placement of pure, , porary scene of middle-class Parisians relaxing along the
unblended colors in close conjunction on the canvas, which banks of d1e Seine River. What drew him most strongly
are actually perceived by ilie eye as glowing, vibratiug pat to the particular scene, perhaps, was the manner in which
terns of mixed color. This effect appears in many paintings ilie figures could be arranged in diminishing perspective
by Monet, as anyone realizes who has stood close to one of along ilie banks of d1e river, although delightful inconsis
his works, first experiencing it simply as a pattern of dis tencies in scale abound throughout the composition. At
crete color strokes, and then moving gradually away from;t,, this point in the picture's evolution the artist was con
it to observe all the elements of the scene come into focus. cerned as much with the recreation of a fifteenth-century
Building on Impressionism and scientific studies of opti-:' exercise in linear perspective as with the creation of a uni
cal phenomena, Seurat constructed his canvases with an :fYing pattern of smface color dots. Broad contrasting areas
overall pattem of small, dodike brushsttokes of generally of shadow and light, each built of a thousand minute
strokes of juxtaposed color-dot complementaries, carry d1e
eye from ilie fOreground into the beautifully realized back
ground. Certainly, Seurat was here attempting to reconcile
the classical tradition of Renaissance perspective painting
with a modern interest in light, color, and pattern. The
immense size of the canvas gives it something of the impact
of a Renaissance fresco, and is especially dramatic since it is
composed of brushstrokes smaller than a pea. The paint
ing's scale also shows avant-garde art asserting its status
relative to the academic tradition (and thus, paradoxically,
developing a new "grand tradition" of its own).
More important in the painting than depth or surface
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pattern is the 1nagical atmosphere that the artist was able
to create :fiom the abstract patterns of the figures. The art
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i historian Meyer Schapiro notes that Semat depicts "a soci
ety at rest and, in accord wid1 his own art, it is a society that
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enjoys the world in pure contemplation and calm." Seurat's
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figures are like iliose of a mural by Piero della Francesca
in ilieir quality of mystery and of isolation. By placing the
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'I' producing a static atmosphere critics have often described
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as "Egyptian." In the accumulation of commonplace
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anticipate not only the abstraction of Piet Mondrian but
" 3.2 Georges Seurot, The Couple, study for La Grande Jaffe,
I! 1 884. Conte crayon on paper, 1 2Y.: X 9Y.:" [31. 1 X 23.5 em). also the strange Surrealist stillness and space of Giorgio
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The British Museum, London. de Chirico and Rene Magritte (see fig. 15.31). The most
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48 CHAPTER 3 o POST-IMPRESSIONISM
Grande ]atte) and he probably painted the wooden fiame
armmd the work as well. Van Gogh and Gauguin also
expressed interest in the way their works were framed, pre
ferring solutions much simpler than the ornate, gilded
frames usually placed on their paintings.
Seurat's chief colleague and disciple was Paul Signac
(1863-1935), who strictly followed the precepts of Nco
Impressionism in his landscapes and portraits. Lil(e his
colleagues, Signac regarded his revolutionary artistic style
as a form of expression parallel to his radical political an
archism. This movement was closely associated with other
Nco-Impressionists in France and Belgium who believed
tl1at only through absolute creative freedom conld art help
to bring about social change. In his later, highly colOristic
seascapes, Signac provided a transition between Nco
Impressionism and the Fauvism of Henri Matisse and his
followers (see chapter
7). And through his book, D'Eugene
Delacroix au NCo-impressionisme) he was also the chief pro
pagandiSt and historian of the movement. His portrait of
the critic Felix Feneon (fig. 3.4), who had been tbc first to
use the term Nco-Impressionism) is a fascinating example
of the decorative formalism that the artists around SeLuat
favored. The painting, vvith its spectacular spiral back
ground inspired by patterns Signac had fotmd in a Japanese
P,rint, contains private references to the critic's ideas and to
3.3 Georges Seurat, Study for le Chahut, 1 889. Oil on those of the color theorist Charles Benry, with which
canvas, 2 1 X 18Ji'' (55.6 X 46.7 em). Albright-Knox Signac was very familiar..
Art Gallery, Buffalo. In the hands of other painters Seurat's Nco-Impres
sionist technique too often declined into a decorative
scientific and objective of all the painters of his time is, formula for use in narrative exjJosit:iot1. This was also the
curiously, also one of the most poetic and mysterious. fate of Impressionism; as _it gradually became accepted
In a preparatory oil for a later painting, such as the study and then, much later, immensely popular throughoUt the
for Le Chahut (fig. 3.3), the color dots are so large that the (.-n world, its color and light, quotidian subjects, radiCal
figures and their spatial environment
are dissolved in color patterns that
cling to the surface of the picture. The
painting depicts a provocative and
acrobatic dance, then popular in Paris
ian cafes, which Seurat beautifully
orchestrates into a series of decorative
rhythms, giving form to a then
current theory that ascending lines
induce feelings of gaiety in the viewer.
For his imagery Seurat was clearly
inspired by the colorful posters tbat
were placed around Paris to advertise
the dance halls. Around the study for
Le Chahut he painted a border of mul
ticolored strokes (as he had for La
CHAPTER 3 POST-IMPRESSIONISM 49
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I cropping, and photographic immediacy-initially so shock important since the Renaissance prompted his oft-quoted
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1 ing-were all too quickly discovered to be charming, (and frequently misunderstood) remark tl1at he wanted to
: ',1 i endearing, and capable of every kind of vulgarization. "mal(e of Impressionism something solid lilce the art of
Seurat's Nco-Impressionism, on the other hand, affected the museums." By this he clearly did not mean to imitate
not only Fauvism and certain aspects of Cubism in the early the old masters. :He realized_ quite correctly, that artists
twentieth century, but also some Art Nouveau painters like Veronese or Poussin had created in their paintings a
and designers. world rl1at was similar to but quite distinct from the world
in which they lived-that painting, resulting from the
Form and Nature: Paul Cezanne artist's various experience, created a separate reality in itself.
It was this kind of reality, the reality of the painting that
I;! Of all the nineteenth-century painters who might be was neither a direct reflection of life, like a photograph,
, I considered prophets of twentieth-century experiment, nor a completely separate entity, which cezanne sought in
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' 'I the most significant was Paul Cezanne (1839-1906). his own work. And he felt progressively that his sources
cezanne struggled rl1roughout his life to express in paint must be nature and the objects of the world in which he
his ideas about the nature of art, ideas d1at were among the lived, rather than stories or myths from the past. For this
most revolutionary in the history of art. Son of a well-to reason he expressed his desire "to do Poussin over again
do merchant turned banker in Aix-en-Provence in south from nature."
ern France, he had to resist parental disapproval to embark cezanne arrived at his mature position only after long
on his career, but once having won the battle, unlike and painful thought, study, and struggle with his medium.
Monet or Gauguin, he did not need to struggle for mere Late in his life, the theoretical position that he tried to
financial survival. As we view the splendid control and express in his idiosyncratic language was probably achieved
serenity of his mature paintings (two qualities that, in par more through the discoveries he made painting from
ticular, became touchstones for modernist art), it is difficult j,) nature than through his studies in museums. In the art of
to realize that he was an isolated, socially awkward man of : the museum he found corroboration of what he already
a sometimes violent disposition. This aspect of his charac- :' instinctively la1ew. In fact, the art of his mature landscapes
ter is evident in some of his early mythological fignre is in many ways anticipated by such an early work as Uncle
scenes, which were baroque in their movement and excite Dominic as a Monk, which depicts his mother's brother
ment. At the same time he was a serious student of the art in the white habit of the Dominican order. The sources
of the pa:st, who studied the masters in the Louvre, from in Manet and Courbet are evident, but the personality
Paolo Veronese to Poussin to Delacroix. revealed by the portrait---the forceful temperament of
the artist himself-is different from d1at in the work of
Early Career and Relation to Impressionism either predecessor. Modeled out from the blue-gray
Cezanne's unusual combination of logic and emotibh, ground in sculptured paint laid on in heavy strokes with
of reason and unreason, represented the synthesis d1at the palette knife, the painting is not so much a specific por
he sought in his paintings. Outside of Degas, the trait as a study of passion held in restraint. It exemplifies
lmprcssionis\s in the 1870s largely abandoned traditional cezanne's use of the matrix of paint to create a unified
drawing in an effort to communicate a key visual phenom pictorial structure, a characteristic of all his work.
enonthat objects in nattue are not seen as separated from Throughout the 1860s, cezanne exorcised his own
one anod1er by defined contours. In their desire to realize inner conflict in scenes of murder and rape and, around
the observed world through color, with both the objects 1870, he attempted his own Dijeuner sur l'herbe in a
themselves and the spaces between them rendered in terms strange, heavy-handed variant on Manet's painting. After
of color intervals, they tended to destroy objects as his exposure to the Impressionists, he returned to the vio
three-dimensional entities existing in three-dimensional lence of these essays in his Battle of Love (fig. 3.5), a curi
space. Instead they recreated solids and voids as color ous recasting of the classic theme of the bacchanal. Here he
shapes functioning within a limited depth. Because it did has moved away from the somber tonality and sculptural
not mal(e a clear distinction between three-dimensional modeling of the 1860s into an approximation of the light
mass (objects) and tl1ree-dimensional depth (spaces), blue, green, and white of the Impressionists. Nevertheless,
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I Even Renoir felt compelled to restudy the drawing of tl1e and effect. The artist subdues his greens with grays and
I Renaissance in order to recapture some of that "form" blades, and expresses an obsession -with the sexual ferocity
which Impressionism was said to have lost. And Seurat, he is portraying that is notably different from the stately
Gauguin, and Van Gogh, each in his own way, consciously bacchanals of Titian and even more intense than the emu
or unconsciously, was seeking a kind of expression based parable scenes of Rubens. At this stage he is still exploring
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I on, but different from, that of the Impressionists. the problem of integrating fignres or objects and sur
Certainly, cezanne's conviction that Impressionism rounding space. The figures are clearly outlined, and thus
ignored qualities of Western painting that had been exist sculpturally in space. However, their broken contours,
50 CHAPTER 3 POSTIMPRESSIONISM
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3.5 Paul Cezanne, Baffle of Love, c. 1 880. Oil on canvas, 1 4'A: X 1 8X" (37.8 X 46.2 em). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
sometimes seemingly independent of the cream-color area differentiation as objects recede from the eye. cezanne
of their fel sh, begin to dissolve solids and integrate figures once explained to a friend that sunlight cannot be "repro
with the shaped clouds that, in an advancing background, duced," but that it must be "represented" by some other
reiterate the carnal struggles of the bacchanal. means. That means was color. He wished to recreate nature
In the 1880s all of Cezanne's ideas of nature and paint with color, feeling that drawing-was a consequence of the
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ing came into focus in a magnificent series of landscapes, correct use of color. In The Bay from L Estaque) contours
still lifes, and portraits. During most of this period he are the meeting of two areas of color. Since these colors
was living at Aix, largely isolated frmn the Parisian art vary substantially in value contrasts or in hue, their edges
world. The Bay from L'Estaque (fig. 3.6) is today so famil are perfectly defined. However, the nature of the definition
iar from countless reproductions that it is difficult to real tends to allow color planes to slide or "pass" into one
ize how revolutionary it was at the time. Viewed from the another, thus to join and mllfY surface and depth, rather
hills above the red-tiled houses of the village ofL'Estaque than to separate them in the manner of traditional outline
and looking toward the Bay of Marseilles, the scene does drawing. The composition of this painting reveals
not recede into a perspective of infinity in the Renaissance cezanne's intuitive realization that the eye talces in a scene
or Baroque manner. Buildings in the foreground are both consecutively and simultaneously, with profound
massed close to the spectator and presented as simplified implications for construction of the painting and for the
cubes with the side elevation brightly lit. They assert their future of modern painting.
The middle distance of The Bay from I/Estaque is the
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fluctuating identity, both as frontal color shapes parallel to
the picture plane and as the walls of buildings at right bay itself, an intense area of dense but varied blue stretch
! angles to it. The buildings and intervening trees are com ing from one side of the canvas to the other and built up
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posed in ocher, yellow, orange-red, and green, with little of meticulously blended brushstrokes. Behind this is the
I CHAPTER 3 POSTIMPRESSIONISM 5 1
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3.6 Paul Cezanne, The Bay from L'Estaque, c. 1885. Oil on canvas, 31 X 39%" (80 X 1 00.6 em).
The Art Institute of Chicago.
curving horizontal range of the hills and, above these, the and still life. It is important to understand that to him
lighter, softer blue of the sky, with only the faintest touches these subjects involved similar problems. In all of them he
of rose. The abrupt manner in which the artist cuts off'his was concerned with the recreation, the realization, of the
space at the sides of the painting has the effect of denying scene, the object, or the person. The fascination of the still
the illusion of recession in depth. The blue of the bay life for cezanne, as for generations of painters before him
asserts itself even more strongly than the ochers and reds of and after, lies in the fact that its subject is controllable as no
the foreground, with the result that space becomes both landscape or portrait sitter can possibly be. In Stilt Life with
ambiguous and homogeneous. The painting must be read Basket of Apples (fig. 3.7), he carefully arranged the wine
simultaneously as a panorama in depth and as an arrange bottle and tilted basket of apples, scattered the other apples
ment of color shapes on the surfuce. casually over the tablecloth, and placed the plate of biscuits
Even at the end of his life, Cezanne never had any desire at the bade of the table, thus setting up the relationships
to abandon nature entirely. When he spoke of "the cone, between these elements on which the final painting would
the cylinder, and the sphere" he was not thinking of these be based. The apple obsessed Cezanne as a three-dimen
geometric shapes as the end result, the final abstraction sional form that was difficult to control as a distinct object
into which he wanted to translate the landscape or the and to assimilate into the larger unity of the canvas. To
still life, as has sometimes been assumed. Abstraction for attain this goal and at the same time to preserve the nature
him was a method of stripping off the visual irrelevancies of the individual object, he modulated the circular forms
of nature in order to begin rebuilding the natural scene as with smal flat brushstrokes, distorted the shapes, and
an independent painting. Thus the end result was easily loosened or broke the contours to set up spatial tensions
recognizable frpm the original motif, as photographs of among the objects and unifY them as color areas. By tilting
cezanne's sites have proved, but it is essentially different: the wine bottle out of the vertical, flattening and distorting
the painting is a parallel but distinct and unique reality. the perspective of the plate, or changing the direction of
the table edge tmder the cloth, cezanne was able, while
Later Career maintaining the appearance of actual objects, to concen
Few artists in history have devoted themselves as intently trate on the relations and tensions existing among them . .AB
as cezanne to the separate themes of landscape, portrait, Roger F1y observed, the subtleties through which Cezanne
3.7 Paul Cezanne, Still Life with Basket of Apples, c. 1 895. Oil an canvas,
24% X 3 1" (6 1 .9 X 78.7 em). The Art Institute of Chicago.
gained his final result "still outrange our pictmial appre robably long acquainted, there is little sense of particular
hension." However, we can comprehend that he was one ized portraiture in The Card Players.
of the great constructors and colorists in the history of cezanne usually relied on friends or family members as
painting, one of the most penetrating observers, and one models, most frequently his patient wife, Hortense Piquet,
of the most subtle minds. but for Boy in a Red Waistcoat (fig. 3.9) he hired a yotmg
cezanne's figure studies, such as the various versions of
The Card Players (fig. 3.8), remind one in their massive,
closed architecture of his paintings of quarries. The artist
brings great solemnity to this genre subject by his grandly
balanced composition, by the amplitude of the figures, ,.n
who solidly occupy their space, and by discarding tl1e usual
narratives included in older paintings on this theme, such
as the card-shark subjects of Caravaggio. Altl1ough the
sitters were local farmhands with whom the artist was
3.8 Paul Cezanne, The Card Players, 1 890-92. 3.9 Paul Cezanne, Boy in a Red Waistcoat, 1 888-95. Oil on
Oil on canvas, 25',{x 32Y." (65.4 X 8 1 .9 em). canvas, 35Y. X 28%" (89.5 X 73 em). National Gallery of Art,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Washington, D.C.
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1:1i 3. 1 0 Paul Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Les Lauves, 1 902-6. Oil on canvas, 25 X 32" (64.8
8 1 .3 em). Collection Mrs. Louis C. Madeira, Gladwyne, Pennsylvania.
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54 CHAPTER 3 o POSTIMPRESSIONISM
3.11 Paul Cezanne, The Large Bathers, 1 906. Oil on canvas, 6' l 0" X 8'2' (2. l X 2.5 m). Philadelphia
Museum of Art.
emotions expressed in the earlier Battle of Love (see fig. shall see, a conscious program in Gauguin's paintings, first
3.5) within the grandeur of his total conception. Thus, ,., in the small artists' colony of PontAven in Brittany and
while the figures have been so formalized as to seem part later in the South Seas. In both places the subjects he pur
of the overall pictorial architecture, their erotic potential sued were those of the Romantic tradition: the exotic, the
now charges the scene. It can be sensed as much in the otherworldly, the mystical. In this, Gauguin and the artists
high-vaulted trees as in the sensuous, shimmering beauty who were associated with him at Pont-Aven and later at Le
of the brushwork, with its unifYing touches of rosy flesh Pouldu in Brittany, as well as very different painters like
tones and earthy ochers scattered throughout the delicate Odilon Redan and Gustave Moreau, were affected by the
blue-green haze of sky and foliage. The Large Bathers, in its Symbolist spirit.
miraculous integration of linear structure and painterly Symbolism in literature and the visual arts was a popu-
freedom, of form and color, of eye and idea, provided the lar-if radical-movement of the late nineteenth century, a
touchstone model for Fauves and Cubists alike, as well as direct descendant of the Romanticism of the eighteenth
th_e immediate antecedent for such landmark, yet disparate and the early nineteenth centuries that stemmed from a
paintings as Matisse's Bonheur de vivre (see fig. 7.6) and reaction against Realism in art and against materialism in
Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (see fig. 10.6). life. In literature, its founders were mainly poets: Charles
Baudelaire and Gerard de N erval; the leaders at the close
A. Visual Language of the Heart of the century were Jean Monas, St6phane Mallarme,
and Paul Vcrlaine. In music, the German Richard Wagner
and Soul: Symbolism
was a great force and influence, as was Claude Debussy
The formulation of modern art at the end of the nine the outstanding French master. Baudelaire had defined
teenth century involved not only a search for new forms Romanticism as "neither a choice of subjects nor exact
but also a search for new content and new principles of truth, but a mode of feeling"-something found within
picture-making. Tllls search was meaningfitl in itself; it was rather than outside the individual-"intimacy, spirituality,
not simply a continuation of outworn cliches taken from color, aspiration toward the infinite." Symbolism arose
antiquity, French history, or my thology. It became, as we from the intuitive ideas of the Romantics; it was an
CHAPTER 3 POST-IMPRESSIONISM 55
r
il '.
:'I,i' : approach to an ultimate reality, a pure essence that tran- Matisse and Georges Rouault, as well as others who were
scended particular physical experience. The belief that the to be dubbed the Fauves, or "wild beasts," of early mod
: i work of art should spring :from the emotions, from the ern painting. Inspired by Romantic painters such as
I" ii
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im1er spirit of the artist rather than representing observed Delacroix, Moreau's art exemplified the spirit of themal
'.i I.. natur, dominated the attitudes of the Symbolist artists and du-siJcle) an end-of-the-century tendency toward profound
'I 1 melancholy or soul sickness, often expressed in art and
was to recur continually in the philosophies of twentieth
!
' '' ,,I) century Expressionists, Dadaists, Surrealists, and even of literature through decadent and morbid subject matter.
I Mondrian and other makers of abstract art. In several compositions around 1876, Moreau interpreted
i For the Symbolists the reality of the inner idea, of the the biblical subject of Salome, the young princess who
dream or symbol, was paramount, but could be expressed danced for her stepfather Herod, demanding in return the
only obliquely, as a series of images or analogies out of execution of Saint John the Baptist. The bloody head of
which the final revelation might emerge. Symbolism led the saint appears in Moreau's painting as if called forth in
some poets and painters back to organized religion, sorrie a grotesque hallucination (fig. 3.12). He conveys his sub
to mysticism and arcane religious cults, and others to aes ject with meticulous draftsmanship and an obsessive profu
thetic creeds that were essentially antireligious. During the sion of exotic detail combined with jewellike color and rich
1880s, at the moment when artists were pursuing the idea paint texture.
of the dream, Sigmund Freud was beghming the studies Moreau's spangled, languidly voluptuous art did much
that were to lead to his theories of the significance of to glamorize decadence in the form of the femme fatale, or
dreams and the subconscious. In the visual arts Symbolism "fatal woman." The concept of woman as an erotic and
Was manifested in a diverse range of styles. Paul Gauguin, destructive force was fostered by Baudelaire's great poems
one of the movement's leading exponents, sought in his Les Fleurs du Mal (The Fwwers ofEvil) (1857) and the mid
paintings what he termed a "synd1esis of fmm and color centmy pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer.
derived from the observation of the dominant element." f:'1 Among scores of male artists in the last decades of the nine
He advised a fellow painter not to "copy nature too much. " teenth century, Salome frequently served as the archetype
Art is an abstraction; derive this abstraction from nature ( of a castrating female who embodied all that is debased,
while dream.ing before it, but think more of creating than
the actual result."
In these statements may be found many of the concepts
of twentieth-century experimental painting, from the idea
of color used arbitrarily rather than to desaibe an object
visually, to d1e pdmacy of the creative act, to painting as
abstraction. Gauguin's ideas, which he called "Synthetism,"
iiwolved a synthesis of subject and idea with form and-colO},
so that his paintings are given their m.ystet)S their visionary
quality, by their abstract color patterns.
Symbolism in painting-the search for new forms, anti
naturalistic if necessary, to express a new content based on
emotion (rather than intllect or objective observation), in
tuition, and the idea beyond appearance-may be inter
preted broadly to include most of the experimental artists
who succeeded the Impressionists and opposed their artistic
1'':-
fi' goals. The Symbolist movement, while centered in France,
': I
was international in scope and had adherents in America,
Belgium, England, and elsewhere in Emope. These artists
i
[I had a common concern with problems of personal expres
sion and pictorial suucture. They were anticipated,
II' inspired, and abetted by two older academic masters
fl
I Gustave Moreau and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes-and also
I
' by Odilon R.edon, an artist born into the generation of the
I:
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I !1 Itnpressionists who attained his artistic maturity much later
than his exact contemporaries.
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111 , Moreau and the Fin-de-Siecle
Gustave Moreau (1826-98) was appointed professor at 3.12 Gustave Moreau, The Apparition, c. 1 876. Oil on
I I. the Ecole des Beamc-Arts in 1892 and displayed remark
able talents as a teacher. His students included Henri
canvas, 21Ji X 1 7W' 154 X 44.5 cml. Fogg Art Museum,
Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
I 56 CHAPTER 3
111 POSTIMPRESSIONISM
sexually predatory, and perverse. The femme fatale also frequently found his subjects in the study of nature, at
played a central role in the work of such composers as times observed under the microscope, they were trans
Wagner and Richard Strauss, writers including Gustave formed in his hands into beautiful or monstrous fantasies.
Haubert, Joris-Karl Huysmans (who admired Moreau's Redon studied for a time in Paris with the painter Jean
painting enormously), Stephane Mallarme, Oscar Wilde, LCon GCr6me, but he was not temperamentally suited to
and Marcel Proust, and a great number of artists, ranging the rigors of academic training. He suffered from periodic
from Rossetti and Moreau to such fin-de-sihle figures as depression-what he called his "habitual state of melan
Redon, Aubrey Beardsley, Edvard Munch, and Gustav choly"-and much of his early work stems from memories
Klimt. Moreover, the deadly temptress thrived well into the of an unhappy childhood in and around Bordeaux, in
twentieth century, as she resurfaced in Picasso's Les southwest France. Like Seurat, Redan was a great colorist
Demoiselles d'Avignon, (see fig. 10.6), the paintings and who also excelled at composing in black and white, and the
drawings ofEgon Schiele, and the amour fou ("mad love") first twenty years of his career were devoted almost exclu
art of the Surrealists (see chapter 15). sively to monochrome drawing, etching, and lithography,
Although Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-98), with works he referred to as his "noirs," or works in blade. His
his simple, naive spirit, bleached colors, and near-archaic activity in printmaking contributed to the rise in popularity
handling, would seem to have stood at the opposite pole of etching in the 1860s, prompted in part by a new appre
from the elaborate, hothouse art of Moreau, d1e two ciation in France of Re1nbrandt's prints, which Redon
painters were alike in a certain academicism and in the especially admired for their expressive effects of light and
curious atnaction this held for the younger generation. shadow. Redon studied etclling with Rodolphe Bresdin, a
In Puvis, the reasons for such an anomaly can be readily strange and solitary artist who created a graphic world of
discerned in his mural painting Summer (fig. 3.13). The meticulously detailed fantasy based on the work of the
allegorical subject and its narrative treatment are highly northernEuropean masters Diirer and Rembrandt. Redon
traditional, but the organization in large, flat, subdued .later found a closer affinity with the graphics of Francisco
color areas, and the manner in which the plane of the wall 1Goya, the greatest printrnalcer of the early nineteenth
is respected and even asserted, el?bodied a compelling 1=entury (see fig. 1.14). Redon himself became one of the
n-uth in the minds of artists who were searching for a new modern masters of the medium of lithography, in which he
idealism in painting. Although the abstract qualities of the invented a world of dreams and nightmares based not only
mural are particularly apparent to us today, the classical on the examples of past artists but also on his close and
withdrawal of the figures-as still and quiet as those in scientific study of anatomy.
Piero della Francesca and Seurat-transforms them into Redan's own predilection for fantasy and the macabre
emblems of that inner light which the Symbolists extolled. drew him naturally into the orbit of Delacroix, Baudelaire,
Symbolism in painting found one of its earliest and most and the Romantics. In his drawings and lirl1ographs, where
characteristic exponents in Odilon Redon (1840-1916), ,6\ he pushed his rich, velvety blacks to extreme limits of
called the "prince of mysterious dreams" by the critic and expression, he developed and refined the fantasies of
novelist Huysmans. His artistic roots were in nineteenth Bresdin in nightmare visions of monsters, or tragic-roman
century Romanticism, while his progeny was the twentieth tic themes taken from mythology or literature. Redan was
century Surrealists. Redn felt Impressionism lacked the close to the Symbolist poets and was almost the only artist
ambiguity that he sought in his art, and though he who was successful in translating their words into visual
equivalences. He dedicated a portfolio of his lithographs
to Edgar Allan Poe, whose works had been translated by
Baudelaire and MallarmC, and he created three series of
lithographs inspired by Gustave Haubert's Temptation of
St. Anthony, a novel that achieved cult status among
Symbolist writers and artists in the 1880s. Huysmans
reviewed Redan's exhibitions enthusiastically at the same
time that he was himself moving away from :Emile Zola's
naturalism and into the Symbolist stream with his novel of
artistic decadence Against the Grain) in which he discussed
at length the art of Redan and of Gustave Moreau.
After 1890, _Redon began to work seriously in color,
almost immediately demonstrating a capacity for exquisite,
original harmonies, in both oil and pastel, that changed
the character of his art fiom the macabre and the somber
3.13 Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Summer, 1 891 Oil on
.
to the joyous and brilliant. Gone are the nightmarish
canvas, 4' 1 1 " X 77W ( 1 .5 X 2.3 m). The Cleveland Museum visions of previous decades, replaced by a new enthusiasm
of Art. for religious and mythological subjects. Yet in Roger and
58 CHAPTER 3 POSTIMPRESS!ONISM
in Salon painting, Rousseau's nopical paintings are worlds landscape framing a mysterious scene. In this work, as
away from the cliched academic scenes of North Mrica in others, Rousseau expressed qualities of strangeness
or other exotic locales. Yet to the end of his life Rousseau that were unvoiced, inexpressible rather than apparent,
continued his unuitical admiration for the Salon painters, anticipating the standard vocabulary of the Surrealists.
particularly for the technical finish of their works. The This painting was lost for years until it was rediscovered
Sleeping Gypsy (fig. 3.16) is one of the most entrancing and in 1923 in a coal dealer's shop by Louis Vauxcelles, the
magical paintings in modern art. By this time he could art critic who had created the term "Fauves." In fact, it
create mood through a few elements, broadly conceived has been suggested that the term, meaning "wild beast,"
but meticulously rendered. The composition has a curi occurred to Vauxcelles because one of Rousseau's jungle
ou.sly abstract quality (the mandolin and botrle foretell paintings was exhibited very near the works of Matisse and
Cubist studio props; see figs. 10.17, 10.26), but the tone his colleagues at the notorious 1905 Salon d'Automne
is overpoweringly strange and eerie-a vast and lonely ( se chapter 7).
3.15 Henri Rousseau, Carnival Evening, 1 886. Oil on canvas, 46 X 35" ( 1 1 6. 8 X 89.2 em).
Philadelphia Museum of Art.
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3.16 Henri Rousseau, The Sleeping Gypsy, .3 X 2 m). The Museum of
II Modern Art, New York. (
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60 CHAPTER 3 POST-IMPRESSIONISM
elemental venues of "primitive" soaetles, whether the starts in Rouen and Copenhagen, he had largely severed
religious art of Breton peasants in r:t-orthwest France or the his family ties, isolated himself, and become involved with
traditions of the Maori peoples in Polynesia. By establish the Impressionists.
ing contact with supposedly ('uncivilizCd" cultures, so the Gauguin had spent tbe early years of his childhood in
mytb went, tbe enlightened artist could be in touch witb Peru, and he seems almost always to have had a nostalgia
the primitive side of his or her own nature and express it for fur-off, exotic places . This feeling ultimately crystallized
through art. Of course, such notions were forged at a time in the conviction that his salvation, and perhaps that of all
when Emopean countries were aggressively colonizing the contemporary artists, lay in abandoning modern civiliza
.
very societies Western artists sought to emulate. tion to return to some simpler, more elemental pattern of
In searching for the life of a "savage," no French artist life. From 1886 to 1891 he moved between Paris and the
traveled fartber from tbe reaches of Western urban life tban Breton villages ofPont-Aven and Le Pouldu, with a seven
Gauguin. He has become, sometimes to the detriment of montb interlude in Panama and Martinique in 1887 and a
a serious consideration of his art, a romantic symbol, the tempestuoUs but productive visit with Van Gogh in Aries
. personification of the artist as rebel against society. After tbe following year. ln 1891 he sailed for Tahiti, returning
years of wandering, first in the merchant marine, then in to France for two years in 1893 before setrling in tbe Soutb
the French navy, he settled down, in 1871, to a prosaic but Seas for good. His final trip, in tbe walce of years of illness
successful life as a stockbroker in Paris, married a Danish and suffering, was to the island ofHivaoa in the Marquesas
woman, and had five children. For the next twelve years Islands, where he died in 1903.
the only oddity in his respectable, bourgeois existence was The earliest picture in which Gauguin fully realized
the fuct tbat he began paiuting, first as a hobby and tben his revolutionary ideas is Vision after the Sermon) painted
with increasing seriousness. H even managed to show in 1888 in Pont-Aven (fig. 3.17). This is a startling and
a painting in tbe Salon of 1876 and to exhibit in four pivotal work, a pattern of red, blue, black, and white tied
Impressionist exhibitions from 1879 to 1882. He lost his Wgether by curving, sinuous lines and depicting a Breton
job, probably due to a stock-market crash, and by 1886, pasant's biblical vision of Jacob wresrling witb tbe Angel.
after several years of family conflict and attempts at new ':fhe innovations used here were destined to affect the ideas
3.1 7 Paul Gauguin, Vision alter the Sermon, 1 88 8 . Oil on canvas, 28% X 36W (73 X 92. 1 em). National Gallery
of Scotland, Edinburgh.
CHAPTER 3 POSTIMPRESSIONISM 61
,;',!
of younger groups such as the Nabis and the Fauves.
Perhaps the greatest single departure is the arbinary use
of color in the dominating red field within which the pro
tagonists struggle, their forms borrowed from a Japanese
print. Gauguin has here consnicted his space to such an
extent that the dominant red of the background visually
thrusts itself forward beyond the closely viewed heads of
the peasants in the foreground. Though the brilliant red
hue may have been stimulated by his memory of a local
1:eligious celebration which included fireworks and bonfires
in the fields, tins painting was one of the first complete
statements of color as an expressive end in itself.
From the beginning of his life as an artist, Gaugniri did
not restrict himself to painting. He carved sculptures in
marble and wood and learned the rudiments of ceramics
to become one of the most inriovative ceramicists of the
century. (It is a feature ofmodern art in general that artists,
including Picasso, Matisse, and many others, have been
less consnained by the boundaries between the academic
disciplines of painting and sculpture, or between so-called
fine-art and craft practice, than artists of earlier post
Renaissance generations.) By the late 1880s Gauguin
had ventured into printmaking, another medium to whi4,
he brought all his experimental genius. One of Ins most
enigmatic works, made in Brittany during an especiant
3.19Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are
We? Where Are We Going? 1 897-98 . Oil on canvas,
4'6%" X 1 2'3" ( 1 . 4 X 3.7 m). Museum of fine Arts, Boston.
de Chavannes," Gauguin said, "with studies from nature, apparent in his early drawings-landscape itself had an
then preliminary cartoons etc. It is all dashed off vvith the expressive, emotional significance.
tip of the brush, on burlap full of knots and wrinldes, so After his exposure to the Impressionists in Patis, Van
that its appearance is terribly rougb." The multiple forms Gogb cbanged and lightened his palette. Indeed, he dis-
and deep spaces of this complex composition are tied covered his deepest single love .in color-brilliant, unmod-
together by its overall tonalities in green and blue. It was ulated color-which in his hands took on a character
this element-color-that the artist called 'a mysterious /1 radically different froiD the color of the Impressionists.
language, a language of the dream." Even when he used Impressionist techniques, the peruliar
intensity of his vision gave the result a specific and individ
CHAPTER 3 PO STIMPRESSIONISM 63
3.20 Vincent van
Gogh, The Night
Cafe, 1 888. Oil on
canvas, 27!6 X 35"
169.9 X 88.9 em)
Yale University Art
Gallery, New Haven.
i
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a vibrant field of linear rhythms painted, according to the astronomy, and religion. Though tl1eir studies have shed
artist, in "pale malachite. " The coloristic and rhythmic light on Van Gogh's interests, none has tapped a definitive
integration of all parts, the careful progression of source that accounts for the astonishing impact of this
emphases, from head to torso to background, all demon painting, which today ranlcs among the most famous works
strate an artist in superb control of his plastic means. "In a of art ever made .. VVhen we think of expressionism in paint
picture," he wrote to Theo, "I want to say something com ing, we tend to associate with it a bravura brush gesture,
fOrting as music. I want to paint men and women with that arising fi_om the spontaneous or intuitive act of expression
something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize, and independent ofrational processes ofthought or precise
and which we seek to give by the actual radiance and vibra technique. The anomaly of Van Gogh's paintings is tl1at
tion of our colorings. " they are suPernatural or at least extJ:asensory experiences
The universe ofVan Gogh i s forever stated in The Starry evoked with a touch as meticulous as though the artist
Night (fig. 3.22). This work was painted in June 1889 at were painfiilly and exactly copying what he was observing
the sanatorium of Saint-Remy, in southern France, where before his eyes.
he had been taken after his second brealcdown. The color
is predominantly blue and violet, pulsating with the scintil
A New Generation of Prophets:
lating yellow of the stars. The Starry Night is both an inti
The Nabis
mate and a vast landscape, seen from a high vantage point
in the manner of the sixteenth-century landscapist Pieter Nco-Impressionism, the quasi-scientific handling of color
Brueghel the Elder. In fuct, the peaceful village, with its created by Semat and Signac, made its appearance in 1884,
prominent church spire, is a remembrance of a Dutch Vf.hen a number ofartists who were to be associated with
rather than a French town. The great poplar tree in the ilie mqvement exhibited together at the Groupe des
foreground shudders before our eyes, while above whirl J\rtistes Independants in Paris. Later that year the Societe
and explode all the stars and planets of the universe. Van des Artistes Independants was organized tlnough the
3.22 Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1 889_ Oil on canvas, 29 X 36)4" (73.7 X 92. I em). The
Museum of Modern Art, New York.
I rl[I
virmally alive with supernatural power. And so
they entitled the painting The Talisman and
I 'I dubbed themselves the "Nabis." The group
,,
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3.23 Paul Serusier, The Talisman (Landscape of
the Bois d'Amour), 1 888. Oil on wood cigor-box
cover, l 0 X 8%" [26.7 X 2 1 .3 em). Private
I
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collection.
66 CHAPTER 3 o POST-IMPRESSIONISM
, '!,.,,
the group) ,all made posters and illustrations for La Rerme interior became a dazzling surface pattern of muted blues,
Blanche. The magazine was a meeting ground for experi - reds, and yellows, comparable to a Persian painting in its
mental artists and writers from every part of Europe, harmonious richness. Space may be indicated by the tilted
including Van de Velde, Edvard Munch, Marcel Proust, perspective of the chaise longue and the angled folds of
Andre Gide, Ibsen, Strindberg, Wilde, Maxim Gorky, and the standing screen, but the forms of the woman and child
Filippo Marinetti. are flattened so as to be virtually indistinguishable from
the surrounding profusion of patterns. Such quiet scenes
Vuillard and Bannard of Parisian middle-class domesticity have been called
The Nabis produced two painters of genius, Edouard "intimiste"; in them, the fLat jigsaw puzzle of conflicting
Vuillard ( 1868-1940) and Pierre Bannard, whose long patterns generates shimmering afterimages that seem to
worldng lives linked the art of fin-de-siecle France to the draw from everyday life an ineffable sense of strangeness
mid-twentieth century. Both were much admired; their and magic.
reputations, however, were for a long time private rather Of all the Nabis, Pierre Bannard (1867-1947) was the
than public. Their world is an intimate one, consisting closest to Vuillard, and the two men remained friends until
of corners of the studio, the living room, the familiar the latter's death. Like Vuillard, Bannard lived a quiet and
view from the window, and portraits of fumily and close unobtrusive life, but whereas Vuillard stayed a bachelor,
friends. In his early works Vuillard used the broken paint Bonnard early became attached to a young woman whom
and small brushstrolce of Seurat or Signac, but without he ultimately married in 1925. It is she who appears in so
their rigorous scientific methods. In Woman in Blue with many of his paintings, as a nude bathing or combing her
Child (fig. 3,24) he portrayed the Parisian apartment of hair, or as a shadowy but ever-present figure seated at
Thadee Natanson, cofounder of La Revue Blanche) and his the brealcfust table, appearing at the window, or boating
famously beautiful and talented wife, Misia, who is on_the Seine.
depicted in the painting playing with her niece. As was ... After receiving training both in the law and in the fine
often his practice, Vuillard probably used his own photo !;ts, Bonnard soon gained a reputation making litho
graph of the apartment as an aide-mimoire while working (graphs, posters, and illustrated books. His most important
up his composition. It is a typical turn-of-the-century inte early infLuences were the work of Gauguin and Japanese
rior, sumptuously decorated with flowered wallpaper, fig prints. The impact of the latter can be seen in his adapta
ured upholstery, and ornaments. In Vuillard's hands, the tion of the japoniste approach to the tilted spaces and
3.24 Edouard Vuillard, Woman in Blue with Child, c. 1 899. Oil on cardboard, 1 9 X 22Xi"
(48.6 X 56.5 em). Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum, Kelvingrove.
CHAPTER 3 POSTIMPRESSIONISM 67
3.25 Pierre Bannard, Promenade of the Nursemaids, Frieze of Fiacres, 1 899. Color lithogrclph on
four panels, each 54 X 1 814" [ 1 37.2 X 47.6 em). The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
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3.26 Pi.erre Bannard, Nu a contre jour (Nude against the Light), 1 908. Oil on
canvas, 49 X 42W [ 1 24.5 X 1 0 8 em). Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de
Belgique, Brussels.
68 CHAPTER 3 POST-IMPRESSIONISM
decorative linear rhythms of his paintings. But fiom the stand as a picture within a picture, became a common stta.t
beginning Bannard also evinced a love of paint texture. egy of Bannard's as well as Matisse's interiors (see fig.
This led him from the relatively subdued palette ofhis early 7.18). But in its quiet solemnity and complete absence of
works to the full luminosity of high-keyed color rendered self-consciousness, Bannard's nude is deeply indebted to
in fragmented brushstrokes, a development that may well the precedent of Degas's bathers, even to the detail of the
owe something to both the late works of Monet and the round tub (see fig. 2.35). Lilce rl10se of the older artist,
Fauve paintings ofMatisse. Bannard's composition is disciplined and complex, care
The large folding screen Promenade of the Nursemaids, fully structured to return the eye to the solid form of the
Frieze of Fiacres (fig. 3.25) is made of four lithographs, nude, which he surrotmds with a multitude of textures,
based on a similarly painted screen. With its tilted perspec shapes, and colors. But Bannard creates an expressive
tives and abbreviated, silhouetted forms, it shows Bonnard mood all his own. As she douses herself with perfume, the
at his most faponiste and decorative. At the same time, the model seems almost transfixed by the warm, radiant light
figures of mother and children, the three heavily caped that permeates the scene.
nurses, and the marching line of fiacres, or carriages, reveal Bmmard's color became progressively brighter. By the
a touch of gentle satire that well characterizes the pene time he painted Dining Room on the Garden, in 1934-35
nating observation Bonnard could con1bine vvith a brilliant (fig. 3.27), he had long since recovered the entire spec
simplicity of design. Like his fellow Nabis, Bannard trmn of luminous color, and had learned from cezanne
believed in eliminating barriers between the realms of pop tl1at color could function constructively as well as sensually.
ular decorative arts and the high-art traditions of painting In this ambitious canvas Bommrd taclded the difficult
and sculpture. He envisioned an art of "everyday applica problem ofdepicting an interior scene with a view tlwough
tion" that could extend to fans, prints, furniture, or, in this the window to a garden beyond, setting the isolated,
case, color lithographs adapted to the format of a four-part geometric forms of a tabletop still life against a lush exte
Japanese screen. ,,fior landscape. Now tl1e model, his wife Martl1e, is posi
fo'
In Nude agaiust the Light (fig. 3.26), Bannard has "tioned to one side, an incidental and ghostly presence
moved from the public sphere of Parisian streets to the inti iin this sumptuous display. By the mid-thirties, virtually
mate world of the nude in a domestic interior, a subject he all the great primary revolutions of twentieth-century
exploited throughout his career as a means to investigate painting had already occurred, including Fauvism, with its
light and color. Bannard silhouetted the model, his ever arbitrary, expressive color, and Cubism, with its reorgani
youthfid wife, Marthe, against the sun-drenched SU1faces zation of Renaissance pictorial space. Moreover, painting
of her boudoir. Light falls through the tall French win had fom1d its way to pure abstraction in various forms.
dows, strongly illuminating the side of the woman tumed Perfectly aware of all tills, Bannard was nonetheless con
from ouT view but visible in the mirror at left. This use of tent to go his own way. In the work seen here, for instance,
reflections to enlarge and enrich the pictorial space, to !'1 there is evidence that he had looked closely at Fauve and
.,
twentieth-centmy experiments of Edvard Munch, Pablo 1890s of performers in Montmartre dance halls, but in the
I,
Picasso, and Henri Matisse. Lautrec was interested in Gofa previous decade he had proved himself to be a sensitive
and the line drawings oflngres, but he was above all a pas portraitist with paintings and drawings of a colorful cast
sionate disciple of Degas, bod1 in his admiration of Degas's of characters, including Carmen Gaudin, the woman_ por
draftsmanship and in the disengaged attitude and calcu trayed in A Montrouge-Rosa La Rouge (fig. 3.28). The
lated formal strategies he brought to the depiction of his artist was drawn to the simple clothes, unruly red hair, and
favorite subjects-the theaters, brothels, and bohemian toug};l look of this young working-class woman, who, arms
cabarets of Paris. dangling informally, averts her face as she is momentarily
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70 CHAPTER 3 POST-IMPRESSIONISM
3.29 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Moulin Rouge-La Goulue, 1 89 1 . Color
lithograph, 6'3)<;" X 4' ( 1 .9 X 1 .2 m). Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
silhouetted against the lighted window. Lautrec creates Paris. His earliest lithographic poster, designed for the
this . simplified composition out of his characteristically notorious dance hall called the Moulin Rouge (fig. 3.29),
long strokes of color in warm, subdued tonalities. But the features the scandalous talents of La Goulue ("the greedy
somber mood of the painting has -also to do with its one"), a dancer renowned for her gymnastic and erotic
subject. Lautrec's painting was inspired by a gruesome interpretations of the chahut, the dance that had attracted
song written by his bohemian friend, the f.unous cabaret Seurat in 1889 (see fig. 3.3). Lautrec's superb graphic sen
singer Aristide Bruant, about a prostitute who conspires to sibility is apparent in the eye-catchlng shapes that, albeit
kill her clients. abbreviated, were the result of long observation. Their
The naturalism of Lautrec's early portraits gave way in snappy curves and crisp silhouettes were born of an Art
the 1890s to the brightly colored and stylized works that Nouveau aesthetic (see chapter 5) that dominated the arts
malce his name synonymous with turn-of-the-century across Europe at the rime.