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IMPRESSIONISM

Impressionists saw themselves as the ultimate realists whose main concern was the perception of optical sensations of light and color.

Whether the lmpressionists were consciously aware of photographic techniques, scientific research in optics, or the physiology of the eye is not important;

they painted as if the world were not matter in space but a source of sensations of light and color.

Objects were perceived as agents for the absorption and reflection of light;

there were no sharp edges indeed no lines, in nature.

ln nature, form and space were implied by

infinitely varied intensities of color and light and

shadows we:re not black but colored in relation to the subjects casting the shadows.

This is Impressionist theory in essence but the individual artists developed styles that sometimes contradicted the theories.

One characteristic of lmpressionism was distinctive. it was not limited to artists; it drew together not only painters and their models, but a number of writers, critics, and collectors. The general public was not part of the movement, for it was consciously avant-garde. The Impressionists were a cohesive group who revolved around the central personallty of Manet. The regular meeting place of Manet's "sc:hool" was the Cafe Guerbois, where Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Whistler, the photographer Nadar, Emile Zola, Baudelaire, and others congregated to argue passionately about the role of the modern artist James McNeill Whistler (1836-1903) and Henry James considered American civilization an embarrassment. Like James, Whistler became an expatriate, even denying that he was born in Lowell, MA.

A major innovator, Manet realized that modeled transitions did not exist in nature; he worked instead in planes. He was one of the first artists to paint with pure colors, eliminating dark shadows that had been used for centuries. . Manet was a pioneer in the use of light as his subject; light was the actual subject matter of Luncheon on the Grass

However, Luncheon on the Grass shocked the public. The painting shows a nude model accompanied by two gentlemen in frock coats; this juxtaposition of a nude and nattily attired figures in an outdoor setting, along with the noncommittal title which offered no "higher" significance, offended contemporary morality.

Yet the group has so formal a pose that Manet certainly did not intend to depict an actual event. Perhaps the meaning of the canvas lies in this denial of plausibility, for the scene fits neither the plane of everyday experience nor that of allegory.

Manet had almost totally abandoned Rennaisance perspective, accepting the canvas for what it really was, a two-dimensional surface. For example, the background figure is much too large: if corrected for perspective, she would be 9 feet tall. Also, the painting is lit from two different directions.

The Luncheon, as a visual manifesto of artistic freedom, is revolutionary. It asserts the painter's privilege to combine whatever elements he pleases for aesthetic effect alone. The nudity of the model is "explained" by the contrast between her warm, creamy flesh tones and the cool black-and-gray of the men's attire. Or, to put it another way, the world of painting has "natural laws" that are distinct from those of familiar reality, and the painter's first loyalty is to his canvas, not to the outside world. Here begins an attitude that was later summed up in the doctrine of Art for Art's Sake.

Courbet is said to have remarked that Manet's paintings were as flat as playing cards. Looking at The Fifer, we can see what he meant.

Done three years after Luncheon, it is a painting with very little modeling, no depth, and hardly any shadows. (There are a few, actually, but it takes real effort to find them.)

The figure looks three-dimensional only because its contour renders the forms in realistic foreshortening.

Otherwise, Manet eschews all the methods devised since Giotto's time for transforming a flat surface into a pictorial space.

The undifferentiated light-gray background seems as near to us as the figure, and just as solid. If the fifer stepped out of the picture, he would leave a hole, like the cutout shape of a stencil.

Here, then, the canvas itself has been redefined. It is no longer a "window," but a screen made up of flat patches of color

Manet maintained a lifelong devotion to "pure painting": to the belief that brushstrokes and color patches themselves--not what they stand for--are the artist's primary reality. For Manet and the Impressionists the objects and figures in their paintings were sometimes treated impersonally, as opportunities to depict light sensations. He always took care to filter out the expressive or symbolic content of his models, lest the beholder's attention be distracted from the pictorial structure itself. His paintings, regardless of subject, have an emotional reticence that can easily be mistaken for emptiness unless we understand its purpose. Frequently detached and nonjudgmental, Manet and the Impressionists, except for Renoir, were often more entranced with optical sensations than with humanity.

We are tempted to think Manet was impelled to create the new style by the challenge of photography. The "pencil of nature, " then known for a quarter-century, had demonstrated the objective truth of Renaissance perspective, but it established a .standard of representational accuracy that no handmade image could hope to rival. Painting needed to be rescued from competition with the camera. This Manet accomplished by insisting that a painted canvas is, above all, a material surface covered with pigments--that we must look at it, not through it.

1868 "The River" Monet (mah-nay), Claude (1840-1926)

Manet's followers began calling themselves Impressionists, although he refused to adopt the term for his own work. The word Impressionism had been coined in 1874, after a hostile critic had looked at a picture entitled Impression: Sunrise by Claude Monet, and it certainly fits Monet better than it does Manet. Monet had adopted Manet's concept of painting and applied it to landscapes done outdoors.

Monet was the spokesman and chief painter of the Impressionist style.

Throughout his long and productive career he relied wholly on his visual perceptions. For him, especially, there were no objects such as trees, houses, or figures. Rather, there was some green here, a patch of blue there, a bit of yellow over here, and so on.

The mechanics of vision were a major concern of Monet and the other Impressionists. To achieve intensity of color, pigments were not combined on the palette but laid on the canvas in primary hues so that the eye could do the mixing.

A dab of yellow, for example, placed next to one of blue is perceived, from a distance, as green, a brilliant green because the eye accomplishes the optical recomposition.

Further, each color leaves behind a visual sensation that is its after-image or complementary color. The after-image of red is blue-green and that of green is the color red. The adjacent placement of red and green reinforces each color through its after-image, making both red and green more brilliant.

Impressionists generally painted with pure pig ments in the colors of the spectrum; conspicuously absent from the spectrum and thus from Impressionist canvases was black, a favorite of academic painters.

Monet contended that black was not a color and he was scientifically correct; black is the absence of color.

This, of course, did not keep Degas and Manet from using black with dramatic effect.

Portable paints in the open sunlight and color perception were two components of Impressionist technique. The third component was speed.

Making natura] light explode on canvas necessitated quick brushstrokes that captured a momentary impression of reflected light, a reflection that changed from minute to minute.

Monet's procedure was to paint furiously for seven or eight minutes and then move quickly to another canvas to capture a different light.

Should a painting require additional effort he would return to the same spot the following day at the same time, a procedure he followed in his forty paintings of Rouen Cathedral done at different times of day.

Early in the morning the elaborate Gothic facade would appear to be quite solid,

but later in the day, as in Rouen Cathedral, West Facade Sunlight, the stonework has dissolved into a luminous haze of warm colors.

Monet was the first artist since the Renaissance to investigate the dimension of time.

Monet's The River of 1868 is flooded with sunlight so bright that conservative critics claimed it made their eyes smart.

In this flickering network of color patches, shaped like mosaic tesserae, the reflections on the water are as " real" as the banks of the Seine.

Even more than The Fifer, Monet's painting is a "playing card."

Were it not for the woman and the boat in the foreground, the picture would be just as effective upside-down.. The mirror image here serves a purpose contrary to that of earlier mirror images. Instead of adding to the illuslon of real space, it strengthens the unity of the actual painted surface.

This inner coherence sets The River apart from Romantic "impressions" such as Constable's or Corot's, even though all three share the same on-the-spot immediacy

An interesting and telling sidelight is that France had been humiliated by Germany in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 . A study of French artistic output of the period points up the artists' tota1 unconcern with politics and so-called national honor.

Rouen Cathedral 

Impressionism, it is often said, revitalized sculpture no less than painting.

The statement is at once true and misleading.

Rodin, the first sculptor of genius since Bernini, redefined sculpture during the same years that Manet and Monet redefined painting.

In so doing, however, he did not follow these artists' lead. How indeed could the effect of such pictures as The Fifer or The River be reproduced in three-dimensions and without color?

What Rodin did accomplish was to capture the spontaneity and immediacy of Implessionism in three-dimensional form. Like Renoir and Degas, Rodin was concerned with the human figure but totally unlike any impressionist, he depicted his figures in moments of stress or tension.

Rodin's sculptures displayed a vigorously creased surface. These welts and wrinkles produce, in polished bronze, an ever-changing pattern of reflections.

But is this effect borrowed from Impressionist painting?

Does Rodin actually dissolve three-dimensional form into flickering patches of light and dark?

These fiercely exaggerated shapes pulsate with sculptural energy, and they retain this quality under whatever conditions the piece is viewed.

Rodin did not work directly in bronze; he modeled in wax or clay. How, then, could he calculate in advance the reflections on the bronze surfaces of the casts that would ultimately be made from these models?

He worked as he did, we must assume, for an altogether different reason: not to capture elusive optical effects,

but to emphasize the process of "growth"--the miracle of dead matter coming to life in the artist's hands.

As the color patch for Manet and Monet is the primary reality, so are the malleable lumps from which Rodin builds his forms.

By discovering what might be called the autonomy of the fragment, he rescued sculpture from mechanical verisimilitude just as Manet rescued painting from photographic realism.

Despite the sculptural revolution proclaimed with such daring by Rodin at 24,

he still believed that the sculptor's noblest task is to show the nude human form, although it could now be done in fragmentary form, and

he persisted in the claim that the sculptor's vocation is to create "new classics"--that is, works free from the dictates of the patron and demanding to be judged in their own terms.

When in 1880 he was at last entrusted with a major task, the entrance of the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, Rodin elaborated the commission into an ambitious ensemble called The Gates of Hell, which, characteristically, he never finished.

The symbolic program was inspired by Dante's Inferno,

but it was equally indebted to Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil.

Its common denominator is a tragic view of the human condition--guilty passions, desire forever unfulfilled here and in the beyond, the vain hope of happmess.

The perceptive critic Gustave Geffroy, writing of The Gates of Hell in 1889, defined their subject as the endless reenactment of the sufferings of Adam and Eve.

Indeed, Rodin had tried in 1881 to persuade the government to let him flank The Gates with statues of the two.

The Gates served as a matrix for countless smaller pieces that he eventually made into independent works.

The most famous of these autonomous fragments is The Thinker, a prodigious representation of tension in repose.

It was intended for the lintel of the Gates, whence the figure was to contemplate the panorama of despair below him.

It descends partly from a statue by Carpeaux of another subject from The Inferno, Ugolino and his sons.

The ancestry of The Thinker can be traced back much further, however. It goes back, indirectly, to the first phase of Christian art. (The pensive man)

It also includes the action-in-repose of Michelangelo's superhuman bodies.

In the context of The Gates of Hell, The Thinker was originally conceived as a generalized image of Dante, the poet, sitting atop the gates and, in his mind's eye seeing what goes on all around him and brooding over Rodin's conception of the Inferno--the figure is sunk deep in thought.

Once Rodin decided to detach him from The Gates, he became The Poet-Thinker, and finally just The Thinker.

But what kind of thinker?

Partly Adam, no doubt (though there is also a different Adam by Rodin, another "outgrowth " of The Gates),

partly Prometheus, and

partly the brute imprisoned by the passions of the flesh.

Rodin wisely refrained from giving him a specific name, for the statue fits no preconceived identity.

The Kiss, an over-lifesize group in marble, also derives from The Gates.

It was meant to be Dante's Paolo and Francesca,

but Rodin rejected it as unsuitable. Evidently he realized that The Kiss shows the ill-fated pair succumbing to their illicit desire for each other here on earth, not as tormented souls in Hell.

Knowing its original title helps us to understand a salient aspect of the group: passion reigned in by hesitancy, for the embrace is not yet complete.

POSTIMPRESSI0NISM

Postimpressionism is a catch-all term for some highly individual artists who reacted against the purely visual emphasis of Impressionism. They were all Impressionists before they explored other styles.

Paul Cezanne, the first and foremost of the Postimpressionists, Cezanne was, in fact, one of the giants of European painting. His art lay somewhere between representation and abstraction, :an intellectualized approach to applying paint to canvas. For Cezanne, the whole purpose of painting was to express the emotion that the forms and colors of the natural world evoked in the artist

Cezanne was born in Aix-en-Provence, near the Mediterranean coast, where he formed a close friendship with the writer Emile Zola, later a champion of the Impressionists.

A man of intensely emotional temperament, he came to Paris in 1861 imbued with enthusiasm for the Romantics. Cezanne, however, quickly grasped the nature of the "Manet Revolution," but utterly transformed it.

Cezanne began to paint bright outdoor scenes with Pissarro, but he never shared his fellow Impressionists' interest in "slice-of-life" subjects, in movement and change.

About 1879, when he painted the Self-Portrait, he had decided "to make of Impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of the museums."

His Romantic impulsiveness of the 1860s has now given way to a patient, disciplined search for harmony of forrn and color.

Every brushstroke is like a building-block, firmly placed within the pictorial architecture, which creates a subtle balance of "two-D" and "three-D." (Note how the pattern of wallpaper in the background frames the rounded shape of the head.)

The colors, too, are deliberately controlled so as to produce "chords" of warm and cool tones that reverberate throughout the canvas.

Cezanne also is noted for his still lifes

His landscapes look like his native Provence but not literally; everything has been clarified and concentrated. Cezanne took liberties with ordinary visual experience that challenge our perceptions and force us to view the world in a new way, in Cezannes way.

Cezanne constructed his paintings slowly, methodically, with an intellectual control. the results are what he called a "durable museum quality" because he painted not just what he saw but what he knew.

 

 

 

1889 "Wheat Fields and Cypress Trees" Gogh, Vincent van (1853-90)

Van Gogh, the first great Dutch master since the seventeenth century, did not become an artist until 1880 and he died only ten years later. While Cezanne and Seurat were converting Impressionism into a more severe, classical style, van Gogh pursued the opposite direction. He believed that Impressionism did not provide the artist with enough freedom to express his emotions. Since this was his main concern, he is sometimes called an Expressionist, although the term ought to be reserved for certain later painters.

Cezanne sold some of his paintings for as little as nine dollars, but the Dutch artist van Gogh sold only three paintings during his ten-year career; depending, entirely on his brother for support.

His early interests were in literature and religion.

Profoundly dissatisfied with the values of industrial society and| imbued with a strong sense of mission, he worked for a while as a lay preacher among poverty-stricken coal miners in Belgium.

This intense feeling for the poor dominates the paintings of his pre-Impressionist period, 1880-85.

In Paris, his Impressionist phase lasted less than two years.

Although it was vitally important for his development, he had to integrate it with the style of his earlier years before his genius could fully unfold.

Paris had opened his eyes to the sensuous beauty of the visible world and had taught him the pictorial language of the color patch,

but painting continued to be nevertheless a vessel for his personal emotions.

To investigate this spiritual reality with the new means at his command, he went to Arles, in the south of France. It was there, between 1888 and 1890, that he produced his greatest pictures.

Like Cezanne, Van Gogh now devoted his main energies to landscape painting, but the sun-drenched Mediterranean countryside evoked a very different response in him: he saw it filled with ecstatic movement, not architectural stability and permanence.

Wheat Field and Cypress Trees,

both earth and sky pulsate with an overpowering turbulence.

The wheat field resembles a stomly sea,

the trees spring flamelike from the ground, and

the hills and clouds heave with the same undulant motion.

The dynamism contained in every brushstroke makes of each one not merely a deposit of color, but an incisive graphic gesture.

This shows the artist's personal "handwriting."

Yet to Van Gogh himself it was thc color, not the form, that determined the expressive content of his pictures.

The letters he wrote to his brother include many eloquent descriptions of his choice of hues and the emotional meanings he attached to them.

He had learned about Impressionist color from Pissarro,

but his personal color symbolism probably stemmed from discussions with Paul Gauguin., who stayed with Van Gogh at Arles for several months.

Yellow, for example, meant faith or triumph or love to Van Gogh,

carmine was a spiritual color,

cobalt a divine one;

red and green, on the other hand, stood for the terrible human passions.)

Although he acknowledged that his desire "to exaggerate the essential and to leave the obvious vague" made his colors look arbitrary by Impressionist standards, he neverthe-less remained deeply committed to the visible world.

Compared to Monet's The River, the colors of Wheat Field and Cypress Trees are stronger, simpler, and more vibrant, but in no sense "unnatural."

They speak to us of that "kingdom of light" Van Gogh had found in the South, and

of his mystic faith in a creative force animating all forms of life--a faith no less ardent than the sectarian Christianity of his early years.

Twice confined to a hospital in Arles after an apparent mental breakdown in 1889, van Gogh resumed painting and continued to produce during his subsequent year-long confinement in an asylum at St.-Remy.

Painted in a field near the hospital, The Starry Night is an ecstatic vision of the power and glory of the universe.

A tall cypress flmes toward the whirling and exploding stars of a cosmic drama.

This expressive work represents the artist's reverent celebration of the wonders of nature and is not, as some have contended, symptomatic of mental problems, although recent research has determined that the artist suffered from a debilitating, illness called Meniere's disease. Symptoms include haluacinations and a ringing in the ears.

Moving northwest of Paris to the village of Auvers-sur-Oise after his release from the asylum, van Gogh completed about sixty paintings during the last two months of his tragic life.

Why he chose to commit suicide at age thirty-seven with a bullet to the abdomen (that killed him several agonizing days later) has never been satisfactorily explained.

 

 

"Vision after the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel)" Gaugin, Paul (1848-1903)

The quest for religious experience also played an important part in the work, if not in the life, of another great Post-Impressionist, Paul Gauguin. Van Gogh's onetime friend, Gauguin (go-ga), has been a kind of folk hero for desk-bound romantics who dream of dropping out of the rat race to pursue their artistic muse. The reality of Gauguin's life and career is, however, not the stuff of dreams.

He began as a prosperous stockbroker in Paris and an amateur painter and collector of modern pictures.

At the age of 35, however, he became convinced that he must devote himself entirely to art, naively assuming that he would be as successful as a full-time painter as he had been as a stockbroker.

He abandoned his business career in 1883 (because of a stock market crash) and separated from his family

A rebel at odds with conventional behavior and society in general, Gauguin was seldom plagued with self-doubt. Writing to his absent wife (whom he had abandoned), he proclaimed that "I am a great artist and I know it."

By 1886 everything was gone: wife, family, money. He eventually found himself living on borrowed funds at a run-down country inn in Brittany.

Gauguin started out as a follower of Cezanne and once owned one of his still lifes.

He then developed a style that though less intensely personal than Van Gogh's, was in some ways an even bolder advance beyond Impressionism.

Gauguin believed that Western civilization was "out of joint," that industrial society had forced people into an incomplete life dedicated to material gain, while their emotions lay neglected.

To rediscover for himself this hidden world of feeling, Gauguin left Paris in 1886 to live among the peasants of Brittany at Pont Aven in western France.

There two years later he met the painters Emile Bemard (1868-1941) and Louis Anquetin (1861-1932), who had rejected Impressionism and began to evolve a new style which they called Cloissonism (after an enamel technique), for its strong outlines.

Gauguin incorporated their approach into his own, and by 1889 emerged as the most forceful member of the Pont-Aven group, which quickly came to center on him.

The new movement became known as Synthetism or Symbolism.

As this Pont-Aven style was first being developed, Gauguin noticed during the summer of 1888 that religion was still part of the everyday life of the country people,

In pictures such as The Vision After the Sermon ("Jacob Wrestling with the Angel"), he tried to depict their simple, direct faith.

Here at last is what no Romantic artist had achieved: a style based on pre-Renaissance sources.

Modeling and perspective have given way to flat, simplified shapes outlined heavily in black, and

the brilliant colors are equally "unnatural."

This style, inspired by folk art and medieval stained glass, is meant to recreate both the imagined reality of the vision and the trancelike rapture of the peasant women.

The painting fulfills the goal of Synthetism: by treating the canvas in this decorative manner, the artist has turned it from a representation of the external world into an aesthetic object that projects an internal idea without using narrative or literal symbols.

Yet we sense that although he tried to share this experience, Gallguin remains an outsider. He could paint pictures about faith, but not from faith.

Gauguin's search for the unspoiled life ]ed him even farther afield

After he quarreled with van Gogh, he went to Tahiti--he had already visited Martinique in 1887--as a sort of "missionary in reverse, " to learn from the natives instead of teaching them.

In Tahiti Gauguin found, he initially thought, an antidote to the sickness of European civilization, a "primitive life"

Although he spent the rest of his life in the South Pacific, he never realized the virgin Eden he was seeking.

Islands were governed by the French and Gauguin had evolved his tropical style before settling down in Polynesia. Gauguin's dream of "solitude under the tropical sun" was compromised by illness, poverty, and harassment by French authorities, but his work did acquire a new vigor.

While critics of the time found Gauguin's colors bizarre and his drawing crude, the public accepted the content of his paintings as actual illustrations of Tahitian life and customs.

Tahiti was, however, Westernized and middle-class, with a snobbish colonial bureaucracy and a pervasive overlay of Western missionary zeal.

One looks in vain in a Gauguin painting for anything resembling the everyday details of colonial life: no officials, traders, sailors, ships, or any possessions of the Europeans who had been living in this colonial outpost for sixty years.

The Polynesia that we see in Gauguin's art was the creation of the artist.

Indeed, he often had to rely on the writings and photographs of those who had recorded its culture before him.

 

Though Gauguin admitted that his Tahiti was a subjective interpretation of what was "vaguest and most universal in nature, we still have a romantic image of Tahiti in Gauguin's mode. Nonetheless his Tahitian canvases conjure up an ideal world filled with the beauty and meaning he sought so futilely in real life.

His masterpiece in this vein is Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1884-85 "Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte" Seurat, Georges

Causing nearly as much controversy as Manet and Whistler, Seurat (sue-rah) exhibited Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte at the eighth and final Impressionist show of 1886. Critics had a field day lambasting the dots of color, the "procession of pharaohs," and a "clearance sale of Nuremberg toys." Favorable critics, and there were some, labeled the new style "Neoimpressionism" or "Divisionism," though Paris wits chose the word "confettiism." Seurat himself used the term "chromo-luminarium" to describe his method of painting with tiny dots using the colors of the spectrum.

Seurat devoted his main efforts to a few very large paintings, spending a year or more on each of them and making endless series of preliminary studies before he felt sure enough to tackle the definitive version.

Aspiring to paint in a scientific manner based on the optical theories, Seurat used his petits points, his dots, to construct a monumentat composition of museum quality, as advocated by Cezanne.

Seurat adapted the laws of color. Like Degas, he had studied with a follower of Ingres, and his theoretical interests grew out of this experience.

He came to believe that art must be based on a system.

With the help of a friend, he formulated a series of artistic "laws" based on early experiments in the psychology of visual perception.

A Sunday on La: Grande Jatte, his greatest masterpiece, had its genesis in this painstaking method.

Irmpressionistic

in subject--the scene is a popular summer resort near Paris where middle-class city dwellers could bathe, picnic, and promenade.--

in brilliant colors and

in the effect of intense sunlight.

Otherwise, however, the picture is the very opposite of a quick "impression."

Modeling and foreshortening are reduced to a minimum, and the figures appear mostly in either strict profile or frontal views, as if Seurat had adopted the rules of ancient Egyptlan art.

Moreover, he has fitted them wlthin the composition as tightly as the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. So exactly are they fixed in relation to each other that not a single one could be moved by even a millimeter.

Frozen in time and space, they act out their roles with ritualized gravity, in contrast to the joyous abandon of the relaxed crowd in typical Impressionist paintings, such as Renoir's Le Moulin de la Galette

Thus despite the period costumes, we read this cross section of Parisian society as timeless.

E.ven the brushwvork demonstrates Seurat's passion for order and permanence.

These tiny dots of brilliant color were supposed to merge in the beholder's eye and produce intermediary tints more luminous than those obtainable from pigments mixed on the palette.

The actual result, however, did not conforrn to the theory.

Looking at the Grande Jatte from a comfortable dlstance (seven to ten feet from the original), we find that the mixing of colors in the eye remains incomplete

the dots do not disappear, but are clearly visible as the tesserae of a mosaic.

in a non-chromatic way, they contribute as units of scale to the grandeur that Seurat achieved

Seurat himself must have liked this unexpected effect, which gives the canvas the quality of a shimmering, translucent screen.; otherwise he would have reduced the size of the dots.

The painting has a dignity and simplicity suggesting a new classicism, but it is a distinctly modern classicism based on scientific theory.

The development of control of line., proportions, and masses of light and shadow make this similar to compositions in the classical style

thus his optical theories were, in prartice, more artistic than scientific

In its psychological impact, the work is curiously modern.

People, animals, hats, and parasols are structural and decorative elements, isolated from each other.

A typical Impressionist genre scene has become a melancholic comment on alienation and isolation in late Victorian .society, symbolizing, the underlying pessimism of the age.

Seurat's systematic approach to art has the internal logic of modcrn engineering, which he and his followers hoped would transform society for the better.

This social consciousness was allied to a form of anarchism descended from Courbet's friend Proudhon, and contrasts with the general political indifference of the Impressionists.

The fact that Seurat shares the same subject matter as the Impressionists serves only to emphasize further the fundamental difference in attitude.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1910 "The Dream" Rousseau, Henri (1844-1910)

 

The most influential of the Postimpressionists were Cezanne and an obscure toll collector named Rousseau.

An isolated and enigmatic genius who began painting late in . life, Rousseau taught himself to paint "alone," as he said, "and without any master but nature."

His naive ideal was what he called the "truth" of the camera; he was actually convinced that his paintings were as "realistic" as photographs.

His jungle landscapes were painted with a startling directness of vision that influenced Picasso and others, but these were tropics of the mind produced by the magical vision of a simple man who, apparently, never left France.

Nothing in The Dream is identifiable in botanical terms.

What we see is

a brooding and sinister jungle inhabited by

a nude on a Victorian couch

some apparently tame animals, and

a creature both animal and human who plays a musical instrument.

Rousseau

combined

the subjectivity of Romanticism with

the so-called objectivity that was aspired to by the realists and Impressionisti,

giving us a vivid illustration of the never-never land between the two extremes.

The magic becomes believably real to us. Rousseau himself described the scene in a little poem:

Yadwigha, peacefully asleep

Enjoys a lovely dream:

She hears a kind snake charmer

Playing upon his reed.

On stream and foliage glisten

The silvery beams of the moon.

And savage serpents listen

To the gay, entrancing tune.

Here at last was an innocent directness of feeling that Gauguin thought was .so necessary for the age.

Picasso and his friends were the first to recognize this quality in Rousscau's work. They revered him as the godfather of twentieth-century painting.

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