CHAPTER 4
POST - IMPRESSIONISM.
After a decade or so, Impressionism had run its course, leaving the way open for new
artists who didn’t agree with its purely descriptive aims of capturing the fleeting moment.
They said it was too ephemeral, lacking in solidity, and in the view of some of them, not
allowing artists to express any real depth of emotion. These artists were known as PostImpressionists.
POINTILLISM.
One branch of Post-Impressionism was a movement known as Pointillism. Two artists to
note are George Seurat and Paul Signac. They painted the same subjects as the
Impressionists while using purer and brighter colours. Instead of the short Impressionist
brushstrokes, they employed a technique of small dots spread closely together over the
whole picture surface. They developed pointillism as a means of mixing colour by
applying dots of red and blue, for instance, side by side so that the viewer mixes them
visually to appear as purple. They would certainly have observed a nascent form of
pointillism in some Impressionist works, in The Red Boats, Argenteuil, for example,
where Monet employs broken touches and small flecks of paint all over the picture
surface. It was only a short step from this to a more formal arrangement of smaller dots.
Like the Impressionists, they reduced contrasts of tone to a minimum, relying on colour
contrasts, and tonal modelling was explored through gradations of pure colour. Their art,
although atmospheric to a degree, tended to revert to clarity of line, solidity of form and
the more structured composition of classical art.
GEORGE SEURAT.
Sunday Afternoon at the Island of La Grand Jatte, 1884-6. Chicago Art Institute, is a
classic example of this painting technique. Seurat spent two years working on this large
painting, as against the fleetingly painted pictures of the Impressionists.
He made small outdoor coloured sketches and painted the finished picture in the studio.
He worked in a monumental scale, as if emulating the Classicists. His subjects are people
in the landscape bathing in the river Seine or out for a sunny afternoon, and to that extent
they are typically impressionistic. But there is a complete absence of any hint of
spontaneity or rapid execution. To his way of thinking, the Impressionists had been too
casual and too careless with their fleeting impressions. His paintings have a still,
reflective quality. Unlike the Impressionists, where the figures are obviously interacting
with each other, Seurat’s people seem lost in their own thoughts, as if in deep
contemplation. There are a number of ways of looking at Seurat’s paintings. Is he
rejecting the casual, aimless, pleasure-filled world of the Impressionists and asking us to
take time out to pause and reflect, or is he representing a frozen solemnity which may be
an ironic criticism of the formal, ritualistic quality of the middle class Parisian life of the
day? In other words, a quality of mock solemnity. This painting is open to a variety of
interpretations, beguiling us by its sense of mystery. Standing before it, you cannot fail to
pause to reflect and contemplate.
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Whatever the interpretation, his work is thought provoking in a way that Impressionism
is not. For discussion purposes, compare this painting with a figure painting by Renoir.
Another of Seurat’s paintings in the National Gallery, London, is The Bathers,
Asniers (1883-84). This picture was painted before the one above at a time when his
pointillist theory was not fully formed. The picture has something of the effects of light
of the Impressionists, especially evident in the background where objects are dissolved in
the light but here again there is the same reflective stillness – of a world almost frozen in
time. This is a very large painting (3m x 2m).
Georges Seurat died at the age of thirty-two but his effect on modern art has been
considerable.
PAUL SIGNAC.
Another Pointillist was Paul Signac. If his formal frozen-like, The Dining Room, (1886)
has echoes of Seurat, his later landscapes in the south of France seem to revert to the
Impressionist pleasure principle, as in Saint-Tropez, The Custom House Pathway in
which he uses hot, rainbow colours to describe the bright light of the Mediterranean. His
technique differed from the Impressionists in that he moved away from their naturalistic
colour representation, so that for the first time in art we are beginning to see the arbitrary
use of
Colour. He developed a freer style than Seurat, using larger dots of colour more spread
apart on the canvas.
In order to give children an appreciation of pointillist technique, a worthwhile exercise
would be to paint a picture in the manner of Paul Signac. A paper mosaic technique
might also be useful as an experiment.
FAUVISM.
Another offshoot of Impressionism was a movement known as Fauvism. Fauve artists
were dissatisfied with the purely descriptive character of Impressionism. Uninhibited by
rules and conventions, they said that colour should be used more expressively and not
necessarily related to objects. Their drawing on the other hand was traditional, and the
perspective and subject matter of Impressionism was maintained. The Fauves looked, felt
and painted. They were much influenced by the late paintings of Van Gough which we
will be looking at later. Fauves, meaning wild beasts, was a term of derision used by an
art critic at the first exhibition of their paintings.
MAURICE DE VLAMINCK.
Maurice de Vlaminck, 1876-1958, was one of a number of Fauve artists. He was born in
Paris in 1876 and became a self-taught artist. He was greatly influenced by Van Gough
whom he said he loved better than his own father. He painted mostly landscapes, with
little regard for naturalistic colour. He said that the artist should be the master of nature,
not her slave. His few portraits show none of Van Gough’s love of humanity and the
latter’s empathy with ordinary people.
In his later career, Vlaminck dropped the bright Fauve colours in favour of a darker
palette, which gives his landscapes, with their broad slashing strokes, a foreboding
appearance.
In Winter Landscape, Maurice de Vlaminck, Boston Fine Arts Museum, the
emphasis is on tones rather than colour. The composition is traditional – the large wind-
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swept tree on the left balancing the low houses and the smaller trees on the right,
diagonal lines, indicating rapid movement leading in to the large house at the centre of
interest. This house also attracts the eye because of the suggestion of brighter colours and
its tones contrasting with the sky. His paint is thick and partly laid on with a knife whose
marks are obvious. His break with tradition is in the indelicate handling.
The effect is one of wild abandon, expressing the gloom and desolation of a winter
evening, but further, expressing the artist’s excitement in the handling of paint. There is
movement everywhere, in the winding road leading to the group of houses, in the wild
clawing trees on the left, in the twirling smoke from the chimney and in the wind-tossed,
murky clouds. The only static objects are the trees on the right but they look as if the life
had been battered out of them. The group of houses in the centre huddle close together
for comfort, as if under sustained attack from the elements.
For discussion purposes, Winter landscape could be compared with one of Carot’s
tranquil landscapes.
Winter landscape would easily lend itself to a response in creative writing. Simply ask
the class to do a piece of writing entitled Winter Evening. A little further prior discussion
could take the form of asking the class to suggest phrases describing the sky, the trees
and their branches, the road and houses?
ANDRE DERAIN, 1880-1954.
Andre Derain was another Fauve artist. He worked with a fellow-artist, Henri Matisse in
the south of France in the summer of 1905. The principal characteristics of Portrait of
Matisse 1905, (Tate Gallery), London are heightened patches of colour, the depiction of
shadows through colour, and rapid execution in large loaded brushstrokes. The light
colours are warm orange pinks, the darks are in cool greens and blues. This modelling
through colour has come a long way from the pre- Impressionists who relied solely on
tonal modelling. There are echoes of Van Gough’s brushwork in Matisse’s beard, with
whose work Derain was familiar. This painting could be compared with Man with a Pipe
by Vlaminck.
Matisse appears intensely introspective in this portrait. Children could paint a variety of
portraits ‘in the manner of’’ Derain’ or Vlaminck.
PAUL CEZANNE, 1839-1906.
Other Post-Impressionist artists, like Paul Cezanne held that Impressionism was too
ephemeral and chaotic and that art should capture the world objectively, as it is, in its
unchanging state, ignoring light and atmosphere and concentrating on colour and
composition to produce a balanced, structured design, as in the Mont Sainte-Victoire
paintings.
His early work was impressionistic, but he later rejected the atmospherics of
Impressionism because of what he considered its failure to represent nature objectively.
He tried to peer beyond the surface appearances of atmosphere to what he considered as
the underlying and unchanging architecture and structure of the landscape. For this
reason, line is just as important in his work as colour. His patches of colour had to be
descriptive, structural and decorative at the same time. His quest, like that of the
Classicists, was for permanent values, but in his use of colour, his debt was to the
Impressionists. Cezanne’s motto was ‘paint what you know to be there, not strictly what
you see’. Because of the absence of linear and aerial perspective in most of his work, it
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could be said that he was the originator of the so called flat canvas so characteristic of
modern art.
More than any other artist, he was to have an influence on Pablo Picasso in the latter’s
cubist phase, setting the tone for the development of 20th century abstract art. Because of
the cerebral character of his work, his art is not immediately accessible to children.
Cezanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire above the Road to Tholonet, 1904. Cleveland
Museum of Art, is a good illustration of his later work, which tended towards
abstraction. In it he retains the pure colours and shifting daubs of paint of the
Impressionists but none of their atmospherics. There are contrasts of orange and blue, of
red and green. Note the well-defined line on the trees and mountain. There are no light
effects, no shadows. Cezanne would say that colour is light. The emphasis is on design
and structure. The trees have been flattened and look less like real trees. The mountain
comes forward. Because Cezanne would hold that linear and aerial perspective are mere
illusions (not objective realities) and so not true to nature, and for this reason he tended to
eliminate them from his art. In the above painting, perspective is flattened, the mountain
appearing to come forward in the picture: ‘paint what you know to be there’.
Compare this painting with an Impressionist landscape.
PABLO PICASSO, 1881-1973.
It is difficult to categorise Picasso. In the course of a long career he experimented
successfully with every known style and approach to art, and invented many more. A
characteristic of his genius was his ability to marry invention to well established tradition.
As an old man studying an exhibition of children's drawings he remarked, 'When I was
their age I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them.'
A lesson there for teachers of art!
Like every aspiring artist, Picasso made his way to Paris in 1900. There followed a
period of extreme poverty, cold and despair. During this time, known as his blue period,
he developed his first really independent style. Poor and destitute himself, he used social
outcasts as his subjects in order to paint the themes of poverty, blindness, alienation and
despair in cold tones of blue. Good for a response in creative writing.
The Tragedy. National Gallery of Art, Washington, is one of the paintings from his
blue period. The suicide of one of his friends some time before this had a profound effect
on his outlook and feelings. Although the paintings are not explicitly about death, they
are at the same time concerned about loneliness and the absence of love.
The Tragedy illustrates this point. It shows a family without any intimacy, people
without life, frozen like statues. There is nothing in their environment to give them any
hope in their isolation from one other. The two adults, heads bowed, obviously feeling
the cold, try to wrap themselves up in their scanty garments. Seemingly ignoring the
child, they are totally preoccupied with themselves. Only the child is making some kind
of a gesture as if a cry for help. Standing trapped at the edge of some sea, they have
reached the end of the line. Their bleak surroundings are a reminder of their spiritual
deprivation. The dominant blue of the painting symbolizes their sadness and destitution.
Guernica. Pablo Picasso, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain.
An obsession running through much of Picasso’s work is the violence done by people to
other people. In 1936, civil war broke out in his native Spain, and Picasso, always on the
side of the people, supported the Republican Government against the military uprising of
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the Fascists. In April 1937, Nazi planes in the pay of Franco bombed the Basque town of
Guernica, killing and wounding thousands of people. As an angry reaction to this, Picasso
painted the 25ft x 11ft Guernica in one month.
For a period, Picasso had experimented with collage. This painting, while not a collage,
gives the appearance of cut out pieces of newspaper stuck on to canvas - probably
alluding to the newsworthy character of the work.
This picture demonstrates that forms in art (perspective, modelling, colour,) need not be
descriptive but can still be expressive of strong feelings. Violent things are happening but
it is the terrible jaggedness and criss-crossing of lines that create the mood of fear and
confusion. The picture is part bullfight and part 'Massacre of the Innocents'.
Apart from its mock allusion to medieval altar pieces, the painting is almost a total
break with tradition. Picasso dispenses with realism in his rejection of perspective,
modelling and colour. But his message is very clear in his distortion of line and form.
Everything has a sharp, cutting, edge - the rays of light from the electric bulb, flames of
fire like spears. The distorted shape and lines in the hand in the bottom left hand corner
suggest savage suffering. The woman on the left holding a dead child is stricken with
grief.
The woman on the right is full of fear and despair as she tumbles from the window of a
burning building and into a flaming fire. The presence of the gored, screaming horse and
the brooding bull increases the feeling of bestiality - the bull a symbol of aggression, the
horse as the helpless victim. The figure rushing in through the door – a bearer of some
horrible news - shows distress, his head distorted in the inrushing movement. The
dismembered fragments of a warrior lie on the ground, his hand grasping a broken sword.
Picasso seems to be saying that violence turns humans into monsters. The human form is
torn apart and reconstructed with sinister significance. Eyes, ears, nose and mouth have
moved into new positions. There is exaggeration and distortion in order to express agony,
hate, fear. Tones of black and grey are used to symbolise death. Good for a response in
creative writing.
See
also Picasso’s The Mother, 1901, City Art Museum of St. Louis, USA.
A NOTE ON CUBISM.
Cubism was a method of painting invented by Pablo Picasso and George Braque around
1909. It was a reaction against Impressionism and Fauvism. The early forms of Cubism
emphasised volume and structure as against colour, line and atmosphere. Pictures were
built up of ‘cubes’ to produce images of real objects in a semi-abstract manner. Objects
were seen and painted from more than one point of view. “I paint what I know to be
there, not what I see”: Picasso. In this, they were taking their cue from the work of
Cezanne, while further developing his ideas.
In a later development of Cubism, perspective was eliminated and curved lines and
bright colours were introduced, as was collage.
Cubism was not abstract art but influenced the development of later abstract art.
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