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7. Impressionist Painting Developments (1) Origins
and Influences (2) Early
History (3) Impressionist
Edouard Manet (4) Impressionist
Claude Monet
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Impressionist Painting Developments
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BEST IMPRESSIONIST
ART PAINTING MEANING OF ART IMPRESSIONISM
OUTDOORS |
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EVOLUTION
OF VISUAL ART WORLD'S GREATEST
ARTWORKS WORLD'S TOP PAINTERS BEST MODERN ART |
Monet, after his return, goes to Argenteuil and stays there for six years. His house, buried in greenery, shrubbery and flowers, becomes the favourite haunt of his friends. The meetings are unrestrained, animated by the charm of young women, companions or friends of the artists. Painting is never forgotten. Its part is great, as proved by the anecdote of the portrait of Camille, Monet painted at the same time by Renoir and Manet. Now Monet ascends rapidly above all the others. If in the years before the war the movement which they led together found its first major fruits in the works of Manet, now it is crystallised around Monet. His engaging personality imposes itself on the other painters; they are struck by the energy he uses to achieve his end despite the handicaps and misfortunes which fate flings in his way. A strange strength, stemming mostly from his own great faith in himself, and a power of persuasion develop in him. His first conquest is Manet. Hesitant up to now and even resisting the persuasion and example of Berthe Morisot, whose charming personality has captivated him, Manet decides to paint in the "plein-air" manner. Almost from the first, as shown by his painting "Claude Monet in his Studio," Manet plunges his forms into scintillation and vibration of light. In avoiding a precise contour he succeeds, with magnificent ease, essentially by colour, in an atmosphere sparkling with light. |
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Manet, who has come to Gennevilliers to spend his holidays, has only to cross the river to join Monet. He depicts his friend in the picturesque floating studio that Monet uses on the Seine, as Daubigny once did. It was a vast bark on which the painter, in the shade of an awning stretched in front of the cabin under which sometimes his wife and friends would sit, was able to work quietly beside the water. Moving between the banks, under the arches that reflect the shimmer of the water, Monet felt himself really in the heart of this world of fluid forms whose evolution he sought to capture under the turning movement of the sun. It was undoubtedly at this time that he
became acquainted with a young neighbour, keen on boating and painting,
Gustave Caillebotte,
who, in 1873, had inherited a fortune which enabled him to pursue his
taste for the arts. After entering the Fine Arts School in the class of
Bonna, he leaves after a short time to work alongside Monet and Renoir,
who have become his friends. He begins buying works that he likes and
in several years builds up an important collection of Impressionist paintings,
with the intention of leaving them to the State for the museums of the
future. In his noble and generous character, and the seriousness of his
convictions, he recalls to some extent Bazille, whose role of benefactor
he assumes. |
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These paintings of Renoir and Monet, painted together, show the marks of a desperately hard effort and an extraordinary tension of the mind. As is commonly said in art circles they are "tired". The successive changes of mind, corrections and adjustments in the pigment leave a certain feeling of heaviness. Later Monet is perhaps to recall this when he resumes his famous series of cathedrals in the studio. Sensible of the criticism levelled against him of diluting shape in the light, he succeeds in finding, with a thick, gritty paste, the equivalent of the density of matter. The effects of light glide over it. The object assumes a porous character and becomes something of a screen; and if it does not really succeed in showing its weight, it does assume a physical presence. During the summer of 1874 the creative processes of Monet are accelerated. His activity reaches almost fever pitch. A brief period, but of great importance to his painting. In a series of canvases blooming with freshness ("The Bridge at Argenteuil," "The Railway Bridge at Argenteuil," "The Seine at Argenteuil" and "Sailing Boats at Argenteuil"), he sets off in search of reflections and rippling in the water, of bursts of light. Varying his technique, with vigorous strokes of the brush, wide or sharp-pointed or in the form or large or small commas, decomposing tones and making local tones burst out, using space to the maximum effect and breaking up masses and surfaces, he observes the phenomenon of light and its multiple facets. But behind the light and graceful effect he produces, there lies a more serious question. Taking the experiment as a whole it shows that it was not so much a matter of Monet capturing the ephemeral, as one likes to say, as his expressing duration, a developed duration, dynamic as is realised by the experience of sensation. Thus, in the apt words of Rene Berger, the Impressionists approach the the world "in process of developing". See also Impressionism's finest supporter: the art dealer Paul Durand-Durel. Renoir: Focuses on Figure-Landscapes This association of Renoir and Monet at
two decisive moments shows the part which Renoir played in the elaboration
of Impressionist technique. If Monet remains the founding father of the
group, the one who drives home the idea to its ultimate conclusion, it
is fair to consider in passing, the part which Renoir
played on the level of lucid research and also the prospecting for necessary
means of communicating sensations to others through the media of painting. |
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In his compositions of 1875 and 1876 he comes to use the human figure in a very original fashion, like a subject that is part of a landscape, on which light may play with greater richness and fantasy. At this time Renoir has a vast garden in the rue Cortot in Montmartre, where he paints in the open air. For his models, as Toulouse-Lautrec is to do ten years later in the elder Forest's garden, he takes the flower girls and seamstresses of the neighbourhood, with their comrades and friends. In a sort of bluish half-darkness, the light appears in the form of large round patches, a little pink, placed indifferently on faces and clothing and creating a phantasmagoria of colours, particularly on charming dresses with their bustles ornamented with stripes and ribbons. In this spirit he produces "La Balancoire" (The Swing) and the great composition of "Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette," in which he is the first to show the daytime aspects of this famous dancing place whose nocturnal atmosphere later was to inspire Toulouse-Lautrec so deeply. Renoir had divided up his sketches and then, as he paints the work, does not hesitate to take the whole canvas several times to the scene of what he is painting. This is not verification in the real sense of the word because it is a very complex composition, in imaginative combination of groups observed separately. In the same way the system of light which he has developed creates a sort of illusion of colour; it combines an alternation of merging masses which express light and shade in a broad and ample tachism according to laws governing complementaries. It is one of Renoir's most fortunate works, one of the most rhythmic and animated in the whole history of Impressionism. Sisley, Pissarro and Cezanne During these years the role of Pissarro is hardly less than that of Monet. Leaving the latter to reign over the waters, he is the painter of the earth and also of a certain unanimist city life. Having returned to Louveciennes in 1871, Pissarro settles soon afterwards near Pontoise, where he remains until 1884. He resumes the simple rustic life, taking his inspiration from landscapes around him but keeping close contact with his comrades by going to Paris regularly to take part in their gatherings. Those early scenes of Louveciennes and neighbouring villages are still near to those which he painted in 1870. They are roads seen full on in a simple linear perspective which sinks into the horizon, bordered by trees with tall, slim trunks topped with light mixture of foliage and branches. For some time Sisley,
also living at Louveciennes and later at Port-Marly where he remains until
1877, paints in the same spirit. For example we may compare his "Road
seen from the Chemin de Sevres" (1873) and Pissarro's "Entry
to the Village" (1872). The same thoroughfare of slender trees, the
same light foliage and branches, the same light blond harmony, the same
speckling of light. Pissarro is more firm and masterly, more assured in
his little |
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In rendering this homage to him Cezanne
was most likely thinking of the months in 1872 and 1873 when he worked
at Pontoise under the direction of his friend, alongside whom he had in
a way gone back to school. From this working retreat his art emerges transformed.
For a long time Pissarro has recognised the immense gifts of Cezanne.
The confidence he shows in him encourages the touchy man from Aix to forget
his dramatic, gloomy manner, his allegoric and literary leanings, and
to give himself over to pure painting. Very humbly, Cezanne begins by
putting a canvas by Pissarro in front of him and making a very close copy
of it. This allows him to become familiar with the new technique of colour
laid on with small strokes of the brush, in patches, but also to go deeply
into the secret of relief. He finds that tension can be expressed without
recourse to vehemence. His character, more inclined towards meditation
than invention, finds an inexhaustible peace and a starting-point in the
contemplation of nature. This long association, which lasted almost two
years, was a most rewarding one for the two friends. Each had a profound
influence on the other, which both were happy to recognise. In recalling
this, several historians are not afraid to use the term "mutation"
for the works of the Aix painter. Cezanne, conscious of his debt to Pissarro,
even says, "Perhaps we are all products of Pissarro." The latter,
for his part, acquires from his companion a sense of the monumental. At this time each of the painters has found
his way. Edgar Degas, after
a voyage to New Orleans which shows him receptive to the exotic charm
of colonial life, becomes definitely taken by the mechanisms of daily
life and begins a systematic study of them. It is the world of dancing,
observed in the wings of the Opera, that of laundresses or that of the
racecourse that attracts all his attention. His technique is no less remarkable. Colours
dissolve into luminous powdery clouds and space between figures assumes
an indefinable liveliness. He begins by using pastels which, mixed in
gouache and moistened with steam
from boiling water and placed and fixed layer after layer, gives him a
material of dazzling, pearly richness.
NEXT: (8) Impressionist Exhibitions in Paris. Acknowledgements: |
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