Nine Paintings Plus Two
One day in the 1960s, a kid growing up in a magical town in the middle of Louisiana blew out blazing blue candles on a birthday cake and opened a present that turned out to be The Encyclopedia of Art by Eleanor Munro. The book had been published by Golden Press several years earlier. It was wonder encapsulated, perfectly arranged and designed in a way that could cure even a troglodyte of artistic indifference and ignorance...
Art, the boy learned, is not a static thing. Movements and styles come and go...
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He also learned that sometimes the easiest way to learn about these movements is to simply look at examples. A Cubist work tends toward a different appearance than a Realist portrait. And he learned, too, not to get too hyper about attaching labels to the painters and their work. Some artists, like Picasso, work in many different styles...
Late in the 19th century, a style called Impressionism dominated French painting. Its practitioners often worked outdoors, attempting to capture the scenes before them spontaneously and in vibrant color. The art historian Sarah Newmeyer describes the Impressionist goal as an attempt to "record on canvas not what they knew was form but what they saw as light." They intended to do this by using paint to capture immediate sensory impressions made on the optic nerve by the quick glimpse of an object or scene...
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| Soleil Levant, Claude Monet, 1872: Impressionism |
Such thinking verged on blasphemy of the highest order to the Academy of Art of the Institut de France which held great power over art and artists. Its members dictated line was a primary characteristic of acceptable painting and color a subservient adjunct. Thanks to the power of the Academy, the French government in 1893 rejected 27 paintings of 65 bequeathed to the nation by the estate of a collector- artist named Caillebotte. The rejected canvases included work by the Impressionists Paul Cezanne, Claude Monet, Edouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre August Renoir, and Alfred Sisley...
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| Le Moulin de la Galette, Pierre August Renoir, 1876: Impressionism |
A visit to Wikipedia lists several Impressionist painting characteristics: relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes; open composition; emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time); common, ordinary subject matter; inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience; and unusual visual angles...
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| Lydia leaning on her arms, Mary Cassatt, 1879: Impressionism |
As Impressionism waned in France, another major artistic movement was coming to prominence in Germany. This was Expressionism. Adherents of this school had no urge to reproduce objective realities. They were concerned with the emotions and responses provoked in the viewer by objects and events...
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| Lady In A Green Jacket, August Mack, 1913: Expressionism |
Expressionist artists rallied around the work of a Norwegian, Edvard Munch, whose portraits of a screaming figure standing on a bridge, captured a sensation that Nature herself was shrieking in rage and pain, that shadows were coming soon to darken the world...
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| On White II, Wassilly Kandinsky, 1923: Expressionism |
[Newmeyer, in her Enjoying Modern Art, speculated geography possibly had something to do with the styles of the Impressionists and Expressionist, noting the landscape of France offered sunny skies and coastlines while Germany lay almost totally hemmed in by its neighbors. She didn't press the point about geography but I suspect if she wrote today, she might ponder the difference in styles in terms of the growing role of science in the daily lives of men and women in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century. Methinks in some way Impressionists were physicists with paintbrushes, capturing data received by the human eye, and Expressionists akin to psychologists who urged primal screams long before Arthur Janov began to use the technique in the late 1960s.]
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| Blue Horses, Franz Marc, 1911: Expressionism |
Munch, incidentally, had been earlier influenced by Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh whose work has been described as Post-Impressionistic-- a movement continuing the Impressionist tradition but modifying it to emphasize geometric forms or distort shapes to provoke an emotional response or to use unusual colors...
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| Strassenarbeiter, Vincent Van Gogh, 1889: Post-Impressionism |
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| Two Women Bathing, Felix Vallaton, 1896: Post-Impressionism |
La Belle France is not one to be outdone and she soon responded to the Expressionist movement by fostering Surrealism, a school that achieved widespread popularity across Europe...
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| The Red Tower, Giorgio De Chirico, 1913: Surrealism |
Surrealism is one of the most difficult movements for a blogger prone to short overviews if that blogger wants to create a quick summary and be done with the week's writing. To me, the artists who call themselves surrealists try to capture the world of dreams and subconscious desires, the landscapes of the collective and individual unconscious...
Its devotees consider surrealism to be a revolutionary movement, a philosophy mocking the smug self-satisfaction of the bourgeois rationalist at the same time it embraces the mystic and metaphysical. When we look at a surrealist work, be it by Dali or Magritte or Ernst or Tanguy, we encounter surprises, the juxtaposition of objects that do not seem to belong with one another...
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| The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, Salvador Dali, 1959: Surrealism |
The world of the surrealist is the world where a properly dressed woman from the 19th century walks through a landscape of classical architecture to a meeting with a skeleton as a nude woman slumbers on a recamier in the shadows of distant desert mountains under a moonlit sky. And, in the hands of the right artist, it is a world more real than the one you and I see in our waking workaday hours...
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| Venus Dormida, Paul Delvaux, 1944: Surrealism |
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Note: All photographs for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia, without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: None
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