The Touch of Color PASTELS at the NATIONAL GALLERY of ART

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The Touch of Color PASTELS AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART

September 29, 2019 – January 26, 2020 FIRST USED DURING THE RENAISSANCE, pastels are still manufac- tured from a carefully balanced mix of pigment, a filler such as chalk or clay, and a binder, then shaped into sticks and dried. With a single stroke of this stick, the artist applies both color and line. Because of the medium’s soft, crumbly texture, the line can be left intact or smudged with a finger or stump (a rolled piece of leather or paper) into a broad area of tone. Pastelists have used this versatile medium in countless different ways over the centuries. Some have covered the surface of the paper or other support with a thick, velvety layer of pastel, while others have taken a more linear approach. Some have even ground the stick to a powder and rubbed it into the support, applied it with a stump, or moist- ened it and painted it on with a brush. Throughout history, the views of artists and their audiences toward the medium have varied as widely as the techniques of those who used it.

2 Fig. 1 Benedetto Luti, Head of a Fig. 2 Rosalba Carriera, Allegory of Bearded Man, 1715, pastel and colored Painting, 1730s, pastel and red chalk chalks on paper, National Gallery of Art, on blue paper, mounted on canvas, Washington, Julius S. Held Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund Samuel H. Kress Collection

A few sixteenth-century Italian artists mimicked the lifelike appearance of flaw- used pastel to block out colors in prepara- less skin. Among the most influential tory sketches for paintings. Although pas- of all eighteenth-century pastelists was tel continued to serve this function for Rosalba Carriera (fig. 2). Her fame centuries, it was soon used for other pur- extended well beyond her native Venice poses as well. By the early eighteenth cen- and helped to popularize the pastel por- tury, the medium had become a popular trait throughout Europe. In 1720 she trav- choice for independent works of art: pastel eled to Paris, where her delicately exe- head studies by Benedetto Luti (fig. 1), for cuted portraits and allegorical subjects instance, were so successful that art histo- attracted widespread acclaim. The critic rian Luigi Lanzi complained a century Pierre-Jean Mariette, for instance, praised later that they had “inundated all Europe.” her work, claiming that “this sort of pas- Throughout the eighteenth century, how- tel, with all the strength and truth of col- ever, artists and patrons considered pastel ors, preserves a certain freshness and especially suitable for highly finished lightness of touch . . . which is superior to portraits: its velvety texture, or “bloom,” that of oil painting.” Carriera’s sitters and

3 4 Fig. 3 Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Fig. 4 Hugh Douglas Hamilton, Frederick Claude Dupouch, c. 1739, pastel on blue North, Later Fifth Earl of Guilford, in paper, mounted on canvas, National Rome, late 1780s, pastel and gouache(?) Gallery of Art, Washington, Samuel H. with touches of graphite on paper, Kress Collection mounted on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the 50th Anniversary Gift Committee patrons included royalty and nobility from tioned as paintings as well. Some artists, throughout Europe. At home in Venice, such as Hugh Douglas Hamilton (fig. 4) her studio became a tourist attraction made elaborate full-length portraits, but as British aristocrats traveling through the majority were half- or bust-length. Italy visited to commission portraits or At a time when opportunities for to admire the examples on view. female artists were exceptionally limited, The taste for pastel portraits was pastel was considered suitable for women especially strong in France and Britain. to use: working with this dry, manufac- By mid-century, French pastelists were tured medium was, as one eighteenth- renowned for their level of technical bril- century writer put it, “far preferable to liance: in their hands, pastel could mimic their soiling their fair hands with paint- the appearance of every texture from the ing in colors in oil.” Practical consider- cold glint of metal to the glow of satin. ations also contributed to this notion. Foremost among the French portraitists A pastel studio devoted primarily to por- was Maurice-Quentin de La Tour. One traits could be run on a smaller scale observer marveled, “We see, we smell, we than the workshop of a painter composing think we can touch everything he paints. large biblical or mythological scenes, It is truly velvet, fur, gauze: it is not possi- which required models and the help of ble that this is merely the deception of assistants — almost always male — who pigments.” La Tour’s contemporaries had to be supervised. admired not only his technical skill but Carriera was far from the only highly also his ability to capture a sitter’s fleeting successful woman pastelist of the century. state of mind — for example, presenting In Paris, for example, pastelist and painter his teacher Claude Dupouch in front of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard was one of just an easel, as though in mid-conversation four women admitted into the Académie in the studio (fig. 3). This momentary Royale (fig. 5). She also taught a number quality was in fact the result of careful of pupils — all of them women — and preparation and multiple preliminary served as official painter to the Mesdames, sketches. Normally executed on paper the daughters of Louis ¥¦. This associa- mounted on canvas, eighteenth-century tion of pastels with the feminine, however, pastel portraits were consistently extended beyond the realm of the artist described as paintings rather than draw- herself, especially as the fashion for pastel ings. In their richly tonal appearance, spread to Britain’s middle class later in with pastel covering the entire surface of the eighteenth century. Intimate, infor- the paper, they certainly resembled paint- mal pastel renditions of family members ings. Framed and covered with glass to were popular decorations for women’s protect their delicate surfaces, they func- spaces, such as dressing rooms. Pastel’s

5 6 Fig. 5 Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Fig. 6 Jean François Millet, Calling A Fashionable Noblewoman Wearing Home the Cows, c. 1866, pastel and a Plumed Hat, c. 1789, pastel on blue conté crayon on tan paper, National paper, mounted on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, New Collection (William A. Clark Collection) Century Fund reputation as simple and easy to master and limited tonal range suited his humble attracted a growing number of amateur subject matter of peasants and shepherds artists, many of them women. An anony- and represented a revolutionary departure mous French treatise of 1788 recom- in the way artists used pastel. mended pastel to female amateurs, noting Millet’s work contributed to an inter- that it could “rescue so many young national revival of the medium, though women from the tedium of solitude,” and the pastels of the late nineteenth century that it was one of the “resources against are so different from their predecessors idleness, the source of so many indiscre- that they represent almost an entirely new tions.” Art supplies were also marketed to art form. In contrast to the intense focus women: one prominent pastel manufac- on portraiture during the eighteenth cen- turer, for instance, offered a selection for tury, no single subject matter dominated ladies containing a range of colors ideal during the revival. The portraits of the for “flowers, figures, and landscapes” — previous century were not forgotten, how- subjects considered suitable for the ever; on the contrary, a new interest in female artist. eighteenth-century art fueled the taste Although the careers of some pastel- for pastel. While the emphasis on lifelike ists in France, including Labille-Guiard’s, appearance in the earlier portraits held survived the French Revolution, the little appeal, artists and critics admired the sumptuous aristocratic portraits of the use of pastel to capture fleeting expres- eighteenth century had fallen out of style sions. In a passage praising La Tour’s by the turn of the century. Pastel sank portraits, the critic Paul Desjardins com- into decades of neglect by most serious mented, “Pastel should be used to convey artists. Its revival in the nineteenth cen- what is most ephemeral in nature — tury represented a significant shift in the the expression passing over the human way both artist and audience regarded the face, the rapid interplay of sunlight and medium. The drawings of Jean-François shadow —nothing more. . . . That’s the tri- Millet, for example, were a revelation umph of this technique. It must capture (fig. 6). Made almost entirely for a single what is most elusive.” This immediacy collector and rarely exhibited during appealed to the growing number of ama- Millet’s lifetime, his pastels had little teur and professional artists who worked influence until they were shown publicly in the open air. It aligned so perfectly after his death in 1875. Millet’s approach with the goals of the impressionists and to pastel could hardly have been more their circle that most of the major artists opposed to the meticulous blending of of the movement worked with pastel at his eighteenth-century predecessors: his one time or another. Beginning in the coarse, energetic hatching, heavy contours, 1860s, Claude Monet turned to it sporadi-

7 Fig. 7 Claude Monet, Waterloo Bridge, Fig. 8 Édouard Manet, Madame Fig. 9 Edgar Degas, Young Woman 1901, pastel on blue paper, National Michel-Lévy, 1882, pastel on gray Dressing Herself, 1885, pastel over char- Gallery of Art, Washington, Florian primed canvas, National Gallery of Art, coal on tan paper, mounted on board, Carr Fund Washington, Chester Dale Collection National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the W. Averell Harriman Founda- tion in memory of Marie N. Harriman

cally over his long career to capture shift- As in the previous century, some ing effects of light and color ranging from of the most prominent women artists coastal sunsets to the fogs of London’s worked in pastel. In some notable cases, cityscape (fig. 7). Édouard Manet used it women selected pastel not in response to mainly at the end of his life, when his society’s expectations but as an aesthetic poor health made painting in oils difficult. choice. Early in Mary Cassatt’s career, she His body of work in pastel consists almost noticed some Degas pastels in a gallery entirely of fresh and spontaneous portraits, window. The sight of them changed the mainly of women (fig. 8). One of the most direction of her work and inspired her to ceaselessly creative of all pastelists was turn to impressionism. Years later she Edgar Degas, who experimented with the still recalled the revelation of seeing them medium for decades. Among other tech- for the first time: “I used to go and flatten niques, he combined pastel with a variety my nose against the window and absorb of supplementary media such as charcoal all I could of his art. It changed my life.” (fig. 9), sprayed areas with fixative so he Cassatt collaborated with Degas for more could rework passages without smearing than a decade and they shared many of the colors beneath, mixed ground pastel the same pastel techniques (fig. 10). Over with water and other substances, and the course of her career she experimented reworked prints with pastel. with a variety of pastel techniques, which

8 9 were influenced not only by her time with neous . . . impression, that the art is incapa- Degas but also by her serious study of old ble of manly and vigorous delineation,” master art, including the pastel portraits before hastening to assure his readers that of La Tour. Some late-nineteenth- and pastel was “a more firm and masculine early twentieth-century pastel proponents art than a careless world imagines.” viewed the medium’s lingering feminine Cassatt was just one of the American associations as negative and attempted artists who were exposed to pastel when to dispel them. In a typical example, the they studied or worked in Europe. As they prominent British art writer P. G. Hamer- returned home, the pastel revival traveled ton lamented that the “charm and effemi- with them. Hoping to encourage the nate softness which distinguish so many growing interest in the medium, a group pastels have also produced . . . a very erro- of American artists formed the Society of

10 Fig. 10 Mary Cassatt, The Black Hat, Fig. 11 James McNeill Whistler, The c. 1890, pastel on tan paper, National Palace; white and pink, 1879/1880, Gallery of Art, Washington, Collection pastel and conté crayon on brown paper, of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon National Gallery of Art, Washington, Paul Mellon Fund and Patrons’ Perma- nent Fund

Painters in Pastel in 1882. The society delicate color, as “something so new in held only a few exhibitions before dis- Art that every body’s mouth will, I feel, banding, but it exerted a lasting influence: pretty soon water.” Many of his contempo- it raised awareness among American art- raries agreed. The critic Frederick Wed- ists and the public while inspiring similar more marveled, “A few touches of the pas- societies in Europe, which in turn spurred tel in various colours, and somehow the further interest in pastel and its history. sky is aglow and the water dancing. The The Société des pastellistes français, for thing has been wrought as it were by pure instance, included eighteenth- century magic.” Whistler’s sketches provided portraits as well as contemporary work in inspiration for a new generation of pastel- its first exhibition in 1885, while the Pastel ists when they were exhibited both in Lon- Society, founded in London in 1898, don and in the United States throughout remains active today. the late nineteenth and early twentieth Although he spent his career abroad, centuries. The Palace; white and pink (fig. 11), James McNeill Whistler was one of Amer- for example, appeared in the Whistler ret- ica’s most influential pastelists. The artist rospective at the Copley Society in Boston described his own evanescent sketches in 1904, just after the artist’s death. Some of Venice, executed on brown paper in a critics felt this was the only appropriate few strokes of black and then touched with way to work with pastel: the British writer

11 Frank Rinder noted, “Freshness and artists and critics had assigned to it. The spontaneity are lost in labour which restricted subject matter of the eighteenth appears to aim at copying . . . oil painting, century expanded to a limitless variety of and colour design, a special opportunity themes. In the hands of American artists of the medium, is too much neglected.” Everett Shinn and George Luks, the In contrast, other prominent pastelists medium once considered suitable mainly such as William Merritt Chase (cover) for aristocratic portraits now depicted life and Childe Hassam (fig. 12) reveled in in the tenements and streets of New York pastel’s powdery opacity. They kept alive City (figs. 13 and 14). As in the late nine- the centuries-old tradition of using pastel teenth century, some painters or print- in a more tonal manner. makers explored pastel only briefly — As the twentieth century unfolded, Käthe Kollwitz, Henri Matisse (fig. 15), and pastel continued to break free of any Roy Lichtenstein, for instance, worked with assumptions or conventions that earlier it for limited periods in their long careers.

12 Fig. 12 Childe Hassam, At the Grand Fig. 13 Everett Shinn, Fifth Avenue Bus, Fig. 14 George Luks, Breadline, 1900, Prix de Paris, 1887, pastel over graphite 23rd Street and Broadway, 1914, pastel pastel on paperboard, National Gallery on paperboard coated with sawdust, and charcoal on gray-washed paper, of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection National Gallery of Art, Washington, mounted on board, National Gallery of (Estate of Susie Brummer) Corcoran Collection (Bequest of James Art, Washington, Bequest of Julia B. Engel Parmelee)

13 Fig. 15 Henri Matisse, Woman with Fig. 16 G. Daniel Massad, Breach, Fig. 17 Jeanne Rij-Rousseau, Abstraction, Exotic Plant, c. 1925, pastel on paper 2009, pastel on gray paper, National c. 1920s, pastel, charcoal, and black coated with sawdust, National Gallery Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of crayon on maroon paper, National of Art, Washington, Chester Dale the artist in memory of his parents Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mr. Collection and Mrs. Stuart P. Feld

Others, such as the contemporary and professionals, the successors to the American artist G. Daniel Massad, have short-lived Society of Painters in Pastel, devoted decades or entire careers to it have come together on social media (fig. 16). Pastel’s traditional status as an and in person to discuss techniques and appropriate material for female artists share ideas. long ago ceased to factor into the choice As the materials of pastel — pigment, for the many who adopted it in the binder, and filler — have remained largely twentieth century. Jeanne Rij-Rousseau’s consistent over the centuries, so too have richly colored, abstract pastels (fig. 17) its intrinsic qualities as a medium. In all can be linked to her development of an their varied techniques and approaches, aesthetic philosophy known as Vibrisme, artists turn to pastel not only for its imme- which posits that colors emit waves simi- diacy but also for its versatility, its velvety lar to the sound waves of music. More matte surfaces, its intense color, and most recently, new communities of amateurs of all, its unique beauty.

14 15 Cover: William Merritt Chase, Study of Flesh Color and Gold (detail), 1888, pastel on paper coated with mauve-gray grit, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Raymond J. and Margaret Horowitz