Class 3: The Impressionist Revolution

A. Who were they?

1. Title Slide 1 (Renoir: The Skiff) 2. Revolution/Legacy

Last week was most about poetry. Today, will be almost all about painting. I had originally announced it as “The Impressionist Legacy,” with the idea that I was take the actual painters—Monet, Renoir, and the like—for granted and spend the whole class on their legacy. But the more I worked, the more I saw that the changes that made modernism possible all occurred in the work of the Impressionists themselves. So I have changed the title to “The Impressionist Revolution,” and have tweaked the syllabus to add a class next week that will give the legacy the time it needs.

3. Monet: Impression, Sunrise (1872, Paris, Musée Marmottan)

So who were the Impressionists? The name is the easy part. At the first group exhibition in 1874, (1840–1926) showed a painting of the port in his home town of Rouen, and called it Impression, Sunrise. A hostile critic seized on the title as an instrument of ridicule. But his quip backfired; within two years, the artists were using the name Impressionistes to advertise their shows.

4. Chart 1: artists before the first Exhibition 5. Chart 2: exhibition participation

There were eight group exhibitions in all: in 1874, 1876, 1877, 1879, 1880, 1881, 1882, and 1886. So one answer to the question “Who were the Impressionists?” would be “Anyone who participated in one or more of their shows.” Here are seven who did, with a thumbnail of their earlier work, plus two who didn’t. Unfortunately I did not have room for Alfred Sisley, , or Mary Cassatt; I will make it up to the women at the end of today’s class. And even then, it is not quite so simple as that. Only one artist, Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) took part in all eight exhibitions; there were some who took part but whose style was noticeably different; and more than one artist who painted in an almost identical style but never participatedl. You will see that I also included two significant artists who, for different reasons, did not take part at all: Édouard Manet (1832–83) and Vincent van Gogh (1853–90).

6. Chart 3: before, during, and after

All these artists were transformed by being connected with the movement, however briefly. The thumbnails at the bottom show what each went on to afterwards. I have narrated a little video to sum up the situation, together with larger pictures from each artist.

7. Impressionist timeline video 8. Chart 3 (repeat)

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B. Subjects

9. Pierre-Auguste Renoir: The Skiff , with topic list

You know the picture I have been using on the website? It was painted by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841– 1919) in 1875, between the first and second Impressionist Exhibitions. I am going to use it as the home base for some rather meandering excursions on four different topics: Subject, Focus, Surface, and Color.

10. Pierre-Auguste Renoir: The Skiff (1875, London NG), with alternate titles

First: what is it? It appears on Google under three different titles: The Seine at Asnières, on the Seine or just The Skiff. Which do you think suits it best? The Seine at Asnières implies it is merely a landscape; the important thing is the place, not the activity in it. Boating on the Seine would be the other way around; the painting would be depicting an activity, to which the actual place is coincidental. And picking on just one object, The Skiff, leaves the other questions undecided. Or rather, it makes is not about the place or about the activity, or even about that little boat, but a combination of all of them. The essence of the picture, I think, is middle class people enjoying themselves in a pretty place.

11. Salon subjects not painted by Impressionists!

Is this unusual? I think it is. As you may know, the French held large official exhibitions every year called the Salons, that established taste and made reputations. Here is a bunch of pictures by various artists that had success at the Salons in the middle years of the century. It is almost a catalogue of approved subjects that the Impressionsts never attempted: Religion, Allegory, Myth, Historical and Narrative subjects of all kinds, and never with an eye to Sentiment, Exoticism, or Social Realism—though they were all “small-r realists” in their very bones drawing their subjects from contemporary life.

12. Gustave Courbet: three paintings

One older artist who did point the way to this kind of subject, and whom most of the Impressionists respected, was Gustave Courbet (1819–77). He began in mid-century as an aggressive Social Realist, but did not confine himself to this vein. Here are three paintings by him on the same basic theme as the Renoir: Young Women Relaxing in a Pretty Place. The earliest of them, Young Ladies of the Village (1852, NY Met) has a bit of noblesse oblige about it, the upper classes making nice to the peasants. The second, Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine (1856, Paris, Orsay), is more like everyday life, but the freshness of the sunlit water in the distance is weighed down by the heaviness of the treatment of the two girls; it doesn’t look out-of-doors. By the time he painted The Charente at Port Bertaud in 1862, however, Courbet had lightened his palette, quite possibly under the influence of some of these younger artists. Now the two ladies are simply a part of the setting. You can see how the young Impressionists could have admired this, and Georges Seurat (1859–91) in particular might have responded to its airy calm.

13. Georges Seurat: Bathers at Asnières (1884, London Tate)

This picture of his, Bathers at Asnières (1884, London Tate), is painted on the very same stretch of the river as Renoir’s Skiff. I am always surprised to see the very utilitarian road bridge in the background and

— 2 — the factories belching smoke behind. This is an ordinary suburban setting, not some private park, a fact that Seurat accepts but Renoir conceals. But what makes Seurat not really an Impressionist like the others, despite his participation in the last exhibition, is that his painting, though full of outdoor light, is calm and composed, meticulously assembled in the studio and eternally still. Renoir’s, by contrast, is dashed off out of doors and pulsing with movement.

14. Pierre-Auguste Renoir: The Skiff, repeat

If I have one general point to make for this hour, it is this: Impressionism is all about painting in the moment; its subject is the here-and-now.

C. Focus

15. Pierre-Auguste Renoir: La Grenouillière (1869, Stockholm)

This was by no means the first time that Renoir (or many other Impressionsts) had gone to some beauty spot close to Paris to watch the middle classes enjoying themselves. Here he is in 1869, five years before the first Impressionist exhibition, painting the riverside restaurant and bathing-place, La Grenouillère. On this occasion, he went with his friend Monet, both starving artists, and both painting the same view—the little artificial island known as Le camembert—from the same spot. I have had fun turning one into the other and back again.

16. Transformation of the above into Monet version (1869, NY Met) 17. Pierre-Auguste Renoir: La Grenouillière (1869, Stockholm) 18. Claude Monet: La Grenouillière (1869, NY Met) 19. — comparison of the above, top halves only

Let’s compare them. The Renoir seems more close-up, more colorful, and more detailed; the Monet broader and deeper, with simplified forms. Look at the top halves of the pictures. Monet is clearly interested in the sunlight on the far side of the river, the effect of looking from comparative shadow into light; he keeps the middle ground uncluttered enough for us to be able to see beyond it. His subject, one might say with 20/20 hindsight, is the lighting.

20. Renoir: Dancing at the Moulin de la Galette (1876, Paris Orsay)

With Renoir, though, it is the people. He pulls the foliage of the far bank right towards us; its texture, together with that of the distant water and the willow tree on the island, merely amplify the vivacity of the crowd having a good time. He would explore the theme more fully in his famous picture from 1876, Dancing at the Moulin de la Galette. Here, the crowd is the point, a snapshot of people having a good time, a few looking towards the camera, but the rest mostly quite unaware.

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21. Camille Silvy: A Garden Party (c.1862)

Snapshot? Camera? I use the words advisedly, for photography was by now a reality, and that reality changed the role of art. What’s the point of making a painting just to record something, if the camera can do it better? But painting was still superior at conveying the artist’s human reaction to his subject, and in capturing the effect of fleeting movement. Look at this 1862 photograph by Camille Silvy (1834– 1910). These are also people having a party in the open air, and their arrangement is far from an official group photo. But all the same, they are frozen in their apparently casual attitudes, because the long exposure times required it. Renoir has no freeze whatsoever.

22. Manet: Musique aux Tuileries (1862, London/Dublin)

The ancestor of Renoir’s Moulin de la Galette is an earlier picture by Manet, also of people in a crowd with music playing: his Music in the Tuileries of 1862. It is a rather more prosperous crowd than Renoir would paint later, and it contains portraits of Manet himself and several prominent figures in the arts. The whole thing has a little bit of the air of a photograph, and Manet may have used photographs for some of it. But it is broken up by Manet’s use of the dappled light coming through the trees, so that instead of the entire group being in semi-focus, you get little accents of detail here and there.

23. Manet and Renoir, compared 24. Renoir: Dancing at the Moulin de la Galette, full screen, repeat

Renoir uses dappled light too, but not in the same way as Manet. Rather than picking out details from the darkness, it unifies the entire picture, foreground, middle-ground, and distance. And it gives the whole thing a feeling of movement. When we look at the Manet, we think of a formal photograph reinterpreted by a brilliant artist. When we look at the Renoir, we think of a modern casual snap, such as you might take on your iPhone.

25. Manet: Road Menders in the Rue de Berne (1878, private collection)

I have wandered a little far in this foray into photography, but allow me to stray two steps farther. I mentioned that Manet became a virtual Impressionist in style, although he always refused to join their exhibitions. Here is a relatively late work, Road Menders in the Rue de Berne, which is as Impressionist as they come. But what interests me is to see it as a photograph, not as a way of fixing things in focus, rather the exact opposite—the camera’s limited depth of field. Here, the focus appears to be about a dozen yards down the street; the distance is blurred, as you would expect, but the immediate foreground—the workers who are the ostensible subject of the painting—are more blurred than anything else. What is that, if not photographic?

26. Degas: Dancers in Blue (1897, Moscow), with photographs by the artist

There is one artist who was an active photographer himself, Edgar Degas (1834–1917). Here are two of his own pictures of dancers adjusting their costumes backstage. You can see the use he made of the upper picture in the larger woman with her back to us in the pastel Dancers in Blue (1897); the dancer just beyond her is a reverse of the second photo. Clearly he used his camera to record casual poses for

— 4 — later use. But here’s my question: did he hope for a crisp image but be limited by the technology of the time, or did he actually cultivate the blurry image as the equivalent of his own touch with the pastel?

D. Surface

27. Edgar Degas: Cotton Office, New Orleans (1873, Pau), transformation vidro 28. Edgar Degas: Cotton Office, New Orleans (1873, Pau)

Here is a 19th-century newspaper photograph of men working in some kind of office. Only that newspaper halftone effect was just me playing with PhotoShop. The image is actually an early painting by Degas, who was sent to New Orleans to look after the family business. My only point is to show that Degas was already thinking as a photographer. Although presumably carefully composed, there is a casual quality about this, as though the Times-Picayune had just sent a man up with a camera to see what he could get.

29. Edgar Degas: Place de la Concorde (c.1875, Hermitage) 30. Pierre-Auguste Renoir: Pont Neuf (1872, private collection)

And this, which I think is even more remarkable. The year is 1875. Degas is back in Paris by now, the first Impressionist Exhibition behind him. This view of the Place de la Concorde hardly looks composed at all, does it, just a group of random people looking this way and that, their bodies cut off by the viewfinder. It seems very much the work of the moment: take out the camera, click, move on. Only cameras of the time could not yet do that, but painters could. Compare the Renoir of a similar date, the Pont Neuf. Being Renoir, it is full of light, air, and depth; the Degas by comparison looks shallow and grey. But maybe he wanted it to look shallow. The Renoir follows the convention that the picture frame is a window on the world. But Degas seems to be saying no, it is simply a flat surface, just like a photo.

31. Edgar Degas: Café Singer with Glove (1878, Harvard)

Time and again with Degas, you will find this combination of unusual framing and a deliberately flattened space, such as this picture of a Singer with a Glove, which might almost be designed for a poster. Note that it is in pastel, rather than oils, and pastel is intrinsically a flat medium

32. Degas: Dancers in Blue (1897, Moscow), repeat

So looking again at the Dancers in Blue, we notice the exquisite tension between the implications of space, and our awareness of chalk on paper, emphasized by the fact that Renoir allows the paper to show through in so many places.

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33. Manet and Monet Gare Saint-Lazare paintings compared 34. Claude Monet: Gare Saint-Lazare (1877, Paris Orsay) 35. Édouard Manet: (1873, Washington NGA)

I would not say that this emphasis on the flatness of the painted surface, which would be so significant for later generations, is a characteristic of what we think of as the core Impressionists; you don’t find it in Monet, Renoir, or Pissarro. But you do find it in Cézanne, Degas, and especially Manet. Here is another of those Art History 101 comparisons. Manet and Monet both painted pictures at the Paris Gare Saint-Lazare during the 1870s. Both are fascinated by the effect of the steam from the locomotives. But while Monet made this the whole subject of his painting, which relies absolutely on its sense of depth, Manet made it only one element in a painting remarkable mainly for its flat surface design—which is a deliberate counterpoint to the poses of the two figures, one looking out and the other looking in.

36. Monet: Water Lilies (1920, NY MoMA)

Towards the end of his life, though, and especially in his long series of Water Lilies, Monet’s also moved away from the window-on-the-world conception. But not in the direction of flatness. Rather, the canvas seems to dissolve in the play of light and color in the pigments on its surface. The work of Jackson Pollock and many other Abstract Impressionists would be inconceivable without his example. I found a five-minute video of Monet’s Water Lily paintings, and will use it now to round off the hour. Originally it had some new-agey kind of music, so I have replaced it with the opening of the String Quartet by Maurice Ravel (1875–1937). Coming from 1903, it is at least the right date!

37. Claude Monet: Water Lilies, video compilation 38. Class title 2 (Water Lilies, MoMA)

E. Color

39. Renoir: The Skiff (repeat)

One last time for Renoir’s Skiff, which so perfectly illustrates the last of my major topics, color. Which in turn will lay the groundwork for my class next week, “Captured by Color “.

40. Edouard Manet: Monet Painting in his Studio Boat (1874, Munich)

So to recap: as in photography, and perhaps because of photography, Impressionism is all about painting in the moment; its subject is the here-and-now. And capturing the here-and-now requires two things: going out there to take it in, and seeking out the most momentary aspects of a scene. What could be more momentary than the play of light on water? What could be more out-there than a boat floating on the water itself? Although a painting might be touched up in the studio, it was an essential part of the Impressionists’ credo to paint out of doors—en plein air—whenever possible. And they would go to great lengths to make this possible. Even though he was still poor, Monet had a boat set up as a studio

— 6 — as early as 1874. Here he is painting from it, being captured in turn by Manet, clearly under the influence of his Impressionist friend.

41. Reflections in the water, Grenouillière pictures and The Skiff

To capture their fleeting impressions, the Impressionists applied touches opaque paint directly to a prepared white canvas. You can see these short quick brushstrokes in these details of of water reflections, two from the Renoir and Monet pictures at La Grenouillière in 1869 and the other from Renoir’s Skiff of 1875. The main difference is the color. Back in 1869, both Renoir and Monet were using black; only six years later, Renoir, who was telling everyone that black does not exist, is doing it all in terms of color.

42. Pierre-Auguste Renoir: The Skiff (1875, London NG), details of boat and water

Now look at these two details. It is not only that all the colors are rich, but that each area is made up of several closely-related colors pulsing against one another. The greenish blue and the darker blue might be considered a clash in someone’s clothing, but here they punch each other up so as to appear almost glowing. Similarly, look how the deeper orange on the rim of the boat punches up the paler orange of the rest. And look how the flashes of orange reflected in the water react to the blues of the rest; orange and blue are complementary colors. If you don’t know what “complementary” means, here is a little video to help you experience it.

43. Complementary color video 44. Chevreul and Rood

In using these optical effects of color, how complementary colors and neighboring shades of the same color react with one another, Renoir and other Impressionists are using the discoveries of Michel Chevreul and Ogden Rood that I mentioned in the first class. But it wasn’t just theory; they were also benefitting from two other practical developments of the mid-19th century: the synthesis of a wider range of brighter pigments, and the marketing of paint in tubes, so that it could be used unmixed.

45. Pierre-Auguste Renoir: The Skiff (1875, London NG), details of landscape and highlights

Two more passages from the top part of the Renoir picture, and then I am done with it. You will see that he paints in the distant background very lightly, with relatively thin paint. But the reflection of the house in the water is almost three-dimensional, applied in thick impasto without any blending. This is another characteristic of Impressionist painting—and it’s not just a matter of surface texture. If colors are to blend in the eye rather than on the canvas, they need to be applied separately side by side, in short thick brushstrokes. This is in contrast to the traditional way of using oil paints, by applying layers of transparent glaze over a solid ground. But that is a technique that only works in the studio over a period of days; it is the very opposite of painting in the here-and-now, and The Impressionists had no use for it.

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46. Monet: Snow at (1875, London NG), detail 47. Monet: Snow Effect, the Street at Argenteuil (1875, London NG), detail

48. Monet: Snow at Argenteuil (1875, London NG) 49. Monet: Snow Effect, the Street at Argenteuil (1875, London NG)

I think I could show this slide in a class on Abstract Expressionism and fool at least some of the people. But in fact it is a detail of a Monet painting, as is the next slide, both from 1875. They both represent the same thing; what do you think it is? Snowscapes. But snow is white, right? Even if you allow for the fact that the red streaks in the first might be from where the snow has warn away, the shadows are distinctly blue. And the multiple colors in the second one are reflections of the sunset in the sky. It was probably through painting snow scenes that the Impressionists became aware of the power of the sky to change the appearance of things below, and once they had discovered this, they applied it to reflections on water, sun dappled through trees, and just about everything else they painted.

50. Monet: Rouen Cathedral (1894), with photograph of the actual building

It may seem obvious to us now, but the breakthrough was to divorce color from what we think we know—snow is white, water is blue, grass is green—and replace it by what that particular artist sees at that particular moment: the here-and-now. When I think of how Monet could sit in front of the Cathedral of Rouen day after day, on and off over the course of several years in the early 1890s, and paint the stone in almost any color other than the grey we “know” it to be, I am at a loss how to describe it. Is this the ne plus ultra of objectivity, the eye recording with perfect accuracy exactly what it sees, or an extreme subjectivity, in which the picture takes shape only in the mind of the artist? It is a question that will return more than once in the art of the Twentieth Century.

51. Monet: Rouen Cathedral series, montage of eight versions.

I have assembled eight or nine of the Rouen Cathedral paintings into a video. The music is a snatch from the “Sunken Cathedral” from the Preludes (1910) by Claude Debussy.

F. Recap

52. Monet and Pollock

I was struck by the similarity of the paint surface of one of these Rouen Cathedral paintings to an Abstract Expressionist drip painting by Jackson Pollock. It’s absurd, of course; there is a lot of ground to travel between 1910 and 1951. But it occurred to me that I could sum up most of the points I have made today in a short sequence of similar comparisons, some less absurd than others, which I offer as a video.

53. Legacy sequence video

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G. A Musical Postlude

54. Marcel Bachet: Claude Debussy (1884)

Claude Debussy (1862–1918) is often called a musical Impressionist. Even in his lifetime, though he strenuously denied the term. That music you heard for the Rouens, for example, was not a description of an actual cathedral but a legend of a church sunken beneath the waters that occasionally rises to the surface. Yet when you take this remark he made in an interview in 1911 (courtesy of Wikipedia), it is hard not to imagine a painting by Monet. And when he publishes a book of piano pieces in 1901 and calls them Images (Images, or Pictures), what are you to think? Admittedly, not all the imagery is visual, but when it is, as in Reflets dans l’eau (Reflections in the Water), the Impressionist adjective does seem to stick. I will play it in a performance by Marc-André Hamelin. Rather than making it into another of my video montages, I will simply show him at the piano for most of the time, because I want you to hear the images and colors Debussy creates in sound—though I will throw in a Monet picture from time to time!

55. Debussy: Reflets dans l’eau (Marc-André Hamelin) 56. Childe Hassam: Tuileries Gardens (1897, Atlanta)

When I search for French music of the period that does describe contemporary scenes—the equivalent, that is, of what the Impressionists were doing in paint—I pretty much come up blank. But I can offer a sideways view that makes a related point. In 1874, far off in Russia, Modest Mussorgsky (1839–81) wrote a piano suite called Pictures at an Exhibition giving musical illustrations of pictures by his friend Viktor Hartmann. One of these (though Hartmann’s painting is now lost) is about children playing in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris. The Tuileries have been painted by several French Impressionists, but the liveliest, I think, is a picture by Childe Hassam (1859–1935), one of the few American artists to come to Paris and learn from what they were doing there. It is a very short piece, so again I’ll show it in a straight performance by the pianist Evgeny Kissin.

57. Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition: Tuileries (Evgeny Kissin) 58. Maurice Ravel

But when I think of the Impressionist legacy in terms of the emancipation of color—the topic of next week’s class—I am on much firmer ground. For one of Debussy’s innovations in piano writing was in finding new sonorities for the instrument, as I hope you heard. But he also orchestrated many of his pieces, adding orchestral color. As did his slightly younger contemporary Maurice Ravel, though he went further, and orchestrated works by other composers too. Here is his orchestral version of the Mussorgsky piece we have just heard; note what he makes of the interplay between the woodwinds and (especially in the middle section) the strings. The conductor is Gerard Schwarz.

59. Mussorgsky/Ravel: Pictures at an Exhibition: Tuileries (Gerard Schwarz) 60. Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt

Still thinking of the orchestrator’s role in adding color to a monochrome outline, I want to play a few measures of Ravel’s famous Pavane pour une infante défunte (Pavan for a Dead Princess, 1899), a

— 9 — relatively early work written for the piano. Then I will turn to his orchestral version, written in 1910. Note the richness of color which comes from giving that opening theme to the French horn and, although the orchestra is small, the sensitive use of color throughout; listen especially for the silvery tone that enters the music in the middle section.

61. Berthe Morisot: Grain Field (1875, Paris Orsay)

Since this is such gentle music, I will accompany it by some pictures about mothers and children by the two female Impressionists: Berthe Morisot (1841–95), who married Manet’s sister, and Mary Cassatt (1844–26), another American expatriate. I do realize that in representing them by their so-called “female” side I am doing an injustice to their range, especially Morisot, who could be as forceful as and of her male colleagues. But they are lovely paintings, nonetheless, and I want you to see them.

62. Ravel: Pavane pour une infante défunte (piano), opening 63. Ravel: Pavane pour une infante défunte (orchestra), complete 64. Class title 3

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