Adventures of
an Art Collector

DELCROIX
Lelia Mourns over the Body of Sténio
Oil painting, 1847
Ex. Collection: FLG
Formerly on loan to Stanford University Art Museum, and
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Published in THE PAINTINGS OF EUGENE DELACROIX: A CRITICAL CATALOGUE, 1986, Number 289, Plate 108

 

VOL 1 PAINTINGS, European & American

 

VOL 2 PRINTS, European & American

 

Part 1. OLD MASTERS – BACKGROUND

Northern Renaissance: DURER
Southern Reniassance: BOTTICELLI & LEONARDO
Baroque – Flemish: RUBENS & VAN DYCK
Baroque – Dutch: REMBRANDT
Baroque – French: CALLOT
18th Century: TIEPOLO & PIRANESI

 

Part 2. EUROPEAN MASTERS – 19TH CENTURY

Neo-Classicism
Romanticism
Realism
Romantic Realism
Impressionistic Realism
Impressionism
Postimpressionism
Symbolism

 

Part 3. EUROPEAN MASTERS – 20th CENTURY

Fauvism
Expressionism
Cubism
Dada & Surrealism
Late Modernism

 

Part 4. AMERICAN MASTERS – 19TH CENTURY

Romantics
Realists
Tonalists
Impressionists
Symbolists

 

Part 5. AMERICAN MASTERS – 20TH CENTURY

Urban Realists
Cubists & Abstract Artists
Visionaries
Regionalists
Abstract Expressionists
Mid-Century Realists
Postmodernists

 

VOL 3 SCULPTURE, European & American

A. Medieval

B. Renaissance & Baroque

C. 19th Century

D. 20th Century

 

VOL 4 DECORATIVE ARTS, European & American

 

VOL 5 SCULPTURE, Tribal & Ancient

A. Tribal (Africa & Oceania & North America)

B. Pre-Columbian

C. West Asian & Egyptian

D. Minoan & Mycenaean

E. Greek

F. Roman & Etruscan

G. Celtic

 

VOL 6 ASIAN PAINTINGS

 

VOL 7 ASIAN PRINTS

 

VOL 8 ASIAN SCULPTURE

A. South Asia

B. Tibet & Nepal

C. Southeast Asia,

D. Japan

E. Stone Age China

F. Buddhist China

 

VOL 9 ASIAN DECORATIVE ARTS

VOL 2  EUROPEAN PRINTS – Introduction

 

Part 1. OLD MASTERS – BACKGROUND

 

The technique of engraving images goes back to the cave artists of the Stone Age. The concept of engraving images that could be printed on clay appeared in the West Asian cultures of the Bronze Age, starting about 3000 BCE with the Sumerians who engraved cylinder seals and readable clay tablets. The Chinese and the Japanese had paper and were making rubbings many centuries ago. The earliest known printed text with woodcut illustrations was a Chinese edition of the DIAMOND SUTRA from the Buddhist tradition in the 9th century. This scroll is about 17 feet long.

Europeans made printed textiles in the 6th century. The production of paper in the 12th century opened the door to other possibilities. The first European woodcuts on paper were German playing cards early in the 15th century. The printing press with moveable type developed in the middle of the 15th century.

By the end of the 15th century and early 16th century, illustrated books were being printed. Makers of medieval manuscripts made verbal-visual harmonies laboriously on painted sheets of sheepskin. Now unified work-image experiences were made much more easily on printed pages. Books had been very rare for thousands of years, available only to the clergy and elite classes of society. Now thousands of books were being produced throughout Europe for all the middle classes to read, generating whole new definitions of public education and the sociology of democracy.

At the same time, the technique of tightly focused engraved prints was mastered by painters such as Mantegna in Italy and by Durer in Germany. Many think the engravings of Durer have never been matched. Etching developed in the 17th century. Rembrandt made the greatest etchings of the age. In many ways, his 300 etching plates tell the whole of the human story.

The brilliant visualizations by painter-printmakers during the Renaissance and Baroque periods (1400s through 1600s) gave printmaking a new respect. However, many regarded these pretty sheets of paper as little more than “ads” for paintings. It was not until the 1700s that a large population started to regard prints as original works of art. The concept of limited editions and signing prints did not become widespread until the 1800s. Art historians and connoisseurs determine if a fine print is an original, a replica, a reproduction, or a fake. All four types of prints will be illustrated in this course. The difference affects visual quality and financial value.

Modern printmakers regularly have drawn inspiration from the Old Master printmakers we will visit in this course. Also inspired by Old Masters have been those who permeate our environment today with billions of multiplied images in periodicals, on TV shows, and computer screens. Only five centuries ago all printed images were unique, handmade, and precious. Now duplicated images form the informational architecture of our lives.

OLD MASTERS – Northern Renaissance: DURER

 

Epiphany by Albrecht Durer (attributed). Cut c.1486-89.
Published 1493
Woodcut
Collection: FLG on loan to IAD
Published in THE SPIRIT OF THE RENAISSANCE, 2007

NOTE: This explosive image of an epiphany – the Spirit of the Divine bursting into the material world – probably was cut by Durer. It must be among his earliest works, and is much more sophisticated than many of the rather crude woodcuts in this book. The page is from the Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493 which was a monumental history of the world and the most important illustrated book of the early Northern Renaissance. Durer (born 1471) worked on this book as a teenager between 1486 & 1489. His remarkable capacity to render dynamic images of the Transcendent seems to have started with this image and continued for the rest of his life. This very early image is obviously somewhat elementary, but it already speaks of his rapidly maturing specialization in luminosity. The intensity of his luminous bursts of radiance in the form of halos, auras, and epiphanies is unmatched during the Renaissance. My attribution of this woodcut to Durer was confirmed by Gunther Troche, Director of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in 1970 when he was curating an exhibition of Durer prints.

Melancholia by Albrecht Durer: (1514). A later printing from the original plate
Engraving.
Collection: FLG on loan to IAD
Ex. Collection: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Published in THE SPIRIT OF THE RENAISSANCE, 2007

 

DURER (after)
Virgin & Child on the Crescent Moon (printed c1505)
Wood engraving. Later edition
Collection: FLG

 

OLD MASTERS – Southern Renaissance: MANTEGA, BOTTICELLI & LEONARDO

 

OLD MASTERS – Baroque / Flemish: RUBENS & VAN DYCK

 

 

RUBENS
ST. CATHERINE OF ALEXANDRIA
c.1620. Etching & engraving
Collection: FLG

NOTE: Rubens had a large workshop of engravers making prints after his designs. He can be credited with the general composition of many of the plates but not for any of the execution. This “St. Catherine” is the only etching Rubens is known to have made himself. Following Christian tradition, she is standing over the spiked wheel on which a pagan Roman emperor attempted to torture her to death in the 4th century. Following her prayer, the wheel broke, and the emperor had to settle for having her beheaded. Rubens has given us not only a story but a story wrapped in a vivid expression of the meaning of the story. This is an explosive figure of a Transcendent spirit who has triumphed over torture, a spirit who has moved beyond ordinary humanity to an illuminated state of Grace. This Transcendent condition of the soul is what the halo symbolizes in the sacred art of the West and the sacred art of the East. It is typical of Baroque art to be activated by swirling masses, as if being blown by the wind. This convention is dramatic and thus emotionally engaging which is what the Catholic Church during the Counter Reformation wanted its art to be. The dramatic “wind” blowing form into place also was thought of as the Divine Spirit moving earthly matter into purposeful positions.

 

VAN DYCK
Self-Portrait (etched c1630)
Etching, probably a 17th century edition
Collection: FLG

NOTE: Anthony van Dyck began in the studio of Rubens, and then became arguably the most graceful portrait painter of the age. Apparently at the recommendation of Nicholas Lanier (whose portrait he painted), van Dyck became court painter to King Charles I of England. His English portraits established the standard against which British art would be judged for centuries. His etched portraits are as graceful as his paintings. This self-portrait is the most famous example. The combination of specificity and spontaneity is remarkable. This famous self-portrait is from a series of portraits he did with collaborators, a series called ICONOGRAPHY, a series which was the first printed “book of famous people.” ICONOGRAPHY was not published as a bound book, but rather as loose sheets that collectors could keep as a portfolio or bind into a book. The Louvre bought the original copper plates and still sells good impressions from its electrotypes.

An ELECTROTYPE is a reproductive print of considerable fidelity. The technique was invented in the early 19th century. The process involves making a mould of the original engraving, etching, or block of type, by depositing a thin copper or nickel shell over the original surface by means of electrolytic action. The facsimile impressions are printed from this new block.

 

OLD MASTERS – Baroque – Dutch: REMBRANDT

 

REMBRANDT
THE ALCHEMIST (aka FAUST) (etched 1652)
Etching & engraving. A late impression from the original plate
Collection: CSUEB. Gift of IAD
Ex. Collection: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

NOTE: Rembrandt eventually had an international reputation as an etcher. The meaning of most of his portraits and narratives is clear. But this famous print is mysterious. Scholars have debated its meaning for centuries. An old man in a dark room looks up from his writing desk, pen in hand, and sees a luminous disc inside of which are words. The meaning of those words is a mystery. Most of the room is imprecise – the table, the books, the globe; but the words are quite precise. The whole scene is a mystery, and that may well have been just what Rembrandt wanted it to be. The title published in the 17th century was “The Practicing Alchemist.” Only in the 18th century did it start being known as “Faust.” To the uninitiated, Alchemy was little more than efforts by greedy people to turn lead into gold. There were such people during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. However, true Alchemy was a meditative tradition within Christianty that had parallels with Asian yoga. During the 16th & 17th centuries, true Alchemy was a special interest of leading figures of the time including Sir Isaac Newton. By means of spiritual practices, one attempts to transcend lead-like selfishness and attain the Transcendent state of Golden Consciousness. {For further details, click here for “The Mystic Ladder: Parallel Stages of Consciousness in Alchemy & Tantra.”]

The legend of Faust probably was based on the life of J. G. Faust (c1480-1540) who was an alchemist and magician in Wurttemberg. In Goethe’s play/poem Faust (which occupied much of his life), the central character makes a “deal with the Devil.” For a number of years, Faust gets what he wants and then must surrender his soul to the Devil. If the subject actually is Faust, the scene probably is when a good angel warns Faust not to sign up with the Devil. What is the Devil actually? In a number of spiritual traditions, the Devil is understood to be one’s ego – selfishness personified.

 

 

Part 2. EUROPEAN MASTERS – 19TH CENTURY

 

INTRODUCTION

During the first half of the 19th century, four different styles of painting and printmaking ran side by side. The highly rational Neo-Classicism of the 18th century continued with the cool, smooth figures and faces of Ingres.

Romanticism became popular as a reaction to the tightly drawn boundaries and thin colors of Ingres and his school. The Romantics, from Delacroix to Turner, preferred fluid edges, intense color, and dramatic plots. Realism offered a third alternative. Courbet and Millet in Europe, and Homer in the United States pictured the life of ordinary people, giving sincere respect to the working class for the first time. By the middle of the century, a style that can be described a Romantic Realism was the most popular style among the art-buying public. The most beloved practicioners of the time included Bougereau and Makovsky. It was against this type of art that Manet and the Impressionists reacted.

 

EUROPEAN MASTERS – 19TH CENTURY – NEOCLASSICISM

 

Neoclassicism was a style of art & architecture that developed in Europe during the second half of the 18th century inspired by a continuing reverence for Raphael, and by the discovery of many Greek and Roman antiquities – products of the new discipline of archeology. Architecture grew ancient columns at every opportunity. The writings of Winckelmann, drawing on Platonic ideals, stressed the beauty of Greek art and “brain-born images” over mere nature. The paintings and prints of this style have an emotional restraint, solid sculptural forms, rigid postures, firm outlines, and usually very little color. The goal was “noble simplicity.” Neoclassicism is primarily a rationally oriented, left-brain aesthetic. The first great practitioner of this style in the late 18th century was David, who became Napoleon’s court painter. The next great practitioner was David’s student, Ingres, who with masterful linearity was a dominating figure in early 19th century France. The two great rivals of the era were Ingres and Delacroix.

DAVID (after)
The Death of Marat (painted 1793)
Original etching & drypoint by J. David, ND
Collection: IAD (2012)

NOTE: Jacque-Louis David was the most gifted Neoclassical painter of his era. During the late 18th century, the mood of many French people was turning away from the shallow frivolity of the Rococo style of art and architecture to a more moral mood. David shared this mood, a mood that was being stimulated by the democratic ideals of Enlightenment philosophers. That included many of the same philosophers who had inspired the American Revolution of 1776.

His first great painting “Oath of the Horatti” (1784) celebrated the Republican ideals of ancient Rome. We see the sons of the general taking an oath to fight to the death for the collective values of their community. David’s “Death of Socrates” (1787) shows us a philosopher who questioned traditional mythology and it cost him his life. Socrates could have accepted exile rather than death. However, he chose to drink that deadly cup of hemlock in order to show that the values to which he had dedicated his life were those of his community, and that this cup was the collective judgment of his beloved society.

Deep social changes in French society led to the French Revolution in 1789. The Divine Right of Kings would be eliminated by bloody means and replaced by a democratic republic. The United States was the first modern republic. France became the second modern republic. David was proud to be part of the French Revolution, and voted for the death of the King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette. The subject of “The Death of Marat” is the murdered body of Jean-Paul Marat, a famous early leader of the Revolution and a friend of David’s. It is one of David’s most famous paintings. He was asked to make a number of replicas at the time by fellow revolutionaries.

In some ways “Marat” is traditional. As part of his effort to sacralize the Revolution (even though he was an atheist), David seems to have deliberately composed the dead body (with his extended arm) in the Christian tradition of the way the body of Christ looked when brought down from the Cross. The aesthetic effect as a whole composition is one of “noble simplicity” – a continuation of the ideals of Neoclassicism.

In some ways “Marat” is modern. It is one of the first major political paintings in European history. It was admired by Napoleon who, when he became Emperor, made David his court painter. Moreover, the dramatic contrast of darkness and brilliant lightness, with the “story” squeezed in between, inspired a range of modern painters from Munch to Picasso. David’s pupil, Ingres, would carry Neoclassicism far into the 19th century. This rare etching is by J. David, David’s grandson, and a leading etcher of the era.

INGRES (after)
Odalisque with a Slave (painted 1839)
Engraving by Haussoullier, c1880s
Collection: FLG

 

EUROPEAN MASTERS – 19TH CENTURY – ROMANTICISM

 

Romanticism started to be discussed as a style about 1800. Based on imagination and emotion, Romanticism grew in reaction to the Neoclassical, highly rational values of the Enlightenment that were discredited by the bloody horrors of the French Revolution. Romanticism flourished until the middle of the century, celebrated by many poets (such as Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and Poe) and philosophers such as Burke who said: “…all that stuns the soul…leads to the sublime.” The poet and art critic Baudelaire said it in a word: “Romanticism… is feeling.”

The visual characteristics of Romantic paintings and prints include emotional situations, dramatic perspectives, fluid outlines, and rich colors. Leading practitioners included popular painters such as Delacroix and Turner in Europe, Cole and Church in the United States, and visionary printmakers such as Blake and Doré. The aesthetic of Romanticism is primarily that of the right-brain.

 

 

 

Glad Day by William Blake, c1805
Engraving, later edition
Collection: FLG
Exhibited in FLAMING PAGES: THE ILLUMINATED BOOKS OF WILLIAM BLAKE, University Art Gallery, 2006

 

NOTE: This is the second version of this famous print, and was never colored. Thanks to donations from IAD, the Special Collections of the CSUEB Library now has outstanding facsimile editions of all of Blake’s “illuminated books.” In 2004, drawing on that collection, FLG organized an exhibition called FLAMING PAGES: THE ILLUMINATED BOOKS OF WILLIAM BLAKE. It was the first such exhibition. Professor Martin Paley, an advisor to the exhibition, spoke at the opening. This impression, a later printing from the original plate, was featured in the exhibition.

 

BLAKE (after)
Title page in
VISIONS OF THE DAUGHTERS OF ALBION, 1793
Lithographic replica of an engraving
Facsimile edition by Dent, 1932
Collection: FLG
Gift of Arthur B. B. MacLeMore, 1955
Exhibited in FLAMING PAGES: THE ILLUMINATED BOOKS OF WILLIAM BLAKE, University Art Gallery, CSUEB, 2006

NOTE: The Dent editions are the finest facsimile editions of Blake’s illuminated books produced before World War II. This title is a fine example. It was exhibited in my Blake exhibition of 2006. For that exhibition brochure CLICK HERE. Arthur MacLeMore was my Godfather. Under his guidance, I studied World Art and World Religions from 1953 to 1958. That is why I was able to teach a class in Comparitive Religion when I was a student at Kenyon College. Uncle Arthur (as I called him) had an enormous library that contained facsimile editions of all of Blake’s Illuminated Books.

At the end of each year of study, he gave me a facsimile edition of one of Blake’s Illuminated Books. Holding those books in my hands was like holding rainbows. It was that experience of seeing words and images dance together in a swirl of colored light that made me want to become a poet and an artist at the same time. So, in 1954 (at the age of 14) I started my first private press (Sun Moon Press) and “published” my first illustrated book of poetry, STAR SONGS, I’ve been illustrating and publishing collections of my poems ever since as private press editions. For a checklist of my poetry publications CLICK HERE. It was from this background in the ’50s that in the ’60s I began writing art history books and catalogues, publications in which the words and images also dance together. I have never written a book without pictures. My daughter once asked me why I did not write books with just words. I told her I did not know how. In fact, I don’t even read books that are unillustrated. I read about a hundred books a year, but they are all illustrated. My mind just stopped working in the non-visual mode after all those novels in college, and after I graduated as a speed-reader from Evelyn Woods Reading Dynamics Institute at 10,000 words a minute. That psychological transformation contributed to the restructuring of my brain because that form of speed-reading turns word-reading into a semi-photographic visual process. I know it is unusual, and I often apologize to friends and relatives who love novels; however, both my left-brain & right-brain always want to work together at the same time. My two hemispheres have become geared that way. Except for short passages, if a book does not engage both sides on my mind, neither side wants to gear up. I ended that conversation by reminding my daughter what Alice (of Alice in Wonderland) once said: “What’s the use of a book without any pictures…?”

 

 

NOTE: When Blake was illustrating Milton, he felt Milton was on Satan’s side. John Martin had a different vision. For him, the Divine Light was superior to all else and could never be extinguished. In an era when most book illustrations were merely reproductions of existing paintings, Martin’s mezzotints were original creations – creations so much admired that they were produced in a number of editions. He did his own mezzotinting with a painterly fluidity. He generated two editions simultaneously, one large folio-size and a smaller edition in Imperial Octavo, both first published in 1827. It was his mysteriously beautiful light that captured the popular imagination, along with his skillful sense of human scale being dwarfed within dramatic vistas of infinite space. Those who admired his work included artists such as Rossetti and Thomas Cole (who founded American landscape painting), writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jules Verne, and H.G. Wells, as well as such filmmakers as Cecil B. DeMille and George Lucas.
MEZZOTINT is an Italian term meaning half-tone. It is a form of printmaking that developed in the 17th century in an effort to approximate the tonalities of a painting. The technique is a member of the intaglio family, along with etching and engraving. However, it produces an image made with subtle tonal gradations of light and shade rather than with lines.

DORE
The Angelic Throng in the form of a Rose
(Il PARADISIO, Canto 31)
Wood engraving from
IL PURATORIO ED IL PARADISIO by Dante, 1867
Facsimile edition by Pantheon, 1948
Collection: FLG
Exhibited in THE ART OF THE BOOK: THE MODERN LIVRE D’ARTISTE, University Art Gallery, CSUEB, 1999

NOTE: No 19th-century printmaker was more productive than Gustave Doré. He was widely respected as a painter and a sculptor, but is now remembered primarily for the prints he made to illustrate books. Starting in the 1850s, he visualized almost 100 books. This child prodigy became a very skillful literary illustrator making memorable images for books by Dante, Rabelais, Milton, Coleridge, Byron, Poe, and Balzac. The breadth of his vision was enormous. His illustrations are highly imaginative. Some are intensely mystical. His style is a Romantic extension of what Delacroix had begun as a literary illustrator, but with more realism than most illustrators of the time. Doré had a very large following. His drawings were engraved on wood, under his watchful eye, and then inked for printing. He sometimes needed a staff of 40 engravers to keep up with the huge demand. THE DIVINE COMEDY of Dante is one of his most celebrated books, and this image has been reproduced more than any other from the set. It takes the inner eye and inner ear above all the lower heavens, as far as the soul can travel, up past astral and causal planes to the very edge of what the mind perceives as space and time – the ultimate outer membrane of the perceptual bubble of the mind. After that, there is only luminous silence.

For a feeling of how a large number of Christians have pictured the Heavens since the Middle Ages, compare this image with that of Botticelli’s Dante image under SOUTHERN RENAISSANCE (click here). The Doré image is virtually the Botticelli image seen from below. For thumbnails of all the Dante illustrations CLICK HERE.

 

 

DELACROIX (after)
Mephistopheles over Wittenberg (drawn 1825-27)
Lithograph from FAUST by Goethe, 1828
Collection: Unknown

 

 

DELACROIX (after)
The Death of Ophelia (printed 1843)
Lithograph from HAMLET by Shakespeare {ACT IV, scene vii}
Collection: Unknown

NOTE: Eugene Delacroix was the greatest French painter of the Romantic era. He consciously continued the richly colorful and highly energetic tradition of Rubens, while his rival Ingres and the other Neoclassicists of the time favored the restrained tradition of Poussin. Delacroix also was a brilliant writer. His free use of intensely emotional color and passionate shapes inspired the Impressionists, Cézanne, van Gogh, Matisse, and Picasso. Delacroix shared with Lord Byron (one of his favorite poets) a love for the “forces of the sublime.” Baudelaire said: “Delacroix is passionately in love with passion… .”

Lithography was not widely respected as an art form until Delacroix decided to explore the medium. He was the first major artist to do so. By 1825 he had started to illustrate such works as Goethe’s FAUST, as well as Shakespeare’s HAMLET and KING LEAR (1843). Goethe seems to have been quite pleased, and is reported to have said: “Delacroix has surpassed my own vision.”

Thereafter, respect for the medium of lithography grew. Nevertheless, etching remained a more respected medium for painters until the 1890s when the brilliant color lithographs in Paris started to be enthusiastically collected works of art.

DELACROIX (after)
Christ Asleep during the Tempest (The Barque). painted c1853
Original Etching by A. Greux, c1853

NOTE: It is traditional to say Delacroix was not a religious man. However, he painted quite a few Biblical scenes with deep emotions. Delacroix painted this particular composition several times. Van Gogh was very moved by Delacroix’s sketch for this painting. According to Robaut (1855), this etching was made by A. Greux for Durand-Ruel. The names of both artists appear underneath the image on some impressions but these are not signatures.

 

TURNER
Rain, Steam, Speed: The Great Western Railway (painted c1844)
Oil
Collection: National Gallery, London

NOTE: J. M. W. Turner was the greatest British painter of the 19th century. His visions of the natural world and our relationships with it were rendered with explosions of light and breathtaking angles of perception. Whatever was dramatic caught his eye. He melted matter into cauldrons of color – colors that stretched forms to the outside edges of abstraction. Animating his imagery was his conviction that light is the body of God. He was a strong influence on generations of later painters, from the Impressionists of the 1870s to the Abstract Expressionists of the 1940s.

The early history of the Industrial Revolution got underway with the English invention of the steam engine in the 18th century. The development of the railroad in the early 19th century wove together the commercial centers of England and eventually every modern nation. The railroad that Turner is picturing here ran from London to Bristol at the wondrous speed of 35 miles an hour.

This was England’s first major railroad. It was built during the 1830s by a brilliant engineer and entrepreneur named I. K. Brunel. Brunel was the genius who also (starting in 1843) built the propeller-driven metal ships that tied together the world-wide British Empire in ways that old-fashioned sailing ships could not. One of his iron ships could make the transatlantic voyage from four weeks to two weeks. A Brunel ship also laid the undersea cable that united Europe and the United States by means of the electric telegraph (1866). Brunel represents the kind of self-confident visionary who created the Industrial Revolution. Many of his bridges are still in use, and the British still regard him as a National Hero.

 

Keswick Lake by J. W. M. Turner, 1834 for Rogers, POEMS, p. 36
Chromolithograph from a Watercolor
Printed by E. Goodall Collection: FLG on loan to IAD
Published in GLOBAL VISION: A SURVEY OF WORLD ART, Part 1, 2006
Documented in J. M. W. TURNER: HIS ART AND LIFE, 1979 number 1182, p. 440

NOTE: J. W. M. Turner England’s most famous landscape painter composed the most abstract paintings and watercolors of the early 19th century. Many of his spontaneous sketches- such as this one- probably from the 1820s were later used to make detailed engravings for a wide public and for smaller public chromo-lithographs such as this. His highly abstract color fields and profound luminosity strongly influenced the French Impressionists. Monet and Pissarro discovered Turner’s work in London in 1870 just as their Impressionist styles were maturing and they acknowledged his influence. This Chromo-Lithograph is an 1840-1850 edition.

 

EUROPEAN MASTERS – 19TH CENTURY – REALISM

 

Realism in the visual arts was a major movement in France and elsewhere between about the 1830s and the 1870s. It was especially popular during the 1850s & ‘60s. It developed in reaction to the idealism of both Neoclassicism and Romanticism, and took on several different forms. All those forms involved doing away with traditional subjects such as the mythological, the biblical, and the historical, and placing the focus on contemporary, everyday reality.

{WRAP: GOYA} Before Realism as a movement began, the realistic work of Goya as an isolated phenomena exploded in Spain at the beginning of the 19th century. The first form of Realism as a continuing movement was landscape painting. It was concentrated in the forest of Fontainebleau, some 35 miles southeast of Paris, in and around the village of Barbizon. So it came to be known as the Barbizon School.

At first, during the late 1820s, there were only a few painters working there, led by Corot. By the 1860s, there were hundreds of painters working and living there. The French political revolutions of 1848 increased the taste for democratic Realism. Among the leading Barbizon figures were Corot, Rousseau, Millet, Daubigny, Dupré, and Troyon. They were strongly influenced by the Dutch landscape painters of the 17th century, such as Ruisdael and Hobbema. But the

spark that animated the start of the Barbizon School was an exhibition of the landscapes of Constable in the Paris Salon of 1824. Constable made them want to picture their own landscapes.

Their usual technique was to paint nature directly in the open air (plein air). They were the first to do this. Before this time, artists did their painting indoors. Their aesthetic was primarily tonal, with darkened light, heavy shadows, mid-range colors, loose brushwork, and soft forms. As Corot expressed it: “I love more than anything else…the harmony of the tones.” Corot’s direct pupils included Morisot, Pissarro, and Boudin (the teacher of Monet), but Corot also inspired generations of painters (and a very large number of forgers).

Sometimes there were figures in the landscapes of some of these artists (such as Corot), but figures usually were secondary to the landscape, except in the case of Millet for whom figures were primary. He was focused on the noble values of his fellow farmers, and was among the first to paint farm people with reverence. The religiosity of the paintings and prints of this deeply religious man eventually won him a large audience.

The early landscapes of the English and the French were the first manifestations of what would be the most important single development during most of the history of 19th-century European painting – landscape painting. Turner and Constable, and especially the Barbizon painters, were a major inspiration for the Impressionists who followed their lead into outdoor painting during the 1870s. Landscape painting had developed slowly in Europe. Realistic settings for figures developed in the 15th century. Giovanni Bellini and Leonardo were among the first to paint really convincing landscapes for their figures. But it was not until the 17th century that landscape became its own subject, especially in the hands of the Dutch masters and Claude Lorrain. These artists were the departure points for both the English landscapists and the French landscapists in the early 19th century.

A second group of Realists were urban Realists. The most famous painter to call himself a Realist was Courbet. He grew up in the country and loved rural values, but he wanted to make it in the city. So he moved to Paris in 1839. The work of Rembrandt, Halls, and other Dutch masters, along with Chardin and le Nain, convinced him he should focus on daily reality and nothing else. He once said: “Show me an angel and I will paint one.” In 1849 he won a gold medal from the state. “The Stone-Breakers” of 1849  is considered by many to be Courbet’s first great work. For the rest of his life he would celebrate the working poor and work for greater democracy as both an artist and as an active citizen of the Republic, with socialist and anarchistic ideals, even when it cost him jail time. When some of his paintings were rejected by the Exposition Universelle of 1855, he set up his own exhibition Pavilion of Realism next door. {WRAP IMAGE: Pavillion}

The urban Realists and the rural Realists laid the foundations for Modernism by rejecting the traditional subject-matter of the mythological, the biblical, and the historical, and by insisting that the only proper subject matter for contemporary art is contemporary life. This is what Baudelaire as an art critic had in mind at mid-century when he invented the term “modernity” and called out for art that is of its own time in his famous essay “The Painter of Modern Life.” (1860). He wrote: “By ‘modernity’ I mean the…fugitive…the half of art whose other half is the eternal and immutable… .”

The next stage in the development of Modern art in the 1870s was Impressionism – a style that my professor of Modern Art, Meyer Schapiro, called the “the final, Rococo phase of Realism.”

Manet and Whistler started off under the Realism of Courbet, then found their own way to mature styles.

Both of their styles anticipated Impressionism in some ways. Manet’s style in the 1860s I have called Impressionistic Realism, a modified Realism that was moving toward Impressionism by reducing Courbet’s Realism to an “impression” of what can be seen at a glance. Whistler’s style in the 1860s I have called Tonalistic Realism. He turned Courbet’s corporeal Realism into Tonalism. In the process, Whistler compressed foreground and background into a very flat picture-plane, a convention that would be developed by the Impressionists, Postimpressionists, and many later Modernists. Some call Whistler’s style Aestheticism. That term is suggestive but not diagnostic from the point of view of arthistorical analysis. Whistler certainly believed in Aestheticism, but Aestheticism was an attitude not a style, an attitude that favored “art for art’s sake” – a love of beauty for its own sake, with no interest in morality or storytelling.

Among the popular printmakers at midcentury, Daumier and Doré with great compassion filled periodicals and books with thousands of illustrations of the disadvantaged urban populations on whose backs the Industrial Revolution was built.

In the U.S., Homer was inspired by Courbet’s Realism. Later, what may be described as a branch of the Barbizon School developed in the U.S. during the 1880s and ‘90s. Among the leading figures were George Inness and William Keith.

Realism would take on many forms during the 19th century. For example, Rosa Bonheur painted some landscapes in the forest of Fontainbleau but her primary Realism was in her striking portraits of animals. She was the first woman to receive the Legion of Honor.

During the second half of the century, the most popular of all styles of figure painting and genre paintings was what has come to be known as Romantic Realism.

 

GOYA (after)
Here Neither [Hanged Man; soldier Watching] (etched c1812)
From THE DISASTERS OF WAR, 1812-14
Lithograph from an etching (Modern edition)
Collection: IAD

NOTE: Francisco Goya was the first Realist in European art, long before Realism became a named style. From a modest background, this dynamic Spaniard learned art from the etchings of Rembrandt, Valasquez, and Tiepolo. He worked his way into the Spanish Court and made courtly Rococo paintings. But he was repulsed by the empty, decadent lives at court, and later by the horrors of the war that arrived with the invading French army of Napoleon in 1808. From his guts came a new way to picture the world. From his haunted visions came his first series of etchings: the CAPRICHOS of 1799. During the French invasion, while 20, 000 fellow Spaniards were starving to death around him, Goya created his next set of powerful prints: THE DISASTERS OF WAR (partly inspired by Callot’s THE MISERIES OF WAR). This war was one of the many horrific wars with which the Modern history of Europe began. Goya’s prints were magnets for every later artist who wanted to visualize intense realities. Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Daumier, and van Gogh would study Goya very carefully. In the 20th century, Picasso would owe Goya a great deal, especially when Picasso was responding to the Spanish Civil War of his time during the 1930s. By coincidence, Goya and van Gogh (who can be described as the last great Realist of the 19th century) shared the same birthday – March 30.

 

COROT (after)
Souvenir of Italy [Landscape], ND
etching
Replica etching, Bibliotheque Nationale edition, 20^th century
Collection: IAD

NOTE: J-B-C Corot had more than one way of painting. His earlier work has a solidity that came from both Poussin and his visit to Italy. He also did more work with the classical figure than any other Barbizon artist. However, from the 1850s on, he was best known for the quiet silvery radiance of his landscapes that were extremely popular. There never is a hint of the Industrial Revolution in sight. The viewers could dream of an earlier time. For Corot, the dream was to attain the condition of music. Many would say that he did.

Corot also did more than any other artist of the time to elevate the aesthetic value of the quickly painted sketch. Until then, a sketch was merely a working tool to get to a finished canvas. In the hands of Corot, the painted sketch came to be appreciated as a work of art in itself, as did his feathery etchings. The sketch as a complete artistic reality would be a very meaningful new idea to the young Impressionists to whom Corot was a warm and generous mentor.

The usual Barbizon technique was to paint nature directly in the open air (plein air). They were the first to do this. Before this time, artists did all their painting indoors. The Barbizon painters, however, finished their paintings indoors. Their aesthetic was primarily tonal, with darkened light, heavy shadows, mid-range colors, loose brushwork, and soft forms. As Corot expressed it: “I love more than anything else…the harmony of the tones.” Corot’s direct pupils included Morisot, Pissarro, and Boudin (the primary teacher of Monet), but Corot also inspired generations of painters (and a very large number of forgers).

In an effort to reach a large audience, Corot mastered etching, lithography, and the cliché-verre (glass picture) – a semi-photographic mode of printing from glass plates, a technique that preceded actual photography. One etches an image on a piece of glass that has been smoked with a candle. The glass is then placed on light-sensitive paper and left in the sun where the image transfers to the paper.

 

————————————————————————–

THE ETCHING REVIVAL

 

The birth of etching in the 17th century, as a quick way to make an engraving, resulted in many masterpieces from artists such as Rembrandt. However, during the 18th century, the etching technique produced few original works. It became primarily a reproductive technique, except on the hands of a few masters such as Tiepolo and Piranesi. The Etching Revival began during the 1850s, with Barbizon painter-printmakers such as Corot, Millet, and Daubigny leading the way in the restoring of etching as an expressive medium with the unique touch of the artist.

{wrap: DESJOBERT: BAS-BREAU, NEAR BARBIZON. Etching}

Earlier Barbizon etchings, like earlier Barbizon paintings, stress the thick materiality of the trees in the forest. These early densely packed trees seems to enclose the light. This etching by Desjobert is an example. In time, there was less materiality, more tonality, and a brighter luminosity. These painter-printmakers moved from a thick, heavy, almost material light toward a thin non-material light that is the strongest element in the composition, a light

that envelops the trees and the animals. These two etchings by Troyon and Daubigny are examples of the transition from thick light to thin light. The openness and energetic spontaneity of Daubigny’s late etchings of the 1860s seem to have been a particular inspiration to the young Monet and Renoir as they followed the footsteps of Barbizon artists into the magical Forest of Fontainebleau. In short, such etchings appear to have a springboard for the birth of Impressionist painting. {wrap: Daubigny River Crossing: very abstract landscape with a couple & a cow}

You can get the DESJOBERT from BIGSTOCKPHOTO.COM & the DAUBIGNY from OLDMASTERPRINTS.COM

The Revival spread quickly in Europe and the U.S. From the 1860s to the 1880s, etching manuals appeared and etching clubs were formed. As the Revival was getting underway in the 1860s, masterpieces came from the hands of Manet and Whistler, both of whom also admired the etchings of Rembrandt and Goya. A new Realist tradition began in the world of printmaking, a tradition that parallels the growing acceptance of the very different, more Modern, painted sketch by the Impressionists. By the 1920s, etching collectors were spending a great deal of money. Such collections had become major status symbols, but the quantity of original work was shrinking. The Great Depression of the 1930s put an end to the Etching Revival around the world. Only in the Postmodern era have a handful of artists such as Jasper Johns wanted to explore etching again.

ENGRAVING, perfected in the 16th centuty, involves cutting thick lines with a wide tool called a graver or burin. The ink is held in the grooves. The printed lines are smooth and have a hard edge.

ETCHING, perfected in the 17th century, involves cutting lines into a wax-covered plate with a needle. The hand motions are much like drawing. The hard or soft ground resists acid. The plate is bathed in acid which bites the lines which have been exposed as bare metal. It is those lines that have been sunk into the plate which hold the ink. The printed lines have a smooth, hard-edged line. The technique of MEZZOTINT was added in the 18th century. It provides a tonal element, while AQUATINT provides the effect of a watercolor wash.

DRYPOINT, also perfected in the 17th century, involves cutting lines with a needle directly into an unwaxed plate. In addition to the line cut into the plate, some of the metal from the groove collects on the edge of the cut. When inked, the burr leaves a very soft feathery line.

PHOTO-ETCHING (gravure, or photogravure) developed during the same period as the Etching Revival for commercial production in the middle of the 19th century. A number of photographers at the turn of the century, such as Stieglitz and Coburn, used it as an excellent translation of the wide tonal range of the platinum print.

 

DAUMIER
Third Class Carriage (painted 1864)
Oil
Collection: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Lithographic reproduction of the oil, ND
Collection: IAD

NOTE: In the popular mind, no artist is more closely associated with 19th-century Realism than Honoré Daumier. He was a true “man of the people” in a way that has never been matched. He was a painter and a sculptor, but most of his work was illustrations printed in periodicals.

These periodicals were read by people in Paris who could not afford the paintings of Courbet or Corot. But they could afford newspapers and the kind of comical journals to which Daumier contributed his best-known images – primarily LA CARICATURE (which ran from 1830 to 1835) and LE CHARIVARI (which ran from 1832 to 1937 and inspired the British magazine PUNCH). Daumier’s energy was enormous. He left us 4,000 lithographs, 1,000 wood engravings, 1,000 drawings, and 500 paintings, as well as a number of sculptures.

He is most remembered for caricatures – satirical drawings of incompetent government officials, unjust lawyers, and human beings full of shortcomings, drawings that he started to publish during the 1830s & ‘40s. In other words, he was partly a cartoonist, partly a social critic, and largely an artist of extraordinary skill and deep humanity. After his start in periodicals, he turned to the new art of lithography, and finally to painting. Largely overlooked until the 20th century was the power of such paintings as “Third Class Carriage.”

His range of subjects was the whole of The Human Comedy, a subject he liked to discuss with his friend Balzac whose novels explored some of the same territory. Daumier rendered the life of working-class people with a respect bordering on reverence. For the newly prosperous middle classes that he satirized regularly he also had a sympathetic understanding of their very human weaknesses.

Daumier has been called the “Michelangelo of Caricature.” But he was a great deal more than a satirist. His faces and figures speak volumes. I suspect his snapshots of the moment inspired the Impressionists to respect the fleeting glance. His robust vitality was admired by Delacroix, Millet, and Degas who collected his prints extensively. In the 20th century, he was a hero among the Expressionists. In the words of Baudelaire: “One of the most important men, I will say not only of caricature, but also of modern art.”

For a listing of the complete works of Daumier, click here for DAUMIER-REGISTER.ORG.

DAUMIER
The Legislative Belly (drawn 1834)
Replica Lithograph, ND
Collection: IAD

NOTE: Pictured here are the conservative members of the French Chamber of Deputies. Each one would have been recognizable at the time. This satirical “portrait” pictures them as arrogant, lazy, and corrupt. Most Americans today have a similar view of the U.S. Congress.

 

DAUMIER
Mr. Babinet alerted by his Housekeeper to the Arrival of the Comet (drawn 1858)
Lithograph on the original Newsprint, 1858
Collection: Smart Museum of Art, Chicago

  

DAUMIER
Nadar elevating Photography to the Height of Art (drawn 1862)
Lithograph, c1862
Collection: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

NOTE: Nadar was an important photographer in 19th century France. He actually did photograph Paris from a balloon. Photography developed during the 1840s and started to be popular in the 1850s & ‘60s, particularly for portraits. The process was quick, cheap, and remarkably “real.” It soon became the most universal form of picture printing.

Some thought photography would replace painting. That did not happen. In fact, most people did not consider photography to be a “fine art” until the middle of the 20th century. But photography in the mid 19th century did influence how painters looked at what they were doing. I think many painters probably said to themselves something like: “If photographers can do Realism so well, perhaps we should do something else.” This kind of questioning contributed to the development of less realistic, more “modern” painting.

 

DAUMIER
A Literary Discussion (drawn 1864)
Replica lithograph from the original Newsprint, 20th century
Collection: IAD 

NOTE: For a comprehensive register of Daumier prints CLICK HERE.

 

DAUMIER
Rue Transnonain (drawn 1834)
Lithograph, c1834
Collection: British Museum, London 

NOTE: Not all of Daumier’s images were humorous. As with David’s “Marat,” this is a picture of a recent killing in Paris. The title of this print is the address of where a working class family who opposed the government was killed by government troops. Several bodies lie on the floor. The history of France’s efforts after Napoleon to create a democratic republic is a bloody story of riot and revolt after riot and revolt as the nation went back and forth between being a constitutional monarchy and being a republic. A stable Third Republic was not established until after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

 

DAUMIER
Advice to a Young Artist (painted 1860)
Poster, ND
Collection: IAD

 

DAUMIER
The Connoisseur (painted ca.1860-65)
Pen and ink, watercolor
Collection: Metropolitain Museum of Art, New York

NOTE: Daumier had begun his career making cartoons (as did Monet and many others). In this later years, Daumier had become so respected as an artist that he made watercolors and paintings especially for collectors. Many 19th century figures in the art world were moved by his work, such as Baudelaire (who lived next door), and Degas who collected 1,800 of his prints and studied closely his vibrant linearity and his razor-sharp contrasts of light & dark. They admired Daumier’s work partly because of his extraordinary skill in the simultaneous rendering of form and feeling with singularly expressive lines, and partly because of the depth of his humanity. No one since Rembrandt had said so much about the full range of the Human Condition.

For a short visual survey of French 19th century prints (DAUMIER to DEGAS), Click Here

DORE
Over London, by Rail, 1872
engraving 

DORE (after)
Illustrations in LONDON: A PILGRIMAGE, 1872
Facsimile edition by Dover, 2004
Collection: FLG

NOTE: No 19th-century printmaker was more productive than Doré. He was widely respected as a painter and a sculptor, but is now remembered primarily for the prints he made to illustrate books. Starting in the 1850s, he illustrated almost 100 books. This child prodigy became a very skillful literary illustrator making memorable images for books by Dante, Rabelais, Milton, Coleridge, Byron, Poe, and Balzac. The breadth of his vision was enormous. His illustrations are highly imaginative. Some are intensely mystical. His style is a Romantic extension of what Delacroix had begun as a literary illustrator, but with more realism than most illustrators of the time. Doré had a very large following. His drawings were engraved on wood, under his watchful eye, then inked for printing. He sometimes needed a staff of 40 engravers to keep up with the huge demand. Each commercial success, and there were many, brought him larger contracts.

His most complex projects were not standard literary volumes, but rather the ENGLISH BIBLE (1866), and LONDON: A PILGRIMAGE (1872). The contract for LONDON had him living in London three months of the year for five years, and receiving the enormous sum of 10,000 pounds each year. In this monumental volume of 180 wood engravings, Doré changed his focus from literature and mysticism to social realism.

The Industrial Revolution was bringing great wealth to London and England along with grinding poverty and widespread disease among the lower classes. The novels of Charles Dickens, from the 1830s to the 1860s, took long looks at all this and told the story of this early modern world with deep feeling and unmatched skill. As Dickens reported: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… .” He became the most popular writer of the age. With his books, and in many other ways, Dickens fought for children’s rights, public education, and many other social reforms. Doré also wanted to tell the story of modern urban decay, but visually.

Doré’s book sold many copies, but not all the critics liked LONDON. They said Doré concentrated too much on the poor side of the city. That, of course, is exactly what he wanted to do. Everyone knew the happier side of the city. He wanted to show the side most people did not want to see. Why? Because he wanted to help change the situation. The books of Dickens and Doré actually did make life somewhat better for those who had almost nothing. They did not do this single-handedly, but their role was important. The selfish materialists of the upper middle class, who were allowing millions to starve because of their mindless greed, were finally moved to begin social reforms. For thumbnails of all the LONDON illustrations CLICK HERE.

 

EUROPEAN MASTERS – 19TH CENTURY – ROMANTIC REALISM

 

Romantic Realism, at first glance, seems like a contradiction in terms. After all, Romanticism is a style against which the Realists revolted. The new Realism became strong in much of European art during the 1850s & ‘60s. By then, many elements of Neoclassical line and Romantic color has merged in the paintings approved by the academic Establishment, an Establishment controlled in France by the Académie des Beaux-Arts. The tight rules of its school continued the traditions of Raphael and Poussin and Ingres, in other words the Renaissance tradition. The focus of Academic training was rendering the human body by using plaster casts of Greek sculpture and later drawings from nude models. The goal was to paint figures that look a good deal like low-relief sculpture. And they did it very well.

Before the Revolution of 1789 French artists lived by selling their work to the nobility and the clergy. That had been the way since the Middle Ages. After the Revolution of 1789, noble patronage largely disappeared. Until commercial galleries developed at the end of the 19th century, the only way an artist could become established was to be accepted into the annual or bi-annual Paris Salon, a large juried exhibition organized by the government. The situation was similar in England where the Royal Academy was the arbiter of taste.

Before the Revolution of 1789, the art patronage by the middle class in France was rather small. Those who could afford art tended to purchase little domestic scenes and still-life paintings, while the nobility purchased large canvases of “noble” History and Mythology aiming for universal and timeless values. Many aristocrats agreed with the 18th century art historian J. J. Winckelmann that looking at Greek art would make people wiser. Others went further, agreeing with the poet-philosopher Friedrich Schiller that only art can elevate people to their full moral potential.

After the Revolution of 1789, the economics of the Industrial Revolution generated a very large middle class that grew and grew until it eventually gained political control of all Modern nations. The upper middle-class continues to hold that power, both economically and politically. There are still a few constitutional monarchies, but their power is ceremonial not political.

During the first half of the 19th century, sociologically speaking, the aesthetic debate between line-loving Neo-classicists and color-loving Romantics (between those who favored Poussin and those who favored Rubens) was largely a class debate between the old upper class and the new middle class. Eventually, the old and the new found out that they could get along.

Romantic Realism was a compromise between the romanticised Neoclassical tradition that had dominated the European art created for the upper class since the middle of the 18th century and the Realism favored by the new democratic middle class. This aesthetic compromise was accepted by the Academic artists of the official Beaux-Arts tradition of the Establishment for the rest of the 19th century.

The Academic artists mixed elements of the real with a good deal of romantic feeling for color and sentiment. Suiting the middle-class values of newly democratic Europe and North America, subjects often pictured were highly detailed family scenes (usually indoors), friendly neighborhood views, and portraits. Solid individualism and contemporary family values is what this part of the new tradition was all about. Typical were Makovsky in Europe and Eastman Johnson in the U.S.

Mythological images of gods and goddesses were permitted by the rules of Academic Realism (as moral lessons), so long as the pictures were not too sensuous. To picture actual erotic feelings was not permitted in the world of Victorian morality. Masters of this “noble” genre within the tradition included Gérome, Cabanel, and Bouguereau.

The French government eventually withdrew from sponsorship of the Salon. At the start of the 20th century a new organization called the Salon d”Automne was established in Paris by Rodin and Renoir, and quickly attracted Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse, and Picasso. It remains an important exhibition.

The term “Romantic Realism” has a long history in literary criticism and history, but has now also become part of art history and criticism as a way of describing a wide range of visual art over the last century and a half. The term is used for art from the Hudson River School of the mid 19th century to the extreme photorealism of today, along with the very contemporary folksy landscapes of Thomas Kinkade. (By the way, I understand Kinkade is the richest artist alive today.)

 

MAKOVSKY (after)
Avant Le Marriage
d’apres Le Tableau de M. Makowski [sic] (painted 1880s)
[aka The Russian Bride’s Attire]
wood engraving from
L’EUROPEENNE ILLUSTRE, 1890, pp.168-168
Collection: FLG

NOTE: This print was based on Konstantin Makovsky’s very popular painting that was exhibited at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and is now in the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

 

GEROME
The Bath (painted c1880-85)
Poster. Edition of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1974 {Editor/Publisher: FLG}
Collection: FLG

NOTE: J.-L. Gérome was a highly respected Academic artist in France starting in the middle of the century. One may or may not like his subjects, but his skill as an image-maker cannot be denied. His primary interest was the female nude. He also was a gifted teacher with a considerable range of subjects for an Academician. His students included some of the best European and American artists of the later 19th century, such as Eakins, Redon, and Cassatt. Even the young Vincent van Gogh signed up for Gérome’s distance-learning course. (Theo van Gogh, Vincent’s brother, headed the Paris office of Goupil.) After a long period of neglect, Gérome’s popularity has returned. Ever since I first published this poster almost 30 years ago, some version of this image has been continuously editioned by FAMSF on cards, calenders, etc. The French have put him on a stamp, and Getty Museum in Los Angeles recently presented a Gérome exhibition.

 

GEROME
The Harem Bath, 1878
Engraving
Edition by Goupil
Collection: IAD

NOTE: Gérome’s dealer was Adolphe Goupil, whose daughter, Marie, Gérome married. Goupil, from his base in Paris, had a world-wide business in painting, sculpture, and reproductive prints. When such dealers entered the art market during the second half of the 19th century and began to make high quality reproductions of the paintings they had for sale, during the 1870s and ‘80s, the taste for collecting photogravure prints became widespread, and remained for decades the primary form of international art-collecting in the middle class. A whole new market for picture-postcards also opened up. The quality of reproductive prints became excellent in books and art magazines such as GAZETTE DES BEAUX-ARTS and THE STUDIO. It was not until after World War II that this type of black & white print was replaced by color prints in art magazines and mass-market magazines, along with cards and posters. It was by means of color reproductions in LIFE, LOOK, etc. that millions of people “saw” fine art for the first time.

 

BOUGUEREAU
The Broken Pitcher (painted 1891)
Poster. Edition of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1975
{Editor/Publisher FLG}
Collection: Tom & Charlotte Gleim

NOTE: William-Adolphe Bouguereau was one of the most respected painters in all of the 19th century in both France and in the U.S. His technical skill was remarkable. His output was enormous, over 800 paintings. His pearly tones were hypnotic. His shy peasant girls and smooth nude goddesses contained just enough eroticism to be permitted to hang in Victorian homes. His work has often been considered by Modernists as the worst kind of painting, the very thing that the Impressionists rebelled against. It is indeed what the Impressionists rejected. But does that mean it’s bad? Postmodernism has allowed a revision of terms like “good” and “bad,” a revision that looks favorably on styles very different from Modernism.

As Chief Curator of San Francisco’s city museums during the early 1970s, I felt it was appropriate for our exhibition program to be a balance of shows that would appeal to large audiences, and shows of special interest for scholars and collectors. So, in addition to shows such as “Prints of the Italian Renaissance,” and “Vuillard,” we presented blockbusters such as King Tut and van Gogh – shows that appeal to every kind of visitor. We also presented exhibitions of artists appreciated by millions of people who happen to like Realism (but were not appreciated by the Modernist Establishment) – shows such as Andrew Wyeth and Norman Rockwell. Those two shows were very well attended. Our Wyeth book was picked up by the Book-of-the-Month Club and sold over 700,000 copies in its first decade.

I also felt it might be good to reconsider Academic painters of the pre-Modern era. Their paintings had been languishing in basements for decades, unseen by anyone. They were once loved by millions of people. Should Bouguereau be hated forever just because he did not want the Impressionists to be allowed into the Salon? Perhaps these paintings were worth a second look. So, in 1975 we presented the first 20th century exhibition of Bouguereau’s paintings, an exhibition organized by Mario Amaya at the New York Cultural Center. It was an eye-opener for many who had never seen his work. The poster I published at the time sold well, and there have been many FAMSF editions since then. The painting itself was donated by M. H. de Young, founder of the de Young Museum, who represented the best in late 19th century American taste.

I was surprised when I was congratulated for presenting the show by the Director of the Louvre, Michel Laclotte, who called it a radical act. He liked to visit San Francisco in part because the California Palace of the Legion of Honor museum at the time was the only French museum in America. [For the history of how the CPLH became a French museum CLICK HERE.]

I thought this show would be interesting to do, but did not think of it as radical. Laclotte said it was the first show he’d seen in America that respected a French Academic artist. Then he told me that he and his team were planning the new Musée d’Orsay as a very different kind of museum, a museum of the whole of the second half of the 19th century – a museum of not only Impressionists and Postimpressionists, but also of Academic artists such as Bouguereau who defined so much of the art of the age.

After all, he said, the 19th century was a century of both ways of looking at the world, and a national museum should present the whole of a nation’s cultural history. Then over lunch he added: “And these Academicians were continuing the Renaissance style, which was a pretty good style to be continuing. It defined the core values of Western civilization for centuries.”

When Laclotte gave me a private tour of the d’Orsay under construction in 1985, it was my turn to congratulate him for developing a museum masterplan that was a truly radical act. The world was expecting France to create nothing other than a temple of Impressionism and Postimpressionism, but the world got much more. “Postmodern” was the attitude behind Laclotte’s planning. A Postmodern attitude is an attitude that allows people to look at both Modern and non-modern art and then decide for themselves what they like.

The d’Orsay, which opened in 1986, has become one of the most visited museums in the world, and has expanded popular appreciation for the art of the Academics. In a recent exhibition at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Bouguereaus were the hit of the show, and there are over 2,000 Bouguereau reproductions for sale on eBay.

 

BOUGUEREAU
The Birth of Venus  (painted 1878)
Gravure, 1908
Edition of the Musée du Luxembourg
Collection: IAD

NOTE: This is his most famous painting.  It is almost 10 feet high.  It was purchased from the Salon of 1878 for the Musée du Luxembourg but is now in the Musée d’Orsay.  Most people in Europe and the U.S. “saw” this picture for the first time in photo-gravures such as this one, a “fine print” often protected by a sheet of tissue paper.

 

EUROPEAN MASTERS – 19TH CENTURY – Impressionistic Realism

 

Impressionistic Realism was a modification of Realism. It was developed by Manet during the 1860s and served as a bridge to Impressionism. He flattened corporeality and provided only the barest of detail such as one could see at a glance. This left the viewer with a visual “impression.” This was a key step on the road to Impressionism. He also illustrated the “first modern book” – Mallarmé’s translation of Poe’s RAVEN – in 1875, a book that included Manet’s haunting “impression” of a shadow.

Some call his transitional style “Pre-Impressionism.” But that is a non-diagnostic term. It points to nothing but chronology, and says little about characteric features. Therefore I use the term Impressionistic Realism because this term helps to explain the visual character of Manet’s transitional style.

 

MANET
Olympia (small plate), 1865-67
(Based on the painting of 1863)
Original etching & aquatint
Printed by Félix Bracquemond
in EDOUARD MANET by Zola, 1867
Edition by Dentu
Ex. Collection: FLG

 

MANET
Olympia, 1863
Oil
Collection: Musée d’Orsay, Paris

NOTE: “Olympia” of 1863 is one of the first paintings by which Edouard Manet became famous (or infamous). In his mind, he was linking to a noble tradition of nudes in this posture, a tradition going back to Titian and Giorgione. But the Art World was shocked by how he did it. In the first place, the woman seems to have no modesty at all. The confrontational gaze suggests a very “modern” woman – very self-assured. That is an attitude that makes non-modern men (then and now) quite uncomfortable. Moreover, she may actually be a prostitute! Among the artists, the shock was in the flatness of her form. Most art lovers thought that a “good Realist” should make

his ladies round, sculptural, tactile. Every artist had done that since the Renaissance; but Manet did something else. He made her body very flat, hardly modeled at all. The print is even flatter. Courbet remarked that Olympia has the “flatness of a playing card.” This radical simplification of traditional, descriptive, Renaissance ideals toward Symbolism’s new aesthetic idea of an “impression rather than a description” was a major step in the early development of Modern art.

Manet was not an Impressionist, but he anticipated Impressionism in many ways. What Manet did has often been called “Pre-Impressionism.” That is a clumsy term, a non-diagnostic term, that speaks of nothing but chronology and does not express any stylistic features. Therefore I have replaced “Pre-Impressionism” with a more diagnostic term that indicates visual features of Manet’s style: “Impressionistic Realism.”

 

MANET
Portrait of Baudelaire, Full Face
(based on a photograph by Nadar), 1865-69
Etching
Printed with the date 1865
Edition by Salmon
Collection: FLG on loan to IAD
Published in GLOBAL VISION, Part 1, 2006

NOTE: Manet and the famous Symbolist poet & art critic Baudelaire were good friends during the 1860s, and perhaps as early as the late 1850s. Indeed, they were frequent companions.  In the mind of many, Manet is the first “modern” painter, and Baudelaire is the first “modern” poet.  In fact, Baudelaire seems to have invented the very term “modernity.”  It is what he wanted every poet and painter to be expressing.  Between 1862 and 1869 Manet etched five portraits of Baudelaire.

This particular rendering of Baudelaire (based on a photographic portrait by Nadar), was done in the Realist style that was typical of French painting and printmaking during the 1850s & ‘60s, a style within which Manet matured in the years leading up to his first masterpieces of the early ‘60s.  He used this Realist style as he began to etch in 1859 or 1860.  During the early ‘60s his fascination as an etcher was with Spanish Old Masters especially Velásquez and Goya.  Their influence would never leave him completely as he walked with both courage and hesitation over the bridge between the pre-modern and the modern.

The next image following this one is of another “Portrait of Baudelaire” that Manet began in 1862 using a very different style, an outline style with very little detail.  Manet had been inspired by both the flatness of Japanese prints and by the Symbolist concept of “suggestion rather than description” to make this second portrait one of radical simplicity.  Manet would continue to use variations of both styles for some time.  However, it was while using his “impressionistic” style that he created his most innovative prints such as the portrait of his dear friend Berthe Morisot (c1872-74), and his revolutionary “portrait” of a shadow in the edition he illustrated of Poe’s RAVEN in 1875 which featured a French translation by his new poet friend Mallarmé whom he met in 1873.

In many works of the ‘60s & ‘70s, Manet takes away the concept of a centralized composition inside traditional perspective, and sometimes takes away all traditional background.  This leaves us with nothing but an “impression.”  This radical innovation was not lost on the critics.  These critics may not have liked what Manet was doing, but some of them did understand it.  For example, Silvestre wrote: “It is this instantaneous impression that Manet has intended to render.”  The term “Impressionism” was coined by another critic by the name of Leroy in a satirical review of 1874 for LE CHARVARI.  Leroy was making fun of the title Monet had given to one of his paintings: “Impression: Sunrise.”  But the term “Impressionsim” stuck.

 

MANET
Portrait of Baudelaire, in profile with a Hat, 1862-69
Etching.  [Plate Signed with a monogram]
Later edition
Printed with the date 1862
Edition by Salmon
Collection: FLG on loan to IAD
Gift of Mark Burstein, 1976
Published in GLOBAL VISION, Part 1, 2006

NOTE: Both this portrait and “Portrait of Baudelaire, Full Face” were published in CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: SA VIE ET SON OEUVRE by Asselineau in 1869, two years after the poet’s death.  Manet took both portraits through a number of states before he was satisfied that they were ready for publication in this book.

 

MANET
Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets, 1872
oil
Collection: Musée d’Orsay, Paris

 

MANET
Berthe Morisot in Black (drawn 1872-74)
Original Lithograph, first printed by Clot, 1884
This edition 1946
Collection: IAD (2012)

 

MANET
Berthe Morisot in Silhouette (drawn 1872-74)
Original lithograph, as first printed 1884
Collection: Art Institute of Chicago

MANET (after)
Nevermore! (aka “That shadow that lies floating on the floor”)
from LE CORBEAU (The Raven) by Poe
translated by Mallarmé, 1875
Edition by Lesclide
———-
Facsimile edition, Walker & Co., 1968
{published at the recommendation of FLG}
Collection: FLG.  Gift of the Publisher
Exhibited in THE ART OF THE BOOK: THE MODERN LIVRE D’ARTISTE, University Art Gallery, CSUEB 1999

NOTE: This book is widely considered the first “Modern” book. Mallarmé learned English primarily so he could understand the poetry of Poe. Baudelaire was equally enthralled by Poe. Why was Poe’s poem so compelling? It was a new kind of poem – one never seen before. The story is more a mystery than a narrative. The key symbols are haunting and unexplained. The teller of the tale has lost his love, Lenore. A strange bird pecks at the window, flies in, and says a strange word: “Nevermore.” And that’s the end of the poem. Baudelaire and Mallarmé were attracted by a story left untold, a story that is merely suggested. They were equally attracted by Poe’s new way of using words. Poe’s words are only partly rational signs. They also are musical sounds, the aesthetic power of which often transcends their ordinary meaning. The reader is left with the feeling of having just heard a strange, haunting melody. The meaning is unclear, but the effect is gripping. It is this form of mysterious, musical suggestion that inspired the entire Symbolist Movement of the later 19th century.

Poe wrote “The Raven,” his best known poem, in 1845. It has been famous ever since. In 1885 an American critic would claim it was “the most popular lyric poem in the world.” It is one of the few poems that a large number of people can recite from memory. Most literary historians interpret the poem to mean the lover who has lost his love will “nevermore” be free from pain and sorrow.

 

 

EUROPEAN MASTERS – 19TH CENTURY – Impressionism

 

JONGKIND
Sunset, Harbor of Anvers (etched 1868)
etching
Modern edition, 1946
Collection: IAD (2012)

Impressionism was the final phase of Realism. The classic form of the Impressionist style was created in 1869 by Monet and Renoir. They had painted in the Forest of Fontainbleau intrigued by the pioneering Realism of the Barbizon School. They also had been interested in the solid corporeal Realism of Courbet whom they visited from time to time as young men. Then they were inspired by the radically flattened Realism of Manet, and his idea of rendering only an “impression” of reality. They would take this concept to the next level.

The Impressionist style that they created flourished in various ways in the hands of many other painters during the 1870s: Pissarro, Sisley, and others. Other semi-Impressionists (such as Degas) exhibited with the Impressionists but did not share all their ideas. Manet refused to exhibit with them, and Degas did not like the outdoors at all.

What was Impressionism? Where did it come from? Here is part of a general answer I published in CLAUDE MONET: PAINTINGS IN CALIFORNIA COLLECTIONS (1974):

Like every new movement in the history of art, the Impressionists were able to draw on all the painting that had preceded them, as well as all the innovations that were taking place in their contemporary world. Among the numerous resources they chose to be influenced by in their formative years were: the sensuality in the courtly art of Rococco; the light-reflecting impasto of Constable; the luminous mist in the landscapes of Venice and Turner; the vertical view-points and “floating” space of Japanese prints; the numerous insights into the nature of light and vision offered by the new technique of photography, and the color theories of scientists like Chevreul and Helmholz; as well as the energetic brush work of Delacroix, who realized that no object has only one color in it, and that pure, unmixed hues placed side by side, will “fuse naturally at a certain distance.”

In the bright sunlight and open air, Monet and his friends began to paint landscapes unlike any that had ever been seen before. The Barbizon School painted landscapes of darkness. They tended to work with the deep shadows of dusk and dawn. An Impressionist might say that the Barbizon painters did not stay outside long enough. Most of them finished their canvases in the studio. They were after a broad view of nature’s image. They took a long, meditative look at the general character that the solid reality of nature offers the eye.

They were not interested in movement. Almost nothing moves inside their compositions; nor is there any abstract sense of motion in their carefully controlled technique. They were not interested in air. They were not interested in the changes of times. Their panoramas are abstract allegories of what nature looks like standing still.

Monet and his friends looked through a shorter slice of time in a smaller piece of space. They were interested in the more vibrant reality that dwells inside each moment before it changes into the next. Wanting to capture all the aspects of nature’s transitory existence, the young Impressionists not only began but finished their canvases out-of-doors. Before them only Daubigny and Boudin were doing that regularly.

To experience nature in its ripest complexity, they chose to paint in the bright sun. Under the impact of light at its strongest, they saw that nothing is black or grey outside. Even shadows contain colors. So they eliminated from their palettes that dark color range which was so important for Manet, and began to use lighter and lighter hues, concentrating on the primary colors (red, yellow, blue) and their complementaries (orange, green, violet).

To capture the momentary “effect” or “impression” of a figure in a dark setting was one problem – one that Manet had solved. But how can one capture all the shimmering quality of colored light outside?

Monet’s genius came up with a radically new approach. He would represent the object not in terms of the form he knew the object to have, but in terms of the image that the light from the object reflects into the retina of his eye. In this way, the image that he was capturing on the canvas was not the intellectualized, hard outline around a tactile object, but the purely visual, vibrating halo of colored light surrounding it.

Intuitively reaching out for a way to capture the sensations of this image, he evolved a vocabulary of short, rapidly executed strokes which enabled him to represent those energy vibrations that he could feel moving through the air and earth and water all around him.

We might think of “energy” and “vibrations” as terms that did not become popular until the 1960s. However, both terms were often used by artists in the late 19th century. Materialists seldom understand such terms. But that did not (and does not) bother artists. The classic Impressionist brushstrokes are short, rapid, and energetic, and they undulate – not entirely unlike the physical shape of light waves themselves. Sometimes I wonder if these artists, who did study the science of light and color, were (consciously or unconsciously) imitating the undulating nature of electro-magnetic waves. [For my book of poems on ELECTRO-MAGNETISM click here.]

Monet and Renoir loved aspects of the city, especially the vitality they felt on a parade day (Monet) or in a dance hall (Renoir); but they also had a special love of nature. Their vision of the natural world was a dream-world, a dream that appealed to many urban dwellers who were no longer surrounded by nature.

Nature was rapidly leaving the lives of the new urbanites in Paris (and in every major city), taken away by industry and the urbanization of what has been the natural, pre-urban environment of villages in the country. These urbanites had a desire to hold on to nature, a desire than manifested in a wish to look at images of nature in poetic ways. And they wanted these paintings and prints to be unpolluted visions. No factories appear in Impressionist paintings or prints, as a rule. Industry was not part of the dream.

The Impressionists stayed focused on the material world of everyday people and objects, as seen inside the Renaissance traditions of linear perspective and gravity. There are no angels or goddesses. This obviously is a form of Realism, but a new form of Realism that favors the passing glance, a glance that requires little detail in the picturing of the moment. More often than not, there is no story being told, only a glance at a passing moment captured as an energized vision of colored light.

Traditional Realism requires no effort on the part of the viewer to grasp the reality of the picture. There usually is an obvious narrative, an actual story being told, a story supported by a great deal of naturalistic detail. The visual stage is set. The story being performed by the figures in the pictured play is as clear as if one is hearing the spoken lines of a drama.

The Impressionists did something entirely different. Sketch-like pictures were painted rapidly outdoors with short vibrant strokes in fluid motions and high-keyed colors. There was very little darkness, even at the edges. Even shadows were colored. These “incomplete” compositions force the viewer to “complete” the picture.

Impressionists do not tell stories; they capture glances. The viewer of an Impressionist work (consciously or not) has to bring the picture into focus, to make the picture “real” by a leap of imagination. This engagement of the imagination was a step toward the post-naturalistic symbolism of Postimpressionism, when the symbolic worlds of the new artists become more important than real worlds of the old artists.

Most of the Impressionists were poor for a long time. Only towards the end of their careers did they begin to sell well. There were only a few favorable reviews of their early exhibitions in the 1870s. Eventuallly, the critics and collectors, liked what they saw. Monet, for example, became wealthy and created his dream garden in Giverny where he painted the famous water lilies in his water garden during the last decades of his life.

Monet also enjoyed a considerable amount of respect from contemporary painters and poets. Cézanne said: “Monet is only an eye, but my God what an eye!” Mallarmé said to their mutual friend Berthe Morisot: “I am happy just to have lived in the same epoch as Monet.”

Some Impressionists became Postimpressionists, as we shall see in the next section. But not Monet. There is a saying among art historians: “Monet was the first Impressionist and the last Impressionist.” That may not be entirely true; however, Monet did continue classic Impressionism into the 20th century, when he created many of his greatest water lily paintings.

What is Monet’s magic? I can’t think of another artist who has left so many critics tongue-tied when they try to articulate his unique qualities. Color – yes, deeply important. Many consider him the greatest colorist of the century. Light, however is at least as important, indeed I think it is even more important. Why? Because it is light that gives life to color. When asked what his subject-matter is, Monet replied: “The subject-matter…is…light.”

What he most wanted to capture is what he called the “enveloppe” – the luminous air that envelops everything we see. This transparent aura of luminosity embraces all material objects. It is the animating component of visual reality. For Monet, this is the “nothing” that is everything. Visually, it determines every object it surrounds.

Monet was always after this luminous atmosphere, an envelopment he spoke of in many ways:

We live in a luminous cloud of changing light. That is what I have to catch.
…the object enveloped in sunlight and atmosphere.

I want to paint the air which surrounds the bridge, the house, the boat, the beauty of the air in which these objects are located…

…the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life – the light and the air which vary continually. For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value.

…that which I seek: “instantaneity,” especially the enveloppe, the same light spreading everywhere… .

In his earlier work, there often is a certain solidity of form that is enveloped by the luminosity he loved so much. Starting in the 1880s, he took this way of picturing to another level. He began to have the materiality of objects de-materialize, virtually melt into the “enveloppe.” The cathedral in Rouen and the Houses of Parliament in London appear to have no physicality at all! They are merely masses of mist.

During the Renaissance, the arts and the sciences were not as separated as they are today. A craftsman like Leonardo was equally interested in both, and used both. But the two worlds grew apart. During the 19th century, some artists became interested in science again. The Impressionists were particularly interested in the science of color and perception. However, for most people, the dividing line between the sciences and the humanities remained strong. The traditional dividing line between the sciences and the humanities has grown more elastic in the 20th century. I am reminded of Einstein’s famous fomula: E = MC². This formula is more than a theory. It is a bedrock of modern physics. Among other things, this formula enabled the creation of the Atomic Bomb. What are the implications of this formula: ENERGY = MASS times the SPEED OF LIGHT squared?

Light and matter seem entirely different at first thought, but actually they are aspects of each other. Light is what matter becomes when it is moving very fast – literally at 186,000 miles per second. Matter is what light becomes when it is moving very slowly, slow enough to be perceived by our human senses. In short, matter is solidified light – light that has materialized.

One of the most interesting things that has happened in 20th century philosophy is not only that the humanities and the sciences have grown closer, but also that physics and metaphysics have grown closer. Physics is the study of material reality. Metaphysics is the study of the relationships between material reality and Transcendent reality. What Einstein described in his famous formula is very similar to what the great spiritual traditions have been describing for centuries.

Monet was not a religious man, but according to Gustave Geffroy, Monet’s first biographer, a number of Monet’s close friends testified that he was pantheistic at heart. Many (from his time to ours) have felt a strong spirituality embedded in his work.

Monet and his close friend Mallarmé shared a perception of the material world as only a suggestion of the larger universe. A photograph of Mallarmé hung in Monet’s home. Monet’s friend, the sculptor Auguste Rodin, was deeply moved by Monet’s Rouen series, a series that echoed Rodin’s own spiritual love of medieval cathedrals. Those two artists exhibited together. They both felt Transcendent energy pulsating though the universe. Rodin pictured how it moves through a body. Monet pictured how it moves through the air.

Georges Clemenceau (later Prime Minister of France during World War I) wrote of the Rouen series in 1895:

The perfect eye would distinguish…all…vibrations perceptible… . Monet’s eye…is ahead of ours, and guides us in the visual evolution [of] our perception of the universe.

Another critic of the time, C. Janin, was certain that what Monet was revealing in the series was “eternity.” This feeling has persisted though the whole of the 20th century, with Modern critics such as William Seitz at MoMA writing about Monet’s “transcendentalism” and his “cosmic pantheism.”

Monet’s vision was somewhere between matter and light. When we look at his late great paintings of water lilies, we see how far he traveled into an imaginary world that is partly here and partly not. His matter is so luminous that it seems to be on its way to becoming light.

He took away the usual borders of our vision; the watery world seems to go on in all directions, toward infinity. He took away the distinction between earth and sky. All we feel is unbroken continuity. The lilies are rendered as such abstract forms, with such broad fluid strokes, that they seem to be half a fact and half a dream.

Are we looking at water lilies themselves or their reflections? Hard to tell, and after all, are such distinctions important? We have been taken to another world, a world beyond logic, a spiritual space, where air, earth, light, and water have been fused into an Alchemical Unity.

It was not until quite late in their careers that the Impressionists produced prints. The quality of those prints varies a great deal. In the selection for this historical period, as in all the historical periods in this course, the selection is quite concise. I have tried to show you typical examples of the very best work of these artists when they worked as printmakers.

Many amateur artists and some professionals still practice versions of this ever-popular style, popular not only because it is pretty but because the energy of its spirit is extremely positive, and that positive spirit is very rare today.

 

RENOIR
La Grenouillere {The Frog Pond}. (painted 1869)
Oil
Collection: National Museum of Sweden, Stockholm
[Replica oil, c1890-1900
Collection: FLG on loan to IAD
Published in GLOBAL VISION, Part 1, 2006] 

NOTE: It was in this painting, and in other paintings of the same period, that Pierre Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet created the Impressionist style with scenes of the natural world permeated with glittering sunlight and rendered with short, spontaneous brushstrokes of vibrant color. The end results looked to most people of the time like mere sketches, but to the artists these works were complete expressions of the real world perceived with feeling – “impressions” of passing moments deeply felt. The Art World gradually adjusted its vision and began to love Impressionist art. Renoir and Monet and the others, who had lived in poverty most of their lives, became rich. In the 20th century, Impressionist paintings, prints, books, posters, and cards became (and remain) the best-selling art style of all time.

 

RENOIR
La Moulin de la Galette
Conceptualization and first painting: 1876
(Renoir painted two versions)
First edition: 1919.  Published by Vollard
This edition: c.2000.  Published by the Vollard Estate
Color etching
Collection: FLG

NOTE: Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), together with his friend Claude Monet, is remembered as one of the creators of Impressionism in 1869.  This style flourished during the 1870s when Renoir painted two versions of “La Moulin de la Galette.”  Renoir is often called “the painter of joy.”  This image is a good example of why.  Indeed, I think the reason why Impressionist prints and books sell more than those of any other era is because the essential spirit of Impressionism is joyful.

I have been in love with Renoir’s art since I was a boy.  All during college, a print of “The Boating Party” hung on my wall.  When I was hired to work for Duncan Phillips in Washington, D.C. during the summer of 1963 it was my privilege to look at “The Boating Party” in his collection every day.  On one memorable day, I saved this priceless painting from a fire.  Some think that is the most important thing I have every done.   Renoir’s period of greatness was limited.  His later paintings are often rather ugly (and so are many of this prints), especially after his arthritis became so bad that paintbrushes had to be tied to his hands.  However, at his best, Renoir’s form of figurative Impressionism is matchless.

Norton Simon also had a deep love of Renoir.  He was the first person to pay a million dollars for a Renoir way back in the 1960s.  In 1990, when I was working for Norton Simon in Pasadena, he was considering bidding on the second version of “La Moulin de la Galette.”  The auction house sent it to Los Angeles for him to look at.  He asked me for a recommendation.  I said: “Buy it!”  He paused, and said: “I’d like to, but the estimate is $70 million and I only have $50 million.”  It did sell for over $78 million and thus set a world record for an auction sale.

Just before Renoir died, Volland published a color etching of this legendary image in 1919.  This particular print is from an excellent second edition of this hand-colored etching that authorized by the Vollard Estate in 2000.

 

RENOIR
The Hatpin (drawn 1894)
lithograph [Plate Signed]
Authorized edition of 1952
Printed by Mourlot
Collection: CSUEB. Gift of IAD
Published in GLOBAL VISION, Part 1, 2006

NOTE: Renoir did not make prints until late in life, after his fingers became crippled by arthritis. Not all of his prints are of high quality, however ‘The Hatpin’ is considered a masterpiece and his best work as a printmaker. This impression is not from the first edition, printed by Vollard a century ago, but from the last estate-authorized edition in 1952 by Mourlot, the famous lithographic printer in postwar France. This impression is from the first stone for a multi-colored lithograph. This lithograph is a 1952 edition that was authorized.

 

MONET (after)
Grainstacks, Last Sunrays (painted c1894)
lithograph from 20 LITHOGRAPHIES D’APRES CLAUDE MONET
Printed by Thornley, 1894
——————————
Facsimile lithograph in THE UNKNOWN MONET by Ganz & Kendall, 2007
Collection: FLG

NOTE: There is a belief that Monet did not make prints, but that is not entirely true. It is correct to say that he never became involved in direct printmaking because Monet’s attitude toward printmaking was ambivalent. However, in his early days of mid 1860s, when he was anxious for publicity, he made line drawings for reproduction. That was a kind of printmaking. More importantly, in the 1890s he decided to collaborate with a very skillful British lithographer named William Thornley on a number of print projects. Best known is a portfolio based on a set of 20 paintings selected as a kind of mini-retrospective of the last decade. With help from photography, Thornley produced 20 transfer color lithographs (each printed from a number of stones) in a portfolio called 20 LITHOGRAPHIES D’APRES CLAUDE MONET (1894). Monet was responding to the new vogue for color lithography. With a new level of visual quality being available, Monet was happy to be able to offer something to middle class collectors who could not afford his paintings. The prints are lovely. Monet was so pleased with this portfolio that he put his signature on all 25 sets, along with the signature of Thornley.

However, the portfolio did not sell well. Many years would go by before collectors could leave the idea that a reproductive print (a print made from an existing painting or drawing) could be considered an original work of art – depending on the intension of the artist. That psychological breakthrough did not happen until the Postmodern prints of Rauschenberg and Warhol. These Monet prints now sell for many thousands of dollars apiece.

MONET (after)
Water Lillies (painted c1914-17)
{acquired at the recommendation of FLG}
Poster editioned by FAMSF, 1974.  (editor/publisher: FLG)
Collection: FLG

NOTE: Of all the subjects that Monet painted, none has been loved by more people than his water lilies. This particular painting is widely considered one of his greatest water lily paintings. This painting has been chosen to appear on the cover of any number of Monet books, including the most important of all scholarly books on Monet – the four-volume, boxed, catalogue raisonné of George Wildenstein.  Outside the scholarly world, a poster of this painting has been seen on the walls of the “Golden Girls” TV show for decades.  The remarkable aesthetic character of this painting is such that it is the most visited work at the Legion of Honor museum in San Francisco.

When I was Chief Curator of San Francisco’s California Palace of the Legion of Honor museum in the 1970s, it was was an entirely French museum – the only such museum in the United States at the time. [For a short history of the CPLH museum CLICK HERE]. Part of the reason I was hired for that position was because of my special knowledge of and love for French art.

Our acquisitions policy at the time was to represent French art from the Middle Ages to the end of the 19th century. We had an agreement with SFMOMA that they would take it from there, starting with Matisse.

I knew I wanted to end the museum’s suite of galleries with a great Monet, but which kind of Monet? My preference was for water lilies, because I consider them to be his greatest works. How to go about looking? I devised the following strategy. Every time I went to New York, London, or Paris (once or twice a year) I would look at every Monet that was for sale. If I encountered a painting of interest, I would go as quickly as possible to the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris – the so-called “Cathedral of Impressionism” in a special building not far from the Louvre. This unique museum of water lily murals in a pair of oval galleries that Monet had created in his final years, this unique envelopment of his finest work, was my bench mark. Only if a possible purchase could hold its own in comparison with the spirit of the murals of the Orangerie would I give that painting further consideration.

I looked for years. Little on the market came close, except for a handful of fine works offered to me by Danial Wildenstein and Katia Granoff. Wildenstein (at my request) also introduced me to Florance Gould who was said to be the richest woman in the world. She kindly agreed to lend us some of her 19th century French masterpieces for the 50th Anniversary of the CPLH. They came to the opening together, along with both of his sons. Katia and I briefly considered co-creating a Monet exhibition for the 50th Anniversary, an exhibition to which I gave the working title of “The Music of Silence.”

Even a surprising percentage of the water lilies hanging in major museums did not hold up too well to the bench mark – except of course at the Musée Marmottan (which houses the world’s largest collection of Monet’s paintings – a gift from Monet’s second son Michel.)

Finally, after five years of searching, I found this incredible painting at the New York gallery of Spencer Sammuals. It was a dream come true. The price was higher than anything the trustees had ever spent, but the painting sold itself. Its presentation in San Francisco was timed to coincide with the 50th Anniversary celebrations of the museum in 1974.

DEGAS (after)
Mary Cassatt in the Louvre, Paintings (etched 1897)
Etching, aquatint, & drypoint
(20th century replica lithograph)
Collection: FLG

NOTE: Edgar Degas was not a happy man, but he was an extremely versatile artist. In the words of one of my favorite professors, Hyatt Mayor (Curator of Prints at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art): “Degas explored more media than any artist between Durer and Picasso.” The media he mastered included painting, drawing, pastel, sculpture, etching, lithography, monotype, and photography. [For the first exhibition catalogue of Degas’ work as a photographer, which I helped to develop, CLICK HERE]. This image is of his friend Mary Cassatt at the Louvre. Both Degas and Cassatt exhibited with the core Impressionists, but neither of them ever abandoned all of the corporeal Realism in which they were trained. In short, Degas worked on the edges of Impressionism.

EUROPEAN MASTERS – 19TH CENTURY – Postimpressionism

 

POSTIMPRESSIONISM – The First Generation

Postimpressionism is a term that refers to a cluster of Early Modern styles that developed over three “generations,” each “generation” dated by the decades in which the key artists reached maturity. The term was coined by a critic named Roger Fry in 1910. He focused on Cézanne, Gauguin, and van Gogh, and extended the concept to Matisse. It was a very perceptive term because it separated these artists from the Impressionists at a time when they were all being considered together as one radical style. It is not a very good term from a technical point of view because it merely indicates chronology and provides no information that is descriptive of the style or styles (which is what good arthistorical terms do). But the term has been around for so long that we are stuck with it. The overall timetable is clear:

1) 1st Generation 1880s: Cézanne, Gauguin, van Gogh

 2) 2nd Generation 1890s: Lautrec, Bonnard, Munch

 3) 3rd Generation 1900s: Fauves & Expressionists

There is a wide variety of individual styles within Postimpressionism, and many books have attempted to find common features, usually without much success. Indeed, there probably has been more debate among art historians about the definiton of this term than there has been about any other term in recent history, except Postmodernism.

After studying the subject for 50 years, I have located a set of characteristics that collectively characterize the general features of all three generations of Postimpressionsts: 1) figures are more symbolic than naturalistic; 2) colors are more symbolic than naturalistic; 3) there is a flattening of the picture-plane – a bringing together of the background and the foreground; 4) the primary focus is on the expression of internal emotional states rather than external visible realities; and 5) the character of these emotions often were related to a questing for the Transcendent.

Most Postimpressionists had lost interest in traditional religion, but were conscious that they were engaged in a secular search for the sacred. As van Gogh remarked: “We are all traveling toward infinity.”

Postimpressionism was a fundemental transformation in the very purpose of art. The entire Renaissance tradition of art was being overturned, and the foundations of Modern art were being established. The whole of the Realist-Impressionist tradition was not overturned all at once. Cézanne, Gauguin, and van Gogh all worked in an Impressionist style before they moved on. In the process of moving on, they maintained some of the main features of the Realist-Impressionist tradition. Most of the focus remained on everyday life – actual people, objects, landscapes – not angels or goddesses as a rule. (Gauguin liked to break this rule, and indeed he liked to break many rules.)

Most of the figures still respond to gravity. Most of the compositional structures are still delineated by the general elements of linear perspective, but it is often modified for a formal purpose.

Most of the figures still look like human beings, but their shapes are changed (often dramatically) to suggest an emotional reality (rather than a material reality). And natural shapes also are modified for a formal purpose, often so there will be an “echoing” of forms, as when the back of a horse echos the curve of the mountain behind it.

Colors are often particularly radical. They very often have little to do with the natural world, but are selected to express an emotional truth (rather than a physical fact). This was a very difficult change for many artists to undergo. For example, van Gogh refused the whole idea for some time. Finally Gauguin convinced him of the expressive value of this “new truth” about imaginative color, and the rest is history. What van Gogh then did with the emotional power of color has never been surpassed – equaled perhaps but never surpassed.

In short, the radically new conviction among the Postimpressionists is that internal realities are just as important as external realities, in other words, that feeling is at least as important as thought. This was a revolutionary break from the materialistic assumptions that had dominated (and still dominate) most of the industrialized, urbanized world, and its traditional, comfortable, story-telling, naturalistic art.

Consider this statement by Cézanne: “Right now a moment of time is passing. We must become that moment.” If those words were coming from an Impressionist, the reference would be to what is seen in a moment. However, as those words are coming from a Postimpressionist, the reference is to what is felt in a moment.

The traditional concept of a painting or a print being a “window” through which to see the so-called “real world” was abandoned by the Postimpressionists. Elements of the “real world” are simply used as points of departure for composing a semi-abstract image that reflects a psychological feeling, or what Mallarmé (following Leonardo) called “a state of the soul.”

The Postimpressionists were not widely known during their lifetimes. Van Gogh sold one painting. Cézanne and Gauguin spent much of lives in self-imposed exile, far from the marketplace of art. The Establishment was just beginning to accept (reluctantly) the innovations of the Impressionists at the end of the century. What the Establishment knew about the Postimpressionists was “too much.”

Nevertheless, in the mind-set of this new kind of form-making, and the spiritual purpose behind it, is the beginning of Modernism. There were many Postimpressionists, of course. In this concise survey, I am concentrating on just a few of those I consider the most important members of each of the three generations, just as I have done with Impressionism and all the other isms.

Like the Impressionists, the Postimpressionists did not usually start to edition prints until the 1890s. And like the Impressionists, the quality of their prints varies considerably.

 

1) 1st Generation 1880s: Cézanne, Gauguin, van Gogh

 

CEZANNE (after)
Pine Trees & Rocks (painted c1902-06)
Limited edition collotype from a watercolor
CEZANNE AQUARELLES by Georges, 1926
Collection: CSUEB, Gift of IAD
Ex. Collection: Earle Loran, Berkeley, who reproduced it in his famous book on Cézanne [CEZANNE’S COMPOSITION, 1970] in place of the lost original watercolor. In other words, this print is as close to the original watercolor painting as anything can ever be.
Published in GLOBAL VISION, Part 1, 2006

NOTE: Without a title, it would be difficult to know this image is part of a natural landscape. It is, and its precise location has been found and photographed. However, what we see is a feeling, a feeling as abstract and as softly rich as chamber music. Cézanne tells us: “A work that did not begin in emotion is not art.”

It is because he transformed the very purpose of making paintings and prints, and did it with such brilliance, that he has been so widely respected. Many (including Matisse and Picasso) have called Cézanne the “Father of Modern Art.”

Paul Cézanne’s primary achievement was moving beyond the traditional Renaissance idea of a painting or a print as a “reproduction” of visible reality (a window through which to view the world around us), and replacing that idea with the revolutionary idea of a picture as primarily an abstract composition. He used realistic elements merely as points of departure for arrangements of form and color and light that are primarily as abstract as a musical composition.

He began as a passionate Romantic, moved into Impressionism, and then into Postimpressionism. He was inspired by the firm formality of Poussin, and by the strict outlines of Plato’s solid geometry. However, what he built out of those influences transcends his sources.

Noting there are no lines in nature, he reduced the role of drawing. Instead of using drawing to construct the illusion of three-dimensional space in an architectural manner, he virtually eliminated the Renaissance tradition of rationalizing space by means of linear perspective. Instead, he constructed a new kind of pictorial space with blocks of flat colors knitted together by dark fluid lines that vibrate between the edges of the color-forms and the pulsating whiteness of unpainted infinity.

For generations, Formalist critics and historians have spoken about Cézanne from nothing other than a formal point of view. They have chosen to overlook what he said about why he made these forms. Many younger critics and historians have not been hypnotized by Formalist propaganda. I am happy to be part of this generation. We think art history involves both form and content.

Many feel Cézanne’s paintings are not only formal unifications of great visual power but also as symbols of the Transcendent, especially since the unpainted parts of the canvas seem to symbolize the infinite luminosity of the divine. This is not a baseless projection. He was raised Catholic and in 1890 became a committed Catholic – making him one of the very few Modernists who actually was “religious.” He attended church regularly. He made statements in conversations and in his letters that are entirely congruent with metaphysical interpretations of his work.

A number of Cézanne “conversations” survive. Some of the quotations may be inflated with the enthusiastic rhetoric of poet-friends who published these conversations. After all, by the end of his life, Cézanne had become almost a god to a number of young painters and poets.

At Columbia, I argued these points with one of my professors who is an authority on the matter, Theodore Reff. There certainly is a good deal of room for debate, and Reff and I did not always agree on which words are really those of Cézanne or close to Cézanne. I encourage you to read as much as you can and decide for yourself.

As I look back over the historical evidence as a whole (what he actually wrote and what he is said to have said), I find a core of consistency to the wording of Cézanne’s thoughts about art and spirituality. For example:

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God-made object like a tree or a flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

What I am trying to explain is more mysterious. It is entwined in the very roots of being.

I feel colored by the nuances of infinity.

Nature…as it is felt…is divine.

Art must provide the flavour of…eternity.

Try to understand. If my canvas is saturated with that vague cosmic religiosity that stirs me, that makes me better, and it will touch others in an area of their sensitivity even they are not aware of.

Art is a religion. Its purpose is the elevation of thought.

Cézanne’s watercolor paintings are often as beautiful as his oil paintings, and sometimes even more luminous. In part, this is because it is in his watercolors that he almost always gives equal space to the light of color and to the light of emptiness. Here, inside this combination, is the dance of eternity and time. [WRAP: a Watercolor]

Neither my words nor anyone’s words can take you to the experience of this dance. Words can only point the way. You have to go there yourself.

 

GAUGUIN
Portrait of Mallarmé (etched 1891)
Etching, engraving, & aquatint [Plate Signed]
Printed 1919
Collection: FLG

NOTE: In this haunting portrait of his friend Mallarmé, one sees the elfin ear of one whose deepest love was for the Orphic World of ancient Greece, before the meaning of primal mythology was lost, crushed by urban rationality, when Orpheus and other poet-musicians of the shamanic tradition still sang the Truth. We also see the raven from Mallarmé’s translation of Poe’s most famous poem that features the mysterious raven. We can almost hear the great dark bird whispering “NEVERMORE.”

Paul Gauguin started as a part-time Impressionist then quit his day job as a stockbroker to become a full-time Postimpressionist. In his search for the Transcendent in a Godless world, he (like his friend van Gogh) was strongly attracted to Buddhism. They were among the first artists in Europe to be so attracted. Gauguin pictured Buddha from time to time, and painted a portrait of a friend with the title of “Nirvana.”

Indicative of how far Gauguin was into the study of Buddhist doctrine is a letter he wrote to Bernard shortly after the death of van Gogh:

To die at this moment was a great happiness for him; it respresents the righteous end of his suffering and if he returns in another life he will carry the fruits of his good conduct in this world (according to the laws of Buddha).

Gauguin also was strongly attracted to the ideas of his friend Mallarmé who proposed to painters and poets that they suggest rather than describe, and that each vision rendered should be a poetic vision whether visual or verbal. In the late 1880s, Gauguin worked on a concept he called Synthetism. What he was trying to synthesize was the old tradition of visualizing natural forms with the modern Mallarméan concept of symbolic figures and symbolic colors in an abstract harmony that is suggestive of emotional states rather than descriptive of external realities. This heroic attempt to unify the old and the new was at the core of the work of all three generations of Postimpressionists, and thus of Modernism as a whole.

Gauguin decided he wanted to leave urban life, saying: “Civilization makes you sick.” In 1891, after a sendoff dinner hosted by Mallarmé, he sailed to Tahiti in the hopes of finding a life that was less corrupt, more pure, in Polynesia. He did not find all that he was looking for – after all Tahiti had become a French colony. But he found a good deal of the tribal world was still alive. It was there that he painted most of his greatest paintings. The best-known is “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” (1897-98). What does all this mean?

Much has been written in an effort to explain this huge mysterious painting. In a letter of 1899 from Tahiti, Gauguin suggested people were wasting their time trying to understand this painting and its title with the rational side of the mind. He wrote:

… my dream is intangible, it comprises no allegory; as Mallarmé said, “It is a musical poem, it needs no libretto.” Consequently the essence of a work, unsubstantial and out of reach, consists precisely of that which is not expressed; it flows by implication from the lines…without words; it is not a material structure.

Standing before one of my pictures of Tahiti, Mallarmé also remarked: “It is amazing that one can put so much mystery into so much brilliance.”

Like most Postimpressionists, Gauguin was not a religious person, but part of him wanted to be. He painted quite a few Christian themes, and wrote a good deal about religion, particularly in his book L’ESPRIT MODERNE ET LE CATHOLICISME (1897-98). But he was looking at faith from the outside not the inside. Nevertheless, Gauguin was ultimately after the Light of the Transcendent that radiates through matter, though thought, from the other side of form. His ego was so large it got in the way of being able to see the realm where all is light, but at least he had a glimpse, a taste that made him very thirsty for more. Here is one of the ways he expressed it:

Oh mysterious world of all light, thou hast made a light shine within me, and I have grown in admiration of thy primordial beauty, which is the immemorial youth of nature.

 

 

GAUGUIN (after)
NOA NOA: VOYAGE DE TAHITI
First edition by Piper, Munich, 1926
Collection: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Gift of FLG, 1987

NOTE: For those who collect books illustrated by great artists, it is a sad fact that (unless we count the letters of van Gogh in a posthumous edition illustrated with his drawings) only one illustrated book was generated by a member of the First Generation of Postimpressionists. That was Gauguin’s NOA NOA {FRAGRANCE}. Gauguin probably was inspired to make an illustrated book (and in a large format) by the edition of Poe’s RAVEN that was created by Manet and Mallarmé in 1875 [CLICK HERE].

Gauguin imagined being the author, with a text written in his own hand, and a rich collage of actual woodcuts, along with reproductions of drawings and paintings from his Tahitian voyage. He enthusiastically gathered visual and verbal material for this album in Tahiti, much of it during 1891. The book opens with a quote from Baudelaire: “Tell me what you have seen?” In the text, Gauguin speaks of the slow, sweet rhythms of Polynesian life. Then he reports on Polynesian mythology for which he had considerable respect.

The 10 woodcuts he made to illustrate NOA NOA visualize many of these myths and legends. The suite is permeated by rich abstract rhythms, strange symbolic colors, and a mysterious spiritual luminosity. These prints mark the first time a Western artist worked at length under the influence of tribal art. His example would inspire many early Modernists to explore tribal art, art that became a profound influence on the development of Modernism. The book ends with Gauguin returning to France.

When he actually did return to Paris in 1893 he looked for ways to get his work exhibited and published, without much success. He returned to Polynesia where he died in 1903. The text alone (edited by a friend) was first published in LA REVUE BLANCHE in 1897. Of course, the text is only half of the experience. It was not until 1926 that the world saw in the Munich volume the whole of Gauguin’s remarkable viseoliterary dream.

The original manuscript is in the Louvre. This volume published by Piper was the first printed edition of the manuscript. The size of the limited edition was 300. As my friend Riva Castleman (Curator of Prints & Books at MoMA) observed in her book A CENTURY OF ARTISTS BOOKS (1994), this lavish Munich edition, prepared with great care, was “a remarkable event in book publishing.”

Shortly after his death, Gauguin was given a major retrospective at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1903, and a larger one in 1906. These exhibitions were powerful experiences for many young artists in Paris who had known only some of his work. Picasso was particularly interested in what he saw. He admired Gauguin greatly. Picasso sometimes even signed himself “Paul” in Gauguin’s honor. There is reason to believe Gauguin’s combination of sensuality and primitivism led directly to Picasso painting “Demoiselles d’Avignon” in 1907.

 

GAUGUIN (after)
Auti te Pape (Women by the River) Engraved c1893
Hand-colored Woodcut
2nd edition by Librarie de France, 1925
Collection: FLG on loan to IAD
Published in GLOBAL VISION, Part 1, 2006

NOTE: This is one of the woodcuts he made to illustrate NOA NOA. He cut the blocks and pulled a few proofs, but did not print editions. The first edition was hand-printed by his son Polo. This impression is from the 2nd edition of 1925. The figures show how much he was incorporating tribal art. The symbolic (non-naturalistic) color is typical of Postimpressionism as a whole.

The entire suite of NOA NOA woodcuts is permeated by rich abstract rhythms and a mysterious spiritual light. Gauguin’s prints are by far the most important group of prints made by a member of the First Generation of Postimpressionists. The importance of his “discovery” of tribal art, as a way of freeing himself from the urban art of the past, would be difficult to exaggerate. Tribal art had been looked down on as “mere artifacts” without true beauty. Gauguin looked with new eyes and saw true beauty. It was his work and his attitude that turned the eyes of many young Modernists toward tribal art, including the eyes of Matisse and Picasso and the Expressionists. Tribal art eventually became the most important single “outside” influence on the development of Modern art during the first half of the 20th century.

 

VAN GOGH
Portrait of Dr. Gachet, 1890
Original Etching
Collection: Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena
Published in Lanier Graham, VINCENT VAN GOGH:
PAINTER, PRINTMAKER, COLLECTOR, 1990

NOTE: Vincent van Gogh loved prints. He collected many prints (European and Japanese), and he made several lithographs during his early period. This is the only etching van Gogh ever made. Van Gogh told his brother that he was grateful for the medical help Dr. Gachet was trying to provide, but that he seemed to Vincent to be as troubled as he was. Many have looked at this portrait and seen not only a doctor but also the anxious, deeply troubled face of all of modern humanity (a face that I also see crying out from Munch’s famous man on the bridge, a face which was painted about the same time as this one).

What is behind the look on Dr. Gachet’s troubled face? Constant doubt and endless anxiety are modern plagues caused by disconnection from a tribe, and disaffiliation with traditional spirituality. Van Gogh, like most Modern artists, had little interest in the kind of traditional religion that had held Western society together for centuries. Van Gogh’s early interest in his father’s Christianity evaporated after he abandoned his early dream of being a preacher.

However, van Gogh maintained a deep devotion to spiritual values as he moved from his dark early paintings and prints in Holland, to the bright Impressionist colors he discovered in Paris, and finally during the profound Postimpressionism of his final years. Symbolizing ideas became increasingly important to him. He put a bright luminosity around the head of his mother in his portrait of her because he wanted it to feel like a traditional Christian halo. He was fascinated by what he regarded as the spiritual values of Japan. Projecting his psychology into that idealized world, he painted himself as a Buddhist monk. {WRAP: G as a Monk}

When I started my graduate work at Columbia, it was my great good fortune to have as my advisor, Meyer Schapiro, the most widely respected historian of Modern art in the United States. Attending his lectures on Modern art was very stimulating. Talking with him privately in his office was even more stimulating. We could go deeply into a subject for as long as we wished. One of our special topics was van Gogh.

In his book VAN GOGH (1950), one of his many legendary publications (a book that is still in print), Schapiro said this: “His career as an artist is a high religious-moral drama… .” Schapiro also described the art of van Gogh as: “…the first example of a truly personal art, art as a deeply lived means of spiritual deliverance or transformation of the self… .”

In our first conversation in the Fall of 1963, I told Schapiro what Motherwell had said to me the year before: “Abstract art is a form of mysticism.” Schapiro smiled and said: “Of course!” I knew I had come to the right graduate school!

I then added that Motherwell’s sentence is why I decided to become an art historian and a curator. For as long as I could remember my central interests had been both art and spirituality. I was fascinated by abstract art, especially Abstract Expressionism, but never knew why. Motherwell’s statement blew my mind and then glued it back together. All of a sudden, it became clear that Modern art, from van Gogh and Gauguin to Pollock and Motherwell, had always been a quest for self-transformation, a quest for the Transcendent, in a world where (to them) God was gone.

I had grown up in a family devoted to public service. Like van Gogh, I had considered becoming a minister, but was looking for another form of public service. I knew it would be in the area of cultural affairs, but what exactly? I was in my junior year at the School of International Service at American University in Washington, D.C., considering UNESCO, the Foreign Service, etc. But nothing felt quite right.

Motherwell had come to A.U. to give a talk. At the end of my conversation with Motherwell that day, I felt it would be very useful for more of contemporary society to realize that Modern art is not merely interesting. Modern art can be a way toward spiritual wholeness, and (in that moment) I knew this is what I wanted to do. The road of my life stretched out before me. I saw myself as a professor and a curator of Modern Art. The next day, I signed up for a second major in Art History and began looking at graduate schools. I ended up selecting Columbia University in New York City, largely because Meyer Schapiro was teaching there, and his books stirred by soul.

Professor Schapiro guided my course of study so that I could trace the history of art not as mere forms but as a very important way humanity in the Western World has quested for the Transcendent from the Medieval era (his first speciality) to the Modern era (his second specialty). The first topic we considered for my master’s thesis was some aspect of “Metaphysical Symbolism from Alchemy to Abstract Expressionism,” but that, he said, was much too broad. “Focus on a single aspect you can deal with in a useful way. For example, the Androgyne, or the sun-moon unity that you have decided to name the Soluna.”

The second topic we discussed was “How Modernism replaced religion in the Postimpressionism of van Gogh and Gauguin.” Again too broad, he said, “…but worthwhile. This really is what Modernism is about, after all, as you have discovered.” So, explore the topic, he continued, but focus on a specific area of the general topic to which you can contribute something new. He ended that particular conversation with these words: “Along the way, consider what happened to van Gogh when he lost interest in what most people call God. He decided to speak of Love’s presence as God, or what he said was ‘as good as God’.”

With that idea spinning in my mind, I plunged into more research on Postimpressionism and the birth of Modern Art as a new kind of spirituality. At the end of that first year at Columbia (1963-64), my mentor was taken from me. Schapiro told me he was being promoted to the position of University Professor, and would no longer be teaching Art History in the usual way. He told me I would need a new advisor. I was sad. Because I had already done so much work on Nicholas Lanier and the collecting of Italian Art in Renaissance England, he recommended I complete that biography under Professor Wittkower for my M.A. thesis and then work on Postimpressionism for my Ph.D. I followed Schapiro’s advice, and moved under the wonderful wing of Wittkower, but not until Schapiro and I had some memorable conversations on the nature of Alchemical symbolism, and the Kabbalah, and how van Gogh continued to use religious symbolism in his non-religious art.

Once I became a museum curator, it was my privilege to install two van Gogh exhibitions. The first was in San Francisco at the de Young Museum (December 1970 – January 1971). This exhibition was part of the last world tour of the private collection of van Gogh’s nephew, who was named Vincent after his uncle. He was usually simply called “the engineer.” His collection was by far the largest van Gogh collection in the world. He could have sold it for billions of dollars, but he sold nothing and was planning to donate all of it to the Dutch nation at the end of the world tour. His collection is now the heart of the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Three things stand out in my memory from that experience: seeing so much of van Gogh’s art all at once was overwhelming; holding several of the canvases in my hands was an experience beyond words; and spending a good deal of quality time with Mr. van Gogh was very special.

We had lunch a number of times. He agreed with Professor Schapiro that “Uncle Vincent” had remained a very spiritual man all his life, not religious in the ordinary sense but deeply spiritual.

LG: How did your uncle think of God? 

VvG: As love. God is love. When we love, God is moving through us. When we love well, when we do something well, God is flowing through us smoothly. We do not get in the way of the flowing.

How van Gogh died is vivid testimony to the depth of his spirituality, the depth of his capacity to love. Mr. van Gogh (the nephew) told me his side of the story, which of course his mother had told him. I was too overwhelmed by what he was telling me to make notes at the table, as I usually do during particularly rich conversations. So I do not have many exact quotes to share with you. I could not even write a general recollection that night. My hand would not stop trembling. But the next day, I did write a summary in my journal with a couple of direct quotes. Here is the heart of it:

There was not a great deal of money to go around. Mr. van Gogh’s father (Theo) had been the primary financial support of his brother (Uncle Vincent) for years. But with the arrival of a baby (him) the finances had become very thin indeed. Uncle Vincent had always felt guilty at being a burden on his brother, and felt he could no longer do that under the new circumstances. A choice had to be made, and Uncle Vincent did not want Theo to have to make the choice. It was clearly more important to Uncle Vincent that the available funds support the life of the child. “So Uncle Vincent took away the problem. He killed himself.”

He told me this story while we were having lunch in the round building at the south end of the Golden Gate Bridge. At the end of his story, we both were silent for a long time, looking out over the San Francisco Bay. My mind eventually turned to one of van Gogh’s letters to Theo [Letter #242]:

When one is in a sober mood, how good it is to walk on the barren beach and look at the grayish-green sea with long white streaks in the waves. … I think I see something deeper, more infinite, more eternal than the ocean in the eyes of a little baby.

In 1989 at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, I had the privilege of curating an exhibition that included Mr. Simon’s entire van Gogh collection – seven paintings, a letter, and the etching we have been talking about. On the wall beside this etching of Dr. Gachet I placed a photograph of the very similar painted portrait that van Gogh made of Dr. Gachet – a portrait with a face that van Gogh described in one of his letters as having “…the heartbroken expression of our time.”

Mr. Simon’s van Gogh collection is remarkable, the largest private collection in the world. In the text I explored how van Gogh looked for meaning in various mythologies – Christian, Buddhist, and Pantheistic. [For my catalogue of that exhibition, CLICK HERE.]

Van Gogh and the other Postimpressionists grew up at the beginning of the “Age of Disbelief.” God was fading from view, at least among Modern artists. And much of Modern society is still living inside this “Age of Disbelief.” For the first time in many centuries, young artists were not attracted by the truths of the faith of their fathers. For the first time in living memory, God was gone from the lives of many people – not from all the people certainly, but from many people.

What were these people to do? Human beings cannot live without a mythology they believe in. So van Gogh searched different mythologies. Gauguin searched different mythologies. We as a society are still searching different mythologies.

Mythology is the matrix of meaning. Without the values assigned by a spiritual mythology to various thoughts and actions, a fragmented society has few deeply meaningful values. People simply exist. This psycho-social situation has often been called the Existential Condition, the condition in which many modern people live isolated lives, anxious, and incomplete. It is a condition exacerbated (if not actually caused) by living in cities.

People who live in villages are part of tightly knit communities. The social structure of a community and the psychology of being part of a community are filled with meaning. Over the centuries, especially since the Industrial Revolution, fewer and fewer people have felt this feeling of wholeness.

I suspect there was a turning point in the middle of the 19th century, when Poe was writing and Baudelaire was writing out of a kind of despair, a kind of desperation, at discovering they were all alone with nothing but their own raw consciousness.

The urge to merge with the Transcendent seems to have been as strong as it has always been, but Poe and Baudelaire, and all the early Modern poets and artists who had lost their religion, had nothing to guide them – no priest, no yogi, no shaman. This is the Existential Condition that I see in the face of Dr. Gachet.

What emerged from this general historical condition of alienation among the avant-garde was a secular search for the sacred, and the name of that searching became “Modernism.”

Van Gogh, Gauguin, and the other great Postimpressionists who generated Modern art, may not have attained the Nirvana they were seeking. But they put everything they had into trying, into seeking, knowing it would take everything they had to break through to the Transcendent. What moves so many people today when they visit the art museums of the world is what these seekers left behind as they peeled back the skin of their souls. They left us art of astonishing beauty, visions of a Higher Realm – the profound sight of seeking.

 

 2) 2nd Generation 1890s: Lautrec, Bonnard, Munch

 

 

BONNARD (after)
France – Champagne (designed 1891)
Poster, early edition [Plate Signed]
Collection: IAD (2012)

NOTE: In 1889, a young Pierre Bonnard joined a Paris group of other young painters who called themselves the Nabis that in Hebrew means the Prophets. They were hopeful that a better way of being Modern was to be in a group, rather than individuals struggling alone. This group included Vuillard, Sérusier, Denis, Ranson, and others. They met regularly, wore robes, and conducted mystical rituals. Their devotion to the Transcendent was intense. Denis wrote: “Lord, we are only a few young fellows devotees of the Symbol…Mystics! … . May our reign come to pass.” Bonnard exhibited with them until they disbanded in 1900. The Nabis were focused on symbolism and spirituality under the influence of Gauguin’s intensely colorful Postimpressionism, Mallarmé’s philosophy of Symbolism, Redon’s mysticism, and traditions of occult organizations. Bonnard eventually lost interest in groups, but he never lost interest in the core goals of spirituality. As late as 1940, in a letter to Matisse, Bonnard wrote: “I dream of seeking the Absolute.”

The Nabis also liked the flatness and symbolic unmodulated colors of Japanese prints. They also continued the ideals of the Arts & Crafts Movement and Art Nouveau in their desire to bring art and life closer together by making the decorative arts more vital. That spirit went into a range of activities from poster design to furniture. For example, Bonnard made beautiful folding screens as room dividers.

In 1890 Bonnard began to make lithographs. That medium was encouraged by Toulouse-Lautrec whom he met the following year, and with whom he would collaborate on a theatre design in 1896. Bonnard went on to make a total of 10 posters and over 100 other prints. In 1891 his “France-Champagne” poster is a great success, and he exhibited in the first exhibition of “Impressionist and Symbolist Painters.” In 1894 he began designing graphics for LA REVUE BLANCHE. His work as a printmaker continued to flourish when Vollard in 1895 asked Bonnard to start preparing a series of lithographs and illustrated books. He became one of the most gifted colorists of the 20th century, and for many the “last of the Impressionists.” Bonnard actually was a Postimpressionist for most of his career. However, it is true that he was a lifelong friend of Renoir who encouraged Bonnard when he was very young and probably taught him something about melting colors together. And when Bonnard, in his later years, moved to the south of France he did indeed become a landscape painter of very impressionistic scenes.

 

 

BONNARD (after)
La Revue Blanche (designed 1894)
Poster. Early edition [Plate Signed]
Collection: IAD (2012)

NOTE: LA REVUE BLANCHE (The White Review) was a Paris periodical that started in 1889 and published the work of contemporary writers and artists. It was the first revue to give equal attention to the visual and verbal arts of the avant-garde. Bonnard began doing graphic designs for the Revue in 1894. This poster, with its animated forms and playful spaces, is the best-known example of his work for the Revue. The woman in this poster probably is Misia Natanson who was married to one of the two brothers who owned the Revue. Intelligent and beautiful, she was painted by Renoir, Redon, and Lautrec. Her lively salons included Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton, Maillol, Mallarmé, Debussy, Ravel, and later Picasso, Gide, and Cocteau.

 

TOULOUSE-LAUTREC (after)
Jane Avril – Jardin de Paris (designed 1893)
Poster, ND [Plate Signed]
Edition by Jardin de Paris
———————————
Facsimile edition, c1960s
Collection: IAD (2012)

NOTE: The 1890s was the decade in which the Second Decade of Postimpressionists matured. The artists associated by most people with these dynamic years of the Belle Epoch are Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Pierre Bonnard. Most of those visual associations in the popular mind are with posters. The 1890s was the Golden Age of French posters. Of the many good poster designers working in Europe, none took to the task with a more robust vitality than Lautrec. As a painter of solid figures, the shapes he outlined in his early work during the late 1880s owed a good deal to the traditional forms of Manet and Degas. However, he rendered those shapes with increasingly energetic, highly abstract, intensely colored lines. It was a form of colored drawing. By the early ‘90s, in paintings such as “At the Moulin Rouge,” the coloring of his faces had left the world of nature for the world of emotional Symbolism.

As a very short man of stunted growth (his parents were first cousins), and as an alcoholic, he was most at ease in the world of other social misfits – mainly the world of dancehalls and prostitutes – rather than his family’s aristocratic circles. This was the only group he could join. When he was asked to do posters by the owner of a new cabaret called the Moulin Rouge in the bohemian quarter of Montmartre, Lautrec was delighted. Most accomplished painters looked down on such work. He did not. This was his world, and it was a joy for him to visualize its colorful energy. Moreover, he was encouraged by the success of Bonnard’s first poster, “Champagne-France” (1891). One of his best-known posters is “Jane Avril – Jardin de Paris.” This celebrated dancer also was Lautrec’s good friend.

As a graphic artist, Lautrec no longer felt bound by the conventions of figure painting. He let his imagination run free when composing this poster. The musical instrument in the foreground came alive in his mind and formed an undulating frame around the scene. The “living line” in this poster and others has much in common with the serpentine line that permeated many Art Nouveau designs, lines like those that Lautrec’s friend Oscar Wilde commissioned from Audrey Beardsley. In his posters and book illustrations, Lautrec immortalized many vivacious dancers including Jane Avril, Yvette Guilbert, and La Goulue (“The Glutton”) who is credited with the invention of the Can-Can. He also made extraordinary lithographs of Loie Fuller, the most famous dancer of the age. He lived hard and died young from alcoholism and syphilis.

 

Jane Avril
Photograph, c1893
Collection: Unknown

NOTE: This celebrated dancer also was Lautrec’s good friend.

TOULOUSE-LAUTREC
Miss Loie Fuller, 1891
Drawing & Lithograph
Collection: Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, Alba

TOULOUSE-LAUTREC (after)
Cover of
YVETTE GUILBERT by Geffroy, 1894
Edition by Estampe Originale
———————————————-
Facsimile edition by Walker, 1968
{Published at the recommendation of FLG}
Collection: CSUEB, Gift of IAD
Exhibited in THE ART OF THE BOOK: THE MODERN LIVRE D’ARTISTE, University Art Gallery, CSUEB, 1999

MUNCH
Anxiety (painted 1894)
Original Lithograph, 1896
Collection: Munch Museum, Oslo

NOTE: The majority of the most famous Postimpressionists lived in France. The most famous Postimpressionist who did not is Edvard Munch, a Norwegian. This very complex artist also has been called a Symbolist and/or an Expressionist. Various versions of “The Scream” have become instantly recognized icons of modern popular culture. Munch was respected in certain circles during his lifetime, but neither he nor van Gogh enjoyed anything like worldwide fame until the 20th century moved farther into the Age of Anxiety. That was after another major turning-point in social history, the point at which more people were living in cities than on farms – a point that turned in various parts of the Western World between the 1920s and the 1940s. Then, suddenly, van Gogh and Munch became famous. Suddenly, we saw ourselves reflected in the faces of these artists.

In this painting and print that Munch called “Anxiety,” we see a family who has begun to live inside The Existential Condition. Each in their own way appears to feel isolated, anxious, and incomplete. Being part of a nuclear family is not enough for a human being to feel the fullness of their humanity. Traditional extended families provided a greater feeling of fullness for each individual, and so (in a way) did working for a single company one’s whole career. The company was a kind of second family. But extended families are not the way modern families are now structured. The Industrial Age has required that families be nuclear families and move from city to city to satisfy corporate needs, and the average worker changes jobs several times in a career. Moreover, for a growing number of people, God actually is dead. What was called God has not been replaced by any other deeply satisfying mythology. Life without a meaningful mythology is a kind of hell.

P.S. Statistics naturally vary from area to area. Take London, for example. In 1851 the urban/rural ratio was 51% of 2,300,000 people. In 1891 it was 72% of 4,000,000. In the U.S., in 1800 it was 94% rural. In 1940 it was 44% rural. In Northern Europe and Western Europe the urban/rural ratio is now 83 percent. In Southern Europe and Eastern Europe the ratio is about 66%, as it is in West Asia and Africa. The change of the ratio in China is remarkable. In 1980 the urban ratio was 20%. In 2011 the urban ratio was 51% of 1.35 billion people. In 1900 the global urban ratio was 13% of 220 million. In 1950 it was 29% of 732 million. In 2005 it was 49% of 3.2 billion. By 2050 it is estimated that 66% of 6 billion people will be living in cities and towns. According to the United Nations, our planet as a whole passed the urban/rural tipping point in 2007.

 

MUNCH
The Scream. First version painted 1893
Lithograph, 1895
Replica lithograph, 20th century
Collection: CSUEB. Gift of IAD

NOTE: This image is by far Edvard Munch’s most famous work. It takes us far deeper than van Gogh’s “Dr. Gachet” into the psychology of anxiety. It takes us to the Breaking Point at which the feeling of anxiety can no longer be contained. Munch knew it was a very special image. He rendered it in many media – oil, pastel, watercolor, lithography, and woodcut. One version (not an oil painting but a pastel) sold in 2012 for $120 million.

“The Scream” has become an instantly recognizable iconic image in modern popular culture. I can think of no other anxiety-based image that has so many different types of contemporary manifestations – for example: Hollywood movie masks for horrific characters, Halloween costumes, cartoon characters (Bart Simpson & others), life-size blow-up dolls, a screaming doll called the “Screaming Scream,” and a series of Andy Warhol versions. In short, it is us.

 

 

 3) 3rd Generation 1900s: Fauves & Expressionists

 

 

EUROPEAN MASTERS – 19TH CENTURY – Symbolism

 

By the end of the 19th century, another movement known as Symbolism had captured the hearts and minds of many of the most gifted artists and poets in Europe. Many date the beginning of this movement to the poetry of Baudelaire whose life effort was to find “the infinite in the finite,” and thereby to find spiritual peace at the end of the seemingly endless pain of daily life.

Elements of the real world were merely points of departure for dream images and mythic metaphors. This aesthetic focused on not facts but symbols – temporary poetic capturings of emotional states. Symbolism continued many of the earlier features of Romanticism such as being grounded in feelings, and longing for the infinite. The pretty pictures of Impressionism seemed superficial to the Symbolists. They felt that the mainstream Postimpressionists did not go deep enough into the metaphysical dimensions of life. In other words, they had too little interest in mythology and mystic symbolism.

Earlier forms of visual Symbolism had been developing for some time, at least since the Pre-Raphaelites in the 1850s & ‘60s (if not since William Blake). However, by 1886 the Symbolist Movement had an actual manifesto from the hand of Moréas who advocated pure subjectivity as the way to escape the horrifying rationalism and materialism of the Industrial Age. Each Symbolist artist and poet followed his or her own type of subjectivity, but they were connected by their common quest for the Absolute. The Symbolists shared this quest with the Postimpressionists, but unlike the Postimpressionists the Symbolists were repelled by all forms of Realism and often visualized occult narratives.

Those with little self-discipline took this advice too literally and often drowned in the stupors of mindless sensuality. Those with enough discipline not to be overwhelmed by emotion found ways to link the finite and the infinite, found ways to generate images of the Transcendent that were meaningful to others.

All along the way, the thoughts and poems of Mallarmé inspired a great many poets and artists with the idea of suggesting/evoking/revealing rather than describing. His wide influence can be seen reflected in his circle of friends. Among the Impressionists (the first generation of artists to “suggest” reality), his good friends included Manet, Monet, Renoir, Morisot, and Degas. One of his best friends was Whistler whose art was the very essence of “suggestion.”

His visitors included Monet, Sérusier, Vuillard, Whistler, and Rodin, along with Verlaine, Rilke, Gide, Valéry, Wilde, Yeats, and Debussy, the magical musician who composed “The Afternoon of a Faun” as what he called an “illustration of Mallarmé’s beautiful poem.”

Among the Postimpressionists, those who came to Mallarmé’s home regularly on Tuesday evenings to hear him speak of art as a spiritual meditation, of art as a new kind of secular religion, were Redon (who planned to do a book with him) as well as Gauguin and Munch – both of whom made striking portraits of their mentor. It is not an exaggeration to say that Mallarmé’s concept of symbolic art is at the very root of Modernism as a whole. In short, Modern art is symbolic art.

Moreover, Mallarmé suggested that what is best for writers and artists to do with symbols is to orchestrate them into “harmonies,” or “melodies.” This abstract musicality is a key lesson that Baudelaire and Mallarmé learned from the poetry of Poe and then propagated throughout the Symbolist Movement. The teaching, primarily from Mallarmé, is that Modern poems primarily are abstract compositions in which what matters most are the arrangements of sounds and the rhythms of their tonal relationships. The so-called “meaning” of the words is important but subordinate. What matters most is where your intuition takes you.

In his classic essay, THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT IN LITERATURE (1899), the Symbolist poet and critic Arthur Symons explained Mallarméan philosophy quite clearly: Words…are of value only as a notation of the free breath of the spirit; [they] chime upon one another.

Only in this way, says Symons, can the true poet express the invisible essence of the Transcendent, and thereby activate within the reader the kind of response that is an “affirmation of…eternal…life.”

This influence of this essay did not terminate with 19th-century Symbolism; it would have a strong influence of W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and many others. As I have pointed out again and again, much of 20th-century Modernism sprang from Symbolism.

Mallarmé’s direct influence also continued far into the 20th century. Gauguin’s devotion to Mallarmé was felt by many, including all the Nabis group (Bonnard, Vuillard, and the others who regarded art as a sacred ritual), as well as the young Picasso who came to Paris attracted by Mallarmé and Gauguin and drenched himself in Symbolism in the days before Cubism. Braque carried Mallarmé’s poems with him into the trenches of World War I. Cubism, Futurism, and Orphism (an abstract form of Symbolism) owe much to Mallarmé’s deconstruction techniques that were made famous in his concrete poem “A Throw of the Dice” (first published in 1897), a poem that arguably is the most influential poem of Modern times.

Apollinaire and Duchamp held Mallarmé in highest regard as Dada and Surrealism were getting underway, and so did Matisse (who illustrated a book full of his poems with a special feeling). America’s greatest Surrealist, Joseph Cornell, loved Mallarmé dearly. And at the beginning of Abstract Expressionism, the last of the Modern movements, Motherwell was painting “Mallarmé’s Swan.” All these Modern movements employed Mallarmé’s richly suggestive stream-of-consciousness technique that flows under and around the gates of rationality.

Narrative art (whether visual or verbal) constructed out of precise descriptions, is a rational or left-brain aesthetic. The art of symbols (composed of fluidly interacting symbols, moods, and tones (whether visual or verbal) is an intuitive or right-brain aesthetic.

As many young poets were following Mallarmé’s lead into prose poems and “free verse” (free from rhyme), a growing number of artists were inspired by him to move into the realm of “free form” – that is to say, away from attachment to descriptive content and toward the flowing interactions of intuitive connections.

And that was just the beginning. The power of Mallarmé’s continuing presence throughout the entire history of Modernism is remarkable. Impressionists, Postimpressionists, and Symbolists, together with Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Duchamp, Surrealists, and Abstract Expressionists, all were very grateful to Mallarmé the poet for the songs his spirit sang, and to Mallarmé the philosopher for pointing out with luminous lucidity that only by opening to the intuitive can one touch the Transcendent.

Looking back over the history of 19th century art, let’s consider what happened and what was about to happen. Some say early Modernism started with Fauvism and Expressionism during the first 10 years of the 20th century. I would say early Modernism stood up on the two feet of Postimpressionism and Symbolism during the last 20 years of the 19th century.

 

Part 3. EUROPEAN MASTERS – 20th CENTURY

 

INTRODUCTION

 

The first decade of the 20th century witnessed an astonishing explosion of creativity. Matisse and the Fauves gave new meaning to symbolic color, an exuberant joyful meaning. Matisse is considered by many to be the greatest colorist of the 20th century. He also was one of the last great masters of the human figure.

Many German-speaking Expressionists, in the uncertain years leading up to World War I (1914-18), were inspired to use this new French idea of intensely expressive color in a different way, a way that explored less joyful, and often anxious, internal reflections. Many think the most powerful image of this German generation is “The Prophet” by Nolde. Joyful Expressionist prints or paintings are extremely rare. Exceptions to this brooding inclination include Marc who found joy in the spirit of Nature (especially in images of animals), and Kandinsky who expanded his feeling of joy into the cosmic realm of total abstraction.

Cubism was such a powerful explosion that it blew away much of Fauvism and Expressionism, and most other lingering forms of Postimpressionism. Cubism was invented by Picasso and Braque (working closely together) between 1908 and 1910. They looked at people and objects from a multiple perspective, and fused overlapping elements from different spaces and times in a single image. Cubism proved to be the most influential style of the first half of the 20th century.

During and after World War I (1914-18) alternatives to the new Modern mainstream tradition of Cubism, Futurism, and Abstraction developed in the form of Dada and Surrealism. They reached for higher states of consciousness, often using dream-inspired images. The best-known practitioners include Duchamp, Ernst, Arp, Miró, Dali, and later Giacometti.

In the United States, Modernism got off to a slow start. The remarkable early abstractions of O’Keeffe and Dove did not inspire a following. Attention focused instead on various forms of urban and rural Realism (the “poetry of fact”) until the dramatic birth of Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s from the hands of Pollock and de Kooning and the rest of the New York School.

LITHOGRAPHY. Intaglio techniques (engraving and etching) continued to be used by artists during the Modern era, but only small editions could be made before the lines on the metal plates began to fade. The development of lithography in the early years of the 19th century solved that problem. Images drawn on a stone (and later on aluminum plates) could be printed many times. Color lithography (chromo lithography) was developed in 1837. Offset lithography, a photographic technique of the later 19th century, is the process by which most newspapers and books were (and still are) printed. Many of the most beautiful color lithographs ever made were created in Paris in the years around 1900 by artists such as Lautrec and Bonnard as ads and as fine prints (for publishers such as Vollard), and again after World War II in Paris at the workshop of Mourlot. In the late 20th century, with the advent of personal computers, many people bypassed commercial printing and publishing companies and became “desktop publishers.” Moreover, a remarkable new use for lithography developed for making the printed circuits at the heart of computers. If the printing is smaller than 10 micrometers, it is called microlithography. If the printing is smaller than 100 nanometers, it is called nanolithography.

P.S. Many integrated circuits have an accidental beauty. When I was a curator at New York’s Museum of Modern art, we acquired some for the collection.

 

 

 

EUROPEAN MASTERS – 20th CENTURY – Fauvism

The Fauvists were a group of painters who began to develop their new style about 1900, and then exhibited together in Paris three times between 1904 and 1908. They (along with the contemporary German Expressionists) were the third and final generation of Postimpressionists. The group included Matisse, Derain, Dufy, Rouault, Braque and several others. Their colorful heroes included Gauguin, van Gogh, and Cézanne. The word “fauve” in French means “wild beast.” The term was given to this group by an art critic who found their extreme brushwork and radical colors to be truly “wild.” The leading figure was Matisse who made over 800 prints and worked on 38 illustrated book projects.

 

MATISSE (after)
The Joy of Life [Le Bonheur de Vivre]. painted 1905-06
Notecard, edition by the Barnes Foundation, Merion
Collection: FLG

NOTE: Henri Matisse was the greatest colorist of his age, and the last great Modern master of the human figure. His feeling for color was profound. To him color is a living reality permeated with Transcendent luminosity. It is largely because of Matisse that color became a primary dimension in Modern art. He also did more than any other early Modern artist to develop the Asian aesthetic of “emptiness” wherein that which is not there is as important as that which is. This appreciation for “unfilled space” seems to have come from the two Symbolist artists under whom he studied: Moreau and Guimard, as well as from the thoughts and poems of Mallarmé. They all also taught him to suggest rather than describe.

Like most Modern artists, Matisse had little interest in traditional religion. However, he had a great deal of interest in what he called “spiritual space” or “meditative space.” When asked if he was religious, his reply was: “only when I am working.” He also once said: “I am somewhat Buddhist. The essential thing is to work in a state of mind that approaches prayer.” Matisse had a special feeling for light as a metaphysical reality. He described this light as “not the physical phenomenon, but as the only light that really exists, that which is in the artist’s mind.” He spoke of it as a “very pure, non-material light.” Most of his life was devoted to evoking what he called the “spiritual space” of this timeless light.

In this very early painting from the beginning of his maturity, he already is picturing his consciousness. The colors are not natural. They are symbolic, Transcendent. They are the mysteriously luminous colors that permeate the universe of his mind. The figures are not natural figures. Each body has been animated into an unusual shape by the vibrant spirit of love. Around the central Dance (the Dance of Life) lovers merge into each other and experience unspeakable Oneness. The aroma of ecstasy is everywhere.

Matisse is my favorite painter-printmaker of the early 20th century, and has been since high school. My collection of Matisse prints began at that time with commercial magazine cut-outs. Illustrated here are most of the original prints and facsimiles that I have collected since then. This very personal collection includes the Matisse prints I love the most. There are more Matisse prints in my collection than there are prints by any other artist. There is no limit to the joy he brings me. But it also is a teaching collection. I use it in my classes on Modern Art. My selection covers most of his chronology from “The Joy of Life” of 1904-05 and “The Dance” of 1909-10 to the “Blue Nude” and the “Swimming Pool” of 1952. Some version of “Blue Nude” has been on my wall since 1956. It is a spine-splitting song of ecstasy.

Because I had compiled a comprehensive catalogue of the Illustrated Books of Matisse, John Elderfield asked me to advise him on which books to include in his monumental MoMA exhibition of 1992. We met in 1989 at the Simon Museum where he and his wife spoke highly of my 1970 Guimard exhibition at MoMA, and were enjoying my Matisse exhibition at the Simon – “Dreaming in Color: The Art of Matisse” (especially the wall labels, they said.)

The second time John invited me to MoMA was in 2009 to advise him on which de Kooning prints to include in his 2011 retrospective exhibition at MoMA, because I had written the catalogue raisonné of de Kooning prints. As John is an art historian of enormous skill and great discrimination (and probably the most powerful Modern curator in the U.S.), I looked forward to seeing how he would make his final selections.

When my wife and I arrived for the MoMA opening, we were delighted to see that John had decided to feature in a special way the print that I consider de Kooning’s greatest print – “Litho #1 (Waves #1)” of 1960. It was hanging on a wall with major de Kooning paintings. Very few prints of any period can withstand this kind of side-by-side comparison with paintings.

No other print by de Kooning was so featured in the exhibition, and with good reason. As the American Print Renaissance got going in the 1970s, many large lithos were made, but this monumental print of 1960 was historic not only for its quality but also for its radical size, almost 4 feet high. “Litho #1” probably is the first Modern print to be able to hold its own next to a painting of the same size. This monumental print entered the IAD Collection in 1990. CLICK HERE for that image.

John and I talked about a number of things that night, not only how he hung “Litho #1” but also how “Matisse would have enjoyed the fluidity of its motions.” We also spoke of the influence of Zen on not only Bill’s prints but also his paintings such as “Door to the River” which I has discussed with Bill as Zen-inspired. John concluded: “Matisse did not need Zen influence, of course; he was Zen!”

 

MATISSE
The Dance (painted 1909-10)
Original Lithograph from VERVE, 1938
Printed by Mourlot
Collection: FLG
Ex. Collection: John Windle
Exhibited in “Dreaming in Color: The Art of Matisse,”
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, 1989

NOTE: Matisse painted two versions of this very large picture, one in 1909 (now at MoMA) and the other in 1910 (now in Moscow). Matisse had a special fondness for the MoMA version. He described it as an “overwhelming climax of luminosity.” When I worked at MoMA, I looked at this painting every day on the way to my office. It was a wonderful way to begin the day!

 

MATISSE
The Dance II (painted on three canvases 1931-33)
Original Triple-fold lithograph of the tryptich, with pochoir coloring
from HENRI MATISSE by Roger Fry
Edition by Editions des Chroniques du Jour, 1935
Collection: FLG
Ex. Collection: Roger Walton

NOTE: The extremely flat style of this painting for the Barnes Collection anticipates his later cut-out style.

 

 

 

 

 

MATISSE
Cover of VERVE, Volume 1, Number 1, 1937
Original Lithograph (in its original box).
Printed by Mourlot
Collection: FLG
Ex. Collection: John Windle

NOTE: This lithograph was composed for this cover. VERVE was an elegant French quarterly (1937-1975) designed to showcase original lithographs by contemporary artists. The publisher was Teriade. The printer was Mourlot. The quality was outstanding. Matisse contributed many original lithographs over the years.

 

 

 

 

 

MATISSE
Skater I & Skater II
Pair of Original Linocuts from VERVE #4, 1938? 1939?
[Plate Signed]
Printed by Mourlot
Collection: FLG
Ex. Collection: John Windle 

NOTE: Like all Postimpressionists, Matisse stayed within the confines of gravity and the world of visible, physical realities as his points of departure. He never moved all the way into the realm of total abstraction. However, he sometimes came close. This pair of skaters, especially the second one, is as close to total abstraction as he ever came.

 

 

 

 

 

MATISSE
Illustrations in POESIES by Mallarmé
Etching & engraving
Edition by Skira, 1932
—————————————————————
Facsimile edition by Skira, Edition #4126 [No Date]
Collection: FLG (Purchased in Paris, 1985)
Exhibited in THE ART OF THE BOOK: THE MODERN LIVRE D’ARTISTE, University Art
Gallery, CSUEB, 1999

NOTE: Matisse had a deep love of Illustrated Books. He created some of the most beautiful books of the 20th century. His list of “his” editions included only those over which he had total artistic control, from the choice of the text and the type to the way his own illustrations were presented in relation to the text. POESIES was his first book. The poems of Mallarmé were special to him. He made a great many drawings for the project. In the end, 29 of those drawings were published in the book as extraordinary etchings and engravings. Matisse said he used very thin lines without any shadows so that the visual images would not overwhelm the words. Filled with a Mallarméan love of emptiness, Matisse wanted the illustrated pages to be what he described as “almost white.” Matisse’s hope was that he could echo some of what Mallarmé called the “universal musicality” of his poems, musicality that Mallarmé (following Leonardo) said corresponds with “a state of the soul.”

 

 

 

MATISSE
Untitled {“Fire Dance”}
Linocut from POESIE DE MOTS INCONNUS, 1949
Edition by Iliazd
Printed by Imprimerie Union
Facsimile Reprint as the greeting card of Fequet-Baudier
Collection: FLG

NOTE: This anthology features poems and prints by Arp, Braque, Chagall, Matisse, et al. Matisse’s linocut illustrates a poem by Rouke Akinsemoyin. This print, which I call “Fire Dance,” is one of the most abstract he ever did.

 

 

 

 

MATISSE
Borne Away to the Stars [Couple Embracing]
Original Linocut from PASIPHAE, 1944
Edition by Fabiani
Printed by Fequet & Baudier
Facsimile edition printed by Fequet & Baudier
Collection: Unknown

NOTE: PASIPHAE was one of several books that Matisse worked on during World War II. This tender picture of a loving couple among the stars is the best-known print in the book. This image faces these lines:

More closely than the clinging vine
About the wedded tree,
Clasp thou thine arms, ah, mistress mine!
About the heart of me.

 

 

 

 

 

MATISSE
Embrace (composed 1941)
Original Linocut in FLORITEGE DES AMOURS DE RONSARD
Edition by Skira, 1948
Collection: Unknown 

NOTE: Matisse translated Ronsard’s 16th century French into modern French for this book.

 

MATISSE (after)
JAZZ
20 pochoir prints with a holographic text, all by Matisse
Printed from a set of metal stencils by Vairel
Editioned by Teriade, 1947
——————————————————-
Facsimile edition by Braziller, 1999
Collection: FLG
Exhibited in THE ART OF THE BOOK: THE MODERN LIVRE D’ARTISTE, University Art Gallery, CSUEB, 1999

NOTE: JAZZ by Matisse and A TOUTE EPREUVRE by Miró are widely considered the most beautiful Illustrated Books of the 20th century. The story of JAZZ begins in 1941 when Matisse underwent surgery for stomach cancer. Afterwards, confined to a wheelchair, it was difficult to paint or draw. He decided to start composing by cutting free-hand with a small pair of scissors various colored papers that he had painted to his specifications with gouache. He then arranged them on another sheet of painted paper. Assistants then prepared them for the printer between late 1943 and early 1944. Each page is 24 x 12 inches and folded in the center. All of the text was written (painted) in his own hand. The first edition of 250 portfolios in 1947 sold for $125.00.

This project, and the discovery that he could “paint with scissors,” gave him what Matisse called a “second life.” His work as a painter was over, but he did not miss the process. He used this other spontaneous technique for the rest of his life. It was a special joy for him to be able to draw, sculpt space, and color all at the same time. Many consider his “cut-outs” to be as beautiful as anything he ever did. I agree.

As a rule, the iconography of JAZZ is described as scenes from a circus. That certainly seems to be the front-story. However, I was never satisfied with this obvious explanation. I think there is a back-story. The more I thought about the fact that this work was done during the horrible days of World War II, days when members of his immediate family were imprisoned and tortured by the Gestapo, the more “M. Loyal” started looking like Charles de Gaulle (wartime leader of the Free French and later President of France), and the more “Icarus” started looking like a dying soldier, and the more the “Wolf” (not a normal circus animal) started to seem like a personification of the evil enemy. Even “The Clown” looks to me more like a bloody mutilated soldier than a clown, and the “Sword Swallower” seems to also be a cry for help. Jack Flam, a noted authority on Matisse and his cut-outs, has asked me to write an essay on this topic. One day I will do that. It is very expensive to buy an original edition of this world-famous book. It can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even good facsimile editions such as this handsome Braziller production can cost $100. Happily however, small partial facsimiles of JAZZ can be purchased for $1.00

My first such miniature edition was given to me by Monroe Wheeler in honor of my promotion from Assistant Curator to Associate Curator at MoMA in 1968. That edition had been published by MoMA in 1948 for its members, at Monroe’s suggestion. Monroe was a great lover of illustrated books. He headed MoMA’s publications program for many years (starting in 1941), and therefore played a major role to spreading the gospel of Modernism beyond the walls of MoMA. He also assembled MoMA’s matchless collection of Illustrated Books. In that wonderland of books I have spent endless hours over a number of years. I could not have had a better education in the art of the livre d’artiste. Piper did a miniature edition of JAZZ in 1957. Braziller did a nice miniature edition in 1985.

 

 

 

 

MATISSE (after)
The Thousand & One Nights (composed 1950)
An original collage of paper cut-outs
Poster, Edition by Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg
Collection: FLG

NOTE: The original cut-out from which this print was made was his largest cut-out composition, almost 54 feet long. The original is in the MoMA collection. It was originally conceived to decorate his private dining room in the Hotel Régina in Nice. Matisse said: “I have always adored the sea, and now that I can no longer go for a swim, I have surrounded myself with it.” The construction begins and ends with a starfish, as if that creature were telling the tale – a dream-like tale of joyous, unbroken fluidity. The whole is a composition of endless musicality. No figure is held back by being contained in an entirely human body, yet they all enjoy their smoothly rounded humanity swimming and diving into and out of the water, and into and out of the abstract rhythms of each other.

 

 

 

MATISSE (after)
Flowing Hair (Blue Nude). (Composed 1952)
Original Lithograph from VERVE #, 1958 [Plate Signed & Dated]
Printed by Mourlot
Collection: FLG & GKS on loan of IAD
Published in GLOBAL VISION, Part 1, 2006

NOTE: If I had to give away all the other Matisse prints in my collection and keep only one, it would be this one. Some version of “Blue Nude” has been on my wall since 1956. It is a spine-splitting song of ecstasy.

 

 

EUROPEAN MASTERS – 20th CENTURY – Expressionism

 

“Expressionism” is a tricky term. In every work of art there is some kind of “expression.” But “expressionism” usually means a particularly intense form of expression. It could be argued that there has always been a strong element of expressionism in German art, from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. However, for art historians, the term “Expressionism” defines a specific movement in the early 20th century among German-speaking artists, primarily in Germany but also in Austria. The cluster of individual Expressionist styles can be classified (together with its sister-style, Fauvism) as a 3rd and final phase of Postimpressionism.

The emphasis is on emotionally configured faces and figures the shapes of which are symbolic rather than naturalistic, and colors that are symbolic and selected by emotion rather than naturalistic. You will recall this also was the case in the first two generations of Postimpressionism. But there was a new spirit in the air.

There were strong influences being felt by the Germans from the powerful emotionality of van Gogh and Munch, as well as from the German Middle Ages. The tribal explorations of Gauguin pointed the first Expressionist group in Dresden to their local anthropology museum where they became fascinated with the tribal art. They were the first Modern group to feel this fascination that soon became one of the strongest single influences on the shaping of Modern art. {WRAP: 2 WOODCUTS: S-Rottluff: KNIEDE 1914 & GROSSE PROHETIN 1919}

The spark that ignited the general trajectory of this German development was the art of the Paris Fauves who opened doors to this radical exploration of symbolic color and symbolic form about between 1900 and 1905. Some key Germans, such as Kandinsky, had lived in Paris in 1905 at the start of the Fauve movement, or visited shortly thereafter. Within a short time, the Germans were seeing what they could do with these visual innovations that were moving dramatically from Impressionistic objectivity to endless subjectivity.

By 1911, both the Die Brucke group in the north of Germany (started in Dresden in 1905), and the Blaue Reiter group in the south of Germany (formed in Munich in 1911) were calling themselves “Expressionists.” Many in both groups were inspired by Nietzsche’s THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA to think of themselves as assertive leaders of a higher consciousness who should lead society to a better way of life. But the direction taken by the two groups was quite different.

In the north, where the focus usually was on claustrophobic city life, we see sharply angular, vertical slashing lines and twisting contortions that spoke of a world filled with tensions, anxieties, alienation, and angst. {WRAP: Kirchner: Potsdamer Platz 1914} They also flaunted their young, uninhibited sexuality. {WRAP: Kirchner: Judgement of Paris 1913}

{WRAP their group portrait by Kirchner, from GOOGLE/Expressionism} This Die Brucke group was started by four students of Jugenstil architecture including Heckel, Kirchner, and Schmidt-Rottluff. Their ideal (at first) was a communal art in the medieval tradition of craft guilds. They revived the ancient art of woodcuts to spread their message to a wide public with bold, rough-cut imagery. [WRAP: woodcut} They were launching a deliberate political attack on the traditional naturalism of bourgeoisie art and the narrow, egocentric values of middle-class society that loved this kind of “comfortable” art. This was the self-centered, materialistic society the young radicals wanted to shock and then remodel. It is a bitter body of work. Their emotional satisfaction seems to have been found in the act of attacking. The kind of joy one finds among the Fauves is nowhere to be found.

In the south, where the focus was more rural and less political, the Blaue Reiter group had more peaceful visions of possible harmonies. Kandinsky and Marc and the others (including women artists who enjoyed equal respect) had visions of the Transcendent that looked on Modernism as a new kind of secular religion that could fill the world with purified values. Inspired by Symbolism and Theosophy, they saw themselves as secular priests of the new religion. Their key publications were the BLAUE REITER ALMANAC and Kandinsky’s book THE SPIRITUAL IN ART. {WRAP: Marc’s Atonement}

The gospel of Marc was a kind of pantheism. Kandinsky took his transcendentalism to the radical extreme of total abstraction. He was one of the first to do so. Kandinsky’s book became the best-selling book ever written by a Modern artist. {WRAP: K’s The Archer, woodcut, 1908-09; published 1912 as the colophon of the ALMANAC ).

Generally speaking, there were two phases to the Expressionist movement – before the First World War of 1914-18), and after the war – the first global war, and the first mechanized war.

There was a good deal of positivity before the war. After this horrific war, in which the German army was crushed by the armies of the English and the Americans, the picture was extremely bleak. Dix pictured the horror of war itself. Kollwitz pictured what it did to a war-torn society, particularly to the women. Thereafter, the postwar Expressionists focused their art on the greedy, mindless, imperialistic values of those who had started the war in the first place.

 

 

HECKEL
Portrait of a Man, 1919
Original Woodcut
Collection: Museum of Modern Art, New York

NOTE: This print is widely considered Erich Heckel’s masterpiece.

 

 

MARC
Large Blue Horses (painted 1911)
Postcard, edition by Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Collection: FLG 

NOTE: Franz Marc as a boy was called the “little philosopher.” He was considering the ministry before he decided to become an artist, or more specifically an artist-philosopher. Early on, he was attracted to the philosophy of Novalis who said: “All life is rhythm.”

He also was drawn to the Romantic painters from Delacroix to Runge who described his own work as “symbols of the eternal rhythm of the cosmos.” But how does a Modern artist sing the song of Eternal Nature? That is the problem Marc set for himself and struggled with for years. He said he was looking for the “back door to Paradise.”

He took a step in the right direction by visiting Paris in 1903 when he was overwhelmed by the bold colors of Impressionism and Postimpressionism, and the fascinating unmodulated colors of Japanese prints. During another visit to Paris in 1907 he helped hang a van Gogh exhibition and was stupefied by the experience. He called van Gogh: “the greatest, most poignant painter I know.” Van Gogh called himself a “musician with colors.” At one level Marc certainly seems to have been responding to this dimension of van Gogh’s work. At another level, he surely was struck by van Gogh’s ability to express emotion by means of rhythmic waving lines. One of van Gogh’s favorite words was “energy.” I suspect Marc was feeling van Gogh’s energy vibrating throughout every brushstroke on every canvas.

In 1910 he discovered Matisse and the Fauves. The door to Paradise was opening wider! He was discovering himself, and he did it in a semi-shamanic manner. He loved animals so much that he was able to look at the world from an animal’s point-of-view. He wrote: “I try to feel myself pantheistically into the…flow of the blood of nature, in trees, in animals… .” It was with this profound perspective that he came to feel what Goethe spoke of as the “vibrations…by which Nature links all this together.”

In 1911 he painted the great canvases for which he became famous. The best-known is “Large Blue Horses.” Every time I look at it I feel a special kind of wholeness. The curves of the horses and the curves of the landscape echo each other. There is no duality. Then, when I am walking away from the experience, I often think of words that Marc loved and often quoted from Schiller: “…the animal embodies everything man has lost – spontaneity, serenity, inner harmony.” In his missionary mode, Marc wrote in the ALMANAC:

We are standing on the threshold of one of the greatest epochs that mankind has ever experienced, an epoch of great spirituality. … [The tasks for artists is to] create contemporary symbols than can be placed on the altars of the great spiritual religion of the future.

MARC (after)
Small Blue Horses, (painted c1911)
Lithograph from a watercolor. [Later edition]
Collection: FLG on loan to IAD
Published in GLOBAL VISION, Part 1, 2006

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MARC
Atonement {At-One-Ment}, 1911
Original Woodcut
Collection: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

NOTE: Marc made about 60 prints, woodcuts and lithographs. Marc’s feeling of being at-one with Nature and with the Universe as a whole, is rendered vividly in this woodcut. The original meaning of atonement was at-one-ment, meaning at-one with the Transcendent.

KANDINSKY (after)
Garden of Love (cut & plate signed 1912)
Woodcut from SOUNDS {KLANGE}, 1913
Collection: Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Gift of IAD
…………………………………………………………
Authorized Replica Lithograph from the woodcut, 1962
Collection: FLG
Exhibited in THE ART OF THE BOOK: THE MODERN LIVRE D’ARTISTE, University Art Gallery, CSUEB, 1999
Published in GLOBAL VISION, Part 1, 2006

NOTE: Wassily Kandinsky in most textbooks is credited with being the first painter to paint a totally abstract composition. The creation of abstract art is one of the most amazing events in the history of humanity. In a brief moment, the entire tradition of picturing visible reality, a tradition tens of thousands of years old, suddenly disappeared. The very definition of art was transformed. Nothing like that had ever happened before. There had been abstract patterns in the decorative arts, of course, but never in the fine arts.

Another remarkable aspect of this artistic revolution was how it happened. It took place within a very short period of time, between 1910 and 1920. It took place over a large area of the Western World, from Moscow to Munich to Paris and New York. And none of these artists knew each other!

The most important thing about this revolution is why it happened. The written testimony of the leading revolutionaries has been preserved, and their statements are quite consistent. They were all reaching for the Transcendent, but they knew that non-material reality cannot be described with ordinary words or ordinary pictures. It is transcendent of that mode of perception. Words and the material world in which they function is the sphere of space & time. The Transcendent is above and below this perceptual bubble.

Their intuition told them that there must be another way to evoke the experience of “the other side.”

They found clues among the Symbolist poets and painters who pointed to the teachings of many philosophers and to the great spiritual traditions of the world (Alchemy, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.). All of these traditions have said that the only way to suggest the Transcendent is by means of verbal and visual metaphors. These metaphors can function as “ladders” that our intuition can climb to the sky.

[For my essay on “The Mystic Ladder: Parallel Stages of Consciousness in Alchemy and Tantra” CLICK HERE.]

All these revolutionary artists regarded materialism, in all its forms (economic and psychological), as the primary problem with people having little or no awareness of that which is non-material. Kandinsky articulates this position at the beginning of his book THE SPIRITUAL IN ART. Since the Industrial Revolution and the rise of science as a new kind of religion, many people had become stuck in the narrow assumption that matter is really all there is, and that logical information is the only information that really matters. Neglected or disregarded is intuitive information.

These pioneering artists concluded that pictures of material reality get in the way of the mind touching that higher level of consciousness that is the psychological space of non-material reality. So all these artists elected to stop picturing material reality and start picturing non-material reality. Their hope was that such paintings, prints, and poems would evoke the spirit of the Transcendent inside their audience by means of what Kandinsky called “spiritual resonance.”

Kandinky and his partner Gabriele Munter were drawn to this metaphysical position by reading the Theosophy books of Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant, the Anthroposophy books of Rudolf Steiner, as well as THE GREAT INITIATES by Edouard Schuré. All these metaphysicians shared with Blake the conviction that “all religions are one,” and that matter and spirit are aspects of each other.

Who created abstract art? Several artists were doing it at the same time between 1910 and 1920. The best-known names are Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich. When I was a young curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, I spent many hours looking at how these legendary painters suggested the psycho-cosmic relationships in which spirit and matter unite. Each rendered the spirit-matter relationship differently. Kandinsky was explosive. He dove into the Transcendent experience and then erupted with hot volcanoes of color. Mondrian and Malevich were more contemplative. They stood back from the Transcendent experience and reflected on it quietly, making cool geometric forms as metaphors of spirit-matter balance. Later, in the 1940s, the Abstract Expressionists got a taste of the strange and wonderous experience of the Infinite Luminosity we call the Transcendent, and left us powerful images of their anxious efforts to get beyond the ego-loving materialism in order to taste more Light.

The credit for being the very first to paint an abstract painting usually is given in textbooks to Kandinsky. The date usually given is 1910. A number of scholars have questioned this date; but he certainly was one of the first even though the actual date may have been 1913. Moreover, what he did with this new way of seeing has proven to be more memorable for more people than the work of other great innovators.

What he painted in those early years is quite remarkable. He set the standard by which biomorphic abstraction (non-geometric abstraction) would be judged for the rest of the century. For collectors and curators of prints, it is equally exciting to look at what he did as a printmaker during those pioneering years before the Great War of 1914.

The best-known group of those black & white prints is his book SOUNDS {KLANGE} published in 1913, with prose-poems by the artist. This book is a total work-of-art. Kandinsky called it a “musical album.” He was the author, the illustrator, and the designer. He wrote the 38 prose-poems between 1909 & 1911. The suite of 56 woodcuts he began in 1907. That suite proved to be a major arena of visual research as he moved during these critical years from the last vestiges of Symbolist naturalism toward the Abstract Symbolism for which he became famous. As a painter and as a printmaker, he actually worked using both Realistic Symbolism and Abstract Symbolism until 1912-13. Only after that did he begin to talk publically about Abstract Symbolism or what he called “concrete” art, and “absolute” art.

Too often overlooked is the important role played by Gabriele Munter, his partner and fellow painter, during Kandinsky’s struggle to shift from his rational side to his intuitive side, from the Realistic to the Abstract. At one point, while trying to start a large painting of a flood, he was blocked. What happened next has been reported this way:

Munter told him that he was trapped in his intellect… . She suggested he simply repeat the word uberflut (“delufe” or “flood”) and focus on its sound rather than its meaning. Repeating this word like a mantra, Kandinsky painted and completed the monumental work in a three-day span.”

This “Garden of Love” is the best-known print in SOUNDS. At their request, IAD donated an original impression of this print to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for their matchless collection of German Expressionist prints (which did not have this very important print). Kandinsky regarded the woodcuts of SOUNDS as some of the most important work he ever did. He wanted that work to be better known. So, in his later years, he supervised the production of replica lithographs. His widow continued that work. I have kept a replica of “Garden of Love” (authorized by the estate) on my wall for many years. That is the impression that was exhibited in the 2006 exhibition at CSUEB of “Global Vision: A Survey of World Art, Part 1.” I am moved by its musicality, and by the fact that Pollock was looking at very similar compositions when he was in the process of finding himself.

[For a complete micro-gallery of the pages of SOUNDS on the MoMA site, CLICK HERE.]

Kandinsky’s more famous book is THE SPIRITUAL IN ART {UBER DIE GEISTIGE IN DER KUNST}. It was written over a period of about 10 years and seems to have been completed about 1910. A version was presented at a conference in Russia in December 1911, and the first published editions appeared in 1912. Many editions quickly followed. It became the best-selling book ever written by a Modern artist.

For many years, the standard English edition, authorized by his widow (and published by my friend George Wittenborn in 1947), carried an introduction by S. W. Hayter. Hayter was the painter-printmaker-teacher who played a key role in helping Pollock find himself between 1944 & 1945. Their legendary interaction was the start of Abstract Expressionism

[For the Hayter-Pollock story as told to me by Hayter and his assistant, “Pollock, Hayter, & the Seeds of Abstract Expressionism,” CLICK HERE.]

When I discussed Kandinsky’s book with Hayter in Paris in 1985, he made a number of very interesting points. Here are some of my notes from that conversation in which he summarized and then quoted Kandinsky from time to time:

After his opening salvos against materialism, Kandinsky’s point of departure was musical vibrations. When he looked at colors, he heard sounds, musical sounds. He’s not talking about metaphors there, but of actual experience. That of course is too “far out” for some readers, Bill said with a smile. The rest is a little more available.

What moves so many readers, Bill continued, is the power of Kandinsky’s metaphors. They go right down to our unconscious mind. For example, colors are not just pretty; they cause “vibrations in the soul.” That results in an “inner resonance.” Form is the exhalation of a “spiritual breath.” A form that touches the soul is good art. Otherwise, it’s not worth making.

Is it not curious, Bill asked out loud, that so many people say this book explains and defends abstract art? Those people have not read the book. The book does nothing of the kind. It was written before he had conceived of abstract art! However, it does lay out the mystical principles on which he did eventually build abstract art.

Bill continued with reflections on Kandinsky’s metaphysics: He did not define “spiritual” very clearly in the book. He relates the term to religion, but he may have been talking about religious feeling and not religion. Then Bill said the following with a clarity and forcefulness that stunned me:

In other words, as Carl Jung and Erich Fromm remind us, spiritual awareness can develop whenever and however the ego is transcended. A good working definition of Transcendence is feeling ‘at-one’ with the universe, not separate from the universe as a whole. No concept of God need be involved. As you know, there is no God in the Zen experience of Enlightenment. It’s a change in the quality of consciousness. You and I might have a brief moment of Transcendent experience from time to time. But the teaching is that once true Enlightenment takes place, the ‘at-one’ feeling is constant.

Bill ended that line of thought with two more striking sentences:

One must have a certain level of consciousness to appreciate abstract art, a level at which intuition is as important as rationality. Kandinsky got there about 1910.

Bill continued, in a reflective mood, recalling how impressed he always had been with how quickly and how widely Kandinsky’s book connected with artists around the world, not only among Europeans but also by Stieglitz and O’Keeffe and their circle in New York, all the way to an edition in Japan. Bill concluded:

He touched the core of our humanity.

Then Désirée, his delightful wife, came home and the three of us returned the conversation to Abstract Expressionism in the U.S. and the parallel development of L’informel in France. Happily, Bill and I stayed in touch for some time with a series of letters. He kindly checked the transcript of our conversation so that what I published would be accurate in my book THE SPONTANEOUS GESTURE: PRINTS & BOOKS OF THE ABSTRACT EXPESSIONIST ERA (1987). In one of my last letters to Bill I shared with him a statement by Diego Rivera about Kandinsky:

He opened a window to look inside the All.

NOLDE
The Prophet (cut 1912)
Lithograph from the woodcut, 20th century
Edition of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Collection: CSUEB. Gift of IAD

 NOTE: This print by Emil Nolde is widely considered the most powerful print of the Expressionist era.

NOLDE
Lake Geneva (painted c1930s-40s)
lithograph from a watercolor, 1970
Collection: FLG

NOTE: Emil Nolde was one of the most gifted of the German Expressionists. As he did with all Modern art, Hitler removed Nolde’s work from German museums and forbid him to paint. Nolde quietly continued to paint in secret, with a special focus on watercolor landscapes. He was one of the last great landscape painters of the Modern era.

 

DIX
Wounded (etched 1916)
Original Lithograph from an etching, 1925
Collection: FLG on loan to IAD
Published in GLOBAL VISION, Part 1, 2006
Exhibited in “The Cost of War,” CSUEB, 2008

NOTE: Otto Dix was a German soldier in World War I. This is a picture of himself. He became an important member of the Second Generation of Expressionists after the Great War.

 

 

 

 

 

KOLLOWITZ
The Widow II, 1922-23
Lithograph from WAR, Leaf #5
Collection: FLG

NOTE: Kathe Kollowitz was the most important woman artist of the German Expressionist movement. Her best work was lithographic. This print, and the next one from her book called WAR are among the most powerful she ever made. She stands at the head of the Modern tradition of Social Realism.

 

 

 

 

 

KOLLOWITZ
The Mothers, 1922-23
Lithograph from WAR, Leaf #6
Collection: FLG

 

KLEE
Kleinwelt
Lithograph from the engraving
Collection: FLG

EUROPEAN MASTERS – 20th CENTURY – Cubism

 

Modern Art may be said to have begun with Postimpressionism, a series of related styles that developed over three generations. The First Generation of painters, led by Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh, matured during the 1880s. The Second Generation of painters matured during the 1890s. It included Lautrec, Bonnard, and Munch. The Third Generation of painters matured between 1900 and 1910. It included Matisse and the Fauves in Paris and German-speaking Expressionists. Cubism was invented by Picasso and Braque between 1908 and 1910.

This new style was so powerful that it blew away much of the force of the final generation of Postimpressionists – the Fauves and the Expressionists. Those artists were still holding on to the outward appearance of people, places, and things as seen inside a single moment of time from a single point of view. That was a Renaissance assumption that had defined European art for centuries. The Cubists exploded that Renaissance assumption. They decided instead to explore a new idea – the idea of a person, place or thing as seen from several points of view simultaneously.

Without any knowledge of what Einstein was thinking (which was curiously similar thinking), the Cubists folded space and time into each other. In the process, they broke forms into smaller elements and also forced the foreground and background into each other. The result is a stimulating formal achievement. It is neither very colorful nor very emotional, as a rule, but it is a striking kind of atonal musicality.

As with music for the ear, this visual music has no central tonal center around which other tones revolve. The traditional perceptual center of the Renaissance tradition has been exploded into equally important elements that exist all over the canvas. When looking at a Cubist composition, many feel they are looking at a windowpane that has been shattered and reassembled out of broken parts.

Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler (1884-1979) is of special significance in the history of Cubism. In his native Germany he was trained in finance but preferred art. He opened a tiny gallery in Paris in 1907 just as Picasso was painting his legendary “Demoiselles d’Avignon.” He quickly fell in love with this unknown thing called Cubism and became the exclusive representative of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris. His gallery was the very core of the Cubist experiment from 1907 to 1914.

Traditional dealers felt they were doing their artists a favor by representing them; his attitude was the opposite. He not only was actually a friend of his artists, he had a novel way of supporting them. He gave them an annual stipend in return for ownership of whatever they produced. This gave each of them the rare feeling of financial security and psychological freedom. In short, he not only represented the core Cubists, he was a catalyst who helped Cubism to flower. Kahnweiler also published books by emerging writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Antoin Artaud, André Malraux, and Gertrude Stein, as well as beautiful livres d’artistes. In addition, he was one of those rare dealers who also was an important art historian – a respected historian of Cubism.

From Kahnweiler and others we hear again and again about the continuing importance of Mallarmé. One might think his influence, which was so strong on Impressionists, Postimpressionists, and Symbolists would have ended with the closing of the 19th century. But that was not the case. The importance of Mallarmé in the development of Cubism would be difficult to exaggerate. Mallarmé’s poem “Un Coup de Des” (first published in 1897) probably is the most influential poem of the Modern era. It gave to Modernism the concept of deconstructed space and time. The poet Pierre Reverdy said that what the Cubists did was “consolidate” the verbal innovations of Mallarmé.

Kahnweiler in his essay “Mallarmé and Painting” reports that Mallarmé was very influential on the Cubists. He goes so far as to state that Mallarmé as a source for Modernism was equalled only by Cézanne.

Robert Motherwell made a similar statement in his preface to FROM BAUDELAIRE TO SURREALISM: “Mallarmé was responsible for the atmosphere in which Cubism became possible.” When I asked Motherwell to say more about that in a conversation at MoMA in 1965 this was his reply: “Mallarmé blew the world apart. The Cubists put it back together.”

 

PICASSO
Portrait of Vollard (painted 1909-10)
photolithograph – tipped-in book plate, 1957
Collection: IAD (2012)

NOTE: Of all his Cubist painted portraits, Pablo Picasso thought this one was his best. It is a portrait of Vollard who was the most important print publisher of the age, and a major supporter of Picasso as a dealer-publisher. When I started reading art books in the 1950s the best color prints in books are not printed with the text. The technology was not yet good enough for that. The good prints were printed separately and then tipped-in which means glued on to the page. The print quality was so high that it was rarely matched until the digital technology of the late 20th century. These tipped-in prints were so attractive that many were stolen from libraries.

 

 

 

 

 

PICASSO
Portrait of Apollinaire (etched 1913)
Original Etching (frontispiece)
from ALCOOLS by Apollinaire, 1913
Edition by Vollard
Collection: Unknown

NOTE: None of Picasso’s etched portraits of the Cubist era were as powerful as his oil portrait of Vollard. But many are quite good, and some of the best were done for books. This “Portrait of Apollinaire” is one of the best of those. Apollinaire was an important poet and art critic, and a good friend of Picasso. Picasso loved being involved with illustrated books. Over his lifetime, he contributed a good number of his 200 prints to over 150 illustrated books.

 

 

 

 

 

PICASSO
THE METAMORPHOSES by Ovid
First Edition by Skira, 1931
————————————-
Facsimile edition, University of California, 1954
Collection: CSUEB
Gift of IAD
Exhibited in THE ART OF THE BOOK: THE MODERN LIVRE D’ARTISTE, University Art Gallery, CSUEB, 1999

 

PICASSO (after)
Jupiter & Semele
Etching from METAMORPHOSES by Ovid
Edition by Skira, 1931
——————————————————
Facsimile edition, 1969, supposedly made to help fund the restoration of the Eiffel Tower. [Hand Signed?]
Collection: CSUEB. Gift of IAD
Published in GLOBAL VISION, Part 1, 2006

NOTE: After World War I Picasso left Cubism and turned to a gentle Neoclassical style. He used that style to illustrate this book by the ancient Roman poet Ovid, a book that was his only American publication. Skira gave Picasso the commission in 1928. The book appeared in 1931. There is reason to question the authenticity of this particular inscription and the signature. So it has been a good case study in connoisseurship in my Museum Studies seminar.

 

 

 

 

 

PICASSO
Bacchanal with a Minotaur, 1933
Original Etching from THE VOLLARD SUITE, Plate 85
Printed by Roger Lacouriere
Edition by Vollard, 1950
Collection: Museum of Modern Art, New York

NOTE: This suite of 100 etchings was Picasso’s last great work as a printmaker. They were etched between 1930 and 1937. The main theme is the Minotaur. The Minotaur image comes from the ancient pre-Greek mythology of Minoan Crete. He is a creature who is half man and half bull, and for Picasso a perfect metaphor for his own double personality. The wordless story told in this series of images is of the mindless passion of the Minotaur.

PICASSO (after)
Minotaur caressing a Sleeping Woman (etched 1933-34)
Original Etching from THE VOLLARD SUITE, Plate 93
Printed by Roger Lacouriere
Edition by Vollard, 1950
——————————–
Facsimile lithograph authorized by the estate, 1973
Collection: FLG

 

 

PICASSO
Minotauromachy (etched 1935)
Original lithograph from an etching [Hand Signed]
Editioned by Abrams in PICASSO:
50 YEARS OF HIS GRAPHIC ART, 1955
Collection: FLG on loan to IAD
Published in GLOBAL VISION, Part 1, 2006

NOTE: This is widely regarded as Picasso’s most important print. Not only is it a composition of great power, it also is the point of departure for his last great painting – “Guernica” of 1937.

 

 

 

 

 

PICASSO
Guernica, 1937
Oil
Collection: Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid

NOTE: This was Picasso’s last great painting. It was painted in response to the Nazi bombing of the Basque village of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, a bombing that was “merely” a training exercise for the new German air force. It is one of the most important paintings of the 20th century. After this profound explosion of creative energy and moral purpose, Picasso’s artistic juices began to ebb. Most of his work thereafter is minor and often merely the repetitious renderings of an old man remembering his vibrant youth.

 

 

 

 

 

BRAQUE
Papiers Colles II, 1963
Original Lithograph in DLM, 1963
Collection: FLG

NOTE: Although this lithograph is a late edition, it was done in his early Cubist style. Picasso is usually given credit for the invention of Cubism. This is partly due to Picasso’s enormous ego and endless self-promotion. Actually, the evidence indicates that the basic concept of Cubism came from the mind of the more modest Georges Braque. Then the two worked together on the formal implications of this revolutionary concept for years.

 

BRAQUE
Flowers and the Light, 1962
Original Lithograph [Hand Signed]
Collection: FLG on loan to IAD
Published in GLOBAL VISION, Part 1, 2006

NOTE: In his later years, Braque relaxed his Cubist style and made some of the most lyrical paintings and prints of the 20th century. This is one of the best examples.

 

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EUROPEAN MASTERS – 20th CENTURY – Dada

 

Dada was a cultural movement that flourished in Europe and the United States between 1913 and the early 1920s when some of its leading figures transitioned into another movement, the Surrealist movement. Dada was sparked into being by the horrific events of World War I (1914-1918). Dada artists protested not only against the war but also the mindless logic of materialism, nationalism, and colonialism that generated the war, and the comfortable art of the bourgeois class whose greedy stupidity started the war.

Quite a few of these like-minded artists gathered in the safe-haven of Switzerland to live out the war. Their primary gathering place was the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. A lively cast of characters (including Arp, Ball, Hennings, Janco, Tauber, Tzara, and Richer) provided entertainment unlike any seen before. Absurdity was everywhere. Nonsense was everywhere – in poems, in songs, in plays, in costumes, and on the walls. Their manifestos and widely publicized various public antics were shocking to many (and that was just fine). They were trying to blow up the past and clear the way for a more humane future.

To the consternation of all who thought of art as something idealized and remote, the Dadaists rummaged around in the neglected pockets of the everyday, discovering the richness of common realities. To their newly opened eyes, the hitherto unrealized aesthetic potential of their daily environment continuously burst like an endless string of colored firecrackers. They reached right out into the middle of life, and brought the actual world right back into the middle of art.

Taking hold of reality with a brand-new grip, they conducted a revolution in the history of seeing. Because their revolution was successful, we look at things differently today. They made us aware that the difference between what we usually accept as art and what we usually regard as reality can be very small. The sensuous line of an oil slick, the massive gnarls of a tree stump, or the sharp outline of a spark plug now can now be legitimately enjoyed as much as a painting.

After the war in Berlin another highly creative group of artists (including Hausmann, Heartfield, Hoch, and Huelsenbeck) blew the horns of Dada. In the process, they (along with Schwittersin Hanover and Ernst in Cologne ) made the finest collage and photomontage compositions of the age. There also were activities in Eastern Europe and Japan.

In New York City, the mischief was being caused mainly by Duchamp, Picabia, Man Ray, and Beatrice Wood. The mischief-making that caused the greatest uproar was the “readymades” of Duchamp, especially “Fountain.”

Historians usually place emphasis on the destructive element within Dada, and that certainly was very important. It was an explosive movement. However, its constructive elements are too often overlooked. Dada brought in Asian philosophy with a new seriousness, and produced the stream-of-consciousness technique that was extremely important to the rest of the 20th century, from the novels of James Joyce and Virginia Wolf, to the free forms of Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, as well as the Postmodernism of the Neo-Dada artists and Beat poets during the 1950s.

 

DUCHAMP
Nude Descending a Staircase #2 (painted 1912)
Original Lithograph
from MARCEL DUCHAMP by Lebel, 1959
Collection: FLG on loan to IAD
Gift of the Artist, 1968
Published in GLOBAL VISION, PART 1, 2006

NOTE: Marcel Duchamp was the most important figure of the Dada movement, and one of the most influential figures of the 20th century – probably second only to Picasso and Matisse in terms of influence over the 20th century as a whole. I used to play chess with Duchamp and have written a good deal about him. For my book DUCHAMP & ANDROGYNY: ART, GENDER, AND METAPHYSICS  click here.

 

 

DUCHAMP
The Large Glass. Original made 1915-23
Photo-offset lithograph from a 1959 book he designed
Collection: FLG on loan to IAD. Gift of Marcel Duchamp, 1968
Published in GLOBAL VISION: A SURVEY OF WORLD ART, Part 1, 2006

 

 

Dada 1916-1923 by Marcel Duchamp, 1953
Color poster
Collection: FLG on loan to IAD
Published in GLOBAL VISION: A SURVEY OF WORLD ART, Part 1, 2006

 

 

 

ARP
Untitled (“The Long Blue Road”), 1949
Original Lithograph from DLM, May 1949
Collection: FLG

NOTE: Jean (Hans) Arp started in the Dada circle and then was a key figure in the Surrealist circle as a sculptor-printmaker. For examples of his sculpture CLICK HERE. <Modern Sculpture> 

 

 

ARP
DEMETER
Conceptualization & first carving: 1960
Realization of this replica: late 20^th century
white marble
Collection: FLG on loan to IAD  [Keep this or Drop?]

 

 

ARP
“Myrtl” {Demeter”} 1960
engraving
<duplicate from Modern Sculpture page>
xxxxxxxxxxx
EXHIBITED: ART OF THE BOOK
The portfolio is Hand Signed

NOTE: Arp was very fond of themes from ancient Greece. Demeter in Greek mythology was the Goddess of Fertility. She also presided over Marriage and Law, as well as the Eternal Cycle of Life & Death. She and her daughter Persephone (Personification of Spring) were at the heart of the Elysian Mysteries where the ancient Athenians found spiritual renewal every year. These Greeks may well have imported the Demeter & Persephone rituals from Minoan Crete. For Arp, Demeter was life itself. Max Ernst said this of Arp: “His nude forms tell of the time of lost paradises, and speak of cosmic secrets. They teach us to understand the language spoken by the universe itself.”

Arp also was a poet, one of the best among the visual artists of the Dada-Surrealist tradition. His first wife, Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943) was one of the most gifted women artists in the Dada-Surrealist tradition. They collaborated frequently on projects, a practice rare in the world of Modern art. She also was a dancer who performed at the legendary Cabaret Voltaire in Switzerland during World War I at the birth of the international Dada movement.

“Demeter,” with her budding breasts of eternal fertility, is my favorite of Arp’s more figurative pieces. I have published it a number of times, and look at it every day. IAD’s Arp collection includes three small bronzes (”Thales of Miletus” of 1951, “Cobra” of 1952,” and “Floral Nude“ of 1957), and a limited edition brass multiple of 1960 called “Golden Goddess.” They have been exhibited together with a marble “Demeter” and several Arp prints from a private collection including an etching of “Demeter” from Arp’s portfolio of etchings VER LE BLANC INFINI (1960).

My students sometimes ask what other Arp piece I would add if I could have one more. My answer is (if I were to have only a little money) a white version of “Star” of 1956 or (if I were to have a lot of money) the unique white marble of 1949 called “Silent.” Every time I see a picture of “Silent” I am stupefied by this Transcendent marriage of Being & Nothingness taking place beyond the Clouds of Reason in the Realm of Dreams. In the visual language of traditional figuration, nonduality often is pictured as the Androgyne, or the Double-Serpent, or Shiva-Shakti. In an abstract form such as “Silent” IS+IS NOT are united in perfect balance without any additional narrative picturing.

P.S. In the interest of “full disclosure,” I hereby confess that the modern sculptors of the early 20th century I love most are Arp and Brancusi. [For a poem I wrote about them both CLICK HERE.]

 

DALI
The Last Supper (painted 1955)
Original Lithograph, 1969 [Hand Signed]
Collection: CSUEB. Gift of IAD
Published in GLOBAL VISION, PART 1, 2006

NOTE: Salvador Dali is the best-known painter-printmaker of the Surrealist circle. In a museum filled with Old Masters, many are surprised to learn that Dali’s “The Last Supper” is the most visited painting in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. For two of my conversations with Dali CLICK HERE.]

 

DALI
And they Crucified Him, 1964
Original Lithograph, 1964 [Hand Signed]
Collection: CSUEB. Gift of IAD
Published in GLOBAL VISION, PART 1, 2006 

 

 

ERNST
Loplop Introduces members of the Surrealist Circle …

ERNST
Original pages from UNE SEMAINE DE BONTE
{A WEEK OF KINDNESS}, 1934
Two pages of collage lithographs
[The four-volume set is Hand Signed]
Exhibited in THE ART OF THE BOOK: THE MODERN LIVRE D’ARTISTE, University Art Gallery, CSUEB, 1999
Published in GLOBAL VISION, Part 1, 2006

NOTE: These pages are from one of his best-known graphic novels. These illustrated books have a wide influence on many artists in the Surrealist circle. In fact, the early Surrealists in Paris were not sure their verbal art could ever be a visual art. Ernst arrived from German taught them that it could be with his brilliant collages. {For my work with Ernst and his wife Dorothea Tanning CLICK HERE.]

 

ERNST
Feathered Androgyne, 1934
Book plate from UNE SEMAINE DE BONTE, 1934
Collection: IAD. Gift of Max Ernst, 1967
Exhibited: “Impossible Realities: Marcel Duchamp & the Surrealist Tradition,” Norton Simon Museum, 1991; and “The Art of the Book: The Modern Livre d’Artiste,” University Art Gallery, CSUEB, 1999

 

HAYTER
Apocalypse (Spanish Civil War), 1937
Original engraving in L’APOCALYPSE by Hugnet, 1937
[Plate Signed]
Collection: FLG
Gift of the Artist, 1985
Exhibited in THE ART OF THE BOOK: THE MODERN LIVRE D’ARTISTE, University Art Gallery, CSUEB, 1999

 

NOTE: William Stanley Hayter was the most important British painter-printmaker in the Paris Surrealist circle and later an Abstract Expressionist. He also was an articulate author and a beloved teacher. In Paris during the ‘30s, he taught many Surrealists how to make prints. In New York during the ‘40s, he taught a number of young painters how to make prints, e.g., Pollock, de Kooning, and Rothko. [For my conversations with Hayter CLICK HERE]

MAGRITTE
The Indiscrete Jewels, 1963
Original lithograph. [Plate Signed]
Collection: FLG on loan to IAD
Published in GLOBAL VISION, PART 1, 2006

NOTE: Réné Magritte was the most important Belgian artist in the Surrealist circle. A signed & numbered impression of this print is on the cover of the catalogue raisonné (1982). This is the only lithograph he made that was not based on one of his paintings.

 

MAGRITTE
The Rape, 1963
Original Lithograph [Plate Signed]
Collection: CSUEB. Gift of IAD
Published in GLOBAL VISION, PART 1, 2006

 

 

 

MIRO (after)
Dawn Perfumed by a Shower of Gold (painted 1954)
Postcard edition by SFMoMA
Collection: FLG

NOTE: Joan Miró remains the most widely respected painter of the Surrealist circle. Dali is better-known by the gereral public, but is less respected in professional circles. Dali did some amazing paintings. He also did a lot of junk. The figure in this painting is an Androgyne, which was a common mythic symbol in the paintings and prints of Symbolism and later of Dada and Surrealism. For my book of the subject, see DUCHAMP & ANDROGYNY: ART, GENDER, AND METAPHYSICS, 2003 {CLICK HERE}

The deep commitment of Miró to spirituality is well known to those who have read his poems and statements, for example he said it is good to “…find the religious essence, the mahic meaning of things.” I had learned something about the particular structure of his metaphysics from his good friend Soulages; but I wanted to know more about his psychodynamics. So I spoke with Magit Rowell who had recently edited JOAN MIRO: SELECTED WRITINGS AND INTERVIEWS (1986):

LG: What were Miró’s thoughts on the ego?

MR: Much like those of Mallarmé, stepping out of the little self into the big universe.

Here is how she quoted Mallarmé in her Miró book:

I am now impersonal, a potential in which the Spiritual Universe may see itself reflected and may develop through what was once my self.

 Miró would speak of a comparable anonymity… .

Anonymity allows me to renounce myself but in renouncing myself, I come to affirm myself more strongly… . The same practice makes me seek…the infinite in the finite.

 

 

 

 

 

MIRO
Untitled (engraved [printed?] 1958)
Facsimile woodcut (#15), one of the 79 woodcuts
in A TOUTE EPREUVE {READY FOR ANYTHING} by Eluard
Facsimile edition by Cramer, 1987
Collection: FLG
Exhibited in THE ART OF THE BOOK: THE MODERN LIVRE D’ARTISTE, University Art Gallery, CSUEB, 1999

NOTE: This is widely considered one of the greatest books of the 20th century. During a period of 11 years, Miró made over 200 woodcuts for this project. Paperback edition: 1997

MIRO
Yellow
original lithograph in DLM, 1961
Edition by Maeght
Collection: Unknown

MIRO
Trace Sur l’Eau {Traced on Water}, 1963
Original Lithograph on the cover of a portfolio of facsimile prints
of watercolors on onion skin paper
Collection: FLG

 

TANNING
Untitled, 1964
Original Lithograph
Collection: CSUEB. Gift of IAD
Published in GLOBAL VISION, PART 1, 2006

NOTE: Dorothea Tanning, an American, was one of the most gifted women painters in the Surrealist circle. She also was the wife of Max Ernst. [For some of my correspondance with Dorothea CLICK HERE.]

 

 

 

 

CORNELL
SURREALISM by Julian Levy, 1936
Original Book Cover
Collection: FLG on load to IAD
Gift of Julian Levy, 1967
Published in GLOBAL VISION, PART 1, 2006

NOTE: Joseph Cornell was the most famous American Surrealist. His primary medium was the shadow-box, but he also produced many graphic works. Levy was the primary New York dealer promoting Surrealist artists during the ‘30s & ‘40s. For my research on Levy and Modern chess sets, and some of our correspondence CLICK HERE.]

 

 

GIACOMETTI
Untitled [sketch for a Tall Man], 1961
Original Lithograph in DLM #127, 1971
Collection: FLG

NOTE: Alberti Giacometti began as a Surrealist sculptor. For examples, CLICK HERE <link to Modern Sculpture page>. After World War II (1939-45) he became famous for his tall, very thin figures that for many symbolize the Existential Condition. When my daughter asked me to explain Existentialism, I showed her this print and photographs of his sculpture, and wrote this interpretive poem for her:

Existential Man
(Homage to Giacometti)

I wander through

the streets of life

wondering who I am

and why I’m here at all.

There is no mythology

to give meaning

to my moments.

As there is no God

and I have no special feeling

for anyone else,

is it any wonder

that what I usually feel

is anxiety, uncertainty, and alone-ness?

I hover between

Being and Nothingness

not sure which side I’m on.

So, you see,

my height is a mask

that hides my emptiness.

I am not really

standing tall.

I think I really am

No-thing at all.

 

 end of Surrealism xxxxxx

 

EUROPEAN MASTERS – 20TH CENTURY – Late Modern

 

 

 

 

SOULAGES
Lithograph 20A, 1969
Original lithograph
Collection: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
{Acquired at the recommendation of FLG}

NOTE: Pierre Soulages was (and still is) the best-known French painter-printmaker of the Abstract Expressionist era. Indeed, he probably still is the most famous artist in France. The Americans of the Ab. Ex. era favored rapidly brushed, highly energetic compositions. The strokes of Soulages are slow and smooth. It was a special pleasure to converse with him about his influences (such as Zen and his friend Miró), and his metaphysics, when he invited me to dinner in Paris in the summer of 1985. The heart of what we discussed I published in THE SPONTANEOUS GESTURE: PRINTS & BOOKS OF THE ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONST ERA (1987).
We spent a good deal of time working together to polish translations of his statements into English, extremely subtle statements involving luminous Nothingness. His English is not perfect, and my French is a long way from what it once was; but we finally ended up with lines for publication that felt good to both of us. Here is one of his statements:
We Modern painters are not painting the forms that you see on the canvas, or the marks you see on the paper of a print. We are painting the light that radiates up through all that, from the other side.”
In short, as with so many major artists of this era, the csubject matter of Soulages is luminosity, Transcendent luminosity, or what he described in a shorter phrases as:

The radiance – the luminosity of the infinite.

 And:

 The light that shines up from underneath matter.

When the subject-matter of an Abstract Expressionist painting or print is not Transcendent, the composition can be as empty as wallpaper. [For one of the letters Pierre and I exchanged, CLICK HERE]

 

 

 

TAPIES
Untitled [Cover of DERRIERE LE MIROIR #210], 1974
Original lithograph
Collection: FLG

NOTE: Antoni Tapies was widely regarded as the most important Spanish painter of the postwar era. He is Catalonian, from Barceloan. It is curious that most of the greatest Spanish artists of the 20th century are not simply Spanish but Catalán: Dali, Miró, and Tapies. Even Picasso spent his formative years in Barcelona. What is it about Catalonia?

Tapies started under the influence of Surrealism, inspired by Miró. He moved on in the mid ‘50s to a lifetime of mysterious “scratchings” that often look like grafetti on a wall, and/or strange signs from an unknown language. Some works have the flavor of Abstract Expressionism, but many are encrusted with objects and other bits of matter – sometimes in a Neo-Dada manner. Some see this mixed image as spiritual fluidity wounded by the ugliness of the hard Spanish street life he knew well and brutal memories of the Spanish Civil War. The critic John Russel described his scrapped and carved canvases as: “not so much painted as excavated from an idiosyncratic compound of mud, sand, earth, dried blood and powdered minerals.”

Tapies never wished to “explain” his work. However, Tapies did say that he was working in the tradition of the sacred, and noted that “we are losing our sense of the eternal.” He also said he was trying to return painting to what he called “origins.”

 

INDIANA
Love,1966 (2000)
Authorized Multiple; aluminum
Collection: FLG on loan to IAD
Published in GLOBAL VISION: A SURVEY OF WORLD ART, Part 1, 2006

NOTE: Robert Indiana was one of the Pop Artists of the 1960s. This image of LOVE became his most famous work, in paintings, prints, large-scale sculpture, and as a desktop multiple. It became an icon of the age. Like a print or a sculptural cast in a limited edition, a 3-D Multiple is a type of “multiple original.” Each one is more or less identical to all the others, and they all are “original.” Inspired by Duchamp, Multiples were made by many famous Postmodern artists during the ’60s and ’70s and afterwards. Many Multiples fall under the category of Desk Art because they usually are small and sit on desks. Duchamp’s legendary objects usually were limited editions. Inspired by the democratic impulse that has been common in Postmodernism, most Postmodern Multiples are not “limited editions” but rather “open editions” which means any number can be made. Indiana’s “LOVE” is probably the best-known Multiple of all time. Its iconic design began as a Christmas Card in the MoMA store in 1965. I played a tiny role in helping the design into production. I happened to be in the store when the manager was considering producing Indiana’s design. (I was looking for a job there.) She asked me what I thought of the design, and I said: “I think it’s great. Publish it!”

 

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VOL 7  PHOTOGRAPHS

 

MILLER
Joseph Cornell with a Yacht Model by Lee Miller, 1933
Photograph. Collection: Norton Simon Museum.
Gift of IAD Published in IMPOSSIBLE REALITIES:
MARCEL DUCHAMP & THE SURREALIST TRADITION, 1991

 

 

SOMMER
Max Ernst in Sedona (1946)
Photo-offset lithograph, 1960s. Collection: FLG on loan to IAD.
Gift of Frederick Sommer, 1989
Published in GLOBAL VISION: A SURVEY OF WORLD ART, Part 1, 2006

NOTE: Frederick Sommer was one of the most important Surrealist artists in the U.S. He was the only artist from the United States to be included in the last great Surrealist exhibition in Paris in 1947. Sommer was a friend and neighbor of Ernst and Tanning in Arizona where he made this haunting portrait of Ernst using a rare double-exposure.

 

MICHALS
Illuminated Man, 1968
Photo-offset lithograph. Collection: FLG on loan to IAD
Published in GLOBAL VISION: A SURVEY OF WORLD ART, Part 1, 2006

NOTE: Duane Michals was an American photographer who worked under the influence of Surrealism and Buddhism. He deeply admired Magritte whom he photographed in a series of remarkable portraits. ‘Illuminated Man’ one of his most famous works was inspired by a Magritte painting showing a man with a similarly luminous head. Michals a longtime student of spiritual traditions intended this powerful image to be a visual metaphor for enlightened consciousness and reminds us that everyone has this potential.

 

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VOL 8  ASIAN PAINTINGS & MANDALAS

 

INDIA

Yoni-Linga and Snakes. c. 1900-1999
Paper: (Color: Cow Dung?) Painting India India. IAD

NOTE: At the center of this composition is the image of a Yoni-Linga one of the most revered icons in Hinduism. Early forms appear in the Indus Valley during the Bronze Age. Tiny shrines with such objects at their center can be found by the thousands all over the Indian countryside today. The larger temples also are usually centered on this simple but profound form. The image combines a semi-abstract form representing Shiva the “male energy” of origination and a semi-abstract form representing Shakti the ‘female energy’ of generation. The two energies are perceived as aspects of each other interacting continuously. Linga means phallus. Yoni means vagina. Here the physical act of sexual union is used as a symbol for the metaphysics of Hindu theology. To the faithful this image is more than a symbol. It is a living reality a transcendent reality worthy of worship. Male scholars name this icon a Shiva Linga but that is only partly accurate because the Goddess is equally present. A better name would be Linga-Yoni or Yoni-Linga. This painting is a traditional tribal vision of the invisible forces at work around a Yoni-Linga. It was recently painted by women of the Mithila region near Madhubani in Northern India next to Nepal. In popular mythology the Shiva serpents bring fertility. Esoterically the dynamic ‘serpent energy’ pictured here in a symbolic way corresponds to the esoteric teachings of Kundalini yoga which state the subtle energy that rises up a pathway parallel to the spine is like serpents that pass through each chakra on the way to the Liberation of consciousness.

C.Lingam-Yoni: Reflections on Nonduality

Kali, Mother of the Four Great Gods. Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, and Indra. c. 1900-1999
Paper: Watercolor: Gold Painting Hindu India. IAD

NOTE: Shown here is the Holy Trinity of classic Hinduism: Brahma Vishnu and Shiva. Brahma the Creator of the universe looks in all 4 directions. He is also god of wisdom while his partner Sarasvati is the goddess of wisdom learning and music. He is not to be confused with Brahman the world soul with which every individual soul (atman) seeks to reunite. Blue Vishnu on a lotus is the Preserver of the universe. His partner Lakshmi is beauty. Shiva with a snake is the Destroyer of the universe. Shiva’s partner Uma is perishable matter. The activities of the Holy Trinity are all happening all the time. The main point of this image is that Kali (in the birth giving position with her necklace of skulls) is the mother of them all. Such a theology is a continuation of the Stone Age and Bronze Age traditions of the Great Goddess ‘Giver & Taker of All’ before the male principle became dominant in India with the arrival of the Indo-Europeans. The fourth god pictured is Indra ‘King of the Gods’ in ancient Vedic mythology with eyes on his body. He appears to have come to India with the Indo Europeans. This modern replica was commissioned from the esteemed artist Shri Kailash Raj who continues the rich tradition of his ancestors. This painting is done in an 18th century style.

D. Ardhanarishvara, the Divine Androgyne of India: A Bibliography of Books

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E.D.G. Sharma & the Living Tradition of Indian Painting

 

 ISLAM

 

Shah Jahan, Emperor of India and builder of the Taj Mahal.
Early 17th century. watercolor
Collection: CSUEB. Gift of IAD

 

VOL 9 ASIAN SCROLLS & CALLIGRAPHY

 

Daruma on the Water. c. 19th century
Paint: Paper Painting Zen Japan. IAD

NOTE: Daruma is the Japanese name of the Buddhist teacher known in China as Bodhidharma. He is considered the 28th Patriarch in a direct line from the historical Buddha. He is thought to have brought a special form of Buddhism to China in the 6th century a form known as Chan in China and later as Zen in Japan. It is said that he arrived by sea rather than by land.

 

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Dragon in the Clouds. c. 19th century
Paint: Paper Painting Edo Japan. IAD

NOTE: No image in Japan or China activates the mythic mind more than the Dragon. Its magical spirit has been articulated in many media but some of the most enduring images have been painted on scrolls such as this one.

 

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Zen Priest with a Flaming Enso (Zen Circle). c. 19th century
Paint: Paper Painting Zen Japan. IAD

NOTE: The enso is a well-known Zen symbol. It is an almost complete circle rendered with a single brushstroke. The white circle worn by Zen monks on their robes is a related symbol. The form of this image has many levels of symbolism including the primal relationship between spirit and matter thingness and nothingness etc. The mode of rendering is itself symbolic of the goal of the Zen path: the fearless- spontaneous fluidity of an Enlightened mind. Young monks might spend many years learning (or un-learning) enough to be spontaneous enough to make an enso which reveals that one’s mind has become totally spontaneous. Then the monk may be qualified to leave the monastery and go out to be of selfless service to the world. This artist shows us the enso in flames. This burning metaphor probably refers to the flaming truth (Dharma) that burns away ego and to the teaching that attachment to all symbols must be burned away even symbols of Buddha. Hence the dramatic Zen saying: ‘If you see Buddha kill him.’

Mountain Colors ~ Buddha Mind brushed by Nantenbo roshi, 1920s (signed)
Calligraphy scroll. Collection: FLG & GKS
Ex. Collection: Professor John Stevens & Shambhala Zen Gallery

 

 

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VOL 10  ASIAN PRINTS

 

JAPAN

 

“Red Fuji” by Hokusai, from VIEWS OF MT. FUJI, 1827.  Old edition

Click here for closer view of above image in PDF format

“The Wave” by Hokusai from VIEWS OF MT. FUJI, 1827.  Modern edition

Click here for closer view of above image in PDF format

“Sudden Shower at Atake” by Hiroshige, from 100 FAMOUS VIEWS OF EDO, 1857.  Old edition

Click here for closer view of above image in PDF format

 

 

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ADDENDA

Portrait of Sri Ramakrishna by Malvina Hoffman. 1952 (signed)
Terracotta. Collection: Vedanta Society of Southern California
Gift of IAD, 2011

NOTE: Ramakrishna is one of the most revered teachers in the modern history of Hinduism. His spiritual son, Vivekananda, played a major role in bringing the ancient tradition of Vedanta to the United States. Hoffman was one of the most widely celebrated sculptors of the early 20th century. Her marble bust of Sri Ramakrishna, commissioned in 1952, stands at the heart of the main altar in the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda temple in New York City. This dynamic terracotta bust, signed by Hoffman, is Hoffman’s study for that marble. At their request, it was donated by IAD to the Vedanta Society of Southern California in Santa Barbara.

 

 

What follows is HOLDING TEXT for future disposition on this page (07/24/2012):

VOL 2  SCULPTURE

 

VOL 2A.1  ANCIENT SCULPTURE / Tribal & Ancient

(Click here for Tribal sculpture)

(Click here for West Asian sculpture)

(Click here for Pre-Columbian sculpture)

VOL 2A.2  ANCIENT SCULPTURE / Minoan & Mycenaean

(Click here to view these topics in Greek & Minoan Studies)

VOL 2A.3  ANCIENT SCULPTURE / Greek

(Click here to view these topics in Greek & Minoan Studies)

VOL 2A.4  ANCIENT SCULPTURE / Roman & Celtic

(Click here to view these topics in Roman Studies)

(Click here to view these topics in Celtic Studies)

VOL 2B.1  EUROPEAN SCULPTURE / Medieval

(Click here to view these topics in Medieval Studies)

VOL 2B.2  EUROPEAN SCULPTURE /Renaissance & Baroque

(Click here to view these topics in Renaissance & Baroque Studies)

VOL 2B.3  EUROPEAN & AMERICAN SCULPTURE / 19th Century

(Click here to view these topics in Modern Studies)

VOL 2B.4  EUROPEAN & AMERICAN SCULPTURE / 20th Century

(Click here to view these topics in Modern Studies)

 

VOL 3  EUROPEAN & AMERICAN SCULPTURE/Decorative Arts

VOL 3a  EUROPEAN Decorative Arts

(Click here)

VOL 3b  AMERICAN Decorative Arts

(Click here)

VOL 4  JEWELRY

VOL 4a  JEWELRY #1 Ancient to Baroque

(Click here)

VOL 4b  JEWELRY #2 19th century

(Click here)

VOL 4c  JEWELRY #3 Art Nouveau

(Click here)

VOL 4d  JEWELRY #4 Modern

(Click here)

VOL 4e  JEWELRY #5 Medals & Decorations

(Click here)

VOL 5  ASIAN SCULPTURE

(Click here to view these topics in Asian Studies)

VOL 5a ASIAN SCULPTURE – India, Gandhara, Tibet, Nepal, S.E. Asia, & Japan

(Click here to view these topics in Asian Studies)

VOL 5b ASIAN SCULPTURE – Stone Age China

(Click here to view these topics in Chinese Studies)

VOL 5c ASIAN SCULPTURE – Buddhist China

(Click here to view these topics in Chinese Studies)

 

Pasted here for possible reference only:

VOL 6C  EUROPEAN Prints / Later 19th century [Should this be “Impressionism”?]

 

INTRODUCTION

Impressionism was the dominant “contemporary” style of painter-printmakers during the second half of the 19th century. The primary bridge-builder whose moved aesthetics away from Renaissance assumptions of space and time and sculptural volume was Manet. He began as a Realist under the influence of Courbet. However, by the 1860s, Manet was flattening his figures to such an extent that they seem to be merely “impressions” of figures. The most famous example is “Olympia.” An important influence on Manet’s thinking may well have been Manet’s good friend Mallarmé. The two saw each other almost every day for years. Mallarmé suggested: “Paint not the thing but the effect it produces.” In other words, do not describe a scene (with many details) but rather render a suggestion or evocation of a scene, or to use Manet’s word: a mere “impression” of a scene. Impressionist pictures (often painted outdoors) are filled with light. The brushstrokes are short, rapid, and energetic, not unlike light waves themselves. The sketch-like character of the compositions often requires that the viewer complete the painting or the print with his or her own mind. Never before was the viewer “required” to participate in the aesthetic moment in quite this way. Even though Manet himself was not an Impressionist, this seems to be where the term and the concept of Impressionism began. Younger painters in “Manet’s gang” such as Renoir and Monet actually invented the pictorial style of Impression together in 1869. The Golden Decade of Impressionism was the 1870s, but some masters such as Monet carried the style with a robust vitality into the 20th century where Impressionism has remained the most popular of all art styles. Why? Because Impressionism is filled with a positive, spontaneous, joyous spirit unmatched in the history of art, and because Impressionism evokes a closeness with the natural world that (alas) has largely disappeared.

Impressionism was the main bridge between traditional art and modern art. After Impressionism came Postimpressionism which is commonly divided into three decades of development. During the 1880s, the First Generation matured. That included Cézanne, Gauguin, and van Gogh. During the 1890s, the Second Generation matured. That included Lautrec, Bonnard, and Munch. During the first decade of the 20th century, the Third Generation matured. That included Matisse and the Fauves in France, and the German-speaking Expressionists. All three generations stayed within Renaissance assumptions of perspective and gravity but they bent the edges of these rules. They consistently made figures that are more symbolic than realistic, and colors that are more symbolic than realistic. Moreover, they moved the background and the foreground towards each other so that there often is a flat “picture plane” rather than the usual deep visual recession of pictorial space. The common goal of all three generations of Postimpressionists was to picture not external visual realities but rather internal emotional realities.

At the end of the 19th century, there was another movement in the visual arts that has come to be called Symbolism. It is closely related to Art Nouveau in the decorative arts. Art Nouveau was a way of working that is also given to explosions of fantasy. One of the most famous practitioners of Symbolism was the painter-printmaker Redon. In a way that anticipates Surrealism, the Symbolists looked away from the ordinary world of visible reality and pictured their dreams.