Читать книгу Claude Monet. Volume 1 - Nina Kalitina - Страница 7

Bonington spent a large part of his life in France, where he studied with Gros and was close to Delacroix. Bonington depicted the landscapes of Normandy and the Île-de-France, locations where all the Impressionists would much later paint. The Impressionists were probably also familiar with the work of the English painter John Constable, from whom they may have learned how to appreciate both the integrity of landscape and the expressive power of painterly brushwork.

Constable’s finished paintings retain the characteristics of their sketches and the fresh colour of studies done after nature. And the Impressionists surely knew the work of Joseph Mallord William Turner, acknowledged leader of the English landscape school for sixty years until 1851. Turner depicted atmospheric effects. Fog, the haze at sunset, steam billowing from a locomotive, or a simple cloud became motifs in and of themselves.

His watercolour series entitled Rivers of France commenced a painterly ode to the Seine that the Impressionists would later take up, and included a landscape with Rouen Cathedral that was a predecessor of Monet’s own Rouen Cathedral series.

Professors at the École des Beaux-Arts in mid-19^th-century Paris were still teaching the historical landscape based on the ideal models created in 17^th-century France by Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. The Impressionists, however, were not the first to rebel against clichéd themes and to stand up for truth in painting.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir told his son of a strange encounter he had in 1863 in Fontainebleau forest. For whatever reason, a group of young ruffians did not like the look of Renoir, who was painting directly from nature dressed in his painter’s smock:

With a single kick, one of them knocked the palette out of Renoir’s hands and caused him to fall to the ground. The girls struck him with a parasol (“in my face, with the steel-tipped end; they could have put my eyes out!”). Suddenly, emerging from the bushes, a man appeared. He was about fifty years old, tall and strong, and he too was laden with painting paraphernalia. He also had a wooden leg and held a heavy cane in his hand. The newcomer dropped his things and rushed to the rescue of his young fellow painter. Swinging his cane and his wooden leg, he quickly scattered the attackers. My father was able to get up off the ground and join the fight… In no time the two painters had successfully stood their ground. Oblivious to the gratitude coming from the person he had just saved, the one-legged man picked up the fallen canvas and looked at it attentively. “Not bad at all. You are gifted, very gifted.” The two men sat down on the grass, and Renoir spoke of his life and modest ambitions. Eventually the stranger introduced himself. It was Díaz.

Narcisse Virgile Díaz de la Peña belonged to a group of landscape painters known as the Barbizon school. The Barbizon painters came from a generation of artists born between the first and second decades of the 19^th century. Almost fifty years separated them from the Impressionists.

The Barbizon painters had been the first to paint landscapes after nature. It was only fitting that Renoir met Díaz in Fontainebleau forest. The young painters of the Barbizon school were making traditional classical landscapes, but by the 1830s this activity no longer satisfied them. The Parisian Théodore Rousseau had fallen in love with landscape in his youth while travelling throughout France with his father.

Camille, or The Woman in a Green Dress, 1866.

Oil on canvas, 231 × 151 cm. Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen.

The Luncheon, 1868. Oil on canvas, 232 × 151 cm.

Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main.

According to his biographer: “One day, on his own and without telling anyone, he purchased paints and brushes and went to the hill of Montmartre, at the foot of the old church that carried the aerial telegraph tower, and there he began to paint what he saw before him: the monument, the cemetery, the trees, the walls, and terrain that rose up there. In a few days, he finished a solid detailed study with a very natural tonality. This was the sign of his vocation.”

Rousseau began painting ‘what he saw before him’ in Normandy, in the mountains of the Auvergne, in Saint-Cloud, Sèvres, and Meudon. His first brush with fame was the Salon of 1833, well before the birth of the future Impressionists, when his View on the Outskirts of Granville caused a sensation due to its focus on a mediocre, rustic motif.

A contemporary critic wrote that this landscape “is among the most realistic and warmest in tone of anything the French school has ever produced”. Rousseau had discovered a sleepy little village called Barbizon at the entrance of the forest of Fontainebleau. There he was joined by his friend Jules Dupré and the aforementioned Spanish painter Narcisse Díaz de la Peña.

Another of Rousseau’s painter friends who often worked at Barbizon was Constant Troyon. In the late 1840s, Jean-François Millet, known for his paintings of the French peasantry, moved to Barbizon with his large family. Thus was born the group of landscape painters that came to be known as the Barbizon school. However, these landscape artists only executed studies in the forest and fields, from which they subsequently composed their paintings in the studio.

Charles-François Daubigny, who also sometimes worked at Barbizon, took the idea further than the others. He established himself at Auvers on the banks of the Oise and built a studio-barge he called the Bottin. Then the painter sailed the river, stopping wherever he wished to paint the motif directly before him. This working method enabled him to give up traditional composition and to base his colour on the observation of nature. Daubigny would later support the future Impressionists when he was a jury member of the Salon.

But Camille Corot was perhaps the closest to the Impressionists. He was living in the village of Ville d’Avray near Paris. With characteristic spontaneity, Corot painted the ponds near his house, the reflection of weeping willows in their water, and the shaded paths that led into the forest. Even if his landscapes evoked memories of Italy, Ville-d’Avray was recognisable.

No one was more sensitive to nature than Corot. Within the range of a simple grey-green palette he produced the subtlest gradations of shadow and light. In Corot’s painting, colour played a minor role; its luminosity created a misty, atmospheric effect and a sad, lyrical mood. All these characteristics gave his landscapes the quality of visual reality and movement to which the Impressionists aspired.

Jar of Peaches, c. 1866. Oil on canvas, 55.5 × 46 cm.

Gemäldegalerie Neue Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Dresden.

Train in the Snow, the Locomotive, 1875.

Oil on canvas, 59 × 78 cm. Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris.

Madame Louis Joachim Gaudibert, 1868.

Oil on canvas, 216.5 × 138.5 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Among the eldest of the Impressionists’ contemporaries were two masters who played a fundamental role in the elaboration of their idea of painting. They were Eugène Delacroix and Gustave Courbet.

Delacroix showed them that colour could be used to paint shadows, that a colour changed in relation to the colour next to it, and that white did not exist in nature, as it is always tinged with reflections. Of course, the future Impressionists could have observed all that in certain works by the old masters from whom Delacroix had learned, such as Titian, Veronese, and Rubens, but Delacroix was a part of their own world and his painting was still creating controversy. The great battle between the Romantics and the Neo-classicists was not over yet. At one point Monet and Bazille even rented a studio near Delacroix’s residence on Place Fürstenberg where they could see him in his garden.

Delacroix taught them to see the richness of colour in nature. As Bazille wrote to his parents about Delacroix: “You will not believe how I am learning to see in his paintings; one of these sessions is worth a month of work.” The Impressionists also encountered the art of Gustave Courbet, the ‘Realist’ painting contemporary life and fighting the conventions of Neo-classicism. Courbet often used a palette knife instead of a paintbrush to lay thick strokes of paint on canvas, demonstrating a degree of freedom in paint handling that had never been seen before.

Under all these influences, Impressionist painting was taking form, bit by bit. The future Impressionists believed they were making a clean break with academic painting when they left Gleyre’s studio.

Eleven years later, they were developing a new concept of painting as they worked en plein-air (in the open air). The time had come to announce this concept, as well as their independence from official art, and to show their canvasses in the context of their own exhibition.

But organising such an event was not as easy as one might think.

Up until then, there was only one venue for exhibiting contemporary art in France: the Salon. Founded in the 17^th century during the reign of Louis XIV by his prime minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the exhibition was inaugurated in the Louvre’s Salon carré, hence its name.

Beginning in 1747, the Salon was held biennially in different locations. By the time the future Impressionists appeared on the stage of art, the Salon boasted a two-hundred-year history.

The Red Kerchief, c. 1868–1873. Oil on canvas, 99 × 79.8 cm.

The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland.

Still Life with Flowers and Fruit, 1869. Oil on canvas,

100 × 80 cm. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

Obviously every painter wanted to exhibit in the Salon, because it was the only way to become known and consequently, to be able to sell paintings. But it was hard to get admitted.

A critical jury made up of teachers from the École des Beaux-Arts selected the works for the exhibition. The Académie des Beaux-Arts (one of the five Academies of the Institut de France) picked the teachers for the jury from among its own members. Furthermore, the teachers in charge of selecting the Salon’s paintings and sculptures would be choosing works made by the same artists they had as students. It was not unusual to see jury members haggling amongst themselves for the right to have the work of their own students admitted.

The Salon’s precepts were extremely rigid and remained essentially unchanged throughout its entire existence.

Traditional genres reigned and scenes taken from Greek mythology or the Bible were in accordance with the themes imposed on the Salon at its inception; only the individual scenes changed according to fashion. Portraiture retained its customary affected look and landscapes had to be ‘composed’, in other words, conceived from the artist’s imagination.

Idealised nature, whether it concerned the female nude, portraiture, or landscape painting, was still a permanent condition of acceptance. The jury sought a high degree of professionalism in composition, drawing, anatomy, linear perspective, and pictorial technique.

An irreproachably smooth surface, created with miniscule brushwork almost indiscernible to the eye, was the standard finish required for admission to the competition.

There was no place in the Salon for the everyday reality young painters were anxious to explore. Finally, there was another, unformulated requirement: the paintings had to appeal to the potential buyers for whom they were made.

The victorious revolution at the end of the 18^th century had given rise to a class of nouveaux riches. Former boutique owners who had profited from the revolution built luxurious townhouses in Paris, bought jewels from the most expensive stores on the Rue de la Paix, and bought no less expensive paintings from celebrated Salon painters.

The newly rich had questionable tastes that required some getting used to. It was precisely in the second half of the 19^th century that the term ‘Salon painter’ became pejorative, implying a lack of principles and venality, the sort of eagerness to please that was indispensable for commercial success.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Bathing on the Seine (La Grenouillère), 1868.

Oil on canvas, 59 × 80 cm. Pushkin Museum, Moscow.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, La Grenouillère, 1869.

Oil on canvas, 66.5 × 81 cm. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

La Grenouillère, 1869. Oil on canvas, 74.6 × 99.7 cm.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Wharf of the Louvre, 1867. Oil on canvas, 96.7 × 124.5 cm.

Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague.

The very fact of admission to the Salon demonstrated extreme professionalism on the part of the painter and under these circumstances changing his manner of painting and his style was no great feat. It was not unusual to find a Neo-classical composition next to a canvas painted in the spirit of Romanticism by the same artist. It was nevertheless a matter of honour for the Salon to retain its prestige and consequently, to maintain the spirit of Classicism upon which it had been based up until then.

Salon favourites were derisively called pompiers (firemen). The contemporary meaning of this word has been lost over time. It may have stemmed from the constant presence of real firemen in the rooms of the Salon, or it may have been that the shiny headgear of the antique warriors in Salon paintings made one think of firemen.

Or perhaps pompier was an echo of the French word for Pompeii (Pompéi), as the Pompeian lifestyle was frequently depicted in the Salon’s antique compositions. One story attributes the origin of the term to the famous phrase by the academician Gérôme, who said that it was easier to be an arsonist than a fireman. By that the honourable professor meant artists like himself fulfilled the difficult and noble duty of firemen, whereas those who one way or another attacked the foundations of the Salon and the classical ideal of art, naturally seemed like arsonists.

The four former pupils of Gleyre, along with Pissarro who had joined them, consciously took the side of the arsonists. Academic stagnation was already inspiring protest among artists.

Even the great Ingres, an Academy member and professor of painting for whom the defence of Classicism was a matter of honour, was saying that the Salon was perverting and suffocating the artist’s sense of grandeur and beauty. Ingres saw that exhibiting in the Salon awakened an interest in financial gain, the desire to achieve recognition at any cost, and that the Salon itself was changing into a sales room by selling paintings in a market inundated with items for sale, instead of a place where art dominated commerce. Moreover, too many artists remained outside of the exhibit, either because of professional mediocrity or because they failed to meet the criteria of Neo-classical painting.

In 1855, only 2,000 out of 8,000 submissions were accepted for the Salon that coincided with the World Exposition. Gustave Courbet’s best work was rejected, including his famous Burial at Ornans.

Entrance to the Port of Trouville, 1870.

Oil on canvas, 54 × 65.7 cm. Szépművészeti Múzeum, Budapest.

The Beach at Trouville, 1870. Oil on canvas, 53.5 × 65 cm.

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford (Connecticut).

Jury members felt that his artistic leanings would have a fatal effect on French art. Indeed, Courbet was the first serious arsonist. He wrote in the catalogue to his individual exhibition:

I have studied the art of the ancients and moderns outside of the system and without taking part in it. I no more wanted to imitate the one than I wanted to copy the other…No! From a full awareness of tradition I simply wanted to draw the intelligent and independent feeling of my own individuality. To know how to, in order to be able to: such was my thinking. To be able to translate the values, ideas, and reality of my time, according to my own understanding; in short, to make a living art, that is my goal.

This statement by Courbet could have just as easily been made by the Impressionists, because, although using somewhat different means, all these artists aspired to the same goal. Each of the future Impressionists tried, with mixed results, to get into the Salon. In 1864, Pissarro and Renoir were lucky enough to be admitted, although Renoir’s accepted painting, Esmeralda, was considered a critical failure for the artist, who destroyed it as soon as the Salon closed. In 1865, paintings by Pissarro, Renoir, and Monet were accepted. In 1866, all the Impressionists – Monet, Bazille, Renoir, Sisley, and Pissarro – had their works accepted.

Pissarro was singled out in a review of the Salon by the young literary figure Émile Zola. Zola wrote that nobody would talk about Pissarro because he was unknown and that nobody liked his painting because he strove for Realism. It is possible that the future Impressionists sometimes got their paintings into the Salon simply because nobody knew who they were yet.

The jury of 1867 was harsh towards the young painters: Bazille was rejected and among the many paintings submitted by Monet, only one was selected. Zola, who typically focused on young artists in his reviews (as if he had failed to notice the academic paintings), wrote to a friend that the jury, annoyed by his ‘Salon’, had closed its doors to all those seeking new artistic paths. The Salon of 1868 nevertheless showed works by all five future Impressionists. Even so, all of them felt an increasing desire to exhibit outside of the Salon.

The idea of having a separate exhibition probably came from Courbet’s example. He was the first to actually do it. In 1865, he hastily set up a shelter on the Champs-Elysées near the World Exposition with a sign that read “Pavilion of Realism”, sparking strong interest among the public. “People pay money to go to the theatre and concerts,” said Courbet, “don’t my paintings provide entertainment? I have never sought to live off the favour of governments…I only appeal to the public”. The future Impressionists wanted to attract attention, too. Even when they found their way into the Salon, their modest little landscapes were only noticed by their close friends.

Hôtel des roches noires. Trouville, 1870.

Oil on canvas, 81 × 58.5 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Garden at Sainte-Adresse, 1867. Oil on canvas, 98.1 × 129.9 cm.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The Beach at Sainte-Adresse, 1867.

Oil on canvas, 75.8 × 102.5 cm. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.

Garden of the Princess, Louvre (Le Jardin de l’Infante), 1867.

Oil on canvas, 91.8 × 61.9 cm. Allen Memorial

Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin (Ohio).

In April 1867, Frédéric Bazille wrote to his parents: “We’ve decided to rent a large studio every year where we’ll exhibit as many of our works as we want. We’ll invite the painters we like to send paintings. Courbet, Corot, Díaz, Daubigny, and many others… have promised to send us paintings and very much like our idea. With those painters, and Monet, who is the strongest of all, we’re sure to succeed. You’ll see, people are going to be talking about us.”

Organising an exhibition turned out to be no simple matter – it required money and contacts.

One month later, Bazille wrote to his father:

I told you about the project of a few young men having an independent exhibit. After thoroughly exhausting our resources, we’ve succeeded in collecting a sum of 2,500 francs, which is insufficient. We’re thus forced to give up on what we wanted to do. We must return to the bosom of officialdom, which never nourished us and which renounces us.

In the spring of 1867, Courbet and Édouard Manet each had their own solo exhibitions, after the Salon’s jury refused the paintings that they wanted to display there. Inspired by these examples, the future Impressionists never abandoned the idea of an independent exhibition, but left it to slowly ripen as they continued to work.

Friends of the artists worried about the consequences of such an exhibit. The famous critic Théodore Duret advised them to continue seeking success at the Salon. He felt that it would be impossible for them to achieve fame through group exhibitions: the public largely ignored such shows, which were only attended by the artists and the admirers who already knew them.

Duret suggested that they select their most finished works for the Salon, works with a subject, traditional composition, and colour that was not too pure: in short, that they find a compromise with official art. He thought the only way they could cause a stir and attract the attention of the public and critics was at the Salon.

Some of the future Impressionists did endeavour to compromise. In 1873, Renoir painted a huge canvas entitled, Riding in the Bois de Boulogne, which claimed the status of an elevated society portrait. The jury rejected the painting and Renoir displayed it in the Salon des Refusés, which had reopened in 1863.

When the time came to organise the first Impressionist exhibition, Bazille was no longer with the group, having died in 1870 in the Franco-German war, so the bold and determined Monet assumed leadership of the young painters. In his opinion they had to create a sensation and achieve success through an independent exhibition, and the others agreed with him.

Sainte-Adresse, 1867. Oil on canvas, 57 × 80 cm.

Gift of Catherine Gamble Curran and family, in honour of the 50^th anniversary of the National Gallery of Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

The Seine at Bougival, 1869. Oil on canvas, 65.4 × 92.4 cm.

Currier Museum of Art, Manchester (New Hampshire).

Exhibiting on their own nevertheless was a little frightening and they tried to invite as many of their friends as possible. In the end, the group of artists exhibiting turned out to be a varied bunch. In addition to a few adherents of the new painting, others joined in who painted in a far different style. Edgar Degas, who joined the group at this moment, proved to be especially active when it came to recruiting participants for the exhibition.

He succeeded in attracting his friends, the sculptor Ludovic-Napoléon Lepic and the engraver Giuseppe de Nittis, both very popular Salon artists. Degas also actively tried to persuade top society painter James Tissot and his friend Alphonse Legros (who was living in London) to join their cause, but was unsuccessful. At the invitation of Pissarro, they were joined by an employee of the Orleans railroad company who was painting plein-air landscapes named Armand Guillaumin. Paul Cézanne travelled to the exhibition from his native town of Aix-en-Provence, also at Pissarro’s invitation.

The young Cézanne had broken with official painting in his earliest works, but he no longer shared the Impressionists’ outlook on art. His participation may have aroused the concern of Édouard Manet, who definitely had been invited. According to his contemporaries, Manet said that he would never exhibit alongside Cézanne. But Manet may have simply preferred a different path. According to Monet, Manet encouraged Monet and Renoir to continue in their attempts to conquer the Salon. Manet found the Salon to be the best battlefield.

In Degas’ opinion, Manet was prevented from joining them because of vanity. “The Realist movement doesn’t need to fight with others,” Degas said. “It is, it exists, and it must stand alone. A Realist salon is needed. Manet did not understand that. I believe it was due much more to vanity than to intelligence.”