Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Late 19th-century French Painting

James Tissot
The Fan
ca. 1875
oil on canvas
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut

Paul Cézanne
House in the country
ca. 1877-79
canvas
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut

Edgar Degas
Before the curtain-rise
ca. 1892
pastel
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut

The green-tinted singer by Edgar Degas "dramatically foreshortened from above" was one of the artist's late-career "finished pastels made for sale."  These began as life drawings made in the presence either of actual performers or of posed models. Degas accumulated an enormous collection of such drawings. Elements combined from several would then contribute to the more extrovert pastels in "incandescent hues"  among the diminishing number of works in the nineties actually intended to leave the studio and be sold.

Henri Fantin-Latour
Madame Leopold Gravier
1889
oil on canvas
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut

Henri Fantin-Latour
The Reading
1870
canvas
Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon

Henri Le Sidaner
Façade at twilight
1897
oil on canvas
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut

Camille Pissarro
Rue Saint-Honoré, effect of rain
1897
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen Bornemisza, Madrid

Gustave Caillebotte
On the Pont de l'Europe
1876-77
canvas
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth

Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) befriended the Parisian Impressionists and bought their paintings, but showed his own work at the official Salon, where they could not. On the Pont de l'Europe (above) parades its rigid formality. Curators at the Kimbell Art Museum point out that in addition to identically dressed figures and monochrome blue tonality, "Caillebotte has adopted the geometric structure of the bridge, one pier of which bisects his picture vertically into two arched bays, these each subdivided by diagonal cross-bracing struts." Fortunately, Caillebotte could also evade industrial modernism, as below.

Gustave Caillebotte
Riverbank in morning haze
1875
oil on canvas
private collection

Gustave Caillebotte
Bathers in the Yerre
1878
canvas
private collection

Carolus Duran
Portrait of Anna Alexandrovna Obolenskaya
1887
canvas
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Puvis de Chavannes
Young women on a seashore
1879
oil on canvas
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Puvis de Chavannes
Shepherd's song
1881
oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Woman with parasol in a garden
1873
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen Bornemisza, Madrid

"Painting arose from the mixing of colors and  at moments when aesthetic warmth brought about a flowering  turned color into a chaotic mix, so that it was objects as such which served as the pictorial framework for the great painters. I found that the closer one came to the culture of painting, the more the frameworks (i.e. objects) lost their systematic nature and broke up, thus establishing a different order governed by painting."

 Kazimir Malevich, writing in the catalogue of the 10th State Exhibition, Moscow (1919) translated by Alexander Lieven