Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Pre-War European Painting

Georges Dupuis
Notre Dame Embankment, Le Havre
1908
oil on canvas
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Paul Cézanne
Blue Landscape
ca. 1904-06
oil on canvas
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Claude Monet
Waterloo Bridge, Effect of Fog
1903
oil on canvas
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

"Besides this same Harmoge, which draweth different colours into one by an orderly and pleasant confusion, it is furthermore requisite that an Artist should take special care about the extreame or uttermost lines; seeing it was ever held one of the greatest excellencies in these Arts that the unrestrained extremities* of the figures resembled in the worke should be drawne so lightly and so sweetly as to represent unto us things we doe not see: neither can it be otherwise but our eye will alwayes beleeve that behind the figures there is something more to be seene than it seeth, when the lineaments that doe circumscribe, compasse, or include the image are so thinne and fine as to vanish by little and little, and to conveigh themselves quite away out of our sight."

– from Book Three (chapter three) of The Painting of the Ancients by Franciscus Junius, first published in English in 1638  edited by Keith Aldrich, Philipp Fehl and Raina Fel for University of California Press, 1991

"Unrestrained extremities" (indeterminatos terminos) = indistinct outlines. Junius speaks of two methods of achieving this effect: by lines becoming ever finer until they approach "neere to the subtiltie of the imaginarie Geometricall lines" and by a clever blending of colors which suggests a gentle recession into the background. Instead of enclosing images with sharply drawn outlines, artists define their images by colors that model the objects, blending them in such a way that the object's color, which is weaker where it is further away, and the shadow resulting from its shape are unobtrusively and cleverly combined, giving the effect of depth. He also hints here at one of the most engaging charms of traditional pictorial art, namely, that painting allows the viewers to imagine that in the space created by the artist they could, if they wished, also move to see and touch the figures from behind, and even find there other objects obscured by those they do in fact see. In his Latin text, Junius also quotes from a fragment of the Pythagorean Theages that likens this subtle merging to certain functions of the soul.

Charles Guérin
Nude Model
ca. 1910
oil on canvas
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Felice Carena
Roman Landscape
1907
oil on panel
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Maurice Lobre
Dauphin's Salon at Versailles
1901
oil on canvas
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Jean Jovenau
Still-life with Mirror
1912
oil on canvas
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Wassily Kandinsky
Landscape
1913
oil on canvas
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Pablo Picasso
Nude Youth
1906
gouache on cardboard
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Henri Matisse
Game of Bowls
1908
oil on canvas
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Maurice Denis
Sacred Spring at Guidel
ca. 1905
oil on cardboard
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Joaquín Sorolla
Hall of the Ambassadors, Alhambra, Granada
1909
oil on canvas
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Jean Puy
Landscape
1903
oil on canvas
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Henri Rousseau
Monument to Chopin, Luxembourg Gardens, Paris
1909
oil on canvas
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

"Long garments are odious in a little bodie," sayth Symmachus. "That garment is decently put on, which doth not sweep the dust, and is not trampled upon for hanging too much upon the ground."