Art the Painting Techniques of the Impressionists,

Art

The Painting Techniques of the Impressionists, Cubists, and Fauvists

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries art styles were changing rapidly in France. Impressionism, Cubism, and Fauvism were three of the styles developed during this time. The painters involved were using new techniques with oil paint to change what was accepted as fine art. Their new techniques reflected societal changes happening all around them. The Age of Industrialization, economic fears, and Romantic ideology had mixed together to form a perfect storm of revolution all over Europe. The "old world" of the middle ages, with its fixed doctrines, philosophies, and methods, seemed further and further away. Artists therefore sought new techniques that would help them to "create illusions" (as the Cubists did) or to emphasize style over substance (as the Fauvists did) or to reflect a world and way of life that was quickly being lost (as the Impressionists did). These artists strove for originality, spontaneity, and fashion. As men, money and machines took over the world, these artists tried to capture the splendor of creation (Monet) or the primal spirit (Picasso) or the art of novelty (Matisse). This paper will analyze these three movements, place them within their historical context, and examine the techniques and works of the artists who embodied them.

What Was Happening in Their World

From 1875 to 1921 (the timeframe of our analysis), a lot had happened in Europe to affect the outlook and situation of painters in Paris, France. The Age of Enlightenment had given way to the Age of Romanticism. Romance had in turn given way to Industrialization. The core group of serious Impressionists -- Monet, Pissarro and Renoir -- each approached the art world in different ways. Monet wanted the attention and patronage of the Salon (Johnson, 2003). He focused on landscape paintings to get it.

The Franco Prussian War had brought Pissarro and Monet into acquaintance in London. Impressionistic works were new and filled a hole left by a change in "sophisticated taste" (Johnson, 2003, p. 600). Simplicity of style and "freshly colored paintings" were replacing large-scale Gothic portraits (Johnson, p. 600). Thus, there was a demand for smaller, more assertive paintings. This demand was met by the Impressionists.

Around this same time, art from other continents was becoming popular. African and Native American art, for example, was being admired by fashionable circles in Europe. Tom Wolfe calls these circles "le monde" -- or, "the world." This "world" was different from any other of the past: it was the "artist's arena…the place where he seeks honor, glory, ease, Success…" (Wolfe, 1975, p. 12). At the turn of the 20th century and "the era of Picasso, Braque & Co., the modern game of Success in Art was pretty well set…the artist would do work that baffled or subverted the cozy bourgeois vision of reality" (Wolfe, p. 13). Subverting convention was important to the Fauvists and the Cubists. The Impressionists had sought to push the boundaries of convention. The Cubists sought to destroy convention.

As Picasso's career took off, World War I broke out in Europe. The fracturing of society, of nations and of peoples made the work of the Cubists seem all the more profound. As societies splintered and generations of men were killed, the lack of "reality" or of any real meaning to life was reflected in the Cubists' abstract works.

Why Were These Artists Doing These Styles?

In 1875, it was important to Impressionist painters that they be able to capture "a transitory glimpse of an atmospheric event, the colors changing with the light" (Johnson, 2003, p. 602). The ability to express some "felt" knowledge was very important to Impressionists like Van Gogh. To others, like Renoir, it was important to illustrate the magic of youth.

The Fauvists expanded the Impressionistic movement. They emphasized a simplistic style and splashes of color. Matisse, for example, depicted his wife in 1905, using more primitive techniques than had previously been popular. Rather than effecting light and shadow, Matisse used simple planes of color to delineate depth. It is another push away from realism, away from Impressionism even. It is a push towards the abstract, which Picasso and his group of Cubists would take to the next level. Matisse and the Fauvists were attempting to move away from the Impressionists by breaking down the rules of painting. Like the Impressionists, they were interested in emphasizing color and style. Unlike the Impressionists, the subject of the painting was almost irrelevant. Looking at Matisse's portrait of his wife, one may suspect that it would not have mattered whether Matisse were painting his wife or the broad side of a barn. His only care seems to be how to emphasize color planes.

From 1910 to 1921, the Cubists dropped the notion that an artist needed to have a clearly defined subject. Definition was blase. Identification was not required. Cubists were leading the way in Abstract "fashion art." It was fashionable to "suggest," and to paint in a way that had never been done before was to place oneself at the height of fashion. Others, like Kandinsky were making strides in Abstractionism. Kandinsky's Composition VII in 1913 was a tremendous, sweeping abstract portrait. But of what? Kandinsky emphasized the spiritual dimension of life and tried to represent it in abstract art. The Cubists, beginning with Picasso, emphasized the "lack" of spirituality in life and represented this "lack" in Cubism. Picasso was a materialist. He joined the Communist Party in 1944 after painting Guernica for the Rebel Republicans in Spain. Picasso was from first to last a revolutionary fighting the code of the "old world" just as the Spanish Republicans were fighting the "old world" Catholic Spaniards led by General Franco and his army.

Technique -- What Colors, Brushstrokes, Methods Were Used?

Pissarro was, for a time, a pointillist. He used small, dotty brushstrokes to produce an effect in the viewer's eye. The viewer was meant to "interpret" the image, implied by the points of paint applied with the tip of the brush. There were no brushstrokes in Pissarro's pointillist paintings. There were only dots of paint, put together in the same way that a printing press would form a picture on paper using dots of color. Pissarro used softer colors to emphasize a sweeter aspect of life. He used nature as his subjects -- landscapes, peasants working on farms as in Hay Harvest at Eragny (1901). Although he experimented with pointillism, he was not tied to it, and Hay Harvest shows more depth of brushstroke. The colors are not as muted as in other works. There is a lively calm in the short strokes.

The Fauvists used a technique that was a bit different. They used rushed, wild brushstrokes and tended towards simplistic representations. They preferred using color rather than line to illustrate borders and boundaries. Like the Impressionists, they emphasized color. But while the Impressionists used color to represent light and the glories of the natural world and the simple people in that world, the Fauvists used color in order to be "loud" and to draw attention to their works. A hint of the primal Africanism that would inspire Picasso's African phase is noticeable in the works of the Fauvists.

The Cubists took the message of the Fauvists to the extreme. They destroyed all concept of line, border and boundary. They reduced human and natural subjects to "shapes" without dimension. They flattened and obliterated what they sought to represent. The technique of the Cubists was based on the work of African and Native American art, which was becoming popular in Europe at the time. Cubism was the artist's attempt to be "fashionable" or to incorporate the "wild" and "primitive" styles of these uncivilized peoples into the art of the "civilized" world. Picasso, Braque and Gleizes, for example, used geometric shapes to portray their subjects. Gleizes' Man on a Balcony (1912) looks like a man viewed through a prism. His body is shattered and fragmented into parts. Yet, these parts produce a kind of harmonious whole. The colors are earthy -- the opposite of the Fauvists' splashy canvases.

Examples -- Who Was Working in This Style?

There was a core group at the center of each of these movements. For example, Van Gogh is one of the most easily recognizable artists to work in the Impressionist movement -- but he was not one of the core founders of the movement. At the core of Impressionism was Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Each had his own distinct take on Impressionism. Each approached the movement from his own particular perspective. Monet focused primarily on landscapes, but gave some attention to picturesque settings of persons (like in the painting Woman with a Parasol). Some of Pissarro's works can easily be confused as belonging to Monet. But Renoir was primarily a figure painter, who focused on the joys and beauties of human nature/sexuality.

In Fauvism, the core group consisted of Henri Matisse, Andre Derain and Maurice De Vlaminck. Each of these painters uses bold, bright and loud colors to represent images -- both landscape and figure. Their portraits seem elementary in ways, but they are styled to be so. They embrace the primitivism coming in to vogue at that time.

The core group of Cubists consisted of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Albert Gleizes. Braque's "cubistic" works won for the group the name Cubism. But each of the painters embraced the style, which embodied the primitivism made popular by the Fauvists as well as the Africanism that Picasso had already made a part of his repertoire.

This paper will now look at an example of art from each of these artists from these core groups to better illustrate exactly what these movements represented.

Impressionism: Claude Monet/Camille Pissarro/Pierre-Auguste Renoir

La promenade, or La femme a l'omberlle, 1875

Monet's "Woman with a Parasol" is a perfect example of Impressionism. It is also an example of the way that Impressionists would try to capture scenes from everyday life -- scenes that embodied something beautiful, colorful or fanciful. This painting emphasizes the transient effect that the Impressionists looked to represent. The sun is creating a rosy pink look in the sky and clouds. These are "Easter" colors -- soft, bright pastels. The woman is almost a silhouette against the sky. She is covered at least by the shadow of her parasol. Yet, she is still the focus of the painting. Her head is tilted towards the viewer, who is situated at the bottom of a gentle slope, near the earth. She is looking down at us.

The brushstrokes are strong, quick and confidant. They give the impression that they were rapidly done. The swirling blues of the sky contend with the swirling blues of the woman's dress. The clouds are formed by simple little brushstrokes. They are like dabs of paint made to give the impression of a cloud formation.

The woman's gaze is even and steady and comes at the viewer from a shaded face. There is something mysterious and unspoken in her eyes, which are very simply sketched in a single color. The parasol is a combination of darker colors which are reflected in the golden greens of the grass.

A child to the woman's left stands directly opposite the viewer and looks at him with a curious, simple expression. There is a slight, dramatic tension in the work which Monet produces by situating the woman in such as position so that she is looking at us over her shoulder, as though we the viewer are really the subject.

Hay Harvest at Eragny, 1901

Pissarro's Hay Harvest is a mixture of his Impressionistic technique and his pointillist technique. The focus of the picture is a French commune where women are gathering hay. Like Monet's painting, the subject is again womanhood. But here the women are working rather than strolling idly and leisurely in the sun. Pissarro's object is to represent working class womanhood -- the peasant class. This object is different from Monet's. Monet represents the picturesque. Pissarro is more "socially conscious." He wants to the upper class to be aware of the lower class. He wants to show the upper class (his patrons) that there is a beauty in the coarse activities of the day laborer.

Pissarro uses short brushstrokes which are almost pointillist but not quite. Some strokes are clearly visible while others are only barely seen and seem like cluster-groupings of dots. The woman in the center of the group is putting on a dark coat over a lighter colored blouse. The woman on the extreme right is looking over her shoulder to her left with her back towards the viewer. The woman on the left is paused from her work, resting to observe the viewer, it seems. The other two women in the foreground are working at the hay. All of the women are wearing long, colored skirts, which correspond to the times.

The painting is almost documentary in aspect. It is impressionistic in the sense that it emphasizes color, light, and a transitory moment in time. Lines are delineated with the help of brushstrokes which move in the way that the subject moves. For example, the brushstrokes of the skirts correspond to the way the skirt is moving -- down or to the side or at an angle, depending on the posture and position of the woman at work or at rest. The brushstrokes of the trees and grass are pointillist (to convey the image of leaves) or vertical and short (to convey the image of grass). The strokes, in short, are designed to better effect a sense of reality, or rather an impression of the reality.

The Swing (La Balancoire), 1876

This painting by Renoir is a good example of the Impressionistic figure paintings he would do. It also emphasizes the youthful nature of his subjects. Here we see a young man (or boy) and a young girl standing on a swing. Like the other two works by Impressionists which we have just looked at, Renoir's "Swing" seems to be a snapshot of a single moment in time. The subjects are half interested-half disinterested in the viewer. The boy has his back to the viewer, while the girl seems to be looking past the boy to the viewer of the scene. A small child looks up at the couple, while a man behind them and beside a tree seems to be peeking at the viewer. Again, it almost appears as though the viewer is being scrutinized by the painting rather than the painting by the viewer. This effect gives the impression of the scene being a real one.

Fauvism: Henri Matisse/Andre Derain/Maurice De Vlaminck

Portrait of Madame Matisse (The green line), 1905

This example of Fauvism takes the colors of the Impressionists and makes them even bolder. Here we see bold, bright pinks, oranges, dark blues, greens, peaches and reds. Madame Matisse herself is split into two different colors. The painting has an "experimental" feel to it. Colors are combined not to given an "impression" of space or depth or of light and shadow. Colors are combined in order to play off one another. The face of Madame Matisse is darker and more muted on the left than it is on the right. Between the two colors is a streak of green. Is one's face normally green? No. Matisse is using color in new and innovative ways. Reality is not so important here. What is important is that Matisse captures your attention. He does this with his startling juxtapositions of color. Even though the portrait comes off as flat and elementary, the colors and the "wild" brushstrokes evoke the primitive artistic works that Europeans were beginning to like at the turn of the century. This picture embodies the technique of Fauvism rather well: it has a subject -- but the subject is less important than the color scheme applied to the subject. Even the color scheme is less important than the overall "wildness" that the portrait suggests. The colors seem to be chosen in such a way as to jar the viewer from his comfort zone.

Andre Derain, 1906

De Vlaminck's portrait of Derain is an oil on cardboard -- a medium that tells us something about the picture. Cardboard is not the customary material used by painters for their portraits. Here it is used by the Fauvist for his portrait of a friend. The spontaneity of using cardboard (the only convenient material at hand) tells us all we need to know about the Fauvists: they are not concerned with following conventional modes.

Moreover, the colors that Vlaminck uses to paint the picture of his friend are startling. The face of Derain boldly painted in red with big, flat brushstrokes. His moustache is thick and jets out to the left, while the eyes of Derain coyly look to the right. The lids of the eyes are blue, as though Derain is wearing mascara. Chrome yellow fills out the lighter parts of the face. A patch of green appears on the bridge of the nose to convey some sense of shadow. It is this sense that the blue lids pick up on. A pipe sticks out of Derain's mouth. And the shoulders of Derain are visible. It is in total an extreme close-up of Derain as he appears to be slightly stooping. Is he conscious of being painted? Or is the painting more like a sketch, quickly done by Vlaminck in a matter of minutes? A spur-of-the-moment creation? Vlaminck wastes no time painting any surrounding space. He concentrates solely on the face and shoulders of Derain, on the wild ways in which Derain's personality might be illustrated through color. This idea helps to explain the bold redness of his complexion.

The River Seine at Chatou, 1906

This portrait of the River Seine takes the style of the Impressionists and wildly pushes it to the next stage. The colors are bolder and the strokes are thicker. The style is simpler an less pains-taking. The overall emphasis is on simplicity. The river reflects only a small range of colors, mostly grayish-blue, with a few points of red reflected here and there. The landscape consists of a few brassy, chrome-colored trees. The sky reflects the somewhat silvery river. The yellowish boat in the foreground contrasts sharply with the blues of the river and sky to effect a startling image of a rather tranquil setting. This is another example of the way the Fauvists would subvert convention. Here, the viewer is startled out of sense of peace by the way the colors contrast and by the way the limbs of the trees bow towards the bold-strokes of the river.

Cubism: Pablo Picasso/Georges Braque / Albert Gleizes

Three Musicians (1921)

Picasso's Three Musicians is a collage and oil painting that depicts a harlequin, a clown and a monk. At least that is what we are told. The cubist nature of the painting, however, makes it difficult to discern anything without a road map or guide. The characters are made of angular cubes, diamonds, triangles and rectangles. Bright whites contrast with bright blues and lighter shades of brown. The characters are framed by dark brown walls and a dark brown floor. They are playing music, it seems. One plays a guitar and another plays a clarinet. Notes are pictured on a page.