A New Look at Impressionism: Surface and Depth

thank you so much for joining us today and please join me in welcoming our speaker Katie Hansen Thank You Kristen and thank you all of you for being here on this unseasonable warm and beautiful afternoon kind of the perfect day to talk about such beautiful and sunny pictures when we think of Impressionism we likely think of something like this with its visible brushstrokes its light bright palette and an easy to enjoy scene of France unlikely we think of Claude Monet Monet in his lifetime and now is the exemplar of Impressionism since this 10-week course offers many fresh perspectives on Impressionism we thought that offering a session covering some basics of Impressionism with a special focus of course on the MFA zone collection would be a helpful building block the works you're looking at now are by Pissaro Monet Cicely and Renoir and with one exception they were all made in the 1870s and 1880s the heyday of Impressionism in France these are plenary paintings they're painted outdoors they show local scenery and natural light they have a great sense of immediacy what do I mean by immediacy I mean that they look like they might be rapidly observed and rapidly made I also when I think about immediacy I think about the sense of the individual the individuals distinctive brushstroke and the choice of places and spaces dear to the particular artist today we'll begin with landscape no surprise here and with a focus on Monet before moving into the slightly thorny er topic of figural painting I also need to mention that well these seams familiar and an easy to see now experimentation in ways of seeing and in modes of display are part and parcel of Impressionism as is a certain technical innovation tubes metal tubes like these only became available in 1841 previously paints had been stored in a slightly more organic fashion as you see here and when paint and tubes became available it was as you might imagine expensive new things tend to be but by the 1870s paint and tubes were readily accepted and and quite widely used they were very popular among artists it might be obvious to state but paint in tubes is is a great innovation for a variety of reasons not least of which being the artist can go to the color men's shop and buy a whole bunch of colors so it's less labor-intensive to have to grind and mix and prepare so many different colors if you can just go buy them already made in tubes the other thing is that it's a lot more portable so what you're seeing on the left here is paint stored in an animal bladder it's all tied nice and tightly closed with some string a little bit of cord there and then a box with various bladders of paint in it now if you can imagine going on a little trip to paint outdoors what a mess that way it might be if one of those bladders popped metal tubes are a little more predictable and portable in that way the other thing that's really important to keep in mind is if you want to get at that paint in that bladder you got to poke it with a tack and then squeeze it to get some paint out how do you close it again so super helpful to have a nice cap on a metal paint tube and I know I'm I'm belaboring this a bit but it is huge important and in fact you don't have to just take my word for it someone you may have heard of who was a close colleague of Monet a certain fellow called pierre-auguste renoir had to say without colors and tubes there would be no Cezanne no Monet no Pizarro and no Impressionism case closed and these paintings are of course not in the MFA's collection they're not on view here at this time I'm showing them to you for a couple of reasons one of which is I love this painting of the young Monet with his palette in hand and because you can see how many different colors are on the palette so that thing I was just saying about how much more convenient it is for an hour for an artist if they can open and close a tube and just buy a tube at the paint shop to have lots of colors on the palette and so that extraordinary range of hues and colors that we that we see in their pictures and then also I'm seeing him standing out in the garden with an easel and a small canvas his box of colors his palette in hand probably painting these flowers and so this sense of how he worked of the scale of the signs of canvas that he's working on add an easel outdoors and I confess to you I love to think about him this way set up just like in this painting when I'm looking at paintings that he made so perhaps you wish to think of him that way as well and so here are two paintings that are in the MFA's collection and so imagining him with his easel and these you know small canvas set up a box of paint in tubes anywhere that he might wish to paint and these are places of personal interest and I realized that this map doesn't project super well to the back of the room but there's Paris and this blue squiggle is the river son going out to to the coast here um Monet grew up in Lahav here this gray spot and he also lived in our Jean toy which is just outside of Paris Giovanni is likely a familiar word for you and right there you're gonna hear about Vito a couple of times so just a few places along along the Sun and as as word we're talking through a variety of things I also want to mention as you're looking at these ships in a harbor it's not a ship that won a battle they're just any old ships in in the harbor likely at the Harv and as you're looking at the Sun at lovak or lava cores right across the river from vitta where we're Monet was living you might notice there's some quirky vegetation in the water that vegetation is not hiding a baby Moses in a basket there are no River nymphs or goddesses swimming in this water it's just the regular old Sun with regular old greenery and none I love that you all laughed and makes me really happy and and it's it's an important thing to remember that impressionist paintings don't expect of us a knowledge of literature or of religion or of ancient history in order to appreciate their their subjects and they they don't really tell stories they are of of their moment but they are of a moment and and and that I think is part of their enduring pleasure is is that immediacy that they have so as I was saying um these ships are probably ships in the port harbor at lahar where Monet grew up right there on the Normandy coast and as you're looking at this it's one that I really love and you'll see this use of unblended color and that's really a hallmark of Monet's impressionist work and to my mind and if you've heard me talk about Monet before you already know that I think he's one of the greatest painters of watery surfaces and one of the things I love about about looking at his work and this one is a particularly great one is looking for this this Alla Prima stroke this way in which he hits the canvas and squiggles down just ala prima all at once and it's it's just a squiggle of paint and also so convincingly it's the reflection of the mast of the ship on the rippling moving surface of the water and that that um that sense of immediacy that sense of his touch that sense of paint on the surface and also that confident self assurance that he must have to on to achieve those in just one little squiggly go so that's something I love to look for in his work and here is a closer bigger view of the Senate lava core which is also on view here on though it is from a private collection as as noted on the screen and and this is a location that was dear to Monet um he is living across the river from this particular spot he's painting his surroundings the things he sees day to day and he he's giving us a great attention to a specific location the way the river turns and we're looking upstream toward Paris these quirky little kind of sandbars with some vegetation growing in the center of the of the river itself and even this but the you know specific kind of distinctive local architecture we really get a sense of a specific place but without the need for meticulous detailing meticulous rendering to really get that that sense of location he lived in vittor 1878 to 1881 we happen to have three paintings of fat away here and these three help me remember a few other characteristic aspects of Impressionism that I wish to mention and so of course I've just been talking about the painting of water or the sort of rippling effects of light on the surface the momentary and moving quality and then you know looking here at at flowers and if you asked Monet it was not water that made it him want to paint it was perhaps a flower that made him a painter but that love of that love of the seasons and having these two side by side this sense in which the changing of the seasons the changing of light and of weather can make the familiar look new the familiar look beautiful and strange and interesting and compelling time and time again for for making a work of art these four paintings by Sicily are all on view right now and well they're not explicitly the seasons I always think of them that way that sense of the importance of times of year that for the sake of visual interest making a familiar location look different in differing effects of light and weather and this is not the sort of traditional way of doing the seasons with an allegorical embodiment of a season or a labor associated with a season this is just the beauty of local scenery and and light and weather and I also realized while I'm on this slide I neglected to mention on instead of putting MFA Boston every time when it's a painting that's in the MFA Boston collection I put the objects identification number it's accession number so if you wish to find it again later those are the numbers that make them quick to search on our website and and another part of Impressionism that's so important and that makes it so pleasurable to look at is that it's often showing us on spaces of leisure and so what we're seeing here are you know one vacation painting of Italy but otherwise paintings that Renoir made in France sha-2 is is just outside of Paris a little bit it's in between Paris and bougie Ville another another place that people went for for dancing for walking in the countryside and so this this sensibility of of interest in in the local in the here and now they offer you these installation shots from the galleries on the second floor here at the MFA paintings by Monet by Cicely and by Renoir and you likely notice that they're all pretty similar in size so another thing that we need to keep in mind is the availability of standard size stretchers for canvas and so this scale of picture that is sort of repeated over and again as something that's available to them and also conveniently they can tuck under their arm if they wish to go outdoors to paint and and another aspect of this scale on the size of work is that Stowe mystic you can kind of imagine having this in in a home and you don't have to live in a castle to have room for it so that's certainly another aspect of a sort of domestic size of their pictures these three artist Cicely Monet Renoir met each other in the 1860s when they were art students in Paris and they had a really tough time getting their paintings to be shown at the official government sponsored and juried exhibition called the salon in Paris and that was the way that an artist really made his or her name at that point was by being shown in one of these large exhibitions on that had you know our critics coming to it and had a brochure with everyone's name and even the address of their studio in it who was a participant the the fish in in the official salon and I'm showing you two installation shots one a photograph the other a drawing and here works were stacked high and crowded together so even if an artist had his or her work accepted by the jury it might be tough for them to make an impact you can imagine a little painting getting rather lost in there or even a painting of a medium size might be really quite difficult to see if it were up very high so there were challenges even even if you got in it still wasn't a sure thing that you were going to be recognized and for Monet and I give you the kind of style that was more typical of the things being accepted at the salon this very on this very finely finished and idealized kind of bodies and shading and modeling and then you know a sense of the the size of this this kind of painting to be to be shown in these in these spaces so Monet and Renoir were having a really hard time in the 1860s trying to get their work even accepted by the jury to then be shown at the salon to then be seen by folks if they could find it in in all of this and so they had an idea and that idea was that they would join together and have an exhibition of their own an independent exhibition and they got together with like-minded friends and they organized their own exhibition outside of that jury system outside of that kind of huge space that was the salon in 1874 the artists joined together with the idea of a Baker's union such that each participant would pay dues and they would use those dues to be able to pay for a space and pay for a little pamphlet to be published for their exhibition and these like-minded folks did this eight times between 1874 and 8 eighty six and each time it was a different cast of characters some people were more constant about showing with the group than others and what I'm offering a selection of works from the MFA's collection by some of the more acclaimed participants in those Impressionists exhibitions unfortunately for me there are no known photographs of the installation of an impressionist exhibition we know what was shown thanks to the little pamphlets that they had published and also thanks to descriptions in letters the artists writing back and forth about how to install the space about what they're going to include that year about who's participating so we get some of the gossip and some of the texture of what that must have been like and then of course also critics writing about the exhibition so we get a sense for what the spaces would have been like and what artworks were there and one of the things that is is poignant in in reading back how they wished to display their own art was that they didn't want to have more than two paintings high so either a single row or a double hang but no higher than that and with breathing room between the works of art so that things could really be seen and you'll notice in the upstairs galleries that we make a little nod to that in the display with the Monet gallery in a single or at most double hang with you know small scale of paintings and in a neighboring room works that were made for salon type display in a salon type very high hang you may also have observed when I was showing this a moment ago that in 1874 when they first exhibited together they called themself the anonymous Society of painters sculptors and engravers they didn't call themselves the Impressionists so where'd what's that about you've probably heard this before and there are different facets to it but one of those one of these sort of art historically famous and pivotal works is impression sunrise which is one of the works that Monet contributed to that first now what we call Impressionists exhibition in 1874 and and why did he call it impression sunrise in a uncharacteristic moment he's very helpful in this regard and he says I had sent a thing a thing thanks Claude I had sent a thing done in lahar v' from my window of the Sun in the fog with some ships masts they asked me for a title for the catalog it couldn't really pass for a view of Lahav so I replied put impression these two paintings were both in the 1874 impressionist exhibition so I love having them side by side because one of them could pass for a view of the Harve and he does call that one the Harve fishing boats and this other one couldn't really pass for a full-scale view so call it impression and in the parlance of the time an impression was a quick notation of an atmospheric effect and and so indeed it is a quick notation of fog and some you know masts of ships things of that nature and does look rather different side by side with this other thing my the same artist he's so great so for an artist to paint something loosely rendered and quickly observed was not in it of itself entirely new but to exhibit such a work was a bold and innovative statement and these artists were valorising their first impression as their immediate response as something worthy of sharing with the world in the past something so quickly and loosely made might have served the artist um something to keep in the studio to use in service of making something larger and more finely tightly finished a more finished looking thing so I offer you this grouping of works all of which are in the MFA's collection so here's an artist who is who means to cater to the expectations of the salon and the salons kind of jury and so he has made these loosely painted sketches and studies but these were in the service of making a much larger scale more tightly finished painting of the same subject and so I've included I know it's a lot of writing on the screen but just to give you a sense 7 by 9 inches versus 124 by a hundred and twenty-nine inches so this slide up here is not to scale the the little one on the top is smaller than this and the big one on the side I hope that helps and so this this idea of of making this would of course not be an impression because it's not a atmospheric effect but in ASCII SAS ketch of some sort in the service of then making a table low on something that is a work of art a finished thing to to share with with one's audiences and he wouldn't have exhibited on these as independent works of art that's not to say that Monet never did that kind of thing and he sometimes would make a smaller version of a thing unplan air and then take it back to the studio and make a larger more finely finished version it doesn't look like this of course but um but it is a more a more tightly rendered version here's my favorite Monet lie when asked by someone when he living in Vito right which is where he painted this if he if if a guest could come visit him in his studio he said my studio but I've never had one and I don't understand how anyone could shut themselves into a room of course he painted unplanned our outdoors plenty of times but not every single time all the time and so is my favorite Monet lie were all allowed a few and that's his so indeed the the painting that's in Dallas now is a studio painting and he made it based on sketches that were made outdoors and it's important to keep in mind Monet is very successful later but in the 1870s he's struggling to sell his landscape paintings and he's struggling to sell things from the impressionist exhibitions and so he does sometimes try making a thing and submitting it to the salon showing it at that official government-sponsored arried exhibition and in this particular case he submitted this one and it got accepted and then it got skyed it was it was hung like above this if you can imagine right so how's anyone gonna see it and so he tried but continued to experience some frustrations in that regard I should say that this practice of sometimes making a sketch or a study or an impression outdoors and then using it later in the service of another work of art was something that Monet had done for a while and this is especially useful in the context of our current exhibition which has this if I may extraordinarily beautiful pastel I absolutely love it which he made outside with pastels and then brought back to his studio and used it help make an oil painting with a similar sort of sunset sky and I'll let you look at the dimensions of these two things and the dates of their making on the screen there and so this this practice of sometimes making something outdoors and then repurposing it in the studio to help himself with another composition was something he did early on particularly but we see we see over and again so I don't want to stress too hard that this is not an impressionist practice it is sometimes um there are two pastels by Monet made when he was in his twenties and that are in our current exhibition over in Gallery 155 and we don't know if he ever exhibited these small pastels they're both signed and we know that he kept them until the 1890s before he sold them but we also know that on the occasion of that first impressionist exhibition in 1874 he showed eight pastels and here they are listed in the catalog oops sorry seven seven and they're just called cookie sketch and that's all we know so we don't actually know which seven pastels he showed that year so sometimes I like to daydream that these could have things among them but we don't actually know what we do know is that um that the Impressionists exhibited works that were considered sketches cookie or impressions in their own exhibitions some critics really praised them for this they were open to the idea of something new and fresh and innovative and and different and other critics were overtly hostile and you may remember two weeks ago Jim Johnson on reading a critic describing this as a study for wallpaper in its embryonic state so they could be pretty colorful in their distaste for what they were seeing and caricatures were also really common in the popular press mocking all kinds of things not just impressionist painting but I thought I would offer to to you here to give you a sense for what Impressionism was was like when it was new so the one on the left there you'll see it says exhibition of impressionist painters on the doorway and here is some sort of policeman with his hands up whoa stop to this very pregnant looking woman and beneath it says madam that would not be prudent stay back from here as though she might go into labor from the shock of seeing this embryonic wallpaper the other one these two fellows are having a conversation at the Impressionists and the one facing us says what are you doing and the other responds I was told there was a lot of talent in this picture so I'm looking to just I'm looking to see if they displayed the wrong side yikes all kinds of things got mocked in the newspaper in the late 19th century it's part of the great fun of being a specialist in this in this particular period you really can get a sense for and for the the sort of tone of when these things were new and so where did they exhibit I mentioned that they pitched in some they paid some dues like a Baker's Union so that they could rent a spot and in 1874 the the place that they exhibited was actually the studio of the very famous photographer nahdar on the boulevard a Cappy scene in Paris and this might so this is not our studio you can sort of see his name there and so this is where the exhibition was um in that particular year and I offer you a Monet painting of the street outside this building this was also shown in that 1874 exhibition and when we look at this in 2018 this might look like Oh Paris that just looks like Paris with those regular height buildings those broad boulevards a lot of people walking that's some people hanging out the window looking down at the street that's familiar Paris had this romantic notion of Paris right I taught school there for a while and this is new Paris in 1874 this area was newly Houseman eyes and we heard about that in the last two weeks a little bit that Paris took the shape it it that we are familiar with now in the middle of the 19th century so those broad boulevards and the regular streetlights and the the cafe culture that goes with having those big sidewalks that was brand new that was super modern in the middle of the 19th century so this is a neighborhood that's newly Houseman eyes it's an area that's full of energy it's a commercial a neighborhood finance kind of Center so this is this is modern this is new this is novel and in other years the exhibition might take place in the gallery of Paul durand-ruel the dealer who started to represent the Impressionists other years they used the the money that they all pitched in to rent an apartment and to have the exhibition and and I mentioned that to sort of reinforce that the spaces were domestic in scale because the paintings were domestic in scale and there were also works on paper and the occasional sculpture of course but mostly it was it was paintings and and so spaces that were intimate in scale and then works of art of course that are also intimate and scale so I am reinforcing the modernity of this neighborhood to reinforce that what maybe doesn't look modern to 20:18 eyes looked really modern in the 1870s about this picture and and many impressionist paintings are characterized by modern scenes modern kinds of subjects and so the boulevards sandini in argent I and winter likely a familiar painting to many of you it's a it's a painting about commuting right I don't know how many of you ride the T but maybe on a very snowy day I know it's hard to think about with this beautiful 80 degrees and sunshine today but just imagine back in your mind and when you get off the train which is here and you're walking home and you're holding your umbrella because it's actively snowing that's what's happening here I mean it's it's it's a it's a commuting scene and then of course spaces of leisure so bougie valle a suburb of paris that people went to and went to this dance hall and enjoyed themselves and of course you know a dress that's the absolute height of fashion we know that the on-trend color I know they had that in 1883 82 83 as well the on-trend color for women's dresses this year was shrimp its cuter in French covet but this kind of this kind of light pink color with the little red you're never gonna see it the same way again shrimp but it's that modern it's that of its moment the sort of dress that looks old-fashioned of course to us now but in 1883 this was the height of fashion in terms of the cut and the color so the the modernity of these pictures is I know I'm stressing it but it's really important our German toy just about 15 minutes by train from Paris bougie ball a little further but not much so that sense of paintings that are innovative in their gestural paint handing handling and in their modern subjects and so these and these these things that we maybe take for granted now I was trying to get the sort of depth back into their historical moment was last week I think that we were also hearing a lot about conventions in landscape painting and so I also really want to draw your attention to the fact that you know artists are trying out compositional devices that are different from that franco-italian tradition or even the Barbizon paintings that you learned about last week and the week before and a major factor in being able to see the the world see France differently was the impact of Japanese prints and here are two examples of Japanese woodblock prints that have compositional devices that Monet admired and then borrowed he tried them out for himself in seeing the world around him so you'll notice that very broad sort of two turning bands its water and and snow here and it's snow and grass there but that kind of broad turning roadway or waterway taking up a huge swath of space and then the you know placement of you know flakes of snow on the surface of the canvas I mean representations it's like snow but that really plays with your sense of surface and depth within the composition is something that and even that that great great interest in effects of weather on the same place was something that Monet was seeing in Japanese woodblock prints that he admired and and trying out in in his own work I like these two together as well these mr. shim flowers are like so close that they're out of focus and then this little piece of land with poplar trees is so far that it's out of focus and there's there's very little middle ground and he's seeing prints that have something very close and very far but relatively little attention to this between and he's trying that compositional device in his own work Monet as you likely know was an avid avid collector of Japanese prints so there he is in his dining room and then a photo of how it looks now and by the early 1860s Japanese art textiles decorative objects proliferated in Europe and were very popular items for artists and others onto to collect and at the 1867 International Exposition in Paris there was a Japanese pavilion that sparked even more widespread interest and dealers started to crop up in Paris selling selling fans selling prints selling garments all sorts of different things and Monet was among those who was absolutely fascinated and who started to acquire a sizable collection ending up with about 200 Japanese woodblock prints so his interest in super vibrant colors and also experimenting with different compositional and perspectival techniques is informed by his admiration for Japanese aesthetics and so this this idea that he sees the world around him differently for having studied works of art and hopefully that feels familiar to you it certainly feels familiar to me and so here's a painting that's very frequently on view in our galleries on the Seacoast at TrueView it's on the Normandy coast just a little south of Lahav if you're imagining back to that I'm slightly out of focus map we looked at earlier and so here's this painting of this funny little tree and why do I call it a funny little tree you look you look at its roots and it's like barely holding on to the ground it's being sort of blown in the wind it sort of deformed and misshapen by having been buffeted by by the weather and and then you have this band of grass and a band of water and a slightly different blue band of sky and you can really imagine Monet with his easel kind of hunkering down and this windy coast and and painting this unassuming this unassuming little picture and it's a really strange composition if we think back about expectations for you know the sort of franco-italian tradition that he's coming out of only slightly earlier of having you know trees as like a bracket on one side of the composition and then a deep dive into space a perspectival space looking back into a far distance that we can imagine accessing instead he's blocked that central recession into space that might be expected by putting this goofy little tree right there he could have just moved his easel five feet one way or the other and then this goofy little tree could just politely be over here right but he's seeing the world differently through the lens of artwork he admires and so you notice here's also a tree right dead center and a work of art that has you know a band of sky and a band of water and a band of land and another band of water and so he's not copying this Japanese woodblock print but he's certainly being inspired by it and seeing the world around him differently for I'm seeing it in the context in through the lens of these Japanese woodblock prints and it helps him sort of come up with new new ways of new ways of seeing new ways of composing and so making something that looks very UNPO stunn composed like you just happened upon this goofy tree on the on the coastline and maybe it was a totally spontaneous thing but you kind of imagine that somewhere in his mind having having admired a work of art before that had that composition might have pushed him to place his easel where he did and not five feet to the left or five feet to the right and for for something else having these two on the screen together I must mention that the one is an oil painting the Monet and the other the Hiroshige a is of woodblock prints so it's on paper and it's about half the size of the of the oil paintings so I've played with scale a little bit on powerpoints you can see it better but it's it's worth mentioning sort of like I was mentioning the scale issues with Ren you of course discussing Monet's fascination with Japanese art and culture here at the MFA likely brings to mind this distinctive painting and this distinctive painting I put at this point in the talk in part because we've been looking at landscapes and we've been looking at works that are attending to light and weather and and at least looking sort of spontaneous rapidly made and this particular painting doesn't fit those criteria so it challenges some of maybe what our expectations are for Impressionism certainly there are figural paintings that fill what our expectations might be for Impressionism natural light outdoors looking a little bit more sort of unpaused uncommanded outside and and Monet is painting comi his wife in their garden in their backyard and Argento a space that's familiar to them he's friends with Renoir this woman may be Comi Monet as well we're not 100% sure but she looks familiar between those two and the sense of not in fact needing to know for sure if if it's her or not to enjoy to enjoy the painting this sort of beautiful scene of someone relaxing outdoors and I like to of course bring back this you sort of think she could be right there with this scene in his backyard and Argento as he set up painting another another aspect of this composition of course you know people tend to look at people in a compositions but as you're looking at the painting itself there's as much attention to the flowers as to the grass as to the dress as to the face so Monet's not directing us where to look he's not telling us something is more important than the other there's sort of this all-over composition which is quite characteristic of Impressionism it does look a reasonable amount like his wife so we can tell it's her here's a photograph of her sort of characteristic outfit and and hairstyle of hers so that sense of of it being and something near and dear to the artist I don't know who that kid is Camille and Claude Monet had two boys one of them was born in 1867 so he's too old to be that kid the other one was born in 1878 so for all we know many many things about Monet paintings we don't always know all of the things if you happen to know who the kid is please let me know um phone-a-friend fast forward a little bit here and so this this sense of certainly we have figural paintings that fulfill all those things we've just been talking about about Impressionism there's domestic and scale there they look you know rapidly observed they have all this natural light and then we have works that don't fit those criteria these the and I shifted the scale on the slide just to play up the point that Lodge Epona's and dance Abruzzi Vall are nearly life-size representations of people rather than be small paintings there's also a really much greater degree of finish a much more tightly rendered on surface which we've talked a lot about and and also this sense of kind of overall treatment here but you know with Renoir this is more I would have focused and this is more in focus if you will to direct your eye to direct your attention and and that's also a different a different strategy in making a painting and that makes it feel a bit more like a tableau and a bit less like an impression and so that sense of the momentary or fleeting is is less so in these large-scale figura paintings less or in fact no interest in natural light and whether both of them looking quite posed quite composed why did they do this their exhibition pictures they're they are made for exhibition and to get your attention for two different exhibitions but that strategy which we've they've learned from official traditions of making something really big and distinctive to stand out amongst the other works so Mona exhibited this painting in 1876 at the second impressionist exhibition and it was a big virtuoso display of color of his paint handling and really you know stood out there on a nearly life-sized figure painting is unusual in Monet's work and really special to have in our gallery upstairs where it stands out amongst the smaller scale landscape paintings with with natural light for which he's rightly best known Lodge Epona's is not the only large-scale figure painting that he made he made another one ten years earlier of the same model she's wearing a blonde wig this time this is um she had dark hair you saw her before in the garden um and in 1866 he had made this painting of a woman in a green dress and he showed it at the official government-sponsored and Darood salon and he had a great success he got good critical praise and also someone bought it a publisher bought it for a handsome price so that was pretty exciting for him and ten years later he's struggling a bit to sell and and so he said since certain ammeter reproached me for renouncing the figure reminding me of the success obtained by the woman in the green dress I made logic Ana's for one of our exhibitions it was a strategy it was a thing he tried and and there there he is telling us what he was what he was doing he's not always the most helpful um when it comes to telling us why he under why he did something so I'll give you a sense of a few things he said about these two paintings um with regard to woman in the green dress he said Madame Monet my first wife did indeed model for a woman with a green dress and while I hadn't set out specifically to do a portrait but merely a Parisian lady of the period the resemblance is striking super Thank You Claude so you won't be surprised when asked um well he was working on the Japanese what he was up to he said I'm painting one of the famous after actors robes it's superb to do I was tempted by being shown a marvelous robe with some golden embroidery that was several interests think look at the fabric okay so when Monet is not helping me out um one of the great things to be able to do is if a painting has been shown publicly when it was brand-new is to see what critics had to say and reading lots of criticism and some critics in 1876 did not like this painting at all they did not understand what he was trying to do they were really troubled by the placement of the face and I don't mean hers we're all together here okay good um but one really stood out to me one critic really stood out to me and what he had to say was this his most important picture is young woman trying on a Japanese theatrical robe please note that was not the title of the painting in the exhibition but it gives you a sense that the critic knew what he was looking at so I continue she stands with an open fan in her hand at the height of her face and carries on laughing cheerily playing the role of the costume turning her pretty Parisian face to enjoy the effect of this trailing gown okay he still hasn't gotten me all the way there but that one turn of phrase um cheerfully playing the role of the costume maybe want to know more about what she's wearing and what is the role of that costume Monet already told us it was an actor's robe which is true and so speaking with my wonderful colleague Sarah Thompson who's curator of Japanese art here she shared with me this Japanese foot block print that tells the same story told on the cheek Ock a kimono that Camille Monet is wearing and the story is something like this a samurai goes leaf peeping this is perfect for October in Massachusetts he's looking at maple leaves changing colors he happens upon a beautiful woman by a body of water this happens every time you go leaf peeping am i right they have some saké also and he falls asleep and in his slumber a god to him and tells him that that beautiful woman is not what she seems she's in fact a demon and she's out to get him so he wakes up and draws his sword sees her reflection in the water demon and defends himself so just at the moment of drawing the sword to defend himself you notice I'm showing you a Japanese woodblock print that's significantly later in date and that date helps me remind remind me to tell you that this particular play was not an independent play this story I just told you it was not an independent play on the Kabuki a kabuki stage until 1887 but it had been a subplot within other plays for a century prior to that so we know that there were plays and staged at that Universal Exposition in Paris in 1870 1867 but we don't know if this was one of them so well I would love to think that Camille Monet is enacting the role of the costume we can't actually know if Monet knew this story or not and again that sense it's really fun about being an art historian that for all that we know a lot about Monet and we know a lot about this painting we don't know all the things so I don't know if she's just being theatrical or if she's in fact playing the role of the demon lady either way we see that she's very overtly posing she's not being herself she's not wearing her clothes or even her own hair and so it's always always more to think with the dance of bougie vault was also an exhibition picture made specifically to capture attention at an exhibition but in this case it was not at one of the group exhibitions that the Impressionists held together likely Shep Anna's was shown by Monet at the second impressionist exhibition in the 1880s that dealer I mentioned before Paul durand-ruel started also hosting solo exhibitions for some of the artists here presented and he let Renoir know that Renoir would have us in the in late fall early winter of 1882 he let Renoir know that Renoir would have a solo show in the spring of 1883 and so he finished these large-scale paintings to be centerpieces for that exhibition and that exhibition took place in Paris in the spring of 1883 and then at a an affiliated gallery in London thereafter dance at bougie vols paint wasn't dry in time for Paris so it went to London but made as as paintings for for exhibition to really sort of showcase what he was about in that particular moment and that was a slightly more refined and unfinished kind of paint handling I got so excited I lost my place in my notes I can't really talk about a figural art and the Impressionists without talking about this troublemaker des gah and why do I call him a troublemaker because he's he's a distinctive case within the Impressionists and so I offer you some familiar favorites from our galleries here and he of course is an artist we associate with modern entertainments with portraits with works of art that showcase the human body the the figure and and you may or may not know about Edgar Daka that he exhibited in seven out of the eight impressionist exhibitions but he objected to the moniker Impressionists he preferred realist but we also want to be careful about that because as we were talking about last time realism capital R means a different thing with someone like corbeil or me lay or and so so he's he's a little he's a little tricky in this regard he was very much committed to Modern Life something that we've talked about with Impressionism he was interested in unusual compositions unusual ways of cropping a subject he's very much showing on his distinctive his distinctive brushwork but he maintained studio painting he maintained making preparatory drawings and working up a canvas much more in the way that we think of traditionally and less so in the way we think of when we think about somebody like Monet I put these two side-by-side because they were both exhibited in that first impressionist exhibition in 1874 and they really highlight just how different these two painters are and if you'll allow me an extremely long quotation I'd love to read you something that was written by emile zola about Dada and it sort of highlights how and how different and how distinctive Dada was as compared to the other Impressionists and it's why I've come to him at the end of the talk here and you'll also notice from the mean-spiritedness of some of the quotation that Zola wasn't a huge fan it's really long whoa okay bear with me he says in short Monsieur de gah alone has profited from the exhibitions devoted to the Impressionists and the reasons thereof must be sought in the very nature of the talent he exhibits Monsieur Daaga has never been one of those persecuted at the official salons he was admitted he received a relatively prominent place only since he is of a delicate artistic temperament and cannot impose himself by the power of his painting the general public walked past his pictures without seeing them poof justifiably nettled by this he quickly grasped how much he had to gain by membership of this little coterie where his refined and elaborate works could be seen and studied individually and indeed no sooner was he freed from the throngs of the salon then everyone hailed him and a circle of fervent admirers formed around him that's not entirely true we might add that the works of the other Impressionists rather hastily put together could only set off the precision of his finish there moreover he could exhibit sketches fragments of studies the simple line work in which he excels which would never have been MIT admitted at the salon it follows that monsieur de gaw is quite right to confine himself to the impressionist exhibitions and never again set foot in the great bazaar in of the salon where the endless hubbub can do him no good at all again I love the laughter it it's it I think some of these some of these passages of their own words of you know of the words of people who saw them in the moment provide a sense of humor and a sense of comfort de Gaulle looks really to his art looks really different than Monet's art and people saw that then too and they were a little curious than to about how he fit in I'm so seeing that he's not really a salon painter but he's not really the same kind of painter that Monet is how does this all work was something that was was curious then and I think I find is curious for folks now to but but again this sense of his modernity his interest in unusual cropping and the way he challenges expectations in all kinds of different ways so I have these two up side by side because the the top one of course conforms to what solo was just saying about fine details and line works and you know the sort of fussiness that he's complaining a little bit about with to God but the other one is much much broader and it's handling more masses of color and it's it's quite different it's much more generalized in its in its treatment and I put it up next to another painting with lots of people mounted on horses which is a battle scene so again reminding us that the guy is showing a really weird moment in a modern entertainment that's a lot of backsides of horses right it's not like the finish line or something super exciting it's a pretty haphazard kind of moment not this you know grand battle kind of scene and also this really throws into relief how much more detail someone like my son yeh is giving and to cause something much more generalised and in fact when Duke went to the races which he did he didn't bring his canvases and paint there he might make a little sketch but he was storing his memories to bring home to his studio but he passed a pair of binoculars to his companion at the races and when those binoculars were handed back to him to God nudged his companion and said it was kind of like looking at him my son yeh right I say this not to be mean although it's a little bit mean um but this sense that um he's thinking about how we see and we don't see like that without the aid of binoculars maybe we see more like that in in real life in the sort of passing moments and experience of entertainments and so on this this sense that Impressionism challenges our expectations about composition about ways of seeing and it gets us to reconsider how we see what we see where we see it and and perhaps Impressionism informs our lens of looking at the world around us the way that Monet was seeing the world around him through the lens of works of art that he admired and dagga loved to make sketches he also loved to take a work of art and have that work of art sometimes function as the jumping-off point for another work of art so I have the MFA's oil painting on the screen next to a pastel that's in the collection of the Thyssen and you can hopefully quickly see that certain this looks very UNPO stand composed right lots of horses bottoms but then you see that certain of the figures are repurposed certain if ik rippings are repurposed much much later in another composition so this making of the paintings in the studio and then the reusing of motifs from one work of art to the next so even when it looks or feels unpaused and uncommit quite composed I'm gonna step out of my lane for just a second I know that there's a conservation lecture coming up in a couple of weeks but I couldn't resist showing you this x-ray because it's an MFA painting and I have this x-ray and so that you can also see I know x-rays are super hard to look at whoa so again reinforcing that sense of dukkha hosing and composing a work of art on the canvas making changes so even though this might look like something casually observed quickly observed it's its own layers its object hood reveals a bit of his working process and when we have special vision to look at it another thing that daca was acclaimed for by certain critics was his way of making portraits and so I offer you on these family portraits and the words of a critic Edmund durante who wrote an essay called la nouvelle pantry are the new painting in 1876 coincident with that second impressionist exhibition and he doesn't name daga when he's talking about what makes a modern portrait modern and great but he is definitely talking about de gah and he says no longer will we separate the individual from the background of his apartment or the street never in our existence does he appear to us against a neutral empty vague background instead there are furnishings chimneys wall hangings around him an interior which expresses his fortune his class his mityay and so you see these these people in their characteristic poses even slightly out of focus as they move in interiors that are clearly familiar to them enjoying a pastime that is pleasurable for them this way of of showing someone in their most characteristic way and this picture too is is a portrait in fact of de gAHS friend paul of a pencil with his wife the wet-nurse and their son honoree in addition to being a genre seen at at the races so these kinds of modern portraits which are you know less posed looking or might be really dense and difficult in their psychological weightiness and their their their works of art of people he knows well and he studies closely but ultimately they don't give themselves away we end up looking at them and sort of sort of feeling and intensely without knowing all the answers and for me anyway that's these these people always remain a bit at a distance from me in in their psychology and and that that modern sensibility of how well can we ever really know someone else anyway it's always there in the in the looking for me at these at these particular paintings I also offer on to you that like with the jockeys with da art generates art that de gAHS work is always a studio art whether it's a sketch or another finished painting that de guy uses and continues to create and innovate and think and I am your lecturer next week as well so I can tell you that that's an idea we'll delve into much further next time with de gAHS pastels so in closing I want to just say that we began today with and what might have felt like this seemingly simple surface of Impressionism and moved into greater depth with works that might challenge or complicate those initial impressions of Impressionism thank you [Applause] if anyone has a question please raise your hand and we have microphones on either side that we can get to you hi thank you I wonder if there are any principals they are known determining the decisions about cropping a lot of times figures are cut off sorry principals yeah determining the cropping decisions I mean artists choice and certainly in many cases I could have shown a lot more Japanese woodblock prints so uh often the the cropping is something that they're seeing they're you know placing a pole or something in the center of a composition to God does that frequently yes something he's admiring in Japanese woodblock prints as well and then I think also the the sort of strangeness of some of the cropping is to reinforce this notion of something being uncomfy even when we know that it's not even when we know that it's a studio painting if you crop something unexpectedly it makes it feel momentary it makes it feel spontaneous and also gives the sense that it's a slice of a life that's being seen you know a slice of something being seen further beyond the confines of that canvas rather than being bracketed in in with you know trees on either side to sort of hold it together like a conventional composition some some of the sort of casualness of compositions certainly we could think about with photography which we we also have to keep in mind doesn't do sort of snapshots at that point so a person walking through walking through a scene as someone's taking a photo wouldn't appear as a sort of cut off figure in you know scenic photograph so certainly and I didn't bring images today Dada was interested in in photographs and and some of the ways in which his portraits are our post and composed look very much like the way a daguerreotype or a car 2vz it might be posed and composed and valorising the changing City was certainly also something that photographers were commissioned to photograph Paris as Paris is changing from it's windy bowl of are it's windy streets with cobblestones to the broad boulevards so that that sensibility of of employing photography and the service of modernity is is very very much you know in the spirit of what we're talking about here but technically speaking getting a figure to crop like that isn't isn't technically possible yet all right with whom mony business wrap fish I was really quite expected with that and I wondered if that was true there are many tales of Japanese woodblock prints being used as packing materials I have not heard the fishmonger one before and I have heard of other objects coming wrapped up and the you know instead of like we would use newspaper the wrapping was a woodblock print and that was how an artist you know discovered them to begin with and and and I I think of them as tales in part because we also know that by the 1860s there are major shops in Paris and Monet's in his 20s when he when it's when that's happening so having having the fishmonger wrapping wrapping his purchases in woodblock prints so many decades later at the point that he would be an attorney would be a would be a surprise for sure how was that for diplomatic how is it determined who could display at the impressionist exhibits they got in a lot of fights about that and they they were they were quite open and they would invite their friends and fairly frequently Digga would invite artists that some of the other painters didn't really like so it's when I made that slide and I had just the sort of major names on the slide I I thought maybe I should make a second slide with some of the names that are unfamiliar but who showed with the Impressionists because it's not just the usual suspects that we think about now and then additionally there are names that are quite familiar now that you might be surprised when I tell you they showed with the Impressionists so somebody like Gauguin showed with the Impressionists somebody like Odeon red owned that beautiful floral still life that's in the pastel exhibition he showed with the Impressionists once and so some artists who are you know still really well-known names we just don't associate them with Impressionism did show in the impressionist exhibitions and then other artists who you probably have never heard of Raphael II for example and we're also showing with them so it was it was a bit at invitation and and then a sort of conversation would be a polite way of describing the way that the organizers dealt with this and they took turns you know dealing with who was gonna be really the kind of driving force behind finding the venue and doing the hang and making the pamphlet and all that kind of stuff so I wondered why you didn't mention money because he was certainly major figure time he is a he is a bit older than the Impressionists and an artist that they very much admired and knew quite well he sometimes painted with them or paint painted of them in fact but he never exhibited with them I mean he was invited but he did not exhibit with them he continued to exhibit at the salon even with terrible criticism but at the salon he also ultimately he was represented by Paul durand-ruel who was the dealer who also would represent the Impressionists so he's very much part of their circle and I did think about including him but decided instead to focus on the the ones who showed together any more question if you're feeling shy you can ask me a question up here [Applause]

Channel: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Views: 12,605

Rating: 4.8490567 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 4tPPt2o0WoM

Length: 77min 48sec (4668 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 24 2020