1. Chapter 21- Living With Art
The Modern World of Art
Chapter 21- Living With Art

2. IMPRESSIONISM:
The Impressionist style of painting developed in the late 1870s in France. The artists sought to represent objects with light and air; it was not to paint local colors, but the effects of light under which everything momentarily changes color.

3. The name of the movement is derived from the title of a Claude Monet work, Impression, Sunrise

4. Characteristics of Impressionist paintings include relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes and emphasis on the accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities.
Armand Guillaumin (1841–1927), Sunset at Ivry 1873

5. Movement is a crucial element of the Impressionist style.
Claude Monet Haystacks

6. Radicals in their time, early Impressionists broke the rules of academic painting. They began by giving more emphasis to color and free brush strokes than they did line.

7. They also took the act of painting out of the studio and into the modern world. Previously, still lifes and portraits as well as landscapes had usually been painted indoors.
Claude Monet Woman With A Parasol 1875

8. Impressionism was an art of immediacy and movement, of candid poses and compositions, of the play of light expressed in a bright and varied use of colour.
Vincent van Gogh The Starry Night 1889

9. Post-Impressionism
Poor name for the group as many of the artists in this presentation as many of these artists exhibited with the “impressionists” and many of the impressionists outlived artists in today’s presentation. 9

10. Characteristics Emphasis on color and form Art for art’s sake
Didn’t try to sell their art
No patrons
Didn’t care what critics or public thought
Strived to invent new techniques
Van Gogh painted over 700 images, but sold less than 6 during his lifetime 10

11. Vincent van Gogh (1853 – 1890) Bright colors (especially yellow)
Short, choppy brushstrokes
Sometimes didn’t even use a brush
Lonely life of poverty, depression and mental illness 11

12. Vincent van Gogh
Sunflowers
1888, Oil on canvas 12

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15. Self Portrait on 1889.
Slanted eyes to look Japanese
Thought of himself in this image as a Buddhist monk 15

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20. Vincent van Gogh Wheatfield with Crows 1890, Oil on canvas
Wheatfield with Crows is one of Van Gogh’s most famous paintings and probably the one most subject to speculation. It was executed in July 1890, in the last weeks of Van Gogh’s life. Many have claimed it was his last work, seeing the dramatic, cloudy sky filled with crows and the cut-off path as obvious portents of his coming end. However, since no letters are known from the period immediately preceding his death, we can only guess what his final work might really have been.
Vincent van Gogh
Wheatfield with Crows
1890, Oil on canvas 20

21. Paul Gauguin (1848 – 1903)
Abandoned his wife and kids, travelled the world and settled in Tahiti
Knew van Gogh
Painted together in France
Argued frequently
Figures with no shadows
No realistic colors 21

22. Day of the Gods (Mahana no Atua) 1894, Oil on canvas
Paul Gauguin began to paint in his late 20s. A restless man, he traveled and worked in the French regions of Brittany and Provence as well as the South and Central Americas. In 1891, he moved to the French colony of Tahiti in search of "ecstasy, calm, and art." He spent all but two of the remaining years of his life in the South Seas. When he returned to France in 1893, he spent most of his time in Paris promoting his work and writing and illustrating Noa Noa, a fictionalized account of his Tahitian experience. Day of the Gods (Mahana No Atua), one of the very few paintings Gauguin completed during this period, is closely related to his literary project.
Set in a Tahitian landscape by the sea, the composition is divided into three horizontal bands. At the top, islanders perform a ritual near a towering sculpture. Like many figures in Gauguin’s Tahitian images, the monumental sculpture was derived not from local religion but from photographs of carved reliefs adorning the Buddhist temple complex at Borobudur (Java). In the middle band, three symmetrically arranged figures are placed against a field of pink earth in poses that may signify birth, life, and death. The woman in the center, formally linked to the sculpture at the top, is similar in appearance to other depictions of Tahitian females that Gauguin used to suggest the Christian figure of Eve in paradise. The lower portion of the composition evokes the brilliant, contrasting hues reflected in the water. Gauguin’s Postimpressionist style, defined by a decreasing tendency to depict real objects and the expressive use of flat, curving shapes of brilliant color, influenced many abstract painters of the early 20th century.
Paul Gauguin
Day of the Gods (Mahana no Atua)
1894, Oil on canvas 22

23. Spirit of the Dead Watching 1892
One of Gauguin’s most famous paintings from his first visit to Tahiti is Manao Tupapau or Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892). The painting depicts Gauguin’s young mistress Teha’amana lying nude, face down on a bed with a stark black figure in the background. Unlike many of his other strong and powerful portrayals of women, this one shows a woman who is clearly frightened and vulnerable. In Noa Noa Gauguin recounts finding Teha’amana lying in this position on a bed. His sentiments are exactly what he tried to capture in this painting. He explained, “[Teha’amana]’s terror was contagious… Never had I seen her so beautiful, so frighteningly beautiful” (Wallace 132). The combination of these two characteristics, fear and beauty, led Gauguin to create a striking message about European portraiture’s portrayal of the nude female. His portrayal was meant to show a reversal of the more common, objectifying conception of the female nude.
Paul Gaugin
Spirit of the Dead Watching
1892 23

24. Georges Seurat (1859 – 1891)
Pointillism – Painting using tiny dots that are side by side
Scientific use of color
Painted indoors with artificial light 24

25. Georges Seurat The Bathers, Asnières 1883 - 1884 25
Very much a sub-section of Impressionism
Works by Paul Signac & George Seurat were included in the last Impressionist Exhibition held in 1886 – at the suggestion of Camille Pissarro’s son Lucien.
All four met in 1885 and worked in the style soon to be labelled Neo-Impressionism by critic Félix Fénéon and later ‘pointilism’.
Divisionism is used to refer to the theory and pointillism to the technique.
The pictures hung separately from the main exhibition – inviting critics to compare old & new styles
Positive reviews from Fénéon and Paul Adam; “This exhibition initiates [us] into a new art.”
By early 1880’s many impressionist felt that Impressionism had gone too fare in dematerializing the object and had become too ephemeral.
Seurat tries to retain Impressionist Luminosity whilst reconstituting the object – choosing a typical Impressionist theme – urban leisure.
The working method was far removed from the spontaneity associated with Impressionist Paintings.
Seurat made 14 oil sketches before final selection for the ‘Bathers at Asnières’
In 1884, Seurat sought out Seurat after seeing the Bathers and discovered a shared interest in Colour theory and optics, and developed it scientifically.
Georges Seurat
The Bathers, Asnières 25

26. A Sunday on La Grande Jatte – 1884 1884 – 1886, Oil on canvas
27 preparatory pieces
Isolated figures
Rigid forms
Workmen is detailed and larger than other figures.
Perspective, but hard to tell with high horizon and trees blocking view.
Arch through parasols.
No one is moving. Time is stopped and this is emphasized by pointilism. It’s dots, not strokes, so the brush wasn’t moving either.
Influenced by the Impressionists’ experimentation with color, Postimpressionist painter Georges Seurat worked with innovative techniques. On an enormous canvas, the artist depicted city dwellers gathered at a park on La Grande Jatte (literally, "the big platter"), an island in the River Seine. All kinds of people stroll, lounge, sail, and fish in the park.
Using newly discovered optical and color theories, Seurat rendered his subject by placing tiny, precise brush strokes of different colors close to one another so that they blend at a distance. Art critics subsequently named this technique Divisionism, or Pointillism. The artist visited La Grande Jatte many times, making drawings and more than 30 oil sketches to prepare for the final work. With his precise method and technique, Seurat conceived of his painting as a reform of Impressionism. The precise contours, geometric shapes, and measured proportions and distances in Seurat’s masterpiece (not to mention its monumental size) contrast significantly with the small, spontaneous canvases of Impressionism.
Over the past several decades, many scholars have attempted to explain the meaning of this great composition. For some, it shows the growing middle class at leisure. Others see it as a representation of social tensions between modern city dwellers of different social classes, all of whom gather in the same public space but do not communicate or interact.
Georges Seurat
A Sunday on La Grande Jatte – 1884
1884 – 1886, Oil on canvas 26

27. Paul Cézanne (1839 – 1906) Tried to recapture the glory of landscapes
Obsessed with 3D feel in nature
His still-lifes tilt, twist, and violate the laws of physics 27

28. Paul Cezanne The Basket of Apples 1895, Oil on canvas
After a brief period in Paris, Paul Cézanne returned to his native town, Aix-en-Provence, in the south of France. There, he devoted himself to portraits, still lifes, and landscapes. Wishing to make (in his own words) something "solid and durable, like the art of the museums" out of Impressionism, Cézanne sought out the structural regularity of his subjects. By repeating the round and angular shapes in The Basket of Apples, the artist demonstrated his formalist approach.
Despite his attention to the shapes and structures of his subjects, Cézanne animated the objects in the painting. He placed the basket of apples on one of his characteristic tilted tables; it careens forward from a slablike base that appears to upset rather than support it. Upon closer inspection, the tabletop seems to be fractured, since it emerges on the right side at a different level than on the left. Cézanne's use of geometric form and disjointed perspective made him an inspiration to Pablo Picasso, Cubism, and the abstract art of the 20th century.
Paul Cezanne
The Basket of Apples
1895, Oil on canvas 28

29. Paul Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire 1902 – 1904, Oil on canvas
Cézanne realised that the eye takes in a scene both consecutively and simultaneously – and in his work, the single perspective gives way to a shifting view, acknowledging that perspective changes as the eyes and head move.
The image shows the recession of cool colours and advance of warm colours (and variations in intensity).
Here, as with Cézanne’s other landscapes, he renders depth and space with COLOUR, rather than traditional forms of linear perspective and tonal modelling.
“Colour must reveal every interval in depth.”
The image has a restricted colour palette of pale greens, earth colours and a wide range of blues.
Cézanne’s work stood apart from the ‘Impressoinists’, as he was still concerned with maintaining form, rather than purely focusing on the effects of light.
Cézanne uses ‘directional’ brushstrokes, with the different planes of the landscape being placed in parallel lines; equal and separate brushstrokes.
He is painting from a high viewpoint – which tips the landscape up, flattening it closer to the picture plane and cuts down the sky area.
Paul Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire
1902 – 1904, Oil on canvas 29

30. Impressionism & Post-Impressionism Art Activity!
Pick an artist from either art period (refer to the PowerPoint as needed)
Find a work of art from this artist
On paper, work on sketching the outline of the basic shapes
Tomorrow and Thursday we will establish colors and textures with the use of pastels and colored pencils!