National Gallery tour— Part 3

If it walks like an Impressionist
and talks like an Impressionist...

ANDREW MANGRAVITE

(Third of five articles about the National Gallery of Art.)

We are now at the Grand Rotunda, with its fountain and statue of Mercury, after an original by Giovanni Bologna. This space acts as a natural boundary. We are leaving the world of the Renaissance behind, and find ourselves at a leap transported into the 19th Century via the Chester A. Dale Collection of French Art.

We enter a room filled with dark, tasteful landscape paintings— the very vision of Nature that Impressionism would revolt against. Camille Corot’s The Forest of Fontainebleau (1834) and Eugene Delacroix’s Arabs Skirmishing in the Mountains (1863) are definitely “outdoor” paintings— but nothing about them seems especially outdoorsy. Both seem studio-derived, while Horace Vernet’s Hunting in the Pontine Marshes (1833) is so much a pure work of the imagination that it could almost be an illustration from a children’s book.

In the next room, a series of smaller works by Corot, the English painter John Constable and the German painter Caspar David Friedrich suggest a more mature understanding of the properties of light. Andre Giroux’s Santa Trinita dei Monti in the Snow (1827-28), an earlier work than Vernet’s, clearly is more modern in execution—an aberration, perhaps, in that Giroux’s Forest Interior with a Waterfall, Papigno is as “stagy” as Vernet’s work, but not as imaginatively rendered.

Of course, another explanation for this apparent lapse is a purely economic one. When Giroux invested time and labor in a large salon-type landscape, he had to be certain that it would sell. Thus he had no recourse but to give the public what it wanted. In smaller works he could “play around” and try out techniques that interested him. Or, of course, he just may have been a painter of inconsistent talent.

What makes it Impressionist?

This could not be said of Friedrich, and his smallish oil Northern Landscape, Spring (1825) is every bit as powerful as his larger works. This one offered vision plus technique. Richard Parkes Bonington’s Seascape Off the French Coast is really an Impressionist work in all but name. It can compare favorably with any of Manet’s seascapes. So one must ask: “What makes it Impressionist?” Is it simply the fact that it’s painted off of doors with sea-spray dappling the artist’s face? If a Bonington and a Turner could work out-of-doors, sketching with sea-spray in their faces, then return to their studios and convert their sketches into paintings that look very much like what Manet and his colleagues would paint a few decades later, does the fact that they spent time indoors disqualify them? Who is a more Impressionist painter than John Constable? Yet Constable somehow falls between the cracks of Romanticism and Impressionism—neither one nor the other.

I suppose my question is this: Does intent or results make the work? If it looks Impressionist, does it matter that the artist didn’t set out to create an Impressionist work? (Later on during my idiosyncratic tour I’ll be struck by how many Romantic paintings were created long before anyone ever thought to codify or discuss a Romantic Movement in literature and the arts.)

What can you say about a dead toreador?

The next room comes as bit of a shock in that we move from landscapes to figurative works. Pieces by Manet, Renoir, Degas, Frederic Bazille and an early work by Cézanne serve to remind us that Impressionism was a multi-faceted affair, not simply all about painting scenery out of doors. Edouard Manet’s The Dead Toreador (1864) is a wonderful slap at the 19th Century love of grandiloquence: The guy’s just lying there dead, stretched out like a trout on a plate.

A helpful artist sketching nearby informed me that the original painting was much larger, contained more figures, and Manet’s colleagues suggested that he “cut to the chase.” If this is true, they did him a great service. The almost monochromatic color scheme also could not have pleased the public much.

Frederic Bazille died young and is one of the “forgotten Impressionists” (whose works often seem more interesting than those of the remembered ones). His Young Woman with Peonies (1870) seems a much more intelligent work to me than Manet’s Olympia.

Renoir’s absence of erotic charge

Something should also be said about the several Renoir pieces. Yes, the little girl with the watering can standing the garden is charming. The large reclining odalisque is more problematic. A painter either makes you feel the flesh or he doesn’t. Gustave Courbet’s nudes always carry an erotic charge. His painting of the lady playing about with her parrot is good enough to find its way onto someone’s erotica webpage. On the other hand, for all the nudes that Renoir churned out—and I should say here that the painting of the Odalisque is not a nude—he never conveyed an erotic charge to me. He may have loved the flesh, but he didn’t convince me to love it. In short, the odalisque seems rather dated to me, a bit of 19th Century pictorialism.

The figurative work of the Impressionists has always seemed less effective to me than their landscapes. I’ve always felt that the American followers of Impressionism— William Merritt Chase, Robert Henri, William Childe Hassam— outdid their French models in that regard.

The Degas paintings are all impressively self-possessed. The Song Rehearsal (1872-73) and Madame Camus (1867-70) are livelier works— one by virtue of its paparazzi-like content, the other for its flat almost poster-like quality. Count Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec Monfa is off in a little room by himself, as befits a purveyor of “feelthy peectures.” His music hall paintings are nice, though it appears that Chester A. Dale may have been a latecomer to the game when all the best ones were already taken. The perky little red-haired tart lifting up her chemise as she lines up for the health inspection is still quite something.

Pointillists and dot-matrix printers

From Lautrec we move on to Camille Pissarro and the Pointillist painters. Georges Seurat and Henry Edmond Cross are each represented by one smallish landscape. Seurat’s The Lighthouse at Honfleur is actually the more conservative of the two, with a palette of pale colors and only limited variations between them. His dots are more randomly applied as well. Cross’s Coast Near Antibes is a more extreme work with a palette largely composed of oranges and blues. His dots are quite precise and laid out in even rows. As a result, Cross anticipated the output of dot-matrix printers. But unlike the Seurat, his dots don’t blend into a harmonious whole as you step away from them. Even at a considerable distance, Cross’s work looks “speckled,” while the colors in Seurat’s painting blend smoothly, as a pointillist work should.

Exiting from a warren of small side galleries, we are now back in a large room, and we have entered the domain of “Monet-the-Eye,” as the kindly Degas once dubbed him. Eight very nice landscapes and a single floral painting occupy this room. The landscapes span the years 1880 to 1908 and allow you see how Monet gradually learned to dissolve his world in pure light—a secret held by Turner before him. Two of the Rouen Cathedral: West Façade series are here, so you can actually get an idea of the artist’s fascination with the passage of time as it affects light. Monet presses closer and closer to abstraction, and a work like The Seine at Giverny (1897) demonstrates how close he comes to duplicating the discoveries of Turner.

Do people matter to the artist?

The room given over to Van Gogh and Gauguin certainly points up the evolving divergence between Impressionism and what came to be called Post-Impressionism (because no one realized that the so-called "Post-Impressionists" were actually part of Impressionism's shadowy rival, the Symbolist Movement). Even an early Gauguin like Peasant Girls Dancing, Pont-Aven has very little in common with the incidental figures of classical Impressionism. People matter to Van Gogh and Gauguin.

Not so with Paul Cézanne, who achieves his greatest successes when he leaves humanity behind to concentrate on increasingly geometric and analytically rendered landscapes. It's truly wondrous to behold how, in a work like Riverbank (1895), he builds form from the simple juxtaposition of isolated patches of color. Cézanne's brush strokes really do look like what one hostile critic of Pissarro's work referred to as innumerable "tongue-lickings."♦




Part 3 of Andrew Mangravite's five-part idiosyncratic tour of the National Gallery of Art.
To read Part 1, click here.
To read part 3, click here.