Did Matisse Ever Reach “True Painting”?

Sometime in the early 1930s, Henri Matisse hired a photographer to document his paintings at different stages of development. These photographs became signposts along the road toward what Matisse wanted to achieve in his painting and served not just as reminders, but also as alternative paths for consideration and reconsideration. In Matisse: In Search of True Painting, which runs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through March 17, 2013, Matisse’s well-known recursive process is once again displayed, but for the first time art historians question why the master worked this way. “Taken as a whole,” curators Dorthe Aagesen and Rebecca Rabinow write in the introduction to the catalog to the exhibition, “it reveals Matisse as an artist who conducted a dialogue with his earlier works, someone who continually questioned himself and his methods in order to, as he put it, ‘push further and deeper into true painting.’” By the end of the exhibition, the question remains for us, as for him, if Matisse ever reached his destination. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Did Matisse Ever Reach “True Painting”?"

[Image: (Left) Reprint of archival photograph documenting Henri Matisse's process
of painting The Dream, 1940. January 7, 1940. Reprint of archival photograph. 31 1/2 x 26 15/16 in. (80 x 68.4 cm) (Frame) Image: 23 1/4 x 18 5/8 in. (59 x 47.4 cm). © 2012 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (Right) Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954). The Dream, 1940. Oil on canvas. 31 7/8 x 25 9/16 in. (81 x 65 cm). Private collection. © 2012 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.]

[Many thanks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for providing me with the images above and other press materials related to Matisse: In Search of True Painting, which runs through March 17, 2013. Many thanks also to Yale University Press for providing me with a review copy of the catalog to the exhibition.]

Blinded Me With Science

Claude Monet, Haystacks, Hoarfrost Effect, 1891, oil on canvas, 65 × 92 cm, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

—From “The Tables Turned” by William Wordsworth

Science and art have always warily stood apart while keeping close. As Wordsworth lamented, we often “murder to dissect” when we take a living, creative act and place it under the microscopic eye of hard, cold science. Heavenly magic crashes to the level of earthbound fact. In Painting Light: The Hidden Techniques of the Impressionists, Iris Schaefer, Katja Lewerentz, and Caroline von Saint-Georgecall upon science not to bury Impressionism under analysis but to use science to foster greater understanding and appreciation of it. Schaefer et al paint the Impressionists themselves as a band of intuitive scientists. “Looking back,” they write, “how Monet and many of his contemporaries succeeded in realizing scientific and above all optical laws so comprehensively in their paintings, despite the fact that in the 19th century these laws were only just being scientifically recognized and researched, is oe of the most exciting issues.” When Monet paints Haystacks, Hoarfrost Effect (above, from 1891), one of his many studies of haystacks under different weather and light conditions, he acts like a scientist gathering data in pursuit of a theory. Similarly, van Gogh kept a box full of colored yarn that he used to study color contrasts before realizing them in paint. We associate Impressionism with feeling and emotion, yet the artists themselves often acted in a consciously premeditated way when painting. Rather than murder to dissect, Painting Light dissects to give these works new life.

Henri-Edmond Cross, Landscape in Provence, 1898, oil on canvas, 60.3 × 81.2 cm, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud, Cologne.

Schaefer et al see Monet et al anticipating scientific findings in the field of optics and color perception. Many of the scientific findings are made years before, but remain in the domain of specialists until the Impressionists help pull them into the mainstream. Once in the mainstream, however, it is the Neoimpressionists, especially Pointillists such as Georges-Pierre Seurat, Paul Signac, and Henri-Edmond Cross (whose Landscape in Provence, from 1898, appears above), who consciously take scientific findings and try to apply techniques in paint to take advantage of those findings. Joining theory with practice, the Pointillists “indisputably eliminated the disadvantage of subtractive, that is dark and dull-looking, color mixtures, through the use of pure colorism” and “attain a hitherto unprecedented luminosity,” the authors effuse. Rather than physically mix the colors on canvas via paint, the Pointillists facilitate the natural process of the human eye to mix colors optically. The human eye literally wants to connect the colored dots, so Seurat and others take advantage of that desire to achieve effects impossible with paint alone.

Gustave Caillebotte, Boats and Shed on the Bank of the Seine, 1891, oil on canvas, 46 x 55 cm, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud, Cologne.

I confess to skimming through technical sections of most exhbition catalogues. The scientific rigor appeals to my rational side and the infrared and x-ray images lend of patina of hard science to the “soft” methodology of art criticism, yet I often find little purpose to all the gadgetry, as if someone wanted to “blind me with science” rather than open my eyes to something new in the art thanks to new technology. Painting Light makes the most of technological know-how and never loses sight of the big picture of bringing new insights to the well-worn tale of Impressionism. Schaefer et al cogently discuss the importance of color merchants in the lives of the Impressionists. Good suppliers of paint were pure gold to these artists. Art supply merchants such as Pere Tanguay and Paul Durand-Ruel not only appear in portraits by the Impressionists but also became their earliest dealers. Painting Light reveals how new innovations in tube paint, brushes, and pre-stretched canvas all helped make possible the image of the Impressionist as a wildly gesturing artist working in the open air and bound only by the borders of his imagination. “Even today, many pictures of the Impressionists display a bravura which would have been unthinkable without the flat-bound bristle brush,” the authors conclude. They also explain the financial realities of the time in which these artists needed to economize where possible when sales flagged. Thanks to infrared light, we can see the pentimenti beneath Gustave Caillebotte’s Boats and Shed on the Bank of the Seine (above, from 1891) showing the failed first attempt at painting the boats. Realizing that he had painted the boats too large, Caillebotte turned the canvas upside down, painted a skyover the first boats, and tried again, saving himself the cost of the canvas. Tales such as this bring a human element to the Impressionists many studies lack.

Gustave Caillebotte, Laundry Drying on the Bank of the Seine, circa 1892, oil on canvas, 105.5 × 150.5 cm, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud, Cologne.

In another Caillebotte painting, Laundry Drying on the Bank of the Seine (above, circa 1892), the authors point out a poplar bud embedded in the paint—proof that the artist stood close enough to the poplars shown in the painting to have them physically seed the work itself. With their move to the outside, the Impressionists continued the work of the Barbizon School and “irrevocably eliminated the dominance of the completed work over the sketch,” the authors believe. Schaefer et al discuss in full the pleasures and perils of painting en plein air, which range from sand finding its way into seascapes to Cezanne’s death in 1906 days after being surprised by a sudden storm when working far from home. Again, the physicality of these artists working with materials and under certain conditions comes across boldly in a way that most books fail to do. The authors even bemoan the practice of reproducing paintings without frames, which they see as part of the author’s intent. After reading Painting Light, you’ll never look at an Impressionist work in a museum the same way again.

Gustave Courbet, Château de Chillon, 1873, oil on canvas, 54.1 × 65.3 cm, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud, Cologne.

Painting Light contains countless insights and dispels many cherished myths, such as the myth that a “true” Impressionist work was done outdoors. Gustave Courbet’s recognizably Impressionist Château de Chillon (above, from 1873) was painted from a photograph, smashing that myth resoundingly. The most common myth shattered, however, remains the idea that we see these works today as the artists intended. Time has altered many of these colors, sometimes thanks to the inexpensive paints used by impoverished artists showing why they were inexpensive over time. Sections of a van Gogh protected by the frame from light reveal a brilliant red that once covered the entire work, thus throwing into doubt all conclusions made about his use of color in that work and all others. Examples of works cut or cropped or even “completed” by another hand will make you wonder just how much of your favorite Impressionist painting is actually by the artist. Painting Light brings these works back to life and shows us through science that everything we thought we knew about these works and these artists should be open to question. Painting Light makes art scientists of us all.

[Many thanks to Rizzoli for providing me with a review copy of Painting Light: The Hidden Techniques of the Impressionists by Iris Schaefer, Katja Lewerentz, and Caroline von Saint-George. (C) Painting Light by Iris Schaefer, et al., Skira, 2009.]

Connecting the Dots

As we gathered ourselves to leave after watching Wall-E on Alex’s first trip to a movie theater, I looked up during the credits just in time to see an homage to Georges Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (above, from 1884-1886). Seurat’s placid park scene has become one of those comfortable pieces of cultural furniture, like the Mona Lisa or Michelangelo’s David. Born December 2, 1859, Seurat would probably be quite dismayed by such a development. As James H. Rubin argued in Impressionism and the Modern Landscape: Productivity, Technology, and Urbanization from Manet to Van Gogh (reviewed here), Seurat and his friend Paul Signac developed pointillism as a more scientific style to mimic technological progress when Impressionism had grown too mainstream and failed to address the changing industrial world or the populist leftist politics emerging with the rise of the modern middle class. It’s impossible today to understand just how much a revolution in the sense of rebellion Seurat’s paintings and style was at the time. The optical theories upon which Seurat based his carefully placed dots (Sunday Afternoon took over two years to finish) seem commonplace today, but at the time challenged cherished ideas of how we perceive the world. As hard as it is to believe now, Seurat was a rebel.

Two years after finishing Sunday Afternoon, Seurat painted The Sideshow (above, from 1888). Moving inside from the bright light of the day, Seurat paints a scene lit only by gas footlights. The brilliance of his outdoor scene gives was to the murky half darkness of the stage upon which the performers caper. In The Sideshow, Seurat not only breaks down color into tiny pieces but reduces the scene and the people in it into simple shapes. The musician at the center morphs into a triangle resting on top of a rectangle, with a lighter-colored circle for a face. Seurat creates an overall impression of cold, inhuman, mechanized precision, as if the background and the characters were stamped out in metal by an assembly line. If Sunday Afternoon shows the mixing (or lack of) between the socioeconomic classes, The Sideshow shows how popular, lowbrow entertainment belongs solely to the lower classes and how such diversions may have a deadening effect on their minds, growing as murky as the dim lights around them.


Of course, it’s easy to go overboard on the cultural and socioeconomic content of Seurat’s work. The first thing that comes to my mind when seeing Seurat’s Le Port de Gravelines (above, from 1890) is not the role of the shipping industry in late nineteenth century France but the beauty of the sweeping curve of the bank as it hugs the blue water while the powder blue sky echoes above. Seurat seems comfortable today because his style is irresistibly sensual. Like Cameron in that scene in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, we can’t believe the magic trick of all those dots evolving into a recognizable face. Sadly, Seurat died in 1891 at the age of thirty-one, just a year after finishing Le Port de Gravelines. Like so many other young rebels, Seurat never had the chance to grow old and, perhaps, change his spots. Reassembling what Seurat first meant by his work is as daunting a challenge as guessing how he himself would have connected those dots decades later.

Industrial Revolution

Impressionism, thanks to the seemingly endless string of blockbuster exhibitions circling the globe, often seems a tired, exhausted vein of art gold. Too-often relegated to the soft-focus, pretty pictures of calendars and gift shop items that rake in profits for museums, Impressionism and the Impressionists too often seem toothless. The disconnect between the bite of later Modern art movements and our present understanding of Impressionism leaves us wondering how those later schools rose from that first revolution. In Impressionism and the Modern Landscape: Productivity, Technology, and Urbanization from Manet to Van Gogh, James H. Rubin gives Impressionism teeth again and reconnects the rebels of Impressionism with their unruly descendents. Rubin recovers the lost roots of Impressionism, explaining why, for example, Paul Cézanne included a railway bridge off to the right of many paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire (above, one example from 1885-1887). Opposing the common view of Impressionism and industrialism as diverging paths, Rubin sets both revolutions on parallel tracks and “places images of industrial waterways, trains, and factories… at the heart of Impressionism’s pioneering artistic enterprise of the late 1860s and the 1870s.” For too long, critics have condemned Impressionism as a primarily aesthetic revolution. “Grounding Impressionism in socioeconomic, technological, and political modernity,” Rubin counters, “makes it possible to reevaluate and strengthen the movement’s claim to avant-garde status on far more than aesthetic grounds.” Rubin allows the “effete” Impressionists to rejoin the modern, Industrial Revolutionary world and finally get their hands dirty again.

Rubin builds a highly convincing case by presenting piece after piece of evidence, going back to the very beginning of Impressionism with the work that gave the movement its name—Claude Monet’s Impression: Sunrise (above, from 1873). Monet’s painting shows the busy industrial harbor of Le Havre. Sunlight plays upon the water, but tugboats spew bluish smoke into the air as well. “In many of his paintings of industrial scenes Monet exercised aestheticizing options, such as blurring detail in fog,” Rubin responds to those who don’t “see” the industry in such Impressionist work. “But that does not necessarily mean he was suppressing such elements; rather, he seems to have been trying to capture what for him was their invigorating beauty.” “Believing profoundly in the value of productive labor,” Rubin later writes, the Impressionists try to make even the pollution beautiful. Even more interestingly, Rubin argues that the Impressionist style itself expresses that faith in labor. “Impressionism’s representation of a modern naturalistic landscape in an ostentatiously proactive style is inextricably bound up with the metatheme of productivity,” Rubin believes. Whereas photography captured the image faithfully, Impressionistic painting not only reproduced the image but added the reproduced the act of labor itself through labored brushstrokes.

Rubens paints an Impressionist movement far more engaged with their time and place than ever done before. “Impressionism’s pleasing imagery is not value free, even though it implies disinterested freedom and enjoyment,” Ruben writes. For Rubin, the Impressionists present an “essentially urban, upper-middle-class, consumer-oriented vision of the world” chafing against the repressive establishment of 1870s France. The Impressionists complete culturally the renovations that Napoleon III and Georges Haussmann began when they modernized Paris into the city we still know today. Rather than fight progress, the Impressionists embraced it as the quintessential aspect of their age. The Impressionists praised figures such as industrialist Henri Rouart, who patronized the Impressionists and even tried his own hand at painting. Edgar Degas returned Rouart’s friendship and patronage with the affectionate portrait titled Henri Rouart in Front of His Factory (above, from 1875), which links industry with artistic sensibility beautifully. Rubin’s revival of the industrial roots of the Impressionists makes them seem much like the American Ashcan School of Robert Henri, and vice versa. Henri imbibed the spirit of Impressionism during his time there in the late 1880s and brought it back to America, where he adapted it to his increasingly industrialized and urbanized homeland. Thanks to Rubin’s argument, such (re)connections between the Impressionists and later movements not only become possible but, perhaps troublingly so, blur many of the lines of distinction between Impressionism and later developments.

Ruben centers his argument on the Impressionists’ embrace of progress, so it’s understandable that he falters momentarily when dealing with conservative dissenters such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who bemoaned Haussmann’s renovations to Paris that introduced new buildings “cold and lined up like soldiers at a review.” In the catalogue to last year’s PMA exhibit Renoir Landscapes 1865-1883, Christopher Riopelle argued in an essay titled “Renoir in the City,” that Renoir willfully painted out many of Haussmann’s new additions in works such as The Grands Boulevards (above, from 1875), focusing instead on the parks and private gardens also introduced by Haussmann. “That such islands of privacy and peace” that were Paris’ many private gardens “were still to be found in the metropolis,” Riopelle writes, “was, for Renoir, a beguiling feature of city life.” For Riopelle, Renoir’s blurring is a “corrective” or “subtle, utopian statement,” whereas I assume Rubin chooses to read it as just another aestheticizing choice. The dichotomy in Renoir’s attitude and how it plays out in his painting, however, does not take away from Rubin’s larger argument but, instead, attests to just how passionately involved these artists were in everyday life in late nineteenth-century France—enough to march along with progress but never in mindless lockstep.

Rubin uses the work of the Post-Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists as a bridge between the Impressionists and twentieth-century Modern art. Georges Seurat and Paul Signac develop a more scientific style that mimics technological progress in an updated way when the Impressionists’ style no longer fit in with the changing industrial world. Even an old hand such as Camille Pissarro tried to keep up with the times and paint in the new fashion. The popular print media began to generate more images of industry and progress, inspiring artists such as Vincent Van Gogh to see industrialization in a whole new light. In Factories at Clichy (above, from 1887), Van Gogh responds not only to popular print culture but also the Post- and Neo-Impressionist works he saw in Paris, while simultaneously updating his own sympathy for the common man. “Van Gogh’s leftist sympathies for the working man led to his interest in urban and industrial imagery,” Rubin writes. Such faith in progress seems naïve today, but we must remember that the Impressionists worked before the Robber Barons and the grand failure of technology in the cataclysm of World War I. Living in our post-Enron world, the Impressionists’ belief in the power of industrial progress to do good seems not only naïve but dangerous. Perhaps that difference in mindset is the highest hurdle to overcome in accepting Rubin’s premise, which revitalizes the Impressionists as active participants in their time and not just timeless, disengaged makers of pretty pictures.

[Many thanks to the University of California Press for providing me with a review copy of James H. Rubin’s Impressionism and the Modern Landscape: Productivity, Technology, and Urbanization from Manet to Van Gogh.]

Free Radical

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (above) today seems like the comfort food of Post-Impressionism. Georges Seurat, born on December 2, 1859, spent over two years painting it, from 1884 to 1886, meticulously implementing his Pointillist technique, which he termed Chromoluminarism. Whenever I look at it I hear the gentle piano works of Erik Satie. However, both Seurat and Satie were the radicals of their time, disrupting the status quo artistically with their bold new ideas regarding art and music. Whether this radical art reflected Seurat’s possibly radical politics remains a mystery.

Paul Signac, Seurat’s friend and fellow pointillist, painted a befriended his fellow anarchist Felix Feneon. Feneon, in turn, saw Seurat’s La Grand Jatte as a revolutionary statement on class conflict in France. Feneon saw sarcasm in Seurat’s depiction of the moneyed classes. Seurat remained silent throughout his short life on such issues, preferring to concentrate on his revolutionary art. The MOMA’s current exhibition of Seurat’s drawings, such as At the Concert Européen (above, from 1886), shows his amazing draftsmanship, which reproduced in graded shades of grey the same effect he achieved in points of color. Seurat’s drawings almost appear like ghostly photographs, with the figures melting into the shadows around them.

Seurat died of causes still under dispute in 1891, leaving works such as Circus (above) unfinished. Dead at the age of 31, he painted in the pointillist style for a brief 8 years. Like so many other artistic movements, Seurat’s pointillism involved a utopian dream, specifically the belief that color could be used to create harmony and emotion the same way that musical notes created harmony and emotional effects in music. In the final analysis, Seurat’s radical scheme longed for the status of comfort food all along, a harmonious experience as soothing as Satie’s compositions. Where Seurat would have taken his art had he lived longer is a great “what if?” Signac lived long enough to find the bold colors of proto-Fauvism creep into his pointillism. Would Seurat’s misty Island of La Grand Jatte have glowed with neon, acid color? Would we know Seurat at all if his work had taken that same turn?

Getting to the Point

Along with Georges Seurat, Paul Signac helped develop the painting style known as pointillism. Born November 11, 1863, Signac often takes second place to Seurat when people connect the dots between pointillism and its practitioners, but Signac deserves a place of prominence as well. In works such as The Port of Saint-Tropez (above, from 1901), we see Signac combining his love of sailing with his love of art. Thanks in some part to Signac’s “discovery” of the beauty of the French Riviera, Saint-Tropez and other beach towns soon became the destination of artists ranging from Renoir to Matisse, all drawn there by the dazzling blue water and stunning sunlight. Signac served as a missionary of sorts for artists seeking sensory overload, helping usher in the more colorful movements of early modern art.



Like Seurat, Signac belonged to the radical circles of the French art world. His Portrait of Felix Feneon (above, from 1890) shows his friend, the prominent anarchist, art critic, and art dealer, against a bold, carnivalesque backdrop almost mesmerizing in color and design. Signac and his friends, which included Alfred Jarry, hoped to turn not only the art world but all of society upside down, rocking the boat that had grown too steady, too comfortable for too many years. Just as the pointillist style sought to break down color into its most basic components before rebuilding it anew, these radical anarchists looked to tear down the establishment to build French society anew.


Signac’s greatest legacy may be in his influence on the Fauves, who followed him down to Saint-Tropez and took off in their own direction after following his lead. It is impossible to look at works today like Signac’s The Papal Palace, Avignon (above, from 1900) and not immediately think of Matisse or Derain, both of whom knew and worked with Signac on the Riviera. Although they didn’t share in his radical politics, they did share in his radical ideas about painting, especially the use of unreal color to express emotion and mood. The royal purple Papal Palace seems electrically charged here, as if it were made of neon. The pointillist technique used makes it almost jewel-like in its iridescence. Matisse flirted with pointillism early on before finding his own style, but he never gave up the lessons in color that Signac and the South of France taught him.

Mistaken Identity

Placing artists in schools and movements always serves as a handy shorthand way of pinning them down, placing them in a neat category to easily digest them. But, sometimes, these identifications do more harm than good, reducing a unique artist to a label. Louis Valtat, born on August 8, 1869, is a perfect example of mistaken identity. Young Women in the Garden (above), from 1898, shows some of the influence of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, with whom Valtat worked in the theater in 1894. Valtat soaked up many different influences throughout his career—Impressionism, Pointilism, Van Gogh, the Nabis–and yet, all because of one publication in 1905 he’s been labeled a Fauve, and the label still sticks to him.

Valtat’s Portrait of Madame Valtat (above) from the fateful year of 1905 shows much of the influence of Renoir, his close friend. In fact, Renoir and Valtat painted portraits of each other as a sign of how close they were. Looking at Madame Valtat above, one can easily recognize the same drowsy, soft focus and curving brushstrokes of Renoir’s women. Yet, when the magazine L’Illustration featured the works of Fauvists Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, and others just as the term Fauve or “beast” had been pejoratively coined, Valtat’s works were unlucky enough to appear close enough in the magazine to seem a part of the same movement by pagination if not by content or style. Valtat did study with Gustave Moreau, who taught Matisse, but the association ends there. Unfortunately, once the term stuck, it stuck for good.

I find Valtat’s work to be a wonderful compendium of the different styles that were all percolating in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. Trees in Normandy (above), from 1920, retains the soft focus and naturalism of the Impressionists, yet Valtat hints at a Pointillist technique, perhaps learned from his friend Paul Signac. Add in the free, almost Expressionist brushwork and you can see the influence of Van Gogh, as well. Throwing around all these terms to dissect just one painting and painter shows how limited they really are and how easily it is to overdepend on them. Louis Valtat’s paintings teach us that it is better to forget the labels if they keep you from really seeing the art.