Impressionism

La belle Epoque (1870-1914), a golden age characterized by optimism and indulgence, as

well as abundant artistic and scientific discovery. It is the time of the Moulin Rouge,
shopping arcades, and the Eiffel Tower, which was built to serve as the grand entrance to the
1889 World’s Fair in Paris.

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), French poet and art critic, set the tone for the era. He told
artists to paint scenes of modern life and invent new contexts and techniques for traditional
subject matter.
He is credited with coining the term “modernity,” which refers to the fleeting experience of
life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility art has to capture that experience.

Impressionist painters were inspired by photography to capture and recreate the changeability
of nature, especially light and color. They often worked en plein air at different times of the
day and in different seasons and settings.

A loosely formed group of painters who organized a series of exhibitions outside the official
French Salon in 1874.

Claude Monet, Impression: Sunrise,

1872

Claude Monet, Haystacks (sunset),

1890

Claude Monet, Woman with a

Parasol: Madame Monet and Her
Son, 1875

Claude Monet, Grand Canal, Venice,

1908

Claude Monet, Water Lilies, 1918-1926

 Auguste Renoir, Moulin de la
Galette, 1876

Auguste Renoir, By the Water,

1880

Camille Pissarro, Boulevard Montmartre, 1897

Edgar Degas
first artist to explore the animal movements recorded in the
1870s by Eadweard Muybridge’s stop-motion photographic
experiments, which were the direct precursor to cinema.

Edgar Degas, The Jockey, 1889

Edgar Degas, Dancer with a

Bouquet of Flowers (Star of the
Ballet), 1878

Post-Impressionism
A term to identify different artistic trends that followed Impressionism temporally and
stylistically. These include Neo-Impressionism, Primitivism, the Nabis, and works of artists
such as Auguste Rodin, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Cezanne.

Georges Seurat - Neo-Impressionists (most natural response to Impressionism)

• He believed that nature could be captured with color alone with scientific
discoveries of optics and perception.
• His “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” - he develops the
technique of pointillism - is one of the iconic paintings of Modernism and a piece at
the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886.
 Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on
the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1886
oil on canvas, 2 x 3 m

Georges Seurat, The Seine and la Grande

Jatte in Springtime,1888

Georges Seurat, The Circus, 1891

Paul Signac, Portrait of Félix Fénéon,

1890
oil on canvas, 73 x 92 cm

Paul Signac, Antibes, 1911

Paul Cezanne
• His work is a bridge between the early avant-gardes of the late 19th century and the
high modernism of the early 20th century
• Cezanne was a serious student of art history and wanted to define his place within it
• He strongly believed that painting should be neither a direct reflection of life, nor an
entirely separate reality. It should present the perfect balance between Realism and
Idealism on the canvas.
• From the 1880s, he worked on landscapes and still lifes in the south of France.

Paul Cezanne, The Card Players, 1895

Paul Cezanne, Still Life with Basket of Apples,

1893, oil on canvas, 62 x 79 cm

Paul Cezanne, L’Estaque, 1885

Paul Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire seen from Les

Lauvers, 1906, oil on canvas, 65 x 81 cm
Paul Gauguin (Primitivism)
• He rejected the opticality of the Impressionists and neo-Impressionists, but he
retained their pallet of colors
• Rather than paint realistically, he advised not to “copy nature too much.
• He mostly painted non-European

Henri Rousseau – primitivism

Paul Gauguin, Still Life with

Japanese Woodcut, 1889

Paul Gauguin, The Sacred

Mountain, 1892

Paul Gauguin, Two Women, 1901

Henri Rousseau, The Sleeping

Gypsy, 1897

Henri Rousseau, Exotic Landscape, 1908

The Nabis
• A rebellious group of young student artists who followed the example of Paul
Gauguin.
• Their uses of color go further than Gauguin towards pure abstraction.

Paul Sérusier, The Talisman, 1888

Édouard Vuillard, The Striped Blouse, 1895

Vincent van Gogh
• He was born in the Netherlands to a village preacher but moved to Paris where he
met Seurat and Gauguin.
• From them he learned to use brilliant, unmodulated color as an expressive device.
• He used color the most powerfully.

Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait, 1887

Vincent van Gogh, Sunflowers, 1889

Vincent van Gogh, The Night Cafe, 1888

oil on canvas, 70 x 89 cm

Vincent van Gogh, Wheatfield with

Crows, 1890

Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889

Oil on canvas, 74 x 92 cm

Auguste Rodin, The

Gates,1880-1917

Vincent van Gogh, The

Bridge in the Rain (after
Hiroshige), 1887

Lorenzo Ghiberti, Gates of Paradise, 1450

Auguste Rodin, The Thinker, 1889

 Auguste Rodin, Balzac, 1898

Art Nouveau
• Popular between 1890 and 1910
• An international style that spanned across the fine and decorative arts, including
architecture, painting, graphic art, interior design, jewelry, furniture, textiles,
ceramics, glass art, and metal work.
• Inspired by natural forms and structures, particularly the curved lines of plants and
flowers.
• Took its name from the Maison de l’Art Nouveau, an art gallery opened in 1895 by
the Franco-German art dealer Siegfried Bing, who helped introduce Japanese art to
the West.

Théophile Steinlen, Le Chat Noir, 1896

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Moulin Rouge, 1891,

lithograph, 190 x 120 cm

Henry van de Velde, Tropon, 1899

Alphonse Mucha, Dreaming, lithograph, 1897

Victor Horta, interior of the Hotel Tassel, 1894

Entrance to a Paris metro station

 Louis Tiffany, Lily lamp, 1900

James McNeil Whistler, The Peacock

Room, 1877

Joseph Maria Olbrich, Secession Building, 1897

“To every age its art, to every art its freedom”

Antoni Gaudi, Casa Batllo, 1904

Symbolism
• An approach to the ultimate reality
• Leads some poets and painters to religion and mysticism.
• During this time, Sigmund Freud was also beginning his studies that would lead to his
theory of dreams and the workings of the unconscious.

John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott,

1888

Odilon Redon, The eye like a strange balloon

goes toward infinity, 1882
lithograph, 26 x 20 cm

Gustave Moreau, The Sacred Elephant, 1885

Stéphane Mallarmé
• A French Symbolist
• Famous for his poem “A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance” (1897).
• He introduced the concept of using chance in the production of art. Artists like
Duchamp and Cage as well as whole movements like Dada and Fluxus would use in
their work.
Henri Matisse
 • He wanted to return the nature in Impressionism and the emotional, colorful
expression in post-Impressionism, without the literary morbidity of Symbolism.
• He concentrated on paintings ability to communicate directly the artist’s experience
of reality.

The Fauves saw painting as an autonomous creation, freed from narrative or symbolic ends.

Fauvism
• The word fauve means “wild beasts”
• It is a reference to these artists’ - Matisse, Derain, and Vlaminck
• They used brilliant, arbitrary color, which was more intense than the neo-
Impressionists and the non-descriptive color of Gauguin and van Gogh.
• The Fauves wanted to use pure color to develop an entirely new use of color.
• For them, all pictorial elements could be realized through color. Even space and
modeling could be rendered without the Renaissance tricks of perspective or
chiaroscuro.

André Derain, The Drying Sails,

1905

André Derain, Charing Cross

Bridge, 1906

André Derain, Turning Road, L’Estaque,

1906, oil on canvas, 130 x 190 cm

Maurice de Vlaminck, The River Seine at

Chatou, 1906

Maurice de Vlaminck, Portrait Of André

Derain, 1906, oil on cardboard, 27x 22 cm

Henri Matisse, Portrait of Madame

Matisse/The Green Line, 1905
oil and tempura on canvas, 40 x 33 cm
 Henri Matisse, The Roofs of Collioure, 1905

Henri Matisse, Landscape at Collioure, 1905

Henri Matisse, The Open Window, 1905

oil on canvas, 55 x 46 cm

Henri Matisse, Harmony in Red

Henri Matisse, Window at Tangier, 1912

Henri Matisse, The Conversation, 1912

Cubism
• Cubism questions the means by which reality was understood and represented
• Influenced by Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and Henri Bergson’s philosophy of
time in their belief that space and time change in relation to the position of an
observer.
• Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque

Pablo Picasso, The Old Guitarist, 1903

Pablo Picasso, Acrobat and Young Harlequin,

1905
oil on canvas, 191 x 109

Braque
• Working from a different direction
• In Houses at l’Estaque, August, he revisits Cezanne’s compositions.
 • By suppressing details and restricting his palette, the houses and trees become
simplified, geometric volumes sealed off from background sky or land.
• Louis Vauxcelles, the critic who coined the term Fauve, noted that here Braque
“reduces everything, places figures and houses, to geometrical schemes, to cubes.”

Georges Braque, Houses at l’Estaque, August, 1908

Picasso and Braque believed that there is nothing natural about Renaissance perspective; it is
only one way in which to give the illusion of three-dimensional space.
In Analytic Cubism, they tried to develop a new system of depicting fragmented objects in an
equally hardened and fractured space. They did so by revisiting two of the most traditional
subject matter: still lifes and figure studies. Objects from their studios and cafes filled their
paintings: newspapers, food, and musical instruments.

Georges Braque, La guitar, 1909

oil on canvas, 71 x 56 cm

Pablo Picasso, Girl with a Mandolin,1910, oil on

canvas, 100 x 74

Georges Braque, Violin and Palette, 1909, oil on canvas, 92 x 43

In High Cubism, objects are analyzed, broken down, and dissected to the point at which
figures can only be grasped by a few clues: accordion keys, curves reminiscent of arms of a
chair, nautical rope, guitar strings.
 Pablo Picasso, Accordionist,1911,
oil on canvas, 130 x 90

Georges Braque, The Portuguese, 1911, oil on

canvas, 117 x 81

Synthetic Cubism - collage combining different pictorial vocabularies in one frame.

In his Still Life with Chair Caning, we have several items from a Parisian cafe. Le Journal is
indicated by the letters JOU - also indicating “play” - as well as a knife, lemon and abstract
forms of a glass. He pastes a facsimile of chair caning, which plays with the very idea of
representation. The rope around the edges is an ironic imitation of a traditional gold frame.

Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair

Caning,1912, oil and oilcloth on canvas with
rope, 27 x 37

Pablo Picasso, Guitar, Sheet Music, and

Wine Glass,1912, pasted paper, gouache,
and charcoal on paper, 50 x 37

Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Compote and Glass,

1914, oil on canvas

Pablo Picasso, Three Musicians, 1921

Expressionism
• In 1905, a group of German architectural students formed Die Brücke, The Bridge,
whose goal was to connect “all the revolutionary and fermenting elements”
• They were influenced by German medieval art, symbolism, art nouveau, fauvism,
and the work of van Gogh and the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch.
• The style extended to a wide range of the arts: architecture, painting, literature,
theatre, dance, film and music.
 Gustav Klimt, Portrait of
Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907

Egon Schiele, Self-Portrait, 1910,

oil and gouache on canvas

Edvard Munch
• Born in Oslo but trained and worked in France and then Berlin.
• His work expresses the angst and nihilism of the fin de siècle – the philosophy of
Friedrich Nietzsche and a search for alternative belief systems like buddhism and
theosophy.
• Munch was deeply involved in literary circles. And his life was surrounded by
sickness and suffering.

Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1893,

oil and tempura on board

Edvard Munch, Vampire, 1902, woodcut

and lithograph

The works of the Expressionists were disregarded by the Nazis and were included in Hiltler’s
exhibition of “degenerate art” in 1937.

Die Brücke manifesto 1906

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Die Brücke

members,1926
 Ernst Kirchner, Street, Dresden

Ernst Kirchner, Street, Berlin

Ernst Kirchner, Nollendorf Platz, 1912

Ernst Kirchner, Portrait of Henri van de Velde, 1917

woodcut, 49 x 40 cm

Emil Nolde, The Human, 1912

Abstraction
• During Die Brücke, another expressionist movement called Der Blaue Reiter was
germinating in Munich
• Der Blaue Reiter employed the free use of form, color, and space in order to express
emotional and even spiritual moods.
• Like Die Brücke, they viewed modern industrial society with skepticism. Instead of
directly critiquing it in their work, artists of Der Blaue Reiter tended to retreat from
society. This is reflected in their formal movement towards pure abstraction.

Kandinsky (Der Blaue Reiter)

• He began to explore ideas about “non-objective” painting that do not derive form
from the objective world.
• In 1911, he published a book called Concerning the Spiritual in Art, which linked
abstraction in painting with the ephemeral art of music as well as the ideas of
Theosophy, which combined elements of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Western
mysticism.
• His paintings of this time are expressionistic compositions of color, line, and form
that move towards total abstraction, although some hieroglyphic elements remain.
 Vasily Kandinsky, Composition VII, 1913

Paul Klee (Der Blaue Reiter)

• Also interested in music.
• He wanted to create imagery infused with the rhythms and counterpoint of musical
composition - saying that color could be played like a “chromatic keyboard” - in
order to arrive at a realty just beyond the visible world.

Klee and Kandinsky would reunite at the Bauhaus 10 years later.

Paul Klee, Hammamet, 1914

Watercolor and pencil on paper, 21 x 19 cm

Kazimir Malevich took Cubist geometry to its most radical conclusion.

In his Morning in the Village after a Snowstorm, cylindrical and mechanized
figures move through a modeled red, white, and blue Cubo-Futurist landscape.

Kazimir Malevich, Morning in the Village after a Snowstorm, 1912

Suprematism – a nonrepresentational painting. carried abstraction to an ultimate geometric

simplification: The Black Square.

Kazimir Malevich, Installation with Black

Square, St. Petersburg

Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist

Composition: White Square on White

Under the influence of Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko, and El Lissitsky,
Kandinsky’s paintings exhibit more regular shapes and straight lines.

Constructivism was an artistic and architectural philosophy that originated in Russia and was
a rejection of the idea of “art for art’s sake.” The movement was in favor of machinic and
industrial art as a practice for social purposes, in the service of the Bolsheviks.
 Vladimir Tatlin, model for Monument to
the Third International, 1919
Projected to be 400 m tall

Alexander Rodchenko, Stairway, 1930,

photograph

El Lissitsky, Proun 99, 1925, Metallic paint on

wood, 128 x 98 cm

Vasily Kandinsky, White Line no. 232, 1920

Oil on canvas, 128 x 98 cm

Kandinsky left Russia for good back to Germany

This time to Weimar, where a progressive new art school was
started by the architect Walter Gropius.
Gropius’s vision was to collapse the distinction between fine art
and design and to integrate all the arts into a total utopian vision.
Both Kandinsky and Klee explored the fundamental elements of
color and geometric form in their works of this period.

Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Principles

Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Building
Dessau,1925

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

German Pavilion for the International
Exposition in Barcelona, 1929

Vasily Kandinsky, Composition VIII

Vasily Kandinsky, Several Circles no. 323

 Paul Klee, In the Current Six Weirs

Paul Klee, Ad Parnassum

• Another form of geometric abstraction was developed by Piet Mondrian, who was
associated with a group called De Stijl.
• He sought to express the spiritual realm through art, but his was a purely rational
aesthetic from the start.
• He was looking to create an “absolute devaluation of tradition” through abstraction.
He was opposed to all forms of Impressionism and Expressionism
• He mainly used primary colors, plus black and white, and pure geometric forms. He
wanted each of these forms and colors to have equal weight in the composition.

Piet Mondrian, Composition in Color A

Piet Mondrian, Tableau no. II with red,

Blue, Black, Yellow, and Gray

Constantin Brancusi, Bird in Space, Bronze