Colours of Impressionism: Musee d’Orsay masterpieces show in Adelaide
Monet’s secret is a harmonisation of tone and hue. His lights and darks are suffused with colour.
On the face of it, there are few styles of art more detached from the historical and political circumstances of their time than impressionism. Neoclassicism in France was deeply engaged with the 1789 revolution and the Napoleonic adventure; romanticism was particularly sympathetic to struggles for freedom, from the Greek war of independence to the anti-slavery movement, and was also involved in the rise of cultural nationalism in various parts of Europe. Realism represented the lives of workers and peasants, as well as the new conditions of urban existence and relations between the classes, as we see in Manet.
Impressionism, in contrast, alludes to the differences of urban and rural life, but emphasises leisure more than work, and tends to show members of different classes mingling in places of entertainment, such as cafes and theatres, rather than pointedly marking differences and tensions as Manet does in both Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe (1863) and Un bar aux Folies-Bergere (1882). Above all, it avoids any reference to the greatest national disaster of its time, the shamefully swift defeat of France by Germany in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71.
This war, trumped up by Bismarck as a pretext for rallying the diverse German states behind the leadership of Prussia, was an enormously important historical event, unifying Germany and ultimately helping to set the scene for the Great War. It led to the abdication of Napoleon III, the siege of Paris, and then the Paris Commune, when political radicals imagined they could create a new government without the support of the rest of France. The farce of the Commune turned into tragedy when the French army retook the city in a systematic and ruthless sweep in May 1871. These events must have traumatised all who lived through them, and yet the impressionist style, which developed before and flowered after the conflict, seems a deliberate turning away from history.
This apparent anomaly can perhaps be explained by two related developments, which also help to illuminate features of later modernism: the first is the loss of a language with which to address a broader public, and the second is an increasing concentration on personal, intimate, and increasingly on idiosyncratic experience.
In regard to the first factor, a decline in shared beliefs and cultural references can be traced back to a surprisingly early period, and is visible even in the art of the late 17th century. A continued decline, in the 18th century, of religious art and of the secular, historical and mythological subjects that were the vehicle of philosophical and political allegory, is masked by a temporary, though often merely rhetorical, resurgence in the neoclassical period. But by the early and mid-19th century the problem is acute: religious faith can no longer be taken for granted, nor does the new middle class have the depth of education to feel at home in the traditional canon of secular subjects.
The other factor, the turn towards private and intimate experience, seems to arise as a response to an anonymous and utilitarian mass society. This is how we can understand the central concern of impressionism with fleeting sensations and transient effects of light and weather. In a world of mass conformity, anonymity and social regimentation, only the immediate and momentary personal experience can be authentic. Art can no longer address matters of public concern, but it can address us separately, individually and intimately.
The present exhibition from the Musee d’Orsay in Paris is rather mixed in quality, relevance and structure, and includes many artists not usually considered part of the impressionist movement, but it does contain some very fine works, and even the less remarkable pieces can play a part in providing a context.
Thus several cityscapes, whether impressionist or not, evoke the new realities of life in enormous modern cities such as Paris or London. And Manet’s strangely sinister Moonlight over the Port of Boulogne (1869), with its Goya-like ambience of irrational menace, reminds us of dimensions of feeling and reference that we won’t find in the painting of the impressionists.
The first great painting in the exhibition, and arguably the most compelling and mysterious of all, is Monet’s The Magpie (1868-69), where the bird, perched on a rickety gate in a snowy landscape, is the darkest note in a composition filled with subdued luminosity. Monet reminds us that the effect of light in a painting is nothing to do with the use of bright colour or a high-keyed palette, much less the abuse of white. It arises from contrast, but not necessarily from extreme contrast; the most powerful effect sometimes requires the subtlest of means.
Monet’s secret is a combination of understatement and a harmonisation of tone and hue. His darks are not particularly dark, and even the snow is many shades darker than a sheet of paper. But these lights and darks are suffused with colour: the snow a soft warm hue verging on orange, from the sun; and the shadow of the fence, by virtue of the principle of complementary colours, a soft grey just tinged with violet.
But the result, which is impossible to convey even in the best reproductions, is akin to an effect of movement: it is as though we can feel the light propagating itself through space, emanating from the light haze of the background and pouring through the rickety fence towards us, bathing the whole snowy foreground in a paradoxically warm glow.
Another high point of the exhibition is in the following room, where three smaller paintings, by Sisley, Pissarro and Monet, have been oddly framed together as a kind of triptych. But unlike almost all the other pictures in the exhibition, these are not glazed; instead, a taped area on the floor reminds not to get too close. Even from a little further away, however, we can feel just how much glazing subtly distances us from the concrete experience of the paint surface.
But this in itself would be of limited interest if the pictures, or two of them at least, were not outstanding. With the little view of boats on the river by Monet we see the artist managing a far more extreme range of tone, and achieving a unity that hardly any other painter in the pictures hanging nearby could capture — not Boudin, whose pictures are almost adjacent, nor for that matter Monet’s contemporary Sisley.
Why the tonal problem of the boats on the water is so hard is because it is difficult for us to perceive the real range of lights and darks. As the infant grows and the visual cortex is fine-tuned to interpret optical data, we learn to discount much of what we see. If we walk into a room in which one wall is lit and another is in shadow, we don’t conclude that the walls are painted in different colours; in fact, our brain auto-corrects so we don’t even notice the disparity. Similarly, if we look at a collection of things some of which are lit while others are in shadow, we again compensate so that we can see into both light and dark.
This automatic adjustment helps us to extract more information, but it also prevents us from being aware of what the eye is really seeing. A painter, as I have observed before, has to unlearn these autocorrection and discounting habits and relearn to see the raw data, as it were, if the resulting image is to look vivid and even correct to its viewers, who look at the picture with the same habits with which they see the world. The painter must therefore present them with a version of the undiscounted data.
If we look at most other pictures hanging nearby, we can see the effort the artist is making to reconstruct the actual tonal relations of what he is seeing, but it is as though he is having to do this step by step. Monet, on the other hand, seems to be able to see the whole range of lights and darks simultaneously and to capture these complex phenomena as a single, unified tonal pattern. This again is a picture that repays close contemplation. It is useless to take a picture on your mobile phone, because what there really is to see cannot be captured and taken away; besides, art is not something we consume or appropriate and hoard, but something to which we surrender ourselves.
The adjacent picture by Pissarro holds its own, although in a very different way, more in the tradition of Corot, with its distinctive palette, sense of space and harmonious juxtaposition of architecture and landscape. And indeed Pissarro is really the other hero of this exhibition; in the next room, there is a fine painting by him at one end of a wall and one by Cezanne at the other, reminding us how the architectonic landscape, with its characteristic play of horizontals and verticals and crystalline building forms, which Corot had ultimately learnt from Poussin, was passed o Pissarro and from him to Cezanne, both preceding and succeeding the more subjective and optical art of impressionism.
Although there is a series of beautiful little oil studies by Seurat, the end of the exhibition is dominated by Monet, with one famous view of the lily pond with its Japanese bridge that the artist designed in his own garden, like a set in which he could work at leisure, free of most of the inconveniences of plein-air painting in public, and also one of the series devoted to the facade of the gothic cathedral of Rouen.
This picture brings us back, many years after The Magpie, to the mystery of Monet’s grasp of colour and tone. For among other things, the title explicitly tells us that the cathedral is in full sunlight, and yet when you approach the canvas the paint surface is dull and muddy.
It transforms almost miraculously as you step back, glowing with luminosity; but this is not the old commonplace about things roughly painted from close-up becoming realistic from a distance. It is rather a change from dullness to brightness, and once again the secret to the mastery of tonal contrast, but above all tonal coherence, lies in the understanding of chromatic effects. Objectively the values of the paint are neither very high nor very low, but in conjunction, and through the play of warm and cool hues and the energy generated by complementarities, the whole surface of this magnificent building seems to come to life in the summer sunlight.
The Colours of Impressionism
Art Gallery of South Australia. Until July 29.
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