Renoir & Monet - La Grenouillère, 1869

Renoir


Monet


La Grenouillère (`The Froggery') was a restaurant and bathing place on a small branch of the Seine at Croissy. It was an extremely popular area because the Railway line from Paris to Saint-Germain, the first to be opened in France, had a station at nearby Chatou. Both Monet and Renoir painted several views of it in 1869 (Monet: La Grenouillère, Metropolitan Museum, New York; Renoir: La Grenouillère, Oskar Reinhardt Collection, Winterthur, Switzerland). Several successful academic painters had houses nearby, and the place was extensively written about, sometimes approvingly, sometimes not so, during the 1860s. It was thought of as a very `contemporary' subject, and its popularity was confirmed in the year that Monet and Renoir painted it, when it was visited by the Emperor Napoleon III and Eugénie, his wife.

Bathing at La Grenouillère by Claude Monet

In this painting, Monet's brushwork is vigorous and the individually distinguishable brushmarks indicate that hog's hair brushes between about 1-2cm (2/5-4/5in) wide were used. There is little variation between the size of stroke in foreground and background to suggest depth, although more uniformly straight horizontal strokes and pastel shades on the distant water aid the impression of depth and recession. His brushwork is strongly descriptive, catching the character of different forms. Long unbroken strokes outline the boats, short horizontal daubs indicate the foreground water, abrupt jabs are used for flowers and foliage. Monet rejected traditional, smooth brushwork which created an illusion of surface texture; instead, his varied handling helps to evoke the actual natural textures. Monet's talent for summarizing the essential character of his landscapes was already apparent in his early caricatures, which demanded an ability to capture basic features concisely.

Monet's palette for this picture was already fairly limited, moving toward the restricted range of the Impressionists. Black--the absence of light--appears to have been abandoned, confirming his move away from Manet's influence. Most of the colors typically found in Monet's Impressionist palette are already in evidence. Vermilion, one of the few traditional colors used by Monet, has been identified virtually pure in the red flowers on the left, and mixed with other colors elsewhere. The greens were viridian, emerald and chrome, the latter a commercially produced mixture of Prussian blue and chrome yellow widely marketed in the period. All three greens were modern colors. Chrome yellow and lemon yellow mixed, were used in the brightest greens of the background trees. Because of their tendency to blacken in the presence of sulphides, the chrome yellows were abandoned by most of the Impressionists toward the end of the 1870s. Monet replaced them with the more stable cadmium yellows. Cobalt violet, available from 1859, was the first opaque pure violet pigment to appear on the market and was therefore rapidly adopted by artists. It was used here by Monet in mixtures, for example in the foreground water. The early eighteenth century invention, Prussian blue, was used by Monet in the darkest mixtures, such as the swimming costumes, while cobalt blue is the bright blue of the water. Lead white was consistently used by Monet throughout his career, but, as strong contrasts form the basis of this composition, its role in this picture was relatively limited. In his paintings from the 1870s on, lead white was liberally used in most of his color mixtures, bringing with it a new overall brilliance and pale pastel-like quality, as he sought to depict the light tones and minimal light-dark contrasts of full sunlit landscapes. Interestingly, a family of colors commonly used by Monet from the early 1870s, the red alizarin lakes, has not been identified on this picture. The artificial alizarin, more permanent than the natural organic root derivative madder lake, was only discovered in 1868, which may account for its absence here. Both Prussian blue and probably chrome green were abandoned by Monet during the 1870s. Monet combined slurred wet-in-wet mixing on the canvas with premixed hues. For example, the somber colors on the boats are obtained by mixing complementaries, like red and green, which give darkish neutral hues that are more colorful than those made by sullying a color with black.

The apparently accidental nature of the composition is deceptive. The striking horizontal of the duckboard, which cuts right across the picture surface, is placed almost exactly halfway up the picture. This was an unconventional device at this date. The broad shapes of light and dark above and below that line echo each other, giving a flat decorative unity to the composition which is reinforced by the harmonizing colors and patterned brushwork. Thus, even at this early stage in his career, Monet was already preoccupied with contrasts of naturalistic illusion and flat pattern, which were to become a feature of Impressionism, and to remain with Monet throughout his life.

taken from www.ibiblio.org

Paul Gauguin - Fatata te Miti & Parau na te Varua ino

Paul Gauguin's famous guise as the original Western savage was his own embellishment upon reality. No mere bohemianism, that persona was, for him, the modern sequel to the "natural man" constructed by his idol, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Gauguin's rejection of the industrialized West for an earthly paradise embraced, in artistic terms, all handmade arts and crafts as equivalent creative endeavors. As his own ideal artist-artisan, he produced an abundant, cross-fertilizing body of work in many media, dissolving the traditional boundaries between high art and decoration. Full Bio

Parau na te Varua ino (Words of the Devil), 1892

Lured to Tahiti in 1891 by reports of its unspoiled culture, Gauguin was disappointed by its civilized capital and moved to the countryside, where he found an approximation of the tropical paradise he had expected. The Tahiti of his depictions was derived from native folklore supplemented by material culled from books written by earlier European visitors and overlaid with allusions to western culture. The pose of the standing nude, for instance, is derived from a medieval statue of the biblical Eve and more distantly from the Venus Pudica of classical sculpture. The artist placed this rich combination of references to original sin, the loss of virginity, and occidental standards of beauty and art within the context of his Tahitian mythology and primitive, non-European aesthetics.

The meaning of the title Parau na te Varua ino is unclear. The phrase varua ino, evil spirit or devil, refers to the masked kneeling figure and parau means words, suggesting the interpretation "Words of the Devil." The meaning of many of Gauguin's Tahitian paintings remains elusive. There is little likelihood that Gauguin's original audience would have been able to interpret the Tahitian legends that Gauguin carefully inscribed on most of the sixty-six paintings he took back to Paris in 1892.

Fatata te Miti (By the Sea), 1892

Like Parau na te Varua ino, Fatata te Miti was painted during Gauguin's first trip to Tahiti. Its setting, in fact, is quite similar. The two paintings share brilliant pink sands and vividly colored accents, the brilliant fringed blossoms of the phosphorescing hutu, and on the left the same unusually shaped tree. These similarities point to Gauguin's use of "documents," the term he used for sketches and working drawings that he would incorporate into many paintings and prints.

Their similarities invite us to compare the two works, and in other respects we find they are quite different. Where Parau na te Varua ino is densely symbolic, this painting is a more straight-forward depiction of life on the island. One woman removes her pareo to join a companion already plunging into the sea for a swim. Nearby a man fishes with a spear. The intense, tropical colors—hot oranges and cool blues—convey sensual delight. This is the effortless and uninhibited paradise that Gauguin had hoped to find in the South Seas. Little remained of this life, however, by the time Gauguin reached Tahiti. Polynesian culture had been transformed by western missionaries and colonialism, and the ancient religion replaced by Christianity. Gauguin wrote and illustrated a manuscript about Polynesian mythology, but most of what he knew about the island gods came from previously published sources.

EMBONPOINT

The Word of the Day for May 6 is:

embonpoint \ahng-bohng-PWANG (the "ng" is never pronounced, but the vowels are nasalized)\ noun
: plumpness of person : stoutness

Example sentence:
The judge was a man of stately embonpoint who walked with a heavy step as he entered the courtroom.

Did you know?
"Embonpoint" is most often used to describe people of heavy, but not unattractive, girth. It derives from "en bon point," a phrase from Middle French that means "in good condition." The word was first used as a noun in English in the 17th century. It has subsequently appeared in works by Charlotte Bronte ("a form decidedly inclined to embonpoint" -- Shirley), James Fenimore Cooper ("an embonpoint that was just sufficient to distinguish her from most of her companions" -- Home as Found), and George Eliot ("as erect in her comely embonpoint as a statue of Ceres" -- Adam Bede), among others.

Was Gauguin to blame?

BRAND NEW INFORMATION

Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier - The Barricade, Rue de la Mortellerie

The barricade, Rue de la Mortellerie, June 1848 known as Souvenir of the civil war
Paris, Musée du Louvre

Enrolled as a captain in the Artillerie de la Garde nationale, Meissonier viewed at close quarters the days of 1848 during which the troops of General Cavaignac annihilated the Parisians in revolt. This small picture is almost a piece of reportage; the implacable realism of a daguerreotype. "This is the horror of the truth", was Delacroix's comment.
The many disappointments resulting from the revolution of 1848 and the Second Republic opened to the door to Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, enabling him to play a role on the French political stage. And he managed to rally to his cause not only the bourgoisie worried by the revolutionary disorders, and the peasants hostile to the Republic, but also a part of the working classes which believed in his social programme. On 10 December, 1848, Louis-Napoleon was elected President of the Republic. However, Meissonier's barricade is the prefiguring of future brutal repression, namely that which followed the coup d'etat of 2 December, 1851, staining right at the outset the future Imperial regime.

This is the original watercolour which was the basis for the painting...

After the taking of a barricade

The corpses of rioters, together with the cobblestones that form the remains of a barricade, lie like dummies who have lost their limbs in the center of a Paris street lined with old houses. Ernest Meissonier painted this picture after a watercolor (Musée du Louvre) done at the scene on June 25, 1848, during the workers' riots. These events made for a troubled beginning to the Second Republic, a few months after the February 1848 revolution. The painter, a captain in the National Guard who was sympathetic to the government, painted the scene that lay before him after a barricade had been taken near to the town hall. The painting is highly original in comparison with another depiction of a barricade, Liberty Leading the People (July 28, 1830) by Delacroix (1831, Musée du Louvre), celebrating the revolution of 1830. There is no pretension to allegory here, no pompous rhetoric. It is the most powerful image to emerge from the events of 1848.

A masterpiece by the "giant among dwarves"

Meissonier wanted to exhibit this canvas at the 1849 Salon under the title of June, but he abandoned the idea because the events were too recent. He exhibited it instead under the title Memory of Civil War at the 1850-51 Salon, but the critics were put out by the painting's unpleasant subject matter. Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) was the only one who dared to admit being disturbed by it and talked of "this trusty truth that no-one wants to tell." Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) had been struck by the watercolor done at the scene, upon which the painting was based. This painting is unquestionably Meissonier's masterpiece. Most of his works depict scenes of daily life under the Ancien Régime and are painted in small format. Combined with his small stature, they earned him the nickname of "the giant among dwarves" that was coined by Edgar Degas (1838-1917). Another of Meissonier's pictures to achieve fame was called The French Campaign, 1814 (1864, Musée d'Orsay, Paris), and became the most expensive work sold in the nineteenth century.

A scene observed

The picture is extremely realistic, Meissonier having painted every part of the canvas, the cobblestones as well as the rioters, with the same attention to detail. Unlike historical paintings generally, the work seems to portray a scene observed without comment or message. Although it depicts a historical event, it is a work that is more akin to genre paintings, particularly on account of its small size. It has recently been interpreted by an art historian as a warning to future rebels. Indeed, the artist's impassive reaction to the horror in front of him may well express the hostility of his own social class, the bourgeoisie, toward the underprivileged.

Chernobyl

In a similar vein in Liam's abandoned amusement parks, some atmospheric pictures of Chernobyl as it is now. And a good read

iHockney

Artist David Hockney uses his iPhone to paint mini masterpiece

See it here