Neo-Pasticism and Purism

The Die is Cast,
1938,
Le Corbusier

Some time ago, in expounding on the multitude of "isms" in 20th century art, I mentioned a couple I doubt many people are familiar with. In many ways they are similar but at the same time, they also have one major difference. I'm referring to Neo-Pasticism and Purism. Both art movements came during the years between the two world wars and to some extent, were reactions on the part of their founders to the irrationality and chaos of "the war to end all wars."  Both movements sought to impose upon art a sense of careful, compositional, and chromatic order. Neo Plasticism was the brainchild of Piet Mondrian. Purism, that of Amedee Ozenfant, and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret who later called himself Le Corbusier (pronounced Lay Cor-BOO-see-ay). Today, Corbusier, rather than his painting, we are most familiar with his architectural work employing many of the principals of Purism.

Guitar and Bottles, 1920, Amedee Ozenfont

The Purism Manifesto, Apres le Cubisme was published in 1918. It proclaimed the great human pleasure in organizing things and being a part of that organization. Nearly all of their paintings were still-lifes and nearly all of them depicted clearly delineated everyday objects, arranged with a "grammar of sensibility" celebrating simplified forms and standard, time-tested compositional devices and unity. Purism was the antithesis of accidental or emotional art, favoring instead the synthesis of line, planes, shapes and color first coming from Picasso's and Braque's Synthetic Cubism, but drawing back from the near total disintegration of recognizable content which had evolved from Cubism. With the Purism movement came the magazine, L'Espirit Nouveau, published until 1925.  It became a standard bearer for Avant-garde art, and probably did more to promote the broader modern art movement than any of the rather cold, dry Purism paintings depicted on its pages.

Composition in Red, Blue, and
Yellow, 1930, Piet Mondrian

As for Neo-Plasticism, merely mentioning the name of Piet Mondrian probably says more in describing the painting of this movement than any long, descriptive discourse on individual works. One could basically say it was a more extreme version of Purism. The most obvious difference was the total renunciation of recognizable subject matter. It was an austere exploration of design elements to the exclusion of all else. Mondrian's extended discourse Neo-Pasticism in Painting (plus three other manifestos on the subject) hit the newsstands about the same time as Purism's mouthpiece magazine and manifesto. Artists such as van Doesburg, Severini, Lissitzky, and Arp teamed with the Bauhaus school, hoping to see adopted a universal language of art, and its integration into every aspect of daily life. The movement worked (with considerable success) to influence everything from painting to architecture, furniture design, interior design, consumer products, advertising, and even urban planning. It was Utopian. It was socialistic, and it had a strong influence in Germany. And ironically, though it collapsed in disarray amidst the turmoil of Hitler and the Second World War, it was not without influence among the Utopian planners of the Third Reich.

Nature Run Amok

Pastoral Landscape, 1677, Claude Lorrain

When someone refers to painting nature, our first inclination is to think of a landscape. And indeed, the first studies of nature were in the realm of the ideal, Arcadian meadows with idealized streams, picturesque trees, flocks, maybe a few shepherds, all carefully balanced to soothe the senses and instill a feeling of gentle, secure, loveliness. The painters, Jacob van Ruisdael and Claude Lorrain (left) come to mind. But those who live near the sea, towering mountains, active volcanoes, or great rivers, know that nature is not always so docile. As the early19th century progressed and the Romantic era of painting, music, and literature developed, it was the heroic, demonic, or dramatic violence of nature's extremes that began to capture the imagination of artists of the time.

Satan Calling to Beelzebub over a
Sea of Fire, 1802, Henry Fuseli

In England there was J.M.W. Turner exploring the land, the sea, and the forces of nature illuminated by a sort of heroic, eternal light. At about the same time, Henry Fuseli, William Blake, James Barry, and John Martin were probing the more sinister nature of these forces, using them to demonstrate the dreaded depths of men's souls, their nightmares, and their psyches. Fuseli's Satan Calling to Beelzebub over a Sea of Fire (right), painted in 1802 is a good example of this type of painting. Blake chose to explore the element of divine planning and intervention in these elements of nature, while James Barry tried to delve into nightmares, using the chaos of nature at its worst to give shape to man's worst fears and frustrations. And John Martin demonstrated the forces of nature by painting biblical and oriental themes such as his 1812 canvas, Sadak Searching for the Waters of Oblivion (below, left), or The Fall of Babylon painted in 1819, both based on Persian legends.

Sadak Searching for the Waters of
Oblivion, 1812, John Martin

The Last Days of Pompeii, 1830-33,
Karl Pavlovitch Brullov

Perhaps the most incredible painting of this type however, was Karl Pavlovitch Brullov's horrifying Last Days of Pompeii (above, right), painted over the course of three years from 1830 to 1833. Now hanging in the Russian State Museum in St. Petersburg, it's an enormous canvas, bringing to mind some of this century's great disaster movies, replete with a seeming cast of thousands and special effects to boggle the mind. The sky is black, the scene illuminated only by Vesuvius itself as the mountain reigns death and destruction of cataclysmic proportions upon the hapless Roman men, women, and children fleeing before its vengeful wrath. There is a supernatural quality on an apocalyptic scale to most if not all these paintings which are as far removed from tranquil Arcadian landscapes as Poussin's  chaotic Rape of the Sabines (below, left) is from David's noble Oath of the Horatii (below, right). And the comparison of nature's turmoil to that of man is most apt, as if man were, at times, trying to imitate nature's turbulence in his own affairs.

The Rape of the Sabines,
1637-38, Nicholas Poussin

The Oath of the Horatii, 1784,
Jacques-Louis David

Nadar

Nadar Self-Portraits, 1865

As artists today, many of us would be "lost" without photos to work from. Some of us have learned to use them and rely on them more than others, but I would guess just about every painter today has used them at some point in time. Ever wonder what artist was the first to use photos in his work? Of course it's hard to say for sure, but a likely candidate would be Gaspar-Felix Tournachon. You don't want to know how to pronounce that because he went by the name Nadar (pronounced Na-DAR) most of his life. He was born in 1820, and inasmuch as photography, for all intents and purposes, took its bow about 1840, his use of it around 1850 in doing a series of 270 caricatures of famous Parisians certainly puts him on or near the ground floor as the new medium took off (at least insofar as art is concerned). Nadar published his drawings in a magazine called Pantheon, which was so popular he put out a second edition the following year.

So fascinated was Nadar by the potentialities of this new medium he decided to give up drawing and let the camera do the work for him. In 1854, he opened a photo studio specializing in portraits using the Collodion wet plate process. (Yes, the glass photographic plate was put into the back of the camera wet.) Because of the limited amount of natural light his makeshift studio afforded, he tended toward a very high-contrast style, using a single light source on one side of the face, allowing the range of flesh tones to run from white, through all the shades of gray, to black. It was not only very dramatic, but allowed for an impressive degree of modeling of the various facial planes (as can be seen in the self-portraits, top left). Nadar was so successful that by 1860, he was able to move to a building specially designed as a photography studio/gallery. It was there that many of the first Impressionist art exhibits were held (below, left).

Nadar's Paris Studio-Gallery,
1864

Nadar Elevating the Photograph to
High Art, 1863, Honore Daumier

Nadar was an odd sort. He was a swarthy, heavy, bearded, bear of a man, drawn to social, literary, and artistic events; ironic, sharply observant, and intensely critical. He was an adventurous showman, pioneering the use of hot-air balloons to take aerial photos of Paris (below, left). And, apparently not satisfied with hot-air balloons, he even went so far as to try building a steam-powered helicopter. Perhaps as a result of having struggled for several years with inadequate natural light, Nadar was among the first photographers to welcome the use of electric, artificial light in shooting his subjects. He demonstrated in some rather bizarre ways the usefulness of his primitive artificial light sources. Going from aerial photography, he took his lights and cameras to subterranean locales (below, right). If not waking the dead in the catacombs of Rome, he no doubt startled the rats a little when he shot photos in the sewers of Paris.

As the Daumier cartoon (above, right)
 proclaims, Nadar took photography to new
heights, but also to new depths, revealing
a Paris few (human) Parisians had ever seen
before (ca. 1900).

Aerial View of Paris, 1868,
Nadar, featuring the Arc de Triomphe

Moving Up in the World

A successful artist from the 15th through the 18th
centuries might have lived and worked in a house
not unlike this one in Kent, England.

In the world today, most successful artists are what we would term "upper middle-class." A few "stars" are probably well above that. Two-hundred years ago, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, even a successful artist tended to live very modest existence in what we would call lower-class neighborhoods. Most supported a family of five or more in two or three rooms over the "store" so to speak, eking out a living as best they could doing whatever they could. Even a successful portrait painter would find himself also painting signs for the local gentry or decorating furniture for the local cabinet maker just to make ends meet. And often, his "digs" were so crude he was forced to do his "important" work in the homes of his clients. The status of the painter in society may have moved up somewhat from the just-another-craftsman level of pre-Renaissance times, but economically they were usually pretty much among the downtrodden.

              Frederic Lord Leighton's Arab vestibule

One thing changed all that--national art academies. Once official, state-sanctioned and supported art academies became prominent, those who successfully exhibited in their salons began to milk the prestige for all it was worth. This was especially the case in London and Paris. By mid-century, so-called "Academic Artists" were quite upwardly mobile. London's Lord Leighton had a mansion in fashionable Holland Park designed by the prominent English architect, George Aitchison, with an exotic Arab vestibule (above, right); while Randolph Caldecott's home featured a Moorish-style studio with rich Persian tiles and a mosaic fountain. Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema's home had two studios, one in a Pompeiian style for himself and a second, decorated in heavy German paneling for his wife (his painting, A Favourite Custom, is below, right). In Paris, Ernest Meissonier had built for himself a luxurious Neo-Renaissance palace. For all their straight-jacketing, stratifying, decadent ills, the national art academies had the effect of lifting the status of their artist to undreamed-of heights within just a few decades.

A favourite Custom, 1909,
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema,
any excuse for a female nude
(preferably as many as possible)

And what did these Academic artist trade for their new found prosperity? Some might say, quite literally their souls. Prizes in a Salon show often brought Royal patronage, but such patronage was limited to grandiose portraits, propagandizing history painting, sanitized mythological works, and religious works so vapid that they would today be considered Sunday School illustrations. Above all there would be female nudes, dozens of them sometimes in the same painting. By the end of the century, the Pompiers (as thet came to be called) had very nearly elevated such work to a cult status. Any story, religious, allegorical, or mythological scene that could in any way logically contain a female nude was pounced upon like dogs on a bone, then played to the hilt. But always it had to be of high moral character. In 1878, for example, the Academic painter, Henri Gervex, painted a scene from the poem Rolla by Alfred de Musset in which Gervex depicted Maria, a young prostitute, lying out naked on her bed, her clothes in a pile beside her while at a window, Rolla, a dashing but desperate bon vivant, contemplates suicide (bottom). Even for an Academic show in which there were more nudes than clothed figures, this was too much. The painting was banned for its moral deprivation. Gervex, though an "academically correct" artist, had gone too far.

                        Rolla, 1878, Henri Gervex, a nude too far

Monet and Renoir

La Grenouillere, 1869,
Pierre-Auguste Renoir

La Grenouillere, 1869,
Claude Monet

Although I've never done so personally, it's not uncommon for two friends, both artists, to find they so enjoy the inspiration and influence of one anothers company that they take to working together.  Sometimes this happens in a studio as with Picasso and Braque, but more often it occurs outside, in painting on location. Women, perhaps being more social than men, do it a lot, as do husbands and wives. Edward Hopper and his wife come to mind for example. It allows the artists to talk about their work, art, feelings, difficulties, or just mundane things like The Days of Our Lives. Painting can be a lonely profession. In so doing, the artists learn from each other, sometimes even begin to paint like each other. In many cases, only art experts can distinguish between a Cubist Braque and a Picasso from the same period. The same is true of the work of two earlier painters--Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet. During the summers of 1873 and 1874, they were very nearly "joined at the hip."

Mme. Charpentier and Her Daughters, 1879,
Pierre-Auguste Renoir 

Without their signatures at the bottoms, the work of Monet and Renoir would appear easily to have come from the same hand. Their scenes from La Grenouilliere and Argenteuil on the banks of the Seine are often very nearly identical, one only slightly to the left or the right of the other. There were a few very subtle differences. Renoir's palette tended to have a little more range, sometimes called his "rainbow" palette, than did Monet's. Also, Monet tended toward pure landscapes with only incidental figures while Renoir always placed more emphasis on the figures. Still, during these impoverished, early stages of Impressionism their friendship made them and their work practically inseparable.

Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881,
Pierre-Auguste Renoir

It was Renoir's love of the female figure that made the difference between them. It brought him the earliest success of any of the Impressionists, starting with his Mme. Charpentier and Her Daughters in the 1879 Salon. Unlike Monet who labored on in obscurity and poverty for several more years, Renoir took the money and ran. With his new found prosperity, he was able to indulge his love of travel. Not surprisingly, he took off to Italy, soaked up all the Renaissance art he could handle, then came home, complaining that except for a particular Tiepolo he dearly loved, he could see just as good art in the Louvre. He returned to his Montmartre garden studio, married one of the sweet, plump faces in his Luncheon of the Boating Party, and continued to do well, though he was one of the first to forsake Impressionism in favor figural subjects. There were still Impressionistic elements in his backgrounds and colors, but more and more his edges grew harder, his drawing more dominant, and his arthritis more troublesome. For the last twenty years of his life he was largely unable to walk and could only hold a brush with great difficulty. However, his son, the film maker Jean Renoir, debunks the myth that his father had to have the brushes literally tied to his fingers to work. He does concede, however, that his father's fingers were so sensitive that the brush handles irritated them to the point he could only work with linen covering them. Monet, also battled this handicap as well as failing eyesight in his declining years. Though they never again shared the summer sun, as they grew older, they continued to share much in common.

Water Lily Pond, 1915-26, Claude Monet,
painted in two sections totaling some 6 by 18 feet (due to poor eyesight),
completed shortly before his death

Mona's Influence

Guernica, 1937, Pablo Picasso

Luncheon on the Grass, 1863, Edouard Manet

Mona Lisa, 1503,
Leonardo

One of the rarest occurrences in the world of art is when one work by a single artist has such a profound impact that it exerts an influence on the work of that artist's contemporaries, sometimes for decades to come. In the 20th century, Picasso's Guernica (above, left) had such an impact. During the previous century, it was Manet's Luncheon on the Grass (above, right). Before that, discounting Michelangelo's frescoes, which were really many paintings on a single theme, our eyes come to rest on Leonardo's Mona Lisa (right), perhaps the most influential single painting of the entire millennium. Painted in 1503, the work is a mere 21 by 30 inches.  It depicts in gossamer-thin layers of glazed oil and pigment, Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of a Florentine businessman, who must have been somewhat dismayed to have commissioned a portrait of his lovely wife, never to have it delivered. History doesn't record whether he ever had to pay for it, but tradition has it Leonardo kept the portrait with him the rest of his life. He died in France in 1519, which is how it came into the hands of France's King Francis I and eventually in the hands of the Louvre where it is today (albeit behind a thick layer of bulletproof glass).

Donna Valeta, ca. 1515, Raphael Sanzio

Before that though, it's doubtful there was a single major artist in Italy that hadn't seen the Mona Lisa, or at least knew it by reputation. Around 1515, Raphael Sanzio painted his own ideal of feminine loveliness in the Donna Valeta (Veiled Lady, right). Of course, having waited 12  to 15 years to compete with the great Leonardo, the two paintings are somewhat different. Styles had changed. Raphael's lady is no less lovely, though not as serene, and the painting appears a bit more fussy than did Leonardo's effort. The lighting is more dramatic but the pose is identical, right down to the angle of the head, even the position of the fingers though not the placement of the hand. There is no other-worldly smile or dreamy, extraterrestrial background as in Leonardo's, and the dress in much more fashionably rich, even extravagant, as compared to Mona Lisa's simple black number. The hair is done up tightly under the flowing scarf of Raphael's Donna Valeta whereas Leonardo permitted Mona Lisa to "let her hair down."

Portrait of a Man with Blue-Green Eyes,
1540-45, Titian

The Venetian artist, Tiziano Vecellio, better known as Titian, was clearly under the influence of Leonardo's Mona Lisa when he painted Portrait of a Man with Blue-Green Eyes (a.k.a. The Young Englishman, left). Of course, inasmuch as this portrait is that of the opposite sex, direct comparisons are more difficult. But it's not hard to notice the similarities. Painted around 1540-45, the figure is suave, informal, and has much the same psychological directness as Leonardo's effort. And in turn, Titian's painting was also quite effective in influencing later portrait artists such as Rembrandt, Anthony van Dyck, and Peter Paul Rubens. It's amazing the impact of a single smiling face in the hands of a master artist.

Mixed Media Baroque

Christ Afixed to the Cross, ca. 1640s, Sacro Monte, Varallo, Italy

Although we don't tend to see them now so much as we use to, there was a time in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s when hardly a tourist area in this country didn't have its own wax museum. A few, such as the venerable Madam Tousaud's in London (and elsewhere), still exist and are considered classics, but the vast majority were second-rate tourist rip-offs catering to teenagers or younger, where movie creatures from Frankenstein to Frank Furter (Rocky Horror Picture Show) strutted their stuff next to poor likenesses of rock stars and recent presidents. Though the wax museum is an outgrowth of the late 18th and 19th centuries, the yearning to create realistic, painted, sculptural likenesses goes back much further. The medium was not colored (or painted) wax but painted wood, and the work dates back to the early 1600s.

The Road to Calvary, ca. 1600

In the beginning, two artists collaborated. Giovanni d'Errico carved the figures and an artist who went by the name, Morazzone, painted the frescos forming a backdrop for them in decorating a series of chapels (now some 45 in number) of Sacro Monte, Varallo, in the mountains of Northern Italy. Starting with Adam and Eve, but primarily dwelling on the life of Christ, the elaborate tableaus depict the gospel story from the annunciation to the cruicifixion and entombment. I mentioned wax museums at the start because the installations remind one of what we might encounter in that venue. Photographed, one might even go so far as to say they resembles "stills" from a motion picture on the life and death of Christ. Yet much of the chapel complex is over 400 years old. It's a mixed medium extravaganza rivaling a passion play, in the finest baroque tradition, perfectly preserved over the centuries by the monks of the Sacro Monte shrine.

Christ Before Pilate, ca. 1600

Pontius Pilate sits in judgment; Ciaphus presents his case. Christ is diminutive, humbled, cloaked in a short, red robe mocking kingly grandeur, while all about are up to a dozen Roman guards, Jews, and onlookers. Though carved, painted wood is the medium of choice, the clothes, the swords, the spears, the Roman helmets, all are real. On the walls in back, the fresco artist, Morazzone, a follower of Gaudenzio Ferrari, has recreated with trompe l'oeil fidelity the grand arches and architecture of the Roman court framing a crucifixion and still more painted figures in an overall mixed-media presentation to rival or even surpass the best Madam Tousaud ever had to offer. Over the centuries, various painters and sculptors have worked to enlarge and maintain the numerous tableaus exhibited. If this presentation is sufficient to awe us today, think what an impact it must have had on the thousands of weary pilgrims who trekked up to this remote, mountain monastery four hundred years ago.