Old Masters – New Visions

Still Life

The art of still-life painting may be studied in the Old Masters-New Visions exhibition from the early eighteenth century until the second half of the twentieth century, that is, over a period of more than 200 years. Because it is almost always composed of objects which are a familiar part of everyday life, the still life, as a theme or subject, has an enduring and universal appeal. Although the human figure is never included in a still-life composition, the objects depicted are invariably for human use or consumption.

Unlike history paintings or mythological scenes, the still life is usually unpretentious and almost always small in scale. Objects rest passively on a table for the scrutiny of the viewer: their surface texture, their size, and their construction or shape are all presented for appraisal.

Honesty and frankness, then, are the virtues of the still life, and these qualities were introduced into French art by Jean Siméon Chardin (1699-1779). In his painting A bowl of plums, c.1728, both natural and manufactured objects stand on a flat surface which slopes with gentle perspective towards the picture surface. The angle of this surface is defined in a subtle fashion by the soft shadows cast by the jug and the foreground fruit. By thus tilting his objects towards us, Chardin has situated the viewer leaning forward over the subject with the painter. In this way he not only draws us into the picture, but also involves us in the mood of the painting. The softness of the shadows implies a gentle, congenial lamplight thrown from the left, and this, together with the faithfully rendered surfaces of plums, induces a mellow sense of well-being. The plums, with their glistening skins, are available: somebody has already started on them — witness the plumstone at the bottom left of the picture.

Perhaps the principal reason why Chardin is the greatest French still-life painter of the eighteenth century is that while he seduces the senses, he satisfies the mind. The spatial placing of the objects in A bowl of plums is not only legible and clear, it is also elegant. On the right of the painting, a large peach lies next to the base of the jug. To indicate that the peach is in front of the jug, Chardin gave it an intact contour, whereas the jug is intact except for the shape of the peach. In turn, the belly of the jug interrupts the fruit bowl which is intact but for the shape of the jug. By this simple but effective means — the perspective of contour — Chardin defines the viewer's position in relation to these three objects. When we take into account the three small objects at the lower left of the picture, we find that Chardin has accomplished an entertaining composition which follows that rhythm much admired in the eighteenth century — the serpentine line back through space. At upper left, some discreet movements in a darker tone whip the line back towards the central part of the painting.

Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) was an admirer of Chardin's works, which he was able to study in the Louvre in Paris. But if Cézanne regarded the Louvre as 'a good book to consult', he also believed that 'to achieve progress nature alone counts'.

In Ginger pot with pomegranate and pears, which Cézanne painted in the 1890s, the similarities with A bowl of plums are not difficult to recognize. Once again a number of objects, natural and manufactured, are situated on a table whose gently sloping surface implies or determines the position of the viewer. However, in Cézanne's painting there is a gap between viewer and table edge, a kind of chasm, into which the folds of white material cascade. Beneath the table, the angles created by the juncture of floor and skirting-board, and floor and table, are echoed at the top of the picture in the folds and edges of the drapery that the artist has arranged above. It is in all these intricate and busy shapes that we notice the difference between Cézanne's painting and that of Chardin. For example, Cézanne includes a pile of books at the upper left where, in the Chardin, there is only space. These differences can be explained in terms of Cézanne's use of light. Following his experiences of outdoor painting with the Impressionists, Cézanne preferred daylight to the lamplight Chardin used to illuminate his objects. Consequently, because the pervasive nature of daylight exposes more to the human eye, Cézanne's subject was more complicated. Lamplight, on the other hand, is its own editorial device: it highlights certain objects or features while everything else is left in darkness.

In using natural light and combining a greater number and variety of objects in his compositions, Cézanne had set himself an altogether more complex task than had Chardin. He had to unify a much more complicated set of relationships so that everything hung together on the picture plane. In order to describe the effect of daylight, he modulated all his surfaces. Such a variation in surfaces also accurately reflects human perception, which takes in a scene in rapidly shifting glances. Thus the large blue vertical plane behind the table is painted in many different colours, from greens to mauves. The varied nature of Cézanne's energetic drawing is also related to the way we perceive objects: his contours and borders are sometimes razor-thin, like etched lines, at other times broad and watery. Compare the lines of the foreground table leg and skirting-board with the more generalized lines of the hanging drape. Although Cézanne was a great admirer of classical draughtsmanship, he realized that the convention of drawing a contour around everything is neither true to reality nor to human perception. Space flows around and past objects. In the piece of fruit nearest to us in the left foreground, for example, the contour lines are emphasized at the lateral edges but released at the top. Many of Cézanne's lines are drawn in duplicate or even triplicate, as in the straw handle of the ginger jar. Cézanne did this because he wanted to reflect the relative nature of an object's position in space; relative, that is, to the shifting nature of the human gaze.

In another quite remarkable way Cézanne showed his awareness of a peculiar deficiency in human perception. People often have to live with a degree of ambiguity, since the identity of things and their meaning is not always clear. Cézanne reflects this common experience in many of his paintings by deliberately leaving the identity of an object or shape ambiguous. In this painting for instance, the area to the right of the books is a case in point: it seems to be part of the hanging drapery, but it also looks like a startling mask with one large, dark, circular eye.

Never again, after Cézanne, would artists dare to attempt what Cézanne called the 'manifold picture of nature' which committed him to such a 'real and immense study'. Never again would artists try to reconcile the position of objects in space, in full atmospheric colour, with the flatness of the picture plane. Ginger pot with pomegranate and pears is a small picture but an heroic one, with its 'light vibrations, represented by reds and yellows' and its 'sufficient amount of blue to give the impression of air'.

The Spanish artist Juan Gris (1887-1927) joined his fellow countryman, Pablo Picasso, in Paris in 1906. For five years he watched Picasso and Georges Braque develop the paintings which became known to the world as Cubist. Then, in 1911, Gris himself began to paint in the same style. Like all other Cubists, he was an ardent admirer of the work of Cézanne. In Still life with newspaper, 1916, a tipped brown table is reminiscent of the paintings of both Cézanne and Chardin. But in this work, accepting no obligation to record either lamplight or daylight, Gris aimed directly for harmony of composition, using synthetic means to achieve his goal.

Gris restricted the range of his colours and his shapes. He had trained in industrial design, and there is a mathematical, machine-like precision to his painting. His method was to organize his composition first and to think about the nature of the objects in it second. He had no need to look at a bottle or glass in order to include them, since their general shape is familiar to everyone. The same was true of a fruit dish or lemon. The fact that the viewer can recognize all these objects means that the painting was intended to be easily accessible. To make certain of this fact, Gris arranged a direct entry point for the viewer in the form of the legible title of a newspaper. Now this particular device had a double function. Since Chardin, the still-life painting has been a democratizing art form, describing the objects used by ordinary people everywhere. It therefore seems particularly appropriate that Gris included a reference to the press, that most democratic (in theory!) of institutions: everyone handles and reads newspapers. Gris presented the newspaper in its folded-up form as if it had just been delivered. He deliberately made it look like a collage to enhance its everyday, real quality. As if all this were not enough, Gris chose a newspaper called L'Intransigeant, which means in French, as in English, someone resistant to imposed authority — another reference to democracy or to independence.

The idea of independence was profoundly important to the Cubists. We have already noticed that the objects within Gris's painting are generalized; they are also often insubstantial. The shadow of the bottle at the top right, for example, is stronger than the bottle itself. The fruit, dish and glasses are modelled in a tentative, almost ghostly fashion. All these objects are subordinate to the overall design of the painting. The fundamental point about Gris’s interpretation of his subject is that the most important object is not a bottle or a glass or even a newspaper, but the painting itself. The most radical innovation of the Cubist movement was to change the status of a painting from being a set of references to other things – a window-on-the-world – to being an independent object in its own right, equal with a table, chair or other piece of furniture.

Still life was the ideal subject for the Cubists, who were trying to analyse the structure and surface of objects and to reconstruct pictorial space. The innovations of the movement had been developed with elegance and intelligence, but also with austerity and frugality. Were these last two Spartan virtues necessary? Georges Braque (1882-1963), one of the originators of the movement from about 1908, set out in the 1920s to prove that they were not. In The round table, 1929, the table top is tipped vertically to display an abundance of objects to delight the senses. Fruit, in the form of two apples, might have strayed from a Cézanne painting. To slice through them Braque has thoughtfully provided a knife, its handle poised over the edge of the table, ready to be grasped. The pleasures of music are also displayed: a thick-sided guitar touches a profuse supply of sheet music lying on the table top or leaning against a brown wine bottle. Even the table itself is a source of enjoyment. The rhythmic pattern of the base column is a play on the forms of classical architecture which Braque could enjoy without taking too seriously. The thickness of the table top is exuberantly drawn, without the geometric rigour employed by Juan Gris. The brown paint covering the table has been combed to simulate wood graining. In doing this Braque was making a wry comment on the tradition of illusion in art, at the same time deliberately using a trick that he had mastered during his apprenticeship as a house painter and decorator in the family business. The artist as joyful decorator is evident in this painting in a number of ways: the chevron patterning of the floor, the panelled dado — topped with classical scroll work — round the walls and, above all, in the overall plasticity of Braque's paint, which was given body by a mixture of sand and plaster.

The effect of such a granular paint quality is twofold. On the one hand, the texture reinforces the object nature of the painting; like the painting by Gris, The round table stands in its own right as an independent thing. On the other hand such a palpable, tactile surface satisfies that sensuous human appetite for rich texture, the need for touch. In his own very modern and direct way, Braque gives us the same kind of satisfaction offered by the velvety surface of Chardin's plums.

All the paintings discussed so far were painted in France, and in the French tradition they appealed to the senses as much as to the intellect. In their various ways they all also offered a friendly invitation, a democratic welcome, to the audience they addressed.

The still-life paintings of the Italian Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) function in a different manner, in a way for which the tradition stemming from Chardin only partially prepares us. As in Chardin's still life, Morandi's objects passively await our scrutiny. They are also small in scale making the viewer feel dominant (at least in size!), and the viewer's glance is once again directed downwards onto the subject. The backdrop in Morandi's Still life is also reminiscent of that in the Chardin, except that in the later painting the lighting is suggestive of a photographer's studio, where objects or people are set up ready for a shot.

There the similarities end. Morandi's objects stand in two parallel ranks, regimentally. Their bases form a straight, horizontal line. As objects, they seem properly subservient, but we are not encouraged to enter their world. Although all the objects seem to be containers, their identity is not obvious. There is nothing for the viewer to eat, no lettering to read, nothing with a handle to grasp. Their surfaces, like their very natures, are inert and somewhat bland. Morandi, unlike Braque, offers nothing to beguile the senses.

It is as though Morandi's objects occupy a universe different from, but parallel to, our own — a 'meta' world. In the earlier years of this century, Morandi belonged to the Metaphysical School of Italian painters, led by Giorgio de Chirico, who wrote: 'We use paintings to construct a new metaphysical psychology of things'.

Morandi collected and kept a repertoire of 'things' — objects — in a quietly obsessive manner, getting them out and arranging them whenever he was ready to paint. He did more than keep his collection of objects; he 'doctored' them, covering some with layers of paint, sometimes in geometric shapes, to divorce them even further from their original function. The modern art historian Werner Haftmann noted that 'there was something disquieting about the way an inanimate object, seemingly withdrawn into its solemn steadfastness, could affect human emotions'. Haftmann also observed that 'the tragic solitude of everyday things results from the fact that the intellect assigns them a place in a logical order governed by utilitarian conventions'. Morandi's still-life compositions derive their grace and their lyricism, as well as their enduring power to disturb and their continuing value as objects of meditation, from the artist's ability to remove these objects from their normal utilitarian order and set them in a new abstract order where they have a dignity of their own.

Figures in Landscape

The theme of figure in landscape is as old as art itself. In exhibition Old Masters: New Visions this important theme can be studied in many works which date from the beginning of the seventeenth century to well into the twentieth century. For the purpose of this booklet, a ruthless and perhaps arbitrary selection has been made, leaving out of discussion important works by artists such as Ingres, Delacroix, Constable, Corot, Puvis de Chavannes, Sisley, Seurat, Morisot and Soutine.

The earliest painting in the exhibition and in this selection is The repentant Peter, c.1600, by Domenikos Theotokopoulos (1541-1614), who was renamed by his Spanish contemporaries El Greco (the Greek), by which name he has been known ever since. Born in Crete, he trained in Venice and then went to work in Toledo, Spain, in 1577. Both Crete in the east and Spain in the west were provincial regions, isolated from the centre of 'civilization', Italy. The only art in Crete would have consisted of images of saints, solemn and devotional. Spain was also an intensely pious nation whose mysticism was influenced by its proximity with Arab culture.

The figure of St Peter almost fills El Greco's canvas. The saint's eyes are watery with grief at his sin, the sin of denying Christ. His passionate emotion, expressed through the sinuous line of his body, surges upwards from the base of the picture and is continued through his upward gaze. The folds of his robes vibrate with an energy which spreads outwards, encompassing both the distant landscape on the left and the figure of the repentant Mary Magdalene, on her way to the Holy Sepulchre. Behind her, beneath a turbulent sky, is the city of Jerusalem.

El Greco used the landscape not only to enhance the devotional mood of his figure, but also to help identify the character of St Peter. In St Matthew’s gospel (16 : 18) Jesus said: ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church’. Thus St Peter is identified by El Greco with the huge rock against which he is placed. The ‘keys of the kingdom of heaven’, which Christ gives to Peter in the following verse from Matthew, are also in El Greco’s picture, tied to the saint’s waist. Above and on either side of Peter’s head, almost like garlands, are new shoots of green leaves. These symbolize the spiritual growth that is possible after confession.

In El Greco's painting, the landscape was of no account in itself. It was useful as a theatrical backdrop to lend drama and meaning to momentous events or as a setting for the powerful figure of St Peter. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that artists began to regard the landscape itself as an interesting subject. One of the first to do so was the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875). Corot's landscapes, unlike those of El Greco, dominated the figures within them. In his Italian landscape Genzano, 1843, the small figures are little more than incidents in a canvas given over largely to the depiction of nature. Corot's nature is neither wild nor dramatic; it is serene in a homely sort of way. Tracks made by humans or the animals they keep thread through the countryside and lead up to the town. In contrast to El Greco’s agitated sky, Corot’s calm sky spreads an even light over the whole scene.

It was Corot's unprecedented acceptance of ordinary people in their everyday world that gave his paintings such freshness. The town is not Jerusalem, nor Troy, nor Rome. Its architecture is pleasant but unremarkable. We can see a church on the left but there are no palaces or castles. Similarly, the two people in Corot’s picture are not heroes, saints or martyrs. Neither are they the kind of picturesque peasants patronized in eighteenth-century landscapes. Corot's landscape forms are also modest and real, rather than dramatic or showy. There are no majestic oaks or pines, and no towering beeches. Such shrubs and bushes as are described are neither rhetorical nor symbolic. This even-tempered view of a scene and its people implies the growing democratic climate of Europe, which was replacing the great authoritarian power structures established in the Middle Ages.

Modern democracy may not be the first thing that comes to mind when we look at Luncheon of the boating party, 1881, which shows a group of individuals at lunch on the terrace of a restaurant overlooking the river Seine. However, such a scene does reflect the affluence and leisure of the new middle classes, who were able to escape the city for the pleasures of the countryside. Painted in 1880-81 by the French artist Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), this work depicts a number of his friends, whose middle-class prosperity is suggested by their dress and their leisurely boating expedition and luncheon.

Almost all the characters in this scene have been identified. For example, the man leaning on the rail at the left of the picture, in singlet and straw hat, is Alphonse Fournaise, whose father owned the restaurant. Next to him, fondling a small dog, is Aline, Renoir's new girlfriend and model, soon to be his wife. Opposite her is Gustave Caillebotte, a wealthy young yachting enthusiast and Impressionist painter. It is known that Renoir deliberately depicted Caillebotte as younger than he actually was at this time, and herein lies the key to the meaning of the whole painting. Although it seems like a typical Impressionist description of a group of people having fun, of the type Renoir used to paint four or five years earlier, when we look closely at Luncheon of the boating party we can see that the figures have been painted separately and in isolation. There is a line around the figure of Caillebotte, for instance, and even a drawn line around his arm, reminiscent of an Italian Renaissance fresco painting. X-ray evidence shows that Renoir moved the positions of his figures, and we know from the artist himself that he erased the figure of a young woman because she irritated him! This means that the painting is not the record of a single event, which is what it purports to be, but rather the construction of a scene using models who posed one by one. In fact, we can go a stage further and recognize this scene as a reconstruction of the kinds of pleasurable gatherings Renoir had previously enjoyed when the Impressionist movement was in full swing a few years earlier. Thus the artist is attempting to relive some of the happiest moments of his life, refusing to let them go as, in his fortieth year, he enters middle age.

It was about this time that Monet, Sisley, Pissarro, Renoir himself, and others of the Impressionist group were all going their separate ways. Perhaps this explains why so many of the characters in Luncheon of the boating party are not so much glancing at one another as staring into space. Neither Fournaise nor Caillebotte is looking at anyone in particular. The man in the middle, in brown coat and hat, stares out across the water and so does the top-hatted banker. The idea of a reconstruction also explains the youthful look of Caillebotte, which Renoir preferred to retain, rather than describe his old friend's current appearance.

Renoir may have been nostalgic for good times past but he was, in fact, already taking a direction which led away from his old friends. His ambition now was to exhibit consistently at the annual Paris Salon, the conventional career path for artists, which he had ignored for several years. Accordingly, he withdrew from the Impressionist group exhibitions, believing that they were incompatible with an 'official' career. (Nevertheless, Luncheon of the boating party was shown at the seventh Impressionist exhibition in 1882, along with twenty-four other Renoirs, all supplied by his dealer Durand-Ruel, who owned them.) Renoir was turning more and more to the classical tradition, and the figures in Luncheon of the boating party, carefully drawn and grouped, are a good indication of his new direction. Within a year of completing this painting, he travelled to Italy to study the masters of Venice and Florence, and Raphael's frescos in Rome.

There is, nonetheless, a good deal of Impressionism in Luncheon of the boating party. The still-life passage and the landscape are both painted in the Impressionist style. The soft, gentle light of the Seine valley is reflected from the waters of the river and filtered through foliage and the semi-transparent canvas of the striped awning. The bottles, glasses and fruit on the table glint with light and contribute to the general sense of well-being. This stretch of the river at Chatou, west of Paris, was one of Renoir's favourite spots for many years. He and his friends travelled there by train, only a short ride from the city, and Renoir has included the railway bridge across the river at the upper left. The river Seine and its bridges were vital subjects for Impressionism, just as friends and good times were central to the lives of Impressionist artists. For the figures in Luncheon of the boating party, then, the landscape setting was something to be enjoyed, a welcome break from city living.

If the landscape provided an agreeable setting for the Impressionists, for the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), nature and its colours were deeply significant. By painting God's creation, van Gogh, son of a pastor, was preaching to the flock and serving God. Entrance to the Public Gardens in Arles, 1888, was executed at a time when the artist was at the height of his powers and, perhaps, in closest communion with the world around him. When he was at work on his Sunflowers, 1888, which he painted shortly before, van Gogh wrote: 'l have a terrible lucidity at moments, these days when nature is so beautiful. I am not conscious of myself any more, and the picture comes to me as in a dream'.

Entrance to the Public Gardens in Arles is a most lucidly painted scene: we know where everything is and what everything is. Yet there is also something dream-like about it. At the level of reported reality we see a normal enough place. A path leads off into the park. On either side of the path there are benches with people sitting on some of them. Other townsfolk stroll under the trees. In the foreground a man stands, legs apart for stability, while he reads the newspaper. All this ordinariness appealed to van Gogh who painted such scenes in preference to more conventional views in the town, Arles has, for instance, a famous Roman amphitheatre and a medieval cathedral. Van Gogh chose to live near this park in the new and unfashionable end of town, close to the railway station, attracted by the sense of community which is embodied in this scene.

The attractive plantings of trees and shrubs in the park gave the artist a chance to set down, as he often did, a marvellous range of greens: blue greens, orange-yellow greens, chrome-yellow greens and lemon greens. At the same time he was able to give free rein to his astonishing and unique ability to find an infinity of different brushmarks to express the endless variations in nature. The tall tree trunk on the left thrusts upwards, the markings of its bark expressive of its energy. Van Gogh differentiates between all the different types of foliage right across the picture, from left to right, and even finds a pattern of marks for the sky. Its blue-white markings are in harmony with all the other structures on the canvas, including those of the path. It is this unity which was more important to van Gogh than anything else; it was the unity of the creation and its energy.

Like van Gogh's Sunflowers, this painting seems to have a dreamlike quality. For many people public gardens have a sense of timelessness, perhaps because they are designed as retreats from the hectic rhythm of everyday life. People sitting on benches often look as though they have always been there. So it may have appeared to van Gogh when he painted this scene. The overhanging trees form a protective canopy over his fellow humans at rest. We can tell from maps of the area that this is only a small garden, but van Gogh paints it as though it could go on for ever. Our viewpoint is from the outside looking in, and the broad avenue invites us to enter the park and perhaps discover its inner secrets. The path itself is painted in creamy yellows, yellow being the symbol, in van Gogh's mind, for happiness. (He actually summed it up with the word 'gratitude'.) At the entrance to the park the newspaper reader stands like a benign guardian or sentinel, perhaps reminiscent of the guardian of heaven — St Peter — who was the subject of the first painting discussed in this essay.

The fifth and final painting in our discussion, Deer in the forest l, 1913, continues the theme of figures in landscape, but with a striking difference: the figures are not human at all, but animals! In itself this is not particularly original, but the artist has gone further. Such was his empathy for the animal community that he attempted to paint the world as if through the eyes of animals. The artist was the German Franz Marc (1880-1916). He explained his highly original attitude in these words: 'Is there a more mysterious idea for an artist than the conception of how nature is mirrored in the eyes of the animal? How does a horse see the world, or an eagle, a doe, or a dog? How wretched and soulless is our convention of placing animals in a landscape which belongs to our eyes, instead of submerging ourselves in the soul of the animal in order to imagine how it sees'.

Marc saw his goal as 'the animalisation of art'. While he rejected 'the impious people that surrounded [him]', he acknowledged that 'the untouched instinct of animals for life struck a chord of all that [was] best in [him]'. On a visit to Paris in 1907, he admired the work of van Gogh and recognized in him a kindred spirit. Marc noted, after returning to Germany: 'Art is nothing but the expression of our dream; the more we surrender to it the closer we get to the inner truth of things'. Marc's attitude to his palette, to colour, was strikingly similar to that of van Gogh. For Marc, too, colours were symbolic: 'Blue is the male principle, astringent and spiritual. Yellow the female principle, gentle, gay and sensual. Red is matter, brutal and heavy'. Looking at Deer in the forest I we can see how he applied parts of his colour theory: 'If you mix blue and yellow to make green, you arouse red, matter, the earth ... Green always needs the help of some more blue (sky) and yellow (sun) in order to silence matter'.

In Marc's painting the deer are innocently at one with their environment. To achieve the crystalline structure that expressed this integrated harmony, the artist absorbed the lessons of modern French art. His interpenetrating forms are derived from Cubism. His colours are Post-Impressionist, derived from van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse.

Marc belonged to an artistically literate group centred on Munich. Led by Wassily Kandinsky, members of the group called themselves 'Der Blaue Reiter' (The Blue Rider). In 1912 they produced an Almanac in which Marc revealed that art was for him a religious pursuit, as it had been for van Gogh and as it most certainly was for El Greco, 300 years earlier. Marc set the objective for artists in these words: 'To create in their work symbols for their age, which will go on the altars of the coming spiritual religion'.

It was a high ideal, perhaps even higher than the spiritual strivings of El Greco. In 1600, El Greco worked within a powerfully established religion, unquestioned in Spain. In 1913, Franz Marc saw in the relationship between natural forms the essence of a religion for his own century, which he was convinced would be an era of great spirituality. He was killed in the First World War, and the twentieth century developed along different lines from those which he and his friends envisaged. Nevertheless, the spiritual ideal has survived and is particularly evident in the visual art of the last fifty years. Visitors to the exhibition Old Masters: New Visions will sense the truth of this when they look at the two abstract paintings by Mark Rothko (1903-1970) which, like all ten paintings discussed in this booklet, are on loan from the Phillips Collection, Washington DC.

Terence Measham,

Education Department.