From Paris With Love: Masterpieces of the Musée d’Orsay at the de Young Museum

Any art lover who has been to Paris knows what it’s like to try to see everything in a finite time frame. Cruel choices must be made, masterpieces must be missed, and croissant or two wolfed down in the name of maximizing viewing. If only the great museums of Paris could somehow travel the world and come to our doorstep. Until September 6^th, nearly 100 masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay, the preeminent art museum for Impressionism in the world, will count San Francisco and the de Young Museum as their temporary home in the exhibition Birth of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay. Thanks to the Musée d’Orsay’s refurbishment and reinstallation in anticipation of the museum’s 25th anniversary in 2011, Americans unable to travel to Europe can stay within national borders and see works by Paul Cézanne, Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and native son James McNeill Whistler. It’s a big, beautiful French kiss to America and a chance to see masterpieces that may never travel again as a group. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "From Paris With Love."

[Many thanks to the de Young Museum for providing me with press materials and the catalogue to Birth of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay, which runs through September 6^th.]

Blinded Me With Science

Claude Monet, Haystacks, Hoarfrost Effect, 1891, oil on canvas, 65 × 92 cm, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

—From “The Tables Turned” by William Wordsworth

Science and art have always warily stood apart while keeping close. As Wordsworth lamented, we often “murder to dissect” when we take a living, creative act and place it under the microscopic eye of hard, cold science. Heavenly magic crashes to the level of earthbound fact. In Painting Light: The Hidden Techniques of the Impressionists, Iris Schaefer, Katja Lewerentz, and Caroline von Saint-Georgecall upon science not to bury Impressionism under analysis but to use science to foster greater understanding and appreciation of it. Schaefer et al paint the Impressionists themselves as a band of intuitive scientists. “Looking back,” they write, “how Monet and many of his contemporaries succeeded in realizing scientific and above all optical laws so comprehensively in their paintings, despite the fact that in the 19th century these laws were only just being scientifically recognized and researched, is oe of the most exciting issues.” When Monet paints Haystacks, Hoarfrost Effect (above, from 1891), one of his many studies of haystacks under different weather and light conditions, he acts like a scientist gathering data in pursuit of a theory. Similarly, van Gogh kept a box full of colored yarn that he used to study color contrasts before realizing them in paint. We associate Impressionism with feeling and emotion, yet the artists themselves often acted in a consciously premeditated way when painting. Rather than murder to dissect, Painting Light dissects to give these works new life.

Henri-Edmond Cross, Landscape in Provence, 1898, oil on canvas, 60.3 × 81.2 cm, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud, Cologne.

Schaefer et al see Monet et al anticipating scientific findings in the field of optics and color perception. Many of the scientific findings are made years before, but remain in the domain of specialists until the Impressionists help pull them into the mainstream. Once in the mainstream, however, it is the Neoimpressionists, especially Pointillists such as Georges-Pierre Seurat, Paul Signac, and Henri-Edmond Cross (whose Landscape in Provence, from 1898, appears above), who consciously take scientific findings and try to apply techniques in paint to take advantage of those findings. Joining theory with practice, the Pointillists “indisputably eliminated the disadvantage of subtractive, that is dark and dull-looking, color mixtures, through the use of pure colorism” and “attain a hitherto unprecedented luminosity,” the authors effuse. Rather than physically mix the colors on canvas via paint, the Pointillists facilitate the natural process of the human eye to mix colors optically. The human eye literally wants to connect the colored dots, so Seurat and others take advantage of that desire to achieve effects impossible with paint alone.

Gustave Caillebotte, Boats and Shed on the Bank of the Seine, 1891, oil on canvas, 46 x 55 cm, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud, Cologne.

I confess to skimming through technical sections of most exhbition catalogues. The scientific rigor appeals to my rational side and the infrared and x-ray images lend of patina of hard science to the “soft” methodology of art criticism, yet I often find little purpose to all the gadgetry, as if someone wanted to “blind me with science” rather than open my eyes to something new in the art thanks to new technology. Painting Light makes the most of technological know-how and never loses sight of the big picture of bringing new insights to the well-worn tale of Impressionism. Schaefer et al cogently discuss the importance of color merchants in the lives of the Impressionists. Good suppliers of paint were pure gold to these artists. Art supply merchants such as Pere Tanguay and Paul Durand-Ruel not only appear in portraits by the Impressionists but also became their earliest dealers. Painting Light reveals how new innovations in tube paint, brushes, and pre-stretched canvas all helped make possible the image of the Impressionist as a wildly gesturing artist working in the open air and bound only by the borders of his imagination. “Even today, many pictures of the Impressionists display a bravura which would have been unthinkable without the flat-bound bristle brush,” the authors conclude. They also explain the financial realities of the time in which these artists needed to economize where possible when sales flagged. Thanks to infrared light, we can see the pentimenti beneath Gustave Caillebotte’s Boats and Shed on the Bank of the Seine (above, from 1891) showing the failed first attempt at painting the boats. Realizing that he had painted the boats too large, Caillebotte turned the canvas upside down, painted a skyover the first boats, and tried again, saving himself the cost of the canvas. Tales such as this bring a human element to the Impressionists many studies lack.

Gustave Caillebotte, Laundry Drying on the Bank of the Seine, circa 1892, oil on canvas, 105.5 × 150.5 cm, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud, Cologne.

In another Caillebotte painting, Laundry Drying on the Bank of the Seine (above, circa 1892), the authors point out a poplar bud embedded in the paint—proof that the artist stood close enough to the poplars shown in the painting to have them physically seed the work itself. With their move to the outside, the Impressionists continued the work of the Barbizon School and “irrevocably eliminated the dominance of the completed work over the sketch,” the authors believe. Schaefer et al discuss in full the pleasures and perils of painting en plein air, which range from sand finding its way into seascapes to Cezanne’s death in 1906 days after being surprised by a sudden storm when working far from home. Again, the physicality of these artists working with materials and under certain conditions comes across boldly in a way that most books fail to do. The authors even bemoan the practice of reproducing paintings without frames, which they see as part of the author’s intent. After reading Painting Light, you’ll never look at an Impressionist work in a museum the same way again.

Gustave Courbet, Château de Chillon, 1873, oil on canvas, 54.1 × 65.3 cm, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud, Cologne.

Painting Light contains countless insights and dispels many cherished myths, such as the myth that a “true” Impressionist work was done outdoors. Gustave Courbet’s recognizably Impressionist Château de Chillon (above, from 1873) was painted from a photograph, smashing that myth resoundingly. The most common myth shattered, however, remains the idea that we see these works today as the artists intended. Time has altered many of these colors, sometimes thanks to the inexpensive paints used by impoverished artists showing why they were inexpensive over time. Sections of a van Gogh protected by the frame from light reveal a brilliant red that once covered the entire work, thus throwing into doubt all conclusions made about his use of color in that work and all others. Examples of works cut or cropped or even “completed” by another hand will make you wonder just how much of your favorite Impressionist painting is actually by the artist. Painting Light brings these works back to life and shows us through science that everything we thought we knew about these works and these artists should be open to question. Painting Light makes art scientists of us all.

[Many thanks to Rizzoli for providing me with a review copy of Painting Light: The Hidden Techniques of the Impressionists by Iris Schaefer, Katja Lewerentz, and Caroline von Saint-George. (C) Painting Light by Iris Schaefer, et al., Skira, 2009.]

The Mad Munch

When most people hear the name Edvard Munch, the immediately see The Scream in the mind’s eye, as if it were Munch’s own face crying out in front of a blood-red sky. All biography of Munch seems to be psychobiography. Comparing Munch’s reception with that of Claude Monet, Jay A. Clarke in his Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety, and Myth writes, “Munch’s typecasting as an unbalanced genius has encouraged historians to consider his work as emotional biography, whereas that of the more ‘stable’ Monet has been viewed formally, as so many layers of paint.” In his book accompanying the Art Institute of Chicago’s exhibition of the same name, Clarke not only recovers the lost history of how Munch became Munch, but also shows the role that Munch himself played in creating that persona. Munch “was perpetually considering his legacy and, wanting to be perceived as a true original, did his best to expunge suggestions that he might have had artistic models of his own,” Clarke argues. “Munch anxiety of influence reaches at once back in time and into the future, on him as the center and from him to the margins, manifesting itself in ways political, psychological, social, and most of all visual.” Munch’s highly Impressionistic Rue Lafaette (above, from 1891), a direct quotation of a work by Gustave Caillebotte’s A Balcony, Boulevard Haussmann, is just one of the many traces Munch and complicit critics covered over in his personal mythmaking that Clarke uncovers to recover a fuller picture of the complete artist who was Edvard Munch.

Munch seems to transcend category because he belonged, however fleetingly, to so many of them: Impressionism, Naturalism, Romanticism, Symbolism, Expressionism, etc. Throwing all of these influences into his melting pot, Munch cooked up his special blend of personal vision. Munch “recast epics and existing mythic vocabularies in his own idiom,” Clarke explains, “and while these sources are not always obvious, they are a subtle visual presence.” For example, Munch’s Evening on Karl Johan Street (above, from 1892) marries the Impressionist street scene with a Norwegian subject while also adding the new Symbolist touches Munch may have seen in James Ensor’s work. In a separate section, titled “Individual Works: Tracing Influence from [Anna] Ancher to [Anders] Zorn,” Clarke encyclopedically and alphabetically lays out not only the names of artists who may have inspired Munch in some way but also the specific works that Munch might have seen and those works by Munch that may have developed from them. Familiar and obvious names such as Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cezanne stand next to less familiar Scandinavian influences such as Eilif Peterssen and Frits Thaulow. Seeing how Munch’s Madonna took shape in Munch’s mind following encounters with Franz von Stuck’s Sin and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix doesn’t diminish Munch’s accomplishment in the least. In fact, it makes it seem even more amazing as he navigated such visually cluttered waters while charting a course of his own. Unfortunately, the demands of the time were for true originality, and Munch would do anything to meet those demands.

After bumping up against influence after influence, including a nationalist Norwegian movement that longed to claim Munch among its own, Munch’s “art was neither French nor Norwegian, neither Impressionist nor Symbolist—the autonomous stance he took was calculated, defiant but very much of the moment,” Clark writes. “The ‘insane’ Munch… was a product—one introduced both by hostile and friendly critics and later packaged and presented by the artist and his early biographers in a very deliberate way.” In his Self-Portrait with Burning Cigarette (above, from 1895), Munch paints himself as he wishes his to be seen—a bohemian artist smoking like all the “cool kids” whose very image is a murky, instable thing that threatens to fall apart. As his unstable reputation grew, Munch played to that audience, giving them exactly what they wanted. Yet, Clarke argues, “while [Munch] wore his strangeness and insanity like a mantle in the wider world, he inhabited quite a different person in private.” Munch knew which works would spark controversy and which wouldn’t and carefully orchestrated exhibitions of his work to fulfill the expectations of the viewing public. Even when Munch finally sought professional help during the famous mental breakdown of 1908, he personally took care of the business side of his art. Art historians love to sever artists from all ties to the real world, but Clarke’s study restores those ties and recovers Munch the shrewd businessman and curator of his own oeuvre. Some may turn away from the idea of a great artist concerned with filthy lucre, but I personally enjoyed the way Clarke deconstructs the myth of Munch to resurrect Munch the man in control of his world despite the very real personal anguish that played a part, but not an exclusive part, in his art.

Clarke really focuses on Munch the marketer in his exploration of Munch’s printmaking. In the same year as Self-Portrait with Burning Cigarette, Munch created a print titled Self-Portrait with Skeleton Arm (above, from 1895). The murkiness is gone, replaced by a deathly black void behind Munch’s disembodied head. A skeletal arm rests below the face, while Munch’s name appears above in tombstone-style script, completing the Halloween-like calling card. Munch knew that macabre sold well and ventured into printmaking to expand his product to markets different from those who could buy expensive oil paintings. “Munch carefully and strategically anticipated market trends and absorbed other artists’ technical tricks while simultaneously elaborating and expanding his own repertoire of images,” Clarke concludes. Munch used different printmaking processes, colored papers, colored inks, the different grains of wood, and even developed jigsaw-like assembled blocks to print multicolored prints all in the name of creating new, must-have images for the collector. As Clarke shows, even when Munch seems his weirdest in terms of subject matter, he always remains within some contemporary trope, such as Munch’s recasting of Rodin’s The Kiss as his print The Kiss.


As much as possible, Clarke’s Becoming Edvard Munch allows us to see the “sunny side” of Munch, in works such as Munch’s The Sun (above, from 1911-1916), part of his Oslo University Aula decorations. Munch intended for his work to show the whole gamut of human experience, from birth to death with all the love and angst between. Munch’s mythmaking has effectively erased much of the more hopeful side of his work, leaving us with only half of the total picture, and the dark half at that. The Sun represents just one of many late scenes of regeneration, specifically the idea of heliotherapy en vogue at the time. After “taking the cure” at a spa, Munch grew fascinated by the idea of regeneration and recreation of the self by different means. In Becoming Edvard Munch, Clarke cures the diseased popular caricature of the “mad” Munch and recreates the living artist as a thinking visionary always in control of his art regardless of the madness marketed in the art itself.

[Many thanks to Yale University Press for providing me with a review copy of Jay A. Clarke’s Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety, and Myth.]