It was the summer of 1892 at the art colony of Pont-Aven. An impecunious Swiss artist Cuno Amiet (1868-1961) came to study with the Nabis, Emile Bernard, Armand Seguin, and Paul Serusier. What Amiet took from their innovative techniques was the conviction that color would the organizing principle in his painting, above all. And although Amiet would try on various styles and methods throughout his seventy year career, color was its unifying theme. 
Gardens, with their controlled riots of color, were a frequent subject. Look how the colors seem to arrange the people, too. A little girl becomes part of a tableau with the flattened blooms, just as the woman sitting in a chair relaxes into the rhythm of the foliage. A woman appears to dig in the garden in time to the swaying shadows around her.
Images: courtesy of Swiss Art Research Institute, Zurich. 1. Girl With Flowers, 1896.
2. Woman Sitting in The Garden, 1910.
3. Woman Working in The garden, 1911.
4. Blooming Garden With Bench, 1933.
5. Rose Trees, 1946.
6. Garden With Figure, 1960.
9 comments:
Am I off base in seeing similarities to Bloomsbury artists? That is what first popped in my rusty ol' art-history-head...
Thank you for these gardens!!!
I love flowers in the garden!
Wonderful post, Jane. These are gorgeous images and your poetic descriptive snippets are lovely and have added much to my enjoyment of an artist completely unknown to me until today. Thanks so much.
Gorgeous paintings for the beginning of the summer. "The girl with flowers" his earlier work, I adore:)
Jane, the opener is sheer delight and the 3rd one looks like a corner in the Conservancy Garden in Central Park. Love these.
There are reported to be about 4,000 paintings by Cuno Amiet - somewhere. About a quarter of them self-portraits which is hard to harmonize with his devotion to color. The garden scenes are, by necessity, close-ups. However many of his landscapes are very long views that introduce distortions to the way we usually look at landscape. Because it is in the collection of the Musee D'Orsay, Amiet's "Winter Scene" is his best-known work and a good example of what I mean.
Suse, interesting idea. I thought of surrealism when I looked at "Garden With Figure."
I first saw Cuno Amiet work in Switzerland many years ago. I was struck buy how he saw light, shade and shadow. I had never seen bright sunlight rendered in such a fashion with such astonishing and unexpected colors. He is one of my favorites, many thanks.
Debra, what museums did you visit that included Amiet's work? He seems to have had particular versions of landscape that he returned to regularly.
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