"The Operetta Of Paint"

"To paint not the thing itself, but the effect it produces,”  - Stephane Mallarme on the virtues of pastel.  

To be dubbed 'the operetta of paint' is to be dismissed with a smile.  Chalks were the province of amateurs and  the achievements of those old fogies, the Versailles court artists of the kings were out of style a century later.  Pastels shared the low  reputation of watercolor until  both were 'rediscovered' by professional artists in the late 19th century. 

In 1885 the Societe des Pastellistes Francaises was founded in Paris and its public debut was an exhibition at the prestigious Galerie Georges Petit.  With cleverness and admiration, the new artists paired their works with the unjustly ignored works of their predecessors.  The show was so successful that it became an annual event and, in 1908, Cent Pastels repeated the original gesture.

By the time Albert Besnard  executed Eclipse in 1888, he had had absorbed the influences of four years in England with the Pre-Raphaelites.  He adopted their muted palette and, on his return to France, began a series of what he called 'environmental portraits'.  Here the woman's head eclipses the moon yet its light defines her feature.  Besnard plays games with light.

Gate is what a Nabi work looks like  in pastels. The green gate is open but, with no sense of perspective (surely the influence of Japanese prints),  Ker-Xavier Roussel has created a mysterious yet charming image.  An open gate that suggests closure, a wall obscured by trees, and a view obscured by the wall.

Two women, two aspects of the artist Edmond Aman-Jean.  Like his friend, Besrnard, Aman-Jean created  female images like this emblematic Venice - Goddess of the Sea.  Withdrawn, indirect, and idelaized, these women are ultimately the artist's fantasy of the unknowable.  Like William Degouve de Nuncques, he was also keenly aware of the new Symbolist poetry through his friendships with Mallarme, Verlaine, and Villiers  de l"isle Adam.

 

For a relatively conventional portrait, Aman-Jean appears to channel the style of Pierre Bonnard.  To be sure, Mme Prinet's dress is a bit risque, with its white breastplates, made the more noticeable by large blocks of yellow and green.  The background is rendered in the same strokes used for the ruching on her dress.  Were her enigmatic smile and indirect gaze her choice, or that of the artist?

It was Baudelaire who first made the point that the Symbolists  found nature to be "lacking in imagination."  

In Fragments of an Intimate Journal (1883) Swiss writer Henri-Frederic Amiel declared that "any landscape is a state of mind."

The pictures of the Belgian William Degouve de Nuncques function as visual equivalents to symbolist poetry. Although his Pond In Sunlight is not markedly realistic, we recognize in  its flickering presences the artist's credo that after drawing the lines: "fill the rest of with feeling."

 A relatively late work  in his eventful career, Paul Serusier's budding spring landscape is anchored by the clumps of daffodils thrusting upward  in the foreground.  His powdery colors appear to levitate off the paper, fluttering like dust motes caught by a ray of sun.   Sometimes the lightness  of chalks conveys the greater depths.

Images:
1. A. Andreas - Exposition des pastels de E. Murer, 1895, Museum of Modern Art, NYC>
2. Albert Besnard - The Eclipse, 1888.usee d'Orsay, Paris.
3. Ker-Xavier Roussel - Gate, 1893, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
4. Edmond Aman-Jean - Venice - Goddess of the Sea, c. 1893, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
5. Edmond-Aman Jean - Portrait of Jeanne Prinet, 1901, Musee Antoine Leuyer, Saint-Quentin.
6.. Eugene Loup - Revereie, c.1901, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
7. William Degouve de Nuncques - Pond in Sunlight.
8. Paul Serusier - Landscape, 1912, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.