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Colour and
the Avant-garde
...
Neo-Impressionism
In the late nineteenth century, the Impressionists paved the way for modernity in colour,
being less concerned with the subject as with rendering variations in light and atmosphere.
This is apparent in Maxime Mauffra’s (1861-1918) 1902 work Evening at Morgat*, in the spirit
of Sisley (1839-1899) or Pissarro (1830-1903), yet a late starter when compared with Claude
Monet’s (1840-1926) impetus from 1872.
Modern
Artists
...
The modernity
from 1850 to 1914
...
42
The spontaneity found in the inspiration of the Impressionists gave way to the desire of
the Neo-Impressionists to give structure to the application of colour. Georges Seurat (18591891) devised a form of painting using
small dots of pure colour (fig.1) inspired
by the chemist Eugène Chevreul’s laws
of “simultaneous contrast” (1826). Many
artists adopted Seurat’s technique adding
their own personal touch – among them
Achille Laugé (1861-1944) whose career
was mainly based in his native region, a
few kilometres from Carcassonne. His
Road at “Hort” (1896-98) testifies to his
precocious advocacy of divisionism,
which he would never relinquish. Henri
Martin (1860-1944) of Toulouse studied
painting in Paris with Laugé in the class of Jean-Paul Laurens (1838-1921). He quickly made
a name for himself and received many official commissions. Retaining only the fragmentary
brushwork from Seurat’s divisionism without applying Chevreul’s principles, he used similar
tones, as in the Old House* in 1904.
Also a pupil of Laurens, Georges Ribemont-Dessaigne (1884-1974) quickly turned away
from Impressionism, and from divisionism and the influence of the Nabis. He achieved a highly
personal synthesis of these different influences, as is apparent in his Lakeside Landscape*.
One of the founders of the Dada movement after World War I, he abandoned a career in painting
to become a writer of repute.
English translation by Susan Schneider
Fauvism
The issue of a new approach to colour gave rise to another important movement in the early
twentieth century – Fauvism. Several of its exponents are to be found in this room, including
Othon Friesz (1879-1949) and Raoul Dufy (1877-1953). The Portrait of Fernande Olivier* by
Kees Van Dongen (1877-1968) embodies this new aesthetic, with its colours applied through
vivid and sensual free brushwork, in which pink becomes red and blue turns black. He
presented two paintings at the famous Autumn Salon of 1905, during which the critic Louis
Vauxcelles coined the term “Fauves” (literally “wild beasts”) to describe a group of artists
who explored the power of saturated colours to the height of contrast. The following year,
Van Dongen rented a studio at the Bateau Lavoir (in Montmartre, Paris) and met Picasso, with
whom he would become friends. Picasso’s girlfriend Fernande Olivier often modelled for him :
the Spanish Woman (1906) and the following year the portrait in this room, similar to the
Portrait of Madame Matisse (The Green Line) (1905, Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst,
fig.2). While his Fauvist friends soon looked to pastures new following in the footsteps of
Cézanne, Van Dongen was to persist in his experimentations with the triumph of colour until
the eve of World War I.
*
An asterisk indicates that the work mentionned is displayed in the room
fig.1- Seurat
The Bridge of Courbevoie
London, Courtauld Institute Galleries
All rights reserved
Van Dongen was also interested in the place of
the line in composition. Around 1905-10, his
figures would therefore appear surrounded by
rings, ultramarine or reddish in colour, as one of
the characteristics of his portraits. At his first
exhibition in Düsseldorf in 1908, the painters of
the “Die Brücke” association – Max Pechstein in
particular – made contact with him, thereby
forging a link between German Expressionism and
French Fauvism.
A friend of Matisse and Derain with whom he
shared exhibitions with the Fauvists, Auguste
Chabaud (1882-1955) was born in Nîmes and
made his debut at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
After World War I, he retired to the family estate
at Graveson near to Avignon where he spent the rest of his life on his own between painting,
sculpture and poetry. His Moulin de la Galette*, a night scene, was one of the many guingettes
(open air cafés) where one could go to dance on Sundays and eat galettes (pancakes). The
atmosphere of freedom and pleasure attracted bohemians and artists who would meet
models, provided entertainment for the local populace and a chance for the bourgeoisie to
mix with the riffraff.
Sonia and Robert Delaunay
All of the Sonia Delaunay’s artistic phases (Fauvism and abstract art, easel painting or
decorative arts) testify to her loyalty to pure colour, heightened by the laws of “simultaneous
contrasts”. Born in the Ukraine, Sonia Terk (1885-1979) married Robert Delaunay in 1910.
The dazzling colours and brutal workmanship of Philomene* (1907) reveal her early
experimentations between Fauvism and Primitivism, before turning to lyrical and colourful
‘Orphic’ Cubism. This important Fauvist portrait with its violent, cloisonné colours betrays
the lessons of Gauguin and Van Gogh yet without erasing the stamp of Primitivism characteristic
of contemporary Russian painting. The large hands and strong contrast between the model’s
austerity and the floral profusion of the ground remind us that the model is a seamstress.
Sonia’s career remained inextricably bound to that of Robert Delaunay (1885-1941), even
if each asserted their own personality and differences. Under the twofold influence of Monet
and Gauguin, Robert Delaunay based his experimentations on colour and the laws of Chevreul.
Moving from a form’s geometrical deconstruction to its reconstruction using colour alone in
what the poet Guillaume Apollinaire termed “Orphic” Cubism, in 1912 the Delaunays achieved
a pure and abstract style of painting in which colour was both form and subject. During World
War I, the two artists left for Spain and Portugal. Robert Delaunay’s painting then underwent
a phase of “return to order”, as in Portuguese Still Life*. Colour shaped perspective and objects.
In the Independent Salon of 1911, Delaunay had already exhibited alongside André Lhote
(1885-1962), Albert Gleize (1881-1953) and Roger de La Fresnaye (1885–1925) whom he
was to meet again in 1917 at the exhibition of the Section d’Or (Golden Section) at the Galerie
Boétie. Under the impetus of Jacques Villon, this group of artists sought harmony and the
ideal form based on the principle of the golden number defined during the Renaissance.
fig.2- Henri Matisse
Portrait of Madame Matisse
(The Green Line)
Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst
All rights reserved