Art Minute: Happy Birthday Édouard Manet!

Édouard Manet (23 January 1832 – 30 April 1883) was a French painter. One of the first 19th-century artists to approach modern-life subjects, he was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism.

His early masterworks, The Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia, engendered great controversy and served as rallying points for the young painters who would create Impressionism. Today, these are considered watershed paintings that mark the genesis of modern art.

Manet depicted many scenes of the streets of Paris in his works. The Railway was painted in 1873. The setting is the urban landscape of Paris in the late 19th century. Using his favorite model in his last painting of her, a fellow painter, Victorine Meurent, sits before an iron fence holding a sleeping puppy and an open book in her lap. Next to her is a little girl with her back to the painter, who watches a train pass beneath them.

Le Chemin de fer
(The Railway)
Oil on canvas
1873
National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC, United States)
Art Renewal Center

Instead of choosing the traditional natural view as background for an outdoor scene, Manet opts for the iron grating which "boldly stretches across the canvas." The only evidence of the train is its white cloud of steam. In the distance, modern apartment buildings are seen. This arrangement compresses the foreground into a narrow focus. The traditional convention of deep space is ignored.

Historian Isabelle Dervaux has described the reception this painting received when it was first exhibited at the official Paris Salon of 1874: "Visitors and critics found its subject baffling, its composition incoherent, and its execution sketchy. Caricaturists ridiculed Manet's picture, in which only a few recognized the symbol of modernity that it has become today".

The critical resistance that did not abate until near the end of his career. Although the success of his memorial exhibition and the eventual critical acceptance of the Impressionists—with whom he was loosely affiliated—raised his profile by the end of the 19th century, it was not until the 20th century that his reputation was secured by art historians and critics.

Manet's disregard for traditional modeling and perspective made a critical break with academic painting's historical emphasis on illusionism. This flaunting of tradition and the official art establishment paved the way for the revolutionary work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. Manet also influenced the path of much 19th- and 20th-century art through his choice of subject matter. His focus on modern, urban subjects—which he presented in a straightforward, almost detached manner—distinguished him still more from the standards of the Salon, which generally favored narrative and avoided the gritty realities of everyday life. Manet's daring, unflinching approach to his painting and to the art world assured both him and his work a pivotal place in the history of modern art.

Art Minute: Happy Birthday Paul Cezanne!

Born in Aix-en-Provence, France on Jan. 19, 1839, French painter, Paul Cezanne, was one of the greatest of the Post-Impressionists, whose works and ideas were influential in the aesthetic development of many 20th-century artists and art movements, especially Cubism. Cézanne's art, misunderstood and discredited by the public during most of his life, grew out of Impressionism and eventually challenged all the conventional values of painting in the 19th century through its insistence on personal expression and on the integrity of the painting itself. He has been called the father of modern painting.

Paul Cézanne, French (1839–1906)

Maison Maria with a View of Château Noir
c. c. 1895

Oil on canvas
, 25-5/8 x 31-7/8 in. 

Kimbell Art Museum, Ft. Worth, Texas


Provençal buildings with stucco walls and red-tiled roofs—often, as here, observed from a road turning into the picture—formed one of Cézanne’s favorite subjects.


By the late 1870s, Cézanne had devised his hallmark manner of applying color in short parallel strokes, no differently for objects than for empty space. Here the distinctive way in which the trees are rendered with jagged broken lines, along with the density of the sky, relates stylistically to paintings that he made in 1895 at a quarry near the Château Noir.

It was at the Château Noir, an unfinished and abandoned nineteenth-century building complex in the Gothic style, visible in the right background of the Kimbell painting, that Cézanne stored his art supplies beginning in 1887. 

Landscapes such as this, in which Cézanne shows corners of rural France with simple domestic buildings, were to be a major source of inspiration for Braque and Picasso, and by extension for Cubism and early twentieth-century art. -Notes from the Kimbell's web page




On a sunny day last October, CCS's upper grade students traveled to Ft. Worth and were fortunate to see this Cezanne painting during our tour of the Kimbell's permanent collection.

(Both photos were taken in the natural light diffused into the space by a series of baffles. Carter Wiseman, author of Louis I. Kahn: Beyond Time and Style, said that "the light in the Kimbell gallery assumes an almost ethereal quality, and has been the distinguishing factor in its fame ever since." So very true.)

Art Minute: Happy Birthday John Singer Sargent!

Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose
John Singer Sargent
Tate Gallery, London, England
68.50 inch wide x 60.50 inch high

John Singer Sargent (January 12, 1856 – April 14, 1925) was the most successful portrait painter of his era, as well as a gifted landscape painter and water colorist. Sargent was born in Florence, Italy to American parents.

Sargent studied in Italy and Germany, and then in Paris under Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran.