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Indepth Arts News:
"Monet, Renoir, and the Impressionist Landscape"
2001-01-21 until 2001-04-15
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Houston, TX,
USA
Monet, Renoir, and the Impressionist Landscape beautifully illustrates the
rise of landscape painting as the dominant genre of the avant-garde—one
of the great dramas of 19th-century painting. Throughout art history,
landscape paintings were considered less ambitious than history paintings
or portraits. Between 1850 and 1900, however, artists introduced exciting
innovations in the art of landscape. Landscape paintings were increasingly
in demand by middle-class patrons wishing to decorate their urban
apartments with pictures of the countryside. From Jean-François Millet to
Vincent van Gogh, artists sidestepped the centuries-old tradition of history
painting. Instead, they focused on modern values of color, light, and brush
stroke.
The exhibition opens with an early landscape by Claude Monet, Rue de la
Bavolle, Honfleur, placed within the context of the Realist landscape style
developed by Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, Charles-François Daubigny,
and Théodore Rousseau. In the 1850s and 1860s, a group of artists known
as the Barbizon School boldly diverged from the classical tradition of
creating idealized, Italianate landscapes and instead explored their native
French countryside. They produced spontaneous sketches done outdoors,
and presented them as completed works. These innovations inspired
Monet, Auguste Renoir, and the younger generation of Impressionists, who
later developed a new way of painting plein-air subjects that emphasized
luminous color and atmospheric effects.
The core of the exhibition is 36 masterpieces created by the Impressionist
generation, including 13 stunning works by the most steadfast Impressionist
master, Monet. This section surveys the development of the Impressionist
landscape in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. Monet’s Entrance to the Village
of Vétheuil in Winter and Grainstack (Sunset), and Renoir’s Rocky Crags at
L’ Estaque show these two artists’ spontaneous, improvisational style
whereas Edgar Degas’s At the Races in the Countryside and Paul
Cézanne’s Turn in the Road reveal the movement’s more refined, cerebral
character. Contemporaries of the Impressionists who worked in a
traditionalist mode, represented by François-Louis Francais and
Henri-Joseph Harpignies, enrich the story of landscape painting during this
dynamic moment.
The concluding section of the exhibition examines the profound legacy of
the Impressionists on landscape painting. Their stylistic innovations were
imitated and modified by artists working in their own time, such as Jean
Charles Cazin and Léon Augustin Lhermitte, as well as by younger artists
like Paul Gauguin, van Gogh, and Paul Signac. Works such as van Gogh’s
great Houses at Auvers signal the new generation’s rejection of the
adamant naturalism of Impressionism in favor of a more expressionistic
treatment of nature.
The works in this exhibition tell the fascinating story of the development of
the Impressionist landscape by artists both famous and lesser known.
These artists’ innovations indeed reflect the dramatic changes of
19th-century painting.
IMAGE:
Vincent van Gogh,
Houses at
Auvers, 1890,
oil on canvas,
Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston,
bequest of John
T. Spaulding.
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