Category: Impressionism

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Am I done yet?

“Don’t overwork it” is terrible advice. Even the freshest of Impressionists reworked paintings.
Vase of Flowers, started 1882, Claude Monet

Yesterday I wrote about scientific research into color perception and how that affected painting at the end of the 20th century. Another major change of the same period had to do with what constituted a finished painting.

For earlier generations, a painting was complete when it had a slick surface with plenty of detail. The mechanics of painting were carefully hidden underneath the bling of the finish layer. Part of the ideal was that the viewer should have no idea about the sheer hard graft involved in painting. Unfinished paintings had no place in collections and were often destroyed on an artist’s death.
Late 19th century painters inserted the process of painting into the finished work. They used thick impasto, left parts of their canvas bare, and kept outlines and drawing marks visible. That made the painting a temporal record of development as much as a snapshot of a moment. These ideas continue into the modern period (perhaps in some cases to overripeness).
Edmondo and Therese Morbilli, started 1866, Edgar Degas
But were they ever that straightforward? Recently, researchers Kimberly Jones and Ann Hoenigswald analyzedEdgar Degas’ portrait of Edmondo and ThĂ©rĂšse Morbilli at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. They were trying to determine what “finished” meant to Degas.
Degas was a compulsive tweaker of his paintings, sometimes repainting them even after they’d been shown and sold. Many of his paintings appear to be unfinished, but are they? Jones and Hoenigswald discovered that this Morbilli portrait (he painted the couple more than once) was extensively reworked over a period of decades. Passages that appear to be open ground were, in fact, painted over sections with finished detail. The researchers’ conclusion was that, even though they could lay the order of his process bare, they could not determine his intentions.
The myth is that Impressionists recorded things quickly, easily and confidently. Claude Monet’s Vase of Flowers appears to be a finished painting, but in his correspondence, he mentioned his dissatisfaction with it. Analysis shows that he repeatedly returned to it, scraping paint off or painting over dried sections. It sat in his studio for forty years, occasionally being reworked, until he signed it in the 1920s. Did he truly think it was finished, or was he, in his eighties, just sick of working on it?
Route tournante Ă  La Roche-Guyon (A Turn in the Road at La Roche-Guyon), 1885, Paul CĂ©zanne. When part of the aesthetic is to show the bare bones of process, how can anyone but the artist say a painting is done?
Part of the shift in what constituted ‘finished’ might have been driven by economics. During the Renaissance, most work was done to commission. An artist didn’t have the luxury to continuously fiddle with his work.
But part of this is also attitude, and it’s worth thinking about in terms of our own work. Camille Picasso famously said, ‘To finish a work is to kill it.’ The modern interpretation of this is the overused injunction to “not overwork” a painting. This is a corruption of the process-baring aesthetic, and usually terrible advice. If you don’t hit your limit, you’ll never learn how to negotiate past or around it. Jones and Hoenigswald’s analysis shows us that, for Degas, it was possible to bring a painting back from the brink repeatedly.

When part of the aesthetic is process—as it is now—only the artist can definitely say that a painting is finished.

How we arrive at completion is another matter. I prefer a less-detailed surface myself. I often get there by painting over, painting out, and scraping out fussy passages, and, yes, paintings sit around my studio for a long time sometimes. It’s nice to see these techniques validated by art historians.

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The scientists of color

We owe a great debt to the engineers and scientists of the 19th century. In many ways, they invented modern painting.
In the Time of Harmony. The Golden Age is not in the Past, it is in the Future, 1893–95, Paul Signac, Mairie de Montreuil

A friend once told me engineers were ‘boring.’ Having now been married to one for 37 years, I can tell you that she was wrong. Equally importantly, we wouldn’t have much art without science and engineering. Art rests on discoveries in the physical world.

Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color by Philip Ball is a fun read. It also makes the serious point that art isn’t created merely by artists. Art incorporates the scientific and engineering innovations of its day.
Ball’s emphasis is on the advances made in pigment technology in the 19th century, and how they influenced Impressionism. That’s true as far as it goes, but scientific insight into perception also influenced how painters handled color.
Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), 1872, Claude Monet, MusĂ©e Marmottan Monet. This painting is what gave the movement its name.
Michel EugĂšne Chevreul was a famous French chemist. He is best remembered for having invented margarine. He was also the director of the dye works at the Gobelins Manufactory in Paris. In trying to make a uniform black dye, he realized that a color was perceived differently based on its setting. This lead to the idea of simultaneous contrast, which in turn led to the Impressionist understanding of complementary colors.
Scientists have a great influence on art, but they are sometimes reactionary. Chevreul believed chiaroscuro was the most important element in creating natural, or lifelike, paintings. Instead, Impressionists turned to his color relationships to define light and shadows.
Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwellis most famous for his theory of electromagnetic radiation, but his interests were wide. He was particularly interested in color perception, color-blindness, and color theory. Using linear algebra, he proved that all human color perception was based on three types of receptors. He is the father of colorimetry, or the systematic measurement of color perception.
An image of James Clerk Maxwell’s color photograph of a tartan ribbon. Scanned from The Illustrated History of Colour Photography, Jack H. Coote, 1993
Based on his research into the psychology of color perception, Maxwell designed the first color photography system. He proposed that a color photograph could be made by shooting three black-and-white pictures through red, green and blue filters and then projecting it in the same way. He demonstrated this first color photograph in 1861.
American physicist Ogden Rood was also an avid painter, a member of the American Watercolor Society. Rood divided color into three constants: purity, luminosity, and hue. In 1874 he gave two lectures to the National Academy of Design in New York on Modern Optics in Painting.
La RĂ©colte des Foins, Éragny, 1887, Camille Pissarro, Van Gogh Museum.
Rood suggested that small dots or lines of different colors, when viewed from a distance, would blend into a new color. He believed that the complementary colors of his color wheel, when applied in pairs by the artist, would enhance the presence of a painting: “… paintings, made up almost entirely of tints that by themselves seem modest and far from brilliant, often strike us as being rich and gorgeous in colour, while, on the other hand, the most gaudy colours can easily be arranged so as to produce a depressing effect on the beholder.”
Rood’s theory of contrasting colors influenced Impressionism, and was particularly influential on  Georges-Pierre Seurat. Seurat called his new style chromo-luminarism; Pointillism was a derogatory term invented by his critics. We are now so used to optics experiments in painting that we hardly  give any thought to their origins. But we, along with the painters who came before us, owe a great debt to the work of Maxwell, Chevreul, Rood and others.
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Changing visions

At the Milliner’s Shop, Edgar Degas, between 1905 and 1910.
Stanford opthamologist Michael Marmor has written two books on eye disease and famous artists. He focuses on Edgar Degas and Claude Monet and raises the question of whether their declining eyesight materially changed their painting.
Degas suffered retinal disease as he aged and Monet had cataracts. (While cataracts are easily repaired in the 21st century, retinal disease is a trickier process.)
Woman with Loose Red Hair, Edgar Degas, undated
Marmor used Photoshop to blur and reduce saturation in some of the artists’ later work to give some sense of what they might have seen.
“These simulations may lead one to question whether the artists intended these late works to look exactly as they do,” said Marmor, who concluded that “these artists weren’t painting in this manner totally for artistic reasons.”
Water Lilies, Claude Monet, painted between 1917-19, when his cataract process was well underway.
No artists achieve exactlywhat their mind’s eye lays out for them. The difference between intention and execution is the artifact the world understands as “style.” And no artist paints as he or she does totally for artistic reasons. The Impressionists, in particular, were painting in a period of rapid technological change. New pigments, the invention of the paint tube (leading to plein air painting), gaslight, chemical dyes which literally changed the way the world looked, industrial air pollution and a host of other innovations affected their painting.
“Contemporaries of both have noted that their late works were strangely coarse or garish and seemed out of character to the finer works that these artists had produced over the years,” Marmor wrote.
The Rose Walk, Giverny, Claude Monet, painted from 1920–22, when his cataracts were overripe.
Of course many artists throw over the traces in their old age. It’s the “I don’t give a #$%” phase, where all the aspirations and conventions which have guided one’s work over decades suddenly become tiresome and one just sublimates oneself in the paint. May I live long enough to experience it myself.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me on the Schoodic Peninsula in beautiful Acadia National Park in 2015 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops! Download a brochure here.
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The Glasgow Boys

A Hind’s Daughter, James Guthrie,1883
Quebec has tried twice and failed to secede from Canada. The referendum of 1995 was considered a foregone conclusion by pollsters; commentators breathlessly discussed whether the Maritime Provinces—separated from the rest of Canada—would ask to join the United States. However, the polls were wrong and although the Parti QuĂ©bĂ©cois remains a political force, the idea of Quebec separatism is spent.
Yesterday Scotland also ignored the polls and voted to stay in the United Kingdom. Hopefully, the Scottish separatist movement will go the way of the Parti Québécois. In honor of that, let me give you a tiny bit of Scottish painting.
The head of the Holy Loch, George Henry
The Glasgow Boys are called the Scottish Impressionists, but they’re more similar to the Australian Heidelberg School painters in their sentimental attachment to their history. Their painting was done en plein air with free brush work and an emphasis on the play of light. But they were not interested in modern life—as were the French Impressionists—but in the romance of Scotland’s rural past.
Considering the blanket of pollution over 19th century Glasgow, the workers packed into its tenements, and the befouling of the River Clyde, that made sense. What rich industrialist wanted a painting of the environmental and social mess his new-found wealth had helped create?

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