Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [80]
Renoir, “The Bathers,” 1887, Philadelphia Museum of Art. In Renoir’s Post-Impressionist period, he pointed sensuous nudes as solid, carefully defined forms.
WHILE PARIS BURNED ...
Ironically, while the Impressionists churned out their upbeat canvases full of light, Paris endured some of its darkest, most desperate days. In 1870-71 during the Franco-Prussian War, France suffered one humiliating defeat after another. German troops besieged Paris, devastated the city by shelling, and prevented all supplies from entering. Citizens resorted to eating rats and animals from the zoo and stripped parks of trees for fuel. Thirty-six thousand people starved to death.
Although Manet, Degas, Bazille (who died in the fighting), and Renoir served in the Army (Renoir without seeing action), Sisley, Pissarro, and Monet fled to England to escape the draft. The only blood that ever appeared in Pissarro’s work was when Prussians turned his studio into a slaughterhouse, using his 1,500 painted canvases as aprons while butchering hogs.
After France’s ignominious defeat, Parisian republicans set up a reform government, the Commune, brutally repressed by French troops. Civil war broke out. During this fierce resistance, 30,000 were executed. Meanwhile, the Impressionists decamped — except Manet, who produced lithographs protesting the suppression of the Commune. In rural retreats they painted dazzling landscapes, blithely oblivious to the civic upheavals they considered an unwelcome intrusion into their artistic activities.
DEGAS: THE RELUCTANT IMPRESSIONIST. “Art is not a sport,” said Edgar Degas (1834-1917), explaining why he detested painting out-of-doors. Yet, despite this basic difference from the Impressionists, he was counted a charter member of the group through friendship, his commitment to contemporary subject matter, and his opposition to official academic painting.
Distinct from the others, Degas had zero interest in landscape painting and no concern for the effects of changing atmosphere and light. His subjects were limited: racetracks, circuses, opera, café scenes, women at work, nudes bathing, and — above all — ballerinas. Thoroughly trained in academic art, Degas idolized Ingres, who advised him, “Draw lines, young man, many lines, from memory or from nature; it is this way that you will become a good painter.” Degas’s emphasis on linear drawing and composition, as well as the three-dimensional depth and firm contours of his pictures, set him apart from the Impressionists, as did his preference for artificial light.
Degas shared with Monet, Manet, and Renoir, however, an interest in scenes that appeared unplanned and spontaneous, as if capturing a split-second glimpse of the world. For Degas, this haphazard appearance was carefully contrived. “No art was ever less spontaneous than mine,” he said. “A picture is an artificial work, outside nature. It calls for as much cunning as the commission of a crime.”
AT THE BARRE. Degas’s specialty was the human figure in a moment of arrested motion. His hundreds of paintings, drawings, and pastels of ballerinas show his compulsion to portray casual moments of action. The unconventional poses catch the dancers off-guard while scratching, yawning, or adjusting their slippers. This “unposed,” snapshot effect derived from Degas’s interest in photography, which froze subjects in awkward movements.
His eccentric compositions reflect the influence of Japanese prints, which placed figures informally off-center, sometimes cropped by the edge of the frame. Degas represented dancers, onstage or at rehearsal, from oblique angles with lighting often originating below as if from footlights. He typically clusters figures to one side with large empty areas of floor space exposed. In