Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [83]
Cassatt, “Young Mother Sewing,” c. 1893, MMA, NY. In Cassatt’s trademark mother-and-child images, she adopted elements from Japanese prints like strong linear patterning and flat forms in high-keyed color.
Like them, Morisot used no outlines, just touches of color to indicate form and volume, but her style was even freer than the other Impressionists’. Her vigorous brushstrokes flew across the canvas in all directions. She also shared the Impressionist goal of portraying personal visual experience. Her paintings were heavily autobiographical, often dealing with her daughter, Julie. “She lived her painting,” as the poet Paul Valéry said, “and painted her life.”
PISSARRO. Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) was the father figure and peacemaker of the Impressionist group. A kindly anarchist, he took artists like Cézanne and Gauguin under his wing. “Do not define too closely the outline of things,” he advised. “It is the brushstrokes of the right value and color which should produce the drawing.”
MORE DEVELOPMENTS IN GRAPHIC ARTS
When we left off (see p. 43), Renaissance artists were using woodcuts and engravings to produce multiple prints. Since then other techniques make possible the widespread reproduction of an artist’s work.
DRYPOINT AND ETCHING. In drypoint, a design is scratched into a copperplate with a fine steel needle, which permits soft atmospheric effects. In etching, indentations on a plate are submerged in an acid bath so that only the lines appear in the print.
LITHOGRAPH. In the lithograph, the artist draws on a limestone slab with a greasy crayon. Water is applied, which adheres to the stone’s nongreasy surfaces, and then greasy ink is rolled on, which sticks only where there is no water. A sheet of paper is then applied to the slab in a lithographic press to reproduce the image.
SILK SCREEN PRINTS. The newest graphic art is silk screen printing or serigraphy, developed in the United States most obviously by Andy Warhol. He attached a stencil to a screen of silk stretched on a frame, then forced ink through the stencil with a rubber squeegee. The image produced was flat and unshaded, appearing commercial and mechanical — the effect Warhol desired.
Pissarro excelled at reproducing an outdoor scene exactly with bright colors and patchy brushstrokes. “One must be humble in front of nature,” he said. Besides rural landscapes, he is known for bustling Parisian street scenes, as if viewed from a second-story window, filled with people and carriages rendered as spots of color.
In 1890-92 Pissarro flirted briefly with the pointillism of Seurat and Signac, carefully arranging small dots of color to convey form. A patient teacher, Pissarro instructed Cézanne in how to control form through color and diagonal brushstrokes. “Humble and colossal,” Cézanne called his mentor.
Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806), “Woman Bathing Her Baby in Tub,” MMA, NY.
JAPANESE WOODBLOCK PRINTS In the 1860s Japanese color woodblock prints, known as ukiyo-e prints, were first imported into France, where they became an important influence away from the European tradition of painting. “Ukiyo,” which means “floating world, ” referred to the red-light district of Japanese cities, where all social classes mingled in the pleasure-seeking round of theaters, restaurants, and brothels. The prints’ informal glimpses of contemporary life reinforced the Impressionists’ preference for modern subjects.
Artists like Degas, Manet, Cassatt, Whistler, and Gauguin also appropriated Japanese techniques, the first non-Western art to have a major