Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [95]
A simple man, Rousseau sang loudly while he worked to keep his spirits up, but sometimes frightened himself with his bizarre imaginings. Once he had to open a window and stop work until he regained his composure. A visitor saw him painting with a wreath of leaves around his thumb. When asked why, Rousseau answered, “One must study nature.”
REDON: FANTASTICAL FLOWERS. Another French painter who, like Rousseau, would later inspire the Surrealists was Odilon Redon (pronounced Ruh DON; 1840-1916). After drawing a subject accurately, “I am driven as in torment,” Redon once said, “to create something imaginary.” The creatures of Redon’s imagination were even more bizarre than Rousseau’s: macabre insects, amoeboid monsters like his noseless cyclops, plants with human heads, and a hot-air balloon that is simultaneously an eyeball.
“My originality consists in making improbable beings live,” Redon said, “by putting ... the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible.” Influenced by the disturbing poetry of Poe and Baudelaire, Redon created works that evoke a hallucinatory world.
Since he was dealing with the unseen world, Redon’s technique focused on suggesting rather than describing his subject. He relied on radiant color and line to inform his erotic, perverse visions.
In “Orpheus” Redon used iridescent color to evoke a magical netherworld. The painting alludes to the mythological musician — his floating, dismembered head is seen in profile beside a fragment of his lyre — who has lost his love, Eurydice. Redon’s canvases sparkled with glowing color — especially the clusters of strange flowers that were his signature.
RYDER: SUBJECTIVE SEASCAPES. The American Symbolist painter Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917) was another fan of Edgar Allan Poe who, like Redon, painted pictures from his imagination and used simplified forms and yellowish light to create works of haunting intensity.
One of the most original artists of his day, Ryder was the stereotypical hermit artist, who, in his last years, refused to even go out during the day because he felt sunlight would sear his eyes. He lived alone in downtown New York amid incredible squalor. Totally indifferent to his surroundings, Ryder piled his studio waist-high with dusty papers, milk bottles, ashes, and dead mice in traps. He slept on the floor to avoid bedbugs and, when a caller knocked, it took 15 minutes to clear a path to the door. The artist “must live to paint,” he said, “and not paint to live.” Amid the dirt and disorder, Ryder painted a dream world that contorted reality.
Redon, “Orpheus,” 1913, Cleveland Museum of Art. Redon is known for delicate, opalescent flowers, ghostlike profiles, and mystical apparitions.
Ryder looked to nature for inspiration, closely observing the sea and sky, but his paintings were intentionally short on detail to create the mystical feeling he sought. “What avails a storm cloud accurate in color,” he asked, “if the storm is not within?” In “Death on a Pale Horse,” his most famous painting, a menacing cobra uncoils in the foreground as a spectral figure holding a scythe gallops across a barren landscape. Although the image is drawn from Ryder’s private demons, it evokes a primordial shudder.
Sadly, Ryder was as indifferent to his art materials as he was to his life-style. He worked in fits and often slapped ill-prepared paint (even candle grease) onto a wet undercoating. As a result, all 150 of his canvases are severely cracked.
THE BIRTH OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE
Near the turn of the century, architecture branched out into several directions. The Neoclassical tradition continued to dominate public buildings like banks, libraries, and city halls. Architects for these civic projects studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, a prestigious but conservative art school in Paris. The “Beaux-Arts” style of domes and arches seemed out of place on the bustling streets of modern metropolises. These mock Greek or Roman buildings were like a leftover stage set from Spartacus.
At the same time, new materials, new technology,