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Delacroix, Chassériau, Decamps, Fromentin,
Degas, Seurat, Puvis de Chavannes
From Delacroix to
Matisse: Drawings from the Algiers Museum of Art
The Algiers Museum of Fine Arts houses a
collection of 8,000 works, dating
from the 14th to the 20th century, including
a Print Department with nearly 1,750 drawings and engravings. A selection of
around 60 French drawings, from the 19th and early 20th centuries, will give the
public an idea of the wealth and diversity of this collection that is
little-known in France. On the one hand, the exhibition will present works by
“Orientalist” artists such as Chassériau, Decamps, Delacroix and Fromentin,
on the other, it will focus on some of the key figures in French drawing: Degas,
Derain, Millet, Puvis de Chavannes and Seurat. It will be complemented by a
section on the history of the museum and the restoration carried out for the
exhibition.
The Tepidarium by Théodore Chassériau,1853. Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Chassériau,
Théodore (1819-56). French painter. He was the most gifted pupil
of Ingres,
whose studio in Rome in entered when he was 11, but in the 1840s he conceived an
admiration for Delacroix
and attempted, with considerable success, to combine Ingres's Classical
linear grace with Delacroix's Romantic color. His chief work was the decoration of the Cour
des Comptes in the Palais d'Orsay, Paris, with allegorical scenes of Peace and
War (1844-48), but these were almost completely destroyed by fire. There are
other examples of his decorative work, however, in various churches in Paris.
Chassériau was also an outstanding portraitist and painted nudes and North
African scenes (he made a visit there in 1846).
Entry of the
Crusaders into Constantinople on 12 April 1204 , by Delacroix, 1840 (240 Kb); Canvas, 411 x 497 cm (162
x 195 1/2 in); Musée du Louvre, Paris
Ferdinand-Victor- Eugène Delacroix was born on April 26, 1798, in Charenton-St-Maurice, France, and
died on August 13, 1863 in Paris, France. In 1815 he became the pupil of the
French painter Pierre-Narcisse Guerin and began a career that would produce more
than 850 paintings and great numbers of drawings, murals, and other works. In
1822 Delacroix submitted his first picture to the important Paris Salon
exhibition: Dante and Virgil in Hell. A technique used in this
work--many unblended colors forming what at a distance looks like a unified
whole--would later be used by the impressionists. His next Salon entry was in
1824: Massacre at Chios.
The Barque of Dante, 1822 by Delacroix (150 Kb); Oil on canvas,
189 x 242 cm (74 1/2 x 95 1/4"); Musee du Louvre, Paris
With great vividness of color and strong
emotion it pictured an incident in which 20,000 Greeks were killed by Turks on
the island of Chios. The French government purchased it for 6,000 francs. He is the greatest French Romantic painter, whose use of colour was influential in the
development of both Impressionist
and Postimpressionist painters. His inspiration came chiefly from historical or
contemporary events or literature, and a visit to Morocco in 1832 provided him
with further exotic subjects. Eugene Delacroix is numbered
among the greatest and most influential of French painters. He is most often
classified as an artist of the Romantic school. His remarkable use of color was later to
influence impressionist
painters and even modern artists such as Pablo Picasso.
Algerian Women in Their
Apartments
1834 (170 Kb); Oil on canvas, (180 x 229 cm) (71 x 90 1/4"); Musee du
Louvre, Paris
Georges Seurat was born on December 2, 1859,
Paris, France and died ond March 29, 1891, Paris, France. He was the founder of
the 19th-century French school of Neo-Impressionism whose technique for
portraying the play of light using tiny brushstrokes of contrasting colours
became known as Pointillism. Using this techique, he created huge compositions
with tiny, detached strokes of pure colour too small to be distinguished when
looking at the entire work but making his paintings shimmer with brilliance. Works in this style include Une Baignade
(1883-84) and Un dimanche après-midi à l'Ile de la Grande Jatte
(1884-86).
The Lighthouse at Honfleur
1886 by Georges Seurat. (210 Kb); Oil on canvas, 66.7 x 81.9 cm (26 1/4 x 32 1/4
in
A French painter who was a leader in the
neo-impressionist movement of the late 19th century, Georges Seurat is the
ultimate example of the artist as scientist. He spent his life studying color
theories and the effects of different linear structures. His 500 drawings alone
establish Seurat as a great master, but he will be remembered for his technique
called pointillism, or divisionism, which uses small dots or strokes of
contrasting color to create subtle changes in form. He studied at the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts in 1878 and 1879. His teacher was a disciple of Jean-Auguste-Dominique
Ingres. Young Seurat was strongly influenced by Rembrandt
and Francisco
de Goya.
Une Baignade, Asnières, by Georges Seurat, 1883-84 (retouched 1887);
"Bathing at Asnières"; 79 x 118 1/2 in; Signed, bottom left; National
Gallery, London
After a year of military service at Brest,
Seurat exhibited his drawing Aman-Jean at the official Salon in
1883. Panels from his painting Bathing
at Asnieres were refused by the Salon the next year, so Seurat
and several other artists founded the Societe des Artistes Independants. His
famous canvas Sunday
Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte was the
centerpiece of an exhibition in 1886. By then Seurat was spending his winters in
Paris, drawing and producing one large painting each year, and his summers on
France's northern coast. In his short life Seurat produced seven monumental
paintings, 60 smaller ones, drawings, and sketchbooks. He kept his private life
very secret, and not until his sudden death in Paris on March 29, 1891, did his
friends learn of his mistress, who was the model for his painting Young
Woman Holding a Powder Puff.
UNE BAIGNADE
Painted in the same year as Pissarro's
The Pork Butcher, Seurat's first large picture shows in contrast
the monumental sense of form which complemented the method (still in process of
development) of dividing color. This was a move away from Impressionism
though there is an Impressionist atmosphere in the landscape background with the
river distance, the Courbevoie bridge and the smoking factory chimneys of the
industrial Paris suburb of Asnières. In Impressionist fashion also he made a
number of small oil sketches from which the final composition was derived. The
sketches have the character that belongs to work carried out on the spot. Asnières
was to Seurat and his friend Signac
what Argenteuil had been to Monet
and Renoir.
The Seine and its boats offered a like attraction; the bridge at Courbevoie and
the island of the Grande Jatte, seen across the river from the bathing-place on
the right, were also to furnish material for magnificent pictures. Une
Baignade is a whole collection of Seurat's motifs---and a truly
remarkable work for a young man of twenty-four. The kinship with Piero
della Francesca that has often been remarked is distinct in the
ordered rhythm of design and the firmly simplified contours. The feeling of
repose is heightened by the lateral directions of figures, stylized shadows and
river bank.
The picture was exhibited at the first Salon
des Indépendants in 1884 and in 1886 was one of the `Works in Oil and Pastel by
the Impressionists of Paris' exhibited by Durand-Ruel at the National Academy of
Design in New York. Too original to find immediate favor either in Paris or New
York, it received harsh criticism. The critic in an American paper who described
Une Baignade as the product of `a vulgar, coarse and commonplace
mind' seems with every epithet to present the exact opposite opinion to that
with which the work is regarded now.
Planning the composition of Bathing at Asnieres,
Seurat made field trips to the island of La Grande Jatte; the approximate site
can be checked on any map of the Paris suburbs. But this first of his big
canvases was executed in the studio, merely drawing upon the preliminary studies
made outdoors. Coming from Paris, Beaubourg wrote to Coquiot, the island was
on one's right, more or less opposite the spot where people swim on Sundays,
halfway between the Bineau bridge and the northern tip of the island, just where
the river makes a sharp bend toward Courbevoie and Asnieres. Seurat was often to
be seen painting there.
Jules Christophe left this short description of
Bathing at Asnieres: Water, air, the railroad bridge in the distance, boats,
shimmering trees, seven men and boys in various stages of undress, either in the
water or sprawled upon the grass. Not many people saw the canvas (at the Salon
des Independants it was relegated to the bar), but it represented a great deal
of work.
According to Signac this large composition, for which Seurat had
made so many preliminary drawings and oil studies, was painted in broad,
smooth brush strokes placed atop one another, in a palette of ochres and more
vivid colors. Like Delacroix,
he blended his colors in individual areas.
Signac goes on to sum up Seurat's
method as follows: Observance of the laws of contrast, methodical separation
of the elements (light, shadow, local color, reactions).
This is a hazy
work, saturated with summer heat. In the distance loom factories and their
smokestacks. We feel the oppressiveness of the atmosphere, the immobility of the
scene. The light here weighs more heavily than the shadows. In an article,
Arsene Alexandre refers to the enormous amount of work that went into this
painting: Bathing at Asnieres made it clear that Seurat was the one younger
artist capable of putting his back into it-one of the few capable of organizing
a vast composition utilizing hitherto unknown techniques.
The many partial
studies that went to produce this work have been brought together into a
coherent, unified whole. The summer silence is broken only by the boy who is
cupping his hands to make a sound like a boat horn. This is vacation time, rest
after toil. The distribution of blacks and whites, light tones and dark, strait
and curving lines (the latter predominating) is very elaborate. The light, the
sun, the greenery, the buildings, the water, the people, the boats gliding along
in the background- everything gives off the torpid heat of a summer afternoon.
–Nicholas Pioch