Impressionism to Cubism in 9 Minutes

Transcript (Download)

The impressionists Monet, Seasley, and Vissaro were in love with natural light.

They were more interested in what light did to colors and shapes than in objects themselves.

The woman seems no more important in this picture than the boat or the reflections in the water.

You would never know from this painting that Monet was desperately poor, begging money from his friends for paint and canvas.

He recorded what he saw, not what he might have been feeling.

Guy de Maupassant said, Last year I often followed Claude Monet in his search of impressions.

He was no longer a painter in truth, but a hunter.

He proceeded, followed by children who carried his canvases, five or six canvases representing the same subject at different times of the day and with different effects.

He took them up and put them aside in turn, following the changes in the sky.

And the painter before his subject lay in wait for the sun and shadows, capturing in a few brush strokes the ray that fell or the cloud that passed.

The impressionists were criticized in their own day for painting everyday subject matter in an unfinished technique.

The carriages in this painting by Vissaro are only a collection of brush strokes until we see the whole composition.

Stazan looked for the structure beneath appearance, building blocks of the visual world.

The impressionists were content with nature the way it was.

Stazan wanted to recreate it.

Stazan was a proud and lonely man.

He lived most of his life in Aix, a small town in the south of France.

He lived modestly and never tired of the countryside around his studio.

He painted his landscapes out of doors, his portraits and still lifes in this room.

Duncan Phillips, the collector, wrote, Stazan had pondered every touch, no wasted motions, no hastily improvised devices.

His composition was built from top to bottom and from end to end.

And when it was finished, the relations of one thing to another seemed inevitable, as if determined from the beginning of the world.

Stazan's cosmos within a frame is so compact and complete that there is nothing more to say.

Vissaro paints people hanging in the blinding light of midday, where the edges of things become blurred.

The generation that followed, the expressionists Van Gogh and Gauguin, lacked not only public support but couldn't get along with each other.

These men lived short, hard lives and suffered both psychologically and physically.

Van Gogh's paintings expressed his own state of mind more than the way the world looked.

Even in his portraits, which were records of the people he liked, such as this painting of Dr.

Ray, who treated Van Gogh at Arles, there is a tortured quality in the repressed, twisting patterns of the wallpaper.

In this landscape, yellow pigment becomes the equivalent of sunshine.

The surfaces of Van Gogh's pictures are thick with paint, often applied with a loaded palette knife.

The paint takes on a life of its own, separate from the objects it describes.

The torment of Van Gogh's last years is reflected in this painting, in its slashing brushstrokes and acid color.

In my own work, he wrote to his brother Theo, I am risking my life, and half my reason has been lost in it.

Gauguin said scornfully of the Impressionists, they look for what is near the eye and not at the mysterious centers of thought.

Gauguin saw the peasant women of Arles as mysterious and exotic, more like witches than housewives.

With Gauguin, you can see the texture of the linen canvas beneath the paint.

He paints much more thinly than Van Gogh in veils of color rather than thick strokes.

Having spent his childhood in Peru, Gauguin carried the art of painting in his own hands.

He was not aware of the idea of a primitive world in his mind.

In 1891, Gauguin sold enough paintings in Paris to escape France and look for his new Eden in Tahiti.

What is he? asked August Strindberg, the 19th century dramatist.

He is Gauguin, the savage who hates an encumbering civilization, a bit of the titan who, jealous of the creator, in his spare moments makes his own little creation.

The child who takes apart his toys to make others from them.

He who swears and flaunts, preferring to see the sky red rather than blue with the crowd.

Some artists, like Rousseau, stayed in Paris but inhabited a strange world of their own.

Europe was changing rapidly.

Enormous technological advances were taking place.

Trains, airplanes, automobiles, dirigibles, suggesting the breaking up of traditional ideas of time and space.

Rousseau included some of these real objects from the modern world in his fairy tale settings.

Rousseau treated both the jungles he never visited and modern technology which was all around him as equally strange phenomena.

There are no airplanes in Picasso or Braque, but there are reflections of the breaking up and reforming of the world around them.

Since the camera could reproduce the real world, painters didn't have to anymore.

Together, Picasso and Braque invented cubism, which combined geometric simplification and faceted shapes.

Said Braque, we were like two mountaineers roped together.

If it weren't for the face, the still life on the table and the hands, this painting of Picasso's dealer, Conveiler, would be totally abstract.

The Impressionists recorded the world they saw.

The Expressionists Van Gogh and Gauguin made their emotions visible.

And of the Cubist Picasso, the poet Apollinaire said, since anatomy no longer existed in art, Picasso had to reinvent it and carry out his own assassinations with the practiced and methodical hand of a great surgeon.

The Impressionists

Identifier

F.2005-05-0004

Date Of Production

1973

Abstract

Educational documentary on the modern art from the Impressionist through the Expressionists and ending with Cubism. Features paintings by and biographical information on Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gaugauin, Picasso and Braque. Sponsored by the Art Institute of Chicago for an exhibit of paintings owned by the Russian government.

Run Time

0:09:52

Format

16mm

Extent

370 feet

Color

Color

Sound

Optical

Reel/Tape Number

1/1

Has Been Digitized?

Yes

Language Of Materials

English

Element

Answer Print

Genre

Educational
Sponsored

Form

Short

Subject

Art

Related Collections

Subseries II: Film Group Sponsored Films

Related Places

North America ➜ United States ➜ Illinois ➜ Chicago

Sponsor/client

Art Institute of Chicago

National Endowment for the Humanities

Main Credits

Mike Gray Associates, Inc. (is production company)

Olin, Chuck (is director)

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