Last Weekend for Impressionists

The exhibition From Paris: A Taste for Impressionism - Paintings from The Clark finishes at the Royal Academy of Arts on Sunday.  I went to see it on Tuesday and it was crowded for an early weekday.  I can only imagine it will be worse this weekend - but it's still worth going to see.

Banks of the Seine at By (c. 1880-81) by Alfred Sisley

oil on canvas, 54.3 x 73.3 cm

© Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 

Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA, 1955.534

The exhibition is made up of paintings from the Collection of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (normally known as "the Clark") in Williamstown, Massachusetts which is currently undergoing building works.  As all good museums do, they lend out their works while they are unable to house them at home - which is how this exhibition came about.  

If you can't get to the Exhibition you can

• see images of all the paintings on display in a Masterpiece Gallery created by the Clark.  
• see videos of curators talking about specific works here
• read Debra Mancoff's article in the RA magazine about the exhibition - From Paris: A Taste For Impressionism
• Download the education guide (3.3 MB)

Major Degas exhibition opens in Paris

A major exhibition of work by Edgar Degas (1834-1917) opens at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris on Tuesday 13th March.  Degas and the Nude has been organised jointly by the Musée d’Orsay and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Edgar Degas (known as), Hilaire-Germain Edgar de Gas (1834-1917)
Après le bain, femme s’essuyant la nuque
[After the Bath, Woman Drying her Neck], 1895-1898
Pastel on fine vellum paper glued on card, 62.2 x 65 cm, Paris,
Musée d’Orsay, bequest of Count Isaac de Camondo, 1911
© Musée d'Orsay, dist. RMN / Patrice Schmidt

There's not been a major exhibition devoted to the work of Degas since the 1988 retrospective at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais.  However he was admired as an artist by Bonnard, Matisse and Picasso during their early careers.

About the exhibition - Degas and the nude

The exhibition includes a number of graphic drawings from the Musée d’Orsay collection which are rarely seen due to concerns over their sensitivity to light.  The exhibition also includes paintings on load from great private and public collections - including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery, London and the Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

Degas had recurrent themes in his work.  The nude was an important motif but one which until now has not been given the attention it deserves.

Degas painted nudes throughout his career and repeated poses over the decades.

Degas used to say, "One must do the same subject over again ten times, a hundred times".

Thus reviewing his artwork which relates to the nude helps to demonstrate the way in which his artwork evolved, in terms of both technique and style, over the course of his artistic life.

Degas was noted for his innovative temperament, which expressed itself in many different areas. The works brought together here have been selected because they show the variety of techniques that Degas tackled in his search for new expressive possibilities.In addition to drawing and painting, the artist was particularly fond of pastel as it could be used spontaneously with no preparation or drying time, giving him the option to rework the image. Degas was also renowned for having rediscovered the principle of the "monotype", a print that does not require engraving, which he sometimes highlighted with pastel. He also tried his hand at etching, lithography and particularly at sculpture, which increasingly occupied him as his sight failed in the late 1880s.

The exhibition explores the evolution of his approach to the nude.  It has seven sections which follow a chronological order and set out his development over the course of almost 50 years.  These are summarised below but you can read more on the website.  It travels from academic rendition to avant garde approaches to representation of the nude.

1. The Classical Body: Degas' Early Nudes his early work as a student focuses on studies of classical antiquity.  His first historical composition, Petites filles spartiates provoquant des garçons [Young Spartans exercising], is on special loan from the National Gallery in London.
2. The Body in Peril: Scene of War in the Middle Ages This section relates to his attempt to produce grand history paintings based on lots of preparatory drawings.  At the end of this period he broke with the Academic style
3. The Body Exploited: Degas' Brothel Works A series of drawings from the 1870s of prostitutes in a brothel remained largely unknown during his lifetime - mainly due to the subject matter.
4. The Body Observed: Degas' Naturalist Nudes In the 1870-80s, Degas drew women going about their normal activities associated with the "toilette" - bathing and brushing their hair.  As well as using pastels, this section includes examples of his practice of developing pastels over a faint proof of a monotype.
5. The Body Exhibited: Degas' Nudes in the 1880s His "suite of female nudes, bathing, washing, drying themselves, wiping themselves, combing their hair or having their hair combed" at the 1886 exhibition demonstrates how Degas used pastel to render elements of the body.  He juxtaposes different strokes of colour to produce the form of the body.  It also includes the wax models which he sculpted in his lifetime and which were only made into bronze sculptures after his death.
6. The Body Transformed: Degas' Last Nudes  As he grew older, anatomical accuracy became less important to him.  He also studied poses which were hard for a model to hold from his models which he made himself.
7. The Legacy of Degas' Nudes  the last section is devoted to the legacy Degas left the generations of artists that followed him.

The exhibition continues until 1st July.

I'm thinking of looking up the times of trains to Paris........

Links:

• Edgar Degas - Resources for Art Lovers
• Musée d'Orsay - Resources for Art Lovers

Degas, Hockney and the freeze frame

I went to a free lunchtime lecture at the Royal Academy today on Degas and the Freeze Frame given Professor Katherine Adler, art historian.  She used to be Director of Education at the National Gallery and used examples of paintings she was familiar with in that gallery to provide context for points she was making about Degas and movement.

Interestingly, her view of Degas relationship with photography is very much closer to the one I'd always assumed - although not the one suggested by the exhibition Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement.

Here's a summary of some of the points she made:

18th September 2011 - Who's made a mark this week?

This weekend it's been Open House London weekend - and I came home feeling like I'd just been exposed to one of the most extreme visual experiences ever!

We hopped on the Tube to the City of London, avoided the long queues to see the inside of the Bank of England and visited the artwork known as the Lloyds Building  instead - for some absolutely fantastic views from the 11th floor.  We also visited the Guildhall and Guildhall Art Gallery - which just happens to have a Roman amphitheatre in the basement - PLUS for this weekend only one of the 13th century copies of Magna Carta AND an exhibition about Atkinson Grimshaw which opens tomorrow.  Atkinson Grimshaw - Painter of Moonlight is on display until January.

I came home with the catalogue and will be returning for a visit to the exhibition.  That's how I found out a night sky is a pale shade of chromium green!

Liverpool from Wapping (1875) by Atkinson Grimshaw

The Guildhall also had some fabulous stained glass windows in the crypt (which I'll post once I've got them out of my camera!)

Now for the rest of what I noticed last week.... 

The Degas Exhibition - notes for pastellists

First - following on from yesterday's post - REVIEW: Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement - I forgot to say that all pastellists visiting the exhibition should leave a large proportion of the time allowed for visiting the exhibition for Room 9 - Colour and Dynamism (the penultimate room in the exhibition).  This is where most of the larger scale colourful late pastels are located.  You'll need much more time for this room than some of the others - as Alastair Sooke commented in this Telegraph video about the exhibition - How Degas captured movement

Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement - Gallery Guide

I've had the experience before now of making a special pilgrimage to an art gallery or museum to see a pastel by Degas - only to find that it's off on its travels to an exhibition somewhere(!) or it's in the process of restoration (the latter being what happened last time I visited the Musee d'Orsay).  Sooooo frustrating!

So if you enjoy pastels works and art by Degas you should definitely make a point of seeing the exhibition!

Pastellists may well enjoy the notes of insights below into Degas's process of working.  Like any good pastellist I had to ask some of the more obvious questions!

REVIEW: Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement

One of three major Art Exhibitions in London this Autumn is at the Royal Academy of Arts.  Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement opens this Saturday (17 September) and continues until 11 December.

Edgar Degas - The Dance Lesson, c. 1879
Oil on canvas 38 x 88 cm National Gallery of Art, Washington,
Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1995.47.6
Image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

This exhibition has assembled around 85 paintings, sculptures, pastels, drawings, prints and photographs by Degas - from public institutions and private collections in Europe and North America.

You can see ten images of works in the exhibition on the Royal Academy website.  

The artwork on display includes both celebrated and little-known works by Degas, including the sort of preparatory drawings which were never intended for either sale or exhibition.  Rather the latter were a way of Degas assembling a pictorial record over time of how the movement in ballet actually worked.

Also included in the exhibition are photographs by his contemporaries and examples of early film and a number of photographic records and artefacts normally found in a museum.

The exhibition aims to offer an insight into the process of how Degas viewed and recorded the movement of dance  and dancers in order to create pictures of movement in his drawings and paintings of dancers.   There have been a number of exhibitions of Degas and the Dance before - as one might expect - but none which have attempted to articulate its connection with photography and it's believed this exhibition is unique.

I went to see it on Tuesday and can certainly recommend it as an essential exhibition for all fans of Degas's art and anybody interested in the early development of photography and its connection with art. 

Fans of Degas should also note that this exhibition is not going to be travelling.  It's been four years in the making and is ONLY being held at the RA in London.  I guess because many of the pieces are drawings which conservationists prefer to see have limited exposure to light and air; many have also come from private collections - and in the case of one notable oil painting of a dancer being photographed in a studio - from the Pushkin Museum in Russia.

There's an awful lot to like about this exhibition.  There are some splendid paintings - including some on loan from other countries that we are not likely to see again in London in my lifetime.  The curators are to be congratulated for securing the works they have.  There's also some painstaking research which has contributed to a better understanding of how drawings and photographs connected through to some finished work.

However, being a major Degas fan and somebody who has studied him in some depth, I have to say that I was disappointed by some of the aspects of Degas's which are left undeveloped or omitted in terms of some of the conclusions being drawn. I'll elaborate as I continue with this review.

Major Art Exhibitions in London in 2011

Find out about the major art exhibitions the major art galleries in museums in London  in 2011.

Have you ever missed an exhibition because you didn't realise it's on? I have - and that's the reason why I produce this list each year - so that I don't miss the exhibitions in London that I want to go and see!  This post gets printed out and tacked to my pin board!  It's good to share too.

This list of major art exhibitions in London focuses on painting, drawing and sculpture and is organised according to the names of each of the major art galleries and museums and for each of these the listing is in date order.  The links in the names of the exhibitions are to their microsite pages (where available) on the relevant art gallery or museum's website where you can find out more about the exhibition, how to get tickets and what are the linked events.  The bigger galleries tend to have a number of events associated with each exhibition.

The blockbuster is probably going to be the da Vinci exhibition at the National Gallery since it's a one-off and da Vinci has increased in popularity in recent years for reasons not altogether connected to art!

However I expect the Watercolour exhibition at Tate Britain will prove to be very popular too.  There's an article about it in the current edition of Tate Etc and it looks absolutely fascinating - and I'm sure it will get great reviews.

The big attractions for me will the Watercolour exhibition at Tate Britain, plus the exhibitions about the Watteau Drawings and the Degas Dancers at the RA and the Toulouse Lautrec at the Courtauld.  I also rather suspect I'm going to be taking quite a few trips to south London to see the anniversary exhibitions at the Dulwich Picture Gallery - there's a distinct North American flavour to Dulwich this year!  I'm also going to be interested to see the Gerhard Richter retrospective at Tate Modern.

However I know there will be other exhibitions which will surprise and delight me - it'll be interesting to see which ones they are.

CLICK ON THE EXHIBITION TITLE to reach the website page for that exhibition

The Private Lives of the Impressionists

I'm very happy to recommend a book by Sue Roe called The Private Lives of the Impressionists. I've still not got to the end of it but I'm really enjoying this book which really rounds out one's understanding of the group called the Impressionists.

My paperback version (RRP £9.99) is my current bedtime reading and you might be surprised to know that I'm recommending it despite the fact I've not yet quite got to the end of it! I'm opting for the 'draw it out and make it last' option rather than racing to finish it - but thought I'd highlight it now in case people are starting to provide suggestions to people about what they'd like for Christmas. The paperback price definitely puts it in the stocking filler category.

UK Paperback Book Cover (Vintage House)

detail from Self Portrait in his Atelier
by Claude Monet

Actually, another important reason I'm only three-quareters of the way through is that it's my current bedtime reading and I tend to fall asleep fairly fast so I'm only managing a couple of pages each night! I have however known this book was going to get a book review from me after only a very few pages of starting to read this book.

So why do I want to recommend it?

This is what the book does:

• it covers the lives of all the Impressionists - Manet, Monet, Pisarro, Cézanne, Renoir, Degas, Sisley, Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt before, during and after the creation of their group

Timeline of the Impressionists - Wikimedia

• it also highlights the other people who are important to the story of the Impressionists - such as painters Caillebotte and Bazille, the art dealer Durand Ruel (who established the market for Impressionism in the United States as well as in Europe) and the paint merchant Tanguey also get pretty good coverage.
• it describes the environment of the places where they lived, frequented and painted as they were at the time which has provided for me a whole new perspective of certain of the works.
  
• This is also a story of the Paris which had been transformed by Baron Haussman and of the impact of the Franco-Prussian war - which had a major impact on more than one of the painters - the siege of Paris in 1870-71, the establishment of the Paris Commune and the emergence of the Third Republic.
  
• it tells the stories of the Salon des Beaux Arts and the first Salon des Refuses in 1863 and exhibitions by the Impressionists (minus Manet) starting in 1874, 1876, 1877, 1879, 1880, 1881, 1882 and 1886 and the relative success of each of the painters in different contexts
  
• you gain insight into their familial and fraternal relationships - and the very many difficulties associated with the class system of the time without having to read a detailed biography of individual painters. This highlights some of the oddities such as the fact that both Manet and Cezanne had wives and children who were not known to their families.
• For Americans, there an interesting chapter towards the end of the book which i've already peeked at which tells the story of how Duran Ruel opened up the market for Impressionist paintings in New York.
  
• The book more or less finishes in 1883 around about the time of the death of Manet. Its focus is therefore much more about the birth of Impressionism than about everything that happened to the Impressionist Painters - however it does leave scope for another book! At the moment, an epilogue provides a very abbreviated summary of what happened next for each if the painters
  

Why I recommend this book

This book covers a critical period for a number of the different painters who became known as the Impressionists. It's incredibly dense and covers a huge amount of detailed information in a way which speaks of comprehensive and meticulous research.

What makes this book different for me is the articulation of the various relationships between the different painters. So often books about the Impressionists tend to list them as individuals and comment on their works in the same way. This book focuses much more on the connections and the way they supported and influenced once another. It's an invaluable insight also into how a group with common motivations can support one another through different challenges and emotional and financial difficulties - and there were quite a few of those!

It also gives a very good insight into just how long it took some of these painters to become successful and just how financially stretched they were at times.

I am particularly enjoying the way in which Roe provides an insight into the incredibly different characters and personalities of the painters. I am repeatedly left wondering quite how some of them came to be members of the same group.

I like the way the book discusses how specific paintings came into being. The index is good because you can look up a specific painting by title and check out what it says - so it's good if you also want to use it as a reference source. Unusually for a paperback, this book also provides two sections of colour plates of paintings which feature in the text.

It's also a really great index for tracking down particular events. In fact the notes and index - which make up around 20-25% of the pages of my paperback persuade me that this is a very well read, well researched and well organised author! It's brilliant for providing you with references to sources if you want to pursue some particular aspect of one of the painters.

One of the surprising by-products of reading this book is that I now feel I understand far more about what happened in Paris and France in the second half of the 19th century than I ever did
while studying late 19th century European History at school!

Now I know I've succeeded in making it seem incredibly academic - but the reality is that this book is an incredibly easy read. Roe has a gift as storyteller. She has been able to take dry facts and convert them into a narrative which is always interesting - even when it takes you down paths you're not quite expecting.

I also think this book would be a terrific read for anybody currently facing challenges associated with the credit crunch and the recession. Reading about people facing very similar difficulties somehow helped to remind me of the enduring themes and challenges of life. There really is nothing new under the sun - except when somebody has a bright idea about how to apply paint!

The Visual Translation of Japan in Late 19th-Century Paris

Chinese And Japanese Exhibits At The 1867 World Fair in Paris
Source: WikiCommons - Le Monde Illustre 1867

Japonism is the term used for the influence of Japanese art in the west. This post is part of my Japanese Art project and is a combination of my own initial research on this topic and notes I made at a seminar I attended at the National Gallery in February called Gained in Translation: The Visual Translation of Japan in Late 19th-Century Paris - given by Karly Allen.

The seminar was about the influence of Japanese Art in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century

It is frequently acknowledged that the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists were ‘influenced’ by the art of Japan, but what exactly do we mean by that? Were these painters more interested in the unfamiliar subject matter of Japanese art, or in the liberating use of line and colour? What sort of images were artists looking at, and how did they access them?

This talk will try to answer some of these questions through close scrutiny of paintings in the National Gallery. Focusing on figure painting, we will investigate the collections of Japanese prints owned by Degas, Renoir and Van Gogh to discover what they ‘translated’ from the Japanese images they loved.

History of the influence on Japan on art in Europe

Artists who were influenced by Japanese art include Manet, Pierre Bonnard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Mary Cassatt, Degas, Renoir, James McNeill Whistler (Rose and silver: La princesse du pays de porcelaine, 1863-64), Monet, van Gogh, Camille Pissarro, Paul Gaugin, and Klimt. Some artists, such as Georges Ferdinand Bigot, even moved to Japan because of their fascination with Japanese art.

Although works in all media were influenced, printmaking was not surprisingly particularly affected, although lithography, not woodcut, was the most popular medium. The prints and posters of Toulouse-Lautrec can hardly be imagined without the Japanese influence. Not until Félix Vallotton and Paul Gaugin was woodcut itself much used for japonesque works, and then mostly in black and white.
Wikipedia - Japonism

The key events were as follows:

• 1635 - Japan becomes isolated from the rest of the world.
  
• 1853-54 - Commodore Perry's fleet arrives and then concludes a trade treaty - Japan opens for trade
• 1855 - Japan concludes trade treaties with Russia, USA, Great Britain and France.
  
• 1856 - French engraver Félix Bracquemond came across a copy of the sketch book Hokusai Manga at the workshop of his printer; pages had been used as packaging for a consignment of porcelain. His subsequent dialogue with ceramicist Theodore Deck who had studied far eastern techniques fostered the ultimate growth of Japonisme
  
• 1860-61 - reproductions (in black and white) of ukiyo-e were published in books on Japan.
• 1862 - Japanese import and tea shop 'La Porte Chinoise' opens at 36 Rue Vivienne in Paris. This contributed to public knowledge of Far Eastern ways. Subsequently, it became ' de rigeur' for all department stores then started to have Chinese and Japanese departments
  
• 1867 - End of the Edo period / beginning of the Meiji Period in Japan
  
• 1867 - stoneware service decorated with motifs from Hokusai's Manga commissioned by Rousseau, a dealer in ceramics
• 1867 - Exposition Universelle in Paris - includes Japanese objects and prints
• 1867-8 - Manet paints Zola against a background of Japanese woodcuts in Manet's studio.
  

Portrait of Emile Zola
Edoaurd Manet
Musee d'Orsay / Wikicommons

• 1872 - "Japonisme" created as a term by a French art critic, Philippe Burty, to "designate a new field of study--artistic, historic and ethnographic" which would present a more systematic and comprehensive approach to the newly discovered Japanese art.
• 1876 - Monet paints 'La Japonaise' (now in the Museum of Fine Art in Boston)
  
• 1878 - Exposition Universelle in Paris - includes a Japanese Pavilion
• 1878 - Ernest Chesnau published Le Japon a Paris on the influence of Japanese Art.
• 1887 - Vincent and Theo Van Gogh exhibit their collection of Japanese woodcuts at Le Tambourin, Boulevard de Clichy
  
• 1888 - Parisian dealer Samuel Bing founded Le Japon Artistique - a new periodical printed in German and English and effectively 'created' Japonisme. Van Gogh subscribed to this
  
• 1890 - Exhibition of woodblock prints at L'Ecole fes Beaux Arts - a display of 763 woodcuts.
  
• 1893 - Bing organises exhibition of prints by Utamaro and Hiroshige.
• 1900 - The Japanese pavilion at the international exhibition in Paris included India ink drawings, calligraphy and early sculptures.
• Japanese art influences Art Nouveau and the Symbolist movement.
  

In the spring of 1890, shortly after visiting an extensive exhibition of Japanese prints at the Ecole des beaux-arts, Paris, Mary Cassatt wrote a note to Berthe Morisot: "You who want to make color prints wouldn't dream of anything more beautiful. . . . You must see the Japanese—come as soon as you can."
Art Explorer - Introduction: Cassatt's Influence from Japanese Art

Mary Cassatt et sa soeur au Louvre (1879-80)
Hilaire Germaine Edgar Degas
Pastel, over etching, aquatint, drypoint, and crayon électrique on tan wove paper
305 x 127 mm (image/plate); 313 x 137 mm (sheet)
Art Institute of Chicago

Whistler, Tissot, Monet, Manet and Degas were all buying up Japanese prints. Comparisons were made with the great artists of the western traditions of printing eg Durer. Europeans were 'discovering' Japanese art - which of course already existed even if the western world didn't know about it! Many of the artists developed very significant collections of Japanese Art:

• Mary Cassatt and Degas were friends and worked closely together.
  
• Cassatt had the means to build up a large collection of prints. She was hugely influenced by the art from Japan.
  
• Prints of Japanese courtesans appear to be clearly reflected in his works of women bathing.
• Degas' painting of Mary Cassatt at the Louvre is clearly influenced by Japanese art in terms of cropping and colouring. This mixed media version is also an etching which has been coloured. This one in the Metropolitan Museum shows it in a different format and as a mono version. In my opinion, I think Degas was trying to get more of a sense of the quality of some of the printing effects achieved by the Japanese.
  
• Van Gogh acquired 474 prints - many of them from Bing. Vincent and Theo Van Gogh put on an exhibition of Japanese prints before Vincent went to work in the south of France. Van Gogh tried to reproduce the line of the wood block print in his pen and ink drawings. Some of the perspective 'issues' in his paintings is believed to relate to how perspective is treated in Japanese prints.
  
• Monet owned 12 volumes of Hokusai's Manga. The walls of his dining room at Giverny are decorated with Japanese prints.
  

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York provides an interesting timeline overview of Japonisme

Woodblock print, about 1768,
Suzuki Harunobu
Techniques - Block print on paper; 26 cm x 19 cm (unframed)
V&A Museum no. E.1053-1963 / Wikipedia

Karly Allen suggested that the key artists were as follows. I've added the hyperlinks.

Suzuki Harunobu (1725-70)
Isoda Koryusai (active 1765-80s)
Kitigawa Utamaro (1753-1806)
Torii Kiyonaga (1752- 1815)
Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849)
Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858)
Utagawa Kunisada (1786-1864)

She showed us how Japanese prints compared to compositions by western artists - which is difficult to reproduce in a blog post because tracking down images takes a lot of time! However I'm going to try and do at least one post which demonstrates this. Once you start seeing the comparisons, one quickly becomes very clear about the degree of influence.

To the Impressionists and their second generation successors, Japonisme spelt liberation, the revelation of techniques which released them from the old traditional concepts of classical modelling taught at the academies.
Siegfriend Wichman Japonisme

A number of the museums are really excellent sources of information about how Japanese art and prints in particular influenced western art.

Some of the influences on the Impressionists were identified as being the following. I've suggested some of the artists whose work particularly exemplifies this:

• their particular way of cutting off/cropping their subject (Degas)
  
• asymmetric compositions leaving lots of empty space (Degas)
  
• graphic treatment of bands of colour (Cassatt)
  
• combining flat but intense hues (Monet, Van Gogh)

Robert Genn in his 2006 letter Japanese prints observed the following as being characteristics

Gradations in large areas with intermediate tones.
Integrated forms with implied borders.
Stylized, neutralized and formulized expressions.
Beguiling combinations of curved and straight lines.
The dynamic and slow-fast-slow nature of some curves.
Two-dimensional patterns within three-dimensional forms.
Plain, formalized and controlled perspective.
Use of solid black for strong contrast.
Pattern gradations on particular fabrics.
Hard-won gradations for sensitive areas such as hairlines.
Pictorial attention to ordinary domestic scenes.
Decentralized or off-picture subject placement.
Robert Genn - Japanese Prints

It seems to be me that the last quotation (below) is certainly one way of viewing what one can get out of a project of this sort.

Each of them assimilated from Japanese Art the qualities closest to their own gifts. All of them found in Japanese Art a confirmation, rather than an inspiration, of their personal ways of seeing, feeling and interpreting nature
Ernest Chesneau 'Le Japon a Paris'

Links:

• Timeline of Japonisme
  
• Metropolitan Museums of Art - Japonisme
• Art Institute of Chicago
• Introduction: Cassatt's Influence from Japanese Art
• Degas's Mary Cassatt in the Paintings Gallery at the Louvre
• Wikipedia -
• Japonism
• 1867 - Exposition Universelle
• Books
• Japonisme - the Japanese Influence on Western Art since 1858 by Siegfried Wichmann (Thames and Hudson 1981; paperback 1999; reprinted 2007)
  
• Japonisme - Cultural Crossings between Japan and the West Lionel Lambourne, Phaidon
• Articles
• Examination: Cassatt's Artistic Portrayals of Contemporary Women and Children A look at two of Cassatt's favorite subjects - women involved in everyday activities and women interacting with children - and the influence of Japanese art on her work.
  
• Japonisme: East-West Renaissance in the Late 19th Century Journal article by Yoko Chiba; Mosaic (Winnipeg), Vol. 31, 1998
• Blogs:
  
• Gauguin Art - Japanese style
• Paris Breakfasts - On Japanese woodblock prints
• Japonisme
  

A fish for Good Friday

Study after 'A Trout Rising'
by Joseph Crawhall (Scottish; 1861-1913), Hunterian Museum, Glasgow
original - watercolour on line 28.2" x 39.0"
study - coloured pencils on Saunders Waterford 10" x 14"
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

This is another of my studies for my Japanese Art Project and, as it's Good Friday today, I thought it might be appropriate to have a fish as an image.

In this instance, it's a study of a work by a Scottish artist called Joseph Crawhall who was himself influenced by Japanese Art. This is what the Hunterian Museum has to say about the original work.

As a watercolour artist, Crawhall’s strength lay in depicting animals and birds. His decorative technique, as seen in this work in the brush strokes and the use of pure colour on linen, was influenced greatly by the Japanese prints that were popular during the 1880s and 1890s.
Hunterian Museum - A Trout Rising, Joseph Crawhall

You can see some more of his work at the Hunterian here and he also has work in the Burrell Collection, also in Glasgow.

What I particularly like about the original is the great use of the brush in mark-making and the stunning use of very limited amounts of colour on a very neutral background. What's interesting in studying the work of those influenced by Japanese art is to find out what they took from the art and then reused in their own projects.

What I'm taking away from this study is the way in which crispness of edges brings these into focus just as 'washiness' and soft edges suggest depth and recession and objects within our peripheral vision. Trying to emulate really good watercolour work and brushwork is not easy! Soft edges are also not a big feature of ukiyo-e and I'm thinking I maybe need to look a bit more at Japanese watercolours.

I came across this fish in a book I bought last Friday. It's called Japonisme - Cultural Crossings between Japan and the West, Lionel Lambourne, Phaidon Press. Lionel Lambourne OBE is the former Head of Paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum (1986-1993) and a curator. When looking him up I came across a rather curious blog which is all about Quotes about Japan - which highlight some from this book.

I've only skimmed the book so far - but what I've seen and read suggests that this a very erudite and interesting book by a scholar who has done a lot of research, selected a number of images not seen in other books and writes extremely well. I can't do better than quote the publishers precis.

After 1858 when full trade was resumed, a wave of 'Japanomania' swept across Europe and America. The 1862 'Great Exhibition' in London was the first to display a wide range of Japanese goods in the west. Visited by hundreds of thousands of people, the prints, ceramics and lacquer work became the height of fashion.

After an introduction telling the story of the first contacts, the long isolation and the events leading to the renewal of free trade in Japan, he turns to capture the excitement in Europe as artists – led by Whistler and the Impressionists – discovered Japanese prints and artefacts, and began to incorporate their influence. The story spreads far beyond fine art to follow this creative mania into the decorative arts, interior design, furnishings, fashion accessories and, in turn, literature and theatre.

With his inimitable style and his rich store of well-chosen anecdotes, the author brings peculiar personalities to life and conveys a vivid impression of the enthusiasm that Japonisme generated. Chapters are devoted to travel, Japonisme in America, landscape and gardens, and even the curious subject of ghosts.

The visual impact alone of Japan on the West was enormous, as is expressed wonderfully in the rich and varied selection of 250 illustrations. These assimilate many original Japanese prints and artefacts juxtaposed with the works they directly inspired, as well as a vast spectrum of influences on the decorative arts, posters, advertisements, book illustrations, fashion, cartoons, photography, gardens and architecture.

Particular highlights come in:

• Chapter 2 - Japan and the Painters - focuses on Whistler, Tissot, Degas, Cassatt, Van Gogh
  
• Chapter 3 - The Poster and the Japanese Print - focuses on Bonnard, Toulouse Lautrec and Beardsley

Other artists covered in other chapters include Monet, Klimt, Manet, Gauguin, Arthur Wesley Dow and architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

[Note: I'm continuing to fight my broadband connection/modem router which continues to be very problematical this week plus the 'lurgy' which continues to linger and linger........]

Links:

• Japonisme - Cultural Crossings between Japan and the West, Lionel Lambourne, Phaidon Press. Paperback 250 x 290 mm, 9 7/8 x 11 3/8 in, 240 pp, 220 colour illustrations, 30 black and white illustrations. ISBN 0714847976
• Hunterian Museum, Glasgow
• Glasgow Museums, Burrell Collection
  
• Wikipedia
• Joseph Crawhall
• Good Friday
• Making A Mark - The Japanese Art project
• The influence of Japanese Art
• The concepts and characteristics of ukiyo-e
• The elements of ukiyo-e
• Principles of design and composition and ukiyo-e

Composition - the four most important lines

I have always been taught that the four most important lines in a painting are the edges of the paper or canvas which crop the image you are using as a subject.

There are various views about how to crop a subject and a lot that can and has been said on this topic. I've tried to touch on just a few of the issues to do with cropping below and have then suggested some tips at the end. I hope you find it food for thought!

Where to start

First base for most people learning about art tends always to focus on learning about how to use media - and consequently there's a huge tendency to focus on the more conventional and safe options for composition before contemplating how this might change as confidence in handling the medium grows. Sometimes people never ever get round to contemplating that there may be scope to change how they compose a picture!

Our thoughts about how and where to place those four lines is something which then often seem to change as we make progress with our art and mature in our experience, knowedge, perspective and practice.

It's also one of those topic areas which is often rewarding to revisit from time to time no matter how experienced or knowledgeable an artist is.

There is no right answer per se - but looking at how others have tackled this topic can often be very stimulating to our practice as individual artists.

Art History - containment versus creative tension

Although there is no right answer but there have always been different views as to how those four edges can be placed and this has varied over time and between different places.

You can read a useful overview of the history of pictorial composition and design by Nancy Doyle.

Questions and answers about where to place the four lines and what choices are available for how to crop the image also seem to depend in part on what sort of artwork people are used to seeing and how much they have experimented with different sorts of crops. Which is why visiting art galleries and museums - in real life or online - often opens our eyes to different ways of seeing.

One very obvious example is the way in which Japanese art had a huge impact on western art as Japan opened up and its artwork became available to a wider audience in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The style of composition, picture format and crop associated with Japanese wood block prints became a significant influence on many notable artists at the end of the nineteenth century. Van Gogh, Whistler and Degas were all hugely influenced by the work of Japanese artists such as Hokusai and Hiroshige. (More about this in a later post)

While reading "how to read paintings", I also came across something which was new to me.

The majority of paintings up to the end of the nineteenth century......correspond to the ideal of the closed composition. The main elements of the subject are placed in the centre of the picture. In particular, all the human figures are contained within this sector and are surrounded by space - an empty zone in which the motifs are less dense - between them and the edges of the canvas. This was very often exactly the case in Classical style paintings of the seventeenth century.....

From the end of the 19th century artists started becoming far more interested in opening composition up, leading to its almost systematic decentralisation.
extract from "How to read paintings" - Composition - The Interior of a Painting

At The Races - before the start (1885-1892) by Edgar Degas
oil on canvas
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (United States)

He then goes on to comment on how Degas compositions engage the viewer by unusual angles and crops which systematically cut figures off at top, bottom or sides. It struck me that much of what is taught as conventional 'rules' relates more to the classical style of painting and less to what Degas was up to!

Marion Boddy-Evans (the Guide for about.com:painting) also comments about placing subjects in the centre in the top 5 ways to ruin a painting

Fried Egg Composition: It can be done successfully, but only rarely. When it's done badly, it's from the Fried Egg School of Composition (also known as the Bull's Eye School). Putting the subject or focal point of a painting right in the center of the painting, vertically and horizontally, is dull, boring, hideous, horrible. A viewer's eye goes straight into the center of the painting, takes in what's there (but not what's around it, towards the edges), and moves on to the next painting.
Marion Boddy-Evans Top 5 ways to ruin a painting

Filling the frame

I find it interesting to look at the work of professional photographers to see how they employ composition as the elements and principles used are intrinsically the same. Here's one example.

One approach widely advocated in photography is "fill the frame". Here's the results of a photography challenge to 'fill the frame'.

Fill the frame with as much of the subject as you can. This can be done by getting in extremely close, or simply changing your angle or perspective. Any distracting background is eliminated, and the image is much more intimate, viewed at an eye-to-eye level.
Composition Refresher by Theresa A. Husarik

Cactus #4
8" x 8", coloured pencil on Arches HP
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

I'd love to do all my work from objects in front of me but the reality is I can't always stay long enough in one place or get hold of what I want from flower shops so it's an approach I use a lot when producing my small works for flowers and other botanical subjects. There are various photography websites which show you how to 'fill the frame' and what sort of impact it can have on your images as a result.

If you have a camera and like flowers, you can experiment very easily by just reading the section in the manual about how the macro button works! I took a bit of time to read that bit and therefore initially had to employ the cropping tool in PS Elements to work out the options using my own photographs.

Figures in Paintings

The implication of 'containment' for figures means that you tend to see all of the figure - which makes the figures smaller (or the painting larger). It brings a setting into play and places more emphasis on the context in which the figures are set. It also means that things like perspective of natural forms or the built environment become more important. Portraits by people who are proud of their homes often involves the home in some way in the background.

Alternatively the crop can portray only part of the figure and the background can disappear or become altogether less important. A neutral background helps to focus on the faces and what people are doing.

The key question is probably to ask yourself what role the figures play in a composition and hence which treatment might suit them best.

The picture format and ratio

Two very important things to think about when constructing your four lines are:

• the picture format - either 'portrait' (longest side is vertical) or 'landscape' (longest side is the width). Conventionally images of individuals are cropped in a portrait format - but they don't have to be. Landscapes too are conventionally constructed in a 'landscape' format - but they don't have to be.

The Bird House
pastel 40cm x 28.5cm
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

• The picture ratio - which is is the ratio of height to width. Whether viewing an image plein air and using a one form or other of viewfinder to find the most pleasing image or whether you are looking at a reference photograph or sketch check what the picture ratio is. Do this before starting to translate the image to paper or canvas and you can avoid a lot of wasted time while you puzzle out why the picture doesn't look right!
  

Some Tips - on picture format and cropping

Crop around or Cross through?
Think about the scope for containing subject matter or cropping right across it. Here are some different ways of experimenting with different crops.

• Use a viewfinder when working plein air. Remember to walk around and try and find alternative viewpoints with different sets of four lines. Walk backwards and forwards ie zoom in and back up!
• Do consider cropping across your subject matter but try and avoid creating a candidate for the 'funny amputations' album
  
• Use sketching to try out different compositional formats and different ways of cropping an image. I find that
  
• the more I sketch, the more I feel able to try out different ways of 'seeing' and 'representing' an image on a piece of paper.
  
• if it's not going to be a finished piece, people are often feel more able to experiment.
  
• if you don't want to "spoil a sketchbook", you have to get one that you don't mind spoiling!
  
• Try out alternative options in a 'working drawings' sketchbook before starting. This is intended to be for experiments - it doesn't matter if it doesn't make sense to anybody else!
  
• Back in the studio use your computer. Try using a digi photo and/or a scan of a sketch and then try using the crop tool in Photoshop (or other sofware) with different picture ratios at different sizes.
  
• Take one photo and see how many acceptable alternatives you can produce. Repeat with another photo - and then remember to keep trying different alternatives every single time you use reference material.
  
• switch to greyscale before using the crop tool if you want to work in value thumbnails.
  

Image format matters!
Think about how the image format relates to the format of your support. They must be the same format otherwise your drawing will become distorted as you try to fit the image to the paper.

In other words it's no good looking through a 6:4 ratio viewfinder if you are then trying to work according to a 10:8 piece of paper!

Here are a few tips:

• work out what the ratio is on your camera's viewfinder. Tthe large screens on digital cameras are now very useful for trying out different crops before starting work.
• check to see if you can change the format of your photography on your camera
• if using a photo as a reference then check its format first
  
• take out homemade viewfinders with you which have a different format. Common ones are 6:4, 7:5, 10:8. These can multiply up to working in common formats eg 12:8, 14:10 and 20x16.
• use the rule of thirds as a guide (coming soon - in a post later this week)

Links:

• How to Read Paintings by Nadeije Laneyrie-Dagen Paperback: 272 pages; Publisher: Chambers (June 21, 2004); ISBN-10:0550101225; ISBN-13: 978-0550101228
• Composition and Design - Resources for Artists
• Composition and Design - finding and creating a focal point
• Composition and Design - A Digest #1
• Greg Albert - The Simple Secret to Better Painting
• Composition - Principles of Design
• Composition - The Elements of Design
• Composition and Design - An Introduction