Georges Seurat (1859–1891), Poseuses (1886-8)
Poseuse debout, de face (1886)
All painting is a form of optical illusion, but pointillism, the technique Seurat pioneered in the 1880s, aims to deconstruct the act of seeing itself. He was keenly interested in how the eye interprets colour, and drawn to the theories of the chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul. Chevreul explored the workings of colour after he became director of the historic Gobelins tapestry factory in 1824.
He observed that two colours, when placed near to one another, would look like a third colour when viewed from a distance, and called the effect ‘simultaneous contrast’.
Chevreul advised painters to incorporate such colour contrasts into their work, referring to its affect as ‘harmony’; Seurat was interested in the way it evoked emotion. This visual manifestation of emotion as a sense of blurred vibration, is part of what makes his works so captivating. His Poseuse debout, de face (1886), serves as illustration in this argument. See how the particulate blue light floats in front of the model’s body, colouring her skin, but also catching her up in a swirl of atmosphere, a little cyclone of vibrating beingness. Although the model stands in a studio, the colourful aura reminds one of the air on a beach at dusk, when one can almost see the negative ions shimmer, all forms revealed as a swarm of atoms, electric.
Marking an important shift in the development of Renaissance art, it soon became a site of devotion for artists as well as churchgoers, among them the young Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564).
He made several studies from the frescoes, including a recently rediscovered drawing, A nude man (after Masaccio) and two figures behind, that will be sold at Christie’s Paris on 18 May in the single-lot auction.
While the position of the central figure in Michelangelo’s version is the same as in Masaccio’s fresco, he has added a more defined musculature.
Michelangelo made the figure much more robust and monumental, while at the same time keeping the fragility of the figure, who is exposed and shivering.
He did this by subtly shifting the position of the feet and redrawing the head a little, but especially by emphasising the back and the buttocks of the man.
Part of the church of Santa Maria del Carmine, the Brancacci Chapel in Florence was painted with a cycle of scenes from the life of the apostle by Masaccio (1401-28), together with his colleague Masolino and later completed by Filippino Lippi.
Roter Stier, 1912
Franz Marc. His career was short. Sadly ended by the Great War. He was at the centre of the Expressionist group of artists known as Der Blaue Reiter.
On the 20th anniversary of Franz Marc’s death, his friend and co-conspirator Wassily Kandinsky wrote, ‘It is sad that, beyond the Rhine, so little importance has been attached to commemorating one of Germany’s finest artistic hopes.’
Marc was a visionary who shared Kandinsky’s belief in the spiritual nature of colour, and together they founded the radical movement Der Blaue Reiter — also know as The Blue Rider — which made the case for a mystical modern art.
‘Art has always been and is in its very essence the boldest departure from nature,’ wrote Marc in 1912. ‘It is the bridge into the spirit world.’
The Foxes, 1913
The Foxes signifies a pivotal moment in the artist’s career. The year 1913 is a key one for Marc: He is experimenting with a new dynamic visual language, inspired by Orphism and Futurism, which would become his leaping-off point into Abstraction.
Mysticism and a yearning for spirituality are not generally associated with Modernism, but both artists were fascinated by theosophy and the elemental forces of nature. They believed that when the material world eventually came to an end, all that would remain would be souls communicating through coloured auras.
This religiosity almost certainly dated back to Marc’s childhood. Born in Munich in 1880, he was a child of the Romantic generation. His father was a landscape painter and his mother a devout Calvinist, and the artist grew up with the idea that strength could be found through nature.
Galvanised by the brilliant, semi-Cubist images of the French painter Robert Delaunay, Marc’s palette became more vibrant and his backgrounds more fragmented, so that his depictions of animals seemed to melt into form and colour. Marc believed that a painting’s success was partly dependent on the viewer’s involvement. In The Foxes he is constantly leading the viewer’s eye back to the centre of the work through his use of overlapping planes and intersecting lines.
Roter Stier, Red Bull (1912), Pushkin Museum in Moscow
Träumendes Pferd, Dreaming Horse (1913), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
An old Chinese legend tells of the painter Wu Daozi (680-c760), who learned to paint so vividly that he was finally able to step inside his work and vanish into the landscape. Magical though it sounds, this legend iterates the common intuition that artworks are more like portals than ordinary objects: they can transport us into other worlds. When I look at Pieter Bruegel’s The Hunters in the Snow (1565), I feel like I was there in the frost-bitten village, rather than the galleries of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
Sometimes, artworks have such a magnetic pull that we forget the actual world around us and lose our sense of time and place, of other people – and sometimes even of ourselves. The French art critic Denis Diderot (1713-84)called such immersive experiences ‘art at its most magical’. Once a painting by Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714-89) pulled Diderot inside a pastoral river scene so completely and enjoyably that he compared the experience to a divine mode of existence:
Where am I at this moment? What is all this surrounding me? I don’t know, I can’t say. What’s lacking? Nothing. What do I want? Nothing.
We are using water colours and ink to create this playful kitten.
Have fun!
Playful Kitten
A Girl in Acrylic
Please don't eat the daisies
A Girl (part three)
A Girl (part two)
A Girl (part one)
Painting the space around
Rosehip
Sleeping beagles
Roses in red ink
Colourful mugs
Dressing up
Drawing from the right side of the brain
Umbrella
Landscaping in soft pastel