Old Masters of the Modern

By ROBERT HUGHES

If any single art show can be said to have saved the life of a financially troubled institution, it must be the display called "Post-Impressionism," which opened at London's Royal Academy in November and has been running to crowds at -L-2 a head ever since. In the months before the show, the Academy was rumored to be in such dire fiscal straits that it was going to have to sell its most famous possession, the Michelangelo Tondo of the Madonna and Child. Now it has been ransomed by the oldest form of modern art, a fact that is rich in historical irony since the Academy was the last bastion of "traditional" art to hold out against the encroachment of modernism. Long after the Museum of Modern Art in New York became a going concern, Royal Academicians like Sir Alfred Munnings were still rising over their port at Academy banquets to denounce Cezanne as a fumbler and Van Gogh as a crop-eared madman. No doubt their offended ghosts are gibbering in the courtyard at the thought of all of Burlington House being turned over to the largest exhibition of early modern art ever mounted in Great Britain, with nine Cezannes, 13 Van Goghs, 14 Gauguins, twelve Seurats--in all, 428 works by 169 painters, from 1880 to the early 1900s. They represent the very conception of culture that the Royal Academy, when such work was first seen in England before World War I, believed it was its mission to crush. If anyone still doubts that modernism is our academy, our official culture, here is the ocular proof of it.

It is right that this show should be held in London, since the word post-impressionism was invented there, and applied to the painting of the 1880s by Roger Fry, the English art critic, when he organized a sensationally vilified show of Manet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, Cezanne and others at the Grafton Galleries in 1910. By then the painters that Fry's exhibition encircled were all dead, and his name for them was a last resort: he toyed with calling them "expressionists," luckily decided not to, and at last exclaimed, "Oh, let's just call them postimpressionists; at any rate, they came after the impressionists!" And so the word was born. It described nothing, but it indicated that after 1880, the annus mirabilis that saw the birth of modern art, there had been a general reaction against impressionism among younger European painters, sometimes even within the ranks of the impressionists themselves.

The organizers of this Royal Academy show, a team of scholars working under Art Historian Alan Bowness, have treated the period in an even vaguer way than Fry. There were retrograde as well as advanced currents in 1880s art, and many artists recoiled from impressionism, or were indifferent to it, instead of trying like Gauguin or Van Gogh to push beyond it. They are represented too, to the confusion of the term: if post-impressionism means not only Van Gogh's Arlesian canvases, in all their lambent color and twisting, linear energies, but also the eclectic products of a tonal impressionist like Jules Bastien-Lepage, with his soulful peasant girls in burlap, what can it mean? To what imaginable modernist context do the many style retro canvases in this show belong--Giovanni Boldini's portrait of Mme. Max, for instance, or Albert Maignan's Passage of Fortune, 1895, with its gauze-veiled figure of Lady Luck bumping on her wheel down the steps of the Paris Bourse? In such respects, the show will do much to replace the "heroic" image of early modernism--the intransigents battling the Academy--with a cozier picture, in which pompier and avant-garde share the common ground of being figurative, of supplying comprehensible images to a public bored or intimidated by abstract art.

On the other hand, so wide a cast has its advantages. All art has a context in other art, and the advanced painting of the 1880s was no exception. Thus, to take only one example, one's understanding of the motives of the Pont-Aven painters, Paul Gauguin and the artists who gathered around him in Brittany--Emile Bernard, Maurice Denis, Paul Serusier and others--can only be enriched by seeing how their more traditional contemporaries dealt with the same subjects of Breton life. Brittany pervaded the salons of the 1880s. Its landscape of tight villages, stony shorelines, near primitive Christian rituals and crude effigies was visited by artist after artist, in the hope of finding not only good local color for genre scenes but plenty of metaphysical symbolism as well. "Atheist that I was," Bernard wrote of Brittany, "it made of me a saint. It was this Gothic Brittany which initiated me in art and God." And one can judge the intensity of the Nabis' desire for a new sort of pictorial symbolism by seeing Bernard's, Serusier's or Gauguin's Pont-Aven paintings against the more ordinary folklorique images by now forgotten academicians like Emile Vernier or Alfred Guillou. Never before had French art experienced such a plague of nuns and innocent provincial virgins. The trend was neatly parodied by a journalist, Alphonse Allais, who in 1883 exhibited a perfectly blank sheet of white paper with the title First Communion of Anemic Young Girls in the Snow.

What was the anti-impressionist reaction of the 1880s all about? Partly, subject matter, the issue of what painting could express. Impressionism had been the art of the bourgeois paradise, naturalism unmodulated by idea. It had no content beyond the "view" ("Monet is only an eye," Cezanne said, "but good God, what an eye!"), no governing system of imagery, no symbols. To younger artists, it therefore seemed lax and unambitious. They wanted to return painting to a more demanding kind of diction --exemplary and grand, like the art of the museums. All manner of stylistic sources fed into their project: the abstracted allegories of Puvis de Chavannes, for instance, gave some cues to Gauguin, as did the formal outlining of Japanese cloisonne enamel: that bluish bounding line was the diametric opposite of impressionist blur and pulsation. The swirling abstract patterns it the background of Paul Signac's portrait of Critic Felix Feneon--with its long portmanteau title, Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones and Colors, Portrait ofM. Felix Feneon in 1890--may have begun as a tiny detail of a kimono design in a Japanese print.

At all points the emphasis was on style, on the inherent artificiality of art, its inability to be confused with nature, and its newly declared aim, in Feneon's words, of "decorating a rigid, rectangular surface." Others, like Maurice Denis, wanted to restore art to the primacy as religious utterance that it had enjoyed before the deluge of 1789: "Lord," Denis exclaimed in his diary in 1889--the year the Eiffel Tower, symbol of materialist progress, was built--"we are a group of young people, devotees of the symbol, misunderstood by a world which mocks us Mystics! Lord, I pray you, may our reign come!" The desire for coherent symbols --religious, mystical, anything but political--was as important a part of the early modernist program as the desire to purify art to flat patches of color on a flat surface. B Gauguin wanted to make vast allegories of human fate; Edvard Munch, in Norway, elaborated an entire structure of symbolism to describe the 1 inner world that Freud, in the 1890s, was beginning to approach through clinical means. Even styles that now seem symbolically neutral could be charged with unexpected meanings.

Nothing, one would think, could be addressed more purely to the eye than Seurat's divisionism, his way of analytically representing color and light by means of dots of pure pigment, stippled closely together. In front of a painting like The Gravelines Channel, Grand Fort-Philippe, 1890, one.is conscious of nothing but the field of infinite nuances, the chalky light of the marine estuary, the artist's utter absorption in vision itself: this is one of the most exquisite paeans to the discriminatory power of the human eye ever to be set on canvas, far away, one would suppose, from the world of social affairs. And yet, thanks partly to the anarchist opinions of Seurat's disciple Paul Signacrand largely to the socialist convictions of Italian artists, divisionism as a style became a hallmark of radical opinion in Italy, the vehicle, not of pure nuance, but of huge political allegories like Giuseppe Pellizza's The Fourth Estate, 1901.

The show is rich in souvenirs and epigrams of the modernist imagination, Serusier's little Talisman of 1888, for instance, with its plain flat patches of color that demonstrated so vividly to Denis and Bonnard that art should not be mere representation, but rather "a transposition, a caricature, the passionate equivalent of an experienced sensation"; or the 1890 self-portrait by Edouard Vuillard, done in brilliant polemical slabs of nonnaturalist color. But it is to the great paintings at the center of the exhibition that one returns, those hinges upon which art swung from the 19th century into the 20th, disclosing a new amplitude of color and form as it turned. Rarely does one get a chance to see a wall of Gauguins like the one in the Royal Academy, and the late paintings, such as Annah the Javanese, 1893, make one realize how complete was the liberation of feeling that went with the unfettering of post-impressionist color. The stocky, compact little body looks curiously unsensuous, at least by the conventions that Ingres or his salon followers would have recognized, but it is color that turns it into the epitome of carnality: the deep lunar blue of the chair enthroning the shadowed flesh, the sudden blaze of yellow on the floor. In such paintings, the world is reformed entirely in terms of color. The way to Matisse and the Fauves is open. A new era has begun.

-- Robert Hughes

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