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Cézanne and the End of Impressionism

A Study of the Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art

The University of Chicago Press

Introduction: The Subjectivity of Impressionism

They are impressionists in the sense that they render not the landscape, but the sensation produced by the landscape.

JULES ANTOINE CASTAGNARY, 1874

THROUGHOUT HIS CAREER, the critic Jules Antoine Castagnary brought the issues of a "naturalist" art before the French public. In the course of reviewing the Salon of 1863, he defined the "école naturaliste" as an expression of contemporary life; subsequently he repeatedly called for an honest and direct manner of painting that would reflect modern man in his modern society. When Castagnary viewed the works of a diverse group who assembled in 1874 under the rubric "independents," he focused his attention on a number of the younger artists — Pissarro, Monet, Sisley, Renoir, Degas, and Morisot. These painters, as well as a few others, he wrote, should be characterized by "the new term impressionists. They are impressionists in the sense that they render not the landscape, but the sensation produced by the landscape." Castagnary's statement seems to have been the first serious attempt to define "impressionism" by a critic both favorably disposed to it and familiar with its technical, philosophical, and psychological dimensions. His remark, however, is anything but clear, since he alludes to a distinction between a natural world, the "landscape" that exists independently of one's perception or experience of it, and the "sensation produced" by this landscape. Is this sensation available for all to have? Or is the landscape necessarily seen differently by different artists? Does the new "impressionism" depart from "naturalism"?

John Rewald, whose History of Impressionism remains the most comprehensive source of information on the movement, quotes Castagnary's remark in conjunction with his own account of the first impressionist exhibition and the significance of the new style. But Rewald's interpretation does not resolve the ambiguity of Castagnary's definition. He writes that the impressionists "renounced even the pretense of recreating reality. Rejecting the objectivity of realism, they had selected one element from reality — light — to interpret all of nature ... the impressionists ... knew that they had accomplished a great step forward in the representation of nature." Following the earlier analysis of Lionello Venturi, Rewald argues in effect that the impressionists represent a light seen directly or immediately, rather than objects in space seen indirectly by means of the interpretation of patterns of light. Their success depends on "the careful observation of colored light appearing in a scene at a particular moment." Many questions remain unanswered. Does the light that is observed exist objectively for all to see? Is the light seen differently by different observers? If light is part of "objective reality," why is impressionism unrelated to a conventional "realism"? And if sensations are subjective, in what sense can observation be "careful" — by what standard might it be judged accurate?

The cumulative force of Rewald's commentary pushes impressionism in the direction of an art of objective or "accurate" observation, if not of nature (the "landscape"), at least of one's own sensation of light; and this light is described as if existing for all to see. Such an assessment of impressionism is representative of recent scholarship; but it is not in fact the position which was taken by Castagnary, one of the major sources on the ideological concerns of the time. His cryptic definition of impressionism is considerably qualified by a remark he adds almost immediately (which most scholars do not quote): "[the impressionists] leave reality and enter into full idealism." For Castagnary, "idealism" did not signify a world of universals lying behind a world of appearances or "reality," but rather a world of individual ideals, sensations, and imagination, a world he associated with the aims of earlier romantic artists. The critic claimed that the impressionists differed from their predecessors only in their exaggeration of a sketchlike technique, "le non fini." Castagnary regarded the rendering of a tentative, sketchlike "impression" as a mode of expression suitable for some artistic subjects but not for others. As for those who "pursue the impression to excess," he warned (pointing to Cézanne as his example):

From idealization to idealization, they will arrive at that degree of romanticism without bounds, where nature is no more than a pretext for dreams, and the imagination becomes incapable of formulating anything other than personal subjective fantasies, without any echo in general knowledge, because they are without regulation and without any possible verification in reality.

Here Castagnary seems to make a distinction central to the psychology of his contemporary, Hippolyte Taine; implicitly he contrasts sensation generated in contact with the external world — that is, sensation subject to verification by others, which Taine ironically called "hallucination vraie" — with the completely private, idiosyncratic sensation of dreams and fantasies. For Castagnary, a concentration on the impression, the personal "idealized" sensation, can lead only to extreme subjectivity, not, as Rewald and others have argued, to the "representation of nature." Castagnary feared that impressionism might result in a departure from naturalism and its reflection of human values and social conditions; it might, in effect, constitute a return to the fantastical romanticism the critic had himself forcefully rejected.

Was Castagnary's response to impressionism itself anomalous and idiosyncratic or did it have some foundation or potential verification in the intentions of the artists or in the beliefs of the age? Certainly, many artists and critics of the late nineteenth century spoke of impressionism as an art of depicting nature and modern life, but they also repeatedly spoke of it as an intensely personal art that could not be judged by the familiar standards which ranged from accomplished academic paintings to seemingly automatic and objective photographs. For many artists and critics, impressionist painting seemed both objective and subjective. How this could be so is not adequately understood today, nor, consequently, is the relationship between impressionist and symbolist art. For many, symbolism embodied an extreme of subjectivity; it was an art of "idealization" and "fantasy," one Castagnary could not have approved. But (as Castagnary indicated) impressionism, too, could be an art of subjectivity. When the sense of the impressionists' subjectivity and idealization becomes clear, so does the meaning that their art held for the symbolists.

* * *

The "symbolism" of which critics around 1890 spoke was the product first of a number of young poets and writers who were seeking to establish their own place in the history of literary schools; in general, they sought relief from the dominant thematic motifs of many of their immediate predecessors (such as Zola) who, in the eyes of these younger writers, had depicted only the material aspects of culture and society. The younger generation sought a new style as well as new subject matter, a style of purified language in which the play of words might run as free as the play of the most liberated artistic imagination. The poet Jean Moréas introduced the term "symboliste" to designate the new school of literature in an article of August 1885; his "symbolists" included Mallarmé, Verlaine, and Moréas himself. About a year later, Moréas published his symbolist manifesto, stressing that the new poetry would evoke immaterial "Ideas" by means of a departure from (or distortion of) the "objective" view of the naturalists. Moréas and the other young symbolists were highly polemicized, oriented toward the public display that their many ephemeral journals provided; and they were often in disagreement among themselves as each group or individual vied for prominence. Frequently, it seems, their disputes were quite artificial, as they held more ideas in common than they were willing to admit. From this circle of poets and critics emerged two figures of special importance for the history of art. The first was Félix Fénéon, who was responsible for defining publicly the break that Seurat made between his own form of idealized art and that of the earlier impressionists. The second, Albert Aurier, the early champion of both Van Gogh and Gauguin, developed in 1891 a basic definition of "symbolism in painting"; this precocious intellect drew on his experience of both literature and the visual arts, as well as his study of aesthetics and the theory of criticism.

Aurier's attention had been directed to Gauguin by Émile Bernard, a young artist who had campaigned to publicize what he and Gauguin had begun to call "synthetic" or "synthetist" painting. Bernard looked upon the more mature Gauguin as a spiritual leader. Unusually inventive and possessing a facility for theoretical construction, the younger man may have suggested as much to Gauguin as Gauguin did to him. Eventually, especially after Aurier pronounced Gauguin the creator and guiding force of the new "symbolism in painting," a slighted Bernard came to dispute Gauguin's prominence, claiming to have been an essential influence in the formation of the style; and Gauguin himself bitterly denounced Bernard as an unoriginal imitator. Although Gauguin was the more accomplished artist, the degree to which he may indeed have learned from Bernard remains unclear. The two painters worked especially closely during 1888 (and also maintained close contact with Van Gogh), and their style of that year has since been considered characteristic of the "synthetisier or symbolist-oriented art developed by members of the generation following the impressionists. Gauguin's Lutte de Jacob avec l'ange (1888; fig. 1) is the best-known example: it displays the simplified rendering of volumes, the broad outlining, and the flat, unmodeled passages of brilliant color that signified, for Aurier and others, the motivating force of an "Idea" or mystical vision; this painting seemed to turn from the observation of an external, mundane reality to reveal, by way of a purified language of visual forms, the world of symbolic correspondences.

In 1889 Gauguin exhibited the Lutte de Jacob and other works at the Café Volpini, just outside the grounds of the Exposition universelle. Bernard and several others associated with Gauguin hung their paintings in the same large room in an attempt to provoke major critical comment. The artists called themselves the "groupe impressionniste et synthétiste." In his account of the event, Rewald notes that Aurier may have suggested this title; the result was that many viewers, disassociating the two terms, wondered who in the Volpini exhibition was an "impressionist" and who was a "synthetist." Yet around this time and even later, Gauguin often referred to his own manner and to avant-garde art in general as "impressionniste," while simultaneously professing his concern for "synthèse." It was left to Aurier to make a formal distinction; in 1891 he argued in his essay on Gauguin that the artist's quality of synthesis, the expression of an immaterial "idea" in material, visible form, definitively linked his work to the aims of literary symbolism (as opposed to naturalism or impressionism). Subsequently, Maurice Denis and other symbolist artists and critics commonly spoke of "synthétisme" and "symbolisme" as synonymous terms; in his own statement on Gauguin, Denis wrote that "synthétisme [in painting] became, through contact with the literary figures, symbolisme." Such "literary figures" included Stéphane Mallarmé, Gustave Kahn, Jean Moréas, Charles Morice, Félix Fénéon, and, of course, Albert Aurier.

A year before publishing his comments on Gauguin, Aurier had written a penetrating essay on Van Gogh that defined this artist, too, as a symbolist. According to the critic, Van Gogh considered his material means of color and line as "expressive," not imitative, and as "techniques [procédés] of symbolization," "a kind of marvelous language destined to translate the Idea." This was the essence of "symbolism in painting": to direct pictorial means toward the expression of "Ideas" rather than the representation of objects. Aurier wrote in his essay on Gauguin that the artist's technical devices, through simplification and reduction to elements of line and color, should become "signs ... the letters of an immense alphabet with which the man of genius alone can spell." The critic's sense of the "Idea" was Neoplatonic and mystical — an essence, a universal and eternal truth that might be known through the contemplation of its sign or symbol. For Aurier, artists became seers or visionaries; they did not limit themselves to immediate appearances as did impressionists and realists, nor did they create idealized images of the conventional sort. For this reason, the critic chose to call Gauguin's art idéiste, not idéaliste: "idealistic" art was the province of the academy, an art of a "conventional objectivity" as much tied to the rendering of objects (as opposed to "signs") as was realism. In a summary statement, Aurier wrote that Gauguin's art could be described with five related terms: it was idéiste, symboliste, synthétique, subjective, and décorative.

Gauguin's symbolist art was thus "subjective" in several senses; above all, for Aurier, it revealed the "idea perceived by the subject." The critic insisted that Gauguin should not be viewed as an impressionist. Nevertheless, he made it clear, when he defined the character of impressionism, that that art, too, was subjective. I shall come to investigate the position of Aurier and others on this issue in more detail; and the accumulation of documentary evidence will indicate that symbolism and impressionism, as understood around 1890, were not antithetical, especially if the term "impressionism" is to signify the art of Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and those closely related to them. Despite the concern of Aurier and others to identify a distinct group of symbolists, symbolism and impressionism cannot be set in opposition with respect to many of the central critical issues.

When symbolist artists and critics spoke against those variously described as "impressionists," "naturalists," or "realists," they generally did not have artists such as Monet, Renoir, or Pissarro in mind. Aurier actually praised those he called the "impressionist" painters — specifically Manet, Degas, Cézanne, Monet, Sisley, Pissarro, and Renoir — for their "attempts at expressive synthesis." He rudely dismissed a different set of "naturalists" that included the popularly successful Jean Béraud (a painter of "la vie moderne"; fig. 2), Bouguereau (known for his lifelike figural groups; fig. 4), and Detaille (who rendered military scenes; fig. 3). To these three artists, both Aurier and Maurice Denis would readily add Detaille's honored master, Meissonier (d. 1891), the fastidious recorder of detail (fig. 5). Aurier once exclaimed: "I would not swear that [the photographer] Nadar's lens does not have more soul than does [Meissonier himself]." Béraud, Detaille, Bouguereau, and Meissonier were not traditional painters of idealized ennobling subjects, but rather, in the general sense, naturalists and realists, even "impressionists." To symbolist critics, their works lacked "soul" or emotion and were limited by both their conventional technique and their materialistic goal of imitating nature. Impressionists such as Monet and Renoir, in contrast, were regarded as having developed a much more liberated technical procedure, one that allowed for personal emotional expression. Accordingly, Monet and the symbolist Gauguin could share mutual literary friends and admirers; and Gauguin was, in effect, the pupil of Pissarro and Cézanne. Furthermore, symbolists and impressionists alike saw themselves as appropriating aspects of the French romantic tradition; both groups appreciated the works of Delacroix, Stendhal, and Baudelaire.

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Excerpted from Cézanne and the End of Impressionism by Richard Shiff. Copyright © 1984 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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