Félix Fénéon
From Some Critical Writings
FROM THE IMPRESSIONISTS IN 1886 (1886)
From the beginning, the Impressionist painters, with that
concern for the truth which made them limit themselves to the interpretation
of modern life directly observed and landscape directly painted, have seen
objects conjointly related to one another, without chromatic autonomy,
participating in the luminous qualities of their neighbors; traditional
painting considered them [these objects] as ideally isolated and lighted them
with a poor and artificial daylight.
These color reactions, these sudden perceptions of complementaries, this Japanese vision, could not be expressed by means of shadowy sauces concocted on the palette: these painters thus made separate notations, letting the colors arise, vibrate in abrupt contacts, and recompose themselves at a distance; they enveloped their subjects with light and modeling them in the luminous tones, sometimes even daring to sacrifice all modeling; sunlight was at last captured on their canvases.
They thus proceeded by the decomposition of colors; but this composition was carried out in an arbitrary manner: such and such streak of impasto happened to throw the sensation of red across a landscape; such and such brilliant reds were hatched with greens. Messieurs Georges Seurat, Camille and Lucien Pissarro, Dubois-Pillet, and P Signac divide the tone in a conscious and scientific manner. This evolution dates from 1884, 1885, 1886.
If you consider a few square inches of uniform tone in Monsieur Seurat's Grande Jatte, you will find on each inch of its surface, in a whirling host of tiny spots, all the elements which make up the tone. Take t grass plot in the shadow: most of the strokes render the local value of grass; others, orange tinted and thinly scattered, express the scarcely action of the sun; bits of purple introduce the complement to green cyanic blue, provoked by the proximity of a plot of grass in the sunlight accumulates its siftings toward the line of demarcation, and beyond t point progressively rarefies them. Only two elements come together to p duce the grass in the sun: green and orange tinted light, any interact being impossible under the furious beating of the sun's rays. Black be a non-light, the black dog is colored by the reactions of the grass; dominant color is therefore deep purple; but it is also attacked by dark blue arising from neighboring spaces of light. The monkey o leash is dotted with yellow, its personal characteristic, and flecked w purple and ultramarine. The whole thing: obviously merely a crude description, in words; but, within the frame, complexly and delicately measured out.
These colors, isolated on the canvas, recombine on the retina: have, therefore, not a mixture of material colors (pigments), but a mixture of differently colored rays of light. Need we recall that even w the colors are the same, mixed pigments and mixed rays of light do necessarily produce the same results? It is also generally understood t the luminosity of optical mixtures is always superior to that of mate mixture, as the many equations worked out by M. Rood show.' For violet-carmine and a Prussian blue, from which a gray-blue results:
50 carmine + 50 blue = 47 carmine + 49 blue + 4 black
mixture of pigment mixture of rays of light
for a carmine and green:
50 carmine + 50 green
=
50 carmine + 24 green + 26 black
We can understand why the Impressionists, in striving to express extreme luminosities-as did Delacroix before them-wish to substitute optical mixture for mixing on the palette. Monsieur Seurat is the first to present a complete and systematic paradigm of this new technique. His immense canvas, La Grande Jatte [Fig. 15], whatever part of it you examine, unrolls, a monotonous and patient tapestry: here in truth the accidents of the brush are futile, trickery is impossible; there is no place for bravuralet the hand be numb, but let the eye be agile, perspicacious, cunning. Whether it be on an ostrich plume, a bunch of straw, a wave, or a rock, the handling of the brush remains the same. And if it is possible to uphold the advantages of "virtuoso painting," scumbled and rubbed, for rough grasses, moving branches, fluffy fur, in any case "la peinture au point" [literally "well-done (cooked) painting"] imposes itself for the execution of smooth surfaces, and, above all, of the nude, to which it has still not been applied.
The subject [of the Grande Jatte]: beneath a canicular sky, at four o'clock, the island, boats flowing by at its side, stirring with a dominical and fortuitous population enjoying the fresh air among the trees; and these forty-odd people are caught in a hieratic and summarizing drawing style, rigorously handled, either from the back or full-face or in profile, some seated at right angles, others stretched out horizontally, others standing rigidly; as though by a modernizing PUViS.2
The atmosphere is transparent and singularly vibrant; the
surface seems to flicker. Perhaps this sensation, which is also experienced in
front of other such paintings in the room' can be explained by the theory of
Dove:3 the retina, expecting distinct groups of light rays to act upon it,
perceives in very rapid alternation both the disassociated colored elements
and their resultant color.
Félix Fénéon, "Les Impressionnistes en 1886 (VIIIe Exposition Irnpressionniste)," La Vogue, 13-20 June 1886, pp. 261-75; reprinted with additions late in 1886 as a pamphlet under the title Les Impressionnistes en 1886; reprinted in Felix Fénéon, Oeuvres, ed. jean Paulhan (Paris: Gallimard, 1948); in D.-R., pp. xi-xiii; and in Felix Fénéon, Au-dela de l'impressionnisme, ed. Francoise Cachin (Paris: Hermann, 1966), pp. 64-67. The English translation and notes by Linda Nochlin are reprinted from Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, 1874-1904, Sources and Documents in the History of Art (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1966), pp. 108-10. (D 1966. Reprinted by permission of Hermann and Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.
Felix
Fénéon (1861-1944) Symbolist writer and art critic. Founded the Revue
independante in 1884 and contributed frequently to La Vogue and the Belgian
publication L'Art moderne. Early established as the primary literary spokesman
for Seurat and his followers, whom he dubbed "Neo-Impressionists."
His review of their work at the 8th Impressionist Exhibition (1886) was the
first serious and knowledgeable consideration of these artists, and it remains
today an authoritative explanation of Seurat's early goals.
I
In Modern Chromatics (Students' Text-Book of Color), published in 1879, a book
was to be extremely influential upon Seurat and his group, the American phys
Ogden N. Rood, a professor at Columbia University, had explained the important
difference between mixing pigment (subtractive mixture) and mixing light
(additive mixture), demonstrating the latter by means of Maxwell's Discs, and
insisting upon superior luminosity.
2
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898(, painter of poetic and idealized
allegories, best known for his murals, and greatly admired by the Symbolists.
3
Heinrich-Wilhelm Dove (1803-1879), German physicist and meteorologist, whose
“theory of luster,” probably transmitted through Rood’s writing, was
influential upon Seurat.