aquarelas cezanne.pdf

The Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to TheBurlington Magazine for Connoisseurs.

http://www.jstor.org

Czanne's Watercolour Technique Author(s): Kurt Badt Source: The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, Vol. 83, No. 487 (Oct., 1943), pp. 246-248Published by: The Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/868734Accessed: 13-04-2015 19:57 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of contentin a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

This content downloaded from 143.106.1.138 on Mon, 13 Apr 2015 19:57:08 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Jean Lemaire: Painter of Architectural Fantasies Lemaire's position in the landscape painting of his

time can be fairly exactly defined. He springs primarily from Poussin. In some of his compositions he borrowed the partly ruined but not picturesque buildings which Poussin uses as a background for his religious and mythological stories. In others he imitates the complete temples and villas which Poussin introduces into his later landscapes. But he lacks Poussin's heroic quality. He is far removed from the picturesqueness of Salvator Rosa, and from the idyllic luminous landscapes of Claude. His landscapes are simply evocative of antiquity but in paintings like the Dublin composition he shows imagination in the combination of his architectural elements. Hubert Robert need not have been ashamed of the circular temple on the bridge, and the colossal sculptures on the left introduce an individual if somewhat eccentric note. This is not great painting, but it foreshadows the romantic-classical spirit which scattered classical ruins and temples of Venus through the gardens of the later eighteenth century.x6

1" Circumstances have prevented me from seeing certain other works attributed to Lemaire, and mentioned in Thieme-Becker, particularly those in French provincial galleries, such as Bordeaux, Le Puy and Fontainebleau. Two paintings by him are mentioned in the Aedes Walpolianae (1747, p. 61) as being at Houghton. They represented Alexander at the tomb of Achilles, and The Consulting of the Sybilline Oracles. They are not now traceable in the Hermitage to which the majority of the Houghton collection passed, and I have

not been able to determine whether they are still at Houghton. Another composition at Knowsley, attributed to Poussin, and representing The Arts appealing to the Genius of Rome, seems to me to be probably by Lemaire, though I only know it from the engraving by Winstanley.

Dr. Borenius has kindly called my attention to the following paintings attributed to Lemaire in eighteenth century English sale catalogues:

1725/6. And. Hay. Lot 34. Diogenes throwing away his dish. Le Mere. Bt. ?31 Ios. Lord Burlington. I731/2. Sir Andrew Fountaine. Lot 41. Cupid bringing

Satyr before Venus. Le Mere Poussin. ?3 7s. 1731/2. Cocks. Lot 41. Cupid bringing a Satyr before Venus.

Le Mere. 1738. Mr. Paris. First day, lot 15. A Landscape, manner of

Gaspar. Le Noire (sic.). Bt. ?I 9s. Glynn. 1743. Geminiani. First day, lot 54. Hippomenes and Atalanta. Le Mere and N. Poussin. C12 55s. 1744/5. Knight. Lot i. A Seaport. Le Mere. It is, of course, possible that some of these may be by Pierre

not Jean, and in the case of the Fountaine and Cocks pictures, which may be identical, this is even likely, since Pierre was a regular imitator of Poussin's figure compositions, and these references may be to copies after the latter's treatment of the subject. On the other hand those which represent landscapes are more likely to be by Jean. It is even possible tentatively to identify the Hay painting with one in the Cook collection (cf. HERBERT COOK: Catalogue of the Paintings at Doughty House, iii, 1915, No. 432) which depicts the story of Diogenes in a landscape setting. GRAUTOFF (Nicolas Poussin, I914, ii, p. 280) has already suggested Jean Lemaire as the author of this painting. For some reason Cook rejects the interpretation of the picture as the story of Diogenes, though in fact it unquestionably represents this subject.

CEZANNE'S WATERCOLOUR TECHNIQUE BY KURT BADT

EZANNE'S watercolours demonstrate, beside the effects intended and the means used to attain them, the difficulties arising from the creative process of the artist himself. This is evident from the fact

that, out of his nearly four hundred aquarelles more than three hundred and fifty are unfinished. But it is note- worthy that not one of them has been abandoned because of technical mistakes.

There are, I think, three different types of unfinished watercolours by Cezanne.

First : sheets intended as complete pictures composed to fill up a square and be marked off with a frame. They show part of the objects fairly finished whilst others are only indicated.

Second: sheets likewise intended as complete pictures, but giving the effect of complete " realisation " by means of single strokes of colour whilst a large portion of the paper is still blank.

Third : pictorial, rhythmical and colouristic motives without the intention of constituting a picture in the usual meaning of the word.

Sheets of the first type are proof of C6zanne's diffi- culty in retaining his " poetical vision " in the face of nature, with its changing aspects and infinity of details. Whilst painting, Cezanne must have discovered par- ticularities which did not harmonize with the shape of his original conception, or even have observed important relations between natural objects belonging to one composition which could be carried over as a motif into another composition. Especially when he was over- worked, he fell from the high level of his creative imagination and then gave up his work.

In a different category are his unfinished watercolours of the second type. Though unfinished, they are perfectly " realised." The method employed on these sheets is borrowed from drawing, which by means of strokes creates rather than imitates forms. Cezanne attained by a system of coloured shadows what, before him, was achieved only by monochrome drawing: namely, to make solid substance plastically visible and intelligible without reproducing its surface.

In the watercolours in question Cezanne uses colours as the Old Masters employed pencil, charcoal or ink. He does not cover continuous planes but areas adjoining bodies reaching their outlines. The result is that the surfaces of the bodies with single coloured tints flash up here and there, the colour touches representing dark parts of bodies or darks behind bodies. From the contrast between them and the specially defined white surfaces these vacant parts develop into clearly perceivable plastic values. I do not think that Cezanne came to this most striking fusion of drawing and painting deliberately.

It may be tempting to define the third kind of Cezanne's unfinished aquarelles as studies or even sketches. That would, however, be fallacious. They are neither preliminary notes of pictorial ideas nor hasty condensations of impressions. When Cizanne was a young artist he improvised ; later on he gave, in every case, the definite scaffolding of a composition.

Nevertheless, he left a number of watercolours which were not intended to become complete pictures. They consist of single, small motives, such as a part of a tree, a pot, a chair, a piece of drapery, a few apples or pears, even some rocks. Their most striking feature is that the rhythmical and harmonious factor predominates

246


Cezanne's Watercolour Technique over the attempt to imitate natural objects. I would almost term them poetic abbreviations discovered in small objects in nature, similar to those that a lyric sometimes reveals by means of the extraordinary combination of a few words.

From about the year 1885, when the artist turned more vigorously towards watercolours and developed his own very particular manner, his technique did not change very much until his death in 19o6.

After a general preparation with the pencil, he operated with light coloured touches and colour strokes, which he put separately one beside the other ; then he covered them over in order to obtain more intense and more differentiated tones.

C6zanne wished to secure these particular character- istics of the aquarelle, the ground shining through the colours, and the light reflected from the white ground of the paper. Therefore he produced deeper tones by several layers of transparent paint, every one of which shows its precise contours. So skilfully did Cezanne repeat this practice that he achieved depth of transparent colour never reached before, and succeeded in producing a very delicate gradation from the dark to the brighter tones. I know of no case in which Cezanne used a real " wash," modifying a single colour from a hardly visible tinge into intensity. He reserved a special nuance of colour for every nuance of darkness. In this respect Cezanne's watercolours are at the extreme opposite to Turner's.

Cezanne painted with exact movements of his hand, making the beginning and end of his strokes clearly visible, but generally without participating in the final effect. It consists of delicate curved pencil lines, irregular hatches, bundles of strokes, forming dark bands of different breadth. They served C6zanne for the beginning of the coloured execution of watercolours. He followed them up with the brush, intensify- ing and transferring them into coloured values. He doubled or tripled the touches, deepened and enlarged the half-tints, until a phantastic creation of coloured darks came into existence out of which single objects emerged. Autonomous harmonies were developed binding objects together. The pictorial and not the objective significance was the leading principle.

The sharply accentuated darks approach the objects from the surrounding space and often prove to belong to things situated on a plane behind the brightly- coloured object. They are knitted together, regardless of their plastic value and meaning, into mysterious, written characters upon a flat surface. When dark objects are shown in front of a light background, the darks flicker like flames, waver up and down, changing in colour. Throughout the dark masses a rhythmic current runs from body to body, from zone to zone, embracing masses and space alike.

From a complex vision of such darkly coloured bands Ctzanne's watercolours actually originate. The dark bands were maintained during the whole working process as a harmonious and rhythmic basis of the composition.

From what kind of an artistic conception did this technical process emanate ? The first supposition is, in Cezanne's own words: " Peindre ce n'est pas copier servilement: c'est saisir une harmonie entre des rapports nombreux." The second: this harmony has to be established exclusively by colours.

Strong harmonies of colours seemed to Cezanne to exist in the darks, where different colours were blended together. Only through the dissolution of darks into such colours, as e.g., purple, dark green or dark blue, did it become possible to harmonise the local reds, greens and blues of a motif contrasting with each other, the latter being represented as " consequences " of the dark colours. Therefore : to establish a reliable basis for a picture, aiming at a general harmony and unity, Cezanne had first to build up a scaffolding of dark colours, then he had to create sequences of continuous chromatic scales from the darks to the lights " upwards." The transformation of darks into strictly distinguishable colours and the acceptance of dark harmonies as basis for the whole picture, guarantee Cezanne the creation of "a harmony parallel with nature " which was, in his opinion, the essence of art.

From the historical point of view Cezanne's watercolour technique appears most puzzling. It is strange that a man who worked under the influence of Camille Pissarro, who had his own impressionistic period, conceded the decisive place to the darks.

The antagonism has been recognised but has not led to, any notion of Cezanne's historical " situation."

Cezanne, from the stylistic point of view, belongs more to the Venetian school of the sixteenth century than to any group of nineteenth century painters. He is also akin to Delacroix, who in his turn leads back to Rubens and further back to Venice. All those painters painted " out of the darkness." Cezanne had in common with these artists the fundamental factor of technique, and with him painting reverted to an old tradition. Only in producing the darks by means of opposite and complementary colours, Cezanne is indebted to impres- sionist painters. He extended their method of colour division, which they used for the representation of light, to the darks and composed every colour with nuances of harmonious contrasts.

In the year 1905 Maurice Denis, describing an exhibi- tion of Cezanne's watercolours, said that they were " fortement Ntablies par des contrastes vifs sur des prdparations lavies au bleu de prusse." Maurice Denis had noticed a very characteristic feature of Cezanne's colouring : the blue-basis. For the blues are not only dominating in Cezanne's aquarelles, but blue is made the " bed of painting," to quote an expression ascribed to Titian; it is used as the material wherein the other colours are " embedded."

It is scarcely necessary to remark that Cezanne's blue is not only one colour. Cezanne used four different blues on the palette and increased their number by mixing them with green, red or ochre.

When he chose blue as his colouristic basis, he was following the example of Pissarro who gave his pictures a general tone of bright blue. Cezanne, however, trans- formed this idea of a homogeneous atmospheric unity into a method of composition ; instead of a pale greyish blue he used the most intense shade.

Simultaneously he returned from the impressionistic technique to an old tradition. He prepared his watercolours by the " blue-painting," giving them a kind of monochrome foundation. So the blue in his pictures accomplished the same function as the under-painting of the Old Masters, which was to give the picture as much unity as possible and to simplify the pictorial process.

Blue, from the lightest to the deepest tints, is Cezanne's

247


Cezanne's Watercolour Technique medium, his pictorial equivalent for darks, just as, in earlier periods of painting, it had been brown or grey- black. In both cases it is a means to an end-and often, the blue tinges, which we still see on the unfinished aquarelles, are only the preparations intended to be over-painted according to the requirement of the painting. In the completely finished watercolours we find no outstanding blues, but a general deep blue " sound " running through the colouristic composition.

There is a corresponding general factor on the light-side of Cezanne's palette, the ochres, changing from yellowish to brown and reddish. These ochres provide a kind of basis contrasted with the blue foundation. As they blend easily with red, blue and green, they are chosen by Cezanne for the subdued transitions forming the approaches of strong colours to each other. Used throughout the whole picture they guarantee a second, a softer, colour unity to the composition.

To sum up: CUzanne began his watercolours by developing a system of blue rhythms and harmonies to which he tried to give the greatest possible extension, and he added a system of ochres, filling up the distant harmonies with intermediate tones. From these two systems of blues and ochres he proceeded to the different local tones needed for the reproduction of individual objects, with the aim of inserting the highest local colours, exactly balanced, between the blue-tinted and the ochre-tinted spheres.

Local colours are the most striking ones and a painter begins with these because they are the most accessible to his observation. They could not be directly observed by Cezanne as harmonious concords, but had to be created as a result of the harmonies previously established. That is why precisely the most intense colour accents are often not given in the unfinished watercolours.

ANCIENT BRONZES IN THE ROYAL PALACE AT BENIN BY EVA L. R. MEYEROWITZ

N 1897 the Vice-Consul General Mr. Phillips, together with six other British Government officials, two traders, inter- preters and two hundred and fifteen carriers, left Sapele, a small port on the

Nigerian coast, to pay a semi-official visit to the King of Benin. On their way to Benin-City they were ambushed by Bini warriors and, with the exception of two Europeans, all were killed. Eight days later the news of this disaster reached London and a punitive expedition was immediately ordered ; forty-six days after the massacre the city of Benin was conquered and totally destroyed.1

The only loot of any value among the ruins of Benin were the bronzes and ivory carvings found in the Royal Palace and in the houses of the nobles; and apart from those which were taken as souvenirs to England, the great bulk of them found their way into the hands of Lagos dealers who auctioned the bronzes as " scrap metal " and the beautifully carved ivory tusks as " damaged ivory."

Professor von Luschan, the famous German eth- nologist, upon hearing this, immediately cabled to Lagos and was able to secure the larger part of this booty for the German Museums.2 He was the first to realise the outstanding value of the finds and describes the best bronzes, after having examined many of them, as technically perfect, the casts so good " that neither Benvenuto Cellini himself nor anybody before or after him, up to the present day, could possibly improve upon them."3

It seemed incredible to the astonished world, that a people so " savage " and " primitive " in their way of life could be responsible for the creation of so highly developed an art.

It is therefore not surprising that O. M. Dalton and C. H. (later Sir Hercules) Read4 came to the conclusion that, although there probably had been an indigenous knowledge of brass-casting, the Bini learnt most of it subsequently from the Portuguese who had discovered Benin in 1472 and who about thirty years later established trading stations and missions. But the historical traditions of Benin, which I am inclined to believe, tell us otherwise; for according to these, bronze and brass-casting was introduced into Benin by King Oguola who reigned towards the end of the thirteenth century and who, tired of ordering the bronze work required at his court from Ife,5 asked for a metal worker to be sent to him in order to establish this craft in his own country.

The King of Ife sent him Ighe-igha, a great artist and great teacher, who is believed to have left many designs to his students. He was deified after his death and is worshipped to this day by the brass- smiths in the quarter of the royal brass founders in Benin City.6

The destruction of Benin left the Bini completely bereft of all works of art which they once had created, bearing testimony to their great past. The large heads, ancestral portraits, on altars and shrines of the nobility, as one sees them to day, are pitiful ;

1 Commander R. H. S. BACON : Benin the City of Blood, London [1897].

2 According to F. v. LUSCHAN : Die Altertuemer von Benin, p. 12, 13, there are about 2,400oo bronzes and ivory carvings, etc., in European collections, of which were then (in I919), 1,250 in German museums, 280 in the British Museum and 227 in the Pitt-Rivers Museum. Vienna has a good collection of 167 pieces and Leiden of 98 pieces. The rest is in smaller collections scattered all over the world.

s F. v. LUSCHAN : Die Altertuemer von Benin, Berlin [I919], p. I5.

40. M. DALTON and C. H. READ : Antiquities from Benin in the British Museum, London [1899], p. I9. 6 Benin was originally colonised from Ife, situated to the north- west of it, and remained a vassal state, politically and culturally dependant for many centuries.

6 The fact that Portuguese fathers, traders, etc., are depicted on some of the plaques and that, in many instances, bronze imported from Portugal was used, is no proof whatsoever for the theory which credits the Portuguese with having taught the Bini this craft.

SAlready before 1897 these ancestor " portraits " were not cast any more but carved and covered with sheet brass.

248


Article Contentsp. 246p. 247p. 248

Issue Table of ContentsThe Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, Vol. 83, No. 487 (Oct., 1943), pp. i-x+236-260Front Matter [pp. i-x]EditorialJacob Burckhardt and England [pp. 237-239+241]

Jean Lemaire: Painter of Architectural Fantasies [pp. 236+240-246]Czanne's Watercolour Technique [pp. 246-248]Ancient Bronzes in the Royal Palace at Benin [pp. 248-253]Shorter NoticesA Statuette by Pedro Millan of Seville [pp. 253-255]Portrait and Character [p. 254]A Portrait by Jacopo Tintoretto [pp. 254+256]Harold Gilman (1878-1919) [pp. 254+256]

ObituariesF. Maitland Griggs [pp. 254+257]E. Alfred Jones [p. 257]

LettersSir James Thornhill's Collection [p. 257]Van Dyck and the Amsterdam Double Portrait [pp. 257-258]Federico," Not "Federigo [p. 258]

The Literature of ArtReview: untitled [pp. 258-259]Review: untitled [p. 259]Review: untitled [pp. 259-260]

Forthcoming Sales [p. 260]Back Matter

Documents

aquarelas cezanne.pdf