In 1883, 20 years after Manet had shocked Paris with his Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, Seurat submitted his first major painting to the Paris Salon—a huge canvas called Bathers at Asnières. It was rejected and Seurat turned away from the official art establishment. In 1884, he helped form a group of artists called the Société des Artistes Indépendants and befriended the artist Paul Signac (1863–1935). He enthused Signac with his ideas about painting dots of pure color on canvases which would be blended by viewers’ eyes and so appear brighter to them than pre-mixed colors.
Seurat advocated juxtaposing complementary colors, such as blue and orange, as the Impressionists and other Post-Impressionists had done, to make each color appear even more vibrant and luminous. Still experimenting with this technique, from 1884 to 1886 he painted his huge canvas, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. He exhibited it at the final Impressionist exhibition, where a critic described his work as “Neo-Impressionist” and the technique as “Pointillism.” In the four years before his sudden death aged 32, he adhered to his method, producing one large-scale painting each year. His technique was closely followed by other Neo-Impressionists and later appeared in various 20th-century art styles.
Key Works
Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte 1884–6, ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO, CHICAGO, IL, US
Models 1886–8, BARNES FOUNDATION, LINCOLN UNIVERSITY, MERION, PA, US
Invitation to the Sideshow (La Parade de Cirque) 1887–9, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK, US
Le Chahut 1889–90, RIJKSMUSEUM KRÖLLER-MÜLLER, OTTERLO, THE NETHERLANDS
TOULOUSE-LAUTREC
1864–1901 • POST-IMPRESSIONISM, ART NOUVEAU
At the Moulin Rouge: The Dance
1890 OIL ON CANVAS
115.6 × 149.9 CM (45½ × 59 IN)
PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART, PHILADELPHIA, US
The Moulin Rouge was one of the most fashionable places in Paris. Toulouse-Lautrec painted the figures in his brutally frank, but compassionate manner, using the angled floorboards to lead viewers’ eyes into the action. The male dancer is teaching a young woman the can-can. In the foreground, a woman in pink faces the dancers.
Epitomizing the Parisian nightlife of the 19th century, Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa was a French painter, printmaker, draftsman, graphic artist, and illustrator. Known as much for his physical deformities and tragic life as he is for his exuberant, elegant and provocative images of the period, his impact on the graphic design of the 20th century was profound.
The last in line of a family that dated back 1,000 years, Toulouse-Lautrec was born in southern France to the wealthy Comte and Comtesse de Toulouse-Lautrec. Through an inherited illness, he was weak and often sick. During adolescence he broke his legs. The bones did not heal properly and his legs stopped growing. As he matured, his body was of a normal size, but his legs were short; his head looked abnormally large and he walked with difficulty. This embarrassed and repelled his father, and precluded Toulouse-Lautrec from living a normal upper-class life. So he spent most of his time painting and drawing and in 1882, he began studying in Paris with Léon Bonnat (1833–1922).
At the age of 19, he was given an allowance and a studio in the Montmartre area. He began painting his surroundings and the shabbily glamorous people who lived and worked there. To overcome his embarrassment about his deformities, he began drinking heavily. He became a well-known figure, sketching in nightclubs and dance halls, capturing the energy and atmosphere around him. During the day, he transferred his sketches to canvas or print, creating brightly colored works in economical, flowing lines. When the Moulin Rouge opened as a cabaret, he was commissioned to produce a series of posters.
Almost all Toulouse-Lautrec’s work is of the nightclubs, cafés and brothels of Montmartre and figures such as the cabaret singer and actress Yvette Guilbert and the dancer Louise Weber, known as La Goulue (“The Glutton”), who invented the can-can dance. With their asymmetry, simple lines, bold colors, and flat shapes, many of his compositions display a Japanese influence. He was also inspired by Gauguin’s fluid contours and Degas’ intimate understanding of the figure, but his own strong sense of design and honesty created a unique style, which was both empathetic and detached. Unlike most of the other Post-Impressionists, his work sold during his lifetime but in the 1890s, syphilis and alcohol began to affect his health and he died aged just 36.
Key Works
Red-Haired Woman (The Toilette) 1889, MUSÉE D’ORSAY, PARIS, FRANCE
Training of the New Girls by Valentin “the Boneless” (Moulin-Rouge) 1889–90, THE PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART, PHILADELPHIA, US
La Goulue Entering the Moulin Rouge 1891–2, THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ARTS, NEW YORK, US
At the Moulin Rouge 1892–3, THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO, CHICAGO, IL, US
Poster: Jane Avril at the Jardin de Paris 1893, MUSÉE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC, ALBI, FRANCE
Modernism to Pop
c.1900–1970s
From the end of the 1800s to the middle of the 20th century, there was an explosion of new ideas, technologies and discoveries. Communications, science and medicine were all advancing rapidly, changing everyone’s lives irrevocably. As a result, the challenges to accepted artistic conventions became even more inevitable, frequent and revolutionary.
A changing world
Modernism is a term that is often broadly interpreted and even its dates are not agreed on. It comprises fine art, design, literature, music and poetry. Rejecting the academic art of the past, Modernism welcomed everything that was fresh and avant-garde. It began predominantly in France with the Impressionists, gathered momentum by about 1890 and ended as an international phenomenon by the 1950s. The year 1900 is often cited as a watershed in the history of Western art, when the academies more or less lost their power and artists began to lead the way. Central to Modernism is the recognition and acceptance of new ideas and technologies and the changing nature of the modern world. This sits alongside the need to move on from outdated, traditional forms of art, architecture, literature and social thinking. Some Modernists self-consciously broke with the past, rejecting all established customs, while others simply attempted to reinterpret tradition and to give it a new, modern twist.
While scientists such as Charles Darwin (1809–82), Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and Albert Einstein (1879–1955) were refuting accepted theories and principles, new inventions including cars, trains, factories and electricity were changing the look of the world. These changes undermined certainties in the ways in which people lived, and initiated even more experimentation in art and design. Modernist artists explored new methods, materials and ideas, spurred on by the Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, Pre-Raphaelites and Symbolists. It was no longer enough to simply paint in one approved manner; artists had to invent new ideas, to express new thoughts and attitudes—to keep pace with the new machine age. And as the 20th century progressed, overshadowed by the two most atrocious wars the world had ever known, those expressions often became angry, confused and violent.
New directions
While artists enjoyed having their own autonomy, their reasons for producing art, such as celebrating national pride, no longer seemed relevant. Almost all Modern artists were greeted with contempt or hostility and it began to be normal for them to shock. Sometimes this was deliberate, but often it was unintentional—the artists were simply trying to express themselves in new ways.