Columbus Museum of Art » European Modernism

Victor Chocquet Seated

scott — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 15:13:02 +0000

The art collector Victor Chocquet was a great friend of Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Paul Cézanne and a staunch defender of new trends in art. This portrait of him is a part of Cézanne’s response to the Impressionists whose aim was to capture “fleeting reality,” and it is evidence of Cézanne’s stated desire to make “something solid and durable” of that reality. To build a stable composition, he has used short brushstrokes to paint interlocking rectangles of color, alternating the warm areas of red and yellow with the cool areas of green and violet.

The Breakfast

scott — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 15:11:04 +0000

Among Edgar Degas’s most memorable pictures are intimate scenes of women bathing or performing other personal rituals. A master draftsman, Degas explored with intensity and pleasure the potential of pastel for spontaneous, sensuous expression. In this work, Degas captured the model in the act of sipping from a cup, with her face turned away and her body relaxed. He has achieved a mood of quiet reverie, placing the viewer discreetly behind the model, looking down at her.

Portuguese Woman

scott — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 15:08:42 +0000

Robert Delaunay belonged to a movement in French painting called Orphism, after Orpheus, a poet-musician of Greek mythology. Delaunay believed that the emotional impact of pure colors, like that of music, is immediate. The strong palette of The Portuguese Woman was inspired by the bright colors that Delaunay found in Portugal, where he lived from 1914 to 1917. Here, the concentric circles and parallel planes are derived from Cubism and may or may not be related to real objects.

Portrait of the Painter Étienne Terrus

scott — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 15:06:44 +0000

“Colors became cartridges filled with dynamite to be exploded through contact with light,” André Derain said about the paintings he and his friend Henri Matisse created in the summer of 1905. That autumn, a critic dubbed their work Fauve, from the French for “wild beast.” The artists who painted in this style worked intuitively, seeking visual and emotional stimulation from their subjects and translating their feelings directly to canvas, as Derain has here, using vibrant, irregular dashes and patches of intense color.

The Assassination

scott — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 15:04:44 +0000

James Ensor’s nightmarish paintings were a forerunner of twentieth-century Expressionism and Surrealism. Ensor was born and lived most of his life in Ostend, Belgium, where his family kept a souvenir shop. The seashells, toys, and lurid carnival masks sold in the shop appear in many of his paintings. Disgusted by modern society and the violent, brutish nature of humanity, Ensor filled his paintings with masked figures—symbols of hypocrisy—whose ugliness reveals both the true selves of the figures and the bitterness and pessimism of his own inner world.

The Cathedral

scott — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 15:02:19 +0000

Lionel Feininger went to Germany in 1887 to study music, but instead he became a painter, living there for fifty years before returning to the United States. Feininger developed a particular style of Cubism that he called “Prismism” because of its transparent, faceted forms and delicately modulated colors. Feininger was drawn to the spiritual associations of both music and religious architecture as subjects—here, he has created visually a musical fugue using repeated and overlapping Cubist planes, and he has conveyed the sound of tolling bells above the rooftops in circular Cubist forms.

To Jacques Nayral

scott — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 14:59:38 +0000

Albert Gleizes was intensely interested in the expressive potential of Cubism. The death of his brother-in-law, Jacques Nayral, killed in action in France in 1914, profoundly affected Gleizes, who painted this memorial portrait of Nayral. In keeping with the memorial purpose of the painting, Gleizes adopted a static com- position and a somber color scheme. The jagged Cubist facets—some colored, some softly modeled—suggest the lights of a night battle seen through haze and smoke.

Playing Cards and Glass of Beer

scott — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 14:51:10 +0000

In 1912, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, and Juan Gris began constructing images by combining painting with real objects. The invention of this type of collage marked a major new direction in the evolution of Cubism. The result was a pictorial art made up of multiple “realities.” Here, there are real things (patterned wallpaper and playing cards), things realistically painted (mug, pipe, and faux marble), and abstract things (white silhouetted objects). The whole is held together visually by a pattern of strong vertical and horizontal lines.

Schokko with a Red Hat

scott — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 14:48:47 +0000

Alexej Jawlensky resigned his position as an officer in the Russian army to become a painter. His style was influenced both by the brilliant colors of the Fauve painters and by the way actors in the theater transform themselves using makeup, costumes, and lighting. Here is a portrait of an exotically costumed model with a fan. Her yellow-green face appears as it might look under stage lighting and is complemented and intensified by the surrounding reds. “Schokko” (the model’s nickname because she loved hot chocolate) radiates a powerfully artificial and theatrical presence.

Tower Room, Fehmarn (Self Portrait with Erna)

scott — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 14:46:38 +0000

This work belongs to the Berlin period of Ernst Kircher’s career, when he moved from Dresden and after he began to focus more on outdoor subjects. Here, the artist is shown with Erna Schilling, his lifelong companion and model, at a favorite retreat, the lighthouse on the island of Fehmarn in the Baltic Sea. At Fehmarn, Kirchner sought to get closer to a primitive state of mind and feeling in order to reach truths about man and nature. This work is both a search for self-identity and an attempt to offer the viewer a meaningful declaration about life—qualities that define the general character of German Expressionism.