women.
… For about an hour Manet was leading his wife and me all over the place … what is more I had completely lost sight of Manet and his wife, which further increased my embarrassment. I did not think it proper to walk around all alone. When I finally found Manet again I reproached him for his behaviour.2
A young poet said, “When I am near Madame Manet I feel like an uncouth lout.”3
After Morisot’s death Renoir, Monet, and Degas organized a retrospective exhibition of her works.
JP
Ascending and Descending Hero (1965)
Bridget Riley (1931–)
Bridget Riley,
Ascending and Descending Hero, 1965
Acrylic emulsion on canvas, 72 x 108 in.
Gift of Society for Contemporary Art (1968.102)
The Art Institute of Chicago
© Bridget Riley 2017. All rights reserved,
courtesy Karsten Schubert, London
Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago
Doesn’t look like much, does it? Is it even art? Well, is it something that attracts the eye? Does it speak to the senses, even causing aggravation? Is it arranged in an arresting way? Does it make you think? Does it make you feel? If so, surely it’s art.
Bridget Riley was one of the youngest, most driven, and most influential women in the modern art world. In 1931, in Cornwall, England, during the Second World War, she fell in love with the outdoors. She was intrigued by the constant changes in light and colour and cloud formation and admired the world around her from a young age.
After her father was seriously injured in a car accident, she spun into a complete mental and physical breakdown. She was out of touch, and out of mind, something she had never experienced. Failing in painting, she eventually found her way back to London where, at the Tate Gallery, she saw an Abstract Expressionist exhibition that sparked some inspiration.
Riley began her first Op Art pieces, sticking to shades of black and white and the simplest of geometric shapes. She based these paintings on the illusion she felt in her own eye. She wasn’t painting from theory, she was experimenting, until she found an image she wanted to share. Ascending and Descending Hero is among her important early works, culminating in bold, hypnotic canvases. These works were purely instinctive and, consequently, enticing to us.
Op Art made its way into pop culture because of Bridget Riley. Designers, even in the fashion industry, fell in love with it, as did advertisers. She became one of the art darlings of the sixties. She is today a hip eighty-four-year-old woman, still perfecting her unique artistic vision.
Is it art? Yes, it is.
SG
24. A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884 (1884–86)
Georges Seurat (1859–91)
Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884, 1884–86
Oil on canvas, 207.5 x 308.1 cm
Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection (1926.224)
The Art Institute of Chicago
Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images
Admit it! You want to share this idyllic moment, go back in time and reality and check out the scene, even to greet the woman with child stately walking toward us.
Georges Seurat painted La Grande Jatte, arguably the most influential and famous piece of his oeuvre , when he was just twenty-seven. During that time, amid the late eighties, the Impressionist movement needed a pick me up, someone with a fresh eye, new ideals, and inspiration. Georges Seurat was just that spark to steer the Impressionists in a new direction.
La Grande Jatte takes on the form Seurat envisioned and created, formally known as Pointillism, informally known as Divisionism. He wisped small brush strokes and dappled tiny dots of complementary colours onto his canvas, creating a bright, incandescent glow of colour and light. By placing small dabs next to each other, the colours blend in different ways and create an almost 3D effect.
The sophistication of modern affluence basking in the sun on this Parisian island inspired Seurat to begin his largest work. Modern life was his muse for many projects and influenced him in the creation of this piece, but while painting it, Seurat captured the natural beauty and qualities of light within nature and their interaction. Different hues cast shadows from the women’s skirts onto the ground. The mixing of greens creates a blue shadow next to them. The light greens create a yellow ring around the leaves on the trees and, most prominently, around the characters in the shaded foreground. This seamless colour creates a very realistic depiction of light and its changes, something the viewer would actually experience if they had gone to this park, or any park for that matter.
Seurat had many preconceived ideas about this painting, but fretted endlessly about its layout. As preparatory work, he completed twenty-eight drawings, twenty-eight panels, and three canvases full of sketches. After much deliberation, he depicted forty-eight people, three dogs, and eight boats in his gorgeous park setting. From a distance, the activity of people on land and off leads the viewer’s eye in all directions within the frame but doesn’t overwhelm. Yet Seurat was very mechanical when constructing this piece. “Some say they see poetry in my paintings,” Seurat said. “I see only science.”
When it debuted in 1884, critics and observers sneered at the so called pretentious characters in the scene and compared them to robots and tin soldiers. His techniques were widely rejected by the art world establishment until thirty years after his death in 1891, when he died of an undetermined disease at age thirty-one. In 1924, Frederic Clay, an avid art collector and lover, bought La Grande Jatte and loaned it indefinitely to the Art Institute of Chicago, where it still hangs. Sadly, but in a way sweetly, La Grande Jatte is among the most parodied of all time. Seen in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off , Family Guy , Sesame Street , The Simpsons , The Office , Looney Tunes , and even the subject of a Broadway musical, Sunday in the Park with George , Seurat brought his vision to life and it continues to enchant us.
SG
25. Tarquin and Lucretia (1578–80)
Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti) (1518–94)
Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti), Tarquin and Lucretia, 1578–80
Oil on canvas, 175 x 151.5 cm
Art Institute Purchase Fund (1949.203)
The Art Institute of Chicago
Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images
How do you capture the crackle of Tintoretto? Painter of perhaps
