Handbook of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts Part 11

In the White Bridge we sense the very essence of soft spring-time. The yellow-green of young gra.s.s and tender foliage gives the general tone of the painting. In the foreground, on the bank of a stream, a crooked tree reaches out its sappy young branches, which form, together with the latticed railing of an intimate white bridge, a delicate pattern against some evergreens behind. In the foreground on the quiet surface of the stream the reflection of the bridge forms a tracery in pale lilac.-The Martin B. Koon Memorial Collection.

[A Ray of Sunlight. John W. Alexander, 1857-1915.]

A Ray of Sunlight. John W. Alexander, 1857-1915.

A fine and characteristic example of the work of John W. Alexander, is A Ray of Sunlight. The appeal of the work is felt immediately. It represents a young woman playing a violincello. One can imaging emotional strains of Chopin. There is extraordinary breadth in the treatment of the musician's gown, yet the coa.r.s.e absorbent canvas gives a soft and interesting surface to the broad planes. The most lasting attraction of the picture is due to the artist's treatment of light. A soft, glowing, effulgence flows in from the right, and envelops the graceful figure, a direct ray falling across the forearm and reflecting in the polished surface of the instrument.

[River in Winter. Gardner Symons, 1861-]

River in Winter. Gardner Symons, 1861-

Gardner Symons, an important member of the modern group of American landscape painters, is fond of representing winter scenes with snow covering the ground and softening its contours. In River in Winter he has produced a cheerful scene, treated with much beauty of color. Late afternoon sunlight slants across the snow, casting rosy lights and violet shadows. Between spa.r.s.ely wooded banks, a river flows toward the spectator. In the distance are low opalescent hills beneath a transparent greenish sky.-The Martin B. Koon Memorial Collection.

It may be interesting to compare River in Winter by Symons with the painting in the same collection and bearing the same t.i.tle by Edward W.

Redfield. Redfield is a well known American painter noted for his winter landscapes. Our example of Redfield's work is highly characteristic.

Compared with Symons' painting, we find it less warm in color, characterized by a more brittle and restless handling of surfaces, and a less sedate and simple feeling for composition, but quite as convincing as a portrayal of nature.

[Garden in June. Frederick C. Frieseke, 1874-]

Garden in June. Frederick C. Frieseke, 1874-

Frederick Carl Frieseke is one of the most delightful among the younger American painters who revel in the sunlight of Impressionism. He studied at the Chicago Art Inst.i.tute, at the Art Students' League, and, in Paris, under Constant, Laurens and Whistler; but Claude Monet has been the important influence. Frieseke's interest is in the color effect of the things in his chosen field of vision, in the effect things make at a single glance upon an eye trained to see the transient color of shadows and of objects in sunlight. For the detailed study of form, he cares little; yet his drawing is adequate, and his spots of bright color are always worked together into a pleasing and balanced pattern, as we see it in the Garden in June.

Lately, a more diffused light and less dazzling color has appealed to Frieseke, and he has given us a series of lovely impressions of ladies at their various domestic pursuits. The painting ent.i.tled The Toilet in the Inst.i.tute's collection is an example of the later studies.-The Martin B.

Koon Memorial Collection.

[The Open Sea. Emil Carlsen, 1853]

The Open Sea. Emil Carlsen, 1853

The consummate workmans.h.i.+p of Emil Carlsen in covering a canvas with pigments gives the illusion of appealing to more senses than the sense of vision. The delicious handling of color and the creamy texture of his paint seem to tickle the palate and to please the finger tips. The Open Sea is the sea at its most alluring. A fair breeze gives the water vivacity without making it threaten. It seems friendly, with its subtle endless s.h.i.+fting of blues and pale greens; one's face welcomes the dash of spray from the crest of such a wave.

Emil Carlsen was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1853, and came to America in 1872. He studied architecture in his native city, but subsequently devoted himself to painting, in which he soon achieved unusual success.

He has received many awards and is represented in the Metropolitan Museum, the National Gallery in Was.h.i.+ngton, and other important collections.

A Woodland Interior in the Inst.i.tute's collection is another work by Carlsen, revealing similar charms to those found in The Open Sea.-The Martin B. Koon Memorial Collection.

[The Yellow Flower. Albert Reid, 1863-]

The Yellow Flower. Albert Reid, 1863-

The favorite subject of Robert Reid's study is the gracefully clad figure of woman, enveloped in the soft atmosphere of the studio or out of doors.

His treatment is purely decorative, and his color contrasts slight. He poses his model quietly, engaged in unpurposeful occupations such as gazing at a bowl of goldfish, dreaming before a bit of bright porcelain, or seated placidly in a meadow, as in The Yellow Flower. In this pleasing painting, the filmy blouse, the yellow skirt, the golden skin and hair almost melt into the yellowish green of the gra.s.s in which the figure is Placed.-The Martin B. Koon Memorial Collection.

A psychologist has pointed out somewhere that if it were not for the artists among us pointing out the beauties of landscape, very few of us would ever appreciate them. One finds no landscapes painted on Greek vases. The early European painters used landscapes only as backgrounds for portraits or religious subjects. Certainly there exist in nature charms of color in shadow, rich varieties of pure tone in sunlight which none of us suspected until the Impressionist painters insisted upon them.

[Midsummer. R. Sloan Bredin, 1881-]

Midsummer. R. Sloan Bredin, 1881-

In Midsummer by R. Sloan Bredin one finds not only an unusually pleasing piece of diagonal composition, not only a lyrical mood undisturbed by disharmony, but also a way of seeing things which, if we could make it a part of ourselves, would much enhance our own visual enjoyment of nature.

The beautiful play of color through the foliage of the big tree at the left of the ca.n.a.l, the subtle effects produced by the faint haze of a July noonday, the fresh tones of the nearer foliage drooping across the larger tree beyond, should prove a lesson as well as a joy.

[Night's Overture. Arthur B. Davies, 1862-]

Night's Overture. Arthur B. Davies, 1862-

One of the most personal and interesting painters in America today is Arthur B. Davies. His painting ignores the commonplaces and unessentials of life. "Never once does he wander from his dream, his vision," writes Samuel Isham. "His enchanted garden is not visited at rare intervals; it is not one of many resorts, it is his home, his retreat from which he never departs. It is a wonderful land of which he gives us glimpses-of flowery meadows and bosky groves peopled by youth and childhood." His visions are naive, tender, whimsical, often vaguely allegorical, sometimes a little unintelligible, but never trite nor sentimental. In his recent work he seems to tend more and more toward the unintelligible, as his love of the allegorical and the purely spiritual grows.

To Night's Overture much of these remarks may seem not to apply. Here is nothing of the naive, the whimsical, the allegorical. And yet this landscape is characteristic of Davies' art. It is a highly spiritualized and individual treatment of landscape, wonderfully decorative in color and arrangement, and highly endowed with feeling.-The Martin B. Koon Memorial Collection.

MODERN EUROPEAN PAINTINGS

To trace the history of painting in the XIX century in France, is to trace the main stem of its recent developments throughout the western world.

Germany has grafted something of her own national spirit upon the parent art forms of the French; England has contributed some original impulses; Holland and Spain have looked back to their own past as well as across to the contemporary painting of the French. Yet it is France, with her bewildering crowding in of new ideas and crowding out of old, which during the past century, has led the way in painting, and in the opening of the XX century continues to lead.

In the beginning of the XIX century, the longing of intellectual France for a return to the poise and civic virtues of republican Rome had found its visual expression in the cla.s.sical paintings of David (1748-1825) and Ingres (1780-1867). The beginnings of Romanticism are seen in the paintings of Gros, who dared to paint his characters in clothes more modern than the toga. Gericault and Delacroix (1799-1863) completed the development in their impa.s.sioned color and movement and their searching out of romantic and exotic subject matter.

A group of mid-century artists who combined many of the qualities of the Cla.s.sic and Romantic schools included Cabanel, Lefebvre, Bouguereau and Gerome. The military painters, Meissonier, Detaille, and de Neuville, might conveniently be grouped with them, they alike treating romantic subjects in a precise and academic manner. Reflections of this group in Germany are seen in Piloty, Menzel and Max; in Great Britain in Alma-Tadema, Leighton and Orchardson. Such painters as these expressed the Academic att.i.tude with which, from 1850 to 1885, the ideas of the Barbizon painters, the Realists, the rising Impressionists, and, in England, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (unrelated to any Continental movement) had to compete.

The Barbizon School, including Rousseau, Corot, Millet, Daubigny, Troyon, and others, owed much to the Dutch landscape painters of the XVII century and to the influence of the Englishman Constable (1776-1837), who had gone directly to nature and represented what he saw with a fidelity rare since the time of Ruisdael and Hobbema. The spirit of this group inspired Mauve and Jacob Maris in Holland, while Israels was influenced rather by the old Dutch masters of figure painting.

Modern Impressionism is a mixture of two streams of influence. One arose in the direct vision of Courbet, and the realistic painting of enveloping atmosphere as invented by Velasquez and rediscovered by Manet. The other stream springs from the poetic impressionistic methods of Corot and the fiery Turner. Influenced by these two currents, Monet and Renoir produced the high-keyed externality of Luminism, which has strongly affected contemporary American painters; while in Europe, Degas, p.i.s.sarro, Sisley, Sorolla, Zuloaga, Zorn and Liebermann have drawn in varying degrees from the same two streams. Defying all cla.s.sification, stands the one great decorator of the century, Puvis de Chavannes; while initiating the most modern art movement are Cezanne, Gauguin and Matisse, who revolt against objectivism, and strive in visual forms to express the abiding verities.

[Landscape. Georges Michel, 1763-1843]

Landscape. Georges Michel, 1763-1843

To those who asked him why he did not go to Italy for his subjects, Georges Michel would answer: "The man who can not find enough to paint during his whole life in a circuit of four miles is in reality no artist."

This artistic creed was nothing less than revolutionary at that time, in the early days of the XIX century, when the landscape painter regarded nature as unworthy of his brush unless it was bedecked with ancient temples and peopled with G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses, or at least suggested Italy or some distant land. Georges Michel lived on the heights of Montmartre in Paris. He walked out into the country and painted what he saw. His landscapes are actual studies of nature painted in the open air. As one of the first painters of paysage intime, Michel was a forerunner of Rousseau and the men of 1830. His narrow, subdued scheme of color establishes his relations.h.i.+p with the great Dutch masters of the XVII century. In France, however, his was pioneer work; he did not cater to the popular demand, and it was not until the World Exhibition in 1889 that his genius was generally recognized.-Gift of James J. Hill.

[Child with Cherries. Gillaume Adolphe Bouguereau, 1825-1905]

Child with Cherries. Gillaume Adolphe Bouguereau, 1825-1905