The Physics of Nature, the Physics of Painting
Alain Tapié
The acceleration of social and cultural change in the West at the end of the eighteenth century found, in the art of painting, a sufficiently new and eloquent translation to revive an economy of the image that—under Neoclassicism—seemed to have capitulated before literary hegemony. That hegemony had come to resemble a factory of illustrated quotations, preserved and recovered through phenomenal technical virtuosity, to the point of imposing itself— with the help of Winckelmann— as the assured representation of the ancient ideal. Neoclassical artists could not simultaneously construct and sustain a universal system—neo-academicism and its values as expressed in the Salons—while also wishing for the development of a free and limited art market, whose natural tendency is to favor artistic singularities. The Romantic current, combining literary citation with the efforts of the artist’s personal imagination, would permeate all nineteenth-century painting through compromises with academism, an enchanted distrust of realism, and deep complicity with naturalism. A startling Romantic passion that still marks the field of History, simulates religious inspiration, and manipulates the actions of heroes, even as it already yields to Impressionist ardors and languors.
Jules Castagnary wrote in 1857: “Art changes from time to time in its subject and in its object; in its subject, as the traditional spirit gradually fades before the individual’s free inspiration; in its object, because interpretation—of both man and nature—slowly replaces divine myth and historical epics.”¹ The critic delivered his verdict late, long after reality had already asserted itself through facts. In the 1830s, man and his activities had won a wide place among painters’ subjects of interest, and this would remain so until the peak of the period called “Impressionist,” after 1874. Nature, and the dynamic force of its elements, had begun to deregulate and recombine space from the end of the eighteenth century onward, within the circle of English watercolorists, because nature predisposes both to the undiscipline of gesture and the wandering of feeling—despite a strong tendency toward precise notation, more descriptive than narrative, inherited from the Dutch tradition of the seventeenth century.
In those same years, the Romantic source did not run dry. On the contrary, it assumed new forms, drawing from the depths of painting itself, feeding on realist accents abundantly redistributed across the canvas, far removed from the use of linear structures better suited to narrative forms. In their letters or notebooks, painters frequently evoked sensations and impressions of nature and of life’s facts that they sought to free from picturesque notation—the traveler’s mnemonic that helps fix an atmosphere. They supplied art critics with materials that would later make it possible to formulate a theory of these perceptions. It was not yet a time when the formulation of an artistic theory could anticipate and directly influence artistic production. Baudelaire’s theorization of modern life, beginning in 1858, “competed” with the activity of the painters he knew. Their circles used the terms “realism” and “naturalism” interchangeably. Émile Zola said to Edmond de Goncourt: “Yes, it’s true, I mock this word, naturalism, as much as you do; nevertheless I will repeat it incessantly, because we must give things a name so that the public will believe they are new.”² Twenty years earlier, Champfleury had declared: “As for realism, I consider it one of the best jokes of the age […]. Realism is as old as the world, and in every period there have been realists; but by constantly using this word, critics have obliged us to use it.”³
To recognize that art history can, depending on the period, manifest a dominant sensibility influenced by an aesthetic current—Romanticism, realism, naturalism—does not prevent us from understanding these currents as combinations of components that merge, whose intensity varies according to the artist, the place, and the time. Realism, for its part, represents over time an attachment to the presentation of figures, objects, and spaces constructed through narrative or descriptive processes rather than conceptual ones, bearers of facts more than of History, reproduced most often in a sequence of subjects, translated through an illusionistic model whose overall composition tends to free itself from plastic conventions and to rely instead on principles of observation.
English watercolorists, strategists of the local image
Naturalism and realism express two aesthetic visions that would find, in nineteenth-century society, the most mature expression of their twinship and complementarity—partly thanks to the dialectical and conflictual relationships they maintained with the other two major currents of Western tradition: classicism and academism. This revives, on a broader scale, the dispute between drawing and color inaugurated in the seventeenth century by Roger de Piles within the Academy. The hegemonic ambitions of Neoclassicism, with drawing as a tool for conquering illusion, reignite a conflict all the more vivid insofar as, at the end of the eighteenth century, official painting—history scenes and portraits—became more narrative than ever, almost literal description. The historian might hope that the duel between drawing and color, embodied by their respective champions Ingres and Delacroix, would guide the evolution of painting. The evolution, however, would take place through subject matter. Whether maintaining ancient forms or moving toward new plastic sensibilities, painters now increasingly favored the representation of the present: the present of history, of portraiture, of interior scenes, of picturesque description, and above all of landscape—since landscape became the representation of their thought and their state of mind.
Insidiously, the hierarchy of genres folded back on itself as painters ventured outside the academic institution. Landscape, until then last among the genres, found itself in a strong position in the practice of painters who sought in the vision of the present the manifestation of an absolute that is at once immediate, limitless, and—paradoxically—atemporal. Let us cite Alexander and John Robert Cozens, Thomas Girtin, John Sell Cotman, Constable and Turner, Richard Bonington, Louis Francia, Georges Michel, Camille Corot, Eugène Isabey, Paul Huet, Charles Daubigny, and Gustave Courbet when he painted in Normandy. They opened the way to Impressionism, creating in the public a new desire: to find in nature the mirror of the soul. This was an irresistible attraction rather than an act of will, since, in the first half of the century, nature—largely shaped by humans yet still wild due to the force, vitality, and fleeting singularity of the elements that animate it—compelled the gaze to probe it deeply. The dominance of drawing diminished with the disappearance of buildings, temples, and ancient ruins, progressively replaced by topographical peculiarities, anecdotes of everyday life, and sites that mark human activity—roads, bridges, paths, carts, fountains, groves, boats, and sails. As for prestigious buildings and their ruins, attention turned to those that glorified a truthful rather than mythical past, contributing to the feeling of the sublime through a nostalgia born of individual experience. Gradually, in the tentative and accidental search for silence or power in natural settings, the great empty and solitary expanses appeared in landscape—where sky, sea, fields, light, hills reign—as if each were, in itself alone, the landscape.
Having subjected various objects and subjects to the laws of nature’s expression, painters had to invent—each expressing a preference for a picturesque fragment or for a specific element—a phenomenological approach, an incredibly intuitive personal technique nourished by perceptual insight, in order— as the philosopher would summarize it— to describe the thing in itself outside any conceptual construction, and to discover its essence in any domain, whether geological, meteorological, social, psychological, or purely poetic. Sea or sky—one immensity is as good as another—soon imposed themselves as privileged realms. They remained foreign to the Western conception of pictorial space ordered by mathematical perspective, which, in representing a viewpoint, relies on solids with firm angles and precise profiles, on clear models (palaces, castles, arches, temples, pavements) that frame nature within regulating lines so as to reduce it to a secondary role in the balance of colors.⁴ These observations do not apply to Dutch landscape painters, who worked in the spirit of atmospheric perspective, through gradations of volumes and the fading of values within chromaticism. The sea and sky painted in the classical era are, as Lucien Lepoittevin notes, rebellious to linear, perspectival illusionism: “The art of painting rejects water and the sea, difficult to insert into aesthetic schemes that leave little room for the infinite and the indefinite, for objects and notions that do not fit into rational concepts explaining a universe regulated like a divinely inspired mechanism.”⁵ Alain Corbin adds: “There is no sea in the Garden of Eden; the liquid horizon on whose surface the eye loses itself cannot be integrated into the closed landscape of paradise. To want to penetrate the mysteries of the ocean is to brush against sacrilege; it is like wanting to enter the unfathomable nature of the divine.”⁶ For nineteenth-century landscape painters it would be enough to free intuitive gesture before a nature whose wild character had not yet been altered by human activity, to plunge into meteorological, geological, organic truths and elevate them to the status of subjects in painting.
Thus, from Turner to Monet, the painting of impressions in the nineteenth century is the painting of nature—once drawing and color have been absorbed—of textures, transparencies, and grain that pass freely from portrait to landscape, to still life, to city. Everything would have begun in an England that turned its back on Flemish and Dutch inspiration to embrace naturalism, Italian fashion, and particularly Venetian influences—a mixture of melancholy and irony. From Naples came the vortices of a Baroque landscape seen at a distance by the watercolorist John Robert Cozens, who would pass them on to Thomas Girtin, Joseph Turner, and John Constable. Tourist exchanges between England and Venice encouraged the development of a typically English veduta that would not have disowned the solidity of Dutch panoramas. Local identity was enough to create a subject whose sincerity came from the fact that technique adapted precisely to intention. Watercolor aimed at the immediate translation of fleeting effects, to the point of making one forget the motif that served as pretext. John Cotman and Joseph Turner are considered masters of this art, but it was above all Girtin who perfected the principle, with virtually no preparatory drawing. A few microscopic strokes of watery paint evoke a tree or a house. Large washes of diluted color establish the atmosphere. The juxtaposition of marks made en plein air on the motif is so rapid that no thought accompanies it; only feeling passes through the hand, as if the project became purely gestural. The moment when technique plays with medium and support marks a fundamental change in the artistic field: “an art without any real content of thought, without practical, didactic, or moral utility; an art that carries no historical reminiscence, that sings the glory of God only by transposition.”⁷ Benefiting from this suspension, this provisional absence of genre and subject, feeling finds its expression as much in execution as on the surface.
With the end of hostilities between France and England and the Peace of Amiens in 1802, Normandy—departure point for picturesque travel, but above all a land of necessary and indispensable experiences for all those who, coming from across the Channel and from Paris, wished to surrender to the expressive riches of nature and make it an instrument for interpreting the soul—offered a palette of diverse subjects, appealing both to the simple illustrator of folklore and monuments and to the artist who wished to portray nature’s harshness in epic clashes of the elements, pushing artists toward a true expressionism. The link between the two worlds was forged through the illustrations of Architectural Antiquities of Normandy, published in London in 1822, and the Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France by Baron Taylor, begun in 1820, to which, among others, Boys, Isabey, and above all Bonington would contribute for Normandy. The latter, through what Henri Lemaître called his “picturesque Impressionism,” had considerable influence on Huet and Corot. He was the painter of transparency and values defined as “of movement” by the historian Bernard Berenson, while Constable, for his part, brought a Baroque treatment to paint handling and brushwork. The Salon of 1824 in Paris remains famous for the presentation of his The Hay Wain, a solid composition built with color. He had almost insidiously reestablished the realist device of Dutch landscape and at the same time invented the vibration of color through a fragmentation of brushstrokes made of pure tones.
In Normandy: landscape and the physics of the elements
The question of regionalism in painting arose in the nineteenth century as a result of two phenomena: the disappearance of the natural microcosms that had constituted the provinces under the Ancien Régime, and the advent of an idea of nature that left the philosophical sphere to find its roots concretely in the study of the territory’s morphology and human activities. The identity of a region was henceforth recognized through perception and evaluation of its natural qualities. Nature, region, identity of provincial schools: let us consult the art historian Philippe de Chennevières. In 1847 he affirmed that painting is always linked to its territory of reference, recalling that “almost all the great artists of the French school were born in the provinces; there they had their artistic revelation, and there they learned their craft.”⁸ The historian not only identifies the provinces as one of the places of artistic production, but is animated by a highly modern conviction: that there exists an inevitable, organic bond between painting and places, as if every text, every expression possessed its own vernacular substratum. In the case of painters of old France, Chennevières referred, as regards nature, to the evocation of light and colors.
When Chennevières was writing, Huet and Isabey, following Bonington, were already digging into the matter and texture of Norman landscapes in order to discover, in nature, the other side of mimesis. The richness of these intuitions extends, beyond the notion of cultural milieu and the role of nature, to the capacity of local painters to transform their own individual inventions and discoveries into universal motifs of painting. One may understand the evolution from the picturesque to the sublime by citing, after Turner, the itinerary of Bonington who—from his topographical watercolors made in Sheffield and Nottingham, where he taught between 1808 and 1815—gradually brought forth in the landscape, thanks to those traits of modernity that Baudelaire said he embodied, “intimacy, spirituality, color, and aspirations toward infinity.” Bonington, more than anyone, animates the movement from the meticulous realism encountered in the Voyages pittoresques to the imagination of the subject. The discovery of a detailed heritage inscribed in nature’s organic life, the persistence of living provincial traditions bearing brutal medieval truth, woven into the network of lanes and paths leading to the castle, the thatched-roof house, or the church, provided the artist with an environment of strong flavors and colors that encouraged the true and sincere impression of which, a hundred years later, Proust would in turn become a theorist.
The narrative of modernity unfolds through Baudelaire as through Ruskin. The theoretical vision follows step by step the artistic vision. And thus, for Ruskin, the real world, accepted in all its states whatever their quality or beauty, allows to emerge—through the tireless and physical pursuit of a truth of perception—an “elevation of the spirit produced by contemplating the greatness of all things,”⁹ which he calls “the sublime.” This listening to nature’s rhythm in discovering its microcosmic organicity, this ability to represent simultaneously the inventions in “nature’s dictionary and the way of feeling them,” seems to Baudelaire to be generated directly by the theorists of German Romanticism who, in 1799, published Wilhelm Schlegel’s “extraordinary pictures” in the Athenaeum. With this text, Schlegel opens two decisive fields for defining modernity. In a dialogue whose form is still steeped in neoclassical iconography, Waller declares to Louise: “All plastic art falls within the realm of the organic or the mathematical. In other words, either it brings out in created forms the inner unity that animates them, or it calculates their proportions according to developed rules.”¹⁰ Applied to landscape, the first part of this observation helps us understand that truth in the work is first and foremost physical. Even if destroyed by the preeminence of contours and formal organization, the landscape opens to time and infinity, because hierarchies between the center and the edges of the painting disappear. The practice of the feeling of infinity, associated with the most refined perceptions of textures in a landscape representation grasped as a framed slice of nature, defines exactly—through the movement between universal and local—the experience of the sublime as Romanticism was able to feel it. With the modern landscape dreamed by Schlegel, Ruskin, Baudelaire, Proust, and revealed—body and soul—by painters, the camera obscura disappears, having “no longer the eloquence of nature and not enough of that of the work of art.”¹¹
All natural phenomena in Normandy open themselves to the image, and all its images—grove, river, human activity, sea—abandon themselves to painting. Bonington, then Isabey, Paul Huet, Jongkind, and Boudin reveal the raw lyricism of Norman nature that destroys the postcard-picturesque image. Boudin’s famous phrase returns like an echo: “The Romantics have had their day. We must now seek the simple beauties of nature. […] Make the blue burst forth.” It is also Ruskin’s program, who, in his instinctive perception of painting, had foreseen its metaphorical power, its capacity to become nothing other than itself beyond its subject. What Ruskin theorized in his dialogue with the sky already appeared painted in his mind, since he defined cloudiness as the mobility of painting-nature.
Landscape has become a historical monument. It has preserved the image of prestigious buildings, characteristic dwellings, ruins heavy with nostalgia; it has made represented nature a reservoir of forms and values; it is the guardian of know-how and styles inscribed in an immediate history through the play of official Salons and exclusions. In this space, as in the time of all mannerisms, the boundary remains the essential search and the flight from civilized nature toward wilder shores: a myth repeated daily. And thus the sea and its shores inhabit painters like borderless mirrors that sometimes receive the subtle, transparent touch, sparing of matter and color, organized around two strokes that separate earth, sea, and sky wrapped in all the primal sensations of vapor, heat, humidity, and cool wind—until the painter’s and viewer’s gaze sees the desire for rest transformed into the desire for other shores; at other times they receive the firm, solid, constructed touch, cut into the roughness of stones, mortar, and stubble, kneaded into the viscosity of heaps of stones and the whirlwinds of icy wind—until the painter’s and viewer’s gaze sees the desire for storm transformed into the desire for other shores.
The genius of Normandy—used here in Littré’s sense: a natural disposition for certain things—aroused in painters who lived there, or in those who frequented it, the need to go beyond the picturesque while relying on the subject’s inner reality. With the field thus cleared, they paint the color of time: a time belonging only to these places, contained in certain identifiable and inimitable lights, universal and mystical like a biblical moment. In what determines Norman identity, there is no will to belong to an environment, no corporatist overdetermination; there are voices that come from the heart, like that of Jean-François Millet—“how I feel in my place!”—or that of Albert Lebourg who, rediscovering Normandy’s “full harmony,” noted “the time lost before things and countries not made to be painted.” So many individual personalities, developed in the secrecy and humility of studios, realize Philippe de Chennevières’ thought: the universal is born from the particular. Not to imitate nature as one copies truth, but to seize nature as a reserve of singular truth. The relationships between the Norman coast and painting surpass the question of regional painting, because Normandy emanates an identity rebellious to the size and framing of the image. To paint in the depths of Normandy means, according to Barbey d’Aurevilly, to paint outside one’s time—without remaining tied to a superficial image of nature.
(Testo molto lungo: se vuoi, posso continuare la traduzione nello stesso registro mantenendo note e riferimenti invariati, oppure farne una versione “editoriale” più scorrevole per catalogo/sito.)
