INTRODUCTION
Alain Tapié
The close relationship between landscape painting— the dominant genre throughout the nineteenth century— and the art market suggests that Parisian centralism dictated both the choice of subjects and styles. It must nevertheless be acknowledged that landscape painting drew its origins from distinct geographical locations, at different moments in time.
From around 1825, when Romanticism began to emerge from literary and academic constraints, until 1885—when art dealers finally regained the financial foundations that allowed them to secure serial production of works by painters—the land, sky, and sea of Normandy asserted themselves through subjects in which the physics of nature corresponded to the physics of painting, in an often unexpected blending of laborious activity and leisure.
From 1850 to 1900 in the Île-de-France, around Paris, attention focused to the north on the banks of the Oise with the group of painters from L’Isle-Adam, characterized by elegiac inspiration and an atmosphere of harmonious vulnerability, and to the south in the Forest of Fontainebleau with the so-called Barbizon School. The latter remains at the margins of our narrative. Having formed earlier, it still bears the multiple traces of a picturesque literary spirit whose sense of measure, colored perspective rooted in the tradition of Dutch realism, and conceptual and ideological approach made it a reserve of freedom that nonetheless lay outside this new culture of expression characterizing landscape painting in modern art. Given its edifying and identity-driven intentions, the Barbizon group could easily be reflected in Théodore Rousseau’s statement of 1834: “I burn with the desire to accomplish the difficult task of restoring to the canvas an idea of the immensity that surrounds me, in order to spread its beneficial effects among those less fortunate than myself.”
The landscapes of the Île-de-France introduced major innovations in an unconstrained perception of the landscape. Brushwork and chromatic choices often benefited from bold solutions developed elsewhere and earlier, within the ferment of a wild and deeply rural nature. Along the banks of the Seine, games and leisure blended with emerging industrial activities. At the center stood Paris—its boulevards, its cafés, bustling crowds, singular figures strolling with nonchalance—far removed from sentiments and impressions mirrored in nature, giving rise to paintings that embodied the visual desires of their future buyers, images as swift as modern life itself. Just as the Norman scene transformed Romanticism into a physical substance with heroic qualities, the Île-de-France, through its capacity to forge a distinctly French identity, gave rise to a new political and social function of painting.
From 1870 to 1910, finally, the landscapes of Provence emerged, with L’Estaque, La Ciotat, and Mont Sainte-Victoire, masterfully dominated by Cézanne. Here it is not the brushstroke that vibrates, but color, and the subject finds its rightful place only through extreme sobriety. These three geographical sites, through the gift of their landscapes, thus constitute—each in different ways and at different times—the birthplaces of modern painting.
In representation, topographical features are certainly imbued with social realities. Yet the presence of these realities tends to dissolve within the deeply naturalistic treatment of the Norman landscape; it multiplies within the realist space of Parisian streets and rural outskirts; and it disappears within the formalist space of Provence. These three dynamics belong to the realm of aesthetic—or rather, sensory—perception of the world. They act as dominant tonalities, even as they circulate and contaminate one another across territories through the activity of painters who, in their relationship with the landscape, persist in bringing forth—well beyond mere impression—expression, whose energy enables the convergence of the artist’s expectations, the demands of the subject, and the plastic forces of the object.
Naturalism, realism, and formalism—like Romanticism—are characteristics that can merge with one another, and whose intensity varies according to the artist, the place, or the period. Naturalism represents over time—its exceptional effects already evident in the landscapes of Rubens—the exploitation of the “physical” component of natural models: grain, texture, the emergence of an inner light amid the confusion of elements—vegetal and mineral alike—or in the visual penetration of all surfaces offered to perception: transparencies, opacities, iridescences of fluids, organic developments of folds and layers, sediments and accidents presented by objects and bodies, in a relative detachment from the image as the primary site of meaning.
Realism, on the other hand, represents over time—as seen in the essential features of the art of van Eyck or Caravaggio—an attachment to the presentation of figures, objects, and spaces constructed through narrative or descriptive processes rather than conceptual ones, bearing social facts more than historical ones, rooted in immediacy rather than symbolic distance. The painting appears as a sequence that links the elements of the subject, highlighting their relationships. The often illusionistic model of these figures, objects, and spaces is based on principles of observation that do not submit to the rules and conventions established by the Academy.
Formalist aesthetics essentially aim to ground composition in the separation of planes, colored masses, and drawing. They uphold concept and allegorical message, tending to free the work of art from the painter’s expression in favor of pure visual sensation. Cézanne himself would use this expression in reference to his own research.a1.
1 A. Tapié, Peindre en Normandie, XIXe–XXe siècles, Conseil Régional de Basse-Normandie, Paris 2001, p. 13.
