AS PHENOMENOLOGY: SOME REFLECTIONS ON IMPRESSIONISM AND ITS PROGENY.
Art as Phenomenology:
Some Reflections on Impressionism and its Progeny
[august 2004]
Cezanne Blue Vase
Matisse Carmelina
What really made artists
like Cezanne, Picasso and Matisse so important is that they pushed open a
freshly opened door—they realised and exhaustively explored the fact
that any picture can be reduced to a merel mass of textured shapes of
colour—or shapes of textured colour—and once any visual view is
translated into such a perspective, and regarded in this way, one merely
needs [the artist’s task is] to recreate the particular aggregation or
patchwork of textured and coloured shapes in order to depict the scene in
question. To an extent, this attitude is implicit to most Impressionism
and later, this same impulse opened the door to abstract art.
Picasso Self Portrait 1906
This was a breakthrough
in art because it meant that the focus then fell mostly on creating
pictures as composites of shape and colour rather than on painting ‘things,’
which are not real as separate things anyway, but which can be
legitimately deconstructed into mere aggregations of shape, colour and
texture in our world. They are not really ‘things’ in the normally
accepted sense, but are simply discontinuities against a background.
This new viewpoint
constituted a transformation of art, which became liberated from its
previous heavy reliance upon formal strictures of light and shade ‘rules’
and the strict formalities of ‘how to paint things.’ In this way,
impressionism had engendered a refreshingly phenomenological approach to
the visual arts, both in terms of seeing and in terms of painting the
world around us.
It is doubtful that many
earlier artists had fully appreciated these points, but had merely been
taught how to somewhat slavishly follow a set of rules on ‘how to paint,’
instead of actually looking at our world directly and experiencing it in a
raw, fresh, as-it-is manner and then trying to depict it in an as-is
fashion. It was impressionism that first opened the door to a more subtle,
fuzzy and fundamentally more phenomenological approach to art.
Cezanne: Mont
Sainte
Victoire
The crucial change of
attitude is that the ‘new artist’ no longer needs to sit down to paint a
portion of this world—a group of objects in light, shade and colour that
conforms to human rules and expectations—but can merely compose any
arrangement of shapes, colours and textures on the canvas with no rules
governing the process at all. ‘Paint what you see’ had finally been taken
literally and can be seen as the motto of the entire movement.
Monet Haystacks
This radically new
approach is perhaps most vividly apparent in Cézanne’s landscapes and
even in some of his still lifes, where a mere patchwork of textures
coloured shapes is worked into a picture, upon which the eye and mind can
rest and gradually unravel shapes and forms, perspective, etc in the
normal way. This process can also be seen in Cézanne’s many studies of
Mont St Victoire, and in Monet’s soft studies of haystacks and Rouen
Cathedral under varying lighting conditions.
Monet Rouen Cathedral
This new art reveals
what we do when we look at a real landscape—the new artist has recreated
the same visual process, the same mental process of discernment that we
engage in when looking at our world. The nature and functioning of our
vision means that we see both a blurred background of forms and colours
and also individual ‘things’ placed upon that background; we see both. But
in the older formalised art, all things are depicted as things rather than
in a blur. Thus, it was a deficient and inaccurate system in certain
respects.
Sisley – The Saint-Martin Canal.
1872
Impressionism
sought, in its way, to correct those deficiencies by using a blurred and
fuzzy way of depicting everything, not just backgrounds, but including
also ‘things’ themselves; a blurring of shape borders became acceptable.
Matisse and Picasso then took this all a stage further into distortion of
shape and colour and greater abstraction. Yet, even with them, there
remains the same basic approach as that of Cezanne and Monet, Sisley,
Seurat, etc.
This new form of art
attempts not to project onto the visual world our innate assumptions and
preconceptions about ‘things,’ but to take the visual world more or less
on its own raw and fresh terms and to recreate portions of it in paint in
a direct manner, or to mutate parts of it as required according to one’s
own subjective perception and interpretation.
Seurat – Rainbow (study for
Bathers at Asnières), c. 1883
Inevitably, some of this
transformation of art was driven by instinct in an unconscious and
undeliberate manner. In another sense also it was partly also undertaken
in a conscious and deliberate way, especially by many of the intellectuals
of the day.
G W F Hegel
To some, it was
undoubtedly primarily an instinctive reaction to and rebellion against the
suffocative old methods and a natural yearning for the fresh air and
greener pastures of innovation—of new ideas and techniques. To a tiny
minority of mostly intellectuals, it was probably a more conscious
rebellion with deeper philosophical roots as well as a strong current of
instinctive development.
The same
attitude that refused to accept language [words as things] as the sole
shaper of our intellectual world [our knowledge] was also prone to
challenge the notion that a person can be separated out as a distinct
entity from the wider socio-cultural nexus into which they were born and
in which they are inextricably embedded for life. This attitude can be
seen as owing something to Hegel, by acknowledging the holistic
interconnectedness of all things.
Edmund Husserl
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The same attitude
reveals the world not as composed of ‘things,’ but that there are many
interconnected discontinuities and heterogeneities resident upon a
broader, deeper more homogeneous background or ground substance, from
which no single separate ‘thing’ can be successfully extricated or
demarcated.
Chardin – Self Portrait
Thus, in art, as in
philosophy and social science the realisation dawned that we merely
observe a broad canvas within which seemingly different ‘things’ reside
that are ever-changing and mutating. The artist, informed with this new
approach, implicitly does not sit down to paint a view containing
‘things,’ but composes his/her own impression of this fleeting moment,
this flux of forms, composed only of coloured and textured shapes,
arranged according to nature or rearranged according to the will, whim and
tastes of the artist.
Eugène Boudin – Trouville
– 1864.
Constable Brighton Beach with
Colliers, 1827
Therefore, one might
imagine that the impressionists in their own way, and in stark contrast to
fragmentary science, echoed the views of Husserl in philosophy and
culture, and Wittgenstein in linguistic philosophy—that the world is not
composed of things, but that all aspects of a broader canvas are
interconnected and that this interconnectedness dominates any fertile real
thinking about man and the world, not seeing things as separate parts of a
mechanical toy, as reductionist science would certainly have us believe.
Corot – Rome:
The church of Trinità dei Monti
Seen from the Valley of Trinità dei Monti – 1826-28.
Therefore, as we can
plainly see, the artists since about 1900 have not been inclined to draw
outlines of objects and ten ‘colour them in’ as their predecessors would,
but to take paint and pastel directly and depict with colour the world in
front of them in a fresh and direct manner.
Turner, King’s College Chapel,
Cambridge
Producing a mosaic of
coloured shapes is a closer approximation to genuine artistic activity and
the product—a patchwork of shapes and colours—is a closer
approximation to the visual world around us—for objects are not crisply
delineated ‘things,’ but are merely elements within a wider fabric that is
the landscape.
These ideas can
be seen quite clearly in the works of Corot, Sisley, Pissarro, Monet,
Boudin and Gaugin, and even to some degree in Turner, Chardin and
Constable and it is a technique and attitude that was then progressed much
further by Cezanne, then by Picasso and Matisse.
Steiner Goetheanum
Gaudi, Barcelona Cathedral
In all these artists,
‘things,’ shadows, light, shade and background tend to blend into each
other in a natural fashion just as they do in the real world. This
approach is not confined to landscape and has been successfully extended
into the traditionally crisper and more discrete terrain of still life and
portraiture.
Rudolph Steiner
This attitude also finds
some resonance in the smooth, curved and ‘organic’ architecture of
Steiner and Gaudi, where more organic blurred and rounded forms have
ousted the sharp linearity and squares of mathematical ‘science’.
A small minority of
artists in any epoch probably knew that a landscape is merely a collection
of various shapes, colours and textures, but the key point about
impressionism is that it signalled the time when artists not only began to
see the world anew but also to act on that perception. Thus, although it
is claimed that Constable, Turner, Boudin and Chardin were using
impressionist techniques 50 years before the movement broke out, yet they
did not start a movement, but were just precursors of it and back to whom
the main methods of the movement can be traced.
Pissarro, The Road to
Louveciennes. 1872
Corot, Florence. View from the
Boboli Gardens.
Rather than the
tradition of drawing outlines of ‘things,’ and colouring them in, they
acted upon the view they held and painted blobs of colour they could see
and hence an impression of the landscape was created rather than
hard-edged outlines of ‘things’ that make up the view. This radical new
approach is clearly visible in Monet, Sisley, Corot, Seurat and most other
true impressionists. It is therefore just as much an idea, a way of
seeing, as it is a technique.
This radical departure
from tradition is so subtle and yet so absolute in its view of the visual
world around us. It basically refuses to accept that the world is composed
of ‘things’ each to be separately delineated, but rather, it holds that
there is just one extensive ‘colour continuum’ that is interrupted in
places here and there by discontinuities where the different ‘forms’
appear in it.
Sisley, Le Couple – Environs de
Louveciennes 1873
Thus, according to this
new perspective, the object, its shadow and the background and sky are no
longer conceptually—in the artist’s mind—seen as separate distinctive
entities, but are joined up, as if fused together and so blending into one
another as part of a wider whole. Such a Hegelian view is both subtle and
radically new.
The pictures clearly
reflect a change in attitude and in style and hence a change in the
artist’s vision and perception of the world around us. Instead of the
precise, mathematical, scientific view of ‘things’ we see a mass of
blurred and fleeting colours that blend into each other and form an
impression of the world, upon which our eyes can rest and explore and so
find things in due course, after much looking and exploring.
Sisley, Sand on the Quayside, Port
Marly. 1875
This shift brings art
closer to the actual visual process we employ when looking at the world
around us, especially for the first time in unfamiliar surroundings. We
look at and absorb an impression of the chaotic mass of image material
that hits us. We absorb only sufficient visual information required to get
by; we do not gaze at length at every single object around us
individually.
Eugène-Louis Boudin. The Beach at
Tourgéville-les-Sablons, 1893
Thus, impressionism
reveals a secret about the visual process that had previously been
undisclosed, a secret about the way we look and what we come to see in the
visual world around us. We see what we want to see and what culture has
taught us is there. This is largely predetermined by our own preferences
for certain shapes, colours, textures and subjects. But overall, it is
clear that impressionism is an advance on the previous tradition.