Constable, Duranty, Mallarmé, Impressionism, Plein Air, and Forgetting

Constable, Duranty, Mallarmé, Impressionism, Plein Air, and ForgettingAuthor(s): Joel IsaacsonSource: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Sep., 1994), pp. 427-450Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3046037 .

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Constable, Duranty, Mallarm6, Impressionism, Plein Air, and Forgetting

Joel Isaacson

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1 Paul Cezanne at work on the hill of Les Lauves, 1906. Photograph by Ker- Xavier Roussel (postcard: courtesy Atelier C6zanne, Aix-en-Provence)

One of the most revealing documents of nineteenth-century art has come down to us in the form of a photograph (Fig. 1). In this photograph we see the sixty-seven-year-old painter Paul C6zanne working in the open air, a practice in which he had engaged for more than thirty years, since the early 1870s, when he began to paint the landscape in the company of his friend and mentor Camille Pissarro. The momentary record of a lifetime's work is encapsulated in this striking image.

C6zanne, dressed in paint-stained suit and tie, stands

poised, brush in hand, before a canvas placed on an easel, set outdoors in an area close to his studio in Aix-en-Provence.' In his left hand he holds his palette; a can, most likely filled with turpentine to clean his brushes, hangs from the easel below the canvas. The canvas, angled to avoid the glare of the sun, tilts toward him, as if in response to his tensed body, which leans forward as he prepares to place a stroke upon its surface. His right hand and the brush that it holds are seen in

sharp focus, suggesting that he has stopped momentarily before actually applying the stroke, a suspension of movement consonant with the slight leftward turn of the head, directed out toward the distant landscape that is his subject. The searching gaze and the poised brush are one; only when his visual scrutiny of the landscape is satisfied and he returns his eyes to the canvas will the brush move forward and the act be completed. It is a single act in a lifetime of such acts, the carefully orchestrated movements of hand and eye having been repeated thousands and thousands of times. Which does not mean that it was an easy rhythm that had been established; the relationship between hand and eye might be at times fluid and harmonious, at others, halting and charged with a disruptive tension.

We cannot re-create that rhythm or that strain-those efforts at realization-but the photograph does tell us something about some of C6zanne's concerns. It tells us that he wanted to get itjust right, and about the difficulty of doing

This essay had its start in a talk given at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1987. I was particularly pleased to have in the audience George Heard Hamilton, whose Charlton Lecture Claude Monet's Paintings of Rouen Cathedral (Lon- don, 1960) stands for me as a stimulating precedent for the inquiry I make here. I also thank Matthew Rohn for his interest and support at that time. Subsequent versions of the paper were presented at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan. Some of the material was discussed in

two seminars at the University of Michigan, and I thank the graduate students in those classes, especially David O'Brien for the questions he raised and for his continuing interest in key aspects of the subject. In addition, I extend my gratitude to Frangoise Cachin and Richard Brettell for their help in obtaining color transparencies, and the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies at the University of Michigan for a Faculty Research Grant that provided needed funds for research and travel. 1. The photograph shows Cezanne at work on a painting of Mont Sainte-Victoire from a spot near

his studio in the area of Les Lauves, just above Aix. It is one of a group of three photographs, frequently reproduced, taken by K.-X. Roussel on the occasion of a visit with Maurice Denis to Cezanne in 1906. A painting by Denis done at the time depicts the easel in the center flanked by the three artists and with a conveniently incorporated view of Mont Sainte-Victoire in the distance. See J. Rewald, Paul CUzanne: A Biography, New York, 1986, 258-59. (Fig. 1 crops a portion of the sky from the original, nearly square format reproduced in Rewald.)



428 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1994 VOLUME LXXVI NUMBER 3

just that. It tells us about the means at his disposal-the brush loaded with paint-and about the extraordinary disparity between the natural world out there-an unbounded world-and the poor, niggardly confines of the little rect-

angle of canvas upon which his tools may be deployed. It is an image of great immediacy, but like all such images it tells

only part of the story. For the moment and the act revealed, as all moments and acts, are only a fragment of history, of

personal history and the history of world and culture that the artist inhabits.

C6zanne recognized that. As an artist he was keenly aware of the weight of history, of received knowledge, of tradition, and of the conventional language or languages of painting. To the younger artists who sought him out in his later years, he spoke of his wish to throw off the yoke of history, the burden of earlier paintings, and immerse himself in the moment of the photograph. He spoke, as did his contempo- raries, of painting only "what we see, forgetting everything that existed before us."2

Constable and Duranty

"Lorsque je m'asseois, le crayon ou le pinceau ' la main,

devant une sce'ne de la nature, mon premier soin est d'oublier quej'aiejamais vu aucune peinture."'

The statement is familiar-certainly to students of nineteenth-

century landscape painting, or to anyone who has read E. H. Gombrich's Art and Illuszon or the commentaries upon it since its publication in 1961-but it takes on a note of

strangeness as presented here in French. The passage, in this

form, appears toward the end of Edmond Duranty's La Nouvelle Peinture of 1876, one among a selection of aphorisms drawn by Duranty from the French translation of C. S. Leslie's Memoirs of the Life of John Constable.4 Duranty used Constable's words to sum up and reinforce some of the main

points that he had made earlier in his essay about the ideas and the historical position of the Impressionists at the time of their second group exhibition, which had opened in April of that year."5

Constable's remark about forgetting ("d'oublier que j'aie jamais vu aucune peinture") provides a link, across the entire nineteenth century, to the similar aim expressed by C6zanne one hundred years later. But Constable's desire takes on

particular importance as well in the year 1876, for it is also a

key concern of the poet and critic St~phane Mallarm6, whose

essay "The Impressionists and Edouard Manet," published later that summer, constitutes, along with Duranty's La

Nouvelle Peznture, the principal analysis of Impressionist aims at that relatively early stage in the development of the movement. Mallarme's essay coincides, in turn, more or less

exactly, with the emergence of a body of work, principally by Pissarro and Cezanne, that reveals, I believe, one of the most

probing and painstaking efforts to give form to the complex, epistemological, inquiry in which Impressionist painting was

engaged (see Figs. 7, 9-13).

Impressionist painting arose in a world of astonishingly rapid change, beset by a ceaseless play of conflicting aims and assessments. The immediate world of the painters was rent by competition between past and present, tradition and the new, imagination and realism, convention and originality, and rendered more uncertain still by the rise of new market arrangements and forms of patronage, and conse-

quent changes in artists' roles, products, and self-definitions.

Duranty's essay implicitly acknowledges these dynamic social

tensions, and his selections from Constable's Memozrs6 seem

carefully chosen to underscore his awareness of both the

currency of those tensions and their long historical emer-

gence. Through Constable, Duranty is concerned to establish a continuity of aim that goes back to the early nineteenth

century (and beyond that to Diderot, whom he cites as well),7 and so to construct a particular view of Impressionism, one that would establish its avant-garde tendencies within a long, explorative history.

Collectively, the Constable selections seem designed to reinforce Duranty's presentation, throughout the essay, of what he construes as the principal aims of the Impressionists. Following their order in Duranty's text, Constable's key points are:

1) Opposition to convention; anti-academicism; the need to free oneself from the examples of others, to find one's own

way. 2) Following from that, the wish to develop an original art

expressive of one's individuality, in preference to an art that adheres to received models (while recognizing that the latter,

being familiar, is more likely to bring ready success, whereas an art based on what one sees and feels in nature will be slow to gain favor with a public that prefers cleverness to wisdom and sincerity and is not ready for a new and bold approach to

nature). 3) Nature is the focus: nature contains nothing that is ugly,

nothing that warrants the distorting corrections of academic artists. The painter should approach nature humbly; arro-

gance will blind him to its beauty. It is in this context, one in which we find the artist gauging

his position in relation to nature and the conventions of art, that Duranty presents Constable's statement about forget-

2. Letter to Emile Bernard, Oct. 23, 1905. P. Cezanne, Correspondance, ed.J. Rewald, Paris, 1937, 276-77; Paul CUzanne: Letters, ed. J. Rewald, trans. M. Kay, 4th rev. and enl. ed., Oxford, 1976, 316

3. "When I sit down to make a sketch from nature, the first thing I try to do is, to forget that I have ever seen a picture" (see n. 10). 4. Gombrich, 174. E. Duranty, La Nouvelle Peznture, i propos du Groupe d'Artzstes quz expose dans les Galeries Durand-Ruel (Paris, 1876), ed. M. Gu6rin,

Paris, 1946, 52; in The New Pazntzng, 477-84, see 484 for epigraph (trans. with notes, 37-49, see 46). Hereafter, for ease of reference, I shall cite both the French and English texts in The New Pazntzng catalogue. Leslie, 279. Excerpts from Leslie's Mem- ozrs were translated into French from the second edition of 1845 as "Pensees d'un paysagiste," Maga- sin pzttoresque, xxImI, Aug. and Oct. 1855, 266-71, 342-43 (see 343), from which Duranty derived his

shorter selection of passages published as "Idles de Constable, peintre anglais," in his short-lived journal RMahsme, no. 2, Dec. 15, 1856, 29-30 (see 30); the article was signed L. Presurier, a pseudonym for

Duranty (see M. Crouzet, Un MWconnu du Rahlsme. Duranty, Paris, 1964, 26, n. 87, and 342). Duranty drew upon these selections twenty years later for La Nouvelle Peznture. The statement used as an epigraph to this section appeared in each instance.



PLEIN AIR AND FORGETTING 429

ting he has ever seen a picture, about throwing off the

ascendancy of earlier painting. That expression is consistent with Constable's other prescriptions, all directed against inherited formulas and aimed toward an uncontaminated and individualized approach to nature. Constable's words sum up and confirm the message that Duranty conveys throughout his essay, a message he supports through citations from other artists and writers along the way: Eugene Fromentin, Lecoq de Boisbaudran, Diderot, and Emile Zola.

La Nouvelle Peznture begins by quoting several paragraphs from Eugene Fromentin's article on Realism, which had

appeared only a few months earlier in the Revue des Deux Mondes of February 15, 1876. Duranty's aim seems to be to take Fromentin's essay, which was a strong attack on Realism from Courbet to the new group of Impressionists, and turn it to his own ends. Duranty may have cited Fromentin at

length, however, because he valued the quality of Fromen- tin's analysis even if he disagreed with his position. Fromen- tin's comprehensive view of Realism recognizes, albeit with distaste or faint praise, a number of broad categories of Realist effort and accomplishment: he cites the painters' turn to the open air, their insistence on direct perception; their

opposition to convention and the play of imagination; their search for truth in the experience of everyday ("the sensation of what is seen in the street"). The result, in their work, has been: "from dark, the colors are becoming light, black is

turning to white, depth rises again to the surface, the fluid becomes rigid, the glossy becomes mat, and chiaroscuro

gives way to the effects ofJapanese prints.""8 The remainder of Duranty's essay is devoted to developing

and going beyond Fromentin's analysis, turning it from

negative to positive, from dark to light. He undercuts Fromentin's distrust of the contemporary by lampooning his

predilection as a painter for depicting "contemporary Ar- abs" and launches into an attack upon Orientalism, histori- cism, pastiche, and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, in which he enlists the aid of Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, citing Lecoq's critique of the self-perpetuating routines of the Ecole, which result only in fostering a nation of imitators. Where in that setting is there room, Lecoq asks, for "the naive, the sincere, and the natural"? Further on, in his discussion of drawing, Duranty cites the "great" Diderot, "who established the zdeal of modern drawing, that is, drawing from nature, based on observation." And at the end of his essay Duranty turns to Zola's early defense of Manet, in which he called for a marriage of nature and temperament, science and observation, and an end--consistent with Lecoq's and Duranty's own appeals-to the tyranny of convention as embodied in the Greek ideal.9

Duranty makes use of these several predecessors to reinforce his own view of the value of new ideas, freedom and

originality, the importance of nature, observation, and an immersion in the texture of everyday life. He stresses the

necessity of plein-air practice and new subjects that embrace the contemporary in all its irregularity and fortuitousness. The Impressionist accomplishment he sums up under the

headings of a new method of color and drawing and a gamut of original points of view that succeed in altering the conventions of perspective-based composition: color-based on science and close observation and a recourse to noncon- ventional models, such as Japanese prints; drawing-based on the observation of nature, of the familiar, through which human beings would be captured expressively in their actions and integrated with their settings; new modes of composition-deriving from new angles of vision, a mobile

reinterpretation of the perspective window on the world and of the role of the frame, resulting in fortuitous croppings, groupings, imbalances. By such means, the new art, based in nature and observation, is seen to have been realized.

Duranty presents the excerpts from Constable's Memoirs

nearly at the end of La Nouvelle Peznture, and, as such, they serve to reiterate the main points of the essay. Included

among Constable's statements is the plaintive remark with which I introduced this section: "When I sit down to make a sketch from nature, the first thing I try to do is, to forget that I have ever seen a picture."'0 It works to condense metonymi- cally the entire complex of factors concerning the Impression- ists' relation to the world, the stance they had chosen and

pursued doggedly, and often despite themselves, as they discovered that the search for an understanding and a vision and a way of working that made sense to them also set them

against tradition, the Ecole, convention, and the expectations and demands of the public. Constable's statement

speaks, in effect, of a shucking-off of custom, of inherited schemata, of history, and language-of those imperious ascendancies over mind and hand that constituted the intellectual and artisanal culture the painters inhabited. To

"forget" that culture was a way to escape it or go beyond it. One way to do so, as Constable said, was by returning directly to nature, nature as guide, as the domain of innocence and

truth; only by such a path might they attain the goal that had been proclaimed, wishfully and determinedly, since at least the mid-century: the forging of a new manner, a new

language of painting. Duranty put it this way: "... they are trying to create from scratch a wholly modern art, an art imbued with our surroundings, our sentiments, and the things of our age.""

5. On the brochure and its relationship to the Impressionist group, see Crouzet (as in n. 4), 331-44. The Impressionist exhibition opened Apr. I and the brochure was published by Alcan-L6vy by Apr. 12 (ibid., 332, n. 82). 6. Or, at least, from the selections in the Magaszn pzttoresque in 1855 (as in n. 4). 7. The New Pazntzng, 481 (trans., 43). Discrepancies between Duranty's text and the corresponding

passages in Leslie's original are mainly due to Duranty's own editing of the first French translation in the Magaszn pittoresque of 1855. In The New Pazntzng catalogue the English translation makes use of Leslie's original and is somewhat fuller than the text in French. 8. The New Pazntzng, 477 (trans., 38, here slightly altered). In his review of the Impressionist exhibition in June, Emile Zola also quoted Fromentin at length, followed by an extended passage from

Duranty's La Nouvelle Peznture; Zola, 193-94. 9. The New Parntzng, 477, 478, 481, 484 (trans., 38, 39, 43, 46-47). 10. Leslie, 279 (emphasis in the original). Duranty, following his source in the Magasin pzttoresque (as in n. 4), interpolated the phrase "le crayon ou le pinceau a la main" and removed the emphasis; The New Pazntzng, 484 (trans., 46). 11. The New Paintzng, 479 (trans., 40).




Mallarmt and Plein Air The idea of forgetting, which emerges in its condensed force

only at the end of Duranty's pamphlet, is the principal theme of the essay written a few months later by Mallarme and

published in England in the London periodical The Art

Monthly Review in the issue of September 30, 1876.12 Duran-

ty's brochure is the finest and most comprehensive piece of

writing produced at the time on the broad character of

Impressionism. Mallarme's article is fundamentally an essay on plein air, and in that respect it is more parochial in character than is La Nouvelle Peznture. In one particular way, however, it is more fundamental, more penetrating, and that is in its analysis of the Impressionists' approach to nature, in which themes of truth, sincerity, and purity-all associable with the notion of forgetting-are given primacy.

Mallarme begins his article in all but obligatory fashion, with "a short glimpse backward on art history," a brief treatment of Courbet and Realism. He then turns quickly to

Manet, whom he links to the Impressionists, both in terms of their shared position as outsiders and, at least implicitly, for the similarity of their aims. The remainder of the essay, although nominally focusing on Manet, is devoted in its core concern to Impressionist plein-air practice.

Mallarme considers Manet's work as guided by instinct and an explicit desire to approach each work afresh, not confined by academic formulas.'3 A key passage early in the

essay develops this view:

Each work should be a new creation of the mind. The

hand, it is true, will conserve some of its acquired secrets of manipulation, but the eye should forget all else it has

seen, and learn anew from the lesson before it. It should abstract itself from memory, seeing only that which it looks upon, and that as for the first time; and the hand should become an impersonal abstraction guided only by the will, oblivious of all previous cunning. (p. 29)

Mallarme goes on to say that in order to achieve this goal, the

painter must put to one side his tastes and feelings and seek,

through hard effort, the necessary impersonality. Loss of ego, deliberate abstraction, obliviousness, na'vete,

the striving of mind and hand to work against knowledge, against convention and habit ("the eye should forget all else it has seen," the hand be "oblivious of all previous cunning"), these are the terms Mallarm% offers. They are by now

familiar; one suspects that Mallarm% had looked more than once at the passages from Constable that Duranty had just published in La Nouvelle Peznture. Whether that was the case or not, the precedent and the parallels are there to be discerned: anticonvention, sincerity, true feeling, individual-

ity and originality, the distrust of cunning (mannerism,

pastiche; "ruses," in Duranty's text), the assumption of

humility before nature, and the self-admonition to "forget that I have ever seen a picture," those are the key attitudes to be derived from Constable's aphorisms. In both Mallarm% and Constable the prescription is clear: the artist should seek to escape from received practice and authority and seek a selfless and unmediated approach to nature. Civilization put aside, the artist one to one with his natural model, the Rousseauian ambience in which Diderot and Constable

emerged, and to which Duranty makes appeal, persists now in Mallarme's prescriptive analysis of Manet and the true character of plein-air painting.

Mallarme furthers his discussion of plein air, turning to Manet's Le Linge (Barnes Collection, Merion, Pennsylvania), which, following its rejection by the Salon jury, was shown by Manet in his own studio from April 15 to May 1, 1876. Mallarme praises what he sees as Manet's extraordinary achievement in conveying the sense of objects suffused by light and atmosphere, an effect of natural truth accom-

plished by a reorientation of technique and style, in particular, of the relationship between line and color, figure and

ground, "surface and space," "color and air."

Open air:-that is the beginning and end of the ques- tion .... The search after truth, peculiar to modern

artists, which enables them to see nature and reproduce her such as she appears to just and pure eyes, must lead

them to adopt air almost exclusively as their medium. (p. 31)

Such an aim will lead, he feels, "to a new manner of

painting": sketchy, flexible, compositionally novel, capable of keeping the interplay of mass and atmosphere-the visible and the invisible-in a state of engaging, enduring impermanence.

In pursuing his discussion of plein air, Mallarme develops further the twin themes of forgetting (putting knowledge aside) and finding (pursuing nature innocently and di-

rectly).14 Manet is both an erudite artist who "seems to

ignore all that has been done in art by others ... [drawing] from his own inner consciousness all his effects of simplifica- tion" (p. 31), and an original painter "by whom originality is

doubly foresworn, who seeks to lose his personality in nature

herself, or in the gaze of a multitude until then ignorant of her charms" (p. 32). At this point, Mallarm6 introduces the

public (the "multitude"), and in a complicated maneuver he

proceeds to pair and play off nature and public through the

12. S. Mallarme, "The Impressionists and Edouard Manet," Art Monthly Review, I, Sept. 30, 1876, 117-22; in The New Painting, 28-34 (page citations in the text are to this more accessible source). The article may have been written partly in response to

Duranty's study, which appeared on Apr. 12, less than two weeks after the opening of the Impression- ist exhibition on Apr. 1. Mallarme's essay was

completed by mid-Aug. 1876, according to a letter from George T. Robinson, editor, informing Mal- larm' that the translation into English was com-

pleted and in the hands of the printer; the French

original has been lost. See Documents StWphane Mallarme, ed. C. P. Barbier, I, Paris, 1968, 65. Alan Bowness has suggested that the essay may have been written in April and May, prior to the commission from Robinson in July (ibid., letter of July 19); "Manet and Mallarme," Phzladelphia Museum ofArt Bulletzn, LII, 1967, 217. 13. This theme was already stated with regard to Manet by Zola in 1867; Zola, 87. 14. Richard Shiff discusses forgetting and finding In reference to the quotation from Cezanne about

"forgetting all that has existed before us." Shiff

writes of an "intentional forgetting," of Cezanne's wish to "reject traditional technique and become an 'original' finder, sensitive to whatever nature might lay before him"; Shiff, Chzanne and the End of Impresszonism, Chicago, 1984, 113. Shiffs extended discussion of theory and criticism throughout his book has been of great value to me in addressing the issues presented here.

Paul de Man has linked the idea of forgetting to the concept of modernity: "Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier,




remainder of the essay. Plein-air painting performs a role in

renewing the public's awareness of and responsiveness to both nature and art. As does Duranty, along with the plein airists Mallarme discusses the trio of primarily figurative painters: Degas, Morisot, Renoir; they "share in most of the art theories I have reviewed here" and "are united in the common bond of Impressionism." They "have brought to the service of art an extraordinary and quasi-original new- ness of vision," which has the capacity, in turn, to renew our own experience as spectators, "to make us understand when

looking on the most accustomed objects the delight we should experience could we but see them for the first time"

(p. 33). The eyes of the painter before nature, as of the viewer before the painting, will have shared a common experience of renewal.

It is at this juncture, and as if building on his perception of the bond between painter and public, that Mallarme makes his well-known optimistic claim for a parallel and mutually fructifying advance in art and social democracy, welcoming the Impressionist as the "energetic modern worker," who in his and her concern for an original artistic vision, will address the multitude that "today ... demands to see with its own

eyes." The Impressionists and Manet serve that end, that vision of a new society, by subordinating themselves to nature: "if our latter-day art is less glorious, intense, and rich [than the 'imaginative' art of the past], it is not without the

compensation of truth, simplicity, and child-like charm" (p. 33). Truth, purity, innocence, naivete are, as we have seen, leitmotifs in Mallarme's assessment of Manet and the Impres- sionists, and, as he approaches the conclusion of his remarks,

they become attributes that link the artists to modern society, which he seems equally to wish to praise-in terms of its

present attainments and future possibilities: "The participa- tion of a hitherto ignored people in the political life of France is a social fact that will honour the whole of the close of the nineteenth century" (p. 33). Pursuing the parallel between modern art and society he reaffirms the need to release the confining influence of convention and academic

training. Truth to nature requires that we "let the hand and

eye do what they will" if nature is to "reveal herself' (p. 34). Art is, in that way, to take its place alongside the move toward freedom and democracy that Mallarm% sees as honoring the modern era.

In the end the character of that art he has exposed to

scrutiny remains his primary focus; its core of meaning resides, as he has insisted, in the artist's attitude toward

nature, from whence it draws its strength and reason for

being:

The scope and aim ... of Manet and his followers is that

painting shall be steeped again in its cause, and its relation to nature . .. what can be the aim of a painter before everyday nature? To imitate her? Then his best efforts can never equal the original with the inestimable

advantages of life and space. "Ah no! ... that which I

preserve through the power of Impressionism is not the material portion which already exists, superior to any mere representation of it, but the delight of having recreated nature touch by touch. I leave the massive and

tangible solidity to its fitter exponent, sculpture. I content

myself with reflecting on the clear and durable mirror of

painting, that which perpetually lives yet dies every moment, which only exists by the will of Idea, yet constitutes in my domain the only authentic and certain merit of nature-the Aspect. It is through her that when rudely thrown at the close of an epoch of dreams in the front of

reality, I have taken from it only that which properly belongs to my art, an original and exact perception which

distinguishes for itself the things it perceives with the

steadfast gaze of a vision restored to its simplest perfection. (p. 34)15

The artist's aim is not to imitate nature-that is an impossibility. But he and she can engage in the exercise of recreating nature "touch by touch" and thereby produce a durable record of what in nature "lives yet dies every moment."

Through their medium artists reconstitute and give perma- nent form to nature's evanescence, to, as Mallarme sees it, its

very authenticity-"-the Aspect." Painting, then, is nature's

paradox. It gives form to that which, in its essence, is beyond permanence. It makes the invisible visible. To accomplish this feat, to create this "durable mirror," is a painstaking task. To see nature more purely, more innocently than is thinkable in the schools requires persistent effort; it requires going beyond convention, beyond training, beyond culture, back beyond language, to a state of naive yet sustained

scrutiny and inquiry. It is Constable's world of forgetting to which Mallarm% returns in the end.

Forgetting and Innocence

Forgetting has a long history in the nineteenth century. That

history is closely linked to the terms and concerns voiced by Constable in the selections made by Duranty for La Nouvelle Peinture: antiacademicism, anticonvention and antitradition, i.e., the need to react against the received, the remembered, the habitual; and, at the positive pole of that reaction:

sincerity, originality, individuality--expressions of innocence

in the hope of reaching at last a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin.... This combined interplay of deliberate forgetting with an action that is also a new origin reaches the full power of the idea of modernity" (Blzndness and

Inszght: Essays zn the Rhetorzc of Contemporary Critz- czsm, 2nd rev. ed., London, 1983, 148). Forgetting for Cezanne and his colleagues, however, had

nothing of the self-conscious, aggressive modernist mission De Man attributes in his essay to Nietzsche and to the poets Rimbaud and, later, Antonin Artaud (see, e.g., 147). Norman Bryson also cites

Nietzsche in referring to the inhibiting role of inherited schemata in realist practice and writes of the necessity for artists to cultivate a "willed forget- fulness that seeks to empty itself of all remembered contents" (Tradztzon and Desire, Cambridge, 1984, 19). 15. My emphasis. My reading of these words is in

sharp distinction to that of Stephen Eisenman in The New Pazntzng, "The Intransigent Artist or How the Impressionists Got their Name," 51-59. I see no evidence in Mallarme's essay of the "late Mod- ernist credo of medium purity" that Eisenman sees

dawning there (54). Mallarme is concerned with the nature of open-air painting, with the effort to achieve a fresh and unprejudiced perception of the motif in nature and of the intangible effects of light and atmosphere of which the painter becomes aware. Although he understands that the painter must translate light into paint-that he must re- create nature "touch by touch"-his intent is not to stress the material character of the final product; his emphasis, rather, is on the delicate process of

interchange between a highly sensitized perception and its painted equivalent.




and humility before nature, nature accepted as guide and

purpose. Forgetting also has a broad history and is implicit in a

number of refrains articulated by artists and critics during the course of the century. They tend to appear more

frequently about mid-century, in parallel with the growth of

realism, and persist in scattered observations within the course of the second half of the century. We find emerging the notion of the "innocence of the eye," the wish, found in the literature of Barbizon, to attain a state of naivete before

nature; to paint naturally, "as the bird sings"; to see afresh, "like a child," or, in a special instance-Baudelaire's essay on Constantin Guys-like a convalescent after an illness, eager to return to the world with fresh eyes; 16 or to be granted that tabula rasa of vision associated with the topos of having been born blind and then suddenly being given the gift of sight.

What are these wishes after all? Save for Ruskin's "innocence of the eye" this is not theory, it is fantasy. Despite a

lineage going back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy, to Lockean and Rousseauian innocence and to

Berkeley's theory of vision,17 these utterances seem little more than banal fragments floating in a void that theory has vacated or not yet entered. Impressionism has no theory; that is, none was formed or articulated by the artists during the high years of Impressionist activity in the 1870s. Degas offers jottings and, later, reminiscences; Renoir pontificates about architecture and the insensitivities of modern life; Monet grants interviews and for the most part weaves a fabricated tale of open-air studios and creative spontaneity, although he told a different story in private, in his letters to his wife and dealer. Cezanne's and Pissarro's correspondence is a different matter. Pissarro's unfailingly intelligent observations in his pedagogically directed letters to his son Lucien,

beginning in the early 1880s, do not constitute, however,

especially in their emphasis upon training, a coherent body of theory. Cezanne's late letters and his remarks to interview- ers in his last years do tend to reinforce each other and yield a consistent picture of aims and practices that probably had their principal formation back in the 1870s, when he and Pissarro worked actively together as plein-air painters.

Impressionism's best theory-formulated and articulated

early on-is probably that offered by Mallarmi and Duranty in their essays of 1876. Both writers were close to artists:

Duranty primarily to Degas, Mallarm6, at that stage, to Manet. Neither painter was a landscapist or plein airist

(despite Mallarm%'s view), but that did not prevent Duranty and Mallarm6 from being as clearly aware of plein-air aims and practices as any observers of the time. Their understand-

ing of plein air as a process that leads away from knowledge toward a purified and naive perception of nature provides a reference point, a "home" for those shards of the Impression- ist mythology with which I am here concerned: to "paint like a child," "as the bird sings," as if seeing for the first time. These commonplaces have been with us for a long while, and in the past I have dismissed them as useless myths. But

Duranty and Mallarme, and Constable, are less easily cast aside. These banalities may after all contain the core of

Impressionist theory and an essential guide to the under-

standing of its practice. They have been taken as indices of

Impressionist theory before, but always in relation to a different view of Impressionist practice than the one I am

presenting here. In the past, these utterances have been seen as consistent with the notion of Impressionist spontaneity, with capturing the instant, the first impressions received by the artist before the motif, the world perceived in the

pre-form of colored patches, prior to the censorial role of

knowledge and intelligence.'8 In that framework, these

fragments do seem to link readily enough to a set of critical

responses that emerged early on in the 1870s, when the

Impressionists first appeared on the scene, and which has

persisted in popular, and often in critical, understanding to the present day.

From the time of the first group exhibition in 1874, some

critics, most of whom were more or less close to the artists, aware of their efforts and sympathetic to their exhibiting enterprise, began to write of first "impressions," of an almost instantaneous annexation of the world of appearances, featuring those aspects of nature available only to the eye rather than to knowledge of tangible form and spatial location. Castagnary's classic definition-"They are Impres- sionists in the sense that they render not the landscape, but the sensation produced by the landscape"-followed on

Philippe Burty's observation that the paintings in the exhibition shared a feeling for "the purity [nettete] of the first sensation." Two years later, writing at the same time as

Duranty and Mallarme, Emile Blkmont said that the Impres- sionists succeeded in extracting from the landscape the

multiple lines and colors that, "in one glance, the eye perceives before a scene." Among the critics of the third

group exhibition, in 1877, A. Descubes began his review in an explanatory tone (which ultimately gave way to character-

istic reproof); he offered first the view of another, sympathetic critic, who said that the aim of the painters was to give "the impression of the first glance, of the first shock, so to

speak, in order to fix the fleeting vision ofa ... landscape as

16. Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other

Essays, trans. and ed. J. Mayne, London, 1964, 7-8. Baudelaire further compares the responses of the convalescent to those of the child, writes that

"genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will," and describes Guys as a "man- child." 17. See, e.g., Gombrich, 296ff. 18. Charles Stuckey gathers most helpfully a number of statements, drawn from 19th-century plein airists, that attest to a desire for perceptual innocence; he offers them in the course of developing a

case for Impressionist painting as involved with

instantaneity and immediate retinal response; Stuckey, 106-21 19. J. Castagnary, "L'Exposition du boulevard des

Capucines," Le Suicle, Apr. 29, 1874; in H. Adh&- mar, ed., "L'Exposition de 1874 chez Nadar (retro- spective documentaire)," Centenaire de

I'Impresszonnisme, exh. cat., Grand Palais, Paris, 1974, 265. Burty, "Chronique du jour,"La Ripub- hIquefranfaise, Apr. 16, 1874; in Adh6mar, 256. E. Blkmont, "Les Impressionnistes," Le Rappel, Apr. 9, 1876; in J. Letheve, Impressionnistes et symbolbstes devant la presse, Paris, 1959, 79. "d'un coup, l'oeil

pergoit devant un aspect." A. Descubes [Amed&e Descubes-Desgueraines], "L'Exposition des Impres- sionnistes," Gazette des lettres, des sciences et des arts, 1, Apr. 20, 1877, 185: "l'Timpression du premier coup d'oeil, du premier saississement, pour ainsi dire, fixer la vision fugace d'une femme qui passe ou d'un paysage entrevu par une crois&e brusquement ouverte", "attentif ~ I'ablouissement d'une minute, il essaiera de fixer sur la toile une forme passagbre, 6vanouie aussit6t qu'entrevue." (I have not been able to identify the unnamed critic whom Descubes

quotes at the outset of his review.) For a more




if seen through a window suddenly thrown open." To which Descubes added his own observation that, "attentive to the dazzle of the moment," the Impressionist "will try to capture ... a fugitive form, which disappears as soon as it is

glimpsed."'9 This view entered slowly but firmly into the work of Theodore Duret; in Les Peintres impressionnistes of 1878 he gave a balanced view of Impressionist method,

noting only, in the vein we have been considering, the

"fugitive impressions" that Monet and Sisley attempted to fix

upon the canvas. By 1883 he elaborated that element

further, claiming that the Impressionists "observe the fugitive aspect, the special notation of the moment, the impression ... of the object," and characterizing their method of

painting as "impulsive" (prime-sautiere) and responsive to a

coup-d'oezl, "a glance cast upon the natural scene."20

Interestingly enough, this strain of critical explanation, this emphasis upon the immediate, the fugitive, forms no

part of the analysis of Impressionist aim and method in

Duranty's La Nouvelle Peinture or Mallarm,'s essay of 1876.

For them, plein-air painting was a deliberative process not related to perceptual mechanics or to the notion of capturing an impression prior to cognitive editing. Rather, they saw the

plein airists working through and against habit, knowledge, and culture toward a state of clarified seeing (of innocence) in which their originality could be fully developed.

The several statements about the recovery of innocence-- that of the child, of the blind suddenly endowed with

sight-with which we are concerned may well be placed under the more general headings of independence and individualism. Artistic individuality, the desire of the artist to

find his own form of expression and not to resemble others, is a staple of the talk surrounding Barbizon landscape, where a cult of individualism developed as a component of the school's Romantic heritage. We find it articulated, for ex-

ample, in the jottings of Corot:

As far as I'm concerned, no one has taught me anything. When you are alone face-to-face with nature, you try to do the best you can, and, naturally, you make up your own

way of doing things. ...

Follow your convictions. It is better to be nothing than to be the echo of other painters. .. . The beautiful in art is truth bathed in the impression we have received of nature's appearances.21

In Le Paysagiste aux champs, written in 1865, Frdric Henriet

surveyed the many sites visited by the landscapists of the School of 1830 and named the numerous painters who

frequented them, but he warned against the possible harmful effects of group activity, the threat to originality that results from inevitable comparisons with others, which

torment the painter, bring him to change his manner, and throw him into a harmful preoccupation with technical

procedures. One needs a lot of talent or great confidence not to be influenced and sidetracked by different ways of

seeing, feeling, and expressing by those among whom one works.22

Monet's letters from Normandy from 1864 to 1868, when he was still something of a newcomer, reveal his ambivalence about that issue, but evidence a growing preference for

originality linked to isolation. Writing to Bazille from Hon- fleur on July 15, 1864, he states, "It would be better to be

alone, and yet, all alone, there are some things that one cannot fathom"; and on August 26 he tells Bazille that he is

working well in the company of several painters, including Boudin and Jongkind, and says, "I regret very much that you aren't here, because in such company there's a lot to be

learned... "23 But by October he disclaims any influence of Corot on a small landscape painted "entirely from nature" and adds: "I have done it as conscientiously as possible without thinking of any other paintings." Still at Honfleur in late October-early November he now insists on the benefits of isolation: "I am quite alone at present and, frankly, I work all the better for it."24 His well-known letter to Bazille written four years later, in December 1868, from a temporary refuge at Etretat with his companion and one-year-old child, con- firms this attitude. He writes that he does not envy Bazille's

evenings with their painter friends at the Caf6 Guerbois in

Paris, however pleasant the company might be:

Don't you think that directly in nature and alone one does better? ... I've always been of this mind, and what I do under these conditions has always been better. One is too much taken up with what one sees and hears in Paris, however firm one may be, and what I am painting here

has at least the merit of not resembling anyone ... because it will be simply the expression of what I shall have felt, I myself, personally.25

complete survey of theoretical and critical views associated with notions of spontaneity and the impression, see R. Shiff, "Impressionist Criticism, Impressionist Color, and C6zanne," Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1973, 38-51. 20. Les Pezntres zmpresszonnzstes, Paris, 1878; in Du- ret, Crztzque d'avant-garde, Paris, 1885, 70, 73. "Pr6f- ace," Catalogue de l'exposztzon des oeuvres de P.-A. Renozr, Paris, 1883; in Crztzque d'avant-garde, 113, 114. There were other critical voices at the time that qualified the stress upon the fugitive and momentary: Huysmans and Zola, actually, in 1879,

Charles Ephrussi in 1880, Ernest Chesneau in 1882, and, in 1883, Jules Laforgue. With reference to Laforgue, Linda Nochlin has emphasized the complex and comprehensive character of Impres- sionist vision and working method in "Camille Pissarro: the Unassuming Eye," Artnews, LXIrV, Apr. 1965, 24-26, 59-62. (For the most complete bibli-

ography of Impressionist criticism, see O. Reuter-

swaird, Impresszonzsterna znfor publzk och krztzk, Stock- holm, 1952, 245-64.) 21. Corot racontM par luz-mime et par ses amzs, ed. P. Courthion, VWsenaz-Geneva, 1946, I, 88-89 (my

translation). 22. F. Henriet, Le Paysagzste aux champs, Paris, 1876, 17 (my translation). 23. Wildenstein, I, 420-21: letters 8, 9 (trans. J. Rewald, The Hzstory of Impresszonzsm, 4th rev. ed., New York, 1973, 111). 24. Wildenstein, i, 421: letter 11, Oct. 14, 1864 (my translation); letter 13 to Boudin, end Oct.-beg. Nov. 1864 (trans. Rewald [as in n. 23], 112). 25. Wildenstein, I, 425-26: letter 44, Dec. 1868 (trans. Rewald [as in n. 23], 190; here slightly altered).




In a collateral effort to find his own individuality as a painter, Corot expressed a wish to be able to recapture the untar- nished vision associated with children: "Every day I pray to God to make me into a child, that is, that he enable me to see nature and render it like a child, without prejudice."''26 It is an

expression repeated many years later by Cezanne, once in

conversation with Emile Bernard: "As for me, I want to be a

child," and, again, to Jules Bordly, to whom he said he wished

"to see as someone who has just been born.""27

Expressing a similar desire to wipe the slate of perception clean, C6zanne told Bernard that "we must see nature as if no one had seen it before us."2" At the same time, Monet took up a familiar trope that reaches back to the seventeenth

century when he confided, as told by the painter Lilla Cabot

Perry, that he "wished he had been born blind and then

suddenly gained his sight so that he could have begun to

paint in this way without knowing what the objects were that he saw before him." And on another occasion, presenting his fictional picture of an innocent, presuppositionless approach to painting, he told Gustave Geffroy, "I paint as the bird

sings."29 What Monet, Corot, and Cezanne posited in these wistful

but deliberate expressions was the "innocence of the eye," which John Ruskin had discussed in 1857 in The Elements of Drawing, where he interlinked the several refrains we have

just sampled:

The whole technical power of painting depends on our

recovery of what may be called the innocence of the eye; that is to say, of a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of

colour, merely as such, without cause of what they sig- nify-as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted with sight.30

Each of these expressions posits the possibility-or is it

merely a faint hope that borders on self-delusion?--that the

artist might achieve a state of na'ivete shorn of conventional

learning. In a letter of August 20, 1859, Corot recommended "la plus grande naivete6 l'6tude," and he stated the case

quite fully in 1872: "You must interpret nature naively and

according to your own feeling, detaching yourself completely from what you know of the old masters or your contemporar- ies."31

C6zanne's well-known advice to Emile Bernard in 1905

affirms that Corot's views penetrated to the core of Impres- sionist theory and permeated the painters' practice, or at least their thinking about it:

The Louvre is the book in which we learn to read. We must

not, however, be satisfied with retaining the beautiful formulas of our illustrious predecessors. Let us go forth to

study beautiful nature, let us try to free our minds from

them, let us strive to express ourselves according to our own personal temperament.32

On another occasion, in a similar expression in which he sets the culture of painting against the direct experience of

nature, he aligns himself with the Constable who wrote,

famously, to his friend John Dunthorne in 1802:

For the last two years I have been running after pictures, and seeking the truth at second hand. . . . I shall return to

Bergholt, where I shall endeavour to get a pure and unaffected manner of representing the scenes that may employ me.... There is room enough for a natural pain- ture.33

One hundred years later, Cezanne put it this way: after

telling Jules Bordly that he wished "to see as someone who has just been born," he continued, "Today our vision is a bit worn out, abused by the memory of a thousand images. And the museums, the paintings in the museums! ... We no

longer see nature; we see [only] paintings."34 Two statements, one by Monet, one by Cezanne, sum up

and encapsulate the views we have gathered so far. Toward the end of the century, Monet described his approach to

plein-air painting to Lilla Cabot Perry:

When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have

before you, a tree, a house, a field or whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of

pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to

you, the exact color and shape, until it gives your own naive

impression of the scene before you.35

Monet's words are consistent with those we find in Cezanne's letter to Bernard, dated October 23, 1905, to which I have

already referred at the end of my introduction: "Now the theme to develop is that-whatever our temperament or form of strength face to face with nature may be-we must render the image of what we see, forgetting everything that

existed before us."36 Both statements speak of throwing off the familiar, of going back to a state of innocence that somehow precedes those attainments of knowledge, culture,

language, and habit that govern our daily living in the world.

26. E. Moreau-Ndlaton, Corot raconti par luz-meme, Paris, 1924, 11, 46 (my translation). 27. E. Bernard, "Une Conversation avec Cezanne", Mercure de France, CXLVII, June 1, 1921, 376; cited

by Stuckey, 108. J. Borbly, "Cezanne a Aix," L'Art vivant, no. 2, 1926, 491-93; in Conversatzons avec Cizanne, ed. P. M. Doran, Paris, 1978, 22 (my translation). 28. Bernard (as in n. 27), 372 (my translation). 29. Perry, 120. G. Geffroy, Claude Monet: Sa VIe, son oeuvre, Paris, 1924, I, 125. Both statements offered

by Stuckey, 108, that in Geffroy slightly altered.

30. The Works ofJohn Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and A.

Wedderburn, London, 1904, xv, 27, n. to par. 5; my emphasis on word "recovery." See also Stuckey, 108, and Gombrich, 296ff. 31. Corot raconti par luz-mime at par ses amzs (as in n.

21), I, 82, 84 (my translation). 32. Cezanne, Correspondance (as in n. 2), 275: letter 183; Paul Cbzanne: Letters, 315.

33. Leslie, 15. See also Gombrich, 380, and accom-

panying discussion. 34. Borbly (as in n. 27), 22. 35. Perry, 120 (my emphasis). 36. See n. 2. 37. See n. 30.

38. On the "natural attitude" or "natural stand-

point" see Edmund Husserl, Ideas, trans. W. R.

Boyce Gibson (1931), New York, 1962, 91-115, sects. 27-39; partly reprinted in Kockelmans, 68- 79. See also J. Kockelmans's introductory essay, "Some Fundamental Themes of Husserl's Phenom-

enology," in Kockelmans, 24-36, esp. 27-29. The natural attitude is almost a misnomer; it refers to the ordinary, the practical, the encultured world of everyday experience, a more or less secure realm of facts, expectations, established relationships. It is, according to Husserl, the "world in whzch Ifind myself and which is also my world-about-me" (Ideas, 93).




They accord with Ruskin's way of positing the "innocence of the eye," his realization that innocence is something that must be worked-through-to in a process of recapturing, of

"recovery."37 If we take these several expressions together-- poor excuses for theory though they may seem to be-and if we listen to their message, it is, as it was with Mallarme, Constable's world of forgetting at which we arrive.

Proviso It must be reaffirmed, as necessary clarification of my purpose, that forgetting represented a species of desire and,

beyond that, a fantastic wish, the very extravagance, the

impossibility of which, serves to underline the strength of the

goal of renewal held by the Impressionist painters. The dream of innocence was both a rhetorical strategy and an

index of serious commitment to develop a painting that would somehow break free from the constraints of en- trenched theory and practice. In the remainder of this essay I shall hold to forgetting as a principle of considerable

motivating power in the evolution of Impressionist aims. It is difficult today, with our heightened awareness of the

social construction of the individual, to credit a theory of

transparency, which the goal of innocence would seem to be. Is it possible to put history aside, personal history and the

history of the world and culture of which we are a part? Is it indeed possible to suspend the world, to shuck off in any compelling way the "natural attitude"-the term coined by early phenomenologists for our familiar, culturally deter- mined ways of looking at things-that dominates and makes

possible the normal conduct of our daily lives?38 Could C zanne put the book of knowledge aside? Of course not, no more than Monet could experience the "purified" vision of a blind man restored to sight. The impossibility of the goal of innocence has long been recognized by later phenomenology; it is embedded, for example, in Merleau-Ponty's well- known essay "Cezanne's Doubt."39 A painter's thought, like a

philosopher's, is always situated; his cultural and historical

position must be recognized as irrevocably conditioned by his existence as a social animal. He carries this baggage with him wherever he goes and does not succeed in extricating himself from it, even when he enters the world of the

landscape and begins to paint. A recognition of the unattain-

ability of the goal does not, however, destroy the idea of

forgetting; rather, it historicizes it and permits us to pursue the discussion with a greater sense of balance. Impossibility is

only one dimension of the "theory" of forgetting.

The Screen of Trees We have had our fill of written texts and uttered fragments for the moment. Let us go back to the photograph of

Cezanne at work, and attempt to follow him into the

landscape (Fig. 1). By the time Ker-Xavier Roussel took this

photograph in 1906 Cezanne had been working outdoors for

approximately thirty-five years, having begun at Pontoise and Auvers in the early 1870s, with the help, direction, and

companionship of Pissarro. A close study of that relationship has never been made, nor is this the occasion for doing that, but I would contend that in their collaborative work- Pissarro mainly the teacher, Cezanne the pupil-fundamental principles of Impressionist practice and aims were

forged.40 C zanne inherited, in effect, through Pissarro, the

legacy of Constable and Corot, and came to know more about the driving insistence and penetrating lucidity with which Monet had approached the outdoors in the previous decade. Cezanne's credentials as an Impressionist painter, credentials that he never sought to deny, were earned in the 1870s. I propose to explore, however briefly, a fascinating outcome of the collaboration between Pissarro and Cz- anne-a demonstration, in a group of paintings, of plein-air concerns that linked the two painters and that serve to ratify, in effect,

Mallarm,'s insight into the nature and goals of modern open-air practice.

Outdoor oil painting had a long history by the 1870s. This is not the place to document that history,41 but it is of course

generally accepted that Constable and Corot played key roles in its nineteenth-century development. We can point to the centrality of open-air oil sketching in Constable's practice and to Corot's knowledge of oil-sketching techniques gained from his teacher Michallon, which became in part the foundation for his attempt, long before Cezanne, to rework Poussin (and Claude) after nature and to learn, through direct observation, ways in which he could reinvigorate their

heritage. One difficulty in assessing both the character and impor-

tance (and hence in establishing an adequate history) of

open-air painting is that it is all but impossible to gauge to what extent work en plein azr served as a mediating practice. We do know, however, that the nature of that mediation

changed across time. From the seventeenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century, open-air painting had two primary functions: first, it was the site for preliminary sketches, usually in watercolor or wash, increasingly but still rarely in oils on a small scale, the sketches serving as studies that

might provide details or, possibly, compositional and

39. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-sense, trans. H. and P. Dreyfus, Evanston, Ill., 1964, 9-25; originally published as "La Doute de Cezanne," Fontazne, no. 47, Dec. 1945, and reprinted in

Merleau-Ponty, Sens et non-sens, Paris, 1948, 15-49. 40. The relationship between the two artists will be the focus of a major exhibition, "Cezanne, Pissarro: An Impressionist Collaboration," curated by Rich- ard Brettell and Joachim Pissarro, which is sched- uled to appear at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in fall 1995 and then at the Mused d'Orsay, Paris. For the most complete and reliable study of Pissarro's work during the 1870s, see R. Brettell,

Pzssarro and Pontozse, New Haven and London, 1990. He discusses Pissarro's "screen of trees"

paintings from Pontoise (see Figs. 7, 9) on pp. 176-84. For a separate study of Pissarro's land-

scape concerns, including a section on his links to Constable, see idem, "Pissarro in Louveciennes," Apollo, cxxxvI, Nov. 1992, 315-19. 41. On plein-air painting and its history, see: D. Bomford et al., Impresszonzsm: Art zn the Makzng, National Gallery, London, 1990, esp. 19-27; P. Conisbee, "Pre-Romantic Plezn-Azr Painting," Art

Hzstory, II, Dec. 1979, 413-28; French Landscape Drawzngs and Sketches of the Ezghteenth Century, exh. cat., British Museum, London, 1977, essay by R.

Bacou; P. Galassi, Corot zn Italy: Open-Azr Paznting and the Classzcal Landscape Tradztzon, New Haven and London, 1991; idem, "The Nineteenth Cen-

tury: From Valenciennes to Corot," in Claude to Corot: The Development of Landscape Painting zn France, exh. cat., Colnaghi, New York, 1990, 233-49 (see also the several other essays by different authors in the same catalogue); Pazntzng from Na- ture: The Tradztzon of Open-Azr Ozl Sketchzng from the 17th to 19th Centurzes, exh. cat., Fitzwilliam Mu- seum, Cambridge, and Royal Academy, London, 1980-81, "Introduction" by L. Gowing, cat. by P. Conisbee.




coloristic referents for a larger-scale tableau; second, it offered a source of stimulus and refreshment for the painter caught up in the formulas and routines of the studio. Constable occasionally sought to erase the divide between outdoor etude and finished painting by reenacting something of the freedom of the study in large-scale studio sketches of the same size as his Royal Academy pictures.42 Occasionally, as with Corot's Port of La Rochelle (Salon of 1850-51; Yale

University Art Gallery), the painter might create special conditions so that a finished painting could be executed

entirely before the motif, as Corot did in this instance by working from a window looking out to the harbor. For the most part, however, painters continued to work, whether in

drawing, watercolor, or oil (on paper or canvas), in a

preliminary or intermediary fashion. An important shift began to take place in the 1860s. The

beginning of the change may be conveniently marked by Daubigny's construction of his studio boat late in 1857, which enabled him to work on any surface and with any medium, directly outdoors, while protected from the elements. If Daubigny's own practice thereafter was not entirely consistent with the premise of his act-outdoors and studio rolled completely into one-it marked, nevertheless, an

important point of departure, and we find that it affected the

younger artists who emerged in the 1860s in a significant new way. They began to ask themselves, more imperatively, more keenly than had their predecessors, what it meant to

paint outdoors, what was possible-and what not achiev- able-in that arena. They asked themselves whether the

paintings they produced in that manner could not be given a

change of status-no longer the separate, although generally well enough received, category of esquisse or landscape etude, but as finished paintings in their own right, as tab-

leaux.4" As they pursued their activity they came to realize that working outdoors offered possibilities and made demands that their predecessors had not sufficiently realized.

Monet, for example, began, about 1864, to pose questions that his mentors Boudin and Jongkind, both plein airists, never seem to have addressed, or at least not in a sufficiently probing and consequent way. Above all, Monet seems to have asked what his presence meant, what could and how did

one see, what role did vantage point play (what was the difference between one vantage point and another), how did the awareness gained through direct scrutiny affect the kind of notation-the shape, size, look, thickness, hue, speed of the painted marks-that could and should be made, or at least attempted. Monet's efforts to come to grips with such

questions can be read in several key paintings from the 1860s-his views of the town of Honfleur and its harbor in 1864 (Wildenstein, nos. 31-34), the Women in the Garden of 1866-67 (Wildenstein, no. 67), his views from the east

balcony of the Louvre in 1867 (Wildenstein, nos. 83, 85), The

Rzver of 1868 (Wildenstein 110), in which he developed the

"color patch" as the key formal tool that might profess in one and the same moment both the truth of the landscape (by reference to its appearance) and the truth of painting (by revealing the nature of the painter's means).44

Monet and his friends who worked outdoors came to

realize, however, that if those truths were to be discovered, artists must be faithful to a supreme condition of the

situation, a situation akin to being alone in the world, with

only their canvases and brushes and pigments for compan- ions. To be out there in the landscape, to make an art that would be responsive to that condition, required that they separate themselves from the formulas for seeing and for

making that they had inherited from their predecessors (Cezanne's "let us try to free our minds from them, let us strive to express ourselves according to our personal temperament").45

In approaching the open air the Impressionists sought to

suppress knowledge in favor of the goal of a purified perception. But it was not the instantaneous, the precogni- tive, sensational immediacy of perception about which the

early critics, such as Burty, Blkmont, Descubes, and Duret, wrote. Rather, it was perception of a different sort, a seeing that was hard won, that resulted from a knowing attempt to bracket or short-circuit the familiar world of everyday under-

standing in order to penetrate to, and attain, a state of

unpremeditated and unmediated vision.46 The state of forgetting that they sought to achieve could

come only at the end of a long process. What that process was

42. See, e.g., C. Rhyne, "Constable's First Two Six-foot Landscapes," Studzes zn the Hzstory of Art, xxiv, 1990, 109-29. 43. For these terms, see A. Bermingham, "Reading Constable," Art Hzstory, x, Mar. 1987, 38-58; A. Boime, The Academy and French Pazntzng zn the

Nzneteenth Century, London, 1971; P. Grunchec, Les Concours d'esquzsses pezntes, 1816-1863, Peinture Ai l'Ecole des Beaux-Arts, exh. cat., 2 vols., Ecole Nationale Sup6nreure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1986, S. Levine, Monet and Hzs Crztzcs, New York, 1976 (with a useful index); P. Radisich, "Eighteenth- Century Plezn-Azr Painting and the Sketches of Pierre Henri de Valenciennes," Art Bulletzn, LXIV, Mar. 1982, 98-104. 44. See J. Isaacson, Monet Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe, London, 1972; idem, Claude Monet: Observatzon and

Reflectzon, Oxford, 1978; idem, "Observation and

Experiment in the Early Work of Monet," in Aspects of Monet, ed. J. Rewald and F. Weitzenhoffer, New York, 1984, 14-35. See also the "Epilogue" to L. Nochlin, Realzsm, Harmondsworth, 1971, esp. 222- 35, 238-47, on notions of truth in painting, architecture, and design.

45. See n. 32. 46. The language employed here is deliberately phenomenological. My reference is to the idea and the operation of the phenomenological reduction, first posed by Husserl and revised by him and his later interpreters. The effort, in a deliberate way, is to bypass, put out of commission, penetrate through, or cancel the normal habits and supposi- tions with which we approach the world in everyday understanding, i.e., in the natural attitude (see n. 38). The Impressionist painters, too, as they sought to forget-i.e., to put aside the old masters and to see the world afresh-attempted to penetrate to a state of innocent or naive or unprejudiced perception, a goal hard won (and, of necessity, impossible to attain). For helpful discussions of the phenomenological reduction and the idea of a presuppositionless philosophy, see, e.g.: G. Brand, "Intention-

ality, Reduction, and Intentional Analysis in Husserl's Later Manuscripts," in Kockelmans, 197- 217; M F. Farber, "The Ideal of a Presupposition- less Philosophy," in Kockelmans, 37-57, J. Kockel-

mans, "Some Fundamental Themes of Husserl's

Phenomenology," in Kockelmans, 24-36; J. Pass- more, A Hundred Years of Phzlosophy, 2nd ed., Har- mondsworth, 1968, 185-94. See also Maurice Mer-

leau-Ponty, Phenomenology ofPerceptzon (1945), trans. C. Smith, London, 1962, xiii, on the phenomenological reduction: "It is because we are through and

through compounded of relationships with the world that for us the only way to become aware of the fact is to suspend the resultant activity, to refuse it our complicity"; and xiv, on the impossibility of a

complete reduction. 47. For the complete letters of Monet, see Wilden- stein. For citation of many of the most important letters and the most thorough and reliable analysis of Monet's methods, see the exhaustive study by J. House, Monet Nature znto Art, New Haven and London, 1986. See also Bomford et al. (as in n. 41). 48. See Wildenstein, I, nos. 438-49. The range of finish is revealed, e.g., by comparing W 448, a

vigorously brushed and boldly composed picture signed with the initials Cl M., with W 438 (Mus&e




like is revealed in the little we know about Impressionist technique and in the abundant record of their paintings. Impressionist painting was for the most part traditional in its

procedure. As we look at the oeuvres of individual artists we can make distinctions easily enough between dtude or esquisse and tableau, between tbauche and more finished, more la- bored work. On the other hand, we have no ready guide to the comparative role of the less and the more finished, to the

comparative valuation made by the painters themselves,

although it seems clear enough that when Monet, for

example, merely initialed a canvas, he, in that act, accorded it a lesser status, that of tude, perhaps. We have no indication that he valued those studies more highly than the more

developed pictures, numerous indications from his letters that he, as Czanne, was fully absorbed in and committed to an extended process of repeated working and gradual realization.47

The durational character of that process is emphatically revealed in, for example, Monet's paintings of the Gare Saint-Lazare of 1877, a group that ranges from relatively brief sketches-initialed by Monet-to very heavily en- crusted canvases, as thoroughly worked as any he did from that time to the onset of the series paintings in the late 1880s.48 Monet's effort was seconded by Pissarro, who may have always worked more deliberately than Monet but who, about 1877, began to build up the surfaces of his paintings with a degree of concentration that must have predisposed him to and aided his adoption, in the mid-1880s, of the

painstaking pointill6 procedure of Seurat. If I turn finally to painting in order to gauge some of the

ways in which the goal, indeed the fantasy, of perceptual innocence could be acted out and take on material form, it is Pissarro's work of the late 1870s that I would like to examine

along with that of his pupil and collaborator in the science of

plein air, Cezanne (for Cezanne I shall turn principally to selected pictures from the mid-1880s). The paintings to be

discussed, by both artists, are concerned with a dominating formal scheme-a row of trees ranged across the foreground and usually set before some houses or distant hills. This motif has occasionally been referred to as a "screen of trees," partly

because the trees usually serve to veil or filter or "screen" our

perception of the more distant objects-the houses and hills.49 It is a motif that has something of an extended history in the nineteenth century, particularly in the work of Corot. He was followed by the Impressionists, especially Pissarro and Cezanne, who turned to the motif frequently during the 1870s and 1880s. During his career Cezanne did nearly sixty oil paintings of the screen and Pissarro about eighty, most of them from the 1870s, with a considerable clustering of just over twenty canvases from 1877 to 1879.50 Czanne painted perhaps a dozen screens in those years and then returned to the motif with great concentration in the middle of the 1880s.51 Their shared interest in the motif or device is

evident, and the frequency with which they explored it (from about 1872 on it appears in one-fifth of C zanne's output in

oils) gives us reason to think that it was in some way exemplary of their aims.

Corot painted the screen of trees throughout his career.52 In the very early View from the Farnese Gardens, Rome, painted in 1826 (Fig. 2), we see the motif in rudimentary form, not

yet a true screen. Two sturdy trees are set in the foreground; they serve partly to occlude, partly to frame the cluster of solid houses in the middle distance, impressive in their cubic

clarity. The trees, despite their balanced arrangement, serve almost as a repoussoir; they maintain a discrete identity, as do the buildings beyond.

In the Farm Scene of the 1840s (Fig. 3), Corot depicts a corner of nature not unlike the subjects Pissarro often turned to later on. The relationship of foreground and middle

ground is more complex than in the view of Rome. At the

right trees and foliage vie for attention with the farm

buildings. For the most part, however, each element is

depicted legibly and given a clearly defined spatial location and function. The calligraphy of the final layer-the fore-

ground branches-remains separate from the objects across which its forms are allowed to play.

In The Bridge at Mantes of the late 1860s (Fig. 4) we have a more compositionally dynamic variant on the structure of the View from the Farnese Gardens, but forty years later the definitional relationship between foreground and distance

d'Orsay), one of the most heavily worked pictures of Monet's career. 49. For a recent essay that extends some of the points developed in this section, see J. Isaacson, "Pissarro's Doubt," Apollo, cxxxvI, Nov. 1992, 320-24 (esp. 323 for color details of our Figs. 7, 9). Further details of Fig. 7 may be found in Brettell, 1990 (as in n. 40), 182; and T.J. Clark, The Pazntzng ofModern Life, New York, 1985, pl. ii. 50. If we concentrate on Pissarro's extant work

prior to 1880, we find that from ca. 1870 through 1879 Pissarro did approximately 53 paintings with the screen motif, around one-eighth of his produc- tion during that period. From 1877 through 1879 he did approximately 23 screens, or one-fifth of his output. Not every observer will agree as to what constitutes a proper screen, however; indeed, it is possible to add more than one-half as many addi- tional paintings that contain important elements of the screen motif, e.g., a single foreground tree with spreading branches set before the farther landscape. Hence, it is better to keep the numbers

approximate. Nevertheless, I have based my calcu- lation of 53 screens on the following works dating from 1870 through 1879, using the catalogue raisonne by L.-R. Pissarro and L. Venturi, Camille Pzssarro: Son Art-son oeuvre, 2 vols., Paris, 1939 (hereafter referred to as PV): nos. 81, 87, 88, 94; 106, 123, 135, 146, 148, 164, 167; 207, 212, 216, 236, 237, 239, 247, 250, 275, 282, 297, 299; 308, 313, 326, 335, 336, 345, 380, 382-84, 387, 389, 395; 410, 433-35, 437, 441, 442, 444, 448, 476, 477, 480, 482, 489, 496; 503. To this list, add one painting not in PV: Snow at Louveciennes, 1871-72, Art Institute of Chicago, repro. in C. Lloyd, Camille

Pzssarro, New York, 1981, 42. 51. The figures for Cezanne are based on the catalogue

raisonn, by L. Venturi, Cizanne: Son Art--son oeuvre, 2 vols., Paris, 1936 (hereafter referred to as V). I have used the following list of ozl pazntings from the 1870s and 1880s: 1870s: 138, 142, 143, 146, 148, 151, 152, 155, 158, 165, 169, 170, 171, 173; 309-11, 317, 325, 331, 332; 1880s: 409, 413, 419-22, 425, 427, 438, 443, 445-47, 462, 463, 465-67, 469, 470, 472, 475-81, 485;

636, 652, 654. Watercolors (based on J. Rewald, Paul Cizanne: The Watercolors, Boston, 1983): 1870s: 73, 88-90, 112, 114, 117; 1880s: 155-57, 256, 258, 259. See also the oil (not in V) formerly in the Art Institute of Chicago: Arbres et maisons au bord de I'eau, ca. 1892-93, sold at Sotheby's, New York, Nov. 11, 1987, no. 23. 52. The screen motif emerged slowly in Corot's career, starting with about 7 paintings in the 1830s, with the number then doubling each decade thereafter, culminating in perhaps 60 paintings in the 1860s and with about 44 from the 1870s prior to his death in 1875. See A. Robaut and M. Moreau-

Nelaton, L'Oeuvre de Corot: Catalogue razsonni et illustrd, 4 vols., Paris, 1905; A. Schoeller and J. Dieterle, Corot, premier suppliment a L'Oeuvre de Corot par A. Robaut et Moreau-Nilaton, Paris, 1948; Schoeller and Dieterle, Corot, deuxztme suppliment a L'Oeuvre de Corot par A. Robaut et Moreau-Nilaton, Paris, 1956. No screen paintings are catalogued in the 3rd supplement by Dieterle, Paris, 1974.




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2 Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, View from the Farnese Gardens, Rome, 1826. Washington, D.C., Phillips Collection (photo: Phillips

Collection)

Jli-

3 Corot, Farm Scene, ca. 1840-50. Atlanta, High Museum of Art;

bequest of Albert Edward Thornton in memory of his mother, Mrs. Albert Edward Thornton, Sr. (photo: High Museum)

has not appreciably changed. The sharply angular forms of

the sturdy bridge are set in sharp counterpoint to the organic

twisting forms of the foreground trees, and each element is

given a distinct placement and identity within the clear, luminous setting. The light linear trace of branches in the

foreground animates the surface of the picture and preserves a clear separation from the forms set farther back in the

pictorial space. Corot's paintings of the screen motif may well have

stimulated Pissarro to experiment with it during the 1860s,

when he avowed his debt to Corot, listing the Barbizon

painter as his teacher when he submitted work to the Salon in

1864 and 1866. Pissarro's earliest surviving screen painting dates from about 1868 (PV 69), and we can point to at least

four done about 1870 at Louveciennes before the Franco-

Prussian War. Winter Landscape at Louveciennes (PV 8 1; Fig. 5)

organizes a disparate scattering of slender young trees drawn

from far and near into a cohesive arrangement, like a Gothic

screen set before the landscape. Its active pattern marks the

way across the surface, but it differs from the screens of Corot

in that some of its units "drop back" and are implicated

visually and tactually with more distant parts of the land-

scape: as when the trunks of two saplings at left act like tongs

securing the impasto of a white-pigmented house in their

V-shaped grasp; where the two dark trunks just left of center

seem to sandwich painted touches from foreground and

mid-ground, dabs of russet leaves and thick slabs of white

from the face of a farther house; and where vertical slices of

the mid-ground houses at right attach themselves like




pennants to the gray-tan trunks ranged before them. In these ways foreground and distance are made to interact in visually intricate and spatially compromised ways.

The complex orchestration of Winter Landscape at Louveci- ennes, in terms of the visual and textural interaction of spatially disparate elements, did not soon become a constitu- ent aspect of Pissarro's outdoor landscapes, however. More often than not during the next several years he continued Corot's practice, allowing foreground and background to maintain their separate realms. For example, working in England in 1871 he produced Near Sydenham Hill (with Lower Norwood in the Distance) (Fig. 6), a painting that is like a Baroque efflorescence of the motif offered by Corot in his early View of the Farnese Gardens, Rome (Fig. 2). Instead of Corot's closed masses, Pissarro presents vibrantly branching crowns that dominate the upper half of the composition. Although the branches may seem to animate the sky, they belong to a different plane of activity, close to the foreground. Rather than stolid guardians that stand out before the clustered houses below in Corot's composition, Pissarro's vibrant forms serve as flats placed well downstage, framing a backdrop depicting houses, hills, and sky.

It was only in the second half of the 1870s that Pissarro renewed with any consistency an inquiry into the interactive relationship between near and far that he had incorporated into the Winter Landscape at Louveciennes (Fig. 5). Beginning about 1877, as his paintings reveal, he became involved

increasingly with the visual relationship between elements, between trees and houses, near and far, the occluding and the occluded. The role of visibility, visuality-the ability to see and the questions of how and whether one sees both the entire landscape and the relationship of its parts-became a factor that entered fully into the process of painting and in that very way gave a new content, a larger dimension of meaning to the pictures. The pictures were clearly no longer pictures "of' something perceived, but became that and more-records of perception, of the kinds of seeing and questioning with which, Pissarro had come to realize, the painter working outdoors is inevitably engaged. Courbet's earlier emphasis not only upon seeing but also upon knowing how to see comes clearly to the fore. The complexities of perception, the uncertainties and doubt that arise in the acts of close, repeated, and continued looking, and of painting, become now a significant key to the full meaning of the picture.

The Red Roofs: Corner of the Village, Winter Effect, 1877 (Fig. 7), exemplifies the change that took place in Pissarro's work in the second half of the 1870s. The painting depicts a wooded site in late autumn or early winter; several gable- roofed farmhouses are seen clustered behind an orchard of young trees, their twisting branches all but bare of leaves, planted across the foreground. The subject is close to that of an almost contemporaneous painting by Corot, The Mill at

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4 Corot, The Bridge at Mantes, 1868-70. Paris, Mus&e d'Orsay (photo: Reunion des Mus~es Nationaux)




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5 Camille Pissarro, Winter Landscape at Louveciennes, ca. 1870. Paris,

Mus(e d'Orsay (photo: Reunion des

Mus(es Nationaux)

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6 Pissarro, Near Sydenham Hill (with Lower Norwood in the Distance), 1871. Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum (photo: Kimbell Art Museum)




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7 Pissarro, The Red Roofs: Corner of the Village, Winter Effect, 1877. Paris, Mus6e d'Orsay (photo: Reunion des Mus6es Nationaux)




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8 Corot, The Mill at Saint-Nicolas-lez-Arras, 1874. Paris, Louvre (photo: Reunion des Musdes Nationaux)

Saint-Nicolas-lez-Arras, dating from the summer of 1874 (Fig.

8), but the two pictures differ significantly in approach. Corot works as he had three decades earlier in the Farm Scene

(Fig. 3), registering the dry-brushed branches and touched-in

leaves over the preexisting forms of the buildings, just as he

laid in a final trace of branches in areas of foliage, a kind of

signature stroke that completes the painting. Pissarro, too, tended to work in much the same way in 1874. But as he

approached The Red Roofs he began to paint-and to

look-with greater "difficulty." Corot's elegance and cer-

tainty became Pissarro's doubt as his pictures took on a

greater weight of pigment and a cruder, more ragged aspect. The Red Roofs attains a textural richness and complexity

that serves as the equivalent in paint of the visual tangle the

artist had before his eyes. Indeed, perceptual intricacy and

textural complication must have reinforced one another in

the process of working the canvas. The strokes and clots of

paint reveal no rhythmic touch; they seem half made, half

discovered as a result of Pissarro's attempt to read the scene

in depth, to record the knotty, interactive visual relationship of trees and houses, near and far, the organic and the

fabricated. Strokes of branches stutter and break off in their

passage, interrupted or absorbed in the assertive textural

economy in which the houses came to assume their final

form. In Wooded Landscape at L'Hermitage, Pontoise (Fig. 9) of the

following year, Pissarro erected a beautifully delicate yet active screen of undulating vertical trunks and looping

spreading branches. The screen holds its identity here, much

more firmly so than in The Red Roofs, and the distant houses

retain much of their clarity of shape, especially across the

right half of the composition. But the foreground branches

agitate the sky, the sharply angled houses seen between the

trees to left of center sacrifice their spatial orientation and

definition. In the narrower gaps between the trees at center

and halfway over to the right the pigmented masses between

the trees-white, pink, and blue, referring to houses farther

back-seem as if extruded, squeezed and pressed forward

toward the picture plane. The orderly arrangement of the

screen initially promises clarity to the viewer, as it must have

done for the painter, but the latter's working process, his

on-the-spot inquiry, may have led him to animate the work

and keep it-as perception dictated-in a constant state of

suspension.

C6zanne turned to the screen-of-trees motif in more than a

dozen paintings during the 1870s; he occasionally paralleled Pissarro in choice of subject but rarely engaged in the




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9 Pissarro, Wooded Landscape at L'Hermitage, Pontoise, 1878. Kansas City, Missouri, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art; gift of Dr. and Mrs. Nicholas S. Pickard (photo: Nelson-Atkins Museum)




concerted perceptual inquiry that we see in Pissarro's work

beginning about 1877. Through much of the decade C6z- anne insisted in certain paintings on retaining a brutal

facture, an awkwardness and severity that worked, as it were,

against nature's abundance.53 More ungainly than anything by Pissarro and almost like a reproof to the light elegance of Corot's touch, In the Oise Valley of 1873 (Fig. 10) exhibits, nevertheless, a degree of attentiveness to the scene that is not unlike that revealed in his colleagues' work at the same time. The branches and leaves in the foreground are superim- posed upon the preexisting forms of the houses at the left,

clearly established in shape and outline. The leaves of the left tree are impulsively smeared over the house beyond and the

upper leaves seem to besmirch the sky. The occlusive becomes synonymous with the aggressive, but the simple foreground precedence of the masking trees is retained.

C6zanne occupied himself with the screen motif sporadi- cally until the mid-1880s, when he suddenly turned to it with

great concentration (at least twenty-nine oil paintings and four watercolors derive from the years around 1882-87). Of this large group I would like to focus on two exemplary works, paintings that build upon his experience with Pissarro

during the 1870s, but reveal bold new emphases of their own. In the Minneapolis Institute of Arts's Chestnut Trees at

thejas de Bouffan (Fig. 11) the black trees stand solidly before

houses, field, mountains, and sky. The activity of branches is confined to the upper half of the painting, where they seem to agitate the sky; one can almost hear the electric crackle of their movement. The sky is responsive; the pale bluish-gray paint breaks off around the branches, exposing the white canvas and making the interaction between trees and sky alive and continuously changing. The trunks, by contrast, do not appear to interact physically with the solid objects in the middle and far distance, but they are made, nonetheless, to affect our perception of them. In the very center, in the space between the divided trunk of the tall straight tree, the upper contour of Mont-Sainte-Victoire is erased; its solid form flattens out and bleeds into the sky. Similarly, the house at

right is deprived of its structural integrity; between the

parallel limbs of the tree second from right, the house loses its cubic shape and barely manages to retain a stage-flat substantiality. The trees are not painted so as to engage texturally or graphically with the objects farther back, but

they are made to affect our ability to see the landscape whole; those uncertain areas between trees lose their identity harshly, they become emphatic in their register of doubt.

Three other landscapes from the middle of the 1880s

reprise the basic setting and disposition of Pissarro's The Red

Roofs (Fig. 7) of approximately ten years earlier, although they depart somewhat from it in stylistic personality. Whereas

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10 Paul Cezanne, In the Oise Valley, 1873-75. Private collection, Japan (photo: Christie's, New York)




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11 Cezanne, Chestnut Trees at thejas de Bouffan, 1885-87. Minneapolis Institute of Arts (photo: Minneapolis Institute of Arts)

Pissarro's treatment was clotted and curdled, Cezanne's is fluid and lissome. He has, by 1885, at least in his landscapes, put aside the traces of his early crudeness. In Trees and Houses

(Paris, Orangerie; Fig. 12) the loss of acute vision beyond the screen is, as in Chestnut Trees at thejas de Bouffan, exaggerated and simplified: the lower portion of a house wiped away in the center; a detached window hanging from a reaching limb; half a house evaporated by a forking trunk further to the right. But Cezanne also found ways, as did Pissarro in The Red Roofs, to connect, to saturate near with far and far with near. By the mid-eighties he had developed the groping and

halting line, the multiple contour and the trace that trails off into indecisiveness, the breaks in pigment at the edges of

things that permit the white canvas to play an affirmative, sometimes a deconstructive role. He gave a house the color of underbrush, or branches the color of houses; he painted

limbs like hollow reeds, and then filled them with the substance and hue of what is behind them, far back in the

landscape. In Oslo's version of Trees and Houses (Fig. 13) he claims that the presence of the trees perceptually compro- mises (read: wipes out) houses and an entire hillside, so

drivingly insistent has he become on the impossibility of

realizing an object's identity in such a world of visual

complexity. Or substance, identity-content-is in the visu-

alizing, in the process of imparting identity and pulling it

away that is fundamental to the experience of seeing and

painting in the open air.54

Plein Air and Forgetting, Painting and Representation The effort of Pissarro and Cezanne in the screen-of-trees

pictures is central to an understanding of Impressionist landscape painting. As they entered into the landscape and

53. For the following screen paintings by Cezanne

(ca. 1872-ca. 1882) we can find close parallels in Pissarro's output: V 138, 142, 143, 148, 151, 155, 169, 171, 173, 311, 317, 325, 331, 332. More severe and awkward in character are: V 146, 152, 165, 170, 309, 310.

54. The Oslo painting certainly could have been carried further. Had Cezanne done so he might have complicated, nuanced, and particularized the

relationships between elements-between houses and hills and vegetation, and between them and the

foreground screen of trees. As it is, with the paint-

ing in a relatively rudimentary state of development, he registers the visual complexity of the scene and its painted representation as presenting a fundamental problematic: the edges of things, the gaps betwen branches and trees, and spatial location are recognized as areas of endless inquiry, open to unrealizability.




12 Cezanne, Trees and Houses, 1885-87. Paris, Mus&e de l'Orangerie (photo: Reunion des Mus~es Nationaux)

began to paint, both artists immersed themselves in the world of forgetting. It was essential, they came to recognize, that the book of knowledge be put aside, that the painter realize that houses and trees have no objective status indepen- dent of each other and of our ability to perceive them. Or at least they realized that to be one stand a painter might take if he attempted to be faithful to his own experience. In that

sense, the ego that Constable cautioned against when he counseled humility before nature, and that Cezanne seems to have distrusted as well, asserted itself quite fully in these

naive and humble paintings forged in the one crucible that made forgetting even a possibility: the open air.

Beginning in the 1860s plein-air painting entered a new

phase of its history. It changed from being the staging

ground for something that would come later, that would be,

by definition, bigger and better-the finished tableau; it now came to be seen as the proving ground for testing a new

relationship between vision and painting. In relation to traditional plein-air practice, the attitude toward time

changed, as well. The painter no longer acted as prospector searching out a satisfactory motif for a future composition or

seeking renewal in the fresh air in short, occasionally even

prescribed, stretches of activity.55 The painter's response to nature became a continuing one, and the quality of his

experience, working in and against nature, working with and

against the schemata of past painting, became integral to the character of the works he produced.56 Plein air, as Duranty and Mallarme recognized, was the arena for durational

55. Late 18th-century landscape theorists, e.g., Lep- rince and Valenciennes, advised that no more than two hours be spent on a study from nature, no more than one half hour, according to Valenciennes, for a sunrise or sunset scene. Leprince, Principes du dessin dans le genre du paysage, Paris, ca. 1780, cited

by P. Radisich (as in n. 43), 99. P. H. de Valenci- ennes, Elimens de perspective pratique, 2nd rev. ed.,

Paris, 1820, 338; cited by Boime (as in n. 43), 138. Turner, in 1813, pleased with the rapidity with which he had completed oil sketches in Devon, noted that one of them, "perhaps the best," was done in "less than half an hour"; W. Thornbury, The Life ofJ. M. W. Turner, R.A., 2nd ed., 1877, 153; cited by P. Conisbee in Painting from Nature (as in n. 41), 34, no. 55. In 1883, Jules Laforgue, in discuss-

ing Impressionist practice, recommended fifteen minutes before the motif and noted that even that was too long to capture the "fugitive reality" of the scene; jules Laforgue: Textes de critique d'art, ed. M. Dottin, Lille, 1988, 171-72 (Selected Writings ofJules Laforgue, trans. W. J. Smith, New York, 1956, 194). And Monet told Lilla Cabot Perry that "no painter could paint more than one half hour on any outdoor effect and keep the picture true to nature";




- "Lr:

13 Cezanne, Trees and Houses, 1885-87. Oslo, Nasjonalgalleriet (photo: J. Lathion)

experience; immediate responses provided no more than incidents along a line of continued invention. Repeated returns to the site, working again on the same canvas, became the norm rather than the exception.

The "impression," the "first sensation," of which the early critics wrote, was a will o' the wisp. Those notions did not enter into the working practice or the aims of the Impression- ists. For that matter, it was the working process that itself

gave the lie to the "impression" and to the associated ideas of

instantaneity and spontaneity from the beginning.57 From the first delay between stroke and observation, the insistent, biting role of practice emerged fully in the painters' awareness. They became newly and more acutely aware of how each mark of the brush could heighten or destroy, or at least

alter, the dream of representation. In the dialectical process that unfolded, a number of activities came into play with

varying frequency and intensity: looking at the landscape, looking at the canvas at arm's length, walking back to scrutinize it from a distance, returning, looking at the canvas and at the landscape while reapproaching the easel, each

action-despite the drive toward purity-impregnated, un-

predictably, with the spur of immediate interests and the sedimented experience of a lifetime.

One of the finest perceptions of the plein-air process has been offered by T. J. Clark, precisely in a discussion of Pissarro's The Red Roofs (Fig. 7). In a splendid passage he describes the varieties of uncertainties that, in his view, seem to be registered in the picture and played out in Pissarro's

at another time he described work on the Poplars series, where, for one painting, "the effect lasted only seven minutes, or until the sunlight left a certain leaf'; Perry, 123, 121. 56. E. H. Gombrich's formula of schema and correc- tion, whereby the view of nature is subject to the conditioning power of preexisting pictorial images, "correctible" only in small part by fresh scrutiny of

the model in nature, must be acknowledged here. His discussion serves as obbligato to my presentation throughout this essay; Gombrich, esp. chaps. 2-5, 9. 57. A literature on the meaning and limitations of the notions of instantaneity and spontaneity has emerged in recent years. See, in particular, R. Shiff, review of several books on Pissarro, Art Bulletin, LXVI, Dec. 1984, 681-90; and Shiff (as in n. 14),

chaps. 4, 5, 7, 8, 14, and p. 241, n. 22, on the distinction between instantaneity and spontaneity. See also S. Levine, "The Instant of Criticism and Monet's Critical Instant," Arts Magazine, Lv, March 1981, 114-21; and J. House (as in n. 47), 220-21 and 92-96, 102-8, where he responds to an essay by R. Herbert, "Method and Meaning in Monet," Art in America, LXVII, Sept. 1979, 90-108.




process of painting it.58 Clark is interested in the relationship between painting and representation, and he notes in particular the confused "pattern of strokes at the right" ("very near to not being pattern at all"), strokes that, raw and over-

worked, "barely make sense" as a record of appearances. His

analysis and his argument are best presented in his own words:

The individual marks are scratched and spread into one another as if they had been worked over too long or too

emphatically; sometimes the surface of the paint is visibly swollen with separate dabs of raw colour, and sometimes it is overlaid, almost cancelled out, with one or two declara- tive smears of red or green. The purpose of all this is not clear at arm's length: it is hard to see what produced the

build-ups and erasures, or the sudden shifts of colour

along the line of a branch or the edge of a roof. And

presumably these things would have been obscure even to the painter as he put the particular touches down.

Not irretrievably so, of course: if he moved back from his work the marks would eventually congeal and release

something seen-the way the light falls on a house front or the space between one tree trunk and another. The

technique was nonetheless strange, for as Pissarro was

painting-I mean the word "painting" in a crude materialist way, as modernist writers might use it-he would have no very well-formed notion of what the paint could stand for and how effectively. While it was being made the likeness was barely one at all, and at best the justice of it was provisional; no doubt the thing did resolve at a

distance, and the painter went back and back to the

proper point to look and compare. But the walk back was itself an odd distancing; it was as if a space had to be kept between painting and representing: the two procedures must never quite mesh, they were not to be seen as part and parcel of each other. That was because (the logic here was central to the modernist case) the normal habits of

representation must not be given a chance to function;

they must somehow or other be outlawed.

Clark is an acute observer of the plein-air process when he notes that working close up keeps the artist uncertain about

how the image will read when he steps back ("at best the

justice of it was provisional"), and he is right to emphasize in his last remark Pissarro's willed separation from conventional technique ("the normal habits of representation must

not be given a chance to function"-an observation in direct line from Mallarme and close to Constable and Cezanne's

"forgetting all that existed before him"). Indeed, the painter working outdoors realizes at all points that the stroke he makes at arm's length is conditional; he is aware at all times that he will have to check it out when he steps back. Where Clark misreads the situation, I believe, is in insisting on the

step back as a detachment, a loss.59 Rather, the relationship between arm's length and distance was an integral part of the

process, one of a series of linked maneuvers out of which the

painting was formed. The first among these is that between the stroke and the

object; contra Clark, the painter does know what a touch stands for, knows that he has had a reason for making it in the first place, even if he does not know "how effectively" it will convey the appearance that concerns him. Each touch

keeps him in contact with the motif: the motif generates the

touches; the touches keep the landscape alive before him,

just as they activate the painted surface. The walk back, the

viewing from a distance, serves a complementary function: it

provides a test, it may confirm or deny, it permits the painter to convert the "trees" into the "forest." The distant view also

precedes (over and over again), in effect prepares, the return to the canvas, the renewed working of close effects, observed in detail and painted at arm's length. The painting is a

product of such relationships, all held in suspension- between observation and transcription, between touch and

observation, between touch and touch-all juggled one after the other and all at once. Painting was not autonomous,

crudely materialist, but constantly connected-to the scene, to the view of the canvas from a distance-never separated from the task of representation.

Clark goes on to say that painting as Pissarro did it was "about seeing," involving "a set of fragile and unprec- edented equations between the painted and the visible," but adds that it meant "keeping the two terms of the equation apart, insisting on them as separate quantities." His recognition of the subtle relationship between the painted and the visible is beautifully caught, but undermined by his emphasis upon-I tend to feel, his preference for-disjunction. Rather than the painter's insistence on a willed separation ("separate quantities"), we should affirm that the relationship between painting and nature is qualitative at base, and

endlessly flawed. Rather than a drift toward alienation, we should discern on the painter's part a complex effort to work

58. Clark (as in n. 49), 20-21, the painting there titled Corn de vzllage, effet d'hzver. 59. Clark's view in this section would seem to be the

product of his doubts about modernism (he refers to modernism twice on p. 20 with a note of distaste: "I mean the word 'painting' in a crude materialist

way, as modernist writers might use it"; and "the

logic here was central to the modernist case"). When he characterizes the painter's step back from the canvas as a "distancing," he presents it as an

estrangement that is meant to hold within it the seeds of the misorientation of the modernist enter-

prise: alienation of far from near (akin to the alienation of the worker from his labor); painting up close as detached from the referent in nature

(hence no better than "'painting' in a crude materialist way"). Signs of disengagement, of estrangement, are what he wants to find as he surveys this

early stage of modernist development; that within modernism there is a painting that is crudely materialist, and hence drained of meaning and relevance, that there is a painting that has gone wrong, is what he firmly believes, or so it seems to me. And it had to begin somewhere. 60. On intentionality, see the following essays in Kockelmans: Kockelmans, "Some Fundamental Themes of Husserl's Phenomenology," 32-36; A. Gurwitsch, "On the Intentionality of Conscious- ness," 118-37; Kockelmans, "Intentional and Con- stitutive Analyses," 137-46; and G. Brand (as in n.

46), esp. 198-200. See also Merleau-Ponty (as in n. 46) on the "intentional arc," 135-36; T. Eagleton, Lzterary Theory, Minneapolis, 1983, 54-61; and Gombrich's endorsement of the intentional character of perception: "Perception as such, as has been said, has a subject-predicate character. To see is to see 'something out there' " (Gombrich, 260). 61. The idea of the invisible in Merleau-Ponty is

complex and covers a wide range of phenomena, e.g., the perception of objects (such as those behind one's back) that are not placed directly before our

gaze; the experience of imagining absences, possibilities, potentialities, etc.; the unconscious, as dis-

tinguished from the conscious, and so on; see J. Edie, "The Meaning and Development of Merleau-




with and through that flawed relationship, an effort that

comprises an acceptance of failure and a compensating awareness that nature's difference is painting's boon. The

recognition of difference was not alienating, or so the

Impressionists' continuing devotion to plein air would sug- gest. Nature fueled painting's invention, while nature's

tantalizing "impossibility" kept painting in check. The en-

crusted, the belabored, the always unpredictable surface of Pissarro's paintings provides us with a record of connected-

ness, rather than a perverse accumulation of a series of denials.

What Pissarro does, and what Cezanne does, is enter into a tense and prolonged exchange with the landscape. What the

Impressionist landscape painter does, at least in his most

probing efforts, is establish what phenomenologists call an intentional relationship to the setting in which he works.

Intentionality refers to the dynamics of perception and human consciousness.60 As developed by Husserl at a time when some of the Impressionists were still active, and carried on and altered by his followers, notably Merleau-Ponty, the notion of intentionality insists that our awareness is always connected to a referent, either in our minds (an idea) or in the world out there. The external referent, the "intended" element, may be either solid or intangible (phenomenology does away with the classical distinction between primary-- shape, motion, quantity-and secondary-sensory-quali- ties, such as color); whichever it is, it will achieve its meaning in relation to the character of the act in which it is encoun- tered.

Working in the landscape Pissarro established an intentional relationship to the scene, as if he was attached, as by an

arrow, to every object-as if every gap and break was an

object-in his field of vision. His scrutiny was directed to nuances of color, tone, and value, to the complex roles of

atmosphere, light, movement, occlusion, and spatial location-the location of objects before and around him and his own position in relation to them. The intangible, the invis-

ible-light and atmosphere-can imprint themselves strongly upon the painter's sensibility;61 the bright reflection of the face of a house farther back may impinge upon the shape of a tree limb closer to us; the edges of things may get lost in haze or glare, or in special instances multiply in response to

binocular disparity. The elements of the scene are open to

perceptual inquiry, to evaluation, to assignment and reassign-

ment, to a dialogue of tangibility and withdrawal, of the visible and the invisible.

The process is pursued in an intricate circuit of exchange between landscape motif, canvas, and painter. Each fixation of the landscape may occasion a painted response, each

painted mark may affect the look of the setting. The painter will attend to one or the other-motif or canvas-or both at the same time, may do that from near the canvas or at a distance, or along the axis between the two. The notion of

intentionality, thus, must be understood not only in relation to the landscape but also to all aspects of the painting process and to the entire range of motivating factors-not the least of which are other pictures-that drive and compli- cate the painter's purpose. We do well, I think, to recognize a

"complex intentionality," a term used by Louis Finkelstein.

Discussing the work of Monet, Finkelstein points to "a synthesis, entirely intuitive and empirical, between many competing states of mind." It is "only through this act," he adds, "of what appears to be will but is more like the

discovery and affirmation of a complex intentionality, refer-

ring both to the experience and to the painting means, that the picture is established at all."''62 A complex intentionality will be directed to both the landscape and the painting, each intended actively and reflectively, and it will be fueled by all the parts, past and present, that make up the substance of our lives.

Pissarro brought all that to The Red Roofs, including the wish to break through the complexity of that many-layered intentionality to a state of innocence or naivete before nature. He strove, as had Constable and as did Cezanne, to bracket out his knowledge of other pictures, and he sought to inhibit the familiar habits of his hand. The aspiration to innocence was a vital part of the world he brought with him as he entered the landscape. Plein air, in fine, in its most

important manifestation, establishes a situation in which

landscape, painting, and painter are subject to a ceaseless

play of intentions that twine and intertwine in unpredictable ways. Without the painting, the landscape would not be what it now became, it would remain absorbed, unreflected upon, within the "natural attitude," the ordinary world of habit and

expectation; without the landscape, the painting-that particular painting-would not have come into being in the first

place. In the open air, vision and painting, painting and

representation were drawn more tightly together than ever before.

Ponty's Concept of Structure," in Merleau-Ponty: Perceptzon, Structure, Language, ed. J. Sallis, Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1981, 50-51. I am using the invisible here, however, to denote intangibles in perception, e.g., the play of light and shadow and atmosphere, which affect the appearance of objects in nature without, in ordinary experience, being perceived themselves. It is the special concern of the artist to observe these things and reveal the ways in which they bring objects, the visible, to life. As Merleau-Ponty puts it: "Light, lighting, shad- ows, reflections, color, all the objects of his quest are not altogether real objects; like ghosts, they have only visual existence. In fact they exist only at the threshold of profane vision; they are not seen

by everyone. The painter's gaze asks them what they do to suddenly cause something to be ... what they do to compose this worldly talisman and to make us see the visible"; "Eye and Mind," trans. C. Dallery, in Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy ofPerceptzon, ed. J. Edie, Evanston, Ill., 1964, 166; originally published as "L'Oeil et l'esprit," Art de France, I, Jan. 1961, 187-208 (191). (In this vein Merleau- Ponty's concept of the play between the invisible and the visible is linked to Mallarme's view of plein-air painting and the painter's role in "The Impressionists and Edouard Manet" [as in n. 12].)

"Eye and Mind" is the principal late work by Merleau-Ponty in which he develops his discussion of the visible and invisible in relation to painting. See also his posthumously published fragments Le

Vzszble et l'znvzszble, Paris, 1964; The Vzszble and the Inviszble, trans. A. Lingis, Evanston, Ill., 1968. Excellent analyses of Merleau-Ponty's ideas are to be found in: F. Bender, "Merleau-Ponty and Method: Toward a Critique of Husserlian Phenom- enology and of Reflective Philosophy in General," Journal of the Brztzsh Soczety for Phenomenology, xrv, May 1983, esp. 186-95; P. Crowther, "Merleau- Ponty: Vision and Painting," Dzalectzcs and Human-

zsm, nos. 1-2, 1988, 107-18; M. C. Dillon, "'Eye and Mind': The Intertwining of Vision and Thought," Man and World, xiiI, 1980, 155-71. 62. L. Finkelstein, "On the Unpicturelikeness of Our Seeing," in Perceptzon and Pictorial Representa- tzon," ed. C. Nodine, New York, 1979, 74.




The title of this essay offers a linear succession of units, unequal in character and value. In the best reading of the

essay, each element should be kept in play, each understood as implicated in the meaning of the others, each contributing beyond the sum of parts. Forgetting is perhaps the thread that binds them all (if it is not, then it retains at least a signal place), although forgetting itself is unstable in meaning, sometimes too thin, sometimes too thick and dense. Forget- ting may stand as a synecdoche for the entire range of

Impressionist aims: antiacademicism, anticonvention, the belief in nature, the wish to forge a new manner of painting. Plein air, in turn-indeed, the plein-air attitude-serves as the essential site for Impressionist practice, the site that makes forgetting a possibility at all. Forgetting, as we have seen, has a double meaning: to forget nature (Monet's "try to

forget what objects you have before you"); and to forget painting (C6zanne's wish to free his mind from the formulas of the past).63 Cezanne sought, as did Monet and Pissarro, to

forget both, to keep both in play, as he attempted to "realize" his painting. Here again, at the end as at the

beginning, the image of Cezanne at work is instructive (Fig. 1). At the center of the photograph, we see the brush held

firmly yet delicately in Cezanne's right hand. Poised, alert, the hyphenated link between vision and painting, the brush serves both terms of the equation; it is forgetting's complex sign.

Frequently Cited Sources

Gombrich, E. H., Art and Illusion, 2nd rev. ed., New York, 1961.

Kockelmans, J., ed., Phenomenology, Garden City, N.Y., 1967.

Leslie, C. R., Memozrs of the Lzfe ofJohn Constable, ed. J. Mayne, Oxford, 1951. The New Paznting: Impresszonzsm, 1874-1886, exh. cat., San Francisco and

Washington, D.C., 1986.

Perry, L. C., "Reminiscences of Claude Monet from 1889 to 1900," American

Magazine ofArt, xvIm, March 1927, 119-25.

Stuckey, C., "Monet's Art and the Act of Vision," in Aspects of Monet, ed. J. Rewald and F. Weitzenhoffer, New York, 1984, 106-21.

Wildenstein, D., Claude Monet: Bzographie et catalogue razsonne, 5 vols., Lausanne and Paris, 1974-91.

Zola, E., Salons, ed. F. W. J. Hemmings and R. J. Niess, Paris, 1959.

Joel Isaacson's work on Impressionism includes two monographs on

Monet, Monet: Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe, 1972, and Claude Monet: Observation and Reflection, 1978, and the exhibition catalogue The Crisis of Impressionism 1878-1882, The University of Michigan Museum ofArt, 1979-80 [Department of the History of Art, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich. 48109].

63. See nn. 35, 32.



Constable, Duranty, Mallarmé, Impressionism, Plein Air, and Forgetting

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