by David Kastan
But violet seems to differ from purple in whatever language—not so much as a different shade of color than as something more luminous: perhaps a purple lit from within. Violet is the shimmering, fugitive color of the sky at sunset, purple the assertive, substantial color of imperial robes. Purple were the sails of Cleopatra’s barge, as both Plutarch and Shakespeare tell us; but Cleopatra’s eyes, as everyone seemed to notice when Elizabeth Taylor played her in the film of 1963, were violet.
And modern painting began with that luminous violet. In Paris in 1874. On April 15.
Well, not really. But if we need one, that is at least a plausible starting date. Stories of origin are almost always false. Everything always begins earlier. This did, too. But that was the day that a group of artists, who called themselves “the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Engravers, etc.,” opened the first of eight exhibitions they would organize between 1874 and 1886 as an alternative to the official Salon de Paris. Many of those who showed their work would remain anonymous. Some, of course, would not: Eugène Boudin, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley.
These would become “the pioneers of the painting of the future,” as a critic, Émile Cardon, prophesied in his review in La Presse. For him, however, this was intended not as a compliment to their artistry but as a condemnation of contemporary taste. Impressionism in his mind was nothing more than doodling with paint. “Dirty three-quarters of a canvas with black and white, rub the rest with yellow, dot it with red and blue blobs at random, and you will have an impression of spring.”1
Critics were outraged by the loose, broken brushwork that made the paintings seem to many viewers more like sketches than proper paintings. In place of the ostentatiously smooth surfaces of more traditional painting, which sought with its impeccable “finish” to erase all evidence of its making, these canvases, with their “blobs” of bright color and individualized, accentuated brushstrokes, announce themselves as both painted and provisional. Monet’s Impression, Soleil Levant (Impression, Sunrise), the painting often thought to provide the name for the movement, was mocked by the critic Louis Leroy in Charivari: “Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.”2
But it was really a color that offended the art world: violet.3 Not the yellow, red, and blue that Cardon had noted but the violet that was now seemingly everywhere—at least on these canvases. Violet became the name for the shock of the new.
In 1881, Jules Claretie quoted Manet’s prediction that “within three years everyone will be painting violet” (tout le monde fera violet) and lamented that this was all too likely to come true. Maybe it already had. An exasperated French novelist, Joris-Karl Huysmans, complained that “earth, sky, water, flesh” were inevitably now the color of “lilacs and eggplants.” Faces were rendered “with lumps of bright violet paint” (avec des grumeaux de violet intense). Ambient light now appeared only “in harsh blue and garish lilac” (de bleu rude et lilas criard).4
It was an outrage. In 1878, Théodore Duret wrote: “In summer sunlight reflected by green foliage, skin and clothing take on a violet hue. The impressionist painter paints people in violet forests, so the public loses all control. Critics shake their fists and call the painter a vulgar scoundrel.”5 Still, violet became the color of choice. The Irish critic and novelist George Moore, thinking about why violet seemed to dominate the impressionists’ paintings, replied with a shrewd insight into the psychology of artistic fashion: “One year one paints violet and people scream, and the following year everyone paints a great deal more violet.” Huysmans had a simpler explanation: “Their retinas were diseased.”6
Or maybe it was their brains. August Strindberg commented on the purplish palette of the impressionists and wondered if perhaps they all were “mad.” Cardon had speculated about possible “mental derangement” (une maladie du système nerveux).7 Alfred Wolff, the art critic for Le Figaro, Paris’s leading newspaper at the time, wasn’t quite prepared to offer a clinical diagnosis but clearly recognized the possibility: it was no more likely that one could make Pissarro “understand that trees were not violet” than that one could cure a “lunatic” who believed himself to be the pope (Figure 31).8
Other critics were less scandalized and saw the color merely as a fashionable affectation. One sniffed that impressionism seemed to demand nothing more from an artist than painting the sky violet. The increasingly familiar bluish purple tones of the paintings regularly drew comment, almost always negative. In a review in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Alfred de Lostelot, an early defender of impressionism, noted the painters’ unusual dependence on the violet color (and even conjectured wildly that some of them might be able to see ultraviolet rays). “Monet and his friends,” he said, granting Monet pride of place in the movement, oddly seemed to see the whole world in violet. “Those that love the color will be delighted,” he said, but he reluctantly acknowledged that most gallery-goers did not.9
If not nearly as ubiquitous in the paintings as the exasperated responses would suggest, violet did differentiate the palette of impressionism from any paintings seen before. And gradually people did come to “love the color.” Perhaps it was a scandal, but as the narrator says in Émile Zola’s novel His Masterpiece, it became the painters’ “gay scandal”—a willful “exaggeration of sunlight” that offered welcome relief from “the black pretentious things” of the official salon.10
Not only did violet provide a distinctive new color for modern art, but strangely, at least for some, it offered a distinctive new color for the world. Nature itself suddenly began to appear “absolutely modern,” according to Oscar Wilde in “The Decay of Lying,” looking like “exquisite Monets and entrancing Pissarros,” with landscapes and skies made up of “strange blotches of mauve” and “restless violet shadows.”11
FIGURE 31: Camille Pissarro, Poplars, Sunset at Eragny, 1894: Oil on canvas, 28 15/16 × 23⅞ in. (73.5 × 60.6 cm). Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri
It is perhaps not quite as perverse an argument as it first appears, or maybe it is: nature imitating art. But the impressionists allowed—no, trained—our eyes to see nature differently: to see it dressed in color tones and modulations of light that, as Wilde pronounced, “did not exist till Art had invented them.”12
This isn’t a claim that impressionists made for themselves. They didn’t make any claims at all. Theirs was a revolution without a manifesto. It didn’t begin as a theoretical program, and to the degree that it became one, each painter acted on it somewhat differently. The paintings were its statements—along with some letters and a few interviews, though most of these were given after the painters had stopped painting as impressionists.
And the label wasn’t even their own, though eventually they would adopt it. At first, they called themselves “independents,” then “intransigents.” Only for their third exhibition did they embrace the term “impressionists” that the critics had already used. “They are impressionists,” said Jules-Antoine Castagnary in a review in Le Siècle in 1874, “in that they render, not a landscape, but the sensation produced by the landscape.”13
That is what almost everyone has said about them: that their subject was the spontaneous visual experience of the world rather than the world itself. Photography could deal faithfully with the world, but only in tonal grays (see Chapter 10). Painters should deal faithfully with how they saw the world, and that included seeing it in color—and encountering it mainly out of doors.
As modern life increasingly moved indoors, modern painting moved outside. Landscape became the characteristic genre of the impressionists, but their interest was not, as with earlier landscape painters, in re-creating the particularities of its geological, agricultural, or architectural features. They wanted, it was said, to re-create the immediate visual impression of that landscape, produced by the light in the very instant before the brain fully organized the scene.
But even this isn’t ex
actly right. Obviously they were not painting realistic images of the world as it objectively exists. (The artist Donald Judd claimed that “the last real picture of real objects in a real world was painted by Courbet.”)14 But neither were they representing immediate visual sensations, even though Monet would say late in his life that his originality lay in his ability to record “impressions registered on my retina.”15 These are paintings by artists “drinking in the intoxicating effects of the sun,” in Philippe Burty’s wonderful phrase in a review published in 1874 in La République Française.16 Landscapes became lightscapes. But we shouldn’t underestimate either the intoxication or the fact that the artists usually returned soberly to the studio to complete their paintings.17 They were committed to neither optics nor objectivity.
Rather, they were painting something in between. Literally. It isn’t that they painted objects as we see them. They painted the luminous air and light that exists in between the eye and those objects. “I want to paint the air in which the bridge, the house, and the boat are to be found—the beauty of the air around them—and that is nothing less than the impossible,” Monet said in 1895 in an interview while visiting Norway. “To me the motif is insignificant. What I want to reproduce is what lies between the motif and me.”18
What “lies between” is something real, although it is transparent and insubstantial. It affects the appearance of objects, but it is not itself normally perceived. To paint it may very well seem to be “impossible,” as Monet said. But it was exactly what he and the other impressionists wanted to portray: not objects but what Cézanne called “the atmosphere of objects”—light and air, which demand color, not contour. The objects themselves mattered only as they provided the particular occasions and some necessary scaffolding for painting the in-between.19
FIGURE 32: Claude Monet, Charing Cross Bridge, The Thames, 1903, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon
And surprisingly the in-between seemed to have a characteristic color. “I have finally discovered the true color of the atmosphere,” Manet would crow near the end of his life: “It is violet.”20 And even though Manet rarely painted as if he really believed this (and never committed to the in-between), Monet often painted as if it were true (Figure 32).
And it wasn’t the result of retinal disease. Cataracts, however, would seriously impair Monet’s color vision late in his life. He had surgery to remove them from his right eye in January 1923 at the age of eighty-two. But when he dedicated himself to painting the color of the atmosphere, his vision had not yet been affected.
Still, Manet’s claim is both unexpected and unconvincing. Both he and Monet knew how much and how quickly light changes through the day. “Color,” Monet said, “any color, lasts only an instant, sometimes three or four minutes at a time.”21 So although there are times when the atmosphere does enchantingly seem to be violet, these are fleeting, occurring mainly in the liminal moments between daylight and darkness. Obviously the color of the atmosphere does not remain constant. It is temporary and transient, which is the precise recognition that motivates the several series of paintings that Monet famously undertook, such as his haystacks and the paintings of Rouen Cathedral rendered in the changeable lighting conditions of the day. These are not variations on a theme but paintings with variation as their theme.
Yet out of the array of atmospheric variation that he captures, Monet returns again and again to violet. Unlike Manet, he doesn’t believe that violet is the atmosphere’s true color—it is no more or less true than any other color produced by particular light—but it isn’t a completely arbitrary choice. It is, however, a choice, and it becomes for him as much a symbol as a sensation. And what permits the choice is the very thing that differentiates violet from purple: that sense of its being magically lit from within.
What is lit from without is usually what Monet paints, as changing conditions of illumination destabilize the very idea of color. What color are the haystacks really? What color is the cathedral at Rouen? Monet’s answer is that the haystacks and cathedral are the color (or colors) they seem to be at the moment of looking. The colors they have are those created in the particular light in which they are viewed. No one color is more real than the other. In fact, “real” is exactly the wrong word for what it is.
The complexity of color—its energy and instability—is the subject of Monet’s series paintings more than the objects that he painted. The paintings defy what scientists often call “color constancy”: the ability of the visual system to stabilize the color of objects differently illuminated. For example, a red tomato picked from the garden in brilliant sunshine and then taken inside to the kitchen would never be perceived as having two different colors, or if we looked at it brightly lit on one side and in shadow on the other. We seem always to know instinctively what color it “really” is. But Monet’s series paintings explore the varying conditions of illumination so intensely that, even with familiar objects, color constancy is impossible to achieve. When we look at these paintings, our brains are unable to correct for the distortions of light. We recognize distortion, if that is what we choose to call it, as what light inevitably does to the surface of objects. We might as well just call it “color.”
Yet from all the colors in Monet’s astonishing palette, it is violet that somehow became not merely a color of light but the color of light or, better, the color of the luminous itself.
It becomes, then, hard to avoid the thought that impressionism, at least as Monet inhabits it, isn’t much interested in anything that can properly be called realism—not even an “ocular realism,” as some have termed it, by which they usually mean a commitment to the illusionistic rendering, not of the world, but of visual experience.22 But the closer one looks, the more impressionism seems to be something closer to abstraction’s nursery than to realism’s last gaudy night. Monet told Lilla Cabot Perry, a young American painter, to “try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field, 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 naïve impression of the scene before you.”23
The “naïve impression” was always a bit of fake. The innocent eye is never really innocent, and both “the scene” and the process of seeing always mattered less than the color and the shape. As Monet’s phrasing suggests, impressionism points the way forward to Piet Mondrian’s blocks of color every bit as much (or maybe more) than it looks back, if only as far back as Manet. Monet wasn’t really very interested either in nature or in vision, and violet isn’t in fact the color of the atmosphere. But it is the color of his formal commitment—to painting color rather than colored objects or even our impressions of them.
That’s why violet became impressionism’s scandal. It is the index, as those early critics of impressionism intuited, of what is most radical and unsettling in these paintings, even if now some of these paintings have become so familiar (domesticated on greeting cards, T-shirts, and coffee mugs) that it is hard to imagine that they ever could have unsettled anyone. The vehemence of the initial negative reaction to these paintings seems baffling today. Their graceful mastery of the world now seems less challenging than charming—objectionable, perhaps, only for being a bit too easy to like.
In a sense, however, that is exactly what the critics responded to, though they misnamed it. Violet is its symptom, misidentified as a cause. It isn’t just that they thought that these paintings are decorative, which they are. Or that they are superficial, which they also are. It is, rather, that the decorative and the superficial seems a betrayal of what art was supposed to be. Art, it was thought, should reveal fundamental truths about the world rather than merely indulging in tricks of the light (though those tricks turn out to be one of the fundamental truths about the world).
Color, therefore, was to be used only for coloring in. Then it could be what was sometimes called “moral color,” confirming rather than contesting th
e primacy of line. But once color becomes primary, as in these paintings, rather than additive—that is, once color becomes what the paintings are essentially about—it can no longer be either moral or true. It is seductive and it is deceptive. But in spite of that—or more likely because of it—color is exactly what impressionism cared about, and that is what its critics hated. Trees shouldn’t be violet, and the world should be made of something more substantial than colored “blobs.”
Objects, which in realist paintings are designed to seem solid and stable, in these shimmer and dissolve. For the early critics of impressionism, the fragmented brushstrokes and flecks of paint were the disturbing evidence of the artists’ weakening attachment to nature and, maybe worse, of their weakening mastery of technique. Either way, the art world was not yet ready to grant the painters their freedom from the responsibilities of representation.
The early critics weren’t wrong about what they saw. The paintings, in creating their dazzling luminosity, disassemble the image, undoing its integrity and stability. Or rather, the image is alternately composed and decomposed, depending on where the viewer stands. From a distance, the paintings are clear and coherent; up close they are just streaks and smears of unruly color on canvas. For one early reviewer, this was the source of a dismissive joke about Pissarro’s landscapes. “Seen up close they are incomprehensible and awful,” said León de Lora in Le Gaulois in 1877. “From afar they are awful and incomprehensible.”24