HIGH AC RES COLLEGIAN
Impressionism" Cont.)
constructed properly* The same, of
course, held true for the studio fig-.
ure, which was built up in much the
same way before it was colored. The
massive darks of Corotts peasant women
attest the truth of his adherence to
this program. Manet himself in his
greatest works of the 1860 ts often used
!towns and blacks to establish his
radically simplified planes. Color too
was modified with the admixture of
neutral tones to control intensity and
value* The bright hues of the famous
Terrape at the Seaside in the Pitcairn
Collection set= almost to be pitted
agai*st the neutral tones which lurk
under the leaves and in the hollows of
the waves. Monet was working toward
his later, cleaner style here, but he
had not gotten rid of this shadow en—
tirely. The practiced eye can almost •
always tell a work by Renoir, or Monet,
or any other member of the group done
earlier than about 1871, justby the
presence of this tonality which no
amount of bright additional color could
quite conceal.
zheo, the true Impressionist manner was
evolved, these colors were excluded,
or at least tey were no longer used to
make forms plastic. In their place came
blue s aid even more frequently a wide
range of violets. Now these new "shadow
colors" give a very different effect,
whether they are dark and intense, or
pale and low—keyed. Instead of tying
the picture together by a value scale,
they join with other hues in a sort of
color symphony in which form, at least
in the traditional understanding of it,
is rather a by-product than an end. In
Monet's Women in a Garden(lB67) the
figures are, as it were, made, but the
people on the street in Boulevard des
Capucines(lB73) somehow seem to have
just happened. In the new search for
light, these painters were content to
have their forms as suggestions because
they were not really the focus of the
interest in the picture—a fact which
helps to explain why Impressionismwas
• •
basically unsatisfactory for such a man continued:n next. edition
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FRIDAY DECEMBER 5 1958
as Degas, or Renoir when he was dealing
vrith the nude figure. As will be seen
later, the public 'lnd (critics wanted,
or thought they wanted, to have the
objects they looked at constructed, and
constructed according to the rules;
when they sensed that f ems were essen—
tially accidents in a technique the
true purpose of which they failed to
grasp, they were annoyed.
The absence of neutral tones as a mod—
eling agent for formwas only one part
of the new a?proach. Another was the
frank and unabashed use of a far wider
range of tints which were "natural,"
ioa,s t not obtained by mixtures worked
up on the palette. The introduction of
tube—encased colors after 1841 and the
new variety of chemical pigments cor?-.
bined to offer the painter a handy source
of almost any color, clean and ready
for his purpose. Now that he was look—
ing at nature to see it as light rather
than form, and when he knew how to ana
lyze the light he saw, he could match
the shadows and lights with tints or
combinations of tints which were applied
directly to the canvas to play their
specific and precise role in the effect
desired, The result was that once the
possibilities of brilliance inherent
in a color gamut of pure hues rivaling
the spectrum had been grasped, the
modeling in brownish or grayish values
was abandoned; it muddied the effect.
Later, the painstaking researchers of
Cezanne and Seurat restored the power
of paint to create solidity to a position
of orimary importance, this time
through novel uses of color itself
rather than chiaroscuro (using, only
light and shade). In Impressionism,
however, form was not insisted upon by
those traditional shadows which, how , -
ever arbitrary, were more capable of
suggesting mass than tints of blue and
violet
The rejection of this modeling by value,
and the use of clear pigments in rain—
bow variety, opened the way for the
achievement of hitherto undreamed of
effects.