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The 1890s: A Period of Waiting
Image: Chau-u-Kaoi, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec |
 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec |
The 1890's: a Period of Waiting
Van Gogh died in 1890, Seurat a year later; Gauguin spent most of the decade in Tahiti; Monet, Renoir and Cezanne were working quietly in the country. In consequence, the artistic atmosphere of Paris throughout the 1890's was very different from what it was in the immediately preceding decades. Of the older painters, only Degas was still in Paris, and he lived in almost complete seclusion. One of his admirers, however, will always be associated with the 1890's - Count Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. He shared Degas' almost exclusive concern with the female figure and also his interest in movement. But although less objective and inventive than Degas, Lautrec had a bond of sympathy with his subjects, most of whom lived like himself on the fringe of society, that Degas never possessed. The 1890's in Paris was a decade of retrenchment, a breathing space before the next astonishing sequence of artistic discoveries, which began shortly after the turn of the century. The little group of Gauguin followers who called themselves "Nabis," the Hebrew word for prophets, was inaugurated with declarations that were indeed of prophetic tenor. Such, for example, was Maurice Denis' statement that "sounds, colors, words, have a miraculously expressive value, beyond representation and any literal meaning," or, written in 1890, his: "Remember that any painting, before being a warhorse, a nude, or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order." Neither Denis nor his friends, however, were able to put their precepts into practice. Their influence was to be a more subtle and indirect one, in, for instance, the development of the ornamental decorative style eventually known as Art Nouveau. Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard were the only Nabis who proved themselves to be painters of consequence, and they returned, after the experimental work of their earliest years, to something closer to Impressionism. |