Camille Pissarro, "The Countryside around Conflans-sainte-Honorine," 1874.
Ode to nature. Spring makes you crave nature.
"The Forest of Fontainebleau," 1876, Abbot Handerson Thayer (American painter). It's incredibly modern for its time, isn't it?
A verdant Cézanne, "The Maincy Bridge, near Melun," 1879.
The Maincy Bridge is a somewhat unique painting in Cézanne's body of work. In 1879, the painter stayed in Melun, very close to the Maincy bridge.
While he was moving away from Impressionist influence, few of Cézanne's canvases are bathed in such luminosity. One feels the air circulating through the space and the water playing with multiple reflections.
At the dawn of the 1880s, a new language was developed based on "facture," the way paint is applied to the canvas. This approach, continually explored and deepened thereafter, particularly in landscapes, finds here a kind of perfect demonstration. The dialogue between space and masses, forms and their reflections achieves a rigorous balance, both powerful and delicate, within a rigorous structuring of the canvas plane.
Paul Cézanne, Avenue in Chantilly, 1888.
So much more to discover and understand about Maurice Denis; it's true that his framing and subjects always have a way of surprising, like "The Green Trees" from 1893, which is incredibly modern, isn't it?
Autumn Forest by Gustav Klimt, 1902.
Henri Rousseau (1844-1910), "Happy Quartet," 1902.
The work's format being very vertical, I'm posting a detail to discover the subtleties of this painting and the world of Le Douanier Rousseau.
This somewhat atypical work was exhibited for the first time at the Salon des Indépendants in 1902. Rousseau clearly attached great importance to this painting, as an annotated catalog was found showing that the asking price at the time was 2000 francs, much more than all his other paintings exhibited at the same Salon.
Marcel Duchamp, "Garden and Chapel at Blainville," 1902.
I could have made a quiz with this painting by Francis Picabia, "Banks of the Loing in Autumn" from 1904, but I prefer to associate it with this poem by Guillaume Apollinaire from 1913.
"And how I love, oh season I love, your murmurs
The fruits falling unpicked
The wind and the forest weeping
All their tears in autumn leaf by leaf
The leaves
That one treads
A train
That rolls
Life
Flows away"
If I could, I would start every day by admiring a painting by Henri Rousseau.
"Woman in Red in the Forest" - 1907.
This is a work that never ceases to move me.
"The Snake Charmer" by Henri Rousseau, painted in 1907.
Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) was self-taught, which undoubtedly appealed to Guillaume Apollinaire, Alfred Jarry, and Pablo Picasso, who understood the need to question all principles of art history, to liberate painting from its archaic academism.
Rousseau's employment at the Paris customs barrier, a customs post of the capital, earned him the nickname Le Douanier Rousseau (the Customs Officer Rousseau).
This painting has always fascinated me. It is at once deeply poetic, undeniably free, and extraordinarily modern, yet the execution is extremely precise and meticulous, almost academic.
Troubling black Venus whose eyes capture our gaze, we are hypnotized, charmed, much more so than the snakes. This exoticism is incredible, this lush greenery, this impression of warmth, even humidity, emanating from this canvas. We are in an exotic Eden. One can only succumb to the charm of this woman, so dark in the moonlight, her magnetism paralyzes us. Exotic vision, a dream of another civilization?
For me, Rousseau is one of the first painters to prioritize feeling over subject matter.
Henri Rousseau never traveled; it was at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, in the menagerie and greenhouses, that his mind was nurtured. This painting was commissioned from Le Douanier by the mother of the famous artist Robert Delaunay, and is now preserved at the Musée d'Orsay.
A marvel by Henri Rousseau.
"Woman Walking in a Fantastic Forest," 1910.
Le Douanier Rousseau gained recognition and esteem from avant-garde painters such as André Derain and Henri Matisse. He befriended Robert Delaunay, Guillaume Apollinaire, and later Pablo Picasso.
To paint, he strives to reproduce what he sees and tries to make what he sees coincide with what he knows of the facts. Exoticism abounds in his work even though Rousseau hardly ever left Paris. His exoticism is imaginary and stylized, drawn from the Jardin des Plantes, the Jardin d'Acclimatation, illustrated magazines, and botanical journals of the time.
Félix Vallotton, "The Cart," 1911.
Natalia Goncharova, "Forest," 1912.
In 1909, the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote: "We want to sing of the love of danger, the habit of energy and temerity."
The poet advocates a way of life that glorifies modernity in its mechanical, urban, violent, and technological aspects.
In art, and more specifically in painting, this enthusiasm for modernity also emerged: "Futurism." Initially influenced by Seurat and Signac's Pointillism, the Futurists later discovered Cubism, which had a considerable impact on the style of their works.
Gustav Klimt, "Apple Tree" 1912.
Gustav Klimt was born in 1862 in Baumgarten, Austria. He founded the Känstlercompanie (Artists' Company) studio with his brother Ernst and the painter Franz Matsch. They achieved great success as mural painters, securing contracts for museums, theaters, and other decorative art pieces for wealthy patrons. Klimt then refined his personal style and the engraving skills his father had taught him.
In 1897, Gustav Klimt joined the Vienna Secession, an Art Nouveau movement whose goal was to give young artists a chance to gain recognition and rebel against the conservative attitudes of academic art.
"The Apple Tree" is a work created by Gustav Klimt in 1912. His paintings of women, considered scandalous, led to many commissions being cancelled. Out of financial necessity, Klimt then tried his hand at landscape painting.
In 1917, he was named an honorary member of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. In January of the following year, at the age of 55, Klimt suffered a stroke. Weakened and afflicted with pneumonia, he died on February 6, 1918.
The colors of autumn, in Canada with Tom Thomson and his painting "Maples," 1916-1917. Luminous.
What a pity that Edvard Munch is known almost exclusively for a single work, "The Scream" from 1893, when he was a pioneer of the Expressionist movement and modern painting. Munch remains, for me, one of the creators of a new era. Munch's art from the 1890s is the most famous, but I have a soft spot for these later paintings like "Elm Forest in Autumn" from 1919.
Always enigmatic, with its backlighting, a work by Alphonse Osbert, "Autumn Contemplation," 1926.
Peter Doig, "Grande Riviere," 2002.
Peter Doig's enigmatic paintings are characterized by a figurative representation of melancholy in the romantic sense of the term, in which the viewer can get lost.
His representations of nature are often full of mystery, as exotic as they are nostalgic, as appealing as they are menacing.
Doig draws inspiration from his personal memories in Canada as well as fragments of our present. He takes as a starting point for his canvases photos, press clippings, and pop culture images such as album covers and movie posters.
David Hockney, Early June Tunnel, 2006.
"Les Imageries" by Warja Lavater tells Perrault's tales using symbols that give children (and others) complete freedom to let their imagination build the characters.
Warja was wonderful and so attentive to children.
Off the beaten path, a magical and somewhat secret place in Arashiyama.
"The Kimono Forest" near Tenryu-ji Temple. A wonderful surprise. Underneath the station, shimmering cylindrical pillars, in a variety of colors and patterns, line up like a forest winding through a fantastical dreamland. The pillars are made from fabric dyed using the traditional Kyo-Yuzen technique, a style of dyeing and
printing used to create the brightly colored Yuzen Kimono in Kyoto.
The "kimono forest" is composed of about 600 pillars, it's breathtaking.
And when night falls on the Foundation and it emerges from the forest, it reveals other aspects of its beautiful architecture.
Since childhood, I've loved this house, but, as often happens, I don't want to see it for fear of losing the strength of my dreams. The Fallingwater house by Frank Lloyd Wright, built between 1936 and 1939. Of course, I love autumn, but also spring, oh and then summer, obviously, ahh but winter, I adore it! In fact, I love it!
Gustave Courbet, "The Flagey Oak," 1864.What beauty! A tree, just a tree. But what a tree! Courbet painted it near the family farm in Flagey, in his native Doubs region.The oak fills the entire canvas, pushing its edges – a framing so tight that one can already sense the influence of nascent photography.When he exhibited it in 1867, Courbet mischievously renamed it "The Oak of Vercingetorix, Caesar's Camp near Alesia." A political provocation in its own right: Napoleon III claimed that Vercingetorix had fought his last battle in Burgundy, while Courbet championed the Franche-Comté theory. The painting thus became a weapon against the Emperor – the very one whose Légion d'honneur he would refuse a few years later.A pioneer of Realism, Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) painted "what he saw" and nothing else. The fate of this painting is like a novel: sold by his sister Juliette to a Philadelphia banker, it went to the United States in 1898, bought back in 1987 by a Japanese collector who traveled to Flagey to see the location of the tree… before a public subscription allowed the Doubs department to repatriate it in 2013 for 4 million euros. The oak itself had been struck by lightning long ago. The painting had to survive it.
Thierry Lefort, "Ah! Beautiful Sundays…"
Look at that midnight blue shadow stretching like an ink flow. That's all Lefort: painting trees not as we dream them in a virgin forest, but as we encounter them by the side of a road, between two parked cars, in the harsh light of a Sunday afternoon in Los Angeles.
For him, nature never opposes the city – it sneaks in, it inhabits it, it saves it. Magritte dreamed the tree, Lefort, he watches it survive in an urban environment and restores its dignity. The cast shadows, his signature, become a second blue canvas laid on the asphalt.
René Magritte, "The Search for the Absolute", 1948.
A bare tree in mid-winter whose branches form the silhouette of a giant leaf.
As early as 1934, in a letter to André Breton, he confided that he was seeking "what belongs to a tree but would go against our concept of a tree." A clear answer a decade later: the leaf IS the tree.
The first three versions were created in late 1940, described in a letter to Claude Spaak dated January 5, 1941; the 1948 version reuses the motif with a more jagged, airier execution.
1948, coincidentally, was his most outlandish year. During his "vache period" – his wild and provocative canvases caused scandal in Paris – Magritte made ends meet by producing fake Picassos, Braques, and de Chiricos with his brother Paul and his surrealist accomplice Marcel Mariën. He even went so far as to print counterfeit banknotes. By the end of the year, he put away the fraudulent brushes and wisely returned to his pre-war surrealism… and his tree-leaves.
