Mystery and Glitter. Pastels in the Musée d'Orsay.
What is pastel?<br>
What is pastel?
Fantaisie, entre 1840 et 1916
Musée d'Orsay
photo musée d'Orsay / rmn © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski
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Pastel is a solidified, coloured powder, which first appeared in the 15th century. The pastel stick is made by blending ground, dry pigment with a little clean water containing clay or chalk, and with a binder (gum Arabic is often used). The resulting paste is then drained using a cloth, before being cut up, whilst still damp, into sticks, which are then allowed to dry naturally.
Although limited at first, more colours gradually appear. With the arrival of synthetic colours in the mid-nineteenth century, the range increased considerably.
As a technique for dry colouring, pastel requires a slightly rough textured support to provide a "tooth". However, the adhesion to the support is fragile, so the best way to protect it is to place it under glass, avoiding any direct contact.
At first, pastel was used to give extra colour to black chalk, sanguine chalk and silverpoint portraits, but gradually pastel became established in its own right.
Portrait d'Irma Brunner, vers 1880
Musée d'Orsay
© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / René-Gabriel Ojéda
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The huge success of portraits in pastel of Venetian painter Rosalba Carriera (1674-1757) started a fashion for this medium. Liotard, Perronneau and Chardin established its credentials, whilst Quentin de La Tour raised it to a rare level of perfection. Aristocrats and the wealthy middle classes were fascinated to see themselves painted so realistically from life, to see everything captured: texture effects, skin tones and psychology, missing nothing.
Rescued from oblivion
Chez la modiste, entre 1905 et 1910
Musée d'Orsay
Achat, 1979
© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski
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The French Revolution, which brought private commissions to a swift halt, and the Neo-Classicism of the early nineteenth century, intent on heroic paintings, had the upper hand over pastel for a short time. But after this eclipse, the sensitivity of Romantics like Delacroix contributed to its revival.
Despite its rediscovery by a few artists, pastel continued to be seen as an art worthy for "girls' boarding schools". In 1885, in an effort to bring pastels to a wider audience, several artists and devotees founded a Society of French Pastellists, whose aim was to organise exhibitions devoted specifically to this medium. Pastel was successfully revived: "Art lovers once again adore it", noted the art critic Félix Fénéon, who also confirmed a vast increase in subjects.
"More than one Realism"<br>
La femme au puits, vers 1866
Musée d'Orsay
Legs d'Alfred Chauchard, 1909
photo musée d'Orsay / rmn © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Adrien Didierjean
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"More than one Realism"
In the 1840s and 1850s, a new generation of artists aspired to represent all aspects of society. It was now just as acceptable to use peasants and workers as subjects, as saints or mythological heroes.
As he was himself the son of a peasant, Jean-François Millet, liked to portray humble workers, according them noble gestures and hieratic poses. With pastel, however, Millet's work became less severe, delighting his contemporaries. Influenced by the 17th century Flemish and Dutch masters, Millet produced several bucolic scenes where his peaceful peasants devote themselves to working in the fields, a nobility in their age-old gestures, as in (Woman at the Well, circa 1866).
Millet's idealised realism is continued in The Shepherd (1887) by Puvis de Chavannes, and Léon Lhermitte's in Two Bathers by a Pool (circa 1893).
Manet and Degas
Danseuses, entre 1884 et 1885
Musée d'Orsay
Dation, 1997
© Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt
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Manet's pastels offer a sometimes neglected aspect of his work. Although Madame Edouard Manet on a Blue Sofa (1874) and Woman in a Tub demonstrate the frank, unaffected expression that one readily attributes to Manet, his delicate feminine portraits, on the other hand, such as the Portait of Irma Brunner (circa 1880), reveal him to be a worthy heir to the 18th century masters.
Edgar Degas, for his part, brings an observant view of modern life, both in his pastels and in his paintings. He would bury himself in the wings of a theatre, in small shops, or in some corner of a flat. His daring perspectives and his glowing palette transcend the lowly world of dancers and of women bathing and ironing.
Impressionism<br>
Etude de ciel au soleil couchant, entre 1862 et 1870
Musée d'Orsay
Legs du comte Isaac de Camondo, 1911
© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski
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Impressionism
The Impressionist works in the following section are the perfect embodiment of what can be achieved with pastel. The Impressionist movement came out of a reaction to the momentous, dark subjects of Romanticism and a rejection of the old Academic formulae. Painters were dropping all conventions in order to take a fresh view and to attain spontaneity and sincerity.
Eugène Boudin, one of the first to apply himself to this school of nature, opened the way for Impressionist sensitivity. Pastel enabled him to capture the changing light of the seashore.
In the 1860s, the young Monet accompanied him to Normandy. Monet was still using pastels many years later, as, for example, in his views of London in 1899. For Pissarro, open to every kind of experimentation, pastel brought an incomparable freshness.
Le pont de Waterloo à Londres, vers 1899
Musée d'Orsay
Legs de baronne Eva Gebhard-Gourgaud, 1965
© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Gérard Blot
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Although landscape artists first and foremost, the Impressionists did not avoid the representation of the human form, provided that it was part of real daily life, as in Gustave Caillebotte's The Swimmer (1877). Equally, the eminently human theme of maternity found a sensitive and unafectated interpreter in the American artist Mary Cassatt.
"A Rising Tide Of Modernity" : Naturalism
Dieppe, vers 1885
Musée d'Orsay
© Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt
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In the 1880s, a thriving Naturalist movement appeared in the wake of the Impressionists. Many painters now worshipped at the altar of nature and of verisimilitude. In 1880, Emile Zola had foreseen this evolution, hailing "a rising tide of modernity, an irresistible force, gradually washing away the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, The Institute, all formulae and all conventions."
Henri Gervex's cliff edge in Dieppe (circa 1885), has all the truth of the real thing. Forain's frank, direct portrait of the writer Huysmans (circa 1878), stands comparison with Marie Bashkirtseff's feminine portraits. As does it with the corpulent Nude woman warming herself (1886) by Besnard : the shadows and the coloured reflections of the hearth reveal that the lesson in Impressionist innovation had been well understood.
Even one Emile Lévy, a painter of large, mythological compositions, bent his rigorous, academic principles: his pastel of the suburbs in the snow : Porte d'Asnières (1887), is faithfully and sensitively observed.
Society Portraits – Suspended In Time<br>
Society Portraits – Suspended In Time
Portrait de Madame José-Maria de Hérédia, en 1885
Musée d'Orsay
© Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt
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In late 19th century high society, where wealthy middle classes mixed with aristocracy, society portraits provided a good source of income for artists. Pastel became established quite naturally as a favourite medium. With its flattering effects, it recalled the gracefulness of aristocratic life before 1789, to the great satisfaction of the clients. As one critic of the time noted, pastel "lends itself easily to expressing delicate skin tones and artful smiles; it is not made to express the seriousness of middle age nor the rigidity of old age."
Between the classic pose of Madame de Hérédia by Emile Levy (1885), and the ethereal suppleness of Mademoiselle Carlier by Lucien Levy-Dhurmer (circa 1910), bourgeois constraints seemed to loosen. But in all these portraits, time appears to stand still and the poses remain conventional. Do these lovely society women, just like captured butterflies or beautiful ornaments in a Louis XVI style drawing room, not seem to be reduced to a decorative role?
Symbolism
Jugement de Pâris, en 1907
Musée d'Orsay
© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski
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At the time when Impressionists and Naturalists were increasingly exhibiting their work, those on the path towards Symbolism were moving in a different direction. They were obsessed by the ideal and aspired to express their feelings, their dreams and their passions.
The Symbolists also revived allegorical and mythological subjects. With Osbert's evanescent muses, the Virgilian landscapes of Ménard (The Judgment of Paris, 1907) and the dramatic scenes of Desvallières - whose extraordinary, monumental pastel The Archers(1895), is being shown for the first time - the myths and legends of the past regained their poetic dimensions.
In these Symbolist portraits, the pastel, because of its powdery composition, brings out mystery more than brilliance. These anonymous languid beauties, locked in silence, conjure up an atmosphere of dreams or a state of mind like melancholy.
As for the Symbolist landscapes, they have a fascination with haunted places. In Roussel's Gate La Barrière, 1897) a feeling of abandonment wells up, giving the gate an almost incongruous presence. But mystery is even more palpable in the two night scenes by Rippl-Ronai, A Park at Night painted between 1892 and 1895, and Degouve de Nuncques Nocturne at the Royal Park, Brussels], from 1897.
Les tireurs à l'arc, 1895
Musée d'Orsay
Don Paul Simon et de ses sœurs, 1951
© Adagp, Paris, 2024 © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt
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Odilon Redon or &The Abstract Line"<br>
Odilon Redon or &The Abstract Line"
Vieillard ailé barbu, vers 1895
Musée d'Orsay
Legs de René Philippon, 1939
© Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt
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Odilon Redon (1840-1916) produced his first pastels in 1880, but it was in the 1890s that colour became important in his work. Linked to the Symbolist movement, Redon's art evokes a world imbued with intense spirituality, and is drawn from a landscape of dreams.
"I have created an art form after my own heart", wrote Redon. But to be precise:"It is also the result of my love for a few masters who have drawn me into the cult of beauty". These "masters" included Rembrandt, Goya, Delacroix and notably Gustave Moreau, as well as Bresdin, whose unbridled, fantastical Romanticism made a big impression on Redon.
Le char d'Apollon, vers 1910
Musée d'Orsay
© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski
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In spite of the numerous interpretations of Redon's work, it aspires to be somewhat indeterminate: "My drawings inspire and cannot be defined. [...] Like music, they transport us to the ambiguous world of the indeterminate." As well as a meaning, therefore, one has to seek a purely aesthetic emotion. In fact, Redon's art lends itself to a formalist interpretation, which the artist himself encouraged us to: "Imagine arabesques or various twisting and turning strands, unwinding themselves not on a flat surface, but in space [...]; imagine the interplay of their lines projecting upon, and combining with, the most diverse elements".
The importance placed on the plastic idiom makes Redon a genuine modernist. As Maurice Denis wrote in 1912, "he is the origin of all aesthetic innovations and revivals, of all revolutions of the taste which we have subsequently witnessed".