As only the French can do it.
Position | Museums Today - Color, Line, Light: French Drawings, Watercolors, and Pastels from Delacroix to Signac - Cover story |
FOR THE ART of drawing, 19th-century France was a remarkably creative period of richness, diversity, experimentation, and inventiveness. "Color. Line. Light: French Drawrags, Watercolors. and Pastels from Delacroix to Signac" presents 100 outstanding works that showcase the broad development of modern draftsmanship during this period.
The tradition of drawing in France already was centuries old by the early 1800s but. increasingly, in the drawings became widely valued, exhibited, and marketed as independent works of art. Their new status officially was recognized and promoted when they were given a separate category at the Paris Salon exhibition.
"Color, Line, Light" is organized chronologically into sections that correspond roughly to five major stylistic movements that flourished during the 19th century: romanticism, realism and naturalism, impressionism, the Nabis and symbolists, and neo-impressionism. The works encompass nearly all of the graphic media used by artists during the period, most types of drawings they made (compositional sketches, figure studies, and finished pieces that were complete works of art in themselves), and a broad range of the subjects they treated (landscape, genre, portraits, and interiors).
Romanticism. The romantic movement in French art thrived during the first half of the 19th century, with Eugene Delacroix as its leading practitioner. Color played an important role in romantic drawings, with watercolor, pastel, and colored papers used frequently to heighten the visual effect and elicit strong responses in the spectators. The power and beauty of nature were favorite subjects, whether presented in the form of threatening storms and raging seas, as seen in "Fishing Boats Tossed before a Storm" (c. 1840), a watercolor by Eugene Isabey, or portrayed in a gentler, more contemplative mode, such as "Sunset over a Pond" (c. 1876) by Francois-Auguste Ravier and "Sunset in an Oriental Landscape" (c. 1845) by Gabriel Hippolyte Lebas.
Realism and naturalism. Simultaneous with the rise of romanticism in France, an interest emerged in drawing the natural world as it truly appeared, as objectively and accurately as possible, without idealizing or embellishing the subject. Artists also broadened their subject matter to include virtually every facet of the everyday world and contemporary life. The new approach to landscape drawing in France was developed for the most part by artists who visited and worked in the wild...
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