Hue and Cry at the Clark: What is Art?

 

 

HUE AND CRY:

            FRENCH PRINTMAKING AND THE DEBATE OVER COLORS

Clark Art Institute

Williamstown, MA

Through March 6

{Click on any image for bigger size/better color} 

 

The venerable Clark is far better known for its collection of iconic paintings than for printmaking, but Hue and Cry might make you reconsider your preconception. While you’re at it, rethink how you consider posters and other (potentially) reproducible works. These are so much part of both the consumer and art worlds of today that many people don’t know that there was once fierce debate over whether they were “art” at all.

 

Most of us have gotten past snobbish debates over taste, but the exhibit at the Clark does two things: It reminds us that the very use of color was once a battleground and it shows that printmaking is more complex than most of us imagine. The Clark show focuses on the French Belle Époque (1890s), though it also explores earlier printmaking as it developed following the French Revolution. A few terms are useful. Relief is perhaps the best known. Anything can be used, but wood is commonplace. An image is carved onto the wood, inked, and printed. Intaglio (including etchings, engravings, and mezzotints) starts with a plate of some sort (often metal) and the image is scored. The ink is applied and the plate transferred to a press. How the ink is applied leads to a whole bunch of other designations but I’ll spare you those except for the marvelous A la poupée, which means that the various colors are meticulously daubed onto the plate with wads. Various types of planographic images, which use prepared surfaces (like stone, which is a lithograph) and a clever process in which the image is made with something greasy (special pencil, crayon, etc.) and chemically sealed. The ink adheres to the surfaces, but not the grease. 

 

Debucourt

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here are some images from the show. One of the earliest is Philibert Louis Debucourt’s Dance Mania (1809) from the Napoleonic Era that parodies upper crust culture. It’s made by the poupée process discussed above. It might not fit your view of art, but it’s a great satire and reminiscent of the sort of cartoon England’s William Hogarth did a century earlier but made into prints. Printmaking got more serious when Impressionists such as Camille Pissarro got into the act. It’s not the most stunning image in the show, but there’s a small crayon sketch of his Peasant Women Weeding the Grass (1894) with his instructions of how to apply colors. 

 

 

 

If a name pops out more than any other it that of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. He perfectly captured the Belle Époque in all of its energy, cultural rebellion, and decadence. Among my favorites are Box in the Grand Tier (1897) and The Englishman at the Moulin Rouge (1892). If you’re wondering why said Englishman is in grey, it’s because he’s trying to pick up one or both of the actresses in the assumption that they were also prostitutes. (He probably wasn’t wrong!) Critics wondered why some of Lautrec's reds were so lurid and why his perspectives were skewed. Note how he used furniture as framing devices. But what really set their teeth on edge is what we see in the billboard below and the poster for Vin Mariani: Lautrec was unabashedly commercial in many of his commissions. This shocked those who felt that art should somehow be above crass things. 

 

 

 

That’s as if artists weren’t flogging their wares in other ways. Paul Cézanne reproduced his famed The Bathers (1897) in lithographs for mass consumption and again invited debate over whether it was actually “art.” One wonders what they made of Émile Bernard, who rendered his Saint Mary Mother of God with a Lily (1895) as if it were something from the Middle Ages. 

 

 

 

And then there were Les Nabis, who sought to move beyond Impressionism, which was by then old hat. They were something of a bridge between the Impressionists and the Modernists, as we see in these image from Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard. Whether or not you like Bonnard’s Little Laundress (1896), his minimalist approach tells you all you need to know about the scene. It’s intriguing to think that Picasso was 15 when Bonnard’s images were en vogue, so you can imagine what next loomed on the horizon. And, of course, critics weren’t immediately impressed. Tell that to the collector who recently paid $106.5 million for one of Pablo’s works! 

 

 

 

Rob Weir