The room where it tips over
Picture a long, hot, awkward upstairs room in Paris in late spring 1886, above a fashionable restaurant called the Maison Dorée on rue Laffitte. This is the 8th Impressionist Exhibition — the eighth and last group show the Impressionists would ever mount; they had been doing them since 1874, the year a hostile critic gave them the name as a joke — running from 15 May to 15 June 1886. Most of the founders are not even here. Monet, Renoir, Sisley and Caillebotte have all defected back to the Salon (the official state-run annual exhibition, the only door to a career in French art for two centuries). The cooperative is on its last legs.
And the picture stopping every visitor is by a 26-year-old none of them had quite figured out. It is enormous — about six and a half feet tall, ten feet wide — a Sunday afternoon on a small island in the Seine, stiff Parisians and their dogs and parasols across a striped lawn under flat dappled light. And the entire surface is built out of millions of tiny separate dots of pure color, laid down like a mosaic. Not strokes. Dots. Step back four feet and it shimmers; step back ten and it locks into place. Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (two years of work; now Art Institute of Chicago) is the painting that — politely, almost academically — kills its parents.
Monet had refused to show alongside it. Pissarro, the oldest and steadiest of the Impressionists, had stood up for Seurat and Signac and got called a deserter by his own friends for it. The younger painters stayed. They had seen what the elders had done, and they thought they could see what it had missed.
Weight, meaning, feeling
What Impressionism had done was teach a generation to paint light — the flicker of shadow on snow, the smear of an orange sun across a gray dawn harbor. The Impressionists put the instant on canvas. But the instant is weightless. It doesn’t stay. By the late 1880s the younger painters could see something was missing — the architecture that lasts, the feeling of a picture, the thing it was about.
The objection had four parts, one anchor against each. Weight. A mountain has weight. Light passing over a mountain does not. (Cézanne, in Aix.) Feeling. A wheatfield is yellow at noon. So what does it feel like to a man standing in it? (Van Gogh, in Arles.) Meaning. A Breton peasant in church doesn’t see a Bible story; she imagines one. How do you paint imagination? (Gauguin, in Pont-Aven.) Science. The Impressionists were eyeballing optical mixing by instinct. What if you did it properly, by formula? (Seurat, in Paris.)
A fifth painter, Toulouse-Lautrec, was already in Montmartre painting the dance hall not the way Renoir had painted it (a sunlit Sunday afternoon) but the way it really looked at midnight, lit by flat green gaslight. None of these five would have called what they were doing “Post-Impressionism,” or anything together at all. They worked in different cities, often barely knew each other, and would mostly have been horrified to be hung in the same room. But each was picking up where Impressionism had run out of road.
A mountain that refuses to dissolve
End the chapter in Provence. The rue Laffitte show is closing in Paris, and 500 miles south an angrier, slower painter has set up his easel in front of a mountain.
The mountain is Mont Sainte-Victoire (a long limestone ridge east of the town of Aix), where Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) has lived since he was a boy. Cézanne is 47, doubt-ridden, ridiculed in Paris for twenty years, painting in near-isolation. He will paint that mountain about thirty times in oil and many more in watercolor by the time he is done in 1906. Every time, the mountain is built out of small blocky strokes of color set side by side like masonry — not blended, not dissolved, but stacked into planes of weight.
What he is doing, in the year the Seurat hangs in Paris, is the exact opposite of Impressionism. The Impressionists tried to catch the instant of light eating the world. Cézanne is trying to find the thing the light is eating — the structure that survives weather and time. The mountain refuses to dissolve.
So here are the two ends of the same year. In Paris, a 26-year-old has finished a vast pointillist canvas that quietly buries Impressionism in dots. In Provence, a 47-year-old is staring at a mountain and rebuilding it out of bricks of paint. Neither knows the other has done it. Twenty-four years later, an English critic will hang them in the same room and give them all a name.
