end of the century and tipping prosecutions of artistic debates of the nineteenth to the twentieth.
debates and developments in artistic practice of the nineteenth century led to accelerated testing in its last quarter. The advent of Impressionism in 1874 can be regarded as a finding of modern research and as an introduction into the work. Once again we are not witnessing a break. The artists propose changes and subjectivity increasingly present in the treatment of pictorial reality of its retransmission. The challenge of painting oscillates between natural reality and abstract reality. Despite the absence in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Tours of significant works of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these variations must be analyzed to understand the development of an abstract painting by Olivier Debre .
In 1878, journalist and critic Theodore Duret publishes a booklet Impressionist painters. Its purpose is not to celebrate the success of the movement, which had much in the public supporters of opponent, but to set the main features of the new style. It describes a mythical figure of Impressionism absolute. The painter is one who "sits on the edge of a river: According to the state of the sky, the angle of vision, time of day, the calmness or agitation of the atmosphere, Water takes every possible way, he painted without hesitation on his canvas water that has all the tones. This definition poses a problem because not only defines and focuses the Impressionist landscapes. The Cezanne, Degas, Caillebotte thus are excluded. Thematic and geographic dispersion will take place within the Impressionist movement.
We can consider that from 1880 Impressionism is no longer a coherent movement but purely and solely individual research.
The quest for the modern artist is to capture the nuances of painting by changing or changing too, almost imperceptible changes of light outdoors or indoors. These moments almost invisible to the eye movement which sees the continuity without being able to isolate these phases. Impressionism seeks to achieve an ideal of truth and to find solutions to problems perception and representation in entering into the details of a tool constantly being transformed.
In Edgar Degas Claude Monet at home this results in the experimental method in the series. These multiple versions of the same motif to address the largest possible number of such appearances, successively a moment by moment, grade after grade. In Edgar Degas that led to studies of dancers or even bathers. The study focuses on the movement, its decomposition and its figuration. Monet, working in series allows to initiate a study of the variation of luminous phenomena on the same subject. In 1891 he is the series of wheels in 1894 that the cathedral of Rouen. This work and this method has profoundly influenced the conduct of experiments later artists. We can consider that working in series of the same subject led to his exhaustion as an object representation for simply being an object of composition. Indeed, if the artist endlessly repeated the same subject, it tends to disappear, giving way to a pictorial analysis only then moving the natural reality to an abstract reality.
Jean Beraud with the series of Parisian exploits this series work. Throughout his career, and more studies with images of characters, usually female, which he hosts Paris. Visible behind the main figure, the elements of composition, as the cab, the silhouette of the Morris column, gives this picture a strong evocative power that explains the success encountered by today's works of this painter. The treatment resulted female figures contrast with the character sketched the landscape. Fleeting images, such as Paris seem to represent an element passenger as a souvenir of a scene of daily life.
The neo-Impressionist seek to renew the Impressionist and lead in its composition effects a deconstruction, fragmentation, a division of the surface. Pointillism is an art practice that will be strongly influenced by scientific sources. Georges Seurat arrived at this method of decomposition of each point into its constituent elements by inference from the decomposition of the optical color. The challenge of this calculation of proportions is that the work is consistent with a sensation perceived in nature. At a rough too Impressionists he intends to substitute a scientific method divisionism.
The painting of modern life research more precisely the representation of nature, contemporary chronicles, data analysis and optical color: Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism argue achieve objectivity in the analysis of visible. They want accurate and scientific as far as possible in a time which grows positivism and believes in the infinite progress of knowledge. In this painting the advent of sensitive, sensory art objects reinvesting some spirituality. The symbolism is a word without equivocation because it suggests the meaning implied allusions and allegories to decipher. He wants more ideal plastically proposing a return to chiaroscuro in opposition to the clarity of impressionist paintings. Exile is not a journey to Arles in Pont-Aven, but an internal exile, and lyrical.
At the objective observation of the Impressionism movement is a profound reaction in investment by the subjective and deformation. In sculpture, Auguste Rodin embodies this work by a deformation of the body for expressive purposes. The writer Octave Mirbeau in 1885 year-old said: "Every body obeys mercilessly passion he is run, each muscle following the pulse of the same behaviors in the strangest and most twisted forms, the characters are logical with destiny for the artist marked their rebellious humanity and punished. "by the adequacy of late anatomical and feeling that it is heavy it is love, tragedy, symbolism and expressiveness of Rodin is considered in the structure of the form.
The expressive nature of the artwork can be found at the heart of the actions of modernity. Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh had made a very violence of the color to exploit the potential expressive and sensitive to the intensity of the paint. Once again we do not own the Museum of Fine Arts Tours of works by both artists. But their collective recognition lets talk about it. In 1888 with the painting titled Vision after the Sermon, Paul Gauguin offers a painting where the composition is based on extremely pure synthetic use subjective rather than descriptive of the color. In the foreground a frieze of heads indicates the return of the mass. In the background Jacob's struggle is an apparition, a mental image. Reality turns to the imagination, are juxtaposed. Gauguin is justified by the words " For me the landscape in this table exists in the imagination of people in prayer following the sermon. In the letter describing his picture can be emphasized that the interest of Paul Gauguin based solely on color. Chromaticism is not justified by the observation of a pattern but by the Translational Research expressive where color does not mimic an object, she transcribed a state of mind. In this table with this extremely red blood, violence. Gauguin said that the likelihood and local color should tend to be subjective and symbolic color.
Following its versions of the Nabis movement appropriates this subjectivity and the expressiveness of color and revives a certain religious tradition with icons and Italian primitives. This is the case of an artist now in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Maurice Denis. It pertains to the sacred prophets. It is a careful reader of esoteric authors, writings on astrology and numerology, he conceives a world and art on the mode of revelation and likes to draw a symbol or nothing is indifferent, neither the proportions nor the props or poses, or chromatic shades.
While the Impressionist revolution seemed to have won and developed an artistic practice which prevailed over objectivity subjectivity, which naturalism was driving only a painting of observation, the movements tend reaction to a degree of idealization and spirituality in the practice of the work. The bull marathon Maurice Denis plays with these mental phenomena appear. Firstly, the link with a mythological tale pays basically in Symbolist structure composition. The fight between barbarism and civilization models the table. The composition has an extremely high horizon line, barely 5 cm of the top of the table are left in the sky. This is fundamentally opposed to a naturalistic observation of the landscape and provides a strong decorative theatricality to the space of action. Maurice Denis associated with this artificiality a palette of colors aggressive, very close to the beasts. Colored shadows green, pink or yellow strengthen the expressiveness and subjectivity. Figures like the landscape elements are strongly identified. The flatness of the composition is completely claimed here. We're not very far from this outbreak and this mental image defined by Paul Gauguin in his sermon after church. The origin literary and the mental aspect of the composition in 1918 shows the willingness to structure an area where the violence of the action there is an almost violent decorative color. As if the struggle between man and beast became a struggle between natural reality and abstract reality.
These oscillations develop a painting where the artist evokes a subjective and uses the vocabulary for pictorial expressiveness. In the first half of the twentieth century, these round trips forge the path of the avant-garde. The artists question and challenge the image is concrete and external or abstract and internal.
Abstraction is at the beginning of the 10s is faced with two structural alternatives. On the one hand an extreme geometry of the real. Retaining the lessons of Paul Cezanne, the Cubists, painters consider geometric abstract forms are contained in a purely geometric vocabulary. Mondrian, whose current exhibition at Beaubourg back on course, is a privileged witness of this development. These studies refer to apple analytical work by the series and we see gradually rounded shapes of branches in structuring geometric lines in which the artist laid surfaces of primary colors red, blue and yellow.
other hand offer the biomorphic forms rounded referring to the living painter Kandinsky precursor of abstraction involves an analysis of reality and go to look for microscopic images as part of a abstract composition.
The common point between these two movements is the natural starting point by which his subjective analysis emancipated. The switch to the abstraction is done in a self-declared work. This ownership of the subject by the artist is a continuation of the use of a subject whatsoever for his artistic evocation. These successive movements were rejected or severely criticized by society.
Things change after the Second World War. Indeed we are witnessing the triumph of modern art official recognized by institutions of all Western countries and held for the expression of freedom in the field of creation. The historical masters are loaded with honors and abstraction is developed along two major trends already visible and noticeable before the war. Next Utopians of these practices, there are also works marked by a kind of regressive desire, antagonists of industrial civilization, adopting attitudes primitivist or decide to pay for the investigation of raw material.
This tradition of modern art and the triumph of artistic practices vary between continuity and crisis. Always behind the same issue, the role and impact of the work between a feeling and a feeling.
paintings by Olivier Debre in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Tours testify to his research.
Before considering work on the theme of the Loire, the large gray canvas of 1959 shows a work structures and complete autonomy in carrying out the work. The canvas portrait, is structured by work off knife after the flexibility of the paint scraper or not the surface in search of an effective recovery. The expression contained in its various passages played on a table whose only referent is the artist's body and the creation of matter. This may make us think the work of American artist Jackson Pollock, which summarized his work by saying: "I do not represent Nature. I am nature. This bypasses the subjective report of observation and even led the artist to nothing more than the expressive element of the composition. The great gray Olivier Debre although it has some colored spots, is a remnant of the paintings produced by this extremely dark artist after World War II.
In the late '60s, Olivier Debre began working on large canvases in connection with nature and the Loire. This immersion in the countryside is in line with his attraction to Impressionism. From an Olivier Debre young age makes her drawings and sketches outdoors. He returns to this great school of modernity, but far short of what he has before, it is an interpretation in which lyricism leads to strong expression. It retains its previous period the tactile aspect of painting. Games thickness being almost an attraction for the viewer to touch the canvas. The recurrence of this issue we propose a new variation on the principle of the series. The changing landscape hour by hour, day by day and month after month, season after season, Olivier Debre we propose an abstraction whose pictorial treatment is related to this phenomenon and its printing pictorial transcript. The colors are much more present referring to almost naturalistic shades. At the very geometrical structure of knife work, the large panoramic paintings are about the effects of monochrome tones that blend emerging painting where color is the residue of the material and its activation artist. The realization of an abstract painting on the face sets can at times be unsettling for the viewer.
We could ask: "What interest there out of the workshop to immerse themselves in nature if it is natural to represent the subject itself? "In Debret it is truly to match the abstract reality and natural reality in the time required to complete the work, not making retrenchment or chronological distance between the observation and composition. The body is absorbed by the natural reality of the subject and translates his impressions on the surface of the artificial reality and abstract painting. The abstraction becomes lyrical evocation of a feeling of sensory and expressive his rocker.
The many debates and artistic possibilities of modernity emerging from the second quarter of the nineteenth century to guide the artistic journey an impossible balance to match that of a natural reality and visible from all experimental an abstract reality which is expressive of a concentrate a feeling and a desire to appear life. That painting is figurative or abstract and identifiable and easily observable, the artistic practices of the nineteenth century constantly questioning the very value of any image of any feeling and any reality. There is no break but rather a progression. The artist being the image of a society moving his painting is itself evolved. Since its origin in modern renaissance table is aware of its artificiality, but plays in a balance where the viewer is more for the credibility of feeling and expression to this artifact.
