Paris, capital of the 19th century, comes to us multi-faceted, direct and intimate in the Royal Academy’s enjoyable new exhibition Impressionists on Paper.
Manet is looking out of his window on a wet day, making sharp, scratchy lead-and-ink arabesques to depict the umbrellas and tottering carriages in “The rue Mosnier in the Rain” (1878). Renoir paints a single passer-by in pastel, a froth of black tulle, arresting us with her sideways glance. Toulouse Lautrec is in Montmartre, at the brothel, sketching with whip-fast, unbroken lines and soft gouache the smooth contours of a lesbian couple in “Two Friends” (1895).
On the leafy side of town, Berthe Morisot is airy and fluent in the watercolour “Horse and Carriage in the Bois de Boulogne” (after 1883). Her grace is almost careless, and the show itself is like sprinkled pearls. A scatter of marks, lines, smudges and swirls evoke fleeting everyday moments, along with the artists’ thrill at new ways of depicting them — but the whole doesn’t quite come together as a cohesive string, and the quality is mixed.
Among other pleasures, there are pastel cloudscapes, loose and exhilarating: “Sky Study” (1869) by Armand Guillaumin; Eugène Boudin’s flaming “Sunset over the Sea” (c1860-70); Pissarro’s “White Frost” (1890), a watercolour of the countryside around Eragny as a film of snow in wan winter light. Van Gogh’s watercolour/chalk “Fortifications of Paris with Houses” (1887) is a bright, simplified summer cityscape influenced by the flat, bold compositions of Japanese prints, and “Thistles by the Roadside” (1888) is a fine example of his rhythmic, rapid reed-pen drawings — demanding speed and decisiveness because the pen quickly runs dry.
All appear fresh: although the artists are generally familiar, most of the exhibits are not, because works on paper are too sensitive for permanent display.
When, in the 1870s, the Impressionists threw out the ideal of a perfectly finished picture in favour of sketchy, improvisational paintings capturing animated modern life, fast and ephemeral, the status of drawings rose immediately. Once considered preparatory studies, rarely intended for show or sale, they came to be perceived as closer to paintings. At the Impressionist exhibitions, drawings and pastels hung confidently among the canvases whereas at Paris’s traditionally academic Salon, they languished in separate, less prestigious galleries.
That leap in status is one reason why works on paper would become fundamental for two of the 19th century’s supreme innovators: Degas working in diverse media, then primarily in pastel, and Cézanne in watercolour.
With 15 works, from a stark pastel “Beach at Low Tide” (1869), where you almost feel the damp sand, via the ethereal gold-and-silver “Two Dancers” (c1878-79) floating across a silk fan to the bravura black chalk modelling of rounded, ungainly figures “Study of Nudes” (c1901), Degas stuns and dominates. His “Dancer Yawning” (1873), painted in “essence”, a dilute oil, on green paper, greets you on arrival: a characteristic jolie-laide figure, arms behind neck, stretching, looking upward, mouth wide open. Alongside, “Dancer Seen from Behind” (1873), on pink paper, is sumptuously awkward.
His friend, poet Paul Valéry, called Degas “a cruel connoisseur of all the shapes and attitudes of women” and “the most intelligent, the most demanding, the most merciless draughtsman in the world”.
The fluidity of “essence” allowed this meticulously intense artist greater spontaneity — and to theatrical effect. It was a favoured medium until the mid-1870s; early examples show how marvellously he conjured mood — “Lyda, Woman with a Pair of Binoculars” (c1866-68), in black, eyes hidden, the gazed returning the gaze, is sinister; the muffled, brown-grey “Woman at a Window”, looking out at a bleached-out Paris, was made during the Prussian siege in 1870, when the city starved. The model was paid with a hunk of meat, which she devoured instantly, raw.
From the mid-1870s, drawing with sticks of colour, Degas was most inventive in fragile, radiant pastels, their powdery, densely layered surfaces yielding scintillating light reflections. In flurried zigzags he depicts “Jacques de Nittis”, little son of a painter friend, energetically drawing; laying down pastel on monotype, like painting on a curtain of black ink, he reveals the instant “Ludovic Halévy finds Madame Cardinal in the Dressing Room”.
By the 1890s — “Dancers on a Bench”, “Two Dancers” or the National Gallery’s tumble of red hair, creamy-pink towel, brilliant yellow chair “After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself” — textures are lavishly varied: finger smudges, overlapping and vibrantly contrasting hues, vigorous non-representational strokes, approaching abstraction. The spatial complexity created by all that patterning dazzles. “I am a colourist with line,” Degas said. Remaining true to what Ingres had advised him in 1855 — “draw lines, young man, and still more lines” — while adopting Impressionist richness of colour and light effects, he paved a route to Modernism.
In watercolour, Cézanne made the journey in an opposite direction, abbreviating and reducing until the late pieces are built in translucent washes, white paper left blank as part of the composition. The majestic “Flowerpots” (1885), 10 terracotta pots on a shelf viewed from below, emphasising the sprouting shoots, with the green leaves a frieze against blue shadows in pale sunlight, is fully resolved, while in “Flowerpots on the Terrace of the Artist’s Studio at Les Lauves” (c1902-06) pots, plants and trees dissolve into luminous colour patches
“Dressing Table” (1890) is astonishing: just a towel hanging, in emphatic folds, from a rack — but resembling a monumental, craggy mountain slope. Sparest of all is “Landscape with La Montagne Sainte-Victoire” (c1904-06): here the mountain itself is a hovering, weightless form, an irregular triangle within a mesh of tints, touches of blue, green, brown, the whole suffused with light, but melancholy too. “I’d like to put reason in the grass and tears in the sky, like Poussin,” Cézanne said of these late landscapes. His friend Joachim Gasquet thought they showed the essence of Cézanne: “The most acute sensibility at grips with the most searching rationality.”
It would be greedy to want more when the handful of Cézanne watercolours here are so rewarding — yet among two dozen artists in the exhibition, the intellectual interest keeps returning to Degas and Cézanne. In the broad arc of art history, Manet and Monet matter as much, but not on paper — they were revolutionary on canvas. Thus Monet’s pastels here, such as the fugitive twilight “Cliffs at Étretat” (c1885), the bulky rocks looming up between pale sea and darkening sky, lack the sheer brutal force of his paintings.
By contrast, Cézanne and Degas — wildly experimental, yet significantly the most classical of the epoch’s major artists, insistent on draughtsmanship — created in watercolour and pastel something original and specific to that medium, with a radicality going beyond the achievements of oil painting at the time. A show dedicated to their works on paper alone would truly enthral.
November 25-March 10, royalacademy.org.uk
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