Outdoor painting

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John Singer Sargent: Claude Monet painting at the edge of the forest , 1885, Tate Gallery
Leonardo da Vinci: Mona Lisa , oil on panel, between 1503 and 1506; Louvre Paris

Open-air painting or plein air painting (from French: en plein air : outdoors;) refers to painting in which artists depict a “piece of nature” in the open air with natural light and shadow conditions and the natural colors of the respective landscape . This form of painting is in contrast to studio painting .

Relationship between outdoor and studio painting

Until the invention of photography , artists had to rely entirely on their preliminary drawings and color sketches as well as on their eidetic memory for every landscape painting painted in the studio , while the open-air painters benefited from the possibility of aerial and color perspective at that time Constantly checking the consistency of their respective landscape motifs and being able to correct them accordingly again and again. But by no means every landscape painting originates from a plein air, the majority, however, from a combination of open-air painting and studio painting. Small-format sketches are made outside, directly in front of the motif, and the resulting larger exhibition formats are only perfected in the studio after these studies.

Concept of landscape

The term landscape arises from the fact that a so-called “piece of nature” is selected and delimited “from the potential infinity of the natural outside world”. While the term “landscape” originally referred to natural motifs, in the course of the development of art history, “the views of cities and architecture” were added.

John Constable: Weymouth Bay with a view of Jordan Hill , oil on canvas, c. 1816; National Gallery London
Claude Monet: The Beach at Pourville , oil on canvas, 1882; National Museum, Poznań

Art history overview

One of the countless research sheets by Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) shows that artists have been working with natural light in the wild at least since the Renaissance . He dedicates himself to this topic in one of the most famous and momentous essays in art history, the treatise on natural painting . The practical consequence of his theoretical insights can be summed up as follows: "Instead of color and pigment, you see light that breaks in the glazes as in the 'Mona Lisa'." Although western painting in Leonardo's time was essentially figure painting and the landscape served as "formulaic staffage", literally as the setting , the conspicuous sfumato in Leonardo da Vinci's painting - this soft blurring of the background -, in Natias Neutert's opinion, "anticipates the atmospheric quality features of later open-air painting."

Open-air painting was founded in the period of late Classicism and the emerging Romanticism at the beginning of the 19th century in landscape painting in England, especially by John Constable (1776–1837) and Richard Parkes Bonington (1802–1828). Both works live from the tension between close observation of nature (e.g. sky and cloud studies) and the resulting realistic color effect. The picture Weymouth Bay with a view of Jordan Hill shows the bay of Weymouth in the county of Dorset - still a popular excursion destination today - with its sandy beach and towering cloud mountains. The exhibition of works by Constable and Bonington in the Salon in Paris in 1824, at which the latter was even chosen as the laureate, had a decisive influence on French landscape painting in the mid-19th century, in particular on the so-called Barbizon School and on the creative process of the Impressionists , as shown not least in a painting such as The Beach at Pourville by Claude Monet (1840–1926). Monet, and of course all other representatives of Impressionism , contributed with their atmospheric works to the fact that plein air painting became more and more established. What also favored the development towards open-air painting was the development of artists' colors in tubes . Up until this point, the artists had to laboriously mix their colors themselves, but the colors were now available to them 'ready to paint' in resealable, transportable tubes.

Claude Monet: Saint Lazare Station in Paris, Arrival of a Train , oil on canvas, 1877; Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts

This should also have benefited Monet when he obtained permission from the management of the railway line to paint under the glass roof of the Saint Lazare train station in Paris - “a place of artistic production that was previously unused in outdoor painting, impregnated by billows of smoke from steam locomotives coming in and out . ”In this context, the poet Émile Zola spoke of the“ poetry of the train stations ”, which the artists had to discover just as their forerunners“ found those of the rivers and forests. ”Danish, English and German open-air painters went as far as Monet Towards the end of the 19th century, however, not: Neither the Skagen painters Michael Ancher and Anna Ancher , Karl Madsen and Peder Severin Krøyer from the fishing village of Skagen , who achieved international significance, nor the artists of the Newlyn School and also those of the Dachau artist colony - they all stuck to the model of the Barbizon School (which Madsen himself had studied on site).

Philipp Röth: Midsummer in the Dachauer Moos , oil, 1895
Paula Modersohn-Becker: Moorgraben, tempera on cardboard, between 1900 and 1902; Privately owned

The companions of the Worpswede artists' colony , the Dachau artists' colony or the Haimhausen artists' colony , on the other hand, often painted outdoors, but preferred the above-mentioned combination of open-air and studio painting . In doing so, they corresponded to the advancing development of art, which increasingly tended to use less and less impressionistic, but more and more expressive forms of expression. A comparison of two paintings on the same subject illustrates this. One: Midsummer in the Dachau Moos by the Dachau painter Philipp Röth (painter) (1841–1921). The other: Moor trench by the Worpswede painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907).

Painting en plain air has not gone out of fashion in the 20th and 21st centuries either. When David Hockney large, full color images, forests, landscape, wood pile or a haystack arise show. Technically, they are created by segmenting the areas according to the Grand Canyon approach from 1998, but today in Yorkshire . They are reminiscent of the landscape painter Roger de Gray.

literature

Plein air painter on the Isebrücke in Hamburg-Eppendorf, 2015

Web links

Commons : Outdoor  painting - collection of pictures
Commons : Monet Exhibition  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files
Commons : Impressionism  - album with pictures, videos and audio files
Commons : Worpswede  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Pons: de.pons.com
  2. ↑ Cf. Natias Neutert: Where are we when we are in the picture? About differentials of the imagination . 1st edition. Lilienstaub & Schmidt, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-945003-98-5 , pp. 44, 45.
  3. ↑ Cf. Natias Neutert: Where are we when we are in the picture? About differentials of the imagination. Lilienstaub & Schmidt, Berlin 2014 ISBN 978-3-945003-98-5 , p. 44.
  4. ^ DuMont's picture lexicon of art. Artists, styles, techniques. Edited by Ann Hill et al. Translation from English by Herma Geyer / Wilhelm Höck / Joachim Rehork. DuMont Buchverlag Cologne 1976, ISBN 3-7701-0845-0 , p. 358.
  5. ↑ Leonardo da Vinci: Treatise on painting. Reissued after the translation by Heinrich Ludwig and introduced by Marie Herzfeld. Eugen Diederichs Verlag, Jena 1909.
  6. ↑ Matthias Thibaut: Divine Light , accessed on September 13, 2015.
  7. ^ DuMont's picture lexicon of art. Artists, styles, techniques . Edited by Ann Hill et al. Translation from English by Herma Geyer, Wilhelm Höck, Joachim Rehork. DuMont Buchverlag Cologne 1976, ISBN 3-7701-0845-0 , p. 358.
  8. ↑ See DuMont's Bild-Lexikon der Kunst. Artists, styles, techniques. Edited by Ann Hill et al. Translation from English by Herma Geyer, Wilhelm Höck, Joachim Rehork. DuMont Buchverlag Cologne 1976, ISBN 3-7701-0845-0 , p. 558.
  9. ↑ Natias Neutert: Where are we when we are in the picture? About differentials of the imagination. 1st edition. Lilienstaub & Schmidt, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-945003-98-5 , p. 63.
  10. ↑ Open air painting . kronberger-maler.de, accessed on September 13, 2015 .
  11. ↑ Natias Neutert: Where are we when we are in the picture? About differentials of the imagination. 1st edition. Lilienstaub & Schmidt, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-945003-98-5 , p. 67.
  12. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.zitatmuseum.de
  13. ↑ Lina Sahne: David Hockney's path to art: So much more than just talent. In: Kunstplaza. December 4, 2018, accessed on January 17, 2020 (German).