Manet and the Post-Impressionists

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Poster of the 1910/11 exhibition using Paul Gauguin's painting Poèmes barbaren

Manet and the Post-Impressionists was the name of an art exhibition in London that took place from November 8, 1910 to January 15, 1911 in the Grafton Galleries on Bond Street (formerly 8 Grafton Street) in Mayfair . It went back to the initiative of the British art critic and painter Roger Fry , who coined the term post-impressionism with this exhibition . Despite strong public rejection and negative press reviews, it became a significant event in the history of modern art . In 1912, the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition opened at the Grafton Galleries.

history

From 1904 to 1910 the Briton Roger Fry was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York . In 1906 he discovered the works of Paul Cézanne during a stay in Paris and turned his interests to modern art. The following year he went back to England and represented the interests of the museum as a “European advisor”. In 1910 he was released after an argument with the museum's director , JP Morgan . In the summer of that year, Fry traveled to Paris with the literary critic Desmond MacCarthy to select paintings for an exhibition in London. MacCarthy, who had taken on the task of secretary for the planned exhibition, traveled on alone to Munich and the Netherlands.

The first exhibition in 1910/1911

Exhibited artists

Grafton Galleries, 1892

The exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists in the Grafton Galleries, London, organized by Roger Fry , showed previously little-known works from mainland Europe to the British public in four rooms, for example by the French painters Paul Cézanne , Paul Gauguin , Henri Matisse , and Georges Seurat , André Derain , Maurice de Vlaminck , Othon Friesz , the sculptor Aristide Maillol and the Dutchman Vincent van Gogh . The word "Post-Impressionism" coined by Fry for the exhibition points to the impressionist ideas and the new directions they emanate as a departure from the past into the future. The catalog published for the exhibition listed 206 paintings and drawings as well as 22 bronzes and ceramics. The unsigned introductory text was written by Desmond MacCarthy and was based on Fry's notes. The work lenders included Parisian art dealers such as Daniel Henry Kahnweiler , Paul Durand-Ruel , Ambroise Vollard , the Bernheim-Jeune gallery and art collectors such as Leo Stein .

The title-giver of the exhibition, Édouard Manet , belonged to a previous generation of artists, but like the other artists shown in the exhibition was unknown to a broad public in Great Britain in 1910. For example, while in Germany numerous private collectors and progressive museums already owned Manet's works, there were few collectors of his work in Great Britain, and the country's museums had not yet acquired any of his paintings. Although the art dealer Durand-Ruel had previously exhibited works by Manet in London, these sales exhibitions were not very successful with the public. All of Manet's works in the Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibition came from Auguste Pellerin's collection , which the art dealers Bernheim Jeune, Durand Ruel and Paul Cassirer had jointly acquired and for which they were now looking for new buyers. From the total of 35 works by Manet in this collection, the art dealers had already shown numerous works in Berlin, Munich and Paris in 1910 and found customers for several pictures in Germany in particular. For the London exhibition, Fry selected nine pictures by Manet: In addition to the late main work Bar in the Folies Bergères , the bar scene Au Café , a portrait of a child and a nude, these works consisted of a series of portraits. Fry contrasted the paintings of Manet, who served as a model for the young generation of artists of the emerging Impressionism in the 1860s, with the works of the subsequent generation of artists.

His successors like Cézanne showed 21, Gauguin 46 and van Gogh 25 pictures. Other artists represented were Seurat with two works, Paul Sérusier with five, Maurice Denis with five, Félix Vallotton with four and Odilon Redon with three works. The Fauves were represented by Albert Marquet with five works, Henri Manguin with four, Maurice de Vlaminck with eight and André Derain with three works. Two paintings by Matisse and three by Pablo Picasso were complemented by numerous drawings and sculptures by both artists. Manet's painting Bar in the Folies Bergères was placed in the first exhibition room across from two canvases of Cézanne - a still life and a portrait of his wife Hortense Fiquet - to underline Cézanne's arrival in modernism.

  • Édouard Manet: La Promenade , 1880

  • Édouard Manet: Bar in the Folies Bergères , 1881/1882

  • Georges Seurat: Lighthouse near Honfleur , 1886

  • Paul Cezanne: Mme Cézanne in a red armchair , 1877

  • Paul Cézanne: Still Life with Apples , 1893/1894

  • Vincent van Gogh: Portrait of Dr. Gachet , 1890

  • Paul Gauguin: Poèmes barbaren , 1896

criticism

Edwardian audiences in London were shocked by the exhibition and the press released negative reviews. The exhibition secretary, Desmond MacCarthy, summed up the general reaction to Fry's choice of paintings as follows: "Kind people called him mad, and reminded others that his wife was in an asylum." ("Kind people called him crazy and reminded others that his wife was in a home. ”) Fry was deeply affected by the fact that his wife, the painter Helen Coombe, was mentally ill. Cézanne's paintings have been compared to children's doodles.

The British writer Virginia Woolf , a friend of Roger Fry of the Bloomsbury Group , wrote in her 1924 essay Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown : "On or about December 1910 human character changed." She was referring to Fry's first art exhibition that year 1910.

The 2010 editorial in the art magazine The Burlington Magazine on a report on the 100th anniversary of the first exhibition indicated that while it was quick to put together and mostly a sales show, it denied that it was a makeshift, which it was was often assumed. Many important art dealers and collectors have contributed works that would have offered an astonishingly representative compilation of the works of Cézanne, Gauguin and van Gogh. Only the selection of works by artists who were still living at the time could have given experts who were familiar with the Parisian art world a reason for legitimate criticism. In contrast to an earlier exhibition in the gallery about the Impressionists in 1905, this one had over 25,000 visitors and made a good profit.

The second exhibition in 1912

Roger Fry: A room in the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition (Matisse room), 1912

Despite these negative reactions, Fry organized a second post-impressionist exhibition, the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition , in 1912 , which ran from October 5 to December 31. Leonard Woolf acted as secretary of this exhibition . In addition to contemporary British painting such as that of the friends from the Bloomsbury Group, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell , it also showed that of Cézanne, Matisse and the Fauves and Picasso. In addition to Fry, Clive Bell and Boris Anrep had chosen the exhibits . Fry's introduction to the French group focused on Cézanne, while van Gogh and Gauguin were ignored. There were also Russian artists such as Natalija Goncharova and Michail Larionow , while Fry did not record works from Germany, Switzerland and Austria-Hungary because, in his opinion, they had not shown any significant new ideas. The exhibition was under the patronage of Lady Ottoline Morrell , with whom Fry had a fleeting love affair. A little later, in July 1913, Fry founded Omega Workshops , an experimental interior design workshop in which Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell were involved.

meaning

The exhibitions shook the established London art audience and had a major impact on young British artists, including the Bloomsbury Group. As an advocate of avant-garde art, Fry founded the exhibition company Grafton Group in 1913 as the successor to the Friday Group . He continued to organize modern art exhibitions such as The New Movement in Art , held in London and Birmingham in 1917. Desmond MacCarthy referred to the first exhibition at The Listener on February 1, 1945 as "The Art Quake of 1910" (" The Art Quake of 1910").

Contemporary exhibitions, in which, among other things, the groundbreaking work of Cézanne was shown, were those of the Gallery 291 in New York in 1911, the Sonderbund in Cologne in 1912 and the Armory Show in New York in 1913. The Armory Show was organized by the American artists Walter Pach , Walt Kuhn and Arthur B. Davies , who got to know Cézanne's work thanks to their visits to Paris. There they had visited the salon of the art collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein and Matisse. The Armory Show exhibition took up the presentation of French artists and thus followed the ideas of the Cologne Sonderbund and the two exhibitions organized by Fry. However, the exhibits also met with rejection in Cologne and the United States.

Works by artists such as Cézanne, van Gogh and Picasso, who were mocked at the time, are currently among the most expensive paintings .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Grafton Galleries , artbiogs.co.uk, accessed on 20 January 2016
  2. ↑ Quoted from the web link Culture quake: Manet and Post Impressionism
  3. ^ Fry, Roger , dictionaryofarthistorians.org, accessed February 26, 2013.
  4. ↑ Quoted from JB Bullen: Post-Impressionists in England , p. 94
  5. ↑ Quoted from arthistory.about.com
  6. ^ Carol A. Nathanson, The American Reaction to London's First Grafton Show , jstor.org, accessed March 4, 2013
  7. ↑ In 1910, for example, the Nationalgalerie Berlin owned the paintings Im Wintergarten and Fliederstrauss , the Kunsthalle Hamburg the portrait Henri Rochefort , the Kunsthalle Bremen the portrait Zacharie Astruc and the Kunsthalle Mannheim The Execution of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico . See Denis Rouart and Daniel Wildenstein: Edouard Manet. Catalog raisonné . Bibliothèque des Arts, Paris and Lausanne 1975.
  8. ↑ For the early owners of Manet's works, see Julius Meier-Graefe: Edouard Manet . Piper, Munich 1912, pp. 310-316. One of the earliest paintings by Manet in British collections was Music in the Tuileries Gardens , which the collector Hugh Lane acquired in 1908 and which was Manet's first painting in a British museum, the National Gallery (London) , in 1917 .
  9. ^ Paul Durand Ruel had already shown works by Manet in the London Society of French Artists in the years 1872–1874 , but found no buyers. He showed again Manet's work (together with works by impressionist artists) in 1905 in the Grafton Galleries and in 1906 sent works by Manet from the Jean-Baptiste Faure collection to the Sully Gallery in London . These sales exhibitions also showed little success. See directory of early Manet exhibitions in Réunion des Musées Nationaux Paris and Metropolitan Museum of Art New York (ed.): Manet. Exhibition catalog, German edition: Frölich and Kaufmann, Berlin 1984, ISBN 3-88725-092-3 , pp. 536-538.
  10. ↑ See the catalog for the Edouard Manet exhibition (from the Pellerin collection) in the Modern Gallery of Heinrich Thannhauser , Munich 1910 and in detail Josef Kern: Impressionism in Wilhelmine Germany . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1989, ISBN 3-88479-434-5 .
  11. ↑ Manet's pictures are: Catalog No. 1 Portrait d'enfant - 1880, today referred to as Fillette sur un banc , Barnes Foundation (after Josef Kern) or Portrait d'enfant Vayson - today Helen Foresman Spencer Museum of Art (according to Anna Gruetzner Robins, Burlington Magazine December 2010); No. 3. Mademoiselle Lemonnier - 1879, today referred to as Isabelle Lemonier le chapeau à la main , Hermitage (Saint Petersburg) ; No. 4 L'Amazone - 1877, today referred to as Jeune femme au chapeau rond , Pearlman Collection [1] ; No. 7 Un bar aux Folies-Bergère / Bar in the Folies-Bergère - 1881, now the Courtauld Institute of Art ; No. 15 La femme aux souliers roses - 1872, today Hiroshima Museum of Art ; No. 17 Au Café - 1878, today the Oskar Reinhart collection “Am Römerholz” ; No. 21 Baigneuses - 1862–1865, today referred to as Baigneuses en Seine , Museu de Arte de São Paulo ; No. 22 La Promenade - 1880, now Tokyo Fuji Art Museum ; No. 151 Miss Campbell (Pastel) - around 1882, today referred to as Portrait de Claire Campbell , Cleveland Museum of Art - See catalog of the London exhibition and a comparison of the catalog for the Munich exhibition in 1910 and Josef Kern: Impressionism in Wilhelmine Germany . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1989, ISBN 3-88479-434-5 , pp. 472-475.
  12. ↑ Quoted from the web link of the Museum of Modern Art.
  13. ↑ Quoted from the web link Birth of the Figure of the Father of Modern Art: Cézanne in International Exhibitions 1910–1913 .
  14. ↑ Portrait of Doctor Gachet , www.vggallery.com, accessed March 4, 2013
  15. ↑ Quoted from the web link Culture quake: Manet and Post Impressionism
  16. ↑ Quoted from the Weblink Editorial of Burlington Magazine , 2010
  17. ^ Second post-impressionist exhibition / Grafton Galleries, Oct. 5-Dec. 31 1912. , trove.nla.gov.au, accessed February 26, 2013.
  18. ↑ Beth Carole Rosenberg Special. Commissioned Essay on the Bloomsbury Group  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as broken. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , enotes.com, accessed March 1, 2013@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.enotes.com  
  19. ↑ Quoted from the web link of the Museum of Modern Art.
  20. ^ Fry and modern art , www2.tate.org.uk, accessed March 5, 2013
  21. ↑ Quoted from the web link Birth of the Figure of the Father of Modern Art: Cézanne in International Exhibitions 1910–1913

Coordinates: 51 ° 30 ′ 35.9 ″  N , 0 ° 8 ′ 36.6 ″  W.