but seurat painted people from a variety of classes, strangers to one another. he painted them in a way which expresses a radically different experience of such places. it's hard to identify with the stiff figures. the style distances us. the grande jatte was a watershed

for the avant-garde of the 1880s. no ambitious artist could paint without acknowledging what seurat had done to typical impressionist subject matter. seurat's innovation was also his style. his compositions are rigorously formal. he replaced impressionism's casual spontaneity with discipline and order. he used current scientific theories of color and developed a systematic method of painting called pointillism. he applied his paint by means of small dots and thereby achieved what he called optical mixture and greater luminosity. for this reason, the artists who adopted seurat's technique became known as neo-impressionists. by the 1880s there was a new generation of the avant-garde

who lived and worked in an area north of the recently modernized center of paris. seurat had his studio on the corner of tichy boulevard. paul signac lived around the corner. vincent van gogh joined them when he arrived from holland in 1886. there was still general agreement that modern paris was the proper subject for advanced ambitious painting. what was new was the variety of competing styles with which artists responded to both impressionism and seurat's neo-impressionism. emile bernard turned to japanese and medieval art to find his answer-- flattened colors and simplified forms which sometimes verged on caricature. henri de toulouse-lautrec studied

popular art forms, especially posters to bring out the seamier side of the places of popular entertainment. living in a less prosperous district of the city van gogh followed several artists to paint in paris' industrial outskirts. there were undoubtedly political commitments involved in this interest in the working-class quarters of paris. signac wrote in the anarchist journal la revolte that the neo-impressionists were bringing their witness to the great struggle which is taking place between the workers and capital. but across the political spectrum artists of the 1880s became intrigued by the hybrid terrains in the outskirts of paris. it was here that the economic and social forces which were remaking the modern city lay momentarily exposed.

in the images they produced, we can see the difficulties they eountered in making a modern art in this landscape. in a series of water colors, van gogh tried to represent these ragged edges of the city where working-class people came to take a breath of fresh air amidst the random elements of piecemeal industrial and urban development. the most telling peculiarity of these drawings is the literalness with which all is set down. yet the artist and hence the viewer are kept at a distance by the yawning empty foreground. in signac's painting of the road to gennevilliers,

the artist makes us look across an open space to the line of factories in the industrial township of asnieres. marked out for future development awaiting houses and factories, this sheer expanse of empty terrain is disturbing. we have to wonder why any painter could conceive of painting a scene apparently so devoid of incident and meaning. it was in this marginal territory that the modern could almost be grasped. could painting make visual sense of such a landscape and its meanings? perhaps only by keeping at a distance or making your paintings a purely formal or stylistic exercise. for instance in seurat's view over the field of lucon to the distant factory town of saint-denis we see very little in the vast, empty foreground except a lot of brushwork.

characterizing what was then called the new art was a growing concern with questions of style, technique, and form. groups of artists formed around different styles and programs, and they began to compete intensely with each other. one critic wrote "all these tendencies make me think "of moving kaleidoscopic patterns which clash at one moment only to reunite at another." undoubtedly this was a period of immense innovation and diversity, yet contemporary critics such as felix feneon recognized an underlying similarity. comparing the work of seurat and paul gauguin, feneon argued that they both maintained a distance from their subjects. seurat, he said, applied science. gauguin used reality only as a pretext for what feneon called distanced creations.

by the late 1880s, these artists started to abandon the attempt to engage with modernity in the form of the city. they left for regions and cultures in which they were tourists. tourists travel to places where the customs of the people can be absorbed as sights, as experiences of the different and the new. the avant-garde artists went to a prosperous, developing brittany, but imagined it as primitive mystic, and strange. in august 1888 bernard painted breton women in a meadow. it depicts the display and leisure of a breton sunday outing, and it is clearly a direct response

to seurat's grande jatte. but it is very different. bernard emphasizes the flatness of the picture surface. he does not use traditional perspective, and he makes no attempt at naturalism. instead, he used the example of japanese prints and medieval stained glass to compose a picture that is only held together by its own invented order of marks and colors on a flat surface. as a result of such stylization, we have no access to or empathy with the breton people depicted. we need to think carefully about what it means to medievalize a 19th-century breton peasant or to transform brittany into japan.

when van gogh saw the painting he made a copy of it and he called it a sunday afternoon in the meadow, thus directly recalling seurat's title. within a few weeks of seeing bernard's painting gaughin produced his bid for leadership of the avant-garde. in vision after the sermon, gauguin painted a red field in which pious women vividly imagine a scene described to them in a sermon they have just heard about jacob wrestling with an angel. it is another distanced creation.

in his invention of the subject matter, gauguin draws on contemporary tourist myths of a medieval and mystical brittany. and the painting relies for its meaning on a city dweller's fantasy of the superstitious piety of peasant women. van gogh also left paris after only two years in the capital and settled in provence in the south of france. he believed that the renaissance of modern art would only take place away from the city symbol of a decadent and diseased society. he also kept in touch with developments in the avant-garde. he invited gauguin to visit him and both artists painted from the same subjects. gauguin painted the scene in arles

as a tapestry of saturated flat colors and shapes. he encouraged van gogh to move away from naturalism and impressionism and to experiment radically with color and perspective. van gogh grew up in the country in holland. he was a stranger in the unfamiliar landscape of the south of france and this was another country. like many northern europeans he imagined the mediterranean to be exotic and that's what he made it. he painted its people and their agriculture in landscapes drawn not only from what he saw around him but from japanese prints and etchings by rembrandt. here, he said, he was seeking his japan. in other words a world of the imagination. and here he found it.

in his collection of japanese prints van gogh saw a beautiful sun-filled, harmonious world which he imposed on the landscapes of provence. the prints themselves gave him confidence to use color more brilliantly and in a more arbitrary way. yet unlike gauguin and bernard he never really understood the implications of the prints in terms of surface and flatness. his surfaces are thick encrustations of paint but they always refer, often vividly, to the quality and texture shape and perspective, of what he painted.

he painted himself at this time as a workmanly japanese painter. he wrote to gauguin, "i have aimed at the character of a simple monk worshiping the eternal buddha." eventually suffering from epilepsy and considered mad by many people van gogh was confined in the sanitarium here at saint-remy near arles. from his window, he could look out on the weird rocky outcrops of the alpilles mountains. in june 1889 that view inspired one of his most famous paintings. the painting is starry night. starry night was an attempt to make a modern religious art. van gogh was suspicious, however, of the catholic undertones

of bernard's and gauguin's religious themes. here he uses typically protestant nature symbolism-- suns and stars and trees striving upwards towards the heavens. incorporating a cyprus tree so characteristic of provence, the painting nevertheless has a dutch church and dutch cottages. van gogh painted starry night using modern color theory. the complementary pair of yellow for light and blue for darkness translated the black and white opposition of religious pictures of divine illumination such as rembrandt's print of the annunciation to the shepherds. and it was also typical of dutch 17th-century woodcuts of celestial revelations. unfortunately for van gogh neither bernard nor gauguin recognized this work as a reply to theirs. it was seen simply as a somewhat overstylized village

in the moonlight. paul cezanne also lived and worked in provence. with seurat, cezanne was the most influential figure of this generation. he had a decisive contact with the impressionists in the 1870s. he left paris and went home to the family estate in provence. there, for the rest of his life, he painted and repainted the landscapes where he had spent his boyhood. cezanne was not a tourist. he was therefore quite different from all the other artists we've discussed so far. cezanne alone remained faithful to the impressionist program

of open-air painting an art based on direct observation of the physical world. for 30 years he set himself to find an answer to this question-- could he make a new art based entirely on what he called his petit sensation? petit sensation was one of cezanne's key concepts. sensation in french has two meanings. it refers both to physical perceptions and also to human feelings. cezanne was never a distanced observer. the countryside was the living proof of the people who had used it, shaped it, marked it.

but it seems that he felt that it was only by a careful study of the precise physical forms of nature the actual colors he saw that he could reach through to the full implications of its human meaning. he was later to write, "i am its consciousness. the landscape thinks itself in me." when cezanne painted the people of the region he produced monumental portraits of people he neither sentimentalized nor patronized. if there is a distance between himself and his subjects it is one of respect for the difference between himself, a middle-class man, and those of another class and culture.

he submitted people to the same discipline as the mountain while he patiently analyzed the field of colored light for which his paintbrush had to find an adequate sign on canvas. it was his honesty about the status of art as representation which led cezanne to his preoccupation with technique. he wrote "i wished to copy nature but i could not. "but i was satisfied when i discovered "that though the sun could not be reproduced, "it could be represented by something else-- color." in the 1880s like seurat, cezanne rejected the disorder of impressionist painting

and evolved what has been called his constructive brush stroke-- carefully building up his pictures by small facets of finely modulated color. this makes his pictures dense, and at times, claustrophobic. but cezanne always tried to re-create through color a sense of space and solidity of form. women artists of the avant-garde painted another equally vivid aspect of modernity. unable to frequent brothels, bars, and cafes, artists like mary cassatt represented the world they knew intimately. her subjects were drawn from the rituals and disciplines of middle-class womanhood. cassatt joined the impressionists in 1879 but her work of the 1880s and 1890s

exhibits many features of post-impressionism in its move towards greater solidity and more organized surface yet her pictures are not distanced from their subjects. they balance a self-conscious exploration of medium and form with a concern to convey a known social and psychological reality. in the bath cassatt made use of the example of japanese art but she used it to achieve intensity and monumentality. the tilted perspective the play of patterns all testify to formal experimentation, but the effect is to concentrate the viewer's attention on the woman and child and what they're doing. the mundane act of bathing is thereby invested with dignity and meaning. suzanne valadon, a one-time milliner and circus performer,

became an artist model. renoir painted her but she also began to paint for herself. the contrast between the images painted by women and the representations of women produced by men alerts us to the sexual politics in the formation of modernism. a persistent factor in the paintings of this era was a kind of sexual tourism. in 1891, gauguin traveled to the south pacific in search of a distant mythic paradise. in the french colony of tahiti, gauguin found it easy to take a wife from amongst young tahitian women

and to use her as his model. he wrote to his european wife about this painting called manao tupapau of his 13-year-old bride in terms redolent of the colonizers' complacency and racism. "i painted the nude of a young girl. "in that position, a trifle can make it indecent, "yet i wanted her that way. "the lines and the action interested me. i gave her a somewhat frightened expression." gauguin added the figure of the spirit of the dead to account for the girl's frightened expression. "these people are very much afraid of the spirits of the dead." gauguin uses color, patterns and simplified forms

as well as invented mythologies to create an image of the exotic, yet the painting nonetheless recalls olympia on her white bed. the displayed body and the watching figure all tie this image back into european concerns. from manet to picasso, from olympia to les demoiselles d'avignon, male avant-garde artists have staked their claims as ambitious modernists on the bodies of women. the major paintings of european modernism are surprisingly often paintings of the female nude. the power men enjoy make women available for artistic experimentation and colonization. in many ways modern art rejected the humanist traditions of western art, but it never abandoned the female nude. instead, it used women's bodies for its most extreme innovations and fantasies.

on their bodies, the implication of distanced creation is there for all to see. there is no such thing as objective art history. there are only the interpretations of art historians. these artists' work has been assessed in different ways. from courbet's country peasants to manet's new classes in the cities, from monet's realism of light to the visions of van gogh the painters we've looked at seem to progressively move away from the real world, rejecting external appearances in favor of an inner, personal imaginative truth. what we have seen is a crisis about how to handle the modern in its immediate form of the city. the importance of the artists of the 1880s and 1890s is a kind of hinge. artists still felt themselves responsible to the world--

its social, as well as its natural, orders. they had also opened up a realm of hitherto unimagined freedom for art. later artists saw, in the imaginative colors of gauguin in the exhilaration of van gogh's energetic brushwork and above all, in the inventiveness of cezanne's later work, resources which were to inspire the whole array of 20th-century isms from purism to expressionism from fauvism to cubism. captioning performed by the national captioning institute, inc. captions copyright 1989 educational broadcasting corporation

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