The Armand Hammer Collection

Ugh, A Day at the Museum??? 

Exhibit #3: The Armand Hammer Collection

Day: 5-10-2012

Location: Armand Hammer Museum

Hello once again blog readers! Last time your eager eyes grazed through the computer screen, I pushed you into the elusive rabbit hole of Surrealist Art at the LACMA. Now I know I promised to bring you guys back into the real world with French realism, but after visiting the Armand Hammer Collection at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, I decided to delve more broadly into the dynamic and varied art movements that hit France during the second half of the 19th century: Realism, Impressionism, and Post-Impressionism. 

After hopelessly meandering around the Hammer for about 15 minutes trying to locate the exhibit and traversing through several sketchy emergency exit stairways (The Hammer Museum was under some renovation and closed off almost all of its pathways),  I finally entered the small exhibit, adorned richly with paintings by some of the most renowned French, Dutch, and Flemish masters. Hanging on the Hammer’s rich maroon and coffee colored walls were various works by Van Gogh, Degas, Fragonard, Rembrandt, Rubens, Gauguin, Daumier, and of course, Monet. All these extremely talented and avant-garde artists helped pave the way for expressionism, abstraction, and modernism. The Armand Hammer Collection is a permanent installment at the museum, that will forever amaze and revitalize many museum-goers with its vibrant splashes of colors and masterful, playful brushwork.

Well, you guys know the cue! Take out your notepads because here comes yet another brief art history lecture about mid-late 19th century French Art!

Emerging out of the steaming backdrop of rapidly industrializing and empirical France was Realism, a movement directly influenced by the philosophy of positivism. Developed by French Philosopher and Enlightenment thinker Auguste Comte, many aspiring positivists advocated for a purely empirical approach of nature and society, an approach based solely on keen observation and rendering of human activity. Since scientific laws governed 19th century France, fueled by philosophies of manifest destiny and rationalism, realist artists argued that only the objects and events of one’s own time and what current French citizens can witness for themselves, were “real.” Rather than wasting their time conveying the spiritual and sublime nature of mythology and antiquity, realist artists such as Gustave Courbet, Jean Francois Millet, and Honore Daumier focused their attention on depicting experiences and sights of everyday, contemporary life. The tangible, the mundane, and the dirty and smog filled industrial world was the sole subject of many realist paintings, loosely orchestrated with short and slashy brushwork that revealed the inner mechanisms of a society dissolving under the contemporary anxieties of rapid, fast-paced society.

The realist visions of contemporary French society gave way to an even more stylized art movement that dropped empirical philosophies of a tangible, progressive, and stable industrial world in favor of an emphasis on the fleeting, impermanent, and intangible aspects of fast-pace Parisian society; a constantly shifting reality of color, compositions, and feeling. Thus impressionism was born from the chaos that was an urbanized Paris, a movement that sought to capture a fleeting moment of Parisian life, not in the absolutely fixed, precise sense of a Realist painting, but by conveying the elusiveness and impermanence of images. The speed and spontaneity of many Impressionists brush strokes actively strive to render society ever-shifting and unstable, whisked under the smoke of work-shifts. The use of tiny dabs of color all melt and blur together to create smooth tonal gradations. The compositions of many Impressionists paintings are also spontaneous, figures rush through the wise boulevards of Paris, some half emerge and disappear as the artist rapidly pens a sketch of his shifting setting. Claude Monet, Renoir, and Camille Pissarro are some excellent Impressionist artists that used artifice to capture bustling French society, opening the doors towards more abstraction and modification of society in art during the 20th century.

Just when Impressionism was gaining international acclaim, not subject to accusations of crudeness and sketchiness, some painters started to feel like many Impressionists neglected the formal and fundamental elements of painting and lost the ability to accurately use line, pattern, form, and color to depict a period of emotional and phycological turmoil and anxiety. By 1880, many artists such as Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gaugin were more systematically examining the potential of form, line, and color to explore the expressive capabilities of art. Bolder color and flatter forms became the norm of many Post-impressionist paintings, striving to intensify the main message of the painting, paintings that were usually an accurate expression of an artist’s feelings about contemporary society. Dissolving, unmodulated color along with hard contours were some of the suggestive aspects of Post-Impressionist art that was meant to strike a chord in many viewers. Paintings by artists such as Gaugin were not quick impressions of society, they were deep and engrossing reflections of his personal outlook on society and the different moods that linger along the atmosphere.

These three movements gave birth to some of art history’s most dynamic, and emotionally wrenching pieces of art, filled with various moods and textures that pulls the viewer through the different stages of Parisian thought in the 19th century. The Armand Hammer exhibit displays all these mindsets in just three little rooms, taking the viewer on a journey through the various visions of progressive French artists. 

Let’s start with a realist painting shall we? Jean Francois Millet’s Peasants Resting (1866) is a piece that just screams French Realism. Imbued with immaculate sincerity of observation and detail while still appearing etched and artistically rendered, Millet’s pastel drawing recording the hackneyed and exhausting toils of the dwindling French Peasantry, is an accurate and heartfelt reflection of tangible and contemporary French society. Millet’s soft and delicate figures seem to have just squatted down on the lush green grass, exhausted from their sowing and plowing. Bound to their perpetual and cyclical daily agricultural tasks, Millet rendered his contemporaneous figures with tons of tender dignity, enlivening the mundane. His sketchy use of the pastel add an air of artifice and democracy to his paintings, letting the imperfections and shaky anxieties of life show through the deteriorating French agricultural landscape. Millet’s realist works are memorable for their poignant glorification of tangible everyday life, imbuing the “real” with the splendor and reverence it deserves. 

Moving away from the sanctified, spiritual silence of Millet’s realist paintings, Camille Pissarro’s Boulevard Montmartre: Mardi-Gras is an extreme example of Impressionist art, a scintillating canvas of thousands upon thousands of dabs, dots, and slashes that wonderfully melt into a Parisian parade. In his fantastic attempt to capture the fleeting, crowed charge of rapidly industrializing Parisian society, Pissarro fantastically implemented the beautiful, wide, and grand avenues of Paris’s boulevards as the setting of his fluttering canvas. Crowds of people melt into tiny textures dots of pristinely dabbed color, whose woven patterns become more distinct as you slowly pull yourself closer to the painting. Twittering tree branches lock arms with the slashed apartment buildings rendered in accurate perspective as forms continue to dissolve and blur into the distance. A sea of greens, yellows, and oranges slowly approaches the viewer as the blur of the parade rapidly accelerates through Paris’s extensive streets. Every citizen is tangled in the twirling crowd as streams of merriment permeate the city streets, perpetually clocked into the circadian rhythm of work and sleep. This is the first colossal impressionist painting that I have encountered that truly implements a rich tapestry of texture and color to weave an unstable impression of city life. Pissarro’s engrossing and wonderfully shifting French landscape is a truly progressive canvas that directly inspired many German and Abstract Expressionists that followed in his footsteps in creating canvases pierced with orchestrated color and brushstroke.

Finally, we get to a Post-Impressionist painting by Paul Gauguin. Paul Gauguin’s

Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin (1889) is a canvas filled with soft, unmodulated color and the serenity of Brittany, France, a quaint isolated town unspoiled by industrialization and built upon the foundations and culture of ancient Celtic folkways. Gauguin sharply departs from the shifting Parisian cityscape in favor of the silent and pious lifestyles of the Brittany peasantry, whose hearts and souls occupy a different niche, religiosity and austerity. In his painting, Gauguin is yet again kindly greeted by a Brittany local, whose figure gently emerges from the edge of his canvas. This daily ritual is ever-sanctified by Gauguin’s expressive use of flat, unmodulated planes of colors to accentuate the haggard, abrasive, but homely fields of Brittany. Guaguin implements the expressive powers of patterned planes of color to convey his dour love and reverence for the town’s simple inhabitants, pure and untainted by the aggressive shifting and instability of city life. Gauguin appears ever cemented to the lush landscapes of Brittany, not a hint of rapid action can be seen in the peasant women’s smooth and controlled movement. 

From the quaint rest of the hard working contemporary peasants, to rushing and parading mobs of the bourgeois, and then back to the grounded and awe-inspiring untainted lives of the pious separated from contemporaneous life, the Armand Hammer collection encapsulates the lives and journeys of those living in a shifting world. Without these people, and the painters that immortalized their lives, mindsets, souls and spirits, modern society would never be blessed with its incredible conveniences and luxuries. 

Well folks, it has been an absolute pleasure taking you on a journey through the art history world. I hope I have introduced to many of you, the wonders many fine art museums have to offer. The stories canvases tell, the reactions they elicit, and the infinite amount of interpretations hidden beneath their rich surfaces are all things that should attract any human being to an exhibit. All I’m asking of people is to sincerely look closer into the paintings in front of them, and open up their minds, hearts, and souls to the infinite meanings they hold. 

Comments are appreciated!