No Lines in Nature:Samuel Courtauld and the Passion for 19c French Art.

"We live in a rainbow of chaos" - Paul Cezanne.

Businessman, collector, and philanthropist Samuel Courtauld appears to be one of the only people in the UK in the period between the wars who had both the wherewithal, the passion, and the faith in vaguely contemporary European art (French, mostly) to be able to, and want to, buy it. This was possibly down to his own Huguenot background, we can't be certain. What we can be sure of is that he bought painting after painting by artists who are now considered the most vital of their and, in some cases, any era.

It was an age when Britain was suspicious of anything European (heaven forbid we would ever be so stupid and insular ever again) and it's thanks to Courtauld, possibly more than any other person, that we now have such a rich, and often freely available to view, selection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art in the UK. London, of course, is particularly well served:- after Courtauld's wife, Elizabeth, died he left much of his collection to his own Courtauld Institute for both conservation and teaching of art history.

Yesterday saw the last day of the National Gallery's Courtauld Impressionists:From Manet to Cezanne show which combined works you can normally see at the Courtauld with those usually held (and available for free - so charging was a bit cheeky, but it was cheap) in the National Gallery. I'd left it late (and I was far from the only one, it was rammed) but I was glad I squeezed it in. It was definitely worth it. A great show.

Camille Pissarro - The Boulevard Montmartre at Night (1897)

It could hardly have failed to be, really. Both Manet and Cezanne are two of the most important figures in 19c art, all art, and the links between them (Monet, Seurat, Pissarro, Gauguin, van Gogh) were no slouches either. There were a couple of outliers, the odd curveball, but for the most part the exhibition traced the story of how the Impressionist artists first appeared, how they developed, and how, eventually, they paved the way for Cubism and even Abstraction.

Not only was Manet not popular in Britain, they didn't even like him in France. Not the art critics anyway. Or the general public. Charles Baudelaire, Emila Zola, and Stephane Mallarme were all fans and contemporaries and each of them loved the way he radically reinterpreted themes and motifs he'd studied in paintings by Renaissance masters like Titian and Velazquez.

In 1862, the year of his thirtieth birthday, Edouard Manet made his first major painting of city life. To our modern eyes, it's nothing spectacular. Nothing special even. But, at the time, audiences were perplexed by both the composition, the less than starchy subject matter (friends and family listening to a concert in a park), and even the unorthodox position Manet must have placed himself in to capture the scene.

Edouard Manet - Music in the Tuileries Gardens (1862)

Edouard Manet - Dejeuner sur l'herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) (about 1863-8)

He was soon to go further. Dejeuner sur l'herbe was dismissed by the Salon in Paris but did find some exposure in an exhibition of rejected works. The nudity caused a sensation. In those days it would have been due to the female sitter's lack of 'decorum', one would presume. Now, and not least because the men in the painting are dressed, it would be seen as patriarchal and indicative of the male gaze. The Guerrilla Girls once asked 'do women need to be naked to get in the Met Museum?' and that question, although not in Manet's time being asked, would have been equally pertinent in 1860s Paris. 

Times change and we could argue the toss about its meaning (or if it's demeaning) until les vaches come home but what's not in doubt is that's a wonderfully rendered, amazingly free, piece of painting. A Bar at the Folies-Bergere is better still. According to Jonathan Jones reviewe for this very show in The Guardian it surpasses even Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon as THE greatest masterpiece of all modern art.

I'm not sure I'd go quite as far as Jonathan. I'm not even certain it was the best, or most important, painting in the show - but it is both excellent and intriguing. The reflection behind Suzon the barmaid does not match that which is being reflected, the details of the faces of the customers in the bar are rendered blank as periphery people are when you're focusing on one specific person, and Suzon herself looks utterly unmoved by the situation. You could say she is a study in boredom but the French word, ennui - of course, seems to capture the mood so much better.

Edouard Manet - A Bar at the Folies-Bergere (1882)

My friend Dan noted that, amongst the wine and oranges, there are two bottles of Bass beer. Bass was brewed in Burton-upon-Trent, suggesting that 1880s France was not as stuffy about Britain as Britain can often be about Europe. A lot of Manet's work appears to make use of a dark, muted palette and is often set indoors but Banks of the Seine at Argenteuil looks like not just an influence on the artists that followed him, but could easily be mistaken for one of their works.

So it came as no surprise that Manet painted this while visiting Claude Monet in the suburbs of Paris. In fact the lady and her child looking out to the river are Monet's wife and son, Camille and Jean. Like some of Monet's work, those now accustomed to more anarchic, edgier, or more conceptual art may throw that tired old curse, 'biscuit tin', at it. Once, though, this was a daring way of painting - and, anyway, I like biscuits and you've got to keep them somewhere.

Edouard Manet - Banks of the Seine at Argenteuil (1874)

Claude Monet - Antibes (1888)

Manet's 'Monet' looks more like a Monet than the Monet hanging across from it. Antibes is a beautiful, wistful painting that captures the feeling of staring out to the sea to ease one's troubled mind, soaking in the glory of nature when real life (whatever that is) gets a bit too much. As the curators of the show have correctly pointed out it captures something of Monet's fascination with the Japanese artists Hokusai and Hiroshige, a fascination shared by James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

In its plein-air style Antibes was typical of Monet, but the Mediterranean setting was in stark contrast to his more typical grey northern skies. It was some years before this painting was made, in 1872, that he painted Impression, Sunrise - the painting that gave the loosely affiliated movement its name and it was in 1874 that Monet, Degas, and Pissarro started to exhibit their work independently of the uninterested and dismissive Salon.

Degas was more of a pain in the arse than most of the others. A racist and a sexist (neither of which were probably uncommon at the time) who slagged off his contemporaries unceasingly and shunned painting outdoors for scenes of ballet and horse racing. He was also richer than the others too so he didn't really need to worry if anybody bought his paintings. 

You'd think the lack of a commercial imperative would give him leeway to be the more interesting painter but, to my eyes, that's just not the case. Degas' work has dated in a way that Manet's, Van Gogh's, and Cezanne's has not. I'm not doubting his technical ability, the ballerinas dancing to Mozart's Don Giovanni and the young, and mostly naked, Spartans, exercising are all brilliantly executed, but I am saying that in contrast to his contemporaries he is the weaker artist.

Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas - Two Dancers on a Stage (1874)

Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas - Young Spartans Exercising (about 1860)

Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas - Woman at a Window (about 1871-2)

But, hey, as we've established, he was up against VERY tough competition. Perhaps if he'd stopped slagging them off and listened to what they were saying he may have done better (#justsaying). Knowing his views on women I'm a little concerned that the panel next to his Woman at a Window states it was painted during the Franco-Prussian war, when Paris was under siege, and that the model was starving. When Degas offered her a hunk of meat (no sniggering at the back) 'so hungry was she, she devoured it raw'. 

If Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas (a treble barrelled forename, ffs, how pretentious can 'one' get?) is an outlier due to being less innovative than the others, then Honore-Victorin Daumier, who was happy with just two first names, is an outlier by dint of his age. He was older than the rest of the artists on show here and, to be honest, he doesn't quite fit in. A dad who has arrived at the party to pick his kids up a bit too early.

Daumier was a caricaturist, a draughtsman, a printmaker, and a cartoonist fond of satire and social commentary. Though none of that is represented here. Instead we're treated to two, vastly different illustrations of scenes from Cervantes 17c novel Don Quixote. They are both, apparently, "imbued with deep personal meaning" which is all well and good but Daumier died 140 years ago, so we can assume that deep personal meaning died with him. For what it's worth I prefer the top, more modern, slightly darker, one.

Honore-Victorin Daumier - Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (about 1868-72)

Honore-Victorin Daumier - Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (about 1855)

Palate cleansed by Daumier's atypical inclusion, I was ready to gorge on one of the finest selections in the whole show. Camille Pissarro may not be has highly regarded as some of his friends but, personally, I've always been a huge fan - and that's not just because he lived briefly around Dulwich, Sydenham, and Crystal Palace and made many painting of SE London.

His lengthy career spans from an apprenticeship as Corot's pupil through to working with Cezanne and, in the knowledge that he was a modest, kindly man, it seems that his reputation may have suffered as he let those with bigger egos take centre stage. If that's so, that's a real shame. In his adoption, along with Seurat, of Pointillism he seemed eager to embrace the new rather than rest on his laurels, something he has in common with another South Londoner, a certain David Bowie!

1897's The Boulevard Montmartre at Night is one of my two very favourite paintings in the show (that's why it's right up there at the top). I love the way he didn't baulk at the new fangled electric street lights, that he didn't see them as anathema to art but as a new challenge. I love, even more, the way he's caught the glimmer, the radiance, the buzz of modernity they would have brought with them, and the thrill of the Paris air at night.  

Place Lafayette, Rouen is pretty damned good too. I loved finding out that on arrival in Rouen, Pissarro decided to give the picturesque medieval town centre a miss and set up his easel near an industrial centre and commercial port. He wasn't looking to paint ugly but to capture the beauty of the everyday and I think he's managed it astoundingly well. You can see in this work how he was beginning to forge the technique of building up a painting by the use of dots. A style that would become known as Pointillism and would be perfected by Georges Seurat.

Camille Pissarro - Place Lafayette, Rouen (1883)

Georges Seurat - Bridge at Courbevoie (1886-7)

Who knows what Georges Seurat would have gone on to achieve had he not died (of an unspecified disease) at the preposterously young age of thirty-one. He achieved quite a lot in his short life as it was. Not fully satisfied with the Impressionist painters intuitive responses to light and colour, Seurat sought to use optical theories to both rationalise and maximise his approach. It can sound cold and calculated but you only to have look at his work to see it had quite the opposite effect. 

Somebody once told me they thought to be rational was to mean you could not be passionate and that to be passionate meant you could not be rational. I felt then, and I feel know, that was hokum of the highest order and I would suggest even a cursory glance at Seurat's Bridge at Courbevoie would prove so. Science and mathematics CAN be applied to art and that art will be no weaker for it. In the case of Georges Seurat, it will be stronger.

It's a marvellous painting. I love the stock still men staring out at the chilly looking waters, the sails on the boats, the green of the riverside, and the shadowy figures lurking in the background, and I love too that, right to the rear of the painting, there is a smokestack billowing out what looks more like confetti than smoke. Bridget Riley must have been a fan?

I'd imagine most artists of the time would shy away from including chimneys belching out industrial waste into the sky in their paintings, not least if those paintings were supposed to picture idyllic scenes, but to me it's part of what makes them. The Bathers at Asnieres, in what must surely be Seurat's most well known painting, aren't rich playboys, lotus eaters, or parishioners of paradise but ordinary folk who had to enjoy their summer in their lunchtime, after work, or at the weekends. They had to make the most of what they had and it's this sense of being aware that these pleasurable hours will soon be done that gives the work its strength. I'd even go so far as to claim it as a memento mori. 

Georges Seurat - Bathers at Asnieres (1884)

Georges Seurat - The Channel of Gravelines, Grand Fort-Philippe (1890)

Less celebrated but, to me, equally superb is The Channel of Gravelines. What a strange, nondescript place to make the subject of a painting. A couple of cottages, a barn, a slightly bigger house, an empty boat, a canal, a huge expanse of, well, nothingness. It elicits in me feelings of sadness, feelings of despair, yet, simultaneously, feelings of joy and expectation. It is a painting I've been staring at in the National Gallery for years, decades even, now and it is still one that has yet to fully reveal its mysteries to me. They continue to deepen and, one thing about me, I love an ever deepening mystery.

Georges Seurat - Young Woman Powdering Herself (about 1888-90)

Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec - Woman Seated in a Garden (1891)

Which is maybe why, following Seurat, I brushed past the section on Toulouse-Lautrec with almost indecent haste. His interesting life story (born into one of France's oldest aristocratic families, laid low by accidents and illness) and interesting life (hanging around with bohemian types, cabaret singers, and prostitutes in Montmartre), for me, overshadows his art. It's good but in this sort of company he comes across as a minor artist, a footnote.

Renoir, too, also suffers in comparison to what has been (and what is still to come). Again, he's good. He's just not quite good enough when he's in the ring with the big boys. Both The Skiff and La Loge are almost textbook Impressionism. If you wanted to show an alien what Impression is/was you could do a lot worse than start with them. They would explain both plein-air painting, interior scenes, and the Impressionist obsession with all things theatrical, though more often the audience than the performers.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - The Skiff (La Yole) (1875)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - La Loge (Theatre Box) (1874)

Vincent van Gogh - A Wheatfield, with Cypresses (1889)

But put either of them next to Vincent van Gogh's Wheatfield from just fifteen years later and they look like the art of the past. It's men against boys. Things were moving pretty quickly. The game was nearly up for Impressionism. It had done its job, it had changed how art was made and how art was looked at, and it was time to move on. Seurat, van Gogh, Gauguin. and Cezanne were the artists who were to do that.

It's easy now, and cliched too, to say you can see something of van Gogh's inner turmoil and turbulent life style in his art - but it's really difficult to avoid coming to those conclusions. Painted from a field near Arles in the south of France, just outside the asylum in which he was receiving treatment, it was the first van Gogh painting to enter a British collection but in its expressionistic clouds, windswept trees and wheat, and restless nature it captures the essence of both the man and his art. It's a pity it was the only van Gogh in the show. Predictably, it had drawn a crowd.

There was only one Pierre Bonnard piece in the show by the time I arrived too. There had been two but the second had been ferreted away to Tate Modern as their Pierre Bonnard:The Colour of Memory opens this Wednesday. Looking at the one Bonnard on show, he doesn't stand out as the most likely of artists to be given a retrospective by such an institution.

His "images of quiet interiors and radiant gardens" don't seem like the sort of subject matter to rub shoulders with the Kabakovs and Fahrelnissa Zeid and he was still practicing Impressionism long after most other artists of his era (Derain, Matisse) had moved towards Fauvism or Post-Impressionism. Yet Courtauld, and the curators of this exhibition, saw something in his work. They saw "a singular artistic vision" and "radical" investigations into composition and colour which, pleasant though it is, I just can't get from 1910's Blue Balcony. I shall endeavour to attend that Tate show and see if further exposure to his work can change my mind.

Pierre Bonnard - Blue Balcony (1910)

Paul Gauguin - The Haystacks (1889)

While Bonnard is still being reassessed, Paul Gauguin's place in the firmament has long been established and it's only recent, and long overdue, reassessment of his sexual peccadilloes (or full on abuse - you choose) that endangers it. As a man, it's very difficult to make a case for him. As a painter, it's a cinch. Works like 1889's The Haystacks show that Gauguin looked back to classical art as much as he looked forward to new developments and in its celebration of the simple, peasant - there's a loaded word, lifestyle we can witness both what made Gauguin great and what made Gauguin a man of great privilege.

As ever with privilege, it is the not knowing one has it that makes the wielding of it so easy, and so egregious. It was a long distance in miles but a very short one in morality from idolised peasant portraiture to jumping on a boat to Tahita and impregnating underage girls. These people were pure, untouched by civilisation, and Gauguin seemed to be unable to see that his arrival would be the very thing that would divest them of that 'purity'. How could it be? He was Gauguin. An artist. A lover of the simple life. It'd be instructive to learn how much interest he took in how the Tahitians actually lived and how much he just wanted to get his end away with exotic, and young, foreign women.

Yet, all these criticisms aside, paintings like Te Rerioa (The Dream) are utterly captivating. They draw you in. The colours are bright but not gaudy, the angles are unorthodox but not self-consciously so, and the whole composition is totally joyous. Gauguin, the swine, makes us implicit in his exploitation and we don't know how we feel about it.

Paul Gauguin - Te Rerioa (The Dream) (1897)

Paul Cezanne - Pot of Primroses and Fruit (about 1888-90)

At least with Cezanne, we are spared such moral quandaries. As van Gogh and Gauguin grabbed the headlines, outraged the art world, and subverted accepted ways of living (in very different ways - as Gauguin was shagging his way round the South Seas, van Gogh was chopping his own ear off), Cezanne quietly, methodically, and with no fanfare whatsoever, set about changing the way the whole world would look at art forever. 

Gauguin showed one possible route, van Gogh another, Seurat another still, but it was Cezanne who found the key to the escape room, who forged ahead on his own, a true pioneer, beating a path that would soon be followed by the likes of Matisse, Picasso, Braque, and Gris. Not that many people saw it like that at the time, of course. Like Manet before him, Cezanne was rejected, time and time again, by the Salon, by the French art establishment.

As other artists looked to paint ever more shocking subject matter, Cezanne stuck to landscapes, fruit, and portraits. He wasn't so much interested in WHAT he was painting but HOW he was painting. He didn't want to show us what things LOOKED like. He wanted to show us what things ARE.

Paul Cezanne - Farm in Normandy, Summer (Hattenville) (about 1882)

Paul Cezanne - Lac d'Annecy (1896)

Over his career, Cezanne's paintings slowly developed into an almost gridlike proto-Cubist style. Lac d'Annecy makes exquisite use of a wonderful range of deep hues and evocative colours, Farm in Normandy is somehow greener than the green of other artists, and even the apples and pears of Pot and Primroses and Fruit, ingeniously, look both exactly like what they are and like something utterly unworldly at the same time. The gentle nature of Cezanne's art should never diminish his status as one of the art world's true titans.

By his fastidious nature and through a combination of hard work and inspiration, Cezanne had opened the door for the next generation (and the next, and the next, ad infinitum) to walk through. But if Manet had not opened the door for him, and then Monet, Pissarro, Seurat et al held it open, then maybe, just maybe, that may never have happened.

Courtauld Impressionists:From Manet to Cezanne did a very good job of cementing my belief that that's how it happened and almost every single painting within it was a joy to behold too. On exiting the gallery I walked out on to Trafalgar Square on a crisp, sunny, January Sunday afternoon. The white spire of St Martin-in-the-Fields stood proud against the clear blue sky. If it hadn't been so cold I could have been in Rome. Art, once again, had made me look at the world, look at MY world, in a different way. It had, briefly, lifted the shawl of depression and anxiety from my shoulders. It had served its purpose. I went for a coffee.

Paul Cezanne - Hillside in Provence (about 1890-2)