Identifier: criticismmo00chil (find matches)
Title: Art and criticism : monographs and studies
Year: 1892 (1890s)
Authors: Child, Theodore
Subjects: Art criticism
Publisher: Harper
Contributing Library: Whitney Museum of American Art, Frances Mulhall Achilles Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Metropolitan New York Library Council - METRO

View Book Page: Book Viewer
About This Book: Catalog Entry
View All Images: All Images From Book
Click here to view book online to see this illustration in context in a browseable online version of this book.

Text Appearing Before Image:
evealed to us a new vision ofnature and a new principle, which is known as the law of val-ues. Not that the old men like Velasquez, Caravaggio, Rem-brandt, and the Dutch genre painters neglected this law, butthe application of it by Manet was more complete, more pur-posed, and more regardful of the increased sensitiveness of ourmodern eyes. His dominant preoccupation was to see howan object exists in the broad daylight of contemporary reality;he looked at nature simply, made no composition, painted somefamiliar scene, either one or two figures or a swarming crowd,guided only by the idea that light draws as well as colors anobject, and that light puts each thing in its place. Hence theintense color notes of his work, the abbreviation of the draw-ing, the simplification of the figures, the treatment of all ob-jects as masses and not as outlines, the intense and direct im-pression which constitutes in the mind of the artist a picture,composed, drawn, and painted logically and implacably.
Text Appearing After Image:
SOME MODERN FRENCH PAINTERS. 73 Here let us note that the much-abused terms impression and impressionist are quite good and useful. Manet andM. Degas, to mention two leaders, seek to reproduce the purephenomenon, the subjective appearance of things; whereas theart of M. Bouguereau or of Cabanel superadds to the sensationperceived by the eye and the mind the uncertain acquisitionsof experience and education, which have created a wholly im-aginary objective world. The impressionist endeavors to re-cord a visual sensation in all its freshness, without impairingor complicating its simple purity by the addition of hypotheti-cal lines or masses which the eye has not directly observed.The most gifted of the impressionist painters are analysts andsynthetizers, who work in a great measure with the same spiritand methods as the primitive Italian fresco-painters. Manets doctrines about light painting, open air, the respectof values, the observation and rendering of each figure in lightand in its

Note About Images