Original subtitles

I want to open this lecture by looking at this painting by Paul Cirrusier, called The

Celtic Tale.

It's one of my favorites of Cirrusier's, and he makes some very interesting spatial

decisions here.

The painting is divided into two groups—those in the dark, in the bottom half, and those

in the top, basking in the light.

Then he uses the trees and rocks to create stylized little portals between the two worlds.

A single tree trunk separates us from what feels like an alternate universe happening

just over those rocks.

In the dark half, the red robes sing out of the darkness and create a beautiful balance

of warms within the cool grays and purples.

But the subjects and their worlds are not the only elements that are very clearly contained

and compartmentalized.

You'll see that the whole painting is made up of blocks of color, very clearly delineated

by thick outlines and sharp edges.

There's no Impressionist blending here, no messy strokes.

It's a very neat and orderly painting.

This is a classic example of what art historians call cloisonism.

The cloison style was adopted by several post-Impressionists, most famously, perhaps, Paul Gauguin,

Emile Bernard, Louis Anquetin, and Paul Cirrusier.

Cloisonism wasn't a huge movement, nor was it a very long one.

But in the post-Impressionist era, it was an important stepping stone to modern art and

an example of how willing this generation of artists were to reject convention and look

for alternative sources of inspiration.

And it gives me a good excuse to talk about the art of some of the lesser-known post-Impressionists

who made important works in this style.

Cloison means partition or compartment in French, and the term more usually refers to a type

of metalwork, where precious stones, enamels, or other brightly colored materials are inlaid

into metalwork, giving the shapes thick, distinctive borders.

Cloison is an ancient technique that many cultures had been using for hundreds of years,

decorating metal objects with color.

The most common method involves soldering metal wires, or ribbons, to the body of the

piece, creating little compartments, or cloisons, as you go.

Then each compartment would be filled.

For some of the earliest European examples, precious stones were painstakingly cut down to

slot inside the compartments.

Later though, these compartments would be filled with different colors of powdered glass, then

they would be fired, and the enameling process melts the glass so that it perfectly fills

the cloisons.

The result is bold, simplified color fields separated as outlined shapes and objects.

Many cultures have adopted the cloisons style, but perhaps the most accomplished examples

come from China and Japan, where it was perfected into an incredibly colorful art form in precious

dishware.

In the late 19th century, Japanese cloisons was becoming all the rage in Europe.

As new companies in Meiji-era Japan industrialized the enamel process and began marketing it overseas.

At the same time, Japanese prints were flooding the European markets and all the rage amongst

the artistic community.

Japanese prints, like their porcelain, also uses that very distinctive style of large blocks

of color separated out by bold lines.

So the cloisons took what they were seeing and took a simplified approach to their art.

Moving the focus of shallow, surface-level details to reveal deeper meanings from our inner

lives and emotional perspective.

Cloisonism hardly seems revolutionary today—modern animation and cartoons are all about black

outlines and filled-in shapes of color—cementing this style into the global consciousness.

But in 19th century France, this approach was in stark contrast to the hyper-blended and three-dimensional

space of academic paintings.

This is a common story in the colonial era, where Europeans learn about what other cultures

have been doing for centuries, then adopting it as their own and claiming that they discovered

it.

Sound familiar?

Of course, things change through the process of translation, and European artists will interpret

and use the cloison style in ways that reflected their own knowledge, culture, and sensibilities.

One big change, for example, is the medium these artists were working in.

No matter what you do, oil paint on canvas is going to look very different than a woodblock

print on paper, or in an enamel cloison.

So pretty quickly, its adaptation into oil painting makes it almost unrecognizable from

the source of inspiration.

Given they both took inspiration from Japan, there's a fair amount of crossover between the

Nabi and cloisonism.

Even though we're looking at his work here, you might remember Paul Ciroussier was one

of the founding figures in the Nabi group.

Styles and ideas were moving quickly, and of course, many artists dabbled in multiple movements.

Remember the post-impressionists all knew each other, and many of them lived and worked

within a few city blocks of each other.

A bit like high school, cliques definitely formed around certain styles or ideas, and they

had their own favorite cafes in Montmartre where they hung out.

But they all gossiped about each other, checked out what the others were doing, and quite a

few artists crossed between groups, or sometimes were part of several circles at the same time.

That's very much the story of Louis Anqueton, Emile Bernard, and Paul Ciroussier, who are

our three main cloisonists.

But they definitely associated with other groups as well at different stages.

Now, I'm not generally one to believe in curses, but there's something strange going on

with these three.

All three made waves and a name for themselves very early in their careers.

After just a decade, each had abandoned the type of painting they became famous for, and

they practically vanished.

Or at least their reputations do.

But in this lecture, I want to give them a little recognition, because they were talented and

important post-impressionists who were pushing the envelope in art.

Emile Bernard began his career red-hot.

He was just a teenager when he started working with the other artists, developing cloisonism,

synthetism, and symbolism.

He made his best and most famous work in the first seven or eight years of his career.

And after that, he sort of faded from the spotlight.

He couldn't stay still.

He was easily bored, and his style became more eclectic.

It meant his work wasn't able to be clearly defined, which history books do not like.

But he continued influencing the next generation of artists through his early work and as a

teacher at École des Beaux-Arts.

When he was just 18, he met Paul Gauguin at the artist colony of Pont-Avennes in Brittany,

and there they would paint together, learning from one another.

Gauguin was 38 when he met the 18-year-old Bernard, but was instantly impressed with the

young artist's innovative ideas.

Bernard was a big influence on Gauguin's eventual style, but Bernard would remain salty about the

fact that Gauguin will never acknowledge this in later years.

The next year, he starts at the Académie-Juliennes, where he meets Van Gogh, Bonnard, Vuillard,

and others.

With Gauguin, the three had their own little painting club for a bit, where they would paint

each other's portraits and send them to each other.

They would often include portraits of the other hanging on the wall within the painting.

Bernard also became very close to another young artist named Louis Anquetin.

The two had very different approaches and styles.

It's surprising they were able to agree as much as they did.

Anquetin tended to play it safe and preferred making beautiful and refined paintings.

Bernard was much more abstract and interested in pushing boundaries in all different kinds

of ways.

He wasn't afraid to make highly simplified, very rough, and naive-looking paintings.

Paintings like Breton Women with Seaweed.

This is quite bold and shows plenty of Gauguin's influence, but it's more abstract than even

what Gauguin would do.

He's reduced this group of four women who are by the ocean, maybe?

It's hard to tell, and the landscape is quite stark.

The biggest question is, what is this enormous red thing?

Is that the seaweed?

Is it a giant mitten?

Is it the sun?

From the title, I would guess it's the seaweed, but I've never seen seaweed resemble anything

like this in my life.

It's a bold move.

Each section is clearly defined and occupies its own color.

But painting a flat color in each section may have been a bridge too far for Bernard.

He's compelled to break it up and give it a bit more variety, adding some contrasting

green in the red, some blues and purples in the white hats.

The way the purple catches on the sides makes it look like they are getting some reflected

light from the seaweed.

Let's make a quick comparison to a similarly themed painting in the same period.

This painting by academic painter Pascal Danyan Bouvere, we can clearly see how far Bernard

is pushing the envelope compared to the Academy.

Emile Bernard had a wide variety of interests, and there was no style of painting he didn't

try.

He was much like Van Gogh in that way.

It makes sense why they got along.

They both had a huge appetite for novelty and variety and sampling all the new techniques

and mediums.

But unlike Van Gogh, there isn't a lot of cohesion behind all of Bernard's experiments.

And Bernard's own hand seems to get lost sometimes.

He wasn't necessarily copying directly from other artists.

He was still giving it his own unique spin, but his new works were often so different than

his previous series that people couldn't tell if it was the same artist.

This painting, called Night Festival, is a great example.

We see him playing with some divisionism here, breaking up his strokes into small dots, especially

throughout the reflection of the water and the fireworks exploding overhead.

Some similarities to Van Gogh here, but then these figures along the bottom don't look

anything like Vincent's figures.

They're much too rounded and simplified.

Yet here we have a cloison-style work where nearly all the choices he makes are different,

even when compared with the other cloison painting we saw from this year, with quite a different

approach to color, mood, and light.

Bernard worked in different mediums as well.

Printmaking and stained glass, for instance, gave Bernard the opportunity to experiment and

push his imagery in new and different ways.

Much of his work in this area also lends itself to cloison.

Stained glass, with its pieces of colored glass surrounded by strong borders, is really

just cloison art done another way.

The strong emphasis on the hats here is quite curious.

And maybe that's Bernard's secret signature in a lot of his work.

The white headdresses we see here are the traditional fancy dress wear of the Breton people, which

he would have observed during his stays in Pont-au-Ven.

The headdresses would be worn with an equally bright white collar, worn over a long black dress.

These were Bernard's favorite people to paint, and maybe they play a role, too, in inspiring

the cloison style.

The flowing ribbons and crisp white fabrics.

The never-ending abstract and negative shapes created by the hats and dresses these would have

made for a striking scene as they were gathered outside, starkly separated from the green and

blue colors of the natural world.

Even when he's not reducing people into oval lumps of a single color, he still has a way

of altering figures in surprising and sometimes humorous ways.

This is not a majestic or suffering or elevated Christ.

This is a short, stocky, and oddly proportioned fellow, flatly cut out of the landscape and filled

with yellow.

Abandoning perspective completely and stacking the composition with a hierarchy almost makes

this painting look like it could have been done many centuries ago.

But there are many tell-tale signs of post-impressionism and cloisonism that clearly identify as more modern.

This is a fascinating print called Women with Pigs.

The woman in red is bent in half in a bizarre way, almost as to assume the position of the

pigs, waiting for their feed from the woman in blue.

This woman seems to have a paint smear for a face.

On close inspection, you can make out the faintly drawn features, but the overall effect is not

flattering by any means.

Bernard says he was inspired by the Bretton people.

But you can't help but think he's making fun of them here.

I can't imagine the women in this print would be too pleased with their depiction.

Perhaps it was these two women in particular he didn't like?

Who knows?

But I would probably think twice about crossing Bernard.

He could turn you into anything.

On the other hand, he often treated these folks with a sort of reverence belied by his

careful and delicate paint application.

This is the innkeeper of the place he stayed while visiting Brittany.

There seems to be a huge shift in the sense of dignity he is imbuing his subject within

this painting compared to the previous.

Even though it looks different again to some of his other works, the flattened forms, blocks

of color, and clear outlines make this an excellent example of cloisonism.

I particularly like the background, the subtle, semi-transparent layering of contrasting colors.

There are pinks under the blues and oranges under the purples, creating a light but rich color

space.

All the background colors get concentrated and saturated into the bouquet of flowers on the

table.

Bernard almost seems to be implying the flowers as the subject of devotion.

Let's jump now to Paul Seroussier.

He, you might recall, had also worked with Gauguin in Pont-à-Ven, and had produced this painting,

The Talisman, which had gotten all his friends back in Paris excited and became the icon of

the Les Nabis group.

But this one artist could not be contained by a single movement.

Bernard and Anquetin were also enamored, or should I say enameled.

And even though they wouldn't become part of the Les Nabis Boys Club, they still loved the

cloison aesthetic and Japanese influences.

Art historians like to make neat little boxes and timelines to make sense of how art evolved.

But the reality is the artist didn't think like this.

A work like The Talisman could inspire several people in different directions at the same time.

The Yellow Farm at Pouledou painting is a striking example of a work that has a cloison feel but

a lot of different influences.

It's dominated by bold sections of yellow, and this is a difficult color to work with,

especially if you're using it for most of the painting.

You have a limited tonal range with yellow.

You can only get so dark with it before it becomes another color.

It either starts turning green, or brown, or orange, and no longer reads as yellow.

Seroussier gives us a complicated composition of interlocking yellow forms, each area slightly

different, pushing that center roof back in space and leaving the brightest yellow up front

and closer to the viewers.

There's more use of light and shadow, and less use of the outline than the more typical

cloisonous paintings.

I think this one hovers between Impressionism as well.

The scene is vignetted by some darker purples and greens, creating dynamic negative shapes

with an interplay with the yellow and the figure-ground relationship.

But now, check out this painting, in which we see a very different stylistic approach.

Looking beyond the differences, there are quite a few similarities, too.

The wide swath of a single color punctuated by a few flat and dark shapes.

We see Seroussier is committing much more to flatness and reduced tonality in the colors

when compared to the yellow farm.

This painting of the forest is graphically painted with black outlines in such a way that

it looks quite modern, as if it could appear in a comic book or the background of a Disney

film.

Cloisonous paintings like this will be a natural source of inspiration for the cartoonists and

animators who would start to emerge in the coming decades.

This is another painting with a very limited palette, almost exclusively orange at the bottom

and purple at the top.

Look at the clever way he has arranged the trees to gradually fill the canvas at the top.

The most curious part, though, is the huddled groups of women.

The first two groups are pretty clear to see, but there are more going back, all the way

to the distant top-right corner, where they just become vague shapes.

Notice the headdresses are not white.

They are painted a drab yellow to blend in and be less noticeable.

He's treating these groups of women as compositional elements, using perspective with the trees to

lead the eye back and up into the distance.

The Candy Merchant is a lesser-known Serousier painting, but one that I couldn't leave out.

This is not quite the candy seller from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

This is a very sad and grim-looking scene.

It looks dark, and she seems lonely and depressed.

Even the candy looks depressing.

I do love the way he's painted that stonework in the back, emphasizing the flat, interlocking

shapes of the woman's body and face as well.

We'll finish Paul Serousier with this portrait of Emile Bernard.

The primary colors of red, yellow, and blue command a strong presence from the background,

especially compared with the muted grays and browns used for the main subject.

Bernard comes across contemplative and regal, despite his humble dress.

Finally, let's look at Louis Anquetin, the third of the young artists who is strongly associated

with cloisonism.

He was born in the small town of Etropagny, but when he was 21, he moved to Paris and

soon fell in with Toulouse-Lautrec, Cormannes, and Bernard.

Anquetin was one of the most exciting and innovative of the Post-Impressionists, but he's someone we

rarely hear about because he did something none of these other painters did—he quit.

Well, he didn't quit painting, but he got fed up with Post-Impressionism and the innovative

new styles and went back to study and paint more academically in his later career.

Let's take a look at his early work.

He's an extremely talented painter, as you can see in the subtle detail and nuance of

this streetscape.

We see evidence of concentrated focus in terms of blending light and shadow and detail work.

With this more focused and realistic attention to certain aspects, he combines flat painting

with black outlines, the hallmark of cloisonism.

If this painting looks oddly familiar to you, it might be because it inspired Van Gogh's own

night café paintings.

We see a strong simplification in color from the blue that dominates three-fourths of the painting.

The sky is very flat, broken up by the tree limbs, interlocking like a puzzle.

Various shades of blue cover the sky—trees, buildings, and people on the street.

The people are also simplified.

We see very few eyes or mouths or noses or fingers—just more basic shapes.

If you didn't notice, there are leaves on the trees.

They're quite subtle, but it's satisfying when you do see them.

The same with the windows on the buildings—just a slightly darker shade of blue.

On the left, we have a much smaller area, but glowing with a contrasting color of a deep

orange that hits the crowd with a greenish-yellow becoming bluer as the light dissipates out into

the night.

Except this one moment, which I love.

On the woman on the bottom right that's closest to us, you see her cheek catches a bit

of that orange light.

By bringing this person up close, it also helps bring us into the scene.

This creates an elegant and dynamic composition.

His use of perspective is very accurate, the detail he gives to the lamp, and then the rest

of the awning as it recedes convincingly back into space.

This painting is an excellent example of the combination of his more academically inclined

work and his experimentation with modern styles.

Look at the column behind her, very meticulously painted, in low relief with photorealistic shadows.

Then we look at this elegant woman, and she has some shadows in her jacket, but otherwise

she has a very flat, very graphic look.

See the way he outlines the jacket and the top of her dress.

Some very slight tonal variations in the face, but otherwise it's a flat peach color.

There are a few other points of interest.

For instance, look at the women in the background.

This one on the right is extremely stylized, with a pointy nose and impossibly tiny hands.

The women further back also displaying some abstraction.

And finally, I love the chaos at the top.

All the lights that recede back into space, the arrangement of flowers on her hat.

It's like all the energy and activity is bubbling up to the top, like a glass of champagne,

perhaps.

A curious and intriguing integration of painting styles that sits somewhere between realism

and cloisonism.

In Woman at her Toilette, we see Anquetin really leaning into more traditional style.

Of course, this is a striking portrait of a beautiful woman, and her face and hair usually

steal the show.

But take a look at her skirt.

Beautifully silky smooth and blended, the way one might expect to see the delicately painted

robes in a Jacques-Louis David painting.

Surrounding her, we see a complicated blend of geometric shapes, each one with a delicate

and complicated pattern.

I think his work is the most exciting when he combines a very soft and blended part, like

the skirt, which commands a presence in its three-dimensional swirling pool of blue.

Combine that with the flatter, hard edges of cloisons.

This gorgeous pastel on paper piece may be my most favorite Anquetin work.

An unearthly glow seems to emanate from inside of her, face radiating also reflecting the blue

light of the paper she's reading, which reminds me a lot of someone looking at an iPhone or

an iPad.

Now, I'm not saying Louis Anquetin was a time traveler, but no one has proven that he wasn't

either.

Each section of the painting gets its own treatment.

Large, broad strokes for the monotone green background, but with varying thicknesses so

some of the paper shows through.

A psychedelic swirl of color and line in the fabric on her elaborate hat, complete with

semi-transparent pom-poms.

Her shirt and jacket have a beautiful yin-yang quality, reflecting the opposite tones in each

other and the line work.

A loose and gestural line quickly hints at the complicated ruffles of her blouse, and the multiple

searching lines of the jacket are slightly lighter.

One, so that we could see them against the deep dark brown, and two, because they catch

the light as well and create a slight bit of dimension.

Her features are simplified and slightly exaggerated into more geometric shapes.

And that, combined with the shape of her hair on her forehead, creates an exciting intersection

of planes emerging from the dark earth tones of the coat and background.

An unfinished look reveals the underpainting of orangey umber, using a very traditional palette

of muted tones there.

Louis was doing really interesting work, but it didn't satisfy him.

He wanted to paint like the old masters, not like a revolutionary.

A lot of artists of this period were switching from oils to pastels to increase the brightness

and saturation of their colors.

Louis loved oil paint and its tradition.

He was frustrated that his colleagues didn't know how to use it properly.

They just slapped it on with reckless abandon.

Some even squirted it straight out of the tube.

Louis wasn't having any of that.

So he went back to school and subsequently fell off the map.

Most of his friends thought that was weird, and they basically stopped hanging out with him.

Only Toulouse-Lautrec stayed in touch.

I'm guessing there was more to it than just painting style.

Perhaps Louis was also embracing a more traditional and establishment worldview

that would have alienated him from former colleagues.

So, by the mid-1890s, cloisonism was pretty much over,

and everyone had moved on or was going in different directions.

It's really only Gauguin who maintains the classic cloison look.

But despite its short stin as a group, cloisonism influence is undeniable,

not only for all the beautiful ways they used it, but also because it's simpler and cleaner.

It's much easier to paint flat with outlines than to create a traditionally rendered form.

Who knows how many up-and-coming artists thought, hey, I could do that.

And certainly this was the way of the future.

Comic books and even animation are just over the horizon.

And with a dozen panels per page or frames per second,

obviously you had to find a much faster way to create images than painting them traditionally.

In that sense, maybe the cloisonists were the most avant-garde of them all.

you've probably read the text book.

If you've ever seen the next 24-hour model here,

you're going to find a similar model for the past month.