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Resurrecting Sisley
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# : |
20668 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1992 |
2,029 Words |
| Author
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Jane Addams Allen
Jane Addams Allen is an award-winning art critic who now
resides in Cornwall, England. |
Alfred Sisley (1839-1899) was an Impressionist's Impressionist. Critics and patrons neglected his work during his lifetime; the English artist died at age sixty impoverished and embittered. After this death, his paintings received only slighting notice from the great historians of the movement such as H.R. Wilenski, John Rewald, and most recently, Robert Herbert.
Yet his fellow Impressionists revered Sisley's work. On the eve of Sisley's death, Camille Pissarro wrote to his son Lucien, "Sisley, I hear, is seriously ill. He is a great and beautiful artist, in my opinion he is a master equal to the greatest." Later when Matisse asked Pissarro who was the typical Impressionist, Pissarro nominated only a single painter--Sisley.
In fact, Sisley may have been neglected precisely because he was more faithful than any other artist to the Impressionist impulse. During the late 1860s and early 1870s, he and his friends Monet and Renoir made the exciting discovery that the visible world was in constant flux through changing light and atmospheric conditions. In order to capture the evanescent effects of light on shifting surfaces, they began painting with small dabs of broken color, arousing the scorn of a public accustomed to the hard lines and carefully defined forms of Academic painting. The label "Impressionists" was originally derisive.
Throughout the 1870s, Sisley and his fellow artists pushed ahead with their explorations of atmospheric light and color. But by the early 1880s, stung by Emile Zola's criticism that the Impressionist movement had produced no masterpieces, Renoir, Monet, and Pissarro consciously began to monumentalize their art. Only Sisley preserved in his pursuit of the evanescent in nature. The French landscape remained his muse. For his fidelity, critics called him a lightweight or damned him with faint praise as a "minor artist."
This unfair critical assessment of Sisley has finally been put to the test by a major retrospective of his work. Organized by London's Royal Academy of Art in collaboration with the Musee d'Orsay, Reunion des Musees Nationaux, Paris, and the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, the show is the first ever to include paintings from all periods of his life. It reveals Sisley as a complex, if uneven, artist who deals with issues that seem fascinatingly relevant to the late twentieth century.
Luminous
...
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