Intimism (painting)
Intimism is a short-lived yet significant avant-garde painting movement that emerged in late nineteenth-century France. This movement arose from a desire among a group of artists to challenge traditional art norms by blending elements of expressionism, realism, and impressionism. Intimist paintings are characterized by their emotional depth, vibrant colors, and heavy brushstrokes, focusing on quiet, everyday domestic scenes. Notable artists associated with Intimism include Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, and Maurice Denis, who often depicted modest moments such as a woman sewing or a child playing with a cat.
The term "Intimism," derived from the French word for "innermost," was coined by novelist André Gide to describe the intimate connection these artworks fostered with viewers. These paintings invite a voyeuristic gaze, transforming ordinary activities into emotionally resonant experiences. While the movement was relatively brief, lasting about a decade, its influence is seen in later artistic developments, particularly in how everyday life can be rendered with profound emotionality. Intimism stands out for its gentle reanimation of familiar scenes, creating a unique aesthetic that celebrates the beauty of the mundane.
Intimism (painting)
Intimism refers to a short-lived but highly influential avant-garde movement in late nineteenth century European art, largely centered in France. The movement, spearheaded by a small cluster of painters determined to upend conservative notions about art itself, consciously fused the emotional energy of expressionism, the subject matter of realism, and the formal experiments of impressionism to create a kind of hybrid art, a narrow genre of intensely emotional canvases that recreated quiet, ordinary domestic scenes but in colliding colors applied with heavy brushstrokes. These intimist paintings gave such everyday settings a most unexpected intensity and evocative subtleties. The name for the school, derived from the French word meaning "innermost," was first coined nearly a half-century after the movement’s peak, by French novelist Andre Gide who thought the paintings, unlike other, bolder works of the era, spoke in a quiet intimacy with viewers.
Brief History
Much like European novelists in the mid-nineteenth century, painters discovered the rich possibilities of capturing and recording the world around them. After nearly three centuries in which visual arts explored grand mythic subjects or heightened allegorical figures or great moments in the histories of kings and generals, realism redirected artists to the immediate and the everyday. As realism flourished, so also did the commitment to verisimilitude. Amid the tumultuous aesthetic revolutions that reshaped art in Europe during the latter half of the nineteenth century, few artists spoke as boldly and as uncompromisingly to younger painters than Paul Cézanne, whose radical canvasses redefined the very premise of realism in painting. Cézanne theorized that art did not need to hide behind its own artifact, that paintings should be viewed (and admired) as created things, as paint applied to a flat surface. Coming at the height of realism and the presumed goal of painters to recreate subjects realistically with careful attention to mathematical perspective, synchronized play of shadow and light to enhance the feeling of depth, and tight and clean lines to mimic observation itself that would render the canvas itself more like a window, Cézanne dared his generation to bring to realism the emotional investment of expressionism and the formal freedoms of impressionism. Let a painting be what it is: a flat surface with planes of colors applied through the medium of the careful eye and hand of the artist.
That willingness to upend assumptions about art engaged a small but passionate group of painters living in Paris. Trained in some of the most prestigious art academies in France, they were, nevertheless, restless and all too eager to explore new possibilities in art. Most prominently among them were Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), Maurice Denis (1870–1943), and Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940). For a time in the 1890s they were loosely confederated and called themselves Les Nabis, drawn from a Hebrew word meaning "prophets," because they saw themselves consciously creating a new kind of art. Although the movement would last barely a decade before artistic disagreements (coupled with uncompromising passion) would end the association, its principal expression came in the scenes of middle-class domestic life—a woman sewing, a middle-aged man reading by lamplight with a small dog asleep at his feet, a matron sweeping a kitchen floor, a young woman absently peeling fruit—that quietly, subtly reanimated such ordinary moments.
Overview
In their extensive manifestos, Les Nabis posed questions about the role of art. Can art endow ordinary life with animation and spirit? Can the artist turn to the most banal and everyday objects and people and recreate them into emotional moments of shattering immediacy and suggestive layering? To view the canvasses of the intimists is to see finally and absolutely pictures from real life that are all too easy to overlook. In Édouard Vuillard’sConversation, for instance, the reader simply watches four women standing about an ordinary vase of flowers; his The Small Drawing Room offers an aerial view of a woman threading a needle; in Pierre Bonnard’sChild with Cats, a young girl with ribbons in her hair strokes the belly of a white cat while a gray one stands behind her; in Maurice Denis’The Baby’s Bath, a woman gently sponges the tiny head of her baby while the child plays absently with its toes. The subject matter are forgettable moments, modest and quiet, and the viewer is positioned much like a voyeur gifted with the opportunity to observe such ordinary moments.
But what renders such ordinary moments extraordinary, of course, is the painting itself. The viewer can never pretend these are realistic moments—these are realistic moments rendered through the visual perceptions of an artist. The viewer is looking at paint applied to a flat surface. There is no attempt to create perspective or visual realism. Inspired by Japanese pen drawings, Les Nabis redefined depth by skewing the clean spatial relationships between objects and between people and objects. There is a kind of lens-just-out-of-focus feel to intimist paintings. There is no doubt the viewer is looking at a canvas, a made thing. Figures blur into color shapes; familiar geometric shapes (of plates, vases, chairs, tables, curtains) swirl and are skewed and bent and endowed with heavy outlines that tilt playfully. Faces, despite lacking careful detailing, emerge as emotional moments through the very lack of particularizing. The rooms themselves are charged with a vaguely supernal light. The scenes are emotionally engaging and inviting exactly because they do not aspire to the dull integrity of a photograph. Rather swirls and blobs of color, along with planes of pure color, create just sufficient verisimilitude to capture the setting but endow it with unsuspected, if quiet and underplayed, urgency.
The radical theory of the artist rendering the familiar and the domestic with urgency and emotion through the very medium of the presentation itself would emerge in the mid-twentieth century film revolution known as neorealism and in the existential faux-realism of postwar postmodernism. However despite an obvious debt to the intimists, neither movement retained the intimists’ profound and subtle gentleness, their loving reanimation of the familiar.
Bibliography
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