40 #228 April 2010 www.artmonthly.org.au Art Monthly Australia DIANA KOSTYRKO Post-impressionism as a blanket term for the artworks in this exhibition from Paris, which will travel on to Tokyo and San Francisco, was not strictly correct. It is implausible that Madame Valtesse de La Bigne (1879), a saccharine full-length portrait by Henri Gervex, could be included under the rubric of Post–impressionism. Or even Impressionism. And somehow the American portraitist, John Singer Sargent, crept in with La Carmencita (1890). If these were included to demonstrate the difference between academic painters and the late 19 th century avant– garde, it was tokenistic rather than salutary. Post– impressionism in this case not only encompassed rogues such as Madame Valtesse de La Bigne, and Albert Besnard’s Madame Roger Jourdain of 1886 (another academic horror), but underplayed the variety of styles or movements actually represented: late-Impressionism, neo-Impressionism, Cubism, Symbolism, the Nabis, proto–Surrealism (Félix Vallotton’s The Red Ball, 1899), proto–Fauvism, Pointillism, Divisionism, Cloisonnism, the School of Pont–Aven, the Decoratives, and the Decadents (Gustave Moreau’s jewel-like Orpheus, 1865). The term Post-impressionism was rather awkwardly coined in 1910 by Roger Fry, the British art critic and one- time curator of the Metropolitan’s European paintings. By that time Impressionism had been co–opted by artists around the world and after early resistance embraced by Russian and American (but not British) collectors. French artists were encouraged to reinvent Impressionism more radically by the theorists of 20 th century modernism such as Fry and his associate Clive Bell. The preix ‘post’ simultaneously superannuated France’s last national style and directly connected Impressionism with almost any European art production that followed. The upper level of the Musée d’Orsay (it was not entirely made clear that some of the paintings in the NGA exhibition came from venues other than the Orsay) is undergoing structural renovation. This has been the impetus for artworks routinely expected to be on display in France to travel out of the country, such as Van Gogh’s Starry Night over the Rhône (1888) (less familiar to us than the New York Museum of Modern Art’s The Starry Night of 1889). Vincent van Gogh was well represented in the exhibition, having an entire wall to himself, as was Georges Seurat with eleven works, of which his incomplete sketch for The Circus of 1891, formerly in Jacques Doucet’s iconic Paris collection, was instructive: his technique we discover was to begin with deft outlines in blue, followed by gradual blocking in with dabs of blue, then oranges, yellows, a little green and a little pink on white canvas. In the large inished article – which the Orsay did not send on tour – the blue outlines were allowed to remain. Monet’s tranquil In the The other Starry Night: Post–impressionists from the Orsay Norwegian (c. 1887) was a masterful study in vibrant colour and tight composition, but how to explain the presence of an insigniicant Degas, Dancers Climbing the Stairs (1886–90), which was hung unsympathetically in the same room as the monumental portraits already mentioned? The small, weird Bonnard, The White Cat (1894), could reasonably have been left out (cat lovers were catered for by other paintings with cats in them), while Seurat’s Landscape with ‘The Poor Fisherman’ by Puvis de Chavannes (c. 1881) was completely lost – and lost on gallery visitors – although its curiosity factor fared better in the exhibition’s catalogue; that is, that the subject of Seurat’s hasty sketch was actually in the same exhibition. Most of the rest were strong: in colour, composition and, in some cases, artistic daring. Only one was indicative of modern industrial urban life: Camille Pissarro’s Pont Boïldieu, Rouen, Sunset, Misty Weather (1896) from the Musée des Beaux–arts, Rouen (on long–term loan from the Orsay), in which horse–drawn carriages share the pictorial space with large steamships and factories billowing smoke. Stylistically most of the paintings in the Post–impressionist exhibition, as one might expect, were deined by stippled or adjacent planes of complementary colours, heavy outlines, and unusual or lattened perspective: Gauguin’s Seascape with Cow (1888) exempliied this. Not all were good, although Seascape manifestly is, but some were great. Paul Sérusier’s The Talisman is great, although not easily accessible. Seemingly a purely abstract painting at irst glance, it is in fact an audacious plein–air landscape composed of areas of