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Jose Marti as Art Critic
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11472 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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10 / 1986 |
3,345 Words |
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Jose Gomez-Sicre
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A little-known but significant fact in the history of art criticism is the contribution of Jose Julian Marti y Perez (Jose Marti), the Cuban patriot and writer involved in the 1868 and 1895 revolutionary uprisings against Spain. Of particular importance was Marti's early writings on the beginnings of Impressionism, which helped shape the development of later criticism on the subject, definitions which still have impact today.
Impressionism made no abrupt break with the immediate past, no attempt to get away from contemporary reality, but it represented a revolutionary cultural concept which could only gradually win acceptance from those who always react unfavorably to any sort of change in the direction of art. It was the technical aspect of the movement that gave cause for surprise. The subject matter remained more or less the same. Realism lightly coated with Romanticism had long prevailed; the few modifications that had been introduced over the course of the years had been matters of detail which touched on nothing of fundamental importance. The novelty of Impressionism lay in its concern with the effects of light and its effort to impart to painting an unaccustomed luminosity.
As was to be expected, the movement had its beginnings in France. That country was then one of the most advanced in Europe. The arts flourished on its soil and new paths were constantly being opened up in science, as for example in the branch of physics known as optics. In the spirit of freedom, which had prevailed since the French Revolution, artists showed themselves eager to explore the possibilities opened up by their scientific brethren. They were particularly fascinated with the phenomenon of iridescence, with atmospheric effects, their representation in space, and their reflection on objects. The artists' experiments were stimulated by the invention of the camera, which permitted them to capture nature in a variety of changing aspects. From photographs they became aware of an element which had been all but forgotten in painting for over two centuries: the air which surrounds all objects of depiction. Its influence had first been perceived by Venetian painters of the sixteenth century, and it had become particularly apparent in the Spanish school of the seventeenth century, especially in the work of that master of masters Diego Velazquez, whose legacy was still to be seen a hundred years later in compositions of Goya. The seventeenth-century Spaniards were not alone in their reception: in The Netherlands, Rembrandt and Frans Hals also strove to capture the atmosphere surrounding their subjects. In succeeding generations, however, interest in this aspect declined, not to be reawakened until the age of the Third French Republic, when it took the art world with the surprise of novelty.
The members of the first generation of Impressionists made their appearance on the scene one by one, for the most part in the years just before 1874, the date on which for the first time they decided to present themselves as a group. They did so taking advantage of an offer of a locale by the well-known photographer Nadal, a gesture symbolic of the link between painting and the new mechanical technique of capturing scenes on sensitized plates. A number of the Impressionists - Degas in particular - were greatly aided in their studies of motion by the camera's ability to stop it in all stages of development.
In the first years following this first exhibition, the Impressionists organized a series of salons at which artists taking an orthodox
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