It creates new expressive meanings for banked space. The further abstraction of space in Toulouse-Lautrec’s and Chéret’s prints lends itself well to both the flattened, graphic nature of their advertisements, and also to color printmaking in its layered approach. The contemporary nature of the gray and yellow rooms was remarkable - the pieces in these rooms were all created from 1891 to 1901. Toulouse-Lautrec’s depiction of the unwanted suitor of “The Englishman at the Moulin Rouge” (1892), in all his abstraction and planar grayness sent a jolt of electricity through me, and Chéret’s goblins and suitors allow for the jubilance of his girls to radiate through the sunshine-colored room. With the sacrifice of subtlety and the substitution of innuendo, the expression of the interior lives of Parisians manifests in the shadowy figures of flirtatious jesters. Hue & Cry hits its stride with Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s and Jules Chéret’s bold array of color lithographs, which depict the exciting modern Parisian life of music house shows and flirtations on the street. Instead, I was met with a bright yellow triangle of what appeared to be posters - the kind of loud print you might see hanging in a homey Italian restaurant with history. For example, Camille Pissarro’s print “The Plow” (1901), a frontispiece for an anarchist journal, portrays the interior life of a farmer, something distinct from the high romantic drama of the first few prints.Įxcited by the polarity of perspectives displayed so far, I was ushered into the next room with the expectation of meeting a progression of the skillfully employed sky tones of Mary Cassatt and Camille Pissarro. Rather than appearing airless from the employment of blank space and simplified palettes, this restraint allows controlled punches of color to invigorate subjects. The century’s jump from the carefully outlined and realistic Neoclassical tradition to a new Impressionist influence hints at the arresting potential for artistic expression through restraint. Walking past a wall partition introduces the second room, this time painted light gray, which features softer and more intimate scenes between mothers and children as well as farmers and their nobly framed livelihoods. In the wake of the Revolution and the introduction of newfound aesthetic inspirations from Japan, artistic prerogative began to animate color printing nearly a century later. The many uncredited hand colorists and artists that produced these pieces with a self-awareness of their cloyingly sweet sentiment and vanity. One print, “Dance Mania” (1809), depicts a party attended by aristocrats, who have been contorted into ostentatious poses and wide grins, a facetiousness which contrasts the atmosphere of the French Revolution just ten years before.
WHO USED THE HUE AND CRY METHOD SERIES
I entered the first room, which was painted floor to ceiling in a pastel pink and contained a series of expensive prints commissioned by an upper class that displayed them as curiosities. Instead, Hue & Cry opens with the early fine-tuning of precise color imaging in the era leading up to the French Revolution. Unlike the Clark’s most recent print-making exhibition, Competing Currents, which featured Japanese ukiyo-e aesthetics and techniques, Hue & Cry presented the newfound global commerciality of prints.
The Clark Art Institute’s new exhibition titled, Hue & Cry, inspires an appreciation of French color prints through a confectionery of bright pastels and prints. (Photo courtesy of Clark Art Institute/Thomas Clark.) FebruThe Clark Art Institute’s newest exhibition features French prints.
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