Masters of modern art from the Hermitage

Impressionism grew out of naturalistic landscape painting and the realist tradition of rural and urban figure subjects. The vital twist given to this practice by the artists who became known as the impressionists was to paint ambitious compositions in the open air, in direct contact with their subject, be it the beauty of nature or modern city life.

Painters such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley wanted to capture the changeable qualities of nature, looking at every nuance of colour and flicker of light as the wind shivered a field of poppies or bent the branches of trees. They worked rapidly before the fleeting effects of light and weather without attempting to conceal the broken brushstrokes and sketch-like execution of their paintings.

Paul Cézanne was influenced by impressionism but he transmuted it into a mode of vision and technique that profoundly influenced the development of modern art. His statement, ‘I wanted to make of impressionism something solid and enduring, like the art in museums’, underlines Cézanne’s intention to capture not the sense of fleeting evanescence but the order, structure and permanence of the object shown. In pursuit of this aim, Cézanne sacrificed conventional accuracy, even breaking up and reorganising the elements of nature in his work.

Symbolism was launched in the late 19th century as a literary movement but it had a broad influence on the pictorial arts. It brought together a diverse group of artists who rejected the conventions of naturalism and impressionism. Instead of treating art as a mirror of nature, the symbolists stressed emotions and ideas, and many turned to the inner worlds of dream, fantasy and the subconscious.

The Nabis (Hebrew for prophets) were one of the key symbolist groups to emerge in Paris in the late 1880s and 1890s, whose members included Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Félix Vallotton and Maurice Denis, among others. They regarded themselves as the messengers of a new form of art based on their interpretation of Paul Gauguin’s ideas. The Nabis favoured non-naturalistic colour, stylisation in drawing and design, and emphasis on the picture plane. Denis’ remark in 1890 that before a picture is of anything it is simply ‘a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order’, became one of the foundational ideas of modernism.

Denis belonged to a religiously inclined sub-group of the Nabis, whereas Bonnard and Vuillard shared a worldlier outlook that revelled in modernity. They used the abstract qualities of paint to express the intimate psychic relationships between people and their familial surroundings.

‘For me Matisse is above all the rest, better than them all, closest to my heart … His work is a festival of exultant colours,’ remarked the collector Sergey Shchukin, whose enthusiasm for Henri Matisse was deeper and more powerful than his feelings for any of the other artists whose works he owned.

In 1905, at the annual exhibition of the Salon d’Automne in Paris, Matisse came before the public as the leader of a new group of painters, including André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Albert Marquet, Kees van Dongen and Henri Manguin.

Their strong, discordant colours and energetic, freely handled brushwork created a sensation, leading one critic to describe the painters as wild animals – fauves. The name stuck, and though the fauves exhibited together only for a few years, they introduced a new concept of colour as an independent and expressive element of their painting rather than an incidental feature subordinate to drawing.

Pablo Picasso’s style developed with electrifying inventiveness in the first decade of the 20th century. He moved from the symbolist-inspired reveries of his blue and rose periods to the radical innovations of cubism, which he created with the painter Georges Braque in Paris in 1908.

The two artists overturned the conventions of illusionist representation, such as perspective, to create startlingly original images. They carved out a new visual language in which subjects were treated geometrically. Shapes were dissected and became multifaceted so that several points of view could be seen within a single image.

Cubism drew on a variety of influences including Cézanne’s paintings and the stylisation of African wood carvings. It consisted of a preliminary phase (1907–09), a second so-called ‘analytical’ phase (1910–12) based on a greater decomposition of shapes, and a third ‘synthetic’ phase (1912–14) characterised by simpler shapes and the use of collage.

The dominant characteristic of modern art is its innovative style. While many artists completely discarded accepted traditions in painting, others sought to assimilate new trends with the art of the past, continuing to work within the conventional genres of portraiture, figure study, landscape and still life.

In the years after 1910, Derain reacted against the impulsive, temperamental fauvism of his early years and reduced the role of colour in his work. He also sought to emulate the classical values of order, harmony and detachment seen in early Renaissance art. Similarly, Matisse affirmed the relevance of tradition when, in 1908, he established a private school that emphasised technical skills and drawing from the antique and the life model.

While artists such as Félix Vallotton and Henri Rousseau maintained distinctly independent voices, many painters were deeply marked by the innovations of Cézanne’s paintings with their fragmented planes and his way of structuring pictorial space stroke by stroke. Cézanne’s posthumous retrospective exhibition at the Salon d’Automne in 1907 established his artistic legacy and had an immediate impact on a new generation of painters including Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, Friesz and Le Fauconnier.

The parameters of modern art were vastly expanded during the years after 1910 as painters began to experiment with the idea of pure abstraction. Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich were among the key figures to initiate the liberation of art from the representation of the visible world.

Although their approach to ‘non-objective’ art differed, Kandinsky and Malevich shared the belief that representational details in painting hindered the spectator’s emotional response to colour, shape, line and composition.

Kandinsky conceived of painting as an alternative pathway to spiritual reality. Malevich’s vision of art, although undoubtedly mystical, was related to a utopian futurist view of a technological world.

Having absorbed the impulses emanating from Western Europe during visits to Shchukin’s collection in Moscow, Malevich launched his suprematist movement in 1915. He defined it as ‘the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art … To the suprematist, the appropriate means of representation is always the one which gives fullest possible expression to feeling as such and which ignores the familiar appearance of objects. Objectivity, in itself, is meaningless.’