5 Impressionist and Post Impressionist Greats to Celebrate 5 Years of Who ARTed
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Welcome to Who Arted? Weekly Art History for All Ages. I'm your host, Kyle Wood, and I am excited to say this marks five years of exploring visual arts in an audio medium. And I thought there is no better guest to bring on for this episode than one of my oldest friends, one of my best teaching friends, and probably most frequent guest on the podcast,

Chuck Hoff, thank you so much for joining me. Well, thank you for having me as a guest. I feel honored. I told you this a little bit, but we are...

running your show daily at our junior high, Kennedy Junior High, as a little plug there. And my students, many of them were your former students, are huge fans of the show. And we've made it a Kahoot. And for those out there, I would suggest you do so too and use his fun facts, like the Friday Fun Facts, as a great way to engage your learners.

Thank you. And to any of my former students who are stuck having to listen to this, I am so sorry. But, you know, I'm sure they thought they were they were finally getting away from me and you just will not let that happen. So, yeah.

I'm a little bit scared

like a milestone episode like this, because at this point I've done a few hundred episodes of this podcast and, you know, um, art smart and, you know, my son's podcasts. So like I've done a lot, covered a lot. And I wanted to kind of mark this with

Impressionism in some ways, bringing it back to where it all started. I mean, the pilot episode I did years ago, like after school in my classroom with, um,

with Tony, my librarian, just experimenting to see how this would go. We were talking about George Seurat's Sunday afternoon on La Grande Jatte. And, you know, for me, impressionism and post-impressionism, like that was my entry point into art. Impressionism, for whatever reason, has captivated me since I was second grade. It's one of the earliest memories I have. Um,

But I know it's oddly polarizing because a lot of people look at impressionism and say, that's where art went wrong. And that's where the de-skilling happened in art. What do you think of that movement? So like you, I feel very similar. I think that is a bridge to many of our young artists. I feel like second and third grade, they get a taste of Starry Night.

And they realize they're not a million miles from being able to create something that has movement. So it touches on some of our principles. And when they create that, they feel closer to an artist, obviously. They can kind of feel that out. And they feel like, you know what? It's possible that I could create something as beautiful as this piece today.

and not feel so awestruck like I'm a million miles from a hyper realist or some of the other you know paintings that you can introduce and they would just feel overwhelmed so I started that way too I feel yeah and I think it's funny even as we describe it like as you say you you see it as a kid and you think like I'm not that far away I could do that you know like which is kind of

why so many people like it. It feels approachable, and it's also kind of why it's so derided and what made it so controversial in its day. Like, to us today, we're so used to those, like, pleasant little daubs of color that it feels like the safest, most innocuous form of art because it's just pretty pictures of landscapes. But

In its day, and when I say its day, I mean the first Impressionist exhibition was 1874. And, you know, so that's sort of the debut of they weren't calling themselves the Impressionists at that time. But that first exhibition, a critic, Louis Leroy said,

ripped them apart saying like, these aren't finished works. These are mere impressions. It's a rough sketch. It, it looks like wallpaper. And we still hear versions of that criticism today. As you look at it, like why do you think the impressionists hit with people so differently? So it's a really good question. I think when I first, um, stepped into education, um,

I remember hearing stories of a lot of my students, you know, athletes and such. And I had, so I was coaching two at the time. So I got all these levels and different perspectives and from different schools. And over the years, I've taught at three different school districts. So what I was getting was I was getting their impression of what art was.

And it needed to be, the son needed to be drawn and painted a certain way. And, you know, there needed to be a bit of realism in all their drawings. And they would get into arguments with their art teachers. And it was really, really frustrating. I had a girl one time, according to her parents, she was told to finish her incorrect drawing so that the teacher can use it in future years as an example.

I'm guessing, you know, I'm kind of beating around the bush a little bit and getting to my point. My point is this is just a really nice example or like a resource that kids can have that says you don't have to look at it the way everybody looks at it, you know, through a photograph. You can actually have your own perspective on what stars look like or what a Sunday afternoon looks like.

when it kind of looks like, you know, a little Mario Brothers kind of clouds and trees, and the kids can feel safe just creating. And I really like that because they weren't looking at me for an answer, but rather just expressing themselves, you know, based on a few examples that I would lead them with. Yeah. And so as we look at, you know, the development of that work,

I think in there you're really getting at a lot of what was happening. So that first Impressionist exhibition, they called themselves, it was such a mouthful, they called themselves the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, etc. I mean, terrible, terrible branding on that. But the show was good. And I think what's interesting is as you look at it,

They really were independent and just trying to show stuff that didn't fit with the salon's ideas of what paintings should be. And for listeners who are newer to the show, welcome. I am glad you have found it. And we've got a whole bunch of stuff in the back catalog for you to explore. But...

I've talked a lot about this because I love the Impressionists. They were trying to do something that was a little bit different. And all of those people in the now we call Impressionist movement, they were kind of coming at it from different backgrounds, different approaches. But what they all had in common was they were trying to get away from that rigid hierarchy of –

you know, historical paintings and allegorical works and religious and mythological subjects as being the end-all be-all. And they were saying, listen, the landscapes we see around us, the people walking the streets, the workers, you know, Paris is being rebuilt. It's becoming this modern cosmopolitan center of

That stuff matters. And that's what they wanted to capture, the fleeting moments in this rapidly changing world.

Because it really was rapidly changing. When we think historically, this was maybe just a few years after the end of the Franco-Prussian War. The advent of photography, you talked about photorealism and stuff. Photography and Louis de Guerre and all that, that was the middle of the 19th century that that came about and photography became widespread and accessible to the masses and

Even something like the tube of paint. The tube of paint was a 19th century invention. And so I feel like all these forces start to come together and people were ready for something different.

And that's where we had the impressionists like Claude Monet going outside the studio and making these quick paintings of just what they saw out in the world. And mostly it was nature. You know, Claude Monet always famously did the haystacks. You know why he did those haystacks? No, I do not. So...

I read this apparently like, you know, the end of the season, the farmers gather the hay, right? So it's like end of summer as they're gathering that. And then they would leave it in stacks out in the field to dry out for a period. And so then you're getting into the fall and very often it couldn't be all collected properly.

In the fall. And so it would sit out all winter and it wouldn't be like till mid to late spring that that would all be finally like taken in and harvested fully. And so when he was looking for a subject that would be stationary and he could see and study in different times of day, different lighting environments, different seasons of the year, he

Well, the haystack is it, right? Because it would sit out in the field for like nine months, which I always found interesting. I always looked at it and I'm like, why haystacks? Could you find a more boring topic? But like, I guess on a practical level, it works. Yeah, that's a great point. And the lighting would change, right? Because you'd have winter haystack, spring haystack, and the directional light and the shadows. So I kind of get it. Yeah. Yeah.

And that's really what I feel like the Impressionist movement became about in the end. It became about the artist's impression of what they're seeing right in front of them, trying to capture the light and shadow. And they were really influenced by –

something that was relatively new on the scene. There was a book that came out like 1839. It was by,

Long-time listeners know I'm not going to get this pronunciation right. Michel-Eugène Chevreau. The English translation of the title of the book would be like The Law of Simultaneous Color Contrast. So it was this book about essentially optical color theory, how our perception of one color is affected by what's around it. And

To me, that's what the Impressionist movement was all about. It's just like, what are we seeing and perceiving just visually on the surface? We don't even need to know what it is. It's not about the object. It's not about anything more meaningful or symbolic or there's nothing to unpack here. It's just about the surface quality.

Where do you see the difference with like the post impressionists? Because then we shifted from like Monet trying to capture what these different subjects looked like in the field at different times a year to people like Van Gogh and Seurat who were, you know, like I said, the post impressionists. How would you describe the difference in the post impressionist lens?

So yeah, post-impressionism, as I look at the three works of art that you have as an example, we see an intensity, we see boldness, we see colors that are a little more distinct, you know, and they contrast each other. So you see some fine lines and a lot of experimentation. So when I look at the, you know, the three works of art, for instance, and I think of the general

I think of experimentation as being one that I think I would love, you know, and I think it became one of the signature things.

interest in what I found interesting at teaching and looking at and the variety. I noticed a great variety. For instance, George Surratt's piece took four years to make and it's humongous variety.

And then when I looked at Starry Night, it sits quite smaller than I thought it was going to be. So there's a great variety in the post-impressionism. Yeah, and Starry Night for me is always just the standout and –

exemplifies the movement in so many ways because it's just so expressive. I mean, the movement across the sky. And for me, that's the one I point to as the shift because I see students who are always like, well, it's still just a bunch of dabs of color and everything. But it's like Monet and others in the Impressionist movement were just trying to capture what does it look like?

And the post-impressionists, it became more about what does it feel like? What's this idea behind it? They're getting more symbolic. It's yes anding the impressionists. You know what I'm saying? It's like it's taking their ideas just to that next level.

And so I think now we're going to take a short break. And when we come back, we'll start talking about a few of the favorite works that I have looked at and discussed over the last five years.

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Whatever you love, find it on eBay. eBay. Things people love. So now I am back here talking impressionism and post-impressionism with my good friend Chuck Hoff. We're going to try to cover five artists, five artworks for the fifth year anniversary. And if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, I would not mind five stars. But Chuck...

As you're looking at this, let's start with Monet's Impression Sunrise. I mean, this is literally the piece that got the Impressionist movement started. The movement was named after this piece and Louis Leroy saying, this isn't a real painting, it's just an impression. What do you think of it?

So, to me it's that the good old fashioned, you know, squint your eyes and you might find something in it or move several steps backwards and you might see, you know, the harbor or industrial revolution beginning or whatever because you have a lot of things going on in what would be considered the background.

You have a really muted gray-blue. But what struck me as being pretty unusual is that red sun that is trying to get its way through. And then I like the way he –

uh, splashed it in the, in the waves. Cause there is a disturbance in the water. It would have been easy for, um, everything to lay pretty flat because it is a, a morning sunrise, but he went and had disturbed it with the boats that were already in the water. And I think that's where my attention is. So he definitely has a focal point. He definitely sits the sun, um, as close to the viewer as possible, um,

And then everything else is consistent. So that to me is, I thought, unusual and probably would have given it a lot of criticism at its time. Yeah. And I think what's interesting to me is that

That sun is so bold, but part of the boldness is because everything else around it is so muted. You know, like you say, there are those people in the boat that's kind of in the foreground, the silhouette. That seems a little bolder. That has a good contrast because of the darkness with what's around it. But everything else is just – it's so hazy. Yeah.

You almost can't see the horizon from a distance, you know? And there's just like this vague illusion at maybe smokestacks and stuff like that. And I kind of... On some level, I kind of like that. I kind of like that he's showing us like...

Maybe the air is kind of thick. Maybe the industrial revolution is happening and maybe it's getting a little hazy. Maybe it was just that time of day and that fog or whatever was going on just because of the natural weather patterns. But I like that he just...

showed it as he saw it from his view out his window and didn't get overly concerned about like, well, I got to make it pretty because this one, if I'm being honest, at least to my eye, it's not pretty. Particularly the sky. Like when I look at the sky, it's,

It kind of falls apart a little bit. It gets disorganized and it's really rapid. And you can see where someone would say, like, I mean, we are not close to being finished here. But I also think, you know, from a teacher standpoint and many of the novices out there painting landscapes, this is a great scaffold. Like this is a great way to step them into painting.

what a muted landscape could look like as there is some atmospheric haze and frankly, some pollution. And that's what that would look like. So great step into building your landscapes up. And so this is, that's why this piece I feel still appeals to me, even though, like I said before, mentioned like that, the sky is just so fast and so quick and,

Yeah. Honestly, like I think if, if I saw someone in my classroom working on this, I would tell them we need, we need to increase the contrast. We need a wider range of values here. Cause I'm losing stuff and it it's, it's reading is just too, too muddied too much in that mid tone. Um, and then at the same time, it does feel like, yeah,

I don't know. It feels almost like a JMW Turner kind of piece in some ways where, you know, you are getting these brushstrokes that are a little bit wild and you lose sight of the horizon. And, you know, there's there's a reason for that. I don't think it happened by accident. It's just I don't know, not my cup of tea.

But moving on, next one, because I don't want this to be too long and bore too many of our listeners. We've got Barrett Morisseau. Now, she was actually probably the most successful of the Impressionists, I guess.

She was one who had exhibited at the Paris Salon, but she joined with the Impressionists from that first showing in 1874 and just kept going with them. I think she just knew, like, this is the way of the future, right?

And with this one, I picked out The Cradle, which I actually did a full episode on a while back. Listeners, check the links in the show notes. I've got a bunch that is referenced here and more Impressionists and related stuff if you want to learn more. But as we're looking at The Cradle, what are you noticing here? What's jumping out at you?

So when I look at the cradle, there is that semi-transparent material between

the baby and the viewer. And so you, you do get a glimpse into what, uh, the mother's looking at. Um, obviously baby's heading our way. Mother's heading towards the baby. So we have like a triangle and her arm, um, kind of creates that triangle. Uh, so it keeps you inside the view. So I find that pretty interesting. I also, uh, notice, uh, some primary colors, uh,

purposely, you know, in the painting. You see these streaks of red and blue throughout, and then of course all the fleshy tones. So the palette is pretty simple and probably pretty intentional.

Yeah. That subtle triangle, you're right, that's kind of interesting because we see actually a couple of triangulated stuff happening with the shape of that gauzy sort of material over the crib or cradle. Yeah.

that piece that's draped over is roughly triangular. And there's this implied triangle, like you said, between the mother looking down at the baby, their two heads make two corners of a triangle. And then our eye is led across the edge of the, the, the baby's, um,

bed or whatever, towards her hand and her arm leads us right back up to her head. So there's interesting movement in the composition. It feels like there's so much that is soft and subtle and yet very deliberately constructed. You know, like you can tell she was very thoughtful about every element of this. Yeah.

The, the, the probably discussion she had with her sister, you know, I'm sure that this was not, you know, something she did. She did is like an echo chamber, you know, just talk to some of her closest friends and family and it's the baby, the baby's propped in kind of an unusual position. And, and I just feel that that shoulder sunk quite a bit into that cradle to allow, you know, what is it most of its position to be towards the viewer.

So I'm not sure it's completely natural, but it is something that's kind of staged. And I think both needed an equal part in this painting. Well, I think what's interesting is like on some ways it feels very natural and relatable, but you're right. There is something about the pose that like,

Yeah, my babies weren't necessarily side sleepers. I've never really seen that so much. But you get why it works for a composition. You gotta see that baby's face. A picture with a baby, I wanna see its face. But I think when you talk about her sister, you're right. This was a painting of her sister, Edma, who was also a painter, but...

more or less walked away from her career after she had the baby and I feel like there's this interesting sort of sense of like you know what a woman sacrifices gives up the mixed feelings like the joy of having a baby but the change that comes to your life along with that all kind of happening in this expression that I see there absolutely yes

So moving on now, we've got Gustav Kayibat's Paris Street Rainy Day from 1877. And you and I actually did a full episode on this one. So I'm sure you've memorized everything that you said two years ago. Take it away. Okay, so here we go. We talked a little bit about the cast shadows being a bit muted.

So kind of they're floating on the streets.

We talked about in the foreground, the viewer, you know, as they look off to the side, they look to the corner of the painting. That kind of keeps us in one half of the painting. We also see that the lamppost does divide the picture in two. We have predominant foreground people on one side, and then on the other side, we take a trip all the way down to what would be considered probably a

quarter mile, maybe half mile into the picture. But it is quite blocked on the other side of that lamppost with the large umbrellas. So those are a couple of things that we had noticed the first time that struck us as being a little unusual.

Yeah. And so, I mean, I, one of the things that stands out to me about this piece, obviously it's like the perfect example of two point perspective, but one of the things that we didn't talk about that I have lately been like a little obsessed with is if you look at it, you can't really see or make out much of anybody's face except for that couple that's in the foreground. Right. Right.

And so I started to dig into, like, who was that couple? Who were these people? And from my research, I could not find a definitive explanation. But there are some people who theorize that the dude was Kaibat's brother.

Which I find kind of interesting and I started looking at photographs side by side and the photographs I've usually seen of – was it Marshall Kayaibot? I've usually seen him like with a full beard but it does kind of look like him.

Other people say it's just representing the well-dressed bourgeoisie of up-and-coming Paris and everything like that. But I just found that to be an interesting little thing because I'm digging for fun facts that we haven't covered already in this. And

And I like to think that he was putting his brother in there the way that like, remember when we did the Renoir, the luncheon on the boating party and actually like Kaibat's in there. His wife is in there. Renoir's wife or future wife was in there. You know, I think it's kind of cool that like all these people seem to know each other, hang out with each other, supported each other and also like painted each other into their works. Yeah.

So yeah, that was the one thing that stuck out to me. So there are close to 30 people in this painting and it's the, it's like the good old fashion. Like I'm really bad at feet. All right, we'll take them all out of your painting. And it, and it not that he, he was bad at drawing faces, but you have to look at it. Like you've included two out of 30 people. And then you've just casted all of the umbrellas like over everyone's faces. And,

You know, I could see that in today's classroom. They would get teased a little bit, you know, if their vulnerability was out there. The three people, the three other people that he did paint had, you know, five o'clock shadows and they were they were completely in profile. So that I found pretty interesting, too. I think it's pretty exhausting. I think he he probably got to a point where he's like, this is so technical, you know,

And you, maybe he didn't mean to go down this. And then he had to put a bunch of people in and he's like, I'm done. You know, I'm certainly not as good at people as I am with buildings.

I am dying now because I'm looking through the rest of Kaivat's work and there are so many paintings where you see the backs of people's heads, the floor scrapers, like they're looking down at the floor. You see the top of their head. You see the oarsmen rowing again. There's a hat covering their face. The young man at his window, you see him from behind like everything.

There's so many of these paintings. You know, it's like, you know, the engineer loved to do these technical things, the cityscapes, the perspective stuff. Maybe it was just the ultimate dodge. Like I just, and he did paint faces. It's not like in his entire body of work, there are no faces and the ones he painted, they were fine, better than I would do. But yeah,

I, I looking at this, I, I do wonder like, was he just not that into faces? Cause there are some things that like, even though you can draw them or paint them, it's just not that fun. Um, wild speculation. This is not, this is not based on any like serious research, but I, I like that theory and I'm, I'm, I'm going with that for the rest of my life. Um,

Well, I appreciate that. If I'm wrong, don't tell me. And it's not, I don't think it's very controversial. I'm just bringing it back to, you know, our young artists that we're teaching and how they get pretty good at doing something and something that they're not fond of. I wouldn't even say good, bad, but just I'm tired of this. And it just seems like if you put 30 characters in, good for you.

Because this certainly doesn't need to be an empty street in Paris. Particularly on a rainy day. But at some point he was like, I'm done. I'm checking out. Yeah.

You've got to be the first person to describe that painting as like someone giving up. Like, I'm done. I've done enough. Like the man who is painting the reflections in the water accumulating between the cobblestones. Like, yeah, he just got lazy.

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I guess shifting gears a little bit towards another one that we actually talked about on a previous episode, Van Gogh's Starry Night. This is from 1889, which brings us into that post-impressionist era. I mean, it's not strictly a date, but stylistically, this would be something I always point at as post-impressionistic, as I've already alluded to because of the movement and the emotion. When you look at this,

What jumps out at you? So, yeah, I mean, for me, the lines are both, you know, horizontal and vertical. And they seem to work, you know, even though, you know, it's super simplistic and yet very recognizable. So everybody...

First off, young viewers would probably say, what is this burning bush or what is happening in the foreground? With the cypress? Yeah, with the cypress tree. And then the second thing I think is quite striking in small towns and great big cities is

uh, the steeple is usually present and the tallest structure in some of our smaller towns. Um, in our large town of Naperville, I know St. Peter and Paul's chapel is huge. Um, and can be seen for, you know, 10 miles around if you get up on a tall hill. And I just, I find that pretty striking because it's dead center in his painting and it, and it's very similar to the Cypress tree, you know, and it's, um,

and how it just stretches into the sky. And I know I brought those two things up because usually people probably start at the sky, but I think the church was pretty significant of small towns and how much taller it was than everything else and how it stood out.

Yeah, but I think what's really interesting about this, because we know that he wasn't doing a straight-up view of what he saw out his window. Like, the cypress tree, he pulled that extremely forward into the foreground, and...

Because from his window, it was very distant. It would have looked much smaller on the horizon. And I think the town wasn't even visible from that window. But he did this sort of this mashup of different views he had seen of his surroundings and put a twist on it. And the thing I always find interesting, because like you say, that steeple is so tall. You can see it is so much taller than the other buildings.

But even the highest point on that steeple doesn't make it more than a third of the way up the canvas. You know, like it barely breaks past the horizon line. And I think that's the thing that I always emphasize to students is this choice of scale and the way that he made the sky occupy space.

two thirds of this composition. Like that sky is so vast. It makes everything else seem so much smaller in comparison. And I think it just makes it feel big and open and expansive, largely because of that just low sloped horizon. Also, you know, to your point,

He had a very, it seemed very deliberate, you know, kind of, like his thoughts were about how he was going to make wind. You know, like how is he going to make this whole thing work? Or it swirled around and tucked into a hill and reflected some of the stars. And he needed space. Like this wasn't going to be something he squished up at the top. It wouldn't have been possible.

as effective if he did it in the other way. But in comparing it to some other examples, this was vastly different because it de-emphasized some of the things that you have right at the bottom, that really small, cozy town.

you know, is drawn in all these different perspectives to your point. He grabbed buildings from the different views and perspectives that he had. Um, and through his window, you know, even though it wasn't all drawn, uh, to the same perspective, you get the idea, but it is a mod podge and it is something he puts together quite quickly. Um, but that sky is stunning.

Yeah. I mean, it has that feel of quick brushstrokes, but like I say, with the post-impressionists, it's not just what I saw in that moment, as we've both said. It's this composite. He's putting together these different views to capture an idea more broadly. And

You know, to move on now, I think we're going to end this one kind of as I began the show, talking about George Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte. This one was from 1884, so I guess we're going out of order on this, but I think it still works. When we look at this, it's, you know, the pointillist masterpiece, although he wouldn't have called it pointillism. He liked divisionism.

All these tiny little dots. It's funny because it's like people who are relaxed in the park, but it also feels so stiff. I mean, you said before the dude spent years on this and made like 60 studies of it. What do you think of this piece? Well, it's got... So to me, my first impression is

I, of course, stood in front of it. And so I got to see it live and I've seen it several times. And, you know, I love to stare at what they all could be staring at. And so my first impression is this. I have sometimes a hard time seeing the trees that are up near the top of the painting and

they're completely in fuzz, right? So you can't tell if they're all the way in the back as they should be, right? Because you, you don't, they're not contoured out or are they in the front because everything else is stylized and super, um, you know, crisp and, and it has the cast shadows and hard lines for shoulders and elbows, but not the trees. Like the trees could almost be a faint cloud. So I,

That would be my first question for George Surratt. It's like, what were you thinking here? Right? Because it has me all confused. So it was like an M.C. Escher, you know, a little bit of like a trick or a trick of eye or something because I see a bunch of trees that are coming towards me and yet everything else is like super fuzzy. So it was a little trippy, but that was my first impression.

Well, it's like the trunk of the tree is pretty defined. It's just the canopy of leaves dissolves and gets fuzzy, right? That's exactly right. That's what you're seeing? Yeah. Yep.

I mean, the quick point, of course, is that she's holding a... She's got a pet monkey. I mean, and everybody laughs, and everything goes to this corner of the painting, and you've got to figure out, is this normal, or is this super affluent? Yes, this lady would always have her pet monkey, right? Because she's dressed really well. But I'm guessing I'm going... My first eyes were the composition, and...

what works and what doesn't and what was done maybe on purpose or what was de-emphasized. And so that's why up in the top of the picture, I always had a problem with a few of those tree canopies or just one canopy, but a bunch of trees that kind of blended together.

Yeah, I mean, it is the one tree by the water that I can't unsee it now. So thank you for that. It's funny, the thing that bothered me actually was not even so much that. It's the, I guess, relative flatness of the faces. Again, it's these hazy faces that are

Like, all in this mid-tone, there's not, like, a... There aren't a lot of, like, hard shadows. There's not a lot of range in the value within the faces on these figures. You know what I'm saying? Like... 100%. They're all in this flat tone, which, like, fine, that's a style, but...

With everything, like there are really hard shadows cast on the ground and stuff like that. So it's like there's this mismatch, I guess. And you're giving a version of that as well. But I think the one thing we can all agree on is a pet monkey being

is awesome, always will be. And I'm still jealous because I remember writing to my local government petitioning to find out if I could get a pet monkey as a small child. I never got my monkey. Yeah. And because we're on the backside of the pandemic we have at home, we have

two geckos and five turtles and 130 fish and an extra dog because of it. So I can look at that monkey and say, good for you, but man, I hope my kids don't get any ideas. And to your point about the faces, I mean, great notice because I notice where the umbrellas are positioned.

And so some of it is believable. Like some of it is just your, your, your constant cast shadow, but there's no back reflective light. So there's no bouncing the light back up into the face. And so it just stays muted. And I looked around the painting. I'm like, all right, well, there's gotta be a break in this. And the two girls, the back of their head, at least the one should probably be in sunlight. Cause she's right at the edge of that, um,

the shadow and he won't allow it. It's almost like you're safe in this zone, but you're not safe in that zone. And so he zones it all out as let's just believe for a minute that everything has a shadow. Well, I think the thing that bothers me about it is, you know, you're, you're playing around so much with like, how do I create an effect? And, you know, the, the dots of colors, it's not realism. So like, we don't need to have,

realistic shadows and everything like that. You're going to say that under the parasol, everything's going to get into this hazy mid-tone and stuff because you're not getting the dramatic chiaroscuro lighting effects and stuff like that. I get that, but this isn't real. This isn't meant to be real. This is his painting of a scene. And if you're doing your rendition of a scene, I feel like

You should make choices that are just helpful to the composition. That's the thing that's always bothered me about the stylization of some of these figures is there's just this flatness to it and a stiffness to it that...

I don't know. It doesn't work for me so much. There's a lot that's good about it, don't get me wrong. I've returned to this painting multiple times and I'm bringing it up in my anniversary episode when I'm talking about five of my favorite Impressionist and post-Impressionist works. But every time I see that, it's just like,

It bothers me, and I'm not sure why. I should be able to let it go, and yet I can't. I think because it's consistent. It's huge, and it took forever. So some of those are... Maybe we excuse it a little bit, and we allow it in because of some of the variables that we just consider to be pretty awestruck. But...

um and it's you know like it's like i said it when they when you walk up on it you know it stops you for a minute but man that's a lot to consider as as the counter is pretty there too like we have these these faces and everything feels like walking dead like are they alive are they dead what's going on and

Or is it just everything just stopped in the world, like a movie? Because they are very stiff, like you said.

Except for the animals. I'll give them that. The animals are moving. At least one is. Well, the animals are moving. And, you know, there's a little girl who looks like she's dancing and stuff in the middle ground. But, you know, when we talk about the animals, I mean, there's a pet monkey in there. And that should pop. There should be higher contrast so that monkey stands out more. Like, if all of this is so contrived, like,

really heighten the contrast and pull my focus to different areas. And, and I guess if we're getting at like the focus and stuff, everything's, everybody's basically looking off to the, to the left, you know, we're looking out at the water that's really not even in frame. So it's like, everybody's looking out of frame, which kind of breaks one of the old compositional rules. And I know that,

artists are always trying new things and breaking the rules and that's how you do something different that gets people's attention. But I don't know. That's a rule I like. That's a long time. Look into frame. I was going to say, it's a long time to spend on a painting to break a bunch of rules and then hope it works. I mean, it did work. We're talking about it. It did work. 150 years later. Yeah, and a museum probably spent a lot of money buying it. So...

Good for you. And every other museum would spend an even more obscene amount of money if they could buy it today. But...

Yeah. I think it works in a lot of ways for at least the color theory, the dots and everything. Your eye does blend them nicely, and I like the frame, the border around it, and the way that he shifted those different colors and the juxtaposition of complementary colors in some areas. It was good proof of concept. I'll give him that. And

Hats off to him for the dedication on this. He knew how to put a little yellow in with the green, but also lighten up the green and darken up the green and stay with lots of the browns and pink. He's got red and pink together on some of the outfits. I just...

I like what he did there for sure. You know, where you, you could tell he kept it simple enough because it was a pretty busy composition. So sometimes kudos to you because, you know, maybe, or kudos to the artist because there's so much going on that you need to sacrifice a few things. And maybe it was the color palette because he kept it, you know, pretty simple.

Well, simple in some ways and needlessly complicated in others. He spent two years working on this, 60 studies for it. And, you know, the color palette and the shadows and the hard shadows, I think that's largely because of, like I said, he was influenced by the...

the theory about the juxtaposition or side-by-side placement of complimentary or opposite colors and the way that you could define shadows, not just with black, but with color and the P the little dots that you're putting next to each other and all of that. And, and I think this was a strong work in, in that regard. And he spent two years on it. I've spent five years on this garbage and I think we can all agree. He had a little bit more,

He had a little bit more to show for his time than I did. Let me know if this was made a TV, if this was made a TV set, is this a 1980s TV set with all the little pixelations? The dots, like it does, it does have that feel of like the fuzz that you would get on, on the old rabbit ear TV. I couldn't even imagine what George was feeling. Cause he's sitting there for two years and people would walk by and go, are you going to do these? Are you going to finish this? You know, are you going to, and he's like, just give it a minute.

Well, I think you're right. And I think that's a good sort of note to end on here is that these people, it had to take a lot of courage. Creativity takes courage. Putting something out there takes courage. And

you know, there are always going to be people who can detract and there can be, you know, people like me who are going to sit there and pick it apart and be like, I think you could have had a brighter highlight here and a darker shadow here to get a wider range and, you know, make this part pop and stuff like that. But, you know, I think...

The fact that people would take this time and put really their livelihood on the line. I mean, this was their career. This was a big deal for them to put something out there. If people didn't like it, for a good number of them, except for Kaibat, if people didn't like it, if people didn't buy it,

They didn't eat. They didn't have a place to stay. They needed this to work out, and it was a big risk. Morisot leaving the salon and going to the Independence show, that was not, by most people's estimation, a safe or smart path. I mean, she was successful, but it very easily could have gone another way.

And we have to always just put this in. They were given the tools to see things in a way that would be competitive with the previous movement. And yet they decided, you know, I'm going to create my own style. And that's what makes it super tricky is that when you're going in that direction, I mean, there's what, 20, 80% chance that this will work out.

And some of it may not sell while they're living, but it takes off and people start mimicking it. And then it becomes this movement. So, yeah, so intentional for sure in the direction. But I always am reminded like, you know, like Jackson Pollock's and stuff like it doesn't start that way.

It just becomes a different movement because they needed something that was less restrictive. Yeah. I mean, they all kind of learned the rules before they broke the rules. And, you know, I said before, creativity takes courage. But I think the other thing that I would always want people to remember is, you know, when

It's really important to be supportive of friends who are trying something new and putting something out there into the world. And the Impressionists...

Part of the reason that they made it was because people like Kayabat were using their resources to support their friends. Like Kayabat, his family made a huge fortune off the textile industry and the building of Paris and real estate and everything like that. So he never had to work. He could make what he wanted and didn't have to worry about selling anything. But all the rest of his friends...

did have to work and did have to sell stuff. And he put together shows, he bought their work and he, you know, donated stuff to the Musee d'Orsay. Um, and,

That network of support is really what made the difference because during the year of the first Impressionist exhibition, if I recall the numbers correctly, it was something like 400,000 people went through the Paris Salon and something like 4,000 people went through the Impressionist exhibition. I mean, it was like

you know, a hundred times more people going to the salon. So it was a real act of courage to be putting their stuff out in the, at that time, the anonymous society of independent artists, sculptors and printmakers, et cetera, show. Yeah. Well said. And on that note, I'm going to end this longer than average episode, but, uh,

We did it. We got five artists for our five-year anniversary. Thank you so much once again, Chuck Hoff. Really appreciate you taking the time. Absolutely. I was honored.

This concludes this week's episode of Who Arted, part of the Airwave Media Podcast Network. If you found this tolerable, please leave a rating or review on your favorite podcast app. You can find images of the work being discussed this week and every week on social media at Who Arted Podcast on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. And of course, on the website, whoartedpodcast.com. Podcast done.