Etretat in Art

When I set out to write this post, I remembered having seen countless paintings of the cliffs at Etretat in France (Wikipedia image). It’s true, I have seen tons, but I didn’t recall exactly how many of them were by Claude Monet.

Monet rarely painted a scene only once. He painted many series, some of which you’ve seen on this blog (water lilies, Rouen Cathedral). Monet loved experimenting with light. He would paint the same subject at dawn, noon, dusk, night, and every time in between, using color changes to show the different lighting conditions. The cliffs at Etretat were no exception. Below is the Manneporte, Etretat, painted at different times by Monet.

And below is Monet’s The Cliff, Etretat, Sunset. I chose to show you this painting because I remember seeing it when it was included in the Monet in Normandy exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art last year and the image stuck with me. I love the sun in this painting.
It wasn’t just Monet who painted this scene, though. Below, find Gustave Courbet’s take on the cliffs in The Cliffs at Etretat and Etretat After a Storm.

Eugene Boudin’s Etretat, The Cliff of Aval (below).
Eugene Delacroix also painted the cliffs but I couldn’t find a picture online to show you. You can always go to the library and look it up in a book if you’re interested.

If you can think of any other artists who painted this scene, please leave a comment and I’ll try to add images. I'm sure I've forgotten some.

And since, in the writing of this post, I realized that I haven’t yet written about Monet’s life and work, look forward to that at some point this week.

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I am participating in NaNoEdMo, though I haven't signed up (and I'm not sure if I will). Also, I forgot about it until today (only one day late) so I'm slightly behind. I'll be caught up by tomorrow. The goal of NaNoEdMo is to dedicate 50 hours to editing a novel during the moth of March. This goal is not nearly as insane as that of NaNoWriMo so I'm confident I'll be successful. I just need a little something to spur me onward. This project will be finished by my birthday!

(Or at least much closer to finished...)

Current NaNoEdMo Hour Count: 2.25/50 hours

Cool Charcoal Project

There's a great project posted at Bookhou Craft Projects. You can create your own abstract masterpiece using charcoal and paper scraps. Go check it out.

Don't forget to check back here later for Monday's post, Etretat in Art.

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Art Institute of Chicago

Just a quick post so you don't feel neglected. The Art Institite of Chicago is packing up their Impressionist collection so they can do renovations on the museum wing in which it is kept. Ninety-two pieces, including Caillebotte's Paris Street, Rainy Day, van Gogh's The Bedroom, Degas' Yellow Dancers in the Wings, and Gauguin's L'Arlesiennes. This is a fabulous collection of art and for a limited time the people of Fort Worth, Texas will get the chance to enjoy them. The collection will be on display at the Kimbell Art Museum from June 29 through November 2, 2008.

Trust me; seize the opportunity!

Georges Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte and several other mainstays of the Art Institute's collection will not travel.

Happy Leap Day! And have a great weekend!

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Complementary Colors

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, fifth edition, a complementary color is “a color that combined with a given color makes white or black.” This is something you can test on your own. Use yellow, red, blue, green, orange, and purple. Mix two colors at a time in as many combinations as you can think of. What are your results?

To make the idea of complementary colors easier to understand, I am linking to a color wheel. Go look at it before you continue reading.

Complementary colors lay exactly opposite each other on the color wheel. In the simple color wheel you just look at, yellow is complementary to purple, red is complementary to green, and blue is complementary to orange.
When complementary colors are place next to each other, both look bright. This has been used to great effect in many paintings. Below, look at van Gogh’s use of red and green in Night Café (above).
Renoir’s use of blue and orange in Boating on the Seine.
Yellow and purple in Degas’ Woman Drying Her Hair. (This was painting at the end of Degas’ life when his eyesight had begun to fail.) Look how much more intense the yellow in the wall is than the red when placed against the purple of the woman’s body.

Try placing complementary colors side by side in your own painting and notice how bright the colors look.

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Degenerate Art

In 1927, the Nazis created a society that would control art. They said they were trying to prevent it from becoming dirty or corrupted. The Nazis wanted to create a society in which everyone looked alike and had like ideas and opinions. What better way to control thinking than to control art?

Imagine if the government decided to destroy any record of any music that wasn’t classical. And then they did it. Suddenly you couldn’t listen to anything with lyrics. There would be no more rock or hip hop or country or anything else. These music styles have helped to shape our culture and our ideas and after awhile I believe that our thinking would begin to change in their absence. This is what the Nazis were trying to do.

Anyway, they took more than 20,000 works of art, including paintings, drawings, and sculpture, by about 200 artists and chose 650 or so for their exhibit of “Degenerate Art.” The exhibit traveled around Germany, making 12 stops in large cities, before many of the works of art were destroyed.

The exhibit was set up to poke fun at the displayed works of art. The walls were often covered with graffiti, and the artists’ names and titles of paintings were sloppily handwritten on note cards next to the works. Click here to watch a short video clip of people looking at paintings in the Degenerate Art exhibit.

Several artists about whom you have already read, were included in the Degenerate Art exhibit, including Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian.

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