Yale Art Gallery Experience

Yale Art Gallery Experience
The Yale University Art Gallery has much to offer to its visitors. Embracing all cultures and periods, their mission is to encourage appreciation and understanding of art and its role in society through direct engagement with original works of art. "The Gallery stimulates active learning about art and the creative process through research, teaching, and dialogue among communities of Yale students, faculty, artists, scholars, alumni, and the wider public." (YAG website). The Gallery also organizes exhibitions and educational programs to offer enjoyment and encourage inquiry, while building and maintaining its collections in trust for future generations. The Yale Art Gallery truly believes in the importance of art in everyones lives. "Looking at art can provide a much needed refuge for reflection, sympathy, quietude, inspiration, and even ecstasy in this increasingly chaotic world. Looking further can deepen knowledge of cultures and artistic practice, develop and hone observational skills, reveal insights into history that other documents can't, and encourage creative, analytical, and autonomous thinking." (YAG Website). The artist I admire, whose work I would like to focus on for this paper are: Paul Cézanne, and Georges Seurat.
This impressionist painter whose work almost always catches my eye is known as Paul Cézanne. His first piece, "The House of Dr. Gachet at Auvers." (1872-73) oil on canvas; features the house of Dr. Paul Gachet (1828-1909). "Gachet was a a homeopathic physician who was one of the earliest supporters of the Impressionists. Gachet would later be immortalized in Vincent van Gogh's Doctor Paul Gachet of 1890. To depict Gachet's house, Cézanne divided the painting into four compositional wedges of sky, road, trees, and houses; a rigorous structuring of the canvas used in his subsequent works. His additional interest in combining different points of view is evident in the head-on view of the house, juxtaposed with the upward tilt of the approaching road. A brightened palette and lively facture suggest the influence of Camille Pissarro, who introduced Cézanne to Impressionist technique while the two worked around Auvers from 1872 to 1874."(wikipedia.com) There's a great sense of location and space in this painting. I like how Cézanne creates a rich depth of field in this piece, using cool colors to open up the canvas. This piece is beautifully rendered with a effortless style.
Cézanne's next piece that I admire is called: "The Neighborhood of Jas de Bouffan" (Environs du Jas de Bouffan), 1885–87. Oil on canvas. The story behind this intriguing piece, is simply that Paul Cézanne’s father bought a large country house and farm, called the Jas de Bouffan, just outside Aix-en-Provence. "For the next forty years, this estate, which included a large eighteenth-century house, alleys of chestnut trees, and views of Mont Sainte-Victoire. This property afforded Cézanne with many of his subjects. It was only in the mid- and late 1880s that Cézanne explored the varied motifs offered by the manor and its grounds in real depth."(wikipedia.org). The work has a traditional design, with a large foreground tree at one side and a clump of smaller trees at the other framing a distant view in the center. "But in Cézanne’s scrupulous adaptation, it becomes an image of a particular place beyond the walls of his family estate, seen in the warm light of Provence on a cloudless summer day. I view both the sense of order and the sense of isolation from this balanced yet uninhabited landscape. This predict this conveys what must have been the artist’s dominant mood in the summer of 1887 or 1888. Calm but resigned. "Always the sky, the boundless things of nature, attract me and give me the chance to look with pleasure.”(wikipedia.org). I think when viewing this piece, the vibrant color harmony is dominated by a rich variety of greens, in one sense toward yellow, in the other toward blue and violet, in a manner at once descriptive and abstract that does indeed do the most good to the eyes.
No understanding of Georges Seurat's (1859-1891) development would be complete without consideration of the 85 oil studies he produced in the formative years prior to his first large painting, Bathers (1883–84). Agrarian workers and peasants are among the most consistent subjects of these early works, which reflect the important influence of Jean-François Millet, the Barbizon school painter of rural life. Seurat achieved his beautiful sense of style through innovative coloristic and painterly techniques. Working directly in the field, he followed the Impressionists’ practice of painting outdoors to capture the fugitive effects of light; he also studied contemporaneous developments in physics, optics, and color theory assiduously. In Seurat's painting, "Vache noire dans un pre" (Black Cow in a Meadow) 1881 oil on panel."(wikipedia.org).

You get a sense of a still life depicted of a large black cow grazing and eating in a field. I love the rich green color used for the lushish grass, and the silhouette effect of the two lonely trees and cow. The shadow growing from each object gives this painting a sense of time in the day. There's not much composition in this piece, but the painterly technique Seurat uses, gives this painting simple but brilliant dimension.
The last piece of Seurats that intrigued my mind was his "Le pecheur" (Riverman; Fisherman) 1884 oil on panel. This piece is another beautiful composition. The painting depicts a fisherman standing in a small paddle boat in an open river, viewing the environment around him. He looks like he is patiently waiting for his catch, or he can be frustrated with his results of the days activity on the river. Anything can be taken away from when it comes to the emotion of the fisherman considering his facial expression is unknown. The river is painted with a sense of great motion and depth, using the cool colors of blues and greens and whites. I love the long dark shadow of the boat on the water. A little piece of land is shown in the background of this painting giving enough to propose a location to the viewer. The cropped view of the boat and fisherman, really draws your attention to the story being told here. The way the river is painted gives this painting such a calm attitude, I feel like i can stare into the water endlessly. I feel Georges Seurat's dabbing technique really brings his paintings to life with such great dimension. In accordance with scientific thinking, he applied pure hues rather than premixed pigments to the canvas and employed the technique of “optical mixing,” in which complementary colors “vibrate” when placed in correspondence with one another. At this time, Seurat made his painting surface highly active through the use of short, crosshatched brushstrokes; he subsequently distilled these brushstrokes into tiny dots, a method now known as Pointillism.