'Impressionism,' minus the color
New England 'Prints' are a
black-and-white issue through March at the CSI gallery
Staten Island Advance - Sunday, March 19,
2006
If Impressionism is all about turning color, light
and fresh air into paint on canvas, then how could there be any such
thing as black-and-white impressionism?
Impressionism sans color is flat out contradiction
in terms. Unless it isn't.
If the action of light can be described without it,
why can't a color-free image count as Impressionism? The evidence
could hardly be plainer than "New England Impressionism: Prints" at
the Gallery of the College of Staten Island this month.
Etchings and lithographs can do a pretty good job
suggesting some of the particular interests of the (original) French
Impressionists, things like sunlight on water or sunbeams passing
through foliage.
Around the turn of the century, long after the last
Impressionist exhibition, New England had a small colony of
Impressionist painters. They painted the expected topics, like
pretty ladies posed outdoors - but they also produced prints.
Economics probably drove them to it. Paintings were
expensive but prints, which would be made in editions and used in
books and periodicals were well within the means of ordinary people.
A DOUBLE LIFE
The star of the CSI show isn't its most famous
representative, Childe Hassam (1859-1935). Another artist Frank
Weston Benson (1862-1951), steals the stage.
Benson led a double life. As a painter he peddled
the standard Impressionist pretty woman picture. But for subjects of
his etchings, he turned right into Field & Stream.
There he found water birds, fishermen, hunting dogs.
In one sharply restrained view "Casting for Salmon" an angler stands
in a smooth-as-satin pool that is charting full sun. Some Bensons,
like his lone-man-in-a-boat, "Lobsterman," recall Winslow Homer.
Childe Hassam gravitated to more urbane subjects. He
caught glimpses of small town Yankee grace ("Doorway, Portsmouth"
and "Church in Old Lyme") on sunny days through flickering leaves at
high summer in New England.
The effect is so persuasive, you don't miss color.
The New England Impressionists had their own Mary
Cassatt, an artist named Polly Thayer. Her "Portrait," an elegant
drawing, is in the show. Nearby, there's a medium-famous woodblock
("Iris") print by Arthur Wesley Dow.
Dow's handsome print isn't Impressionistic. Instead,
it recalls another tradition, that of the flat, graphically austere
Japanese woodblock print, a great influence on the progressive young
painters of 1870s/80s Paris, the brief golden age of impressionism.
By Michael J. Fressola
Reprinted here with permission
from the
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