Paul Signac – Entrance to the Grand Canal, Venice

“Venice has been called a feminine city. (…) it is by living there from day to day that you feel the fullness of her charm; that you invite her exquisite influence to sink into your spirit. The creature varies like a nervous woman (…) you desire to embrace it, to caress it, to possess it.”

Paul Signac (1863-1935), Entrance to the Grand Canal, Venice, 1905

The soft and hazy pink, lilac and yellow shades of Paul Signac’s painting “Entrance to the Grand Canal” have completely seduced me and the more I gaze at this mesmerising painting the more I feel myself becoming one with its flickering surface made in its entirety out of little dashes of colours. What a contrast; the calm, almost zen-like patience it takes to paint in this Pointilist manner, with the finished effect which is dazzling and vivacious and alive. In short, it looks effortless, but the process of creating in was not effortless. The painting, as the title suggests, shows the entrance to the Grand Canal in Venice. On the right we have the cascading row of gondolas and on the left the canal poles or ‘pali di casada’ and another gondola with a gondolier, slowly approaching its destination. A sea of yellow and blues divides the lively foreground from the dreamy background where the silhouettes of Dogana del Mar and the church Santa Maria della Salute stands against a pink and yellow sky. It appears indeed as if they are floating in the air. The water, the sky, the architecture are all but dots and dashes of pink, yellow and blue, and in the eye of the viewer they seem to be merging. There are no strict lines that divide the one from the other, and perhaps this manner of capturing Venice’s charms is the most suitable for this flimsy, illusory, watery, floating city.

Details

Paul Signac spent a lot of time in Saint-Tropez and painted many lively seascapes, but visiting Venice and staying there has proven to be an extraordinarily prolific time in his career. Signac had been reading John Ruskin’s “The Stones of Venice” and that was a further motivation to visit the famed city. During his month there, from mid April to the end of May in 1904, he painted over two hundred watercolours and he used these watercolours as inspiration for his larger oil on canvas paintings. I am pretty sure that the last watercolour in this post titled “La Salute” could have served as a basis for the “Entrance to the Grand Canal, Venice”. The watercolours are charming indeed, as you will see bellow, they are very playful, sketchy and I love that. Signac loved to sit in the gondola and sketch the view he had from that almost water-level position. He sketched tirelessly and captured the changing weather and flickering colours of the lagoon, and these watercolours are a sort of a visual diary as well, in the same manner that Delacroix had sketched during his travels to Morocco or Turner’s watercolours of sunsets, clouds, hills and castles during his travels. Signac also painted other scenes from Venice, such as the lagoon of Saint Mark. All of his paintings of seas and ports are beautiful in their hazy dreaminess, but for some reason the pink and yellow shades in the painting above are my absolute favourite.

Paul Signac, Venice, Grand Canal, 1904, watercolour

Paul Signac, Venise, San Giorgio et la Salute, 1904, watercolour

The colours, the softness, the fluidness, the mood, the hazyness and the rosyness of this painting, have all reminded me of this passage from Peter Ackroyd’s book “Venice: Pure City”:

“Venice has been called a feminine city. Henry James noted that “it is by living there from day to day that you feel the fullness of her charm; that you invite her exquisite influence to sink into your spirit. The creature varies like a nervous woman …” He then expatiates on the various “moods” of the city before reflecting on the fact that “you desire to embrace it, to caress it, to possess it.” (…) It was considered to be licentious in action and attitude. It was, after all, the city of touch, the city of sight, the city of texture. It spoke openly to the senses. It revealed itself. The presence of water is also believed to encourage sensuality. Luxury, the stock in trade of the city, represents the apotheosis of sensuous pleasure. The lovers of the world came, and still come, here. It was known to be the capital of unlimited desire and unbridled indulgence; this was considered to be an expression, like its trade and its art, of its power. Venetian conversation was known for its lubriciousness and its vulgarity. The French poet, Guillaume Apollinaire, called Venice “le sexe même de l’Europe.”

Paul Signac, Venice, 1904, watercolour

Paul Signac, Venice, La Salute, 1904, watercolour

“In poetry, and drama, Venice was often portrayed as the beloved woman, all the more charming for being constantly in peril. It could be said in Jungian terms that when the masculine identity of the city was lost at the time of its surrender to Bonaparte in 1797, it became wholly the feminine city enjoyed by exiles and tourists from the nineteenth century onwards. The journalism and literature ofthe last two centuries, for example, has included many representations of Venice as a “faded beauty.” It has been celebrated for its power to seduce the visitor, to lure him or her into its uterine embrace. The narrow and tortuous streets themselves conjured up images of erotic chase and surprise. The city was invariably represented as a female symbol, whether as the Virgin in majesty or as Venus rising from the sea.

(…) It was believed that the men of Venice were, in the words of one eighteenth-century critic, “enervated and emasculated by the Softness of the Italian Musick.” The tenderness and luxuriance of the city were considered to be corrupting. But there was also the ambiguous status of land and water, of frontier and mainland. Anyone of weak sensibility might thereby be aroused or stimulated into transgressing ordinary boundaries.“

John Singer Sargent – Riva Degli Schiavoni, Venice

John Singer Sargent, Riva Degli Schiavoni, Venice, 1904

Despite the beauty of John Singer Sargent’s oil on canvas paintings such as the wonderful “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose”, it is his watercolours that I truly adore. These watercolours have a wide range of motifs; from ladies lounging in the grass on a summer day, to scenes of Venice, to Arab women and even crocodiles. Wherever he travelled, the urge to paint watercolours followed him like a shadow. And these days, in particular, it is his watercolours of Venice I love the most. I can never decide whether I love his watercolour “Riva Degli Schiavoni” or “The Piazzetta”, both from 1904, more, but today I decided that perhaps I love the former more. “Riva Degli Schiavoni”, as the title reveals, shows The Riva Degli Schiavoni, a monumental Venetian waterfront in the sestiere of Castello named after the Slavic merchants from Dalmatia which brought cargo from the other side of the Adriatic sea. From 1420 to 1797 most of Dalmatia was under rule of the Republic of Venice and it is not surprising then that some other landmarks in Venice carry the “Schiavoni” in their name; the early Slav merchants such as Palazzo Schiavoni, and Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, to name a few. Still, it is clear that Singer Sargent wasn’t lost in the dreams of the past while he was sketching this wonderful watercolour, the ardour of the blues, their richness against the rough blackness of the gondolas, it is clear that he was right then and there, sketching feverishly, not being stingy with his use of the rich, vibrant blues. The sketchiness brings liveliness and immediacy that paintings by Canaletto, as interesting as they are, just cannot bring. While Canaletto laboured over the precise architectural details, Sargent allowed his brush to roam the paper freely because for him the details were of secondary importance while the task of capturing the mood of the place took precedence.

John Singer Sargent, The Piazzetta, Venice, 1904

From Peter Ackroyd’s book “Venice: Pure City”:

“The most obvious sign of continuity is also the most familiar. The gondolas have been plying the waterways of the city for a thousand years, with only the smallest modifications in shape and appearance. (…) The gondolas are first mentioned in a document at the end of the eleventh century, although they must have been in existence for many decades before that date. (…)  There were ten thousand gondolas in the sixteenth century, many of them festooned with ornaments and carvings. This encouraged displays of showmanship and rivalry among the wealthier Venetians, who were allowed few opportunities of conspicuous consumption in public. Such a spirit was of course to be resisted by a Venetian state that curbed individualism of any sort in the name of collective brotherhood. So the ornamentation was, in a decree of 1562, forbidden.

John Singer Sargent, Gondoliers’ Siesta, 1904, watercolour

That is why the gondolas became black. Even though black was not considered by the Venetians to be an unfavourable colour, the gondolas ever since have regularly been seen as floating coffins. Shelley compared them to moths that have struggled out of the chrysalis of a coffin. James Fenimore Cooper felt that he was riding in a hearse. Wagner, fearful in a time of cholera, had to force himself to board one. Goethe called it a capacious bier. And Byron saw it:

Just like a coffin clapt in a canoe,
Where none can make out what you say or do.

Byron is here describing the amours that might or might not take place in the private space of the cabin. The gondolier penetrating the interior canals of the city has also been given a phallic importance, so that in Venice sex and death are once more conflated. Henry James wrote of the experience that “each dim recognition and obscure arrest is a possible throb of your sense of being floated to your doom.…” A ride on a gondola can prompt some very powerful instincts.“

John Singer Sargent, A Bridge and Campanile, Venice, 1902-4, watercolor over black chalk on thick wove paper

John Singer Sargent, Venice, 1903, watercolour

John Singer Sargent, Scuola di San Rocco, c. 1903, watercolour on paper

Kees Van Dongen – La Casati in Venice: The Pretty Lies, The Ugly Truth

“The image in the mirror may in some sense be a guarantee of identity and of wholeness. The root of narcissism lies in anxiety, and the fear of fragmentation, which may be assuaged by the sight of the reflection. (…) Venice always associated itself with the Virgin. But of course the image in the mirror is a false self; it is hard, abstract and elusive. It has been said that the Venetians are always aware of the image of themselves. They were once masters of the display and the masquerade. They were always acting.”

(Peter Ackroyd, Venice: Pure City)

Kees Van Dongen, La Casati, 1918

Dutch Fauvist painter Kees van Dongen once famously exclaimed that “painting was the most beautiful of all lies”, and it seems very fitting then to continue with his notion of painting being a lie and write about this beautiful portrait called “La Casati” from 1918. As the title suggests, the portrait shows the rich Italian heiress Luisa Casati who lived a life rich with adventures, scandals, depts, eccentricities and – art. Not that she was an artist, but she lived her life as if it were a work of art and, as wondrous a work of art as her life indeed was, it needed to be captured in paintings and photographs. Not only did Casati commision her portraits, but also many artists, painters and poets were flying around her as moths around a candle, drawn irresistibly to her legendary persona and intense individualism. Casati’s face, even in photographs, is a kind of dramatic face that one doesn’t forget too soon and I guess, in that regard, van Dongen’s portrait is realistic. Apart from the face perhaps, the portrait isn’t realistic at all, the figures are in fact very stylised and the colours are nonmimetic, far too intense and vibrant, though typical for Kees van Dongen’s Fauvist style. Still, even on a deeper layer it is ‘realistic’ because Luisa Casati’s extravagant persona and the nocturnal, fantasy city of Venice have a lot in common. Casati lived in Venice, from 1910 to 1920, at the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, on Grand Canal in Venice.

Even when she left the city, the city stayed inside of her because the two, Luisa and Venice, are as two sides of the same coin in terms of character; both posess the watery fluidity and bluntly refuse to be defined or define themselves, both are eccentric, self-obsessed narcissists with a fetish for deception and self-deception through lies and masquerade, anxiously putting on false facades, as is indeed typical for Venetian architecture, and layers and layers of rouge, red lipstick, mascara, feather boas, jewels and feathers, so that the final facade is so rich with layers which are impossible to peel off and get to the core. Luisa, like the waters and canals of Venice, is capricious and changeable. Garish red hair, large black eyes like bottomless abysses, unhealthy absinth-greenish complexion, thin and elongated figure, midnight blue formless, fluid gown. The scene at once nocturnal and Venetian, and yet out of time and place. Nothing about it seems realistic or accurate, and Kees van Dongen for one never strived to capture anything realistically, if painting is lying, then he lied beautifully. He would always put a special emphasis on the woman’s figure, and he would exaggerate it, elongate it purposefully, and the clients loved it.

Here is something from Peter Ackroyd’s book “Venice: Pure City” which I found particularly striking:

“But of course water is the life and breath of Venice’s being in quite another sense. Venice is like a hydropic body filled with water, where each part is penetrated by another. Water is the sole means of public transport. It is a miracle of fluid life. Everything in Venice is to be seen in relation to its watery form. The water enters the life of the people. They are “fluid”; they seem to resist clarity and precision. (…) In myth and folklore water has always been associated with eyes, and with the healing of eyes. Is it any wonder, then, that Venice is the most visually seductive of all the cities of the world?

The endless presence of water also breeds anxiety. Water is unsettling. You must be more alert and watchful in your perambulations. Everything shifts. There is a sense of otherness. The often black or viscous dark green water looks cold. It cannot be drunk. It is shapeless. It has depth but no mass. (…) But if water is the image of the unconscious life, it thereby harbours strange visions and desires. The close affiliation of Venice and water encourages sexual desire; it has been said to loosen the muscles, by human imitation of its flow, and to enervate the blood. Yet Venice reflects upon its own reflection in the water. It has been locked in that deep gaze for many centuries. So there has been a continuing association between Venice and the mirror.

(…) The image in the mirror may in some sense be a guarantee of identity and of wholeness. The root of narcissism lies in anxiety, and the fear of fragmentation, which may be assuaged by the sight of the reflection. The Virgin Mary, in the Book of Wisdom, is lauded as “a spotless mirror of God”; Venice always associated itself with the Virgin. But of course the image in the mirror is a false self; it is hard, abstract and elusive. It has been said that the Venetians are always aware of the image of themselves. They were once masters of the display and the masquerade. They were always acting. (…) It is a place of doubleness, and perhaps therefore of duplicity and double standards. (…) The reflection is delightful because it seems to be as substantial and as lively as that which is reflected. When you look down upon the water, Venice seems to have no foundations except for reflections. Only its reflections are visible. Venice and Venice’s image are inseparable. In truth there are two cities, which exist only in the act of being seen.”

Edmund Dulac, The Carnival, St Marks, Venice, n.d.

The blueness is absolutely intoxicating to me at the moment and I crave it the same way Elizabeth Siddal craved laudanum; in the blue waters of John Singer Sargent’s watercolours of Venice, in Klimt’s blue dress of Emilie Floge, in mosaics of Galla Placidia, in blue vases of Odilon Redon, in the blueness of Persian ceramics and interiors, blue of Edmund Dulac’s nocturnal Oriental fairy tale scenes, in Claude Monet’s blue waters beneath water lilies, and now, as I am gazing at this portrait by Kees van Dongen, I feel the blueness and the mystery seeping out of the painting and colouring my soul. I can feel the water, its depth and mystery, its scent, its constant movement, its secrecy. Everything in the painting is bathed in blueness; the background, the waters, the gondola and the gondolier, and even Luisa is dressed in a dress of midnight blue. There is so much intense blueness that it feels not as merely a nocturnal scene, but as a fantasy scene. Luisa is sailing the waters and threading the paths of her dreams.

Japonism in Claude Monet’s “On the Boat”

Claude Monet, On the Boat, 1887

Japanese artists regularly used all sorts of unusual perspectives and compositions to enrich the artwork and excite the viewer. In ukiyo-e prints we can often see a figure or an object cut out in a strange way, but our eye instantly fills in the part that is missing, we are instantly engaged and we build the rest of the scene with our imagination. This artistic technique was normal in the art of Far East but was perceived as something most unusual and outrageous in European art circles. German painter Franz von Lenbach in particular expressed his intense dislike of the cut-off technique, he wrote: “The Impressionists – those choppers-off of necks and heads – despise the closed form of the human body which has been taught to us by the Old Masters.” In retrospective it is almost amusing how such a little thing would be so provocative. The train of art was moving fast, vanishing in a cloud of smoke and Franz von Lenbach was still on the train station, completely stuck in the dusty, old and boring art routines. The western art traditions favoured symmetry and harmony and the ideal placement of the object portrayed was the centre of the painting. More conventional nineteenth century painters such as Alexandre Cabanel or Adolphe William Bouguereau followed this traditional composition but the Impressionists, and the art movements that followed, were a rebellious bunch who liked to do things their way and didn’t care about anyone else’s approval or praise.

Mizuno Toshikata, 36 Beauties – Viewing Snow, 1891

One of the most popular cut-off objects in the last nineteenth century and early twentieth century art was the boat and we can find many interesting examples of this in the art of the Impressionists such as Claude Monet, Edouard Manet and Berthe Morisot, amongst others. A beautiful example of this is Monet’s painting “On the Boat” from 1887. The dreaminess of the painting is almost unbearable, overwhelming to say the least. Gazing at those soft, airy shades of blue feels like gazing at the clouds on a lovely spring day – ethereal. The rich colouration of the water surface and the reflection of the two figures in the water is splendid. The atmosphere is beautifully conveyed. Two ladies seen sitting in the boat in the middle of the river Epte are Suzanne and Blanche, the daughters of Mrs Hoschedé.

They are dressed in white gowns but it seems the colour of the river is reflected on the dresses and vice versa. The boat is cut-off but as you can see, this composition works beautifully because we don’t need to see the whole boat for the scene to be beautiful and also, this cut-off composition may sound harsh and dynamic but it can actually work well in serene scenes such as this one. In a way it almost looks like a dreamy film scene, as if the camera is just capturing the boat slowly gliding down the river. It feels like a moment captured in time, rather than a staged scene. Bellow you can see other examples of cut-off boats which are interesting but not as dreamy; Monet used darker shades of green and blues in those paintings and the white dresses of the girls contrasts more strongly with the colour of the surrounding nature.

Also, I’ve chosen a few examples of cut-off boats in ukiyo-e prints and, as you can see from the dates, some date back to the eighteenth century and some were created even after Monet’s paintings which shows that Monet and the Impressionist bunch were not only inspired by the Japanese art of the past but that both the artists of the West and of the East were creating exciting new artworks at the same time. Scenes of two lovers in a boat and Ariko weeping are particularly lovely to me. These examples all show that an ordinary object such as a boat can be visually exciting if seen and portrayed in a new and different way; it’s all about how something is painted and now what is painted, I feel.

Claude Monet, The Pink Skiff, Boating on the Epte, 1887

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, Ariko weeps as her boat drifts in the moonlight, Print 38 from A Hundred Aspects of the Moon, 1886

Claude Monet, In Norway The Boat at Giverny, 1887

Okumura, Masanobu, Two Lovers in a Boat, 1742

Berthe Morisot, Summer’s Day, 1879