Sedef's Corner is One

Today is the first year anniversary of Sedef's Corner.  Although I had started the blog as a place to store and publish my writings, I had no idea where I wanted to go with it.  I had been writing for the past four years, but without an outlet except the graciousness of my friends.  I was writing because I just had to and this blog became a great place to keep doing it.

What prompted me to put serious time and effort into it was a book I read by Rita Golden Gelman - "Tales of a Female Nomad- Living at Large in the World."  Through the message I garnered from her book, on May 29th 2010, I finally took the courageous step and said, "this is how I want to live my life."  Thorough the course of the past year, as life went on one day at a time, I tried to share my experiences, thoughts and knowledge... basically all the things I love, right here.

There was no one theme in the beginning except for my experiences, but slowly as I let things happen, this became a place where I started to share my knowledge from one of my biggest passions - Art History.  And today, I feel Sedef's Corner has finally come into its own as a blog about Art and the History of Art.  I am and always will be an ardent lover of art and I hope to continue my journey into the past as well as the present of this enchanting world.  From now on, this will be my platform for all that I find interesting about the creative process.

I will have to start another blog for my traveling tales... Hope to see you there as well...

Edgar Degas - Interior

Edgar Degas, Interior, 1868-1869
(Philadelphia Museum of Art)

I finally got a chance to see one of the most intriguing paintings we studied in Impressionism this semester, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Friday evening.  This painting that is all about ambiguity is incredibly fascinating because it can be read as a critique about searching for the narrative in reading and experiencing paintings .  Although it seems to be a painting loaded with meaning, there are no clear clues or answers to any of the questions we typically ask of a painting such as this.

It is the scene of a starkly decorated room that seems to be lacking the personal effects that would be seen in a bedroom of this period inhabited by a gentleman and a partly clad woman.   The room contains a single bed, feminine wallpaper, a dresser with a map hanging over it and a table in the middle with an open sewing box, the silk interior illuminated by the lamp causing our eye to focus on it as the center of attention.  While the gentleman has only removed his hat and placed it on the dresser, the woman is in her undergarments with her corset strewn across the floor by the man.  We know he is of the bourgeois class due to his clothes but have no idea to her social status.  Part of the confusion is due to the mixing up of gender specific objects with their owners.  Typically the woman's clothing would be near her and the clothing or objects relating to the man would be near him reinforcing each gender's identities.  In this painting, Degas has depicted the woman's garments on the bed and the floor near the man while his top hat and the map on the wall (a very male object since they would be the one's who would go exploring the world) are all the way on the other side of the room closer to the woman.

The sewing box would refer to a woman's purity, virginity and doing her duty; in this painting she has set down her sewing which may be a sign of her loosing her virginity, or she could just be a seamstress.  At this time, there was consistent association in poetry and prose between sewing or embroidery and artifice.1 Degas who was famously known for saying 'Art is vice. You don't marry it, you rape it.  Whoever says art says artifice' could be using the sewing box to reinforce this issue.

The single bed, in the room, perfectly made up, might be pointing to this being her room as someone with a position in his employ.  The room itself seems like a domestic interior but it could also be a hotel room because of its impersonal decor. In which case they could be an unmarried couple having an assignation or a couple who is traveling.  The artist has not given us specific enough clues to figure out the relationship between the couple or the relevance of the interior they are standing in.

The dramatic lighting and the use of chiaroscuro as well as the tilted perspective of the room all add to the theatricality of this painting. The visual distortion of spaces and figural proportions in order to achieve a more expressive effect was called "a perspective of feeling" by Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, who was well known in Degas' circle.2  Degas' distorted perspective of the room heightens the emotional resonance in the painting.

Although the man which is the dominant figure whose shadow looms up and above, is aiming his controlling male gaze in the woman's direction, there is nothing in his look or casual stance that suggests any kind of a violent commentary.  Even though we can't see the expression on the woman's face, she has turned away from him in such a way that the discord between the two figures becomes obvious. There was a belief at this time that by looking at a person's physiognomy, you could tell about his nature.  Degas did paint the male protagonist's ears pointy referring to the physiognomy of a satyr, which was a man with an insatiable appetite for sex.  The sexual undertones are present in the painting without a certain narrative.

This painting was titled 'the Rape'  after it's first public showing 35 years after it was painted.  Some art historians interpreted it as a literary work, associated with Emile Zola's Therese Raquin.   But according to Susan Sidlauskas in her essay "Resisting Narrative:  The Problem of Edgar Degas's Interior" if there was a tale in Interior, Degas twisted it beyond recognition.3


Edgar Degas did not exhibit this painting and kept it in his possession until 1904 when he sold it at Galerie  Durand-Ruel.  No one seems to know why he painted such a scene or what he was trying to say but the painting does contain elements Degas deemed important. The issue of disconnect, Degas' association of sexuality and art with artifice, incorporating "a perspective of feeling", are all used to great effect in Interior, helping to further defy any kind of a logical explanation for this puzzling painting.   It seems to have a story that wants to be told but Degas refuses to give us the narrative, challenging us in our encounter with the visual phenomena set before us.


1  Susan Sidlauskas, Resisting Narrative:  The Problem of Edgar Degas's Interior, The Art Bulletin December 1993, Volume LXXV number 4, 691
2  Ibid., 686
3  Ibid., 676

Favorites from the Art Institute of Chicago - European Art before 1900

During my stay in Chicago back in March, I had a wonderful opportunity to visit the Art Institute of Chicago.  The following are the works and their museum labels that drew my attention in the galleries of European Art before 1900.  Please keep in mind this is a very personal tour of the works of art that appealed to me, I found interesting or relevant.

Prints And Drawings Gallery 216 A

Rosalba Carriera

Italian, 1675-1757

A Young Lady with a Parrot, c. 1730

Pastel on blue laid paper, mounted to laminated paper board

600 x 500 mm

(Although this is a small work, I felt I had to put it up in a bigger size in order to do it justice)

In 1720 the great financier and collector Pierre Crozat persuaded the renowned Venetian pastelist Rosalba Carriera to visit him in Paris. Her one-year stay carried her immediate admission to the French Academy and the reputation of having brought the art of pastel portraiture to France.  this vivacious pastel demonstrates the style and techniques for which Carriera was famous; exquisite details of flowers, lace, and jewelery, executed with wet chalk; a vaporous hint of diaphanous materials, created in a dry manner; and the poised yet piquant suggestiveness of the young woman's pose, which captures the spirit of the Rococo as it would develop in France.

Joseph Wright of Derby

English, 1734-1797

Self-Portrait in a Fur Cap, 1765/68

Monochrome pastel (grisaille) on blue-gray laid paper

425 x 295 mm

Joseph Wright was a leading figure in support of the development of the portrait as a central genre in 18th-century England.  Influenced by the mezzotints of his contemporary Thomas Frye, he produced a number of dramatically lit self-portraits, both in oil and in monochrome pastel (grisaille), during the mid-1760s.  In this example, Wright used an exotic black hat and nocturnal lighting to evoke the melancholic tradition of portraiture.  Indeed, he seems to have delighted in his talent for evoking mood through light effects, depicting himself in the role of the deeply pensive artist.

Medieval to  Modern European Painting and Sculpture 

Gallery 216

Jean-Honoré Fragonard

French, 1732–1806

Portrait of a Man, 1768/70

Oil on canvas

80.3 x 64.7 cm (31 5/8 x 25 1/2")

Best known as a painter of light-hearted, amorous scenes, Jean-Honore Fragonard also occasionally turned his hand to history painting and portraits.  This canvas belongs to a group of at least 15 works known as "figures of fantasy," which are related by their sketchlike quality and fanciful presentation.  Mainly depicting Fragonard's friends, and rapidly executed to demonstrate his technical skill, these paintings depaerted radically from formal portrait tradition, adapting costumes and poses from earlier centuries in a manner that displayed the artist's virtuosity.  According to a contemporary account, Fragonard executed such works "in one fell swoop for a louis[d'or (a gold coin)]."

Medieval to  Modern European Painting and Sculpture 

Gallery 218

Sir Joshua Reynolds

English, 1723–1792

Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces, 1763–65

Oil on canvas

95 1/2 x 59 3/4 in. (242.6 x 151.5 cm)

As the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts, Sir Joshua Reynolds urged his fellow artists to paint edifying subjects based on the art of antiquity and the Renaissance.  Since he made his living largely as a fashionable portrait painter, he developed a grand style that flattered his sitters by giving them classical attributes and poses.  Here the Three Graces seem to be looking favorably upon Lady Sarah, who is dressed in a vaguely classical robe. Beautiful and well connected, she attracted the attention of the future King George III shortly before he ascended the throne.  He was persuaded not to marry an Englishwoman, however, and instead made a sensible and happy match with a German princess.  Lady Sarah's marriage to Sir Charles Bunbury was not so fortunate.

Medieval to  Modern European Painting and Sculpture 

Gallery 219

Joseph Wright of Derby

British, 1734-1797

The Gulf of Salerno, 1783/85

Oil on canvas

16 3/8 x 23 3/8 in. (41.6 x 59.4 cm)

Inscribed on original stretcher: Gulf of Salerno painted by Jos. Wright/exhibited 1785

Henry Fuseli  

British, 1741-1825

Sketch for "Oath on the Rütli," Female Figure (verso), 1779/81; 1785/90 (verso)
Oil on canvas

stretcher: 29 15/16 x 26 9/16 in. (76 x 67.5 cm); irregular edges of the original canvas: 28 5/8 x 22 3/4 in. (72.7 x 57.8 cm); edges of the Oath on the Rütli image: 25 5/8 x 21 3/8 in. (65.1 x 54.3 cm)

Although Henry Fuseli spent most of his career in England, he was born Johann Heinrich Fussli in Zurich, a city that fostered early Romantic ideas.  His first important commission was for the large painting The Oath on the Rutli in the city hall of Zurich. This sketch is a preliminary study for that work.  It depicts the oath sworn on the Rutli meadow in 1292 by representatives of three Swiss cantons (territories) against the ambitions of their Habsburg overlords.  Fuseli's dynamic, elongated figures, which were strongly influenced by Mannerist art, are less an accurate representation of the historical past than they are an expression of the universal desire for freedom.

Medieval to  Modern European Painting and Sculpture 

Gallery 219 A

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes
Spanish, 1746-1828

Winter Scene, c. 1786

Oil on canvas
13 1/2 x 14 in. (34.3 x 35.6 cm)

Medieval to  Modern European Painting and Sculpture 

Gallery 220 A

Auguste Préault
French, 1809-1879

Le Silence, 1842/43

Plaster
Diameter: 40 cm (15 3/4 in.)

The roundel known as Le silence was created for the tomb of Jacob Robles (1782-1842) in the Jewish section of the Parisian cemetery Pere-Lachaise.  Abandoning traditional funerary imagery, Auguste Preault fashioned an enigmatic and mysterious evocation of death in this skeletal face, which is shrouded in drapery with a finger touching its lips.  In part, the image drew upon the traditional monastic symbol for silence in the cloisters, but here the sculptor also conveyed a sense of ambiguity by leaving open whether the figure is living or dead.  When Preault exhibited a bronze cast of Le silence in 1849, it was hailed as a "one of the representative works of modern art" and became an icon of Romanticism.

Medieval to  Modern European Painting and Sculpture 

Gallery   220 

Jacques Louis David
French, 1748–1825

Madame de Pastoret and Her Son, mid-1791/mid-1792

Oil on canvas
129.8 x 96.6 cm (51 1/8 x 38 in.)

This portrait of Madame de Pastoret, begun in 1791 by Jacques Louis David in the midst of theFrench Revolution, reflects the changing image of the aristocracy during this turbulent period. Rejecting the sumptuous clothing and stately environment that many aristocrats had preferred in the past, Adelaide de Pastoret appears instead as a modest image of maternal virtue, with unpowdered hair and an informal white cotton morning dress. The youthful mother looks up warmly at the viewer, as if her sewing has just been interrupted. The crib at her left suggests that she raised her son, Amédée David, at home rather than send him away to a wet nurse, a customary practice at the time. The top of her gown is unbuttoned, implying that she breastfed her son, a practice that had recently gained acceptance among upper-class women. Madame de Pastoret was known for her interest in child rearing: she was an active philanthropist and the founder of the first daycare system in Paris. 

Jacques Louis David was one of the most influential artists working in the Neoclassical style at the turn of the 19th century, and he often put his art in the service of contemporary politics. David was, at the time he painted this work, an ardent revolutionary and antiroyalist. The political differences between David and Adelaide’s husband, the Marquis de Pastoret, who was a staunchroyalist, may explain why this painting remained unfinished. The loose brushwork of the background and Adelaide’s hair reveal the initial paint layers before the artist applied the more highly finished final layers that are typical of his work. The marquis refused the portrait during the artist’s lifetime, and it was not until after David’s death that Adelaide’s son purchased the work.

Joseph Mallord William Turner

English, 1775-1851

Valley of Aosta: Snowstorm, Avalanche, and Thunderstorm, 1836/37

Oil on canvas

36 1/4 x 48 in. (92.2 x 123 cm)

Turner, "the painter of light", was the master of light and atmosphere decades before Monet.  As a matter of fact, it is strongly argued that Monet was influenced by Turner after seeing his works during his stay in London at the time of the Franco-Prussian war.  Turner is such an interesting character as well as an innovative artist that I think I will probably do a post on him specifically in the future.  This space or the information they had on this work does not do him justice.

John Constable  

English, 1776-1837

Stoke-by-Nayland, 1836

Oil on canvas

49 5/8 x 66 1/2 in. (126 x 169 cm)

This large dramatic landscape by John Constable reveals the artist’s appreciation for rural life. Although he lived in London for many years, Constable maintained a lifelong fondness for the landscapes of the English countryside in which he spent his childhood. This painting is based upon sketches the artist made while visiting an aunt in Stoke-by-Nayland, a small farming town a few miles from his native village of Suffolk. Like many other painters of the time, Constable would first make open-air sketches at a specific site and then produce finished works in the studio. This particular painting, however, is considered unfinished. Depicting an early summer morning, the scene features lush greenery that sparkles with the dampness of a light summer rain. Emphasis on the profusion of water reinforces the fertility of the land. Amidst the overwhelming beauty of the surroundings, the people and animals at work on this farm seem small. The rough surface is largely the result of Constable’s use of a palette knife to apply pigment, and the vigorous marks visible in the paint illustrate the excitement with which the artist composed the scene. 

Although frequently associated with the Romantic movement, Constable strove to depict nature with more careful observation from life than his contemporaries. His ability to render the sense of direct experience and his bold brushwork inspired French contemporaries such as Eugène Delacroix and was an inspiration for artists of the Barbizon school and Impressionistmovement.

Gustave Courbet

French, 1819-1877

The Valley of Les Puits-Noir, 1868

Oil on canvas

43 3/4 x 54 1/4 in. (111.1 x 137.8 cm)

Inscribed lower right: G. Courbet '68

Some works of art should definitely be seen in person, and this is one of them.  Nothing of its magic, its appeal comes through in this image.  I decided to include my own photo of it as well since the one from the museum's website is so dissatisfactory.  This was one of the first paintings that caught my eye on my first visit.

Gustave Courbet

French, 1819-1877

Mère Grégoire, 1855 and 1857/59

Oil on canvas

50 3/4 x 38 3/8 in. (129 x 97.5 cm)

Mère Grégoire is a character from a popular song written in 1820 by French lyricist Pierre Jean Béranger. As described by Béranger, she was the portly proprietress of a Parisian brothel. Here, Courbet represents the madame behind a counter, negotiating with an unseen client. With one hand, she offers a tri-colored flower, a symbol of love, and possibly an allusion to French Republicanpolitics. (The red, white, and blue of the flower match the colors of the French flag.) Her other hand, open and expectant of payment, rests on a ledger. The madame will sell the “flower” for money and then ring the small bell to call over a female companion for the client.

Courbet began painting Mère Grégoire in 1855. At the time, the painting was only a small portrait of a woman’s head. In the following years, Courbet gradually enlarged the composition to include the half-length figure and the interior setting. In choosing to depict Mère Grégoire, Courbet aligned himself with the revolutionary beliefs of the poet Béranger and others of his generation, for whom Mère Grégoire represented the rights to freedom in love and life that were forbidden under the repressive French government of Napoleon III’s Second Empire (1852–1875). Courbet’s Mère Grégoire serves as an example of Realism because it depicts a common woman, a madame no less, as its subject, with no attempt to embellish or idealize her appearance or conceal her occupation. As the artist bluntly noted in his remarks on Realist philosophy, “The art of painting can consist only in the representation of objects visible and tangible to the painter.” Courbet’s image is uncompromising: the common subject is represented through somber tones and roughly applied pigment, often laid down by the artist with a palette knife.

I think this might be a good place to stop for now.  There is so much more that I will have to post later.  All the information is from the gallery labels and Art Institute's websites.  I am including the links below. I hope you enjoy these as much as I did.

http://www.artic.edu/pathfinder/php/pathfinder.php (the museum floor plan)

http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections (museum's website)

http://www.artic.edu/artaccess/AA_Rococo/index.shtml (art access- a more detailed examination of some of the works)

The Dance of Life & The Waltz

Edvard Munch, The Dance of Life,(Part of  Frieze of Life Series) 1899-1900
(National Gallery, Oslo)

Munch saw dancing as an act of love and procreation.  The Dance of Life, that is the centerpiece of his Frieze of Life series, encompasses the three stages of a woman's life - youth, maturity, old age.  The girl with the white dress with golden hair, standing by a flower represents innocence, the mature woman in the middle wearing a red dress and dancing with a man represents passion and the self-contained black clad woman on the right looking on to the dancing couple represents experience while in the background, other couples whirl around in the dance of life.  The scene takes place on Asgardstrand shore in Norway, the image of the moon and its shadow which is Munch's invention, drawing the eye to the background.

This work is also an autobiographical work, because the couple dancing in the middle is  Munch and Mrs. Heiberg, his love, while the two figures on the left and right are Tulla Larsen, another one of his lovers who married someone else.  He and his lover are almost united into one figure; her hair comes down and while her skirt also echoes the motion, it goes all around them as a red outline surrounding and encompassing them completely.  They are living in their moment and no one can break into it.  She actually didn't have such long hair but Munch used women's hair as a surrounding and uniting element in his paintings.

In order to make it more truthful, he has ravaged the surface of the painting.  He did not want the surface of the painting to look fine. This brought the whole scene into reality.

Camille Claudel, The Waltz, 1895
(Musee Rodin, Paris)

Artists at the end of the 19th century were trying to represent love, lovemaking, capturing emotion, conveying the idea of two bodies merging into one in a dance which was like love making.  One of the most beautiful works of art representing this idea is The Waltz by Camille Claudel.  She has captured the perfect rhythm of two souls which is so full of drama and emotion. Their hands intertwined, lost in the moment, lost in each other. Claudel, the woman whose name is forgotten and never got the recognition she deserved as an artist because she was always overshadowed by her great love, Rodin.  She actually wanted to make this out of marble but she couldn't afford the materials.  She showed it to the ministry of culture with hopes of getting a commission but the idea of a couple intertwined completely naked (they were nude at first) was unspeakable and the fact that the sculptor was a woman only added insult to injury.  She later covered them with her skirt, obscuring all the offending parts of their bodies, but she still didn't get the commission.  It was cast in bronze later by a wealthy gentleman.  The woman who made this graceful, elegant sculpture was only referred to as a copyist of Rodin.

Munch sought to capture emotional turmoil in his work which he called the Modern Life of the Soul.  He objectified his own personal experience, transferring it to an extensive statement about the human condition and contemporary society.  Camille Claudel, on the other hand, captured human emotions so poetically, giving  a different interpretation to the dance of life, conveying all that is beautiful and wonderful in a loving relationship.

Edvard Munch - Evening Melancholy I

"In a strongly emotional state of mind, a landscape will have a particular effect on one.  By portraying this landscape, one will produce a painting which is effected by one's mood.  The mood is the main thing, nature is simply the means."
                                                                             - Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch, Evening Melancholy I, 1896 (color woodcut)

Munch took part in the decorative craze that was going on especially in France at the end of the 19th century.  He conceived a group of 22 paintings that he worked on as a group like Monet's series paintings, hoping to sell them together.  He wanted it to be a picture of life with a Nordic theme. Life, Love, Fear, Death, Melancholy.  Wanting to give something back to humanity, Munch decided to paint feelings, not a photograph of nature, or a pretty picture to hang in a drawing room.

Emotion and anxiety, all those feelings that have importance for human beings were important to Munch and in order to emphasize the aura of intense emotion he wanted to evoke, he would use shadows and rings of color around his figures. Munch worked on various different techniques to create the images of his paintings with different mediums to find the affect different materials would have on the meaning of his work.

Munch taught himself printmaking and created his own prints. He would take the whole and cut it into 3 jigsaw woodcut pieces which would aid him and make the multicolor printmaking process easier.  He experimented a lot with reproducing prints of his paintings which allowed him more flexibility and the different materials provided opportunities for experimentation and innovation.

Like Gauguin, Munch used printmaking to aid the character of his art.  He liked the little imperfections saying it made the work more real, more sincere.  The natural grain of the wood would be part of the element of design and technique.  Gauguin used the 10 woodblock prints for his journal/novel from Tahiti, Noa Noa,  to aid him in giving his audience the essence of the place.  Munch used the different woodcut prints to explore the essence of human emotions.

In Melancholy I, Munch depicts his friend Jappe Nilssen, sitting by a lone, desolate shoreline, in deep thought.  His shoulders are stooped, his expression grim, he seems to be looking into the depths of the water. He is a dark figure alone on a dark landscape.  The red of the sky could be indicative of his desire to have someone to love in his life.  When we compare this image to Gauguin's Nave Nave Fenua (Delightful land) we can see the distinct difference between the two artist, how they looked at life and their environment.  Gauguin wants to represent to us this delightful land full of happy, native women where life is primitive and natural while Munch is showing us the anxiety that is part of the human condition in a modern world.

Edvard Munch - Madonna

Edvard Munch, Madonna, lithograph and woodcut, 1892-1902
(Museum of Modern Art, New York)

This lithograph of a mysterious and erotic woman with moonlight cast across her face is titled Madonna.  Munch has taken a traditional religious icon and represented her as a passionate, sexual woman.  She looks as if she is in the throes of ecstasy.  This is actually a representation of Munch's conflicting ideas about women as dangerous seductress as well as the givers of life.  She is surrounded by a red frame, the color of passion and life.  The color red combined with forms resembling sperm floating on the frame is underscoring the idea of life-giving.  For Munch life and death always went hand in hand, there is a dead fetus on the bottom of the frame presenting this idea.

Paul Gauguin, Hail Mary, 1891
(Metropolitan Museum of Art)

When  he was in Paris, Munch was enthralled by Paul Gauguin's work.  Gauguin was also doing biblical images around this time and  he was obsessed with Eve.  In Hail Mary he reworked the western concept of Mary with the symbols of another culture.  Gauguin's Mary was brown and wearing a red pareu, while an angle with yellow wings is presenting the Madonna and Child to two half naked Tahitian women in western style prayer poses.  In the lush setting, exotic fruits are laid out at the bottom of the picture, recalling an altar.
Similar to Gauguin, Munch is reworking the theme of the Madonna here, in his own visual vocabulary.  While the primitive was Gauguin's obsession, Munch was interested in sex, life and death.

By representing the dead fetus, he might also be tipping his hat to the French Symbolists because he wanted to show these paintings in Paris.  There was an obsession with degeneration of society and depopulation in France at this time. The French Symbolists were also depicting dead fetus' because of the beginnings of the feminist movement and women having less babies, society was developing a fear concerning the drop in the birth rate and abortion.  On the one hand there is woman as seductress and on the other the symbol of death - life and death going hand in hand together in art as well as society's conscious.

Edvard Munch - Self-Portrait with Cigarette

"Sickness and insanity were the black angels that guarded my cradle."
                                                                    - Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch, Self-Portrait with Cigarette, 1895
(National Gallery, Oslo, Norway)

Edvard Munch, a Norwegian Symbolist, was obsessed with sickness and death.  He lost his mother when he was five and then his favorite sister and his brother, all to tuberculosis. But this was not exceptional since health problems were rampant at this time and people thought it was due to living in cities where the air was not clean.  Munch, as an adult, had acute anxiety and depression and even had to be institutionalized.

After studying art in Oslo and not getting the response he wanted to his first show, he went to Paris to learn to draw on a fellowship from the government.   He had to return home after a very brief stay because his father died. Although he traveled, he lived in Germany for the rest of his life.  Munch had some very tumultuous relationships, never got married or had any children.

Munch worked on several self-portraits to explore his mood and sense of self.  In Self-Portrait with a Cigarette, he portrayed himself almost being subsumed by a purple cloud of smoke, giving the impression that he had been smoking for sometime.  The smoke also heightens the expressive effect of his hand and face. He has painted yellow highlights on his face and hand as well as red veins popping on his hand giving him an overall sickly appearance.  Because he put so many different things in his paints, how he treated the surface of the canvas and the drippings at the bottom, this painting almost has the appearance of a water color. He stares out, his eyes wide and intense, with his hand blocking the progress of the viewer into the picture, protecting himself.  He almost looks startled, questioning, maybe a little surprised at himself or someone who is watching him.  This is a very radical image because smoking a cigarette was not the typical way artists depicted themselves.

Munch is actually proclaiming his association with the commonly accepted concepts of Decadence and Bohemianism  in the 1890's in Self-Portrait with Cigarette. Decadence was a Parisian literary movement from the 1870's that suggested the exploration of the self in art as opposed to the naturalistic narrative that dealt with social issues- a rhetoric of moral deformity as a source of artistic redemption.  Bohemianism was the lifestyle of the marginal, non-traditional, like-minded artists and writers who promoted a dissent from the prevailing middle-class modes of behavior, and the cafe which was served as the social setting for this.1  

When he showed this painting along with a group of others, critics were so appalled that they said this was the work of a sick mind that could potentially corrupt young minds.  Scharffenberg, a 26 year old medical student, tried to scientifically prove a direct link between Munch's art and the illnesses in his family. Munch was not bothered by this, in fact he considered sickness a positive for creativity because it suggested that the aesthetic imagination could exceed the boundaries set by a rational mind and provided the flexibility for the artist's creative abilities to come thorough.  He insisted that illness and anxiety were central to his work. In 19th century there was a well established connection between artistic creativity and illness.

There was also a social class related issue to smoking, because cigarettes communicated that its user was someone outside of middle class boundaries and or someone with pretensions to working class status.  During his early adulthood, one of the ideals of Munch and his circle of friends from 'Kristiania (present day Oslo) Boheme' was the destruction of such boundaries; cigarettes and alcohol were the signs of their bohemian cafe persona.2


Norwegian critic Andreas Aubert identified Munch, as "one of the children of a refined, over civilized age," affected with the condition of neurasthenia, a nervous disorder.  Munch embraced this idea because this condition made the person have more sensitivity to the world around him so he could portray the world differently.3


With the iconography of this image, Munch is referencing marginality, dissolution, and taking his place with the degenerate who wanted to demolish middle-class values.  In this self-portrait Munch gives us a glimpse into the his inner feelings and symbols instead of what he observed in the mirror. He is also using color, line and composition in an expressive way to evoke emotions and moods. All these elements makes this painting a great work to study in order to understand one of the different artistic styles of Symbolism.

1-3 Patricia G.Berman, "Edvard Munch's Self-Portrait with Cigarette:  Smoking and the Bohemian Persona" Art Bulletin, Vol. 75, No. 4,(Dec 1993), 630-636

Edouard Vuillard - Self-Portrait

Edouard Vuillard, Self-Portrait, 1892
(Private Collection)

The Nabis' art was a combination of Gauguin's Symbolism and Impressionism. Unlike Gauguin, they did not reject modern life, their subject matter like the croquet game was very much of the moment.  Edouard Vuillard painted a lot of intimate interior scenes involving his mother, sister and his mother's business which she ran out of their home.  He was obsessed with pattern.

Edouard Vuillard must have painted this colorful self-portrait from his imagination though. Obviously his hair was not bright yellow, face pink and beard bright orange.  His whole face has become a pattern, even the odd shape that covers half his face is just for effect.  The dots on the background are decorative elements he paints to give energy and an aura around his head.  He has even broken with the tradition of the canvas always being rectangular.

Vuillard was best known for his interior scenes where the objects and figures are embedded in their surroundings.