Jules LaForgue

The French poet and critic, Jules LaForgue was a Reader of French at the Prussian court from 1881 to
1886, during which time he reviewed German art exhibitions for the Gazette des beaux-arts. He
became interested in Impressionism in 1881 and subsequently devoted his attention to analyzing and
defending the new movement. Even more significantly, he sought to devise a theory that would link
Impressionism with current studies in optics and the psychology of perception. In this text he sets up
an opposition between the traditional elements of painting, such as line, theoretic perspective, and
studio lighting, all of which he sees as artifice, and the Impressionist use of the plein-air technique, and
employment of the vibration of color to create form and perspective, which he states engages the
“natural eye.” He also describes the Impressionist practice of painting during a brief span of time, as
Monet did in his series of paintings depicting Rouen Cathedral and haystacks in a field at different
times of day and during different seasons. LaForgue was notable among critics of the time for his
support of originality, and his insistence on engagement with art primarily as a visual experience.
(Introduction by Christine Sciacca)

"IMPRESSIONISM," 1883
Physiological Origin of Impressionism: The Prejudice of Traditional Line. It is clear that if pictorial work
springs from the brain, the soul, it does so only by means of the eye, the eye being basically similar to
the ear in music; the Impressionist is therefore a modernist painter endowed with an uncommon
sensibility of the eye. He is one who, forgetting the pictures amassed through centuries in museums,
forgetting his optical art school training-line, perspective, color-by dint of living and seeing frankly and
primitively in the bright open air, that is, outside his poorly lighted studio, whether the city street, the
country, or, the interiors of houses, has succeeded in remaking for himself a natural eye, and in seeing
naturally and painting as simply as he sees. Let me explain.
Leaving aside the two artistic illusions, the two criteria on which aestheticians have foolishly insisted --
Absolute Beauty and Absolute Human Taste one can point to three supreme illusions by which
technicians of painting have always lived: line, perspective, studio lighting. To these three things,
which have become second nature to the painter, correspond the three steps of the Impressionist
formula: form obtained not by line but solely by vibration and contrast of color; theoretic perspective
replaced by the natural perspective of color vibration and contrast; studio lighting-that is, a painting,
whether representing a city street, the country, or a lighted drawing room, painted in the even light of
the painter's studio, and worked on at any hour-this replaced by plein-air, open airthat is, by the
painting done in front of its subject, however impractical, and in the shortest possible time, considering
how quickly the light changes. Let us look in detail at these three points, these three dead language
procedures, and see them replaced by Life itself.
Line is an old deep-rooted prejudice whose origin must be sought in the first experiments of human
sensation. The primitive eye, knowing only white light with its indecomposable shadows, and so
unaided by distinguishing coloration, availed itself of tactile experiment. Then, through continual
association and interdependence, and the transference of acquired characteristics between the tactile
and visual faculties, the sense of form moved from the fingers to the eye. Fixed form does not originate
with the eye: the eye, in its progressive refinement, has drawn from it the useful sense of sharp
contours, which is the basis of the childish illusion of the translation of living non-dimensional reality by
line and perspective.
Essentially the eye should know only luminous vibration, just as the acoustic nerve knows only
sonorous vibration. The eye, after having begun by appropriating, refining, and systematizing the
tactile faculties, has lived, developed, and maintained itself in this state of illusion by centuries of line
drawings; and hence its evolution as the organ of luminous vibration has been extremely retarded in
relation to that of the ear, and in respect to color, it is still a rudimentary intelligence. And so while the
ear in general easily analyzes harmonics like an auditory prism, the eye sees light only roughly and
synthetically and has only vague powers of decomposing it in the presence of nature, despite the three
fibrils described by Young, which constitute the facets of the prisms. Then a natural eye-or a refined
eye, for this organ, before moving ahead, must first become primitive again by ridding itself of tactile
illusions-a natural eye forgets tactile illusions and their convenient dead language of line, and acts only
in its faculty of prismatic sensibility. It reaches a point where it can see reality in the living atmosphere
of forms, decomposed, refracted, reflected by beings and things, in incessant variation. Such is this
first characteristic of the Impressionist eye.
The Academic Eye and the Impressionist Eye: Polyphony of Color. In a landscape flooded with light,
inwhich beings are outlined as if in colored grisaille, where the academic painter sees nothing but a
broad expanse of whiteness, the Impressionist sees light as bathing everything not with a dead
whiteness but rather with a thousand vibrant struggling colors of rich prismatic decomposition. Where
the one sees only the external outline of objects, the other sees the real living lines built not in
geometric forms but in a thousand irregular strokes, which, at a distance, establish life. Where one
sees things placed in their regular respective planes according to a skeleton reducible to pure theoretic
design, the other sees perspective established by a thousand trivial touches of tone and brush, by the
varieties of atmospheric states induced by moving planes.
The Impressionist eye is, in short, the most advanced eye in human evolution, the one which until now
has grasped and rendered the most complicated combinations of nuances known.
The Impressionist sees and renders nature as it is-that is, wholly in the vibration of color. No line, light,
relief, perspective, or chiaroscuro, none of those childish classifications: all these are in reality
converted into the vibration of color and must be obtained on canvas solely by the vibration of color.
In the little exhibition at the Gurlitt Gallery, the formula is visible especially in the work of Monet and
Pissarro . . . where everything is obtained by a thousand little dancing strokes in every direction like
straws of color-all in vital competition for the whole impression. No longer an isolated melody, the
whole thing is a symphony which is living and changing like the "forest voices" of Wagner, all
struggling to become the great voice of the forest-like the Unconscious, the law of the world, which is
the great melodic voice resulting from the symphony of the consciousness of races and individuals.
Such is the principle of the plein-air Impressionist school. And the eye of the master will be the one
capable of distinguishing and recording the most sensitive gradations and decompositions on a simple
flat canvas. This principle has been applied not systematically but with genius by certain of our poets
and novelists.
False Training of the Eyes. Now everyone knows that we do not see the colors of the palette in
themselves but rather according to the illusions which the paintings of the past have developed in us,
and above all we see them in the light which the palette itself gives off. (Compare the intensity of
Turner's most dazzling sun with the flame of the weakest candle.) What one might call an innate
harmonic agreement operates automatically between the visual effect of the landscape and the paint
on the palette. This is the proportional language of painting, which grows richer in proportion to the
development of the painter's optical sensibility. The same goes for size and perspective. In this sense,
one might even go so far as to say that the painter's palette is to real light and to the tricks of color it
plays on reflecting and refracting realities what perspective on a flat canvas is to the real planes of
spatial reality. On these two things, the painter builds.
Mobility of Landscape and Mobility of the Painter's Impressions. You critics who codify the beautiful
and guide the development of art, I would have you look at this painter who sets down his easel before
a rather evenly lighted landscapean afternoon scene, for example. Let us suppose that instead of
painting his landscape in several sittings, he has the good sense to record its tonal values in fifteen
minutes -- that is, let us suppose that he is an Impressionist. He arrives on the scene with his own
individual optic sensibility. Depending on the state of fatigue or preparation the painter has just been
through, his sensibility is at the same time either bedazzled or receptive; and it is not the sensibility of
a single organ, but rather the three competitive sensibilities of Young's fibrils. In the course of these
fifteen minutes, the lighting of the landscape-the vibrant sky, the fields, the trees, everything within the
insubstantial network of the rich atmosphere with the constantly undulating life of its invisible reflecting
or refracting corpuscles-has undergone infinite changes, has, in a word, lived. In the course of these
fifteen minutes, the optical sensibility of the painter has changed time and time again, has been upset
in its appreciation of the constancy and relative values of the landscape tones. Imponderable fusions
of tone, opposing perceptions, imperceptible distractions, subordinations and dominations, variations
in the force of reaction of the three optical fibrils one upon the other and on the external world, infinite
and infinitesimal struggles.
One of a myriad examples: I see a certain shade of violet; I lower my eyes toward my palette to mix it
and my eye is involuntarily drawn by the white of my shirt sleeve; my eye has changed, my violet
suffers.
So, in short, even if one remains only fifteen minutes before a landscape, one's work will never be the
real equivalent of the fugitive reality, but rather the record of the response of a certain unique
sensibility to a moment which can never be reproduced exactly for the individual, under the excitement
of a landscape at a certain moment of its luminous life which can never be duplicated.
There are roughly three states of mind in the presence of a landscape: first, the growing keenness of
the optical sensibility under the excitement of this new scene; second, the peak of keenness; third, a
period of gradual nervous exhaustion.
To these should be added the constantly changing atmosphere of the best galleries where the canvas
will be shown, the minute daily life of the landscape tones absorbed in perpetual struggle. And,
moreover, with the spectators the same variation of sensibility, and with each an infinite number of
unique moments of sensibility.
Subject and object are then irretrievably in motion, inapprehensible and unapprehending. In the
flashes of identity between subject and object lies the nature of genius. And any attempt to codify such
flashes is but an
academic pastime. Double Illusion of Absolute Beauty and Absolute Man! Innumerable Human
Keyboards. Aestheticians
have always talked a great deal of nonsense about one or the other of two illusions: the objectivity of
Absolute Beauty, and the subjectivity of Absolute Man-that is, Taste.
Today we have a more exact feeling for the life within us and outside us.
Each man is, according to his moment in time, his racial milieu and social situation, his moment of
individual evolution, a kind of keyboard on which the exterior world plays in a certain way. My own
keyboard is perpetually changing, and there is no other like it. All keyboards are legitimate.
The exterior world likewise is a perpetually changing symphony (as is illustrated by Fechner's law,
which says that the perception in differences declines in inverse proportion to their intensities).
The optical arts spring from the eye and solely from the eye. There do not exist anywhere in the world
two eyes identical as organs or faculties. All our organs are engaged in a vital struggle: with the
painter, it is the eye that is dominant; with the
musician, the ear; with the philosopher, the powers of the mind, etc. The eye most deserving of our
admiration is the one which has evolved to the greatest extent; and
consequently the most admirable painting will be not that which displays the academic fancies of
"Hellenic beauty," "Venetian color," "Cornelius' thought," etc., but rather that which reveals this eye in
the refinement of its nuances or the complication of its lines.
The atmosphere most favorable to the freedom of this evolution lies in the suppression of schools,
juries, medals, and other such childish paraphernalia, the patronage of the state, the parasitism of
blind art critics; and in the encouragement of a nihilistic dilettantism and open-minded anarchy like that
which reigns amid French artists today: Laissez faire, laissez passer. Law, beyond human concerns,
must follow its automatic pattern, and the wind of the Unconscious must be free to blow where it will.
Definition of Plein-Air Painting. Open air, the formula applicable first and foremost to the landscape
painters of the Barbizon School (the name is taken from the village near the forest of Fontainebleau)
does not mean exactly what it says. This open air concept governs the entire work of Impressionist
painters, and means the painting of beings and things in their appropriate atmosphere: out-of-door
scenes, simple interiors, or ornate drawing rooms seen by candlelight, streets, gas-lit corridors,
factories, market places, hospitals, etc.
Explanation of Apparent Impressionist Exaggerations. The ordinary eye of the public and of the non-
artistic critic, trained to see reality in the harmonies fixed and established for it by its host of mediocre
painters-this eye, as eye, cannot stand up to the keen eye of the artist. The latter, being more sensitive
to luminous variation, naturally records on canvas the relationship between rare, unexpected, and
unknown subtleties of luminous variation. The blind, of course, will cry out against willful eccentricity.
But even if one were to make allowance for an eye bewildered and exasperated by the haste of these
impressionistic notes taken in the heat of sensory intoxication, the language of the palette with respect
to reality would still be a conventional tongue susceptible to new seasoning. And is not this new
seasoning more artistic, more alive, and hence more fecund for the future than the same old sad
academic recipes?
Program for Future Painters. Some of the liveliest, most daring painters one has ever known, and also
the most sincere, living as they do in the midst of mockery and indifference-that is, almost in poverty,
with attention only from a small section of the press-are today demanding that the State have nothing
to do with art, that the School of Rome (the Villa Medici) be sold, that the Institute be closed, that there
be no more medals or rewards, and that artists be allowed to live in that anarchy which is life, which
means everyone left to his own resources, and not hampered or destroyed by academic training which
feeds on the past. No more official beauty; the public, unaided, will learn to see for itself and will be
attracted naturally to those painters whom they find modern and vital. No more official salons and
medals than there are for writers. Like writers working in solitude and seeking to have their productions
displayed in their publishers' windows, painters will work in their own way and seek to have their
paintings hung in galleries. Galleries will be their salons.
Framing. In their exhibitions the Independents have substituted intelligent, refined, imaginative frames
for the old gilt frames which are the stock in trade of academic convention. A green sunlit landscape, a
white winter page, an interior with dazzling lights and colorful clothes require different sorts of frames
which the respective painters alone can provide, just as a woman knows best what material she should
wear, what shade of powder is most suited to her complexion, and what color of wallpaper she should
choose for her boudoir. Some of the new frames are in solid colors: natural wood, white, pink, green,
jonquil yellow; and others are lavish combinations of colors and styles. While this new style of frame
has had repercussions in official salons, there it has produced nothing but ornate bourgeois imitations.

"Impressionism: The Eye and the Poet" by Jules La Forgue, William Jay Smith, trans., is reprinted from the May
1956 issue of Art News. Copyright ©1956 Art News.