Color and Light

Inspired by the work of Realist painters such as Gustave Courbet and Francois Bonvin, Henri-Edmond Cross's earliest paintings were compositions in dark, somber colors. Following his involvement with the avant-gardist circle around Georges Seurat, he gradually adopted the Neo-Impressionist technique and began to develop a unique visual vocabulary. After his move to the Mediterranean coast in 1891, Cross's palette became increasingly lighter, resulting in dazzlingly colorful landscapes, genre paintings, and compositions that are overlaid with mythological and allegorical allusions. This volume traces Cross's artistic trajectory through all stages of his prolific career and situates his masterful approach to color and light within the broader context of the European avant-garde of his time. In addition, it examines the painter's anarchist sympathies and the political dimensions of his depictions of utopian sceneries. Exhibition: Museum Barberini, Potsdam, Germany (17.11.2018-17.02.2019). "In 1891 Henri-Edmond Cross was one of the first painters who decided to settle down on the coast of southern France. As Maurice Denis remembered: 'In this northerner's pale eyes there shone all the brilliant light of the Midi.' Surrounded by gloriously beautiful nature, Cross devoted himself to his art, which attests to a marvelous conquest of color. His development leads from the austere portraits of his early period to intensely colored nudes depicted in leisurely abandon in Mediterranean landscapes. This catalog retraces Cross's career in its entirety, focusing on the artist's growing command of color in its astoundingly infinite variations and highlighting the painter's role in the liberation of color at the dawn of the twentieth century."