Art

In the second half of the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution and the invention of railways profoundly transformed perceptions of the outside world, nature and the landscape. In the 1870s Claude Monet, along with his colleagues Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley, developed the airy art of Impressionism, which involved swiftly capturing an atmospheric moment with spontaneous brushstrokes. Aided by the invention of the paint tube, the Impressionists increasingly abandoned their studios and found myriad subjects to inspire them outdoors, which they painted there and then, en plein air.

France experienced an economic boom in the second half of the 19th century, and Paris became the world’s leading cultural metropolis. Artists began asking themselves what qualities a picture needed to reflect those social phenomena. They looked around for novel ways of seeing and painting to capture this new world. Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro and Pierre-Auguste Renoir recognised that objects continually changed how they looked depending on the light and the environment, creating different visual impressions. They now set out to record those impressions, largely working en plein air – outdoors – and seeking to convey their atmospheric effect rather than aiming at strictly accurate imitation. The Impressionists made their first public appearance at a joint exhibition in 1874. Numerous further exhibitions – eight in total – were to follow.

The construction of the first railway lines brought outlying areas around the city of Paris within reach of a populace seeking leisure and relaxation. The Impressionists painted both the railways’ technical infrastructure as it advanced into rural areas and the swarms of people heading out of the capital. Their rapid painting technique enabled them to record their immediate impressions on the spot.

The Impressionists’ technique was revolutionary: instead of mixing their paints on the palette, they applied them directly to the canvas in luminous dabs of colour which only blended together in the observer’s eye, creating an effect of great immediacy.

For all their emphasis on landscape painting, the Impressionists still continued to paint the human figure. Nevertheless, in his depiction of a seated girl, Pierre-Auguste Renoir exploited the ambient light to emphasise the model’s presence captured at a moment in time. Edgar Degas experimented with blurring and cropping of the kind he had encountered in photography.

Édouard Manet is a precursor of Impressionism who in his own time was already searching for new ways to depict modern life in Paris. He abandoned the clarity of conventional pictorial structures, instead allowing the observer’s eye to wander freely across the canvas. His seemingly spontaneous application of paint disrupts the stability of a classical composition and the integrity of forms, figures and spaces.

Édouard Manet was of pivotal importance to Emil Bührle, who regarded him as the originator of modern French painting, and sought to ensure he was properly represented in his collection. At the same time, however, Manet also linked back to earlier techniques: when developing his spontaneous painting style, he drew inspiration from the great masters of the tradition, such as the Dutch artist Frans Hals. Emil Bührle, himself a student of art history, wanted to reflect such lines of influence in his collection.

Bührle added further figures and eras of earlier art to his collection: he was, for example, fascinated by the 18th-century Venetian masters because their depiction of light reminded him of the later work of the Impressionists.

Bührle was also interested in the developments in art that followed and were inspired by Impressionism. The three great Post-Impressionists – Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin – occupy a central place in his collection. They bring the achievements of Impressionism into the modern era.

In Cézanne’s rhythmic dabs of colour, painting itself acquires an intrinsic value. Here, rather than depicting the material qualities of the shirt and jacket, Cézanne seeks to densify the composition using brushwork. He structures the dabs of colour in relation to the overall surface of the painting. He also pays great attention to the spaces in between: from a painting perspective, the gap between the red jacket, the arm and the table is just as important as the forms defining the figure of the boy. The result is a dense network of painting.

The Impressionists applied their paint loosely to create an atmosphere. Van Gogh, by contrast, employed dynamic brushstrokes to express strong emotions. This artistic flourish can be seen in the impasto technique: the oil paint is applied thickly and without gradations, stroke by stroke. The approach is further accentuated by the contrast between complementary colours.

Paul Gauguin preferred to paint large, closed areas of colour and used curving (arabesque) lines to divide up his compositions in a new way. They have a novel, abstract quality that gives the picture density on its surface.

Bührle’s collection also gives space to the fourth avenue of Post-Impressionism: the Pointillism of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, which is based on a systematic approach to the Impressionists’ technique. Rather than applying paint across the surface of the canvas in brushstrokes, the Pointillists employed individual points of colour of identical size, from which the motif emerges when viewed at a distance.

The works of the Nabis (a group of artists who derived their name from the Hebrew word for ‘prophets’) and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec take the collection beyond Impressionism. Unlike the Impressionists, the Nabis liked to paint intensely atmospheric interiors centred around human figures.

The Nabis were inspired by the early paintings of Paul Gauguin from rural Brittany. They regarded themselves as the prophets of a new kind of art which should serve to express ideas through forms, and be symbolic, subjective and decorative. Illusionism, reality and trompe-l’œil were taboo. While the Impressionists had focused much of their work on the landscape, the two most important Nabis, Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, were particularly interested in depicting figures in decorative interiors.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was also very much interested in painting people indoors; but unlike the Nabis, he chose mainly to depict not private, personal spaces but specifically seedy locations such as cabarets and brothels. He also showed the darker side of life, which did not greatly interest the Impressionists.

When looking ahead to the artistic avant-garde of the 20th century, Bührle was once again guided by the impact of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.

In 1909, taking up where Cézanne had left off, the founders of Cubism, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, began radically transforming painting. They focused attention on the ways in which painting covers surfaces: line, colour shading, formal rhythm and the creation of space through the illusion of overlaid surfaces now became the essential content of their pictures. The aim was no longer to reproduce the visible world, but rather to construct it anew and in a controlled manner within the picture. Braque’s Violinist exemplifies the clear, seemingly non-material Cubism of these years. In his 1917 painting, Picasso combined surface elements and patterns to create a decorative unity.

In 1951, Bührle began adding the final element to his collection: an extensive group of medieval sculptures.

Emil Bührle’s interest in medieval sculpture was personal. It reminded him of his student enthusiasm for Gothic art, and there was also the matter of his religious faith: he was an Old Catholic and endowed a church in Oerlikon, acquiring some of these works to display inside it.

The Virgin of Mercy is a popular pictorial motif of the late medieval era. Small figures representing various classes of society seek shelter beneath the cloak of the standing Madonna holding the Christ Child, with the men to the right and women to the left from Mary’s perspective. Mary’s care for the child is thus transmitted to all the faithful. Two angels hold the fabric of the gilded cloak. The sculpture in general is lavishly gilded and painted.