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Newsletter - Spring 1998
Acquisitions

Henri-Edmond Cross's
On the Champs Elysées..

It's a leisurely afternoon on the Champs Elysées, that most famous of Parisian avenues that stretches from the Arc de Triomphe to the Tuileries. A wetnurse cradling a baby relaxes in the shade of the trees lining the famous thoroughfare where carriages and strollers take part in the social promenade. Beside her, a young girl sits in the lush green grass.

Henri-Edmond Cross produced this five-color lithograph late in the 1890s, working in the method developed by his Neo-Impressionist compatriots Camille Pissarro, Georges Seurat, and Paul Signac. In the autumn of 1898, this image was published in Pan, a German review of art and literature that also included prints by other Neo-Impressionists, as well as a text by Signac. Like Seurat's Grande Jatte, Cross's print appears to show a perfect moment in the life of the modern city-tranquil, civilized, idyllic. But like Seurat's painting, this image may also have been intended as a social critique of contemporary Paris, rather than an accurate depiction of the city. The peaceful scene is almost completely disconnected from many less pleasant actualities of the time, when concepts of "progress" were offset by the negative effects of industrialization, the decline of environmental circumstances, the hardships of the working classes, and the estrangement of city dwellers from the arcadian pleasures of the countryside. Born Henri-Edmond-Joseph Delacroix, the artist anglicized his name in 1881 to avoid confusion with the great French painter Eugène Delacroix. In the early 1880s Henri-Edmond Cross was showing portraits and still-lifes in the realist style at the Salon, but he soon lightened his palette and began to paint out of doors under the influence of Monet and Pissarro. He helped to found the Société des Artistes Indépendants in 1884, and it was through this group that he became acquainted with the painters whom the critic Félix Fénéon later dubbed the "new Impressionists." In addition to Camille and Lucien Pissaro, Signac, and Seurat, the Neo-Impressionist group included the less well known painters Charles Angrand, Louis Hayet, Léo Gausson, Albert Dubois-Pillet, and Maximilien Luce, as well as Cross himself. Like the Impressionists before them, the members of this circle were concerned with the depiction of modern life, and were sympathetic to the cause of radical politics to one degree or another. Cross shared the utopian and anarchist beliefs of his colleagues, although on a less vehement level, and often contributed lithographs to various political journals of the time.

Basing their technique on what they termed "scientific" principles, the Neo-Impressionists believed that they could recreate the optical effects of natural light by applying colors in discrete dots or patches on canvas or paper. Cross adopted the method wholeheartedly in 1891 and in the same year moved to the south of France where he began to concentrate on seascapes, farms, and images of peasants at work. Earlier in his career, he applied his colors in smaller dots, but by the time he created Les Champs Elysées, he was using larger patches of color to produce more intense color contrasts in a mosaic-like pattern. Cross's use of rough linear strokes to outline certain details-like the bonnet of the seated nurse-parallels the technique used by Seurat's in some of his studies for the Grand Jatte. This particular print, one of the few Neo-Impressionist works in the museum's collection, is an early trial proof on China paper before the Pan edition with its letterpress title.