The Von der Heydt Museum Celebrates Alfred Sisley ~ The True Impressionist

Written by Angelique Waterstone Thursday, 08 December 2011 00:39

Wuppertal, Germany.- The Von der Heydt Museum is proud to present "Alfred Sisley: The True Impressionist" on exhibtion at the museum through January 29th 2012. Alfred Sisley felt that aside from the object of the painting — the motif — the most interesting thing about a landscape is movement, life. To create the illusion of life was the most important thing in a work of art for him. We see it in his brushstrokes. When they let the small clouds wander, when they make the surface of the water tremble, when they draw a delicate breath of wind through a sea of leaves. The Von der Heydt-Museum was able to bring about eighty such more or less animated paintings to Wuppertal. This large retrospective documents Sisley's whole oeuvre — it takes us from the forests around Fontainebleau, where Sisley set up his easel in the 1860s, to the paintings created during his last trip to England in 1897. In doing so, the exhibition presents an extremely unspectacular painter. Distinctive breaks, unexpected twists, pioneering ideas beyond impressionism—none of that leaps to our eye during a tour of the retrospective. Sisley continued to work in modest dimensions and with landscape motifs. He delved into the sky, water, meadows, trees, and held them fast in all types of weather, at various times of the day and year.

Simply typically impressionist. Thus the exhibition's subtitle celebrates him as the "true impressionist." Largely Sisley adhered to what he had developed between 1865 and 1875. It was in the Paris studio of the painter Charles Gleyre where Sisley — then still the financially carefree son of an English merchant family — met the future impressionists. Together they liked to paint en plein air. Around 1865, for instance, Sisley depicted his friend Claude Monet working in the forest of Fontainebleau. From one room, from one painting to the next, the Wuppertal tour leads from these rather gloomy beginnings to the luminous landscape impressions, which Sisley captures on canvas in gardens, on deeply furrowed fields, on the Seine near Argenteuil, or in the wintry, luminously orange Bougival in 1872 and 1873. Water rises into the painting from below. And the dominating sky expands up above: brilliant blue with fleecy white clouds, autumn gray and calm, or illuminated by the reddish light of the rising winter sun. Regardless of what the sky looks like—it always seems predominant, determines the mood. At times, it fills the painting with weary melancholy and at other times with the energizing freshness of a cool spring morning. Sisley always remained true to the impressionist cause—even when his father's business went bankrupt and his financial support ended once and for all around 1870/71.

He continued on his chosen path, even though it brought him little money and much malice from the critics. He left the expensive Parisian life to settle with his common-law wife and their two joint children in the more affordable surrounding region. Seeking new motifs, he moved here and there, and his family followed. The show clearly demonstrates how much Sisley's choice of motif depended on the changing environs. How consistently Sisley made his surroundings his own by painting. While Monet, for instance, already took the new railroad bridge of Argenteuil as his subject in 1873 and three years later the steaming locomotives in the train station of Saint-Lazare, in Sisley's painting modern life does not occur. Industrialization, mechanization, urbanization had no place in his pictorial world. Throughout his life, he cultivated the poetry of the rural idyll in his works. Only his last paintings—made in 1897, two years before he died—have a presentiment of something new. Solemnity replaces the old lightness, and stability establishes itself where fleeting movement previously reigned.


The Von der Heydt-Museum is located in the pedestrian zone in Wuppertal-Elberfeld. Originally built as a city hall, the building was rededicated in 1902 at the Metropolitan Museum Turmhof. Since 1961, it has been known as the Von der Heydt-Museum. In the collection are paintings by Dutch artists of the 16th and 17th Centuries, paintings and graphic arts of the 19th Century, including excellent images of Impressionism, as well as the paintings of the 20th century, including outstanding impressionist works. The museum now has one of the richest collections in Germany, due primarily to the citizens of Wuppertal and their art and community spirit. In the course of more than hundred years through wealthy foundations and donations from the citizens as well as direct museum purchases have enabled an impressively extensive collection of early 16th Century to modern day art to be assembled. Despite the Nazi action against "degenerate art, the collection now contains 3000 paintings, 400 sculptures and 30,000 works on paper. With world-renowned works of Dutch painting, 19th Century paintings by Claude Monet, Franz Marc, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and 20th century works by Otto Dix, Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon, the Von der Heydt-Museum is one of the most important, internationally renowned art venues in Germany. Among the outstanding works in the Prints and Drawings collection are drawings, pastels and watercolors by artists including Edgar Degas, Paul Cezanne, Claude Monet and Georges Seurat. The collection includes representative holdings of prints by Hogarth and works of German classicism and romanticism. The German Roman Hans von Marées is represented with 41 drawings. Other priorities in the collection are the work of the Expressionists, including Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Adolf Erbslöh and Oskar Schlemmer, Pablo Picasso, Lovis Corinth and Max Beckmann. Of prominent importance also is a large collection of watercolors by Paul Klee. Visit the museum's website at ... http://vdh.netgate1.net/

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