Pastels: A Historical Perspective

For the last many years, I have been trying to sell the idea of mounting medium-specific exhibitions to my friends who run art galleries in the capital. On many occasions I suggested to the National Gallery of Modern Art that the NGMA should have a permanent display on the 'history of a medium', like watercolour, intaglio prints, lithographs or relief prints. Such medium-specific display would have informed the public about the historical perspective of different media in the hands of our artists.

Since our art world, as shaped by the electronic and printed-media, is personality-centred, the fact that the individual artist and his medium area are also a part of the art history of our times is overlooked. How a conjecture of history, non-artistic factors like new technology and inventions, the colonial system of art education, new social formations like the urban middle-class and the introduction of new art materials, influenced the ideas and techniques of Indian artists, all these should have become a part of our art awareness. Our appreciation of art would have been much deeper then.

Since the opening of art schools under the British patronage in colonial India, literally thousands of artists took up oil, watercolour, intaglio and relief printmaking as their media of expression. But few of them explored the pictorial potential of pastel as the European masters did. Some of the modern celebrities like Francis Bacon are still inspired by the late pastels of Degas for their unique overtones and chromatic complicity. All the early Indian modernists and those of the later generation must have used pastel and coloured chalk during their undergraduate days, like their predecessors in the 19th century. Most of them, if not all of them, left pastel for oil, watercolour, (acrylic is the current craze), or other graphic media.

Perhaps this preference for media other than pastel has a reason rooted deep in the history of art education in colonial India. One obvious reason is that unlike oil painting, pastel can not be used on a large surface of mural dimension. The other reason is to be found in the curriculum of the first art schools in this country. The first city in colonial India that earned the privilege of having a western-style art school was Poona, now Pune. Around 1798, the British Resident, Sir Charles Malet, founded the school to train local artisans to assist the visiting British artists. The foreigners were working on archaeological cities or painting 'native' people and their way of life.

Skipping over such short-lived art schools, we may mention here that the first art schools, fully staffed and equipped with a definite curriculum, were founded in Madras in 1850, in Calcutta in 1854, and in Bombay in 1857, a 'gift' of Sir Jamshetji Jijibhai, a Parsi industrialist-merchant.

Modeled on the curriculum developed at the South Kensington School of Art, London, the curriculum of Indian art schools had a built-in tilt towards 'scientific drawing' for developing the traditional decorative designs in Indian crafts and architecture, through European perspectivist drawing modules. Copying from plaster casts of European classical sculptures and drawing from live models came much later when the first entrants – the local artisans – were gradually replaced by the so-called 'English educated' art students from the urban middle class which itself was a new social formation under the colonial rule.

So we see, from the very beginning the stress was on the rigorous linearity that grasped the details of the object in volume, and shading was allowed only to the 'advanced' students who did it earlier with linear batching or with charcoal or coloured chalk. Coloured chalk is not pastel. The white chalk is treated with colours. Pastel is powdered pigments held with gum. And pastel is rarely mentioned in the annals of early art schools. We have seen an excellent drawing of the Aphrodite of Knidos (plaster cast), beautifully shaped and highlighted in coloured chalk by M.V. Dhurandhar, one of the early batches of 'upper class' students of the Bombay art school in the 1890s.

Pastel could not have been used by Indian art students the way it was handled and expolored in the Parisian ateliers of the later half of the 19th century. The South Kensington precepts for colonial India did not have any room for such creative exploration of the medium. Besides, even in England and Europe the revival of pastel, after its steady decline for about three centuries, inspired modern masters only in the last decades of the last century.

With the revived interest in the pastel as a result of better understanding by the artists and appreciation by the public, the 'Societé des Pastellistes' was founded in Paris in 1870. We have seen what Millet and Degas did with the medium. Around the same time, American artists like Mary Cassatt, who exhibited with the Impressionists, and Robert Blum and others seriously experimented in pastel. In England, the revival of the medium dates from 1880 when the first exhibition of the 'Pastel Society' was held at the Grosvenor Gallery.

I don't think such experiments in the medium, even after its arrival in India, were ever encouraged by the teachers in Indian art schools. Even now both students and teachers seem to treat the medium as something preparatory to oil or other media, something that enables them to draw and understand the chiaroscuro. Occasionally we come across some young artists working in 'oil pastels' more as a substitute for oil painting than as a distinct medium with its limitations and possibilities. Pastel, dry or oil, does not pretend to work like oil or watercolour.

At this point, before we come to the splendid pictorial tradition left behind by pastel over the last three centuries, a few words about the medium itself is necessary. Pastel is a rather fragile, finger-like stick, cast in pure colour powder mixed with a weak binder of gum Arabic. Since the powder colours are not mixed with water or oil, they retain their pristine freshness when rubbed on paper. The softest pastel, when in contact with paper, smoothly disintegrates to create delicate tones, sometimes almost transparent, sometimes creating shades of other colours when overlaid on the previous working in different colours. But pastel itself can be used in its harder and grittier variety to get an effect more like quick charcoal drawing or highly textured lithograph. Pastel colours when brushed against other things tend to fall off from the surface of the paper. Artists use fixatives like a very weak solution of gum sprayed over from a distance. Fixatives may dim the glow of pure colours. The oil pastel overcomes this weakness of dry pastel. Yet, the purists stick to the dry variety.

The pastel sticks are usually arranged in a series of tones, the darkest stick consisting of pure colour, all others of the series are mixed with white to a greater and greater degree as they ascend the scale towards the lightest. This enables the artist to create numerous shades of colours and an almost infinite range of tonalities, depending on the artists's understanding of the medium.

Side by side with the medium, another drawing and shading medium must be mentioned, which is rather popular with the artists of the new generation. It is conté. Conté is the proprietory name for synthetic black, red and brown chalk, first developed by Nicholas Jacques Conté (1755-1805), the French mechanical genius, inventor and chemist. During the Napoleonic wars with England when France could not import plumbago or graphite for making drawing pencils, M. Conté developed this synthetic chalk to substitute the graphite pencil.

Some historians of the medium credit Johann Alexander Thiele (1685-1752) for the invention of pastel. Some hold that Mme. Vernerin and Mlle. Heid invented pastel sometime during the 17th-18th centuries. Others say that Thiele himself, a landscape painter and etcher of distintion, might have perfected the medium. But drawing in coloured chalk – the precursor of pastel – was practiced long before by Guido Reni (1575-1642). Still other historians place the invention and use of pastel in northern Italy in the 16th century, which was quickly adopted for portraiture by such masters like Hans Holbein, the Younger (1497/8-1543), Francis Cluet (b.? – 1572), and later by Maurice Quentin Latour (1704-88), Francis Boucher (1703-70) and Jean Baptiste Chardin (1699-1799), the celebrities of Rococo art.

Although the word 'pastel' connotes 'pale', whitened colour, it should not be used to cover the medium as a whole, because we have already mentioned the pristine freshness of its range of pure colours. The medium was popular particularly with the Rococo artists of the 18th century, as mentioned above, because they could create delicate 'flesh tones' by mixing pastel strokes with those in white chalk.

The Impressionists and Post-Impressionists like Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) used pastels for subjects other than portraits. Two Swiss painters should be credited with the spread and popularization of the medium all over Europe. One was Dietrich Meyer (1572-1658). He was also the reputed inventor of the intaglio of soft-ground etching which, before the coming of lithography in 1798, could reproduce the fine texture of charcoal or pencil drawing in intaglio prints. The other was Jean Etienne Liotard (1702-1989), one of the finest pastellists of his times.

Now we come to Edgar Degas (1839-1917) and his ballet girls dressing, practicing and performing; his working girls and models dressing, undressing and bathing, all done in scintillating strokes and rubbings of pastel on surface treated with gouache or watercolour. The mysterious glow of light on the diaphanous materials of ballerinas' dresses, the lighted stage and the ballet classroom, the girls' flesh tones in light and shade, their movements and gestures, the throbbing awareness of the fleeting time in the age of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, all were seen, felt and recorded by this all time master of pastel.

With this medium, Degas made endless experiments – pure pastel on smooth, somewhat glossy surface, for instance, fascinated the artist himself. He worked in pastel, on ground touched or prepared with gouache, distemper or oil thinned with turpentine, and he sprayed his pastels with boiling hot water for fixing and also for mixing the other colour shades on paper. Degas achieved a rare level of pictorial excellence by using the medium on dried monotype prints. He used the medium more as a quick drawing material than as a material for 'painting', i.e. covering the whole surface. The areas he left out on the paper always became a vital part of his total design.

The special character of the medium - the powdery tones on the textured paper - was explored profoundly by another modern master, Odilon Redon (1840-1916). Redon was hailed as one of the major Symbolist painters. Paul Valéry and Stephan Mallermé were his friends. If we patiently consider his preference for pastel as his medium of expression we will find out the characteristic effect peculiar to the medium, which was sometimes achieved by intaglio printmakers with aquatint.

Redon rejected the naturalism of Gourbet in favour of a 'representation of imaginary forms that haunted' him, and he wanted to allude to the mysteries of 'shadows and lines'. He was called the 'spectral Goya', and he 'found that charcoal and pastel suited his vision better than oil', and he 'called his own art an exciting form of music, freer, with logic of its own, a logic of strange associations felt', as Wylie Spencer commented.

Pastel, mostly neglected as a medium in this country, inspired artists in the West, who dedicated their lives and inventiveness to it. Now, in view of the rising craze for shocking newness in the postmodern situation, we have to wait for artists who will come to explore the medium to uncover unknown beauties still latent in it.

SANTO DATTA
30th September 1996