What is pastel?
Pastels are rarely exhibited due to the fragility of the powdery pigment and the light sensitivity of the paper on which it rests. laCollection launches a curated NFT collection ‘French Pastels from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’, that will reflect this immediate nature of the paintings, perfectly preserved as a digital asset.
Intensely colorful, pastel is dry, powdered pigment, bound into a stick or crayon and applied by an artist directly to a support, usually paper. By its nature, pastel is potentially evanescent. It’s notoriously difficult to layer and affix to paper — which is, in turn, light sensitive. As a result, works in pastel are delicate and only rarely displayed.
The History of Pastel
Pastels originated in northern Italy in the 16th century. Pastel enjoyed a surge in popularity in 19th-century France. Bold, new colors — made possible by the advent of synthetic dyes — encouraged experimentation. For avant-garde artists like Monet, Degas, and their peers, pastels offered tactility and immediacy, qualities so aligned with their vision: to capture the here-and-now, to evoke the fleeting effects of weather, fashion, and human expression.
In 1889 French art critic Paul Desjardins observed: “Pastel is the lightest, most fugitive of techniques — like the pollen of a lily or the dust from a butterfly’s wing that an artist scatters and fixes on paper. Pastel should be used to convey what is most ephemeral in nature — the expression passing over the human face, the rapid interplay of sunlight and shadow — nothing more — -That is the triumph of this technique. It must capture what is most elusive.”
The Medium
Works in pastel hover somewhere between drawing and painting; held in the hand, the medium is capable of graphic, linear mark-making as well as lush, painterly effects. Some practitioners even moisten or pulverize the sticks to create a brushable material.
Occasionally, artists combine pastel with other media (like charcoal, printer’s ink, or paint) in a single work; others take advantage of its idiosyncratic qualities — its velvety or granular, fugitive nature for example — to create dazzling effects. Pastels are imminently portable and, unlike paint, do not require drying time.
Pastel & Impressionism
During the late 19th century, avant-garde artists in France and beyond took up pastels to capture the immediate — a disappearing smile, rain clouds moving away, and vibrant flowers soon to perish. The pastel works of artists such as Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jean-François Millet, Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas are key to understanding Impressionism, which changed the course of art history. The innovative use of pastel allowed freely and lightly brushed colors to take priority over lines and contours.
Artists Famed for Using Pastels
Remarkable here is the range of effects the artist achieves with pastel. Small, linear strokes describe the glints of light on the dancers’ hair, broader strokes the opaque outer skirts. For the puffy underskirt, Degas rubbed the medium, with either his hand or a rag. The density or diffusion of the pigment coincides with the way light behaves on each surface depicted. He also crushed his pastels and added liquid, creating a thin paint or thick paste: notice the brushy application of green-blue in the lower left and the strong, dark brown at the edge of the bench and juncture of the wall and floor.
Pissarro’s experimental and innovative use of pastel, like that of his friend Degas, modernized and revitalized the medium. Here, Pissarro combines tempera paint with pastel, crushed into a paint or paste, as well as applied dry. The result is a work whose effects seem to hover between painting and drawing — note the opaque fabrics and play of light on leaves.
In this dense enclosure of lush green foliage, dandelions play out their life cycle: some closed; one with its full yellow face open; a cluster turned downy, their white orbs coming apart as seeds scatter; a few totally bare, divested of both brilliant petals and feathery seeds. Covering the entire sheet with pastel, Millet pays exquisite attention to naturalistic detail, eloquently conjuring a sensation of being outdoors transfixed by the beauty and abundance of nature.
NFT soon available on laCollection.
Here Degas created a surface encrusted with pastel, which takes on the appearance of a dense fabric, rather than a light, airy powder. While other artists in this gallery used subtle strokes to achieve three-dimensionality, or strokes of varying widths to differentiate skin from clothing, Degas’s bold striations cross boundaries of flesh and fabric. The layering of colors draws attention to itself, to the artist’s touch and retouch of the surface. This composition, too, is cumulative: Degas altered the scale of the page by adding strips of paper. Look carefully and you might notice seams along each edge.
In this work, Monet captures a fleeting vision of sunset, as the last rays of light glow through lavender clouds, the sun already beneath the horizon. Monet thickly covered the surface here with heavily applied strokes of pastel, marked by a sense of spontaneity in the bold purple, pink, and orange strokes across the sky. Pastel could be manipulated at will and applied with extreme rapidity in front of the most fugitive natural events. The richly mingled golds, mauves and warm grays in the work, therefore, may well represent Monet’s first response to the unfolding sunset.
These pastels are available as digital lithographies on laCollection.io as part of the ‘French Pastels from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’ NFT collection, from July 14 to September 2022. Click here.
Useful links
- Exhibition which inspired the NFT collection: ‘French Pastels: Treasures from the Vault’ (June 30, 2018–January 6, 2019), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
- Video of Katie Hanson, Curator of European Paintings at MFA, Boston, presenting ‘Dancers Resting’ (c.1881–85) by Edgar Degas, pastel on paper mounted on paperboard.
Source: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
