The painter Louis Anquetin set new standards with bright colors and a bold pictorial composition. The interactive analysis of his work Femme à la voilette demonstrates his power of innovation.
Louis Anquetin, who was born in 1861 in Normandy and died in 1932 in Paris, played a small but significant role in the development of Symbolism. He became a student of painting in the studio of Fernand Cormon in 1884, where he met Émile Bernard, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. In the eighteen-sixties he concentrated on contemporary Parisian themes and collaborated with Bernard to develop Cloisonnism, as both of them considered Post-Impressionism to be outdated. The term “Cloisonnism” is derived from cloisonné and alludes to a special enameling technique.
Cloisonnism is characterized in particular by strong contours and surfaces that have been barely elaborated, but also by the bright colors and a bold pictorial composition beyond the rules of central perspective.
Louis Anquetin would not remain an avant-garde painter for very long. In the course of the eighteen-nineties his style became visibly more conservative. He oriented himself increasingly toward Rubens’ style and turned way from depicting modern life.
In 1891, Anquetin painted a nighttime street scene in the innovative manner of Cloisonnist painting with its solid black outlines and planar color fields in which an elegantly dressed Parisian woman casts a mysterious glance while her garment and the window seem to take on a life of their own.
