Impressionism

Impression: Sunrise, Cluade Monet (1872)

THE STORYof what we call "Modern Art" starts with Impressionism. Although the Impressionist movement was not exclusively made up of French people, it did start in France. The French Revolution of 1789, together with industrial revolution all around Europe and specially England, inspired lots of social, political, and also artistic ideas. The artists felt the need to deal with the new world in a new way. The young rebellion artists ceased to follow the old rules.

It is interesting to note how preceding artistic styles encouraged and made way for one another and how these, in turn lead to Impressionism. Since the eighteenth century, English artists like John Constable and William Turner had demonstrated an enthusiasm towards painting the landscape. It should be noted that the "old-style" painters used to have a quite restricted range of subjects (e.g. historical and mythological scenes and portraits of royal families).

Possibly the most obvious precedent to Impressionism was the art of the Realists, like Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Jean-François Millet, and Gustave Courbet. Their fundamental objectives, "to open a window on the world," and "to paint a message" were similar, in many ways to the ideals held by the Impressionists. The non-western art styles, specially Egyptian and Oriental which were quite popular at that time, had also great influence on the young painters.

On the other hand, the new scientific findings about light and color, and technological achievements like invention of camera, made the painters search for new techniques and styles. They had to prove that painter was not replaced by camera, and painting was more than just a faithful snap-shot of the outside world.

Still Life, Paul Cézanne (1879)

The Académie Suisse, founded and run by the painter Charles Suisse, provided a cheap and productive venue in which aspiring painters could exchange new and progressive ideas. It was here that Camille Pissarro , Claude Monet, Armand Guillaumin and Paul Cézanne first came to know each other. Despite the obvious advantages of free models which were provided, the Académie Suisse was appealing for a number of reasons. The most important of which was that it provided a place to air new and controversial attitudes in painting. Those that would otherwise never have been exposed in a community which was committed to a traditional style and open only to the most limited of adaptations.

In France, this community was represented and controlled by three bodies; the Salon , the Académie and the École des Beaux Arts. Typically, all of these institutions were structured within a very defined set of parameters. Only certain candidates qualified for positions in particular offices, etc. The artworld of Paris at the time is fairly described as being an incestuous society in which similarly educated officials came together and regulated what would otherwise have been a far more diverse collection of "accepted" art.

The Salon had become an annual exhibition at which members of the Académie, often professors at the École, judged entries. It was the restrictive nature of these judges that prompted a group of young artists to exhibit their works separately in the studio of the photographer, Nadar. They called themselves "Société anonyme des peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs'' (Anonymous society of painters, sculptors and engravers), composed of Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Armand Guillaumin, and Berthe Morisot.

Lady at her toilette, Berthe Morisot (1875)

The first exhibition, held in 1874, included Monet's famous "Impression: Sunrise" which is generally thought to have prompted the naming of the whole genre. The critic Louis Leroy called his scathing review of their show, "Exhibition of the Impressionists". This name, though initially used as an insult, was then accepted by the group.

The impressionist style of painting is characterized chiefly by concentration on the general impression produced by a scene or object and the use of unmixed primary colors and small strokes to simulate actual reflected light. The most conspicuous characteristic of Impressionism was an attempt to accurately and objectively record visual reality in terms of transient effects of light and color. Outdoor painting and using real-life scenes are also essential parts of Impressionist art. The principal Impressionist painters were Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Morisot, Guillaumin, and Frédéric Bazille. Degas and Cézanne also painted in an Impressionist style for a time in the early 1870s. Later on, Cézanne played an influential role in Post-Impressionism and Cubism. The established painter Édouard Manet, whose work in the 1860s greatly influenced Monet and others of the group, himself adopted the Impressionist approach about 1873.

Other artists, like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Georges Seurat, Vincent Van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin, were also related to the Impressionist movement, but more precisely speaking, they formed what known as Post-Impressionism which in turn led to other styles in modern art such as Expressionism, Symbolism, and Cubism.

Yvette Guilbert, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1894)

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