Impressionism

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IMPRESSIONISM

changing concepts of painting
modernity
impressionism and positivism
impact
bibliography

Impressionism was an artistic movement that originated in France in the 1860s and 1870s. In 1874 painters including Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, Armand Guillaumin, and Paul Cézanne participated in the first of eight independent impressionist exhibitions held until 1886. They had been friendly during the previous decade, when they encountered official resistance to their novel way of painting. Their independent exhibitions were their way of gaining exposure and of responding to traditions that had recently excluded them from the government-sponsored annual exhibitions called Salons. The core impressionists were eventually joined by Gustave Caillebotte and the American Mary Cassatt. Closely identified with the impressionists was Edouard Manet, whose controversial and ground-breaking works of the 1860s led the mostly younger painters to consider him their leader, even though he refused to exhibit in their shows. The older realist artist Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) had also inspired them—he became friendly with Monet while painting together on the Normandy beaches—and his challenges to the political and artistic establishment were notorious since the 1850s. Indeed, many critics saw impressionism as the natural consequence of Courbet's realism. Finally, the painter Jean-Frédéric Bazille had been a central figure in the group, but he was killed during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), before he could join in the exhibitions he had helped conceive.

changing concepts of painting

Impressionism transformed the Western conception of landscape painting from timeless and nostalgic idealizations of distant places to brightly colored, seemingly accurate representations of existing, often familiar sites seen at specific moments. Throughout the long history of landscape painting, nature was generally represented as a refuge and a place of freedom from the constraints of ordinary society. During the first half of the nineteenth century in France, the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau's concept of a "return to nature" as a return to innocence and authenticity certainly underlay the moody and solitary landscapes of many painters of the Barbizon school, such as Théodore Rousseau, Jean-François Millet, and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. The impressionists learned many lessons from these painters, especially Corot, who mentored both Pissarro and Morisot and who practiced peinture claire, that is, working on a light-colored ground as a way of enhancing luminosity. Yet, responding to calls for modernity and naturalism—to reflect the environments of contemporary (French) humanity—the impressionists were less interested in escape than in recording their peers at both work and play. Whether in landscapes or in paintings focused on the human figure, their settings and situations were always contemporary rather than historical or nostalgic. Thus, their works implied that history was constantly being made out of the ordinary visual facts and culture of everyday life, as well as that the times and places in which they were living were worthy of representation in art.

Although in the twenty-first century the practice of painting on the spot directly from observation is taken for granted, in the nineteenth century that commitment was controversial. It was inseparable from debates over the role of modern subjects in art (as opposed to classical traditions), and was accompanied by pejorative comparisons to photography, which was considered unselective and mechanical, hence noncreative. Impressionist practices were also fraught with political connotations, conditioned by the new prosperity and related democratic aspirations. With their views of specifically contemporary activities, whether in Parisian cafés, on beaches, or in flowery fields, or of the economic life on waterways, railways, and boulevards, the impressionists made their paintings sensitive and inclusive reflections of modernity.

The name impressionism was coined by a satirical critic named Louis Leroy following the first impressionist exhibition. Leroy made fun of Monet's Impression: Sunrise (1872), a sketch-like view of the harbor of the painter's native Le Havre: "Impression: I was sure of it. I was telling myself,

since I'm so impressed, there must be an impression in it. And what freedom, what ease in handling! A sketch for wallpaper is more finished than that there seascape!" The same critic mockingly accused another painting by Monet of representing figures strolling along the Boulevard des Capucines as no better than "black tongue-lickings" and a painting by Pissarro of consisting of filthy "palette scrapings" (quoted in Berson, vol. 1, pp. 25–26). Such statements expressed disgust with a technique considered so shoddy that it failed to produce a realistic effect. Another name for the group, intransigents, although eventually abandoned, referred to a broader revolutionary significance, echoing as it did the name of a group of Spanish revolutionaries from the early 1870s. The impressionist exhibition followed by just a few years the Paris Commune (1871), a civil war that pitted leftists who had taken over the city against the more conservative government forces that controlled the French army. The result for the Communards was a predictable bloodbath, which consolidated the power of a right-wing coalition in a spirit of paranoia toward further challenges to authority. The impressionists elicited memories of radical politics because of their independent movement and their free and broken brushwork. They flouted the official art salons' monopoly on public exhibitions and their style of paint handling defied the traditional craft of academic art, which taught careful draftsmanship and polished finishing. In addition, they were seen as descendants of the realist Courbet, whose activism during the Commune landed him in jail following its defeat and then forced him into exile.

There are wide variations in the look of impressionist pictures, especially when comparing the relatively traditional handling and draftsmanship of Degas to the fragmented brushstrokes of pure color that Monet and Renoir developed side by side at La Grenouillère on the banks of the river Seine. It is sometimes said there were two factions within impressionism. Degas had an academic training that taught him respect for careful drawing and planning; and he hailed art as a carefully thought-through activity rather than a mere spontaneous response to external stimuli. Yet he and those impressionists in sympathy with him took pleasure in visual displays of their deliberate technical processes and decisions as much as Monet and other impressionists, for whom spontaneity and instantaneity were revealed by sketch-like open brushwork and the use of brilliant color.

For the latter, which also included Pissarro, Sisley, and Guillaumin, who painted primarily landscapes, working out of doors, or en plein air, was an important step away from the artifices and recipes of the studio. Their more urban colleagues Manet, Degas, and Caillebotte surveyed the dance halls and the Opéra, as well as shops and boulevards for scenes of pleasure and material consumption. The female impressionists, Morisot and Cassatt, given the limitations of their access to the primarily male public world, developed a flair for domestic scenes, although Morisot also painted some exquisite landscapes viewed from homes at the country or the seashore. Yet as different as all these artists appear or claimed to be, they shared a commitment to the representation of modern life based on direct observation of their own world, displayed through a variety of innovative technical approaches.

modernity

For many, modernity was exemplified by countryside locations, leisure, and sporting activities. These are usually the most familiar and highly prized impressionist paintings. But Monet, Guillaumin, Pissarro, and Cézanne (in his early years) included as a counterpart to leisure scenes evidence of the productivity, infrastructure, and technologies that underlay French progress in the new industrial age. Indeed, the poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), while lamenting the loss of taste occasioned by the rise of the bourgeoisie and photography, urged modern artists somehow to capture the essence of their world, which for him was one of constant change, including the flow of crowded commercial avenues and socializing at sidewalk cafés. In addition, the productive energies and speed associated with factories and train travel, as in Monet's Saint-Lazare train station series, were as much a part of the landscape of modern vision as were ladies on beaches and promenades among poppy fields. The liberal art critic Jules Castagnary actually called for a modern landscape that would reflect contemporary progress built on democratic change. And both critics urged a technique that would transcend the age-old opposition between line and color, which for centuries had been a staple of the academic discourse on art. They favored a method derived directly from actual experience. Baudelaire extolled the rapid sketching he found in the work of contemporary illustrators, especially Constantin Guys, who was known for watercolors depicting flâneurs strolling through the urban crowd. In his famous essay, The Painter of Modern Life (1863), Baudelaire made Guys's combination of the fleeting glance and analytic sharpness of vision an ideal for the painter of modernity. There is much evidence that Manet took these ideas seriously, and through his example they were echoed in the works of impressionism.

Implicit in the word impression are two ostensibly opposed concepts: that of the rapid look or instinctive judgment and that of the exact imprint, as in a photographic impression. Hence impressionism could appear to some a casual and imperfect practice, whereas to others the intuition that light is the basis of vision, and color its medium in art, was scientifically true and called forth comparisons to photography. Both points of view could result in praise or condemnation. An early impressionist masterpiece by Monet, the Terrace at Sainte-Adresse (1867) exemplifies these characteristics. It is one of those paintings that seems to express a moment in time so perfectly that one could judge the season and the time of day with almost expert accuracy. Yet at the same time as

it produces this effect of objectivity, the painting makes a generous display of pictorial gesture and technical artifice, as in its spots and dabs of red and yellow representing flowers and its squiggles and wavy lines of greens and blues imitating the constant movement of the harbor waters near Le Havre. The peculiar and pleasing stiffness of this composition typifies early impressionism, still under the thrall of Manet's confrontational flatness and broad areas of strong local color. Monet has clearly discarded the academic convention of perspective, which would structure his canvas as a window into deep space, in favor of a rigorous surface-based geometry, held together primarily by the vertical flag poles and strong horizontal fence-line, evoking the aesthetic of Japanese prints, which were popular at the time. Monet painted the picture from the window of the villa belonging to his aunt, whom he showed with his father, cousin, and a suitor enjoying fresh breezes credited in their time, as ours, with healthy effect. Yet even while the painting so easily exemplifies the themes of pleasure and open air associated with impressionist landscape, its background is the industrial shipping on which their booming native city of Le Havre and family business depended, and on which Monet focused in many other pictures devoted to his maritime home, including Impression: Sunrise, especially in the early 1870s when impressionism was emerging as a coherent movement.

Degas's Musicians in the Orchestra (c. 1870, reworked c. 1874–1876) is a representative masterpiece from the more urban and figure orientation within impressionism. The composition is divided boldly into close-up representations of musicians in the lower half with the ballerinas and stage-set above. In fact, the performance has come to an end. Stepping out of their roles as characters and chorus, the dancers are taking their bows; the musicians pause from their playing. Unlike the relatively precisely delineated portrait (though unidentified) heads of the musicians, the stage scenery is so sketchily painted, one could never mistake it for a genuine landscape. The glare of stage projectors on the prima ballerina's curtsy highlights the artifice underlying the performance and the diaphanous fabric of her costume. Whether Degas's compositional strategy has come from the close-range vision of opera glasses, the cropping effects of photography, the eye-grabbing strategies of Japanese prints, or the in-your-face aesthetics of caricature and popular illustrated newspapers does not matter; all such media evoke the modern age. Degas seems as interested in displaying his own performance as an artist as in revealing the strategies underlying the illusions produced by opera and the dance. He never allows the viewer to forget that he himself remains forever the stage manager, metteur-en-scène or choreographer of the realistic effects produced by his work.

Although few impressionists were as self-conscious as Degas, they shared the commitment to develop a style that would embody their modernity as much as their subject matter. Renoir is another example of how impressionism is made up of special individuals sharing this common bond. In 1874 he exhibited The Loge as a kind of advertisement for the promise of his work. The female figure attending a theatrical or operatic performance is clearly a portrait—Renoir's forte and a means to earn his living through commissions. Yet the woman, a paid model, stands both for a general public of potential clients—of course, her male companion is the one likely to be paying—and a display of Renoir's special eye for women. Indeed, with her sumptuous garb and delicate features, she is as much an object of spectacle as is the painting itself. The viewer's erotic attraction to the woman's soft skin and seductive features coincides with materialistic appetite for the luxurious object created through generously applied paint and ravishing colors. The theme of vision and scopic consumption are not only implied by the theatrical setting but emphasized by the presence

of opera glasses in the woman's hand. Moreover, her companion is preoccupied not with close-up viewing of the stage—his angle would be completely wrong—but by a sight we imagine as comparable to that presented by the painting itself. It is no accident to discover that Renoir believed in the inferiority of women except as objects to fulfill his manly and household needs, and whose ubiquity in his painting gave rise to his uniquely persuasive exercise of artistic potency.

Evoking the subtext of gender relations underlying much of Renoir's painting leads to considering other social meanings of impressionism. Pissarro was the most faithful of the impressionists, exhibiting in all eight of their exhibitions and often keeping the group together through persuasion as well as collaboration with members of both factions. Yet politically, Pissarro was the most extreme of the impressionists, accused by Renoir as "that Jew" who had tried to introduce anarchist painters into the group. In Pissarro's artwork, however, it is hard to find explicit political meanings. Rather, his choice of more rural than suburban settings suggested that his ideal world was a nostalgic precapitalist utopia in which community and privacy were in perfect balance, and in which labor was the redeeming virtue. In such primarily agricultural situations, Pissarro generally showed peasants at work, a far cry from the bourgeois pleasure-seekers of most impressionist landscape. He also made his brushwork appear more deliberately methodical and he attenuated his colors compared to most of his cohorts, in order to avoid the superficially pleasing decorative effects and ostentatious spontaneity he later dismissed as "romantic" impressionism.

An excellent example of such work is Côte des Boeufs at L'Hermitage (1877), in which studiously interlaced branches and the assemblage of houses they screen produce a tautly woven structure with the sort of rigor that Pissarro's younger companion at the time, Cézanne, much appreciated. A peasant woman and her son seem unexpectedly to have discovered the artist as they cross through the woods on their daily routine. Pissarro has so integrated them to his vision of rural stability that one hardly notices them at first. It was in such surroundings that Pissarro worked most comfortably, and given his large brood of children, he could not afford more sophisticated locations. Born on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas and a citizen of Denmark, Pissarro was an outsider to the Parisian and bourgeois world of most of his cohorts. Although Pissarro's social ideal of inclusion seems nostalgic for being based on a disappearing world, it was also progressive for its belief in the possibility of a harmonious future. Such motivations lay behind the investment of time and effort he made in the impressionist's collective movement, which embodied inclusive and democratic principles he hoped one day might extend to society as a whole.

One of Mary Cassatt's masterpieces, Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (1878) shows how superb impressionist paintings could be made within the limitations of a bourgeois woman's life. Cassatt came from respectable society in Philadelphia, where she had studied at the famous Philadelphia Academy. A modern woman nonetheless, she came to Paris in order to pursue her artistic career. She knew that a proper lady could not go out without an escort, whether to the countryside or to observe

modern life in cafés, museums, or the theater. Introduced to the impressionist circle by Degas, an artist who did many fascinating pictures of family and friends, Cassatt discovered that modern forms of beauty could be found in her immediate, if restricted, surroundings. A little girl just returned from school flops down on the soft armchair of her family's elegant and well-lit sitting room. Mother is still out shopping or visiting friends in the afternoon. Colorful slipcover patterns play vividly across the canvas in a space whose foreshortening is worthy of compositional strategies used by Cassatt's mentor, Degas. Like Degas and Manet, too, Cassatt makes reference to past art traditions through a device used by no less a master than Rembrandt to suggest an instant when privacy has been interrupted. The girl's pet terrier, probably Cassatt's own Yorkshire or a Griffon, lounges on the armchair next to her. Yet he faces the viewer in a way that acknowledges an outside presence and suggests the dog's readiness to pounce and yelp should there be any unseemly movement. With her petticoats showing, this is an intimate moment and the canine sentry must be equal to its duty. Like so much impressionist work, the picture looks casual and spontaneous—with its ostensibly unposed figure and broad brushwork. Yet the careful planning needed to produce such charming effects is driven by the ambition to make the greatest art from the most ordinary and insignificant circumstances.

impressionism and positivism

Impressionism's commitment to direct observation and surface experience, along with its evocation of progressive change, are certainly associated with the spirit of positivism, a contemporary philosophy developed by Auguste Comte (1798–1857) and applied to art by his disciple and specialist in the psychology of perception, Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine. Comte's quasi-religion of progress based on scientific attitudes was followed by Taine's deterministic theories on the history of art. Their ideas might be stated as the relationship between art and its immediate physical and social environment, expressed through the empirical perceptions of the talented individual. Drawing on both Taine and Baudelaire, the novelist é mile Zola, a childhood friend of Cézanne through whom he met the impressionists, wrote famously that "art is no more nor less than a corner of nature seen through a temperament." This statement reminds us that whatever conception of nature one may have, each individual has a personal way of seeing it. Monet's concentration on the mutable elements of nature—the liquids and gases in water, clouds, and even the industrial vapors of locomotives—implies a concept of nature in which the only constant is its everchanging flux and flow. The impressionists' concentration on the surface of forms evokes a sense that nature is a place unknowable other than by immediate and highly personal sensation, even when it is as ineffable as the interaction of light and form—what Monet at the time of his later paintings called "the envelope."

The association between these ideas and impressionism can be gauged by two developments from impressionism. The first is by the neo-impressionist critique of their achievement. Certain artists of the next generation, especially Georges Seurat (Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1886), according to the critic Félix Fénéon (1861–1944), sought to make impressionism more socially responsible and democratic by developing a collective technique accessible to all. Seurat exhibited his work along with others by him and a few followers in a separate room of the last impressionist exhibition in 1886. Hence, many saw his effort simply as the latest stage of impressionism. Seurat's dot-dash or pointillist method reduced the labor of painting to a repeatable formula, while at the same time creating the sensation of duration over time rather than a spontaneously grasped instant. On both grounds, neo-impressionism claimed greater objectivity, thus challenging the individualist basis of impressionist truth to nature in favor of a shared and more permanent, hence more classical, vision. Through Seurat's eyes, then, impressionism celebrated merely momentary, superficial pleasures and casual, intuitive craft rather than the mental and physical concentration derived from rational calculation and rigorous effort. This moralizing argument fit a political critique of bourgeois society that came to be associated with avant-garde painting of both the Right and the Left after impressionism.

Paul Cézanne also managed to transcend the impressionist sense of moment to produce what he called "a more lasting art, like that of the museums." In ways more fruitful than Seurat and more lasting for modern art, his increasing abstraction led toward future styles of the twentieth century, especially cubism. Yet Cézanne, who was of the same age group as the impressionists, and painted and exhibited with them in the 1870s, deserves to be classified among them because, unlike Seurat, he never abandoned their principle of working directly from the motif en plein air or of conceiving form in color. One of the classic paintings of Cézanne's mature style, La Montagne Sainte-Victoire (1886) was done at the same time as Seurat's Grande Jatte, and like the latter, it displays both a rigorous structure—note how the central tree focuses attention and flattens the composition—and a sense of temporal duration. Yet Cézanne's effects are produced by carefully applied patches of color, whose amazing economy lends an intellectual dignity associated with deep reflection to his labor rather than the impersonal mechanics of Seurat's dots or the spontaneous rapidity of earlier impressionism. Nor do Cézanne's paintings seem like visual fragments or slices of reality, as do many impressionist works. They come across as unified microcosms of both place and time, as exemplified by the absence of figures, the domineering presence of the greatest mountain in Cézanne's native Provence and the viaduct across the Arc River valley, which evokes Roman antiquity even though it was known to his countrymen as a recent railway construction. While incorporating lessons from neo-impressionism, then, Cézanne held fast to his impressionist roots.

impact

In the other arts, impressionism's impact was limited. The sensitive, mobile surfaces of Auguste Rodin's bronze sculptures caught the light in ways associated with impressionism. Claude Debussy's music came to be called impressionist because its flowing, seemingly directionless style challenged past conventions and evoked certain motifs in nature associated with impressionist painting. In the literature of Henry James, the term refers to the literal naturalism of settings described in so much detail that it both overwhelms and yet concentrates one's anticipation of the narrative.

In painting, almost every country had its impressionist school; the British and the American, with their direct ties to Monet's circle, were the strongest. In later art, the abstract expressionism of artists like Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) has been traced to Claude Monet's late Waterlilies, and the contemporary painter Joan Mitchell (1926–1992), who spent much time near Monet's former residence in Giverny, has been called an "abstract impressionist." However, perhaps the greatest legacy of impressionism is that it is the most popular style for so many amateur art colonies and Sunday painters, who celebrate both nature and leisure while working hard to develop their personal techniques.