Impressionism

Introduction to Impressionism

• Started in the mid-19th century.

• Loose brush strokes, sketchy lines, and blotches of color that blend together to create the feeling of an impression.

• Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, etc.

• Among the founders of this movement was French artist, Claude Monet

• In 1874, a group of artists got together and mounted their own exhibition as an alternative to the Salon.

• Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas and Alfred Sisley were all part of this group.

• The exhibit itself was not a success, but It was an important first step: the first independent group show of Impressionists art.

• Seen as unfinished work

• Deemed as “offensive” and “insulting”.

Why offensive and insulting?

• The Impressionists chose to paint everyday scenes from the world they knew.

• The Impressionists used vibrant, light colors, sometimes mixed directly on the canvas, in strong contrast with the darker palettes of traditional art.

• Impressionists applied their paint with quick, spontaneous brushstrokes. There were not concerned with a meticulous finish.

Top Impressionists

• Claude Monet• Pierre-Auguste Renoir• Edgar Degas• Vincent van Gogh• Paul Cezanne• EdouardManet

Blurred Moving Figures

• Monet noticed that slow shutter speed blurred moving figures and he began to smudge his painted similarly in order to achieve this blurry effect. This was just the very beginning of the Blurring paint effect.

ARTWORKS

Claude Monet "Rue Montorgueil, Paris, Festival of June 30, 1878 (1878)"

Haystacks

Playing with Light

• For the Impressionists, light was crucial for capturing the brief moment of apprehension by the viewer, and they tried to show the ever-changing play of light on a subject. Monet, for instance, would paint the same scene several times to record the changing light conditions at various times of the day, such as in a series of paintings of haystacks.

Brush Strokes

• The Impressionists also emphasized the brush strokes on the canvas. According to Margaret Samu of New York University, they tended to use "short, broken brushstrokes that barely convey forms." One of the most famous examples is a painting by Georges Seurat, titled "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte," where the brush strokes were reduced almost to a series of dots. This technique came to be called "pointillism."

Everyday Subjects

• Impressionist painters used common, simple scenes for their subjects. Workers on vacation, women out for a stroll and Parisian parks appear frequently in their works. Up until that time, only art that contained historical, religious and classical themes was considered worthy to be hung in galleries.

Other Genres of Art

• Painting was not the only medium that Impressionists worked in. Degas, well known for his paintings of dancers, also created sculptures, while Auguste Rodin sculpted some of the most famous statues in the world, such as "The Thinker" and "The Kiss." In music, artists like Claude Debussy sought to capture the same shifting impressions in sound that the Impressionist painters tried to represent on canvas.

Characteristics of impressionism in the visual arts:

• Closeness to nature• Short and broken brush strokes• Implies the unfinished, the

incomplete, the fleeting moment• Playing with light• Common and simple everyday

scenes

Sources• Finocchio, Ross. “Nineteenth-Century French Realism.” Heilbrunn

Timeline of Art History. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Web. 24 Oct. 2010. <http://www.metmuseum.org/&gt;.

• Samu, Margret. “Impressionism: Art and Modernity.” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Web. 24 Oct. 2010. <http://www.metmuseum.org/&gt;.