French Impressionism and Post Impressionism in the late 19th C.
©Werner Hammerstingl,1998,1999
Before the emergence of Impressionism we can see a major political and social transition in central Europe which has demonstrable artistic and literary consequences.
The major aspects of this change include:
Painters have now access to synthetic chemical pigments developed by modern science which replace the old-fashioned organic pigments. The new pigments often have greater luminoscity and brilliance.
Lithography makes possible low-cost reproductions which allows artists to reach a new public with prints of their work. The same technology also brings about the newspaper and the low-cost novel. In every case, individual ideas can now be "broadcast" and diseminated amongst a more diverse audience than previously. Sheetmusic also can be printed and distributed widely. The previous ties between knowledge (as apart from education) and class-structure are being stretched much further.
Painters and poets who had not long before escaped reality as such with flights to the exoctic and romantic dreamworlds that typify the Neo-classic and Romantic styles and periods, are returning to the here and now. Balzac and Dickens are writing social critique,
Daumier and Courbet paint the social underdog in a style that creates social impact because of it's convincing realist treatement and the genre of subject-matter. We can see painters slowly turning towards the great cities for inspiration and subject-matter and a dominance of the artificial over the natural.
The growing need in this new social climate for artists to achieve immediacy of expression mean that we see them going outdoors to paint, using smaller canvasses out of necessity and speeding up the process of recording and depiction.
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.
Impressionism, (French "Impressionnisme"), a major movement, first in painting and later in music, that developed chiefly in France during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Impressionist painting comprises the work produced between about 1867 and 1886 by a group of artists who shared a set of related approaches and techniques. The most conspicuous characteristic of Impressionism was an attempt to accurately and objectively record visual reality in terms of transient effects of light and colour.
The principal Impressionist painters were:
and
who worked together, influenced each other, and exhibited together and independently. Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne also painted in an Impressionist style for a time in the early 1870s. 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.
The word ``impressionniste'' was printed for the first time in the Charivari on the 15 April 1874 by Louis Leroy(ed), after Claude Monet's landscape entitled Impressions: soleil levant [Impressions]. This word was used to call Exposition des Impressionnistes an exhibit held in the salons of the photographer Nadar and organized by the "Société anonyme des peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs'' [``Anonymous society of painters, sculptors and engravers''], composed of Pissarro, Monet, Sisley, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Guillaumin and Berthe Morisot.
The popular press, predictably (the more things change...) had a field day making fun of the impressionists. for example, Louis Leroy who wrote as the art-critic for the Le Charivari reported on April 25th that his companion at the opening, a noted academic (identity not disclosed) had made the following sarcastic remark:
"Impressionism- I was certain of it. I was just telling yself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it...and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in it's embryonic state is more finished than that seascape"
Edmond Duranty (La Novelle Peinture, The new painting, 1876) on the other hand gave high praise to the Impressionists:
they have...succeeded in breaking down sunlight into rays, it's elements, and to reconstitute it's unity by means of the general harmony of spectrum colours which they spread on their canvasses.... The most learned physisist could find nothing to critizise in their analysis of light.
The Founders
The founders of this society were animated by the will to break with the official art. The official theory that the color should be dropped pure on the canvas instead of getting mixed on the palette will only be respected by a few of them and only for a couple of years.
In fact, the Impressionism is a lot more a state of the mind than a technique; thus artists other than painters have also been qualified of impressionists. Many of these painters ignore the law of simultaneous contrast as established by Chevreul in 1823. The expressions ``independants'' or ``open air painters'' may be more appropriate than ``impressionists'' to qualify those artists continuing a tradition inherited from Eugène Delacroix, who thought that the drawing and colors were a whole, and English landscape painters, Constable, Bonington and especially William Turner, whose first law was the observation of nature, as for landscape painters working in Barbizon and in the Fontainebleau forest.
Eugène Boudin, Stanislas Lépine and the Dutch Jongkind were among the forerunners of the movement. In 1858, Eugène Boudin met in Honfleur Claude Monet, aged about 15 years. He brought him to the seashore, gave him colors andtaught him how to observe the changing lights on the Seine estuary. In those years, Boudin is still the minor painter of the Pardon de Sainte-Anne-la-Palud, but is on the process of getting installed on the Normandy coast to paint the beaches of Trouville and Le Havre. On the Côte de Grâce, in the Saint-Siméon farm, he attracts many painters including Courbet, Bazille, Monet, Sisley. The last three will meet in Paris in the free Gleyre studio, and in 1863 they will discover a porcelain painter, Auguste Renoir.
At the same time, other artists wanted to bypass the limitations attached to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and were working quai des Orfèvres in the Swiss Academy; the eldest, from the Danish West Indies, was Camille Pissarro; the other two were Paul Cézanne and Armand Guillaumin.
Le ``Salon des Refusés''
The French people were highly impressed by the works of Edouard Manet, and became outraged when they learned that he was refused for the 1863 Salon. The indignation was so high among the artistic population that Napoleon III allowed the opening of a ``Salon des Refusés'', where Manet, Pissarro, Jongkind, Cals, Chintreuil, Fantin-Latour, etc. showed their works. Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe provoked a great enthusiasm among the young painters, who saw represented in Manet's painting many of their concerns. They started meeting around him in the café Guerbois, 9, avenue de Clichy, and thus creating l'école des Batignolles.
The 1866 Salon accepted the works of some of them: Degas, Bazille, Berthe Morisot, Sisley; Monet exposed the portrait of Camille, Pissarro, les Bords de la Marne en hiver; Manet, Cézanne, Renoir were refused, and Emile Zola wrote in l'Evenement a diatribe which made him the official upholder of those newcomers bearing an more revolutionary attitude in the conception than in the still traditional painting. The main distinction lies in the attraction for color and the liking of light; but Berthe Morisot remained faithful to Manet's teaching; Degas was mixed between his admiration of Ingres and the Italian Renaissance painters; Cézanne attempted to ``faire du Poussin sur nature''; Claude Monet himself, in la Terrasse au Havre and les Femmes au jardin (1866, Louvre, salles du Jeu de Paume), is far from announcing his future audacity.
The 1870 war
The 1870 war split up those beginners. Frédéric Bazille was killed in Beaune-la-Rolande; Renoir was mobilized; Degas volunteered; Cézanne retired in Provence; Pissarro, Monet and Sisley moved to London, where they met Paul Durand-Ruel. This stay in London is a major step in the evolution of Impressionism, both because these young artists met there their first merchant, and because they discovered Turner's paintings, whose light analysis will mark them.
Back in Paris, most of these painters went to work in Argenteuil (Monet, Renoir), Chatou (Renoir), Marly (Sisley), or on the banks of the river Oise (Pissarro, Guillaumin, Cézanne). Edouard Manet painted the Seine with Claude Monet and, under his influence, adopted the open air work.
The opinion of the public
Durand-Ruel was unable to sell the works of the future impressionists and had to cease buying in 1873; thus, next year, they decided to expose in Nadar's (15 April-15 May 1874), where they displayed the works that the Salon had refused.
They invited with no success Manet, but Lépine, Boudin, Bracquemond the engraver, Astruc the sculptor, and the painters Cals, de Nittis, Henri Rouart, etc. joined them. Many artists became then conscious of the public and critics incomprehension, but the solidarity didn't last long.
Cézanne didn't participate in the group second exhibit, galerie Durand-Ruel, rue Le Peletier, in 1876, which hold 24 Degas and works from Berthe Morisot, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley and Frédéric Bazille. They met some upholders, such as Duranty, Armand Silvestre, Philippe Burty, Emile Blémond, Georges Rivière, soon with Théodore Duret.
The disappearance of Cézanne, Renoir, Sisley, Berthe Morisot in the 1879 exhibit proved that the group was splitting apart.
Renoir preferred to send to the official Salon Mme Charpentier et ses enfants and the Portrait of Jeanne Samary; yet only few people admired his artworks and of those of his friends, and the artists'life was uneasy, if not miserable. Degas tried, with Pissarro, to maintain the unity of the group, but his attempt failed since Monet, Sisley and Renoir were missing for the fifth exhibit, opened in April 1880; however, artworks from Gauguin appeared there for the first time. In 1881, some of the Impressionists went back to Nadar's: Pissarro, Degas, Guillaumin, Berthe Morisot. The ``seventh exhibition of independant artists'' was the become the ``Salon des indépendants'' two years later.
Only Monet and Sisley continued to journey deeper into the analysis of the changing moods of light and their effects on objects. Degas, Renoir and Cézanne headed towards other painterly persuits, whereas Pissarro was interested by the researches of Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac. At this stage, Impressionists were becoming publically appreciated, but their situation was still harsh; the Salon continued to refuse their paintings, and in 1894, 25 out of 65 artworks donated by Caillebotte to the Luxembourg museum were rejected.
Yet, when Camille Pissarro, the Impressionist patriarch, died in 1903, everybody agreed that this movement was the main XIXth century artistic revolution, and that all its members were among the finest painters. The influence of the Impressionists was great out of France, especially in Germany, with Liebermann, Corinth, and in Belgium.
The first of the eight Impressionist exhibitions was held in 1874:
Included were the following artists (and others)
The other seven Expressionist exhibitions were held in 1876,1877,1879,1880,1881,1882 and 1886
Less closely connected with the Impressionists were Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Odilon Redon. Concerned with perceptive portraiture and decorative effect, Toulouse-Lautrec used the vivid contrasting colours of Impressionism in flat areas enclosed by a distinct, sinuous outline. Redon's still-life florals were somewhat Impressionistic, but his other works are more linear and Symbolistic. In general, Postimpressionism led away from a naturalistic approach and toward the two major movements of early 20th-century art that superseded it: Cubism and Fauvism, which sought to evoke emotion through colour and line.
Post-impressionism is a movement of major importance in Western painting. As a movement it represents both, an extension of Impressionism, and a rejection of that style's inherent limitations.
The term Post-impressionism was coined by the English art critic Roger Fry for the work of such late 19th-century painters as Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and others. All of these painters except van Gogh were French, and most of them began as Impressionists; each of them abandoned the style, however, to form his own highly personal art.
Impressionism was based, in its strictest sense, on the objective recording of nature in terms of the fugitive effects of colour and light. The Postimpressionists rejected this limited aim in favour of more ambitious expression, admitting their debt, however, to the pure, brilliant colours of Impressionism, its freedom from traditional subject matter, and its technique of defining form with short brushstrokes of broken colour. The work of these painters formed a basis for several contemporary trends and for modern art in general.
After a phase of uneasy dissension among the Impressionists, Paul Cézanne withdrew from the movement in 1878 in order "to make of Impressionism something solid and durable like the art of the museums." In contrast to the passing show depicted by the Impressionists, his approach imbued landscape and still life with a monumental permanence and coherence. He abandoned the Impressionists' virtuoso depiction of evanescent light effects in his preoccupation with the underlying structures of natural forms and the problem of unifying surface patterns with spatial depth. His art was the major inspiration for Cubism, which was concerned primarily with depicting the structure of objects. In 1884, at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, Georges Seurat revealed an intention similar to Cézanne's with paintings that showed more attention to composition than those of the Impressionists and that delved into the science of colour.
Taking as a point of departure the Impressionist practice of using broken colour to suggest shimmering light, he sought to achieve luminosity through optical formulas, placing side by side tiny bits of contrasting colour chosen to blend from a distance into a dominant colour. This extremely theoretical technique, called Pointillism, was adopted by a number of contemporary painters and formed the basis of the style of painting known as Neo-Impressionism
The Postimpressionists often exhibited together but, unlike the Impressionists who were a close-knit, convivial group, they painted mainly alone.
Cézanne painted in isolation at Aix-en-Provence in southern France; his solitude was matched by that of Gauguin, who in 1891 took up residence in Tahiti, and of Van Gogh, who painted in the countryside at Arles.
Both Gauguin and van Gogh rejected the indifferent objectivity of Impressionism in favour of a more personal, spiritual expression. After exhibiting with the Impressionists in 1886, Gauguin renounced "the abominable error of naturalism."
With the young painter Émile Bernard, he led a self-conscious return to the aesthetic of primitive art, for which he believed imagination and ideas were the primary inspiration and the representation of nature merely a vehicle for their expression. Copying the pure, flat colour, heavy outline, and decorative quality of medieval stained glass and manuscript illumination, the two artists explored the expressive potential of pure colour and line, Gauguin especially using exotic and sensuous colour harmonies to poetically depict the Tahitians he eventually lived among. Arriving in Paris in 1886, the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh quickly adapted Impressionist techniques and colour to express his acutely felt emotions.
He transformed the contrasting short brushstrokes of Impressionism into curving, vibrant lines of colour, exaggerated even beyond Impressionist brilliance, that convey his emotionally charged and ecstatic responses to the natural landscape.
Post-Impressionists