© Copyright 2005 Paul van Rensburg.
BIOGRAPHIES:
NEO-IMPRESSIONISM:
Impressionism caught on quickly in America from the 1880s onward. The ground had been prepared by American painters who became sympathetic to the style while living in France. They included Mary Cassatt, who exhibited with the impressionists on four occasions, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and John Singer Sargent.
Other American artists who became identified as practitioners of the new style were Frederick Carl Frieseke, Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf, Lilla Cabot Perry, Theodore Robinson, John Henry Twachtman, and J. Alden Weir.
Artists in other countries were just as quick to catch on, namely British painter Walter Sickert, Italian painter Giovanni Segantini, and German painters Max Liebermann and Lovis Corinth who all adopted aspects of impressionism and helped popularize the style. Others were:
Impressionist art started when four art students and friends - Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley and Frederic Bazille, one day became bored with their studio class and decided to take their easels, and go to the nearby forest of Fontainebleau where they started painting in the open air (en plein air).
This dramatic change of light and scenery necessitated a completely different style of painting. In order to capture the momentary and transient effects of the changing sunlight, they had to paint swiftly, using short brush strokes and pure and unmixed colour, not smoothly blended as was the custom at the time.
As they were painting realistic scenes, they were forced to emphasize vivid overall effects rather than details. The resultant paintings broke all the existing rules of academic painting, being lighter, brighter and more spontaneous with an emphasis on freely brushed colour with an overall luminosity, rather than exact form and line. They produced loose or densely textured surfaces rather than the carefully blended colours and smooth surfaces favoured by most artists of the time.
This rebellious outing set the stage for a movement which would soon be joined by others and develop over the next twenty years into a movement which would pave the way for all subsequent 20th century art movements. In fact, the influence of Impressionist thought would spread even beyond the art world, leading also to Impressionist music and Impressionist literature.
The artists most often associated with impressionism include Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Pierre Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley.
The name "Impressionism" was coined in 1874 by French art critic Louis Leroy in a satirical review published in Le Charivari. The name of the movement is derived from Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant).
IMPRESSIONISM - A BRIEF HISTORY
Impressionism is regarded as a radical and revolutionary art form which challenged the existing art establishment in France between 1860 and 1900 and eventually changed the very nature of the way people think about art.
At the time the ideals of art were rigidly controlled by academic institutions such as the French Academy of Fine Arts and Le salon, France's official annual art show. In order to be accepted for display at Le Salon, paintings had to conform to strict rules regarding theme, colour, composition and brushwork. In fact, an artist's career depended on being accepted into the establishment to get recognition for his work and to obtain commissions to create works of art for the government and other wealthy patrons.
Conventional art in France was done exclusively in studios with subjects centered around religion, history and Greek mythology and was primarily aimed at illustrating and teaching moral lessons. It was characterised by deep, rich colours and dark shadows and the utmost care was taken to create an illusion of reality by hiding all traces of brushwork and presenting an extremely smooth and translucent surface, In effect concealing the artist's personality, emotions, and working techniques.
The conventional compositions were ostentatious with a majestic air and usually focused on a central activity or group of imposing figures with spectacular, identical bodies.
Nature as such, was never portrayed as a subject in itself, but primarily in an ornamental capacity to set the scene for a story. It was altered to best enhance the drama portrayed before it, be it a dark and stormy sky split open by heavenly sunrays, or a delicate and softily lit garden containing graceful dancing nymphs or classical ruins.
When the Impressionists first exhibited their paintings in the 1870s, critics ridiculed the movement and the general public expressed outrage upon seeing such radical artistic techniques. In newspaper cartoons pregnant women were, for instance, warned not to enter an Impressionist art exhibition because of the danger of a miscarriage. In other caricatures it was even proposed that the advancing Prussian army be fended off by showing them Impressionist paintings. The Salon regarded their paintings as shocking, unfinished and insulting and refused to accept them for exhibition.
Disappointed by their lack of success at official exhibitions, these artists resolved to proceed without the salon. They were especially indignant at the humiliating way in which the Salon had responded to the work of fellow painter Édouard Manet. Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863, Musée d'Orsay, Paris) was rejected by the official Salon of 1863, but displayed instead at a special exhibition of rejected paintings (called the Salon des Refusés) in 1863. Critics voiced their outrage to this painting, which depicted a naked woman seated at a picnic with two men clothed in contemporary dress. Nudes were an acceptable subject at the time in allegorical or historical paintings, but not in scenes of everyday life.
In summary, the following artists are
generally regarded as true impressionists:
- Alfred Sisley 1839-1899
- Berthe Morisot 1841-1895
- Camille Pissarro 1855-1903
- Claude Monet 1840-1926
- Edgar Degas 1834-1917
- Edouard Manet 1856-1833
- Frederic Bazille 1841-1870
- Gustave Caillebotte 1848-1894
- Mary Cassatt 1844-1926
- Auguste Renoir 1841-1919
Although Sisley would die in poverty in 1899, Renoir had a great Salon success in 1879. Financial security came to Monet in the early 1880s and to Pissarro by the early 1890s. By this time the methods of Impressionist painting, in a diluted form, had become commonplace in Salon art and fashionable painters such as Jean Beraud and Henri Gervex found critical and financial success by brightening their palettes while retaining the smooth finish expected of Salon art.
It took nearly 20 years until Impressionism was finally recognized and appreciated in France.
From the 1880s several artists began to develop different precepts for the use of colour, pattern, form and line, derived from the Impressionist example, namely Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. However, their art style was bolder and more expressive than early Impressionism. These artists were slightly younger than the Impressionists, and their work is known as post-Impressionism.
Georges Seurat and his friend Paul Signac went their own way with Pointillism, a painting technique that uses many, many little dots to compose a painting.
Neo Impressionists and Post Impressionists are:
In 1874, a group got together and organised their own exhibition as an alternative to the salon. This group included Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas and Alfred Sisley. Although the exhibition was not a success, it was the first independent group show of Impressionist art. The impressionists held seven subsequent exhibitions between 1876 and 1886 and not all response to their work was negative. Some critics liked their fresh approach to painting and wrote favourable reviews encouraging the painters. The individual artists saw few financial rewards from the Impressionist exhibitions, but their art gradually won a degree of public acceptance. The public, at first hostile, gradually came to believe that the Impressionists had captured a fresh and original vision, even if it did not meet with approval of the artistic establishment.
Their dealer Durand-Ruel played a major role in this as he kept their work before the public and arranged shows for them in London and New York. By the 1890s impressionist paintings began to attract more buyers. Impressionism appealed mainly to newly rich middle-class collectors, who brought fewer prejudices to new art than did members of the establishment. These collectors also responded to the small scale and ready comprehensibility of impressionist paintings.
- Konstantin Korovin and Valentin Serov in Russia
- Francisco Oller y Cestero, a native of Puerto Rico who was a friend of Pissarro and Cézanne
- Laura Muntz Lyall, a Canadian artist
- Wladyslaw Podkowinski, a Polish Impressionist and symbolist
- Nazmi Ziya Güran, who brought Impressionism to Turkey.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Boyle, David, "Impressionist Art", Watson-Guptill Publications, ISBN 0-8230-0988-2
Mauclair, Camille, The French Impressionists (1860-1900), translated by P.G. Konady.
A Project Gutenberg eBook.
encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761553672/Impressionism_(art).html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressionism
BIOGRAPHIES:
NEO-IMPRESSIONISM: