Impressionism Although the Term Impressionism

Impressionism Although the term "Impressionism" was first used in 1874 by a journalist ridiculing a landscape by Monet, the bitter controversy that raged for twenty years over the merits of Impressionism actually began eleven years earlier in 1863 at the Salon des Refuses, an exhibition held to accommodate the exceptionally numerous works rejected by the jury for the salon that year. It was here that Manet shocked the viewing public with his Dejeuner sur l'Herbe which helped to withdraw the curtain of classical illusion and brought the nude up-to-date.

This form of "Impressionism" set the artistic stage for many years to come and influenced an entire generation of painters well into the 20th century.

In addition, it has been suggested that the Impressionist movement was also influenced by Baron Haussmann who between 1853 and 1870 completely renovated the city of Paris by "tearing down old buildings to create more open space for a cleaner, safer city." Thus, through his efforts, painters like Pissarro and Cailebotte came to the forefront and "enthusiastically painted the renovated city (by) employing their new style to depict its wide boulevards, public gardens and grand buildings" ("Impressionism: Art and Modernity, Internet).

In essence, the Impressionist movement sought to create the illusion of forms bathed in light and atmosphere. This required an intensive study of light as the source of our experience of color which revealed the important truth that local color, being the actual color of an object or figure, is usually modified by the quality of the light in which it is seen, the reflections from other objects and by the effects produced by a juxtaposition of colors and forms.

Also, the juxtaposition of colors on the canvas which fuse at a distance produces a more intense hue than the simple mixing of the same colors on the palette. Although it is not strictly true that the Impressionists used only the primary hues, juxtaposing them to create secondary colors, they achieved remarkably brilliant effects with their characteristically short, choppy brushstrokes which accurately captured the vibrating quality of natural and artificial light sources.

By 1886, the Impressionists were accepted by the art world as serious artists, but just at the time when their colorful studies of contemporary life no longer seemed crude and unfinished, these painters and a group of young followers came to feel that too many of the traditional elements in painting were being neglected in the search for momentary sensations of light and color.

A more systematic examination of the properties of three dimensional space, of the expressive qualities of line, pattern and color, and of the symbolic character of subject matter, was undertaken by four men in particular -- Georges Seurat, Paul Cezanne, Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin.

Since their art diverges so markedly from earlier Impressionism, although each had at first accepted the Impressionist methods and never rejected the new and brighter palette, these men have come to be known as the Post-Impressionists, a classification that signifies their chronological position in nineteenth-century French painting.

Five specific painters who lived and worked between 1875 and 1900, best represent the Impressionist movement, due to their individual styles and the huge impact they had upon the artists that came into prominence in the early years of the 20th, namely Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), Edouard Manet (1832-1883), Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) and Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890), all of whom possessed the immense ability to "not merely see things but to see through them to a significance and a reality far deeper than what is given in their superficial appearance" (Miller 126).

In 1887, the great French Impressionist painter Pierre Auguste Renoir completed a series of art studies based on a group of nude female figures known as The Bathers, currently in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. These studies, especially one painting simply called Bathers, are unsurpassed in the history of Western art, due to their true representations of feminine beauty and grace.

As pointed out by Marilyn Stokstad, The Bathers "clearly indicates Renoir's new commitment to the classical tradition of the female nude" (1017) and demonstrates his astonishing mastery of the human form in all its beauty and complexity. Manet's great masterpiece, the Bar at the Folies-Bergere (1882), reflects an analogous absorption of the human figure into the pictorial context. The surface of the canvas vibrates with the reflections light spilling from the gas globes onto the figures and the brilliant still life of fruit and bottles on the counter.

In this study of artificial light, both direct and reflected in the mirror background, the subject matter has lost its earlier importance. Manet tells us little about the barmaid, and less about her customers, but much about his optical experience in this momentary pattern of light in which the barmaid is only another motif or a larger still life amid the glittering bottles. The Place du Theatre Francais (1895) by Camille Pissarro, shows relatively the same qualities as those of Manet.

This painting presents the artist's visual sensations of a crowded Paris square, viewed from several stories above street level, via a panorama of blurred, dark accents against a light background. Like Manet, Pissarro is after the most fugitive effects of movement, but unlike Manet, not so much of light as in the life of the street. He achieved a deliberate casualness in the arrangements of the figures, an effect like that which a single glance from a window would provide if prolonged for only a few seconds.

Ceaseless change of position and the ceaseless change of color were the new orders of Pissarro's experience, for there was no longer a standard of unchanging optical truth, just as there was no longer a standard way of seeing. Pissarro, in essence, approached nature sincerely and with his own modern sensibilities; thus, a clear understanding of Pissarro lies in knowing that nature is only that which is revealed to our senses.

For the Impressionist, and especially with Pissarro, this means that the modern sensibility focuses on what is real in nature, being the color stimuli provided to the analytic eye of the modern painter. As an artist, Paul Cezanne allied himself with the Impressionists, especially Pizzarro, and at first accepted their theories of color and their faith in subjects chosen from everyday life. Yet his own studies of the old masters in the Louvre persuaded him that Impressionism lacked form and structure.

As he once said, "I want to make of Impressionism something solid and lasting like the art in the Louvre" (Adams 257). The basis of Cezanne's art was his new way of studying nature; his aim was not for truth to appear on the canvas but a lasting structure behind the formless and fleeting screens of color the eye always beholds. In his Still Life (1890), Cezanne's method may be seen at its best.

The individual forms have lost something of their private character as bottles and fruits and approach the condition of cylinders and spheres. There is a sharp clarity of planes and the edges of the planes set forth the objects as if they had been sculpted. Even the highlights of the glassware are as sharply defined as the solids. The floating colors of the Impressionists has been arrested, held, and analyzed into interlocking planes. Thus, Cezanne gives the viewer what might be called, paradoxically, an architecture of color.

In contrast, the order of the experience of color as rendered by Vincent Van Gogh impetuously and arbitrarily exploited the new color to express his emotions when confronted by nature. His 1889 work The Starry Night, envisions the sky as one sees it when looking up on a clear, dark night -- a spangling of twinkling pinpoints.