¶ … innovative qualities of Impressionist and Realist painters' works, together with outlining the connection with Modern art and its implications in specific examples.
Realism appeared as a reaction to Romanticism and Classicism, by forsaking previous reliance on artifice and emotion in favor of unaltered objectivity. Admittedly, the current strived to offer truthful, accurate portrayals of everyday life instances which surrounded the artists. In this sense, Edouard Manet's Le Dejeuner sur L'Herbe and Goustave Courbet's the Stone Breakers are exponential for the purity of their rendition of quotidian routine, namely leisure enterprises and respectively people at work. The influence of realist principles can be clearly traced to modern photography, a form of visual art which brought the artist's yearning to create real representations even further, and a meaningful example for this is the 1978 Untitled Film Still #21 by Cindy Sherman.
Impressionism was radically distinct through its attempt to capture the general impression that a scene or object provoked, by means of short strokes which served to emphasize a dynamic reflection of light on various surfaces, leaving the 1870s critics outraged and feeling that the paintings were not finalized. The Rehearsal on Stage by Edgar Degas, Moulin de la Galette by Pierre Auguste Renoir and Mother and Child by Mary Cassatt altogether illustrate the impressionist ephemeral light-play which can be linked to modernity through its rejection of the eternal and portrayal of temporary commonplace scenes and daily middle class people's activities.
Post-impressionists such as Georges Seurat - a Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte - and Paul Cezanne - Mont Saint-Victoire - deemed the Impressionist technique limited and struggled to bring new elements, such as Cezanne's translated three-dimensionality, tight composition aimed at visually increased harmony and solidity, or Seurat's Pointillist approach which improved upon the accuracy of line and detail. The manner in which Cezanne abstractly modulated color in his paintings was seminal to the controversial cubist style. What is more, Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon simplified previous endeavors in terms of structure by employing a savage two-dimensional angularity, and as such was exponential for early modern art.
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