Monday, August 8th, 2011
titleImpressionism and Art/titleImpressionism was an important artistic movement, originally in painting and later on in music, that developed mainly in France during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Impressionist painting is defined as the work produced between about 1867 and 1886 by a number of artists who shared a set of similar methods and techniques. The most noted characteristic of Impressionism was an attempt to realistically and objectively record visual actual scenes in terms of moving effects of light and colour. The principal Impressionist painters were Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot, Armand Guillaumin, and Fr d ric Bazille, who worked together, influenced each other, and exhibited together and alsoindependently. Edgar Degas and Paul C zanne also painted in an Impressionist style for a period in the early 1870s. The established painter douard Manet, whose work in the 1860s greatly influenced Monet and others of the group, also took up the Impressionist style about 1873. p These artists became dissatisfied earlier in their careers with academic teaching’s emphasis on producing images of an historical or mythological subject matter with literary or anecdotal overtones. They also rejected the conventional imaginative or idealizing treatments of academic painting. By the late 1860s, Manet’s art reflected a new aesthetic which became a guiding style in Impressionist work in which the importance of the traditional subject matter was ignored and attention was shifted to the artist’s use of colours, tone, and texture as ends in themselves. In Manet’s painting the subject became a vehicle for the artful composition of areas of flat colour, and perspectival depth was reduced so that the eye would look at the surface abrasions and relationships of the depiction rather than into the illusory three-dimensional space it created. About the same time, Monet was influenced by the innovative painters Eugene Boudin and J.R. Jongkind, who depicted fleeting effects of sea and sky using highly coloured and texturally varied techniques of paint application. The Impressionists also used Boudin’s practice of working entirely out-of-doors while looking at the actual scene, instead of finishing the paintings from sketches in the studio, as was the established practice. p In the late 1860s Monet, Pisarro, Renoir, and various colleagues began painting landscapes and river scenes in which they tried to unemotively record colours and forms of objects as they appeared in daylight at a given time. These artists left the traditional landscape palette of muted greens, browns and grays and instead painted in a lighter, sunnier, more brilliant key. They began by painting the play of light on water and the reflected colours of ripples, wanting to copy the many and motion effects of sunlight and shadow and of direct and reflected light that they observed. In their efforts to reproduce actual visible impressions as registered on the retina, they reduced the use of grays and blacks in shadows as inaccurate and used complementary colours instead. More importantly, they learned to create objects out of discrete flecks and dabs of pure harmonising or contrasting colour, thus evoking the broken-hued brilliance and the variations of colour resulting from sunlight and its reflections. Forms in their pictures no longer had clear outlines and became softer, shimmering and vibrating in a re-creation of actual outdoor conditions. And finally, traditional formal compositions were abandoned favouring a more casual and less contrived disposition of objects within the picture frame. The Impressionists extended these newfound techniques to paint landscapes, trees, houses, and even urban street scenes and famous buildings such as railroad stations. p In 1874 the artists held their first show, independent of the official Salon of the French Academy, which had rejected almost all of their works. Monet’s painting Impression: Sunrise (1872; Mus e Marmottan, Paris) earned them the initially insulting name Impressionists from the journalist Louis Leroy writing of them in the satirical magazine Le Charivari in 1874. The artists themselves eventually adopted the name as it perfectly described their intention to accurately paint visual impressions. They held seven following shows, the last in 1886. During that time they continued to develop their own personal and individual styles. All of them, however, affirmed in their work the principles of freedom of technique, a personal rather than a conventional approach to subject matter, and the truthful reproduction of nature. p By the mid-1880s the Impressionist group had begun to dissolve as each painter increasingly pursued his own aesthetic interests and principles. In its short existence, however, it had accomplished a revolution in the history of art, providing a technical starting point for the post-impressionist artists Paul C zanne, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Georges Seurat and freeing subsequent Western painting from narrow techniques and approaches to subject matter. p pLooking for a href=http://www.discountart.com.au/support/sitepage.asp?Page=Art^Canvasart canvas/a or a href=http://www.discountart.com.au/support/sitepage.asp?Page=Acrylic^Paintacrylic paint/a for your impressionist masterpiece? 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