Impressionism

impressionism, in painting

impressionism, in painting, late-19th-century French school that was generally characterized by the attempt to depict transitory visual impressions, often painted directly from nature, and by the use of pure, broken color to achieve brilliance and luminosity. It was loosely structured in that many painters were associated with the movement for only brief periods in their careers. Their association often came about more for the purpose of exhibiting their works than from an approach to painting held in common.

The Birth of Impressionism

The movement began with the friendship of four students of the academic painter Marc Gleyre: Monet, Renoir, Sisley, and Bazille. These four met regularly at the Café Guerbois in Paris with Cézanne, Pissarro, and Morisot, and later with Degas, Manet, the critics Duret and Rivière, and the art dealer Durand-Ruel. The painters repudiated academic standards and reacted against the romantics' emphasis on emotion as subject matter. They forsook literary and anecdotal subjects and, indeed, rejected the role of imagination in the creation of works of art. Instead they observed nature closely, with a scientific interest in visual phenomena. Although they painted everyday subjects, they avoided the vulgar and ugly, seeking visual realism by extraordinary stylistic means.

Impressionists and Postimpressionists

The subject matter of their painting was as diverse as the various artists' personalities: Manet chose Old Master themes which he treated in a novel and stunningly direct way so that his canvases were the focus of acid controversy and scandal. Monet, Sisley, and Pissarro were the most consistently impressionist in style. Their subject was landscape and the changing effects of light. Degas painted horse races, the ballet, and portraits of ordinary people, all with a photographic sense of "accidental" composition. Renoir, painting his idealized women and children and his lush landscapes, developed divisionism; omitting black for shadows and outlines from his palette in the 1860s, he used pure, bright color to separate forms. Monet painted many series of the same subject at different times of day so that the character of light became his subject and the forms of objects seemed to dissolve, as in the series of Rouen Cathedral.

The interests and attitudes of these painters influenced the postimpressionists Cézanne, Seurat, Gauguin, and Van Gogh. Toulouse-Lautrec gained from a study of Degas's paintings; Matisse, Vuillard, and Bonnard all owed a debt to the landscape painters. However, impressionist objectivity was limiting; the severe and total rejection of both the function of imagination and of the enduring aspects of reality began to pall. Gauguin and Van Gogh used color imaginatively and violently for its expressive emotional value. Immediate impressions and flickering light gave way to heavier subjects, solid with "meaning," in the works of the impressionists' successors.

See postimpressionism and articles on individual artists, e.g., Renoir.

The Legacy of Impressionism

Impressionism and postimpressionism ran their course and produced aesthetic revolution from within and without, putting hosts of painters to come greatly in its debt. At first, with a few exceptions, the works of the impressionist and postimpressionist schools were received with hostility from critics and public alike. This situation continued until the 1920s. By the 1930s impressionism had a large cult following, so that in the 1950s even the least works by painters associated with the movement commanded large prices.

Throughout the next three decades, impressionism and postimpressionism became increasingly popular, as evidenced by the major exhibitions of Monet and Van Gogh at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in the 1980s, both of which drew enormous crowds. Record prices to date include two 1990 sales, one at Sotheby's of Renoir's Au Moulin de la Galette for $78.1 million, the other at Christie's of Van Gogh's Portrait du Dr. Gachet for $82.5 million.

Bibliography

See J. Rewald, The History of Impressionism (1980); T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life (1984); W. H. Gerdts, American Impressionism (1984); D. Bomford et al., Impressionism (1990); B. Denvir, Encyclopedia of Impressionism (1990); C. Moffett, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism (1991).

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impressionism, in music

impressionism, in music, a French movement in the late 19th and early 20th cent. It was begun by Debussy in reaction to the dramatic and dynamic emotionalism of romantic music, especially that of Wagner. Reflecting the impressionist schools of French painting and letters, Debussy developed a style in which atmosphere and mood take the place of strong emotion or of the story in program music. He used new chord combinations, whole-tone chords, chromaticism, and exotic rhythms and scales. In place of the usual harmonic progression, he developed a style in which chords are valued for their individual sonorities rather than for their relations to one another, and dissonances are unprepared and unresolved. Although conceived in reaction to romanticism, musical impressionism seems today the culmination of romanticism. Its influence was widespread and is evident in the music of Ravel, Dukas, Respighi, Albéniz, de Falla, Delius, C. T. Griffes, and J. A. Carpenter.

Bibliography

See C. Palmer, Impressionism in Music (1973).

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Impressionism

Movement in art that developed in France in the late 19th century. In painting it included works produced c. 1867–86 by a group of artists who shared approaches, techniques, and discontent with academic teaching, originally including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, and Berthe Morisot. Later Édouard Manet, whose earlier style had strongly influenced several of them, Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne and others joined them. The identifying feature of their work was an attempt to record a scene accurately and objectively, capturing the transient effects of light on colour and texture. To this end they abandoned the traditional muted browns, grays, and greens in favour of a lighter, more brilliant palette; stopped using grays and blacks for shadows; built up forms out of discrete flecks and dabs of colour; and often painted out of doors, rather than in the studio. They abandoned traditional formal compositions in favour of a more casual and less contrived disposition of objects within the picture frame, and their subject matter included landscapes, trees, houses, and even urban street scenes and railroad stations. After the French Academy's Salon consistently rejected most of their works, they held their own exhibition in 1874; seven others followed. A critic described them derisively as “impressionists,” and they adopted the name as an accurate description of their intent. Before dissolving in the late 1880s, the group had revolutionized Western painting. See also Post-Impressionism; Salon des Indépendants.

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Impressionism

In music, a style initiated by French composer Claude Debussy at the end of the 19th century. The term, which is somewhat vague in reference to music, was introduced by analogy with contemporaneous French painting; it was disliked by Debussy himself. Elements often termed impressionistic include static harmony, emphasis on instrumental timbres that creates a shimmering interplay of “colours,” melodies that lack directed motion, surface ornamentation that obscures or substitutes for melody, and an avoidance of traditional musical form. Impressionism can be seen as a reaction against the rhetoric of Romanticism, disrupting the forward motion of standard harmonic progressions. The other composer most often associated with Impressionism is Maurice Ravel. Impressionistic passages are common in earlier music by Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt, and Richard Wagner, and in music by later composers such as Charles Ives, Béla Bartók, and George Gershwin.