Impressionism+Research+A

__Period 6 Impressionism Research__
-Impressionism was a 19th century art movement that began as a loose association of Paris-based artists, who began exhibiting their art publicly in the 1860s. -The name of the movement is derived from the title of a Claude Monet work, //Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant)//, which provoked the critic Louis Leroy to coin the term in a satiric review published in //Le Charivari//. -Characteristics of Impressionist painting include visible brushstrokes, open composition, emphasis on light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, the inclusion of //movement// as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles. -The emergence of Impressionism in the visual arts was soon followed by analogous movements in other media which became known as Impressionist music and Impressionist literature. Impressionism also describes art created in this style, but outside of the late 19th century time period. -French Impressionist painting is currently the most popular of all European bodies of art. Part of the romance of Impressionism comes from the stories of uphill struggles against the Academic painters and critics who dominated 19th-century French art, only to be swept into obscurity by the artists they had scorned. However, a reaction was bound to set in, and during the final decades of the 20th century, a number of politically oriented critics began to argue that far from being radicals, the Impressionists appealed to bourgeois tastes partly because their technique was easy to digest and their subject matter inoffensive. They point out that the industrialization of Europe is rarely reflected in their works, and that they paid little or no attention to the sufferings of the urban poor. Many of them were acutely conscious of their popularity, and eager to cash in on it. Radicals in their time, early Impressionists broke the rules of academic painting. They began by giving colors, freely brushed, primacy over line, drawing inspiration from the work of painters such as Eugene Delacroix. They also took the act of painting out of the studio and into the world. Previously, not only still lifes and portraits, but also landscapes, had been painted indoors, but the Impressionists found that they could capture the momentary and transient effects of sunlight by painting //en plein air//. Painting realistic scenes of modern life, they emphasized vivid overall effects rather than details. They used short, "broken" brush strokes of pure and unmixed color, not smoothly blended, as was customary, in order to achieve the effect of intense color vibration. (wikipedia.en.org) Impressionist art is a style in which the artist captures the image of an object as someone would see it if they just caught a glimpse of it. They paint the pictures with a lot of color and most of their pictures are outdoor scenes. Their pictures are very bright and vibrant. The artists like to capture their images without detail but with bold colors. Some of the greatest impressionist artists were Edouard Manet, Camille Pissaro, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot and Pierre Auguste Renoir. http://longwood.cs.ucf.edu/~MidLink/Impress.html -While the term Impressionist covers much of the art of this time, there were smaller movements within it, such as Pointillism, Art Nouveau and Fauvism.Pointilism was developed from Impressionism and involved the use of many small dots of colour to give a painting a greater sense of vibrancy when seen from a distance. The equal size dots never quite merge in the viewer's perception resulting in a shimmering effect like one experiences on a hot and sunny day. One of the leading exponents was Seurat to whom the term was first applied in regard to his painting 'La Grand Jette' (1886).
 * The Definition**

Techniques

 * Short, thick strokes of paint are used to quickly capture the essence of the subject, rather than its details. The paint is often applied impasto.
 * Colors are applied side-by-side with as little mixing as possible, creating a vibrant surface. The optical mixing of colors occurs in the eye of the viewer.
 * Grays and dark tones are produced by mixing complementary colors. In pure Impressionism the use of black paint is avoided.
 * Wet paint is placed into wet paint without waiting for successive applications to dry, producing softer edges and an intermingling of color.
 * Impressionist paintings do not exploit the transparency of thin paint films (glazes) which earlier artists built up carefully to produce effects. The surface of an Impressionist painting is typically opaque.
 * The play of natural light is emphasized. Close attention is paid to the reflection of colors from object to object.
 * In paintings made //en plein air// (outdoors), shadows are boldly painted with the blue of the sky as it is reflected onto surfaces, giving a sense of freshness and openness that was not captured in painting previously. (Blue shadows on snow inspired the technique.)
 * They paint the pictures with a lot of color and most of their pictures are outdoor scenes.
 * Their pictures are very bright and vibrant.
 * The artists like to capture their images without detail but with bold colors.

__Impressionist Artists (wikipedia.en.org)[[image:Monet1.gif width="159" height="146" align="right" caption="Claude Monet's Sunrise "]]__

 * Frédéric Bazille
 * Gustave Caillebotte
 * Mary Cassatt
 * Paul Cézanne
 * Edgar Degas
 * Armand Guillaumin
 * Édouard Manet
 * Claude Monet
 * Berthe Morisot
 * Camille Pissarro
 * Pierre-Auguste Renoir
 * Alfred Sisley

The Founders
The founders of this society were animated by the will to break with the official art. The official theory that the color should be dropped pure on the canvas instead of getting mixed on the palette will only be respected by a few of them and only for a couple of years. In fact, the Impressionism is a lot more a state of the mind than a technique; thus artists other than painters have also been qualified of impressionists. Many of these painters ignore the law of simultaneous contrast as established by Chevreul in 1823. The expressions ``independants or ``open air painters may be more appropriate than ``impressionists'' to qualify those artists continuing a tradition inherited from [|Eugène Delacroix], who thought that the drawing and colors were a whole, and English landscape painters, [|Constable], Bonington and especially [|William Turner], whose first law was the observation of nature, as for landscape painters working in Barbizon and in the Fontainebleau forest. [|Eugène Boudin], Stanislas Lépine and the Dutch [|Jongkind] were among the forerunners of the movement. In 1858, Eugène Boudin met in Honfleur Claude Monet, aged about 15 years. He brought him to the seashore, gave him colors and taught him how to observe the changing lights on the Seine estuary. In those years, Boudin is still the minor painter of the Pardon de Sainte-Anne-la-Palud, but is on the process of getting installed on the Normandy coast to paint the beaches of Trouville and Le Havre. On the Côte de Grâce, in the Saint-Siméon farm, he attracts many painters including [|Courbet], Bazille, Monet, Sisley. The last three will meet in Paris in the free Gleyre studio, and in 1863 they will discover a porcelain painter, Auguste Renoir. At the same time, other artists wanted to bypass the limitations attached to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and were working quai des Orfèvres in the Swiss Academy; the eldest, from the Danish West Indies, was Camille Pissarro; the other two were Paul Cézanne and Armand Guillaumin. http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/glo/impressionism/

Beginnings
In an atmosphere of change as [|Empereur Napoléon III] rebuilt [|Paris] and waged war, the [|Académie des Beaux-Arts] dominated the French art scene in the middle of the 19th century. The Académie was the upholder of traditional standards for French painting, both in content and style. Historical subjects, religious themes, and portraits were valued (landscape and still life were not), and the Académie preferred carefully finished images which mirrored reality when examined closely. Color was somber and conservative, and the traces of brush strokes were suppressed, concealing the artist's personality, emotions, and working techniques. The Académie held an annual, juried art show, the [|Salon de Paris], and artists whose work displayed in the show won prizes, garnered commissions, and enhanced their prestige. The standards of the juries reflected the values of the Académie, represented by the highly polished works of such artists as [|Jean-Léon Gérôme] and [|Alexandre Cabanel]. The young artists painted in a lighter and brighter manner than painters of the preceding generation, extending further the [|realism] of [|Gustave Courbet] and the [|Barbizon school]. They were more interested in painting landscape and contemporary life than in recreating scenes from history. Each year, they submitted their art to the Salon, only to see the juries reject their best efforts in favour of trivial works by artists working in the approved style. A core group of young realists, [|Claude Monet], [|Pierre Auguste Renoir], [|Alfred Sisley], and [|Frédéric Bazille], who had studied under [|Charles Gleyre], became friends and often painted together. They soon were joined by [|Camille Pissarro], [|Paul Cézanne], and [|Armand Guillaumin]. In 1863, the jury rejected //[|The Luncheon on the Grass]// //(Le déjeuner sur l'herbe)// by [|Édouard Manet] primarily because it depicted a nude woman with two clothed men at a picnic. While nudes were routinely accepted by the Salon when featured in historical and allegorical paintings, the jury condemned Manet for placing a realistic nude in a contemporary setting.[|[1]] The jury's sharply worded rejection of Manet's painting, as well as the unusually large number of rejected works that year, set off a firestorm among French artists. Manet was admired by Monet and his friends, and led the discussions at [|Café Guerbois] where the group of artists frequently met. After seeing the rejected works in 1863, Emperor Napoleon III decreed that the public be allowed to judge the work themselves, and the [|Salon des Refusés] (Salon of the Refused) was organized. While many viewers came only to laugh, the Salon des Refusés drew attention to the existence of a new tendency in art and attracted more visitors than the regular Salon.[|[2]] Artists' petitions requesting a new Salon des Refusés in 1867, and again in 1872, were denied. In April of 1874 a group consisting of Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Cézanne, [|Berthe Morisot], and [|Edgar Degas] organized their own exhibition at the studio of the photographer [|Nadar]. They invited a number of other progressive artists to exhibit with them, including the slightly older [|Eugène Boudin], whose example had first persuaded Monet to take up //plein air// painting years before.[|[3]] Another painter who greatly influenced Monet and his friends, [|Johan Jongkind], declined to participate, as did Manet. In total, thirty artists participated in the exhibition, which was the first of eight that the group would present between 1874 and 1886. The critical response was mixed, with Monet and Cézanne bearing the harshest attacks. Critic and humorist [|Louis Leroy] wrote a scathing review in the //Le Charivari// newspaper in which, making wordplay with the title of Claude Monet's //[|Impression, Sunrise]// //(Impression, soleil levant)//, he gave the artists the name by which they would become known. Derisively titling his article //[|The Exhibition of the Impressionists]//, Leroy declared that Monet's painting was at most, a sketch, and could hardly be termed a finished work. media type="yahoo" key="487830" width="425" height="350" media type="google" key="6229805697196345792&hl=en" width="400" height="326" media type="youtube" key="4U64dGk0M6E&rel=1" height="355" width="425"good for presentation He wrote, in the form of a dialog between viewers, //Impression — I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it … and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.//[|[4]] The term "Impressionists" quickly gained favour with the public. It was also accepted by the artists themselves, even though they were a diverse group in style and temperament, unified primarily by their spirit of independence and rebellion. Monet, Sisley, Morisot, and Pissarro may be considered the "purest" Impressionists, in their consistent pursuit of an art of spontaneity, sunlight, and color. Degas rejected much of this, as he believed in the primacy of drawing over color and belittled the practice of painting outdoors.[|[5]] Renoir turned against Impressionism for a time in the 1880s, and never entirely regained his commitment to its ideas. Édouard Manet, despite his role as a leader to the group, never abandoned his liberal use of black as a color, and never participated in the Impressionist exhibitions. He continued to submit his works to the Salon, where his //Spanish Singer// had won a 2nd class medal in 1861, and he urged the others to do likewise, arguing that "the Salon is the real field of battle" where a reputation could be made.[|[6]] Among the artists of the core group (minus Bazille, who had died in the [|Franco-Prussian War] in 1870), defections occurred as Cézanne, followed later by Renoir, Sisley, and Monet, abstained from the group exhibitions in order to submit their works to the Salon. Disagreements arose from issues such as Guillaumin's membership in the group, championed by Pissarro and Cézanne against opposition from Monet and Degas, who thought him unworthy.[|[7]] Degas invited [|Mary Cassatt] to display her work in the 1879 exhibition, but he also caused dissention by insisting on the inclusion of [|Jean-François Raffaëlli], Ludovic Lepic, and other realists who did not represent Impressionist practices, leading Monet in 1880 to accuse the Impressionists of "opening doors to first-come daubers".[|[8]] The group divided over the invitation of [|Signac] and [|Seurat] to exhibit with them in 1886. Pissarro was the only artist to show at all eight Impressionist exhibitions. The individual artists saw few financial rewards from the Impressionist exhibitions, but their art gradually won a degree of public acceptance. 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]. 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.[|[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressionism [[image:http://www.fineart-e.com/images/pis-007.jpg width="155" height="128" caption="Pissaro's Plein Air"]]