Notes on Impressionism

• European and American science and industry produced wealth and power
• Period of materialism
• Expansion of colonial interests in Africa, Asia and South America
• 1854 Admiral Perry obtained a treaty that opened Japan to trade with western powers. Japan was an ordered, talented society.
• Progress was celebrated at expositions and world's fairs
• Industry produced marvels: railroads that linked nations; balloons that permitted aerial photography, daring escapes, and novel celebrations
• machines that could weave, manufacture, and sort products of all kinds
• Supplanted skilled artisans sometimes attacked the machines tha had taken their jobs
• Worship of machines
• Engineering feats such as suspension bridge, subway in London, the Eiffel Tower, and iron and glass buildings of the expositions produced a feeling of awe and of confience in the power of science and industry. These influences found their way into the arts, which interpreted them and gave them back to tthe community for contemplation.
• Photograph was most important influence of industry on painting. Paul Delaroche saw the official demonstration of the daguerreotype in Paris in 1839 and declared: "From now painting is dead."
• Painter becomes like the scientist, who studies only what can be perceived.
• Realists insisted that even the most detailed and "photographic" history painting was unreal. It could not portray a scene witnessed by the painter and was thus invalid as a realist composition.
• Representations of events from mythology were scorned for the same reason, as were idealizations of form
• Emphasis on seeing beyond the surface to the implications of the scene portrayed.
• Meaning, in other words, was integral to the realist vision; there were often social "messages" in realist works.
• Japanese woodblock artist Hokusai brought bright, flat colors in Japanese prints. Their subject matter was ordinary moments in daily life
• Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) in The Gross Clinic 1875
• Dr. Samuel David Gross often lectured at Jefferson MedicaL cOLLEGE. Thomas Eakins studied anatomy and did many of his sketches there. In The Gross Clinic, Eakins centers on the professor, who has turned away from the operation to explain a point to his students. The patient's blood is still on his hand and his scalpel. His assistants attend to their duties-Eakins is at the right of center, looking down. The mother of the patient (or so she has been identified), at the left of the canvas, shows her grief and offers a contrast to the scientific detachment. In the background, dim and distant, are medical students in the theater, learning their profession. The dark clothing permits the powerful contrast of the patient's blood and his skin. Eakins is indebted to Rembrandt in this painting and also the photograph, as is apparent in the intense highlights, the receding shadows, the selective focus, and the blurring of the instruments at the lower left.
• Maurice Denis said "Remember that a picture-before being a war horse, a nude woman, or an anecdote-is essentially a plane surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order."
• Most painters wanted viewers to forget the paint and imagine themselves as witnesses of an event. Manet, in contrast, applied paint to his canvases in such a way that it was impossible for a viewer to see them without being aware of the sensual values of hues, and intensities. It is said that Manet painted with an improvisational zeal so intense that his models sometimes became frightened of his ferocity.
• Monet 1840-1926
• frequented Cafe Guerbois which was popular with the impressionists.
• His Impression, Sunrise earned the impressionists their name-given in derision by a critic who was reading through the catalog of the group show put on in the photographer Nadar's studio in April 1874
• Monet uses color theory recently published which insisted that colors interact, that adjacent colors affect and intensify one another. Theory suggested that in paintinbg or weaving, it was better to place different colors next to each other and let the eye mix them rather than mix them together on the palette.
• Postimpressionists: value of form; intensity of surface
• 1886 last group show of impressionists had been hyeld
• Postimpressionists had in common: love of color, concern for making the painted surface the most important aspect of painting (as opposed to illusion of three dimensions) and unceasing interest in experimentation, which made their work more and more personal.
• Cezanne analyzed form and structure. Mont Sainte-Victoire may have been influenced by Hiroshige's woodblock prints of Fuziyama, appeared in a book that was available. Hiroshige made 100 porints of Fuziyama. Japanese prints, which had been used as wrapping paper for porcelain imported into Paris in 1850s, had shown the impressionists that they could use FLAT COLOR AND FLAT PERSPECTIVE to advantage. Cezanne doesn't use such technique but shows the fascination of the Japanese with repeating a visual experiment-each time slightly differently, as if paying homage to the subject matter.
  
  
  

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