Semester 2, Lecture 3

At the beginning of this course, when we looked at the development of the Renaissance, I talked to you about the fact that the Renaissance came about as a result of a shift in the way that European people viewed reality. The change in the way that things were seen happened because of a whole range of social, political and cultural developments; what happened in art was both a cause and an effect of that shift.

With Impressionism in the second half of the 19^th C, we see another significant change in the mode of representation taking place in visual art which reflects and also speeds up changes that are taking place in society at large. Impressionism supplanted the visual modes that Renaissance Art had established, and it paved the way for huge changes in art which we know as Modernism.

We have already observed that early 19^th C photographs captured, for the first time, images of fleeting phenomena, like body shapes when people are walking, or the shape of a horses legs when it runs. This was the first time that images had been seen of insignificant or trivial phenomena. This changed all of the rules of image-making that had been established during the Renaissance and modified in the following centuries. The old ways of seeing were literally abandoned by some artists in favour of a new way of seeing and relating to the visual world. For example, the actions and events of everyday life began to be seen as appropriate subjects for painted images, moving the subject matter away from historical, religious or romantic subjects. We know that the Realists had put forward the idea that artists should deal only with the world around them, and that they should invent nothing. Their concern should be solely with the truth and actuality of contemporary experience.

I have discussed with you the fact that Manet initially saw himself as painting in the tradition of the great masters, but in the 1860’s recognised his affinity with the Realists. The Dejeuner Sur l’Herbe was so scandalous because it seemed to represent the scene of the picnic as a contemporary event.

However, in 1865, Claude Monet began this painting, which was intended to be both a tribute and a challenge to Manet. This was originally a huge painting, over four metres by six. The project had to be abandoned in 1866, just before the Salon where Monet had intended to show it, opened. He later described how he gave the unfinished painting to his landlord as security for rent that he couldn’t pay. The landlord rolled it up and put in the cellar; when Monet had the money to get it back in 1884, he discovered that it had gone mouldy." He cut it up, and kept only three fragments. The third has now disappeared.

It seems to say, well if you are going to paint real life, contemporary life, then why not paint it as it actually is? Why modify the scene to include an unlikely nude? You can see that the poses of the figures represent the kind of casual movement that any of us can recognize as part of everyday life. The second challenge in the work seems to come from the manner of painting it. This is a faithful representation of the effects of sunlight, which suggests with the real focus of contemporary painting is not the subject matter, but the effects of light and the nature of vision itself.

Throughout the 19^th C science and technology was developing at an incredible rate; the study of optics and the physiological principles of visual perception were being intensively pursued by various sciences. Artists, scientists and philosophers in this period were all moving in the same direction, towards a realization that colours were not as Leonardo and Alberti thought, immutable realities but depended on individual perception, that they were part of the universe of light, one of the elementary dimensions of nature. Michel Chevreul (1786-1889) is credited for formulating the first systematic attempt to study and write about the subject of color combining. He developed laws of contrast and harmony from which stemmed concepts of monochromatic, analogous, complementary and triadic color schemes that are found in most modern art textbooks.

This discovery, along with many others, caused many people to doubt the existence of a permanent, independent, unchangeable reality which could be controlled by perspective or the physics that Isaac Newton had described. Instead, the nature of matter was being revealed as the interaction of underlying forces and processes. For the impressionists this meant that attempts to capture the immediate, momentary impressions with the greatest possible fidelity were aligned with a developing modern understanding of how the universe operated. They really revelled in seeing the world in all of its unfolding, ephemeral complexity.

A critic and poet of the time, Jules Laforgue wrote extensively about Impressionism. He wrote “Essentially the eye should know only luminous vibration, just as the acoustic nerve knows only sonorous vibration.”

Monet advised a young American artist at the time ” When you go out to paint, to forget what object you have before you-a tree, a house, a field, or whatever.  Merely think , here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow and paint it just as to looks to you, the exact colour and shape, until it gives you your own naïve impression of the scene before you.” What we see in these works is Monet’s attempt to recreate in pigment an equivalent for his optical sensations or the neurological reactions of the retina to stimuli received from light rays reflected by the phenomenal world. 

Alongside all of the technological and scientific developments that were taking place in the 19^th C, chemistry was developing at a furious rate, and one of the consequences of this was the development of a range of chemical pigments which are more stable than natural ones; this led to the invention of the paint tube containing ready mixed oil paints in a wide range of colours. Mass production meant that these materials were cheaper and readily available which facilitated the possibility of painting outside of the studio. The Impressionists laid great emphasis on painting in the open air, placing them in direct personal contact with the subject that was engaging their attention.  They eliminated black shadows and outlines which do not exist in nature, painting shadows in brilliant colour. They experimented with various techniques of broken colour, trying to maintain brilliance, rather than mixing to produce dull shades. 

We have already considered the impact of photography on the way that people were seeing at the time. Another factor that must be taken into consideration in the way that visual experience of the world changed has to do with speed. Until the popularisation of the railway in the 1830s nobody had experienced travelling faster that roughly 15 mph; from a train it was possible to view a landscape moving at speeds of 50-60 mph. This motion and transience blurred the precise outline to which most of renaissance art had attuned the eye, and it effected the subjective nature of visual experience. It also made travel easier and  more accessible, so we see artists moving from the city to the country and back again.

During the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 – 71 a number of the artists went to England where they saw the works of Turner and of Constable.

[SOCIAL CONTEXT AFTER GARE ST LAZARE]

Impressionism came out of a certain social and cultural context, which was responsible for shaping its forms and determining its ideology.  Most of its practitioners had grown up under the not so distant shadow of the revolution and of Napoleon, they had lived through ’48, the Coup d’etate, the Second Empire, the Franco Prussian War and the Commune, dying under the Third Republique.  The background to their lives was one of constant political turmoil, with which they were necessarily involved.  They were not as overtly political as say Courbet was; their politics was more in their resistance to the artistic establishment and views of what art should be. Like the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood which we looked at last week, the Impressionism were a self-conscious group.  They held their first exhibition together in 1874, and continued to paint together and to exhibit together intermittently over a number of years, but artistically and in terms of personality these artists were quite different to each other, and there were many tensions within the group.   Underlying basic animosities between different personalities there was a basic dichotomy between line and colour, between thought and feeling, between form and atmosphere. You could see that very clearly in the contrasting of those two works at Gare St. Lazare – Monet’s atmospheric semi-abstract treatment, with a heavy emphasis on colour, and Caillebot’s much more traditional rendition with it’s linear perspective and clarity of form.

Impression- Sunrise Monet’s painting which gave the movement its name is a good example of how Monet constructed a whole composition in terms of colour alone. High viewpoint.  No solid clear cut shapes, and all content or subject matter in the traditional sense is gone. 

CONCLUSION TO MONET

The concept of the impression which held the group together at the start was an inherently contradictory one, because it seemed to indicate both objective and subjective approaches to perception, going someway beyond a straightforward accurate view of nature to include the individual and unique sensation of a particular artist. This internal contradiction led to the group pulling apart in different directions. The one we are going to look at is what is called Neo-Impressionism.