Impressionism and the Modernity of Paris:
I
Impressionism
was intimately tied to the liberating effects on French life produced by the
social and political events of the first half of the 19th
century. It was a reflection of
the modernity transforming Paris. The preoccupation of the Paris of modernity
was with the present, not the past. All that was solid melted into air, as the
architecture as well as the culture of the old Paris became history with
Haussmann’s drastic transformation of the city, with its broad social
implications. The new preoccupation with the present extended into the realm of
art: “Painters were simultaneously causes and effects of Parisian modernity.” (4)
The writer, Edmond Duranty,
challenged the painters of his time: “Greek vision, Roman vision, medieval
vision…with the 19th century absolutely forbidden! The man of antiquity created what he
saw. Create what you see!” (7) The
traditional historical, religious, and mythological themes of classical
art--the art of the past--were abandoned in favor of a contemporary art--an art
of the evolving modernity--with themes of nature and of leisure and
entertainment predominating. In
terms of style, art was taken from the studio outside to the great outdoors (plein
air art), and the
dark, subdued colors and structured lines of Classicism and Neo-Classicism were
abandoned in favor of light and color and free-flowing brushwork.
In essence, Impressionism was the
art of impressions. Edouard Manet, a precursor of the Impressionists,Iexplained
how he sought “only to render [his] impressions in his work.” Impressionism arose as a reaction of
the Impressionist artists against the formal representative quality of the dominant
academic artistic style of the day.
It was also the response of the artists of modernity to photography,
which “had established a standard of representational accuracy that no
hand-made image could hope to rival.
Painting needed to be rescued from competition with the camera.” Manet insisted that “a painted
canvas is, above all, a material surface covered with pigments—that we must
look at it, not through it.” He
advocated “pure painting” where it was “the brush strokes and color patches
themselves, not what they stand for, [that] are the artist’s primary reality.”
(1) The brushwork, structure, and subjects of impressionist paintings reflect
modern role of the painter as a detached, yet active observer of the life
around him, whose paintings are infused with social analysis. The Impressionists did not merely
depict the scenes they painted, they manipulated them, turning them into a form
of social commentary on the life of the modern Paris. The emphasis shifted from
the scene itself to the impression of a scene, and this impression was achieved through
color, light, and brushstrokes.
For the Impressionists, the experience of seeing took precedence over
simply seeing.
Claude Monet, arguably the greatest of the
Impressionist painters, referred to his art as Impressionist because to him it
represented not an image, “but the effect of the scene on the eye of the
observer.” It was his painting,
“Impression, soleil levant”,
exhibited in the first Impressionist show in 1874, that provided a name for
this new movement in art.
Claude Monet, Impression, soleil levan
Not everyone
appreciated the modernity of the Impressionists. Count Nieuwerkerke, the Imperial Director of Fine Arts,
declared Impressionism “the painting of democrats, of those who don’t change
their linen, who want to put themselves over on men of the world. This art displeases me and disgusts
me.” (7) Criticism was not limited
to the nobility. The writer, Paul
de Saint-Victor, preferred “the sacred grove where fauns make their way…the
Greek spring in which nymphs are bathing” (7) to the scenes of nature and
Parisian life and leisure that the Impressionists chose to depict. And that popular publication of
the bourgeoisie, Figaro, reported
that “The impression which the
impressionists achieve is that of a monkey who might have got hold of a box of
paints.” (7)
But despite the
criticism, the generally poor reception, and the lack of commercial success
that the Impressionists encountered with their work, their art was the
predominant art of their day, the art that “gave us representations of
modernity in painting that seem to us to have been the most truthful images of
the time.” (4) And these images are those of the new Paris of Baron Georges
Haussmann, who helped usher modernity to the French capital.
The Impressionists
Georges Haussmann, Impressionism, and the
Haussmannization of Paris
The
Impressionists’ View of the New Paris