Introduction

Impressionism as a phenomenon in art

Impressionism in painting

Artists - Impressionists

3.1 Claude Monet

3.2 Edgar Degas

3.3 Alfred Sisley

3.4 Camille Pissarro

Conclusion

Bibliographic list

Introduction

This essay is dedicated to impressionism in art - painting.

Impressionism is one of the brightest and most important phenomena in European art, which largely determined the entire development of contemporary art. Currently, the works of the Impressionists, who were not recognized at the time, are highly valued and their artistic merit is undeniable. The relevance of the chosen topic is explained by the need for every modern person to understand the styles of art, to know the main milestones of its development.

I chose this topic because Impressionism was a kind of revolution in art that changed the idea of ​​works of art as integral, monumental things. Impressionism brought to the fore the individuality of the creator, his own vision of the world, pushed political and religious subjects, academic laws into the background. Interestingly, emotions and impressions, rather than plot and morality, played a major role in the works of the Impressionists.

1.

Impressionism (fr. impressionnisme, from impression- impression) - a trend in art of the last third of the 19th - early 20th centuries, which originated in France and then spread throughout the world, whose representatives sought to most naturally and impartially capture the real world in its mobility and variability, to convey their fleeting impressions. Usually, the term "impressionism" means a direction in painting, although its ideas have also found their embodiment in literature and music.

The term "Impressionism" arose from the light hand of the critic of the magazine "Le Charivari" Louis Leroy, who titled his feuilleton about the Salon of the Les Misérables "Exhibition of the Impressionists", taking as the basis the name of this painting by Claude Monet.

Auguste Renoir Paddling pool, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

origins

During the Renaissance, the painters of the Venetian school tried to convey living reality using bright colors and intermediate tones. The Spaniards took advantage of their experiences, this is most clearly expressed by such artists as El Greco, Velazquez and Goya, whose work subsequently had a serious influence on Manet and Renoir.

At the same time, Rubens makes the shadows on his canvases colored using transparent intermediate shades. According to Delacroix, Rubens displayed light with subtle, refined tones, and shadows with warmer and more saturated colors, conveying the effect of chiaroscuro. Rubens did not use black, which would later become one of the main principles of Impressionist painting.

Édouard Manet was influenced by the Dutch artist Frans Hals, who painted with sharp strokes and loved the contrast of bright colors and black.

The transition of painting to impressionism was also prepared by English painters. During the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), Claude Monet, Sisley and Pissarro traveled to London to study the great landscape painters Constable, Bonington and Turner. As for the latter, already in his later works it is noticeable how the connection with the real image of the world disappears and the withdrawal into the individual transmission of impressions.

Eugene Delacroix had a strong influence, he already distinguished local color and color acquired under the influence of lighting, his watercolors painted in North Africa in 1832 or in Etretat in 1835, and especially the painting "The Sea at Dieppe" (1835) allow us to speak of him as a forerunner of the Impressionists.

The last element that influenced the innovators was Japanese art. Since 1854, thanks to exhibitions held in Paris, young artists have been discovering masters of Japanese printmaking such as Utamaro, Hokusai and Hiroshige. A special, hitherto unknown in European fine art, the arrangement of the image on a sheet of paper - a displaced composition or a composition with an inclination, a schematic transfer of form, a penchant for artistic synthesis, won the favor of the Impressionists and their followers.

Story

Edgar Degas, blue dancers, 1897, Pushkin Museum im. Pushkin, Moscow

The beginning of the search for the Impressionists dates back to the 1860s, when young artists were no longer satisfied with the means and goals of academicism, as a result of which each of them independently seeks other ways to develop his style. In 1863, Edouard Manet exhibited the painting “Luncheon on the Grass” in the “Salon of the Rejected” and actively spoke at the meetings of poets and artists in the Guerbois cafe, which were attended by all the future founders of the new movement, thanks to which he became the main defender of modern art.

In 1864, Eugene Boudin invited Monet to Honfleur, where he lived all autumn, watching how his teacher painted sketches in pastels and watercolors, and his friend Jonkind applied paint to his work with vibrating strokes. It was here that they taught him to work in the open air and write in light colors.

In 1871, during the Franco-Prussian War, Monet and Pissarro leave for London, where they get acquainted with the work of the forerunner of Impressionism, William Turner.

Claude Monet. Impression. Sunrise. 1872, Marmottan Monet Museum, Paris.

The emergence of the name

The first important exhibition of the Impressionists took place from 15 April to 15 May 1874 in the studio of the photographer Nadar. There were presented 30 artists, in total - 165 works. Canvas Monet - “Impression. Rising Sun" ( Impression, soleil levant), now in the Musée Marmottin, Paris, written in 1872, gave birth to the term "Impressionism": the obscure journalist Louis Leroy, in his article in the magazine Le Charivari, called the group "Impressionists" to express his disdain. Artists, out of a challenge, accepted this epithet, later it took root, lost its original negative meaning and came into active use.

The name "Impressionism" is rather empty, unlike the name "Barbizon School", where at least there is an indication of the geographical location of the artistic group. There is even less clarity with some artists who were not formally included in the circle of the first impressionists, although their techniques and means are completely “impressionistic” (Whistler, Edouard Manet, Eugene Boudin, etc.) In addition, the technical means of the Impressionists were known long before the 19th centuries and they were (partially, limitedly) used by Titian and Velasquez, without breaking with the dominant ideas of their era.

There was another article (authored by Emil Cardon) and another title - "The Rebel Exhibition", absolutely disapproving and condemning. It was it that exactly reproduced the disapproving attitude of the bourgeois public and criticism towards the artists (Impressionists), which dominated for years. The Impressionists were immediately accused of immorality, rebellious moods, failure to be respectable. At the moment, this is surprising, because it is not clear what is immoral in the landscapes of Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, the everyday scenes of Edgar Degas, the still lifes of Monet and Renoir.

Decades have passed. And a new generation of artists will come to a real collapse of forms and impoverishment of content. Then both criticism and the public saw in the condemned Impressionists - realists, and a little later, classics of French art.

Impressionism as a phenomenon in art

Impressionism, one of the most striking and interesting trends in French art of the last quarter of the 19th century, was born in a very difficult environment, characterized by variegation and contrasts, which gave impetus to the emergence of many modern trends. Impressionism, despite its short duration, had a significant impact on the art of not only France, but also other countries: the USA, Germany (M. Lieberman), Belgium, Italy, England. In Russia, the influence of impressionism was experienced by K. Balmont, Andrei Bely, Stravinsky, K. Korovin (the closest in aesthetics to the impressionists), the early V. Serov, as well as I. Grabar. Impressionism was the last major artistic movement in France in the 19th century, drawing the line between modern and modern art.

According to M. Aplatov, “pure impressionism probably did not exist. Impressionism is not a doctrine, it could not have canonized forms ... French Impressionist artists, to varying degrees, have one or another of its features. Usually, the term "impressionism" means a direction in painting, although its ideas have found their embodiment in other forms of art, for example, in music.

Impressionism is, first of all, the art of observing reality, conveying or creating an impression, which has reached unprecedented refinement, an art in which the plot is not important. This is a new, subjective artistic reality. The Impressionists put forward their own principles of perception and display of the surrounding world. They erased the line between the main objects worthy of high art and secondary objects.

An important principle of Impressionism was the departure from typicality. Transience, a casual look has entered art, it seems that the canvases of the Impressionists were written by a simple passer-by walking along the boulevards and enjoying life. It was a revolution in vision.

The aesthetics of impressionism took shape partly as an attempt to decisively free ourselves from the conventions of classic art, as well as from the persistent symbolism and thoughtfulness of late romantic painting, which offered to see encrypted meanings in everything that needed careful interpretation. Impressionism affirms not only the beauty of everyday reality, but also makes artistically significant the perceived variability of the surrounding world, the naturalness of a spontaneous, unpredictable, random impression. The Impressionists seek to capture its colorful atmosphere without detailing or interpreting it.

As an artistic movement, impressionism, in particular in painting, quickly exhausted its possibilities. Classical French impressionism was too narrow, and few remained true to its principles all their lives. In the process of developing the impressionist method, the subjectivity of pictorial perception overcame objectivity and rose to an ever higher formal level, opening the way for all currents of post-impressionism, including Gauguin's symbolism and Van Gogh's expressionism. But, despite the narrow time frame - some two decades, impressionism brought art to a fundamentally different level, having a significant impact on everything: modern painting, music and literature, as well as cinema.

Impressionism introduced new themes; works of a mature style are distinguished by their bright and spontaneous vitality, the discovery of new artistic possibilities of color, the aestheticization of a new pictorial technique, the very structure of the work. It is these features that arose in impressionism that are further developed in neo-impressionism and post-impressionism. The influence of impressionism as an approach to reality or as a system of expressive techniques was found in almost all art schools of the early 20th century; it became the starting point for the development of a number of trends, up to abstractionism. Some of the principles of impressionism - the transfer of instantaneous movement, the fluidity of form - manifested themselves to varying degrees in the sculpture of the 1910s, by E Degas, Fr. Rodin, M. Golubkina. Artistic impressionism to a large extent enriched the means of expression in literature (P. Verlaine), music (C. Debussy), and theater.

2. Impressionism in painting

In the spring of 1874, a group of young painters, including Monet, Renoir, Pizarro, Sisley, Degas, Cezanne and Berthe Morisot, neglected the official Salon and arranged their own exhibition, later becoming the central figures of the new direction. It took place from April 15 to May 15, 1874 in the studio of the photographer Nadar in Paris, on the Boulevard des Capuchins. There were presented 30 artists, in total - 165 works. Such an act was in itself revolutionary and broke with age-old foundations, while the paintings of these artists at first glance seemed even more hostile to tradition. It took years before these, later recognized, classics of painting were able to convince the public not only of their sincerity, but also of their talent. All these very different artists were united by a common struggle against conservatism and academicism in art. The Impressionists held eight exhibitions, the last in 1886.

It was at the first exhibition in 1874 in Paris that a painting by Claude Monet appeared, depicting a sunrise. It attracted everyone's attention primarily with an unusual title: “Impression. Sunrise". But the painting itself was unusual, it conveyed that almost elusive, changeable play of colors and light. It was the name of this painting - "Impression" - thanks to the ridicule of one of the journalists, that laid the foundation for a whole trend in painting called impressionism (from the French word "impression" - impression).

Trying to express their immediate impressions of things as accurately as possible, the Impressionists created a new method of painting. Its essence was to convey the external impression of light, shadow, reflexes on the surface of objects with separate strokes of pure colors, which visually dissolved the form in the surrounding light-air environment.

Credibility was sacrificed to personal perception - the Impressionists, depending on their vision, could write the sky green and the grass blue, the fruits in their still lifes were unrecognizable, human figures were vague and sketchy. What was important was not what was depicted, but the “how” was important. The object became an occasion for solving visual problems.

The brevity, etude nature of the creative method of impressionism is characteristic. After all, only a short study made it possible to accurately record individual states of nature. What was previously allowed only in sketches has now become the main feature of the completed canvases. Impressionist artists tried with all their might to overcome the static nature of painting, to forever capture all the charm of an elusive moment. They started using asymmetrical compositions to better highlight those they were interested in. actors and items. In some methods of impressionistic construction of composition and space, the influence of passion for one’s age is tangible - not antiquity as before, Japanese engraving (by such masters as Katsushika Hokusai, Hiroshige, Utamaro) and partly photography, its close-ups and new points of view.

The Impressionists also updated coloring, they abandoned dark, earthy paints and varnishes and applied pure, spectral colors to the canvas, almost without mixing them first on the palette. Conditional, "museum" blackness in their canvases gives way to the play of colored shadows.

Thanks to the invention of ready-to-carry metal paint tubes, which replaced the old hand-made paints from oil and powdered pigments, artists were able to leave their studios to work in the open air. They worked very quickly, because the movement of the sun changed the lighting and color of the landscape. Sometimes they squeezed the paint onto the canvas directly from the tube and got pure sparkling colors with a brushstroke effect. By placing a dab of one paint next to another, they often left the surface of the paintings rough. In order to preserve the freshness and variety of colors of nature in the picture, the Impressionists created a pictorial system that is distinguished by the decomposition of complex tones into pure colors and the interpenetration of separate strokes of pure color, as if mixing in the eye of the viewer, with colored shadows and perceived by the viewer according to the law of complementary colors.

Striving for maximum immediacy in the transfer of the surrounding world, the Impressionists for the first time in the history of art began to paint mainly in the open air and raised the importance of a sketch from nature, which almost supplanted the traditional type of painting, carefully and slowly created in the studio. By virtue of the very method of working in the open air, the landscape, including the urban landscape they discovered, occupied a very important place in the art of the Impressionists. The main theme for them was quivering light, air, in which people and objects are, as it were, immersed. In their paintings, one could feel the wind, the damp, sun-warmed earth. They sought to show the amazing richness of color in nature.

Impressionism introduced new themes into art - the daily life of the city, street landscapes and entertainment. Its thematic and plot range was very wide. In their landscapes, portraits, and multi-figure compositions, the artists strive to preserve the impartiality, strength, and freshness of the “first impression,” without going into individual details, where the world is an ever-changing phenomenon.

Impressionism is distinguished by its bright and immediate vitality. It is characterized by the individuality and aesthetic value of the canvases, their deliberate randomness and incompleteness. In general, the works of the Impressionists are distinguished by cheerfulness, passion for the sensual beauty of the world.

Impressionism (impressionnisme) is a style of painting that appeared at the end of the 19th century in France and then spread throughout the world. The very idea of ​​impressionism lies in its name: impression - impression. Artists who were tired of traditional academic painting techniques, which, in their opinion, did not convey all the beauty and vivacity of the world, began to use completely new techniques and methods of depiction, which were supposed to express in the most accessible form not a "photographic" look, but an impression from what you see. In his painting, the impressionist artist, using the nature of strokes and color palette, tries to convey the atmosphere, heat or cold, strong wind or peaceful silence, foggy rainy morning or bright sunny afternoon, as well as his personal experiences from what he saw.

Impressionism is a world of feelings, emotions and fleeting impressions. It is not external realism or naturalness that is valued here, but the realism of the expressed sensations, the internal state of the picture, its atmosphere, depth. Initially, this style was heavily criticized. The first Impressionist paintings were exhibited at the Salon des Les Misérables in Paris, where works by artists rejected by the official Paris Art Salon were exhibited. For the first time the term "impressionism" was used by the critic Louis Leroy, who wrote a disparaging review in the magazine "Le Charivari" about the exhibition of artists. As the basis for the term, he took the painting by Claude Monet “Impression. Rising Sun". He called all the artists Impressionists, which can be roughly translated as "impressionists". At first, the paintings were indeed criticized, but soon more and more fans of the new direction in art began to come to the salon, and the genre itself turned from an outcast into a recognized one.

It should be noted that the artists late XIX centuries in France, they came up with a new style not from scratch. They took as a basis the techniques of the painters of the past, including the artists of the Renaissance. Such painters as El Greco, Velazquez, Goya, Rubens, Turner and others, long before the emergence of impressionism, tried to convey the mood of the picture, the liveliness of nature, the special expressiveness of the weather using various intermediate tones, bright or vice versa dull strokes that looked like abstract things. In their paintings, they used it quite sparingly, so the unusual technique was not evident to the viewer. The Impressionists, on the other hand, decided to take these depiction methods as the basis for their works.

Another specific feature of the works of the Impressionists is a kind of superficial everydayness, which, however, contains incredible depth. They do not try to express any deep philosophical themes, mythological or religious tasks, historical and important events. The paintings of artists of this direction are inherently simple and everyday - landscapes, still lifes, people walking down the street or doing their usual things, and so on. It is precisely such moments where there is no excessive thematicity that distracts a person, feelings and emotions from what they see come to the fore. Also, the Impressionists, at least at the beginning of their existence, did not depict "heavy" topics - poverty, wars, tragedies, suffering, and so on. Impressionist paintings are most often the most positive and joyful works, where there is a lot of light, bright colors, smoothed chiaroscuro, smooth contrasts. Impressionism is a pleasant impression, the joy of life, the beauty of every moment, pleasure, purity, sincerity.

Pierre Auguste Renoir - The Frog

Renoir - Ball at the Moulin de la Galette

Edgar Degas - Blue Dancers