KEY ARTISTS:
Manet
Impressionists: Monet, Degas
Women Impressionists: Cassatt & Morisot
KEY MEANINGS:
Depictions of men/women (portraits/figures etc.)
Work & Leisure
Modernity
KEY CONTEXTS:
Economic |
Technological |
Social |
There was a sense of political stability under the rule of Napoleon III (Louis Napoleon) and France continued their progress with modernisation inspired by the Industrial Revolution. The middle class continued to prosper economically within this context, while the working class largely remained in roles that served them.
The increased wealth brought more social power to the middle class, which they began to demonstrate in various aspects of the French society and culture. |
The impact of modernisation continued.
The Industrial Revolution made possible the modernisation of Paris, known as “Haussmannisation”, a city renovation project beginning in 1852. New technological inventions shaped the modern lifestyle and travel. e.g. railway allowed bourgeoisies' day trips to the countryside, and electricity inspired the world of nightlife and entertainment. The invention of photography and new colour pigments now in tubes, inspired the artists to re-think they way they made art. |
The middle class started to enjoy life of travel, leisure and pleasure, as now they were living in a modern society – thanks to the Industrial Revolution. They thrived in the refreshed city of Paris which now had new buildings, parks, electricity, nightlife, cafes and theatre entertainment under the Haussmann project. They also often enjoyed trips to the countryside and showed off their elevated status with elegant fashion.
The French Salon still imposed unbending rules on the young artists who started to look away from the tradition with their new interest in Japonism and photography. Manet's submission caused a social scandal at 'Salon des Refuses 1863' and became a catalyst for the development of Impressionism, a break from the Salon academicism pioneered by Courbet. |
Impressionism In Short |
The Case for Impressionism |
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Life & Art at the end of the 19th Century |
The Impressionists and Photography |
Seeing with a Japanese Eye (Japonism) |
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The Social Climbing Bourgeoisie: Modern Life of Leisure & Pleasure
Welcome to the world of the bourgeoisie, a class that walked the line between middle class and aristocracy with image as its balancing pole. The bourgeoisie was a class fighting for freedom from the aristocracy while simultaneously striving to attain the privilege of that class.
For the social climbing bourgeoisie, image was everything. Members of the bourgeoisie utilized fashion to mimic the air of the aristocracy, outings to the theatre and the opera to inflate their public image, and appearances at restaurants and racecourses to demonstrate their economic status and their aristocratic taste. In addition, members of the bourgeoisie spent many hours promenading through gardens and enjoying the outdoors. But in all places a social climbing bourgeoisie must behave with grace in order to fully mimic the noble image, thus proper etiquette was essential. This ironic mix of revolutionary spirit and high society aspirations forms the essence of the bourgeoisie. www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/hist255-s01/pleasure/index.html |
SALON DES REFUSES 1863: Academicism Still Persisted
Charles Amédée de Noé’s cartoon published in Cham au Salon de 1863: Deuxiéme promenade (Martinet Paris, 1863). Caption reads:
“My son, remove your cap! Pay your respects to the failed attempt.” |
Salon des Refusés refers to an art exhibition held in Paris, in 1863, to show paintings that had been rejected by the jury of the Paris Salon - the official annual showcase of French art.
Both subject matter and style were judged by the selection jury. Subjects were ranked according to an official hierarchy of genres, and lower ranked genres were regarded less favourably. In terms of style, the Academy expected idealized, true-to-life realist painting with all traces of brushwork erased leaving a polished finish. A rejected painting might be very bad news for an artist, since the Salon show provided the only opportunity in the French arts calendar for him to display his works to art collectors and dealers, as well as art critics and writers. In 1863, so many paintings had been rejected by the Salon selection jury (fewer than 2,218 pictures out of a total of over 5,000 were accepted) and so many artists protested, that Emperor Napoleon III ordered a new exhibition to be organized - dubbed the "Salon des Refusés" (Exhibition of Rejected Art) - in order to display all the paintings and sculptures that had been refused admission to the Salon, so as to allow the public to judge the merits of these works for themselves. The Salon des Refusés drew huge crowds of more than a thousand per day, many of whom were particularly affronted by the scandalous nudity on show in Manet's oil painting "Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe" (1862, The Luncheon on the Grass), which depicted a female nude having a picnic with two fully dressed bourgeois men. The picture sparked an outrage amongst the audience. Why is the Salon des Refusés So Important? Three reasons. (1) Because it undermined the infallibility of the French Academy and, by implication, Academic art across Europe. (2) Because it highlighted the need for alternative "unofficial" exhibitions, to prevent highly conservative academic bodies from dominating both aesthetics and public taste in art. (3) Because, to a great extent, it legitimized the newly emerging forms of avant-garde art, and paved the way for the even more shocking style of "Impressionism", which its exponents unleashed on Paris in 1874, in a series of independently organized exhibitions (1874-84). www.visual-arts-cork.com/history-of-art/salon-des-refuses.htm |
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THE PAINTER OF MODERN LIFEÉdouard Manet (1832-1883)Édouard Manet was the most important and influential artist to have heeded poet Charles Baudelaire's call to artists to become painters of modern life. Manet had an upper-class upbringing, but also led a bohemian life, and was driven to scandalize the French Salon public with his disregard for academic conventions and his strikingly modern images of urban life.
He has long been associated with the Impressionists; he was certainly an important influence on them and he learned much from them himself. However, in recent years critics have acknowledged that he also learned from the Realism and Naturalism of his French contemporaries, and even from seventeenth century Spanish painting. This twin interest in Old Masters and contemporary Realism gave him the crucial foundation for his revolutionary approach. Manet's modernity lies above all in his eagerness to update older genres of painting by injecting new content or by altering the conventional elements. He did so with an acute sensitivity to historical tradition and contemporary reality. This was also undoubtedly the root cause of many of the scandals he provoked. He is credited with popularizing the technique of alla prima painting. Rather than build up colours in layers, Manet would immediately lay down the hue that most closely matched the final effect he sought. The approach came to be used widely by the Impressionists, who found it perfectly suited to the pressures of capturing effects of light and atmosphere whilst painting outdoors. His loose handling of paint, and his schematic rendering of volumes, led to areas of "flatness" in his pictures. In the artist's day, this flatness may have suggested popular posters or the artifice of painting - as opposed to its realism. Today, critics see this quality as the first example of "flatness" in modern art. http://www.theartstory.org/artist-manet-edouard.html |
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THE EYE OF AN IMPRESSIONISTClaude Monet (1840-1926)Claude Monet was the leader of the French Impressionist movement, literally giving the movement its name. As an inspirational talent and personality, he was crucial in bringing its adherents together. Interested in painting in the open air and capturing natural light, Monet would later bring the technique to one of its most famous pinnacles with his series paintings, in which his observations of the same subject, viewed at various times of the day, were captured in numerous sequences of paintings. Masterful as a colourist and as a painter of light and atmosphere, his later work often achieved a remarkable degree of abstraction, and this has recommended him to subsequent generations of abstract painters.
An inspiration and a leader among the Impressionists, he was crucial in attracting likeminded artists to work alongside each other in and around Paris. He was also important in establishing the exhibition society that would showcase the group's work between 1874 and 1886. He said, "When you go out to paint try 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 it looks to you, the exact colour and shape, until it emerges as your own naïve impression of the scene before you.” Cezanne said of Monet, "Monet is just an eye - but God, what an eye!" http://www.theartstory.org/artist-monet-claude.htm |
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A CLASSICAL IMPRESSIONISTEdgar Degas (1834-1917)The eldest son of a Parisian banker, Edgar Degas reinforced his formal academic art training by copying Old Master paintings both in Italy, where he spent three years (1856–1859), and at the Louvre. Degas early on developed a rigorous drawing style and a respect for line that he would maintain throughout his career. His first independent works were portraits and history paintings but in the early 1860s he began to paint scenes from modern life. He started with the world of horse racing and by the end of the 1860s had also turned his attention to the theatre and ballet.
In 1873, Degas banded together with other artists interested in organizing independent exhibitions without Salon juries. He became a founding member of what soon would be known as the Impressionists, participating in six Impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886. Despite his long and fruitful association with the Impressionists, Degas preferred to be called a Realist. His focus on urban subjects, artificial light, and careful drawing distinguished him from other Impressionists, such as Claude Monet, who worked outdoors, painting directly from their subjects. A steely observer of everyday scenes, Degas tirelessly analysed positions, gestures, and movement. Degas developed distinctive compositional techniques, viewing scenes from unexpected angles and framing them unconventionally. He experimented with a variety of media, including pastels, photography, and monotypes. Degas was frequently criticized for depicting unattractive models from Paris’ working class, but others, like realist novelist Edmond de Goncourt, championed Degas as “the one who has been able to capture the soul of modern life.” By the late 1880s, Degas was recognized as a major figure in the Parisian art world. Financially secure, he could be selective about exhibiting and selling his work. He also bought ancient and modern works for his own collection, including paintings by El Greco, Edouard Manet, and Paul Gauguin, who became close friends. Depressed by the limitations of his failing eyesight, he created nothing after 1912; at his death in 1917, he was hailed as a French national treasure. www.nga.gov/collection/artist-info.1219.html |