Impressionism developed in a period of extreme change in France. The Universal Exhibition of 1867, in essence a World's Fair, marked the height of the French Empire and confirmed Paris as the capital of luxury and fashion.
By the Exhibition of 1889, crowned by the new Eiffel Tower, which was to celebrate the "marriage" of art and technology, French society had experienced a new force: the proletariat.
We saw earlier the changes brought about in the Protestant Dutch areas by the rise of a new segment of society; the bourgeoisie, the merchant middle class.
In France, the shift in power that led to the Rococo Style (from the aristocracy to the bougeousie) was about to shift again from the bougeousie to the proletariat.
The increased industrialization of France, and the greed of the factory owners, during the last half of the century created the perfect atmosphere for the rise of the proletariat. As power again shifted from the merchant bourgeoisie to the industrial bourgeoisie and the factory replaced the workshop; cities and towns were soon overrun with the new workers. Le Creusot went from a a population of 9,000 to 25,000 and in Paris the working class now made up over 25 percent of it's 2,000,000 inhabitants. They earned two francs a day for thirteen hours of work. Often combative, they soon tried to organize (unions) which would lead to bloody confrontations with those in power. Between 1827 and 1851 barricades were erected in the streets of Paris on nine occasions! But this time the government prevailed. And in what was probably the first "revitalizing of the down town area," old quarters were tore up, railroad stations were installed at the far ends of new thoroughfares and effectively forced the working classes out of the city, in effect dispersing them into the suburbs.
 The Siege of Paris Elephant in the Zoo killed for food. |
The Third Republic's first Assembly, formed to negotiate a peace agreement with the Germans, proved to be overwhelmingly royalists (who favored a return to a monarchy). The republicans (those favoring a republican style government) and a hodge podge of other radical groups, in fear of a return to monarchy, formed a Commune to save the Republic and for several weeks civil war raged in Paris. After several weeks of violent blood-letting by both sides, the Commune was finally suppressed by Government troops.
The panic and horror created by the insurrection was evident in a letter written to George Sand by Flaubert: "I find that the entire Commune should have been condemned to the galleys and these bloody imbeciles forced to clear away all the ruins of Paris, chained by the neck as mere convicts."
Our friend Gustave Courbet, a minor member of the Commune, was arrested on June 7 and taken to Versailles to be judged. Given a lenient sentence by the official court, his critics were less amenable:
"We should show all French citizens Courbet locked in an iron cage at the base of the (Vendome) column. We will make people pay to see him." Barbery d'Aurevilly
The idillic world of impressionism we find in their paintings, that time when things moved slower and life was simpler, would seem to be our illusion. The art of the Realists and Impressionists attacked the very foundation of the traditional society by its acceptance of the "moderns," the working class, and their world. And their insistence on "truth" as opposed to illusion (what is, rather than what you might like it to be) is not always a popular position, even today.
Edouard Manet
 Luncheon on the Grass c. 1863 |
Like Courbet, and the Impressionists to follow him, Manet was savagely attacked by the "official" press. In reference to the Caillebotte bequest of Impressionist painting to the State (France), Leon Gerome (the painter of Young Greeks Arranging A Cockfight... see your realist section) stated to the press: "They are doing shitty painting, I am telling you. People are joking and saying, 'This is nothing. Wait...' No. It is the end of the nation, the end of France!" They were not only attacked for being incapable; but they were also rotten anarchists, accomplices of the current extremists. Destroy France? Rotten Anarchists? Moral degenerates?
Pretty heavy epithets for painters of parks, children and beautiful women. The Industrial Revolution was in full swing and the new ruling class of industrialists looked to the past for their cultural symbols. They wanted art that would express a continuity, stability, eternity and would point out their belonging "by divine right" to the country's elite. In other words, an art that would sustain their collective illusion of themselves and their place in society. The art of the Realists/Impressionists seemed to attack the very foundation of their belief in a classes society by its acceptance of the "moderns", the working class and their world, and their insistence on "truth" as opposed to illusion.
 The Fifer |
Most of us look at television sets, not for their own sake but for the images that are produced. Images (illustrations) of things or events brought to us on the "canvas" of our television screens.
Here Manet wants you to look at the Fifer as you would have to look at the Japanses print... knowing nothing of the culture that produced the print; it can not "send" a social comment as Courbet did, it has no religious conotation for us (I don't know about the Japanese, but then that's the point), it can be appreciated only for itself. No messages, no "content" other than itself!
Claude Monet
 Regatta at Argenteul c.1872 |
 Detail from "Regatta" |
The unfinished was also the technical means of expressing the ephemeral. Impressionism is the art of metamorphosis. No longer did one paint a landscape but the action of the clouds, of the wind, of the rain on trees and on fields. Paintings were entitled Morning Effect, or Impression Sunrise.
 Impression Sunrise c.1872 |
Their contemporaries
regarded the Impressionists depiction's of the transitory as clumsy,
amateurish, or childish. "There is a moment of the world which passes,"
explained Cezanne (A Post-Impressionisnt painter we will be looking at
shortly), "one must paint it in its reality."
Cezanne does not, adds Merleau-Ponty, "wish to separate the things
which appear to our eye and their fleeting manner of appearance." The
logical consequence of an aesthetic of the ephemeral was the development
of the series. And Monet would push it to its ultimate conclusion... each
haystack, each cathedral is a fraction of one and the same investigation.
Each canvas refers to all the others and reads as the unfinished section
of a speech on the unfinished... reality has now become conditional.
The Hay
Stack Series of 1891
Gustave
Geffroy, Monet's friend, tells how... "he is in a hurry to cross the
countryside to the place where he began his canvas. He wonders if he is
going to rediscover exactly the same combination of light, shade, reflections,
water, and sky that he experienced so intensely the day before."
Geffroy again in the preface to the exhibition of 1891 gives us
a firsthand account of Monet... "If the haystacks had not been removed
he would have been able to continue, go there during the entire year,
renew the seasons, reveal the infinite changes of time on the eternal
phase of nature."
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Rouen
Cathedral Series of 1894
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Of Monet's Cathedrals Clemenceau, a critic, observed: "The immutability of the subject brings out more strongly the mobility of the light." No longer was the object of the painting the huge Gothic Cathedral but the undulating play of light which constantly dressed and undressed it.
This atomizing of object... beginning with a flecking and jumbling of outlines paralleled contemporary thinking in science. As the physicist Bachelard explained: "We must first break with our concept of rest: In microphysics it is absurd to assume matter at rest since it exists for us merely as energy and sends its message only through radiation (vibrations)." Matter is energy, energy is matter.
And Romantic drama was gone... no longer the heroic action or daring deed. The painters eye is now a dispassionate observer, attaching no more importance to a human silhouette than to that of a tree or branch. Immobilized by Monet, suspended by Degas, petrified in their humble tasks by Van Gogh, human beings sink into the general texture of the surface... at most a vibration among many other vibrations. We reconstruct them thanks to the "spontaneous visual coherence of the human eye" which constantly tries to identify and personalize the confused patterns it is presented... The spectator must now become a participant in the creation of the work of art.
Auguste Renoir
 Le Moulin de la Galette c.1876 |
Like the Protestant Baroque and ancient Romans before them, this new urban middle class wanted paintings that reflected their life style -- paintings that they could relate to and that affirmed their belief (consiously or unconsiously) of the "rightness" of their acceptance of modern materialistic society. Painting was the "mass media" of the day. The fact that they saw themselves portrayed in a positive light, fit subjects for Art, reassured them of the correctness of their beliefs. And none portrayed the "good life" better than Renoir.
 Girl with a Watering Can c.1876 |
 Luncheon of the Boating Party c.1881 |
By the 1880s Renoir felt he had exhausted the possibilities of Impressionism. "It was a break in my work. I had gone to the very end of Impressionism and I came to the conclusion that I knew neither how to paint nor how to draw. In short, I was at a dead
 Bather Seated on a Rock 1892. Oil 31.6 x 25.35 " |
"Voluptuos and lyrical, pulpy and tender as though to mak the painter's reconciliation with nature... his canvases became a song of participation and adherence to nature and the joy of living symbolized by his women like fruit."
Realites /Impressionism/Chartwell Books.Inc.
Edgar Degas
 Ballet Rehearsa. c.1874 |
He prefered the tawdry and seedy nightlife of gas-lit streets and cafes to the sun lit boluvards and parks of Paris. "For you natural life is necessary; for me, artifical life" he remarked to an Impressionist friend. Illusion and reality -- the tinselly disguise and the naked truth -- are contrasted in his deceptively informal compositions.
Degas was fascinated by the dancers at the ballet and drew them over and over. His dancers are never idealized or romanticized; he shows them in every facet of their activities, all the gossamer and glitter seen "out front" vanish backstage. Here they go through backbreaking work-outs or squat breathlessly, their bodies relax agacelessly, with legs sprawleing wide apart, totally devoid of erotic or an other charm.
 Dancers With Double-Bass c.1887 |
Degas told George Moore, an Irish writer, that "The nude has always been represented in poses which presuppose an audience... these women of mine are honest, simple folk, unconcerned by any other interest than those involved in their physical condition....It is as if you looked through a keyhole."
 The Tub c.1885-86 Pastel 271/2 x 271/2" |
 The Tub c.1886 Pastel 231/2 x 321/2" |
Lynn University Art Appreciation
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