A new way
to see the world
Breaking all the rules, the impressionists showed how light could define a moment in time.
By moving outside the Impressionist artist could focus on the optical effects of natural light. Monet would sit in one spot, and paint all day, studying the effects of the light at all hours.
In this blogpost an artist re-creates a Monet painting at the exact spot where it was originally painted. The artist noticed that the light of the scene that was painted lasted no more than a few minutes. Too fast to have been recorded it in paint.
Art critics said these paintings were badly done, unfinished sketches rather than the refined paintings of the elite academy. The word “Impressionism” was meant as an insult but the Impressionists loved the description and took it as their own.
Japanese woodblock prints (Ukiyo-e), pictures of the floating world, focused on everyday life just as a photo showed ordinary people doing everyday things. The fleeting moment of the snapshot was what the impressionists wanted. This was the opposite of the refined studio based, academy artwork that was fashionable at that time.
Impressionism was a response by artists to the newly established medium of photography. Impressionism did not look “real” the way a photo does. By using visible brush strokes, Impressionist artists created an unfinished look, doing what a photograph could not do. Artists captured scenes in brilliant colours that lasted no more than a few minutes. Photos at that time were only in black and white and 5 to 20 minute exposures were required.
Impressionism: the World’s best loved and the Most Misunderstood Art Movement
Paris 1874; The end of an era and the radical beginning of a new world.
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”Before they were posters in your dentist’s waiting room, these were images of postwar life. Monet, Degas, Renoir and the rest had just lived through France’s humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.
”The capital was besieged. Napoleon III was dethroned. Alsace and Lorraine were lost to the new German Empire ... Then, just after the Prussian victory, the artists witnessed the Paris Commune. For two months, a red banner replaced the tricolor flag, until, in May 1871, the French army brought down the revolutionary government in a bloody week of street fighting.
