Impressionism and the Critique of Bourgeois Norms in the Belle Epoque
From Bourgeois Leisure to Modernity in the Artistic Avant-Garde
Paris, the city of light, was the catalyst of the impressionist movement. No city has ever been more prepared to greet the world, and Paris did. All the world’s kings, emperors, maharajahs, and princes; the gratin and the nouveau riches brushed shoulders and filled in and out of this capital. From children tea dressed in lace in the Bois de Boulogne to women dining out in restaurants wearing hats, “The City of Light” had a lot going on.
In the meantime, artists were depicting shadows and movement, as well as light, color, and vibrancy
With Impressionism[1] and Art Nouveau, art of the Belle Epoque took on new shapes. Therefore, it can be said that Impressionists tried to represent the physical world as a sequence of images in a single glance rather than create an illusion through lighting or movement.
Impressionism, which was considered the artistic avant-garde in the 1860’s, became prominent. Early impressionism had a moral component; it was more than just painting hedonism or a craving for brightness and color. In its discovery of a continually changing phenomenal outside environment, the forms of which relied on the causal or mobile spectator’s instant location, there was an implied criticism of symbolic social and domestic formality, or at least norms opposed to them.
[1] The word impressionism comes from the French verb, “imprimer” meaning to print, emboss or strike.
Many early impressionist paintings depict casual and spontaneous social events such as breakfasts, picnics, promenades, holidays, and boating trips.
These urban utopias not only demonstrate the real forms of bourgeois leisure in the 1860s and 1870s, but they also show the enlightened bourgeoise’s dissociation from the official ideas of his social class (Clark,2015).
As the settings of bourgeois sociability migrated away from community, family, and church and toward commercialized or privately improvised forms such as streets, cafés, and resorts. Impressionism was altered as well; by 1880, the enjoying individual is scarce; just the private vision of nature remains.
Impressionists shifted from painting bourgeoisie in their informal recreational settings to painting modern life, and they also focused on a relatively narrow range of subjects: typically, middle-class recreational time in urban or suburban settings, such as Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines or Railroad Bridge at Argenteuil.
In some ways, impressionists followed the legacy of early nineteenth-century realists in their approach to painting scenes from everyday life; yet, they shunned historical, mythical, and exotic subjects and took their adage, “Il faut être de son temps,” “one must be one’s own time”.
Many painters were shifting their attention to urban scenes. After massive urban redevelopment in the 1850s and 1860s, Paris became the world’s most modern city. Its vast boulevards and walkways provided an almost open-air theater atmosphere. Poets, playwrights, and artists were all enthralled by it.
The impressionists’ themes were urban and suburban areas that were fast changing, as opposed to the realists’ contemporaneous vision, which often did not imply rural or provincial areas, but rather a timeless way of life and labor.
The zeitgeist, or spirit of the age, of impressionism was one of innovation and a desire to break with traditional artistic conventions. Impressionist artists sought to capture the modern world as it was experienced, rather than idealizing it or representing it in a formal, conventional manner.
Impressionism was also marked by a sense of freedom and experimentation, as artists sought to explore new techniques and approaches to art-making. This included an emphasis on the use of light and color, as well as a focus on capturing the fleeting, ephemeral nature of the world around them.
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Works cited:
Clark, T. J. (2015). The painting of modern life: Paris in the art of Manet and his followers. Princeton University Press.
Baudelaire, C. (2018). The painter of modern life. In Modern art and modernism: A critical anthology (pp. 23–28). Routledge.
