Turning Negatives to Positives: The Impressionists
In 1855 Paris, the painters Monet, Degas, Renoir and Pisarro displayed their new work at the Exposition Universelle, and their revolutionary new paintings attracted the contemptuous derision of the haughty Parisian art critics of the time. One commented how Claude Monet had simply made an ‘impression’ of a sunset in one of the pictures, which had of course been the artist’s main intention. After the publication of this ‘insult’, the group of artists took the slur and named themselves the same, starting a tradition that would later inspire all kinds of creative movements from punk to grunge to the ‘stuckist’ painters.
This experience of the derision of critics being too hasty, and the works themselves ending up as priceless artefacts also seeded the reputation of multilateral, mutual distrust between artist, critic and audience. Before the impressionists, painting and sculpture had largely been in the service of royalty or religion, with kings and bishops paying the artists to flatter, describe and deify. Their arrival occurring simultaneously with that of photography, removing once and for all the need to slavishly capture the subject of the work, announced that the new subject was to be the moment of painting the play of light itself.
Impressionism, successful mostly in France, was not to be confused with expressionism, more popular in Germany and exemplified by artists such as Munch, Klimt and Schiele. While impressionism captured the light and the moment of painting without worrying too much about detail, expressionism was more about the painting of the inner state of the artist, portraying neuroses, fantasies and fears. The post-impressionists, briefly featuring Vincent van Gogh, represented a relatively disciplined return to nature for inspiration, and the neo-impressionists turned the spontaneous moment of light capture into a more rigid practice.
The Orangerie gallery in Paris features an ovaloid room with Claude Monet’s ‘Waterlillies’ painted around its full-height walls. These pond flowers feel like they’ve been glimpsed and captured in the round on a sunny day, almost as if the painter was on a revolving seat while he painted. The confusion this work caused original art-watching Parisians encouraged the now timeworn activity of stepping back from the work in order to appreciate the whole ‘feeling’, as opposed to analysing certain details, looking for evidence of diligent, observational craft.
Manet’s early daring clarity of perception had gradually given way, painting by painting, to the truth to light spontaneity expressed by Paul Cezanne. Cezanne took impressionism to its limits, constructing squares of French summer light and juxtaposing them so that they became the building blocks of a new form of post-impressionism, predating cubism, later popularised by Braque and one Pablo Picasso. Meanwhile, Pisarro and Sisley’s pointillism was intricate, mosaic-style detail on a large scale, capturing Parisian scenes as if there were constantly specks of snow or maybe television interference, many small strokes making up a larger scene. The big picture built through the application of minute observations was increasingly the impressionists’ game.
Photography and the fraternity of the people had liberated artists in northern and western Europe; conceptualism, futurism and cubism were knocking at the door, and for the first time a group of artists had proudly worn an insult — ‘[mere] impressions’ — and turned it into a badge of identity. Turning negatives into positives was immediately seized on as a creative technique in battling adversity, and the decades-old paintings of Renoir, Monet and Cezanne et al were soon to be worth millions. Beyond their incipient financial worth, art lovers the world over rejoiced in the free warmth demonstrated in the artists’ liberation, the joyful spirit of the moment for once taking precedence over the accepted tradition of clinically captured detail.
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