Ch.16 - French Art after the Commune - Conservative and Modernist Trends Flashcards
Impression, Sunrise, 1872
Claude Monet
Was seen as an attack on form, unfinished, offensive to masters of painting. Monet was doing what Manet was trying to do. Capturing a moment.
This is a scene in Normandy, we see marine fog on the water, and the rising sun reflected in the water. He isn’t painting what he knows is there, he is painting what he sees.
He is painting that fleeting visual sensation of what he sees. Another captured moment that will not last through the day. Light and color as fleeting sensations.
Even though the objects might be fixed the lighting ill change at times of day.
Manet didn’t carefully create a perspective grid composition, Manet did a series of outdoor sketches which he did in his studio. Painting what is before his eyes, which is a new way of looking at things
Impressionists began studying outdoor light in order to convey fleeting optical sensations. Same scene over and over again
Up close, this piece looks like garbage. Choppy, obvious brushstrokes that are dabbled along the canvas hastily. When you step away from it however, you see movement, and the painting come to life. Quite fascinating.
As a sketch, this work may have been critiqued differently. Submitted as a finished work, however, it was highly criticized by Leroy, who called it a “wallpaper in an embryonic state”.
Gare St-Lazare, Paris, 1877
Claude Monet
Part of a series of 12 impressionist sketches that Monet did of this station. Leads viewers on a tour of the station and is quite the spectacle.
Exemplifies modern life, and all its chaos and instability.
Monet branches away from his usual landscape subjects of trees, water, and sky.
Ball at the Moulin de la Galette, 1876
Pierre Auguste Renoir
To suggest liveliness of this outdoor ball in Montmartre, Renoir uses short brushstrokes of colour, freely applying them. He aimed to convey the movement of light/shadow from the trees above onto the people, and to reflect the light in the glassware on the table.
Montmartre was a more lower-class, liberal, prostitution area/ red light area that these artists would hang out in.
Cropped figures, choppy brushstrokes. Baudelaire wrote that the experience that the modern artist should convey is “flaneur”. “Flaneur” means stroller or wanderer. A series of casual glances. The viewer is given the viewpoint of the “flaneur”.
The light is coming from chandeliers, and also the trees. Shadows are dappled across the ground and clothing of the men and women. Many women in this photo supplemented their income with prostitution. These middle-class/wealthy men would come hang out in Montmartre to have fun and buy sex.
Renoir’s works are always delightful.
This setting features Bohemian artists, upper-class men, lower-class women, shop girls, etc. Not a place you would take your family or wife.
The Dance Class, 1874
Edgar Degas
Differs greatly from all other impressionist works before it. Questionable to even call it impressionist.
Degas is a different kind of Impressionist who is more interested and focused on the field and angle of vision, and the perception of moving bodies.
This piece had a few contemporary innovations, such as the viewpoint, which makes the viewer feel as if they’re on a ladder.
Degas’s compositional innovations are seen as a an attempt to come closer to the way we see the world.
A focus on the idea of casual glances, which lack composition, framing, and symmetry. Nothing is staged.
Degas’s works have been compared to photography. He was influenced by Japanese “birds-eye viewpoints”.
Paris Street, Rainy Weather, 1877
Gustave Caillebotte
Painting the outdoors is known as “en plain air”.
This painting is from an angled viewpoint, is totally decentralized, and is that of what your eye might see in real life.
Shows modern life, a time in Paris when manufacturing, department stores come around, and people begin wandering about with less purpose.
Caillebotte wasn’t a fan of modernity, and saying that it wasn’t “all light, colour, and movement, it is also dreariness and uniformity”.
Very unorthodox composition and viewpoint in it’s time. Sort of looks like a photograph
Shows a main intersection that was done by Haussmann in Paris.
The Cradle, 1872
Berthe Morisot
Women were not represented well in the impressionist exhibitions, but when they were, they equaled male colleagues in quality and quantity of their works.
This piece, her most famous, shows a setting which men would not be used to seeing, as it was inside the nursery of a 19th century middle-class home.
Uses some of the same choppy brushstroke techniques, complimentary colours. Many women in this time worked on needlework, including knitting, embroidery, etc. This was a domestic activity, which could be depicted by the female Impressionist artist.
Woman in a Loge, 1879
Mary Cassatt
Like Degas, Cassatt was interested in the suggesting effect of a casual glimpse.
The cropped figure is similar to that of Degas’s works.
Cassatt was interested in subject matter that was both feminine and modern. Unusual to showcase a woman in the crowd, as opposed to the person on stage. This piece makes the viewer feel as if they’re with the figure i attendance.
