Impressionism: Reflections and Perceptions

MEYER SCHAPIRO Reflections and Perceptions IMPRESSIONISM Reflections and Perceptions PREFATORY NOTE PROFESSOR MEYER SCHAPIRO (1904- 1996) first wrote on Impressionism in 1928 in an essay entitled "Modern Art" published in An Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West: A Syllabus, 7th edition, (New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 270-322). He gave courses on Impressionism at Columbia University over the following decades, as well as at New York University in 1935 and the New School for Social Research, and lectures at Vassar College (1944) and in Minneapolis (1957). This volume is an expansion of the six Pattin Lectures that he delivered at Indiana University, Bloomington, in 1961. While lecturing, Professor Schapiro spoke extemporaneously, with slides as his primary guideline, allowing himself to be inspired anew by each painting. The Pattin Lectures were taped and their transcription provided Schapiro with his first complete manuscript on Impressionism. During later years, Schapiro returned to his manuscript to amplify and clarify his ideas. His wife, Dr. Lillian Milgram, assisted him throughout this process by carefully retyping each page and saving each version for future reference. Under Professor Schapiro's direction, two of his students, Robin Sand and John Klein, researched and assembled the basic lists of illustrations for each chapter. While reviewing the galleys of the fourth volume of his Selected Papers (Theory and Philos ophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society, George Braziller, 1994), Schapiro, then age 89, turned his attention again to Impressionism. He continued to revise his manuscript and the lists of illustra tions. Well aware of his mortality, he asked me to serve as editor for the project of publishing the manuscript. I thank George Braziller for the opportunity to do so. Schapiro died soon after the publication of the fourth volume of his Selected Papers. Since her husband's death, Dr. Milgram has been of immeasurable and unfailing assistance as the var ious chapters were assembled and typeset. Furthermore, she has graciously overseen the process of organizing the chapters and determining the final list of illustrations. We warmly thank her for her tireless help and commitment to this project. I would also like to thank Sarah Faunce and Petra Chu, Jim McLachlan and Nan Watkins of Western Carolina University, and Phil Rees and Rachel Frew of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill for their help in finding references. Adrienne Baxter singlehandedly pulled the book together. Professor Schapiro drafted a general Table of Contents for this volume, which I have generally followed. The full texts of the completed chapters, somewhat amplified according to Professor Schapiro's marginal notations, have been reprinted in their entirety. Outlines for chapters on Raffaelli, Impressionism and Japanese art, Impressionism and the Rococo, and Impressionism and Archi tecture have not been included. Because the texts began as transcriptions of lectures, some additional editing was needed to accommodate the new printed format. I hope, however, that the melliflu ous tone and inspired cadences of Professor Schapiro's spoken lecture style have been retained. JAMES THOMPSON Associate Professor Western Carolina University INTRODUCTION: The Seer, the Seeing, and the Seen "IMPRESSIONISM" HAS BECOME a vaguer term as the works of the painters who are called the "Impressionists" have become better known. After first designating the style of a small band of French artists of the last third of the nineteenth century-perhaps no more than eight or nine painters-Impressionism was soon applied to novels, poems, and music, and even to a point of . VIew In sCience. If common features lead us to bracket these painters rigidly as a group, we will fail to rec ognize their great differences from each other, even in the I870S when they chose to exhibit together under one name. It seemed then to the Italian painter and art critic Diego Martelli (fig. I) that, among those whom he knew personally in Paris, Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas were the "artists of modernity," while Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro were the "true Impressionists who represent the dawn of the future." I By the mid-I880s certain of them had diverged enough to raise doubts as to the rightness of the common label, with its connotations of the sketchy and formless in art.2 Paul Cezanne, who had been a disciple of Pissarro and who exhibited with the group, can appear accordingly not truly Impressionist because of his constructive form. Renoir, too, was occupied with modeling and volume and therefore seems an atypical member, while Degas's life long pursuit of the contour was opposed in principle to the dissolution of line seen in so much of Monet's work. Even Pissarro and Alfred Sisley, who were closer to Monet, never carried pic torial novelty of color and stroke as far as he did. From these observations there might seem to have been only one true and thorough Impres sionist: Claude Monet. But Monet's art, too, changed radically in the course of fifty years, so that his later work still looks new, with a prophetic conception of space and surface related to that of artists of the following generations. Impressionism eludes strict definition by aesthetic features. The term arose as the name of an exhibiting group at a unique moment in the course of I 870S art and had less aptness for the same painters a decade later. One can argue that the name is misleading and has no place in serious 9 IMPRESSIONISM FIGURE I. Edgar Degas, Portrait of Diego Martelli, 1879, 110 x 100 cm, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh criticism and history. At least one ought not to infer from its original sense the constant traits binding certain individual innovative artists or reflecting the consistent practice of a school. Yet in examining the art of the nineteenth century as a whole and in considering the work before and after the phase called Impressionist, viewers have come to recognize how important were these few painters as a group . What they shared was not just a single trait, but a set of related aims, which individual members realized in different degrees-all of them were devoted to an ideal of modernity that included the imaging of the actually seen as part of the common inclu sive world of the spectacle, in opposition to the then-current official taste for history, myt�, and imagined worlds . To treat their works together as an epoch-making unit remains illuminating mainly because of their relationships to what preceded and to what followed them. Their con nections with earlier and later art are so significant that their originality is better understood by attending to their achievement as a collective growth. Among these artists Monet stands out as an exemplar, the clearest and most far-reaching in IO The Seer, the Seeing, and the Seen accomplishing certain broadly shared goals. Such an assessment, however, does not place him above all the others. In fact, these painters, while so distinct as personalities, were at one time conscious of a community of radical aims. They chose to exhibit together under the same ban ner, they had common opponents in the supporters of official art-already a ground for associ ation-and they stimulated each other in the development of their personal styles. These painters were strong individuals who absorbed more from each other at certain moments than from any other contemporaries. Despite their great differences and despite the dif ficulty in describing Impressionism so that the designation applies clearly to all of its practition ers in the same way, these artists can instructively be perceived as a group and considered in terms of common qualities, however elusive such affinities might turn out to be and however dif ferent may be the weight of those features. If the Impressionists were not a distinct class in the logical sense through those qualities, they were a family by virtue of their ancestors and descen dants and by virtue of their relations to one another. The aim of these reflections has not been to deal, as in a monograph, with each painter sep arately. Several broad aspects of their art have been considered here in general and illustrated by examples from all of their works. Only Monet has been isolated in a separate chapter to show the distinctive life-course and continuing growth and fertility of an exemplary Impressionist painter's art. Readers may regret that less attention has been given to the others. This focus was not originally planned; but the characteristic Impressionist features that appeared in this study turned out to be most evident and sustained in Monet's work. More might well have been said about Manet, generally seen as the mentor of the young artists, the leader of those on their way to a new art. Though younger than Pis sarro and only slightly older than Degas, Manet is often separated from the Impressionists because of the nature of his art in the 18 60S, with its residue of earlier realism and imaginative painting, his interest in novelistic, even journalistic, themes, and his distinctive palette of blacks and grays, as well as his rare neutralized tones applied in large, clearly defined masses. Manet's art was advanced and powerfully challenging in its time, and it helped free the young Impressionists from the banality of the academic schools. But if in the I860s his work was a lib erating example, his art of the I870S and I880s, with its new luminosity of color and freer brushstrokes, was in its turn stimulated by the younger men and especially by his sister-in-law Berthe Morisot. The provocative subject matter that had made Manet's Olympia (1863 ) and the Dejeuner sur l'herbe (fig.

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