Class 3: The Impressionist Revolution A. Who were they? 1. Title Slide 1 (Renoir: The Skiff) 2. Revolution/Legacy Last week was most about poetry. Today, will be almost all about painting. I had originally announced it as “The Impressionist Legacy,” with the idea that I was take the actual painters—Monet, Renoir, and the like—for granted and spend the whole class on their legacy. But the more I worked, the more I saw that the changes that made modernism possible all occurred in the work of the Impressionists themselves. So I have changed the title to “The Impressionist Revolution,” and have tweaked the syllabus to add a class next week that will give the legacy the time it needs. 3. Monet: Impression, Sunrise (1872, Paris, Musée Marmottan) So who were the Impressionists? The name is the easy part. At the first group exhibition in 1874, Claude Monet (1840–1926) showed a painting of the port in his home town of Rouen, and called it Impression, Sunrise. A hostile critic seized on the title as an instrument of ridicule. But his quip backfired; within two years, the artists were using the name Impressionistes to advertise their shows. 4. Chart 1: artists before the first Exhibition 5. Chart 2: exhibition participation There were eight group exhibitions in all: in 1874, 1876, 1877, 1879, 1880, 1881, 1882, and 1886. So one answer to the question “Who were the Impressionists?” would be “Anyone who participated in one or more of their shows.” Here are seven who did, with a thumbnail of their earlier work, plus two who didn’t. Unfortunately I did not have room for Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot, or Mary Cassatt; I will make it up to the women at the end of today’s class. And even then, it is not quite so simple as that. Only one artist, Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) took part in all eight exhibitions; there were some who took part but whose style was noticeably different; and more than one artist who painted in an almost identical style but never participatedl. You will see that I also included two significant artists who, for different reasons, did not take part at all: Édouard Manet (1832–83) and Vincent van Gogh (1853–90). 6. Chart 3: before, during, and after All these artists were transformed by being connected with the movement, however briefly. The thumbnails at the bottom show what each went on to afterwards. I have narrated a little video to sum up the situation, together with larger pictures from each artist. 7. Impressionist timeline video 8. Chart 3 (repeat) — 1 — B. Subjects 9. Pierre-Auguste Renoir: The Skiff , with topic list You know the picture I have been using on the website? It was painted by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841– 1919) in 1875, between the first and second Impressionist Exhibitions. I am going to use it as the home base for some rather meandering excursions on four different topics: Subject, Focus, Surface, and Color. 10. Pierre-Auguste Renoir: The Skiff (1875, London NG), with alternate titles First: what is it? It appears on Google under three different titles: The Seine at Asnières, Boating on the Seine or just The Skiff. Which do you think suits it best? The Seine at Asnières implies it is merely a landscape; the important thing is the place, not the activity in it. Boating on the Seine would be the other way around; the painting would be depicting an activity, to which the actual place is coincidental. And picking on just one object, The Skiff, leaves the other questions undecided. Or rather, it makes is not about the place or about the activity, or even about that little boat, but a combination of all of them. The essence of the picture, I think, is middle class people enjoying themselves in a pretty place. 11. Salon subjects not painted by Impressionists! Is this unusual? I think it is. As you may know, the French held large official exhibitions every year called the Salons, that established taste and made reputations. Here is a bunch of pictures by various artists that had success at the Salons in the middle years of the century. It is almost a catalogue of approved subjects that the Impressionsts never attempted: Religion, Allegory, Myth, Historical and Narrative subjects of all kinds, and never with an eye to Sentiment, Exoticism, or Social Realism—though they were all “small-r realists” in their very bones drawing their subjects from contemporary life. 12. Gustave Courbet: three paintings One older artist who did point the way to this kind of subject, and whom most of the Impressionists respected, was Gustave Courbet (1819–77). He began in mid-century as an aggressive Social Realist, but did not confine himself to this vein. Here are three paintings by him on the same basic theme as the Renoir: Young Women Relaxing in a Pretty Place. The earliest of them, Young Ladies of the Village (1852, NY Met) has a bit of noblesse oblige about it, the upper classes making nice to the peasants. The second, Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine (1856, Paris, Orsay), is more like everyday life, but the freshness of the sunlit water in the distance is weighed down by the heaviness of the treatment of the two girls; it doesn’t look out-of-doors. By the time he painted The Charente at Port Bertaud in 1862, however, Courbet had lightened his palette, quite possibly under the influence of some of these younger artists. Now the two ladies are simply a part of the setting. You can see how the young Impressionists could have admired this, and Georges Seurat (1859–91) in particular might have responded to its airy calm. 13. Georges Seurat: Bathers at Asnières (1884, London Tate) This picture of his, Bathers at Asnières (1884, London Tate), is painted on the very same stretch of the river as Renoir’s Skiff. I am always surprised to see the very utilitarian road bridge in the background and — 2 — the factories belching smoke behind. This is an ordinary suburban setting, not some private park, a fact that Seurat accepts but Renoir conceals. But what makes Seurat not really an Impressionist like the others, despite his participation in the last exhibition, is that his painting, though full of outdoor light, is calm and composed, meticulously assembled in the studio and eternally still. Renoir’s, by contrast, is dashed off out of doors and pulsing with movement. 14. Pierre-Auguste Renoir: The Skiff, repeat If I have one general point to make for this hour, it is this: Impressionism is all about painting in the moment; its subject is the here-and-now. C. Focus 15. Pierre-Auguste Renoir: La Grenouillière (1869, Stockholm) This was by no means the first time that Renoir (or many other Impressionsts) had gone to some beauty spot close to Paris to watch the middle classes enjoying themselves. Here he is in 1869, five years before the first Impressionist exhibition, painting the riverside restaurant and bathing-place, La Grenouillère. On this occasion, he went with his friend Monet, both starving artists, and both painting the same view—the little artificial island known as Le camembert—from the same spot. I have had fun turning one into the other and back again. 16. Transformation of the above into Monet version (1869, NY Met) 17. Pierre-Auguste Renoir: La Grenouillière (1869, Stockholm) 18. Claude Monet: La Grenouillière (1869, NY Met) 19. — comparison of the above, top halves only Let’s compare them. The Renoir seems more close-up, more colorful, and more detailed; the Monet broader and deeper, with simplified forms. Look at the top halves of the pictures. Monet is clearly interested in the sunlight on the far side of the river, the effect of looking from comparative shadow into light; he keeps the middle ground uncluttered enough for us to be able to see beyond it. His subject, one might say with 20/20 hindsight, is the lighting. 20. Renoir: Dancing at the Moulin de la Galette (1876, Paris Orsay) With Renoir, though, it is the people. He pulls the foliage of the far bank right towards us; its texture, together with that of the distant water and the willow tree on the island, merely amplify the vivacity of the crowd having a good time. He would explore the theme more fully in his famous picture from 1876, Dancing at the Moulin de la Galette. Here, the crowd is the point, a snapshot of people having a good time, a few looking towards the camera, but the rest mostly quite unaware. — 3 — 21. Camille Silvy: A Garden Party (c.1862) Snapshot? Camera? I use the words advisedly, for photography was by now a reality, and that reality changed the role of art. What’s the point of making a painting just to record something, if the camera can do it better? But painting was still superior at conveying the artist’s human reaction to his subject, and in capturing the effect of fleeting movement. Look at this 1862 photograph by Camille Silvy (1834– 1910). These are also people having a party in the open air, and their arrangement is far from an official group photo. But all the same, they are frozen in their apparently casual attitudes, because the long exposure times required it. Renoir has no freeze whatsoever. 22. Manet: Musique aux Tuileries (1862, London/Dublin) The ancestor of Renoir’s Moulin de la Galette is an earlier picture by Manet, also of people in a crowd with music playing: his Music in the Tuileries of 1862.