Art & Music - Impressionism...1/4

The dawning of a new era...

 

Each new school year at my university kicked off with a campus-wide ‘art’ sale – countless undergraduates rifling through hundreds of reproductions of artists’ masterworks, and purchasing decor for their dorm room walls at a song.  My first year at school I was amazed at how nearly every room in my all girls’ dormitory was adorned by at least one piece from the French Impressionists – Monet was a huge favourite, along with Renoir, Degas, Cezanne and Manet. Water lilies and ballet dancers warred for wall space with café scenes depicting the bohemian lifestyle.  

The ‘prettiness’ of the pictures and their ability to match a number of different bedspreads was what the girls coveted – I don’t think that many of us had any idea of the revolutionary sensibility the pleasant scenes represented.

Thumbing their noses at tradition

As a reaction to the artistic traditions that preceded them, the 1860s saw a group of up-and-coming Parisian painters, calling themselves the Société Anonyme des Artistes-Peintres, begin to paint in a new style, never before seen in the galleries.  

Shut out of the prestigious Paris salon, the Société had the effrontery to boycott the establishment and to hold their own exhibition.  It was writer Louis Leroy in his column in Le Charivari, who first used the word ‘impressionniste’ to describe Claude Monet’s painting of a sunrise, entitled simply Impressions: soleil levant.  Leroy meant the term derisively; the painters themselves embraced it (gleefully, I always imagine) and French Impressionism was born.

The cast of characters

Who were the arty malcontents? Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot, Armand Guillaumin, and Frédéric Bazille, worked together and influenced each other; Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne also painted in an Impressionist style for a time in the early 1870s. And Édouard Manet, the only established painter in the group, also adopted the Impressionist approach in about 1873.  A handful of new painters; all young, all radically out of step with the establishment, and all looking to create something new.

A radical aesthetic

So from such inauspicious beginnings a new style arose that challenged the existing artistic aesthetic.   But what exactly characterized this new style and what was its impact?  What was the public’s reaction to this revolutionary art; were audiences always as responsive as we clearly are today, nearly 150 years later?

(This is the next in a series created for the Fuschia Tree's art magazine, Artitude, exploring the inter-relatedness of art and music.)