ISSUE NO 3 : IMPRESSIONISM

 IMPRESSIONISM:
Changing the Way We See the World

The word “impress” is a good start. I am impressed when I see something that sticks in my mind. We see our natural world with our eyes everyday and when looking at a photo or a Realism painting, we see basically the same image that our eyes see naturally. To take an image, whatever it may be and utilize an Impressionism style, but impressionism goes beyond what our eyes see naturally, images can be made of dots, daubs of paint even smears of paint done by fingertips which at a distance or at a glance become alive and "impresses" our mind. The Impressionists were not very popular because they had a different approach to painting. When Renoir and Monet went out into the countryside in search of subjects to paint, they carried their oil colors, canvas, and brushes with them so that they could stand right on the spot and record what they saw at that time. In contrast, earlier landscape painters painted in a very traditional way painstakingly creating paintings that were extremely detailed and worked in their studio from sketches they had made outdoors of people or landscapes or historical events .

The Impressionists often painted "out of doors". This is where the term "plain air" painting got started. Plain air means "outside" in French. Artists began to discard old painting supplies and picked up box easels and painting tubes, allowing them to easily travel outdoors with their supplies. They aimed at showing more immediate effect of light and colour at particular times of the day. Their works are sometimes described as "captured moments" and are characterized by short quick brushstrokes of colour which, when viewed up close looks quite messy and unreal. If you step back from and Impressionist painting, however, the colours are blended together by our eyes and we are able to see the painter's subject which often showed colourful landscapes, sunlight on water as well as people engaged in outdoor activities and enjoyment. I can imagine the energy that artists felt when they actually decided to toss away the technique of painting shadows with dark color that the realism involved. Many Impressionists painted pleasant scenes of middle class urban life, extolling the leisure time that the industrial revolution had won for middle class society. Thus Impressionism style is often familiar yet mysterious.


The Impressionists remained realists in the sense that they remained true to their sensations of the object, although they ignored many of the old conventions for representing the object "out there." But truthfulness for the Impressionists lay in their personal and subjective sensations not in the "exact" reproduction of an object for its own sake. Artists became more concerned with the independent expression of the individual. Reality became what the individual saw. Because when an artist releases a new work to the public, he is displaying a part of himself or herself to the world. With Impressionism, the meaning of realism was transformed into subjective realism, and the subjectivity of modern art was born.

Naming the Newborn Genre
The critical response was mixed, with Monet and Cézanne bearing the harshest attacks. Critic and humorist Louis Leroy wrote a scathing review in the Le Charivari newspaper in which, making wordplay with the title of Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant), he gave the artists the name by which they would become known. Derisively titling his article The Exhibition of the Impressionists, Leroy declared that Monet's painting was at most, a sketch, and could hardly be termed a finished work.
The term "Impressionists" quickly gained favour with the public. It was also accepted by the artists themselves, even though they were a diverse group in style and temperament, unified primarily by their spirit of independence and rebellion. They exhibited together—albeit with shifting membership—eight times between 1874 and 1886.

Some of the Famous Impressionist
Paris attracted young artists from all over the world, who then carried Impressionist ideas back to their own countries. Although the Impressionist movement did not exclusively consist of French artists, it did start in France and the French painters are among the most well-known. Frédéric Bazille, Paul Cézanne, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir Alfred Sisley, are among those brilliants. Impressionists beyond France are Chafik Charobim in Egypt, John Peter Russell, Frederick McCubbin and Tom Roberts who were prominent members of the Heidelberg School from Australia, Mary Cassatt from America and others.
By re-creating the sensation in the eye that views the subject, rather than recreating the subject, and by creating a welter of techniques and forms, Impressionism became a precursor to various movements in painting which would follow, including Neo-Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism.

Prepared by: Maha Ali