The document discusses the origins and development of Impressionism in France in the late 19th century, focusing on key Impressionist artists like Monet, Renoir, Degas, and the stylistic innovations they pioneered in capturing light and color. It then examines Post-Impressionism and some of its leading practitioners such as Seurat, van Gogh, Gauguin, who moved beyond Impressionism towards more structured compositions and symbolic content. The movement towards modernism in art in reaction to academic traditions is also addressed.

1. Impressionism Defined
• While British artists were moving away from naturalism, their
French counterparts were pushing the French Realist tradition
into new territory.
• Instead of themes of the working classes and rural life that
had engaged Courbet, the generation that matured around
1870 was generally devoted to subjects of leisure, the upper
middle-class, and the city. (slice of life)
• Although many of these artists specialized in paintings of the
countryside, their point of view was usually that of the city
person on holiday.
• In April 1874, a number of these artists, including Cezanne,
Degas, Monet, Morisot, Pissarro and Renoir, exhibited
together in Paris as the Corporation of Artist Painters,
Sculptors, Engravers, etc.

2. Impressionism Defined
• All thirty participants agreed not to submit anything that year
to the Salon, which had in the past often rejected their works.
• Their exhibition was a declaration of independence from the
Academy and a bid to gain the attention of the public without
intervention of the jury.
• While the exhibition received some positive reviews, it was
attacked by conservative critics.
• Louis Leroy, writing in the comic journal Charivari (shiv-uh-
ree), seized on the title of a painting by Monet, Impression,
Sunrise (1873), and dubbed the entire exhibition
“impressionist.”
• While Leroy used the word to attack the seemingly haphazard
technique and unfinished look of some of the paintings,
Monet and many as colleagues were pleased to accept the
label, which spoke to their concern for capturing an
instantaneous impression of a scene in nature.

3. Impressionism Defined
• Seven more impressionist exhibitions followed between 1876
and 1886, with the membership of the group changing slightly
on each occasion.
• Frustration among progressive artists with the exclusionary
practices of the Salon jury had been mounting in the decades
preceding the first Impressionist exhibition.
• Such discontent reached a crescendo in 1863 when the jury
turned down 3,000 works submitted to the Salon, leading to a
storm of protest. In response, Napoleon III ordered an
exhibition of the refused work called the Salon des Refuses
(“Salon of the Rejected Ones”). (979, Stokstad, Art History)

4. Manet, Edouard (1832-1883)
• Featured in the Salon of the Rejected Ones was a painting by
Manet, The Luncheon on the Grass, which scandalized
contemporary viewers and helped establish Manet as a
radical artist.
• Within a few years, many of the future Impressionists would
gather around Manet and follow his lead in challenging
academic conventions.
• A well-born Parisian who had studied in the early 1850s with
the progressive academician Thomas Couture, Manet had by
the early 1860s developed a strong commitment to realism,
largely as a result of his relationship with the poet Baudelaire.

5. Manet, Edouard (1832-1883)
• In his article “The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire called
for an artist who would be the painter of contemporary
manners, “the painter of the passing moment and all the
suggestions of eternity that it contains.”
• Manet seems to have responded to Baudelaire’s call in
painting The Luncheon on the Grass. Arguably the most
important painting of the 19th century.
• The Luncheon on the Grass frank declaration of modernity
was deeply offensive to the academic establishment and the
average Salon-goer. (980, Stokstad, Art History)

6. Manet, The Luncheon on the Grass, Realism, 1863

7. Manet’s, The Luncheon on the Grass, concept and design was borrowed from, Titian’s, The Pastoral Concert.
Consider and discuss the content, intention, and purpose of each work and address the following questions:
(a) With which styles are the works and artists associated? (b) How are the styles similar? How are the styles
different? (c) Technically and aesthetically, which work appeals to you? WHY? (d) Discuss: line, shape, color,
texture, space, mass/volume, depth and composition.

8. Manet adapted for his composition a group of river gods and a nymph from an engraving by
Raimondo based on Raphael’s, Judgment of Paris. Manet’s allusion to the engraving was
apparent to critic Ernest Chesneau, who specifically noted this borrowing, or appropriation, and
objected to it.

9. Manet, Olympia, Realism, 1863

10. Manet’s, Olympia, concept and design was borrowed from, Titian’s, Venus of Urbino. Consider and discuss
the content, intention, and purpose of each work and address the following questions: (a) With which styles
are the works and artists associated? (b) How are the styles similar? How are the styles different? (c)
Technically and aesthetically, which work appeals to you? WHY? (d) Discuss: line, shape, color, texture,
space, mass/volume, depth and composition.

11. Monet, Claude (1840-1926)
• After some early efforts at plein air (this French expression
means “in the open air” and is used to describe the act of
painting outdoors) painting near his family home along the
Normandy coast, Monet developed his own technique of
applying paint with strokes and touches of pure color,
intended to describe flowers, leaves and waves, but also to
register simply as marks of paint on the surface of the canvas.
• Monet’s fully Impressionistic pictures of the 1870s and 1880s-
such Impression, Sunrise and Boulevard des Capucines, Paris-
are made up entirely of flecks of color.

12. Monet, Claude (1840-1926)
• Using these discrete marks of paint, Monet recorded the
shifting play of light on the surface of objects and the effect of
that light on the eye, rather than the physical character of the
objects. (509, Stokstad, Art: A Brief History)

13. Monet, Impression, Sunrise, Impressionism, 1872

14. Monet, Boulevard des Capucines, Paris,
Impressionism, 1874

15. Renoir, Auguste (1841-1919)
• Auguste Renoir met Monet at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in
1862. Despite his early predilection for figure painting in a
softened Courbet-like mode, Renoir was encouraged by
Monet to create pleasant, light-filled landscapes which where
painted outdoors.
• By the mid-1870s Renoir was combining Monet’s style in the
rendering of natural light with his own taste for the figure.
• Moulin de la Galette, for example, features dancers dappled
in bright afternoon sunlight. (985, Stokstad, Art History)

16. Renoir, Moulin de la Galette, 1876

17. Degas, Edgar (1834-1917)
• Subjects of urban leisure also attracted Edgar Degas, but he
did not share the plein air Impressionists’ interest in outdoor
light effects. Instead Degas composed his pictures in the
studio from working drawings.
• Manet, whom Degas met in 1862, and his circle gradually
persuaded Degas to turn from history painting to the
depiction of contemporary life.
• After a period of painting psychologically probing portraits of
friends and relatives Degas turned in the 1870s to such Paris
amusements as the racetrack, music hall, opera, and ballet.
(986, Stokstad, Art History)

18. Degas, The Rehearsal, 1874

19. Post-Impressionism Defined
• The English critic Roger Fry coined the term Post-
Impressionism in 1910 to identify a broad reaction against
Impressionism in avant-guard painting of the late 19th and
early 20th centuries.
• Each of these painters moved through an Impressionist phase
and continued to use in his mature work the bright
Impressionist palette. But each came also to reject the
Impressionism's emphasis on the spontaneous recording of
light and color and instead sought to create art with the
greater degree of formal order and structure.
• This goal lead the Post-Impressionist to depart from
naturalism and develop more abstract styles that would prove
highly influential for the development of modernist painting
in the early 20th century.

20. Seurat, Georges (1859-1891)
• Born in Paris and trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Seurat
became devoted to classical aesthetics, which he combined
with a rigorous study of optics and color theory, especially the
“law of the simultaneous contrast of colors,” formulated by
Chevreul, a French chemist.
• Chevreul’s law holds that adjacent objects not only cast
reflections of their own color onto their neighbors but also
create in them the effect of their complimentary color.
• Thus, when a blue object is set next to a yellow one, the eye
will detect a trace of purple, the compliment of yellow, and in
the yellow object a trace of orange, the compliment of blue.

21. Seurat, Georges (1859-1891)
• The Impressionists knew of Chevreul’s law but had not
applied it systematically. Seurat calculated exactly which hues
should be combined, in what proportion, to produce the
effect of a particular color. He then set these hues down in
dots of pure color, next to one another, in what came to be
known as pointillism.
• In theory, these juxtaposed dots would merge in the viewer’s
eyes to produce the impression of other colors, which would
be perceived as more intense than the same hues mixed on
the palette.
• In Seurat’s work, this optical mixture is never complete for his
dots of color are large enough to remain separate in the eye,
giving his work a grainy appearance. (995, Stokstad, Art
History)

22. Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Post-Impressionism, 1884-1886

23. van Gogh, Vincent (1853-1890)
• While Cezanne and Seurat were converting Impressionism into a more
severe, classical style, van Gogh pursed the opposite direction. He
believed that Impressionism did not provide the artists with enough
freedom to express their emotions. Since this was his main concern, he is
sometimes called an Expressionist.
• Van Gogh , the first great Dutch master since the seventeenth century, did
not become an artist until 1880: as he died ten years later. His early
interests were in literature and religion. Profoundly dissatisfied with the
values of industrial society he worked as a lay preacher among poverty-
stricken coal miners. This intense feeling for the poor dominates the
paintings of his pre-Impressionist period, 1880-85.
• To investigate this spiritual reality with the new means at his command,
he went to Arles, in the south of France. There between 1888 and 1890,
he produced his greatest pictures.

24. • Like Cezannne, van Gogh now
devoted his main energies to
landscape painting. Van Gogh
saw the Mediterranean
countryside filled with ecstatic
movement, not architectural
stability and permanence.
• In 1886 he went to Paris, where
he met Degas, Seurat, and other
leading French artists through his
brother Theo, who had a gallery
devoted to modern art. Their
effect on him was electrifying: his
pictures now blazed with color.
This impressionist phase would
last for less than two years.
• Although, it was vitally important
for his development, he had to
integrate it with the style of his
earlier years.
Vincent van Gogh, Self Portrait, Post-Impressionism, 1880-1890

25. • To van Gogh himself it was the
color, not the form that
determined the expressive
content of his pictures. The
letters he wrote to his brother
include many eloquent
descriptions of his choice of hues
and the emotional meaning he
attached to them.
• Although he acknowledged that
his desire “to exaggerate the
essential and to leave the obvious
vague” made his colors look
arbitrary by Impressionist
standards, he remained
committed to the visible world.
Vincent van Gogh, Self Portrait, Post-Impressionism, 1880-1890

26. • In this Self Portrait van Gogh paints
himself as a prophet as a Christ like
reformer proclaiming, “ I want to
paint men and women with that
something of the eternal which the
halo used to symbolize.”
• During the last year and a half of his
life van Gogh experienced repeated
psychological crises that led to his
going to an insane asylum and
eventually committed suicide, in July
1890.
• He recorded his emotional state in
paintings that would contribute to
the emerging expressionistic
tradition. (000 Jansen, A Basic
History of Western Art)
Vincent van Gogh, Self Portrait, Post-Impressionism, 1880-1890

27. Vincent van Gogh, Sunflowers & Irises, Post-Impressionism, 1888

28. van Gogh, The Starry Night, Post-Impressionism, 1889

29. Rodin, Auguste (1840-1917)
• The most successful and influential European sculptor of the
late nineteenth century was Rodin. Born in Paris and trained
as a decorative craftsperson, Rodin failed on three occasions
to gain entrance to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and
consequently spent the first twenty years of his career as an
assistant to other sculptors and decorators.
• After an 1875 trip to Italy, where he saw the sculpture of
Donatello and Michelangelo, Rodin developed his mature
style of vigorously modeled figures in unconventional poses,
which were simultaneously scorned by academic critics and
admired by the general public. (1002, Stokstad, Art History)

30. Rodin, The Age of Bronze, Expressionism, 1880

31. Rodin, Figurative Love, Expressionism, 1886

32. Like Manet, many contemporary artists borrow, or appropriate, imagery, which raises questions about
copyright infringement and Fair Use. In 2009, The Associated Press (original image left) threatened to sue
the artist who created the iconic Hope (appropriated image right) poster of Barak Obama for copyright
infringement, but Shepard Fairey says his work is protected under the principle of Fair Use, which exempts
artists from copyright restrictions. In your opinion, should Shepard Fairey have the right to reproduce this
image or does it belong to the associated press? Here the full story on NPR