CA4 Impressionism

Impressionism is a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles. Impressionism originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s.

Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas.

Gare St. Lazare - Familiar Place - Commuter - Modern

Disolve Solidity- Play of Light -

Academic Painter - Perspective, Lines, Contours,

Monet- Surface Removing line

MODERN URBAN LIFE

April of 1890, the (School of Fine Arts) in Paris showcased an exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints. These ukiyo-e images, “pictures of the floating world,”

The word “la coiffure” evokes a precise image, one of wealthy women in glamorous settings. The ritual of grooming, dressing, and preparing one’s hair from the seventeenth and eighteenth century court days of Anne of Austria and Marie Antoinette was passed down to nineteenth-century ideals of femininity and beauty.

body, is a compositional element PATTERNS and TONES

concision—using no more than is necessary to convey an idea

limited color palette

emulate the haziness, sensual, and suggestive possibilities of pastels is what motivated Cassatt not to use woodblock printing but intaglio.

Cassatt’s motivation in making the prints was to make her art more accessible for a large audience. She believed that everyone, regardless of income or social position, should be able to experience art and to own works they enjoy:

new industries and technology, more and more people would have the income, education, and ability to experience art in ways they hadn’t been able to before.

an expression of the artist’s turbulent state-of-mind

night landscapes are rare

Van Gogh mentioned it briefly in his letters as a simple “study of night” or ”night effect.”

INDIVIDUALIZED EXPRESSION

As an artist devoted to working whenever possible from prints and illustrations or outside in front of the landscape he was depicting, the idea of painting an invented scene from imagination troubled Van Gogh

EAR

“These are exaggerations from the point of view of arrangement, their lines are contorted like those of ancient woodcuts” (805, c. 20 September 1889). Similar to his friends Bernard and Gauguin, Van Gogh was experimenting with a style inspired in part by medieval woodcuts, with their thick outlines and simplified forms.

extended observation of the night sky. COLORS OF THE NIGHT SKY

Arguably, it is this rich mixture of invention, remembrance, and observation combined with Van Gogh’s use of simplified forms, thick impasto, and boldly contrasting colors that has made the work so compelling to subsequent generations of viewers as well as to other artists. Inspiring and encouraging others is precisely what Van Gogh sought to achieve with his night scenes.

Though it began as a literary concept, Symbolism was soon identified with the artwork of a younger generation of painters who were similarly rejecting the conventions of Naturalism. Symbolist painters believed that art should reflect an emotion or idea rather than represent the natural world in the objective, quasi-scientific manner embodied by Realism and Impressionism. Returning to the personal expressivity advocated by the Romantics earlier in the nineteenth century, they felt that the symbolic value or meaning of a work of art stemmed from the recreation of emotional experiences in the viewer through color, line, and composition. In painting, Symbolism represents a synthesis of form and feeling, of reality and the artist’s inner subjectivity.

The sea and Tahiti’s volcanic mountains are visible in the background. It is Paul Gauguin’s largest painting, and he understood it to be his finest work.

Sunday painter (someone who paints for his or her own enjoyment) to becoming a professional after his career as a stockbroker failed in the early 1880s

Finished in 1 month

Legend-Poison

painting’s themes of life, death, poetry, and symbolic meaning

It is a canvas four meters fifty in width, by one meter seventy in height. The two upper corners are chrome yellow, with an inscription on the left and my name on the right, like a fresco whose corners are spoiled with age, and which is appliquéd upon a golden wall. To the right at the lower end, a sleeping child and three crouching women. Two figures dressed in purple confide their thoughts to one another. An enormous crouching figure, out of all proportion and intentionally so, raises its arms and stares in astonishment upon these two, who dare to think of their destiny. A figure in the center is picking fruit. Two cats near a child. A white goat. An idol, its arms mysteriously raised in a sort of rhythm, seems to indicate the Beyond. Then lastly, an old woman nearing death appears to accept everything, to resign herself to her thoughts. She completes the story! At her feet a strange white bird, holding a lizard in its claws, represents the futility of words….So I have finished a philosophical work on a theme comparable to that of the Gospel.*

right to left

awareness of the Parisian art market

Paul Gauguin is one of the most significant French artists to be initially schooled in Impressionism, but who broke away from its fascination with the everyday world to pioneer a new style of painting broadly referred to as Symbolism. As the Impressionist movement was culminating in the late 1880s, Gauguin experimented with new color theories and semi-decorative approaches to painting. He famously worked one summer in an intensely colorful style alongside Vincent Van Gogh in the south of France, before turning his back entirely on Western society. He had already abandoned a former life as a stockbroker by the time he began traveling regularly to the south Pacific in the early 1890s, where he developed a new style that married everyday observation with mystical symbolism, a style strongly influenced by the popular, so-called "primitive" arts of Africa, Asia, and French Polynesia. Gauguin's rejection of his European family, society, and the Paris art world for a life apart, in the land of the "Other," has come to serve as a romantic example of the artist-as-wandering-mystic.

Mont Sainte-Victoire

gradually emerged as a major theme in Cézanne’s work.

after his adoption of Impressionism, that he began consistently featuring the mountain in his landscapes

series of works

two-dozen paintings and watercolors

exists in four forms: the first painting, done in oil, tempera, and pastel on cardboard (1893, National Gallery of Art, Oslo), two pastel examples (1893, Munch Museum, Oslo and 1895, private collection), and a final tempera painting (1910, National Gallery of Art, Oslo). Munch also created a lithographic version in 1895.

“I was walking along the road with two friends—the sun went down—I felt a gust of melancholy—suddenly the sky turned a bloody red. I stopped, leaned against the railing, tired to death—as the flaming skies hung like blood and sword over the blue-black fjord and the city—My friends went on—I stood there trembling with anxiety—and I felt a vast infinite scream [tear] through nature.” The figure on the bridge—who may even be symbolic of Munch himself—feels the cry of nature, a sound that is sensed internally rather than heard with the ears.

Symbolist artists of diverse international backgrounds confronted questions regarding the nature of subjectivity and its visual depiction.

126. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon_, Pablo Picasso (video, images, additional resources

130. The Portuguese, Georges Braque (essay, images, additional resources)

131. The Goldfish, Henri Matisse (essay, image, additional resources)

132. Improvisation 28 (second version), Vasily Kandinsky (video, photo, additional resources

133. Self-Portrait as a Soldier, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (essay, image, additional resources

134. Memorial Sheet of Karl Liebknecht, Käthe Kollwitz (essay, image, additional resources)

135. Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier (essay, images, additional resources)

136. Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow, Piet Mondrian (essay, image, additional resources)

137. Illustration from The Results of the First Five-Year Plan, VarvaraStepanova (essay, image, additional resources)

138. Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure), Meret Oppenheim (essay, quiz, image, additional resources 139. Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright (essay, plans and elevations, images, additionalresources)

140. The Two Fridas, Frida Kahlo (essay, image, additional resources)

141. The Migration of the Negro, Panel no. 49, Jacob Lawrence (video-short version, video-long version, photo, additional resources)

142. The Jungle, Wilfredo Lam (essay, image, additional resources)

143. Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central Park, Diego Rivera (essay, image, additional resources)

144. Fountain, Marcel Duchamp (video, images, additional resources)

145. Woman I, Willem de Kooning (video, images, additional resources)

146. Seagram Building, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson (video,images, additional resources)

147. Marilyn Diptych, Andy Warhol (essay, image, additional resources)

148. Narcissus garden, Yayoi Kusama (essay, image, additional resources)

149. The Bay, Helen Frankenthaler (essay, quiz, image, additional resources)

150. Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, Claes Oldenburg (essay, photo, additional resoures)

151. Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson (video, images, additional resources)

152. House in New Castle County, Robert Ventura, John Rausch and Denise Scott Brown (essay, photos, additional resources)