Impressionism, Post- Impressionism and Art

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1 Dr. Schiller: AP History of Art Impressionism, Post- Impressionism and Art This PowerPoint is a compilation of slides and information from PowerPoints created by Matt Curliss, Christy Tran, Pyung Choi, Jenessa Irvine, and Grace Phang, and and William V. Ganis, PhD, and from books by Marilyn Stokstad and Gardner

2 Impressionism: Capturing the Fugitive Images of Modern Life! Impressionism was an art of industrialized, urbanized Paris.! While Realism focused on the present, Impressionism focused on a single moment.! Actually a nebulous and shifting phenomenon, rather than a coherent movement! Large group that exhibited in the 1870s and 1880s.

3 ! A hostile critic applied the label Impressionism in response to this painting (artists later started using the label themselves)! impresssionist painting incorporated the qualities of sketches--abbreviation, sped, and spontaneity.! This work was finished in the sense of a complete thought or the characterization of a specific moment, rather than through the polish and reworking typical of academic works.! The brushstrokes are clearly evident.! Monet, for example, made no attempt to blend the pigment to create smooth tonal gradations and an optically accurate scene.! Although this is not a sketch, it has a sketchy

4 ! Most artists before the late 1870s, including Van Gogh and Gauguin, both early Impressionists, didn't use paint from tubes. Those artists bought pigments in bins from artist paint stores and blended most of their own colors.! Oil paint in tubes, introduced in the more modern areas of Europe around 1860 finally came into wide scale use by the 1870s.! What it did was free the artist from his or her studio to be more mobile with their art. These artists, accepting oil in tubes, came about at the same time as the rise in Impressionist style painting.! By being able to take their paints with them, many ventured away from their studios and traveled out of town and out into nature where they spent a lot of time recording on canvas their images of nature. What paint in tubes offered them was a creative freedom they wouldn't have had otherwise.

5 Japonisme--The Allure of the Orient Westerners started to learn more about Japanese culture after the forced opening of Japan to westerners in by US Commodore Perry The French were so intrigued by Japanese art and culture that they coined the term Japonisme to describe the Japanese aesthetic, probably attracted to both the beauty and the exoticism There was a Japanese Pavilion at the 867 Universal exposition in Paris Japanese objects began flooding Paris (kimonos, fans, lacquer cabinets, folding screens, jewelry, etc). As demand grew, the Japanese began to develop import-export businesses and the money from this trade helped finance Japanese industrialization Artists were particularly draw to Japanese art, especially the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists Japanese presentation of space in woodblock prints intrigued these artists because of the simplicity of the woodblock printing process (a separate block for each color), these prints are characterized by areas of flat color with a limited amount of modulation or gradation this flatness interested modern paints, who sought to call attention to the picture surface

6 Katsushika Hokusai The Great Wave off Kanagawa 1857 color woodblock print 9 7/8 x 14 3/4 in.

7 ! Claude Monet ( )! AKA Oscar Claude Monet or Claude Oscar Monet.! Founder of French impressionist painting, and the most productive practitioner of the movement s philosophy of expressing one s perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting.! The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression: Sunrise.

CLAUDE MONET, Impression: Sunrise, 1872. Oil on canvas 1 7½ x 2 1½ Musée Marmottan, Paris.

8 CLAUDE MONET, Impression: Sunrise, Oil on canvas 1 7½ x 2 1½ Musée Marmottan, Paris.! Monet made no attempt to blend the pigment to create smooth tonal gradations and an optically accurate scene.! Although this is not a sketch, it has a sketchy quality.

9 CLAUDE MONET, Rouen Cathedral: The Portal (in Sun), Oil on canvas, 3' 3¼" x 2' 1⅞. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Stokstad plate 27-69

10 ! Monet s Rouen Cathedral had some forty views.! For each canvas, he observed the cathedral from the same viewpoint but at different times of the day or under various climatic conditions.! He was later accused of destroying form and order for fleeting atmospheric effects.! But he focused on light and color precisely to reach a greater understanding of form.

11 Claude Monet Rouen Cathedral: The Portal oil on canvas each approximately 3 ft. 3 1/4 in. x 2 ft. 1 7/8 in.

12 Claude Monet, Water Lilies, 1906, Oil on canvas 34 1/2 x 36 1/2 in. (87.6 x 92.7 cm)

13 Monet. The Japanese Footbridge c Monet. The Japanese Footbridge, 1899

Monet. The Saint-Lazare Station, 1877, oil on canvas https://www.khanacademy.

14 Monet. The Saint-Lazare Station, 1877, oil on canvas

! Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)! American painter and printmaker.! Lived in France and befriended Edgar Degas.

15 ! Mary Cassatt ( )! American painter and printmaker.! Lived in France and befriended Edgar Degas.! She was limited in her subject choices because she took care of her aging parents and she could not easily frequent the cafes with her male artist friends.! Created images of the social and private lives of women, with intimate bonds between mother and children.! She shows the tender relationship between a mother and child.! Her style in this work owed much to the compositional devices of Degas and of Japanese prints.

16 MARY CASSATT, The Coiffure, Drypoint and aquatint,

17 ! This drypoint etching, The Coiffure, of a woman adjusting her hair is one of the hundreds that Mary Cassatt made in her in-home studio in the summer and fall of 1890 and in the winter of 1891.! It was inspired in part by a woodblock print in her personal collection, Kitagawa Utamaro s boudoir image of the daughter of a prosperous Edo businessman, Takashima Ohisa Using Two Mirrors to Observe Her Coiffure.! La Coiffure also has its art historical roots in Old Master paintings of women bathing and the odalisque though it departs from those conventional models to become a tightly crafted exercise in form and composition.

18 Kitagawa Utamaro, Two Young Women Kneeling Back to Back, Dressing Their Hair in Mirrors, woodblock print

19 ! Vincent Van Gogh ( )! Born in Holland, son of Dutch Protestant pastor, believed he had a religious calling until age 27 where he left to fully dedicate his life to art, mostly self-taught! Studied colors and distorted forms to express emotions and nature! Suffered from epileptic seizures, brother Theo was close and supported his works and we know about Vincent through their personal letters! Used thick, intense color, made paintings textile-like, with bold, vibrant, and swirling brushstrokes Christy Tran 49

20 ! VINCENT VAN GOGH The Night Café! 1888, Oil on canvas 2 4½ x 3.! Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven Christy Tran 50

21 ! Painted year before his death! The sky is not realistically depicted, but rather tried to show the huge, vastness of the universe with the stars and the tiny earth below it! This view was a real one from the asylum he was staying in, and it was very personal to Van! Gogh Depressing! and reminiscent VINCENT VAN GOGH, Starry Night, oil on canvas Approximately 2 5 x 3¼ Museum of Modern Art, New York Gardner plate Christy Tran 52

22 ! v=ubtji_uphpk VINCENT VAN GOGH, Starry Night, oil on canvas Approximately 2 5 x 3¼ Museum of Modern Art, New York Gardner plate Christy Tran 52

23 ! Paul Gauguin! Rejected objective representation for subjective expression (simply put: did not depict scenes realistically, but rather based them on his own perspective, experience, emotion he had towards them; some call this his inner vision)! Believed color above all determined the artists power and creativity! Unlike Van Gogh s intense brush stokes, he used a flatter, more dissolving, abstract pattern! Learnt from Pissarro and in 1883, at the age of 35, he dedicated his life to art Christy Tran 53

24 Paul Gauguin The Vision after the Sermon 1888 oil on canvas 2 ft. 4 3/4 in. x 3 ft. 1/2 in. Gardner plate 29-35

25 they pray devoutly before the apparition! This work decisively rejects Realism and Impressionism! To Gauguin, the people of Brittany were natural men and women, perfectly at ease with their unspoiled peasant environment.! The painting hows the Breton women, wearing their starched white Sunday caps and black dresses, visualizing a sermon they have just heard at church of Jacob s encounter with the Holy Spirit The images are not the optically real of the Impressionists, but instead what memory would have recalled and imagination would have modified. So Gauguin twisted the perspective and allotted space to emphasize the innocent faith of the unquestioning women, while he shrank Jacob and the Angel to the size of fighting cocks. The women are spectators at a contest which for them is perfectly real Christy Tran 52

26 ! No unification of the picture with a horizon perspective, light and shade, or naturalistic use of color. Instead he abstracted the scene into a pattern! pure unmodulated color fills flat planes and shapes bounded by firm line! the shape are angular, even harsh--suggesting the austerity of peasant life and ritual. He was influenced by Japanese works in his abstract, expressive patters of life, shape and pure color. Christy Tran 52

27 PAUL GAUGUIN Where Do We Come from? What Are We? Where Are We Going? 1897, oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Gardner plate Christy Tran 56

28 ! This huge mural shows his artistic methods very well: Use of flat shapes and pure unmodulated color! Very pessimistic, depressing mood, which shows human mortality with the Tahitian women and their local myths(life cycle with children, young women, and elders), a tropical landscape, but mostly with flat areas of color, shows intensity and lushness Christy Tran 56

29 ! This was his Magnus Opus before death (culminating work)! The young woman in the middle picking a fruit shows the simple joys of life, ex. pleasures, happiness of life! The idol with arms up in the back is a cultural belief representing death, like the old woman with hands on her head Christy Tran 56

30 ! George Seurat! Frenchman, very intellectual paintings,! Had a very strict system of painting focusing on color analysis and theory- pointillism or divisionism! Rather than harsh colors and brushstrokes, he organized colors and characterized Impressionism as a calculated arrangement based on the color theory! Method: applied in unmixed dots, viewable from far, rather than close so that one would blend the dots into visible, viewable shapes Christy Tran 57

31 ! GEORGES SEURAT, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,! , Oil on canvas, The Art Institute of Chicago, 6 9 x10 (big) Stokstad plate

32 José María Velasco, The Valley of Mexico from the Santa Isabel Mountain Range (Valle de México desde el cerro de Santa Isabel), 1875, oil on canvas Jose Maria Velasco, The Valey of Mesxico from the Hillside of Santa Isabel, 1882, oil on canvas 58

33 valley-of-mexico-from-the-santa-isabel-mountain-range-1875 Jose Maria Velasco, The Valey of Mesxico from the Hillside of Santa Isabel, 1882, oil on canvas 58

34 ! Paul Cézanne! From Impressionism to a more analytical style, believed it lacked structure and form! Did not strive for truth/realness in appearance but rather a lasting structure! Tried to order and organize lines, and color, by checking his painting against the actual scene, which he called motif! He said that the effects of distance and depth should not be achieved by traditional methods but rather through color patterns! He explored the properties of, lines, planes and color and how they were interrelated! For his method of 3-D, he used small patches in different hues or contrasting colors and saturations 6 0

35 Mount Sainte Victoire

36 PAUL CEZANNE. Mont Sainte- Victoire oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2 3½ x 2 11¼ Stokstad plate Christy Tran 63

37 ! He became known as an outdoor painter, famed for his landscapes, he tried to keep the bright, freshness of Impressionism! He created a series of paintings of Mont Sainte- Victoire (we will see this next) which was near his home, using important techniques such as: Color patches--to capture the true colors (not capturing the moment but the permanence) Varying the colors (cooler colors was the sky, warmer colors were the ground) very flat 6 1

38 Multiple viewpoints- (different perspectives) as if we were actually viewing the scene, not through a camera with only one viewpoint Underlying shapes- of an object, he assembled small geometric shapes combined as a landscape! His still lifes also used flat color patches and underlying shapes, along with multiple viewpoints and their slightly odd shape of the fruits show this (inspired cubists) 6 1

39 ! The many Mont Sainte-Victoires he did:! (this is the one in GARDNER) Christy Tran 6 2

40 PAUL CEZANNE. The Basket of Apples, Ca oil on canvas, 2 3/8 x2 7 The Art Institute of Chicago Stokstad plate

41 ! Objects lose individuality and became more geometric! He had to use fake apples, because he analyzed the shape so much that real ones began to rot! Studied arrangements from different viewpoints so that the items themselves don t look realistic, like an architecture of color 65

Post-Impressionism. Dr. Schiller/Art History

Post-Impressionism. Dr. Schiller/Art History Post-Impressionism Dr. Schiller/Art History 1 Post Impressionism: Experimenting With Form and Color By 1886, most critics and the general public accepted Impressionists as serious artists Christy Tran