The Impressionists and their art [antikvár]

Chaptt trône SOCIAL AND ARTISTIC BACKGROUIW If one wants to characterise them with a singly word that explains their efforts, one would have to create the new term of Impressionists. They are Impressionists in the sense that they render not a landscape but the impression produced by a landscape. (Jules Castagnary, in Le Siecle, 29 April 1874) On 27 December 1873 a group of French artists in Paris - mostly painters, but including some sculptors and engravers - formed themselves into a Société Anonyme, an otherwise untitled cooperative organization the members of which had the common aim of exhibiting their works in a location other than the Paris Salon, which was at that time the official showplace for French art. Exhibits at the Salon were selected by a jury appointed by the Académie of Fine Arts, a section of the Institut de France. The photographer Nadar (the pseudonym of Félix Tournachon) lent the Société his studios at 3 5 Boulevard des Capucines. The exhibition of 165 subjects opened on 15 April 1874 and ran for exactly a month. Ten days after the opening, Louis Leroy, a minor journalist, published in Charivari a viciously scathing attack on the show and its 30 exhibitors. It was written in the form of a satirical dialogue between Leroy and an elderly landscape painter, Joseph Vincent, who as he proceeds round the studios, becomes increasingly incensed by almost everything he sees. At first, bewildered by the lack of detail in some of the paintings, he wonders if perhaps his spectacles are dirty; he goes on and his rage grows as he is confronted by mote and more outrageous works, until, unable to take any more, he performs a Red Indian war-dance in front of an astonished attendant, crying dementedly, 'Hi-ho! I am impression on the march, the avenging palette knife . . .' Leroy's article was titled 'Exhibition of the Impressionists'. This was partly because the word 'impression' is used several times to describe the general effect of some of the paintings (as contrasted with a detailed rendering of a subject), and the 'impression' they accordingly make on their viewers (as exemplified by the dramatic reaction of M. Vincent), but particularly since one of them bore the title. Impression, Sunrise, by the then virtually unknown painter Claude Monet (although the precise identity of this picture is still disputed; see page 92). As many of the paintings on show conveyed an 'impression' of the observed scene, the use of the word was scarcely original. There is actually plenty of evidence that a number of the artists whose work was displayed, as well as their critics, had been using the term in this context for several years. However, Leroy's uncompromising assault gave a coherent and memorable tag to what by 1874 could rightly be regarded as a new artistic movement, and despite the objections of certain of its exponents, 'Impressionism' is the name by which this revolution in painting has been called ever since - sometimes loosely - to describe the overall style of painting, but most accurately to refer to the work of a small and dedicated group of painters who adopted personal styles within an Impressionist frame of