The Impressionists [antikvár]

FRANCE AND IMPRESSIONISM T he Impressionists did not choose their name -it was foisted upon them in 1874 by a critic hostile to their work. However the name soon stuck and was used to describe a group of artists who never intended to be a unified radical movement, who never set out to shock or be revolutionaries. What they had in common was that they were all in Paris in the early 1860s and quickly got to know each other - some in art schools which they abandoned early on, some in the cafés where they would meet - and realized that they shared a desire to paint the landscape, cityscape, and modern life in new ways. The first Impressionist exhibition took place because none of these artists had achieved any regular success at the official Salon, the major venue for the Paris art market, whose juries were notoriously inconsistent and reactionary. The first exhibition by this group did Httle to challenge the all-powerful Salon, but it crystallized critical opinion and pushed the so-called Impressionists into the limelight. They were pilloried by hostile critics and supported by writers such as Baudelaire and Zola who saw in their work an important advancement of art into the modern era. But the Impressionists did not seek to criticize their society; they were largely middle class and politically conservative in an age permanently on the brink of upheaval. They remained true to aesthetic ideas which, with few exceptions, kept them from depicting the grinding poverty caused by rapid industrial expansion, and the sporadic outbursts of war and violence that punctuated the history of their times. JONGKIND The Sainte Catherine's Market at Honfleur oil on canvas 1865 42 X 66 cm (Detail)