The Impressionists and Post-Impressionists [antikvár]

The Impressionists and Post-Impressionists In the spring of 1874 a group of rather unsuccessful French painters mounted an exhibition in Paris at the premises of one of their friends, a photographer called Nadar. There were some thirty exhibitors; and they included Pissarro, Sisley, Degas, Renoir, Monet, Cézanne and Berthe Morisot. The show was a failure. The general public, alternately mocking and angry, was hostile; and the press was extremely rude. One of the paintings by Monet, a view of the harbour at Le Havre at sunrise, was actually titled 'Impression'; and this gave a critic the opportunity to dismiss it as a mere 'impression' and nothing more. That is the origin of the term Impressionist, which, like the word 'Gothic', was originally used in a derogatory sense. But that was by no means the end of the story. Impressionism and the movement that developed out of it, Post-Impressionism, prospered to the point where they have become the best loved of all schools of painting.What can it be about the paintings of Renoir or Manet or Gauguin or Van Gogh that makes them so universally admired and loved? Why are they the chosen decoration of so many, from the housewife who buys a colour reproduction in the local supermarket to the Wall Street banker who hangs originals on the walls of his Fifth Avenue apartment? It is worth looking at the likely reasons for their appeal because it may possibly tell us something about the nature of the art itself. And the first point is the subject matter. Looking through this album, you will find pictures of people out for a Sunday stroll (Plate 65); dancing in an open-air café (Plate 42); at the theatre (Plate 16); boating (Plates 37,43); enjoying the sea-side (Plate 19); painting out of doors (Plate 89); and having lunch by the river beneath a pretty striped awning (Plate 43). There are portraits, but of ordinary people, a postman (Plate 80), a peasant (Plate 81), a doctor (Plate 59). There are plenty of landscapes, some of real places, others so like a dream as to be quite unambiguously artificial (Plate 91). Occasionally there are non-contemporary subjects, such as young Spartan girls inciting the boys to fight (Plate 4), or the vision of Jacob wrestling with the Angel (Plate 62), but even these exert an easy appeal over and above their narrative content. There is very little in Impressionist or Post-Impressionist painting that requires any background knowledge. You don't have to know your Bible or the Greek and Roman classics, or even generally be very well read, to enjoy a Renoir or a Van Gogh or a Seurat. There are plenty of interesting things to know about these pictures: the models were often friends or relations and the settings can often be exactly identified: but this knowledge is not essential to their enjoyment. This was a major problem in 1874, when taste in art was much more snobbish, a much more exclusive prerogative of the upper classes, and when literary content was still thought to be important. The pictures of Renoir, Pissarro, Degas and Monet were considered trivial precisely because they seemed to offer a visual impression and nothing more, no stories, no ironies, no moral overtones. But since then democratic forces have asserted themselves in the arts, as in everything else, and educational and religious values have altered. In 1874 there were still people who would have been disturbed by the idea of a large and evidently important work of art that celebrated the pleasures of the working class. Impressionism is a type of painting that needs no texts to explain it; it does not usually have complex levels of association and meaning. It is, in short, an art without an iconography. In the 1870s that was its disadvantage; in the 1970s this is its virtue. More understandable was the feeling that the Impressionists were either incompetent or foolish because they ignored the solid, concrete nature of so many visible facts about the real world. It is hard for us now to understand that in the late nineteenth century many people still looked to painting for what-until the advent of photography at the beginning of the 1840s—had always been one of its prime functions: the recording of visual phenomena, the presentation of a reassuringly solid image of the world. The fragmentary character of the Impressionist style, the blatant patchwork of strokes, really did seem like an attack on order and stability. We no longer look to contemporary painting for this kind of reassurance because it is so much more convincingly supplied by the cinema and television. Looking through the plates again, you will have noticed that, while almost all the subjects depicted belong to everyday life, the general mood is decidedly optimistic. Now anyone with the slightest experience of life knows that an objective assessment of our probable chances and expectations is not likely to be as positive. Life is full of disappointments, the slow erosion of youthful ideals. Our characters—like our bodies—seldom improve with age. The tragedies of poverty and the indecencies of excess are everywhere. But the important thing about the Impressionists is that they were artistic, not social, realists; revolutionaries in the studio but not in the streets. They were interested in how things looked rather than in the social implications of those things. Furthermore, the effects of sunlight and the play of strong clear colours, which so absorbed them as painters, are just the kind of factors that make for a therapeutic, even celebratory, form of art. Even the somewhat pessimistic vision of Van Gogh and Toulouse Lautrec was softened by the very nature of their style. Van Gogh, who originally wished to be a preacher but was too unstable to bear the strain of intense missionary work, wanted his pictures to move people to pity. In the beginning, he chose serious, even harrowing subjects, like The Potato Eaters, that are not popular or attractive enough to be included in an anthology of this type.