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

Dr. Schiller: AP History of Art

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.

! 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

! 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.

•Westerners started to learn more about Japanese culture after the forced opening of Japan to westerners in 1853-1854 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

Japonisme--The Allure of the Orient

Katsushika Hokusai

The Great Wave off Kanagawa1857 color woodblock print9 7/8 x 14 3/4 in.

! Claude Monet (1840-1926)! 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.

! 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.

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

CLAUDE MONET, Rouen Cathedral: The Portal (in Sun), 1894. Oil on canvas, 3' 3¼" x 2' 1⅞“. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Stokstad plate 27-69

! 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.

Claude Monet

Rouen Cathedral: The Portal1892-95 oil on canvaseach approximately 3 ft. 3 1/4 in. x 2 ft. 1 7/8 in.

Claude Monet, Water Lilies, 1906, Oil on canvas34 1/2 x 36 1/2 in. (87.6 x 92.7 cm)

Monet. The Japanese Footbridge, 1899

Monet. The Japanese Footbridge c. 1920–22

Monet. The Saint-Lazare Station, 1877, oil on canvas https://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/ap-art-history/later-europe-and-americas/modernity-ap/v/claude-monet-gare-st-lazare-1877

! Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)! 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 relationshipbetween a mother and child.

! Her style in this work owed much tothe compositional devices of

Degas and of Japanese prints.

MARY CASSATT, The Coiffure,

1890-1891. Drypoint and aquatint,

! 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. 

 

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

woodblock print

! Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890)! 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

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! VINCENT VAN GOGH The Night Café! 1888, Oil on canvas 2’ 4½” x 3’.! Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven

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! 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

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VINCENT VAN GOGH, Starry Night,

1889. oil on canvas Approximately 2’5” x 3¼”

Museum of Modern Art, New York

Gardner plate 29-34

! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubTJI_UphPk

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VINCENT VAN GOGH, Starry Night,

1889. oil on canvas Approximately 2’5” x 3¼”

Museum of Modern Art, New York

Gardner plate 29-34

! 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

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Paul Gauguin

The Vision after the Sermon1888 oil on canvas2 ft. 4 3/4 in. x 3 ft. 1/2 in.Gardner plate 29-35

! 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

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! they pray devoutly before the apparition! 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

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! 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.

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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 29-36

! 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

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! 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

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! 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

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! GEORGES SEURAT, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, ! 1884-1886, Oil on canvas, The Art Institute of Chicago, 6’9” x10’ (big)

58Stokstad plate 27-73

58Jose Maria Velasco, The Valey of Mesxico from the Hillside of Santa Isabel, 1882, oil on canvas

! 1884-1886, Oil on canvas, The Art Institute of Chicago, 6’9” x10’ (big)

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

58Jose Maria Velasco, The Valey of Mesxico from the Hillside of Santa Isabel, 1882, oil on canvas

! 1884-1886, Oil on canvas, The Art Institute of Chicago, 6’9” x10’ (big)

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-americas/painting-mexico/v/jos-mara-velasco-the-valley-of-mexico-from-the-santa-isabel-mountain-range-1875

! 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

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Mount Sainte Victoire

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PAUL CEZANNE. Mont Sainte-Victoire 1902-1904. oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2’3½” x 2’ 11¼” Stokstad plate 27-70

! 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

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◦ 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)

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! The many Mont Sainte-Victoires he did: ! (this is the one in GARDNER)

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PAUL CEZANNE. The Basket of Apples, Ca. 1895. oil on canvas, 2’3/8” x2’7” The Art Institute of Chicago Stokstad plate 27-71

! Objects lose individuality andbecame 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

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