It has often been said that the 19th century was the first century to think of itself as radically new. From the 1830s onwards, the rise of industrial production and the transformation of the country's largest cities were inseparable from a profound upheaval in all layers of society, from the development of an urban bourgeois lifestyle to the poverty of the working-class suburbs, including the slow transformation of the countryside. The painters we associate with the history of Impressionism, or its perimeter, were born at the beginning of the 1830s and 1840s, and would witness these metamorphoses. Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley made their debut on the Parisian art scene during the 1860s. They emerged as a separate group in 1874, an "avant-garde" that was both celebrated and reviled, when they exhibited together for the first time in Paris. Throughout the 1870s, they developed a clear style of painting, deliberately rapid and sketchy. Joined by artists such as Gustave Caillebotte in 1876, they introduced into their paintings, in a positive (Caillebotte) or critical (Renoir) way, what, following the poet Charles Baudelaire, was called "modern life." More broadly, what the critic Edmond Duranty called "New Painting" in 1876 joined and amplified the trend that led certain artists, from the 1790s onwards, to favour themes from the modern world, without which there was no art appropriate to the novelty of the times and no adequate response to contemporary society.
The Impressionists acted in this way all the more so because they had to quickly adapt to new modes of exhibition, consumption, and production of the image. We cannot forget the way in which painting, press engraving, and photography interacted in the second half of the 19th century. The modernity of Impressionism, multiple, was thus shaped by the contradictory forces to which society as a whole was exposed: renewed attention to the contemporary world, varying loyalty to the France of the terroirs, concern for the expectations of a public that had also been transformed and that had to be reached outside the traditional circuits of exhibition and diffusion, redefinition of the pictorial act in relation to other media, in particular photography.
The exhibition will examine the dividing line, or rather the oscillation, that emerged very early on in Impressionism between the appeal of the modern and the desire to exalt nature alone, or the rustic universe and its ancient solidarities. It will show how these works dominated by "the new vision," color, technique, and perspective, are rethought in such a way as to give us the impression that the artist has captured a transitory moment without fixing it.
With Impressionism, the idea that reality is stable, independent of human perception, disappears.
Impressionism, modernity in motion.
Snoeck| N° d'inventaire | 25969 |
| Format | 19.5 x 26.5 |
| Détails | 256 p., numerous color illustrations, publisher's hardcover. |
| Publication | Ghent, 2022 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9789461618207 |
It has often been said that the 19th century was the first century to think of itself as radically new. From the 1830s onwards, the rise of industrial production and the transformation of the country's largest cities were inseparable from a profound upheaval in all layers of society, from the development of an urban bourgeois lifestyle to the poverty of the working-class suburbs, including the slow transformation of the countryside. The painters we associate with the history of Impressionism, or its perimeter, were born at the beginning of the 1830s and 1840s, and would witness these metamorphoses. Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley made their debut on the Parisian art scene during the 1860s. They emerged as a separate group in 1874, an "avant-garde" that was both celebrated and reviled, when they exhibited together for the first time in Paris. Throughout the 1870s, they developed a clear style of painting, deliberately rapid and sketchy. Joined by artists such as Gustave Caillebotte in 1876, they introduced into their paintings, in a positive (Caillebotte) or critical (Renoir) way, what, following the poet Charles Baudelaire, was called "modern life." More broadly, what the critic Edmond Duranty called "New Painting" in 1876 joined and amplified the trend that led certain artists, from the 1790s onwards, to favour themes from the modern world, without which there was no art appropriate to the novelty of the times and no adequate response to contemporary society.
The Impressionists acted in this way all the more so because they had to quickly adapt to new modes of exhibition, consumption, and production of the image. We cannot forget the way in which painting, press engraving, and photography interacted in the second half of the 19th century. The modernity of Impressionism, multiple, was thus shaped by the contradictory forces to which society as a whole was exposed: renewed attention to the contemporary world, varying loyalty to the France of the terroirs, concern for the expectations of a public that had also been transformed and that had to be reached outside the traditional circuits of exhibition and diffusion, redefinition of the pictorial act in relation to other media, in particular photography.
The exhibition will examine the dividing line, or rather the oscillation, that emerged very early on in Impressionism between the appeal of the modern and the desire to exalt nature alone, or the rustic universe and its ancient solidarities. It will show how these works dominated by "the new vision," color, technique, and perspective, are rethought in such a way as to give us the impression that the artist has captured a transitory moment without fixing it.
With Impressionism, the idea that reality is stable, independent of human perception, disappears.