foreign [Music] impressionism and post-impressionism took place largely in France in the latter half of the 19th century in part impressionism was a reaction against neoclassicism after 60 years this movement seemed as if it was too restrained and too academic on the other hand it was also a reaction against Romanticism although they appreciated the Bold experimentation with color Romanticism seemed too concerned with an inner World in an inner sense of emotional response instead the impressionist wanted to record what the eye saw when it opened upon the external world [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] to me impressionism is part of that exciting movement of the 19th century which I tend to call the pursuit of realism which started with people like Corby and the Barbizon School came through Manet and of course saw the end of the what was the Renaissance that is the whole business of looking at the world through a frame with the illusion given by perspective I also say it as something which was linking in with the exciting experiments being done and inquiries being done into Optics and into color and those two things coming together when the Contemporary and the ordinary the rarest approach was fused with the whole business of what does the eye actually see in terms of color and form impressionism was there an art movement in France which started around the 1860s in Paris and was a revolt against the um academic art that was put out by Diego liberta and exhibited in the salon this group of young painters um didn't get exhibited in the salon so they eventually in the 70s in fact began exhibiting their own work and what their work was about was everyday life in Paris about modernity and also they used a different technique from the standard Salon artists which was much Freer and much more colorful and because they had access to the new technology the new paint in fact much brighter colors indeed the salon was virtually the only route to artistic success at the time art submitted to the salon that failed to match the conservative tastes of the juries which simply not be selected for display and repeated rejection could mean failure for the artist unprepared to create sour friendly images in 1863 the salon overplayed its hand no less than 60 of the artwork submitted that year were rejected and an outcry followed amongst artists and critics aware of this the Emperor Napoleon III decided that the rejected Works should be displayed separately at a special salon a Salah of the rejected called The Salon de refuse a it was a popular idea but one of the paintings displayed at this one-off event caused an outrage a work by an artist who would profoundly influence the painters who would soon change Western Art forever his name was Edward Manet and his controversial painting was called la de Jane solur [Music] in this painting Mane rather shocked contemporary critics by mixing genres of paintings look at it this way what he's done is taken a typical georgioni old Master painting of fetchampatra or a luncheon on the grass and into that he's mixed a realist sensibility of Two Gentlemen dressed who've joined the picnic this shock of two different styles together makes the classical nude seem suddenly to be naked the female nude seems to be completely out of place at first glance in the picture although Manet has many deliberate reasons for including this female nude he was in a way satirizing the tradition of placing the female nude in the pastor of idle she stood for an idea that was working class she stood for the type of woman that was beyond the bands of acceptable behavior may be a prostitute even the effect of this is to strip the mythology out of painting to take away from the old Master sensibility some of its sense of mystery and Magic his use of broad brush Strokes a bright fresh color his seeming disregard for the rigors of line drawing and his strong contrasting of light and shade too much for those raised in the rigid classical tradition [Music] the dejanae salern was roundly condemned put mayonnaise views on color light and brushwork would prove popular with a number of younger artists then struggling for Salon acceptance it would be these artists that would create the style that we know today as impressionism artists like Pizarro Berta Morissette Degas Renoir and perhaps the greatest of them all Monet Claude Monet has become regarded as the archetypal impressionist painter born in 1840 and brought up at laharv in Normandy Monet's artistic talent shown early and he began to receive commissions for his work at the age of just 15. but the Young Artists rejected the formal art training that was then available to him in Paris finding his own views at odds with the traditional principles being taught Monet decided to join the studio of swiss-born Charles glare a successful Salon painter who remembered his own financial difficulties as a student artist and offered models in his Studio to artists for a very small fee glare's benevolence attracted a large array of artists of all ages and abilities indeed it was here that Monet became friendly with painters like Pizarro and Renoir and it was here that the seeds of impressionism were so Monet soon became preoccupied with the effects of light on the subjects that he painted Monet would refuse to paint even the leaves in the background unless the lighting conditions were exactly right for him he would also often travel with his fellow artists to the forest of Fontainebleau near Paris to paint nature or Plein Air in the open air attempting to replace the subdued and Dark Shadows of their predecessor's work with open spaces and sunlight he was concerned with the impression of sunlight on nature he was concerned with the effects of light and the way in which light changes very rapidly throughout the day and the way he achieved this and this rapid change was through his use of paints and his use of brush stroke maybe even more so than someone like Manet he was almost obsessed with showing that he had been working on the canvas and almost the only way he could achieve the effects which he saw in light and the only way he could express his new interest in science and the new way people were understanding how colors worked was to show lots of Rapid brush strokes and a very new approach to the use of color which was more concerned with fleeting Impressions than a finished process the consequent lack of finish in Monet's paintings enraged the critics who saw it as the result of nothing but laziness but despite repeated periods of near starvation Monet maintained his artistic approach in 1870 Monet was forced to leave France to avoid involvement in the franco-prussian war he moved to London and as we shall see he was joined by other Impressionists as well Monet also studied the work of the English landscape artists like jmw Turner and John Constable the pioneer of modern open-air landscape painting the French artist was impressed but with the end of the war Paris would again become the hub for Monet and his contemporaries whose work would soon receive a full public display for the first time tired of repeated Salon rejections the artists who would become known as the Impressionists decided to present their own exhibition in the unlikely surroundings of a photographer's Studio on the boulevard de cappuccino on the 15th of April 1874 the world received its first view of impressionist art on display were works by Monet Renoir dega and Pizarro amongst others including Manet who although never a full-blown impressionist was close to all the others who would be labeled as such after the exhibition he worked closely with Renoir and Monet even painting Monet at work in his Studio boat but in April 1874 the critics were utterly dismissive of the art they produced those critics who did visit turned up simply to Mock and poor scorn one of Monet's Works entitled impressionist sunrise LED one amazed critic to mock the group as Impressionists a derisory label but one which the group came to accept for themselves criticism of the harshest kind would continue though during subsequent impressionist exhibitions this is a late Monet painting done in the south of France in 1888 it's one of a series of ten paintings and it was normal for Monet in fact to paint the same scene many times at different times of the day even in his later years my name fought an uphill battle with the critics he was even offered the Legion of Honor the highest prize that can be given to a painter in France and he refused it it was also in this year that one major critic remarked upon its excessive Rivera its brilliant vulgarity and yet another critic upon seeing this painting simply remarked this is Monet's finest hour despite these strong oppositions the Impressionists continued to experiment with their new ideas Monet and others were looking to record an instantaneous impression of what they saw in front of them often working quickly in a sketch-like manner which blurs the visual field this approach increasingly emphasized the appearance of the brush strokes and the effects of light and color the desire to see differing effects of light on a subject at different times of the day often prompted the artists to paint a scene many times Monet painted 40 pictures of Ruan Cathedral all from the same angle but at different times of the day thus showing the passage of time by the movement of the light over an identical form his fascination with the effects of light above all other factors can be seen in his depiction of a Paris railway station the gar Sant Lazar painted in 1877. of 77 quite a small painting you'll notice is one of many that he painted in this station it's possible that he moved back into Paris in fact from the suburbs because he was so interested in what was going on in this fashion so there are many studies and there's another big painting as well but this particular one is an amazing painting because he's worked the surface so hard and he's used these small strokes and there is a jewel-like texture of the surface and the colors are beautiful and predominantly blue and when you stand at the right distance from the painting you really get a sense of what it was like I imagine to be there he was not all that well liked he was refused by the Samar and therefore he didn't have a reputation but he persuaded the station Master there that he was a a very well-known and famous academic painter son of painter and the station master was very pleased and he said yes he could come and paint and he would get the steam up in the drains and he did about 12 paintings it was very different all from different views in which the steam the light was the thing which was actually what he saw not the girders the particular endrun the particular people he was excited by the fact that it was contemporary technology just as Turner had been with Reigns Demon Speed and he was excited by how the eye actually saw color rather than how we were told because he'd come trying to set down what the ICS and not what the intellect tells him to see Monet's enthusiasm for painting unidealized outdoor scenes as they appeared to the artist's eye was shared by one of his friends and colleagues Camille Pizarro a contributor to the first impressionist exhibition of 1874 and to everyone that followed Pizarro's impressionist approach developed through his associations with Monet and others Camille pasaro was a major member of the impressionist movement we have here a painting of the city of Ruan and its Bridge notice in particular the way in which he's shown the setting sun with the warm light reflecting on the water and yet unlike Constable he hasn't added black to his yellow in order to create the shade in color instead he's added the complement of yellow Violet this creates a much stronger sense of form in his paintings and yet nevertheless he's flattened out his paintings yet again by leaving an extremely visible brush stroke it's as if he's discovered the secret to deep illusions of space and yet reminded us that it's a painting by leaving his brush Strokes visible on the surface [Music] like Monet Pizarro sought to record his visual impression of the scene at a particular Moment In Time to capture the vibrating quality of light Pizarro like many of his fellow Impressionists chose to use short choppy brush Strokes again the critics reacted strongly disdainfully suggesting that impressionist painters fired paint onto their canvases with pistols to be fair to the critics it must have been difficult to come to terms with this defiantly new avant-garde art by 1897 late in Pizarro's career a painting such as Le Boulevard is Italians was much more widely understood by then the practice of standing back from a painting such as this to let the impression of the whole canvas coalesce had become established a significant advance in the appreciation of impressionist art another painter essential to the impressionist movement was Monet's great friend Pierre Auguste Renoir Renoir is perhaps the best loved of all the Impressionists for his subject matter lighthearted scenes from real life pretty children adults at leisure flowers and beautiful nudes all of which have an instant appeal and directly communicate the joy he must have taken in painting renoir's paintings almost demands to be looked at from a distance because developments in the science of Optics at this time new understanding regarding how the eye sees things enabled the Impressionists to translate these developments into their paintings so remoir wanted to show that maybe one of the ways that people taking images is to look at them from a long way away which allows them to get the Swift overview of what they can see in front of them in a painting such as the first outing he varies his use of brush stroke some areas which he perceives to be perhaps more in the background he uses a thinner use of paint he uses softer brush Strokes whereas on features that he really wants to highlight he picks out with a heavier use of paint and the stronger brush stroke but Renoir was really interested in making his brush Strokes obvious and in a way the mythology regarding his nervous personality could maybe be seen and he's almost nervous use of the brush on the canvas as with Monet critics felt that renoir's painting was simply too sketchy too unfinished with a lack of detail that annoyed their traditional tastes although Renoir executed a number of Landscapes his specialty was the study of the human figure often within a group scene one utterly compelling example of this was painted in 1881.
the Luncheon of the Boating Party the viewer acts almost as an observer of the scene a scene full of casual non-posed figure the subjects in renoir's pictures appear quite unaware of the presence of an observer and unlike with the stage set feel of much traditional art with a painting such as this the viewer feels almost a direct part of the action Renoir was a true great of the depiction of groups of people creating Vivid scenes with a medley of colors and an uncanny ability to show how sunlight played upon the subjects a wonderful example of this skill can be seen today at the Louvre is 1876 Moulin de la galette a work utterly at the heart of the impressionist ideal Renoir was certainly influenced by Monet and worked with him in early days and some of his early works is quite clearly trying to follow him on his line is one where he's still under the influence of Monet where he is trying to interpret the light coming through the trees the dappling of light and with no fixed Viewpoint and so we get a restless but exciting patterns of color the man was he's back to us on in the right foreground is his friend riviere who said of this painting that it was an exact picture of Paris at that time in this place and the surface of the canvas is covered in these fairly small brush Strokes broken up into different colors because that was how he saw the light and you don't see a lot of black the black is mostly blue a lot of it is blue and he has different colors in with the black as he does with all the other colors the blue is never pure blue it's a lot of different Blues altogether his interest in people comes through partly because there are so many of them you can tell he's interested but there are glances Rivier for example is engaged in a very serious conversation with two young women to his left and they're looking at each other to the right of Riviera there is a man who's watching Riviera and to his right there is a man who is watching the young women and in the middle of the picture there's another young girl probably looking towards us in fact in this work he is concerned with people as individuals individuals from each other and their own particular characteristics and that is something which began to develop and which developed particularly uh in the later years something of renoir's style can be seen in the work of another great artist of the impressionist era this was Edgar Degas but his approach to his work was entirely his own born in 1834 Degas classical training never truly left him throughout his career he attached far more importance to drawing and line than Monet Pizarro or Renoir [Music] some critics claim dega is not strictly speaking an impressionist artist but he was very much a member of the impressionist Circle and showed work at seven of the eight impressionist exhibitions in a work such as the lawn dresses we can see that he shared renoir's desire to capture the impression of the instant like many of his contemporaries dagar was interested in what were known as Modern Life subjects dagar was interested in Breaking from tradition he was interested in subjects which related to the day-to-day life of people living in Paris this is why he painted images of people at the races why he painted images of ballerinas women washing themselves and why he painted images of shop interiors and domestic scenes of the Parisian bourgeoisie tiger was interested in the idea about of looking of people looking at it at each other and people being looked at in terms of tiger style one of his Inspirations was Prince from Japan in particular 18th century Japanese prints and one of the reasons that more radical artists were interested in art from the East was that in the East there wasn't such a hierarchy of types of painting as there was in Europe and that neither was there a kind of division between art and craft and this was something radical painters in France and Britain were interested in it is Degas paintings of the Paris ballet that represent the Pinnacle of his achievement in the early 1870s he became preoccupied with the subject since it provided an excellent source of subject matter to demonstrate his Mastery of line and motion he sketched from a live model in his Studio and combined poses into groupings the depicted rehearsal and performance scenes he produced many sketches and paintings of this subject and an examination of just one of these the ballet rehearsal from 1876 amply demonstrates his aims and ideas [Music] himself was a very private person and when he did paint women working or washing themselves he puts them in their own space which is which is actually very nice and sometimes he separates us from them by quite a large area so they are even more in their private space and in this painting um you see that he's not impressionist in his use of color as well as in his very carefully arranged composition in this work we see him using as part of the competition one main thing which is the staircase which takes to Swirls you up and through so you're really sort of not able to move to the left out of the picture you're caught by it and by moving up swirling you up you are in fact moving around the painting likewise the floorboards you've got the the floorboards indicated which mean that your eye doesn't Focus as it would say on a traditional classical composition on a particular focal point in the middle say but it actually takes you around and through the work you don't particularly notice the brush Strokes except of course in the tutus of the dances and here the dances are white with pale pink bows nothing bright the brightest spot in this picture is the shirt of the man in the background top right corner you might not even see him who is actually the ballet master so it's a picture of women two distinct groups one working one relaxing by the time of the last impressionist exhibition in 1886 which once again featured Degas were the approach of the whole movement had become increasingly accepted by the public and by many of the critics who had originally been so scathing by 1886 however the unified momentum of the impressionist movement was beginning to ebb away Renoir doubted publicly whether the impressionist lack of emphasis on drawing was entirely a good thing while other artists who had shown regularly at the exhibitions began to seek answers to their own questions about art the subtly different approach of some of these artists would eventually lead to their art being described as post-impressionists and the creations of four particular post-impressionists would become amongst the best known and most valuable in the whole of Western Art from a technical point of view one of the most Innovative of these artists was George Sarah it was at the eighth and last exhibition of the Impressionists in 1886. the Georges Sarat exhibited his Sunday afternoon on the island of the grand yacht an everyday scene like so much impressionist art it is immediately apparent to the viewer that surat's approach differs from the Masters such as Renoir his meticulous approach and his obvious love of mathematical form in art can be seen clearly in his study of the bridge at corbivoire also painted in 1886. this small sketch is in preparation for his larger painting the island of the grand Giant throughout developed a technique which was called pointillism or divisionism in it the painter in place is very small dots of paint there's no signature in the application of paint no gesture as it were it's an impersonal way of painting divisionism also took advantage of recent experiments in color what he did was place a DOT of yellow next to a DOT of blue when seen from a distance the idea was that the yellow and the blue would mix together to create the optical sensation of the color green while in fact this worked better in theory than in practice the overall effect was astounding the painting is made up of a series of impersonal small dots and yet out of this arises the most tremendous atmospheric effect of Rich luminous color but it is perhaps a canvas called bathing and as near that best epitomizes surat's unique ability it is better known by its shortened title the bathers clearly this was not something which spontaneous Monet had talked about instantaneity well this was something which by the whole process of working and thinking of Sierra couldn't actually happen he was trying to take the external world the Contemporary world again the ordinary the Contemporary and the ordinary ordinary prisons going out in the Lantra to sit on in the park but he was then drawing upon that and then in the studio working on developing up a highly complicated structure in the bathers we have it we have static stamp studies in which there were no figures at all he's just done that scene that Park then he applied in another study some figures and worked around with these they became the figures became no more and no less important than every other bit of the work now you can see that in the bridge the bridge at Colbert there's one view of the river sane which he did in 83-4 and it's um constructed of very clear horizontals and verticals and you can see quite clearly his use of this small brush stroke and in the bathers you'll see that his color has lightened up and purified considerably much clearer brighter colors the horizontals here are much less dominant in fact the concentration is mainly on the figures and the figures provide the vertical emphasis of the picture and the color is primarily the blue and the green broken down of course in each case and there is a certain um diagonality about it as well as there is in the previous one only here the emphasis is much much more on people it's more human painting than the bridge in sarat's work the apparent lack of form of earlier impressionist paintings was replaced by a severe regularity and this intellectual approach can be seen as a major break from tradition while is concerned with color would be shared by another artist who would be eventually labeled a post-impressionist too Paul Cezanne born in 1839 cezanne's artistic development like sirens was greatly influenced by impressionism [Music] in 1872 he worked with pizara learning the impressionist approach to open-air painting and cezanne's work would feature in the early impressionist exhibitions [Music] unfortunately critical reaction to his work proved especially vitriolic disillusioned he retreated to his hometown of axon Provence where he could pursue his artistic development undisturbed by the critics as a man of private means he did not have to rely on buyers for his work and could dedicate himself solely to his quest for artistic perfection although Cezanne had initially accepted the impressionist theories of color and the use of everyday life as subject matter he became frustrated with the impressionist lack of form and structure to this end Cezanne made landscape paintings and still life pictures which used a new theory of color he increasingly believed in the representation of nature purely through color patterns he believed the color is all we see and that color should fulfill the traditional role of light and shade in giving depth and solidity to the subjects he painted he did not want to return to the academic conventions of drawing and shading and instead use strong intense colors laid out in an even grid to bring attention to his pictures between flatness and depth if he had to distort outlines to achieve the desired effect then he would this technique heavily influenced the later Cubist movement in his quest for representing nature purely in patterns of color Cezanne worked unceasingly for many years like Sarah he was a rationalist in his approach to his problems his greatest challenge was to apply his theories to landscape painting where he could not use the snapshot approach of the impressionist instead he spent days months and even years experimenting with the subject or Motif as he called it until he had observed the colors for long enough for him to translate them onto canvas one such Motif was the mountain of Mount Saint victoire near his home he painted it often and it gives us a great impression of his use of color to provide solidity in the subjects he portrays [Music] in this particular study of monsoon Victoria we can see if we look towards the center there right A Center we get the edge of a building which shows this vertical with the contrast of light and dark and of course there's the horizontal underneath which gives that strength and it's the Hobbies of the strength which the Zen is good here but you also see as we look through the if you like the plane the contrast the Flames we see the little Bridge towards the back towards the rear which because of its size in relation to that building at the right gives again the impression of depth but without any of the traditional techniques move and then because of color receding advancing uh we have with the subtle relationship of that with the mountain at the back and the sky around it we uh if you might take it into solid depth but in a totally different way than say a constable or a clawed or whatever he's using the directional brush stroke in a different way from the other impression is his brush Strokes are very very organized so that you get a kind of grid over the whole painting and you get a sense of great solidity for example the trees in the bottom are painted with brush Strokes which go up so they're flame-like trees the mountain has sloping brush Strokes to show The Contours of the mountain whereas on the fields you can see flat brass Strokes showing how vertical they are his colors are not bright impressionist colors they are this particular green that he uses a lot of radiant green pale yellows pale oranges and a pale blue of the sky so he liked Daga in fact is interested in composition and structure not just in the patterning on the surface of the painting and not especially interested perhaps in light certainly not in the same way that Renoir was another artist specifically concerned with color was Paul Goga born in 1848 Gogan began his artistic career as an amateur while he worked in a stockbroker's firm is used Gogan was a rather unhappy but wealthy businessman later on when he took up Painting full time he made his greatest contribution to his tremendous interest in primitive art he found Egyptian art South Sea Island art to be tremendously powerful in its formal achievements as a post-impressionist or as Gogan called it a symbolist he led a group of painters who are trying to reinvigorate Western painting with the primary power of primitive painting Gogan felt that modern industrialized society as he experienced it in the late 1800s had distorted man's essential needs it had taught man to appreciate nothing but the material aspects of Life leaving behind all emotional and spiritual needs this quest for the spiritual life in painting took him on many Journeys first it took him to Brittany in the rough unspoiled Countryside there and then to Southern France where he worked with other painters such as Van Gogh finally it took Gogan to the furthest ends of the Earth to the South Seas and to Tahiti he was influenced by what he would have understood is to be the Primitive qualities of these types of foreign peoples his paintings were starting to demonstrate an interest in the workings of the unconscious and interest in the language of dreams and visions and this was something that Western artists such as Goga believed to be particularly strong in more primitive cultures his images such as Jacob wrestling with an angel seem to have this abstract quality to them was an emphasis on Simplicity and almost a deliberate attempt to appear childlike because to be childlike was something which artists who were interested in primitivism believed to be a very important quality and which they believed manifested the type of Truth which had been lost in Western culture but which was far more prevalent in the culture of the South Seas in addition to his own significance as one of the finest representatives of the post-impressionist movement Gogan is also important as one of the very few people to appreciate at this time the art of another great post-impressionist an isolated tortured man from Holland an artist without whom any reference to post-impressionism is incomplete Vincent van Gogh Vincent van Gogh is now generally considered as the greatest Dutch painter since Rembrandt but during his tragic life cut short by Suicide at the age of 37.
