Impressionism is one of the most famous destinations French painting, if not the most famous. And it originated in the late 60s and early 70s of the 19th century and largely influenced further development art of that time.
Impressionism in painting
The name itself " impressionism" was coined by a French art critic named Louis Leroy after visiting the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, where he criticized Claude Monet's painting "Impression: Rising Sun"("impression" translated into French sounds like "impression").
Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Frederic Bazille are the main representatives of impressionism.
Impressionism in painting is characterized by fast, spontaneous and free strokes. The guiding principle was a realistic depiction of the light-air environment.
The impressionists sought to capture fleeting moments on canvas. If at that very moment an object appears in an unnatural color, due to a certain angle of incidence of light or its reflection, then the artist depicts it that way: for example, if the sun paints the surface of a pond in pink color, then it will be written in pink.
Features of impressionism
Speaking about the main features of impressionism, it is necessary to name the following:
- immediate and optically accurate image of a fleeting moment;
- doing all the work outdoors - no more preparatory sketches and finishing work in the studio;
- using pure color on the canvas, without pre-mixing on the palette;
- the use of splashes of bright paint, strokes of varying sizes and degrees of sweep, which visually add up to one picture only when viewed from a distance.
Russian impressionism
The standard portrait in this style is considered to be one of the masterpieces of Russian painting - “Girl with Peaches” by Alexander Serov, for whom impressionism, however, became just a period of passion. Russian impressionism also includes works by Konstantin Korovin, Abram Arkhipov, Philip Malyavin, Igor Grabar and other artists written at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.
This affiliation is rather conditional, since Russian and classical French impressionism have their own specifics. Russian impressionism was closer to the materiality, objectivity of works, and gravitated towards artistic sense, while French impressionism, as mentioned above, simply sought to depict moments of life, without unnecessary philosophy.
In fact, Russian impressionism adopted from the French only the external side of the style, the techniques of its painting, but never assimilated the very pictorial thinking invested in impressionism.
Modern impressionism continues the traditions of classical French impressionism. In modern painting of the 21st century, many artists work in this direction, for example, Laurent Parselier, Karen Tarleton, Diana Leonard and others.
Masterpieces in the style of impressionism
"Terrace at Sainte-Adresse" (1867), Claude Monet
This painting can be called Monet's first masterpiece. It is still the most popular painting of early impressionism. The artist’s favorite theme is also present here - flowers and the sea. The canvas depicts several people relaxing on the terrace on a sunny day. Relatives of Monet himself are depicted on chairs with their backs to the audience.
The whole picture is flooded with bright sunlight. Clear boundaries between land, sky and sea are separated, organizing the composition vertically with the help of two flagpoles, but the composition does not have a clear center. The colors of the flags match surrounding nature, emphasizing the variety and richness of colors.
"Bal at the Moulin de la Galette" (1876), Pierre Auguste Renoir
This painting depicts a typical Sunday afternoon in 19th century Paris, at the Moulin de la Galette - a cafe with an open air dance floor, whose name corresponds to the name of the mill, which is located nearby and is a symbol of Montmartre. Renoir's house was located next to this cafe; he often attended Sunday afternoon dances and enjoyed watching happy couples.
Renoir demonstrates real talent and combines the art of group portraiture, still life and landscape painting in one picture. The use of light in this composition and the smoothness of the brush strokes the best way present style to a wide audience impressionism. This picture became one of the most expensive paintings ever sold at auction.
"Boulevard Montmartre at Night" (1897), Camille Pissarro
Although Pissarro is famous for his paintings depicting rural life, he also painted a large number of fine urban scenes in 19th century Paris. He loved to paint the city because of the play of light during the day and evening, because of the roads illuminated by both sunlight and street lamps.
In 1897 he rented a room on the Boulevard Montmartre and painted him in different time days, and this work was the only work in the series captured after night had fallen. The canvas is filled with deep blue color and bright yellow spots of city lights. In all the paintings of the “boulevard” cycle, the main core of the composition is the road stretching into the distance.
The painting is now in the National Gallery in London, but during Pissarro’s lifetime it was never exhibited anywhere.
You can watch a video about the history and conditions of creativity of the main representatives of impressionism here:
IMPRESSIONISM(French impressionnisme, from impression - impression) - a movement in art of the late 1860s - early 1880s, main goal which was the transmission of fleeting, changeable impressions. Impressionism was based on the latest discoveries in optics and color theory; in this he is in tune with the spirit of scientific analysis characteristic of the late 19th century. Impressionism manifested itself most clearly in painting, where Special attention paid attention to the transmission of color and light.
Impressionism appeared in France in the late 1860s. Its leading representatives are Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Berthe Morisot, Alfred Sisley and Jean Frédéric Bazille. Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas exhibited their paintings with them, although the style of their works cannot be called impressionistic. The word "impressionism" comes from the title of a painting by Monet Impression. Rising Sun(1872, Paris, Marmottan Museum), presented at the exhibition in 1874. The title implied that the artist conveys only his fleeting impression of the landscape. Now the term “impressionism” is understood more broadly than just the subjective vision of the artist: as a careful study of nature, primarily in terms of color and lighting. This concept is essentially the opposite of the traditional understanding of the main task of painting, dating back to the Renaissance, as conveying the shape of objects. The goal of the impressionists was to depict instantaneous, seemingly “random” situations and movements. This was facilitated by the asymmetry, fragmentation of compositions, and the use of complex angles and cuts of figures. The picture becomes a separate frame, a fragment of the moving world.
Landscapes and scenes from city life are perhaps the most characteristic genres impressionistic painting - painted “in the open air”, i.e. directly from nature, and not on the basis of sketches and preparatory sketches. Impressionists looked closely at nature, noticing colors and shades usually invisible, such as blue in the shadows. Their artistic method consisted of decomposing complex tones into their constituent pure colors of the spectrum. The results were colored shadows and pure, light, vibrant painting. The Impressionists applied paint in separate strokes, sometimes using contrasting tones in one area of the picture, the size of the strokes varied. Sometimes, for example, to depict a clear sky, they were smoothed with a brush into a more even surface (but even in this case, a free, careless painting manner was emphasized). The main feature of impressionist paintings is the effect of living flickering of colors.
Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley and Claude Monet preferred landscapes and urban scenes in their work. Auguste Renoir painted people in the open air or in the interior. His work perfectly illustrates the characteristic tendency of impressionism to blur the lines between genres. Pictures like Ball at the Moulin de la Galette(Paris, Musée d'Orsay) or Rowers' Breakfast(1881, Washington, Phillips Gallery), are colorful memories of the joys of life, urban or rural.
Similar searches for the transmission of the light-air environment, the decomposition of complex tones into pure colors of the solar spectrum, occurred not only in France. The impressionists include James Whistler (England and the USA), Max Liebermann, Lovis Corinth (Germany), Joaquin Sorolla (Spain), K.A. Korovin, I.E. Grabar (Russia).
Impressionism in sculpture implies living, free modeling of fluid soft forms, which creates challenging game light on the surface of the material and a feeling of incompleteness. The poses accurately capture the moment of movement and development; the figures seem to have been taken using hidden camera, as, for example, in some works by E. Degas and O. Rodin (France), Medardo Rosso (Italy), P. P. Trubetskoy (Russia).
At the beginning of the 20th century. new trends have emerged in painting, expressed in the rejection of realism and a turn to abstraction; they caused younger artists to turn away from Impressionism. However, Impressionism left a rich legacy: primarily an interest in problems of color, as well as an example of a bold break with tradition.
Everything has its origins somewhere in the past, including paintings that have changed with the times, and current trends are not clear to everyone. But everything new is well-forgotten old, and to understand modern painting, you don’t need to know the history of art from ancient times, you just need to remember painting XIX and XX centuries.
The middle of the 19th century was a time of change not only in history, but also in art. Everything that came before: classicism, romanticism, and especially academicism - movements limited to certain boundaries. In France in the 50s and 60s, trends in painting were set by the official Salon, but typical “Salon” art did not suit everyone, which explained the new trends that emerged. There was a revolutionary explosion in the painting of that time, which broke with centuries-old traditions and foundations. And one of the epicenters was Paris, where in the spring of 1874 young painters, among whom were Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, Degas, Renoir and Cézanne, organized their own exhibition. The works presented there were completely different from those in the salon. The artists used a different method - reflexes, shadows and light were conveyed with pure paints, individual strokes, the shape of each object seemed to dissolve in an air-light environment. Didn’t know any other directions in painting similar methods. These effects helped me express my impressions of ever-changing things, nature, and people as much as possible. One journalist called the group “impressionists,” thereby wanting to show his disdain for young artists. But they accepted this term, and it eventually took root and entered into active use, losing its negative meaning. This is how impressionism appeared, unlike all other movements in painting of the 19th century.
At first, the reaction to the innovation was more than hostile. Too bold and new painting no one wanted to buy, and they were afraid, because all the critics did not take the impressionists seriously, they laughed at them. Many said that the Impressionist artists wanted to achieve quick fame, they were dissatisfied with the sharp break with conservatism and academicism, as well as the unfinished and “sloppy” appearance of the work. But even hunger and poverty could not force the artists to abandon their beliefs, and they persisted until their paintings were finally recognized. But it took too long to wait for recognition; some impressionist artists were no longer alive at that time.
As a result, the movement that originated in Paris in the 60s was of great importance for the development of the world art of the 19th century and XX centuries. After all, future directions in painting were based precisely on impressionism. Each subsequent style appeared in search of a new one. Post-impressionism was given birth to by the same impressionists who decided that their method was limited: deep and polysemantic symbolism was a response to painting that had “lost its meaning,” and modernism, even by its name, calls for something new. Of course, many changes have occurred in art since 1874, but all modern trends in painting, one way or another, they start from a fleeting Parisian impression.
Impressionism (French impressionnisme, from impression - impression), a movement in the art of the last third of the 19th - early 20th centuries, whose masters, recording their fleeting impressions, sought to capture the most naturally and impartially real world in its mobility and variability. Impressionism originated in French painting in the late 1860s. Edouard Manet (formally not a member of the Impressionist group), Degas, Renoir, and Monet brought freshness and spontaneity of perception of life to fine art.
French artists turned to the depiction of instantaneous situations, snatched from the flow of reality, the spiritual life of a person, the depiction of strong passions, the spiritualization of nature, interest in the national past, the desire for synthetic forms of art are combined with motives of world grief, a desire to explore and recreate the “shadow”, " night" side human soul, with the famous “romantic irony”, which allowed the romantics to boldly compare and equate the high and the low, the tragic and the comic, the real and the fantastic. Impressionist artists used the fragmented realities of situations, used seemingly unbalanced compositional structures, unexpected angles, points of view, cross-sections of figures.
In the 1870–1880s, the landscape of French impressionism was formed: C. Monet, C. Pissarro, A. Sisley developed a consistent system of plein air, creating a feeling of sparkling in their paintings sunlight, the richness of the colors of nature, the dissolution of forms in the vibration of light and air. The name of the movement comes from the name of Claude Monet’s painting “Impression. Rising Sun” (“Impression. Soleil levant”; exhibited in 1874, now in the Marmottan Museum, Paris). The decomposition of complex colors into pure components, which were applied to the canvas in separate strokes, colored shadows, reflexes and values gave rise to an unprecedentedly light, vibrant painting of impressionism.
Certain aspects and techniques of this trend in painting were used by painters from Germany (M. Lieberman, L. Corinth), USA (J. Whistler), Sweden (A.L. Zorn), Russia (K.A. Korovin, I.E. Grabar ) and many other national art schools. The concept of impressionism is also applied to sculpture of the 1880–1910s, which has some impressionistic features - the desire to convey instantaneous movement, fluidity and softness of form, plastic sketchiness (works by O. Rodin, bronze figurines by Degas, etc.). Impressionism in fine arts influenced the development of expressive means of contemporary literature, music, and theater. In interaction and polemics with the pictorial system of this style in artistic culture In France at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, the movements of neo-impressionism and post-impressionism arose.
Neo-Impressionism(French neo-impressionnisme) is a movement in painting that arose in France around 1885, when its main masters, J. Seurat and P. Signac, developed a new painting technique of divisionism. French neo-impressionists and their followers (T. van Rijselberghe in Belgium, G. Segantini in Italy and others), developing the tendencies of late impressionism, sought to apply modern discoveries in the field of optics to art, giving a methodical character to the methods of decomposing tones into pure colors; At the same time, they overcame the randomness and fragmentation of the impressionistic composition, and resorted to planar decorative solutions in their landscapes and multi-figure panel paintings.
Post-Impressionism(from Latin post - after and impressionism) - the collective name of the main movements of French painting of the late 19th - early 20th centuries. Since the mid-1880s, post-impressionist masters have been looking for new means of expression, capable of overcoming the empiricism of artistic thinking and allowing us to move from the impressionistic fixation of individual moments of life to the embodiment of its long-term states, material and spiritual constants. The post-impressionist period is characterized by active interaction individual directions and individual creative systems. Post-impressionism usually includes the work of the masters of neo-impressionism, the Nabi group, as well as V. van Gogh, P. Cezanne, P. Gauguin.
Reference and biographical information for the "Planet Small Bay Art Galleries" was prepared based on materials from the "History" foreign art" (ed. M.T. Kuzmina, N.L. Maltseva), " Art Encyclopedia foreign classical art", "Great Russian Encyclopedia".
Introduction
Impressionism as a phenomenon in art
Impressionism in painting
Impressionist artists
3.1 Claude Monet
3.2 Edgar Degas
3.3 Alfred Sisley
3.4 Camille Pissarro
Conclusion
Bibliography
Introduction
This essay is dedicated to impressionism in art - painting.
Impressionism is one of the brightest and most important phenomena in European art, which largely determined the entire development of modern art. Currently, the works of the Impressionists, who were not recognized in their time, are highly valued and their artistic merits are undeniable. The relevance of the chosen topic is explained by the need for every modern person to understand art styles and know the main milestones of its development.
I chose this topic because impressionism was a kind of revolution in art, changing the idea of works of art as holistic, monumental things. Impressionism brought to the fore the individuality of the creator, his own vision of the world, relegating political and religious subjects and academic laws to the background. It’s interesting that emotions and impressions, and not plot and morality, played main role in the works of the Impressionists.
Impressionism (fr. impressionnisme, from impression- impression) - a movement in the art of the last third of the 19th - early 20th centuries, which originated in France and then spread throughout the world, whose representatives sought to most naturally and impartially capture the real world in its mobility and variability, to convey their fleeting impressions. Usually the term “impressionism” refers to a movement in painting, although its ideas have also found their embodiment in literature and music.
The term "impressionism" arose with light hand critic of the magazine “Le Charivari” Louis Leroy, who entitled his feuilleton about the Salon of Les Misérables “Exhibition of the Impressionists”, taking as a basis the title of this painting by Claude Monet.
Auguste Renoir Paddling pool, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Origins
During the Renaissance, painters of the Venetian school tried to convey living reality using bright colors and intermediate tones. The Spaniards took advantage of their experiences, most clearly expressed in such artists as El Greco, Velazquez and Goya, whose work subsequently had a serious influence on Manet and Renoir.
At the same time, Rubens made the shadows on his canvases colored, using transparent intermediate shades. According to Delacroix's observation, Rubens displayed light with subtle, refined tones, and shadows with warmer and rich colors, conveying the effect of chiaroscuro. Rubens did not use black, which would later become one of the main principles of impressionist painting.
Edouard Manet was influenced by the Dutch artist Frans Hals, who painted with sharp strokes and loved contrast bright colors and black.
The transition of painting to impressionism was also prepared by English painters. During the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), Claude Monet, Sisley and Pissarro went to London to study the great landscape painters Constable, Bonington and Turner. As for the latter, already in his later works it is noticeable how the connection with the real image of the world disappears and the withdrawal into the individual transmission of impressions.
Eugene Delacroix had a strong influence, he already distinguished between local color and color acquired under the influence of light, his watercolors painted in North Africa in 1832 or in Etretat in 1835, and especially the painting “The Sea at Dieppe” (1835) allow us to talk about him as a predecessor of the Impressionists.
The final element that influenced the innovators was Japanese art. Since 1854, thanks to exhibitions held in Paris, young artists have discovered the masters Japanese prints such as Utamaro, Hokusai and Hiroshige. A special, hitherto unknown in European fine art, arrangement of an image on a sheet of paper - an offset composition or a tilted composition, a schematic representation of form, a penchant for artistic synthesis - won the favor of the impressionists and their followers.
Story
Edgar Degas, Blue dancers, 1897, Pushkin Museum im. Pushkin, Moscow
The beginning of the search for impressionists dates back to the 1860s, when young artists were no longer satisfied with the means and goals of academicism, as a result of which each of them independently looked for other ways to develop their style. In 1863, Edouard Manet exhibited the painting “Lunch on the Grass” at the Salon of the Rejected and actively spoke at meetings of poets and artists in the Guerbois cafe, which were attended by all the future founders of the new movement, thanks to which he became the main defender of modern art.
In 1864, Eugene Boudin invited Monet to Honfleur, where he spent the entire autumn watching his teacher paint studies in pastels and watercolors, and his friend Yonkind applying paint to his works with vibrating strokes. It was here that they taught him to work en plein air and paint in light colors.
In 1871, during the Franco-Prussian War, Monet and Pissarro went to London, where they became acquainted with the work of the predecessor of impressionism, William Turner.
Claude Monet. Impression. Sunrise. 1872, Marmottan-Monet Museum, Paris.
Origin of the name
The first important exhibition of the Impressionists took place from April 15 to May 15, 1874 in the studio of the photographer Nadar. 30 artists were presented there, with a total of 165 works. Monet's canvas - “Impression. Rising Sun" ( Impression, soleil levant), now in the Marmottin Museum, Paris, written in 1872, gave birth to the term "Impressionism": the little-known journalist Louis Leroy, in his article in the magazine "Le Charivari", called the group "Impressionists" to express his disdain. Artists, out of defiance, accepted this epithet; later it took root, lost its original negative meaning and came into active use.
The name “impressionism” is quite meaningless, unlike the name “Barbizon School”, where at least there is an indication of the geographical location of the artistic group. There is even less clarity with some artists who were not formally included in the circle of the first impressionists, although their technical techniques and means are completely “impressionistic” Whistler, Edouard Manet, Eugene Boudin, etc.) In addition, the technical means of the impressionists were known long before the 19th century centuries and they were (partially, to a limited extent) used by Titian and Velasquez, without breaking with the dominant ideas of their era.
There was another article (by Emil Cardon) and another title - “Rebel Exhibition”, which was absolutely disapproving and condemning. It was precisely this that accurately reproduced the disapproving attitude of the bourgeois public and criticism towards artists (Impressionists), which had prevailed for years. The Impressionists were immediately accused of immorality, rebellious sentiments, and failure to be respectable. IN currently this is surprising, because it is not clear what is immoral in the landscapes of Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, everyday scenes of Edgar Degas, still lifes of Monet and Renoir.
Decades have passed. And the new generation of artists will come to a real collapse of forms and impoverishment of content. Then both criticism and the public saw the condemned impressionists as realists, and a little later as classics of French art.
Impressionism as a phenomenon in art
Impressionism, one of the brightest and most interesting movements in French art of the last quarter of the 19th century, was born in a very complex environment, characterized by diversity and contrasts, which gave impetus to the emergence of many modern movements. Impressionism, despite its short duration, had a significant influence on the art of not only France, but also other countries: the USA, Germany (M. Lieberman), Belgium, Italy, England. In Russia, the influence of impressionism was experienced by K. Balmont, Andrei Bely, Stravinsky, K. Korovin (closest in his aesthetics to the impressionists), the early V. Serov, as well as I. Grabar. Impressionism was the last major art movement in France XIX century, which paved the line between the art of New and Contemporary times.
According to M. Aplatov, “pure impressionism probably did not exist. Impressionism is not a doctrine, it could not have canonized forms...French impressionist artists have one or another of its features to varying degrees.” Usually the term “impressionism” refers to a movement in painting, although its ideas have found their embodiment in other forms of art, for example, in music.
Impressionism is, first of all, the art of observing reality, conveying or creating an impression that has reached unprecedented sophistication, an art in which the plot is not important. This is a new, subjective artistic reality. The Impressionists put forward their own principles of perception and display of the surrounding world. They erased the line between the main subjects worthy high art, and secondary subjects.
An important principle of impressionism was the avoidance of typicality. Immediacy and a casual look have entered art; it seems that the Impressionist paintings were painted by a simple passer-by walking along the boulevards and enjoying life. It was a revolution in vision.
The aesthetics of impressionism developed partly as an attempt to decisively free oneself from the conventions of classicist art, as well as from the persistent symbolism and profundity of late romantic painting, which suggested seeing encrypted meanings in everything that needed careful interpretation. Impressionism not only affirms the beauty of everyday reality, but also makes artistically significant the post-constant variability of the surrounding world, the naturalness of spontaneous, unpredictable, random impressions. Impressionists strive to capture its colorful atmosphere without detailing or interpreting it.
As an artistic movement, impressionism, particularly in painting, quickly exhausted its capabilities. Classical French impressionism was too narrow, and few remained faithful to its principles throughout their lives. In the process of development of the impressionistic method, the subjectivity of pictorial perception overcame objectivity and rose to an increasingly higher formal level, opening the way for all movements of post-impressionism, including the symbolism of Gauguin and the expressionism of Van Gogh. But, despite the narrow time frame - just two decades, impressionism brought art to a fundamentally different level, having a significant impact on everything: modern painting, music and literature, as well as cinema.
Impressionism introduced new themes; works of a mature style are distinguished by a bright and spontaneous vitality, the discovery of new artistic possibilities of color, the aestheticization of a new painting technique, and the very structure of the work. It is these features that emerged in impressionism that are further developed in neo-impressionism and post-impressionism. The influence of impressionism as an approach to reality or as a system of expressive techniques has found its way into almost all art schools beginning of the 20th century, it became the starting point for the development of a number of trends, including abstract art. Some principles of impressionism - the transfer of instantaneous movement, fluidity of form - in varying degrees appeared in the sculpture of the 1910s, in E. Degas, Fr. Rodin, M. Golubkina. Artistic impressionism greatly enriched the means of expression in literature (P. Verlaine), music (C. Debussy), and theater.
2. Impressionism in painting
In the spring of 1874, a group of young painters, including Monet, Renoir, Pizarro, Sisley, Degas, Cezanne and Berthe Morisot, neglected the official Salon and staged their own exhibition, subsequently becoming the central figures of the new movement. It took place from April 15 to May 15, 1874 in the studio of the photographer Nadar in Paris, on the Boulevard des Capucines. 30 artists were presented there, with a total of 165 works. Such an act in itself was revolutionary and broke with centuries-old foundations, but the paintings of these artists at first glance seemed even more hostile to tradition. It took years before these later recognized classics of painting were able to convince the public not only of their sincerity, but also of their talent. All these very different artists were united by a common struggle against conservatism and academicism in art. The Impressionists held eight exhibitions, the last in 1886.
It was at the first exhibition in 1874 in Paris that Claude Monet's painting of a sunrise appeared. It attracted everyone's attention primarily with its unusual title: “Impression. Sunrise". But the painting itself was unusual; it conveyed that almost elusive, changeable play of colors and light. It was the name of this painting - “Impression” - thanks to the ridicule of one of the journalists, that laid the foundation for a whole movement in painting called impressionism (from the French word “impression” - impression).
Trying to express their immediate impressions of things as accurately as possible, the impressionists created new method painting. Its essence was to convey the external impression of light, shadow, reflexes on the surface of objects with separate strokes of pure paint, which visually dissolved the form in the surrounding light-air environment.
Plausibility was sacrificed to personal perception - the impressionists could, depending on their vision, paint the sky green and the grass blue, the fruits in their still lifes were unrecognizable, human figures were vague and sketchy. What was important was not what was depicted, but “how” was important. The object became a reason for solving visual problems.
The creative method of impressionism is characterized by brevity and sketchiness. After all, only a short sketch made it possible to accurately record individual states of nature. What was previously allowed only in sketches has now become main feature completed paintings. Impressionist artists tried with all their might to overcome the static nature of painting and to forever capture the beauty of a fleeting moment. They began to use asymmetrical compositions to better highlight those who interested them characters and objects. In certain techniques of impressionistic construction of composition and space, the influence of passion for one’s own age is noticeable - not antiquity as before, Japanese engravings (such masters as Katsushika Hokusai, Hiroshige, Utamaro) and partly photography, its close-ups and new points of view.
The Impressionists also updated their color scheme; they abandoned dark, earthy paints and varnishes and applied pure, spectral colors to the canvas, almost without mixing them first on the palette. Conventional, “museum” blackness in their canvases gives way to a play of colored shadows.
Thanks to the invention of metal tubes of paint, ready-made and portable, which replaced the old paints made by hand from oil and powdered pigments, artists were able to leave their studios to work plein air. They worked very quickly, because the movement of the sun changed the lighting and color of the landscape. Sometimes they squeezed paint onto the canvas straight from the tube and produced pure, sparkling colors with a brushstroke effect. By placing a stroke of one paint next to another, they often left the surface of the paintings rough. To preserve the freshness and variety of natural colors in the picture, the Impressionists created a painting system that is distinguished by the decomposition of complex tones into pure colors and the interpenetration of separate strokes of pure color, as if mixing in the viewer’s eye, with colored shadows and perceived by the viewer according to the law of complementary colors.
Striving for maximum immediacy in conveying the surrounding world, the Impressionists, for the first time in the history of art, began to paint primarily in the open air and raised the importance of sketches from life, which almost replaced traditional type paintings carefully and slowly created in the studio. Due to the very method of working in the open air, the landscape, including the city landscape they discovered, occupied a very important place in the art of the Impressionists. The main theme for them was the quivering light, the air in which people and objects seemed to be immersed. In their paintings one could feel the wind, wet earth heated by the sun. They sought to show the amazing richness of color in nature.
Impressionism introduced new themes into art - daily city life, street landscapes and entertainment. Its thematic and plot range was very wide. In their landscapes, portraits, and multi-figure compositions, artists strive to preserve the impartiality, strength and freshness of the “first impression”, without going into individual details, where the world is an ever-changing phenomenon.
Impressionism is distinguished by its bright and immediate vitality. It is characterized by the individuality and aesthetic value of the paintings, their deliberate randomness and incompleteness. In general, the works of the Impressionists are distinguished by their cheerfulness and passion for the sensual beauty of the world.
