The Impressionists:
While the Impressionists are considered as a group and shared a set of related artistic aims, most importantly the interpretation of contemporary life in the modern Paris in which they lived, they differed greatly in their styles of aesthetic representation. The main Impressionist artists included Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Berthe Morisot, and Auguste Renoir. While some achieved success and had their work exhibited regularly at the Salons (notably Degas and Morisot), most relied on exhibitions outside the Salons in unofficial group showings with the other Impressionists. They rejected the official taste for formality, fine line, finish, and subjects drawn from history, myth, and imagined worlds, and in so doing became the enemies of academic art. Just as Haussmann ushered in the age of modern Paris by demolishing the old Paris, the impressionists destroyed the academic art system of the past, by refusing to go through government art schools, by creating independent exhibition societies, and by opposing traditional art, bringing Parisian art into the present.
Jean-Honore
Fragonard, Girl Reading
Berthe Morisot, Cradle
(Rococo: formal with strict lines and muted colors) (Impressionist: informal, soft blurred lines, light and color)
But while the Impressionists were considered to be renegades as far as their art was concerned, they were hardly renegades politically or socially. For the most part their backgrounds were of the bourgeoisie or even the noble class. Degas came from the upper class. His father was a prominent banker. Degas studied law before abandoning it for painting. Berthe Morisot was the daughter of a high-ranking government official and the granddaughter of the famous Rococo artist, Jean Honore Fragonard. Pissarro worked in the prosperous family business.
The political orientation of the Impressionists varied. Degas was a member of the right wing. Pissarro was a leftist, more inclined to democracy than socialism, in this resembling the majority of the contemporary Parisian middle class. The Impressionists were not part of the political avant-garde and dreamed not so much of laying down a challenge with their art as merging it into the mainstream of the moment. Most supported their country. Degas was in the artillery division of the French National Guard during the Franco-Prussian War. Monet served in the military in Algeria
In their canvases the Impressionists depicted the Parisian life with which they were intimately involved, and this life took place in the streets and cafes and opera houses and parks of the new capital. Both in their subjects and in their personas, they favored the flaneur, “the purposeful male stroller, an ambulatory naturalist” (6) with a penchant for contemporary life. Naturalism was their theme. Haussmann’s Paris was both their home and a favorite subject for their art.
Impressionism
and the Modernity of Paris
Georges Haussmann, Impressionism, and the
Haussmannization of Paris
The
Impressionists’ View of the New Paris