Page 115 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Camille Pissaro: Entrée du village de Voisins, 1872
Of the 29 painters who collaborated in an ‘alternative’ exhibition in the photographer Nadar’s lavish,
modern studio, several would become leading figures in what became known as the Impressionist
‘movement’. Margaret Samu of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, writes: “ In 1874, a group
of artists called the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, etc. organized an
exhibition in Paris that launched the movement called Impressionism. Its founding members included
Claude Monet , Edgar Degas , and Camille Pissarro, among others. The group was unified only by its
independence from the official annual Salon , for which a jury of artists from the Académie des Beaux-
Arts selected artworks and awarded medals. The independent artists, despite their diverse approaches
to painting, appeared to contemporaries as a group. While conservative critics panned their work for
its unfinished, sketchlike appearance, more progressive writers praised it for its depiction of modern
life. Edmond Duranty, for example, in his 1876 essay La Nouvelle Peinture (The New Painting), wrote of
their depiction of contemporary subject matter in a suitably innovative style as a revolution in painting.
The exhibiting collective avoided choosing a title that would imply a unified movement or school,
although some of them subsequently adopted the name by which they would eventually be known, the
Impressionists. Their work is recognized today for its modernity, embodied in its rejection of
established styles, its incorporation of new technology and ideas, and its depiction of modern life.” https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/imml/hd_imml.htm
Together the ‘Impressionists’ radically challenged the ‘idea’ of what art should be. Perhaps somewhat influenced by the break-through insights derived from the Helmholtz, Young, Maxwell theory of colour vision (1861) - the discovery that our vision is a complex interaction of signals from just three main types of colour sensor in the retina, and that the whole gamut of different colours can be synthesised in our brain from these signals. This discovery certainly justified a new approach to painting, where colours can be modified by adjacent hues, where the possibility that dabs (or points) of pure colour can trigger the experience of subtle mixes of colours in our brain. Here, I’ll be looking at just three of the principle Impressionists: Monet, Pisarro, and Sisley.