Note: Page numbers with ‘f’ refer to figures.
André Dombrowski
We think we know Impressionism well. Its history told many times over since the late nineteenth century as a crucial episode in the rise of modernist painting in France, it pleases museum-goers at an ever more frenetic pace as impressionist exhibition chases impressionist exhibition. Celebrated for its painterly bravura, accelerated sense of life and depiction, and innovative modern subject matter, among other aspects, Impressionism pushed the world of art to new sensuous heights and realms of pictorial openness and possibility. But after receiving much scholarly attention during the heyday of the revisionist art history of the 1970s to 1990s – through the social history of art and feminist art history in particular – academic interest in Impressionism has since diminished, along with interest in European art and visual culture of the nineteenth century more broadly. This volume does not mourn this fact or try to return us to an art historical place and time when the art of Édouard Manet and the painters that followed in his footsteps served as a litmus test of art history writ large. Instead, it seeks to give an account and an overview – and hopefully a fresh introduction for a new generation of scholars less burdened by the art historical canon of the past 50 or so years – of what critical issues the study of Impressionism might productively entertain in the twenty-first century.
Those issues are broad and varied, and this volume seeks to showcase the wide-ranging topics and methodologies relevant to the study of Impressionism now. They include old favorites such as analyzing the period conceptions of an “impression” and the impressionist eye itself, the vexed chronologies of the movement, as well as the particular forms of avant-garde collectivity and exhibition culture the group of artists brought to the fore. Impressionism’s early critical reception and its collecting history receive as much attention as do new interpretations of key paintings. Analyses foregrounding the thematic, historical, and contextual frames of Impressionism return with an updated set of examples and concerns, and new feminist questions are front and center as well. Impressionism as a form of modernist painting is analogized to a host of the period’s new media and its visual culture more broadly construed, which the style often emulated, at times even directly incorporated, despite being primarily represented by the easel picture.
This volume, containing a total of 34 new scholarly contributions, expands the study of Impressionism into other new territories. A large section is devoted to how and why Impressionism became a near-global phenomenon around 1900, spreading its stylistic propositions and ideological tenets to a host of other continents, countries, and cultures with different social, economic, political, and religious paradigms. Several contributions consider impressionist paintings as objects, emphasizing the materiality of representation through new approaches in conservation and heightened attention to description and close observation, while others explore new digital methods and the environmental humanities. The result is a volume that is not a history of Impressionism in the traditional sense of the term and should not be consulted with that expectation in mind, even though an overall picture of Impressionism will surely emerge. Rather, it assembles new examples of the manifold approaches to interpreting impressionist art that have proliferated over recent decades, trying to give a representative, though certainly by no means exhaustive, survey of current studies in Impressionism.
What “Impressionism” comes to mean in this volume can best be taken as the sum total of those varied interpretations. But from the outset, it has been this editor’s intention to keep the focus relatively narrow in order to broadcast a diversity in approach instead. Centering on the group of artists (and their international followers) who constituted the core of those participating in the eight impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886 means that artists like Édouard Manet and Paul Cézanne, whose careers intersected with Impressionism at times, are more sparsely represented. Stretching from the 1860s to World War I, there is only a limited number of studies falling outside this chronological parameter, except when it comes to issues of reception. Although other media are discussed, impressionist painting stands at the heart of this volume. Therefore, the various ways in which Impressionism infiltrated other disciplines or was influenced by them (such as impressionist music, film, literature, and philosophy) are not of central concern to this book, even though, of course, highly worthy topics of inquiry.
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Besides providing an overview of the current landscape of impressionist study in art history, this volume set for itself the goal to re-evaluate the intellectual stakes of impressionist art and to analyze the style’s artistic risks as well as practical and conceptual innovations anew. Despite its often pleasing, fashionable, and innocuous-seeming content, Impressionism opened a view onto some of the most vexing and crucial questions of the late nineteenth century. It is mostly for that reason – and not merely for its pleasing character – that Impressionism became the aesthetic force it turned out to be, sustaining its import for as long and as widely as it did.
Two critics visiting the first impressionist exhibition in 1874 had rather strange – even preposterous – responses to what they saw. They were not alone in verbalizing the experience that year, as is well known, but what they said was remarkable enough to make one pause. The first is the poet Henry Hardy (using the pseudonym Henri Polday), penning a mixed review of the art on display for the art journal La Renaissance littéraire et artistique on 3 May 1874. In an early usage of the word “impression” in this context, Hardy says:
It is painting of impressions. And the impression being as variable as nature itself, [the Impressionists] paint less what they see than what they have seen. – Take an evening effect. Would you be able to stop the sun and clouds? The time it takes to put your objects in place, grab the palette, and prepare your colors, the sun sets, the clouds drift away or transform. At the second stroke of the brush, the sky has changed, yet your canvas is not fully covered while twenty effects have appeared: it would have been necessary to start over twenty times. Do you come back the next day to the same place, at the same time? You will find nothing but a silhouette, and only memory can resuscitate yesterday’s spectacle.1
Impressionism appears in Polday’s words as a conceptual failure, a set of unfulfilled promises, delayed responses, and ghostly traces of memory – hardly an affirmation. It epitomized a kind of painting of what had just been and what had just departed, making room for a visual experience of loss and absence as much as presence.
The second comes from the art writer Philippe Burty, in La République française of 25 April 1874, more positive and equally prescient:
Even though one finds some faults in these works, and even though the transcribed sensations are sometimes as fugitive as the sensations themselves – the freshness of undergrowth, a puff of the warmth of straw, the length of an autumn evening, the scent of the seashore, the redness of young cheeks, or the shine of a new outfit – one has to be grateful to these young artists for pursuing and fixing them in the first place.2
The power of Burty’s reading lies in the synesthetic metaphors with which he fills the impressionist instant. For him, Impressionism captured the uncapturable, made us see what could hardly be seen otherwise, giving the barely there, the almost nothing, visual terms and setting aside mass, substance, duration, and even essence itself.
Both these quotations contain hefty propositions about art and take us quickly to the impressionist heart of the matter. As one spoken from a more doubtful perspective and the other from a more supportive angle, the true impact of Impressionism must surely lie somewhere in between. Broadly speaking, much painting of the prior decades and centuries understood itself in terms of transcendence and atemporality, establishing a presumably stable relationship between viewer and depiction (fictitious as that position was of course). What Impressionism, including its forebearers, achieved was to turn this position on its head. The Impressionists introduced an explicit nonallegorical temporality into the process of painting (unlike, say, the allegorical representation of time via the god Chronos or the many memento mori that populate Old Master paintings), instating a deep-seated instability into the processes of making and viewing art.
After all, an impressionist picture does not merely upset academic standards of completion and fetishize the sketch and a sketch-like look (even in its more “realist” and composed practices like those developed by Frédéric Bazille, Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, and Gustave Caillebotte), it throws any preconceived ideas about what starting and finishing meant generally into question. It tends to interrogate the duration of any undertaking – any act of the hand, the eye, and even consciousness – destabilizing the imaginative confidence that helps us unify actions, objects, and selfhoods. It turns the eye into a restless, mobile entity – and a collective, communal one at that – that actively participates in, and even structures, the act of painting from the bottom up. Impressionist paintings (even highly composed and belabored ones) based on what appear to be ephemeral glances try to convince their viewers that they contain the truth and nothing but the truth. Impressionism insinuated that our sensory abilities are never fully trustworthy and that we constantly miss visual information, although vision is all we can rely on for measure. We are therefore hardly the sole generators of our own experience, knowledge, and being, Impressionism suggests.
A represented moment is not long even if the painting of it potentially exists for centuries, and it is never much to go on. Whatever scene or scenery the Impressionists channeled through their understanding of instantaneity had to make its impact felt in and as the second in which it occurred. This elevation of present-ness and now-ness to the most crucial pictorial timeframe had profound implications for the meanings of past, present, and future in representation. Letting anything exist – even the most heated political topics of their day – as here now and potentially gone the next instant, turned the world of depiction on its head, reversing long-held beliefs about the power of the past over the present. The result was a style that appeared to some merely sensuous, immediate, and disrespectful of convention, but also assiduous in acknowledging the full panoply and true richness of experiencing the here and now.
That is a lot to hang on a set of presumably pretty pictures, but there is more. As a result of its often harried-seeming processes of representation, the world represented in Impressionism began to adapt to the style’s need for brevity. Even if oblique views and bodies cut off by the frame were highly composed and painted over the course of months rather than minutes, they stood arrested as mere moments. Fashionable trends, sideways glances, or short sunsets – at times seen in reflections on water or refractions in mirrors – became essential and necessary to behold. This made the world seem rather insubstantial and shallow (especially to Impressionism’s contemporary and later detractors), yet also gave the present an unmistakable urgency and profundity, the crucial key to meaning. Impressionism thereby pronounced the instability and malleability of all values and systems of signification like few other styles before it.
All of the above is to say that Impressionism poked at ontological certainties and epistemological givens, questioning the nature of materiality, experience, time, and even being itself. In an age when so much that was solid melted into air, when both political and industrial revolutions as well as the arrogance of empire wreaked havoc on social life, Impressionism made nothing matter much. It prettified the world even as it knew it to be sullied by coal dust and expendable bodies; it eased the tensions of the late nineteenth century even while exposing them. These were no small feats, and eventually the Impressionists (and Claude Monet especially) were richly rewarded for them when the collection craze began in the 1890s.
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Even though these issues are not all directly addressed in this volume, I hope nonetheless that the collection of work assembled between these covers demonstrates what was at stake – artistically, aesthetically, phenomenologically, socially, and politically – when Impressionism blasted the world of painting wide open. Each of the sections that make up this book would have deserved its own edited volume, truly crisscrossing the entire globe, covering a broader set of modern identities, or charting each new visual medium the Impressionists encountered during their lifetimes. Rather than going into depth in one or two such areas, this volume puts forth a set of works exemplifying a broad range of methods and concerns. I am certain that missing themes can be identified (and will hopefully be published elsewhere), but my hope in constructing this volume has been to let the plurality of approaches take center stage. To that end, I have asked both established scholars in the field as well as younger ones. Even if the majority of writers are Anglo-American academics (who have traditionally dominated the interpretation of, if not the data sets associated with, Impressionism for the past 50 or so years), efforts have been made to broaden the scope: scholars from France, Germany, Turkey, Japan, and Argentina join those from North America and the United Kingdom; and curators and conservators join academics.
Crafting this volume with a thematic and methodological focus meant giving up on questions of chronology and coverage. Having left the authors much leeway in establishing their own topics, I had to accept certain trends, and also gaps. There is perhaps more on Monet in this volume than I had initially planned, too little on Camille Pissarro and Degas, and nothing much on Alfred Sisley, to name but a few of the crucial Impressionists left out of the conversation. The whole range of artists loosely associated with the movement at the time do not receive new critical readings here (those, for instance, who participated in the first impressionist exhibition but are largely forgotten today, or those who demonstrated some impressionist tendencies in their work but stuck to more traditional subject matter and technique). Berthe Morisot, Caillebotte, and Bazille, on the contrary, are those Impressionists who have traditionally played a lesser role in our overall accounts of the movement, but receive attention from several studies in this volume. This shift in emphasis itself is telling when it comes to the current priorities in impressionist scholarship.
Given that some avant-garde painters, like Manet, Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, or Georges Seurat, have received more continued academic interest over the past decades than the group of core Impressionists, it was crucial to keep the focus on that latter group of artists. To that end, the volume focuses on the mid-1860s to mid-1880s, excluding, by and large, Manet and the painting of modern life, as well as the post-impressionist turn. Reasons for this imbalance can easily be identified, and explain the current academic hesitations around Impressionism. Unlike the Post-Impressionists (like Gauguin), the Impressionists focused much of their painterly energy on the French landscape, and traveled abroad rather rarely. Painting was by far their favored mode of expression, often to the exclusion of the full panoply of modern media culture of the period, such as photography and film (the current focus of much scholarship). Despite the inclusion of some women, the majority of the Impressionists were male, and straight – to the point of period-typical misogyny. Despite the fact that some were born outside Metropolitan France, even as far afield as the island of Saint Thomas (now among the US Virgin Islands) in the Caribbean, the group kept to French sites and subjects – to a degree that makes many suspect (myself included) that Impressionism tended to look away, largely, from the French Empire and its subjects. When North Africa came into view on an impressionist canvas, or models of African descent, it was often with an uncomfortable dose of orientalist stereotyping. The exceptions of course exist (like several Bazilles and some of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Algerian paintings), and they are the topic of chapters in this volume, but in general it would be safe to say that these features – the focus on France and on painting – have impeded Impressionism’s continuing centrality in current academic art historical inquiry. Museums have filled this lacuna over the past decades, and many of the most revelatory new discoveries and interpretations around Impressionism have been in association with exhibitions or museum-collection study. With few exceptions since the 1980s, the major scholarship on the movement can be found in exhibition catalogs. Yet, not all issues the Impressionists painted and addressed are by necessity visible and exhibitable, and this volume hopes to expand the purview of what can be asked of Impressionism today, precisely because loan requests were not at stake.
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This volume is subdivided into seven parts. The first reconsiders crucial questions around the chronology of French Impressionism, the movement’s beginning, end, and internal development. It also interrogates perceptual and cognitive issues around the nature of an “impression” and the new eye–mind relationships Impressionism developed. The second part is devoted to studying the impressionist picture as a material object, delving deeply into matters of practice (paints, supports, and tools), as well as offering new languages of description to account for an especially close attention to painterly materiality. Part three studies Impressionism’s relationship to the new media of the nineteenth century (like photography and film) and other media as well (like printmaking and the decorative arts). Part four examines Impressionism’s account of modern identity, proposing new feminist and queer interpretations, as well as new readings of alterity in Impressionism associated with race and nationality. The fifth part interrogates anew the sites and places of Impressionism and arrays the style’s version of home against its construct of the public sphere. Stretching from Impressionism’s account of privacy and physical proximity to its links to period debates around ecology and finance, this part demonstrates the broad range of impressionist themes and interests. Part six turns to an Impressionism stretching around the world by the year 1900, expanding our usually French purview on Impressionism to include areas reaching from Europe to the Middle East, East Asia, North Africa, and the Americas. This part also includes interpretations that map the style’s entanglements within the period’s global trade. The final part, seven, is devoted to questions concerning the impressionist market and clientele, period criticism, and exhibition displays, reaching to the mid-twentieth century. Many, if not most of the chapters, however, far exceed the boundaries of the part in which they are placed and would easily fit into several. The overall framework is thus an open and flexible one, and I invite the reader to peruse the volume for all the manifold affinities and thematic overlaps that can be identified among the chapters not easily captured in thematic groupings.
Already by the mid-1880s, when barely a full history of Impressionism existed, neo-impressionist and especially symbolist critics went to work to discredit the style. Félix Fénéon was one of the better ones among them, accusing the Impressionists famously of false naturalness and exaggeration when he said, in 1887, that “From there resulted the necessity to paint a landscape in one session and a propensity to make nature grimace in order to prove that the minute was unique and that one would never see it again.”3 Now considered to be the last gasp of a long European tradition of verisimilitude, fetishizing an accurate representation of looking, Impressionism was soon dismissed as having neglected the deeper structures and abstract patterns of art, no matter how much the style (especially in Monet’s later work) began to repeat itself in series and embraced more symbolist themes and techniques. Even though the first full accounts of Impressionism soon appeared, written by the critics and art historians Théodore Duret, Séverin Faust (writing as Camille Mauclair), and Julius Meier-Graefe, among many others, the post-impressionist and symbolist critiques of Impressionism were hard to shake, even though the international market broadened and flourished. Impressionism had to wait for a fuller critical revival until John Rewald’s careful and detailed telling of its narrative in the 1940s and the mid-twentieth century modernist reappraisal of the artistic qualities and pictorial power of Impressionism. Over the following decades, Impressionism received its share of brilliant sociohistorical, feminist, and psychoanalytic readings that decoded the style’s class and gender presumptions, and the style’s innovative techniques and painterly ingenuity were analyzed in great detail as well. What remains for this volume to do is to take stock of where the study of Impressionism has been since, but mostly what it might continue to investigate in the decades to come.
I hope this volume will stimulate the reader to read more and further on Impressionism – on the artists and issues covered, and by the authors represented in this book – and see the movement again as the true artistic and intellectual challenge that it represented in the nineteenth century, and still does today when shown in the right light. Impressionism was once difficult to look at and impossible to disregard. It was a challenge to prevailing artistic norms rather than a norm itself, part of established taste. If this volume manages, even just in small measure, to take our eyes and minds back to the moment in history when Impressionism made beholders alert and uncomfortable, its mandate will have been achieved.