Impressionism All that is solid melts into air

Impressionism "All that is solid melts into air" (Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 1848) "Capture your Moments" (Kodak ad, 1888)

IMPRESSIONISM – Paris, the 1870 s WHAT WAS SO “MODERN” ABOUT IT? How can it have been avant-garde when it is so easy to like, not at all “shocking”?

(left) Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841 -1919), Portrait of Claude Monet. 1875, o/c, Musée d'Orsay, Paris (right) Claude Monet (French, 1840 -1926), Self-Portrait, 1886, o/c, private collection (center) Edouard Manet (French, 1832 -1883) Portrait of Monet, 1880, india ink on paper, Musée Marmottan, Paris

(left) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749– 1832) Color Theory, 1805 -1829 (center) Michel-Eugène Chevreul, color wheel, c. 1860 1888—First Kodak Camera

Claude Monet: Northern Coast of France (La Manche, or English Channel)

James Whistler (American expatriate in London) - Harmony in Blue and Silver, Trouville, 1865

Gustave Courbet, Low tide, Trouville, 1865

Eugène Boudin (French, 1824 -1898), (top) Vacationers on the Beach at Trouville, 1864; (bottom) Boudin, The Beach at Deauville, 1863, oil on canvas Painting out of doors: “en plein air”

(top) Claude Monet, The Beach at St-Address, 1867 (bottom) Boudin, View of Portrieux, 1865

Precursor painters – sources of Impressionism

John Constable (English), The Haywain, 1821

Constable, Cloud Study, 1822, Oil on paper laid on board, 12 x 19 1/4 inches Courtauld Institute Galleries, London

Joseph Mallord William Turner (English, 1775 -1851), Rain, Steam & Speed: The Great Western Railroad, exhibited in 1844 at the Royal Academy, London, oil on canvas. Romantic landscape painter studied by Claude Monet in London in 1870 (in refuge from the Franco-Prussian war.

Théodore Rousseau (French, 1812 -1867) Forest of Fontainebleau, Morning, 1850 “Barbison School”

Eugene Delacroix (French Romantic painter), (top) Tiger Hunt, 1854 (bottom) Odalisque, 1855, oil on wood with source photographic study Gestural painting and optical theory. Romantic orientalist, not a “Painter of Modern Life” “Delacroix, an alchemist of color, miraculous, profound, mysterious, sensual, awesome: explosive color and subdued color, a penetrating harmony. The gestures of man and animal. The scowl of the beast, the snufflings of animality. ” - Charles Baudelaire

(left) Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Madame Leblanc 1823 Oil on canvas. Metropolitan MA, New York City; (right) Eugène Delacroix, Self Portrait. c. 1837. oïl on canvas. Louvre, Paris Note gestural painting of Delacroix – suggestive of speed, passion, individualism

(left) Claude Monet, Dejeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), 1865 -66, Oil on canvas, fragment of original, which was over 13 x 9 feet. Seated man is thought to be Courbet. (right) Edouard Manet, Dejeuner sur l’herbe, 1863

Claude Monet, La Grenouillere 1869, oil on canvas 75 x 100 cm Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY

Claude Monet, La Grenouillère, 1869 Auguste Renoir, La Grenouillère ("The Frog Pond") 1869 Painted side by side at Bougival, a suburb of Paris on the Seine river

Claude Monet, The Thames at Westminster, 1871, oil on canvas, 47 x 72. 5 cm (18 1/2 x 28 1/2"), National Gallery, London

First Impressionist Exhibition 15 April 1874: “Exhibition of the Société Anonyme of Painters, Sculptors, and Printmakers” (left) Nadar (Gaspard-Felix Tournachon) (1820 -1910) Nadar¹s Studio at 35 Boulevard des Capucines (right) Claude Monet, Boulevard des Capucines, 1873 (31 1/4 x 23 1/4") A new view from above on a new Paris: one of Baron Haussmann’s new boulevards

(left) Edward and Henry Anthony, Broadway on a Rainy Day, 1859, albumen silver prints, stereograph (right) Claude Monet, Boulevard des Capucines, 1873 (31 1/4 x 23 1/4") Compare: Stop-action or "instantaneous" stereographic views by Anthony brothers, New York’s first manufacturers of cameras and photographic supplies, with Monet’s flickering “impression. ”

Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise 1873

Monet, Railroad Bridge at Argenteuil, 1874 Anonymous, photo of the Argenteuil Railway Bridge, c. 1895 The Impressionist Eye is, in short, the most advanced eye in human evolution Jules Laforgue

Claude Monet, The Gare Saint-Lazare, 1877, National Gallery, London

(left) Katsushika Hokusai, South Wind, Clear Dawn, from Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji, c. 1830 -2, color woodblock, 10 x 15” (right) Claude Monet, Haystack, Sunset, 1891, oil on canvas, 28 x 36 in, MFA Boston Monet’s 23 views of haystacks (1891 -2) under various light conditions is thought to be influenced by Hokusai’s 36 views of Mount Fuji. Monet owned a copy of this print by Hokusai. “People are not sufficiently aware of how much our contemporary landscape Artists have borrowed from these pictures, especially Monet, whom I often encounter at Bing’s in the little attic where Levy is in charge of the Japanese prints. ” Edmund de Goncourt, 1892

Monet, Rouen Cathedral, the West Portal, Dull Weather dated 1894, painted 1892 Oil on canvas 39 3/8 x 25 5/8 in. (100 x 65 cm) Musee d'Orsay, Paris http: //www. learn. columbia. edu/monet /swf/ Click for information about Monet’s Rouen Cathedral series, 1892 -4

Monet, Rouen Cathedral, the West Portal and Saint-Romain Tower, Full Sunlight, Harmony in Blue and Gold, dated 1894, painted 1893, Oil on canvas, 42 1/8 x 28 3/4 in. Musee d'Orsay, Paris

Claude Monet, Water Lilies (The Clouds) 1903 Oil on canvas (29 3/8 x 41 7/16 in. ) Private collection

Monet's home and garden at Giverny (below right) Studio constructed for the Nympheas (Water lilies) Series

(left) Utagawa Hiroshige, Wisteria Blooms Over Water at Kameido, from One Hundred Views of Edo, c. 1857, color woodblock 14 x 9 in. Brooklyn MA (below) Claude Monet, Water Lilies and Japanese Bridge, 1899, oil on canvas, Princeton University

While the Orangerie museum [Paris] was rebuilt around them for six years, Monet's waterlily paintings, too large to move, had to remain in place in the oval rooms built for them in 1927. (NYTimes, May 14, 2006)

(left) photoportrait of Pierre-Auguste Renoir Frédéric Bazille, Portrait of Pierre-Auguste Renoir 1867, oil on canvas, (37 x 32 1/3 in); Musee d'Orsay, Paris

Claude Monet, La Grenouillère, 1869 Auguste Renoir, La Grenouillère ("The Frog Pond") 1869 Painted side by side at Bougival on the Seine river

Auguste Renoir, The Dance at the Moulin de La Galette (Montmartre), 1876

(left) Auguste Renoir, Torso of a Woman in Sunlight, 1876 (Impressionism, considered first modern, democratic art movement, born out of the class revolution that brought down the Ancien Régime) Hedonism and veiled eroticism (right) Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Bathers, 1756 (Rococo, considered the cultural epitome of French aristocracy, the Ancien Régime swept away by the class revolutions beginning in 1789) Hedonism and veiled eroticism

(right) Berthe Morisot (French, 1841 -95), Self Portrait, 1885; (left) Edouard Manet, Portrait of Berthe Morisot, 1872

Berthe Morisot, The Cradle (sister Edma and child), 1872, o/c (Morisot married Eugène Manet, brother of Edouard, in 1874) Exhibited in the First Impressionist exhibition. Morisot exhibited in 7 of the 8 Impressionist exhibitions.

Berthe Morisot, The Wet Nurse Angèle Feeding Julie Manet, 1880. Private collection

Berthe Morisot, Woman at Her Toilette, c. 1875, oil on canvas, 23 x 31” Chicago Art Institute

(left) Auguste Renoir, The Loge, 1874 (right) Mary Cassatt, In the Loge, 1880

Mary Cassatt, Woman Bathing, 1890 -1891, from series of 10 prints on the daily lives of women, drypoint and aquatint on laid paper, 17 x 11 3/4 in. Japonisme Edgar Degas, who did collaborative works with Cassatt, admired her drawing of the back in this print: "I do not admit that a woman can draw like that. "

Mary Cassatt, In the Omnibus, drypoint and aquatint in colors, 1890 -91 Suzuki Harunobu, (Japanese Ukiyo-e printmaker) 1724 -1770) Women and Child, woodblock print, c. 1750 Ukiyo-e prints were key source for modernist form - flatness, rejection of Renaissance illusionism - but also in content: daily life of the middle and working classes.

Women's Building, Sophie Hayden, architect World Columbian Exhibition of 1893 in Chicago, featuring Cassatt’s Modern Woman mural: 12’- 58’ (lost)

Young Women Picking Fruit of Knowledge and Science, 1892 Women’s Building, Chicago Worlds Fair

(below) Edgar Degas, The Tub, 1886, pastel on paper, 23 x 32” (left) Katsushika Hokusai, Women at the Public Bath, from the Manga vol. I, c. 1820, color woodblock, 7 x 4” In the manga, Degas said, he found relief from Western art’s obsession with “the female form divine. ” European artists continually borrowed motifs from the manga. Both subject matter – contemporary woman bathing – and style that was considered radically anti-academic and modern, are directly influenced by Japanese art.

Motion Photography and the Beginnings of Cinema Eadweard Muybridge, 1879

Eadweard Muybridge (Edward James Muggeridge, British 1830 -1904), AKA “Helios” San Francisco Landscape photographer, Valley of the Yosemite, ca. 1867 Muybridge’s five-month trip to the Yosemite Valley in 1867 yielded 260 published views, 160 of them stereographs. His were among the most celebrated images taken of the Valley.

Eadweard Muybridge (Edward James Muggeridge, British 1830 -1904), Galloping Horse, Motion Study: Sallie Gardner, owned by Leland Stanford, running at 1. 40 gait over the Palo Alto track, June 19, 1879, wet plate collotype, a sequence of photographs with 12 cameras Muybridge began the project in 1872. In 1878, he succeeded in taking a sequence of photographs with 12 cameras that captured the moment when the animal’s hooves were tucked under its belly. Publication of these photographs made Muybridge an international celebrity.

Edgar Degas, At the Races, 1877– 1880, oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

Eadweard Muybridge, The Zoopraxiscope, projector presented in autumn of 1879 The private gathering that watched the first Zoopraxiscope projections at Mayfield Grange, the home of Muybridge's sponsor Leland Stanford at Palo Alto farm, in the autumn of 1879 has the distinction of being one of the earliest motion picture audiences.

Zoopraxiscope disc and detail of stencil

Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: Man Shoveling (Self Portrait), 1895 University of Pennsylvania

Thomas Eakins (American Realist Painter, 1844 -1916), George Reynolds: Seven Photographs, 1883, albumen print, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (lower left) Motion Study: male running jump to left, ca. 1885, (lower right) Motion Study: female nude, blindfolded, walking to left, ca. 1885 Eakins approached the human figure with the analytical eye of a scientist.

(left) Thomas Eakins, The Swimming Hole, oil on canvas, 1884 -85 (right) Eakins's Students at the Site for Swimming, albumen print, ca. 1884

Thomas Eakins, Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, 1871, oil on canvas, c. 32 X 46” (82 x 117 cm), Metropolitan Museum, NYC

Etienne-Jules Marey (French Physiologist 1830– 1904), Photographic Gun: camera with a rotating plate capable of taking rapid sequence of separate images. (below) Marey, Pelicans in Flight, c. 1882 Marey saw Muybridge’s motion photographs when they were published in Paris in 1878. Muybridge’s multi-camera system wasn’t scientific enough for Marey.

Marey, Chronophotographic study of Man Pole Vaulting, 1890 -1891, albumen silver print Marey used dry photographic plates, faster than the wet plates Muybridge used, and an ordinary camera with its lens left open. Behind the lens, Marey put a rotating metal disk that had from one to ten slots cut into it at even intervals. As the subject, dressed in white, moved in front of a black background, the rotating shutter exposed the glass plate, creating a sequence of images.

Thomas Eakins, Motion Study using Marey’s wheel camera, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 1885

Edgar Degas (French Realist/Impressionist Painter and Sculptor, 1834 -1917) Frieze of Dancers, 1895, oil on canvas, 27 3/4 x 79” Multiple views of a single figure, an approach that violated the traditional notion that a painting must represent a unity of time, place, and viewpoint