Claude Monet: Impression, soleil levant (1872) [1]
Oil on canvas (48 x 63 cm)
I.
My view of French Impressionism has until now largely been shaped by D. H. Lawrence's argument that it was essentially an attempt to dissolve substance and to make the body into a thing of light and colour:
"Probably the most joyous moment in the whole history of painting was the moment when the incipient impressionists discovered light, and with it, colour. Ah, then they made the grand, grand escape into freedom, into infinity [...] They escaped from the tyranny of solidity and the menace of mass-form. They escaped, they escaped from the dark procreative body [...] into the open air: plein air and plein soleil ..." [2]
This was a moment of ecstasy; albeit a relatively short-lived and illusionary moment. For invariably the impressionists were brought back to earth with a crash by the so-called post-impressionists, who championed the "doom of matter, of corporate existence, of the body sullen and stubborn and obstinately refusing to be transmuted into pure light, pure colour, or pure anything" [3].
Nevertheless, even if the cat came back - "bristling and with its claws out" [4] - there's no need to denigrate or dismiss the impressionists. And indeed, Lawrence acknowledges that they were wonderful; "even if their escape was into le grand néant" [5] and even if many of their works, whilst delightful, look somewhat chocolate boxy to us now.
II.
The thing that I'm now starting to appreciate is that impressionism wasn't just about the attempted escape into the great nowhere via the denial of substance that Lawrence writes of.
It was also characterised, for example, by visible brush strokes, unusual perspectives, and the attempt to capture movement and the passage of time and impressionism was profoundly hated by piss-taking critics at the time not for its idealism, but it's violation of the rules and conventions formulated by the Académie des Beaux-Arts that had long governed painting in France [6].
In other words, the impressionists were not really afraid of the human body anymore than Turner, whose work was so influential on their thinking, was afraid of ships; they were fed-up of a governing body telling them what to paint and how to paint and they turned to colour and the realism of everyday life in order to defy the authority of the Grey Ones obsessed with lines and contours and idealised images of the heroic past.
It's a little surprising, further more, to find Lawrence of all people criticising artists for painting outdoors in order to capture the ever-changing effects of sunlight and shadow on natural settings; would he really prefer them to remain studio-bound and producing true (because fixed and enduring) representations of the world ...?
I know Lawrence believes that a painting has to come primarily from the artist's intuitive awareness of forms and figures - that working from models and objects can actually spoil the picture [7] - but, c'mon! that's no reason to jeer at those who prefer to work en plain air and catch fleeting glimpses of things and people palpitating avec mouvement, lumière, et vie, as Stéphane Mallarmé said of this new style of seeing and painting.
Ultimately, for a writer like Lawrence who values immediacy and quickness and who attempts to compose a new form of verse that he terms poetry of the present - i.e., one that opens out on to chaos and is all about the nowness of the moment - to criticise impressionism in the manner he does, is more than a little surprising, it's disappointing [8].
And so, today I'm going to give three cheers for the young painters - headed by Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir - who, in Paris in the early 1860s, revolutionised the world of painting [9].
Notes
[1] The title of this painting provided the movement's name after Louis Leroy's 1874 article - 'The Exhibition of the Impressionists' - implied that the painting was, at most, an amusing though unfinished sketch and not to be taken too seriously. Ironically, the term impressionist - a bit like punk a century later - quickly gained favour with the public and it was
also accepted by the artists themselves, even though they were a diverse
group in style and temperament, unified primarily by their spirit of
independence and rebellion (again, a bit like those musicians categorised under the genre heading punk rock).
[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 197.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., p. 198.
[5] Ibid., p. 197.
[6] Via its control of Salon exhibitions and educational programmes, the French Academy of Fine Arts (founded in 1816) enforced rules and conventions for painting in the 19th century, thereby significantly influencing the style and subject matter of art during this period and determining the careers of artists.
Privileging neoclassical and romantic styles and the depiction of mytho-religious or historical subjects - or traditional portraiture - the Academy required artists to display a high level of technical skill and ability rather than creative innovation. The impressionists - to their credit - challenged the conservatism and authority of the Academy; they weren't interested in producing perfect pictures made with precise brushstrokes and a restrained use of colour, overlaid with a thick coat of varnish and doxa.
Interestingly, although the French public were at first hostile, they gradually came to admire how the impressionists were offering a fresh and original vision, even if the art
critics and art establishment continued to disapprove of the new style (during the 1860s, the Salon jury routinely rejected about half of the
works submitted by Monet and his friends, obliging them to exhibit independently in the following decade).
[7] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Making Pictures', in Late Essays and Articles, p. 231.
[8] The only modern painter that Lawrence seems to admire is Cézanne,
dismissing other post-impressionists as sulky and still contemptuous of
the body, even if they begrudgingly admit its existence and, in a rage,
"paint it as huge lumps, tubes, cubes, planes, volumes, spheres, cones,
cylinders, all the pure or mathematical forms of substance".
See D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Articles, p. 198.
[9] And a big shout out also to Gustave Courbet, who had gained public attention and critical censure a decade earlier by depicting
contemporary realities without the idealisation demanded by the
Académie thereby inspiring the impressionists to be bold; and to Édouard Manet, whom the younger artists greatly admired, even though he never abandoned his liberal use of black as a colour and never participated in the exhibitions organised by the impressionists, of which there were eight in Paris; the first in April 1874 and the last in June 1886. Camille Pissaro was the only artist to show work at all of them.
