Impressionism

"They [his early Paris sketches, of circa 1910] are in a high key, somewhat like impressionism or a modified impressionism. I think I'm still an impressionist."

"The most authentic Russian Impressionism leaves one perplexed if one compares it with Monet and Pissarro. Here, in the Louvre, before the canvases of Manet, Millet and others, I understood why my alliance with Russia and Russian art did not take root."

"No original Gauguins were to be seen in Australia, for post-impressionism was officially thought to be the vulgar effusion of five-thumbed lunatics."

"On the other hand, the artist has much to do in the realm of color construction, which is so little explored and so obscure, and hardly dates back any farther than to the beginning of Impressionism."

"Marcel Duchamp, one of this century's pioneers, moved his work through the retinal boundaries which had been established with Impressionism into a field where language, thought and vision act upon one another. There it changed form through a complex interplay of new mental and physical materials, heralding many of the technical, mental and visual details to be found in more recent art.. .He declared that he wanted to kill art ('for myself') but his persistent attempts to destroy frames of reference altered our thinking, established new units of thought, a 'new thought for that object'."

"[T]he camera can preserve the whole spectrum of animation. Blurred images of pedestrian forms moving at an ordinary rate of speed, such as were recorded by the sluggish mechanisms of early cameras, cannot be duplicated by human vision. This feature common in photographs before the development of more sensitive plates and faster shutter systems, is one of the innovations attributable to Impressionist painting. The adumbration of pedestrian figures by a kind of blurred notation seems to be entirely new in art. It was the urban counterpart to the landscapes represented by some of the Barbizon painters. Corot set the countryside in motion; Monet the city."

"Inevitably, the untenable relation between naturalistic art and photography became clear. However much other factors may have contributed to the character of Impressionist painting, to photography must be accorded some special consideration. The awareness of the need for personal expression in art increased in proportion to the growth of photography and a photographic style in art. The evolution of Impressionist painting towards colours one ought to see, and the increased emphasis on matière [the material], can well be attributed to the encroachment of photography on naturalistic art. Impressionist paintings may be seen as mirrors of nature, but above all they convey the idea that they are paintings of nature."

"..the paint marks [in Impressionist paintings] placed apparently without order and which suddenly became magnificently ordered if one knew how to make the right distance.. ..to communicate a deep, sun-drenched image of a stream, landscape or face.. .My eyes were popping out of my head."

"An art mode, new or old, is for the creative mind essentially a point of beginning. Content is brought into being by the activity through which the artist translates the movement into himself. In such an appropriation, there is no difference between an ongoing movement and one that is finished. During the reign of Minimalism, a painter might realize the new through Impressionism. That art history has a schedule of continuous advances en mass is a fantasy of the historian. The shared syntax of art movements is constantly replaced by the sensibility and practice of individuals. The avantgarde art of yesterday is the only modern equivalent of an aesthetic tradition. The fading of the ideas of a movement does not mean that it can no longer be a stimulus to creation. At the very dawn of a movement, the work of its artists commences to replace the concept; instead of Cubism there appear Picasso, Braque, Gris. Compared to the activities to which they give rise, ideas in art have a brief life. In the last analysis, the vitality of art in our time depends on works produced by movements after they have died."

"Bement [her art teacher] told me things to read. He told me of exhibitions to go and see.. ..the two books that he told me to get were Jeromy Eddy Cubists and Post-impressionism and Kandinsky On the Spiritual of Art'.. .It was some time before I really begun to use the ideas. I didn't start at until I was down in Carolina — alone — thinking things out for myself."

"Bonington and Constable gave their coulours a greater power of expression by dividing and analyzing them. Delacroix is very struck by this at the Paris Salon of 1824 [of both English painters there were paintings showed]. The effect of dividing colors in this way was certainly already known, but a few more years were still to pass before the method really asserted itself, and from then on Impressionism was born, with France leading the movement."

"Documentary evidence and scientific pigment analysis together with visual examination of the paintings give a reasonably accurate idea of the colours generally used by the Impressionists. The most common colours were lead white, s, cadmium yellows, yellow ochre, emerald green, green, , blue, red and crimson lakes, and . Black virtually disappeared from the palettes of all but Renoir and Cézanne after the mid 1870s, and even they used it only as a colour in its own right, and not as a means to darken other colours for tonal shadows."

"Light is impressionism."

"I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist."

"It was to the painters of the previous generation that Monet turned... Boudin summed up clothed figures in rapidly noted dashes of color... that... merged the identities of color and line; Jongkind... made sky, rooftops, water, and foliage shimmer in separate dabs of bright paint; Corot employed broad bands of buttery pigment to give the sense of sunlight streaking through foliage to fall on meadow or forest road; Diaz and Rousseau put spots of paint side by side to create a surface mosaic of foliage; Courbet commonly used opaque paint, scraped and dabbed with a palette knife, to form a patchwork of textured areas that adhered as much to surface as to imagined depth. ...Courbet ...insisted that one must paint what one actually sees ...Monet's improvised technique, "sketchy" even in the most finished areas, was ...a further development of the free, somewhat rough way of applying paint which had characterized the mid-century vanguard. In Courbet... free handling was equated with opposition to authority... For other[s] of the same generation, sketchiness was considered forward-looking, independent, and "democratic"... opposed to the highly finished surfaces of officially sanctioned art. Daubigny was accused of giving mere "impressions" of nature... and Millet's shaggy surfaces were treated... as appropriate to his peasant subjects. ...Sincerity, truth, immediacy, spontaneity, natural light, and color, the banishing of muddy colors, the distrust of smooth finish—these were the moral underpinnings of artistic technique that Monet adopted."

"One of the curious features of Impressionism... was the casualness of their work. ...[T]he painters gave the impression of hastily concocted canvases... more... inspiration than... patient labor. The effortless stroke of genius became a leading measure of artistic quality, partly because it denied mere "work." ..."Art for art's sake" was an invention of the romantic era in France. ...They looked towards a mythical past in which the "natural" person could cultivate self-expression, free of the claims of social utility. This fantasized past... had an anti-industrial character. ...Work was despised because the growing industrial revolution was separating it from inventiveness, originality, and individualism. ...The inventiveness and spontaneity that independent artists sought were... opposed to industrial work,... products (with which they associated academic art) and for many... cities... Women and men held parasols and croquet mallets, not sickles and hoes, and dahlias were more attractive than cabbages. (It is true that Pissarro retained much of the outlook of Barbizon artists...) The work ethic implicit in Barbizon art... was done away with by the impressionists. The suburb and the coastal resort, not the farm, is the landscape of Morisot, Renoir, Manet, and Monet. ...The Impressionists ...joined other middle-class vacationers (except for Cézanne and Pissarro, so little in sympathy with Parisian society)."

"Although we credit it with being the gateway to modern art, we also treat it as the last of the great Western styles based upon a perception of harmony with natural vision. That harmony, long since lost... remains a longed-for ideal, so we look back to Impressionism as... a golden era. Impressionism still looms large... because we use its leisure-time subjects and its brilliantly colored surfaces to construct a desirable history."

"All this could be enough -- we would leave an Impressionist painting at this stage -- probably much earlier -- and leave it possibly with great satisfaction."

"Impressionism is at the root of all modern art, because it was the first movement that managed to free itself from preconceived ideas, and because it changed not only the way life was depicted but the way life was seen."

"Impressionism came about because it suddenly became apparent that pure colours mix in the eye in a more dazzling way than they have ever been mixed in paint."

"I started out as an impressionist and that's all about observing - how people move, their voice quality, their attitudes and quirks."

"After 1909, Monet drastically enlarged his brushstrokes, disintegrated his images, and broke through the taming constraints and delicacy of Impressionism for good. Nineteen gnarly paintings, starting in 1909 and carrying through his final seventeen years, finish off the notion that Monet went happily ever after into lily-land."

"Impressions are like pearls; ideas are like the string that turns the pearls into a necklace. The string is invisible, but it is not dispensable and cannot be broken."