IMPRESSIONISM

 

PORTRAITS OF LEISURE: The American Response To French Impressionism


RAEGEN KENNETT

Undeniably the best loved of the modern art movements, Impressionism enjoys a continuous presence in museums and markets and a formidable influence on popular tastes. In France in the 1860s Impressionism introduced the world to the revolutionary ideas of Manet, Monet and Pissaro among others and heralded the end of the Academy by ushering in a modern world and a focus on urban experience as seen through fleeting moments. Impressionism travelled to the United States, in an exhibition organised by dealer-curator Paul Durand-Ruel in 1886. The exhibition was renowned for its innovation and freshness and for the influence it was later to exert upon American painters.

By the time that Impressionism had asserted its presence in American art in the 1890s, the shock of the new had faded and American Impressionism came to be characterised by new ideals. Anti-academic in origin, Impressionism was rapidly and widely adopted in America. A recently emerged bourgeois class in America was eager to acquire the accoutrements of high society and the Impressionist works provided the culture they were looking for with the all the refinement and good taste associated with high art.

The primary and most influential adaptation of the French Impressionist aesthetic may be found in the work of the 'Ten', a New York and Boston painting association. This group originated American Impressionism when they broke away from the Society of American Artists in 1897.

American Impressionism clung tenaciously to the linear tradition. French Impressionism is characterised by a rejection of the artificial subject picture; depiction of the fleeting as opposed to the ordered moment; and its emphasis on changing elements through the representation of light and atmosphere. The linear tradition of the American painters was acquired at academic institutions, such as the Academie Julien in Paris, where many members of the Ten studied.

Claude Monet was perhaps the most influential of the French painters upon the Ten and commanded a great deal of admiration from Theodore Robinson who studied at the Paris ateliers and also with Monet himself in Giverny. However, Robinson was never able to achieve the form dissolution of his mentor. He maintained the academic tradition in his work, resulting in a tightly rendered figure in an Impressionist ground. This hybrid of Impressionist surface and realist form is evident in his The Girl With The Dog, with two figures tightly composed, realistically rendered and featured prominently against a loosely painted Impressionist ground resulting in a strong stylistic disparity.

The work of the Ten is also distinguished from its French counterparts by its tendency towards sentimentality. The 'Ten' became well-known for depictions of leisure class women engaged in aesthetic pursuits, images that carried an appeal and self-aggrandisement for their purchasers as a looking glass that validating their newly acquired status as the cultural elite.

In The Blue Cup by Joseph De Camp, we find a leisure class woman admiring a porcelain teacup. She wears an apron, but is far too genteel to be a maid: her work is aesthetic and not laborious. She admires the cup, as the viewer will admire the painting. Historian Donelson Hoopes defines this phenomenon, "one should recognise a pre-occupation of so many of the Boston painters of this period with images of lovely women - the conception of the attractive young lady herself as an object of rare beauty, no less than the object she holds." 1

While American practitioners of Impressionism maintained the iconographic ideals of academic portraiture, their French counterparts redefined what subject matter could be considered worthy. The bohemian nature of French works is evident in anti-establishment depictions of modern urban culture with scenes of cafes and nightclubs, prostitutes and singers. The Ten in contrast painted pastoral outdoor luncheons, domestic interiors and idealised female portraits which upheld academic traditions and reinforced conservative bourgeois ideals.

Another exemplar of this type of iconography may be found in the work of Frank Benson, who exploited the twin qualities of bright colour and sentiment, both of which became strong characteristics of American Impressionism after 1900. Along with the other artists of the Ten, Benson depicted a world of genteel sentimentality. In The Sisters is depicted a genteel, picturesque setting completely unaffected by the looming urbanisation and industrialisation that history tells us would have been so prevalent in the psyche and the environment of the time. Perhaps these images fulfilled a need for escapism, with the idealistic iconography satisfying a demand for pictures that were reminiscent of another world: a result of the market demand for such images Benson became a top-selling Boston artist, with an annual income reported to have reached six figures. 2

Commercial concerns were also present in the work of other members of the Ten: because of the demand of the art market, artists were able to enjoy successful and lucrative careers. By the time American artists began working in an Impressionist manner, French Impressionism had long been popular. The new leisure class was eager to purchase art in an effort to define themselves as cultured. Given the astronomical prices that the French works commanded, the American works offered a ready substitute with artists enjoying a commercial success. This marketability is another factor which may account for the conservatism of the American movement. The American works were undoubtedly influenced by their marketability, as opposed to the revolutionary ideals of the French who were primarily seeking to establish independence.

If the demand had not been so great nor the style so commercially viable, perhaps the Ten would have been less inclined to produce such timid and academically oriented works. In his diary Theodore Robinson expressed an awareness of this very dilemma; "I should aim for more vitality. I have a horrible fear that my work pleases women and sentimental people too much. I should do more important pictures. I should paint local scenery at home, even if it is as ugly as it may appear to some." 3

The urbanisation of Paris in the late 1800s fostered a generation of artists who confronted the modern world with a style and vision that revolutionised art. Thirty years later, an emerging nation, eager to establish culture and taste, adopted these French innovations to suit their own ideals, producing works that mimicked the French paintings while maintaining conservative American tastes.

These developments help us trace the origins of art and the societal and economic factors that shape its characteristics. This understanding of the origins of modern art and the establishment of its ideals in the American realm will hopefully establish a criteria with which we may evaluate further historical developments in American painting.

 

Artists by Movement:
Impressionism

Centered in France, 1860's to 1880's


Impressionism is a light, spontaneous manner of painting which began in France as a reaction against the restrictions and conventions of the dominant Academic art. Its naturalistic and down-to-earth treatment of its subject matter, most commonly landscapes, has its roots in the French Realism of Camille Corot and others.

The movement's name was derived from Monet's early work, Impression: Sunrise, which was singled out for criticism by Louis Leroy upon its exhibition.

The hallmark of the style is the attempt to capture the subjective impression of light in a scene.

The core of the earliest Impressionist group was made up of Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Others associated with this period were Camille Pissarro, Frederic Bazille, Edgar Degas, Gustave Caillebotte, Edouard Manet, and the American Mary Cassatt.

The Impressionist style was probably the single most successful and identifiable "movement" ever, and is still widely practiced today. But as an intellectual school it faded towards the end of the 19th century, branching out into a variety of successive movements which are generally grouped under the term Post-Impressionism. 		        

 
 
Chronological Listing of Impressionists
 
Use ctrl-F (PC) or command-F (Mac) to search for a name
Alphonse Maureau  19th Century  French Painter  
Eugene Boudin  1824-1898  French Painter Eugene Boudin: The Jetty At Trouville
Art Prints
Camille Pissarro  1830-1903  Caribbean/French Painter Camille Pissarro: Village Market
Art Prints
Edouard Manet  1832-1883  French Painter Edouard Manet: Music At the Tuileries
Art Prints
Edgar Degas  1834-1917  French Painter/Sculptor Edgar Degas: L'Absinthe
Art Prints
Stanislas Lepine  1836-1892  French Painter  
Alfred Sisley  1839-1899  French Painter Alfred Sisley: L'Ile St. Denis
Art Prints
Marie Bracquemond  1840-1916  French Painter  
Claude Monet  1840-1926  French Painter Claude Monet: Monet's Garden
Art Prints
Frederic Bazille  1841-1870  French Painter Frederic Bazille: Little Gardener
Art Prints
Armand Guillaumin  1841-1927  French Painter  
Berthe Morisot  1841-1895  French Painter Berthe Morisot: Skating in the Park
Art Prints
Pierre-Auguste Renoir  1841-1919  French Painter Renoir: Seated Bather
Art Prints
Emil Jakob Schindler  1842-1892  Austrian Painter  
Mary Cassatt  1844-1926  American Painter Mary Cassatt: At the Opera
Art Prints
Luis Jimenez Aranda  1845-1928  Spanish Painter  
Theodore Clement Steele  1847-1926  American Painter Angler's Prize
Art Prints
Frits Thaulow  1847-1906  Norwegian Painter Frits Thaulow: Jardin Du Luxembourg
Art Prints
Gustave Caillebotte  1848-1894  French Painter Gustave Caillebotte: Marche
Art Prints
Lilla Cabot Perry  1848-1933  American Painter Lilla Cabot Perry: Lady with a Bowl of Violets
Art Prints
Jean Beraud  1849-1935  French Painter Jean Beraud: Paris Patisserie 1889
Art Prints
William Merritt Chase  1849-1916  American Painter William Merritt Chase: Near the Beach, Shinnecock
Art Prints
Eva Gonzales  1849-1883  French Painter Reading in the Forest
Art Prints
Albert Lebourg  1849-1928  French Painter  
John Ottis Adams  1851-1927  American Painter  
Richard B. Gruelle  1851-1914  American Painter  
Jean-Louis Forain  1852-1931  French Painter/Illustrator The Buffet, 1884
Art Prints
Theodore Robinson  1852-1896  American Painter  
John Henry Twachtman  1853-1902  American Painter John Henry Twachtman: Springtime
Art Prints
Colin Campbell Cooper  1856-1937  American Painter Samarkand, Santa Barbara
Art Prints
Edward Henry Potthast  1857-1927  American Painter Edward Henry Potthast: In the Park
Art Prints
Willard Leroy Metcalf  1858-1925  American Painter Willard Leroy Metcalf: October
Art Prints
Maurice Prendergast  1858-1924  Canadian/American Painter Maurice Prendergast: Sunday on the Beach
Art Prints
Medardo Rosso  1858-1928  Italian Sculptor  
Helen M. Turner  1858-1958  American Painter  
Robert Vonnoh  1858-1933  American Painter Jardin de Paysanne
Art Prints
Abbott Fuller Graves  1859-1936  American Painter Abbott Fuller Graves: Portsmouth Doorway
Art Prints
Childe Hassam  1859-1935  American Painter Childe Hassam: Rainy Day, Boston
Art Prints
Otto Stark  1859-1926  American Painter  
Dennis Miller Bunker  1861-1890  American Painter Dennis Miller Bunker: In the Greenhouse
Art Prints
Theodore Butler  1861-1936  American Painter  
Charles Courtney Curran  1861-1942  American Painter Charles Courtney Curran: Far Away Thoughts
Art Prints
Frank Weston Benson  1862-1951  American Painter Frank Weston Benson: Summer of 1909
Art Prints
Frantz Charlet  1862-1928  Belgian Painter  
Robert Reid  1862-1929  American Painter Robert Reid: White Parasol
Art Prints
Edmund Charles Tarbell  1862-1938  American Painter Edmund Charles Tarbell: In The Orchard, 1891
Art Prints
Laureano Barrau  1863-1957  Spanish Painter  
Maxime Maufra  1863-1918  French Painter  
Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida  1863-1923  Spanish Painter Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida: After the Bath
Art Prints
Paul Cornoyer  1864-1923  American Paul Cornoyer: Plaza After Rain
Art Prints
Philip Leslie Hale  1865-1931  American Painter Philip Leslie Hale: Crimson Rambler
Art Prints
William Samuel Horton  1865-1936  American Painter  
Reynolds Beal  1867-1951  American Painter  
William DeLeftwich Dodge  1867-1935  American Painter  
Guy Rose  1867-1925  American Painter  
Max Slevogt  1868-1932  German Painter Max Slevogt: Steinbartschen Villa, Berlin
Art Prints
Wilson Irvine  1869-1936  American Painter  
Edward Willis Redfield  1869-1965  American Painter Edward Willis Redfield: Boothbay Harbor
Art Prints
Bessie Potter Vonnoh  1872-1955  American Sculptor  
Louis Betts  1873-1961  American Painter  
Frank H. Desch  1873-1934  American Frank H. Desch: Summer Morning
Art Prints
Albert H. Krehbiel  1873-1945  American Painter  
Ernest Lawson  1873-1939  Canadian/American Painter Ernest Lawson: Spring Night Harlem R
Art Prints
Frederick Carl Frieseke  1874-1939  American Painter Frieseke: Venus in the Sunlight
Art Prints
Edward Cucuel  1875-1954  American Painter Edward Cucuel: Blossoming Tree
Art Prints
Richard Emil Miller  1875-1943  American Painter Richard Emil Miller: Young Woman in Interior
Art Prints
Edmund W. Greacen  1876-1949  American Painter  
William Chadwick  1879-1962  American William Chadwick: Irises
Art Prints
Helen McNicoll  1879-1915  Canadian Painter  
Catherine Wiley  1879-1958  American Painter Catherine Wiley: Summer Day At Newport
Art Prints
Daniel Garber  1880-1958  American Painter Daniel Garber: Bayou
Art Prints
Julian Onderdonk  1882-1922  American Painter Julian Onderdonk: Cloudy Day
Art Prints
Guy Wiggins  1883-1962  American Painter  
Fern Isabel Coppedge  1888-1951  American Painter Fern Isabel Coppedge: Gloucester Harbor
Art Prints
Louis Ritman  1889-1963  Russian/American Painter  
Richard Earl Thompson  1914-1991  American Painter  

 
 
 

 

Freight Cars and Flowers

John Haber
in New York City

The Painting of Modern Life:
American Impressionism and Realism

Art students will love this show's subtitle—or hate it passionately. At least they can hardly help recognizing it. T. J. Clark used it just ten years ago for his thought-provoking history of French Impressionism. If you suspect that the Met's new show will be a little too much like an illustrated book itself, you are right. Until someone brings out the CD-ROM version, though, it will have to do. Lower your expectations and give it a try. Bellows's Stag at Sharkey's (Cleveland Museum of Art, 1905)

Clark showed that Impressionists documented an urban world coming into being. Like Manet himself, he evoked with bitter affection the café society that the painter knew so well. The Met has something of the same agenda. It wishes to restore Impressionism to the past.

Of course, several museums have reinstalled their galleries to place nineteenth-century art in its time. Once the French Impressionists were juxtaposed with their modernist successors, like John the Baptist announcing the new era. Now we are more than likely to see them in context of the Salon painters they rivaled, derided, and sometimes ignored with gusto.

The trouble is that the public still prefers Monet's pretty flowers, Manet's scathing but overtly polite air of rebellion, and the bravura of turn-of-the-century avant garde, while older scholars miss the kinds of connections they had made. They miss relating realists to such tough minds as Thomas Eakins. Worse, those crying out to have their history heard are again overlooked. Women artists and blacks had even less entry to the Salons than to the avant garde.

So Realism and Impressionism still sit uneasily together. The revisionists had better find a whole new country. Somewhere, surely, Realists were the avant garde, and Impressionists were the big shots who could afford Europe. With this show, the Met has its new-found land. It has discovered America.

Whose realism. . .?

A comprehensive exhibition of turn-of-the-century American art makes plenty of sense. (The Whitney will stage its own "American century" before I know it.) The history books like to take us from the last really fun stuff, the Hudson River School, right to the Armory Show and the arrival of American Modernism. One would hardly dream of handling the art of France like that. It would be leaping across a whole generation, from Corot to Cubism.

Besides, in America the opposing styles, Realism and Impressionism, were closer, in part because they were both so timid. Is it that Impressionism cannot capture the special light and air of the New World? Was New York's timing off and its social structure too rigid? Or did William Merritt Chase rule from his 10th Street studio with too iron a hand? Probably a little of all three.

So why is this show so unconvincing? It certainly finds some nice works. Chase shows a fascinating influence from orientalism, and Mary Cassatt created portraits that seem to brush their subject across a scene like fine ink. Dennis Miller Bunker's blue flowers cross an open field like a lightning bolt. Only his early death has left him little known outside Boston. I enjoyed learning, too, that William Glackens, the "Ash-Can" painter, also worked as an Impressionist.

Still, timidity is not that great a premise for a show. One has to face workmanlike painting all too often, and the heavy-handed thesis only makes things worse. It has made the Met exclude some of the best American Impressionism.

Some painters vanish, because they worked in France's interiors rather than on American city streets. So does Thomas Anschutz—who taught modernists like Robert Henri, John Sloan, and George Luks. So does Thomas Eakins, who suggests that Realists really do have a heritage all their own, more recently celebrated in the remodeled Whitney Museum.

The installation hurts, too. Chronology gets shuffled to force parallels, and rooms look like an obstacle course. I could almost hurdle the partitions, if I did not have to stop to read yard-long paragraphs of text.

. . .and whose modernity?

In the end, the thesis fails more than the art. With a painting at last in front of me, I never managed to believe the half of it. Maybe a sunny church front, barely hidden by trees, by Childe Hassam roundly affirms American values. Then again, I had better ditch old postcards of European cathedrals and the Rothko Chapel before my biographers get a chance to reveal my religious leanings.

More seriously still, I grew tired of the show's straw man. To promote Modernism, did scholars ever really oppose Impressionist formalism to gritty Realism? Did America, even in a Whitney Biennial, really exclude more than it begged to fit in?

Maybe the show has a point its own curators cannot see. The Impressionists, who cared deeply about appearances, are surely realists. Realists, committed to broad brushstrokes, had an impact on modern American art worth remembering. Maybe so, but that means a sort of realism and modernity that the new labels exclude.

Most of all, the show affirmed exactly what it wanted to disprove. George Bellows avoids the worst side of things, as a true-blue American must. Yet his blood-stained boxers and smoke-obscured boxcars look downright frightening beside older Impressionism. John Singer Sargent's elegant interiors and designer fabrics are the better art, but younger painters were ready at last to air America's dirty linen in public.