Any art lover can conjure images of Impressionism, a mode of painting beloved for its lush landscapes and dazzling plays of light. But as these five texts show, the movement now celebrating its 150th anniversary was diverse in its reckoning with changing social dynamics.
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Globalizing Impressionism: Reception, Translation, and Transnationalism
After emerging in Paris in 1874, the Impressionist aesthetic spread widely, from Japan (whose own art greatly inspired the French Impressionists) to South Africa to Brazil. As this anthology of essays shows, one of the Impressionists’ discoveries was how loose and slippery appearances could be, and the same held true for their style—no one artist or nation lay claim to Impressionism, and there is no fixed definition of the movement. Reading Impressionism through an engagement with fluidity and circulation, this volume creates geographic connections and celebrates previously overlooked regions and artists.
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Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today
This catalog for a groundbreaking exhibition at Columbia University and the Musée d’Orsay brought much-needed attention to Black presence in 19th-century Paris, showing how Black women in particular were active participants in artistic circles and contributed to the advent of modernity. Denise Murrell, who curated the show, writes especially about a model named Laure who appeared in paintings by Edouard Manet. (Manet never exhibited with the Impressionists but was in many ways a forerunner of the movement’s spirit of avant-garde rebellion.) Murrell acknowledges Laure’s essential humanity in contrast to exoticizing stereotypes and argues that the shift in depictions of the Black female figure was “foundational to the evolving aesthetics of modern art.”
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Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, 1874–1904: Sources and Documents
One of the most fun aspects of learning about Impressionism is realizing just how shocking people found the style at the time. Critics did not withhold their ire, and reading this collection of primary-source materials assembled by Linda Nochlin offers a way to access the newness and strangeness of paintings that have by now become all too familiar. From Jules Laforgue’s celebration of the “thousand little dancing strokes” that make up a Monet to Théodore Duret’s description of laughter and indignity over the absurdity of painting blue shadows in a scene of snow, the language of the time re-enlivens the work. Nochlin was a renowned scholar in her own right, and short introductions to their authors accompany her astute selection of documents here.
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Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society
More than three decades ago (in 1988), Robert L. Herbert introduced a way of reading Impressionism now so standard that it can be hard to remember approaches from before. In what he described as the “social history of art,” Herbert considered paintings to be deeply imbricated within their social and cultural milieu. The Impressionists were, in many ways, painters of everyday life, and Herbert gives us insight into how life in 19th-century Paris was changing. Cafés, parks, racetracks, cabarets, and swimming ponds all provided new sites of leisure for a growing middle class. Herbert tracks both the pleasures and the politics of the transformation, delving into how Impressionist paintings both contributed to the formation of bourgeois identity and revealed some of the malaise of modernization.
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The Art of Impressionism: Painting Technique and the Making of Modernity
Art historian Anthea Callen’s attention to materials and techniques stems from close looking, and rewards the same. In this book from 2000, she takes the process of making seriously and recognizes that works of art are physical things, thinking through what it means to paint outdoors in both practical and symbolic terms. Chapter topics include canvas, ground tints, pigments, tonal values, light (both actual and depicted), varnish, and framing. Throughout, Callen calls attention to how new technologies and materials made the Impressionists’ style possible. Her enjoyable analysis allows the reader to linger with works of art and appreciate the sensory qualities of Impressionist painting all the more.
