impressionism

/im presh"euh niz'euhm/, n.

1. Fine Arts.

a. (usually cap.) a style of painting developed in the last third of the 19th century, characterized chiefly by short brush strokes of bright colors in immediate juxtaposition to represent the effect of light on objects.

b. a manner of painting in which the forms, colors, or tones of an object are lightly and rapidly indicated.

c. a manner of sculpture in which volumes are partially modeled and surfaces roughened to reflect light unevenly.

2. a theory and practice in literature that emphasizes immediate aspects of objects or actions without attention to details.

3. a late-19th-century and early-20th-century style of musical composition in which lush harmonies, subtle rhythms, and unusual tonal colors are used to evoke moods and impressions.

[1880-85; IMPRESSION + -ISM; cf. G Impressionismus, F impressionnisme]

* * *

I

In music, a style initiated by French composer Claude Debussy at the end of the 19th century.

The term, which is somewhat vague in reference to music, was introduced by analogy with contemporaneous French painting; it was disliked by Debussy himself. Elements often termed impressionistic include static harmony, emphasis on instrumental timbres that creates a shimmering interplay of "colours," melodies that lack directed motion, surface ornamentation that obscures or substitutes for melody, and an avoidance of traditional musical form. Impressionism can be seen as a reaction against the rhetoric of Romanticism, disrupting the forward motion of standard harmonic progressions. The other composer most often associated with Impressionism is Maurice Ravel. Impressionistic passages are common in earlier music by Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt, and Richard Wagner, and in music by later composers such as Charles Ives, Béla Bartók, and George Gershwin.

II

Movement in art that developed in France in the late 19th century.

In painting it included works produced с 1867–86 by a group of artists who shared approaches, techniques, and discontent with academic teaching, originally including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, and Berthe Morisot. Later Édouard Manet, whose earlier style had strongly influenced several of them, Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne and others joined them. The identifying feature of their work was an attempt to record a scene accurately and objectively, capturing the transient effects of light on colour and texture. To this end they abandoned the traditional muted browns, grays, and greens in favour of a lighter, more brilliant palette; stopped using grays and blacks for shadows; built up forms out of discrete flecks and dabs of colour; and often painted out of doors, rather than in the studio. They abandoned traditional formal compositions in favour of a more casual and less contrived disposition of objects within the picture frame, and their subject matter included landscapes, trees, houses, and even urban street scenes and railroad stations. After the French Academy's Salon consistently rejected most of their works, they held their own exhibition in 1874; seven others followed. A critic described them derisively as "impressionists," and they adopted the name as an accurate description of their intent. Before dissolving in the late 1880s, the group had revolutionized Western painting. See also Post-Impressionism; Salon des Indépendants.

* * *

▪ art

French  Impressionnisme 

  a major movement, first in painting and later in music (music, Western), that developed chiefly in France during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Impressionist painting comprises the work produced between about 1867 and 1886 by a group of artists who shared a set of related approaches and techniques. The most conspicuous characteristic of Impressionism was an attempt to accurately and objectively record visual reality in terms of transient effects of light and colour. The principal Impressionist painters were Claude Monet (Monet, Claude) (see photograph—>), Pierre Auguste Renoir (Renoir, Pierre-Auguste) (see photograph—>), Camille Pissarro (Pissarro, Camille), Alfred Sisley (Sisley, Alfred), Berthe Morisot (Morisot, Berthe), Armand Guillaumin (Guillaumin, Armand), and Frédéric Bazille (Bazille, Jean-Frédéric), who worked together, influenced each other, and exhibited together independently. Edgar Degas (Degas, Edgar) and Paul Cézanne (Cézanne, Paul) also painted in an Impressionist style for a time in the early 1870s. The established painter Édouard Manet (Manet, Édouard), whose work in the 1860s greatly influenced Monet and others of the group, himself adopted the Impressionist approach about 1873.

      These artists became dissatisfied early in their careers with academic teaching's emphasis on depicting a historical or mythological subject matter with literary or anecdotal overtones. They also rejected the conventional imaginative or idealizing treatments of academic painting. By the late 1860s, Manet's art reflected a new aesthetic—which was to be a guiding force in Impressionist work—in which the importance of the traditional subject matter was downgraded and attention was shifted to the artist's manipulation of colour, tone, and texture as ends in themselves. In Manet's painting the subject became a vehicle for the artful composition of areas of flat colour, and perspectival depth was minimized so that the viewer would look at the surface patterns and relationships of the picture rather than into the illusory three-dimensional space it created. About the same time, Monet was influenced by the innovative painters Eugene Boudin and J.R. Jongkind, who depicted fleeting effects of sea and sky by means of highly coloured and texturally varied methods of paint application. The Impressionists also adopted Boudin's practice of painting entirely out-of-doors while looking at the actual scene, instead of finishing up his painting from sketches in the studio, as was the conventional practice.

      In the late 1860s Monet, Pisarro, Renoir, and others began painting landscapes and river scenes in which they tried to dispassionately record the colours and forms of objects as they appeared in natural light at a given time. These artists abandoned the traditional landscape palette of muted greens, browns, and grays and instead painted in a lighter, sunnier, more brilliant key. They began by painting the play of light upon water and the reflected colours of its ripples, trying to reproduce the manifold and animated effects of sunlight and shadow and of direct and reflected light that they observed. In their efforts to reproduce immediate visual impressions as registered on the retina, they abandoned the use of grays and blacks in shadows as inaccurate and used complementary colours instead. More importantly, they learned to build up objects out of discrete flecks and dabs of pure harmonizing or contrasting colour, thus evoking the broken-hued brilliance and the variations of hue produced by sunlight and its reflections. Forms in their pictures lost their clear outlines and became dematerialized, shimmering and vibrating in a re-creation of actual outdoor conditions. And finally, traditional formal compositions were abandoned in favour of a more casual and less contrived disposition of objects within the picture frame. The Impressionists extended their new techniques to depict landscapes, trees, houses, and even urban street scenes and railroad stations.

      In 1874 the group held its first show, independent of the official Salon of the French Academy, which had consistently rejected most of their works. Monet's painting “Impression: Sunrise” (1872; Musée Marmottan, Paris) earned them the initially derisive name “Impressionists” from the journalist Louis Leroy writing in the satirical magazine Le Charivari in 1874. The artists themselves soon adopted the name as descriptive of their intention to accurately convey visual “impressions.” They held seven subsequent shows, the last in 1886. During that time they continued to develop their own personal and individual styles. All, however, affirmed in their work the principles of freedom of technique, a personal rather than a conventional approach to subject matter, and the truthful reproduction of nature.

      By the mid-1880s the Impressionist group had begun to dissolve as each painter increasingly pursued his own aesthetic interests and principles. In its short existence, however, it had accomplished a revolution in the history of art, providing a technical starting point for the Postimpressionist artists Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Georges Seurat and freeing all subsequent Western painting from traditional techniques and approaches to subject matter.

      In music, Claude Debussy (Debussy, Claude) has always been considered the principal Impressionist. Even though Debussy was influenced by the general aesthetic attitudes of Impressionist painters, he made no attempts to compose with musical techniques that were closely analogous to techniques of painting. Furthermore, the characteristics of Debussy's music are so variable from the first through the last of his compositions that even a general sense of Impressionism might best be restricted to most of his music composed between about 1892 to 1903 and to certain specific later compositions strongly resembling those works in style. Some of these Impressionist works would be the opera Pelléas et Mélisande (first performed in 1902), the orchestral piece “Nuages” (“Clouds,” from Nocturnes, completed in 1899), and the piano piece “Voiles” (“Sails,” from Douze Préludes, Book I, 1910). Other composers considered Impressionistic include Maurice Ravel, Frederick Delius, Ottorino Respighi, Karol Szymanowski, and Charles Griffes.

      Musical Impressionism is often thought to refer to subtle fragility, amorphous passivity, and vague mood music. A more accurate characterization of Impressionist music would include restraint and understatement, a static quality, and a provocatively colourful effect resulting from composers' fascination with pure sound as a beautiful and mysterious end in itself. Technically, these characteristics often result from a static use of harmony, ambiguous tonality, a lack of sharp formal contrasts and of onward rhythmic drive, and a blurring of the distinction between melody and accompaniment. Although Impressionism has been considered a movement away from the excesses of Romanticism, the sources of many of its characteristics may be found in the works of composers who are also considered to be the Romantic precursors of Expressionism—e.g., Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, and Aleksandr Scriabin.

* * *