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ARTISTS

Impressionism

By his insistence that the artist's vision must be free from any limitations of nonpictorial values, such as literary subject matter, symbolism, and psychological overtones, Manet was a forerunner and guiding ideal for the painters known as the Impressionists, but they carried his concept of the act of seeing as the basis of painting even further than he by resolving it into a process of analyzing and recording the light by which objects are made visible. The scientific investigations of Joseph Henry and Ogden N. Rood into the physical nature of light as a mixture of color was fundamental to their theories; Turner's practice in his paintings of romantically exciting sunrises and sunsets provided them with a method of using pigment. The term "Impressionism" was initially an epithet of derision used by a newspaper critic in referring to the first exhibition (1874) of pictures painted by the group. In this showing was a work by Claude Monet (1840-1926) entitled Impression: soleil levant. It became descriptive of the experiential concept underlying the whole method of the group, whose preoccupation with light as the controlling factor in visual experience brought them quite soon to a realization that the ever-changing character of light in nature limits any accurate transcription of its effect to the light scheme of a few moments at best, that is, to an impression rather than to something pondered upon and considered at length. The undeniably striking effect of the canvases painted by Monet and his associates in the Impressionist group-for instance, by Alfred Sisley (1839-1899) and Camille Pissarro (1830-1903)-with their system of short strokes of pure color that fuse together to produce an often amazingly truthful impression of light, is the contribution of the painters themselves, whose excitement in the experience of color in light was comparable in degree and significance to that of the 15th century Renaissance masters in their newly awakened awareness of the world in which they lived. The importance in the history of art of this system of color and light values in the representation of visual facts can be recognized when it is borne in mind that it was the first significant departure in naturalism from the chiaroscuro system of light and dark structural patterns developed by Masaccio more than 400 years earlier.