UNIT 4
“Without colours in tubes, there would be no Cezanne, no Monet, no Pissarro, and no impressionism.” - Pierre-Auguste Renoir, artist
The new pigments supplied many new colours, expanding the painter’s palette. But it was how the impressionists used the new pigments, how the pigments allowed the impressionists to work, that changed the history of painting. The new pigments were the catalyst for painting that was physically and philosophically different from the art of the past.
The young impressionists were strongly influenced by a few previous nonconformist painters such as Eugène Delacroix, Jean-François Millet, and others. Some of these artists focused on landscape and contemporary images of their own day as subject matter. Some left the studio to paint outdoors almost exclusively. Others used strong colour and expressive brushwork. Almost all of these artists used a more direct technique of paint application that depended less on the formulaic building of paint layers, but for the most part their palette was still dominated by traditional pigments, particularly brown. Rarely did they use the modern pigments that were being invented during their lifetime.
The Impressionists felt that art should be of its own time. Academic themes of past military glories or ancient myth seemed unimportant in the face of contemporary changes, such as the newly invented steam-powered ships, trains, and factories. The new pigments allowed the impressionists to capture the present by creating a painting much more quickly. Most of the new pigments were quite opaque, or could be mixed with lead white and still retain a strong colour. The impressionists mixed and applied the exact opaque colour they needed, covering and correcting as they went. Traditional academic technique required complex layering of thin layers of paint that was laborious and slow. It was difficult to make changes, and all but eliminated artistic spontaneity. The impressionists could paint a scene in a matter of days or weeks, rather than months or years.
The new pigments also came with a new understanding of the nature of colour and light, totally changing the painters’ thoughts of what they were representing on their canvas. At the beginning of the 19th century the industrial colour chemists experimented and wrote extensively on the nature of light and colour. Their explanations of complementary colour and the prismatic nature of white light strongly influenced the impressionists, leading them to fundamentally change their approach to painting.
Traditional painters focused on the development of form in terms of light and dark, a technique called chiaroscuro. Through meticulous tonal modelling and the application of formal pictorial devices such as perspective, they were able to turn the inventions of their minds into an illusion of three-dimensional reality on canvas. Many progressive artists increasingly considered this old approach, born of the studio and its dependence on artificially controlled light, to be “false” and hopelessly mired in the past.
The impressionists sought the “truth” by working outside in natural light. They came to see the world as flickering [sparkling] light and colour, a jumble of prismatic light reflected to our eye. The subject of their paintings became light itself. The pigments on their palette were not just colours; they were the ingredients of light. With new pigments filling the gaps in the old traditional palette, the impressionists abandoned the use of chiaroscuro, perspective, and other traditional devices, choosing instead to juxtapose [contrast] colour to distinguish forms.
“I never draw except with brush and paint.” - Claude Monet.
The impressionists abandoned drawing and the hard-edged depiction of objects. They were no longer interested in the underlying structure of objects. Meticulous [scrupulous] drawing simply took too long to record a moment of glittering light. Figures became mere blobs (пятна), splashes of paint. Clarity and finish were replaced with an intentional lack of detail. Patches of white ground were left exposed, becoming a functioning part of the image-unheard of in academic painting.
While the number and variety of pigments available to the impressionists were greater than any previous time in the history of art, the impressionists actually used fewer pigments for any one painting than their academic predecessors. The traditional academic palette held about 15 pigments. Monet’s early pre-impressionist paintings of the 1860s contain as many as 15 pigments in one painting, half of them traditional pigments. A decade later, at the height of pure impressionism, the impressionists’ paintings generally contain no more than eight or 10 pigments. Of these all but one or two are new 19th-century pigments. Yet, with the reduction in the number of pigments, the paintings actually appear more colourful.
Working outdoors directly from nature, the impressionists used their new pigments and techniques to capture crisp, scintillating [brilliant, sparkling] qualities of light rarely seen in painting before their time. But their paintings were nearly the antithesis of the popular painting of their day. The public and many critics, accustomed to the detail and polish of academic painting, simply couldn’t understand this drastic and sudden change. They criticized impressionism’s quick summary technique as nothing more than an “ébauche” (sketch), as if the impressionists had stopped halfway into creating their painting. To critics, impressionist paintings showed little more than a lack of skill and initiative to finish what was begun. They didn’t realize that the goals of the painter and painting itself had changed.
(Abridged from the North Carolina Museum of Art Foundation // http://www.ncartmuseum.org/monet/revolution3.html)