Event Essay I: Dallas Museum of Art; “The Lens of Impressionism”

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My event was the Dallas Museum of Art; “The Lens of Impressionism,” photography and painting along the Normandy coast 1850-1874. I went on Sunday, February 21, 2010. The class studied this era in Chapter 13: The Working Class and the Bourgeoisie. The term "impressionism" was coined by a critic interacting with Clause Monet's "Impression: Sunrise" painting in 1874. French impressionists depicted light and color and was often embellished with romanticism; usually conveyed scenes filled with light and joy (Sayer).

Piece I: Claude Monet's "The Sea at Le Havre, 1868" (oil on canvas)

Claude Monet was the leader of impressionist painting movement. Manet, Cezanne, Degas, Morisot, Pissarro, Renoir, and Alfred Sisley, gave art the ability to communicate at-a-glance visual experience, enabling a picture to enter the mind without any thought of any other sort. His impressionist paintings would later evolve from the at-a-glance experiences to more prolonged meditations, with astounding slow-motion applications of fleeting, idle thoughts and imagery (Stuckey).

Monet's The Sea at Le Havre stresses the interactions of the sun, wind, sand and tides. It provides a commentary about the elemental verities of nature. The horizon cuts the painting almost exactly in half between the sky above and the sea below, drawing attention to the abstract qualities of the composition. The paint was applied with both force and subtlety to capture the movement of the sea and the overcast day.

His subject (the fishing boat) is rendered smaller, and tilted as the wind presses hard against the sail, indicating the vast power of the sea and wind (overall the wind and sky dominate the sea in this work). The hard waves crash against the shore indicating an inc...

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D'Souza, Aruna. The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture. Art Bulletin 90.3 (2008): 489-493. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 28 Feb. 2010. .

Wagner, Anne M. COURBET'S LANDSCAPES AND THEIR MARKET" Art History 4.4 (1981): 410-431. World History Collection. EBSCO. Web. 28 Feb. 2010.

"Manet's Snapshots." Wilson Quarterly 31.2 (2007): 78-79. World History Collection. EBSCO. Web. 28 Feb. 2010.

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