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Essays on history of photography
Essays on history of photography
Art and history
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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.
During Vincent Van Gogh’s childhood years, and even before he was born, impressionism was the most common form of art. Impressionism was a very limiting type of art, with certain colors and scenes one must paint with. A few artists had grown tired of impressionism, however, and wanted to create their own genre of art. These artists, including Paul Gaugin, Vincent Van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Paul Cezanne, hoped to better express themselves by painting ...
At first glance, the cheerful bright blue sky on the upper portion of the painting caught the most attention. The second dominant feature is the small sailboat with seagulls on the background where Monet illustrated in brightest white. Examining closely in that particular area, it is noticeable that the artist intended to incorporate a sheer layer of white surrounding the sailboat to create the illusion of sheen light breaking through the clouds and reflecting into the ocean. Monet used a variation of values along with the combination of heavy and light individual brushstrokes to create uneven tones to show the movement of the water caused by the weather and the sun. Several layers of underpaint can also be seen as the artist’s intention for the waves to appear fuzzier. The fuzzy wave in the foreground to the right is slightly bulged from the canvas showing the finer brushstroke slightly dabbed on the surface. Dense cracking is present all over the painting possibly due to the painting being very
He doesn’t understand why what he has seen or read in magazines isn’t true, but he comes to realize that it’s not what you see, literally it’s what you see when you can’t see. This also applies to the action in Ground Swell, you can see the wind blowing the waves and the waves crashing against the boat, but you cannot fully see the picture which can lead to confusion by the person viewing the painting, but you can see people in the picture and when you look at things from their point of view you can then see that their focus is on the buoy that is afloat. This buoy is also a symbol of unknowing. For the painting, the repetition that makes up the waves shows small movement in the art, which is a part of minimalism.
In the 1880’s the movement known as Impressionism was coming to an end. The eight and last Impressionist exhibition was held in Paris during 1886 (Time). Although Impressionism was coming to an end new forms of art arose to take its place. Some famous artists producing during this time include, Van Gogh, Georges Seurat, and Odilon Redon (Georges). Odilon Redon started his own movement known as Symbolism, which strives to give form to ideas and emotions (Odilon). Another painter responsible for creating a new style is Georges Seurat. Seurat was a French painter who popularized and developed his own style called pointillism.
Impressionist paintings can be considered documents of Paris capital of modernity to a great extent. This can be seen in their subjects, style of painting, and juxtaposition of the transitive and the eternal.
There are several symbols in the story that help to emphasize that point. One powerful one is the boat. It is small and alone on the ocean, with only the occasional patch of seaweed or a seagull or two to keep it company. The waves themselves are the ups and downs of life. At any moment, a ‘wave’ can come and swamp you, leaving you stranded without a clue what to do, and more just keep coming. Just as in life, “…after successfully surmounting one wave you discover that there is another behind it just as important and just as nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats.” Line 9.
The representation of the new age of exploration, which serves as an allusion to man’s potential, is starkly contrasted with the depiction of Icarus that serves as an allegory for man’s limits, indicating the shift from a euro-centric universe. This painting is an oil canvas landscape of the sun setting on the horizon of the ocean sea, while the ships were sailing through the body of water. The focus on humanism during this period is clearly portrayed by the presence of the plowman, shepherd, and fisherman performing their daily task. Lighter colors are used, which differ from the darker colors that were emphasized during the Dark Age or Medieval period. Shadows can be seen on the ground next to the plowman, showing the increasing artistic methods that begin to be utilized.
Before Impressionism came to be a major movement (around 1870-1800s), Neoclassical and Romanticism were still making their impacts. Remembering last week’s lesson, we know that both those styles were different in the fact that one was based on emotion, while the other was practical and serious. However, one thing they both shared was the fact that the artists were trying to get a message across; mostly having to do with the effects of the French Revolution, and/or being ordered to do so. With Impressionism, there is a clear difference from its predecessors.
Impressionist painting was the beginning of a cultural shift away from religious and mythic themes, to subjects and styles that are less static such as everyday life of the general people, and the fleeting moments around them. As history progresses, so does art and the movements they create. The impressionism movement started in an already war-ravaged France where the evolution of ideals and way of life were as impermanent as the subject of the paintings of the time.
I will discuss Post Impressionism by using three works, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Still Life with Basket of A...
Although from the same artist group, these Impressionists originated from backgrounds that seemed worlds apart. Claude Monet, known as the “Master Impressionist” varied the themes in his artwork more than any other artist did. Monet’s work “Impression Sunrise”, of which the term “Impressionist” originates also gives rise to the title “Master Impressionist”. Edgar Degas started his career as an artist with nothing in common with Monet but the era in which they lived. From themes to brushstrokes and choices of colours, Monet and Degas started their relationship as Impressionist artists on opposite ends of the earth. However, towards the climax of their lives as artists, Monet aided Degas in adopting Impressionist Aesthetic qualities.
Claude Monet made the art community address a revolutionary type of art called impressionism. In a style not previously before painted, impressionism captured a scene by using bright colors with lots of light and different shades to create the illusion of a glance. The traditional method of working in a studio was discarded and the impressionist artists carried any needed supplies with them into the countryside and painted the complete work outside. The manufacture of portable tin tubes of oil paints as well as the discovery of ways to produce a wider range of chemical pigments allowed artists to paint in a way unimaginable before this period in time (Stuckey 12). Monet and others, such as Pierre Auguste Renior, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, Edouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, and Alfred Sisley, took this style of art to a new level never seen before.
In this essay, I will contrast and compare the two art movements, Impressionism, and Post-Impressionism. I will be concentrating on the works of the two leading artists of these styles Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh.
The Impressionist movement began in 1874 in Paris created by, among others, Claude Monet. The movement took place during the industrialization that started around 1850 in France. The impressionist painters liked to paint everyday life scenes like Parisian leisure time and modern life activities. They painted scenes of people, mostly the bourgeois, in cafes, theaters and concerts (Janson 706). In other words, the artists found their inspiration in daily outdoor scenes. The Impressionist movement attempted to change the painting convention created by the art academy and including modern life was one of the characteristics ...
Impressionism happened during the nineteenth century particularly in France although there is also impressionist movement in other places although the number of artists involved does not match the number of artists involved in impressionism in France. The characteristics of impressionism include the use of short brush strokes (Perry, 1995) and the lack of effort to veil or hide or keep these brushstrokes from being noticeable as the audience looks at the painting. There is also a renewed attention and focus on the effect of light, particularly the natural ambient light which is why many Impressionist painters work outside the studio, the paintings featuring a subject that is often found outside or outdoors, from Claude Monet’s Woman with a Parasol to Alfred Sisley’s Bridge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne. There is ...