Impressionism:  Also see Impressionist Art Gallery

“The perception of reality that is mediated by personal emotion and reason”
 

-- “Late 19C art movement interested in capturing the fleeting qualities of light, color, and atmosphere”
 

-- Roots in painting: Monet, Manet, Renoir, Caillebotte, Cezanne, and Degas
 

We can understand Impressionism by tracing its roots in other concepts we've explored this semester and its relationship to the emerging and prevailing ideas of its era:
 

1) Psychology: Attempts to capture/represent psychological perception of experience; experience as perceived by the mind, not just the eye or an objective observer See Freud Dreams
 

2) Philosophy and Science: Empiricism:

Locke:  Essay Concerning Human Understanding(1690): “The objects of sensation one source of ideas.” and “The operations of our minds the other source of them.”

3) Modernism: disjunction of understanding of reality based on combination of:

a) Narrator’s impressions (sense-perceptions) of

b) Objective reality/experience, filtered thru:

c) Perspective, understanding, psychology (emotion, bias, past experience etc.) See Freud Dreams

d) Irony: paradox, inverted logic (nude women in common settings)

e)  Decadence: Art for art sake vs. art to better society, prove scientific or philosophical argument

4) French Symbolist Poetry:

          a) Interconnectedness of all elements

b) Replicate the abstractness of music: pure feeling, feeling separated from purpose or meaning

c) Abstract, enigmatic,  relationship between the signified (idea) and signifier (symbol) (no one-to-one relationship the symbol and the thing it symbolizes)

5) Romanticism/Realism vs. Neoclassicism:

                a) Images drawn from Nature/natural world

                b) Common, commonplace settings and themes

Heart of Darkness and Impressionism:

“In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas, sharply peaked with gleams of vanishing spirits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The are was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom…” (1) (1491).

“We looked at the venerable stream (the Thames) not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs for ever but in the august light of abiding memory” (8) (1492).

Also see: Freud Dreams