MODERN ART: FROM IMPRESSIONISM TO CONTEMPORARY ABSTRACT

Modern Art: From Impressionism to Contemporary Abstract

Modern Art: From Impressionism to Contemporary Abstract

Impressionism

The Impressionist is a pictorial movement emerged in Paris, France in the mid-nineteenth century. It was not until 1874 that Impressionism flourished. 15 April of that year, a group of painters wanted to challenge the official Salon exhibition in Paris doing a parallel exhibition in the halls of the photographer Nadar. In total thirty-nine painters with over one hundred sixty-five works. Among them were artists such as Edouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley and Claude Monet, among others. Interestingly it was a work of the latter, the famous French painter Monet, titled "Impression: sunrise" painted in 1872 which he named this artistic movement as Impressionism.

Impressionism broke with the laws of academicism, eliminating the traditional perspective, anatomy and classical chiaroscuro. The authors of this movement rejected the dark colors to find the clarity, transparency and luminosity.

Impressionist painters were the first to set up their easels in the countryside, particularly in the forest of Fontainebleau. For Monet, Renoir and Pissarro, nature was a source of pure sensations, effects which became objects of painting. The initial field was precisely the landscape impressionism. If you originally applied the effects of light from reflective surfaces like water and snow, you will soon extended it to all the compositional elements, such as the human figure, sky, urban landscapes, among others.

The theme was one of the main reasons of discrepancy were the Impressionists with the society of the time. From a popular social class, or close to it, they found the impressionists portray pleasant tastes and habits which they were familiar. By contrast, customers of art belonging to the bourgeoisie and aristocratic were accustomed to idealism and the reflex of sophistication in the ...