Impressionism
as discerned by Tushar Kanoi
When Monet christened his painting of a sunrise at the port of his hometown Le Havre, little did he know that he was christening the style of painting that he and his peers were going to be known for. The Impressionists derailed the trajectory of the existing art scene and were in some sense at the brink of a forthcoming revolution, the outcome of which was going to be liberation. Liberation to the point where emotional expression was going to come at the fore of all art. All orthodox notions and rules of painting were going to be stretched, bent and reinvented in remarkable ways.
The Impressionists in some sense were the advent of modernism in art, or rather the harbingers of a modern mentality in art. At the peak of the high society salon tradition which was drenched in the notion of intellectuality controlled by wealthy aristocratic ‘patrons’, it was a necessity for the 19th century artist to create art that either flattered them or the idea of their intellectuality. Their art should have had the drama and romance to stir vivacious conversations in these circles. Any art that failed to possess this throbbing mystical nature, was immediately deemed unworthy.
In the very first place, for an artist to be able to exhibit at the salon was a privilege that one had to earn. One had to undergo scrutiny at various hierarchies and get their work approved by a jury before they could actually showcase it. To be able to exhibit at a salon meant exposure to many wealthy intellectuals and the opportunity to gain favourable patrons. These aristocrats had managed to weave in place such a nuanced and intricate system of hierarchy and control that it seemed impossible for an artist to not fall into the trap and ipso facto, get out of it. Hence, every nineteenth century artist dreamed of this very opportunity.
It was unexpected for an artist to not work towards becoming a part of a salon or producing work that aided the purpose. Amidst all of this, there came a brand of artists, unconcerned and unperturbed with the formalities and expectations of the salons and on a quest for something greater. A quest for something new; for something honest.
The salon critics of the time concluded with an intent dripping with misogyny that only women had the right to practice impressionism because of the subject matter it dealt with and the artistic virtues it rooted itself in. They felt that the banalities of everyday life was something better left to the whims of the women artists, who apparently did not possess the finesse and sharpness of their male contemporaries. Well, women like Berthe Morisot and Marie Bracquemond took to it, and boy how did they take to it. They produced works as stirring and revolutionary as their male counterparts and together they established the foundation for a revolution in the world of art.
For the first time in history, the common man became the painter’s muse. The impressionist painters sought seemingly mundane, banal activities and people as their subjects. They were fascinated by the farmer, the miner, the baker, the waitress, flowers and bridges - anything that was able to evoke an honest and simple emotion. They painted things exactly the way they saw them mixed with simple emotions that came from the very depth of their existence.
The emotions that an object or a scenario evokes in us is not independent of the physical environment it situates itself in. They believed that the light that washes over an object or the tactility brought upon by wind on a scenario were of prime importance and were in some sense the variables that set the emotional tone of the painting.
Integral to this notion was the dissolution of the idea of an ‘artist’s studio’. The Impressionists were outdoor painters and travelled extensively on foot with their canvas, easel and paints plonked upon their back. Van Gogh used to nail his easel to the ground on many a windy day and paint the wildly fluttering trees or the rain soaked fields, Cezanne made pals with the police officers and often rushed to the scene of crime at the first whiff of a murder and painted the dead bodies live, then and there. It would be impossible to continue this discussion without talking about Monet’s series of paintings of Rouen Cathedral in Normandy. Over the course of two full years, he kept travelling back to Rouen, renting temporary studio spaces in front of the cathedral and just standing there and painting the cathedral at different times of the day and in different seasons. What came out of this was spectacular. He selected the twenty best paintings from this series, took them back to his Paris studio and after a little bit of reworking, put them up for exhibition wherein he managed to sell eight of them. The exhibition was very well received. The fact that Monet chose a cathedral as his subject must’ve appealed to the elite gentry and the fact that the Rouen Cathedral was of the traditional French Gothic Style was seen to be representing the very best of the French history and culture.
Apart from these, for the first time, an impressionist painter was able to show to the world the validity of his ideology. Here were twenty paintings of the same subject, painted from the same position, looking at the same facade and at the same angle and yet, each and every painting had an emotive quality wildly different from any other. This exhaustive series of paintings clearly illustrated the idea that the impressionists so fiercely stood for, that light and other elements of nature manifest themselves as just an important a subject than any other physical object or situation. Each and every painting from the collection of twenty paintings of the Rouen Cathedral stirred in the viewer an emotion so profound and yet so different from the other and this went to show that there is something about a cold winter morning’s sunlight that is emotionally different from the light of a summer morning. The Impressionists were, indeed, at the cusp of a revolution.
At this point, it would only be fitting to call the Impressionists pioneers. Not just in bringing the common man and daily activities to the fore but rather they were pioneers at something more revolutionary. Their impressions were in some sense, an attempt at quantifying emotions. They look at emotions and feelings in a purely empirical fashion. One would assume that the things we feel and the way we feel things are purely a consequence of our personal experience and associations, say, how we feel on a particular day is assumed to be a consequence of the most recent circumstances in our life. One would even think that emotions are arbitrary, in the sense that they are capricious entities; that they have no predictable trajectory - one could go from happy to sad in a matter of a few seconds without any plausible justification. The impressionists are pioneers because they postulated that the emotions we feel, are not just arbitrary or circumstantial, but are rather carefully orchestrated symphonies played out by the various instruments of nature.
Of course, personal circumstances strongly guide the emotions we feel but one should see them as paints against the canvas that is the natural condition at the given moment. Sunlight, the intensity of it, the time of day it is falling at the time of the year it is falling at; rain, the speed at which it is pouring, the sound it is making by crashing against your window, the colour of the sky when it is raining - these are the things that set precedent for our emotions. Materials and situations untiringly transform themselves with the changing conditions of nature and the Impressionists were very astute in capturing that.
Jean Clay in his book Impressionism writes that “Impressionism was born when the idea was imposed on psychology that the visible world was not only composed of solids but is also bathed in an undulating field. With painters, the concrete henceforth gave way to fluctuating, the permanent to the ethereal.” While looking at an impressionist painting, you get this sense connected to something beyond the situation and emotion realised by means of the painting. There’s this transcendental quality that you just cannot put a finger on.
It’s fascinating how light affects our perception of life and life in itself. Even today I remember my teacher rambling at us in school that without light, we cannot see anything and how we can only see an object when it reflects the light falling on it. I think, without light we cannot feel anything. Or rather we’d only feel an endless unsubstantiated angst. Light is the benefactor that lets us explore the rich compounded spectrum of human emotions and without it, we’d be left to the whims of the banality of our associations and interactions and lose that mystical element of emotional ambiguity.