Impressionism in French Painting. What is the difference between Russian impressionism in painting and French? Impressionism as an art movement

Impressionism is a direction in painting that originated in France in the 19th-20th centuries, which is an artistic attempt to capture any moment of life in all its variability and mobility. Impressionist paintings are like a qualitatively washed-out photograph, reviving in fantasy the continuation of the story seen. In this article, we take a look at 10 of the world's most famous impressionists. Fortunately, there are more than ten, twenty or even a hundred talented artists, so let's focus on those names that you need to know for sure.

In order not to offend either the artists or their admirers, the list is given in Russian alphabetical order.

1. Alfred Sisley

This French painter of English origin is considered the most famous landscape painter of the second half of the 19th century. There are more than 900 paintings in his collection, of which the most famous are “Country Alley”, “Frost in Louveciennes”, “Bridge in Argenteuil”, “Early Snow in Louveciennes”, “Lawns in Spring”, and many others.

2. Van Gogh

Known to the whole world for the sad story about his ear (by the way, he did not cut off the whole ear, but only the lobe), Wang Gon became popular only after his death. And in his life he was able to sell a single painting, 4 months before his death. It is said that he was both an entrepreneur and a priest, but often ended up in psychiatric hospitals due to depression, so all the rebelliousness of his existence resulted in legendary works.

3. Camille Pissarro

Pissarro was born on the island of St. Thomas, in a family of bourgeois Jews, and was one of the few impressionists whose parents encouraged his hobby and soon sent him to Paris to study. Most of all, the artist liked nature, and he depicted it in all colors, or more precisely, Pissarro had a special talent for choosing the softness of colors, compatibility, after which air seemed to appear in the paintings.

4. Claude Monet

From childhood, the boy decided that he would become an artist, despite the prohibitions of the family. Having moved to Paris on his own, Claude Monet plunged into the gray everyday life of a hard life: two years in the service in the armed forces in Algeria, litigation with creditors due to poverty, illness. However, one gets the feeling that the difficulties did not oppress, but rather inspired the artist to create such vivid paintings as “Impression, Sunrise”, “Parliament Building in London”, “Bridge to Europe”, “Autumn in Argenteuil”, “On the Shore Trouville, and many others.

5. Konstantin Korovin

It's nice to know that among the French, the parents of impressionism, one can proudly place our compatriot - Konstantin Korovin. Passionate love for nature helped him intuitively give unimaginable liveliness to a static picture, thanks to the combination of suitable colors, width of strokes, choice of theme. It is impossible to pass by his paintings "Pier in Gurzuf", "Fish, Wine and Fruit", "Autumn Landscape", "Moonlight Night. Winter” and a series of his works dedicated to Paris.

6. Paul Gauguin

Until the age of 26, Paul Gauguin did not even think about painting. He was an entrepreneur and had a large family. However, when I first saw the paintings of Camille Pissarro, I decided that I would certainly begin to paint. Over time, the artist's style has changed, but the most famous impressionistic paintings are "Garden in the Snow", "At the Cliff", "On the Beach in Dieppe", "Nude", "Palms in Martinique" and others.

7. Paul Cezanne

Cezanne, unlike most of his colleagues, became famous during his lifetime. He managed to organize his own exhibition and gain considerable income from it. People knew a lot about his paintings - he, like no one else, learned to combine the play of light and shadow, made a loud emphasis on regular and irregular geometric shapes, the severity of the themes of his paintings were in harmony with romance.

8. Pierre Auguste Renoir

Until the age of 20, Renoir worked as a fan decorator for his older brother, and only then he moved to Paris, where he met Monet, Basil and Sisley. This acquaintance helped him in the future to take the road of impressionism and become famous on it. Renoir is known as the author of a sentimental portrait, among his most outstanding works - "On the terrace", "Walk", "Portrait of the actress Jeanne Samary", "The Lodge", "Alfred Sisley and his wife", "On a swing", "The Frog" and a lot others.

9. Edgar Degas

If you haven't heard anything about the "Blue Dancers", "Ballet Rehearsals", "Ballet School" and "Absinthe" - hurry up to learn more about the work of Edgar Degas. The selection of original colors, unique themes for paintings, the feeling of movement of the picture - all this and much more made Degas one of the most famous artists in the world.

10. Edouard Manet

Do not confuse Manet with Monet - these are two different people who worked at the same time and in the same artistic direction. Manet was always attracted by everyday scenes, unusual appearances and types, as if by chance "caught" moments, subsequently captured for centuries. Among the famous paintings of Manet: "Olympia", "Breakfast on the Grass", "Bar at the Folies Bergère", "Flutist", "Nana" and others.

If you have even the slightest opportunity to see the paintings of these masters live, you will fall in love with impressionism forever!

Alexandra Skripkina,

The word "Impressionism" is derived from the French "impression" - impression. This is a direction of painting that originated in France in the 1860s. and largely determined the development of art in the 19th century. The central figures of this trend were Cezanne, Degas, Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir and Sisley, and the contribution of each of them to its development is unique. The Impressionists opposed the conventions of classicism, romanticism and academism, asserted the beauty of everyday reality, simple, democratic motives, achieved a lively authenticity of the image, tried to capture the “impression” of what the eye sees at a particular moment, without focusing on drawing specific details.

In the spring of 1874, a group of young painters, including Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Degas, Cezanne and Berthe Morisot, neglected the official Salon and staged their own exhibition. Such an act was in itself revolutionary and broke with age-old foundations, while the paintings of these artists at first glance seemed even more hostile to tradition. The reaction to this innovation from visitors and critics was far from friendly. They accused the artists of writing simply to attract the attention of the public, and not in the way that recognized masters do. The most condescending considered their work as a mockery, as an attempt to play a trick on honest people. It took years of fierce struggle before these, later recognized, classics of painting were able to convince the public not only of their sincerity, but also of their talent.

Trying to express their immediate impressions of things as accurately as possible, the Impressionists created a new method of painting. Its essence was to convey the external impression of light, shadow, reflexes on the surface of objects with separate strokes of pure colors, which visually dissolved the form in the surrounding light-air environment. In their favorite genres (landscape, portrait, multi-figure composition), they tried to convey their fleeting impressions of the world around them (scenes on the street, in cafes, sketches of Sunday walks, etc.). The Impressionists portrayed a life full of natural poetry, where a person is in unity with the environment, eternally changeable, striking in richness and sparkling with pure, bright colors.

After the first exhibition in Paris, these artists began to be called impressionists, from the French word "impression" - "impression". This word was suitable for their works, because in them the artists conveyed their direct impression of what they saw. Artists approached the image of the world in a new way. The main theme for them was the quivering light, the air in which people and objects are, as it were, immersed. In their paintings, one could feel the wind, the damp, sun-warmed earth. They sought to show the amazing richness of color in nature. Impressionism was the last major artistic movement in 19th century France.

This is not to say that the path of the Impressionist artists was easy. At first they were not recognized, their painting was too bold and unusual, they were laughed at. Nobody wanted to buy their paintings. But they stubbornly went their own way. Neither poverty nor hunger could force them to abandon their beliefs. Many years passed, many of the Impressionist painters were no longer alive when their art was finally recognized.

All these very different artists were united by a common struggle against conservatism and academicism in art. The Impressionists held eight exhibitions, the last in 1886. This actually ends the history of impressionism as a trend in painting, after which each of the artists went his own way.

One of the paintings presented at the first exhibition of the "independents", as the artists preferred to call themselves, belonged to Claude Monet and was called "Impression. Sunrise". In a newspaper review of the exhibition that appeared the next day, the critic L. Leroy scoffed in every possible way at the lack of “formality” in the paintings, ironically inclining the word “impression” in every way, as if replacing true art in the works of young artists. Against expectations, the new word, uttered in mockery, took root and served as the name of the whole movement, since it perfectly expressed the common thing that united all participants in the exhibition - the subjective experience of color, light, space. Trying to express their immediate impressions of things as accurately as possible, artists freed themselves from traditional rules and created a new method of painting.

The Impressionists put forward their own principles of perception and display of the surrounding world. They erased the line between the main objects worthy of high art and secondary objects, established a direct and feedback relationship between them. The impressionistic method thus became the maximum expression of the very principle of painting. The pictorial approach to the image just involves the identification of the relationship of the subject with the world around it. The new method forced the viewer to decipher not so much the vicissitudes of the plot as the secrets of the painting itself.

The essence of the impressionistic vision of nature and its image lies in the weakening of the active, analytical perception of three-dimensional space and reducing it to the original two-dimensionality of the canvas, determined by a planar visual setting, in the words of A. Hildebrand, “distant looking at nature”, which leads to the distraction of the depicted object from its material qualities, merging with the environment, almost completely turning it into “appearance”, an appearance that dissolves in light and air. It is no coincidence that P. Cezanne later called the leader of the French Impressionists Claude Monet "only an eye." This "detachment" of visual perception also led to the suppression of the "color of memory", that is, the connection of color with the usual subject representations and associations, according to which the sky is always blue and the grass is green. The Impressionists could, depending on their vision, paint the sky green and the grass blue. "Objective plausibility" was sacrificed to the laws of visual perception. For example, J. Seurat enthusiastically told everyone how he discovered that the orange coastal sand in the shade is bright blue. Thus, the principle of contrasting perception of complementary colors was put at the basis of the pictorial method.

For an impressionist artist, for the most part, it is not what he depicts that matters, but the “how” is important. The object becomes only an occasion for solving purely pictorial, “visual” tasks. Therefore, impressionism originally had another, later forgotten name - “chromantism” (from the Greek Chroma - color). The Impressionists updated coloring, they abandoned dark, earthy colors and applied pure, spectral colors to the canvas, almost without mixing them first on the palette. The naturalism of impressionism consisted in the fact that the most uninteresting, ordinary, prosaic turned into beautiful, as soon as the artist saw the subtle nuances of gray and blue there.

The brevity, etude nature of the creative method of impressionism is characteristic. After all, only a short study made it possible to accurately record individual states of nature. The Impressionists were the first to break with the traditional principles of spatial painting dating back to the Renaissance and Baroque. They used asymmetrical compositions to better highlight the characters and objects they were interested in. But the paradox was that, having abandoned the naturalism of academic art, destroying its canons and declaring the aesthetic value of fixing everything fleeting, random, the Impressionists remained captive to naturalistic thinking, and even, moreover, in many ways it was a step backwards. One can recall the words of O. Spengler that "Rembrandt's landscape lies somewhere in the endless spaces of the world, while Claude Monet's landscape is close to the railway station"

The phrase "Russian Impressionism" only a year ago cut the ear of the average citizen of our vast country. Every educated person knows about the light, bright and impetuous French impressionism, can distinguish Monet from Manet and recognize Van Gogh's sunflowers from all still lifes. Someone heard something about the American branch of the development of this direction of painting - more urban compared to the French landscapes of Hassam and portraits of Chase. But researchers argue about the existence of Russian impressionism to this day.

Konstantin Korovin

The history of Russian impressionism began with the painting "Portrait of a chorus girl" by Konstantin Korovin, as well as with misunderstanding and condemnation of the public. When I first saw this work, I. E. Repin did not immediately believe that the work was done by a Russian painter: “Spaniard! I see. Boldly, juicy writes. Wonderful. But it's just painting for painting's sake. Spaniard, however, with temperament ... ". Konstantin Alekseevich himself began to paint his canvases in an impressionistic manner as early as his student years, being unfamiliar with the paintings of Cezanne, Monet and Renoir, long before his trip to France. Only thanks to Polenov's experienced eye did Korovin learn that he was using the technique of the French of that time, which he came to intuitively. At the same time, the Russian artist is betrayed by the subjects that he uses for his paintings - the recognized masterpiece "Northern Idyll", written in 1892 and stored in the Tretyakov Gallery, shows us Korovin's love for Russian traditions and folklore. This love was instilled in the artist by the "Mammoth Circle" - a community of creative intelligentsia, which included Repin, Polenov, Vasnetsov, Vrubel and many other friends of the famous philanthropist Savva Mamontov. In Abramtsevo, where Mamontov's estate was located and where members of the art circle gathered, Korovin was fortunate enough to meet and work with Valentin Serov. Thanks to this acquaintance, the work of the already accomplished artist Serov acquired the features of light, bright and impetuous impressionism, which we see in one of his early works - “Open Window. Lilac".

Portrait of a chorus girl, 1883

Northern idyll, 1886

Bird cherry, 1912

Gurzuf 2, 1915

Pier in Gurzuf, 1914

Paris, 1933

Valentin Serov

Serov's painting is permeated with a feature inherent only in Russian impressionism - his paintings reflect not only the impression of what the artist saw, but also the state of his soul at the moment. For example, in the painting "St. Mark's Square in Venice", painted in Italy, where Serov went to in 1887 due to a serious illness, cold gray tones predominate, which gives us an idea of ​​the artist's condition. But, despite the rather gloomy palette, the picture is a reference impressionistic work, since on it Serov managed to capture the real world in its mobility and variability, to convey his fleeting impressions. In a letter to his bride from Venice, Serov wrote: “In this century, everything is written that is difficult, nothing encouraging. I want, I want what is gratifying, and I will write only what is gratifying.”

Open window. Lilac, 1886

St. Mark's Square in Venice, 1887

Girl with peaches (Portrait of V. S. Mamontova)

Coronation. Confirmation of Nicholas II in the Assumption Cathedral, 1896

Girl illuminated by the sun, 1888

Bathing a horse, 1905

Alexander Gerasimov

One of the students of Korovin and Serov, who adopted their expressive brushstroke, bright palette and etude style of writing, was Alexander Mikhailovich Gerasimov. The heyday of the artist's work came at the time of the revolution, which could not but be reflected in the plots of his paintings. Despite the fact that Gerasimov gave his brush to the service of the party and became famous for his outstanding portraits of Lenin and Stalin, he continued to work on impressionistic landscapes that were close to his soul. The work of Alexander Mikhailovich “After the Rain” reveals to us the artist as a master of conveying air and light in the picture, which Gerasimov owes to the influence of his eminent mentors.

Painters at Stalin's dacha, 1951

Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin, 1950s

After the rain. Wet Terrace, 1935

Still life. Field bouquet, 1952

Igor Grabar

In a conversation about late Russian impressionism, one cannot help but turn to the work of the great artist Igor Emmanuilovich Grabar, who adopted many of the techniques of French painters of the second half of the 19th century thanks to his numerous trips to Europe. Using the techniques of the classical impressionists, Grabar depicts absolutely Russian landscape motifs and everyday scenes in his paintings. While Monet paints the blooming gardens of Giverny, and Degas paints beautiful ballerinas, Grabar depicts the harsh Russian winter and village life with the same pastel colors. Most of all, Grabar liked to depict frost on his canvases and dedicated a whole collection of works to him, consisting of more than a hundred small multi-colored sketches created at different times of the day and in different weather. The difficulty of working on such drawings was that the paint hardened in the cold, so I had to work quickly. But this is precisely what allowed the artist to recreate “that very moment” and convey his impression of it, which is the main idea of ​​classical impressionism. Often Igor Emmanuilovich's style of painting is called scientific impressionism, because he attached great importance to light and air on canvases and created many studies on color reproduction. Moreover, it is to him that we owe the chronological arrangement of paintings in the Tretyakov Gallery, of which he was director in 1920-1925.

Birch alley, 1940

Winter landscape, 1954

Hoarfrost, 1905

Pears on a blue tablecloth, 1915

Corner of the estate (Ray of the sun), 1901

Yuri Pimenov

Completely non-classical, but still, impressionism developed in the Soviet era, a prominent representative of which is Yuri Ivanovich Pimenov, who came to the image of a “fleeting impression in pastel colors” after working in the style of expressionism. One of the most famous works of Pimenov is the painting "New Moscow" of the 1930s - light, warm, as if painted with Renoir's airy strokes. But at the same time, the plot of this work is completely incompatible with one of the main ideas of impressionism - the rejection of the use of social and political themes. "New Moscow" Pimenov just perfectly reflects the social changes in the life of the city, which have always inspired the artist. “Pimenov loves Moscow, its new, its people. The painter generously gives this feeling to the viewer,” wrote artist and researcher Igor Dolgopolov in 1973. And indeed, looking at the paintings of Yuri Ivanovich, we are imbued with love for Soviet life, new quarters, lyrical housewarming and urbanism, captured in the technique of impressionism.

Pimenov's work proves once again that everything "Russian", brought from other countries, has its own special and unique path of development. So French impressionism in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union absorbed the features of the Russian worldview, national character and way of life. Impressionism as a way of conveying only the perception of reality in its pure form remained alien to Russian art, because each picture of Russian artists is filled with meaning, awareness, the state of the changeable Russian soul, and not just a fleeting impression. Therefore, next weekend, when the Museum of Russian Impressionism will re-present the main exposition to Muscovites and guests of the capital, everyone will find something for themselves among the sensual portraits of Serov, Pimenov's urbanism and landscapes atypical for Kustodiev.

New Moscow

Lyrical housewarming, 1965

Dressing room of the Bolshoi Theatre, 1972

Early morning in Moscow, 1961

Paris. Rue Saint-Dominique. 1958

Stewardess, 1964

Perhaps, for most people, the names of Korovin, Serov, Gerasimov and Pimenov are still not associated with a certain style of art, but the Museum of Russian Impressionism, which opened in May 2016 in Moscow, nevertheless collected the works of these artists under one roof.

Impressionism (French impressionnisme, from impression - impression), a trend in the art of the last third of the 19th - early 20th century, whose masters, fixing their fleeting impressions, sought to most naturally and impartially capture the real world in its mobility and variability. Impressionism originated in French painting in the late 1860s. Edouard Manet (who was not formally a member of the Impressionist group), Degas, Renoir, Monet brought freshness and immediacy to the perception of life in fine art.

French artists turned to the depiction of instantaneous situations snatched from the stream of reality, the spiritual life of a person, the depiction of strong passions, the spiritualization of nature, interest in the national past, the desire for synthetic forms of art are combined with the motives of world sorrow, the desire to explore and recreate the "shadow", " night" side of the human soul, with the famous "romantic irony" that allowed the romantics to boldly compare and equalize the high and the low, the tragic and the comic, the real and the fantastic. Impressionist artists used the fragmentary realities of situations, used seemingly unbalanced compositional constructions, unexpected angles, points of view, cuts of figures.

In the 1870s-1880s, the landscape of French impressionism was formed: C. Monet, C. Pissarro, A. Sisley developed a consistent plein air system, created in their paintings a feeling of sparkling sunlight, richness of colors of nature, dissolution of forms in the vibration of light and air. The name of the direction comes from the name of the painting by Claude Monet "Impression. Rising Sun" ("Impression. Soleil levant"; exhibited in 1874, now at the Musée Marmottan, Paris). The decomposition of complex colors into pure components, which were superimposed on the canvas in separate strokes, colored shadows, reflections and valery gave rise to an unparalleled light, quivering impressionist painting.

Certain aspects and techniques of this trend in painting were used by painters from Germany (M. Lieberman, L. Corinth), the USA (J. Whistler), Sweden (A.L. Zorn), Russia (K.A. Korovin, I.E. Grabar ) and many other national art schools. The concept of impressionism is also applied to the sculpture of the 1880s-1910s, which has some impressionistic features - the desire to convey instantaneous movement, fluidity and softness of form, plastic sketchiness (works by O. Rodin, bronze statuettes by Degas, etc.). Impressionism in the visual arts influenced the development of expressive means of contemporary literature, music, and theater. In interaction and in controversy with the pictorial system of this style, neo-impressionism and post-impressionism emerged in the artistic culture of France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

neo-impressionism(French neo-impressionnisme) - a trend in painting that arose in France around 1885, when its main masters, J. Seurat and P. Signac, developed a new painting technique of divisionism. The French neo-impressionists and their followers (T. van Reiselberg in Belgium, G. Segantini in Italy and others), developing the tendencies of late impressionism, sought to apply modern discoveries in the field of optics to art, giving a methodical character to the methods of decomposing tones into pure colors; at the same time, they overcame the randomness, fragmentation of the impressionistic composition, resorted to flat-decorative solutions in their landscapes and multi-figured panel paintings.

post-impressionism(from lat. post - after and impressionism) - the collective name of the main trends in French painting of the late 19th - early 20th centuries. Since the mid-1880s, post-impressionist masters have been looking for new expressive means that can overcome the empiricism of artistic thinking and allow them to move from the impressionistic fixation of individual moments of life to the embodiment of its long-term states, material and spiritual constants. The period of post-impressionism is characterized by the active interaction of individual trends and individual creative systems. Post-impressionism usually ranks as the work of neo-impressionist masters, the Nabis group, as well as V. van Gogh, P. Cezanne, P. Gauguin.

Reference and biographical data of the Small Bay Planet Art Gallery are prepared on the basis of materials from the History of Foreign Art (edited by M.T. Kuzmina, N.L. Maltseva), the Artistic Encyclopedia of Foreign Classical Art, and the Great Russian Encyclopedia.

Many of Manet's searches were picked up and developed by a group of artists who entered the history of art under the name of the Impressionists. Impressionism, the last major artistic movement in 19th century art, originated in France in the 1860s. Its name comes from the French word impression - impression. This was the name of Claude Monet's landscape ("Impression. Sunrise", 1872), shown in 1874, together with the works of other young French artists, at the exhibition of "independent" in Nadar's photography studio in Paris. This was the first exhibition of the Impressionists, although by that time the leading representatives of Impressionism were already fully formed artists.
Impressionism is a complex artistic phenomenon that often causes conflicting assessments to this day. This is partly due to the fact that artists with a pronounced individuality, often with very dissimilar creative quests, were associated with him. However, some important common features make it possible to unite a number of masters of French fine arts (as well as literature and music) into a single movement.
Impressionism arose in the depths of French realistic art. Young representatives of this trend called themselves followers of Courbet. Like the realism of the middle of the 19th century, impressionism, especially in the early stages of its development, opposed official academic art with hostility. Impressionist artists were rejected by the Salon, their art met with fierce attacks from official criticism.
Following the masters of realism of the middle of the century, the Impressionists opposed the deathly, divorced from the life of academic art. Their main task, they considered the image of modern reality in its various individual manifestations. They tried to capture the simplest motifs of modern life and nature, which had rarely attracted the attention of artists before. Protesting against the dryness and abstractness of academic art, against its conditional stamps and schemes, the Impressionists sought to convey all the freshness of their direct impressions of reality, the colorful richness of the visible world, its diversity and variability. Hence - the search for a new creative method, characteristic of impressionism, the development of some new means of artistic expression. First of all, this is a peculiar understanding of the composition, free, direct, as if accidental, interest in the transfer of the dynamics of the surrounding world, and finally, special attention to pictorial problems, to the transfer of light and air. Putting forward as an obligatory requirement to work on the player, the Impressionists enriched painting with many coloristic achievements, overcame the conventionality of the color range, characteristic of most of their predecessors, achieved great success in conveying the light-air medium, the effect of light on color. All this gives the painting of the Impressionists freshness and colorful richness.
However, while paying tribute to the indisputable realist achievements of the Impressionists, one cannot fail to note the limitations of their worldview and method. The very approach of the Impressionists to the depiction of reality was fraught with the danger of slipping over the surface of phenomena, of rejecting great life and, even more so, social generalizations. Seeking, first of all, to most directly convey the world around them, the Impressionists attach leading importance to the visual impression. The fixation of fleeting, fleeting visual sensations in their work reaches amazing authenticity, but sometimes it replaces a deep and comprehensive knowledge of the world. Therefore, although the art of impressionism is enriched with new subjects and motifs, it no longer solves big topics of high social significance. The Impressionists perfectly conveyed nature, filled with sun and air, the iridescent shimmer of colors and play of light; they captured on their canvases the captivating brilliance and dynamics of modern life; they discovered the artistic value of many motifs of reality; but they proved unable to express the advanced democratic ideals of their time. Social, and sometimes even psychological problems cease to interest these artists, and their art loses the active social significance that progressive romanticism and democratic realism had in France. Therefore, already in connection with impressionism, one can speak of the elements of the crisis of realistic art, which is deprived of a truly democratic content and critical sharpness.
The ideological limitations of this trend was the main reason for the short duration of its heyday. The rise of Impressionism dates back to the 1870s and early 1880s. In 1886, the last exhibition of the Impressionists took place, but already before it there were significant differences in the group. And although in the future many prominent masters of impressionism still continue to work, they either depart from the principles of this trend, experiencing dissatisfaction with its limitations (Renoir), or no longer create anything fundamentally new. For the crisis that impressionism has been experiencing since the mid-1880s, it is significant, in particular, that many of the achievements of this trend, taken to extremes, turn into their opposite. At this time, some artists, more and more indifferent to the content of their art, give all their strength to pictorial and technical quests, often combining them with decorative trends (C. Monet). The desire to convey the sunlight as accurately as possible leads them to excessive brightening of the palette, the desire to capture the vibration of the air - to the abuse of the system of separate strokes. Stubborn technical searches in the field of light and color are often carried out to the detriment of plastic form and pattern. Many Impressionists, refusing a plot thematic picture, come to etude, neglecting a complete, thoughtful, holistic composition.
By 1886, all the tasks put forward by Impressionism were solved. Further development in the field of narrow tasks of this direction was impossible, it urgently required the formulation of new big themes, deeper problems, as well as a greater breadth and diversity of the creative method.
Having originated and reached its fullest flowering in France, since the late 1880s, impressionism has spread to other countries, where many prominent artists have joined this trend.
Edgar Degas. The greatest French artist of that time, Edgar Degas (1834-1917), was closely associated with Impressionism. He was one of the organizers and participants of almost all exhibitions of the Impressionists. However, in this current, Degas occupies a special place. With impressionism, he is related by the desire to capture the dynamics of modern life, interest in the transmission of light, some pictorial and coloristic searches. At the same time, very much in the method of the Impressionists was deeply alien to him. In particular, he disapproved of their commitment to the visual impression, considering their approach to reality too passive. Degas denied working on the player and created almost all of his paintings in the studio. Summarizing his observations of nature, the artist has always sought to convey its essence and character. “It is impossible to imagine art less directly than mine,” said Degas. “My work is the result of reflection, the study of masters, it is a matter of inspiration, character, patient observation.”
Degas went through an academic school in the workshop of Lamotte. The passion for Ingres and Poussin was reflected in many of the artist’s early works, solved in the classic spirit (“The Competition of Spartan Boys and Girls”, 1860, London, National Gallery). Already in these paintings, the honed mastery of drawing, inherent in Degas, an interest in the transfer of movement, as well as the desire to renew academic painting with a sharp observation of nature, is manifested. In the future, Degas turns exclusively to the image of modern life. The characteristic features of Degas' skill first manifested themselves in his portraits, many of which can be named among the best examples of a realistic portrait of modern times. They convey the models truthfully and accurately, they are distinguished by the seriousness and subtlety of psychological characteristics, the originality of compositional solutions, the classical rigor of the drawing, and the refined mastery of color. Among them are a portrait of the Belleli family (1860-1862, Louvre), a portrait of a woman (1867, Paris, Louvre), a portrait of the father of the artist and guitarist Pagan (c. 1872, Chicago, private collection) and striking courage, liveliness and immediacy of the decision portrait of Lepic with his daughters (Concorde Square, 1873).
Genre works by Degas make up a brilliant picture of the mores of modern Paris. Their subjects are diverse and cover many phenomena of modern reality. The sharpness of observation and a careful study of nature are often combined in them with caustic irony and a pessimistic attitude towards the depicted. Degas often focuses his attention on the unattractive aspects of reality and conveys them with the cold ruthlessness inherent in his skeptical mind. This is characteristic of his paintings, depicting the life of bohemia, cafe visitors, singers performing in cafe-concerts. Thus, in the famous painting "Absinthe" (1876, Louvre), Degas managed with great realistic persuasiveness and sharpness to capture the characteristic scene of modern life and create expressive images of two fallen people.
The favorite theme of Degas's work was theater and ballet. With equal skill, the artist depicts the boring, tedious everyday life of ballerinas - lessons, rehearsals, scenes in the dressing rooms, and the colorful, festive extravaganza of ballet performances. In these works, Degas's inherent ability to capture and convey the often transient, instantaneous, but always characteristic postures and movements of figures, facial expressions is reflected.
Degas's attention was also attracted by labor scenes. In numerous images of laundresses (Paris, Louvre; New York, private collection), the artist managed to convey both the burden of labor and its tedious monotony. In these works, Degas often rises to social generalizations in the characteristic and sharply conveyed images of women from the people. True, unlike Daumier, he is not characterized by the desire to emphasize the moral strength and dignity of the common man.
Degas's pictorial manner develops from the meticulousness of execution in his early works to ever greater freedom and breadth. In his pictorial quest, he in many ways approaches the Impressionists; his palette brightens, he uses pure color, imposes it with separate strokes or strokes (in pastels). The artist shows great interest in the transmission of light (mainly artificial) and air. The latter is especially evident in many depictions of horse races. However, the approximate, monotonous and limited manner of the Impressionists were unusual for him. Picturesque searches, technical experiments, the development of sharp and varied color solutions Degas combined with a strict drawing and great attention to composition. For all their liveliness, surprise and immediacy, Degas' compositions are always carefully thought out and masterfully constructed.
In the late period of creativity, Degas worked mainly in pastels, often depicting nudes. These are usually women, busy washing, combing their hair, getting out of the bath, getting dressed. The artist sharply captures in these works various, sometimes awkward and ugly movements of the human body. All these works are marked by high and original skill. However, Degas's almost exclusive appeal to the image of the nude testifies to the well-known ideological and thematic limitations of his late work.
In addition to oil paintings and pastels, Degas left many works in graphics. He also made a number of sculptures (ballerinas, horse jockeys, nudes), mainly at the end of his life, when, due to an almost complete loss of vision, he was deprived of the opportunity to work in painting.
Degas had a great influence on many French artists of the late 19th century, in particular the so-called "painters of Montmartre". The most significant of the followers of Degas was Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), a sharp draftsman and subtle colorist, who worked a lot in the poster and created in a number of lithographs expressive, often satirical, images of Parisian bohemia not without critical features.
Pierre Auguste Renoir. The work of Renoir (1841-1919), one of the most prominent representatives of impressionism, has a completely different character. Unlike Degas, he was a cheerful artist who captured poetic images of modern Parisians and colorful scenes of Parisian life in his canvases. Renoir began his artistic career as a porcelain painter. In the workshop of Gleyre, where he studied painting for a short time, Renoir became close to C. Monet and Sisley, sharing with them the rejection of the academic routine and Courbet's passion. The influence of the latter marked many of Renoir's works made in the 1860s, for example, "Aunt Antonia's Tavern" (1865, Stockholm, National Museum), a portrait of Sisley with his wife (1868, Cologne, Wallraf-Richart Museum), "Lisa" (1867, Essen, Folkwang Museum). Already in these early works, Renoir paid considerable attention to the transmission of light and pictorial and coloristic problems.
Paintings made in the late 1860s, in particular "The Frog" (1868-1869, Moscow, Pushkin Museum), mark the beginning of the impressionistic period in the artist's work, when he performs his most famous works. At this time (the end of the 1860s and 1870s), he painted mainly portraits and genre paintings, paying some attention to the landscape.
Among Renoir's portraits, children's and women's are the most successful. His works such as The Lodge (1874, London, Courtauld Institute), Girl with a Fan (Hermitage Museum), Portrait of Madame Charpentier with Children (1878, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art), Portrait of the Artist Samary (1877 , Moscow, Pushkin Museum), recreate the characteristic images of contemporary Parisians, their peculiar, unique charm. These portraits cannot be called psychological, but they attract with pictorial skill and persuasiveness of the transfer of models, liveliness of expression, peculiar poetry and a sense of fullness of life inherent in most of Renoir's works.
Genre paintings by Renoir do not differ in the variety or significance of the subject matter. Out-of-town walks of Parisians, open-air holidays - these are the plots of many of his paintings. In them, as in all the artist's work, his cheerful attitude and a somewhat superficial, thoughtless attitude to reality are reflected. But their dignity is the freshness and immediacy of interpretation, the ability to feel the poetic charm of simple motives, to reveal the picturesque richness of reality. His coloring becomes sonorous, varied and iridescent, bright sunlight floods his canvases, a motley noisy Parisian crowd is given in unity with the surrounding light and air environment, erasing the contours of figures and depriving objects of their plastic certainty (“Moulin de la Galette”, 1876, Paris, Louvre ; "Breakfast of the Boatmen", 1881, Washington, Phillips Gallery). While accepting the principles and method of impressionism during this period, Renoir, however, retains in full measure his individual worldview and techniques. His painting technique combines the fractional brushstroke and glazing characteristic of the Impressionists, which gives Renoir's canvases not only a rare colorful richness, but also a coloristic unity.
In the late period of creativity, Renoir moves away from the impressionism. “I reached the limits of impressionism and stated that I can neither write nor draw,” the artist wrote in the early 1880s. The problem of transmitting light and air occupies him much less at this time, he pays more attention to composition, strives for generalization, monumentality, plastic certainty in the interpretation of figures. However, all the changes that occur in the artist's work relate exclusively to the formal side of his art. At this time, Renoir further limits the subject matter of his work, focusing primarily on the depiction of the nude. The fascination with formal problems is combined with purely decorative tendencies, which ultimately leads to a significant conventionality in the interpretation of forms and color in many of the artist's later works.
Claude Monet. All the features of impressionism found the most complete expression in the work of Claude Monet (1840-1926). He was the leader of this trend, he was the first to formulate its principles, developed a player program and a painting technique characteristic of impressionism. Many achievements of this trend are associated with his name. And at the same time, it was precisely in the art of Monet that the limitations of impressionism and the crisis that it had been experiencing since the mid-1880s were especially clearly manifested.
Monet's early works connect impressionism with the realistic art of Courbet, Corot and Daubigny, and also testify to the influence of E. Manet. These are mainly landscapes, portraits and figurative compositions in the open air: Breakfast on the Grass (1866, Moscow, Pushkin Museum), Camille (1866, Bremen, Museum), Woman in the Garden (1865-1866, Hermitage). Many of them are painted en plein air, the artist pays great attention to the transmission of light in them. Since the late 1860s, Monet has been working almost exclusively in the field of landscape, conveying in his canvases direct impressions of nature or city views, attaching increasing importance to the transmission of lighting and air. The best period of his work is the 1870s, when he creates convincing and moody paintings of French nature, characterized by great freshness and coloristic freedom. At this time, he finds many new landscape motifs, simple but attractive, introduces into art the image of the city, squares and boulevards, animated by flickering carriages and a hurrying crowd. To express these motifs, the artist is looking for appropriate painting techniques - lively, pure color, quivering, separate brushstroke ("Capuchin Boulevard in Paris", 1873, Moscow, Pushkin Museum, landscapes made in Argenteuil). However, in the future, the fixation of transient light and atmospheric effects often becomes an end in itself for Monet. The shape and outlines of objects dissolve in the light-air medium, they lose their density and materiality, turn into unsteady colorful spots. Monet strove for scientific accuracy in conveying the effects of light and air on the local colors of objects, studied the laws of complementary colors, paying special attention to the transmission of reflexes, and along this path of technical research reached significant exaggerations. The formal-technical side replaced deep knowledge and disclosure of reality in his work and obscured the integral artistic image in many of his later works. The very motif of nature ceases to interest the artist and becomes only a pretext for conveying color and light effects. This is especially significant for the work of Monet since the late 1880s, when he created a series of landscapes depicting the same motif at different times of the day: a series of haystacks, Rouen cathedrals, views of the Thames, Venice. The perception of nature in these works becomes more and more subjective, and the desire to convey fleeting visual impressions leads to the rejection of a compositionally constructed picture and its replacement with a random sketch. Many of Monet's later works are marked not only by formal technical, but also by decorative quests. This determines in some cases a significant conventionality and deliberateness of compositional and color solutions (series "Waters").
As the head of French impressionism, Monet had a great influence on a number of artists who joined this movement and worked mainly in the field of landscape. Among them, Pissarro and Sisley deserve mention first of all.
Camille Pissarro. Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) in his early works develops the traditions of the French realistic landscape (Courbet, Corot, Barbizon). Then, from the end of the 1860s, having become close to E. Manet and the young artists grouped around him, Pissarro turns to the player, to the brightened, iridescent palette and becomes one of the characteristic representatives of French impressionism. In his paintings, Pissarro depicted the streets of Rouen and Paris, its suburbs and environs, the banks of the Seine, meadows and country roads. Unlike other impressionists, he often introduces the figures of peasants into his rural landscapes. Like all impressionists, Pissarro pays much attention to pictorial searches, the transmission of light and air. However, light and air effects rarely become the main motive in his paintings. In his best landscapes, Pissarro wholeheartedly perceives nature, conveys the richness and diversity of her life. Summarizing his immediate impressions, the artist usually carefully thinks over the compositional structure of the landscape and knows how to give monumentality to the most ordinary motives.
Alfred Speley. More lyrical was the work of Alfred Sisley (1839-1899). Monet's comrade in Gleyre's studio, he joined Corot and Daubigny in his early works, and then became one of the first participants in Impressionist exhibitions. Working exclusively in the field of landscape painting, Sisley usually painted the nature of Ile de France. He was attracted by intimate, immediate motives - fields, villages, banks of rivers and canals, and he knew how to reveal their originality and attractiveness. Sisley had a subtle sense of color, he sensitively captured the variability of nature, the state of the light and air environment. But, adopting the method of Impressionism, he was more restrained in his formal-technical pursuits than other Impressionists, in particular Monet.