Cezanne, Matisse, Monet, Picasso—the impressionist and post-impressionist painters bring in the big crowds at the museums. Van Gogh posters have had a fifty-year run as best sellers.
What explains the enduring popularity of the largely French art that, in its day, was seen as shocking and revolutionary?
If one looks at Monet (one of my personal favorites), one encounters the Bohemian promise. If we will but soften our overly rigid and conventional visual expectations, then we will more fully encounter the sensuous, life-giving beauty of reality. It’s a reparative promise, one based on an essential optimism: the human person is fit for beauty and happiness. Loosen the harness of inherited culture, and we will life more fully.
This Bohemian promise differs from the revolutionary ambition or conceptual coldness in other, later trends in modern art. The excitement of Cubism comes from a feeling that our ordinary perceptions are exposed and shown to be arbitrary constructions. Kandinsky reflects a continuation of this trend, which I think of an a visual form of postmodern critique. He treated ordinary aesthetic sensibilities as a anatomy professor does a cadaver, dissecting, cutting, and exposing.
Middle class Americans vote with their feet. They—we—prefer the Bohemian promise to the revolutionary or analytical modes of art. And not surprisingly. By and large, the last fifty years of middle class culture has not seen an overturning of social norms, but instead a Bohemian softening, not for the sake of deep changes, but in order to allow for more plastic, more sensual ways of life. The old haute bourgeois rigidity (a classicism of culture, to use the artistic analogy) is pretty much gone. People still want to get married, still want to have children, still want to be economically successful, still want to be responsible citizen. But they want to do so as people living inside a Monet painting—with relaxed boundaries, blurred lines, flexible rules.
What to think? A great deal I suppose. But one thought: the mass appeal of Impressionism should warn us against apocalyptic anxieties about contemporary middle class culture. We don’t live in a revolutionary age, at least not at the level of taste. We live in a relaxing age, which, at the end of the day, wants to enrich and preserve rather than destroy and overturn. At least that’s what I find myself thinking when I’m standing in line to see a Cezanne exhibit at the MET.
August 18th, 2010 | 11:40 am
For me, I’ve always viewed Impressionism as fundamentally escapist. I find it odd that it would exist in the middle of European industrialization and not really deal with the issues created by it at all. I think that perhaps the enduring appeal of Impressionism is in fact not its idealization of reality, but its escape from it. Cubism, it seems to me, at least attempts to deal with the hard edges of life. To put a theological twist on it, I think that Impressionism denies original sin and a lot of early 20th century art responds to it by portraying the sin – though often the artists thought their own art was redemptive, rather than pointing to the need for redemption.
Just opinions, I’m no trained art critic.
August 18th, 2010 | 2:08 pm
I guess personally I’m more worried about the 20% unemployment rate and rampant political corruption than about a decline in cultural aesthetics.
August 18th, 2010 | 2:37 pm
Um, a good deal of the Impressionist technique was designed to distinguish what impresses upon the eyes in the first instance from how the brain interprets it.
The best way to appreciate this technique is to remember looking at something that you could not tell what it was, but had to study it for a while for your brain to interpret the depth and shapes and colors. A lot of Impressionist paintings try to capture that difference.
It’s actually more scientific than romantic in that sense.
August 18th, 2010 | 5:09 pm
It is one thing to “wants to enrich and preserve rather than destroy and overturn”. It is another to actually enrich and preserve rather than destroy and overturn — especially when you are all relaxed.
August 18th, 2010 | 7:40 pm
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August 19th, 2010 | 7:26 am
Getting Cezanne, Monet and Van Gogh all tangled up like that is really not very accurate either. Cezanne was an analyst, Van Gogh an emotional painter lost in a personal drama (don’t we all know that?) and Monet doing what Liam describes (witness the endless series of pictures of hay stacks, cathedral facades and water lilies). This post says something about what we take away 120 years later as much as what the artists were actually interested in doing. But I too run to the late 19th c. French pictures in any museum – the formal qualities of surfaces, the colors, being able to see the brush strokes, and even having a sense of the stories surrounding their creation – all of that goes into the experience of the picture. And yet, having said all that, there is something in this article I agree with. I think there is a directness in these pictures and a last ditch effort to encounter natural beauty in some fundamental way that is more or less immediate, paring away the accretions and weight of European art history so that we might see again, and it points to the values the author of this post indicates – things that are there that have always been there if we would only look again with fresh eyes. I’m a little late, but I enjoyed this article. Thanks.
August 19th, 2010 | 11:10 am
There is a kind of Williams Sonoma effect at work–the life of sunny simple pleasures we meant to have one day (sigh).
Or course, Monet’s simple subjects were necessary to what he was trying to do technically, which was very complex. But the technical and “scientific” aspect of his work was not all there was to it (although he was accused of being “only an eye”).
The Impressionists were deeply sympathetic to a stream in French art represented by Chardin, Corot, Courbet, etc.–an older counter-aesthetic to academic grandiosity. (“The best subjects are the simple ones,” said Renoir. “What is wanted is simple painting, no tricks,” said Manet.) This was felt as a “modern” sensibility, fitting for the times, and a necessary break with the burdened past. Beautiful color, and easy, simple pleasures–what’s not to like? Open up the windows, and let in some fresh air. Impressionism won the day, and Cezanne and Van Gogh, while different, are certainly part of this colorful and free new thing, which was bigger than Monet’s technical goals.
I think Dr. Reno is right on why we respond to this lovely, unburdened art. But these artists felt comfortable jettisoning the past because the future seemed so promising and solidly grounded on rationality and science. (Impressionism was not escapist, but just really confident in the possibilities of life lived directly.) We no longer feel this same confidence, and so must view this work with a little sadness and nostalgia. For us it is a bit escapist, I guess.
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