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Updated: May 31, 2025
I shall define later on the ideas of the Impressionists on technique, composition and style in painting. Meanwhile it will be necessary to indicate their principal precursors.
This work of Manet, so much discussed and produced under such tormenting conditions, owes its importance beyond all to its power and frankness. Ten years of developing the first manner, tragically limited by the war of 1870; thirteen years of developing the second evolution, parallel with the efforts of the Impressionists.
They should have been musicians or writers, or handle the more satisfactory, if less subtle, cinematograph. Will there ever be a new way of seeing as well as representing life, animate and inanimate? Who shall say? The Impressionists, working on hints from Watteau, Rembrandt, Turner, gave us a fresh view of the universe. Rhythm in art is no new thing.
I never heard him speak of those whose work had a certain analogy with his own of Cezanne, for instance, or of Van Gogh; and I doubt very much if he had ever seen their pictures. He was not greatly interested in the Impressionists. Their technique impressed him, but I fancy that he thought their attitude commonplace.
We could but utter coarse gibes and exclaim, "What could have induced him to paint such things? surely he must have seen that it was absurd. I wonder if the Impressionists are in earnest or if it is only une blague qu'on nous fait?" Then we stood and screamed at Monet, that most exquisite painter of blonde light.
That all Impressionists do not agree with the following is evidenced by the good that comes to us with their mark,—“Opposed to the miserable law of composition, symmetry, balance, arrangement of parts, filling of space, as though Nature herself does not do that ten thousand times better in her own pretty way.” The assertion that composition is a part of Nature’s law, that it is done by her and well done we are glad to hear in the same breath of invective that seeks to annihilate it.
The compact masses of mountains, the bold, sharp forms, the hanging rocks of cold gray emerging from green slopes, the intense blue aerial distances these all had seemed to be unreal and imaginary compositions of the studio. But now I knew that, whether Titian painted out-of-doors, like our modern impressionists, or not, he certainly painted what he had seen, and painted it as it is.
With Manet and his friends we find, then, that the concern for expression and for the sentiments evoked by the subject, was always subordinated to a purely pictorial and decorative preoccupation. This has frequently led the Impressionists to grave errors, which they have, however, generally avoided by confining themselves to very simple subjects, for which the daily life supplied the grouping.
It is only natural that, fascinated by this study, the Impressionists have almost remained strangers to the painting of expression, and altogether hostile to historical and symbolist painting. It is therefore principally in landscape painting that they have achieved the greatness that is theirs.
They might reject him. If so that would merely prove that they did not recognize a radical departure from accepted methods and subject matter as art. The impressionists, he understood, were being so ignored. Later they would accept him. If he were admitted it would simply mean that they knew better than he believed they did.
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