Why Claude Monet's Work Became the Public Face of Impressionism
posted on 15 March 2011 | posted in Arts and Entertainment
"Impressionism" was the derogatory name given by critics to the work of a small set of French painters working in the 1880s.
The critics found that the attempt by impressionists to depict the quality of "light" in their paintings detracted from the "realism" that these critics felt that painting should be about.
Looking at the wonderful Banksy prints (and it can certainly be argued that Banksy employs impressionistic styles) that are so popular these days, it shows how wrong these critics were and how little they understood about what art COULD be.
Four main styles of Impressionism emerged: Seurat's "pointillism" where the tedious accumulation of small dots of paint of contrasting colors side by side gave the illusion of a third color when viewed from a distance Gauguin's colorful flat planes of color (which eventually influenced Expressionism) Van Gogh's daubing style, where the grouping of indistinct clumps of paint give an impression of movement, and, finally, Monet's "dot-dash" style of paint application. (If you look closely at his work, you can see how many of his strokes resemble a miniature comet: a dot with a tail.) Monet's style fit nicely between Seurat's obsessive work and Van Gogh's reckless and spontaneous slapdash style, retaining both the fluidity of Van Gogh and the color illusions of Seurat. As well, his careful detail gave the viewer a feeling of depth that Gauguin's planes of color lacked, thus making his work more visually interesting by taking a longer time for the viewer to absorb. Monet's career lasted far longer than the other three - he painted well into his eighties - and this, combined with his centrist approach to the the central problem of impressionism - its treatment of light - ultimately made him the artist we most reference when we think about Impressionism.