KINETIC ART

 '' Just as one can compose colors, or forms, so one can compose motions. ''  
                                                                                                               Alexander Calder
     Kinetic art marked an important revival of the tradition of Constructivism and Dadaism. Kinetic means movement and that is exactly what kinetic art is. Kinetic art was made to encourage people that art doesn’t always have to be traditional, but instead optical illusions or objects that move. Kinetic was soon split into two groups Jean Tinguely who made mechanical movement art and Victor Vasarely was more interested in optical illusions and illusion movement. These two artists brought the two different parts of kinetic art together and made them so special.Victor was taught in Bauhaus ideas and founded optical illusions. He created it by mixing black and white in different patterns to create a flickering look. Then the start of the creation of mechanized movement began. They used normal movements to examine objects in outer space. They also used geometric shapes to make them have a sense of shape. These mechanical movement machines would move by hand or air. Although ostensibly fascinated by machines, some Kinetic artists developed a profound interest in analogies between machines and human bodies. Rather than regarding machines and human bodies as radically different - one being soulless and functional, the other being governed by the sensitive, rational mind - they used their art to suggest that humans might be little more than irrational engines of conflicting lusts and urges, like a dysfunctional machine.




















''To me art is a form of manifest revolt, total and complete.''
                                                  Jean Tinguley

MINIMAL ART

   Minimalism is a sytle of art, which Hard Edge and Colour Field Painting tendencies were an important pre-requisite for the development of, as they had essentially prepared the ground for the use of very simple, reduced minimal forms. Minimal Art first established itself in painting, and then sculpture, where it had the greatest impact. 
    Minimal art sculptures were primarily made from industrial materials, such as aluminium, steel, glass, concrete, wood, plastic or stone. The objects, frequently reduced to very simple geometric shapes, were industrially produced, thus removing the artist’s personal signature from the work. The works were also characterised by serial arrangements of a number of bodies/shapes, and large dimensions. 
    The main representatives of Minimal art were Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, John McCracken and Robert Morris.
     In contrast with Abstract Expressionism and its impulsive and gestural expression of the unconsciousness, Minimal artists focused on material aesthetics, the relationship of objects to space, the effects of light, and producing highly reduced arrangements. Donald Judd (1928-94) followed these basic principles, arranging coloured aluminium boxes in different ways, above, or next to one another. Carl Andre (born 1935) stacked rectangular wooden pegs on top of each other, or in a row. Dan Flavin (1933-96) created subtle light spaces with evenly laid out neon tubes. Minimalism also had an impact on dance and music in the 1960s. Minimalist principles also influenced artistic phenomenon such as Land Art, Arte Povera and Conceptual Art. 

HARD- EDGE

    Hard- Edge movement,had no true purpose except for enjoyment when it began. People say that Hard-Edge painting has combinations of artists such as Mondrian, Albers, and Reinhardt. Today, the phrase “Hard-Edge paintings” is used to describe some strange tendencies in abstract painting.Frank Stella Moultonboro II 1965 Hard-Edge painting means an abstract style that mixes geometric painting with the intense forms of Color Field painting. It is bold and from faraway, looks very common, yet very unique and individual. This type of art is known for its “economy of form, fullness of color, impersonal execution, and smooth surface planes.” Eventually, this style of work fell from use as different types of abstract painting moved in and Hard-Edge painting became just a term for types of art. A very famous artist who used Hard-Edge painting is Frank Stella.

POP-ART

   This movement was marked by a fascination with popular culture reflecting the affluence in post-war society. It was most prominent in American art but soon spread to Britain. In celebrating everyday objects such as soup cans, washing powder, comic strips and soda pop bottles, the movement turned the commonplace into icons.Pop Art is a direct descendant of Dadaism in the way it mocks the established art world by appropriating images from the street, the supermarket, the mass media, and presents it as art in itself.Artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg took familiar objects such as flags and beer bottles as subjects for their paintings, while British artist Richard Hamilton used magazine imagery. The latter's definition of Pop Art - "popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business" - stressed its everyday, commonplace values.

    It was Andy Warhol, however, who really brought Pop Art to the public eye. His screen prints of Coke bottles, Campbell's soup tins and film stars are part of the iconography of the 20th century. Pop Art owed much to dada in the way it mocked the established art world. By embracing commercial techniques, and creating slick, machine-produced art, the Pop artists were setting themselves apart from the painterly, inward-looking tendencies of the Abstract Expressionist movement that immediately preceded them. The leading artists in Pop were Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Roy Hamilton, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg.

      

POST PAINTERLY ABSTRACTION

   Colorful painting began as a part of Abstract Expressionism an d later evolved into a further purified form.The phrase Colorfield Painting or Post Painterly Abstraction was first used by the critic Clement Greenberg in an effort to distinguish abstract painting of the 1960s from abstract expressionist works of the 1950s.The colorfield painters sometimes called Abstract Imagists, are the most abstract of all the abstract expressionists because all reference to objective subject matter have been removed.The abstract expressionist works involved a strong personel emotionalism and a painterly quality.Post-painterly abstraction works were more impersonel and from a more intellectual aesthetic.They focused on what they considered to be the fundamental formal elements of abstract painting.Their paintings employed pure,unmodulated areas of colour; flat two dimentional space and a monumental scal.Post-painterly abstraction includes both minimalism and color-field painting.

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

   Jackson Pollock's elegant abstract paintings, which were created by spattering paint on huge canvases placed on the floor, brought abstract expressionism. Abstract expressionism presented a broad range of stylistic diversity within its largely, though not exclusively, nonrepresentational framework. For example, the expressive violence and activity in paintings by de Kooning or Pollock marked the opposite end of the pole from the simple, quiescent images of Mark Rothko. Basic to most abstract expressionist painting were the attention paid to surface qualities, i.e., qualities of brushstroke and texture; the use of huge canvases; the adoption of an approach to space in which all parts of the canvas played an equally vital role in the total work; the harnessing of accidents that occurred during the process of painting; the glorification of the act of painting itself as a means of visual communication; and the attempt to transfer pure emotion directly onto the canvas. The movement had an inestimable influence on the many varieties of work that followed it, especially in the way its proponents used color and materials. Its essential energy transmitted an enduring excitement to the American art scene.

SURREALISM

   Surrealism, movement in visual art and literature, flourishing in Europe between World Wars I and II. Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier dada movement, which before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason; but Surrealism's emphasis was not on negation but on positive expression. The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the "rationalism" that had guided European culture and politics in the past and that had culminated in the horrors of World War I. According to the major spokesman of the movement, the poet and critic André Breton, who published "The Surrealist Manifesto" in 1924, Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in "an absolute reality, a surreality." Drawing heavily on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud, Breton saw the unconscious as the wellspring of the imagination. He defined genius in terms of accessibility to this normally untapped realm, which, he believed, could be attained by poets and painters alike.
     The major Surrealist painters were Jean Arp, Max Ernst, André Masson, René Magritte, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí, Pierre Roy, Paul Delvaux, and Joan Miró. With its emphasis on content and free form, Surrealism provided a major alternative to the contemporary, highly formalistic Cubist movement and was largely responsible for perpetuating in modern painting the traditional emphasis on content.


                                          

PITTURA METAFISIKA

   Pittura Metafisica is a style whose main feature's, in its literal sense, is the depiction of the object's "super-natural" features (Greek "metá" = beyond; "phýsis" = nature), the object's content beyond its visible features.The painters of the Pittura Metafisica created coulisse-like and perspectively exaggerated views that seemed like dreams filled with over-sharply modeled figures and objects, which have been taken from their original contexts and rearranged in new and strange relations. Man is also treated as an object - as "manichino", a faceless jointed doll, or as a construct of stereometric basic forms. Isolation, alienation, inexplicability and mysteriousness coin the atmosphere of the calm, motionless Pittura Metafisica that wanted to be less a way of painting than a means of observing. In their concept of materiality, but also in terms of style, the artists of the Pittura Metafisica referred to the solemn and strict austerity of the Early Renaissance (Giotto, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Paolo Uccello). The simultaneosuly upcoming dynamic Futurism can be perceived as a counter movement to the Pittura Metafisica - Carlo Carrà, up until 1915 one of the leading artists of Futurism, explained his turn to the Pittura Metafisica with the rediscovery of the "principio italiano", which was prevailing in Renaissance. 
                                          
                         
                                                                   




           
                                                          
                       
                                                         
                                                               
           

                                                        
       
                                                           Alberto Savinio
                                            

DADA

    Dadaism or Dada is a movement in visual art as well as literature (mainly poetry), theatre and graphic design. The movement was, among other things, a protest against the barbarism of the War and what Dadaists believed was an oppressive intellectual rigidity in both art and everyday society; its works were characterized by a deliberate irrationality and the rejection of the prevailing standards of art. It influenced later movements including surrealism According to its proponents, Dada was not art; it was anti-art. For everything that art stood for, Dada was to represent the opposite. Where art was concerned with aesthetics, Dada  ignored them. If art is to have at least an implicit or latent message, Dada strives to have no meaning--interpretation of Dada is dependent entirely on the viewer. If art is to appeal to sensibilities, Dada offends. Perhaps it is then ironic that Dada is an influential movement in Modern art. Dada became a commentary on art and the world, thus becoming art itself.
    The artists of the Dada movement had become disillusioned by art, art history and history in general. Many of them were veterans of World War I and had grown cynical of humanity after seeing what men were capable of doing to each other on the battlefields of Europe. Thus they became attracted to a nihilistic view of the world (they thought that nothing mankind had achieved was worthwhile, not even art), and created art in which chance and randomness formed the basis of creation. The basis of Dada is nonsense. With the order of the world destroyed by World War I, Dada was a way to express the confusion that was felt by many people as their world was turned upside down.

SYNCHROMISM

    Synchronism was an art movement based no the idea that sound and color are phenomena that are similar in the way that the individual experiences and perceives them. Movement as well as organization of color into ‘color scales’ are the ways in which synchronism pieces correlate to musical art forms.A basic tenet of synchronism is that color can be arranged or orchestrated in much the same way that notes of a symphony are arranged by composers. This harmonious arrangement of colors and shapes produces experiential results similar to that of listening to well balanced orchestral compositions.
    This art movement artists believed that by painting in color scales could evoke sensations that were very musical in nature. Typically, synchronism pieces feature a strong rhythmic form or forms that then advance toward complexity in form and hue, moving in a particular direction.
In many cases, such explosion of color using color scales pours out in a radial pattern. It is most common for synchronism art works to have some sort of central vortex that bursts outward with color, into complex color harmonies.
    Synchronism has been compared and contrasted to Orphism. Orphism refers to paintings that relate to the Greek god Orpheus, the symbol of song, the arts and the lyre. Though Orphism is rooted in cubism, this movement moved toward a lyrical abstraction that was more pure, in the sense that this form of painting was about synthesizing a sensation of bright colors.
Though there is little doubt that Orphism was an influence to later Synchronism, Synchronists would argue that it is an entirely unique art form. As Stanton MacDonald-Wright said, “synchromism has nothing to do with orphism and anybody who has read the first catalogue of synchronism … would realize that we poked fun at orphism.”
     Several other American painters have been known to experiment with synchronism. Whether synchronism was a branch of orphism or its own unique art form, there is little doubt that the harmonious use of color and movement based composition inspired many artists and art forms. Among these artists were Andrew Dasburg, Thomas Hart Benton and Patrick Henry Bruce.Though the majority of Thomas Hart Benton’s works centered on regionalism and murals, there was also a strong flair of synchronism. Benton’s interest and incorporation of synchronism was due mainly from having studied with synchronism artists such as Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Diego Rivera.

                                           

SECTION D'OR

     Section d'Or was a group of French painters whose common stylistic feature was a debt to Cubism. The name of the group, which was also the title of a short-lived magazine it published, was suggested by Villon. It refers to a mathematical proportion known as the Golden Section in which a straight line or rectangle is divided into two parts in such a way that the ratio of the smaller to the greater part is the same as the greater to the whole. The proportion has been studied since Antiquity and has been said to possess inherent aesthetic value because of an alleged correspondence with the laws of nature or the universe. The choice of this name reflected the interest of the artists involved in questions of proportion and pictorial discipline. 












Marchel Duchamp''Nude Descending a Staircase''

DER BLAUE REITER

      In contradiction to the wild artists of Die Brücke, the members of Der Blaue Reiter were educated at an academic level. But, both groups rejected the academic traditions. They rejected the traditions, not the academic principals. Although these artists left the academic rules of art completely, their work was theoretical very well grounded. The artists of Der Blaue Reiter, August Macke, Franz Marc, believed that every person has an inner and an outer world. The art had to bring these worlds together. This difficult theory was created by Wassily Kandinsky, one of the most important artists of the group. Simply said the theory means that the outer world of color and form brings you to the inner world, the feeling. It is just like in music, where the individual tones form a harmonious whole, which causes an certain inner feeling. Music is the evidence that a feeling is not only related to recognizable and understandable scenes. By the use of this method, Kandinsky created the first completely abstract painting in history. The composition of color and forms are not related to the visible reality, but still causes a certain feeling.This step meant a major change for art with its unknown possibilities. 


          

FUTURISM

   Futurism can be explained by Boccioni's Dynamism of a Soccer Player which  approaches abstraction in its depiction of motion. Like the Cubists, Boccioni’s pictorial language is based on shallow spaces and shifting planes. However, more than any other artists in the modern period, Boccioni and the futurists focus on depicting optical and temporal space, which reflects the dynamic speed and noise of the modern age. Thus, instead of representing a fixed moment, the work depicts a dynamic sensation. Boccioni, in Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture (1913), discusses futurist art as a representation of dynamic forms that propel themselves to the surrounding atmosphere. According to Boccioni, “The figure must be broken open and enclosed in environment”. Therefore, Dynamism of a Soccer Player is not only a painting of a soccer player, but also a representation of the player’s energy, spreading around his surrounding atmosphere. In doing so, the work breaks down the distinction between the body and the body in motion
     .Like Boccioni’s painting, Balla’s Girl Running on a Balcony (1912, above) is a kinesthetic study of a figure in motion. Borrowing from the pointillist technique, Balla has not mixed his non-primary colors in advance, but creates those by painting contrasting dots in close proximity to one another. Without emphasizing any element in the work, this technique is repeated throughout the picture surface. Therefore, the work does not have a central point of focus. In contrast, it appears to be continuing outside the canvas to the spectator’s space, emphasizing the continuous and instable character of the girl’s motion. Although Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Soccer Player is more abstract than Balla’sGirl Running on a Balcony, we can make sense of both works as they recall our peripheral vision. They appear, lively and dynamic, as if they represent a             passing moment in time, captured by our peripheral vision.
   

DIE BRUCKE

   Die Brücke was the first of two Expressionist movements whose name indicates its faith in the art of the future, towards which its works would serve as a bridge. In practice the artists of this movement were not a cohesive group, and their art became an angst-ridden type of Expressionism. The achievement that had the most lasting value was their revival of graphic arts, in particular, the woodcut using bold and simplified forms.The artists of Die Brücke drew inspiration from van Gogh, Gauguin and primitive art. Munch was also a strong influence, having exhibited his art in Berlin from 1892. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938), the leading spirit of Die Brücke, wanted German art to be a bridge to the future. He insisted that the group, which included Erich Heckel (1883-1970) and Karl Schmidt-Rottluf (1884-1976), ``express inner convictions... with sincerity and spontaneity''.Even at their wildest, the Fauves had retained a sense of harmony and design, but Die Brücke abandoned such restraint. They used images of the modern city to convey a hostile, alienating world, with distorted figures and colors. Kirchner does just this in Berlin Street Scene, where the shrill colors and jagged hysteria of his own vision flash forth uneasily. There is a powerful sense of violence, contained with difficulty, in much of their art. Emil Nolde (1867-1956), briefly associated with Die Brücke, was a more profound Expressionist who worked in isolation for much of his career. His interest in primitive art and sensual color led him to paint some remarkable pictures with dynamic energy, simple rhythms, and visual tension. He could even illuminate the marshes of his native Germany with dramatic clashes of stunning color. Yet Early Evening (1916) is not mere drama: light glimmers over the distance with an exhilarating sense of space.Die Brücke collapsed as the inner convictions of each artist began to differ, but arguably the greatest German artist of the time was Max Beckmann (1884-1950). Working independently, he constructed his own bridge, to link the objective truthfulness of great artists of the past with his own subjective emotions. Like some other Expressionists, he served in World War I and suffered unbearable depression and hallucinations as a result. His work reflects his stress through its sheer intensity: cruel, brutal images are held still by solid colors and flat, heavy shapes to give an almost timeless quality. Such an unshakeable certainty of vision meant that he was hated by the Nazis, and he ended his days in the United States, a lonely force for good. He is perhaps just discernible as a descendant of Dürer in his love of self-portraits and blend of the clumsy and suave with which he imagines himself: in Self-Portrait (1944), he looks out, not at himself, but at us, with a prophetic urgency.
         

LES FAUVES

    "Les Fauves" is a term which is French for nothing less than "The Wild Beasts". This not so flattering term was given to the artists of this movement because of their supposed lack of discipline. However Fauvism today is defined as a short-lived movement of early Modernist art which emphasized paint itself and the use of deep color over the representational values retained by Impressionism, even with its focus on light and the moment. Fauvists strongly believe in the power of color as an emotional force. 
    Les Fauves often used a quote by Paul Gauguin to justify their style: "If the trees look yellow to the artist then painted a bright yellow they must be." The two leaders of Fauvism were Henri Matisse and André Derain. Their paintings use bright, vivid colors to draw the eye. Fauvism had some influence on the later formed Expressionists.

EXPRESSIONISM

     Expressionism was an art movement associated mainly with German painting and film of the early 20th century, particularly following World War I. Expressionism had a strong influence on American film noir, due to the migration of German directors to Hollywood in the 1930s. Hitchcock was very much aware of Expressionism, from his interest in modern art and from having worked in German film industry in the 1920s.
    The goal of Expressionism was to evoke the subjective responses that the artist has to objects or events. It contrasted with impressionism, which sought to capture the outward impression of an object or scene. Expressionism did not attempt a realistic portrayal of the world, but rather the extreme and distorting emotions that the world causes in the sensitive individual.The stylistic premise of Expressionism was that the artist's response to the environment was so intense that it affected the form of the art. Surface elements are distorted or exaggerated by subjective pressures. As a reflection of the times, Expressionist painting tended to be vivid and violent, with jarring images.
                             

LES NABIS

  A group from Paris who called themselves Nabis, Hebrew for “prophets.”  were unified by a dislike of impressionism. The Nabis thought the impressionists wanted only to capture fleeting moments on canvas. The Nabis wanted to create something they felt was more meaningful: they wanted to cause spiritual reactions in the viewers of their work.What the Nabi paintings truly had in common, though, was a use of bold but muted colors used in unexpected ways to show real scenes and objects in unrealistic ways. They were greatly influenced by Paul Gauguin, much of whose work can be described just that way. Below is his Self Portrait with Halo in which you see the bold, primary colors placed next to each other in a way that should be overwhelming but isn’t.

SYMBOLİSM

   "I believe only in what I do not see."

                                                        Gustave Moreau.

  Symbolism originated in France, and was part of a 19th-century movement in which art became infused with mysticism. French Symbolism was both a continuation of the Romantic tradition and a reaction to the realistic approach of impressionism. It served as a catalyst in the outgrowth of the darker sides of Romanticism and toward abstraction.
   The term Symbolism means the systematic use of symbols or pictorial conventions to express an allegorical meaning. Symbolism is an important element of most religious arts and reading symbols plays a main role in psychoanalysis. Thus, the Symbolist painters used these symbols from mythology and dream imagery for a visual language of the soul.
   Not so much a style of art, Symbolism was more an international ideological trend. Symbolists believed that art should apprehend more absolute truths which could only be accessed indirectly. Thus, they painted scenes from nature, human activities, and all other real world phenomena in a highly metaphorical and suggestive manner. They provided particular images or objects with esoteric attractions. There were several, rather dissimilar, groups of Symbolist painters and visual artists. Symbolism in painting had a large geographical reach, reaching several Russian artists, as well as American. The closest to Symbolism was Aestheticism. The  Pre-Raphaelites, also, were contemporaries of the earlier Symbolists, and have much in common with them. Symbolism had a significant influence on Expressionism and Surrealism, two movements which descend directly from Symbolism proper.

   

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes

''Beheading of St. John the Baptist''

           

                

                                                                                                          

                                                                                                         Odilon Redon ''The Light of Day''

 Aubrey Beardsley ''The Dream''

                                                                                                      

NEO-IMPRESSIONISM

    The term Neo-Impressionism refers to a pictorial technique where color pigments are no longer mixed either on the palette or directly on canvas, but instead placed as small dots side by side. Mixing of colors takes place from a suitable distance, in the observor's eye, as an "optical mixture".
    French painter Georges Seurat studied writings on color theory and invented a new painting technique that he named "separation of color" or "Divisionism", the main advantage of which is to give a greater vibrancy of color,in 1880s.Seurat's first large painting  "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" may be considered as the founding masterpiece of Divisionism.

                                

    At the start of the movement, neo-Impressionism was not welcomed by the art world and the general public. In 1886, when Seurat first exhibited his now most famous work, there was an overwhelming effect of negative feelings. The commotion evoked by this artwork could only be described with words like "bedlam" and "scandal".

   From 1892 on, Signac, a sailing lover, regularly sejourns in Saint-Tropez. His style becomes more intuitive and his color touches larger, his palette more luxuriant."Compared with Signac's luminous and light paintings, Seurat's paintings seem grey and immobile", contemporary art critics Julius Meier-Graefe writes to describe the chromatic intensity of Signac's paintings.Thus Signac gives birth to a second Neo-impressionism.

                                

                                Saint-Tropez, l'orage - 1895

    Neo-Impressionists’ use of tiny dots to compose a whole picture was considered even more controversial than its preceding movement, impressionism. Impressionism had been notorious for its spontaneous representation of fleeting moments and roughness in brushwork.Neo-impressionism provoked similar responses for opposite reasons. The meticulously calculated regularity of brush strokes was deemed to be too mechanical.This style of painting was far from the commonly accepted notions of creative processes set for the nineteenth century.

IMPRESSIONISM

     A French 19th century art movement which marked a momentous break from tradition in European painting. The Impressionists incorporated new scientific research into the physics of colour to achieve a more exact representation of colour and tone.The sudden change in the look of these paintings was brought about by a change in methodology: applying paint in small touches of pure colour rather than broader strokes, and painting out of doors to catch a particular fleeting impression of colour and light. The result was to emphasise the artist's perception of the subject matter as much as the subject itself. 

    ''Impression—I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it ... and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.''                                                                               

                                                                                                                                      Louis Leroy                                      

     Impressionism is a depiction of an artist’s impression. It does not aim to be accurate in detail which one finds in the realist and neo-realist style. But the impression often elicits a stronger emotional appeal which is variously triggered in the beholder. Many impressionist paintings have a soft nebulous rendering of its subject, almost dream-like. Rules about perspective, clean definite lines and interplay of light and shadows no longer apply. It is a spontaneous expression, often discarding the basic ability to draw correctly and becomes more an interplay of colors. Because it is an impression, every impressionist painting becomes more an expression of the heart.

     Impressionist art is a style in which the artist captures the image of an object as someone would see it if they just caught a glimpse of it. They paint the pictures with a lot of color and most of their pictures are outdoor scenes. Their pictures are very bright and vibrant. The artists like to capture their images without detail but with bold colors. Some of the greatest impressionist artists were Edouard Manet, Camille Pissaro, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot and Pierre Auguste Renoir.Manet influenced the development of impressionism. He painted everyday objects. Pissaro and Sisley painted the French countryside and river scenes. Degas enjoyed painting ballet dancers and horse races. Morisot painted women doing everyday things. Renoir loved to show the effect of sunlight on flowers and figures. Monet was interested in subtle changes in the atmosphere

             Camille Pissarro

Edouard Manet

    

      Many Impressionists painted pleasant scenes of middle class urban life, extolling the leisure time that the industrial revolution had won for middle class society. In Renoir's luminous painting Luncheon of the Boating Party, for example, young men and women eat, drink, talk, and flirt with a joy for life that is reflected in sparkling colors. The sun filtered through the orange striped awning colors everything and everyone in the party with its warm light. The diners' glances cut across a balanced and integrated composition that reproduces a very delightful scene of modem middle class life. 

     In its day, Impressionism was considered a radical departure from tradition. Looking back, we can see that Impressionism was more than a departure – It changed the very nature of the way people think about art today. Thanks to all the very Impressionists for striving to push forward in what they believe in we would not have this very fine art style we call Impressionism today.
    When the Impressionists began painting, Ideals of art were not only controlled, but also looked down upon and rejected by academic institutions such as the French academy of fine arts and the Salon, which had great power over the careers of artists. Even through the hardships, the Impressionists did not give up on the art that they believed in.