Impressionist Landscape: Style, Place & Global Legacies 1870-1920

3 units

We consider Impressionism as a dominant style of the Parisian art world, first undertaken as an extension of Barbizon naturalism, but soon expanded into an avant-garde style that objectified sensation and emotion in the name of truth in representation. We consider the sites of Impressionism, particularly what constituted interests in certain landscapes and geographies in France over the long course of the movement (1874 to 1925). We will examine the place of individual perception, the physiology of sight, and ideas of nature in the development of the Impressionist landscape, through the consideration of style, genre, artistic theory, and these artists' investments in particular sites. Furthermore, the social, commercial and critical networks that supported the movement will be analyzed. Key artists include Monet, Degas, Morisot, Renoir, Cassatt, Bracquemond, and early work of some Post-Impressionists. A special exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum, Women Impressionists and the Land, will allow for multiple visits to the museum, special lectures and one oral report on a painting by a female Impressionist. We will close the semester with discussion of the relationship of the Impressionist landscape to the development of and adaptations of Impressionism in other nations, and its relationship to modernist abstraction, and the aesthetic and nationalist motivations for Impressionism’s appropriation across the globe.