印象派的一切

一八七四年四月十五日，一群在巴黎的畫家，展出數年來一直被官方的沙龍排斥的作品 165件，展覽期間批評家紿他們開了一個玩笑說：「這是一群印象派畫家的展覽」，因莫內 (Monet)的作品，名為「日出．印象」 ; 而這群畫家就以印象派畫家自稱。代表畫家莫內 、雷諾瓦 、畢沙羅 、竇迦、莫莉索 、卡莎特。


印象派的繪畫觀念

光線在物體上的變化，陰影下的微妙色彩，是印象派畫家所要表現的主題。印象派把「光」當唯一真實的對象，不知不覺中把「形象」破壞。剩下是畫家視覺的主觀性。具代表性的觀念 :
1. 以光譜色(分析太陽光後得的七色)作畫。
2. 在畫布上將補色並置，在觀者的眼中自動調色，增加畫面的彩度和明度。
3. 否定固有色，不用黑色和深咖啡色。
4. 不用線條畫輪廓，認為陰影是有顏色的，只是彩度、明度較低。

Impressionism France, ca. 1870s

The Impressionists were a group of painters who, in general, departed from the traditional pursuit of reproducing an illusion of real space in paintings of academic subjects, choosing instead to exploit the possibilities of paint to explore the fleeting effects of nature and the vagaries of visual sensation in, for the most part, rapidly executed works.

Among the several dozen painters who participated in this loosely defined group—most of whom are unknown today—were Mary Cassatt, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre Auguste Renoir.
These artists were associated principally through their group exhibitions.

They shared a set of related approaches and techniques. , such as employing loose brushwork to produce the illusion of the artist’s spontaneous recording of natural light on the canvas and rejecting the practice of chiaroscuro (modeling in light and dark).

Characteristics of Impressionism were an attempt to accurately and objectively record visual reality in terms of transient effects of light and color.

In their pursuit of modernity, some of them borrowed formal devices used in photography and Japanese prints, such as radical foreshortening, cropping, and keyhole or bird’s-eye perspective.

The work of the Impressionists was indebted to the Barbizon school of artists active in the 1850s in developing plein-air (out-of-doors) painting, although even the Impressionists who were most celebrated for painting directly from nature, such as Monet, often completed their canvases in the studio. The Impressionists moved away from the Barbizon school’s romantic naturalism and themes of rural peasant life to more urban subject matter, especially scenes of Parisian leisure and entertainment, city parks, and suburban landscapes.