Series of exhibitions, an abundant literature and record sales give evidence of today. The future Impressionists will grow in a country governed by authoritarian. Their great concern about giving representations, in 1862 , Manet already prefigures Impressionist painting -
However, as the years go by, Impressionism, seems to us nowadays, much more to maintain close links with tradition, and to constitute the esthetic achievement of an artistic creation related to realistic representation.
This link, a long time considered as the most normal thing in the world, to which impressionism had given a new definition based on "impression", will thereafter lose its compulsory character with the evolution of fine arts in XXth century.
Isn't the durable success of Impressionism due to the fact that we are sensitive to its modernity and to its traditionalism?
Of course, Impressionism cannot be reduced to this unique aspect, it is also a bias to paint cheerful reality, that of leisures and beauty of nature, an endless search for natural light... in a word, a certain art of living which fits in with many aspirations of our society.
A new style of painting, that will take the name of Impressionism in the year 1874, will develop in France between 1860 and 1890. This evolution in painting history is not an isolated movement, for independent pictorial art will evolve everywhere in Europe in the second half of the XIXth century towards a much more modern painting that better correspond to industrial progress acceleration , and changes in the way of life .
Painters which will be named, depending on time and context, "Independents", "Intransigents" or "Batignolles Group ", at last "Impressionnists", will be engaged in a struggle, begun with Manet in 1860, against an old and dusty workshop painting art with established conventions that had become too restrictive for modern time, in order to have their new realistic way of painting recognized.
This new painting will be the result of a series of reflexions and intentions which preceded it, that of Barbizon School's painters, and that of neo-impressionist painters of the Meetings of Saint-Siméon in Honfleur ( Boudin, Jongkind, Dubourg... ) that Monet attended as a young painter.
The new realism of the Impressionists definitively rejects the classical research of an ideal of beauty and an eternal essence of things, and postulates instead as preponderant the real vision compared to any learned conventional theory. The work that results from this vision is claimed to be relative : relative to the conditions under which the same scene can be observed (lights, skies, colors...), and relative to the painter himself.
Explanation:
