His father had been an artist, and so the knowledge passed down added with his own art knowledge about different styles and famous artists made for great conversation about the pieces. My own addition of the banter with interpretation and noticing of interesting perspective and detail and color seemed up to par with his, and we took our time gazing at each piece. We spent 3 or more hours there looking at them, going through the entire impressionism exhibit twice, and then took a quick tour of the modern art in the museum--most of which had been seen from our last visit.
This is my understanding of the impressionistic transition: Before impressionism, a painter's goal was to make their painting seem as realistic as possible. Even when you are not painting something that you can see in front of your canvas, something from your mind, it was considered that the more detail, the closer it looked to photography, the better the painting it was. With impressionism, people were breaking from this rule and mindset. Sometimes less is more, so to speak. You could paint your general impression of what you see (hence the name), not just what is in front of you exactly. Only one part of the picture could be in detail, others in haze to de-emphasize importance. The real-world perspective may be lost. The colors may differ. It could look more like a mosaic, have more solid color, or look as though it has been painted in a frantic or simplistic way. It's what the artist sees, only altered to give the viewer the same feeling and impression. Other artists took this to a new level with added surrealism. Impressionism developed into modern art today, which is sometimes seemingly arbitrary, representative, and minimalistic.
Anyway, that was my impression. =P
I do remember the painting "On the Wall Above" being in the museum next to the statue of the giant black mouse from my previous visit, but I hadn't read the letter in the painting. It started with "Dear Picasso," and went on describing his life and referring to the painting on the wall above (in the painting) and how he finished Picasso's unfinished painting for him. For Picasso died while painting it. The entirety of the painting was obviously in Picasso style. This made me laugh...a lot. Especially since I had overlooked the hilarity of the piece the first time around.
I got my share of culture. It's always nice to have a thing or two to be snobbish about on occasion...and I have done this! mwahaha. But I did thoroughly enjoy myself, and I did learn a lot about some famous paintings and famous artists, which is helpful and enjoyable. yay.
Here were some of my favorite paintings:
Jean-Honore Fragonard
A young girl reading
Francisco de Goya
Still life with Golden Bream
Claude Monet
Summer
Mary Cassatt
The Family
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
A Bather
1 comment:
In my art history class at NYU, the way we were told about impressionism is that now that people had photography to capture life-like images of stuff, paintings became obsolete, so they had to make themselves relevant again and do things that photography couldn't: hence impressionism was born.
There's plenty reasons for impressionism I'm sure, but I thought I'd share that one b/c it's also interesting.
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