The Impressionist Art Movement

Impressionism was a 19th century art movement borne out of an insult, but quickly became one of the most popular and enduring art forms in history. Legendary painters like Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edouard Manet, and Mary Cassatt were impressionists. On today's show, we explore the history of this movement and how its artists embraced that derisive term. All of the paintings featured on today's episode can be found in the show notes on the www.5minutetrivia.com website.

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Transcript

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Here at Five Minute Trivia, there's nothing we love more than a good scandal. And this week we've got a great one. Like many scandals, it took place in the world of art. We're talking about a revolutionary movement with barbarians at the gate, an outraged public, an establishment holding on for dear life. They coined a horrific insult for this group of bandits. They called them Impressionists. And today on Five Minute Trivia, we are talking about them and their art movement.

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We choose to go to the moon. The Rum Tumtagger is a curious 10 hundred billion other galaxies. Right now, don't like me.

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Today's show works best with pictures, so our minions at the Five Minute Trivia website have put together a little gallery. You can check it out at www.fivinitrivia.com. That's www.then five minute trivia dot com. Just go to the show notes for this week and follow along. If you were a French artist in the mid-19th century, you had a choice. You could paint carefully composed, realistic images of religious figures, historic subjects, and portraits of important people in a proper studio. Or you could starve to death. See, back then there was one official place to show your work. It was the Paris Exhibition. Entries were chosen by a jury from the Royal Academy of Art, and they favored work that met strict academic criteria. But in the 1860s, there were a bunch of artists that didn't want to be confined to their studios just churning out the same stiff, boring stuff. They wanted to go out in nature and paint the real world. Forests and rivers and sunrises. But the Royal Academy and the exhibition were not down for that nonsense. They wanted to see Jesus Christ in the Garden of Olives, and painters like Alexander Capanel were happy to oblige. It eventually became impossible to ignore these guys. People saw the works of painters like Edouard Manet and Claude Monet and liked it. Even the Emperor Napoleon III saw what the Paris exhibition was rejecting and decreed that the public be allowed to see this stuff and decide for themselves. So in 1863, the Exhibition of Rejects was organized. It was incredibly popular. More popular, in fact, than the actual Paris exhibition. Now, most people just came to laugh at the rejects, but they were also drawn to some of the work that was more natural. In particular, Edouard Manet's Luncheon on the Grass. It's now seen as Manet's greatest painting, but it was scandalous back in the day. If you look at the painting, and again you can see it on our website, you might think it's because of the nudity. But nudity was hardly off limits, and plenty of accepted portraits had more overt nudity than this one. But it was the way Manet did it. The nude figure wasn't a Roman god or a religious figure, it was an ordinary person in the woods. By 1874, these artists were done with any of the officially sanctioned art shows and decided to throw their own. That's right, no government authority, no jury selection. Just literal chaos. Like our favorite scene from Ghostbusters.

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Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies, rivers and seas boiling. Forty years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanoes, a dead rising from the grave, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together.

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Cats and dogs living together, by the way, would be a natural subject for these artists. So these guys called themselves the Anonymous Society of Artists, Painters, Sculptors, Engravers, etc. That, etc., by the way, that that wasn't me. That was actually the name of their group. One of the artists in that group was a man named Claude Monet. He submitted a painting of the sun rising over his hometown of Laavre. Laavre is a port city on an estuary of the River Seine, and his painting shows a red sun with a couple of rowboats on the water and some shapes that could be anything from trees to smokestacks. It's not all that clear, and overall it's a pretty hazy scene. The brush strokes are loose and it's hard to tell where the sky ends and the water begins. An art critic looked at the painting and called it impressionist. It was meant as an insult, like this wasn't a real painting, but some amateur's impression of a painting. But as so often happens, the painters embraced that name. It actually fit what they were trying to do, which was less about reproducing reality and more about creating an emotional impression. They used short, quick brush strokes to capture the essence of a subject, rather than its details. They didn't mix colors, but applied them side by side. They painted outdoors as much as they could. They captured real life. Train stations, cafes, parks, everyday people doing everyday things. There are a lot of artists who belong to the Impressionist movement, and not all of them stayed in it. But the names you'll typically hear are Edward Manet, Claude Monet, two different people, Paul Gauguin, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Victor Vignon. The American Mary Cassat also used to exhibit with the Impressionists in Paris. We encourage you to check out some of the featured paintings on our website. Again, www.fivinitrivia.com. It really helps understand this movement and saves you the work of a Google search. Also, we did let our minions out of their cages just to put it together so you can throw them a bone and let us know what you think. That's all for this week's show. Join us next time, and thanks for listening.