IMPRESSIONISM

IMPRESSIONISM
8th hour, Crystal, LouKisha,Jesse N, Jesse R

DEFINITION OF IMPRESSIONISM

MAJOR ARTISTS Claude Monet.



Biography:

Monet was born on November 14, 1840, in Paris, but he spent most of his childhood in Le Havre. There, in his teens, he studied drawing; he also painted seascapes outside with the French painter Eugene Louis Boudin. By 1859 Monet had committed himself to a career as an artist and began to spend as much time in Paris as possible. Working outside, Monet painted simple landscapes and scenes of contemporary middle-class society, and he began to have some success at official exhibitions. As his style developed, however, Monet violated one traditional artistic convention after another in the interest of direct artistic expression. His experiments in rendering outdoor sunlight with a direct, sketchlike application of bright color became more and more daring, and he seemed to cut himself off from the possibility of a successful career as a conventional painter supported by the art establishment. In 1874 Monet and his colleagues decided to appeal directly to the public by organizing their own exhibition. They called themselves independents, but the press soon derisively labeled them impressionists because their work seemed sketchy and unfinished (like a first impression) and because one of Monet's paintings had borne the title Impression: Sunrise (1872, Musée Marmottan, Paris). Monet's compositions from this time are extremely loosely structured, and the color was applied in strong, distinct strokes as if no reworking of the pigment had been attempted. This technique was calculated to suggest that the artist had indeed captured a spontaneous impression of nature. During the 1870s and 1880s Monet gradually refined this technique, and he made many trips to scenic areas of France, especially the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, to study the most brilliant effects of light and color possible. By the mid-1880s Monet, generally regarded as the leader of the impressionist school, had achieved significant recognition and financial security. Despite the boldness of his color and the extreme simplicity of his compositions, he was recognized as a master of meticulous observation, an artist who sacrificed neither the true complexities of nature nor the intensity of his own feelings. In 1890 he was able to purchase some property in the village of Giverny, not far from Paris, and there he began to construct a water garden (now open to the public)—a lily pond arched with a Japanese bridge and overhung with willows and clumps of bamboo. Beginning in 1906, paintings of the pond and the water lilies occupied him for the remainder of his life; they hang in the Orangerie, Paris; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Throughout these years he also worked on his other celebrated “series” paintings, groups of works representing the same subject—haystacks, poplars, Rouen Cathedral, the river Seine—seen in varying light, at different times of the day or seasons of the year. Despite failing eyesight, Monet continued to paint almost up to the time of his death, on December 5, 1926, at Giverny.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir



Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born on 25 February 1841 in Limoges. He was the sixth child of Léonard Renoir (1799-1874) and Marguerite Merlet (1807-1896). In 1844 Renoir and his family moved to Paris where Léonard Renoir earned his living as a tailor. In 1854 Renoir left school and begin his apprenticeship as a porcelain painter at the firm of Lévy frères. His precocious talent for painting would assure his career as a porcelain painter but the firm went bankrupt in 1858. After that Renoir dabbled in a number of different jobs but it seems that he may have decided to become a full-time painter around this date. On January 24, 1860 Renoir was granted permission to copy in the Louvre, a practice that he maintained for the next four years. At this time Renoir had a taste for eighteenth-century masters, including [|Fragonard], [|Lancret], [|Watteau] and above all [|Boucher]. Boucher's Bath of Diana was the first painting that he adored and he continued to love it all his life. By the following year, 1861, Renoir had begun attending the studio of Marc-Gabriel-Charles Gleyer, a Swiss teacher who offered practical instruction to a number of artists. At the same time Renoir enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and he was there from 1 April 1862 until a couple of years later. In 1863 Renoir may have submitted a work to the official Salon (an annual exhibition of paintings chosen by the jury) but if he did it seams that the jury refused it.

LINKS Pierre-Auguste Renoir http://www.renoir.org.yu/biography.asp http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/search/citi/artist%3ARenoir http://musee-orsay.fr/en/collections/index-of-works/resultat-collection.html?no_cache=1&S=0&zsz=1&zs_r_2_z=3&zs_r_2_w=Renoir%2C%20Pierre%20Auguste&zs_ah=oeuvre&zs_rf=mos_a&zs_mf=20&zs_sf=0&zs_send_x=1&zs_liste_only=1 A good website on VanGogh http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2008/vangoghnight/ Claude Monet. (1) http://www.monetpainting.net/ (2) http://www.intermonet.com/ (3) http://stlouis.art.museum/emuseum/code/emuseum.asp?style=Browse&currentrecord=1&page=search&profile=objects&searchdesc=&quicksearch=Claude+Monet

Edgar Degas



Edgar Degas is the artist I am researching. He is was one of the best back in his day he is usually classed with the impressionists, and he exhibited with them in seven of the eight impressionist exhibitions. However, his training in classical drafting and his dislike of painting directly from nature produced a style that represented a related alternative to impressionism. Degas was born into a well-to-do banking family on July 19, 1834, in Paris. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts under a disciple of the famous French classicist J. A. D. Ingres he did very good in his class. Degas developed the great drawing ability that was to be a salient characteristic of his art. After 1865, under the influence of the budding impressionist movement, he gave up academic subjects to turn to contemporary themes. But, unlike the impressionists, he preferred to work in the studio and was uninterested in the study of natural light that fascinated them. He was attracted by theatrical subjects, and most of his works depict racecourses, theaters, cafés, music halls, or boudoirs. Degas was a keen observer of humanity—particularly of women, with whom his work is preoccupied—and in his portraits as well as in his studies of dancers, milliners, and laundresses, he cultivated a complete objectivity, attempting to catch his subjects in poses as natural and spontaneous as those recorded in action photographs. In the 1800’s his eyesight began to fail on him. He attempted to catch the action of the moment, and his ballet dancers and female nudes are depicted in poses that make no attempt to conceal their subjects' physical exertions is what they are called. It was usually very simple drawings using only a few subjects. Degas was not well known to the public, and his true artistic stature did not become evident until after his death. He died in Paris on September 27, 1917. But still today he will never be forgotten.

Links for Edgar Degas http://www.metmuseum.org/explore/degas/html/index.html http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/degas/ http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/degas_edgar.html

Georges Seurat



Links for Georges Seurat: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/536352/Georges-Seurat http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/seurat/ http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/tsearch?oldartistid=28150&imageset=1

painter, founder of the 19th-century French school of Neo-Impressionism whose technique for portraying the play of light using tiny brushstrokes of contrasting colours became known as [|**Pointillism**]. Using this technique, he created huge compositions with tiny, detached strokes of pure colour too small to be distinguished when looking at the entire work but making his paintings shimmer with brilliance. Works in this style include //Une Baignade, Asnières// (1883–84) and //Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte// (1884–86). i am doing a reasearch am doing a researach on george seurat: he is the best known goodest artest ever in the 1800's. george was born december 2. they all thought he was a really good artist an so then he became an artist and lived through drawing, he loved to draw and so thats wat he put his mind to is drawing he drawed until the day he died