modern art: Impressionism

Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro, the great masters of impressionism, painted café and city life, as well as landscapes, working most often directly from nature and using new modes of representation. While art had always been to a certain extent abstract in that formal considerations had frequently been of primary importance, painters, beginning with the impressionists in the 1870s, took new delight in freedom of brushwork. They made random spots of color and encrusted the canvas with strokes that did not always correspond to the object that they were depicting but that formed coherent internal relationships. Thus began a definite separation of the image and the subject. The impressionists exploited the range of the color spectrum, directly applying strokes of pure pigment to the canvas rather than mixing colors on the palette. In sculpture, dynamic forms and variations of impressionism were created by Rodin, Renoir, Degas, and the Italian Medardo Rosso.

Sections in this article:

• Introduction
• Modern Sculpture
• Postwar Modern Art and the Rejection of Modernism
• Other Modes of Modern Art
• Geometric Abstraction
• Cubism
• The Isms of Early Twentieth-Century Art
• Nineteenth-Century Painting after Impressionism
• Impressionism
• Origins of Modern Art
• Bibliography

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