The Art of Impressionism: Painting Technique & the Making of ModernityThis magnificent book is the first full-scale exploration of Impressionist technique. Focusing on the easel-painted work of Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Cézanne, Cassatt, Morisot, Caillebotte, Sisley, and Degas in the period before 1900, it places their methods and materials in a historical perspective and evaluates their origins, novelty, and meanings within the visual formation of urban modernity. Drawing on scientific studies of pigments and materials, artists’ treatises, colormens’ archives, and contemporary and modern accounts, Anthea Callen demonstrates how raw materials and paintings are profoundly interdependent. She analyzes the material constituents of oil painting and the complex processes of “making” entailed in all aspects of artistic production, discussing in particular oil painting methods for landscapists and the impact of plein air light on figure painting, studio practice, and display. Insisting that the meanings of paintings are constituted by and within the cultural matrices that produced them, Callen argues that the real “modernity” of the Impressionist enterprise lies in the painters’ material practices. Bold brushwork, unpolished, sketchy surfaces, and bright, “primitive” colors were combined with their subject matter—the effects of light, the individual sensation made visible—to establish the modern as visual. |
Contents
Landscape art plein airisme | 5 |
Standardised support sizes a question | 18 |
Prepared paper | 25 |
White grounds and bright plein air light | 82 |
Clairobscur and the politics of genius | 88 |
Lustre | 94 |
Impressionism and modern paint technology | 98 |
Modern paint containers | 105 |
Rendering light modern | 177 |
Local colour light and colour temperature | 186 |
Disrupting the boundaries | 193 |
Painting frames | 201 |
layers of meaning | 209 |
15 | 216 |
232 | |
238 | |
Painting au premier coup | 157 |
The coloured ébauche | 163 |
coloured taches scumble and pleine pâte | 169 |
Common terms and phrases
absorbent grounds aesthetic appearance Argenteuil artists bitumen Bomford Bouvier bright brush brushwork Callen Camille Pissarro Cassatt catalogue century Cézanne Cézanne's chrome yellow clair-obscur Claude Monet colouristic colourmen commercial composition contrast Corot dark Degas Degas's Delacroix detail of pl ébauche étude example exhibition fabric foreground frames Gettens and Stout green grey Hareux hues Ibid impasted impasto Impressionist painting Impressionists landscape painting landscapists lead white Lefranc light effects Manet materials matt Mérimée mixtures modern Morisot motif Musée d'Orsay Museum Naples yellow National Gallery Neo-impressionist nineteenth-century oil binder oil grounds oil painting opaque outdoors Paillot de Montabert paint layer paint surface painters pale palette Paris Paul Cézanne peinture pictorial picture Pierre-Auguste Renoir pigments Pissarro plein air portrait priming quoted ready-primed Renoir Salon scumbled self-primed shadows sketch stretcher studio technique texture tints tion tonal tone transparent twill ultramarine varnish vermilion Vibert viridian white ground Winsor & Newton