Impressionism and The Famous Cafes of Paris Essay

Impressionism and The Famous Cafes of Paris - Essay Example The essay "Impressionism and The Famous Cafes of Paris" provide a detailed information about impressionism movement and gives a review on famous cafes of Paris in the 19th century. Impressionists painted day-to-day events instead of extraordinary occurrences. All this had to take place in a very unconventional setting. What better setting could they find than the famous cafes of Paris? How did the cafes relate with the impressionists and the post-impressionists? How much did the cafes influence the artists' work? How different they are now from what they were in the 19th century? These are some of the questions this paper tries to explore. Impressionism was an important movement in painting which began in the late 19th Century and developed through the early 20th century in France. It began when a few of the French artists became disillusioned with the way painting was taught in those days -- the mythological or historical subject matter. â€Å"They also rejected the conventional, i maginative or idealizing treatments of academic paintings.† Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renior, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot, Armand Guillaumin and Frà ©dà ©ric Bazille comprised the initial artists of the movement. Among those who adopted the impressionist style of painting for some time were Edgar Degas and Paul Cà ©zanne. Édouard Manet was the painter who had inspired the impressionists to adopt the style in which they painted. Later, he also joined the movement and adopted its style. The impressionists were not hitherto known by this name. In 1874, when the group organized its own exhibition, an art critic, Louis Leroy, wrote a scathing criticism of the painting Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), by the then unknown artist Claude Monet. Louis titled his review, The Exhibition of the Impressionists, and had this to say in his article: Impression - I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.2 It was from here on, that the group came to be known as the Impressionists and hence, the movement came to be known as Impressionism. This was the identity, which while the world derided, the artists of the group were proud of it. Neo-Impressionism and Post-Impressionism Impressionism, as a technique is still being practiced among the contemporary artists. However, the movement began to wane very shortly. The greatness of the movement does not lie in its longevity, its greatness lies in influence and productivity. As a reaction to Impressionism, two new movements came into being. Artists reacted against the empirical realism3 of the impressionists and devised a new technique based on scientific application of the optical principles of light and color to render the transient nature of time. This technique came to be known as Neo-Impressionism. Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Henri-Edmond Cross, Albert Dubois-Pillet, Maximilien Luce, Tho Van Rysselberghe and the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, formed the first Neo-Impressionist group. Together, in 1881, they formed Socit des Artistes Indpendants (Society of Independent Artists). Like its predecessor, this movement also waned quickly, but not without having a lasting influence on the works of such great artists as Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Henri Matisse. An English art-critic, Roger Fry, gave the name Post-Impressionism to the works of artists like Paul Czanne, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulous