Glance at Impressionism & Surrealism
By Anisa Hashemi
Arts Editor
- Impressionism
Who needs linear perspective, balanced composition, or chiaroscuro? Not impressionists!Often, impressionist paintings were done in the open air. They were the result of spontaneous experience without overthinking. The impressionists painted immediate visual sensations like light through colors. The style was also strongly influenced by the 19th century scientific research on the chemistry of paint, and the laws of optics.
Some important figures of the impressionists period (1860s-1886) are Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, Edouard Manet, and of course, Claude Monet.
Claude Monet (1840- 1926)
Claude Monet might just be my favorite artist amongst everyone I’ve studied and seen. If you are interested by him and his life, I recommend you read Le syndrome de l’Orangerie by Grégoire Bouillier for fun insight on his personal life and his beautiful waterlily paintings.
I personally had the chance to witness his famous work Sunset on the Seine at Lavacourt, Winter Effect at the Petit Palais in Paris this year, and it was absolutely phenomenal. The real painting is on a large 100×150 cm canvas and it truly feels as if you are looking through Monet’s eyes.
Monet is an observational artist who has the habit of drawing the same subject matter over and over at different times of the day under different lighting. “Lavacourt is a village in the Paris area, located on the left bank of the Seine, opposite the village of Vétheuil where Monet was based in September 1878. The winter of 1879 was particularly harsh. Paris and the surrounding area were paralysed by snow and all transport stopped. Despite the intense cold, Monet painted twenty or so paintings during the first months of 1880, observing the ice on the Seine slowly thawing.” (Petit Palais).
In this painting, nothing has a defined shape or outline, because the artist focuses on making light, the visual effect of mist, and the reflections on the water the subject matter of this work. The reflections are composed of horizontal daubs of paint to convey the leisurely motion of the water and the blurred forms that we would actually see if we were there. Monet’s goal was to capture in paint the visual effects of reality as he saw the landscape in the moment. It is all about conveying the impression he had of what he saw that evening.
Monet was interested in painting things that change every time you look at them, which is why he spent so much time painting in the outdoors.
Furthermore, we notice a change in his art style throughout his life. The subject matter became deliberately less clear, as he focused more on the effect and illusion of it rather than its true form.
Monet is a pioneer in believing that the artist must focus on the color, light, and feeling the subject produces. This idea opposes the past belief that concentrated on specific, universally clear subjects, such as historical events or family portraits, who did not care for the impression of light at different hours. Monet was indeed slowly stepping into something that would develop into abstractionism…
To this day, Monet’s soft artworks, research on light’s behavior and his incredible skill at painting fast enough to capture the specific moments he witnessed make him an incredible artist. My favorite.
2. Surrealism
Moving on to a new art style with a completely different purpose, Surrealism. The movement officially began in 1924 with André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, and developed especially during the interwar period. Breton, a French writer, poet, and doctor, was influenced by Freud’s psychoanalysis and championed free association (a technique from Freudian psychoanalysis) to explore the subconscious. Surrealists aimed to reveal a higher reality beyond everyday appearances through dreams, fantasies , and repressed thoughts. Many artists like Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and Joan Miró followed Breton and embraced automatism and dream imagery to bypass conscious intention and attempt to express the unconscious mind.
Salvador Dali (1904-1989)
Salvador Dali is perhaps the most famous surrealist artist. His paintings have a genuinely hallucinatory quality: he called them hand painted dream photographs. Let us look at his work, The Persistence of Memory. There are hardly any abstractions because viewers recognize most of the elements. Real things were ingeniously put together in unusual ways and contexts to create distorted, dream-like paintings. He too read Freud and claimed that the point of his painting is to express the subconscious and document its workings.
The deserted, coastal landscape of the painting evokes a sense of timelessness and a dreamlike quality. Dalí’s hometown of Port Lligat is thought to have inspired this landscape, lit by a never setting sun that has no horizon. Dali rendered every single detail of his dreamscape with great precision to make the world of the painting as convincing as a real dream. Salvador Dali’s famous “melting clocks” portray the strange distortion of the notion of time in dreams and memories. Each of the clocks represents the past present or future, showing how they can coexist in dreams. Furthermore, there are ants scattered on a pocket watch, two rectangular prisms, a tree, and a strange white figure in the center. The ants and dry tree suggest morbid thoughts of death and decomposition. Also, some claim the white figure on the ground to be a duck, others a horse, and some see it as a distorted alf face with evidently long lashes.
Additionally, an impossible system of lighting produces strange color combinations. Indeed, there is no clear source of light, unlike all realistic paintings. This created a confusion and contradiction of shadows and highlights across the canvas.
As a whole, I believe Dali has a very interesting and effective approach to painting dreams. by focusing so much on the distortion and non-linear progression of time, the use of both realistic objects and unclear elements, and the confusing source of light, he truly expresses the consistent, yet inconsistent nature of dreams and the creative mind.