Talking Japanese, making an impression.

Japanese woodblock prints became widely accessible after 1854, when Japan was reopened to foreigners. Though western artists had previously looked at and sythesised the work of other cultures in their work, most notably the 17th and 18th century interest in chinese orientalism that had essentially been an art of fantasy and exoticism. With the rejection of conventional ideals on which western art was based that began to take hold with the romantic movement, artists of the mid to late 19th century looked toward the new  (unconventional to western eyes) aesthetics of Japanese art . The rejection of the rigid conventions of western art lead them to learn from different ways of thinking and visual representation. So potent was the impact when they did, every major late 19th century painter (with the possible exception of Cezanne) was to be influenced by it. Indeed, the history of western art is to a much greater extent than is commonly realised that of a liberating and vitialising effect of successive waves of discovery by western artists of alien cultures, first Japanese, then African and Polynesian.

Japanese prints dramatically effected the whole course of western art in the latter half of the 19th century. They provided a catalyst which helped painters throw off the spell of classical tradition, free themselves from the authority of the old masters (furthering the ideal laid down by Velasquez of the contemporary artist free of the patron, a creative intellectual  rather than a crafts man) the artists of the 19th century looked for new ways of seeing, new conceptions in art. It can also be said that this desire to find new ways of seeing was in part driven by the invention of photography, though as a medium this was still in its infancy.

Japanese prints were popular, but often deemed vulgar subject matter and unorthodox in their viewpoint by the general public. The artists saw them as being as fresh and brilliant in their bold use of colour as they were vivacious in form. Degas confessed that he learnt from them what drawing really meant - that it was a ' way of seeing form'.

The freshness of colour, unorthodoxy of design and subject matter in Japanese prints appealed to the impressionists, especially Monet. Japanese art indicated a way to solve the problem of how to combine and reconcile pictorial three-dimensional illusionism within the flat painted surface whilst rejecting standard western conventions such as perspective.

Piero Della Francesca

The influence of Japanese art even extended into the growing commercial graphic or commercial art of the time, most notably in the work of Toulouse Lautrec who confronted the problem most directly and in its simplest terms, revolutionising the art of poster making by flattening the illusionistic space in the Japanese manner and uniting the pattern of pictorial elements with that of the lettering.

Attacks on artists who bucked the accepted conventions by an outraged public were a regular feature of mid 19th century life. The broad brush work and unconventional themes of the romantics rocked the establishment. Though the work of Turner, who was concerned with practice of painting as an end for itself and the fleeting effects of light than the accepted conventions of allegory had slowly become recognised by the English establishment, the centre of the artistic world at the time was Paris which was still controlled by the conventionally thinking salons.

Turner (1845)

In the 1860's a group of artists set up an exhibition of work,the salon de refuses, for work rejected by the official art world (which controlled the only road to professional acceptance and success through the salons) and lambasted by a conditioned and conservative public who were accustomed to the smooth brushwork and careful finish of salon painting, had some difficulty in reading impressionist paintings with their rough handling and broken colour patches spotted all over the surface, as if they were casual sketches. This group came to be known as the impressionists.

Renoir stated that he and Monet had" freed painting from the importance of the subject, under Louis XV I would have been obliged to paint nothing but specified subjects. I am at liberty to paint flowers and call them simply flowers, without their needing to tell a story" .

Renoir

The impressionists never completely won over the official art world, but they were recognised by the cultivated intelligensia. Though the public and art establishment viewed them as rebels, they were actually far from what we would term rebels. Most were of a good, solid bourgeois origin and enjoyed the full advantages of their position. Their paintings embody precisely those values which true rebels reject. They depict a typically middle-class version of happiness, though the impressionists claimed to be uninvolved emotionally with their subject matter.

Much like the Realists, the impressionists rejected the past as a source of subject matter. They believed that artists should deal only with the world around them, they should invent nothing. For the impressionists, this meant that artists should restrict themselves to what lay within their range of vision at the time and place they were painting. For them the present became the instant of consciousness in which one is aware of existence. Baudelaire said that 'modernity is the transitory, the fleeting, the contingent'. The impressionists followed this idea, concerning themselves with the truth and actuality of contemporary experience (much like the realists, only from a different point of view). But a degree of artifice inevitably entered their work, even some of the most apparently spontaneous of Monet's 'impressions' being dependent on devices learnt from Japanese prints.

When we think of impressionist work, we typically envision a landscape or other out of doors subject painted largely with a high toned palette of clear bright colours applied with varied, broken brushwork to a canvas primed with white (not the traditional raw brown linen) and then washed with a base colour. The composition, apparently as casual as a snapshot, is constructed entirely with colour and relies little on tonal contrast. All these elements had been anticipated separately by earlier painters, but their combination was new. Many of the techniques the impressionists employed had been taught at academies, though only for sketches (etudes). Sketches were traditionally made outside or on location and then brought back into the studio to be interpreted into more traditional 'finished' paintings. The impressionists dared to present the 'sketches' as finished works.

Monet was the leading proponent of impressionism. His painting Impression - Sunrise of 1872 gave the movement its name. Monet experienced nature as distant things veiled in atmosphere, as vibrations or sensations of light and colour rather than shape or form. All 'content' or subject matter, in the traditional sense, has gone too. Light and atmosphere are the subject. Simply the record of a fleeting moment.

" When you go out and paint, try to forget what object you have before you -- a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, here is a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact colour and shape, until it gives you your own naive expression of the scene you see before you ".

Monet said he wished he had been born blind and then had suddenly gained his sight so that he could have begun to paint in this way without knowing what objects were. He often painted motifs in series; whether it was a haystack or cathedral, it didn't matter to him. He was more concerned with painting light and atmosphere through the minute changes of daylight. Monet believed that it is our knowledge of what we see which falsifies our vision.

Though impressionism was a short lived movement, as younger artists toward the end of the 19th century rejected its self imposed limitations and again began to make art with a sense of elevation and meaning, it is a key moment in art history: It could be argued that Monet and the impressionists are the forefathers of abstraction.

Monet in late life

Frank Auerbach

Mark Rothko

James Turrell

Patrick Heron

Howard Hodgkin