What is impressionism?

Impressionism appeared in 1874. In April this year, a group of young French painters held an exhibition of works by artists such as painters, sculptors and printmakers in the studio of photographer Nadal in Capesin Street, Paris. Monet, Renoir, Cezanne and others attended the exhibition. One of the exhibits is Monet's oil painting Impression of Sunrise. The title of this painting was borrowed by Leroy, a journalist with a conservative artistic view. He cynically called the exhibition "Impressionist Exhibition", hence the name Impressionism or Impressionism.

Impressionism came to the French painting world with an innovative attitude. It opposed the outdated classical academic school at that time, and advocated outdoor painting in the sun according to the observation and direct feeling of the eyes, showing the subtle changes of the color of objects in the light, opening up a new field of painting performance.

The basic point of impressionist painting theory is that all colors come from light, and they mainly paint with red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple or similar pigments. Impressionist painters denied the traditional black shadow and used bright colors because of their careful observation of the instantaneous light changes.

Impressionist painters take the expression of trivial matters and direct experiences around them as their theme. They emphasize purely objective description. They also let the frame cut the picture at will and take objective scene fragments for composition in order to obtain an incomplete effect.

There are actually two kinds of impressionist painters: one is to emphasize light and color; Heavy modeling and sketching. Monet, a typical painter who attaches importance to light and color, became less and less interested in the outline portrait of objects from the 1980s of 19, and then concentrated on expressing feelings with light and color in the landscape paintings Haystack and Rouen Church, exploring their independent aesthetic value.

Degas is the representative among impressionist painters who pay attention to modeling and sketching. He pays attention to indoor light instead of external light like Monet. He uses the conversion of light to help express the fast-changing movement, make the still picture dynamic, and use light to strengthen the contrast of colors and make the picture full of fantasy.

Impressionist art enriches the expressive language of painting, making painting get rid of the shackles of plot and theme, and instead give full play to the value of painting language-color and line itself.