Impressionism: The Movement towards Reality
Impressionism may very well be the first modern movement transcribed for art. Its founders were artists who resented the rigorous system instilled by the government and who sanctioned exhibitions, salons, or academes. These highly prestigious institutions rejected many individuals, making most of them feel inadequate and alienated from their passion. As a way to evade the fine finish and particularity to detail, which was conventional during the 17th to 18th century, Impressionists made it a point to capture the transient or ephemeral concept of their subject. This made the objects being depicted leave an impression on the viewer at first glance. By doing so, artists of this era had to slack off a little bit when it came to their strokes and lighten up their color scheme to achieve the look of a less structured but more natural overall image. The traditional practice of lining up each of the objects to fit a certain perspective was discarded to identify the more important elements of the viewers’ vision. For this reason specifically, most art critics lambasted their paintings for looking not only incomplete, but lackluster in quality. Though, the works of Impressionism were very much condemned during its own era, it sparked the development of paintings towards a more diverse and progressive era of appreciation. By straying away from the depictions of symmetry and the ideal concepts of everything, they proved that art is evident in the imperfect, realistic, and natural. One example of an Impressionist painter is Alfred Sisley. He was one of the most underrated painters of his era and maybe even in history. This may be due to the fact that he bestrode between two nationalities by having been born to English parents whilst living amongst the almost conceited culture that is the French. His mother worked as a music connoisseur and his father exported artificial flowers and silk. This could have been a major contributing factor as to why he eventually ended up honing an interest in both art and nature.
Unlike his counterparts, he principally painted landscapes with nature as a main component. He never really deviated away from that practice as it seemed to be his true passion and specialty. Most artists of his era created works that revolved around industrialization, urbanization, and important people. With that being said, an informal but rather unique style of paintings has emerged in France and created a movement that seemed to have influenced the generations of art to follow.
Avenue of Chestnut Trees near La CelleSaint-Cloud (1867)
Although he is often deemed a foreigner due to his English nationality, he trained in France under Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. He was also considered as a focal point among creators of a new style of art. Sisley produced many works that depicted landscapes known for their potential to reproduce an effect of atmosphere and light that affects the viewer’s emotions. One of his most famous works, Avenue of Chestnut Trees near La CelleSaint-Cloud (1867), is a depiction of a hunting trail which leads to a shaded forest by the outskirts of a small village. The subject of the painting is not necessarily a single object but rather the whole landscape and its underlying concept. The intense shades of color allow the picture to truly come alive and highlight the important aspects of the canvas. By deviating from the standardized form of perfect symmetry and formal structure, he loosened his strokes on the brush and went for a more purifying look, which was a method fit for representing nature.
A similarly conceptualized character lives within the persona of Erik Satie. He was an extremely eccentric composer of the same era and never really shied away from that reputation. His educational attainment was never really impressive, and majority of his works were considered short compared to the music of that era. However, he should never have been underestimated for his defiance of musical conventions as his ideas were eventually deemed an overpowering influence on many musical developments over time. Much like Sisley, he seems to have been considered as somewhat an Impressionist in the sense that he contributed to the initiation of a movement towards a more broadened appreciation of the arts. As someone known for being independent, rebellious, and even considerably ruthless, he was well connected to many other musicians, even though he had a somewhat unique perception of what music could be. He made a living by playing the piano and the accordion in various bars and cafes around his area, where he was able to create and produce many of his songs. He deviated from the mainstream trends of the Romantic period, which featured a lot of trills, ornaments, and exaggerated sounds.
Satie’s works, such as Gymnopedies No.1 to No.3, seemed to portray a multifaceted complexion. In a sense they are simple, basic, and easy to listen to in terms of how the left hand and right hand accompany each other in harmony. The left hand plays a simple and quite repetitive bass like progression, while the right hand follows a soft and unornamented melody. Majority of the track is set in a major key but drops into glimpses and shades of minor chords, which really flip the dynamics of the piece. He uses unusual scales from the older forms of composition, which sound similar to that of folk tunes, then mixes them with a thought-provoking twist to express sadness and ambiguity. In a sense, the track gives off a rather mysterious and ambivalent feeling, which evokes in its listeners a more general and open interpretation.
Erik Satie's Gymnopédie No.1
The similarities between the two artists and their works become more clearly evident as we better understand Impressionism as a movement and the element of each art form as they are produced. The elements that were usually termed as Impressionistic include static harmony, emphasis on instrumental timbres that created an interplay of ‘colors’, melodies that seemed to lack direction in terms of motion, simplified ornamentations that took place as the melody, and lastly, the avoidance of musical form. The similarities of the two art mediums lay in their reactions against the style of Romanticism. The sense of realism and naturalism that this movement wanted to encapsulate has been sparking a development in the general perspective of art until this day.
Gymnopedie and Avenue of Chestnut Trees near La CelleSaint-Cloud (1867) somehow strike the same emotions in their audiences as they both depict a free and natural movement. This is evident in the way Sisley brushes on the canvas to best recreate the scene of nature. Satie exemplifies this sincere and gentle motion through the balance of musical harmony. The background, foreground, and middle ground all come together in sound. Specifically, the constant left hand bass notes in the background, the unstructured right hand melodic notes at the surface, and the middle ground- which is formed as the notes are played together- all come together. While considerably simple in terms of procedure, the content and context from where the art is predicated exemplifies its true value and makes appreciating it all the more worthwhile.
Sources:
Satie, E. (1988). Erik satie. VIRGIN CLASSICS Sisley, A., & Rothenstein, J. :. (1966). Alfred Sisley. London: Knowledge Publications Courthion, P. (1989). Impressionism. New York: Galahad Books.