The Impressionist Art of Seeing and Being Seen
Impressionist paintings, after decades of auction records and print-on-demand posters, have become the most reliable crowd-pleasers of European art. Pretty light. Happy haystacks.
Believe me: In 1875, they were hardly so soothing. They were views of a society rocketing through modernization, and losing its bearings as it accelerated.
The movement’s name was originally a critic’s insult. “Impressionist” came from a venomous review of an 1874 exhibition of paintings by Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro — and one woman.
This is her painting “In England (Eugène Manet on the Isle of Wight),” which you can see today at the small Musée Marmottan in Paris.
It’s a scrambled, unstable picture, which is all about how we look — at women, at landscapes, at other pictures.
Look at the details here, and you can see how Morisot paints the seaside as a new stage of modern life, defined through its pleasures and pressures — the pressures, above all, of being watched.
