5 Signs you migh be Getting Over Impressionism (& Postimpressionism!)

1. You find yourself intellectualising Van Gogh’s Sunflowers.
2. Cezanne’s large Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses) fails to actually move you.
3. The time you spend looking at Monet’s The Water Lily Pond can only be measured on a digital stop-watch.
4. The pleasure you take from Renoir’s The Umbrellas is entirely due to the fact that it reminds you of a poem. (In this case the poem is by Luke Beesley… I don’t remember the title, but I know it ends with umbrellas opening at once all over the city.)
5. You are compelled to write a somewhat (but not altogether) facetious list such as this, and post it on a blog.

(Cezanne, Les Grandes Baigneuses 1894-1905)

Since seeing my first major da Vinci, Raphael, Caravaggio, so on and so forth, my respect for those artists loosely known as the ‘Impressionists’ has started to wane (and for the sake of this discussion, I’m including Manet and Cezanne in this group).

The controversial nature of their exhibitions around the fin di siecle was of course due mostly to their apparent disregard for mimetic fidelity, in favour of some other insight into the nature of human perception; whereas many of the figures in mimetic art, from the Renaissance (particularly da Vinci, Michaelangelo's and Bernini's scultures etc) onward, are so lifelike it wouldn’t be a surprise to see one start breathing right there on the canvas.

My gripe is not solely based on this unfortunate comparison between Impressionism and Renaissance painting and sculpture, in terms of ‘realism’ or mimetic fidelity. But the fact is I now seem to be able to only take an intellectual pleasure from most of the so-called 'Impressionists'; how Cezanne flattens the canvas for others to follow, how Van Gogh’s sunflowers are strangely tormented. In short, whereas once they meant something in and of themselves, they have been reduced, for me, to little more than a stepping stone, ie. to Cubism and Abstract Expressionism etc.

In short, give me a good Pollock, Frank Stella, Rothko or whomever else over a good Monet, Renoir, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec etc any day. For the record, my two favourites from this exhibition of Impressionist paintings in the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, were Monet’s The Houses of Parliament (partly because I’d only just seen these in London myself and because I like sunsets) and Camille Pissarro’s The Boulevard Montmarte at Night (because I haven’t yet seen Paris, and it looks pretty at night on this canvas).

(Pissarro, Le Boulevard Montmartre, effet de nuit 1897)