Page 215 - DENG402_HISTORY_OF_ENGLISH_LITERATURE

History of English Literature

Notes landscapes had usually been painted in the studio. The Impressionists found that they could
capture the momentary and transient effects of sunlight by painting en plein air. They portrayed
overall visual effects instead of details, and used short “broken” brush strokes of mixed and pure
unmixed colour—not blended smoothly or shaded, as was customary—in order to achieve the
effect of intense colour vibration.
Although the emergence of Impressionism in France happened at a time when a number of other
painters, including the Italian artists known as the Macchiaioli, and Winslow Homer in the
United States, were also exploring plein-air painting, the Impressionists developed new techniques
that were specific to the style. Encompassing what its adherents argued was a different way of
seeing; it was an art of immediacy and movement, of candid poses and compositions, of the play
of light expressed in a bright and varied use of colour.

Did u know? The public, at first hostile, gradually came to believe that the Impressionists
had captured a fresh and original vision, even if the new style did not receive
the approval of the art critics and establishment.
By recreating the sensation in the eye that views the subject, rather than delineating the details of
the subject, and by creating a welter of techniques and forms, Impressionism.

28.4 Expressionism

Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in
Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from
a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or
ideas. Expressionist artists sought to express meaning or emotional experience rather than physical
reality.
Expressionism was developed as an avant-garde style before the First World War. It remained
popular during the Weimar Republic, particularly in Berlin. The style extended to a wide range
of the arts, including painting, literature, theatre, dance, film, architecture and music.
The term is sometimes suggestive of emotional angst. In a general sense, painters such as Matthias
Grunewald and El Greco are sometimes termed expressionist, though in practice the term is
applied mainly to 20th-century works.

Notes The Expressionist emphasis on individual perspective has been characterized as a
reaction to positivism and other artistic styles such as naturalism and impressionism.
The term was invented by Czech art historian Antonin Matejcek in 1910 as the opposite of
impressionism: “An Expressionist wishes, above all, to express himself... (an Expressionist rejects)
immediate perception and builds on more complex psychic structures... Impressions and mental
images that pass through mental peoples soul as through a filter which rids them of all substantial
accretions to produce their clear essence [...and] are assimilated and condense into more general
forms, into types, which he transcribes through simple short-hand formulae and symbols.”
(Gordon, 1987)

Notes The term “Expressionism” is usually associated with paintings, graphic work, and
other forms of artistic practice in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century
that challenged academic traditions, particularly the Die Brucke and Der Blaue
Reiter groups.

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