Word: impressionist
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...Claude Monet, the quintessential impressionist painter, was born in 1840. That year Queen Victoria married Prince Albert, and in France both Ingres and Delacroix were at work. In 1926, when Monet died, Lenin was two years dead, and Picasso was already a middle-aged man of 45. Having lived such a span, Monet in old age looked like a relic of the 19th century -- hardly a modern artist at all. What could his painting offer a postcubist culture...
Such a reaction against impressionism was strong among younger painters of the 1880s. They were led by Georges Seurat, whose Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884-86, is a manifesto of anti-impressionist aims: a hieratic, pseudoscientific, heavily theorized paean to timelessness, edged with mordant social irony about the mechanization of bourgeois life. For some it made sensuous pleasure look like an insufficient message for art. Impressionism was gaining no new adherents and losing some of its original ones: Sisley had run out of steam by the '80s, and Pissarro had gone over to the younger...
Monet's reply to anti-impressionist prejudice, Tucker argues, was to broaden - the base and subject matter of his work. He wanted to show that the greatest landscape painting in France could still be produced by impressionist means. "Nature should not be submitted to harsh, premeditated analysis, as in the Grande Jatte," he writes of Monet's attitude. "It should be allowed to reign in the painting as it does in the world -- resplendent in all its nuances, variants, subtleties and surprises...
...exhibit also features some imaginative and insightful texts. The poetry of Natasha Shapiro strikes a chord with many modern lovers, and the short story by Eleanor Stafford titled "She Framed Herself in Sofa" is a well-drawn impressionist piece on obsession with self-image...
...about losing business. "You don't grow from $400 million to nearly $3 billion in annual sales within five years if people don't have confidence in you," he says. Still, Ainslie concedes that the timing was intended to avoid any ruckus before Sotheby's big spring sales of impressionist paintings in New York City and London...