Word: impressionists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...trying like Gauguin or Van Gogh to push beyond it. They are represented too, to the confusion of the term: if post-impressionism means not only Van Gogh's Arlesian canvases, in all their lambent color and twisting, linear energies, but also the eclectic products of a tonal impressionist like Jules Bastien-Lepage, with his soulful peasant girls in burlap, what can it mean? To what imaginable modernist context do the many style rétro canvases in this show belong?Giovanni Boldini's portrait of Mme. Max, for instance, or Albert Maignan's Passage of Fortune, 1895, with its gauze...
What was the anti-impressionist reaction of the 1880s all about? Partly, subject matter, the issue of what painting could express. Impressionism had been the art of the bourgeois paradise, naturalism unmodulated by idea. It had no content beyond the "view" ("Monet is only an eye," Cezanne said, "but good God, what an eye!"), no governing system of imagery, no symbols. To younger artists, it therefore seemed lax and unambitious. They wanted to return painting to a more demanding kind of diction ?exemplary and grand, like the art of the museums. All manner of stylistic sources fed into their...