Impressionism in Art

In the history of art, Impressionism achieved highly differentiated color schemes to express light, air, and atmosphere and this defined a completely new approach to the visual conception of light (see also Barnhart, 1942, for a similar analysis of children's drawings).

In Piaget's developmental theory, this indicates that concrete operational modes of representation are being extended to formal operational modes that deal with abstract internal dimensions in addition to manifest form. This attention to inner form, structure, and meaning eventually led to Impressionism and its search for the internal constituent elements of light and color that comprise perceptual experiences. Impressionism sought to capture the inner form and structure of perceptual events. The search for the articulation and representation of inner form and structure, first in the Baroque and later in Impressionism, was the beginning of a shift to more formal operational, abstract modes of representation.

Arnheim ( 1954/ 1974, pp. 134-135), for example, considers Impressionism a "radical countermovement," which sought to reject linear perspective and the representation of the idealized universal figure for a return to elementary shape and color after the "extreme exploitation of projective distortion." Others prefer to conceptualize Impressionism as further progress in the representation of subjective dimensions that began in the Renaissance and was elaborated in Mannerism and the Baroque. Whether one considers the developments subsequent to the Renaissance to be revolution, evolution, or some combination of the two, Impressionism was a major revision in style that had continuity with developments that had taken place earlier in Mannerism and the Baroque. As with all major revisions, the discoveries of Impressionism not only maintained some continuity with prior developments, but also provided preparations for important modifications still to come. Whether viewed as a revolt against the cold, mechanical, mathematical canons of the Renaissance or as further development of the capacity to represent subjective experiences, Impressionism was a major shift in the mode of representation.

Impressionism emerged in the mid- 19th century, typified by the works of Manet, Monet, Degas, Renoir, and culminated in the work of the Post-impressionists, such as Van Gogh, Seurat, and Cezanne. Rosenblum (1974, p. 189), in his analysis of the transformations in the late 18th century Neoclassic and Romantic art, demonstrates how the "destruction" of Renaissance and Baroque traditional perspective began around 1800, even before the work of Turner and Constable in 1820-1835 and Courbet and Manet in 1850-1860. Rosenblum discusses how Neoclassic Romantic works by David, Flaxman, Ingres, and Blake, with their pseudo-simplicity of pure line and perspective, actually contained radical deviations from the principles of perspective that created a personal spatial system within a pictorial flatness. But it was the paintings of Turner and Constable, in the first half of the 19th century, with their primary use of atmospheric factors, shading, and variations of color rather than form, that were major factors in the transition from the Baroque to Impressionism.

Impressionism was a major step in the search for the representation of intrinsic, formal, abstract, symbolic form. To capture this inner form and structure, the Impressionists concentrated on the basic, discrete, sensory elements of which the object was composed. In many ways Impressionism was an extension of the subjectivism achieved in the Baroque. Baroque art was characterized by a relinquishing of the topological dimensions of boundaries and contours; figure and ground tended to merge as space became continuous and homogeneous. This conception of homogeneous space was extended in Impressionism by the search for the common properties and basic similarities of figure and ground. Impressionism found this basic structural similarity by treating all experience in terms of constituent, visual sensations.