Urbanization, Photography and the Birth of Impressionism
Topic 3: Urbanization, Photography and the Birth of Impressionism
- Life in Europe (and, slightly later, the Americas) was being transformed by the industrial revolution. Urbanization, population growth, and new technology meant that more and more Europeans led very different lives than their rural ancestors. The political and cultural effects of this economic transformation would be enormous. (Ironically, the rise of industrial production at the same moment that Romanticism and political reaction were encouraging a fascination with the past meant that many of the new products of industrial society imitated styles of much earlier times.)
- One of the new technologies to emerge at this time was photography. The camera could record visual reality as accurately as a trained painter or draftsman; one of the traditional functions of painters and draftsmen could now be performed by a machine. Could photography be considered an art, and what was the role of the artist in this new world of technology? In the long term, the rise of photography probably encouraged artists to turn away from the depiction of visual reality.
- Meanwhile, some painters adapted photographic techniques, imitating the random nature of photographic compositions and focusing on particular moments in time. These painters were the Impressionists, a group that formed in Paris around the 1860s and who rejected the world of official academies and salons.
- The Impressionists were important for a number of reasons: they exemplified the new role of a self-defined avant-garde; their freer, more spontaneous style of painting signaled the decline of academic art and of strict representationalism, and they celebrated urban life and the new role of the countryside as an easily accessible retreat for city dwellers. The Impressionists were also influenced by new technology: they used mass-produced oil paints in metal tubes, freeing them to paint outdoors and encouraging them to adopt a lighter, brighter palette
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