Impressionism and Post Impressionism?

Question

Can someone please tell me why this quote is true. "Modernist artists interpreted their subject matter by focusing on clour, light and atmosphere".? the artist is Paul Cezzane.

Thanks

Answer 1

To WAY oversimplify, Claude Monet, who did more than anyone else to bring Impressionism together (and whose "Impression: Sunrise" gave the movement its name) had only one eye and impaired vision.

Up through Courbet drawing was incredibly important in the fine arts, and in fact both Manet and Degas made a point of displaying their impeccable draftsmanship.  Ruskin denounced many of Turner's landscapes as "tinted  steam".  In other words, to the extent that you departed from an exact rendering of what you saw, you were not doing good artwork.

As I have impaired vision and occasionally draw well, I can honestly say that there is no reason during his glory days Monet could not have done conventionally good pictures.  It takes work but it takes work to draw period.  His pictures focused on color, light, atmosphere and form because this was an historical moment when many artists and collectors, having been exposed to photography and what it is able to do, were coming to understand that there is more to the art of looking than what went into Ingres's or David's work, wonderful as that is.  Manet took classic themes and techniques which he applied to modern subjects.  Monet and Renoir -- each in their own way developed the use of color in their pictures almost to the exclusion of everything else.  Artists like Caillebotte took what they, Morrisot, Degas, Manet and Cassat developed and combined them in some incredible works.  Cezanne as his work developed focused more and more on form and his work developed a monumentality which strongly influenced Picasso and Braque in the development of Cubism.  

And of course there is Seurat.

We are living in a time which seems to want to react against the Modernists' rejection of traditional drawing.  This is fine, however the truth is that this exploration of alternatives was fueled by the development of Photography and a recognition of its possibilities, and the Modernists, who in the visual arts may roughly be described as having been most active from the 1860's through the 1970's when people began to consolidate these experiments in their work, discovered many wonderful things about how we look.  Artist Chuck Close has fans among experts in Optics who understand very little about why he paints the way he does.