Impressionism

Impressionism is a visual language that took shape in France in the 1860s and 1870s and revolutionized European painting by placing at its centre the immediate visual impression of a changing world. Its aesthetic core was the desire to seize a fleeting instant, the play of light, atmosphere and the vibration of air. The artists left the studio for the open air (plein air) and began to paint what the eye sees under a particular light rather than what the mind knows. Its formal marks are a broken, vibrating brushstroke, a bright, high-keyed palette without black shadows, the optical mixing of pure colours, the dissolution of contour, and a fragmentary composition seemingly caught "by chance," shaped by the influence of photography and the Japanese print. Its motifs are landscape, water and reflections, city boulevards, scenes of leisure and the portrait in a natural setting. Its founders were Claude Monet, with his series of haystacks, cathedrals and water lilies, Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas with his dynamism of movement, and Berthe Morisot; the movement's name came from Monet's painting "Impression, Sunrise." In Ukrainian art the Impressionist discoveries were creatively absorbed by Mykola Burachek, by Oleksandr Murashko, whose canvas "The Carousel" glows with light, by Abram Manevich and Petro Levchenko. Impressionism liberated colour and brushwork, changed the very notion of a finished work, and opened the road to Post-Impressionism and all subsequent modern painting, remaining one of the public's most beloved chapters in the history of art.