Story. The main characteristic features of impressionism How is impressionism similar to classical painting

Interregional Academy of Personnel Management

Severodonetsk Institute

Department of General Education and Humanities

Test on cultural studies

Impressionism as an art movement

Completed:

group student

IN23-9-06 BUB (4. Od)

Sheshenko Sergey

Checked:

Ph.D., Assoc.

Smolina O.O.

Severodonetsk 2007

Introduction

4. Post-Impressionism

Conclusion

Bibliography

Applications

Introduction

An important phenomenon of European culture in the second half of the 19th century. There was an artistic style called impressionism, which became widespread not only in painting, but in music and fiction. And yet it arose in painting. Impressionism (French impressionism, from impression - impression), a movement in art of the last third of the 19th - early 20th centuries. It developed in French painting in the late 1860s and early 1870s. (the name arose after the exhibition of 1874, at which the painting by C. Monet “Impression. Rising Sun” was exhibited).

Signs of the impressionistic style are the absence of a clearly defined form and the desire to convey the subject in fragmentary strokes that instantly capture each impression, which, however, revealed their hidden unity and connection when reviewing the whole. As a special style, impressionism with its principle of the value of the “first impression” made it possible to conduct the narrative through details that were, as it were, grabbed at random, which apparently violated the strict consistency of the narrative plan and the principle of selecting the essential, but with their “lateral truth” imparted extraordinary brightness to the story and freshness.

In temporary arts, the action unfolds in time. Painting seems to be able to capture only one single moment in time. Unlike cinema, it always has one “frame”. How can it convey movement? One of these attempts to capture the real world in its mobility and variability was the attempt of the creators of a movement in painting called impressionism (from the French impression). This movement brought together various artists, each of whom can be characterized as follows. An impressionist is an artist who conveys his direct impression of nature, sees in it the beauty of variability and inconstancy, recreates the visual sensation of bright sunlight, the play of colored shadows, using a palette of pure unmixed colors, from which black and gray are banished. Sunlight streams and vapor rises from the damp earth. Water, melting snow, plowed earth, swaying grass in the meadows do not have clear, frozen outlines. Movement, which was previously introduced into the landscape as an image of moving figures, as a result of the action of natural forces - wind, driving clouds, swaying trees, is now replaced by peace. But this peace of inanimate matter is one of the forms of its movement, which is conveyed by the very texture of painting - dynamic strokes of different colors, not constrained by the rigid lines of the drawing.

1. The origin of impressionism and its founders

The formation of impressionism began with the painting by E. Manet (1832-1893) “Luncheon on the Grass” (1863). The new style of painting was not immediately accepted by the public, who accused the artists of not knowing how to draw and throwing paints scraped from the palette onto the canvas. Thus, Monet’s pink Rouen cathedrals, the best of the artist’s painting series (“Morning,” “At First Rays of Sun,” “Afternoon”), seemed implausible to both viewers and fellow artists. The artist did not strive to represent the cathedral on canvas at different times of the day - he competed with the Gothic masters to absorb the viewer in the contemplation of magical light-color effects. The façade of Rouen Cathedral, like most Gothic cathedrals, hides the mystical spectacle of the bright colored stained glass windows of the interior coming to life in the sunlight. The lighting inside the cathedrals changes depending on which side the sun is shining from, cloudy or clear weather. The word “impressionism” owes its appearance to one of Monet’s paintings. This painting was truly an extreme expression of the innovation of the emerging painting method and was called “Sunrise in Le Havre.” The compiler of the catalog of paintings for one of the exhibitions suggested that the artist call it something else, and Monet, crossing out “in Le Havre”, put “impression”. And several years after the appearance of his works, they wrote that Monet “reveals a life that no one before him was able to grasp, which no one even knew about.” In Monet's paintings they began to notice the disturbing spirit of the birth of a new era. Thus, “serialism” appeared in his work as a new phenomenon of painting. And she focused on the problem of time. The artist’s painting, as noted, snatches one “frame” from life, with all its incompleteness and incompleteness. And this gave impetus to the development of the series as sequentially replacing each other. In addition to the Rouen Cathedrals, Monet creates the Gare Saint-Lazare series, in which the paintings are interconnected and complement each other. However, it was impossible to combine the “frames” of life into a single tape of impressions in painting. This became the task of cinema. Cinema historians believe that the reason for its emergence and widespread dissemination was not only technical discoveries, but also an urgent artistic need for a moving image, and the paintings of the Impressionists, in particular Monet, became a symptom of this need. It is known that one of the plots of the first cinema show in history, organized by the Lumière brothers in 1895, was “The Arrival of a Train.” Steam locomotives, a station, and rails were the subject of a series of seven paintings, "Gare Saint-Lazare" by Monet, exhibited in 1877.

Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), together with C. Monet and A. Sisley, created the core of the impressionist movement. During this period, Renoir worked to develop a lively, colorful artistic style with feathery brushstrokes (known as Renoir's rainbow style); creates many sensual nudes (“Bathers”). In the 80s, he increasingly gravitated towards the classical clarity of images in his work. Most of all, Renoir loved to paint children's and youthful images and peaceful scenes of Parisian life ("Flowers", "Young Man Walking with Dogs in the Forest of Fontainebleau", "Vase of Flowers", "Swimming in the Seine", "Lisa with an Umbrella", " Lady in a Boat", "Riders in the Bois de Boulogne", "Ball at Le Moulin de la Galette", "Portrait of Jeanne Samary" and many others). His work is characterized by light and transparent landscapes and portraits that glorify the sensual beauty and joy of being. But Renoir had the following thought: “For forty years I have been moving towards the discovery that the queen of all colors is black paint.” The name Renoir is synonymous with beauty and youth, that time of human life when mental freshness and the flourishing of physical strength are in complete harmony.

2. Impressionism in the works of C. Pissarro, C. Monet, E. Degas, A. Toulouse-Lautrec

Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) - representative of impressionism, author of light, pure-colored landscapes ("Plowed Ground"). His paintings are characterized by a soft, restrained palette. In the late period of his creativity he turned to the image of the city - Rouen, Paris (Boulevard Montmartre, Opera Passage in Paris). In the second half of the 80s. influenced by neo-impressionism. It also worked as a schedule.

Claude Monet (1840-1926) is a leading representative of impressionism, the author of landscapes that are subtle in color, filled with light and air. In the series of canvases “Haystacks” and “Rouen Cathedral”, he sought to capture fleeting, instantaneous states of the light-air environment at different times of the day. From the name of Monet's landscape Impression. The rising sun came about and the name of the movement is impressionism. In a later period, features of decorativism appeared in the work of C. Monet.

The creative handwriting of Edgar Degas (1834-1917) is characterized by impeccably precise observation, the strictest drawing, sparkling, exquisitely beautiful color. He became famous for his freely asymmetrical angular composition, knowledge of facial expressions, poses and gestures of people of different professions, and precise psychological characteristics: “Blue Dancers”, “Star”, “Toilet”, “Ironers”, “Dancers’ Rest”. Degas is a wonderful master of portraiture. Under the influence of E. Manet moved to the everyday genre, depicting the Parisian street crowd, restaurants, horse races, ballet dancers, laundresses, and the rudeness of the smug bourgeois. If Manet's works are bright and cheerful, then in Degas they are colored with sadness and pessimism.

The work of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) is also closely related to impressionism. He worked in Paris, where he painted cabaret dancers and singers and prostitutes in his own special style, characterized by bright colors, bold composition and brilliant technique. His lithographic posters enjoyed great success.

3. Impressionism in sculpture and music

A contemporary and ally of the Impressionists was the great French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). His dramatic, passionate, heroically sublime art glorifies the beauty and nobility of man, it is permeated with emotional impulse (the group “Kiss”, “Thinker”, etc.) he is characterized by the courage of realistic quests, the vitality of images, and energetic pictorial modeling. The sculpture has a fluid form, acquiring a seemingly unfinished character, which makes his work similar to impressionism and at the same time allows one to create the impression of the painful birth of forms from elemental amorphous matter. The sculptor combined these qualities with a dramatic design and a desire for philosophical reflection (“The Bronze Age,” “Citizens of Calais”). The artist Claude Monet called him the greatest of the greats. Rodin said: “Sculpture is the art of depressions and convexities.”

Everything has its origins somewhere in the past, including paintings that have changed with the times, and current trends are not clear to everyone. But everything new is well-forgotten old, and to understand modern painting, you don’t need to know the history of art from ancient times, you just need to remember the painting of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The middle of the 19th century was a time of change not only in history, but also in art. Everything that came before: classicism, romanticism, and especially academicism - movements limited to certain boundaries. In France in the 50s and 60s, trends in painting were set by the official Salon, but typical “Salon” art did not suit everyone, which explained the new trends that emerged. There was a revolutionary explosion in the painting of that time, which broke with centuries-old traditions and foundations. And one of the epicenters was Paris, where in the spring of 1874 young painters, among whom were Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, Degas, Renoir and Cézanne, organized their own exhibition. The works presented there were completely different from those in the salon. The artists used a different method - reflexes, shadows and light were conveyed with pure paints, individual strokes, the shape of each object seemed to dissolve in an air-light environment. No other direction in painting knew such methods. These effects helped me express my impressions of ever-changing things, nature, and people as much as possible. One journalist called the group “impressionists,” thereby wanting to show his disdain for young artists. But they accepted this term, and it eventually took root and came into active use, losing its negative meaning. This is how impressionism appeared, unlike all other trends in painting of the 19th century.

At first, the reaction to the innovation was more than hostile. No one wanted to buy too bold and new paintings, and they were afraid, because all the critics did not take the impressionists seriously and laughed at them. Many said that the Impressionist artists wanted to achieve quick fame, they were dissatisfied with the sharp break with conservatism and academicism, as well as the unfinished and “sloppy” appearance of the work. But even hunger and poverty could not force the artists to abandon their beliefs, and they persisted until their paintings were finally recognized. But it took too long to wait for recognition; some impressionist artists were no longer alive.

As a result, the movement that originated in Paris in the 60s was of great importance for the development of world art in the 19th and 20th centuries. After all, future directions in painting were based precisely on impressionism. Each subsequent style appeared in search of a new one. Post-impressionism was given birth to by the same impressionists who decided that their method was limited: deep and polysemantic symbolism was a response to painting that had “lost its meaning,” and modernism, even by its name, calls for something new. Of course, many changes have occurred in art since 1874, but all modern trends in painting are, in one way or another, based on the fleeting Parisian impression.

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1. The origin of impressionism and its founders

The formation of impressionism began with the painting by E. Manet (1832-1893) “Lunch on the Grass” (1863). The new style of painting was not immediately accepted by the public, who accused the artists of not knowing how to draw and throwing paints scraped from the palette onto the canvas. Thus, Monet’s pink Rouen cathedrals, the best of the artist’s painting series (“Morning,” “At First Rays of Sun,” “Afternoon”), seemed implausible to both viewers and fellow artists. The artist did not strive to represent the cathedral on canvas at different times of the day - he competed with the Gothic masters to absorb the viewer in the contemplation of magical light-color effects. The façade of Rouen Cathedral, like most Gothic cathedrals, hides the mystical spectacle of the bright colored stained glass windows of the interior coming to life in the sunlight. The lighting inside the cathedrals changes depending on which side the sun is shining from, cloudy or clear weather. The word “impressionism” owes its appearance to one of Monet’s paintings. This painting was truly an extreme expression of the innovation of the emerging painting method and was called “Sunrise in Le Havre.” The compiler of the catalog of paintings for one of the exhibitions suggested that the artist call it something else, and Monet, crossing out “in Le Havre”, put “impression”. And several years after the appearance of his works, they wrote that Monet “reveals a life that no one before him was able to grasp, which no one even knew about.” In Monet's paintings they began to notice the disturbing spirit of the birth of a new era. Thus, “serialism” appeared in his work as a new phenomenon of painting. And she focused on the problem of time. The artist’s painting, as noted, snatches one “frame” from life, with all its incompleteness and incompleteness. And this gave impetus to the development of the series as sequentially replacing each other. In addition to the Rouen Cathedrals, Monet creates the Gare Saint-Lazare series, in which the paintings are interconnected and complement each other. However, it was impossible to combine the “frames” of life into a single tape of impressions in painting. This became the task of cinema. Cinema historians believe that the reason for its emergence and widespread dissemination was not only technical discoveries, but also an urgent artistic need for a moving image, and the paintings of the Impressionists, in particular Monet, became a symptom of this need. It is known that one of the plots of the first cinema show in history, organized by the Lumière brothers in 1895, was “The Arrival of a Train.” Steam locomotives, a station, and rails were the subject of a series of seven paintings, "Gare Saint-Lazare" by Monet, exhibited in 1877.

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It is possible that for all the millennia of existence in the arsenal of human visual arts, nothing more new or revolutionary has ever appeared. Impressionism is present in any modern artistic canvas. It can be clearly seen both in the frames of the film of the famous master, and among the gloss of a ladies' magazine. It has found its way into music and books. But once upon a time everything was different.

Origins of Impressionism

In 1901, in France, in the Combarel cave, cave paintings were accidentally discovered, the youngest of which was 15,000 years old. And this was the first impressionism in painting. Because the primitive artist did not set out to read a moral to the viewer. He simply painted the life that surrounded him.

And then this method was forgotten for many, many years. Humanity has invented others, and conveying emotions through the visual method has ceased to be a topical issue for him.

In some ways, the ancient Romans were close to impressionism. But some of their efforts were covered in ashes. And where Vesuvius could not reach, the barbarians came.

The painting was preserved, but began to illustrate texts, messages, messages, knowledge. It has ceased to be a feeling. It became a parable, an explanation, a story. Look at the Bayeux Tapestry. He is beautiful and priceless. But this is not a picture. This is seventy meters of linen comics.

Painting in impressionism: the beginning

Painting has developed slowly and majestically in the world over thousands of years. New paints and techniques appeared. Artists learned the importance of perspective and the power of a colorful hand-drawn message to influence the human mind. Painting became an academic science and acquired all the features of monumental art. She became clumsy, prim and moderately pretentious. At the same time, sharpened and unshakable, like a canonical religious postulate.

The source of subjects for the paintings were religious parables, literature, and staged genre scenes. The strokes were small and unnoticeable. Glazing was introduced to the rank of dogma. And the art of drawing in the foreseeable future promised to become ossified, like a primeval forest.

Life changed, technology developed rapidly, and only artists continued to churn out prim portraits and smoothed-out sketches of country parks. This state of affairs did not suit everyone. But the inertia of society’s consciousness was difficult to overcome at all times.

However, the 19th century was already in the yard, having long since passed its second half. Processes in society that had previously taken centuries now took place before the eyes of one generation. Industry, medicine, economics, literature, and society itself developed rapidly. This is where painting in impressionism showed itself.

Happy birthday! Impressionism in painting: paintings

Impressionism in painting, like paintings, has an exact date of its birth - 1863. And his birth was not without its oddities.

The center of world art then, of course, was Paris. It annually hosted large Parisian salons - world exhibitions and sales of paintings. The jury that selected works for the salons was mired in petty internal intrigues, useless squabbles and stubbornly oriented towards the senile tastes of the academies of that time. As a result, the salon did not include new, bright artists whose talent did not correspond to ossified academic dogmas. When selecting participants for the 1863 exhibition, over 60% of applications were rejected. These are thousands of painters. A scandal was brewing.

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And the scandal broke out. The inability to exhibit deprived a huge number of artists of their livelihood and closed access to the general public. Among them are names now known throughout the world: Monet and Manet, Renoir and Pizarro.

It is clear that this did not suit them. And a big fuss began in the press. It got to the point that on April 22, 1863, Napoleon III visited the Paris Salon and, in addition to the exhibition, purposefully inspected some of the rejected works. And I didn’t find anything reprehensible in them. And he even made this statement in the press. Therefore, in parallel with the large Paris Salon, an alternative exhibition of paintings was opened with works rejected by the salon jury. It went down in history under the name “Exhibition of Rejected People.”

Thus, April 22, 1863 can be considered the birthday of all modern art. Art that has become independent from literature, music and religion. Moreover: painting itself began to dictate its terms to writers and composers, getting rid of subordinate roles for the first time.

Representatives of impressionism

When we talk about impressionism, we primarily mean impressionism in painting. Its representatives are numerous and multifaceted. It is enough to name the most famous: Degas, Renoin, Pizarro, Cezanne, Morisot, Lepic, Legros, Gauguin, Renoir, Thilo, Foren and many, many others. For the first time, the Impressionists set the task of capturing not just a static picture from life, but capturing a feeling, an emotion, an inner experience. It was a snapshot, a high-speed photograph of the inner world, the emotional world.

Hence new contrasts and colors that had not previously been used in painting. Hence the large, bold strokes and the constant search for new forms. There is no former clarity and sleekness. The picture is blurry and fleeting, like a person’s mood. This is not a story. These are feelings visible to the eye. Look at They are all a little cut off mid-sentence, a little fleeting. These are not paintings. These are sketches brought to brilliant perfection.

The emergence of post-impressionism

It was precisely the desire to bring a feeling to the fore, and not a frozen fragment of time, that was revolutionary and innovative for that time. And here there was only one step left to post-impressionism - an art movement that brought to the forefront not emotion, but patterns. More precisely, the artist’s transmission of his inner, personal reality. This is an attempt to talk not about the external world, but about the internal one through the way the artist sees the world. perception.

Impressionism and post-impressionism in painting are very close. And the division itself is very conditional. Both movements are close in time, and the authors themselves, often the same, as a rule, moved from one manner to another quite freely.

And yet. Look at the works of the Impressionists. Slightly unnatural colors. A world familiar to us, but at the same time a little fictitious. This is how the artist saw it. He does not give us a contemporary nature. He just bares his soul a little for us. The soul of Bonnard and Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh and Denis, Gauguin and Seurat.

Russian impressionism

The experience of impressionism, which captured the whole world, did not leave Russia aside. Meanwhile, in our country, accustomed to a more measured life, which does not understand the bustle and aspirations of Paris, impressionism was never able to get rid of its academic nature. He’s like a bird that rushed to take off, but froze halfway into the sky.

Impressionism in Russian painting did not receive the dynamism of the French brush. But it acquired a dressed-up semantic dominant, which made it a bright, somewhat isolated phenomenon in world art.

Impressionism is a feeling expressed in the form of a painting. He does not educate, does not demand. He claims.

Impressionism served as the starting point for Art Nouveau and Expressionism, Constructivism and the Avant-Garde. All modern art, in fact, began its history from the distant April 20, 1863. Impressionist painting is an art born in Paris.

French-impression): an artistic movement that arose in France in the 60s and 70s of the 19th century. and received the most vivid embodiment in easel fine art. The impressionists developed new painting techniques - colored shadows, color mixing, highlighted color, as well as the decomposition of complex tones into pure tones (overlaying them on the canvas with separate strokes generated their optical mixing in the eyes of the viewer). They sought to convey the beauty of the fleeting states of nature, the variability and mobility of the surrounding life. These techniques helped convey the feeling of sparkling sunlight, vibrations of light and air, and created the impression of the festivity of life and the harmony of the world. Impressionistic techniques were also used in other forms of art. In music, for example, they contributed to the transmission of the most subtle emotional movements and fleeting moods.

Excellent definition

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Impressionism

from French impression - impression) A movement in art that arose in France in the last third of the 19th century. The main representatives of I.: Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot, as well as Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas and some other artists who joined them. The development of a new style of I. took place in the 60-70s, and for the first time, as a new direction, opposing itself to the academic Salon, the Impressionists announced themselves at their first exhibition in 1874. In particular, the painting by C. Monet “Impression” was exhibited at it . Soleil levant" (1872). Official art criticism reacted negatively to the new movement and mockingly “christened” its representatives “impressionists,” recalling the painting by Monet that particularly irritated them. However, the name reflected the essence of the direction, and its representatives accepted it as the official designation of their method. As an integral movement, art did not exist for long - from 1874 to 1886, when the impressionists organized 8 joint exhibitions. Official recognition by art connoisseurs and art criticism came much later - only in the mid-90s. I. had, as became obvious already in the next century, a huge impact on the subsequent development of fine art (and artistic culture in general). In fact, it began a fundamentally new stage of artistic culture, which led to the middle. XX century to POST-culture (see: POST-), i.e. to the transition of Culture into some fundamentally different quality. O. Spengler, who extended the concept of history to culture, considered it one of the typical signs of the “decline of Europe,” that is, the destruction of the integrity of the worldview, the destruction of the traditionally established European culture. On the contrary, avant-garde artists (see: Avangard) of the early 20th century. They saw in I. their forerunner, who opened new horizons for art, freeing it from extra-artistic tasks, from the dogmas of positivism, academicism, realism, etc., with which one cannot but agree. The Impressionists themselves, as pure painters, did not think about such a global significance of their experiment. They did not even strive for a special revolution in art. They simply saw the world around them somewhat differently than the official representatives of the Salon saw it, and tried to consolidate this vision by purely pictorial means. At the same time, they relied on the artistic discoveries of their predecessors - primarily the French painters of the 19th century. Delacroix, Corot, Courbet, "Barbizons". On K. Monet, who visited London in 1871, was greatly impressed by the works of W. Turner. In addition, the Impressionists themselves name among their predecessors the French classicists Poussin, Lorrain, Chardin, and Japanese color engraving of the 18th century, and art critics see similarities to the Impressionists in the English artists T. Gainsborough and J. Constable, not to mention W. .Turner. The Impressionists absolutized a number of painting techniques of these very different artists and created an integral stylistic system on this basis. In contrast to the “academicists,” the impressionists abandoned the thematic premise (philosophical, moral, religious, socio-political, etc.) of art, and thoughtful, pre-conceived and clearly drawn plot compositions, i.e., they began to fight the dominance of “literaryism” in painting, focusing the main attention on specifically pictorial means - color and light; they left the workshops for the open air, where they tried to start and finish work on a specific work in one session; they abandoned dark colors and complex tones (earthy, “asphalt” colors), characteristic of the art of the New Age, switching to pure bright colors (their palette was limited to 7-8 colors), often laid on the canvas in separate strokes, consciously relying on their optical mixing is already in the psyche of the viewer, which achieves the effect of special freshness and spontaneity; following Delacroix, they mastered and absolutized the colored shadow, the play of color reflexes on various surfaces; dematerialized the object of the visible world, dissolving it in the light-air environment, which was the main subject of their attention as pure painters; they actually abandoned the genre approach in fine art, focusing all their attention on the pictorial transmission of their subjective impression of a randomly seen fragment of reality - more often landscapes (like Monet, Sisley, Pissarro), less often plot scenes (like Renoir, Degas). At the same time, they often sought to convey the impression with almost illusionistic accuracy of matching the color-light-air atmosphere of the depicted fragment and the moment of visible reality. The randomness of the angle of view on a fragment of nature illuminated by the artistic vision, attention to the pictorial environment, and not to the subject, often led them to bold compositional decisions, sharp unexpected angles of view, cuts that activate the viewer’s perception, etc. effects, many of which later were used by representatives of various avant-garde movements. Art became one of the directions of “pure art” in the 19th century, whose representatives considered the artistic and aesthetic principle to be the main thing in art. The impressionists felt the indescribable beauty of the light-color-air environment of the material world and tried to capture it on their canvases with almost documentary accuracy (for this they are sometimes accused of naturalism, which is hardly legitimate in the grand scheme of things). In painting they are a kind of optimistic pantheists, the last singers of the carefree joy of earthly existence, sun worshipers. As the neo-impressionist P. Signac wrote with admiration, “sunlight floods the whole picture; the air sways in it, the light envelops, caresses, scatters forms, penetrates everywhere, even into the shadow area.” The stylistic features of art in painting, especially the desire for a refined artistic depiction of fleeting impressions, the fundamental sketchiness, the freshness of direct perception, etc., turned out to be close to representatives of other types of art of that time, which led to the extension of this concept to literature, poetry, and music. However, in these types of art there was no special direction of I., although many of its features are found in the works of a number of writers and composers of the last third of the 19th - early. XX century Such elements of impressionistic aesthetics as vagueness of form, fixation of attention on bright but random fleeting details, understatement, vague hints, etc., are inherent in the work of G. de Maupassant, A.P. Chekhov, the early T. Mann, and the poetry of R.- M. Rilke, but especially to the brothers J. and E. Goncourt, representatives of the so-called “psychological I>, and partially to K. Hamsun. M. Proust and the “stream of consciousness” writers relied on impressionistic techniques and significantly developed them. In music, French composers C. Debussy, M. Ravel, P. Duke and some others are considered impressionists, who used the stylistics and aesthetics of I. in their work. Their music is filled with direct experiences of the beauty and lyricism of the landscape, almost an imitation of the play of sea waves or the rustling of leaves, the bucolic charm of ancient mythological subjects, the joy of momentary life, the jubilation of earthly existence, and the pleasure of the endless shimmer of sound matter. Like painters, they blur many traditional musical genres, filling them with different content, increasing attention to the purely aesthetic effects of musical language, significantly enriching the palette of expressive and visual means of music. “This applies first of all,” writes musicologist I. V.Nestyev, - to the sphere of harmony with its technique of parallelisms and whimsical stringing of unresolved colorful consonances-spots. The Impressionists significantly expanded the modern tonal system, opening the way for many harmonic innovations of the 20th century. (although they noticeably weakened the clarity of functional connections). The complication and swelling of chord complexes (non-chords, undecimated chords, alternative fourth harmonies) are combined with simplification, archaization of modal thinking (natural modes, pentatonic, whole-tone complexes). The orchestration of impressionist composers is dominated by pure colors and capricious highlights; Woodwind solos, harp passages, complex string divisi, and con sordino effects are often used. Purely decorative, uniformly flowing ostinat backgrounds are also typical. The rhythm is sometimes unsteady and elusive. Melodics are characterized not by rounded constructions, but by short expressive phrases-symbols and layers of motifs. At the same time, in the music of the Impressionists the significance of each sound, timbre, and chord was unusually enhanced, and the limitless possibilities of expanding the scale were revealed. Particular freshness was given to the music of the Impressionists by the frequent appeal to song and dance genres, the subtle implementation of modal and rhythmic elements borrowed from the folklore of the peoples of the East, Spain, and in the early forms of Negro jazz" (Musical Encyclopedia. T. 2, M., 1974. Stb. 507 ). By placing the visual and expressive means of art at the center of the artist’s attention and focusing on the hedonistic-aesthetic function of art, I. opened up new perspectives and opportunities for artistic culture, which it took full advantage of (and sometimes even excessively) in the 20th century. Lit.: Venturi L. From Manet to Lautrec. M., 1938; Rewald J. History of impressionism. L.-M., 1959; Impressionism. Letters from artists. L., 1969; Serullaz M. Encyclopedie de limpressionnisme. P., 1977; Montieret S. Limpressionnisme et son epoque. T. 1-3. P., 1978-1980; Kroher E. Impressionismus in der Musik. Leipzig. 1957. L.B.