Impressionism: Art, Perception, and Modernity
When the first Impressionist exhibition opened at the margins of the official Paris Salon in 1874, it caused an uproar. Characterized by bright light, vivid colors, visible brush strokes, and non-traditional subject matter, Impressionism quickly imposed itself as a major art movement, inspiring generations of artists, writers, and collectors, fetching record prices at auction, and colonizing the museum gift shop. Yet, having lost much of its radical edge to the commercialization, reification, and hypercirculation of its images, Impressionism’s specificity and novelty have largely faded from view. What, then, was Impressionism? From Manet’s Olympia to Seurat’s Grande-Jatte, Impressionism was a movement of its time, rooted in the political, cultural, and economic realities of an urbanizing, industrializing France. Breaking with previous artistic conventions centering on beauty, allegory, and unity, the Impressionists emphasized the instability of representation and the fleeting character of perception, their aesthetic innovations made possible by the development of new paint and pigment technologies, as well as the emergence of the modern art market. But how did the Impressionists understand their contribution to the aesthetics and politics of modernity? What made Impressionism so novel? What made it so successful? And what can its enduring appeal tell us about our own aesthetic and political desires in the present?
In this course we will study Impressionist and post-Impressionist painting against the cultural and political history of France, from the Paris Commune to the First World War. We will study works by Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Edgard Degas, Berthe Morisot, Marie Cassatt, Gustave Caillebotte, Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, and Vincent Van Gogh, among others. Readings will draw from a broad range of historical sources and later scholarship. We will read Impressionism through the lens of artistic modernity as well as various ecological, feminist, and global interpretative lenses. Authors will include art historians Meyer Shapiro, T.J. Clark, Linda Nochlin, Michael Fried, Rosalind Krauss, and Albert Boime, as well as philosophers and cultural critics such as Charles Baudelaire, Émile Zola, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Course Schedule
Thursday, 6:30-9:30pm ETSeptember 11 — October 02, 2025
4 weeks
$335.00
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