My last couple of blogs, although nakedly commercial in their attempt to showcase the glories of impressionist pictures we have for sale, have nevertheless sparked some exchange from a few colleagues about the nature of impressionism. Thanks to this discussion, I’ve reread Roger Fry’s series of essays published in 1920 under the title Vision and Design. While I’d love nothing better than to indulge in an exegetical consideration of Fry, the Bloomsbury artist and critic whose 1910 exhibition of impressionist work was the first ever outside France, I’ll rein myself in for the moment.
While impressionism changed artistic expression from one where effect was measured by facsimile and narrative to one of a supra-realism, capturing an aesthetic sense of the image depicted beyond the visual, Fry believed that impressionism made the larger world understand that there is no objective realism. Realism is conditioned by the artist’s own inner vision, and the successful picture will communicate things beyond that depicted in the picture plane. As with the essence of Dieppe in Loiseau’s picture the subject of yesterday’s blog, Guillaumin communicates in ways beyond the visual the nature of a haystack in ‘Paysage de l’Ile de France’. The exemplar of effectiveness is no longer Apelles, whose images of fruit and flowers fooled bees into trying to light upon them, or the post-Renaissance academicism that wedded the accomplishment of Apelles with an edifying historical narrative.
For Fry, the critical reception of impressionism begged questions for other disciplines and concomitantly led to a broader realization that non-Western material culture was certainly as sophisticated in its artistic production as western Europe. A west African Fang mask or Muslim non-figurative embellishment represent traditions and ways of looking at the world that are different from the west, but that’s all they are- different- and that difference is value-neutral. Moreover, once someone can apprehend that material culture varies, and that nothing is better than or worse than, barriers for cross-cultural appreciation and understanding break down. The effect of impressionism, when coupled with Fry’s critical apprehension of it and its cultural implications, cannot be overstated. In her 1940 biography of Fry, Virginia Woolf sums up the effect of the 1910 exhibition by stating ‘On or about December 1910 human character changed.’