French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism
T/Th 9:30 AM - to 11:20 AM, Art 229
Instructor: Marek Wieczorek
Office hours: TBD in Art 355 or by appointment on Zoom.
Course Description:
With dazzling bursts of color and radical new ways of seeing, Impressionism reshaped the course of art history. Today painters like Monet, Renoir, and Degas feel iconic—almost inevitable—but when their first exhibition opened in 1874, critics mocked the artworks as unfinished “impressions,” unable to decide whether some canvases were even hung right-side up. Their bold brushwork, luminous color, and insistence on painting modern life challenged every academic rule of the time. The generation that followed—Seurat, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin—pushed these experiments even further, forging what we now call Post-Impressionism. Their work has become the stuff of legend, but their innovations were once seen as strange, unruly, even shocking.
This course introduces you to these artists and to the rapidly changing world they painted: a newly rebuilt Paris of shimmering cafés and bustling boulevards, but also of social tensions, modernization, and displacement. Together we will explore how images of leisure, fashion, labor, and everyday life reflect deeper questions about gender, class, technology, tourism, and colonial expansion. By learning how to look closely, you will gain tools to understand both the radiant beauty of these paintings and the darker histories they illuminate. Join us as we uncover how Impressionism and Post-Impressionism not only transformed art, but helped define the very texture of modern life.
One very exciting opportunity is the exhibition Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism, on view until January 18 at the Seattle Art Museum, which we will engage with early in the quarter.
Course Objectives:
1. You will gain familiarity with the development of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, and with themes and texts related to these movements. Readings will be provided as downloadable Pdfs.
2. You will learn and refine your knowledge of the elements of visual analysis in modern painting, and develop your skills at communicating visual analysis.
3. You will learn how to develop visual description into art historical interpretation.
4. You will gain exposure to some of the ways in which art historical scholarship relates visual objects to their historical contexts.
5. You will get hands-on experience in engaging with artworks in real and virtual museum settings.