A Journey Into French Art and Music

Location:
Paris, France
Latitude/Longitude:
48.856614000000, 2.352221900000
Journal Entry:

One of the reasons why Paris is such a fantastic place to be is the incredible richness of history, culture and art one can find here. As a pianist, I was already familiar with French “Impressionist” piano music, but seeing as that music was written in France by French composers, this fall presented an opportunity to deepen my understanding of it. What’s more, it turns out that there is also an “impressionist” movement in French visual art which, to some degree, coincided with the aforementioned musical impressionism. Naturally, one wonders what the connections between the two movements might be – lucky for me, there is an unbelievable wealth of Impressionist art in several Parisian museums. Here are some of the things that I’ve learned.

The Impressionist movement, in the sense of visual art, took place in the last 1870s and 1880s; the movement solidified when the French artists Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Berthe Morison, Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley began organizing exhibitions of their art, which was often rejected by the established art critics and juries at the time. Despite such initial difficulties, by the beginning of the 20th century, the work of these artists had become wildly popular and internationally renowned.

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