The Impressionist style ruptured from artistic convention – according to the Musée d’Orsay, the Impressionists “favored a style of painting which immortalized a moment, creating the impression of spontaneity, worlds away from the taste for detail and the flawless finish taught at the École des beaux-arts [a prestigious Parisian arts school]. Their subject matter was variations in light and color captured at different times of day and in different seasons.” You’ll notice when you look at Impressionist paintings that up close, they’re often fairly blurry. For the Impressionists, detail is less important than the overall effect and feeling of a work viewed in its entirety. One could say that the viewer has an impression of what is going on…it’s a little bit like squinting your eyes when you look at something; you lose the detail, but you still have the general sense of what’s there.
Although I really enjoyed wandering through room after room of paintings in the Musée d’Orsay (there are so many paintings there that one has a trance-like feeling of swimming in them; each one containing its own universe of color and form), my favorite Impressionist work among those I’ve seen so far in Paris is Monet’s Water Lilies cycle, housed in the Musée d’Orangerie. The Water Lilies cycle takes up two large oval-shaped rooms, each containing several enormous rectangular panels on the walls. Looking at the work, I found myself completely absorbed by the infinite shades of blue and green, the subtleties of how the water was moving when Monet painted it, the little game of figuring out which things are reflections in the water and what things are floating on the water (which is not always obvious!).
