Impressionism / Late 1860s - Late 1890s

Cathedral of Rouen, Afternoon 

Claude Monet

Impressionism is a movement in French painting, sometimes called optical realism because of its almost scientific interest in the actual visual experience and effect of light and movement on appearance of objects.

Impressionist motto - human eye - is a marvelous instrument. Impact worldwide was lasting and huge. The name 'Impressionists' came as artists embraced the nickname a conservative critic used to ridicule the whole movement.

Impressionist fascination with light and movement was at the core of their art. Exposure to light and/or movement was enough to create a justifiable and fit artistic subject out of literally anything. Impressionists learned how to transcribe directly their visual sensations of nature, unconcerned with the actual depiction of physical objects in front of them. Two ideas of Impressionists are expressed here. One is that a quickly painted oil sketch most accurately records a landscape's general appearance. The second idea that art benefits from a naïve vision untainted by intellectual preconceptions was a part of both the naturalist and the realist traditions, from which their work evolved. 

Impressionism, a major movement, first in painting and later in music, that developed chiefly in France during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Impressionist painting comprises the work produced between about 1867 and 1886 by a group of artists who shared a set of related approaches and techniques. The most conspicuous characteristic of Impressionism was an attempt to accurately and objectively record visual reality in terms of transient effects of light and colour. The principal Impressionist painters were Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot, Armand Guillaumin, and Frédéric Bazille, who worked together, influenced each other, and exhibited together independently. Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne also painted in an Impressionist style for a time in the early 1870s. The established painter Édouard Manet, whose work in the 1860s greatly influenced Monet and others of the group, himself adopted the Impressionist approach about 1873. 

The paintings revealed a simple truth about our environment: all that we see around us is merely an assembly of volumes, colors and textures bathed in light and air. What was painted still mattered, but their significance and meaning was deliberately more ambiguous, with the painter instead focusing on abstraction through technique.

The ascendancy of abstract art at the beginning of the twentieth century foretold the imminent rise of the Modernist school of architecture. Abstraction became a fundamental part of the strategy towards creating a new way to build, emphasizing surface, materiality, and volumes and the interplay of planes and solids rather than the superficial dressing of a façade that wraps a simple masonry box. It makes sense that the earliest Modernists dabbled in painting, often producing Cubist-inspired works. Le Corbusier himself was as much a disciplined painter as he was an architect and deeply engaged in the avant-garde art world of Paris in his time. His Cubist explorations, along with his original observations during his travel as a youth, led him to declare about architecture which was just as true about late Impressionist art:

Grocer Street in Rouen, Early Morning
Camille Pissaro

“Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light; light and shade reveal these forms; cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders or pyramids are the great primary forms which light reveals to advantage…”

Were the Impressionist masters therefore the first Modern architects? Some of Gauguin’s paintings I saw as well those of his contemporaries (Monet’s study Rouen cathedral) seem to suggest that they helped shape the preoccupation of architecture in the twentieth century. It was from the drive to create buildings as abstractions for abstraction’s sake, with little regard to nature that Modern architecture became unpalatable to the general public.

For more ; Impressionism in Painting, Music and Architecture
                  eu.art.com
                  wikipedia.org