Speed up, Impressionists!

Impressionists in Berlin, World Wide Web, California, France, UBER etc....

Why do the curators expect such a huge number? Half a million, this is a tenth of the capital city, and Germany has only about three cities with more than a million inhabitants. Perhaps the french come? May be. But at first, impressionist art is loved by everyone today. It is a really perfect example for the way, experience changes perception. If we look at the root of impressionism, this today most beloved art style, we detect how it fits into our daily visual experiences now and hadn't for a long time before. Within the first impressionist exhibition in 1874, a critic laughed about Monet: "'He paints' means, he puts his colours into a gun and shots onto the canvas." (cited from Wikipedia, article about Paul Cézanne)

We'd say today (perhaps some futurist and electrians even before us), that this critic was congenial. Impressionism was a revolution of art, because the style involved a technology of painting, that was developed to grap the reality of visual perception: punctual, informational, built up of light elements. This light bulb view of modern painting can be called a kind of head over of Brown's television tube: light waves and /or light particles are fired onto the neuronal nets of the eyes and built up from cell to cell. It would have been impossible in 1874 to talk better about television than the impressionists did.

Well, let's take a view on the Berlin exhibition: Who are these french painters who will arrive from US? Whom of them are the most beutiful? The red Barbaras of Renoir, of course, and Ingres, Corot, Courbet, Puvis de Chavannes, Manet, Degas, Pissarro, Monet, van Gogh, Cézanne and Gauguin, und then, some french women not as subjet but as artist: Marie-Denise Villers and the famous Berthe Morisot. If we look at her portraits by the hand of her friend Manet, we understand how friendly she was embraced by sense-impressions. Villers is shown because of a historical contextualisation. The Impressionism is shown as style that participated on a lot of other styles before and around it: romantic painting and its way to use light, and the academic schools of painting as something to oppose. Then additionaly, Orientalism, natural light painting, pointilism and the "father of modernity" are grouped to build a landscape for the impressionists to think and to paint in, without thinking of revolutions at first, like we did in the beginning of our aricle (citing something that has really be said, of course).

The website www.metinberlin.org presents all information you may need about this exhibition. Of course, as a magazine with its head in Germany, we have great fun and pleasure to invite US Citizens to visite New York's french impressionists in the german capital.

We've found it on wikipedia: pictures and a small report about the artist Marie Bracquemond, whose picture "Auf der Terrasse in Sèvres" (1880) we've chosen as beautiful enough for our readers. She was persuaded by other impressionist paintings to chose this new style and they loved lovely the lovable results. Just look at the peeks of light in this picture "On the terrace" ("On the french window"), how the light flutes on the hat and veil, the beautiful "virgulism" (like a comma) fluting of the picture's background and the way the background colours merge with the women's clothes at the lower edges of the painting. Bracquemond suffered on a jealous husband and was critized for every genial painting she painted. After some years with great success, she stopped her career as a painter therefore. Well, the enemy in my bed...and this is US, Hollywood California again, where the sun is even hotter than in the french Midi.

Let's read in the latest LA blogs, as an introduction into the Los Angeles art scene, what UBER Blogger Andrew thinks about the new CalArt artists. Perhaps he found someone who is really a modern impressionist? Well, not the collectrice Gamer Girl, who collects and uploads on her UBER website a hundreds and thousands of funny videos, photos and games. She's a really maniac, but we had to cut a lot to get the impressionist scenes out of her collection. But her website is of the impressionist type of Manet's "Folies Bergère", where we find a mirrow full of daily and modern accidental events and impressions. Tha's Gamer Girl's website impressionism.

But Andrew found something else....

The modern impressinist, perhaps a really conscious one and at least a real artist, is Bianca D'Amico, who presents just now in spring 2007 her art at the CalArt in 935 Mateo. Her art is dirty, girlish, stylish litter It's really great. And she filmed a video and showed it as floor installation, that impressed Andrew a lot (We are showing a still). You see the techniques of impressionism: natural subject, the way to paint is virgulism, accidentially, situative, on the whole more formal than content-determined. Because the video shows how colour is thrown into her face, she might have even known what the congenial critic said about Monet in 1874.

Let's listen to the sensible UBER Blogger Andrew about Bianca D'Amicos "Moneyshot" (2007):

"Bianca D'Amico's floor projection "Moneyshot" (2007), of a woman's face (presumably the artist's) being coated with viscous fluids of various colors. Her face subtly changes (like Rineke Dijkstra's video work) while she undergoes something that is at once nearly pornographic, but also beautiful in the formal array of color. A very strange and disconcerting piece."

Look at more art from Biance D'Amico at: http://www.biancadamicoart.com/

Dr. U. & d.s.W. "Impression kopiert" from a Pole Position Ad, UBER Upload by Gamer Girl.

Claude Monet, Impression, soleil levant, 1872

Oil on canvas, 48 x 63 cm - Musee Marmottan, Paris

Report by Dr. U. & d.s.W.