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Art 101 Week 1 Analysis

Decent Essays

Impressionism and Art Interpretation The shift from Realism to Impressionism in the 19th century represented not only a change in form, but it also represented a shift in ideology. As one of our module videos notes, rather than focusing on accuracy and clarity, Impressionism emphasized “what the mind and the eye sees” and the “impression of light and color.” We will briefly discuss how the differences in the approaches of the Realists and the Impressionists had interesting implications for arts and how these ideologies can be applied to the ways in which believers and unbelievers interpret art. ‘Impressionism’ was a derogatory term first used to mock Claude Monet’s painting Impression, Sunrise, and other later paintings that were patterned after his revolutionary style. At a time when artists took great pains to make their artwork look as life-like as possible, the quick brushstrokes and blurry figures in Monet’s paintings looked anything but realistic to the art critics. Because of its focus on mental images, Impressionism later came to include not only visual arts, but also certain music as well. Debussy and Ravel are two of the most famous Impressionist composers, and our textbook states that what sets their style apart is that “instead of dealing with human emotions, [their] music evoked the atmosphere of nature” (p. 704). This type of …show more content…

This style favored subjective perception and rebelled against life-like depictions. In a similar way, because unregenerate hearts cannot fully recognize the handiwork of God in art and in the natural world, unbelievers can only appreciate art at a subjective, superficial level, even if they understand the historical and cultural context of a given work of art. Believers, however, can see the deeper meaning behind even the artist’s message because they recognize that all artwork reflects the creativity of the original

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