Art history q: was rise of impressionism related to the general sense of time speeding up so you had to capture fleeting impressions?
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1/n The impressionists painted IN life and FROM life rather than in carefully controlled studios with idealized tableaus. Why they did this
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2/n is associated with the rise of the middle class as an economic force and a class with leisure..
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8/n the spontaneity seen in impressionist oils was formerly something ppl did with watercolor which dries in minutes rather than days.
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Hmm. Now I'm thinking about whether relative slowdowns like the great depression showed similar 2nd order effects of deceleration
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Thinking in particular of painters like Edward Hopper who went back to a realist style
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He certainly chose subjects that weren't moving around very quickly. Low vibrational state physically as well as emotionally.
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Seems like he went from watercolor to oils. Ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny in a single artist. Did extreme prep too.
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Watercolor was a study,practice and preparation technique for professional artists back in the days before Abstract Expressionisn.
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Not for Hopper I think. He seems to have been recognized as a watercolorist too, in addition to etchings and oils en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Ho
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Some artists ecelled at both. Homer, Sargeant... but all used watercolor spontanepus sketch as part of their formal training.
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