Corot Painting The Burning Of

Impressionism for summer at the Crocker

The Crocker Art Museum's "Summer of Impressionism" ought really to be called "Summer of Impressionism, Etc."

The three exhibits that fill up the museum's summer schedule are not just shows of Impressionism but rather the story of Impressionism's dissemination from France to America. They cover the antecedents that Impressionism reacted against and stemmed from, and the inheritors of Impressionism who looked toward Modernism.

"Transcending Visions: American Impressionism, 1870-1940," 125 works on loan from the Bank of America Collection, traces the development of American painting from the Hudson River School, which preceded Impressionism, to the Ashcan School, which built on Impressionist theory but depicted a darker, more urban America in works that leaned toward Realism.

"Landscapes from the Age of Impressionism" presents 40 mid-19th century to early-20th century French and American landscapes from the collection of the Brooklyn Museum. It moves from the Barbizon school, which preceded the Impressionists, through American Impressionism, which tends to be more conventional than French Impressionism since the American artists who studied in France were formally trained in French academies.

("Gardens and Grandeur" Porcelains and Paintings by Franz A. Bischoff, which opens Saturday, will give us a look at a California Impressionist who, like Pierre Auguste Renoir, began his career as a china painter and was known as "the King of the Roses." More on that show later.)

"Transcending Visions" begins with works by Hudson River painters Sanford Gifford and Thomas Moran, who were known for their quasi-religious paintings of the grandeur of nature. Moran, who specialized in paintings of the Grand Canyon, is here represented by "View of Fairmount Waterworks, Philadelphia," an atypical subject done nevertheless with the kind of grand scope that characterized his work.

Gifford, who is sometimes called a "Luminist," gives us a glowing scene of Mount Tacoma from Puget Sound. Both works were done in the 1870s and exemplify the kind of heroic landscape that the Impressionists reacted against.

William Morris Hunt's "Pasture by a Pond," also circa 1870, points toward the next step in the evolution of American painting, Tonalism, which stemmed from the French Barbizon school of painters who went outside to the Forest of Fontainebleau to work directly from nature. A number of Tonalist works follow, including a magnificent George Inness work from 1880, "Meadowland in June," which focuses on a more intimate view of nature done in tender tones of intense yet dark greens.

ART273 N04 Landscape: Historical, English, and Barbizon

- Argued: coloristic approach to painting is an answer to Bentonphen, interest in using color to create mood, allowing certain sense of abstraction to enter the work in order to evoke. Not a concrete journliastic image doesn't allow daydreaming. But daydreaming was IN. Freedom is IN.

Forgetting Lot's wife, on destructive spectatorship

Corot and Millet, with critical essays by Gustave Geffroy & Arsène Alexandre

Corot

Corot and his friends

Fifty years of modern painting, Corot to Sargent