Guarisco Gallery 2012

92 BARBIZON SCHOOL: The mid-19 th century Barbizon school of painters bridged the Academic tradition with the new modern movements. This school still painted in the Academic style, that is, with balanced compositions, blended color, and defined edges, but were innovative in two aspects: they painted en plein air , or out-of-doors, and they used a looser application of paint. Prior to this group, virtually all painting was done indoors in studios. Painting en plein air allowed for a naturalism previously impossible for the studio painters to achieve, since those artists were painting from memory rather than observation. In addition, the Barbizon School moved towards a more fluid brushstroke that evolved into the Impressionist technique of applying pure but separated color side-by-side on the canvas to create the illusion of form and line. This differed greatly from the blended palettes of the Academics whose canvases were the result of careful layering and glazing. Major artists who made the transition from Academic style to modern painting include: Edouard Manet, Charles- François Daubigny, Gustave Courbet, and Eugène Boudin. SCIENCEAND TECHNOLOGY: With the invention of paint in tubes and the collapsible easel, artists were able to go outdoors and paint on site. In addition, photography and the growing use of the camera had a tremendous influence on the modern movement. Photography, in addition to increasing the appreciation for spontaneity and immediacy, was responsible for the move away from perfect panoramic compositions; cropped images showing only portions of a subject became typical of the Impressionists. Using this new technique allowed for an entirely new artistic perspective that enabled artists to render the bustle and movement of cities by showing people and objects traversing the canvas, unrestricted by the edges of the picture plane. E VOLUTION & I NFLUENCES