THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO: THE IMPRESSIONISTS.

 HELLO AND WELCOME!

Has been a month full of art, SO MUCH ART! and I want to keep sharing this time my favorite paintings from the Institute of Art in Chicago.

Another haul, now with the Impressionists. 🖼️ 🎨

Fruits of the Midi, 1881 by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. 🍆

Renoir’s style in this piece is described as an attempt to balance the fleeting luminosity of Impressionism with classical pictorial structure. He emphasizes the three-dimensional shape of the objects through strong contours and diagonal brushstrokes. Personally I like the eggplant and the visible direction of the brushstrokes from the tablecloth.

The Basket of Apples, c. 1893 by Paul Cezanne. 🍏 🍎

Paul Cézanne once claimed, is “a harmony running parallel to nature,” not an imitation of nature. In his quest for underlying structure and composition, he recognized that the artist is not bound to represent real objects in real space. Thus, The Basket of Apples contains one of his signature tilted tables, an impossible rectangle with no right angles.

Then a painting from 1877, The lozenge-shaped pattern of the wallpaper identifies the setting for this still life as the Paris apartment where Paul Cezanne and his family lived.

Grapes, Lemons, Pears, and Apples, 1887 by Van Gogh. 🍇 🍋 🍐 🍎

Here I have explored the use of complementary colors—yellow and purple, blue and orange, and red and green—in the service of chromatic intensity and I love the brushwork which as part of his signature it’s hard not to identify.

Apples and Grapes, 1880 by Claude Monet 🍎 🍇

We can see the play of light on the horizontal brushstrokes that folds in the tablecloth. I like how the light follows the direction of the texture for the tablecloth.

Chrysanthemums, 1881–82 by Pierre-Auguste Renoir 🌼

“I just let my brain rest when I paint flowers,” Pierre-Auguste Renoir remarked. "I don't experience the same tension as I do when confronted by the model. When I am painting flowers, I establish the tones, I study the values carefully without worrying about losing the picture. I don't dare do this with a figure piece for fear of ruining it."

I think it looks so messy like if every brushstroke were a petal, even the background or the table, but that's the magic of this work.