If there is one style of painting influenced by the scientific method, that style is Impressionism. But let us proceed in parts, or rather, in moments. Because initially the pictorial term “Impressionism” was born to resign itself, that is, to contradict a mocking article that the critic Louis Leroy wrote in April 1874 in the satirical newspaper Le Charivari entitled “The Exhibition of the Impressionists”. . It was a piece of ridicule that ridiculed the exhibition at the Salon of Independent Artists in Paris, where, among many other works, the painting by Claude Monet entitled “Impression, Rising Sun” stood out.
By reversing the meaning of the term coined by Leroy, Impressionism defined a pictorial style that experimented with the vibration of light on bodies using discontinuous brushstrokes; A technique that some time later, in the 20th century, was called “Gestalt brushstroke” and alludes to Gestalt psychology, a current of modern psychology that was born to scientifically prove that “the whole is more than that sum of its parts”. This, when applied to impressionistic pictorial art, shows that colorful spots whose appearance is scattered are perceived by our brains in a uniform manner. In this way, the painting of the Impressionists, with its short and exhausted-looking strokes, would open the door to pointillism, a pictorial technique that works with dots that define bodies and landscapes when viewed from a certain distance.
More information
However, Impressionism would not have existed without the precise moment that led American John Goffe Rand to invent the screw-top tin tube, which revolutionized the world of painting and strengthened the Impressionist movement. John Goffe Rand patented it in 1841, and until then, when a painter went outdoors with his belongings to paint, he carried his pigments in pig bladders. Therefore, the fact that paint was stored in tubes that kept the colors alive until the end was an incentive for painters like Monet, the artist who gave his name to a style without meaning to; One fine day he left his studio to capture the light reflected in the waters of Le Havre harbor as dawn broke over the ships. The rest is a matter of chance and the poor judgment of a painter engaged in pictorial criticism.
Example of the paint tube that allowed artists to paint outdoors without the pigments drying out. Chrysler Museum of Art
But if there is a scientific personality who contributed to the study of colors and their perception, it was that of the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894), who wrote an essential work for the impressionist painters entitled “Handbook of Physiological Optics He explained that color is a perception. In the second half of the 19th century, a scientific book became an artistic reference work.
With his optical discovery that we only combine three colors in our retina – red, green and blue – Hermann von Helmholtz showed that the other colors originate in the brain. This meant a new way of applying pigment; especially to the shadows that were no longer black. For this reason, pictorial impressionism was closely linked to the scientific field. It was a moment in Europe when the light of science illuminated painting.
You can follow THEME on Facebook, X and Instagram, or sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.