Jeremy Hacker
\nProject Outline<\/p>\n
Impressionism and Desire<\/p>\n
If a photograph could capture desire perfectly and fulfil our longing of achieving a powerful aesthetic moment, then why bother painting at all? There must be some reason artists, particularly painters, choose to work with particular mediums with a specific choice of what gets put onto that medium. The impressionist painter before the end of the 19th<\/sup> century began to play with light, time, subjective focus, and a different portrayal of desire, but why? One only has to look at realistic paintings, near photographic in viewing, such as William Adolphe \u00a0Bouguereau\u2019s, The Birth of Venus, to see what impressionism is potentially and most likely responding to.\u00a0 The woman of this painting is portrayed as a heavenly, godlike woman who stands among cupids in an otherworldly oceanic scene. This painting and Titian\u2019s, Venus of Urbino, both represent the popular, traditional style of depiction of Venus, and painting, which poses the ideal vs the real.\u00a0 With these two paintings in mind, we can look at two Caillebotte paintings, Nude Woman and The Floor Scrapers, and immediately see a shift in perception and reception of art. Nude Woman portrays a naked woman lying on a couch, hardly in a position to care for the viewer, and The Floor Scrapers has an undertone of homosexuality and a brief glimpse of modernism-the idea of scraping out the old and bringing in the new. An immediate contrast immediately surfaces between photorealistic realism painting and impressionism, being their choice of engagement with the viewer and desire\u2019s role in affluence of that view. Realism was held to a high standard of tradition, which art critics didn\u2019t fail to impose on the rise of impressionism, confused and bitter with what they thought shoddy and not well-done painting. The viewer is thus confronted with having to wrestle with the ideas present in these paintings, rather than be pleased with immediate satiation of desire through realism. There\u2019s nothing comfortable about staring at Caillebotte\u2019s Nude Woman, but you can\u2019t help go through a list of questions as to why this piece of furniture is there, who is she, what has happened, etc., whereas in the realistic paintings I\u2019ve brought up don\u2019t leave much room for the imagination as their story unfolds like a fill-in-the-blank picture book.<\/p>\n Why does it matter to look at an art style over 100 years old, when modern art already presents extensive questions about art\u2019s importance and purpose? With any artistic medium there is a tradition and history ingrained in it, because an art style doesn\u2019t spring from nothing. I imagine it is a widely held, firm belief that modern art has its roots from impressionist ideas, particularly the way in which impressionism shifted the viewer\u2019s focus, playing with their desire and anticipation. With the change of time come the change of society, yet when one lingers with impressionism they can\u2019t help but see ideas still prevalent today, particularly with the way we address our desires toward sexuality and commercialism. My goal is to look at the poignant themes which impressionism responds to, and correlate those ideas toward modern times, with desire as a main emphasis in both the viewer and artist\u2019s frame of mind. What I\u2019ve done so far is to give a brief explanation of impressionism\u2019s relationship with desire, but I\u2019ve yet to examine desire. Beside the common sense response to the question: what is desire, I\u2019m curious as to what and where desire comes from. In an examination of Lacan\u2019s psychoanalysis of desire, Borch-Jacobsen has summarized Lacan: \u201cUnknowable, unreal, denatured, sexually neuter, the \u2018object\u2019 of desire is therefore a non-object, a negated object.\u201d (1) If we\u2019re to look at impressionism with this theory as a lens, then what ideas about human desire can we uncover, particularly with what we choose to pine over, and what can the past say about, and even change, the way we think of the present? With a psychoanalytical approach in examining desire, and viewing how shifts of art styles occur as influenced by culture and time, I will try and show how and what role desire plays through looking at key impressionist paintings.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. “Desire Caught by the Tail.” Lacan: The Absolute Master. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991. 202. Print.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jeremy Hacker Project Outline Impressionism and Desire If a photograph could capture desire perfectly and fulfil our longing of achieving a powerful aesthetic moment, then why bother painting at all? There must be some reason artists, particularly painters, choose to work with particular mediums with a specific choice of what gets put onto that medium. 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