Читать книгу Cubists and Post-Impressionism онлайн

23 страница из 70

This is the method of all the very great art the world has ever known—first to see; and then to dream and then on the morrow to paint.

Impressionism cut out the dreams—it painted what it saw.

There were never in the world peasants such as Millet painted, or woods such as Daubigny painted. People thought there were until the Impressionists came and turned on the light.

Corot’s silvery glades have a closer relationship to nature. He felt the reaction that was in the air. He was almost an

CHABAUD

The Laborer

Impressionist but not quite. One feels the poetic, the imaginative—that is, the studio quality in his work. He sought nature but not in the spirit displayed by the Impressionists.

The reaction began with Courbet and was given a powerful impetus by Manet who painted things not as he imagined them but as he saw them, and he did not try to see interesting people and things, he did not look for the picturesque but he painted anything he happened to see upon the theory that the value of a work of art depends not upon its subject but upon its technic; that the worth of a painting is to be found in the painting and not in the object that happens to be painted.