The origin of the avant-gardes: impressionism.- When western society began to show new forms of behavior, tendencies to rupture and revolution, art and culture could not be less.
Thus, at the end of the 19th century, new forms of artistic representation began to appear that began to show reality in a different way, perhaps altered and complex. Among these avant-garde we must mention Impressionism as a starting kick, the one that was born in France at the hands of painters such as Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir and others in the 1870s. This artistic school was born spontaneously and without intending to, simply the painters who assigned to their shapes showed similar features, among which the treatment of light, shadows and colors stood out in each work.
Characteristics of impressionism as a breakthrough artistic avant-garde
One of the main characteristics of impressionism was the novel and transformed representation of reality. This is so because the painters who were part of this school did not seek to paint landscapes or urban scenes with the realistic detail that had characterized until then almost all western art known since the Renaissance .
Impressionist painters painted images made up of marked and diffuse strokes of color, with paint-heavy brush strokes and pastel color combinations that gave a much more luminous synthesis to the whole. Another of the characteristics of impressionist art was that the works could usually be better observed from afar, unlike traditional works: when approaching them, the viewer loses the clarity and only manages to observe in detail the brushstrokes that make up the work.
Criticism of impressionism as a new way of representing reality
As would happen in the future with all the artistic avant-gardes of the 20th century, Impressionism had to face a significant number of criticisms from the specialists of the time who saw incredible artistic disasters in their works. The main contempt these artists received was the idea that they did not know how to paint and therefore they made indefinite spots on the canvases.
The critics knew little and nothing that an idea of experimentation on the observation of reality was being born with these painters that would shortly give birth to new disruptions not only in the forms but also in the color, in the proportions and in all the elements that compose an artistic work. Impressionism was thus central to transforming Western culture and art from then until today.
