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Women of the French Impressionist Movement

ctual centers of world culture in those days: Rome, London, Vienna and - most importantly, Paris. Any person of cultural or intellectual pretention made a "world" tour that included at least these cities. A painting or a piece of sculpture has always been more "international" than literature, its message more direct to the individual, its communication more dispersed to the masses. Thus, when the Communards took over Paris in 1871, Gustave Courbet, an artist of pre-Impressionist sensibilities named Commune Councillor in Charge of Fine Arts, would order torn down the famous Vendôme Column on the grounds that it was poor art - and, when the Communards were defeated, the Royalist government succeeding it would deport Courbet to imprisonment on New Caledonia on the grounds that he had destroyed art officially designated "great" (McKown 35-36).

Revolutions were happening all over Europe during the mid-1800s, social revolutions that went hand-in-glove with changes in the way people perceived their world - and their art. The most successful "revolution" was the one that most 20th Century revolutionaries have spent their time disrespecting: the emergence of the "bourgeoisie," the middle class. Since it will be the contention of this paper that Impressionism was firmly grounded in bourgeois values - values that Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot readily accepted - it is important to fully understand what "bourgeois" represented and how, truly, it was revolutionary.

Despite the success of the American Revolution and the upheavals caused by the French Revolution in the late 1700s, European civilization did not throw off its class-based hierarchical structures overnight and embrace the ideals of liberal republican democracy. Napoleon's championship of, first, republican, then imperial government had a two-fold effect upon the subsequent decades of societal evolution throughout Europe. Napoleon's conquests swept republican ideals int...

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Women of the French Impressionist Movement. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 14:11, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1681399.html