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Description: Globalizing Impressionism: Reception, Translation, and Transnationalism
This anthology ends with a call to continue globalizing the study of impressionism. Published conference proceedings have the effect of fixing an otherwise ephemeral and fleeting moment in the discipline. By contrast, we intend for the debate around globalizing impressionism, initiated by the 2017 Courtauld Institute of Art conference, to be continuous and open-ended. Since the Courtauld...
PublisherYale University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00198.019
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Afterword: Globalizing Impressionism: Reception, Translation, and Transnationalism
Alexis Clark and Frances Fowle
This anthology ends with a call to continue globalizing the study of impressionism. Published conference proceedings, like the present anthology, have the effect of fixing an otherwise ephemeral and fleeting moment in the discipline. By contrast, we intend for the debate around globalizing impressionism, initiated by the 2017 Courtauld Institute of Art conference, to be continuous and open-ended. Since the Courtauld conference, several subsequent conferences and panels dedicated to the topic of globalizing impressionism have contributed to this discussion. We are pleased to see that the Courtauld conference has had such an effect across the subfield and that some of the same participants, also included in this volume, have been invited to participate in these conversations. These include the panel “A World in Light: Impressionism in a Global Context, 1860–1920” at the 2019 College Art Conference and, also in 2019, “Impressionism around the World: Art and Globalization at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” organized by Philadelphia Museum of Art and the University of Pennsylvania. The essays in the present anthology attest to the subfield’s commitment to inviting more scholars and students from around the world to participate in these discussions, in tandem with including artists and artworks typically outside the scope of impressionism studies.
The essays in this anthology place French impressionism in dialogue with local iterations and interpretations of impressionism. In doing so, they expose the problems associated with writing a global history. Globalizing the study of impressionism—French or otherwise—brings with it the risk of eliding or even eradicating local difference. For this reason, this anthology resists adopting a standard definition of impressionism, as to do so would be antithetical to its aims. Definitions necessarily erase the specificities and particularities that characterized the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discourse around this art; they exclude artists and artworks by restricting “impressionism” to those seen to share a style or technical coherence, and so limit the story of impressionism.
This anthology works transnationally to explore both the globalization and localization of impressionism, with an attention to different modalities of translation—many of them connected to publications, reproductions, exhibitions, and markets—and other complicated circuits and networks that transcend national, geographic, and linguistic boundaries. By examining such wider networks, this anthology demonstrates that, more than a contentious label lobbed at artists who abandoned or defied academic expectations for an alternate form of art-making, “impressionism” came to be understood and used as a metonym for modernity. While the artistic or technical expression of impressionism varied from place to place, impressionism as a shared language—something that is the unifying theme of this anthology—connected artists, critics, and even art dealers across the globe, from Turin to Tokyo, and from Glasgow to Geelong. In the end, impressionism was a transnational phenomenon that expressed itself in different ways, interpreted via local experience of a global modernity.
Finally, this anthology intersects with early twenty-first-century debates around globalism and the free circulation of people, products, and ideas, as well as isolationism, protectionism, and calls to maintain culturally (and, often, ethnically and racially) pure nation-states. Like the world in the early twenty-first century, the late nineteenth century witnessed the rise of nationalism and xenophobia, with their intrinsic forms of open discrimination against racial, cultural, and other differences. There is an urgency in telling stories of art in which elevated voices and perspectives allow us to more fully and committedly argue for a shared past and, with it, a shared present. This anthology acts as a record of the ways in which people around the world once perceived themselves as participants in a global modernity. Today a large section of the population continues to admire and appreciate impressionism. Let us therefore hope that this art will continue to teach us to understand the different ways in which people today experience and interpret the world.
Afterword: Globalizing Impressionism: Reception, Translation, and Transnationalism
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