Who were the Immigrants of Ellis Island? (Cultures of America Podcast Ep. #1)

Full episode on Spotify / iTunes

#earth #art #culture

For more than 150 years, as far back as the 1870s, art collectors and exhibitions around the world have featured the work of a group of French painters who came to be known as the impressionist artists, or in French, les artistes impressionistes.

Many of their names are familiar: Claude Monet, Charles Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Some were famously women painters: Marie Bracquemond, Berthe Morisot, Eva Gonzalès all from France.

Their paintings are similarly familiar to anyone who has visited some of the world's largest museum collections of impressionist works, from the Louvre in Paris to the Met in New York. There, in sections dedicated to French impressionism are the works of Degas including his famous studies of ballerinas: the Ballet Class of 1874, Dancers on the Stage in 1877, the Blue Dancers of 1897.

In all of his studies of ballet dancers in the late 1800s, Degas did something that the impressionists became world renowned for: emphasizing the interplay of natural light and its reflections and shadows across different objects and people's bodies.

"The Star" - L'Etoile (Degas)
In his work titled The Star, or in French L'Étoile, a solo ballet dancer on stage can be seen with her arms stretched back tilting forward on one foot in the famous Penché pose, the leaning pose, with a facial expression of immersive bliss. But her expression can barely be seen because of how brightly illuminated her face and neck are as she looks up towards the stage and ceiling lights. And as she tilts her head further to the side and glides across the stage looking up, her hair and forehead slips into the shadows that dominate the back of the stage and that slowly cover the back of her arms as they trail the rest of her body. It's that moment and movement that Degas is able to capture, emphasizing the contrast between the performance's bright lights and dramatic shadows, where that contrast is most obvious in how the dancer herself in a ballerina's signature white dress looks like she's gliding not only across the stage but off the canvas, as if the painting is coming to life in what is truly an immersive experience.

The realism of impressionistic painting, in other words comes from the sense of movement and dynamic lighting and shadows and not from attention to the kind of detail seen in early photography of the time or in paintings that captured photographic detail. The detail the impressionists were most interested in was light and its impact on different colors, objects, people, places. As for other details like the exact type of stitching or embroidery in a dress or the patterns of a tree leaf, Degas and artists like Monet gave more a general impression, because in some sense the lighting and color was more important. And its for this reason that these artists came to be known as the Impressionist Artists.

Written by: Prof. Ali H. Akhtar