By D. Eric Bookhardt, Gambit, New Orleans, 1992
As the long days of summer simmer on, the city sometimes seems to be melting. The streets resemble a rambling sub-oceanic ballet as the air thickens with a billion droplets of incipient steam. It is dreamy, even impressionistic at times.
We look for ways to adjust our lives accordingly, and the pace slackens as we settle into cruise control mode, routinely pausing for snowballs or iced coffee. Adapting to life in the torrid zone is as much mental as physical, an equilibrium of exertion and repose. It is important to think cool thoughts and convert life's rough edges to a smoother flow of events.
As familiar landmarks seem to dissolve under the sizzling solar surfeit, it is interesting to envision this as an instance of nature's own impressionism. A potentially helpful form of homeopathic mental imaging, this reminds us of the impressionist movement at its inception. In 1868 Claude Monet exhibited The River, an epochal work of diffuse pastel luminosity. In fact, it looks a bit like Bayou St. John on a hot July afternoon.
Today, all Monets are locked up in museums and private collections, their prices at auction run up astronomically by jaded Japanese billionaires. So too Degas, Renoir and all the best-known impressionists. It is very much the star system - the big names go platinum and then some.
Yet, there were lost of impressionist artists, and some of the less famous ones were interesting nonetheless. Their works are mostly still around and Dixon and Dixon, the French Quarter art and antiques emporium, recently brought 40 such paintings back from the continent...
. . .Though we usually associate impressionism with painting and sculpture, photography also evolved through this stylistic epoch. Many turn-of-the-century photographs were similarly diffuse, and while this seems at odds with the medium's innate acuity, they could be compelling. A glance at a few such photos at A Gallery for Fine Photography - including a superb English river scene by Alvin Langdon Coburn - bears out photo-impressionism's potential.
In this vein, The Artist, a gum bichromate print by George Seeley, is satisfying in the manner of a fine charcoal sketch. While photo-impressionists were accused of mimicking painting and drawing, their dark, diffuse tones were the result of legitimate processes, and had the effect of reducing images to a mixture of composition and atmosphere, thus invoking the imagination.
Similar techniques were evident in Heinrich Kuhn's The Model (1904) and Arnold Genthe's Hands with Jade (1920). (California-based Genthe also photographed the French Quarter with his soft focus lens in the 1920s, with often magical results.)
And in Rose Petals, among other contemporary images by Wendi Schneider, we find the same evocative pastel luminosity that so enlivened Monet's Water Lilies - evidence that impressionism, in this current, close-cropped form, is alive and well today.