They
wanted to make that representation truer, and they tried to work a
revolution in art by the scientific analysis of light and the
invention of a new method of laying on paint. Instead of joining in
Whistler's search for pure pattern they fixed their attention on facts
alone, or rather on one aspect of the facts, and in their occupation
with light and the manner of representing it they abandoned form almost
as completely as they had abandoned significance and beauty.
So it happened that Monet could devote some twenty canvases to the study
of the effects of light, at different hours of the day, upon two straw
stacks in his farmyard. It was admirable practice, no doubt, and neither
scientific analysis nor the study of technical methods is to be
despised; but the interest of the public, after all, is in what an
artist does, not in how he learns to do it. The twenty canvases together
formed a sort of demonstration of the possibilities of different kinds
of lighting. Any one of them, taken singly, is but a portrait of two
straw stacks, and the world will not permanently or deeply care about
those straw stacks. The study of light is, in itself, no more an
exercise of the artistic faculties than the study of anatomy or the
study of perspective; and while Impressionism has put a keener edge upon
some of the tools of the artist, it has inevitably failed to produce a
school of art.
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