ABSTRACT
By the turn of the last century, Impressionism was considered a truly “global” phenomenon. By that time, prominent schools of Impressionism could be found all over Eastern and Western Europe, North America, and Australia. Some of the last generations of painters in the Ottoman Empire were Impressionists and a prominent school of impressionist painting developed in Japan around 1900 while variants of the style arrived in Southeast Asia. Central and South America developed their own branch of the style, especially in Argentina; and North and South Africa nourished several prominent impressionist painters at the time as well. The global reach of the impressionist phenomenon by World War I is therefore almost complete, and this essay outlines what it was about the impressionist cultivation of the instant that was specifically appealing to a near global polity consumed with innovation and freedom from tradition. Rather than chart this territorial expansion of Impressionism across the globe, however, my essay proposes to engage the ways in which the style itself embodied many of the tropes of 19th-century globalization on a deeper level. Along the way, I argue for a “global Impressionism” not exemplified by an agglomeration of national case studies, but as a style perfectly suited to embellish an increasingly transnational world, in which Impressionism stood connected to the period’s processes of capitalism and imperialism. Tempering and sweetening the latter’s conquest of indigenous traditions, Impressionism spread its message of visual pleasure and individual freedom. The style’s abbreviated and seemingly rapid brushmarks can, after all, be so easily allegorized to the period’s infatuation with speed and commodity culture, as in the inventions of the telegraph, the telephone, the moving image, mass travel, and the complete re-organization of time and space (and the world map) they set in motion.
