ABSTRACT
The study of 'movements' in art, has always seemed a pretty deadly business. The painter Cecil Collins as a teacher of art made regular use of such techniques such as playing music and eliciting free dance movements. If movements, -isms, are then thought of as high points, crystallizations of recurrent ways of being and believing, they can be appropriated pedagogically not as inert facts of history but as living entries into educational practice. It is helpful to map some -isms in terms of whether their emphasis is on the inner or the outer, and whether they are attached to how things appear or to how they are, in philosophical terms the distinction here is between appearance and essence. On a broader canvas, the objective attention to appearances places impressionism within the context of nineteenth century naturalism, to which twentieth century modernism is a reaction.
