ANALYSIS : Art Lecturer’s Impressions of Impressionists Seem to Blur at Times

A breezy trip through the history of Impressionist painting in France and the United States was the subject of a Wednesday night slide lecture by Ron Steen at the Laguna Art Museum attended by a capacity crowd.

An art history instructor at UCLA Extension who has taught public education classes at the Getty Museum, Steen barreled rapidly through his topic, an overly ambitious theme for an hour-and-a-half talk.

For Steen--who kept referring to “Impression ism paintings” and sometimes garbled the pronunciation of artists’ names and painting titles--putting artists in rigid, if hazily described, categories appeared more important than a careful scrutiny of what they were doing.

“There is only one Impressionism (sic) artist: (Claude) Monet,” Steen said at one point. “Everything afterward is Post-Impressionism.”

So what is Impressionism?

According to Steen, an Impressionist painting “looks like it’s evolving.” It is “blurred, fuzzy, interactive.” Interactive? Yes, because it supposedly takes you a minute before “recognition sets in.” And, he said, it is always a landscape.

Where does that leave the famous series of images Monet painted of Rouen Cathedral as it looked to him from sunrise to sunset on a single day?

“For Monet the church was landscape, coming from the soil in France.” Ah, of course.

And what about those famous figurative scenes--by Edouard Manet, Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas--that captured fleeting moments from the entertainment world of bars, cafes and dance halls? According to Steen, these artists are “naturalists” who may use a broken brushstroke but are “philosophically not oriented to Impressionism.”

To his credit, Steen did sketch in some of the social context of Impressionist painting.

The invention of the tin paint tube and collapsible easel earlier in the 19th Century made it possible for artists to venture outdoors to try to capture the retinal impression of sunlight striking objects.

In a painting such as Camille Pissarro’s “Factories at Pontoise,” images of smokestacks reflected an increasing awareness of the inroads the Industrial Age was making on the quality of life. Even Degas’ ballet dancers were not starry-eyed artistes but impoverished girls who generally worked as prostitutes.

Turning to American artists who endeavored to follow Monet’s example, Steen said that (with the exception of expatriates such as James Whistler and Mary Cassat) they would not have seen what was going on in France until a landmark exhibit in 1885 at the National Academy of Design in New York.

By 1887, American artists began trickling to Giverny, Monet’s country domicile. But in mentioning such pilgrimages, Steen often omitted artists’ first names, referring airily to “(Nathan) Hale” and “(Willard) Metcalf” and “(Theodore) Robinson”--not much help for audiences new to the subject.

Zipping breathlessly through the New York-based group called “The Ten,” Steen offered a whirlwind slide tour of paintings that marked the spread of Impressionism to Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Cincinnati, Chicago, New Mexico, San Francisco, Los Angeles and, finally, Laguna Beach. But analysis and evaluation of these works was not forthcoming.