Globalizing Impressionism: Reception, Translation, and Transnationalism edited by Alexis Clark and Frances Fowle and Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts edited by Emily C. Burns and Alice M. Rudy Price

What was impressionism? Both Globalizing Impressionism: Reception, Translation, and Transnationalism, edited by Alexis Clark and Frances Fowle, and Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts, edited by Emily C. Burns and Alice M. Rudy Price, strike at this fundamental question. Sharing a set of conceptual and methodological tools drawn from postcolonialism, transnationalism, and mobility studies; looking to global and decentered histories of modernism as exemplars; and espousing an ambition to contribute to the urgent decolonization of art history, the two volumes substantiate a novel interpretation of impressionism as a flexible cultural discourse and separable aesthetic toolkit that was adopted and adapted for an array of purposes in a variety of places. Both volumes dispense with the national frameworks, center-periphery models, prescriptive definitionism, and logics of “influence” that have characterized much scholarship on impressionism beyond France to date; in so doing, they offer a compelling and nuanced way of attending to impressionism’s myriad iterations, and the links between them, that deserves to shape teaching and research on the subject.

At the core of both volumes is a shared argument that, for people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, impressionism signified neither a fixed style, a closed group, nor a uniquely French artform. Instead, for them impressionism was a “flexible cultural language” (Burns and Price, “Mapping Impressionist Constellations,” Mapping, 3) lacking “always clearly codified stylistic criteria” (Clark and Fowle, “Introduction,” Globalizing). Impressionism functioned as a separable “aesthetic toolkit” (“Mapping,” 5) of practices, techniques, motifs, and meanings from which “artists and authors around the world” were able to select, adapt, and rework in ways that allowed them to express local experiences and traditions while also participating in “a global historical discourse” (“Introduction,” Globalizing). As an “artistic language simultaneously operating locally, nationally, and internationally,” the definition and meaning of impressionism “shifted from place to place” (“Introduction,” Globalizing).

Both volumes extract enormous critical and analytical value from this linguistic metaphor: attending to the distinctive visual morphology, syntax, and semantics of impressionist painting, as well as the pragmatics of its articulation in diverse contexts, they reveal the syncretism, malleability, and international promiscuity of impressionism. The result is a collection of richly descriptive accounts that cohere into a global polyphony of impressionisms-in-use, all sharing a conscious avoidance of any dull, prescriptive insistence on measuring deviations from a singular dictionary form. Indeed, both volumes explicitly refuse to define a standard “Impressionism”—whether in terms of stylistic coherence, specific technical criteria, or a canon of practitioners—and signal this refusal by transcribing impressionism in the lower-case throughout (“Mapping,” 15n1; “Introduction,” “Afterword,” Globalizing). Thus, they trace the transnational “plurality of impressionisms” (“Mapping,” 3) constituted as each local iteration of impressionism was drawn into contact with others from elsewhere, and show how contemporaries recognized impressionism as an “international phenomenon” borne of such intercultural hybridity (Homi Bhabha is an acknowledged touchstone for both projects). Indeed, the movement’s earliest and most influential historians and critics “mapped its dissemination” across national borders—whereupon “artists and authors around the world” claimed “impressionism as part of their national, and so local, painterly traditions, while making their own mark on the history of impressionism”—and described the French iteration as “importing and synthesizing different national schools of painting: British, Dutch, Japanese, and Spanish,” to the extent that, certainly “before World War I, . . . impressionism was not associated solely with France” (“Introduction,” Globalizing).

To substantiate this pluralized and globalized characterization of impressionism, both volumes collect essays that excavate and examine the myriad “transnational circuits” (“Mapping,” 3) and “networks of artists, critics, scholars, curators, and dealers working across linguistic, institutional, geographical, and political boundaries,” as well as the various “modes of translation facilitated by these historical networks [and by which historical actors] translated and so transformed impressionism” (“Introduction,” Globalizing). While the central argument of these books is conceptual, it is adumbrated through detailed studies of concrete instances of translation, transformation, and transportation in ways that bolster the argument’s historical purchase and critical insight. The semantic circulation of impressionism is shown to be a product of the physical circulation of artworks, books, and people; developments in definitions and conceptions of impressionism are tied to the practical realities of exhibiting, dealing, collecting, and publishing.

For example, Alexis Clark “surveys published histories of French impressionism that were written in French, translated into English, and internationally distributed . . . [to underscore] the centrality of publishing to globalizing impressionism” (“Making an Art-Historical Empire: French Histories of Impressionism in Translation,” Globalizing). Ana Maria Tavares Cavalcanti traces the “Shifting Conceptions of Impressionism in Brazil” through a systematic analysis of Brazilian periodicals (Globalizing). Likewise, Joost van der Hoeven identifies a distinctive Dutch “interpretation of the term ‘impressionism’” mediated by ekphratic translation in “mostly unillustrated reviews” (“‘Impressionism’ as a Contested Term in Dutch Art Criticism, 1870–1900,” Globalizing). Laura Moure Cecchini examines the Venice Biennale between 1895 and 1948 as a concrete locus for the consolidation of the pluralistic Italian conception of impressionism (“Imitators of the Imitators?: World Impressionisms at the Venice Biennale, 1895–1948,” Globalizing) and Emily C. Burns zeroes in on the “Seventh Annual Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture by American Artists,” staged in 1894 at the Art Institute of Chicago, as a point of convergence for painters and writers working to culturally translate impressionism for the United States (“‘Nothing but Daubs’: The Translation of Impressionism in the United States,” Globalizing). Laura D. Corey investigates Mary Cassatt’s pivotal role as French impressionism’s “American ambassador,” facilitating both the private acquisition, institutional collection, and public display of impressionist artworks (“Going Public: Mary Cassatt and the 1886 Impressionist Exhibition in New York,” Globalizing). Yukiko Kato follows art dealer Tadamasa Hayashi’s exportation of ukiyo-e to France and importation of impressionism to Japan to show how Japanese responses to impressionism were shaped in part by the circuits of global capitalism (“Tadamasa Hayashi’s Dream: The First Wave of Impressionism in Japan,” Globalizing). Hadrien Viraben meanwhile shows how the international circulation of photographic portraits of impressionist painters via their reproduction in the first monographs devoted to the movement (by Wynford Dewhurst in England, Théodore Duret in France, and Vittorio Pica in Italy) helped monumentalize the still-living artists as “masters of the movement” and so forge the impressionist canon (“The Photographic Pantheons of French Impressionists,” Globalization).

In mapping these concrete and conceptual networks, both volumes consciously move away from the hierarchical center-periphery models that have dominated the study of impressionism outside France to date, according to which “impressionism is often defined as authentically French and all other iterations are derivative . . . examples of diluted influence” (“Mapping,” 3–4); “French impressionism [is] the chronologically first impressionism, [and] French impressionism [is] the stylistically first and most sophisticated impressionism” (“Introduction,” Globalizing). This Francocentrism is often encoded and masked by the use of “‘Impressionism’ and ‘the Impressionists’ . . . [as] an implicit shorthand for French art and artists” (“Introduction,” Globalizing), installing France as the embedded point of reference, the “unmarked case” (Partha Mitter, quoted in “Mapping,” 4), against which other impressionisms are judged and, inevitably, diminished. Here, a further ambition behind the editors’ shared decision to deprive impressionism of its majuscule is to insist upon “coevality, contemporaneousness, and parity” as an axiom and starting point for scholarship, “out of an interest in and respect for all permutations of impressionism as contributing to a global historical discourse” (“Introduction,” Globalizing), and in order to craft “a reshaped and decolonized narrative of multiple impressionisms” (“Mapping,” 4).

Looking beyond France, both volumes collect essays that examine the production of impressionisms in a diverse array of places typically constructed as peripheral in order to dismantle the narrow canon of mostly “white, male, European artists” (“Mapping,” 4), the “limited cast of protagonists” (“Introduction,” Globalizing) through which “the story of impressionism” (“Afterword,” Globalizing) has so far been told. Frances Fowle makes a convincing case for the inclusion of the “Glasgow Boys” in the “canon of British impressionism” (heretofore centered on James McNeill Whistler and Walter Sickert); as Fowle demonstrates, John Lavery, James Guthrie, and their peers developed a distinctive “decorative impressionism,” recognized as such by contemporaries, which synthesized “a multiplicity of sources” including French impressionism, Jules Bastien-Lepage, Whistler, and Adolphe Monticelli (“British Impressionism and the Glasgow Boys,” Globalizing).

With an essay in each book, Ahu Antmen follows the “1914 Generation” of “Turkish impressionists,” who, after returning from Paris upon the outbreak of the First World War, leveraged impressionism’s association with liberated artistic subjectivity in landscapes (“Nazmi Ziya Güran and Turkish Impressionism,” Globalizing) and capacity to represent contemporary life (“Jeune Turc, Jeune Femme: Impressions of a New ‘Beauté Orientale,’” Mapping, 103–16) to reflect upon, and participate, in the modernization of their country, its transformation from Ottoman empire to Turkish nation-state, and the flowering of new political and cultural freedoms for both men and women. Yet, while the Turkish impressionists adapted an aesthetic encountered in France in response to “modern ideals . . . drawn from [European] Enlightenment and positivist thinking” (“Turkish Impressionism”), their emphasis on effects of light and weather—seen as intrinsic and specific to Istanbul and inflected with local cultural resonance (Nazmi Ziya Güran referred to the sun as his “mihrab, in reference to the point where the congregation turns in Islamic prayer,” “Jeune Turc, Jeune Femme,” 103)—transformed impressionism into a vehicle of Turkish national identity far more complex and nuanced than any “mere imitation of Monet” (“Turkish Impressionism”).

Essays in each volume on Japan examine the ambivalent intertwining of impressionism with local institutions (including art schools, artist societies, market, and museums) and its mediation between native and previously-imported Western artforms. Chinghsin Wu follows Kuroda Seiki’s practice as a painter, teacher, and theoretician advocating the aesthetic, pedagogical, and national value of plein-airism against, on the one hand, established taste for nihonga (a modernized and syncretic amalgam of traditional Japanese styles) fueled by “anti-Western Japanese nationalism” (“Institutionalizing Impressionism and Plein-Air Painting in Japan,” Mapping, 137) and, on the other, entrenched preference for the earthy colors of academic and Barbizon aesthetics among those artists who were open to yōga (Western-style art). For Kuroda, the practice of “sketching directly from nature (shasei)” (Kuroda, quoted in “Plein Air Painting in Japan,” 138) so as to record “‘nature-as-is’ (arugamama shizen)” (Matsumoto Seiichi, quoted in “Plein Air Painting in Japan,” 135) and capture “the feeling that thereby arises within” the artist (Kuroda, quoted in “Plein Air Painting in Japan,” 136) through vibrant coloration conforming to outdoor light, would liberate artists from the obligation to endlessly repeat “historical scenes, genre paintings with scenes from plays, . . . mythological scenes . . . famous temples, shrines, and mausoleums” (Kuroda’s student, Yuasa Ichirō, quoted in “Plein Air Painting in Japan,” 136). Yet, Kuroda was suspicious of individualism (while in Paris he criticized “the Impressionists [for] . . . invent[ing] a new nature” and “seek[ing] . . . only originality in colors and execution,” Kuroda, quoted in “Plein Air Painting in Japan,” 139): for him, plein-airism was valuable insofar as it would allow artists to “express the traditional beauty of Japan” and “stand shoulder-to-shoulder with foreign countries” (Kuroda, quoted in “Plein Air Painting in Japan,” 138). Kuroda tempered the colors and execution of impressionism and deliberately “Japanized” Western plein-airism by applying it to nihonga genres to create a new “type of ‘Japanese-style’ oil painting” (Kuroda, quoted in “Plein Air Painting in Japan,” 141) that was “compatible with global modernity” (138).

Yukiko Kato likewise examines how Japanese responses to impressionism were shaped by Japan’s particular experience of (initially forced) modernization and Westernization, seen at different moments and from different positionalities as an external threat to Japanese culture and a marker of internal social distinction. The popularization and institutionalization of impressionism after the First World War “went hand in hand with the development of Western-style capitalism in Japan” (“Tadamasa Hayashi’s Dream”), which cultivated a taste for Western culture and generated the private and corporate fortunes necessary to collect and display it.

These essays on Scotland, Turkey, and Japan—and the others on Brazil, Poland, South Africa, Mexico, Venezuela, Denmark, Norway, Canada, Australia, the US, and Italy, discussed elsewhere—sensitively foreground the particularities and specificities of each location and, with equal tact, trace the myriad connecting threads by means of which they were woven into global modernity, substantiating each volume’s ambition to articulate a decentered plurality of equal impressionisms.

As some essays decenter French impressionism by foregrounding the vibrancy of impressionisms elsewhere, others help provincialize it by challenging assumptions of its universal relevance, demonstrating its canonicity and centeredness to be constructs of history and historiography rather than axiomatic inevitability, and disrupting beliefs in its singularity and purity by revealing French “impressionism as always already operating in relation to places beyond France” (“Introduction,” Globalizing).‍[1] Richard Shiff’s masterful essay evokes the discursive nuances of the term “impression” inherited by the French impressionists (“Impression: A Romantic Anti-Concept for Naturalists and Impressionists,” Globalizing). Through a close reading of mid-nineteenth-century writers including Théophile Thoré, Émile Littré, and Charles Blanc, Shiff shows that the ideas which would become leitmotifs in the reception of impressionism in France—its poetic rather than narrative appeal, its simplification of phenomena according to natural vision, its framing of art as a “response to [a] sensory experience” of nature, the undisguised indexical impress of both the landscape and the painterly process upon the canvas, the subjectivity and individuality of expression, the naïveté of immersion in nature unburdened by artistic formulae or “authoritative antecedents”—were already in motion in the critical discourse of the 1860s, where they coalesced in response to landscapes by Camille Corot and Édouard Manet. Thus, impressionism was not a breakthrough to purified modernism, but just another facet in a longer and broader process of reckoning with the intractable aesthetic paradoxes of art and being. Nor was it purely French: Shiff notes the translation of ideas drawn from “anglophone psychology” and British aesthetic philosophy (namely, David Hume’s empiricism) and the triangulation of aesthetic judgements of French art against stereotypes of English and Dutch national characters and cultures. While this essay continues Shiff’s longstanding interest in the intellectual climate of France in which French impressionism was understood, when collected in a volume with decolonizing ambitions it contributes to the provincialization of France by countering both teleological modernism and center-periphery logics reliant on a coherent and inherently French impressionism illuminating the world.

Mia Laufer’s chapter on Camille Pissarro’s formative period in Venezuela puts the “global roots” of French impressionism front and center (“Camille Pissarro, Fritz Melbye, and Early Impressionist Innovation in Caracas,” Mapping, 22). Pissarro, so central to French impressionism, was born into a Sephardic Jewish family on St. Thomas, a Caribbean colony of Denmark. He started drawing in the port of his hometown, where he met Danish artist Fritz Melbye; in 1852 Pissarro, then aged 22, and Melbye left St. Thomas for Caracas. In Venezuela, Laufer argues, “Pissarro and Melbye experimented with innovations in pedagogy, subject matter, and technique that a decade later would become staples of the impressionist movement” (24). Thus, Pissarro’s shunning of the Academic pedagogy of the École des Beaux-Arts in favor of collaborative practice and artistic sociability en plein air structured by bonds of “mentorship and friendship” (24)—as he experienced with Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Ludovic Piette, Armand Guillaumin, and Maximillien Luce—owed more to his experience “investigating the possibilities of art together” with Melbye in Venezuela than any “specific circumstances in Paris” (24). Likewise, Pissarro’s “interest in exploring quotidian subjects,” “urban subjects . . . work and leisure scenes,” and his “love of landscape painting” were all nurtured long before he left for Paris in 1855, and thus before he encountered the work of Gustave Courbet or the Barbizon painters, who are often proposed as influences (24–25). In terms of Pissarro’s style and technique the argument is more tentative: his “evocative” color, gestural mark-making, and sensitive tonal variation—all geared towards the representation of an effect—“hint at his later impressionist pictures” (25–27). Nevertheless, the essay powerfully unsettles the chronological primacy of France in the history of impressionism.

In Mapping Hadrien Viraben returns, this time co-writing with Claire Hendren, to the constructedness of the impressionist canon (“From Famed Masters to a New Generation: Durand-Ruel’s Transatlantic Label ‘Impressionism,’” 145–57). Viraben and Hendren follow dealer Paul-Durand-Ruel’s “pragmatic and ambiguous use of the label ‘impressionism’” (145) as both a narrow, historical designation (echoing the prescriptions of Théodore Duret) to solidify the reputations (and thus prices) of Claude Monet et al., and a “living label” to “attest to the modernity of,” and thereby market, “a younger generation of painters born after 1856” (145). In exhibitions in France and the US, especially the Carnegie International Exhibition, Durand-Ruel consciously “assimilated” these latter painters with the “original impressionists” (as they are repeatedly termed by Viraben and Hendren, unhelpfully enough for their own argument), thereby shaping the taste of private collectors and the acquisition strategy of public institutions as they coalesced into a strong US market for impressionism.

Nicholas Parkinson likewise focuses on the contingencies of the early historiography of impressionism, here in relation to brutal geopolitics and fragile national identities rather than hard-headed commerce (“The Rayonnement of Our Ideals”: French, German, and Nordic Painting in Fin-de-Siécle France,” Mapping, 158–74). Parkinson maps changing French attitudes to the Nordic and German artists associated with the Düsseldorf School onto the vicissitudes of Franco-German relations and the rabid Revanchisme that gripped French culture in the humiliating aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war. In the early nineteenth century, “a period of increased French and German cultural contact” framed by the “Romantic legacy of Germaine de Staël’s De l’Allemagne (1813),” “Germanic culture” was associated in France “with proximity to nature,” and German landscape painting was hailed for “Germanic artist’s commitment to truth” (161). Yet, following defeat in 1870–71 and annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, French critics revised their aesthetic judgements, perceiving “pictorial lies” and “pastiche” where once they had experienced “truth”: “[a]s the political borders of Europe shifted, so too artistic allegiances transformed” (162–63). As Parkinson demonstrates, such criticism fed into a larger critique of German culture as “a lie created to further Prussian territorial expansion,” wherein the “invasion of German art” into France was the cultural corollary to the annexation of French territory (164). In response, French critics like René Ménard and Charles Ponsonailhe emphasized the Frenchness of impressionism, and imagined it squaring up to the Düsseldorf School as two “opposing armies fighting for territorial supremacy over European art” (159). At the same time, they appropriated non-French artists to the cause of French impressionism and characterized them as “a foreign army legion battling for the triumph of French art” (166). Such martial metaphors reveal the alignment of this “idea of global impressionism” with the “weaponization of culture” as an implement of “cultural imperialism” and colonial expansionism during the Third Republic, underpinned by the desire to compensate for political humiliation and restore national prestige through the global dissemination of French culture (165–66). Thus, the integration of non-French impressionists into written histories and official exhibition spaces (as at the Musée du Luxembourg under Léonce Bénédite) was intended to manifest the universal relevance and “global dominance of the French plein-air tradition” (166), which in turn would justify the violent imposition of French culture on non-European peoples.

Mitchell B. Frank interrogates the German perspective on global impressionism (“The Long History of Impressionism in Germany,” Globalizing). As in France, “[n]ational identity and cultural matters were inextricably linked in Wilhelmine Germany, which was marked by the pursuit of a Weltpolitik, a course to turn the nation into a world power on the political as well as the cultural stage” that turned “German identity” into a central problematic for “[t]he writing of art history.” Frank follows the complex intertwining of globalism (with writers expanding the “geographical and chronological parameters of impressionism beyond the confines of late nineteenth-century France” and integrating German artists into the global “modernist fold”) and nationalism (the imperative to “maintain [the] national divisions” that subtended national identities) in German histories of impressionism, which united progressives and conservatives in an effort to decenter France to the benefit of Germany.

These chapters by Parkinson and Frank showcase the malleability of aesthetic judgements, historical narratives, and art historical categorizations to international relations and national imaginaries. The national ‘Schools’ that structured the way contemporaries assessed the relevance of impressionism to various local cultures were not inherent to collective characters or the immanent expression of national spirits as claimed, but rather actively made in service of concrete political strategies and struggles. By refusing to separate colonial struggles and imperialist strategies from the study of French nationalism, Parkinson productively historicizes the assumptions of French impressionism’s centeredness and thus offers a potent reminder, should one be needed, of the urgent relevance of the decolonizing critique underpinning both publications to contemporary impressionism studies.

A leitmotif in both volumes is the capacity of impressionism to stand as “an indexical sign of modernity,” often experienced and interpreted in terms of “anti-academicism . . . originality and newness” and in dialogue with “national and cultural identities” (“Introduction,” Globalizing). In some instances, as Ahu Antmen explores with respect to Turkey and Øystein Sjåstad in Norway, the modernity of impressionism impelled artists to select particular implements from its aesthetic toolkit in order to speak to the social and cultural transformations of modernization (both focus especially on modern gender roles, Sjåstad, “Christian Krohg’s Images of Family Intimacy in the Age of Impressionism,” Mapping, 77–89). For other people and in other places, the modernity of impressionism was instead indicative of its status as a “foreign art and culture . . . that threatened to oppress local traditions, tastes, and identities” (“Introduction,” Globalizing) and which was associated with a rootless cosmopolitanism reflecting nationalist anxieties about globalization. Samantha Burton, for example, shows how the “tension between foreign and native” in late nineteenth-century Canada—a society avidly seeking a “homegrown Canadian school” expressive of a distinctly Canadian identity—inhered to both plants and paintings as they became transnationally mobile and resulted in a “rhetoric of danger” and “disease” applied equally to tropical flora and French art (“Transplanting Impressionism to Canada,” Mapping, 65–66).

Other essays interrogate the relationship between impressionism and modernism, aiming to problematize the Francocentric and teleological metanarrative of modernism, which, in the Greenbergian mode, positioned impressionism “as [its] source . . . because of the artists’ attention to materiality” (“Mapping,” 4). Alice M. Rudy Price aims to disentangle Danish painter Anna Ancher from exactly this metanarrative by complicating prior associations of “Ancher with Parisian developments,” which, she argues, “trivialize the multifariousness of Danish modernism” (“Impressionism Projected: Anna Ancher, Hygge, and Danish Modernism,” Mapping, 175). “Ancher and her Scandinavian cohorts selectively adapted” French impressionism, “critically interweaving” it with “select postimpressionist precepts”; the unnuanced application of “the impressionist label” to her work “contributes to her exclusion from both the Danish cultural canon and global modernism” (175–76). Mark A. Castro examines how the impressionist label was contrariwise a positive factor in the historiographic legacy of Mexican artist Joaquín Clausell, whose art had value for Mexican modernism, even as it turned away from European aesthetics in favor of native traditions (“‘Echoes of Impressionism’: Joaquín Clausell and the Politics of Mexican Art,” Mapping, 192–203). Zoë Marie Jones investigates the ambivalent relationship between French impressionism and Italian futurism: while Gino Severini claimed that “futurism was a continuation of impressionism,” this putative modernist lineage was complicated by the Futurists’ parallel “insistence on a uniquely Italian modernism” and iconoclastic attitude to past art (“Italian Futurism, Socialism, Urban Change, and Impressionism,” Mapping, 204). Jones argues that the futurist association with impressionism was a strategic weapon deployed against a rival Cubism. Starting from the premise that modernism was a plural, decentered, and global phenomenon—deconstructing the myth and metanarrative of modernism as singular, linear, and European—these histories of impressionisms respond to interventions by historians of modernism including Partha Mitter and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, who offer highly relevant models embracing multiplicity and mobility.‍[2]

If impressionism was indivisible from modernity, it was also inseparable from the “capitalist-colonial structure” (“Mapping,” 6) of which that modernity was an expression. As revealed by the list of places studied in these two books, the globalization of impressionism was, like globalization itself, “an imperfect and incomplete process” (“Introduction,” Globalizing) that “connected with imperialist circuits” and followed “the maps of Western colonial and commercial trajectories”: “impressionism [was] seemingly absent over much of the earth’s landmass” including “voids” “in China, India, [and] much of the African continent” and was “infrequently [and uneasily] embraced” by local “[a]rtists in colonized territories,” where it was more frequently “imposed by Euro-Americans” in order to “stake a . . . claim” to the land of indigenous populations (“Mapping,” 6–10). The important reminder that impressionism did not resonate for every local culture obviates against either text descending into a hagiography of the global march of impressionism; the reminder that modernity was a project of colonizing capitalism prompts authors in both volumes to confront the complicity of impressionist aesthetics in cultures of colonialism.

Emily C. Burns compares the “frontier impressionisms” of Tom Roberts in Australia and Frederic Remington in the United States, whom, she argues, “insidiously seized impressionism in service of a frontier aesthetic subtly tied to the ethos of settler expansion” (“Frontier Impressionisms in the United States and Australia,” Mapping, 51). Burns’s argument is particularly insightful and convincing because it is articulated through a granular and intricate analysis of the particular stylistic, technical, and conceptual aspects of impressionism being adapted to settler expansionism. Thus, she shows how indicators of plein-air painting such as the treatment of color and light—which evoked the artists’ immediate and intimate connection to place, their bodily presence and physical mobility through the landscape—interfaced with impressionism’s lauding of subjective, natural vision—which privileged and legitimized the artist’s sensations—to articulate an impressionist aesthetics of settler possession, wherein these artists claimed ownership over land through its representation. At the same time, impressionism’s broken brushstrokes imparted a masculine vigor which framed this plein-air practice as frontier exploration. Moreover, impressionism’s modernism as an artistic tabula rasa resonated with myths of American and Australian national newness and the construction of their land as terra nullius, and so facilitated the erasure of indigenous populations. In these ways, “stylistic markers of impressionist, naturalist, and plein-air painting raised cultural concepts of freshness, vitality, newness, and authenticity that Australian and U.S. artists and their viewers adapted to their nationalisms . . . the style of impressionism achieved political work in these settler colonial contexts” (59). Yet, impressionism’s emphasis on sensation and immediate experience “obscured [the] power relationship” and nationalist strategies underpinning this particular iteration. Burns’s chapter exemplifies the precision necessary if the celebration of multiplicity (key to the critical charge of both projects) is not to collapse into terminological meaninglessness, with “impressionism” signifying everything and nothing.

The capacity of impressionist aesthetics to erase as well as reveal is examined by Alexis Clark in her chapter on the nocturnes painted by Whistler in Valparaíso, Chile (“Impressionism as Erasure: Whistler and the Chincha Islands War,” Mapping, 33–48). Arriving in 1866, Whistler was witness to the final stages of the Chincha Islands War, a conflict instigated by Spain in an effort to recolonize the guano-rich Chincha Islands from their former colonies of Peru, Chile, and Ecuador. The peripatetic cosmopolitanism that brought Whistler to Chile is often celebrated as sustaining his sophisticated art, and in Valparaíso he found a cosmopolitan town “awash in immigrants, expatriates, exiles, and foreigners” and woven into global networks of maritime “trade in natural resources and the transport of industrial products” (34). Yet, Clark uncovers the “dark side of [Whistler’s] cosmopolitanism” in the “position of privilege” from which he recorded his impressions; not everyone in Valparaíso was cosmopolitan by choice: the guano industry over which the Spanish fleet was fighting depended on the exploitation of “Chinese migrant laborers” and “newly freed but still marginalized men and women of color” who “were forced to tunnel, pick, shovel, blast, haul, and load steaming heaps of guano onto ships bound for U.S. and European fields” (35–37). Yet, Whistler recorded neither the violence of Spanish recolonization nor the racialized exploitation of global capitalism. Instead, in works like Crepuscule in Flesh Colour and Green (1866), Clark finds that Whistler adopts a racialized white gaze (the “flesh color” of the title invoking and privileging whiteness) to allude “to wartime loss and putrescent corpses of certain [white] civilians and gangrenous bodies of select [Confederate] soldiers inlineing [sic] in the bay,” thereby “excluding the bruised and brutalized flesh of kidnapped migrant laborers in the guano mines and the maimed flesh of the multi-racial coalition of soldiers fighting and dying to wrest South America from reconquest by Spain” (41–43). Clark’s “layer[ing of] politics onto paint” (41) is supported by the evidence she presents of Whistler’s racism: during his return voyage from Valparaíso to London he savagely assaulted a black man in “retribution for the defeated Confederacy” (44).

Isabelle Gapp’s study of the Swedish painter Anna Boberg’s scenes of the Norwegian Arctic likewise identifies the interknotting of transnational impressionism with the racialized dynamics of global modernity (“An Arctic Impressionism?: Anna Boberg and the Lofoten Islands,” Mapping, 90–102). In her impressionist interest in the Lofoten islands’ “changing light conditions,” expressed in a “richly vibrant palette” that “builds to the crescendo of color,” Boberg resists the masculinist and racialized discourse that constructed the Arctic as a “white” landscape of pure, virgin snow and ice ready for conquest by hardy “Anglo-American” men (93–95). Yet, neither does Boberg represent the “Sápmi population of the Nordic Arctic” and so “the implicit association between ‘whiteness’ and the colonial space remains” active in her paintings, which thus privilege her own inhabitation of the landscape as a white woman (92). Nuancing this ambivalent politics of place, Gapp further identifies in the plein-air grounding of the artist in the landscape evidence of a “phenomenological awareness of the Arctic climate and environment” (94). Boberg painted the Lofoten fishing industry at a moment of transformation in the face of mechanization: by “purposefully emphasizing the significance of the [traditional] Nordland boat at a time when [less sustainable] motorized vessels were rapidly replacing traditional methods,” Gapp argues that “Boberg’s paintings” evoke the “interaction between industry and environment” and underscore “the social[,] cultural [and ecological] implications of modernization” (96).

As is clear from the chapters already addressed, the adaptability of impressionism to nationalisms—both colonizing and anticolonial—is a recurrent aspect of its myriad localizations. Amalia Wojciechowski analyses Stanisław Wyspiański’s early-twentieth-century pastel views of the Kościuszko Mound against the “contested political backdrop” of Poland’s disappearance as a “sovereign nation” following partition “between imperial powers of Prussia, Russia, and Austria” in 1795, the “failed revolutions” of 1830–31 and 1863, and consequent “forced relocations” and “suppression of the Polish language” (“‘Only the Colors Should Begin to Compose . . .’: Stanisław Wyspiański’s Window View(s) and the Politics of Polish Color,” Mapping, 118). Prevented from giving political expression to their national identity, “Polish nationalists . . . [prioritized] culture as the means for national preservation,” lauded “the individual artist . . . as the protector and progenitor of Polish identity and Polishness,” and assigned “a patriotic role” to landscape painting in “fusing Polish history with its physical manifestation” (118–19). For Wojciechowski, while Wyspiański’s choice to depict the Kościuszko Mound, “a potent patriotic symbol,” sits within this nationalist discourse, his impressionist style—particularly his liberated use of color and indulgence in subjective vision—ostensibly “troubles” its patriotic utility (120). Countering a critical (and historiographical) discourse that identified impressionism’s foreignness as incompatible with Polishness, Wojciechowski sees Wyspiański articulate his “patriotic feelings” (126) through the chromatic language of impressionism. This language, rather than expressing specificity of place, foregrounded Wyspiański’s subjective perception of it, allowing him to selectively erase the traces of Austrian occupation and rendering this filtered landscape Polish because it was seen by a Polish artist (119): “[t]he embedding of self repossesses the depicted landscape” (127–28).

Of course, as Emily C. Burns and Emma Kindred note, for the nationalisms of settler colonies like Australia, the distinctively possessive potential of impressionist subjectivity and color could sustain the appropriation, rather than re-appropriation, of land (Kindred, “‘An Australian Incident’: Tom Roberts’s Impressionism and the Colonial Project,” Globalizing). As Morna O’Neill observes, in South Africa “impressionism was the domain of white South African artists and patrons,” under whose impetus it “performed the crucial work of nation-building,” creating “‘South Africanism,’ a national and imperial identity formulated by white colonial elites” (“Mediating Impressionism in South Africa,” Globalizing). Painters such as Hugo Naudé—who pictured “the veld, the expanse of grassland that came to characterize the South African landscape,” through unblended, prismatic colors and fluid brushstrokes—helped imagine “the land as uninhabited and unsettled, even as the government increased efforts to wrest land rights from the black population” and ignore “the industrial realities of extraction capitalism,” thereby feeding into “the idea of white nationhood that would fuel the creation of the apartheid state after World War II.” O’Neill maps how the impressionism which served this racialized nationalism was mediated by transnational networks and cosmopolitan identities that were themselves racialized. In 1910, at the instigation of “plutocratic ‘Randlord’ collectors, bankers and businessmen,” the Johannesburg Art Gallery imported a collection of French impressionism assembled by Irish dealer Hugh Lane to serve as the basis of “a cosmopolitan civic identity within the context of empire.” This importation was “part of a broader effort to create a stable civil society in South Africa in the aftermath of the South African War . . . [by reconciling] the two principal white “races” of South Africa—British and Dutch . . . [and healing] the wounds of war by drawing upon notions of a shared cultural heritage among the white populations of South Africa, while also envisioning a cosmopolitan audience for modern French painting.” The cosmopolitan aspirations of South Africanism related to the country’s status as a dominion of the British empire, and the important role that “metropolitan” cultural “paradigms” played in mediating South African identities and their aesthetic expression. The impressionist display at the Johannesburg Art Gallery built on an already existing “knowledge of impressionism” imported by white artists who had trained at the Académie Julian in Paris and the Slade School of Fine Art in London. These artists’ circulation in transnational networks of art education bolstered the perception that, by working in an impressionist landscape idiom once back in South Africa, they were “connected . . . to a broader artistic movement” and “participating in impressionism as a global phenomenon”; this notion helped justify and “[elide] the racist colonial agenda upon which their access to the landscape depended.”

Both sets of editors acknowledge the problematic methodological and historiographical consequences that this close mapping of impressionist aesthetics onto national identities has had for the study of global impressionisms. Indeed, so successfully did its early twentieth-century practitioners voice national identities in the language of impressionism that “[t]he singular hermeneutic of national identity is often the only framework for interpreting impressionisms outside of France” (“Mapping,” 3–4). Not only has this “disadvantage[d] international impressionists by framing them as examples of diluted influence” (“Mapping,” 4), the “tendenc[y] to define the parameters of study through national boundaries . . . [has obscured the] circuits, networks, and markets transcending those same borders” (“Introduction,” Globalizing), including colonial ones. The authors collected in both volumes adopt a range of strategies to confront this problematic.

As we’ve seen, some historicize this historiography’s conceptual framework, treating, for example, national “Schools” as the contingent object, rather than neutral implement or assumed foundation, of art historical inquiry. In their introduction to Mapping, Burns and Price draw from postcolonial theories of the nation and cite Homi Bhabha’s “sense of the nation-state as ‘an agency of ambivalent narration that holds culture at its most productive position’” (Mapping, 12); many of the chapters they collect make productive use of this notion (as indeed do others in Globalizing), examining the role impressionisms played in narrating nations and articulating cultural differences in the liminal, interstitial spaces of global modernities. The mythical boundedness of nations is also challenged: O’Neill, for example, draws on Saul Dubow’s notion of “‘Britishness’ as a global ideal . . . that dispenses with claims of ancestry or even territory” to inform her analysis of impressionism’s role in the construction of a South African national identity (“South Africa”). Finally, and perhaps most powerfully, the conscious transnationalism of both volumes destabilizes nation-based historiographies and decenters European modernism and French impressionism.

In her review of Hollis Clayson and André Dombrowksi’s Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century? (2016)—which cleared critical space for both Mapping and Globalizing by starting to ask pointed postcolonial questions about the putative centeredness of Paris and singularity of Parisian modernism—Burns identified a hesitancy on the part of the editors to answer their titular question in the negative.‍[3] Nevertheless, Burns reserved praise for Tamar Garb’s contribution (“Revisiting the 1860s: Race and Place in Cape Town and Paris,” 115–30), which had, in her view, most successfully managed to denaturalize Eurocentrism by “situat[ing] the cultural production of Paris in a much larger global map—one which can take proper account of the traffic in peoples and goods and the emergent multiple and fractured modernities that nineteenth-century migrations and movements precipitated” (116). Thus, it is Mapping that most explicitly works to construct the conceptual architecture within which the transnationalism advocated by Garb might enrich and decolonize impressionist art history. Burns and Price cite Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of the rhizome as a paradigm for spatializing transnational impressionisms. Unlike center-periphery models—which hierarchize the world into centers (advanced cultures where original art is made) and peripheries (primitive cultures where artists merely imitate metropolitan examples) and trace linear, monodirectional linkages of influence—a rhizome is a non-hierarchical, multiplicious, and dynamic structure of interconnected points without an origin or a center; culture is generated from flows of concepts and artefacts across the temporary configurations of the myriad, lateral connectivities that constitute the rhizome. Burns and Price quote cultural geographer Tim Cresswell to describe such rhizomatic impressionisms as “constellations of mobility” (“Mapping,” 11).

The essays in Mapping by Laufer and Burton exemplify the transformative impact that this rhizomatic model can have on understandings of international impressionisms. At the core of Laufer’s argument is Pissarro’s importation of impressionist techniques from Venezuela to France; however, to stop the analysis there would be to reverse the directionality implied by the center-periphery model while leaving its logic intact. Thus, Laufer maps a much more complex, multidirectional set of connections that interwove various local and national cultures. For example, Pissarro made his first plein-air oil sketches in Caracas, “which, as [Richard] Brettell has noted, demonstrate ‘a fascination with fleeting effects of light and with a brilliant palette’ as well as ‘a nervous, gestural brush stroke not unlike that later chosen by the Impressionists’ [in France]” (25). Yet, Pissarro’s mentor Fritz Melbye was already “well versed in the practice of oil sketching . . . [which had been] popularized in Denmark by Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, transported to the Caribbean by Melbye, a follower of his teachings . . . experimented with in the cosmopolitan city of Caracas by Melbye and Pissarro, and then further developed in France by the impressionists. Pissarro’s early exposure to this method was therefore entirely dependent on a global circulation of culture and ideas, made possible largely because of colonization” (26–27).

Burton’s analysis of Frances Jones’s 1883 In the Conservatory, “perhaps the earliest major Canadian impressionist work” (65), successfully uncovers “a more complicated set of global connections than has been heretofore accounted for by the center-periphery model” (66) limited by its exclusive regard for transmission outwards from France. By depicting plants imported from the Caribbean, South Africa, and Southeast Asia through an impressionist style imported from France, the painting produces the Jones family’s conservatory as a cosmopolitan “fantasy space” that, while “collapsing space to bring the Caribbean to Canada,” luxuriates in the “power and wealth” that accrued from keeping them distinct, yet connected (“the artist’s father was a wealthy merchant and company owner in the thriving West Indies trade market,” 67–69). Laufer and Burton’s analyses amply demonstrate that the densely interconnected historical reality of modernity far exceeds the explanatory capability of the Eurocentric habits of mind that have suffused art history.

The study of non-French impressionisms is neither new nor limited to these publications. In the first case, both pairs of editors acknowledge World Impressionism: The International Movement, 1860–1920 (1990), edited by Norma Broude, as an important milestone. Broude’s text is however more progressive, ambitious, and perhaps even relevant, than either editorial team concede. In her introductory essay Broude writes of “the global nature of the Impressionist phenomenon,” which “was sometimes imitated but more often substantially transformed by local artists in response to indigenous tastes and traditions” (“A World in Light: France and the International Impressionist Movement, 1860–1920,” 9). Broude “defined [Impressionism] in the broadest sense as painting that emphasized contemporary life, light, and color, whether influenced directly by the French or growing independently out of indigenous sources” (30), and further acknowledged that “[i]nfluences during the Impressionist era . . . did not flow only from one source and in one direction—that is to say, only from France out to the rest of the world” (31). She also historicized the “universally perceived” centeredness of Paris as an effect of “changing market forces” and the commercial strategies of dealers (31). A number of the recurrent themes of Mapping and Globalizing are prefigured in World Impressionism, such as the ambivalent associations between impressionisms and nationalisms, and the polyvalent association of impressionism with freedom from tradition. The World Impressionism that Broude aimed to chart was “a world in light, but a light of many different kinds” (33). However, these ambitions were indeed undercut in practice, and Burns, Price, Clark, and Fowle rightly criticize the book’s division into encyclopedic, nation-bounded chapters that embed the nation as the bedrock of inquiry and establish a limited canon of each nation’s impressionists which has circumscribed much subsequent scholarship. Indeed, even many of the more recent studies of impressionisms beyond France have remained wedded to national frames of reference.‍[4]

It is their shared decolonial ambition, debt to postcolonial theory, and transnational remit that distinguishes Globalizing and Mapping. Both volumes are self-consciously first steps in this regard, and each calls on scholars “to continue globalizing the study of impressionism” (“Afterword,” Globalizing) and “uncover additional points along the constellations of mobility . . . where impressionism was used or deliberately discarded” (“Mapping,” 15). Creating space for this new research, each volume explodes the definition of impressionism beyond artmaking to include myriad vectors of mobility and “multiple modes of translation” practiced by “artists, critics, scholars, curators, and dealers” (“Introduction,” Globalizing). Treating impressionism as a flexible cultural language necessitates decentering painting, which becomes just one of many ways to articulate impressionism. Impressionism was not the exclusive property of the Société anonyme, but neither was it the exclusive property of painters; in the same way that non-French impressionists did not slavishly follow the lead of French painters, neither did critics, scholars, curators, and dealers dance to a tune fixed by artists. Rather, impressionism was the collective endeavor of all. Thus, the paradigm shift effected by both volumes empowers scholars to attend to these other practices of impressionism on their own terms and so recover their positive contributions to the globalization and localizations of impressionism.

Thus, it is surprising that private collectors are absent from this diversified cast of practitioners; while some of the collected essays continue recent scholarly interest in pioneering commercial dealers (including Paul Durand-Ruel, Ambroise Vollard, Theo Van Gogh, and Alexander Reid), neither the imperatives nor the impact of private collectors are reducible to theirs.‍[5] Since Anne Distel’s foundational Les collectionneurs des impressionnistes (1989) we are well informed about certain individual collectors, and clusters of scholarship have demonstrated the importance of private collectors in localized, often nation-bound, contexts.‍[6] However, the full extent to which individual collectors and private collections of impressionism plugged into transnational circuits remains to be completely understood.

In my own research, I have been able to trace a specifically Welsh iteration of impressionism only by examining the private collection amassed by Gwendoline and Margaret Davies of Llandinam.‍[7] In public exhibitions of their significant collection of modern French and British pictures, the Davies sisters (aided, to be sure, by agents and dealers) transformed impressionism into an implement of nationalist cultural politics that spoke to the ambivalent and conflicted identity of a stateless nation in the grips of rapid modernization. Importantly, however, while their translation of impressionism into Wales spoke to distinctly national desires and anxieties, it was mediated by transnational filaments (including education, travel, publishing, and dealing) that wove together Cardiff, Venice, London, and Paris. Informed by their experiences and relationships with places and people beyond Wales, the Davies sisters were judicious in their purchases, which were characterized by a preference for plein-air naturalism in landscapes and rustic figure studies. While their taste for modern landscapes (and aversion to scenes of industry and urbanity) was shaped by their strict religious beliefs, more significantly it also responded to established discourses and aesthetics that collapsed the idea of Wales onto its landscape as a timeless, unspoiled wilderness. Assembled at the zenith of Wales’s rapid modernization—which transformed the landscape physically and so the nation conceptually—the Davies sisters’ collection of impressionism presented a modern aesthetic intended to fulfill the hopes of fellow Welsh nationalists by inspiring a new, native School of painters capable of giving expression to modern Wales.

For this research, the term “impressionism” has been of ambivalent utility. On the one hand, it was a highly meaningful label for the collectors, dealers, and critics I study, each of whom spent enormous critical energy defining it and communicating their definition to the public. Yet, it was only after dispensing with any fixed standard of impressionism that I was able to perceive the full richness and sophistication of those activities. Given the Eurocentric and teleological baggage that “Impressionism” brings, one might question whether its orthographic transformation into “impressionism” or its pluralization are sufficiently potent to delaminate the historical impressionisms both volumes attempt to celebrate from the historiographical Impressionism they attempt to jettison. Moreover, as postcolonial critics are asking of recent efforts to globalize and pluralize “modernisms”, given the enmeshing of modernity (and thus impressionisms and modernisms) with global capitalism and colonialism, is there a danger, in identifying cultural practices on the so-called periphery with “impressionisms”, however pluralized, of re-imposing Eurocentric paradigms and standards even as we try to disrupt them? Or else, in celebrating the particularity of alternative impressionisms, do we risk eliding the universalized violence of globalized capitalism? If we start to think about the object of our research more broadly, in terms of, for example, pleinairismes rather than impressionisms, would we better equip ourselves to craft decolonized narratives?

Of course, this is just one of many possible avenues of future inquiry. It is the reviewer’s sincere hope that art historians will take up the projects and problematics initiated by these two books and, as more progress is made in diversifying and decolonizing the discipline, that our knowledge of transnational impressionisms will be enriched by new scholarly voices offering perspectives and studying histories from around the world.