Impressionism. The Most Human Painting

The story of impressionism—which, once and for all, influenced all subsequent art—spans just 12 years: from the first exhibition in 1874, featuring the famous “Impression, Sunrise,” to the last, eighth exhibition in 1886. Édouard Manet and Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Gauguin—starting with the stories of whom this audiobook begins—were among the first to challenge the conventions of the “classic” painting that had formed by then. Vincent van Gogh and Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso and Kazimir Malevich, unlike their predecessors, created their own reality on canvas. They weren’t trying to show the viewer “impression”—the beauty of everyday reality—or to convey what the eye sees in a specific moment. Paola Dmitrievna Volkova invites us on a journey from impressionism to surrealism, from an impression to emotion, from the Venus de Milo to “The Black Square,” in another volume of the series “Bridge over the Abyss.”