‘Sticks and stones …’: naming and name-calling in Impressionist imagery

Abstract

In our century, historians have recognized the agency of the act of naming, and art historians pay special attention to the titles created by artists as signs of intention. A variety of naming, name-calling, is an important part of reception history. The fine arts have a history of name-calling in which derogatory words are frequently created and applied to new or different artistic groups, styles, and theories. Many pejorative labels survive to become positive terms, for example, Baroque and Rococo, which were originally disparaging in order to indicate how out of date these styles appeared in comparison with the new classicism. By the mid-nineteenth century, European artists began to select group names for themselves before hostile critics beat them to it: Pre-Raphaelites, Itinerants, etc. In the 1870s, a new phenomenon surfaced, that of artists willingly adopting a freshly minted insult as their identity. The name involved was impressionnisme.