Impressionism used to be discussed as a movement that turned its back on high art’s traditional subjects in order to give more attention to other matters. The Impressionists’ themes, landscape, still life, and an updated, more or less non-anecdotal form of genre painting, were despised subjects, at the bottom of the Academy’s hierarchy. While their contemporaries in the official Salons continued to exhibit historical narratives and evocations of classical mythology, the Impressionists preferred to record what they saw around them. Dispassionately. Clearly there was an Impressionist iconography of street scenes, cafes, theaters, and gardens, but the visual aspects of Impressionist motifs seemed more important than the motifs themselves. The complexity of a crowd on a boulevard, the multiplicity of windows, balconies, and shutters, the patterns of cabs, horses, and pedestrians seen from a distance—all were thought to be more significant than where the crowds were going or which boulevard was represented. When Impressionism was spoken of as the beginning of modernism, this dominance of the visual over the narrative was usually stressed. Seeing, rather than what was seen, was the key.

But in the past decade or so, art critics and art historians have become deeply suspicious of work that appears to address the eye first and foremost. While music is assumed (and permitted) to engage the whole being through the ear, painting and sculpture are, oddly, required to generate an immense amount of associative explanation or risk being dismissed as mindless. The more a painting or sculpture