Waldemar Januszczak created a remarkable four-part series, The Impressionists: Painting and Revolution (available on YouTube), where he explores the unexpected role of technology in making Impressionism possible. He draws attention to innovations like ferrules (the metal bands that allowed brushes to be flat), portable metal paint tubes, lightweight easels, and steam trains—all of which enabled artists to paint on location and respond directly to light and atmosphere.

Later, in New Deal–era America, art instructors developed stepwise frameworks for visual education that echo what the Impressionists practiced intuitively. One such teacher, Victor D’Amico, wrote Experiments in Creative Art Teaching, which I believe includes this kind of framework—though my copy is in storage, so I can't confirm the exact sequence. These teachers shifted the focus from rendering photographic likeness to developing visual awareness—learning to see atmosphere, rhythm, form, and mood.

There’s a clear evolution here: as mechanized seeing (photography, cinema) grew more dominant, artists began searching for what a painting could offer beyond representation. This search culminated in works that explored ambience, movement, and emotional clarity.

You can feel this transition in Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit. He famously said, “The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.” Henri encouraged artists to see not just the subject, but its vital presence—to consider, between seeing and painting, the mood and rhythm that live in observation. He even suggested the ideal school would place the subject in one room and the easels in another, so that walking between them became a moment of reflection.

Stepping one generation further, we meet the Modernists. John Berger once said, “To be a Modernist is to have an opinion about the future.” That captures the shift: artists no longer just challenged the past—they positioned themselves toward the unknown. In Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women, we see this vividly in New York’s Abstract Expressionists, who emerged out of the shadow of industrialization, world war, and displacement. Their work offers a kind of visionary clarity in the face of modern fragmentation.

Poet Robert Hass once noted that in 1900, 90% of war casualties were soldiers; by 2000, 90% were civilians. Art in that century bore witness to this reversal—not just the events, but the moral and emotional reckonings that followed. In this light, artistic movements appear not as styles but as generational responses to crisis—acts of seeing beyond what the tools of the age could offer.

That brings us to now. We're living in the age of generated content—Grammarly smooths our syntax, ChatGPT helps us recall forgotten threads, and yet some part of our cognitive texture is being flattened. A recent MIT study reported a 41% decline in cognitive performance among active ChatGPT users. We have a lot to account for.

Still, every generation must decide how it wants to see. Ours is learning about consciousness models, sensory feedback loops, and new forms of agency. We're not just inheriting tools—we're inventing the terms by which we let those tools shape us.

The other night I woke at 2 a.m. with vivid dreams about self-documenting software and how it might reflect our choices back to us—our values encoded in automation. I thought about standing at a train station in the 1870s, steam and soot thick in the air. At the time, those technologies felt permanent. Today, they’re quaint.

Art doesn’t just show us where we are—it gives us new senses to reclaim what the disruptors try to steal. That, more than any style or theory, may be what the Impressionists began and what we’re still learning to continue.