The works of the touring exhibition of Impressionist engraving in China, which was entitled as “When the Colors Disappear” and was put on the show in Beijing strictly follow the track of progress of Impressionism in its golden age. In the middle of the 19th century, Impressionism toppled the art circle and its style enabled the painting, sculpture, engraving and sketch to advance into a new mile and a brand-new vista. It enabled the artists’ ideologies to go beyond the dogmatic ideas and the set styles and stereotypes. This toppling made it possible that many creative ideas came into being out of the various normative restrictions, which displayed the great characteristics of many artists.

In the wake of new art storm unleashed by Impressionism, the art concepts were rather different from previous ones. Artists were no longer the slaves to the norms of academic schools and broadened their own vision in succession to set free all the imaginations and bring forth the unlimited space for the free, creative ideas and dreams.

When the Impressionist style is applied to the engraving and sketch, there is an unknown and contradictory possibility. Generally speaking, the Impressionist school laid emphasis on the colors and lights. As for the engraving and sketch, it seemed that both of them are in sharp contrast and rather different in styles. Basically, engraving and sketch are based on the contrast between the black and the white, which seems irrelevant to the impressionist paintings.

However, when we carry out further analyses, we can find that the photographic skills which came into being at the same time exerted great influences on the art circle, because photography weakened the importance of the needs of descriptive arts and realistic paintings that they used to possess. The previous engraving skills played an important role in copying and re-printing the art works. With the progress of photographic skills, the copying became easier and the copied works were more faithful, therefore, the function that engraving used to possess had lost its original importance.

We therefore may find that the impressionist revolution had its own reasons and special way of creation in the circle of painting.

To the impressionist artists, to apply the black and the white only seems to be an impossibly difficult and important question. However, it eventually stimulated forcibly the imaginative power of artists. They no longer need the colors, instead, only the signs and handwriting to create. While due to the limitation of engraving with colors, some artists such as Monet refused to adopt this skill. Although he once attempted to use the engraving in creation at the workshop of Dr. Gachet, the draft of this engraving had been left in the unknown and incomplete state since then. He eventually remained devoting to the skills of sketch and color crayon.

The individualized exploration and research of Impressionist engraving can be observed in different versions of the same work that are created by artists at different phases. In paintings, it is very rare to have works that are drawn over the same theme repeatedly. However, in the engraving and lithographic printing, there are various versions of the same theme. The formation of different versions of these works embodied the artists’ passion and devotion to this graphic designing art and the skill, either the correction of skills, or the correction at the phase of plate making, or the ink correction at the phase of printing. These technicality and creativity of handwriting shapes sometimes goes beyond the paintings that are widely popular among the mass.

After the Impressionist and Gauguin’s experiments, the graphic designing artists followed new models, such as Steinlein, Vlaminck and Utrillo and so on. However the pioneer and the most representative of Graphic designing of impressionist school is deservedly no one but Picasso, an artist of freedom and creation, who made everything different since.