Life — August 19, 1897 — page 18: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This cartoon satirizes **Impressionist art** and artistic pretension. The six panels show successive stages of a portrait's degradation—from a recognizable society woman at top to increasingly abstract, chaotic brushwork below. Each panel depicts **art critics or wealthy patrons** examining the work with apparent approval, despite its deteriorating quality. The joke: as the painting becomes more incomprehensible, the observers respond with greater enthusiasm and elaborate praise. This mocks the **early 20th-century Impressionist and modernist art movements**, which traditionalists viewed as fraudulent or meaningless. The cartoon suggests that wealthy collectors and critics enthusiastically endorse artistic nonsense simply because it appears fashionably avant-garde. The title ironically presents aesthetic degradation as legitimate artistic "progress."