In a recent recital in the Musée d'Orsay auditorium in Paris, violinist Marina Chichou played her instrument with a vigor and tempo that recalled the crisp brushstrokes of the blockbuster exhibition upstairs, “Paris 1874: The Invention of Impressionism.” She performed a Pauline Viardot sonatina that may have inspired not only the Impressionist painters who gathered in Viardot's famed salon in the 1870s, but other writers and artists of the time as well.
The concert is part of an ambitious museum program to immerse visitors in the historical context that led to the birth of one of the museum's most beloved yet misunderstood artistic movements. The show, organized in collaboration with the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington DC and touring in September under the title “Paris 1874: An Impressionist Moment,” is much more than that. It is the culmination of an ambitious series of exhibitions around the world, particularly in France, where the museum is celebrating its 150th anniversary by reexamining persistent myths about Impressionist artists and other overlooked contributors to the movement.
Though Impressionism remains widely beloved today, its overexposure has left some aghast at museums' rush to spotlight what skeptics tend to describe as “pretty pictures” and “the playthings of the rich and their fancy museums” (to borrow a phrase from the National Gallery's Mary Morton).
The reaction wasn't so different from some of the criticism leveled at the Impressionists 150 years ago. Journalists in the late 1800s worried that emerging artists like Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro were “imposing an art of pure pleasure” to the detriment of the serious paintings about historical events that were often selected for the official, state-influenced Salon exhibitions, art historian Bertrand Tillier wrote in an essay for the Musée d'Orsay catalog. They went even further, mocking the unfinished, sketchy painting style of the informal Impressionists, whom they deemed “unhealthy” and even “mad.”
Claude Monet, Impressions, sunrise (1871). Photo: Musée d'Orsay. © Musée Marmottan Monet / Studio Christian Baraja (SLB).
Impressions of the Impressionists
Famously, the name “Impressionism” stuck to the group when artists led by Louis Leroy used it to denigrate rather than praise Monet's work. Impressions, sunrise (1872) was the centrepiece of the first Impressionist exhibition, held in a former photography studio in Paris's Opera district. Yet of all Leroy's works that helped bring the Impressionist movement to the forefront, he said Monet's rough brushwork depicting the sun rising over the industrial port of Le Havre, painted in misty periwinkle hues stimulated by an orange sun, was less finished than his “Early Wallpapers”.
Even today, reactions to the Musée d'Orsay's exhibition, which aims to recreate selected works from the iconic 1874 exhibition and compare them with the official salon that took place at the same time (with a parallel VR experience), have been mixed. TimesFor example, I interpret the Musée d'Orsay exhibition as suggesting that the Impressionists lacked the boldness to focus on the safer “world of dance, theater, parks and countryside” rather than on the terrible Franco-Prussian War and subsequent civil war that had brought Paris to its knees a few years earlier. I visited Saint-Denis, a low-income suburb north of Paris, and wrote that “it is far from the romantic Paris depicted by the Impressionists, but its half-invisible reality fascinates tourists.” I add that “the Musée d'Orsay slightly denigrates painters like Degas and Monet by downplaying their excesses, but they certainly need their box office receipts.”
There were signs of discontent on the day of the Musée d'Orsay's press opening, when a French journalist asked the curators Sylvie Patry and Anne Robbins: “Will visitors, expecting to see many Impressionist paintings, be a little disappointed when they discover other paintings that are not talked about much today?”
In fact, the curators are trying to show that the movement's first exhibition included a more diverse range of artists than is commonly assumed, many of whom were united by economic motivations and a longing for some degree of freedom from the Salon's control over who could exhibit their work. But their rebellion was not, as has long been taught, a unified revolt against the powerful Salon. The Musée d'Orsay shows that there was considerable overlap between the two exhibitions, their participants, and the types of works shown.
Claude Monet (1840 -1926) Poppy fields near Argenteuil (1873) Oil on canvas. 50 x 65,3 cm Paris, Musée d'Orsay © RMN -Grand Palais (Musée d'Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski
From 1874 to 2024
There were very few Impressionist works at the 1874 exhibition. Only 7 of the 31 painters and 51 of the 215 works shown in the exhibition, organized by the group that would later be called the “Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors and Engravers,” were Impressionist. The rest were mostly by forgotten artists, including the odd etched portrait of a dog, classical sculptures, and Renaissance-style enamel portraits.
So what are we celebrating 150 years later? The curators at the Musée d'Orsay, along with Morton and Kimberly Jones of the NGA in Washington, took a risk in trying to break with the long-standing David-and-Goliath inaccuracies that still dog Impressionism.
“This black-and-white narrative is repeated in every art history class I've ever taken, and people assume that it's true and accurate, but it's a gross oversimplification of reality,” Jones says. “We want to complicate the narrative, to tear apart the neatness and get to the real truth.”
The 1874 exhibition “is not uniformly radical, and so it requires nuance and reexamination,” Robbins added at the opening. But that doesn't mean the event wasn't groundbreaking. “Among the artists who exhibited in 1874, there was a core, sort of subgroup of artists who were doing other things, and this is the moment when this new painting began to crystallize,” Robbins said.
In addition to strange animal portraits and scholarly sculptures, the exhibition also featured some masterpieces for those who look carefully.—And then I do it.—It stands out as something surprising and new.
Paul Cezanne's Modern Olympia, sketch (1873-74), a painting of a nude prostitute gazed upon by a clothed man, is by Berthe Morisot. Cradle (1872), a masterpiece of the gesture of a mother gazing at her sleeping baby, was the only work by a woman in the 1874 exhibition. Nearby is Edgar Degas's Laundrywoman (1869) is Monet's agile, limited-stroke painting of a woman leaning on an ironing board. Capucines Street (1873-1874) shows a modern, newly constructed street, and also what some might call “beautiful”: Monet's “Field of Red Flowers,” which almost engulfs a woman and child. Poppy (1873). And Monet's Impressions, sunrise (1872), never before has there been a more magnificent industrial port.
These works and other Impressionist paintings were “sources of scandal”, Patry said, because of the speed with which they were made and their decision to “paint the world around them”, which she said “stimulated a sense of shock”.
Paul Cézanne, Modern Olympia (detail), (1873-1874). © Musée d'Orsay, Dist. RMN -Grand Palais/Patrice Schmitt.
The early Impressionists were not blindly romantic or “safe,” as some critics still say: they painted their times, but they differed significantly from the past, and did not paint the moralistic, academic history paintings that Salon judges had traditionally praised.—But as the Musée d'Orsay exhibition wisely demonstrated, some modern and certainly radical works, notably those of Manet, also met the Salon's standards.
In short, context is key: “Many artists are responding to the traumatized citizens of Paris.A terrible year' [“the terrible year,” as Victor Hugo called the violent series of conflicts rocking Paris from 1870-1871]”I can't paint what people would consider impressionistic without thinking about the horrific events that took place in our nation's capital three years ago,” Morton said.
As a result, the Impressionists felt they “needed to move forward, to forge new paths, to not be held back by the past, to move beyond all the trauma,” Jones added. “We're putting this on display so people can understand what they've been through and see why this art is positive, why there's a certain amount of optimism in it.”
Morton says the first Impressionist shows had “something radical, something tougher.” “Paul Durand-Ruel was their dealer, and he packaged what we think of today as Impressionism: beautiful paintings. But these shows were never just that. They were more complex, more diverse, more radical.” For example, she said, Degas was “the great painter of the dark side of Victorian femininity,” and Camille Pissarro “paints from a position of paint and insecurity. He paints to survive. He paints for pleasure.”
With the world they knew changing beneath their feet, and realizing that all might be lost in the latest destruction, the Impressionists acted boldly and began to express the poetry and significance of fleeting moments. Their rapid painting technique was perfectly suited to this, able to capture the fleeting impressions of light and the simple acts of everyday life. This was radical, and never frivolous. It was life-affirming, and for some, a means of survival.
Follow Artnet News on Facebook:
Want to always stay one step ahead in the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critiques that drive the conversation forward.
