It was springtime in Paris, 150 years ago, and something new was afoot: something fresh, something radical. An ad hoc group of 31 artists had issued a response to the city’s annual state-sponsored Salon, with its elitist jury system and decorative traditional canvases, by organizing an independent exhibition of thoroughly modern art. Or so the story goes.
Now, the Musée d’Orsay remembers the moment with “Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism.” Organized with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where travels in autumnthe show is a blockbuster featuring many of the most beloved paintings associated with the Impressionist movement.
Edgar Degas is here, with his scenes of ballet dancers on stage and in rehearsal, their pastry and necks with black ribbons. Pierre-Auguste Renoir is here, too, with his bourgeois couple in sumptuous evening finery watching an evening of theater from his box high above the stage. And of course, there’s Claude Monet, who some call the “Father of Impressionism,” with his light-filled plein air paintings, their short, energetic strokes and soft blue palette.
But the show is first and foremost a careful excavation of a historical moment of greater complexity and artistic variety than is commonly understood. The co-curators of the Orsay exhibition, Anne Robbins and Sylvie Patry, emphasize context to show how artists and their works do not exist in isolation, but are a product of their time. What was going on outside the walls of what became known as “First Impressionist exhibition” was just as important as what was happening inside.
In early April 1874, articles describing an exciting, distinctly unconventional exhibition began to appear in Paris newspapers. From April 15 to May 15, they said, for the price of one franc, visitors could attend day and night. “Ingeniously placed gas lighting will enable art lovers whose work keeps them occupied all day to come and examine (all evening) the works of art of the modern generation,” said one article. Twilight exposure times were a truly urban innovation.
The cooperative that organized the show — the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Tombs — had been formed the previous year, mainly for economic reasons: Artists wanted to determine how and when their work was exhibited, as well as sold, to a growing market of new collectors . (Instead of the more puzzling literal translation, “Anonymous Society,” the epithet is actually the bureaucratic French title for a “joint-stock company.”) Initiated by Renoir, Monet, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, and Édouard Béliard, the ranks of Société grew rapidly. Associates paid 60 francs a year into the company’s coffers, with the aim of financing regular exhibitions.
The first of these took place at 35 Boulevard des Capucines, just down the busy street from the newly built Opéra, with its columned facade and allegorical statues crowning it. Number 35 belonged, until recently, to the great photographer Nadar, whose studio occupied its 3rd and 4th floors. Floor-to-ceiling windows provided ideal natural light for photography and then for the art exhibition. The opening room of the Orsay show is dedicated to Nadar’s installations, displaying black-and-white photographs of his eccentric interiors, which included a waterfall grotto with rocks and plants.
This introductory space also outlines the turmoil of the years leading up to what was simply called the “Premiere Exhibition” (the handle “Impressionist” came later).
The flamboyant surroundings of the Grands Boulevards with their monumental new buildings had only been permitted since the “année terrible” of 1870-71, when areas of Paris were devastated in the Franco-Prussian War and then at the hands of the revolutionary Communards, who blocked streets, they set fire to buildings and tore down the Column of Vendôme.
In this context of transition and rebellion, the Société established itself as an alternative to the Salon, which dates back to 1667. The new exhibition was not a space for art or artists that had been rejected or rejected by the Salon (some artists exhibited at both), but for those who wanted to participate in something in the future. Other than that, the project was eclectic and not unified by a manifesto or an aesthetic.
Now, many of the works from that groundbreaking exhibition are being shown together for the first time since 1874, revealing a surprising range. Monet’s ‘Boulevard des Capucines’ (1873-74), which captures the view of the tree-lined street from Nadar’s studio, and Paul Cezanne’s ribald, loosely painted tribute to Manet, ‘A Modern Olympia, Sketch’ ( 1873-74), are strange artistic companions to Bernard-Alfred Meyer’s enamel ‘Portrait of a Man (After Antonello da Messina)’ (1867), a tribute to the Renaissance painter, and two etchings of dogs, ‘Jupiter’ and ‘ Cesar’ (both 1861). ), by Ludovic-Napoléon Lepic. Those who would become known as “Impressionists” and dominate the historical memory of the event were in fact a minority: just seven of the 31 artists and 51 of the 215 works on display.
A selection of works from the same year’s Salon — hung in stacked formations on crimson walls, as they would be in the vast Palais de l’Industrie et des Beaux-Arts — show how the art establishment of the time was still wedded to history painting, the mythological tableaus and scenes of an emotional kind. Huge canvases depict David conquering Goliath, Cupid in the clouds with his gilded bow, a peasant woman looking out to sea and a mother teaching her child to read.
Impressionist counterpoints were ‘Modern Life’ and ‘Plein Air’, the titles of two rooms at the Musée d’Orsay. These galleries combine paintings shown at the Premiere as well as the Salon, or sometimes are shown independently of both. Meticulous notation indicates, under each wall label, where the works were displayed. This can be dizzying to follow, but it highlights how different artists felt about the exhibition practices of the time.
Manet, for example, chose the Salon for the wonderfully modern The Railway (1873), which shows a woman and child at the Gare Saint-Lazare, steam billowing behind them. It was poorly received, but would probably have been adored at the Premiere, whose meetings begged him to join. As support, the artist instead borrowed Berthe Morisot’s “Hide and Seek” (1873), in which a mother and child play the game around a blossoming tree rendered in rapid strokes. Morisot, one of only two female artists at the Première, had several works on display, all airy and bright, centering on lonely women lost in contemplation.
Responses to the original show were mixed: Critics referred to the group as a “gang of nihilists”, “hardliners”, “communards” and even “crazy”. Others appreciated the emergence of a new style at the core of the exhibitors, and the label “Impressionist” was born when one critic described how these works, with their loose brushstrokes and emphasis on immediacy, created a sense of experience, as opposed to direct representation. of. Many critics were fixated on Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise” (1872), a view of a misty sunrise over the harbor of Le Havre, in which a bright orange sun beckons through a hazy purple sky. Although the artist had hastily named his piece, the designation stuck.
The show was not a financial success and the Société disbanded shortly afterwards. Seven more Impressionist exhibitions were held, each differing in form and content, assembled by different groups of artists practicing under the loose umbrella of the term. (Only Pissarro appeared in all eight.)
The Musée d’Orsay, home to the world’s largest collection of Impressionist art, has created an exhibition that challenges the mythology of the movement’s origins and the ossification of its aesthetic concerns. In the accompanying catalogue, Patry, the curator, quotes abstract expressionist Mark Rothko, whose stunning retrospective is still on display around town: “To classify is to embalm. True identity is incompatible with schools and categories, except mutilation.’ We understand more, and better, by opening things up and up and up.
There was one more part of the show — another exhibition (of sorts) in this exhibition about an exhibition. Underneath a concert awaited ‘Tonight With the Impressionists’, a virtual reality experience that transports visitors to the Premiere, Bougival where artists paint ‘en plein air’ beside the Seine, on the balcony of Monet’s hotel in Le Havre as the sun sets sun and beyond.
What to say? After 45 minutes, I came out dazed and confused. The artists were all very short. Cezanne seemed to have an Irish accent. I walked along the water. A horse ran through my body. Imaginary bald figures (my fellow VR experiencers) spontaneously materialized and disappeared. My guide, an aspiring artist named Marie, took me to the rooftops of Paris where I watched fireworks go off overhead.
It was fun. But the interest in narrative and literal recreation seemed sadly at odds with an exhibition devoted to tone and emotion, The impression, in contrast to the reality, of the world. This is, after all, different for every viewer. The most famous canvases still inspire the imagination and offer something new with every visit, even 150 years after the fact.
Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism
Until July 14, at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. musee-orsay.fr.