‘The Impressionist Moment’ at the National Gallery
By • November 13, 2024 0 32
On April 15, 1874, a small exhibition was opened in Paris by the “Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Engravers, etc.” It premiered one month before the opening of the French government’s annual official Salon, the most important art event in the West for at least a century. The Salon was the gatekeeper of the European art world, capable of defining standards, shaping public taste and pronouncing the fate of an artist’s career.
Compared to the Salon, which featured thousands of paintings by thousands of artists hung floor-to-ceiling in a grand hall originally built for the World’s Fair, the showing by the Société featured about 165 paintings by 30-odd artists in the studio of a working photographer.
Among this group of anonymous painters were Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne and Edgar Degas, and among the paintings was Claude Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise.”
This legendary exhibition is now understood — whether in fact or in fashion — as the birth of Impressionism. It was also, in effect, the opening salvo of the avant-garde, a movement of artists who would strive throughout the next century to create new artforms in opposition to the “official” art and dominant tastes of their time.
Incredibly, the story of these two “competing” exhibitions has never been the subject of its own exhibition until now. “Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment,” on view at the National Gallery, brings together what sure seems to be the vast majority of paintings from the Société exhibition, juxtaposed with major works from that year’s Salon.
The galleries offer a kind of parallel world of ‘now’ and ‘then’ on simultaneous display. We see — often side by side — two versions of the most celebrated paintings from that moment: the ones that were anointed by the Salon in 1874, and the ones that we treasure today. The verdicts are, for the most part, diametrically opposed. To say it another way, today’s audiences probably won’t recognize a single piece in this exhibition that was featured in the 1874 Salon, but they’ll sure as hell know at least a dozen from the Société show.
The moment you enter, two paintings crystalize the disparate sensibilities of the then-and-now: Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “L’Eminence Grise” of 1873 and Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise” of 1872. Gérôme, who was probably the wealthiest and most famous artist in Europe at the time, was awarded the Salon’s Medal of Honor for “L’Eminence Grise.”
Less than a month before, Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise” was mocked in a popular satirical magazine as slapdash and superficial. The article reveled in denouncing the Société exhibition, calling out the artists for caring more about sensation and rapid execution than for precise drawing, composition and subject matter. Spinning a thread of witticism from the title of Monet’s painting, the author labeled these artists “impressionists.”
It would be easy today to tease Gérôme’s painting for being stodgy, obsequious and boring, but the actual fate of that painting is far more devastating than mockery. Nobody remembers it. Once the train of modern sensibility left the station, it seems never to have looked back.
This makes the exhibition sound a bit too black-and-white, which of course it isn’t. It features a number of artists who walked the line between the Academy and Impressionism. Among them is Manet — there are a number of his paintings here that were rejected by the Salon. Manet is now firmly categorized as an Impressionist and was closely associated with Monet, Renoir and Degas, but he chose not to participate in their exhibitions. Manet wanted desperately to succeed within the official Salon system, despite struggling with its conservative standards.
Inversely, the landscape painter Charles-François Daubigny was lauded and adored by the Salon, although with his loose brushwork and bright palette he could have been included in the Société exhibition. He tried to use his status, though unsuccessfully, to make room for emerging landscape artists in the Academy world. His painting “The Fields in June” is a surprising standout.
It feels crucial to mention Berthe Morisot, an Impressionist who had a number of paintings in the Société exhibition. Like Mary Cassatt, she was a woman painting in France in the 19th century and a lot of subjects were effectively off-limits to her, including landscapes (women were not free to travel the countryside with their art supplies in hand, as men did). Her workarounds of these societal restrictions are sometimes extraordinary — painting a landscape within a portrait of her sister and niece. Her paintings on view here punctuate the exhibition with the most lyrical depictions of human experience, particularly “The Cradle” and “Hide-and-Seek.”
I find it endlessly interesting to consider how much we owe our contemporary aesthetic sensibilities to the original Impressionists, this small group of artists who unmoored art from religious, political and social subject-capture. Without Monet, Pissarro, Sisley and a handful of others, Western art might still be entrenched in biblical and Greco-Roman idealization. In many ways, the Impressionists freed Western art from the exhausting maximalism of Academy painting — plenty of which is on view in this exhibition (see “The Trojan Horse” by Henri-Paul Motte or “David Triumphant” by Jules-Élie Delaunay).
The vision of this innovative group of painters gave us what we now take for granted: the sublime nature of the ordinary, the extraordinary beauty of life as it is and an almost moral preoccupation with capturing it in its raw form. We now by and large discuss art by the terms set by the Impressionists: by its power to evoke the feeling of experience. It is an idea that continues to transcend all art that comes after it, from abstraction to film and beyond.
Do the figures in “L’Eminence Grise” resemble humans more than the handful of blue-black brushstrokes that make up the fishermen in Monet’s sunrise seascape? Of course. But those little brushstrokes at the center of Monet’s canvas feel infinitely more human.
This is an extraordinary exhibition that covers a range of fascinating histories — from the birth of suburbs to civil war to the game-changing technology of putting paint in tubes — that ignited and defined an artistic revolution. It is one of the most well-structured and comprehensible exhibitions of its size that I’ve ever seen. I loved it. Don’t miss it.
Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment
Through Jan. 19
National Gallery of Art
