It was springtime in Paris, 150 years ago, and something new was afoot: something fresh, something radical. An ad hoc band of 31 artists had issued a riposte to the city’s annual state-sponsored Salon, with its elitist jury system and decorous traditional canvases, by holding an independent exhibition of thoroughly modern art. Or so the story goes.
Now, the Musée d’Orsay is remembering the moment with “Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism.” Organized with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where it travels in the fall, the 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 onstage and in rehearsal, their confection-like tutus and black-ribboned necks. Pierre-Auguste Renoir is here, too, with his bourgeois couple in sumptuous evening finery taking in an evening of theater from their box high above the stage. And of course, there is Claude Monet, called the “Father of Impressionism” by some, with his light-filled “plein air” paintings, their short, energetic brushstrokes and pale blue-hued palette.
But the show is first and foremost a careful excavation of a historical moment of greater complexity and artistic variety than commonly understood. The Orsay exhibition co-curators, Anne Robbins and Sylvie Patry, emphasize context to illustrate 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 has come to be known as the “First Impressionist Exhibition” was just as important as what was happening inside.
In early April 1874, articles describing an exciting, avowedly untraditional exhibition began to appear in Paris newspapers. From April 15 to May 15, they pronounced, for the price of one franc, visitors could attend day and night. “Artfully positioned gas lighting will enable art lovers whose business occupies them all through the day to come and examine (all through the evening) the artworks of the modern generation,” one article announced. The twilight exhibition times were a truly urbane novelty.
The co-op that organized the show — the Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs — had formed the year before, primarily for financial reasons: Artists wanted to determine how and when their work was exhibited, as well as sold, to a burgeoning market of new collectors. (Rather than the more enigmatic-sounding literal translation, “Anonymous Society,” the moniker is in fact the bureaucratic French title for a “joint-stock company.”) Initiated by Renoir, Monet, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley and Édouard Béliard, the ranks of the Société quickly grew. Associates paid 60 francs a year into the company’s coffer, with the aim of funding regular exhibitions.
The first of these took place at 35 Boulevard des Capucines, just down the bustling street from the newly constructed Opéra, with its columned facade and crowning allegorical statues. Number 35 had, until recently, belonged to the great photographer Nadar, whose studio occupied its 3rd and 4th floors. Windows that stretched floor-to-ceiling provided ideal natural light for photography and subsequently for exhibiting art. The opening room of the Orsay show is devoted to Nadar’s premises, showing black-and-white photographs of its 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 “Première Exposition” (the “Impressionist” handle came later).
The flashy environs of the Grands Boulevards with their monumental new edifices had only been enabled by the “année terrible” of 1870-71, when swaths of Paris were destroyed in the Franco-Prussian War and then at the hands of the revolutionary Communards, who barricaded streets, set fire to buildings and toppled the Vendôme Column.
Against this background of transition and rebellion, the Société established itself as an alternative to the Salon, which dated back to 1667. The new show was not a place for art or artists who had been rejected or refused by the Salon (some artists exhibited in both), but for those who wished to be part of something forward-looking. Aside from this, the enterprise 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 startling breadth. 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 bedfellows with Bernard-Alfred Meyer’s enamel “Portrait of a Man (After Antonello da Messina)” (1867), a homage to the Renaissance painter, and two characterful etchings of dogs, “Jupiter” and “César” (both 1861), by Ludovic-Napoléon Lepic. Those who would become known as “Impressionists,” and dominate historical memory of the event, were in fact in the minority: just seven of the 31 artists, and 51 of the 215 works on display.
A selection of works from the Salon of the same year — hung in stacked formations on crimson walls, as they would have been at the immense Palais de l’Industrie et des Beaux-Arts — show how the art establishment of the time was still wedded to history painting, mythological tableaux and sentimental genre scenes. Enormous 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.
The Impressionist counterpoints were “Modern Life” and “Plein Air,” the titles of two rooms at the Musée d’Orsay. These galleries mix paintings displayed at the Première as well as the Salon, or sometimes shown independently of both. Meticulous notation indicates, below each wall label, where works were exhibited. This can be dizzying to follow, but it highlights how different artists felt about exhibition practices of the time.
Manet, for example, chose the Salon for his fabulously modern “The Railway” (1873), showing a woman and child at the Gare Saint-Lazare, steam billowing behind them. It was badly received, but would likely have been adored at the Première, whose conveners had begged him to participate. By way of support, the artist instead loaned Berthe Morisot’s “Hide and Seek” (1873), in which mother and child play the game around a flowering tree rendered in rapid brushstrokes. Morisot, one of just two women artists in the Première, had several works on display, all of them airy and bright, with a focus on lone women lost in contemplation.
Responses to the upstart show were mixed: Critics referred to the group as a “gang of nihilists,” “intransigents,” “Communards” and even “insane.” Others appreciated the emergence of a new style among the core of the exhibitors, and the designation “Impressionist” was born when one critic described how these works, with their loose brushstrokes and emphasis on immediacy, create the sense of an experience, as opposed to its direct representation. Many reviewers fixated on Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise” (1872), a view of a misty sunrise over the port of Le Havre, in which a bright orange sun beckons through a hazy mauve sky. Although the artist had hastily named his piece, the characterization stuck.
The show was not a financial success and the Société was dissolved shortly afterward. Seven more Impressionist exhibitions took place, each varied in form and content, assembled by different groups of artists practicing under the loose umbrella of the term. (Only Pissarro showed in all eight.)
The Musée d’Orsay, home to the world’s largest collection of Impressionist art, has mounted an exhibition that challenges the mythology of the movement’s origins and the ossification of its aesthetic concerns. In the accompanying catalog, Patry, the curator, quotes the Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko, whose stunning retrospective is still on view across town: “To classify is to embalm. Real identity is incompatible with schools and categories, except by mutilation.” We understand more, and better, by opening things up and up and up.
There was one more part to the show — another exhibition (of sorts) within this exhibition about an exhibition. Down a concourse awaited “Tonight With the Impressionists,” a virtual reality experience that takes visitors through the Première, to Bougival where artists paint “en plein air” by the Seine, to Monet’s hotel balcony in Le Havre as the sun goes down, and beyond.
What to say? After 45 minutes, I emerged dazzled and confused. The artists were all very short. Cezanne seemed to have an Irish accent. I walked across water. A horse ran through my body. Ghostly bald figures (my fellow V.R.-experiencers) materialized spontaneously 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 at sad odds with an exhibition devoted to nuance and the feeling, the impression, as opposed to the reality, of the world. This is, after all, different for every beholder. The best-known canvases still inspire imagination and offer something new with each visit, even 150 years after the fact.
Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism
Through July 14, at the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris; musee-orsay.fr.
