Meeting The French Impressionists At This New Exhibition Is Worth The Trip To Paris

Impressionism, the movement that forever marked the history of art, is now 150 years old, almost to the day. To celebrate the anniversary, the Musee d’Orsay in Paris together with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., just opened a very anticipated exhibition, Paris 1874 Inventing impressionism, where spectators have the chance to feel as if they were there for the movement’s birth.

Despite the immense number of exhibitions and studies devoted to Impressionism over the 1 1/2 centuries since its launch, this is the first event organized to mark its birth and it promises to be among the blockbuster art shows of the year, with some 160 works offering a fresh look at the period.

Paris 1874 Inventer l’impressionnisme, which opened March 26, runs until July 14 before flying to Washington where it will be showcased from September 8, 2024, to January, 19, 2025.

Organized to re-create that day 150 years ago, on April 15, 1874, when the very first exhibition of the movement opened at the studio of photographer Félix Nadar at 35 boulevard des Capucines in Paris, Inventing Impressionism assembles a selection of works featured in that original show along with paintings, sculptures and other works shown at the official Salon of that same year. The museum’s point is to put in perspective the historic event considered the kick-off of the avant-garde movement.

The curators achieved exceptional loans of those works from museums and collections, notably “Impression Soleil Levant” (the image in the poster of the show) by Claude Monet, the title of which inspires the term "impressionist," a mocking label by a journalist at the time and accepted by the painters themselves, for this artistic movement, sealing its success.

Free and independent

They were 30 artists, largely unknown and struggling, who wished to free themselves from the academic codes of the annual official “Salon” led by the Beaux-Arts establishment. They decided to organize their own independent exhibition outside the official channels with a selection of 200 works including very emblematic ones by, among others, Monet, Renoir, Morisot, Cézanne and Pizarro.

Although there are no photographs of the original exhibition and just a few brief descriptions, the museum has recreated that slice of history to permit visitors to immerse themselves in the wealth of contemporary creation in that spring of 1874, highlighted by the radical modernity of the art of the young artists, through two complementary events: the Inventing Impressionism exhibit and One Evening with the Impressionists Paris 1874, a virtual reality experience of unprecedented scale that plunges the public into the heart of that show where Impressionism was born.

Equipped with virtual reality headsets, the public is invited to mingle with the most famous impressionists on that evening in 1874 and to dive into 19th century Paris with Rose, an aspiring writer, who brings viewers into the Nadar workshop where canvases and drawings are arranged as they were 150 years ago.

Misunderstood and disruptive

“An artistic movement emerging from a rapidly changing world, the exhibition visited in its time by only a few thousand curious people, had an exceptional impact that continues until today,” the organizers explain.

Based on new research, the exhibition takes stock of the circumstances that led these 30 artists — only seven of whom are considered “impressionists” — to come together to show their art in complete independence.

The climate of their time was post-war following two conflicts: the Franco-German war of 1870, lost to Prussia, followed by a violent civil war. In this context of crisis, artists were rethinking their art and exploring new directions. Eager for autonomy, contesting an academic system that most often rejected them, Monet, Degas, Morisot, Pissarro and their friends and colleagues came together in the “Société Anonyme” to exhibit their work and assert their freedom.

Their clear and luminous paintings made with quick and lively touches transferred their fleeting impressions to the viewer. They thus freed themselves from the Salon, a major official exhibition dominating Parisian artistic life and guardian of academic tradition. At a time marked by political, economic and social upheavals, the Impressionists offered art in tune with modernity. Their way of painting “what they see, as they see it” still surprises, delights and even disconcerts.

A failure that goes down in history

The works were hung by the artists themselves on walls covered with red-brown wool, a color re-created in the Inventing Impressionism exhibit. All that remains of this exhibition are written testimonies and its booklet. The first room, undoubtedly installed by Renoir, gave pride of place to his painting, with dazzling snapshots of modern life, of the Paris of fashion and entertainment: its boulevards, dancers and spectators, as much motifs also observed and painted by Monet and Degas.

“You who enter, leave behind all ancient prejudice!” warned the critic Prouvaire, noting a few days after the opening that some of the paintings in this unnamed exhibition “give above all the “impression” of things, and not their “very reality,”

Thus the movement was baptised.

The exhibit wasn’t successful, drawing a scant 3,500 visitors. Critics were dismissive and only a handful of paintings by Sisley, Monet, Renoir and Cézanne found buyers. The company, largely in deficit, had to be dissolved after the exhibit.

Nonetheless, that year, the exhibition that survived time was not the official Salon.

Little could anybody at the time imagine that the Salon would be forgotten while the ‘upstarts’ would fundamentally alter the course of art history.