From the October 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
What’s in a name? Three years after the ‘Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, etc.’ opened its first exhibition on 15 April 1874, Emile Zola reckoned that ‘in France, schools get anywhere only once they have been christened’. For the 31 artists exhibiting as part of this vaguely-titled joint-stock company, this was not a promising start. Critics were catholic in their derision: these artists were ‘dissident’, ‘rebels’, ‘lunatics’. Was the show mounted in Félix Nadar’s studio at 35 Boulevard des Capucines a mere ‘Exhibition of Sketches’, as Fernand de Gantès jeered, or was it something more dangerous – a ‘Salon of the Intransigents’, as Le Figaro claimed? The name that has stuck was a joke – if the provocateur Louis Leroy is to be credited with coming up with the ‘Impressionists’ – derived from Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872).
Only once, over the course of their next seven exhibitions, did the Impressionists adopt the term themselves. In 1877, as L’Art reported, Paris was ‘plastered with posters announcing the exhibition of the works of the “Impressionist Painters”’. Renoir recalled that the name was a dare to the public – a profitable snub: ‘You will find here the kind of painting that you do not like. If you come, it will be too bad for you, we won’t refund your ten cents for entry!’
The Public Garden at Pontoise (1874), Camille Pissarro. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
It seems to suit us to think of the Impressionists as unpopular, but it’s hard to imagine now what prompted critics to liken the group’s rosy-hued palette – a ‘singularly cheerful tonality’, as the critic Armand Silvestre observed – to the creed of a ‘nihilist,’ ‘Garibaldian’, or ‘Communard’. Who were these artists, before they were ‘Impressionists’? With 125 works culled from both the Société Anonyme and also from that year’s Salon (the Superbowl, if you will, of academic painting), ‘Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment’, a collaboration between the Musée d’Orsay and the National Gallery of Washington, D.C., puts the visitor in the shoes of a well-heeled 19th-century Parisian, and lets her decide.
It is tempting to tie ‘revolutionary’ art to ‘revolutionary’ moments – think of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, or Picasso’s Guernica. But for all the charges of radicalism that critics threw their way, it’s not easy to see canvases such as Berthe Morisot’s Reading, or The Public Garden at Pontoise by Camille Pissarro, as especially militant. None of the artists we regard as Impressionists painted the events of the Franco-Prussian War or the Commune that succeeded it, but that doesn’t mean – the exhibition suggests – that they were untouched by these events. In the second room of the exhibition hangs a suite of archival photographs taken from albums such as Paris Incendié, which show the ruins that the Impressionists never did. In the burnt-out husks of the Hôtel de Ville, the Tuileries Palace and other sites razed by the Communards, light falls from gaping roofs and blasted windows on to the rubble of the Second Empire.
Dead in Line! (1873), Auguste Lançon. Photo: © Département de la Moselle/Musée départemental de la Guerre de 1870 & de l’Annexion
When France agreed to pay an indemnity of five billion francs to end its war with Prussia, national embarrassment became economic fiasco. It was an inauspicious time to mount an exhibition whose success depended on the pocketbooks of individual collectors – a reality that contributed to the fact that of 102 saleable works at the Société Anonyme, only four sold. At the Salon, allusions to the nation’s traumatic year were veiled. A return to historical themes, and the strictest censorship, favoured works such as Antonin Mercié’s allegorical Gloria Victis (‘Glory to the Vanquished’), which took top prize. Other works, such as Auguste Lançon’s Dead in Line! – in which corpses in French uniform recede, in heartless perspective, on the wasted ground of Bazeilles – must have sneaked past the censors. It’s not the kind of subject that Monet (who had taken refuge in England) would have chosen – and yet, in those plumes, and in those trees, do we glimpse something of the series that would make his name?
After the war, for those still living amid the wreckage of towns, landscape painting must have come as a relief – whether the flush poppies that Charles-François Daubigny sent to the Salon, or the glittering, almost woven skein of Hoarfrost that his mentee Pissarro hung at the Société Anonyme. But Paris bounced back and Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines pictures the luxurious district that sprung up around Nadar’s studio. Black stagecoaches, frosted in blue, file into the cold morning as besuited crowds mill about department stores, restaurants, and the soon-to-be-opened Opéra. Roaming within Monet’s ‘black tongue-lickings’, as Leroy called them, are a few curls of pink – this, surely, is the figure of the Parisienne, denizen of the boulevards and the focus of one of this exhibition’s finest rooms. Women of dubious vocation were a bipartisan fixation. Across from The Theatre Box by Renoir – poster child of the Washington show – Ernest Duez’s Splendeur (one panel of a diptych whose lost twin was titled, predictably, Misère) holds court. Is its subject the prize on which that natty fellow’s opera glasses are trained?
L’Éminence Grise (1873), Jean-Léon Gérôme. Photo: © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
It’s a rare win for Salon painting, which seems, for much of the show, to play its well-practised role as straw man to Impressionism. ‘Paris 1874’ proves – not for the first time – that a painting such as Jean-Léon Gérôme’s L’Eminence Grise, which hangs at the beginning of the exhibition as a pendant to Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, can make even the latter seem radical. It takes work to make the antiquarian accuracy of Gérôme’s 17th-century subject, or his subtle form of political comment, exciting to modern audiences. Perhaps we no longer have the eyes, or the patience, to digest the scrupulous detail, obscure references and moral soundbites that appealed to 19th-century audiences. The opening juxtaposition prepares us for the triumph of Impressionism, a narrative which, 150 years later, has perhaps become too dominant to challenge. As Zola predicted, to the named go the spoils, and ‘Impressionism’ is now synonymous not with crisis, but with victory.
From the October 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.