Impressionism’s Rebels, from Paris to California: Light, Light, and More Light

As the movement turns 150, the avant-gardists of yesteryear still dazzle.

F rom April 15 to May 15, in Paris in 1874, a group of renegade artists then called the Intransigents — but also nihilists, gangsters, and Communards — displayed their art in a special exhibition at the studio of Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, a photographer known by the pseudonym Nadar. They hoped to protest the domination of the Paris art market by the official, juried, annual Salon. Most of them were young, and most had avant-garde ideas. The Salon, by inclusion and exclusion, defined what was good and established taste. It was a cultural monopoly. The new, outsider Salon, in which 31 artists displayed 165 works of art, was later called the first Impressionist Salon, after “Impressionism” stuck as the new movement’s name. The term was initially devised by a critic looking for a slur.

We’re now observing Impressionism’s 150th birthday. No one can argue that Impressionism wasn’t transformative. The movement started in Paris with new paintings by Renoir, Monet, Sisley, Morisot, and Pissarro, among others, but it has to be seen as a launchpad as well as a movement. It started as French, but by the 1890s there were Dutch, Italian, English, German, and American Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, Symbolists, and Fauvists. Renoir and Monet were distinguished 20th-century artists — their work in the 1910s was very different from what they displayed in Nadar’s studio in 1874.

I love French Impressionism for its color and freshness. As a curator at the Clark Art Institute for years, I was immersed in it. The Clark has hundreds of Impressionist works of art, including around 40 paintings by Renoir. My favorite Impressionist picture is at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. It’s a view of Pont Neuf in Paris, the city’s oldest bridge. It’s a pick-me-up painting, and it was that in 1872, when Renoir made it and before Impressionism had a name. Paris had just been attacked and occupied by Prussians. The Communards, those early Trotskyites, had just ruled the roost, though briefly. Parisians needed to see that life could be good once again.

Around 1905, Picasso broke the Impressionist spell, but he was indebted first and foremost to Cézanne, who was never considered an Impressionist on the order of Sisley and Monet, though he was an exhibitor in the 1874 show and, like them, called a gangster, Communard, and nihilist. Degas was in the first Salon as well. He’s his own thing, telling us Impressionism offered new ways to convey light and color, and that it was also a new methodology and attitude that invited new subjects. Nadar, among his many careers, was a hot-air balloonist who pioneered aerial photography. Impressionism, as it developed, was a sweeping, international, and attenuated movement.

This takes me to California. Of all of Impressionism’s vines, California Impressionism is furthest from its roots, geographically and theoretically. When I was in San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Los Angeles in March, I saw lots of good California Impressionist paintings. I also saw the Getty’s Sunrise (Marine), from 1873, painted by Monet the same weekend in Le Havre that he did Impression, Sunrise, which is now at the Musée Marmottan in Paris. Monet displayed Impression, Sunrise in the 1874 Salon show — it was touted as the first Impressionist painting. What does California Impressionism have to do with this?

First, what are the basic ingredients of Impressionism? “Here, a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow,” Monet said of his style. “And paint it just as it looks to you.” Many people believe that the iconic Impressionist paintings we adore were painted en plein air, or outside, before the motif, but this isn’t true. Most are studio paintings, but many of the Impressionists made oil sketches outdoors. Light’s impact on color fascinated them. They applied pure color in dabs and small strokes. Rather than mixing colors or using glazes to soften or deepen colors, they painted dabs of pure, contrasting, or complementary colors side by side. New, synthetic colors and the introduction of paint in tubes made a big difference, too. Impressionists used new colors like cadmium orange, ultramarine, chrome yellow, and cerulean blue, often in dazzling juxtaposition.

Impressionists were realists in many ways. This alone distinguished them from the high-end art of their time, represented by gladiator or harem pictures by Gérôme or sculptural, not succulent, nudes by Bouguereau. Impressionists looked for urban subjects that conveyed modern life, such as new bridges, steam engines, bars, and city parks, and middle-class interiors, fashion, leisure, and children. Scenes of the countryside and sea were often middle-class holiday spots. And in Impressionism, people move. Clouds move. Light changes. Water ripples. That’s really life. When things move, contours blur. Hence the gauzy Impressionist line.

One reason the keepers of received wisdom hated Impressionism was probably that it’s the art of relaxed living. It wasn’t the era of flip-flops, shorts, and T-shirts, but Impressionists sought a less formal style, one that was lighter and brighter, too. Establishment types, even today, tend to deify what they call norms, which usually means they’re too dumb to countenance something different.

California Impressionism is a subspecies of American Impressionism, itself deriving from French Impressionism. I didn’t know much about early California landscapes but stayed at the California Art Club in Pasadena. It has a lovely collection. The heavy hitters among the California Impressionists are William Wendt (1865–1945), Maurice Braun (1877–1941), J. Bond Francisco (1863–1931), Hanson Puthuff (1875–1972), Benjamin Chambers Brown (1865–1942), Guy Rose (1867–1925), and Franz Bischoff (1864–1929). I looked especially for their work at the Huntington, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the de Young in San Francisco.

Calling these artists Impressionists tells us how pliable and accommodating the term is — and has always been. All of them combined studio work with painting outdoors in front of their subjects. All used a high-key palette. Most were committed dabbers and not slashers like, say, Joaquín Sorolla, often said to be a Spanish Impressionist. Most painted lightly rather than thickly. All focused on color’s partnership with light. Everyday bourgeois city life was of no interest to California artists. Landscape was king.

How much of this is accidental, or circumstantial, Impressionism? Rose studied in Paris in the late 1880s and saw lots of French Impressionism hot off the easel. No one else did. For many of these California landscapes, local light, color, and scenery led to an Impressionist look. Southern California, after all, has a Mediterranean climate, flora, and fauna. Many were self-taught, so they weren’t responding to academic trends. Their Impressionism was intuitive rather than theoretical, though French Impressionism was never a dogmatic or ideological movement.

American Impressionism wasn’t a style that found much of a receptive audience on the East Coast. John Henry Twachtman, William Merritt Chase, Willard Metcalf, Theodore Robinson, and Childe Hassam were successful in part because they modified features of French Impressionism, such as the dissolution of form. American aesthetics had a Puritan streak in equating art with artifice but also in viewing every object, however common or utilitarian, as a product of God’s will. Dismantling the form with, for instance, fuzzy contours, snubs God’s will. This suggests to me that California Impressionism was actually a better fit as a distinctly local look. Puthuff’s Approaching Twilight, Topanga Canyon, from 1918, Brown’s California Poppies, from 1920, and Wendt’s The Arroyo, from 1909, show how well a basic Impressionist formula works for California subjects.

All the painters we call California Impressionists today worked a few years after the 1874 Impressionist Salon, and some at least a full generation after. Some dabbed until well into the 1920s. This isn’t California provincialism. Hassam, who lived in Paris in the 1880s and knew French Impressionism well when it was a new approach, flogged an Impressionist look until the ’20s, too, 50 years after Impressionism’s birth.

I’d call these pleasing, refreshing landscapes Impressionism, using an art-history Ancestry.com standard. Yes, they draw from Barbizon painting, from older French and American Impressionists, from Whistler’s tonalism, and from the Hudson River School. American art is usually an amalgam of many styles and approaches. “What works best” is an American way of doing things.

I’m surprised at how few American museums developed Impressionism shows for this anniversary year. The Impressionists, I know, are the deadest of dead white men, in part because their art foregrounds pleasure and we live in an age of scolds, druids, and bores. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Art Institute of Chicago, a place where Impressionism is part of the brand, don’t seem to be doing anything. The Met in New York City just did the blockbuster Manet/Degas, which closed on January 7. So, by a week, it’s an anniversary-year show. The Met’s French permanent-collection galleries, in themselves, cover the history of Impressionism.

The main events saluting the birth of Impressionism are in France, which might be the mother country of Impressionism. But here, in America, is the motherlode of Impressionism at its best. Serious French collectors in the days of the Impressionists were too conservative. They followed the guidance of critics and other established tastemakers, but rich American tourists with edgy taste couldn’t care less about their opinions and couldn’t read French anyway. So boatloads of Impressionist art came here. French museums often need to borrow from us to do Impressionist shows.

Mary Cassatt at Work opens on May 18 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Cassatt’s a good subject for the museum since she was a Philadelphian, exhibited in Impressionist shows in the 1880s, when she lived in Paris, and was the essential tastemaker for rich Americans visiting Paris. She advised them on what to see and what to buy when, like her close friends the Havemeyers, they were serious about acquiring good contemporary art. The Philadelphia exhibition promises to “reshape contemporary conversations about gender, work, and artistic agency,” which means the curators there might turn the project into a yawn. I wonder whether there’s anything new to be said about Cassatt. Many of her paintings are clunkers, brilliant pastelist and printmaker that she was.

In Matisse & Renoir: New Encounters at the Barnes, the Barnes Collection, also in Philadelphia, is going radical, though not in subject. For the first time, the Barnes will remove permanent-collection works from the exact spots where Dr. Barnes arranged them and instead present them in a compare-and-contrast show in a different space. Dr. Barnes prescribed many rules when creating his foundation, including one that nothing was to be removed from his galleries, which he’d exactingly arranged. Last year, the Barnes went to court asking for this rule to be ditched. “Another one bites the dust,” as Queen would sing, but this change makes sense. The exhibition is bound to be enlightening.

At the Dallas Museum of Art, The Impressionist Revolution from Monet to Matisse uses its good collection not to develop the origins of Impressionism, a road worn to its gravel base, but to look at what happened to French art in the 50 years after the 1874 Salon. That’s been done, too, but kudos to the museum for using its paintings, prints, drawings, and other media to track Impressionism’s impact.

Would the Clark Art Institute do something as expansive, considering that Impressionism, especially Renoir in the 1870s and ’80s, is its heart and soul? Rather, the Clark’s focus is modest and on Degas’s works on paper, in which it has formidable strength. At least the print department has initiative, and, as at the Met, the Clark’s showstopping Renoirs, Monets, Pissarros, and Degas paintings and sculptures can be worshipped in the permanent-collection galleries.

Impressionism’s anniversary lollapalooza is in Paris, at the Musée d’Orsay — Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism. I missed its opening in late March but it’s coming to the National Gallery in Washington in September. The exhibition, I’ve read, doesn’t begin with Impression but ends with it. What comes before, among other topics, is a fair and balanced cross-section of the actual 1874 Impressionist Salon, and this will surprise, possibly stun, most people.

Yes, Cézanne, Degas, Monet, Morisot, Pissarro, Renoir, and Sisley — all quintessential Impressionists and all famous today — were well represented, but their work was only a third of the Salon show. The rest was a hodgepodge by artists most don’t know, such as Ludovic-Napoléon Lepic, who displayed etchings of his dogs, Alfred Meyer, who did enamels, and Auguste-Louis-Marie Ottin, who did hoochie-coochie sculptures of nudes. The show was no revolution, the museum says, but more like a poke in the eye to a stodgy but by no means hopeless establishment. Possibly, it was a dud.

Let it be said that Rome began with the pathetic, starving Romulus and Remus fed by an accommodating, likely bemused wolf. It wasn’t until the third Impressionist Salon in 1877 that the new way of painting blasted off. Impressionism’s premiere might have been a revolution only in retrospect, more of a case of new shoots in a field grown tired by too much sameness. Paris was already changing via new money and a massive new city design. That French art should change, too, was likely.

I suspect that there’s a hidden agenda to the Musée d’Orsay exhibition. The French, who forget nothing, rue the decades that passed before Impressionism won the establishment’s acceptance. See, they tell us, citing Lepic’s dogs, we had good reason to be wary.

Wasn’t Impressionism born by the sea, or at least harborside? Impression, Sunrise is, after all, a view of the port at Le Havre at sunrise. Monet’s home, studio, and garden are in Giverny, as is the Giverny Museum of Impressionisms. Manet’s Rochefort’s Escape, from about 1881 and owned by the Musée d’Orsay, is on loan to the Giverny Museum. Manet, by the by, never exhibited with the Impressionists, though he supported the renegade group and drew from Impressionism. He was a superb painter of ocean waves.

Rochefort was a French aristocrat and a committed, polemical socialist arrested and sent to a prison in New Caledonia for his time on the barricades during the Paris Commune. Manet displays his escape in a rowboat. The Musée d’Orsay rarely displays the painting, which is gorgeous, but it doesn’t lack for Manets. If I were in France, I’d go to Giverny just to see it. A bigger version in Zurich, another good ocean-wave painting, focuses more on the rowboat. There, alas, Rochefort looks like Charlie Chaplin, so it’s not a success.

Impressionism is a Paris phenomenon but also a Norman one, as in Normandy. Giverny, a village in Normandy, is where Monet lived for 43 years. It’s an Impressionist haunt and setting, as are Étretat, Honfleur, Le Havre, and Rouen. Monet’s series of paintings of the Rouen cathedral at different times of day is among Impressionism’s pinnacles. This summer, the Museum of Fine Arts in Rouen is doing two new 150th-anniversary shows. David Hockney Normandism is the elderly artist’s latest stunt, aiming as he is to fashion himself as cut from the mantle of Impressionism. I’m skeptical.

The Rouen MFA’s Whistler, the Butterfly Effect aims to spill the haricots verts. But what does Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, from 1871 — Whistler’s portrait of his mother — have to do with Impressionism? The French, cheeky and shameless, consider Whistler to be French, and the painting lives at the Musée d’Orsay. I’d contend that modern art’s DNA instruction book has as many if not more works by Whistler, who considered himself American, than of Impressionism, which can be said to descend from Whistler.

I doubt the French curators will join me. Known by the colloquial name Whistler’s Mother, the portrait does travel. I saw it at the Clark years ago. I’m curious to see what the Rouen curators will say. Rouen is an ancient city with a fantastic art museum as well as the grandest ceramics museum in France. Restaurant Gill in Rouen was a two-star Michelin restaurant — and well deserved — until the chef, Gilles Tournadre, politely withdrew from the rating system in 2020. Life’s short, he said, and he wanted to cook to please rather than to be renowned. Near his restaurant, Joan of Arc went to Heaven en feu et en flammes in 1431.

Here’s to Impressionism. Let’s pop corks for Champagne, shuck some Norman oysters, and deprive some geese of their livers.