An Impressionism 150th-Birthday Bash in D.C.: C’est Magnifique

The National Gallery’s exhibition on the first Impressionist show is serious, elegant, and packed with beauties.

T his past April, I started a series of stories about Impressionism, the movement launched — unofficially, anecdotally, and circumstantially — in April 150 years ago at an exhibition in Paris of around 200 works by 30 artists, some renegades, some misfits, some mainstream, some simply mad as hell. What is now called the first Impressionist salon — there were to be eight, the last in 1886 — ran from April 15 to May 15, 1874.

Enough by-the-numbers. The collective was called the Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, etc., a joint-stock company whose investors — the artists, painters, sculptors, printmakers, and whatever et cetera slapped down a few sous — could display and sell works of their own choosing, unjuried by the heavy hand of official taste.

This is my fifth and my last Impressionism-anniversary story. It’s not a case of saving the best for last, but Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., is the pièce de résistance. It’s so bracing, so keen and sharp, it alone might compel the Swamp to drain itself, conceding that art invigorates and heals but also disinfects.

Paris 1874 doesn’t reconstitute all of what’s known today as the first Impressionist salon, though it comes close. Rather, it clarifies and cleanses old thinking and situates the exhibition that unfolded at 35, Boulevard des Capucines, in a social, political, and, especially, an economic context. Good, old-fashioned, how-do-we-market-the-merde-out-of-these-dabs economics.

Art for art’s sake aside, nothing exists in a vacuum. What was this thing, the birth of Impressionism?

The first gallery presents a juxtaposition of old against new, bite-size and in a nutshell. Paris 1874 then challenges, surprises, and delights as the curators tease complexity from what seemed so easy. Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, long touted as the first Impressionist picture, is there. It’s not really “the first.” We learn along the way that Impressionism wasn’t so much Athena springing fully grown from the head of Zeus as a sumptuous cassoulet, one that simmered not overnight but for years.

That said, Impression, Sunrise is famous, a beauty, and almost never leaves the Musée Marmottan in Paris, having been stolen in 1985 by Japanese gangsters and missing until it was found in Corsica five years later.

What’s old? The official Salon, that’s what. Next to Impression, Sunrise is Jean-Léon Gérôme’s L’Éminence Grise, from 1873, a medal-winner at the 1874 Salon, which opened two weeks after the Société show. The annual Salon, and the affair started in the 1660s, was sponsored by the Académie des beaux-arts, France’s most prestigious art school, think tank, and honors society. It was a juried art show displaying what was seen as the pinnacle of taste in art, filtered by tradition. It was also, though it was unaware of this, the Western world’s preeminent art fair.

In 1874, about 3,700 works by nearly 2,000 artists were on view, packed floor to ceiling at the Palais de l’Industrie, the Gothic Revival pile built in 1855 for the Paris World Fair and thanks to Napoléon III’s effort to exceed the splendor of the Crystal Palace and London’s Great Exhibition of 1851. Around 500,000 people attended.

Gérôme’s painting is emblematic. It’s a history painting. A hierarchy among genres still governed French establishment taste, with history painting on top and, in descending order, religious and landscape subjects, scenes of everyday life, and portraits. Mixed in the hierarchy were sculpture, highly regarded, drawings, near the bottom because they were seen as preparatory, and prints, nice but small and, since geared to individual, private contemplation, unable to convey the grandeur that was French culture. Gérôme’s painting is highly finished, each inch crisp, clear, and resolved, crafted with both élan and precision. We can imagine the artist’s intellect and skill but don’t want to see his gestures. That would be tacky.

L’Éminence Grise is an inspired choice, too, because of its subject, François Leclerc du Tremblay, a Capuchin friar and Cardinal Richelieu’s fixer and right-hand man. Richelieu was the power behind the throne of Louis XIII, so Tremblay possessed discrete, hidden power — much as the Salon’s jury did. It had overt power in selecting what was and wasn’t displayed, considered not only quality but politics and personalities, ruled with opacity, and rankled in its rejections. The jury’s selection process was rigged to favor older, successful artists, some also professors.

Also in the first gallery are Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines, from 1873, displayed in the Société show, a sparkling, fleeting view of a crowded, upscale city street where, in the spacious, luxurious studio of the photographer known as Nadar, the Société show happened. It’s dappling and fresh and a glass hive. It’s peak Impressionism.

Near it is Camille-Léopold Cabaillot-Lasalle’s La Salon de 1874, a view of a gallery in the official exhibition. That’s a clever choice, too. It shows us the Salon’s display strategy, which is mind-blowing abundance, and its well-heeled visitorship, social, attentive, and refined, no jeans, and shirtlessness and bare feet “prohibé.” And no pet-eating illegals allowed.

Praise the Lord and all the saints, and let’s toss the seraphim, the cherubim, and the Four Living Creatures in the mix, too. Nowhere in Paris 1874 do we wade through puddles of tears over white supremacy, settler colonialism, or the prison-industrial complex. The exhibition is straight art history. What a tonic.

There’s real trauma on one score, though, and this helps us understand the Impressionist phenomenon. The Prussian invasion and the Commune — Paris was sacked by revolutionaries, chunks of the city burned, and thousands died — unfolded in 1870 and 1871. The Haussmann demolition and reimagining of Paris had just happened. Promethean bounce-back is part of the miracle that’s human nature, but, in Paris, the will to make something new rather than to rehash the old seems to have been a powerful part of Impressionism’s DNA and an impetus for the Société.

The année terrible cut multiple ways. Artists hoping to pay the bills, much less thrive, believed that the Commune endangered careers because, being a communist movement, it would destroy the bourgeois, art-buying public. Degas, Giuseppe De Nittis, and Henri Rouart, all Société exhibitors, were from affluent backgrounds, but Monet, Cézanne, Sisley, Pissarro, and Boudin couldn’t afford to be too nonconformist. Many of the Société artists had fled Paris during the war and subsequent upheaval. New, impromptu studios and new settings were a creative jolt. Napoleon III was out in 1870. The Third Republic was in.

Questioning authority had cachet, but unhappiness with the Salon wasn’t new. Some was natural. Reject an artist — and Degas was rejected many times — and a new belligerent is born. Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe was notoriously nixed by the Salon. Starting in 1863, artists whose work the Salon jury had rejected held a Salon des Refusés. And by 1873, artists such as Degas, Renoir, and Monet, whose work showed a freer, outdoorsy, more spontaneous character, saw the Salon’s jury system as a road to nowhere. For them, the Société offered the freedom to exhibit, which meant the freedom to market. The Société show would give no awards, which the Société’s members felt were warped by art-world politics.

Paris 1874 celebrates the eccentricity of the Société show, and it also explains it. Renoir’s The Dancer, whose skirt is like a puffy cloud, Sisley’s and Pissarro’s luminous, breezy landscapes, Boudin’s pastel cloud studies, Degas’s ballet dancers, and Monet’s work are iconic. They’re impressions, through their quick-take look and free handling of paint. There’s no moral message, though voyeurs would be pleased. Berthe Morisot’s bourgeois women at leisure and views of the new Paris are there, too, as well as the technology of a modern age. With a palette of gray-blue, ochre, and rose, Sisley’s Seine at Port-Marly has to be the prettiest water-pump station on Earth. Mundane and exurban, it supplied the water to irrigate Versailles’s gardens.

Then there are the oddball artists and objects. Auguste Ottin’s marble bust of Ingres is far removed from the avant-garde, but he was famous and had agreed to be the Société’s treasurer. Édouard Brandon painted scenes of Jewish life. Degas, his buddy, twisted his arm, not for aesthetic reasons but to boost the Société’s paying shareholders. Ludovic Lepic was another Degas friend. He was rich and influential and had a fondness for dogs, whose portraits in the Société show have to be its most counterintuitive works.

The location of the Société show — Nadar’s studio — was much calculated and symbolic. The pioneer of Paris portrait photography, Nadar was modern to the core and then some. An amateur balloonist, he organized mail delivery by hot-air balloon during the Commune blockade, inventing airmail. Nadar’s space was free, the biggest point in its favor, but the movers and shakers among the Société — mostly Degas — thought the neighborhood was in sync with their mission and spirit. It was the heart of the new Paris.

Nearby were Garnier’s new opera house; Le Printemps, the fancy department store; boutiques; the House of Worth; and the Bourse, Paris’s commodities exchange, though it hadn’t been rebuilt yet. Nadar’s space had skylights with adjustable blinds, an elevator, an interior fountain for gentle gurgles, and, in case of a hot spell, air-conditioning.

The walls, to the artists’ delight, were smoky red fabric, the floors were carpeted in red abstract flowers against a black field. Blues and greens in landscapes popped like firecrackers. Red is the color of passion and a good color for evening events meant to enliven and engage rather than sedate. It’s a good dining-room color, especially if dinner is by candlelight. Set against a red wall, Renoir’s The Theater Box got an extra jolt of drama. Unlike the Salon, the Société show wasn’t packed and stacked. Art had room to breathe.

Paris 1874 smartly avoids a black-and-white contrast between the Société and Salon exhibitions and debunks a good-versus-evil approach to them. Both shows, we see, were an eclectic affair. Manet’s The Railway, from 1873, was in the Salon show and, now, it’s in Paris 1874. It’s a scene of modern life, dab-packed, luminous, bright, and less narrative than anecdotal and serendipitous. Gérôme’s L’Éminence Grise is didactic. Manet’s picture stars a sassy, multi-blue bow, a sleeping puppy, a bunch of grapes, an iron grate, and puffs of steam. It’s as Impressionist as it gets. Zacharie Astruc, with 14 works in the Société show, many watercolors, was, like Gérôme, an Orientalist.

There are 45 or so works of art in Paris 1874 that were in that year’s Salon. This is a lot, and the old-versus-new point could have been made with far fewer. Still, I can’t begrudge a place in the sun for Bouguereau, Alma-Tadema, or Henri-Paul Motte, whose Trojan Horse was his Salon debut and a favorite of mine this week.

The first-rate catalogue is edited by Sylvie Patry from the Musée d’Orsay and Anne Robbins from the National Gallery. What’s becoming standard in museum catalogues now are lots of essayists — Paris 1874 has 15 — and short essays that are themselves either impressions and shallow or tangential tributes steered by the curators to their friends. Nothing of the sort here, since the essays, most a few pages, are still rich and satisfying, and, if the French practiced cronyism, at least the cronies delivered substance.

Anchor pictures such as Impression, Sunrise get an essay of their own. It’s too bad the National Gallery didn’t incorporate more of the gold nuggets in this essay into the gallery interpretation of Impression, Sunrise. The painting was placed in the introductory gallery, so it gets introductory messaging. In the book, we learn that the painting is a case study in Impressionism’s complexities and contradictions. Depicting Le Havre’s harbor, it’s lovely and quintessential, with wet-on-wet execution to make the colors blend, single, rapidly applied strokes, cool blue grays, passages of pink, streaks of yellow, and an orange-red sun. It’s morning in Le Havre, then one of France’s most polluted cities, so pretty it’ll kill you. Impressionism isn’t always parks, beaches, and gardens. An astrophysicist recently found, looking at the painting and weather records, that it was done on November 13, 1872. Many of the works by Pissarro, Sisley, and Renoir in the Société show were done around the same time, so what was first is up for grabs.

Paris 1874 isn’t a miniature survey of Impressionism. It does, though, review basic themes and dedicates spaces to modern life in public spaces and at home, suburban leisure, and landscape. I loved the section on the Parisienne, the chic, sophisticated young Paris woman who has managed to remain an icon through every phase of modernity. She’s lively, frank, elegant, and sometimes she’s a courtesan, but who cares? Renoir’s Parisian Girl from the Société exhibition might look like a bit of a simp, but her blue hat, blue dress, and blue gloves make the picture more a color and a craze than a portrait of a person. Indigo-mania reigned supreme in 1874.

By the by, the Société show attracted only 3,500 visitors, a decimal point of a fraction of what the Salon got. Only four works of art sold. By the end of 1874, the Société dissolved. Word of mouth, though, was good, and critics were more positive than negative.

Patry, one of the curators of Paris 1874, wrote a good essay on whether or not the 1877 renegade exhibition really started the movement we call Impressionism. Only 18 artists exhibited so it was more focused, the idiosyncratic artists from the 1874 Société show were gone, and the look was more coherent. Monet, Degas, Cézanne, Renoir, Sisley, and Pissarro each displayed more than 20 paintings, so, for each artist, the show was a miniature solo survey.

In 1874, artists and critics were calling the style and technique of the intransigeants, the rebels — and, yes, the Impressionists — the new thing, for it wasn’t yet seen as a movement. In 1877, “Impressionism” entered French dictionaries. And Renoir’s Bal du moulin de la Galette was there. By then, each of the Impressionists was better known, more successful, and had committed collectors. The Salon still had a few more years to go but not many. In 1881, the French government stopped giving it money. By 1890, it was splitting into pieces. So was Impressionism, too, but the torch was passed.