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Review
Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism, Musée d’Orsay: at last, the truth about the Impressionists – they were a mess
This myth-demolishing show offers a fresh evaluation of the first Impressionist exhibition that opened in the French capital
Is there anything new to say about Impressionism? Really, anything at all? Yes, suggests this wrong-footing, myth-demolishing new show of around 130 artworks at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. It promises a “fresh evaluation” of the first Impressionist exhibition that opened in the French capital, in a former photographer’s studio at 35 Boulevard des Capucines, on 15 April 1874.
In characteristically cussed, Gallic fashion, Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism refuses to begin as it should, with Impression, Sunrise (1872), the painting that, infamously (thanks to a journalist’s mocking witticism), suggested the movement’s name. Claude Monet’s magical, and audaciously sketchy, early-morning view of a decidedly un-picturesque subject – the commercial port of Le Havre on the Normandy coast (where he grew up) – has been lent by the Musée Marmottan Monet, but is presented, icon-like, towards the end, as the apotheosis of the new Impressionist approach. Through a lavender haze, mist-muffled cranes and factory chimneys appear like a ghost-ship’s masts, beneath the orange-red blob of a rising sun seemingly shedding fiery shards, like shavings from a crayon, onto the water below.
Before we get there, though, we’re plunged into a suite of red-walled galleries filled with other exhibits from that initial Impressionist show. Auguste Renoir’s Parisian Girl (1874), decked out, from head to toe, in blue, is displayed opposite La Loge (1874), his vision of a sumptuously attired “cocotte” inside a theatre box.
But what are all these pictures that don’t look Impressionist at all? Today, we’d associate with the movement only seven of the exhibition’s 31 participants. The rest? A “motley assortment”, including various second-rate hacks and no-hopers. It feels almost sacrilegious (and certainly bathetic) even to consider that César (1861), an abortive and absurd etching of a begging Scottie by Ludovic Napoléon Lepic (who?), was once shown anywhere near Impression, Sunrise.
Thus, reveal the curators, who evidently see themselves as truth-tellers, the first Impressionist exhibition wasn’t the scandalous revelation of a new, fully formed avant-garde, but a bewildering hodgepodge of masterpieces and duds, perhaps even a “non-event”. Impression, Sunrise was “barely noticed”; for several years, the Impressionists were known as the “Intransigents”; the plein-air “revolution” was a damp squib.
This, then, is a more complex, grown-up narrative than the glib, oft-told tale of heroic Impressionist defiance of the official annual Salon – the densely hung atmosphere of which is elsewhere summoned brilliantly (although visitors expecting wall-to-wall Impressionism may, again, be caught off guard).
Once more, this is done to resist the popular narrative, by insisting on various surprising “convergences” between the Salon of ’74 and the Impressionist project. For instance, The Railway (1873) by Édouard Manet appears, today, like the quintessential Impressionist masterpiece: a bright scene of modern life near the Gare Saint-Lazare. Yet it was accepted by the Salon’s supposedly stuffy jury. So, the Impressionists – in this telling, more of an “ad hoc alliance” than a unified “clan of rebels” – weren’t totally marginalised by officialdom, after all.
Moreover, suggests the Musée d’Orsay, the movement’s apogee was the third Impressionist exhibition of 1877, which, here, provides a stunning pay-off, as the Impressionists finally emerge, in all their variegated glory, like butterflies from the chrysalis.
Does this steadfastly non-starry-eyed and disruptive exhibition diminish some of the Impressionists’ outlaw glamour? Yes. Yet, it also offers an original take – and, with a subject this hackneyed, that’s a coup.
From March 26; information: musee-orsay.fr