Museums and art galleries often use big anniversaries as an opportunity to build exhibitions studying past occasions or artists. This fall, Washington ’s National Gallery of Art has launched its own large-scale reflect on the sesquicentennial of sperm events in contemporary art history.
“Paris 1874: The Painter Moment ” compares and contrasts two events held in the European capital a decade and a half ago. In doing so, it prompts people to observe the degree to which new craft movements constitute a revolution, or an development, in thought and design.
Competing Paris Shows
This year’s show, which the National Gallery is promoting with a series of music, seminars, and online and in-person conversations, features works from two events held in Paris. In 1874, the Academie des Beaux-Arts held its regular Salon at the Palais de l’ Industrie, while a group of independent artists formed a splinter group, the Societe Anonyme, and held a counter-exhibition.
In the short term, the creation Salon had a much bigger impact. Approximately half a million visitors saw the works at the Salon exhibition, while the splinter group had fewer visitors ( about 3,500 ) than the Salon had paintings ( 3,701 ). But the Societe Anonyme became known as the paintings, giving that present long-run historical importance. The National Gallery exhibit features works from both the Salon and the Societe side-by-side, allowing customers to review changes in 19th century French art with current vision.
Contrast and Derision
The individual shows 150 decades ago came at a tumultuous time in European politics and society, with the state still recovering from its brutal battle in the Franco-Prussian War. As soon as the battle ended, Paris endured the tumult of the groundbreaking Commune in March 1871 and the bloody conflicts that put down the Commune two months later.
Three years after the war and the Commune, European nation remained in tumult, and the painters tried to capture that time. As Jean Rousseau wrote in Le Figaro in May 1874, “We are tired of the conventions, of repetitive beauty, of style and cliched content. We want true wisdom, without attenuation or euphemisms. ” They rendered their content not necessarily looking for picture precision but by trying to capture “the sensation produced by a environment, ” as one of them noted.
The exhibit’s second exhibition sets up the distinction between the startups and the establishment. People entering the show see two functions: “L’Eminence Grise” by Jean-Leon Gerome featured at the Salon, and Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise” was displayed by the Societe. In period, the Monet job gave impressionist its name; initially intended as an insult as part of a mocking evaluation of their show, the group adopted the name as their own.
Sitting side by side, the two functions demonstrate why Monet’s critic may have felt the new team ’s job represented for a dramatic break as to deserve scorn. Gerome’s work beautifully captures the details of a group of courtiers, over to the folds in their beautiful fabrics, while the Monet environment shows dark figures masked in fog, with only an orange-red sun in the bottom third of the painting clearly delineated.
Common Bonds
Yet the break between the impressionists and the establishment did n’t always seem as strong as the contrast between Gerome and Monet. For starters, artists like J. M. W. Turner in Britain and the American James McNeill Whistler had explored atmospheric painting similar to that of the impressionists prior to the 1874 Paris shows.
Some of the works exhibited at the “establishment ” Salon also would have felt at home at the impressionists ’ show across town. Marie Bracquemond, described by the National Gallery as a “lesser-known member of the Impressionist group, ” displayed with them after 1879, but her work “Marguerite” — on view in the Washington show — was accepted and featured in the Salon of 1874.
Relationships between artists made barriers between the two groups permeable. Edgar Degas tried to convince Jean-Jacques Henner to submit works to the impressionists ’ show, but he decided to submit to the Salon instead. Likewise, a National Gallery interpretive display notes that while Edouard Manet “was the recognized leader of avant-garde art in the 1870s … he never exhibited with the Impressionists. Instead, he reserved his ambitions for the larger public and the critical exposure offered by the Salon. ”
Revolution via Evolution
Placing works of the impressionists and the Salon in the same exhibition demonstrates the differences between the two styles and movements. In some cases, as in the contrast between Gerome and Monet in the first gallery, the contrasts prove striking. But later in the exhibition, the differences between Renoir’s “The Theater Box ” ( on the left in the below photo ), exhibited by the impressionists, and Eva Gonzales ’ “A Box at the Theatre des Italiens, ” submitted to ( but rejected from ) the Salon, appear slight:
Similarly, the gallery notes that Charles-François Daubigny’s massive landscape “The Fields in the Month of June” “could just as easily have been included ” in the impressionists ’ show rather than displayed, as it was, by the purportedly “staid ” Salon.
The National Gallery calls the changes made by Monet, Pissarro, Cezanne, and other impressionists a “pivotal shift ” from the types of paintings exhibited by the Salon — and so it was. But it also built on prior works that foresaw differences in palette and brushwork, and “establishment ” contemporaries utilizing the same techniques. By providing the context of impressionism a century and a half ago, the National Gallery’s exhibit shows the revolution via evolution that defines many changes in style and art.
“Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment ” is on view at Washington ’s National Gallery through Jan. 19. Admission is free, but capacity limits and high interest mean guests may encounter queues, particularly on afternoons and weekends.