To look at Claude Monet’s Impressions Sunrise is living in the moment. You are at the docks of Le Havre at sunrise, in the hazy purple light, with cranes and ships looming in the faint light of the sun’s low red disk.
You can also note what isn’t. They have no clear boundaries or clear shapes: the people on the boats, like the boats, are just blue blobs. Sunlight reflected on the water and ship masts is scattered and inconsistent.
By the standards to which European artists adhered over the previous four centuries, Impression, Sunrise is an oil sketch, not a finished work of art. “Really an impression!” scoffed critic Louis Leroy when it was introduced in a group exhibition in 1874, along with works by Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and more. Another reviewer considered the works “paint scrapings from a palette spread evenly on a dirty canvas.” However, this part was Leroy’s criticism of his farewell speech that the entire show was “an exhibition of the impressionists”.
The first impressionist exhibition bearing his name in 150 years is commemorated in France with the enthusiasm of the British royal wedding. The Musée d’Orsay’s exhibition 1874: Inventing Impressionism opens on March 26; other impressionist shows will be held in Strasbourg, Tourcoing, Clermont-Ferrand, Chartres, Nantes, Bordeaux, and an impressionist festival is planned in Monet’s Normandy.
But it doesn’t seem like a century and a half. Impressionist paintings look like today’s city streets, cafes and stations, give or take a top hat. In the years immediately preceding the Paris exhibition, some of the pioneering impressionists came to Britain to escape the Franco-Prussian war. When you look at Pissarro’s south London or Monet’s Thames, it’s like looking into a mirror, but in homegrown Victorian art you see another era wrapped in frock coats. The Impressionists opened a window and let the air in.
This spontaneity is what Lélia Pissarro remembers from her impressionist childhood. This painter and art dealer, who organized the 150th anniversary exhibition at his gallery in London, was born in 1963 as the great-grandson of the artist Camille Pissarro. As a child, he was taught the art by his grandfather, who taught him about it from his father, Camille.
What he inherited as the joyful feeling of being an artist were not many artistic rules. He and his grandfather would go out in a boat to paint and drink: “When I was eight, I drank cider with water.” After school in Paris, he was eating sandwiches among Monet’s Water Lilies at the Orangerie, because “Monet was my grandfather’s godfather.”
Boat parties, picnics and painting outdoors: the pleasures of impressionism absorbed by the young Lélia Pissarro are the same pleasures that bring us back to this art. I can barely take my eyes off Monet’s Bathers in La Grenouillère in London’s National Gallery. It’s a summer day on the River Seine, and people are frolicking in the cool water, which breaks up into spots and droplets of sunlight: no one seems to care that two women in swimsuits are chatting with a man before heading out to sea. plunge.
This was painted in 1869, five years before the official birth of impressionism, but the free and relaxed atmosphere was more reminiscent of 1960s films. In the art of the Impressionists, Paris is a city where men and women meet without pressure on dance floors, in theaters and in cafes. In Renoir’s Bal du Moulin de la Galette, people flirt around a table piled high with bottles and glasses, while behind them, couples sway and embrace in an open-air dance dappled with sunlight and desire.
There is no better way to revisit the radical nature of Impressionism than to revisit its inaugural exhibition in 1874. Women artists claimed their natural place like no other art group before. One of the most represented artists was Berthe Morisot, with nine paintings, the same number as Monet; only Degas had more. These included The Cradle, an intimate masterpiece in which a mother watches her baby sleep.
The show also made room for Paul Cézanne, a difficult outsider. He showed A Modern Olympia, the strange canvas of men gazing at a naked woman, and The House of the Hanged Man, a village view through trees that has all the immediacy of impressionism but presses into something more clumsily solid to evolve into. cubism
As early as 1874, impressionism was paving the way for the next rapid steps towards 20th-century art. Within a decade, Seurat would abstract the kind of scene Renoir loved into A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, an ironic painting of mathematically shaped people dressed in geometric skirts and hats, basking in pixelated sunlight. Thirty years later, Henri Matisse would transform the sunny freedom of Monet’s La Grenouillère into his exuberant 1904 vision of nude women picnicking on a colorful beach called Luxe, Calme et Volupté. Monet and Renoir lived to see the urinal exhibited as a work of art by Marcel Duchamp, and just 50 years later in 1874 the first Surrealist Manifesto would be published.
The year 1874 was truly the birth of today’s art and gave rise to wave after wave of avant-garde discoveries. But Impressionism deserves to be loved for itself, not just for where it goes. One of Monet’s paintings in that groundbreaking exhibition was a melting scene of two pairs of people walking down a hillside towards us through a deep field of poppies blooming in countless red dots: The day seems endless, the afternoon endless, and that’s the strangest thing of all. , the mother and child duo look the same. While one descends to the bottom of the picture and invisibility, another pair ascends to the top of the hill. Remembering her childhood, Lélia Pissarro reaches for Proust’s image of the “petite madeleine”, a cake that opens the doors of memory. Monet’s field of poppies does this for me because I had a framed print of it in my living room, Athena, when I was a kid. When I look at it, I am freed from time, now as I was then.
Jonathan Jones’ top 3 impressionist masterpieces
Claude Monet: Water Lilies, 1890s-1926
Orangerie Museum, Paris
In these expansive paintings of a lily pond, set in curved oval galleries to fully immerse the visitor, as he planned, impressionism proves that it can probe the deepest mysteries of existence, as space dissolves and reality blurs into reflections and memories.
Camille Pissarro: Boulevard Montmartre at Night, 1897
National Gallery, London
City lights shine against a frighteningly dark sky as crowds of anonymous pleasure-seekers fill the sidewalks in this painting that could depict any 21st-century city on a Saturday night, but was painted in the age of horse-drawn carriages.
Berthe Morisot: Reading, 1873
Cleveland Museum of Art
This essential impressionist work, featured in the 1874 exhibition, brings the female experience to the fields. Morisot’s subject loses itself in his book as he merges with the green and life-giving natural world that the Impressionists made fresher than ever.