To look at Claude Monet’s impression: Sunrise is living in its moment. You are there at dawn in the port of Le Havre, in the purple misty light, while cranes and ships materialize vaguely in the dim light of the low red disk of the sun.
You might also notice what isn’t there. It has no fixed boundaries or precise shapes: the people in boats are just blue blobs, just like the boats. The sunlight and ship masts reflected in the water are splashy and disjointed.
By the standards to which European artists had adhered for the past four centuries, Impression, Sunrise is not a finished work of art at all, but an oil sketch. “An impression indeed!” sneered the critic Louis Leroy when it was unveiled alongside works by Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro and more in an 1874 group exhibition. Another critic dismissed the works as “paint scrapings from a palette spread evenly across a dirty canvas”. But it was Leroy’s review, with his parting shot that the entire show was “the exhibition of impressionists.”
The name stuck and 150 years later the first Impressionist exhibition in France is commemorated with the enthusiasm that the British reserve for a royal wedding. The Musée d’Orsay’s exhibition 1874: Inventing Impressionism opens on March 26, with other Impressionist shows in Strasbourg, Tourcoing, Clermont-Ferrand, Chartres, Nantes and Bordeaux, with an Impressionist festival planned at Monet’s Normandy.
Yet it doesn’t seem like a century and a half. Impressionist paintings look like today’s streets, cafes and stations, top hat or top hat. In the years immediately preceding that Paris exhibition, some of the pioneering Impressionists came to Britain to escape the Franco-Prussian War. Looking at Pissarro’s view of South London or Monet’s Thames is like looking into a mirror, although in the homegrown Victorian art you see another era, tied up in frock coats. The Impressionists opened a window and let the air in.
That spontaneity is what Lélia Pissarro remembers from her impressionist youth. This painter and art dealer, who is staging her own 150th anniversary show at her London gallery, was born in 1963, the great-granddaughter of artist Camille Pissarro. As a child, she learned art from her grandfather, who was taught by his father, Camille.
It was not so much artistic rules that she inherited as the joyful feeling of being an artist. She and her grandfather went out in a boat to paint and drink: “When I was eight I drank cider with water.” After school in Paris she ate sandwiches among Monet’s water lilies in the Orangerie, one with them, because ‘Monet was my grandfather’s godfather.’
Boat parties and picnics and outdoor painting: the joys of Impressionism that the young Lélia Pissarro absorbed are the same joys that keep us coming back to this art. I can hardly tear my eyes away from Monet’s Bathers in La Grenouillère at the National Gallery in London. It’s a summer day on the Seine and people are frolicking in the cool water that breaks into specks and blobs of sunlight: no one, it seems, is concerned when two women in bathing suits talk to a man before they take the dip.
This was painted in 1869, five years before the official birth of Impressionism, but the free and relaxed atmosphere looks more like a 1960s film. Paris in the art of the Impressionists is a city where women and men meet each other continuously on dance floors, in theaters and cafés. In Renoir’s Bal du Moulin de la Galette, people flirt around a table covered in bottles and glasses, while behind them couples sway and embrace in an open-air dance full of sunlight and desire.
There is no better way to recapture the radical character of Impressionism than by revisiting the inaugural exhibition of 1874. Women artists claimed their natural place unlike any previous art group. One of the most represented artists was Berthe Morisot, with nine paintings, the same number as Monet; only Degas had more. This includes her intimate masterpiece The Cradle, in which a mother watches her baby sleep.
The show also made room for a difficult outsider, Paul Cézanne. He showed his bizarre canvas A Modern Olympia, in which men stare at a naked woman, and The Hanged Man’s House, a view of a village through the trees that has the immediacy of impressionism, yet insists on something more clumsily solid that would evolve. in cubism.
As early as 1874, Impressionism unleashed the next rapid steps towards 20th century art. Within a decade, Seurat would abstract the kind of scene Renoir loved in his ironic painting of mathematically shaped people in geometric skirts and hats enjoying pixelated sunlight, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. Thirty years later, Henri Matisse would translate the sun-drenched freedom of Monet’s La Grenouillère into his ecstatic 1904 vision of naked women enjoying a picnic on a colorful beach, Luxe, Calme et Volupté. Monet and Renoir lived long before Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal as art, and just fifty years after 1874 the first Surrealist Manifesto would be published.
The year 1874 was truly the birth of contemporary art, with wave after wave of avant-garde discoveries. Yet Impressionism deserves to be loved for itself, and not just for where it led. One of Monet’s paintings in that groundbreaking exhibition was a merging scene of two pairs of people walking toward us from a hill through a deep field of poppies blooming in countless red patches: the day seems eternal, the afternoon endless, and strangest of all of all of them, the mother and child duos appear identical. As one descends to the bottom of the painting and into invisibility, another couple climbs to the top of the hill. Lélia Pissarro remembers her childhood and reaches for Proust’s image of the “petite madeleine”, a cake that opens the floodgates of memory. Monet’s Poppy Field does that for me, because as a child we had a framed Athena print of it in the living room. When I look at it now, as then, I am freed from time.
Jonathan Jones’ top 3 impressionist masterpieces
Claude Monet: Water Lilies, 1890-1926
Orangery Museum, Paris
In these enormous paintings of his lily pond, which, as he planned, are displayed in curved oval galleries to fully immerse the visitor, space dissolves and reality fades into reflections and memories, while Impressionism proves that it is the deepest can fathom the mysteries of being.
Camille Pissarro: The Boulevard Montmartre at Night, 1897
National Gallery, London
The city lights glow against an eerily dark sky as crowds of anonymous fun-seekers fill the sidewalks in this painting that could depict any 21st century city on a Saturday night, but was created in the era of horse-drawn carriages.
Berthe Morisot: Reading, 1873
Cleveland Museum of Art
This foundational impressionist work featured in the 1874 exhibition puts feminine experiences into practice. Morisot’s subject loses herself in her book as she communes with the green and life-giving natural world that the Impressionists made fresher than ever.