The Brooklyn Rail

In the 1970s, the Impressionists came back to the forefront. The exhibition organized jointly by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Grand Palais brought together some 500,000 visitors. It marked the beginning of a major trend in the world of scholarship and exhibitions—leading all the way to the opening of the Musée d’Orsay in 1986, a museum entirely devoted to the arts of the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.

This moment marked the rise of deconstruction as a philosophical movement, expanding into the human sciences and the arts. This contemporaneity led to a large number of academic works on the period, focusing on unexplored phases of art history. The fact that the nineteenth century was a time of social, political and ideological revolutions has evidently made the historiographical effort more acute and necessary.

The current exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay participates in this dynamic of rewriting history. Dedicated to the 1874 Impressionist exhibition in its 150th anniversary year, it aims to explore the many sides of this historic event—often doomed the founding moment of a new movement.

In many ways, it could come across as a deconstructionist manifesto. The first section of the exhibition situates the exhibition: context defining text, the thresholds of an event marking its very structure. The use of photographs and prints situates Paris as a modern city, one that had been struck three years before by the massacres of the Commune—as well as its revolutionary hopes. Therefore, Impressionism started in a place that saw itself as the embodiment of the modern city—as Benjamin would famously write, sixty years later—and yet in which modernity had led to death and destruction. This perspective is far from the innocent enjoyment of nature that has come to symbolize Impressionism.

Looking into context, the exhibition also presents a major display of the 1874 Salon, highlighting everything that became known as Impressionism aimed to contradict: narration, mythology, perfect brushstrokes, Orientalism. From theme to form, the Salon was a relic from the past. Here, the exhibition curators further critiqued the usual approach: they show that a number of artists that were to participate in the Impressionist exhibition also participated in the Salon, thus making the narrative more porous than expected.

On April 15, 1874, the photographer Nadar agreed to rent his studio at low cost for artists who wanted to organize their own exhibition because their work had been rejected by the Salon. It was to be a selling exhibition, providing artists with an opportunity to make a living. Some works were actually quite expensive—including a 5000 Francs Monet, which found a buyer the next year. Nadar rented out the studio for a relatively symbolic fee of 2000 Francs. This exhibition featured a painting its author titled Impression, that was later to be known as Impression, Soleil Levant (Impression, Sunrise), from which the critic Louis Leroy coined the phrase “Impressionist”, thereby giving a name to what was considered in modernist art history as an avant-garde movement.

The Orsay exhibition offers an analysis of the 1874 presentation through several lenses: first, the painting of modern life, embodied by the works of Berthe Morisot, the only woman to participate in the original exhibition; second, the reinvention of nature. From the beginning of the exhibition, the role of urbanism and politics have appeared to frame the entire purpose. The meaning of the works displayed after such an introduction is by nature different: modern life is the utopia of modernity, which found in a number of works an appropriate framing. For example, Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines featured the very avenue of the exhibition. Nature, and not “landscape”—a shift of the nineteenth century—represents an alternative to the city-scape and its life. The representation of greenery was by no means apolitical or deprived of signifier: as the exhibition argues, this clear choice was part of a strategy to displace meaning through a radical reinvention of paintings’ position within the medium and in culture itself.

Many titles in the 1874 exhibition were chosen by their authors—including Esquisse, which has appeared on over a dozen occasions. The history of titles in the nineteenth century is one of emancipation of the artists by means of their control over language. The very gesture of artists organizing their own exhibition is directly connected to the naming of works: they are signs of the artists’ self-empowerment.

The exhibition showcases the 1874 exhibition as a crystallization of dynamics of the time. Many of the works presented are now famous, but quite a few of the artists are not that prominent nowadays—such as the ending piece of a room, by Armand Guillaumin. One of the most commercially successful artists was Alfred Sisley, not the most notable of rooms that included Paul Cézanne, Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, as well as all the aforementioned artists.

Looking into the Impressionist exhibition as a crystallization, this research expands its reach into the 1877 sequel, which closes the moment. The Orsay exhibition starts before and ends after the moment, from the genesis to the aftermath, it deconstructs the very iconism of Impressionism: the idea of a movement, the isolation of an epiphany, the simplification around a few names.

In that sense, it is in keeping with the methodology designed by the exhibition’s lead curator, Sylvie Patry, who worked alongside her Orsay colleague Anne Robbins and National Gallery of Art Kimberly A. Jones and Mary Morton. Sylvie Patry, a widely respected expert on nineteenth century art who served as deputy director for collections of the Barnes Foundation and then the Musée d’Orsay, with a devotion for artists leading her to become artistic director of the contemporary art gallery Mennour, has become famous for could be described as “new deconstruction”: in exhibitions such as this one, and, previously, Berthe Morisot (2019) and Le décor impressionniste (2022), she has engaged in revisiting history, not in a revisionist perspective, but unearthing and locating what happened, in a way that is both faithful and groundbreaking. This is another remarkable instance of her method.