by To look at Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise is to live in his presence. You are right there in the docks of Le Havre at sunrise, in the purple fog light, where cranes and ships rise indistinctly in the faint light of the low red disk of the sun.
You might also notice what he doesn’t have. It has no firm boundaries or precise forms: the people in boats are just dabs of blue, as are the boats. The sunlight and ship masts that can be seen in the water are scattered, incomprehensible.
By the standards to which European artists had adhered for four centuries earlier, Impression, Sunrise was not a finished work of art at all but an oil sketch. “Indeed impressions!” the critic Louis Leroy laughed when it was unveiled alongside works by Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro and many others in an 1874 group show. Another critic dismissed the works as “scatters of paint from a palette spread evenly over dirty canvas”. But it was Leroy’s critique of that piece, and his shot that the whole show was an “impressionist show”.
The name stuck and 150 years later, the first impressionist exhibition is being celebrated in France with the enthusiasm of the British reserve for a royal wedding. The Musée d’Orsay 1874: Inventing Impressionism exhibition opens on March 26, and other impressionist shows are coming in Strasbourg, Tourcoing, Clermont-Ferrand, Chartres, Nantes, Bordeaux, and an impressionist festival is planned in Monet’s Normandy.
But it’s not like a century and a half. Impressionist paintings look at today’s city streets, cafes and stations, give or take a top hat. In the years just before that Paris exhibition, some of the impressionist pioneers came to Britain to escape the Franco-Prussian war. When you look at Pissarro’s views of south London or Monet’s Thames, it’s like looking in a mirror, whereas in Victorian vernacular art you see another age and frock coats intertwined. The emperors opened a window and let in the air.
It is that spontaneity that Lélia Pissarro remembers from her impressionist childhood. This painter and art dealer, who is staging her own 150th anniversary show at her London gallery, was born in 1963, the granddaughter of the artist Camille Pissarro. As a child she was taught art by her grandfather, who was taught by his father, Camille.
It was not so much artistic rules that she inherited as a joyful feeling of being an artist. She and her grandfather would go out in a boat to paint and drink: “I’d have cider when I was eight.” After school in Paris she would make sandwiches among Monet’s Water Lilies in the Orangerie, at one of them, because “Monet was my grandfather’s father.”
Boat parties and picnics and outdoor painting: the pleasures of impressionism that young Lélia Pissarro took are the same facilities that keep us returning to this art. I can hardly tear my eyes away from Monet’s Bathers at La Grenouillère in London’s National Gallery. It’s a summer’s day on the Seine and people are wading in the cool water that breaks up in bells and blobs of sunlight: it seems like there’s not a care in the world as two women in bathing suits are chatting. with a man before they take the plunge.
This was painted in 1869, five years before the official birth of impressionism, but the free atmosphere is more like a 1960s film. Paris is a city of impressionist art where women and men meet in unobtrusive ways on dance floors, theaters and cafes. In Renoir’s Bal du Moulin de la Galette, people flirt around a table covered in bottles and glasses, and behind them couples sway and fall into an open-air dance full of sunlight and desire.
There is no better way to recall the radical nature of impressionism than by revisiting its inaugural exhibition in 1874. Women artists claimed their natural place as no art group had before. Berthe Morisot was one of the most represented artists, with nine paintings, the same number as Monet; only Degas was more. They included her personal masterpiece The Cradle, in which a mother sees her sleeping child.
The show also made room for a difficult outsider, Paul Cézanne. He showed his strange canvas A Modern Olympia, in which a naked woman watches over men, and The Hanged Man’s House, a view of a village of three trees in which all the presence of impressionism still pushes for something more awkwardly solid that has changed. into cubism.
Already in 1874, impressionism was releasing the next rapid steps to the art of the 20th century. Within a decade, Seurat would be abstracting the kind of scene that Renoir loved in his ironic painting of mathematically modeled people in geometric skirts and geometric hats enjoying the pixelated sunlight, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte . Thirty years later, Henri Matisse would transform the sunlit freedom of Monet’s La Grenouillère into his stunning 1904 vision of nude women enjoying a picnic on a colorful beach, Luxe, Calme et Volupté. Monet and Renoir lived to see a urinal displayed as art by Marcel Duchamp, and just 50 years after 1874 the first Surrealist Manifesto would be published.
The year 1874 was the true birth of modern art, unleashing wave after wave of avant garde discoveries. However, impressionism loves itself, not only for its origin. One of Monet’s paintings in the exhibition of that era was a melting scene of two pairs of people walking down a slope towards us through a deep field of poppies blooming in uncountable red spots: the day seems eternal, the evening without end and strangest of all. , the mother and child duos seem identical. As one descends towards the bottom of the painting and invisibility, another pair crests the top of the hill. Remembering her childhood, Lélia Pissarro reaches for Proust’s image of the “petite madeleine”, a cake that opens the flood of memory. Monet’s poppy field does that for me because I had a framed Athena print of it in the living room when I was a kid. Looking into it, now as it was, I get fired from time to time.
The 3 best impressionist masterpieces of Jonathan Jones
Claude Monet: Water Lilies, 1890s-1926
Orangerie Museum, Paris
In these huge paintings of his lily pond displayed, as he intended, in curved oval galleries to fully immerse the visitor, space dissolves and reality blurs into thoughts and memories as impressionism proves that it can explore life’s deepest mysteries.
Camille Pissarro: The Boulevard Montmartre at Night, 1897
National Gallery, London
City lights glow against an eerie dark sky as throngs of nameless pleasure seekers fill the sidewalks in this picture that any 21st century city could show on a Saturday night but was made in the age of horse-drawn carriages.
Berthe Morisot: Reading, 1873
Cleveland Museum of Art
This original impressionist work made in the 1874 exhibition brings the experience of women into the field. Morisot’s subject loses herself in her book as she communes with the green natural world and life that the emperors made fresher than ever.
