How political upheaval inspired the French Impressionists

Transcript

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William Brangham: Impressionism is perhaps the most viewed and most admired movement in art history. Now a new exhibition first shown in Paris looks back 150 years to its founding moment and to the darkness hidden behind all that beautiful light.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown visits for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jeffrey Brown: Two paintings from 1870s France, a dramatic historical scene honored as one of the greatest works of its time, and something quite different, an everyday harbor view at sunrise by Claude Monet. It would become one of the most important works of all time, placed side by side as both greeting to the exhibition and provocation.

Mary Morton, Co-Curator, Paris 1874: The fact that one painting from the summit plummets in terms of art historical fashion and the other one is now central to every conversation about impressionism is striking.

And we wanted to just sort of put that out there to sort of set up the difference, but also the moment, really.

Jeffrey Brown: Mary Morton and Kimberly Jones are co-curators with two French curators of Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment, an exhibition now at Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art.

The goal, to look anew at an inflection point in art history, the birth of modern painting.

Kimberly Jones, Co-Curator, Paris 1874: From the start, we wanted to really dig into particularly the impressionist pathology. And people think they know what impressionism is, but what they think of as impressionism comes at a later date.

The fact that we call this exhibition the impressionist moment is a bit of a misleading notion, because, in the moment, they failed, but clearly there was enough of a success, a sort of a germ of an idea of how to move forward.

Jeffrey Brown: This is an exhibition about exhibitions, two of them held at the same time in Paris in 1874, and here we see works from each, the official Salon, the most prestigious art event of the day, defining taste and making careers, but strictly controlled, conservative in its judgments of proper styles and subjects, and a much smaller, much less attended, independent exhibition organized by a group that included then little-known artists such as Degas, Renoir, Cezanne, as well as Monet.

Art rebels, well, maybe, but the name they used, Societe Anonyme, designated not a revolt, but a corporate structure.

Mary Morton: It was in essence a financial arrangement that these artists committed to, and they had to pay dues, and they would split proceeds from sales, although unfortunately there weren’t very many sales. It was not a successful venture.

Jeffrey Brown: In fact, this so-called first impressionist show was something of a hodgepodge. What was this etching of a dog doing here? And the line between the Salon and the independent show, juxtaposed here, wasn’t always clear.

Art history, we see, is rarely about clean break. It was an art critic who first used the term impressionism, and he meant it as a criticism. And yet something new was happening, capturing light more than fine detail, the ever-changing impression rather than the fixed moment in time, the everyday, rather than grand history or mythology.

But where it came from, that is the lesser-known story told here.

Sebastian Smee, Author, “Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism”: They did an amazing job.

Jeffrey Brown: Sebastian Smee is a Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic for The Washington Post and author of the new book “Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism.”

Sebastian Smee: We have this idea of impressionism as an art form of pretty pictures, gorgeous landscapes.

Jeffrey Brown: Which they are.

Sebastian Smee: They are indeed. They really are. They’re beautiful paintings and it’s a feeling of tremendous serenity and sunlight and almost pleasure and joy that comes off them.

And, to me, it was really interesting to register that and to put that together with the fact that all of the main figures in impressionism and the society that they were part of had just gone through a tremendous trauma.

Jeffrey Brown: Just three years before these exhibitions, Paris was in ruins after a disastrous war and humiliating defeat by Germany and the short-lived Paris Commune, a revolutionary government that took control of the city before being brutally suppressed by French troops, who killed some 15,000 to 20,000 of their own countrymen in a bloody week of street fighting, captured by Edouard Manet in this small lithograph.

Sebastian Smee: He’s showing us what happened on the streets of Paris, and what happened was just so shocking, people didn’t want to think about it.

Jeffrey Brown: Neither, for the most part, did the artists want to show it. Smee points to the example of Berthe Morisot, the only woman in the independent exhibition.

Sebastian Smee: It was a world of children, of interiors and gardens and sometimes landscapes. And she painted all these subjects with an incredibly delicate feeling for fugitive effects of light.

She lived through the Siege of Paris. She’d been reduced to starvation and was really lucky to escape with her life. I think it’s poignant that she was interested in painting pictures that were all about that fragility and those fugitive effects of light and of life itself.

Kimberly Jones: How you process trauma, sometimes, you lean into it and sometimes you want to move past it. And so, particularly with the independents, part of what they’re doing is they’re deciding to look forward.

And so a lot of their landscapes in particular deal with themes of renewal and rejuvenation, the spring after the long dark winter.

Jeffrey Brown: In fact, many were scenes of recent horror, now of newly planted samplings, as in Alfred Sisley’s Apple Trees in Flower.

Kimberly Jones: It’s a site that has suffered, that has gone through its own trauma. And the fact you have this mingling of the old and then the replanted trees, because apple trees will take many years before they actually will bear fruit.

And so it’s not just a pretty picture. It’s really about the country, the family, the community working to rebuild the present for the future.

Jeffrey Brown: The new for the country and for art. There would be seven more impressionist exhibitions over the coming years as the movement coalesced and expanded into the form the world came to know.

And while some artists, including Monet and Pissarro, experience success in their lifetimes, recognition for Sisley, Morisot and others came only after their deaths.

For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Credits:

Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise, 1872
Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, gift of Eugène and Victorine Donop de Monchy, 1940

Berthe Morisot, The Cradle, 1872
Musée d’Orsay, Paris, purchased 1930

Berthe Morisot, The Harbor at Lorient, 1869
National Gallery of Art, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection

Berthe Morisot, Hide-and-Seek, 1873
Private collection, Friend of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Alphonse J. Liébert, The Customs House at La Villette, c. 1871
Alphonse J. Liébert, Place de la Bastille following Commune destruction, c. 1871
Alphonse J. Liébert, Toppled colonne Vendôme following Commune destruction, c. 1871
Alphonse J. Liébert, Vie of Rue Royale after Commune destruction, c. 1871
Unknown photographer, Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot with a Pink Slipper, 1872
National Gallery of Art Library