Impression of The Impressionists

The Luncheon of The Boating Party by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1881)

I recently got as a gift a fascinating book :  The Private Lives of The Impressionists by Sue Roe.  And it deals with just that—the real lives of artists we’ve heard about for so long from the mid and late-1800s:  Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Edouard Manet, Paul Cezanne, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissaro, Mary Cassatt (actually a Philadelphia who moved to Paris), and some I wasn’t familiar with like Berthe Marisot (one of the few women), Caillebotte and Bazille.  I learned how they got together as a group to mutually inspire, support, bitch to, have sex, and borrow money.  I got a thorough tour of the neighborhoods in and around Paris where these artists worked and lived,  just as the city was emerging from a dark, stanky, medieval  past.  Also, thought now their work goes for millions,  back then they were rejected, laughed at, and starving. Their art was considered wildly out of place, dangerous, silly, and just not what proper French people should like. 

Art in the mid-1880 was supposed to be grandiose and inspirational, with themes reflecting religious epiphanies, war and wealth.  No liberties taken with how things looked at all and a lot of overwrought and phony stuff passed for good art.  Not that there wasn’t great work around - far from it—because it inspired this next generation in their craft.  But the Impressionists wanted to interpret life differently and open windows into the normal and everyday:  Life in the streets and cafes, nature at its most …natural, and unguarded, human moments.  One of my favorites, for instance, is the one shown above.  A bunch of young Parisians getting together to drink, flirt, and eat. 

To increase their visibility, starting in the mid-1860s a core group of these new type of artists began organizing salons, or shows to get around the Institut de France, official keepers of what was acceptable French art and it’s annual official exhibition, the Salon des Beaux-Arts and its feeder school, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.    If an artist didn’t go to the school, which greatly increased their chance of getting accepted in the Salon, chances are they wouldn’t meet buyers, get in favor w/ the public, and just plain thrive.  There were maybe eight “salon des refuses (the refused)” over the next 15 yrs.  At the first one, the public and reviewers came to jeer, laugh and be outraged.  How could this be art?  Some people screamed and ran for the doors.  One critic took note of Monet’s painting, Sunrise, Impression, and dubbed the group “the impressionists” - meaning that their work was merely an impression of art, not the real thing.  The name stuck, much to the disgust of Monet and others.  Sunrise, Impression,Claude Monet 1873

Here’s another Monet:St. Lazare (1877)  This scandalized!  Who would ever care to exhibit a railroad station in their home??  How strange, how troubling and noisy, how…common.

What also struck me was how long it took for the public and the critics and buyers to embrace this new approach.  Some of these artists over the years gradually became accepted, and by the early 1900s before their deaths even became rich; others died broke and sick.  The concept of patrons was still strong then:  collectors who believed in the artist and his/her work and gave them commissions or bought a lot of their work so the artist could survive rather than starve. Kind of a safety net.  Today, the art business is truncated and more cruel.  Few patrons collect or commission piece after piece of their wives, husbands, pets and kids. Hell, few even collect. 

Anyway, One man, Paul Durant-Ruel, was instrumental.  He bought dozens and dozens of Impressionist work in the early years, and lent them money too. He had a hunch that this style would break big sometime, somehow.  He almost bankrupted himself doing this.   Eventually, in 1886, he brought over 100 works by the group to America for the first show in NYC.  And the rest is history.  Americans —being Americans— were less uptight and actually were turned on to this new kind of art and their acceptance eventually meant money - lots of it.

Jumping ahead a century or so, in the 1970s and ’80s the art world in Philadelphia was pretty closed.  Unless you were a big somebody, you weren’t shown in the then-tiny group of elite galleries or at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  Greg and I were a part of a group in the ’70s,  Old City Arts, that was comprised of a lot of pissed off artists who felt pushed aside for the old tastes.  So in 1990 we organized a new Salon des Refuses (named after those famous exhibitions a century before)  to show the city that else was new.  We—probably 100 artists— pooled some money and rented the old armory in W. Philly near Drexel’s campus, put up rows of rented chain link fencing and hung 2 pieces per artist.  It was on-juried and non-curated— meaning not arranged carefully  to go together. It was our version of a slow-motion flash mob.  And lo and behold, it attracted thousands - lines wound around the block like a Hollywood movie premiere.  Only it was ART - in Philadelphia!!  It  got covered by radio, and TV.  The galleries and the Art Museum took note and got their noses out of the air - to some degree anyway.  It was tried again two years later, but somehow the bloom was off the paint.  People came, people sold work, but the thrill was gone. 

These supremely talented Impressionist artists inspired Van Gogh and Picasso and totally reinvented how we see art.  Here’s to them!