THE IMPRESSIONIST IN PARIS

by Adam Jacot

Who could have imagined then that such a group of impoverished artists now command the highest prices in the world’s leading auction houses? Almost uniquely in the history of art has such popularity been sustained for any one movement a hundred years on from its origins.

The French Revolution, with its consequent political and social change, had a profound influence on art in Paris. In a subtle and gradual way the role of the artist began to change. The arrival of photography made painting superfluous as a record of important national and historical events. The camera was far more instant and effective as a reporter than as a labour of many months with oil and canvas could ever be. The artist could no longer rely on large official commissions from the state or monarch. And so painting began to be chiefly a means of decoration or social comment and a more personal statement by the artist.

Claude Monet went to the Ecole des Beaux Arts to study under Gleyre along with Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and Frédéric Bazille. When Gleyre’s studio closed in 1864 the four of them would set off into the countryside together.

During this period the four made regular contact with other artists such as Pissarro, Manet, Degas and Cézanne. They met typically on Thursday nights at the Café Guerbois, an artists’ hang out on Avenue de Clichy and were led by Édouard Manet, whom the younger artists greatly looked up to. The Café de la Nouvelle Athènes in Place Pigalle was also a favourite spot.

In the middle of the 19th century the Académie des BeauxArts dominated French art and was the preserver of traditional French painting standards of content and style. The Académie preferred carefully finished images that looked realistic with precise brush strokes and restrained colours. It held an annual exhibition, the ‘Salon de Paris’, to which artists would submit their work.

By 1869 Renoir and Monet worked together at La Grenouillere, a café on the banks of the Seine. They were so poor they couldn’t even afford to buy paints. It was then that they evolved the Impressionist technique of painting with rapid brushstrokes and dabs of colour, shunning the use of black and brown and achieved tones, lights and darks by juxtaposing pure colour. This was particularly effective when painting water and its shimmering surface. They recreated the sensation in the eye that views the subject, rather than delineating the details of the subject.

MONET The Waterlily pond, 1917-1919 paint by French painter Claude Monet. Impressionist paint, oil on canvas. Work of art, impressionism, twentieth century. Collection Albertina museum, Vienna

RENOIR Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a French artist and a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style, a celebrator of beauty and especially feminine sensuality in the tradition of Rubens. Girl with a Hoop Detail Renoir National Gallery of Art, D.C CEZANNE Still Life with Fruit Dish by French Post-Impressionist artist Paul Cezanne, oil on canvas, 1879 1880. The painting is housed in The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA, New York.jpg

Daily life in 1870 was disrupted by the Franco-Prussian war that killed Bazille. Monet and Pissarro went to England to avoid being drafted. By 1873, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Cézanne, Morisot, Degas and others founded the ‘Société Anonyme Coopérative des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs’, to exhibit their artworks independently. In all, thirty artists exhibited in the first show, which was held a year later at the studio of the photographer Nadar.

Their paintings were still not attracting buyers however. The era of 1876-77 saw the creation of some of the greatest masterpieces such as Sisley’s ‘Floods at Port Marley’, Renoir’s ‘Moulin de la Galette’, Monet’s ‘Gare Saint-Lazare, Pissarro’s ‘Red Roofs’ and Degas’ ‘L’Absinthe’.

There were six more group exhibitions. Manet didn’t show in any of them while Pissarro showed in them all. The others fluctuated in their fidelity. Only Sisley remained totally faithful to the original concept. By then Pissarro was experimenting with Seurat’s famous dotted ‘pointillism’, Manet explored genre subjects and Degas turned to studies of women active in their daily work, such as laundresses and milliners.

The critical response was mixed. Monet and Cézanne received the harshest attacks. Critic and humorist Louis Leroy wrote a scathing review in which he played upon the title of Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant), now in the city’s Marmottan Museum, to give the artists the name by which they became known. He called his article ‘The Exhibition of the Impressionists’, and considered Monet’s painting to be, at most, a sketch not a finished work.

Monet, Sisley, Morisot, and Pissarro may be considered the ‘purest’ Impressionists, in their pursuit of an art of spontaneity, sunlight, and colour. Degas believed in the primacy of drawing over colour and thought less of painting outdoors. Renoir had an adversion to Impressionism during the 1880s. Manet, considered by them all as their leader, never abandoned his liberal use of black as a colour, which the Impressionists avoided, and never joined in their exhibitions preferring to submit his works to the Salon.

Among the artists of the core group, defections occurred as Cézanne, followed later by Renoir, Sisley, and Monet, abstained from the group exhibitions so they could submit their works to the Salon. Monet in 1880 accused the Impressionists of “opening doors to first-come daubers”.

The individual artists achieved few financial rewards from the Impressionist exhibitions but their art gradually won a degree of public acceptance and support. Success it seemed had finally arrived though too late for some like Manet and Sisley whose work only soared in value after their deaths. Monet and Renoir however had belated public recognition and their dealer, Durand-Ruel in 1886, played a major role in this as he kept their work before the public and arranged shows for them in London and New York.

It’s important to remember the poverty under which many lived. They led the Bohemian life in garrets and attics exemplified by Puccini’s opera La Bohème. The districts where the artists gathered were essentially cheap and located either side of the Avenue de Clichy and the Boulevard de Clichy near Montmartre which, at this time, was on the outskirts of the city with windmills. Here were their cafés and nightspots with exotic names like Divan-Japonais, La Souris, Moulin Rouge, Tambourin, Chat-Noir and La Place Blanche.

Thy haunted the Cirque Fernando and the Longchamps racecourse. They drank Absinthe and befriended Can-Can girls who were sufficiently magnetic to attract the paintbrush of Degas and Lautrec. The models had names like La Goulue, Yvette Guilbert, Jane Avril and May Belfort beside those of prostitutes and lesbians. A million miles and a hundred years on from the coffee table books in the future generation of salons.