In April 1874, the public exhibition of a group of independent artists, cautiously established as a Public Limited Company for legal purposes, was inaugurated in Paris. Date that rightly commemorates the birth of impressionism as the singular and contagious artistic movement that was to mark the sensitive culture of its time with audacity and aesthetic conviction: “The era of impressionism”, as the manuals then in use recall. Throughout these months and with the appropriate critical record, the Musée d’Orsay of the French capital celebrates the centenary evolution of the movement – ??a century and a half, to be precise – taking into account that in 1974 it had also been celebrated with the honors due to the event with a dazzling display of works never seen before in the Grand Palais that generated ultra-European complicities among which the immediate and stimulating presence in the National Gallery of Art in the North American capital stood out. Washington’s sonorous exhibition serves today as a cardinal motif for the more than evocative historical exhibition of the Musée d’Orsay: serious and solid documentary research on the pioneering daring of 1874, but from a new angle that recovers the surprising convergence of the artists who then They presented to an eager and intrigued public their formal and figurative achievements, which we would soon call avant-garde.
The mocking attitude towards the exhibition, which there was, and dissolving, came from a controversial critic with a hurtful pen from the magazine Le Charivari, with sarcastic and contemptuous tendencies who dared to demystify the iconic painting by Claude Monet – Impression, rising sun, from 1872 –, resplendent and controversial reference of the artistic parade. Virtual reality, now at the visitor’s fingertips, makes it possible to correct the excesses and figuratively complete the extraordinary impressionist universe of the moment. The birth of an era that was basic and radical, founding the European artistic culture to come.
We owe the historian Ernst Gombrich the accurate realization of the spectacle and the insightful premonition of the subversive initiatives that the new art stimulated. The “impressionist secret” undoubtedly resided in the belligerence and maturity of the creator Monet to delve into plein air painting and abandon the studio to expose himself to the tempting challenge of the landscape. The artist could observe, in this way, the pictorial variations and curiosities that dazzled even Monet himself: a painting, nature and motif, that will transfigure the moment energetically stimulated by light, which together with color will be the strident graphic strategies discovered. He also urged leaving the details, always essential, alone and abandoning oneself to sensitive sensations, a visual and speculative empire with sure scientific roots that would make fortune during the great innovative century. An attitude, of course, that opened up the perception of the painting at stake to bewildered critics, accustomed to a realism with borders.
The bold exhibition, presented in the central studio of the photographer Nadar, of Impression, dawn, the definitive title of the work, received angry comments, according to the opinion of the time, for its hasty workmanship and the everyday look at the themes. But the serene and penetrating painting of Claudius of Lorraine, William Turner and Camille Pissarro of pioneers will act as a protective shield for the newcomers and legitimize their transgressive proposals to the public eye. A conclusive affirmation of the empire of the eye, in short, to evaluate and calibrate light and color in the new representation. The wise mix of lighting effects and chromatic experimentation, of strong scientific inspiration, I insist, will end up striking strongly in the surprised and perhaps confused gaze of the viewer. The impression changes as the forms of representation adjust to the observer’s unprecedented expectations. A seemingly simple suggestion, but one that miraculously generated a resounding echo, not only in the artistic criticism of the moment but in the tense and laborious silence of the artistic workshops, always in deaf professional competition.
I remember the disconcerting impact of the Parisian artistic display of 1974. I visited the exhibition with my specialty students, enthusiastic about understanding the roots, traps and half-truths of modern painting that already fantasized a radiant classicism that was assumed to be ephemeral. The visit was, by a gratifying chance, accompanied by the appearance of the now legendary History of Impressionism by John Rewald. A living experience that would forever transform our perception of modern art up to the present and that we can now redo with a grateful gesture. Perhaps the book was the first non-dogmatic manual for reading and information available at the time, which combined theory and artistic practice without neglecting terminological precision and the scientific roots of the tradition of new art that was beginning to emerge with a haughty gesture among us. Citizens of that perennial bankrupt Spain and today democratic Europeans in their own right and long battle. Two feats.
