The Art Institute of Chicago Favorite Impressionist Paintings [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION byJ. PATRICE MARANDEL formercurator: The Art Institute of Chicago o F ALL MOVEMENTS THAT SHAPED the history of modern art, impressionism had the most ex- traordinary fate. Despised, scorned, ridiculed by most contemporary critics, rejected by the public, collected only by a few believers, the paintings of these artists, within less than fifty years, were avidly sought by private and pub- lic collectors. No other school ever affirmed itself so quickly, and with such force. None reached the galleries of major museums so soon after its first appearance. The same Claude Monet whose letters to friends written in the 1860s reveal his poverty—he was then literally starving to death—was proud to send an elegant car to pick up visitors to his retreat at Giverny in the early years of this century. This mark of success was more than merely fortunate: it was a symbol of the impres- sionists' triumph over the blindness and igno- rance of the narrow-minded and self- protective art establishment that reigned in their early days. A century after the creations of these pain- ters were first shown to the public, impres- sionism has become a household word. Sur- prisingly, with the exception of some younger painters today who, deeply interested in color, still find in Monet, Renoir, or Degas a source of inexhaustible challenge, impressionism has ceased to shock—or even to provoke—pas- sionate reactions from the public. Most museums now exhibit next to the paintings of the impressionists those of Caba- nel, Bouguereau, and other academic contem- poraries who despised them. In its typical noncommitted style, the twentieth century puts all these works on the same level, trying to rediscover what was already too well known in the late nineteenth century. Can this situa- tion be explained? Perhaps the impressionists were occasionally their own worst enemies. By choosing "easy" or banal subjects, they often acquired a reputation for facility that over- shadowed the ambition of their project and their radical attitude toward painting. And their choices of subjects—numerous bouquets and pretty children—gave them a reputation for "sweetness." In fact, they were discovering serialism, and they treated their "pretty" sub- jects with the same detachment with which they were treating haystacks, railroad stations, or river banks. Few attempts have been made to place the impressionist painters in their historical con- text. For the most part, they were not born in Paris. Most of them were from the lower or middle classes. Like the characters of a novel by Balzac, they converged on the capital in order to seek fame and fortune. In the years preceding the Commune of 1870, Paris was one of Europe's most fascinating cities. While the backward-looking court of Napoleon III was trying to live in a dreamy recreation of the eighteenth century—typified, for instance, in the paintings of Winterhalter—the emperor's ministers and high officials were changing the image of Paris and of France. Baron Hauss- mann transformed Paris from a small, some-