Impressionism, Originality, and Laissez-Faire
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1 Impressionism, Originality, and Laissez-Faire ROBERT L. HERBERT with the advent of Symbolism in the late 1880s, that in their mature work Morisot, Degas, Monet, and the growth of an antinaturalist current in the Renoir, Cassatt, and Manet were depicting their own paintings of younger artists (Seurat, Van Gogh, Gau- society without analyzing it. They enjoyed theaters guin), Impressionist art came to be regarded as an un- and promenades in the country and simply rep- thinking form of naturalism. The Symbolist critics resented these innocent pleasures. Praise for them praised the new painters by claiming that their art was therefore fell not on their images of contemporary rich in intellectual, expressive, and decorative ideas, life, but on their innovations in color, brushwork, and as opposed to Impressionism which, they believed, other aspects of “pure painting,” so congenial to the merely added a heightened color sense to the old Re- era of abstraction, given the premium it has placed naissance tradition of verisimilitude. Impressionist on the formal components of painting. naturalism was dismissed by Félix Fénéon, Seurat’s Since the 1940s this view has been discredited, and chief defender, in these derisive terms: scholars have expanded the range of issues eligible for analysis to include complicated interrelationships The spectacle of the heavens, the water, greenery, among painting, literature, and the history of Paris varies from moment to moment, professed the first from 1848 to the 1880s.2 We now know that Impres- Impressionists. To imprint one of these fugitive sionism was not a simple-minded representation of appearances on the retina was their goal. Thus arose color-light, and we are constantly reminded of the the necessity to paint a landscape in one séance and a tendency to make nature grimace in order to prove painters’ innovations, for which the words “radical” that the moment was unique and that one would never and “revolutionary” are frequently used (especially again see it.1 by corporate sponsors of the recent spate of “block- buster” Impressionist exhibitions). We have learned This view became commonplace in the twentieth that Impressionism really was born of adversity and century, and until the 1940s it was generally believed miscomprehension; its new brushwork, color, and 23 Copyrighted Material spatial organization were subversive; its devotion to urbs for most of their subjects; even when they turned the immediate present was profoundly shocking; its to the countryside, they represented it as though it subjects and attitudes undermined the whole concept were newly seen, free of the literary, historical, and of what art was, what art schools should teach, and moral overlays that had characterized the work of how art exhibitions should be organized. the preceding generation. They dealt in what are, af- All this is well worth pointing to, but were the Im- ter all, slight events in the history of humankind, pressionists radicals? On the surface of it, no. Caille- mere ephemeral moments seized from the pleasure of botte, Degas, Manet, and Morisot were upper-class leisure-time activities. Not only did they turn toward Parisians who can readily be assimilated with their present-day subjects, they also emphasized features peers, and who demonstrated no wish to make pro- that pointed to the immediate and the momentary. found alterations of their society. Monet was the up- There are many ways to represent a moored sailboat start son of a shopkeeper, eager to be accepted, and or a ballet rehearsal, but Monet and Degas used bro- Renoir, the only Impressionist of artisan-class ori- ken brushwork, indistinct contours, bright colors, and gins, was critical of the ruthlessness of urban-indus- striking compositional geometry to induce in the trial society, but wanted to return to a premodern pa- viewer a sense of the spontaneous, the unresolved, trician order.3 Pissarro was the only political radical that which is just now being seen. Impressionism, among the painters, but he remains a special case, and wrote César Graña, he dealt with rural life, not with the urban and sub- urban society the others preferred. assumes a world in which moments can exist as total What is needed in order to assess the label “rad- units of experience: where self-feeling, as well as the ical” are inquiries along new lines. Further investi- perception of others, has a new swiftness and, within gation of the artists’ subjects, especially their pref- that, a new, flickering poignancy; where the ephem- erence for themes of leisure and entertainment, eral and the unguarded can be memorable and must should be revealing.4 Systematic study of the artists’ be followed and scanned by the painter with a flash- 6 clients and dealers, not yet undertaken, would cer- ing perceptivity of his own. tainly be rewarding. Many of their early patrons, for example, were not long-established members of high Graña’s words point to the combination of external society, but wielders of new money: the financier observation and subjectivity that marked Impres- Ernest May, the banker Albert Hecht, the retailer and sionism. When the painters concentrated upon the il- speculator Ernest Hoschedé, the renowned baritone lusion of what could be seen in the flash of a moment, Jean-Baptiste Faure. The links between the new they seemed to reduce experience to the self, unsup- money and the new painting are doubtless there, but ported by references to other moments, to other ex- will remain speculative until someone does the work. periences. This was upsetting to many, for the viewer, In addition to these aspects of social history, we required to concentrate on this one moment, was de- should look more deeply into the often discussed is- nied contact with other moments—with memory, in sues of the “caught moment,” the hedonistic indul- eªect. gence in natural light and out-of-doors living, the Denial of memory meant denial of history, a per- pronounced individualism of the painters, and their vasive consequence of the Impressionists’ orienta- concern for originality. This chapter concentrates on tion. “History” was not simply the discarded subjects the last two of these.5 of earlier painting, but the means by which they were The Impressionists’ devotion to contemporary rendered, particularly the structure of light and dark phenomena is now recognized as one of the key ele- that gave conventional painting the satisfactory illu- ments of their art. They looked to Paris and its sub- sion of three dimensions. The exaltation of bright 24 ROBERT L. HERBERT Copyrighted Material color and patchy brushwork was the Impressionists’ ence for painting, were discarded with surprising ra- way of presenting what one could see, without re- pidity during the third quarter of the nineteenth cen- course to what one “knows” by virtue of traditional tury, first by the Barbizon artists in the second halves artistic training. This was only an apparent spon- of their careers, then by the Impressionists (after taneity, for Impressionism was just as artfully con- youthful essays in traditional subjects). An education structed as earlier painting. However, to many obser- in Greek and Latin, in Homer and Virgil, and in the vers, then and later, the concentration on spontaneous Bible had little real function for the entrepreneurs of vision and the absence of memory-trained techniques industrial capitalism: “If you’re so smart, why ain’t condemned the Impressionists to a superficial indul- you rich?” These premodern subjects, which had gence in pleasures. Max Friedländer, gifted historian been attached to monarchy, nobility, and theocracy, of Lowlands art, could not grant profundity to Im- eventually ceased to underpin public education (pri- pressionism because he believed that seeing was not vate schools, out of class solidarity, retained the old just looking with the eyes, but with the judgments curriculum for much longer). The Impressionists provided by memory and history: were ahead of most of their contemporaries when they denounced the Academy and its retardataire al- The man who knows most sees most; he sees more legiance to those traditional sources. than is actually visible to him in a given instant and To uproot the past was no easy step for the painters from a given standpoint. The Impressionists, how- to take, and this is evident when we reflect on the ever, were at pains to forget what they knew so as to upheavals it caused. Manet’s mocking of history in notice only what fell within their field of vision. his Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia (both Musée The Impressionists, deliberately forgoing all d’Orsay, Paris), as well as in other pictures of the criticism and judgment in respect of the phenomenal 1860s, was linked to his defiance of the government’s world, appealing neither to sentiment nor to sense of guardians of history—the directors of fine arts, the humor, absorbing the prismatic glitter of things with a positive neutrality, mark the visual art oª from the Academy, the juries of o‹cial exhibitions. The other art of poetry, from history, from satire, as also from Impressionists did battle with the government by or- the aªecting, entertaining, instructive or informa- ganizing their own exhibitions, a step which eªec- tive type of narrative. The picture is no longer the tively, by the end of the century, demoted the Acad- exemplar of an idea, does not point beyond the visi- emy’s shows to minor status, and set the pattern for ble, strikes us as something unique, individual, like a twentieth-century exhibitions, so often sponsored by portrait.7 independent artists’ societies. A number of the Im- pressionists had only perfunctory periods of training For this reason, Friedländer denied the label “genre” in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and their example led to to Impressionism.