The birth of Impressionism comes to life in an exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay

It might seem like gilding the lily to devote a two-part exhibition to a single historical event, and yet the result, “Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism,” is a revelation. In it, the Musée d’Orsay presents a show about a show, specifically, the first Impressionist exhibition, which opened 150 years ago and started what we think of as modern art.

The central exhibition, which commemorates the anniversary of that defining moment, is accompanied by a virtual reality component, the first time such a wide-ranging immersive technology has been used to enhance the experience of fine art. This side show, “Tonight with the Impressionists”, takes place in a space adjacent to the main exhibition.

The physical show (with an admission price of 32 euros, or about $35) is on view through August 11 and will travel to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in September (without the virtual reality component). Of the 157 works in the exhibition, 39 come from the Musée d’Orsay, 8 from the National Gallery and the rest from museums and private collections around the world.

The aim of the VR exhibition, which originated with the Orsay, is for visitors to relive the night of April 15, 1874, when the doors of the first Impressionist exhibition opened at 8 p.m. “It was a very human moment,” said Emmanuel Guerriero, head of the immersive technology firm Excurio, referring to the historic evening, “so we put human emotions in the foreground.” Excurio and Gedeon Experiences co-produced the VR show.

There are no photographs of the historic exhibition, which was hung by the artists themselves. Therefore, “we launched an investigation that lasted two years”, said Stéphane Millière, head of Gedeon Media Group.

Rose, a fictional model of 19th-century artists and aspiring artist, leads visitors equipped with virtual reality headsets through a 40-minute virtual reality experience that relives the opening in Paris. They also travel to Bougival, west of Paris, a favorite haunt of struggling young artists whose calling card was painting. in outdoors—and to the cliffs of Étretat and other key places where they worked or discussed their shared aesthetic mission.

This careful reconstruction took into account land surveys, aerial photography of the neighborhood and the studio, receipts and other documents, the original exhibition catalog (which can be seen in a display case), the letters written by the artists (which fed the VR script) and the reviews. by contemporary journalists. Bringing to life the site of the 1874 exhibition: the former Paris studio of photographer Gaspard-Felix Tourmachon (known professionally as Nadar), with its luxurious crimson tapestries and carpets, its tall windows and interior waterfall, and even its facade, which it boasted Nadar’s name chosen in red and gold lights.

According to Orsay exhibition co-curator Anne Robbins, Nadar rented the building, at 35 Boulevard des Capucines, to participating artists for 2,000 francs. These artists had formed, at the end of 1873, a cooperative society, a Society of painters, sculptors, engravers and lithographers, in response to the realities of the Paris Salon, official headquarters supervised by the Académie des Beaux-Arts, which had rejected a number of them at the end of the 1860s. What they desired was economic and artistic emancipation. Instead of being beholden to juries and art dealers, these frustrated renegades wanted to find their own audience and clientele.

The founding group consisted of 22 members, among them well-known names such as Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro. Its diverse and eclectic members, whose numbers had swelled to 31 by the opening in April, each paid 60 francs over the four weeks, Robbins said. ARTnews, and were meant to present two works each, although they all presented more, for a total of about 200 pieces. The exhibition, which opened 15 days before the Salon, attracted 3,500 paying visitors and garnered approximately 60 reviews.

“It was the first time the public was exposed to so many works called ‘Impressionist,'” Millière said. In fact, the term was coined just 10 days after the opening when journalist Louis Leroy used it to mock the sketchy approach encapsulated by Claude Monet’s work. Print, Sunrise (1872), with its now famous peach-colored orb floating on the pale gray-blue water. This work is located in its own room at the Orsay installation, accompanied by sunrise and sunset pastels by both Monet and his master Eugène Boudin.

The Orsay exhibition makes a tremendous effort to situate the term impressionism in context “There’s a myth that this was a movement of avant-garde, nasty artists,” said the show’s co-curator, Sylvie Patry. Instead, “it started with a cooperative project of 31, and not all of them were impressionists. It was more nuanced than that.” However, there was the audacity of the proposal itself. “Then critics commented that between [the artists]there was a core of bold ones,” Patry pointed out.

Certainly, a timeline at the beginning of the exhibition highlights the fact that several of the participating artists—Paul Cézanne, Alfred Sisley, Monet, Berthe Morisot and Pierre-Auguste Renoir—were born two years apart, between 1839 and 1841. with Pissarro and Edgar Degas born in 1830 and 1834, respectively). But what is common to this modest handful of artists was not a particular school or movement, but the desire to represent modern life; reject class hierarchies; capture impressions of fleeting moments; and introduce a new way of painting that involved loose, lively, bold brushwork and a lively play of colors.

This style would pave the way for other important artists and movements of the 20th century. But the very fact of the exhibition, which went beyond the Salon des Refusés of 1863 by defining itself outside any system of Salons, deserves special attention: “This form of [artists] organizing was in itself radical and revolutionary,” said Patry. “He was surprisingly young and independent.”

The physical exhibition of Orsay (like the virtual one) is closely related to the historical realities of 1874. It is striking how many of the pieces included came from private collections to achieve the goal of Robbins and Patry: almost all the works of “Paris 1874”. they derive from the first Impressionist exhibition, the Salon 91 of that year, or from later Impressionist shows.

In the first room, titled “Ruins and Reconstruction,” the curators provided context for the artworks on display. The lithographs, including two by Édouard Manet (who refused to participate in the first Impressionist exhibition) depict the tumult of the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the bloody rise and fall of the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871.

At the same time, as seen in works such as Louis-Émile Durandelle’s photographs of the construction of the Opera Garnier, the industrial revolution and the recent urban renewal driven by Baron Haussmann had created new buildings, railway stations and parks. The population doubled and new lifestyle trends were on the rise. In short, as one of the wall texts in the exhibition points out, in 1874 Paris was in the midst of a renaissance, full of new businesses, luxury shops and entertainment venues.

The exhibition proper begins in the second room, where Nadar’s studio photographs provide an introduction to some of the same works that opened the original 1874 show. Drawn from various locations, they convey the shock of modern life. In Renoir The Parisian (1874), from the National Museum, Cardiff, Wales, depicts the French actress Henriette Henriot, known for her roles at the Théâtre de l’Odéon. Chic in her last-minute dress and hat, she embodies the new Parisian woman. Next to her, Renoir’s The ballerina (1874), with its diaphanous blue-white tulle skirt and pink slippers, is on loan from the National Gallery in Washington. Monet’s street scene Boulevard des Capucines (1873–74), on loan from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, depicts a crush of people through which carriages pass. by Renoir The hostel (1874), now in the collection of the Courtauld Institute, London, depicts affluent theatergoers: he with raised opera glasses, she boldly surveying the crowd.

Further on, a gallery shows the conservative tastes of the wealthy Salon de Paris, from which the state made its purchases and which would soon open nearby in the Palais de l’Industrie et des Beaux-Arts. Here, historical paintings and monumental biblical and mythological scenes meet with genre scenes, landscapes and “Orientalist” works, many of them on loan from private collections or institutions such as the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Each was exhibited at Salon 91 in 1874.

Salon exhibition artists and Impressionists share the walls in later rooms, since – despite the external competition between the two shows – there were frequent overlaps. Later sections of the exhibition are devoted to paintings from five of the seven Impressionist exhibitions after 1874, when they expanded to include the Pointillist painters Georges Seurat and Paul Signac and the budding Symbolist painter Odilon Redon.

Although “Paris 1874” includes works by many lesser-known artists, the exhibition concludes with a parade of what are now considered masterpieces of Impressionism. The final gallery is filled with such famous works as Monet’s Saint-Lazare station (1877) with his steam engine blowing, and ends with Renoir’s Dance at the Moulin de la Galette (1877), all dappled with sunlight and shadow.

“Financially, it was not a success,” Robbins said of the 1874 program. “It was a failure.” Only a handful of paintings were sold: canvases by Sisley, Monet, Renoir and Cézanne. By the end of the year, the company was bankrupt. But this financial failure was an achievement with immense implications, forever changing the direction of art history.

“We didn’t want to pay homage to Impressionism, but to show a precise moment in time, the birth of a movement,” Patry said. Like the paintings it presents, the exhibition focuses on a transitory moment, but it was a consequential one.