🟧 Paintings of your friends and nice dinners
Impressionist modernism at the National Gallery of Art
Kyle Chayka: On the wall of a gallery in the National Gallery of Art in DC, there’s a line from an 1874 piece on Manet in La Revue de France: Manet “seems concerned above all else to express modern life exactly as it is,” Ernest Chesneau wrote, 150 years ago. “Modern life” is one of those eternal phrases, despite its semantic timeliness. Isn’t every era modern unto itself? Or was “the modern” a discrete period, stretching a century from the 1860s to the 1960s, and the type of life established then is what is described as modern? As in the art world, have we moved on from the modern into the contemporary or even toward the “post-contemporary”? Is there a painter of post-contemporary life? No — I think we are always living in a modern way.
But Manet and the other Impressionists captured life in a more modern way than most. The longer I sit with Impressionism, the more radical I believe it is, the more eternally fresh and alive it feels, in a way that I don’t get from most Abstract Expressionism or other, more recognizably modernist movements. An exhibition “Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment” is now on view at the National Gallery (through Jan 19), and you can just walk into it for free, as everyone should. It mingles works from the French Salon exhibition of that year, presented by the official academy of artists, and works from the First Impressionist Exhibition, an avant-garde pop-up show put on at the same time by those avant-gardists: Manet, Monet, Berthe Morisot, Pissarro, Degas, Cezanne. The Impressionists painted freely from life around them: factory chimneys rising over the Seine but also the views from their studios, their friends having picnics, a nice breakfast, a nice dinner.
It takes effort to remember that the figures and outfits in the paintings were just what was around at the time, not some remembered or imagined history. The frocks and suits were the equivalent of today’s cardigans and crop tops and baggy jeans and chore coats. (There’s a genre of 21st-century painting that I’ve taken to thinking of as Brooklyn Impressionism, IYKYK.) In the paintings, these are people just walking around in the park upon an afternoon, taking their dogs out, drinking glasses of wine. (I would love to see an Impressionism show focused solely on meals and tables.) The normalcy was radical, the banality was modern. There is no historical drama playing out, no referenced mythical or religious narrative. In fact, the non-narrative quality might have something to do with Impressionism’s eternal freshness. Things are just happening.
It also has to do with the simple documentation of light hitting a figure, a piece of fruit, a field of flowers. Which is a thing that has always happened the same way and always will until the sun dies or is blocked from planet Earth. This 1873 painting “In the Wheat Field” by the lesser-known (these days) painter Giuseppe De Nittis was shown in the more conservative Salon exhibition, but it holds up to the official Impressionists. You can practically feel the breeze blowing through it. (One achievement of the NGA exhibition is to make the Impressionists feel less separatist or rebellious and more interwoven in their moment.) Another French critic wrote in 1874, “We are tired of the conventions, of formulaic beauties, of style and cliched subjects. We want real truth, without attenuation or circumlocutions.” That feeling has probably been expressed in every moment of history, the craving for direct sensation, for the fact of being alive. The craving to be modern.
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