The birth certificate is 1874, in Paris. A group of young artists, after having caused a scandal with their bold innovative ideas and having seen the doors of the Salon, a biennial art exhibition held at the Louvre in Paris, considered the only way to make themselves known, barred, decided to unite forces and organize an independent exhibition in the photographer Nadar's studio. The term "impressionism" which gave its name to the current arose from a derogatory expression of their artistic philosophy by an established art critic who wrote that their works and their painting technique expressed a sense of incompleteness or could be considered at most an artistic "impression". Disapprovals from the bourgeois public and the academic world, ruthless judgments from critics, furious clashes with the press, were unable to stifle the desire for something new from the group of artists who, on the contrary, found the energy to carry forward precisely from the reactions they encountered when they appeared. their revolution.
The project of a collective exhibition came to fruition after Ernest Hoschedé had successfully sold several paintings by the Batignolles group
The exhibition was organized in particular by the ephemera Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs (“Society of painters, sculptors and engravers”), in the studio of the photographer Nadar, a prestigious location on the Boulevard des Capucines, in Paris. The initiative aimed to present modern artists in a broad sense. But the choice, testifying to the effervescence of the group, was not unanimous: Degas wanted to propose the participation of artists from all over, while Monet wanted to reject those who had made concessions in order to exhibit at the official Salon. In the end, a compromise emerged and 175 works by 30 painters were exhibited, more or less avant-garde for most of them, it was the only so-called "impressionist" exhibition in which they participated.
Among the artists who exhibited those who attracted the most attention from critics were Degas, Renoir and Monet
The painting "Impression, Sunrise" created by Monet will give its name to the new style thanks to the satirical pen of Louis Leroy, journalist of Le Charivari. The exhibition despite having been a commercial failure that led to the dissolution of the Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, attracted around 3500 visitors and gave the Impressionists confidence in the merits of their movement. After the mixed reactions at the first exhibition (Renoir's Nude in the Sun was judged as the representation of the "putrefaction of a corpse" with "purple tones of rancid flesh") the sale organized on the following 24 March 1875 at the Hôtel Drouot was desolate: there was a riot and only half of the works were sold. Due to the economic recession, Durand-Ruel, having returned to Paris, decided to no longer actively support artists and did not resume his purchases until 1881, however, modern art began to interest collectors who came forward; among these Victor Chocquet, friend of Renoir and Cézanne, who began to build an important collection from this date, the baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure, as well as Georges Charpentier, thanks to whom several personal exhibitions will take place (Renoir in 1879, Manet and Monet in 1880, Sisley in 1881). His wife, painted by Renoir twice, also supported the group of impressionists and invited them to her social evenings, where they had the opportunity to meet Léon Gambetta, Gustave Flaubert, Joris-Karl Huysmans, the brothers Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, Alphonse Daudet or Jules Ferry. If 1874 was the birth date of the current, the premises are in place since 1859 with the arrival in Paris of Claude Monet and the return of Edgar Degas, the first accepted proposals of Pissarro at the Salon, and the rejected ones by Manet, Henri Fantin-Latour and James Whistler. Gustave Courbet, an influential master of the realists and a lover of open-air painting, did not exhibit there. In general, the Salon of 1859 had marked the decline of historical painting, replaced by landscape and genre scenes.
150 years after the historic date, Rome celebrates an exhibition
A date that brought a current of fresh air to the artistic world of the time Rome celebrates the adventure of Impressionism with a major exhibition entrusted to Vincent Sanfo in collaboration with Vittorio Sgarbi, Gilles Chazal, former Director Musée du Petit Palais, Member école du Louvre and Maithe Valles-Bled, former Director Musée de Chartres and Musee Paul Valéry, which will be held from 30 March to 28 July at the Historical Infantry Museum of Piazza Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, with the eloquent title: 'Impressionists. The dawn of modernity'.
The exhibition offers a nucleus of around 200 works, which document with paintings, drawings, watercolors, sculptures, ceramics and engravings, the artists who participated in the eight official "impressionist" exhibitions with particular attention to all the techniques they experimented and used. It is not just a theory of paintings lined up next to each other, but rather an organic set of works that intends to document the outbreak of the impressionist revolution in Paris, investigating a time span that goes from 1850 to 1915. The exhibition project highlights the important changes in the society of the time with the advent of great industrialization, the birth of photography, cinema, electricity, the telephone and the first airplane flights, all exalted and proposed in the famous international exhibitions in Paris. News, which have obviously contributed to changing society and consequently also the world of art. The large body of works is accompanied by documentary materials, letters, photographs, books, clothes and objects that offer a cross-section of the society born and established during the Impressionist movement. The exhibition itinerary, in addition to the masters of their reference such as David, Guericault, Courbet, develops starting from the artists adhering to the Ecole de Barbizon movement who were the inspiring seeds of the young Impressionists, and then moves on to the participants in the eight official Impressionist exhibitions in starting from the historic one of 1874 created in the studio of the photographer Nadar which represented the official entry of the movement into the world of art. The works of the great protagonists therefore find a place in the exhibition: Monet, Degas, Manet, Renoir, Cezanne, Gauguin, Pissarro and others, alongside the great supporting actors such as Bracquemond, Guillaumin, Forain, Desboutin, Lepic and all the other artists who with them they shared the adventure of a new way of making art.
The exhibition, perhaps the largest and most complete on Impressionism ever to appear in Italy
The largest in terms of quantity of works and artists present, it allows you to enter the heart of a movement that undermined the artistic and social conventions of the world to come. The loans, coming from private collections, highlight a substratum that is anything but popular, of precious artefacts that are almost never donated to the public. The presence of some post-Impressionist figures also documents the influence that the movement had in the artistic world of the late nineteenth century, highlighted by the presence of artists such as Toulouse Lautrec, Permeke, Derain, Dufy and Vlaminck among others.
SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE:
– Gilles Chazal: former Director Musée du Petit Palais, Member école du Louvre
– Vittorio Sgarbi: Art Historian, Director of Mart of Rovereto
– Vincenzo Sanfo: Curator of international exhibitions, expert in Impressionism
– Maithe Valles-Bled: former Director of Musée de Chartres and Musee Paul Valéry
