Meeting With The French Impressionists At Splendid New Exhibition Worth The Trip To Paris

28.03.2024 - 11:35 / forbes.com / Claude Monet / Art

Impressionism, the movement that forever marked the history of art, is now 150 years old, almost to the day. To celebrate the anniversary, the Musee d’Orsay in Paris together with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., just opened a very anticipated exhibition, Paris 1874 Inventing impressionism,where spectators have the chance to feel as if they were there for the movement’s birth.

Despite the immense number of exhibitions and studies devoted to Impressionism over the 1 1/2 centuries since its launch, this is the first event organized to mark its birth and it promises to be among the blockbuster art shows of the year, with some 160 works offering a fresh look at the period.

Paris 1874 Inventer l’impressionnisme, which opened March 26, runs until July 14 before flying to Washington where it will be showcased from September 8, 2024, to January, 19, 2025.

Organized to re-create that day 150 years ago, on April 15, 1874, when the very first exhibition of the movement opened at the studio of photographer Félix Nadar at 35 boulevard des Capucines in Paris, Inventing Impressionism assembles a selection of works featured in that original show along with paintings, sculptures and other works shown at the official Salon of that same year. The museum’s point is to put in perspective the historic event considered the kick-off of the avant-garde movement.

The curators achieved exceptional loans of those works from museums and collections, notably “Impression Soleil Levant” (the image in the poster of the show) by Claude Monet, the title of which inspires the term "impressionist," a mocking label by a journalist at the time and accepted by the painters themselves for this artistic movement, sealing its success.

They were 30 artists, largely unknown and struggling, who wished to free themselves from the academic codes of the annual official “Salon” led by the Beaux-Arts establishment. They decided to organize their own independent exhibition outside the official channels with a selection of 200 works including very emblematic ones by, among others, Monet, Renoir, Morisot, Cézanne and Pizarro.

Although there are no photographs of the original exhibition and but a few brief descriptions, the museum has recreated that slice of history to permit visitors to immerse themselves in the wealth of contemporary creation in that spring of 1874, highlighted by the radical modernity of the art of the young artists, through two complementary events: the Inventing Impressionism exhibit and One Evening with the Impressionists Paris 1874, a virtual reality experience of unprecedented scale that plunges the public into the heart of that show where Impressionism was born.

Equipped with virtual reality headsets, the public