The Impressionists: Masterpieces from the Musée d'Orsay
Exhibition themes: Manet, Degas, Renoir, Morisot
It is ironic that two of the greatest names associated with the Impressionist movement, Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas, each held ambivalent views about their association with Impressionism.
Manet's paintings of modern life in Paris, and his evocative reworkings of the old masters (Titian, in his controversial Olympia 1863, and Goya in The Balcony 1868-69 in the present exhibition) had from the 1860s signaled his position at the helm of a new generation of artists who sought to break with traditional pictorial conventions. Yet Manet, despite his friendships with his Impressionist colleagues, the active involvement of his sister-in-law Berthe Morisot with the new movement, and his own failures on the different path he chose for himself, held true to his belief that success for an artist could only be achieved through recognition at the official Salons.
While Degas did participate in seven of the eight Impressionist group shows, he was not enamoured of the term Impressionism being applied to his own work. This was because he seldom painted out of doors, en plein air ; and also, doubtless, due to his recognition of the manner in which his obsession with reworking a motif across dozens of preparatory drawings and painted sketches before completing a single painting was far removed from any concept of a rapidly executed 'impression'.
After having his work rejected from the Salons of 1872 and 1873, Auguste Renoir joined with his artist friends in organizing the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. He also exhibited in the second and third Impressionist group showings in 1876 and 1877, contributing primarily figurative compositions such as his Claude Monet painting 1875 in the present exhibition. As his relationship with the publisher Georges Charpentier and his wife Marguerite brought him a new and wealthy clientele, however, Renoir withdrew from the Impressionist exhibitions, choosing to send his portraits and figure paintings to the more conservative venues that his clients preferred, such as the official Salon.
Berthe Morisot, on the other hand, showed works in all but one of the eight Impressionist exhibitions held in Paris between 1874 and 1886 (the exception being 1879, when she was recovering from childbirth). Like Renoir, Morisot's subjects were also primarily figurative, although often painted out of doors; but they were somewhat more confined in scope than those of Renoir, due to the constraints of her gender and class. A core member of the Impressionist group since its inception in December 1873, she had also been actively involved in organizing their exhibitions.
