Impressionism was a revolution that changed art forever. When Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and their fellow experimenters painted the ephemeral light on dappled woods and rainy Paris streets, they destroyed the traditional idea that art must reveal nature’s deeper truth.
Only the light in the painter’s eye – a fleeting glimpse of a passing moment – mattered for the impressionists. When Monet painted a serpentine curving line of poplar trees in 1891 he caught their greenness against a violet sky. Just to emphasise the momentary and even delusory nature of this strange effect he painted them from another viewpoint as stately sentinels reflected in water. And again, looking like totem poles.
Monet’s 1891 series Poplars, brought together again from collections all over the world for this thought-provoking exhibition, is a tour de force of modern art that shows it was Monet, not Picasso, who first revealed the true complexity of perception and memory in paintings with multiple viewpoints.
But then, the impressionists are not who you think they were. You thought Edgar Degas just painted ballet dancers? At the second impressionist group show in 1876 he exhibited a painting of naked peasant girls cavorting in the sea, wild and uninhibited, letting it all hang out more than 30 years before Matisse painted The Dance.
Inventing Impressionism sees the familiar through new eyes. They are the eyes of Paul Durand-Ruel, the first art dealer who believed in the impressionists. It was at his gallery in 1876 that Degas displayed that shocking primitivist seaside scene. It is often said impressionism is an art that portrays the French bourgeoisie at play. But by going back and painstakingly finding the paintings Durand-Ruel sold and tried to sell, this serious, intelligent show casts doubt on that cosy stereotype.
Edouard Manet’s great painting The Battle of the Kearsage and Alabama, for instance, is a violent image of history happening right here, right now. The Alabama was a Confederate ship that attacked the north’s Atlantic supply lines during the Amercian Civil War. In 1864 the Kearsage tracked it down off the Normandy coast and sank it. Manet painted this smoky scene of modern warfare after apparently watching the fight from a boat.
He finished his contemporary history painting in a month – this is painting as reportage, what the critic and poet Baudelaire advocated when he wrote about “the painting of modern life”.
Berthe Morisot has eyes for another side of modern life – women’s work. Her 1875 painting Hanging the Laundry Out to Dry shows servants going about their daily routine in a middle class garden. Manet too shows a woman bored by her job in his oil sketch for his Courtauld Gallery masterpiece, A Bar at the Folies-Bergere.
The exhibition has its longeurs. There are so many paintings by Renoir that don’t work; it is hard to get excited about another river scene by Sisley. And yet, impressionism emerges here not as some soppy sensual reboot of landscape painting but a clear-eyed report on the modern world.
Who are those Victorians out for a stroll around 1870–71 in Monet’s painting Green Park, London? Reduced to daubed stick figures, holding hands or sitting on the grass, fuzzy in the city light, they might be you or me. We moderns will never really outgrow the first artists who showed us our reflection.
Inventing Impressionism is on at the National Gallery, London, from 4 March-31st May