The Dark Origins of Impressionism

How the violence and deprivation of war inspired light-filled masterpieces

- Susan Tallman

For museums and their public, Impressionism is the Goldilocks movement: not too old or too new, not too challenging or too sappy; just right.

Renaissance art may baffle with arcane religious symbolism, contemporary art may baffle on purpose, but put people in a gallery with Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Camille Pissarro, and explanatory wall texts feel superfluous.

Eyes roam contentedly over canvases suffused with light, vibrant with gesture, and alive with affable people doing pleasant things.

What's not to love? Famously, of course, Impressionism was not greeted with love at the outset.

In 1874, the first Impressionist exhibition was derided in the press as a "vexatious mystification for the public, or the result of mental derangement." A reviewer called Paul Cézanne "a sort of madman, painting in a state of delirium tremens," while Berthe Morisot was privately advised by her former teacher to "go to the Louvre twice a week, stand before Correggio for three hours, and ask his forgiveness." The very term Impressionim was born as a diss, a mocking allusion to Monet's shaggy, atmospheric painting of the Le Havre waterfront, Impression, Sunrise (1872).

Few people saw affability: In 1874, the term commonly applied to Monet and his ilk was "intransigent." Impressionism's rom-com arc from spirited rejection to public rapture informs our fondness for the pictures (plucky little underdogs), and has also provided a lasting model for avant-gardism as a mechanism of cultural change. We now take it for granted that young mavericks should team up to foment new ways of seeing that offend the establishment before being vindicated by soaring auction prices and long museum queues. . For most of history, however, that wasn't the way things worked.

Thus the 1874 exhibition has acquired legendary status as the origin point of self-consciously modern art.