The Impressionist Revolution: Monet to Matisse from the Dallas Museum of Art explores the fascinating story of Impressionism from its birth in 1874 to its legacy in the early twentieth century. Told entirely through the DMA’s exceptional holdings, this exhibition reveals the rebellious origins of the independent artist collective known as the Impressionists and the revolutionary course they charted for modern art.
Breaking with tradition in both how and what they painted, as well as how they showed their work, the Impressionists redefined what constituted cutting-edge contemporary art. The unique innovations of its core members, such as Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Berthe Morisot, set the foundation against which following generations of avant-garde artists reacted, from Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh to Piet Mondrian and Henri Matisse.
The Impressionist Revolution invites you to reconsider these now-beloved artists as the scandalous renegades they were, as well as the considerable impact they had on twentieth-century art.
REBELS WITH A CAUSE
In 1874 an artists’ collective that called itself the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, Etc. opened the first of what became eight group shows held over the course of twelve years. By organizing their own exhibitions, this collective we now call the Impressionists bypassed the official Salon organized by the state-run Academy of Fine Arts, an act that was as rebellious as it was entrepreneurial.
In contrast to the historical subjects and traditional styles championed by the Academy, the Impressionists shared a passion for capturing everyday modern life in all its realities, from the spectacular to the mundane, in an equally modern style. By painting iron bridges, steam-powered transportation, street life, and intimate scenes of domesticity, the Impressionists elevated routine sights to the status of high art.
Despite their efforts, the Impressionists’ exhibitions scandalized the Parisian public and were generally considered a failure. Apart from a few forward-thinking critics and collectors, there was little appreciation or market for this subversive artwork until well after the last show in 1886.
FIELD NOTES
The Impressionists’ radical approach extended beyond their subjects to their techniques and materials. Fueled by technological advances, such as the invention of the resealable metal paint tube and the expansion of railways, nearly all the Impressionists took their canvases outdoors to record the sensations of light and movement, whether in and around France’s capital or further afield to its coasts and southern regions.
To capture such fleeting effects, they rapidly applied bright pigments on light-hued grounds (preparatory layers) in broken, textured brushstrokes. They experimented with cutting-edge color theories, such as painting contrasting complementary colors side by side to boost each color’s vibrancy, and they avoided black and gray in their depiction of shadows and volume. They also chose not to apply shiny varnish, which was traditionally the final step that signified a finished oil painting.
The Impressionists’ vivid colors and dissolving forms stunned contemporary viewers, who were accustomed to the slick realism and earth-toned palettes of Academic paintings shown at the Paris Salon. Most critics and collectors saw Impressionist paintings as clumsy and sketch-like at best and garishly ugly at worst.
WEIRD SCIENCE
Georges Seurat revealed the shocking new style he had secretly been developing in his monumental painting Sunday La Grande Jatte. Whereas the Impressionists explored color and optical theories intuitively, Seurat transformed them into a science. The result was a technique he called Chromo-Luminarism, which is better known today as Pointillism or Neo-Impressionism. Instead of mixing colors on a palette, Seurat and such artists as Paul Signac and Camille Pissarro placed individual points of brilliant color side by side that, when seen from a distance, blend in the viewer’s eyes. Their shared aim was to create a truer representation of how we optically experience light and, in the process, restore the compositional stability that many felt had been abandoned by the Impressionists’ emphasis on spontaneity.
Seurat’s debut of Pointillism in 1886 at what would be the last Impressionist show provoked ridicule from critics and confounded exhibition visitors. Within the Impressionist circle, artists were split. Many saw the potential and experimented with the style, but most moved on quickly from its slow and laborious technique. Still others saw it as the death knell of Impressionism and left Paris in search of a new direction for modern art.
SIDE EFFECTS
Georges Seurat’s debut of Pointillism in 1886 created a backlash within the avant-garde art scene. Many artists with roots in Impressionism, including Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin, led a younger generation of artists in developing new styles that prioritized emotions, ideas, and personal expression over purely optical impressions. Antinaturalistic colors, exaggerated forms, and symbolic subjects characterize the work of the artists we now call the Post-Impressionists.
Though aspects of his theories and lifestyle are problematic, Gauguin was instrumental in this shift. He sought to restore a sense of authenticity to art making by stripping away Western pictorial conventions like linear perspective and modeling. He left Paris in search of “uncivilized” subjects, first in France’s remote regions and later in its colonies, that would embody the “primitive” quality he sought in his art. Van Gogh, Emile Bernard, and Paul Sérusier are among those who followed this example.
The Synthetic style Gauguin developed with Bernard, which emphasized the role of memory, imagination, and abstraction, would have a profound impact on Van Gogh and the young group of artists who called themselves the Nabis (prophets) in the late 1880s. The latter embraced the subversive concept that a painting was nothing more than a decorative arrangement of colors on a flat surface.
EVER AFTER
The radical aesthetics and groundbreaking subjects launched by the Impressionists, and the Post-Impressionists who followed, set the trajectory for the development of contemporary art in the twentieth century. Large retrospectives of the work of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin held in Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna, Dresden, and Berlin in the first decade of the 1900s contributed to the dissemination of their collective styles and theories across Europe. Younger generations of avant-garde artists actively engaged with the previous artistic movements’ core tenets, directly or indirectly, whether adopting or rejecting them.
Almost every stylistic breakthrough from this period—Cubism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Futurism, Abstraction—had its roots in the Impressionists’ subversion of traditional Academic values, from the subject depicted to the finish of the brightly colored surface. This gallery offers a glimpse into some of these innovative movements and their continuation, often to brilliant ends, of Impressionism’s legacy.
