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This revolution was achieved by around just 20 artists,
working in one city, Paris, all children of their time
150 YEARS AGO, on 15 April 1874, the first impressionist exhibition opened in Paris. Seldom in the history of European painting has a single movement caused so profound a shock as impressionism, and seldom, if ever, has one exhibition had as much impact on the history of art. Within a century its exponents became household names around the world, and the prices for their work equalled and then surpassed those of the old masters. If there could be a comparison for their achievement it is certainly only with the Renaissance, when humans first believed in a universe that could be ordered and even controlled, determining what was seen and expressed not in terms of a transcendental scale of values but by the laws of perspective. Te impressionists went one further, liberating art from its dependence on dogma and attempting to paint not what they thought they saw, nor what they were told they ought to see, but what they actually did see. From that emancipation came the art of the 20th century in all its variety.
Not only that, but this revolution was achieved by around just 20 artists, working in one city, Paris, all children of their time and the product of a unique cultural environment that moulded them as much as they influenced it. Between the birth of Pissarro in 1830 and the death of Monet in 1926 France had a variety of governments and constitutions; it was involved in two major wars, several minor ones, and a brief civil war that culminated in the brutal crushing of the Commune. It also gained an empire in both Africa and Asia, and was transformed from an agricultural economy to a primarily industrial one. Waves of financial scandal had swept the country on a regular basis, and the
passions aroused by the Dreyfus affair divided it.
Out of this maelstrom came a group of bourgeois who cared little for any of this. In general they were not personally rebellious, in appearance they were not eccentric, and they were not strikingly different to their fellow citizens. Pissarro was a socialist, Renoir and Degas were out-and-out reactionaries, blatantly anti-Semitic, believing in the inferiority of women, and that ‘education would be the downfall of the working class’. Cézanne had very bad manners but settled down to a provincial life in Aix-en-Provence a confirmed conservative and devout Catholic. Manet was a Republican, and the only one to
leave a record of the horrors of the 1871 crushing of the Commune. One of the consequences of
industrialisation was the rapid expansion of the railways. When Cézanne first visited Paris in 1861 it took him three days; by 1893 it took him a day. (As one seasoned traveller observed, Paris was now only 33 cigars from Marseille.) Te impressionists were able to travel on a scale unknown to their predecessors, exploring not just the Seine and the Channel coast, but Normandy and Brittany, Venice and London. Technological developments meant that from the 1840s malleable-lead paint tubes facilitated painting in the open-air, the discovery of new dyes extended the range of colours available, and research chemists worked on optical combinations of colours that became fundamental to the techniques of impressionism, pointillism, and divisionism. Ten there was photography, what Degas called ‘magical instantaneity’, making accurate reproduction possible, and thus promoting visual literacy among an ever- larger number of people. Te explosion in the number of newspapers and periodicals quadrupled in a century and the appetite for journalism about art was enormous. Te number of dealers in Paris trebled over a century from 1861, the most prominent of whom was Paul Durand-Ruel, who, after taking over the business following the death of his father in 1865, dedicated his professional career to making a success of the new art. By the end of the 19th century, Paris was universally acknowledged as the art capital of the world. Its new, grandiose public buildings and the great railway termini, the development of department stores such as
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