Just a few days ago, it was the 149th anniversary of first impressionist exhibition, held at 35 Boulevard des Capucines in Paris from April 15 to May 15, 1874, doors open 10 am – 6 pm, 8 pm – 10 pm. This little fact led me down a blooming spring path of reading up on the event and the subsequent seven exhibitions, the last of which was in 1886. All in all, the recurrence of these exhibitions was amazing, especially given the number of artist egos and practicalities (such as money) involved.
I began with this excellent Artchive summation and wound up reading all of the summaries from Impressionist Art.com, which covered seven of the eight with a wealth of images, facts, plus a few typos and opinions (e.g., Caillebotte was handsome), and then the quick summary from ThoughtCo.
These artists, from Morisot and Monet to Degas and Cezanne, and the rest of the lot (e.g., Marie Bracquemond, and paternal Manet hovering in the background) are some of my very favorites, and the world they inhabited with its art dealers and crowds, internal and external politics, and witty prose reactions, is, in a word, rich. And obscurities abound, such as the notoriety of Jean-François Raffaëlli, who I knew only from one painting in one of the Art Institute’s 19th-century galleries.
With all I learned, the most interesting must be that in some instances the artists chose how to display their pictures contrary to academic ways (no surprise there, I guess, since this is what the exhibition was all about). Pissarro’s and Cassatt’s frames were two discussed, along with the ways some artists were given their own galleries and some featured in the front of the exhibition, some (the more challenging ones) at the back.
This led me to this little illuminating article from Australia’s AnArt4Life blog, highlighting both the simple colored frames used, the color of the paint on the walls behind the paintings, as well as how the paintings were displayed to as to be appreciated much more easily and individually. It just so happens this article’s writers are in Melbourne, Victoria, where I once happened to visit some of their museum galleries with a person who had a knack for pointing out how the frames of the paintings affected and enhanced the experience.
Well, there you have it, a dully prosaic write-up on one of the most lyrical times in art history. I hope you find something to enjoy in it, despite the stilts. I’ll leave with a couple images from Pissarro, whose role (and work) I came to appreciate more thanks to this exercise. I am enjoying imagining how we would have preferred to display these: venue, wall, frame, and all.
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