Visual Art
French Impressionism at NGV International is the latest in a long line of blockbuster impressionist exhibitions – but the art remains sublime. By Dee Jefferson.
French Impressionism at NGV International
Curators these days are generally quick to tell you how radical impressionism was in its youth, as if embarrassed by the merchandising of Monet, the obscene spectacle of auction prices in excess of $100 million and perhaps also the sheer volume of impressionist exhibitions – Australia alone saw major shows in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2021. So it goes with the National Gallery of Victoria’s current exhibition, French Impressionism – a redux of its 2021 showcase, which closed early due to lockdowns – with director Tony Ellwood reminding us in the opening line of his catalogue note that “the Impressionists were very much the rebels of their day”.
It’s true, impressionism was anti-establishment – the first avant-garde art movement, experimental in technique and democratic in subject matter and organisation, at the tail end of an age in which politics, society and art were still very much in thrall to elites, institutions and rules.
The first exhibition of what we call impressionism, in 1874, was composed of paintings rejected by the state-sanctioned Académie des Beaux-Arts Salon, held yearly at the Louvre. The artists, who included Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne and Berthe Morisot, staged an independent showing in a photographer’s studio. Sales were slim and the reviews were scathing, critics deriding the artists as mad and incompetent and their paintings amateur and ugly. One journalist satirised the pictures as mere “impressions” – unfinished works, not the polished paintings of the Salon. The name stuck, a movement was born. Within 50 years, the outcasts were the establishment.
But as much as everyone loves an underdog tale, it’s not the rebel yell that keeps audiences flocking back to the impressionists – it’s the art. Impressionism shows are ever popular, no matter what story or curatorial rationale you weave around them. The NGV exhibition, co-curated by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) from its collection, tells the story of a social movement, delineating the connections and relationships between the artists, aided by excerpts from their letters and journals. It’s a modest curatorial rationale, executed with a light touch. Most of the fascinating detail lies in the catalogue essays and beyond. There’s a whole room given to the influences of Édouard Manet and Degas, for instance, with no mention of their rivalry.
This is not a comprehensive survey but one built from the works donated and bequeathed to the MFA collection. In a happy coincidence, the MFA was founded in 1870, at a time when moneyed Bostonians were regular visitors to Paris and had already fallen in love with the Barbizon School paintings that anticipated impressionism. Boston’s wealthy were primed to purchase works from the nascent movement and they did – resulting in the museum’s impressive collection of impressionist and post-impressionist works, which includes 35 by Monet.
From this, 100 or so works – including 19 paintings by Monet – are presented across a series of handsome 19th-century-style rooms painted in bold hues.
For better and worse, the Monets tend to dwarf the competition, starting in the exhibition’s opening room, which sets the scene with a comparison of works by former art school chums Monet and Renoir, designed to show the differing styles united under the movement’s loose rubric of painting en plein-air and in front of the subject. Each captures the fugitive qualities of light, the fleeting moment – but side by side, it’s clear why one of these artists is considered the movement’s master. Looking at Monet’s Meadow with poplars (1875), you can almost hear the wind blowing through the leaves and feel the sun warming your skin. Renoir’s Woman with a parasol and small child on a sunlit hillside (1874-76), by comparison, begins to look more like one of David Hockney’s iPad drawings.
Similarly, in the themed room “Watery Surfaces”, one’s gaze is constantly hijacked by Monet’s Grand Canal, Venice (1908). This extraordinary, luminous work is one of dozens of paintings he made during a later-life holiday to the floating city, in an almost manic attempt to capture its unique interplays of light, water and atmosphere. The colours in this particular work are so vivid – including distractingly electric dashes of purple – you almost wonder if it’s been juiced up. It’s a reminder that printed reproductions – and smartphone photos – fall far short of seeing these paintings in the flesh.
The final room of the exhibition, a round chamber lined with 16 Monet canvases – ranging from a sunny garden portrait and two snowy streetscapes in the town of Argenteuil where he moved in the 1870s, to exhilarating views of the windswept and sun-drenched Normandy and Mediterranean coasts and seasonal views of Giverny and his garden – is a wonder worth the $43 ticket price. Almost all of Monet is here: the ravishing colour and virtuoso deployment of tone and texture to capture atmospheric effects and evoke movement; the narrowing of focus, later in life, to capture the contained universes within his garden and its ponds.
It’s not all about Monet. Manet and Degas have their moments; Eugène Boudin, one of Monet’s chief mentors, gets a small room dedicated to his marine paintings; Renoir gets a larger room dedicated to his sometimes-dubious experiments in style. Pissarro, the elder of the movement, inspires a showcase of his roles as a mentor to young impressionists and a “mentee” of post-impressionists Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, whose pointillist cause he took up later in life. A few works by Cézanne are peppered through the exhibition. There is a single work by Vincent van Gogh that invariably draws visitors’ eyes – a lightning flash that momentarily eclipses the duller works around it.
Gentler delights include a room of landscapes by Barbizon School painters such as Charles François Daubigny, Théodore Rousseau and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, including fabulously moody views of the Fontainebleau forest that so inspired them and, in turn, young impressionists such as Monet and Renoir. Between them, the paintings and wall texts hint at some of the key aesthetic, social and cultural preconditions for impressionism, including the rise of railway travel and rural jaunts, which facilitated Barbizon’s burgeoning colony of artists painting nature en plein-air – a radical departure from the historical, mythological and biblical paintings favoured by the Académie.
Curiously, given the rhetoric of artistic rebellion and aesthetic revolution around the exhibition, there is no mention of the politics of the artists, who were almost all republican and occasionally radical. The Franco–Prussian war of 1870-71 is also absent, despite its personal impact on Monet, whose friend and studio mate Frédéric Bazille was killed in action; Degas and Manet, who fought in the national guard; and Morisot, whose health was permanently damaged by living through the city’s siege conditions.
History suggests this show will weather any narrative and curatorial vicissitudes. During several midweek visits in late June, it was possible to witness the most wonderful thing: scores of visitors of all ages not only looking at the paintings but looking long, hard and close. Sometimes art is simply enough.
French Impressionism is at NGV International until October 5.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 12, 2025 as "Monet moments".
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