On Wednesday, April 15, 1874, the Exhibition of the Anonymous Society of Artists, Painters, Sculptors, Engravers, etc. was inaugurated at number 35 Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, between the Madeleine and the not yet opened Palais Garnier. Over time she is remembered as the founding moment of the impressionist movement, partly due to the critic Louis Leroywho in the newspaper Le Charivari recreated a dialogue between two spectators of the exhibition, mocking the canvas Impression, Soleil, Levant by Claude Monet, capture of dawn in Le Havre on November 13, 1872.
The critic put the finishing touch to his attack with a comment that later became archetypal to attack the avant-garde. According to Leroy, one wallpaper had more finish than the 165 works on display by 30 artists. ANDAmong the most represented were Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir. Other participants were Paul Cézanne, Alfred Sisley and Camille Pissarro.
The event was prepared to the millimeter. Seven or eight rooms were rented in the studios of the photographer Nadar, who was in need of funds and gave up the space for the not modest sum of 2,000 francs. The Society made the exhibition coincide with the Paris Salon, the annual pictorial event directed by the Academy of Fine Arts, very conservative in its taste and favoring what is now known as Pompier painting, among whose greatest exponents it is worth mentioning Alfred Cabanel. or William Adolphe Bouguerau.
The future Impressionists had suffered rejection from the Salon’s officials. They challenged the predominance of the line to exalt with color the accelerated changes of the time, from the train to the growing nightlife., with an alternative discourse to that protected by power. Independence, also from the market, was a priority.
To access the exhibition you had to pay one franc and if you wanted a catalog for half was available. The canvases could be seen up close, unlike those in the Salon, a true nightmare due to the concentration of paint in rooms packed with people, who were quite content when they agreed to look, when possible, at the works from a distance, at a distance that was not advisable to admire them. as it should.
Against conventions
This willingness to distance oneself from the system had good teachers in the recent past. In 1850 Gustave Courbet exhibited his painting at the Salon The burial of Ornans. This portrait of a rural funeral turned conventions on its head. The humble also deserved the greatness of gods, kings and elephants, to be discarded in the face of the mutations of the present.
Courbet’s realism had illustrious variants in Honoré Daumier, with his Third class carriage as a summit, and François Millet, immortal with his Angelus. However, only Courbet went further. In 1855 he set up the Pavilion of Realism, his own hall, valid for transmitting the evolution of his work and welcoming visitors outside of orthodoxy. He himself covered the expenses to mark the triumph of the artist from individuality.
Was it a hangover from the old genius dream? Charles Baudelaire, with a pictorial cameo in The artist’s workshop of Courbet, I didn’t see it that way. Years later, well Aware of how the city and its rapid metamorphosis required a new art, he unhesitatingly supported Édouard Manet, shaken in 1863 by the scandal of Olympia.
That year the Salon jury rejected more than 3,000 works. Emperor Louis Napoleon Bonaparte compensated for so many noes with a Hall of the Rejected. Olympia of Manet came to be guarded by guards. The look of this courtesan, successor of The Venus of Urbino of Titian, offended the conventional bourgeois, as if he were a jellyfish of his secrets, of that which is invisible to those close to him.
Subjectivity and photography
Manet’s obsession was light, he felt heir to the classics and one of his references was Diego Velázquez. He wove the present by reflecting on the past, while Monet, Degas and their other acolytes pointed to tomorrow. Even so, they took note of the master’s pictorial and commercial originalities. In 1867 they set up a pavilion independent of those at the Universal Exhibition of 1867. They repeated Courbet’s gesture in 1855, charged admission and vigorously insisted on their difference, secretly crowned during that period with The execution of Maximilian. This canvas could not be exhibited in France at the end of the Second Empire due to the implications of Louis Napoleon in the execution of that Austro-Hungarian puppet in the more than distant Mexico.
In 1870 war against Prussia broke out, the emperor was captured, Paris was besieged and In the spring of 1871 the Paris Commune was proclaimed. Manet and Courbet were part of their federation of artists.
On many occasions Manet is identified as one of the impressionist group. He did not enroll in the brief experience of the Joint Stock Company, which was dissolved in the autumn of 1874, and therefore he declined the option of participating in the Exhibition. His desires went in other directions despite being in tune with the majority of artists in the fray.. Not in vain, many of them had it on their altars for more than a decade. However, his art took another type of path.
The initial reception of the exhibition was far from negative and it opened the doors to the avant-garde both for its themes and its concept. They were the prelude to the isms that would come, They read in advance the death of ancient representation, incapable of combating phenomena such as photography when it comes to filling reality.and they were only recognized when their revolution had given way to other more complex avant-garde movements, as if the visible were not enough and should be represented from a much more visceral subjectivity than the one born that Wednesday, April 15, 1874, an unexpected dawn towards many modernities.
