impressionism
The 1st Impressionist Exhibition, 1874
Although the idea originated with Claude Monet, Degas is largely responsible for organizing the very first Impressionist exhibition. After much debate, the artists, including Degas, Monet, Renoir, Morisot, Pissarro, Sisley, Boudin, and even the young Cézanne amongst many others who are now less well remembered, chose to call themselves the Societe Anonyme des Artistes (Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs etc.). The exhibition was held at 35 boulevard des Capucines in Paris and opened on April 15, 1874 in the top floor studio, actually the former studio, of a friend of several of the artists, a photographer named Nadar.
Although the show was well attended, the critics were merciless. Trained to expect the polished illusions of the Salon painters, the raw, unblended, ill-defined paint of Degas, Renoir, Monet and company was very much a shock. In a sharp attack on the exhibition, the satirical magazine, Le Charivari wrote of a visit with Joseph Vincent, an accomplished and conservative painter:
Upon entering the first room, Joseph Vincent received an initial shock in front of the Dancer by M. Renoir. ‘What a pity,’ he said to me, ‘that the painter, who has a certain understanding of color, doesn’t draw better; his dancer’s legs are as cottony as the gauze of her skirts.’…Unfortunately, I was imprudent enough to leave him [Joseph Vincent] in front of the Boulevard des Capucines, by [Monet]. ‘Ah-ha! he sneered…. Is that brilliant enough, now!’ ‘There’s impression, or I don’t know what it means.’ ‘Only be so good as to tell me what those innumerable black tougue-lickings in the lower part of the picture represent?’ ‘Why, those are people walking along,’ I replied. ‘Then do I look like that when I’m walking along the Boulevard Capucines?’ ‘Blood and Thunder!’ ‘So you’re making fun of me!’ ‘…What does that painting depict?’ ‘Look at the Catalogue.’ ‘Impression Sunrise.’ ‘Impression–I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it…and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape!’” From: Linda Nochlin. Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, 1874-1904: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 10-13.
And on it goes, ever more sarcastically. The article was titled, “Exhibition of the Impressionists,” and the term stuck. From then on, these artists were called Impressionists.
Paris as Spectacle
Haussmann’s Reconstruction of Paris
During each of the previous political revolts (1789, 1830, 1848, and again in 1871), sections of Paris had succumbed to the revolutionaries. These successes were due in part to the political sympathies of the citizens of Paris, but the crooked narrow lanes of the medieval city also played a role. During times of conflict, urban mobs would blockade the maze that were the streets of Paris. Such barricades proved very effective and made Paris all but uncontrollable at such times. Think back to Eugene Delacroix’s painting, Liberty Leading the People, 1830, Marianne (Liberty) is shown rising over a barricade of this sort.
Napoleon III, the great-nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, now ruled France. He asked an administrator, Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann, to modernize; to bring clean water and modern sewers to the fast growing city, to light the streets with gas lanterns, to construct a central market (Les Halles), to build parks, schools, hospitals, asylums, prisons, and administrative buildings. But the most ambitious aspect of Haussmann’s plan was to literally reshape the city. Haussmann, would gain the nickname, “the demolisher.” He plowed over the ancient winding streets of the city, creating broad straight boulevards that were impervious to the barricade and could better accommodate the free movement of troops. The avenues also allowed for the easy flow of commerce and so were a boon for business. Napoleon III had dreamed of a new imperial city whose very streets spoke of the glory of the French empire. Haussmann delivered. Never mind that a huge percentage of the population were displaced from their homes as their buildings were torn down to make way for the clean lines of the new city. The wealthy were quickly accommodated. The new boulevards were lined with fashionable apartment houses. It was, as usual, the poor that really suffered.
The Paris Opera
Let us turn next to the Paris opera house where much of Degas’s ballet imagery was sketched. Understanding the new opera house and its place within the newly reconstructed boulevards of Paris is key to understanding the somewhat perverse culture of voyeurism and display amongst the prosperous classes, a culture that profoundly affected Degas and his contemporaries.
Marvin Trachtenberg & Isabel Hyman have called the huge new Opera house, “the new cathedral of bourgeois [middle, really upper-middle class] Paris…. The glittering centerpiece of the new Paris…. …was meant to be much more than a theater in the ordinary sense. For Charles Garnier [an architect of the Ecole des beaux-arts], it was a setting for a ritual in which the spectators were also actors, participants in the rite of social encounter, seeing and being seen.” The division of the structure supports this. Look at the cross-section above. The dome sits above the audience and orchestra, the high roof over the stage. Behind the stage are the rehearsal rooms where Degas often sketched. But the single largest area, from the front facade to the seats below the dome is reserved for the foyers and the grand stairs hall. This area was, in essence, a second stage. Far more ornate then the performance stage, the lobbies of the Opera were where the social dramas of the rich were enacted. Strolling along the new boulevards or posing in the Opera’s grand foyers, the ruling classes paraded their wealth. The flanuer, a new denizen of the city, was a man of leisure, itself a by-product of the capital generated by industrialization, that walked the streets not for work or need, but for the pleasures of observation. And so the gaze of the observer, whether on Napoleon’s grand new boulevards or in the opera were structured by issues of economic status.
This image was painted by Mary Cassatt. A wealthy American artist who had adopted the style of the Impressionists and spent time amongst them. The fashionable upper-class woman that Cassatt represents in the box seat at the Paris Opera is her sister. She is shown holding opera glasses up to her eyes, but instead of tilting them down, as she would if she were watching the performance below, her gaze is level. She looks straight across the chamber. She is looking, not at the show, but rather, at another member of the audience. Look closely. And have you noticed that in one of the boxes across the room, a gentleman is gazing at her!
