It’s back to the tried and trusted blockbuster names of French impressionism for the latest release from Exhibition on Screen, the Brighton-based outfit demonstrating remarkable staying power in the gallery-film sector; their consistent level of excellence means they remain largely unchallenged in the field. Excursions into the comparatively offbeat – Japanese contemporary art, Edward Hopper, Lucian Freud – are balanced by home bankers, of which this account of the original impressionist exhibition in 1874, must be counted.
The film takes its cue from a show jointly mounted by the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC (where it was called Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment) and Paris’s Musée d’Orsay (Paris 1874: Inventing impressionism). Both exhibitions, and the film, re-create the founding moment of the style, when 30 (or possibly 31) artists – who had been turned down by the official Paris Salon – showed their work in a studio operated by the celebrated photographer Nadar, under the moniker “Société Anonyme”; the Salon des Refusés, the repository for rejects from the Salon founded by Napoleon III, had in fact been established over a decade earlier.
Some of the works on display would go on to become indisputably major – not least Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, which gave its name to the group after a scathing review by art critic Louis Leroy – and the names are legion; alongside Monet, participating artists included Degas, Renoir, Berthe Morisot and Paul Cézanne. (One notable absentee was Édouard Manet who, despite his prominence within the group, apparently preferred to focus his efforts on getting into the official Salon.)
This is a somewhat more granular film than we are used to from the EoS strand, with its focus on a single, undeniably momentous event, rather than a luxurious stroll around a particular artist’s oeuvre or collection. That perhaps explains the decision to move away, after a few opening statements, from the now traditional stream of curators’ talking heads to provide context, replaced here by actors reading from letters and articles from the time. It all adds up to the very classy package we are now completely used to from these film-makers, and a valuable resource for the considerable numbers of people who won’t have been able to see the show in person.
Source: theguardian.com
