PARS.- He Museo de Orsay celebrates 150 years of Impressionism with a major retrospective of 157 works and a spectacular walk through the Pars from 1874, which the visitor can do with virtual reality glasses.
On April 15, 1874, 15 days before the opening of the traditional Parisian Salon of Paintings, a group of rebels and like-minded artists decided to open their own exhibition at n35 boulevard de las Capuchinas, a short distance from the opera house.
That exhibition, curiously held in the former workshop of a photographer, Flix Nadar, will be the start of one of the most decisive artistic movements in the history of painting.
Claude Monet, Pierre-Aguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Douard Manet, Berthe Morisot… in total there were 31 artists, proud defenders of outdoor painting, of portraying factories, trains, cabaret houses or poor people, instead of pompous military parades. , religious scenes or mythological legends.
A symbolic start, since in reality the impressionists were a minority in that exhibition of just over 200 works.
“The history of that exhibition has more nuances than we think. The artists knew each other and began to paint differently from the 1860s onwards,” Sylvie Patry, one of the curators of the exhibition, explained to the press. Paris 1874: Invent Impressionism.
Other artists who were not impressionists decided to join this new alternative salon, hoping to open themselves to another clientele.
They were, however, painters like Paul Czanne and works like A modern Olympia those who caused the scandal.
The challenge of Paris
Paris was then a bustling but bourgeois city, still recovering from the military defeat against Prussia four years earlier, and from the chaos that the Commune revolution had represented.
“That is the challenge of Paris 1874: to penetrate the creation of an artistic movement that emerged from a world in full mutation, and to return to an exhibition visited at the time by only a few thousand curious people,” explained Patry.
The exhibition of the impressionists brought together about 3,500 people, compared to the more than 300,000 who wandered through the enormous official Hall.
The nickname Impressionists was received in a mocking manner by the art critic Louis Lery, in allusion to the painting Impression, rising sunby Monet.
They only sold four paintings. The artists had created a cooperative to organize the exhibition and share expenses and profits, also a historic novelty, but they had to disband it due to the lack of success.
Barely 12 years later, the Impressionists had managed to organize a total of eight exhibitions and change the course of art.
Six years and loans from the entire world
Thanks to loans from the National Gallery in Washington and other museums, as well as from private collections, the visitor can see works such as The Parisian y The dancer by Renoir, for the first time in 150 years.
“Putting together this exhibition, which will remain open until July 14, has required six years of work,” Anne Robbins, chief curator of the Paintings department at the Musée d’Orsay, told the press.
The visitor can also compare the impressionist works with several paintings in the Official Salon.
And to immerse yourself in the era, a separate installation allows the visitor, equipped with virtual reality glasses, to step onto the streets of Paris that afternoon of April 15, 1874.
A team of experts worked for nearly two years with official archives, photographs and maps of Paris to faithfully reconstruct the streets of the opera district and the rooms of Nadar’s workshop.
That facility will remain open until August 11, while Paris celebrates the Olympic Games.
FUENTE: AFP
