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The First Impressionist Exhibition (1874)

One of the most famous (or infamous) art shows in history is the First Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in 1874, featuring 33 artists (some considered as "rebels"), many of whom had suffered rejection for their artworks in the Paris Salon. The month-long show was held in the studio of a prominent photographer known as Nadar (who had just moved his business to a different location and offered his studio rent-free for the exhibition). The show had no title, but a critic labeled the artists as "Impressionists," based on Claude Monet's painting Impression, Sunrise. Despite heavy attendance from a curious public (stimulated by the ridicule of critics), no paintings were sold during the exhibition. Even so, the group held seven more Impressionist shows through 1886. Here is a partial virtual recreation of the original exhibition that attempts to capture the "spirit of these iconoclastic pioneers" and their "new" ways of expressing visual conceptions involving reflected light. The website offers interesting excerpts of critical reviews of the time, along with intriguing reproductions of catalogue pages. The original exhibition presented 165 works by 33 artists, while the virtual exhibition shows images of 20 works by eight artists (Boudin, Cézanne, Degas, Monet, Morisot, Pissarro, Renoir, and Sisley).

Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:35:03 -0800