False Impressions

...These, although informative and frequently entertaining, tend to dwell unduly on academic and mercenary trivia: Which Monet may or may not have been the first to arrive in this country, or what dealers handled a painting, makes eventually for fairly indigestible reading...

...An "astonishing pleiad" of artists, as John Rewald has called them, they took painting out of the studio, thus eliminating the physical and psychological barriers that stood between them and real life —landscape and the sight of ordinary people behaving ordinarily...

...The old notion of Impressionism (that is, the one most recently taught) is called by the show's organizers "contractionist"—a very Watergatey-sounding term I must say...

...The New York Times critic, Hilton Kramer, dealt caustically with this "revisionism," noting in particular the absence of Monet's series paintings...

...Appended to the show and several rooms away is a tribute to the Havermeyers, who, helped by Mary Cassatt, were pioneer collectors and whose excellent and discriminating taste has long been illuminating the French rooms at the Metropolitan...

...The Impressionists, desiring naturalness, achieved a kind of esthetic democracy...

...As an intellectual device, expansionism makes bearable the processing of large numbers of contemporaries contending for recognition, but when applied to art history its effect is quite deadening...

...Though the color in the hands of Manet and Monet was bright, it had nothing like, the intensity of what was to come in the late 19th and 20th centuries...

...Relative to what preceded them, the Impressionists were not escapist...

...And the oft-told story of the Impressionists' struggles is especially reassuring, for it implies, among other things, that the art public was crasser then than it is now—a manifestly untenable stand, if one that makes us feel progressive...

...Since Huyghe is a member of the Academie Francaise, the term must surely have been the work of his translator—the possibility that the bastion of linguistic purity might have been so ignobly penetrated is unthinkable...

...Yet, for all the talk about the colorist revolt, the change seems now to have been much more a matter of spirit than pigment...

...But while we may enjoy the superior feeling that comes from mocking Salon taste or camping over it, we will probably never grasp the full import of this great change in art until we can get some insight into the appetites rearguard painting was satisfying...

...But that's just the trouble with The Impressionist Epoch—the pictures seem incidental to the philosophical structure around them...

...overall sense of pressure from modern scholarship, that cloudy world forever promising new knowledge but usually just handing down new viewing pronouncements...

...I moved through The Impressionist Epoch expecting an explosion and, because it never took place, began to wonder if French art was to be another of those treasures that somehow do not look as good as they used to...

...Leveling, although of a surprising sort, seems also to have been the purpose of the Metropolitan's current celebration of the movement's centenary, The Impressionist Epoch (through February 16...

...It permits the paring down of major reputations to advance lesser figures a notch or two, and it helps justify nonentities of the moment...

...proclaimed William Blake with—considering his own style of drawing—shameless self-congratulation...

...The omission, made even more conspicuous by showing, for example, only one of the Rouen Cathedral studies, had its ironic aspects...

...Considerably more distracting is the...

...To say that there are more great works to see in this baffling exhibition than there is space left to enumerate them sounds like a hasty afterthought...

...Nevertheless, it suggests neatly the outrage felt by sensible men at the start of the Romantic era, when the position of contour and modelled form was usurped by color...

...burghers and barmaids became equally valuable, albeit for painterly rather than political reasons...

...Almost an opponent of Impressionism—certainly of its plein air features—Degas is said to have found Monet "a skillful but not profound decorator...

...In due course it became clear that though all the great figures were present, their work had been chosen in such a way as to play their uniqueness down—these expansionists aren't kidding around...

...This means regarding Monet as the leader of the group and his mature style as emblematic of it...

...A As disturbing was the mangling of Degas' contribution...

...There are some closing references to the Academy, namely "September Morn" and Bastein-Lepage's "Joan of Arc" and, to round the whole thing off, a flurry of American Impressionists...

...Actually, they described a lovely moment of equilibrium in modern history, when the blessings of industrialization still seemed to outweigh the evils...

...They are certainly not easily seen in "The Bellelli Family" and "The Cotton Exchange," both specially imported from France...

...Here his pictures seem to have been selected to stress his ideological differences with his peers and to support his image as a reactionary and purveyor of quotable witticisms...

...True, his genius does not appear consistently in his oeuvre...

...Sir Kenneth Clark quotes the remark in Civilisation, going on to say: "Color was considered immoral-perhaps rightly, because it is an immediate sensation and makes its effect independently of those ordered memories which are the basis of morality...

...The hand of the educator rests heavily on this exhibit, which must have required an anthill of art majors to help put it together...

...Clearly, the war between the Independents and the Academy is not yet over...

...Most likely, their rapid brushwork and broken color began as an unconscious response to the exigencies of prima facie painting...

...At least two visits are necessary—one to take in the art, another to read the wall labels...

...The so-called ungainliness of the poses in the bronzes and pastels of women at their toilet is commonly offered as evidence of his misogyny...

...Coming from a seminal Romantic, the man who saw angels perched in a tree no less, this is a fairly Calvinistic piece of rhetoric...

...Today, however, curatorial thinking apparently on both sides of the Atlantic—the production is the fruit of Franco-American collaboration—tilts toward an "expansionist" approach, whereby Impressionism is seen as a "convergence of loose bonds" between artists working together yet never losing their individuality...

...The latter serves no purpose save the unkind one of turning adequate painters like Childe Hassam and Theodore Robinson into eclectic footnotes...

...Degas is in fact a test case for art appreciation, for however misanthropic he was thought to be, there is scarcely a work of his, even from his stilted academic period, that does not contradict his reputation...

...He himself was a profound, if tortured and incomplete artist...

...Unfortunately, anyone unfamiliar with his work would have a hard time piecing together these qualities at the Metropolitan...

...Can it be that a relationship exists between the intensity of color in both the fine and applied arts and the health of a civilization...

...For any of Monet's groups of pictures of a single subject made at different times would have captured the Zeitgeist of Impressionism more forcefully than a bushel of explanations...

...Having begun with the precursors of Impressionism—Rousseau, Daubigny, Courbet, Millet, Delacroix, et al., as well as with such Academicians as Cabanel and Regnault—the lavishly mounted production ends with the successors, including Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, and even Bonnard...

...Rene Huyghe supplies this definition in a catalogue essay that concerns itself chiefly with packaging the art, literature, science, and philosophy of the period...

...Still, they do manage to reveal themselves in a pastel of a nude drying her back and in the sculpture—most notably in an exquisite bronze of a shying horse whose very ears are nervous...

...Of course, the opposition encountered by the Romantics and by the Impressionists, who reinvested Romantic profits with even more startling effects, has become part of the liturgy of art history...

...Cezanne, for some reason, hangs with the Impressionists, and very odd he looks with them too...

...How expansionism will hit the audience for Impressionism remains to be seen, but it is certainly of a piece with a philosophy that has been gaining ground among teachers of art...

...on the contrary, they were down-to-earth...

...No one before or since has ever portrayed women with such intelligence and sensitivity and with so great a feeling for character...

...Whatever it was about Cabanel's Venus, say, that made her so popular, it transcended for her admirers the fact that she reclines bizarrely on a sea as firm and dry as a sofa...

...One could say that light was the great leveller...

...But at his best he retained Blake's "line of rectitude," and used light to express the ambience, tensions and moods of his subjects, whether human or animal...

...Speaking of Watergate, I noticed the word "specificity" in his text...

...Natural light took over and concentration on its revelations meant jettisoning most of the other things pictures were supposed to deal with...