French impressionism gets gritty
When you hear “French impressionism,” what images come to mind?
Blurry water lilies? Ladies with parasols in poppy fields, parks and beaches? Or, perhaps, gay scenes from a Parisian café full of young people drinking and dancing?
We think of those images since those are the school’s greatest hits — the best-known masterpieces, selected for exhibition and reproduction repeatedly. But Monet didn’t paint only flowers. He also painted coal workers, factories and train stations, like the one depicted in his 1877 painting “The Gare Saint-Lazare,” here on loan from Paris’s Musée d’Orsay and the first image in the Art Gallery of Ontario’s new show “Impressionism in the Age of Industry: Monet, Pissarro and More.”
Running through May 5, the exhibit reveals another grittier side of French impressionism: steelworkers and smokestacks. It’s a hit, too, drawing large crowds and plenty of buzz.
“I think we knew from the beginning that it would be really exciting to share a new kind of impressionism, because people haven’t seen it before,” says Caroline Shields, assistant curator of European art at the AGO. “But it also felt like an important thing to do since, really, half of impressionism has been left out of the writing of art history for a long time.”
Despite their association with benign nature scenes, the impressionists were revolutionary artists who, between the 1860s and 1890s, produced art that depicted infrastructure and industry and explored modernity and urbanization, with all the changes it wrought — good and bad.
At first, this revolutionary perspective didn’t win the artists many friends, since both their subject matter and style were departures from contemporary art conventions of the time. Instead of painting great battles, aristocrats or religious scenes, they painted scenes from everyday life, which at the time was considered radical and offensive.
In the 1860s, the Salon de Paris, the official annual government art show curated by conservative art experts, rejected many of the cohort’s paintings since they didn’t conform to the accepted style. In response, Shields says, they self-funded and invented “direct-to-consumer” art sales, another radical idea for its time.
It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that they were visionaries and rule breakers, since Monet’s crowd-pleasing water lilies now hang in untold numbers of dentists’ offices, hotel rooms and college dorms.
And when you walk into the AGO gallery that celebrates labour you’ll see just how radical they were. The room is dominated by “The Steel Works” (1895), Maximilien Luce’s striking image of steelworkers in the foundry, supported by dozens of other images of workers, including Camille Pissarro’s busy ports and weekly markets manned by dockworkers and butchers (“The Pont Boieldieu in Rouen,” 1896, and “The Pork Butcher,” 1883).
In these images, labourers are depicted as heroes — just as bold and valiant as the generals leading armies in more traditional paintings — which could be read as pro-labour, explicitly political statements from anarchist painters. That may well be part of the reason that these more challenging pieces have gotten a lot less play than the flowers, fields and beach scenes. Luce is one of the artists who was written out of art history, but he was big in his day.
“Luce was right there with all the major pointillist artists that we usually think of, like Seurat,” says Shields. “And there’s a close relationship between pointillism, neo-impressionism and anarchism. Luce was a dedicated anarchist and we can see his deep concern for the plight of the worker coming through.”
Aside from industry, technology and the massive infrastructure boom of late 19th-century Paris, the people affected by the rapid changes are a big part of the story Shields is telling.
That’s why she chose James Tissot’s “The Shop Girl” (18831885), a treasured and beloved item from the AGO’s permanent collection, as the second painting in this show — greeting you as soon as you leave “The Gare Saint-Lazare” and turn the corner into the first room of the main exhibit.
It’s also an invitation to see the impressionists in an entirely new light. Not just lazy drifting water lilies and waterscapes but, instead, radical, rule-breaking social critics trying to make sense of modernity.
Impressionism in the Age of Industry: Monet, Pissarro and More is on at the AGO until May 5. Caroline Shields is giving a Curator’s Talk on March 20 at 7 p.m. Also, the AGO, the Toronto Star and the Toronto Public Library have convened a speaker series in connection with the exhibit called The Liveable City? about issues facing Toronto today. All talks are at the AGO’s Baillie Court at 7 p.m., with the topic of Housing on April 3, Work on April 5, Transportation on April 17 and leisure on April 24. See ago.ca for tickets.