ARTS
Exhibitions
Where size really counts
Belinda Thomson
Landscapes of France: Impressionism and its rivals (Hayward Gallery, till 28 August) This summer's major, unmissable exhibi- tion at the Hayward Gallery invites us to explore the diverse ways in which painters at the end of the Nineteenth century worked variants on those essential compo- nents of landscape — 'sky, earth, water and vegetation' — as Bonnard so succinctly list- ed them. In Landscapes of France: Impres- sionism and its rivals we are asked to consider two parallel developments, that of the mainstream landscapist whose intended public was the mass audience of the annual Salon and that of the Impressionist, work- ing for the select few who visited indepen- dent shows and supported stylistic innovation. The story is not quite that sim- ple of course, because several of the Impressionists began in the first camp and moved into the second, so we meet their work in both contexts. Clear distinctions are maintained nevertheless, both in the exhibition and the catalogue. In the exhibi- tion we are invited to pass from one to the other, the three Salon rooms, which are interrupted by a stunning sequence of smaller Impressionist rooms, echoing the three decades — 1860 – 1890 — covered by the exhibition; in the catalogue the pictures are firmly separated into two sequential chronological lists.
Since the second half of the Nineteenth century, the public perception and institu- tional position of Impressionism have undergone an extraordinary reversal. From a marginalized art form struggling for exis- tence — supported only by a few coura- geous individuals, its practitioners branded dangerous insurgents — today Impression- ism is firmly in the ascendant. Indeed the use of the name is a prerequisite to ensur- ing an exhibition has high attendance fig- ures. By contrast the works of Salon artists have usually passed into obscurity, as we learn from a glance at the locations from `Spring on the Ile de la Grande-Jane' c. 1878 by Claude Monet which John House, the Hayward exhibi- tion's organiser, garnered the loans. For many of these Salon pictures it is their first outing from the provincial museums to which they were donated by the State.
There have been shifts, too, in academic approaches to Impressionism and to its more mainstream context. The history is told in more complex, less judgmental ways today and the Salon artist no longer inevitably stands accused while the Impres- sionist hero emerges victorious. By adopt- ing an even-handed approach, with equivalent numbers of paintings from each camp, Landscapes of France is a revisionist exhibition, but in a limited sense: it asks us to reimmerse ourselves in the vision of the Nineteenth century Salon-goer. The cata- logue essays are informed by some of the most recent lines of research — into the detailed breakdown of Nineteenth-century art publics, the growth in ideas of nation- hood, and the vagaries of State policy towards the art of landscape, par excellence the democratic art for a democratic age.
Nevertheless, the exhibition's purpose is, surely, to enable us to be struck afresh by the Impressionists. Such historical exercises are very necessary today when we have become desensitised to Impressionist inno- vations by over-exposure to reproductions. The hang's differentiation between works produced for public viewing and those for private exhibition and domestic enjoyment also underlines the point that a major fac- tor in the Impressionist revolution was size. (Ironically, today our encounters with Impressionist paintings rarely occur outside the public space.) The point needed forcibly making in this age of photographic reproduction and the exhibition does it in a way that the catalogue cannot. However all the pictures are hung at eye level on uniform pink walls, well-spaced, only very rarely double hung; there is no attempt at recreating the historical conditions of dis- play, the hotchpotch arrangements at the Salon, or indeed the more sumptuous wall coverings of dealers' galleries.
Perhaps what strikes one most forcibly about the Impressionist rooms is the unity of the pictures' colours, tonality and atten- tion to surface. But it is among the Salon artists — for all their unfashionable atten- tion to detail and finish — that we find the greatest diversity of approach to the sub- ject. For their pictures to stand out in the Salon's crowded, unsympathetically-hung halls, landscapists adopted a number of strategies — working on a dominant scale, introducing deep recessional perspective, choosing extraordinary weather effects, dramatic scenery. By the 1880s one finds Salon landscapes which disrupt the conven- tions of composition derived from the clas- sical or more 'realist' Dutch traditions, notably in the uncompromising frontality of Victor Binet's 'Edge of the Wood, near Eu (Seine-Inf6rieure)', or 'Hillside in the Jura' by Auguste Pointelin. These innova- tions seem to have less to do with Impres- sionist influence, which followed its own separate stylistic development, more per- haps with the democratisation of vision engendered by rail travel or photography. Nevertheless, it was surely against this increasingly pervasive, 'artless' naturalism that symbolist artists in the later 1880s and 1890s reacted so violently.
While the smaller formats and deliber- ately humdrum subjects of the Impression- ists were better suited to the requirements of the dealer market, that market's demands perhaps encouraged a bland stan- dardisation of product. Indeed in the third Impressionist room, a sequence of some- what similar works by Monet, Renoir and Sisley brought to mind Gauguin's not unreasonable complaint, in a letter of 1881 to Pissarro, that it would become a dread- ful trademark if they all went on in this way `flooding the place with pictures of rowing boats and endless views of Chatou'.
The public's long-running love affair with Impressionism has had a lot to do with its feeling it was redressing the injustices of history, making amends for what the artists suffered in their lifetimes. Exhibitions like this show that the story was more compli- cated, less heroic, and reveal the oppor- tunistic careerism of the Impressionists as well as that of their Salon rivals.
Belinda Thomson was curator of Bonnard at Le Bosquet at the Hayward last year.
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