Exhibit of the week: Birth of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay

While the Musée d’Orsay undergoes renovations, two exhibitions assembled from its collection of impressionist paintings will travel the world. The De Young Museum in San Francisco is the only musuem that will host both.

De Young Museum, San Francisco

Through Sept. 6

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“Rather than presenting a mere hit parade,” the show illuminates what was truly so different about the impressionists, said Janos Gereben in the San Francisco Examiner. The then-dominant art style, academic painting, rendered historical and mythological scenes in a polished but often lifeless style. The impressionists introduced an appreciation of “visible brush strokes, an emphasis on changing light and movement, and a focus on everyday people.” Paintings such as Édouard Manet’s The Fifer and Gustave Caillebotte’s The Floor-Scrapers challenged viewers by showing them humble subjects from the real world. Likewise, artists such as Paul Cézanne confronted them with a style that seemed almost primitive, said Jennifer Modenessi in the Contra Costa, Calif., Times. The indistinct forms and rough surfaces of his Gulf of Marseille Seen From L’Estaque “must have looked very strange to people accustomed to slick, highly finished paintings.” It can be hard for today’s museumgoers, long accustomed to the impressionists’ innovations, to “look at these famous works of art with fresh eyes.”

It may be even harder for us to give the impressionists’ predecessors a fair shake, said Kenneth Baker in the San Francisco Chronicle. Take Adolphe-William Bouguereau’s Birth of Venus—an airy mythological scene that has all the “calculated false feeling, historical irrelevance,” and other qualities that the impressionists hated. Even if you agree with their judgments, however, you “must admire the technical dexterity” of such a work. This exhibition defines the fault lines between traditionalists and innovators, but also points out the complex connections among, say, mythologists like Bouguereau, symbolists like Gustave Courbet, and impressionists like Pierre Auguste Renoir. “Forget nomenclature for a while, and look hard at the rich range and variety of physical detail in the paintings.” Unless you travel to Paris, you’ll never see their likes again.