Today, this is considered a masterpiece, but in 1874, when it was first exhibited, the art critic (and unsuccessful painter) Louis Leroy slammed it in the satirical magazine Le Charivari, inadvertently creating history when he lambasted Monet and his friends for being incapable of painting things in detail, and damned them all as mere Impressionistes.
And in 1876, at the second public showing of the new artists’ work, a critic went even further:
The rue le Peletier is a street of disasters. At the Durand-Ruel gallery, an exhibition has just opened that is alleged to contain paintings. I entered, and my horrified eyes beheld a terrifying sight—five or six lunatics, including one woman, have got together to exhibit their work. I have seen people shake with laughter on seeing these pictures, but my heart bled when I saw them. These would-be artists call themselves revolutionaries. They take a piece of canvas, splash on a few random daubs of colour, and then sign it. It is a huge fraud, as if the inmates of a madhouse had picked up stones by the roadside and imagined they had found diamonds.
The gallery-owner, Paul Durand-Ruel, was so frustrated at Paris’s inability to understand the Impressionists that he took his trade elsewhere, opening premises in London, Brussels, Vienna and New York, all the while paying artists like Monet, Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro a monthly salary so that they wouldn’t starve.
It wasn’t until the early-twentieth century that these Parisian painters started to get recognition at home, and even then, it was largely thanks to private collectors, many of them foreign, who were coming to Paris to snap up Impressionist canvases for a song.
By then, a new generation of artists, including Henri Matisse and the recent immigrant Pablo Picasso, were suffering the same fate, being jeered at for their ‘childish’ style and desperately courting rich ex-pats like the writer/heiress Gertrude Stein. They would troop along to her dinners and cocktail parties, hoping to sell a painting that would not only pay the rent but would also hang on Gertrude’s wall and be spotted by other rich ex-pats. Again, the mainstream Paris art establishment turned its back on the local talent, and even alleged that people like Matisse were creating rubbish for gullible American tourists.
All this sounds horrific, but one could argue that at least the Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, Cubists, Dadaists, Surrealists and all the other innovative ‘-ists’ had something to react against. Opposition gave them energy and a sense of purpose; it goaded them into perfecting their ideas so that everyone would become convinced of their validity.
These days, on the other hand, more or less anything goes, and—in my humble opinion—Parisian art as a movement has stagnated. The focus is more on the artist than the art. This was true of Picasso, too, but he was so incredibly productive and innovative that he never seemed to let the cult of personality get past his studio door. For some new Parisian artists, though, personality is everything. Their art is all about moi …
Look at my navel
Parisian-born Sophie Calle, for example, has made her life her art. She is highly intelligent and therefore comes up with clever ideas. For example, in the early ’90s she had an exhibition of photos of the spaces left on museum walls by stolen paintings. Yes, it’s a funny concept, but it’s a bit of a one-liner. Once you’ve seen one empty space, haven’t you seen them all?
The most recent example of this style of ‘clever’ art in Paris was an installation called Monumenta 2010 at the Grand Palais. For this, the artist Christian Boltanski filled the 13,500 square metres of the Grand Palais’s immense, glass-roofed central hall with clothes. Visitors walked around piles of rumpled old coats, shirts, pullovers and trousers, heaped in one central stack and a grid of small squares that looked like plots in a cemetery. Meanwhile, booming out of loudspeakers was the slow thump of human hearts beating, a chilling sound because subconsciously everyone is afraid it will stop at any moment. And although this was taking place during one of the coldest winters in recent years, the heating was turned off so that spectators could experience the full desolation of what they were seeing—a monument to the victims of genocide. An honourable intention, no doubt, but its effect as art was slightly diminished given that reviews of the exhibition were sharing newspaper space with reports of homeless people freezing to death in the streets of Paris—due to lack of warm clothing. It was bit like organizing a sound installation of ocean waves on the day after a tsunami.
Surely, though, new Parisian art can’t have disappeared completely into a black hole of its own pretension?
The answer, fortunately, is non. There are still Parisian artists out there creating work that tries to titillate the eye as well as the intellect, and one of the best ways of seeing them is to go to their studios.
To do this, it is not necessary to hang around in Montmartre cafés chatting up anyone with paint brushes stuck behind their ears. At various times of the year, usually in spring
