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Artists, You Will Never Recapture 1870s Paris
Let go of pretension and move on
There’s a mystique of “being an artist” — the artist as rebel. It’s the idolization of the artist as the rogue creative genius who sneers at convention, a virtual deity among mere mortals. Think Picasso, Dali, Rodin, and Gauguin among others. The hagiography of the holy egoism of genius excuses substance abuse, sexual promiscuity, and generally being an ass.
This mystique has more than one cause, of course. Artists have been temperamental for centuries. One particular cause of the mystification stands out, though: an art movement that truly was the rebellious, avant-garde sneer at convention that many artists idolize.
No doubt, you’ve heard of impressionism. Today, impressionist paintings are a staple of coffee mugs, comme il faut mass-produced art prints sold in department stores, and other forms of middle-class conformity. The casual and bland ubiquity of impressionist art today sharply contradicts its iconoclastic beginnings. Impressionism was a militant art movement, one that many artists in the 150 years since have tried to reproduce.
Paris: 1872
Consider French artist Claude Monet (1840–1926) and his painting of boats in the morning haze, Impression, Sunrise (1872). This humble painting led to huge changes.
Not that the painting occurred in isolation, of course. Nothing does. Here is some context to understand the social and philosophical significance of Monet’s painting.
In the 1860s, the French art scene was dominated by the institution of the French Academy of Fine Arts. In particular, they controlled what artworks were exhibited at the Paris Salon, the largest and most influential juried art exhibition in France. The jury of the Academy tended to accept only paintings that displayed the stolid, traditional realist style of painting. That style included the standard that the painter’s brushstrokes were blended to invisibility to be as realistic as possible. The Academy also greatly preferred paintings that were portraits or of historical, religious, or…
