A walk along the Capuchin Boulevard, the night of April 15, 1874, dodging carriages and horses. A meeting with Monet, Degas, Renoir and other painters in which they discuss his artistic style. The observation, from a platform, of the traffic at the Saint-Lazare station in the era of steam locomotives. These are some of the stages of the prodigious journey through time proposed by the Orsay Museum in Paris.
The immersive experience in virtual reality, which lasts 45 minutes and will be offered until August 11, the closing day of the Olympic Games, is a luxury complement to the exhibition Paris 1874. Inventing Impressionism, inaugurated last week and which It will remain open until July 14.
The fathers of Impressionism would never have imagined that the movement they created, the starting signal for the avant-garde, would have such extraordinary success that a century and a half later the public would continue to be enraptured by their paintings and that reservations would be full to visit the Museum. of Orsay.
In 1874 Impressionism had already been practiced for some years, but it still had no name or recognition. Monet, Degas, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Cézannne and others decided to mount an independent exhibition to challenge the prevailing aesthetic canons. The exhibition, which was open for a month, turned out to be an absolute commercial failure. Only four paintings were purchased out of the 102 that were for sale.
Louis Leroy, a journalist for a satirical outlet, Le Charivari, mocked the style, although he unknowingly introduced the term “impressionist” in a derogatory tone. Other critics, however, liked him. Jules Castagnary, from Le Siècle, insisted on the concept, with a positive accent. “They are impressionistic in the sense that they do not capture the landscape, but the sensation produced by that landscape,” he wrote. It was a very appropriate first definition and is still valid. Among the early admirers of the current was Émile Zola.
The genesis of the name was also influenced by an emblematic work, Impression, Rising Sun, which Monet painted on November 13, 1872 from the balcony of the hotel room where he was staying, facing the port of Le Havre, in Normandy. This oil painting, one of the jewels of the current exhibition, is very illustrative of the philosophy of the movement, which emerged in a very turbulent historical era – due to the Franco-Prussian War and the revolution of the Paris Commune – and one of rapid transformation. Instead of limiting himself to capturing rural picturesqueness, Monet chose an industrial and commercial location for this painting. The artist manages to ennoble the cranes and chimneys, with blurred profiles in an orange, almost Japanese tone. He did something similar with the Saint-Lazare station. It was revolutionary to turn into almost poetic objects, into cathedrals of the industrial era, settings that did not seem conceived – or that was the feeling of the dominant sensibility – for aesthetic pleasure. He broke the mold.
The Impressionists consolidated an evolution of art in which the faithful reflection of reality gave way to the construction of an atmosphere, to the difficult portrait of the ephemeral moment.
The exhibition, which will travel to the National Gallery in Washington in the fall, has been made possible thanks to donations from museums around the world and from private collections. There are very beautiful paintings, such as Reading and Hiding, both from 1873, by Berthe Morisot, the only woman in the group, White Frost, by Pisarro, or Dance at the Moulin de la Galette, by Renoir, which closes the exhibition. The exhibition includes an oil painting by Cézanne, A Modern Olympia, which caused a scandal when a prostitute, a black servant and a client appeared.
In the immersive virtual reality experience A Night with the Impressionists. Paris 1874 12 characters appear. The project has required a great deal of technical work and historical research to prepare the texts put into the painters' mouths and to characterize them as faithfully as possible physically and in their character. The result is excellent, although it requires a lot of concentration and skill from the visitor to move in a three-dimensional environment that he knows is fictitious but that his brain perceives as absolutely real, in a certain way a new impressionism of the digital age.
