Gardners Art through the Ages A Global History

Impressionism 823

F

or both artists and art historians, modernist art stands in marked

contrast—indeed in forceful opposition—to academic art, that

is, to the art the established art schools such as the Royal Academy of

Painting and Sculpture in France (founded 1648) and the Royal Acad-

emy of Arts in Britain (founded 1768) promoted. These academies

provided instruction for art students and sponsored exhibitions, exert-

ing tight control over the art scene. The annual exhibitions, called

“Salons” in France, were highly competitive, as was membership in

these academies. Subsidized by the government, the French Royal

Academy supported a limited range of artistic expression, focusing on

traditional subjects and highly polished technique. Because of the chal-

lenges modernist art presented to established artistic conventions, the

juries for the Salons and other exhibitions often rejected the works

more adventurous artists wished to display. As noted in the previous

chapter, Gustave Courbet’s reaction to the rejection of some of his

paintings was to set up his own Pavilion of Realism in 1855 (see

“Courbet on Realism,” Chapter 30, page 799). Years later, he wrote:

[I]t is high time that someone have the courage to be an honest

man and that he say that the Academy is a harmful, all-consuming

institution, incapable of fulfilling the goal of its so-called mission.*

Growing dissatisfaction with the decisions of the French Acad-

emy’s jurors prompted Napoleon III (r. 1852–1870) in 1863 to establish

the Salon des Refusés (Salon of the Rejected) to show all of the works

not accepted for exhibition in the regular Salon. Manet’s Le Déjeuner

sur l’Herbe (FIG. 30-33) was among them. The public greeted it and the

entire exhibition with derision. One reviewer of the rejected works

summed up the prevailing attitude:

This exhibition, at once sad and grotesque,...offers abundant proof

... that the jury always displays an unbelievable leniency. Save for
one or two questionable exceptions there is not a painting which
deserves the honor of the official galleries ....There is even some-
thing cruel about this exhibition; people laugh as they do at a farce.†
In 1867, after further rejections, Manet, following Courbet,
mounted a private exhibition of 50 of his paintings outside the Paris
World’s Fair. Six years later, the Impressionists (FIG. 31-2) formed
their own society and began mounting shows of their works in Paris.
This decision gave the Impressionists much more freedom, for they
did not have to contend with the Academy’s authoritative and con-
fining viewpoint, and thereafter they held exhibitions at one- or
two-year intervals from 1874 until 1886.
Another group of artists unhappy with the Salon’s conservative
nature adopted the same renegade approach. In 1884 these artists
formed the Société des Artistes Indépendants (Society of Independent
Artists) and held annual Salons des Indépendants. Georges Seurat’s A
Sunday on La Grande Jatte (FIG. 31-15) was one of the paintings in the
Independents’ 1886 Salon.
As the art market expanded, venues for the exhibition of art in-
creased. Art circles and societies sponsored private shows in which
both amateurs and professionals participated. Dealers became more
aggressive in promoting the artists they represented by mounting ex-
hibitions in a variety of spaces, some fairly intimate and small, others
large and grandiose. All of these proliferating opportunities for exhi-
bition gave artists alternatives to the traditional constraints of the
Salon and provided fertile breeding ground for the development of
radically new art forms and styles.

* Letter to Jules-Antoine Castagnary, October 17,

1868. Translated by Petra ten-Doesschate Chu,
      Letters of Gustave Courbet(Chicago: University of
      Chicago Press, 1992), 346.
      † Maxime du Camp, in Revue des deux mondes,
      1863, quoted in George Heard Hamilton,Manet
      and His Critics(New Haven: Yale University Press,
      1986), 42–43.

Academic Salons and

Independent Art Exhibitions

ART AND SOCIETY

31-2Claude Monet,Impression: Sunrise,

1872. Oil on canvas, 1 7 –^12  2  1 –^12 .
      Musée Marmottan, Paris.
      A hostile critic applied the derogatory
      term “Impressionism” to this painting
      because of its sketchy quality and clearly
      evident brush strokes. Monet and his circle
      embraced the label for their movement.

1 in.