KAREN WILKIN
At the Galleries
The last fall-winter season was pretty remarkable. "So many serious
shows and even some good art!" people kept saying at New York
openings, in a tone of surprise. "And not just here," out-of-town visitors
and recently returned travelers would add. In New York, you could see
everything from a fresh look at the Impressionists to a stunning, virtually
unknown collection of Indian miniatures; from retrospectives of modern
masters
to
recent efforts by relative newcomers. If you could get to Paris
or London or even Chicago, there were still other riches.
One of the most illuminating and most discussed events of the fall
was
Or(~ills
oj illlpressiollislII,
at the Metropolitan, after an initial (and
slightly expanded) showing in Paris. While it is hard to believe that any–
thing remains to be said about the most popular of modern movements,
the show, the first to concentrate on the 1R60s, the formative decade of
"the new painting" - "Impressionism" wasn't used until 1874 - brought
a fascinating period of transition vividly to life. By setting works by a
generation of young, ambitious painters - Manet, Monet, Cezanne,
Renoir, Pissarro, and their colleagues - beside the work of artists they
admired - Corot, Daubigny, and especially Courbet - as well as those
they detested, the show allowed us to watch the adventurous newcomers
struggle to find their own voices and to locate themselves in relation to
both traditional aesthetic values and new, rather subversive notions of re–
alism. Everyone agreed that
Or(~ills
oj IlIIpressiollism
was full of superlative
pictures, although a few die-hards objected to the show's modest, but
admittedly didactic admixture of entrenched Academicians and the less
than inspired. But that was the point. Everything in the exhibition spoke
to
everything else. Cross-currents, influences, affinities, and antipathies be–
come perfectly visible, reminding us of how seamless history really is, how
artists of different generations, with different conceptions of what paint–
ing can be, coexist and affect one another. No one who looked atten–
tively at this intelligent exhibition will look at Impressionist painting in
the same way again.
The Gustave Caillebotte retrospective that came
to
the Art Institute
of Chicago from Paris, in February, was an interesting footnote
to
OYl~~iIl5
oj 1l1Ipressiollism.
A comfortable bourgeois whose passions were
