{"id":1605018,"date":"2025-12-10T16:18:44","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T21:18:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/observer.com\/?p=1605018"},"modified":"2025-12-10T16:21:43","modified_gmt":"2025-12-10T21:21:43","slug":"review-impressionism-revolution-monet-to-matisse-in-santa-barbara","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/observer.com\/2025\/12\/review-impressionism-revolution-monet-to-matisse-in-santa-barbara\/","title":{"rendered":"From Rejection to Revolution: Santa Barbara Museum of Art Charts the Rise of the Impressionists"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Camille Pissarro, Apple Harvest<\/em>, 1888. Oil on canvas, overall: 24 x 29 1\/8 in. (60.96 x 73.98 cm.), dimensions: 33 1\/2 x 38 3\/4 x 4 in. (85.09 x 98.425 x 10.16 cm.). Brad Flowers, Dallas Museum of Art, Munger Fund<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Their paintings might look like greeting cards from a nursing home, but the Impressionists were 19th century punk rockers. They upended the establishment by presenting what was viewed as rough, unfinished artwork by upstarts bent on subverting tradition. And when the conservative Acad\u00e9mie des Beaux-Arts rejected them, this ragtag group of starving artists, including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Paul C\u00e9zanne and Berthe Morisot, among others, set up their own group show, a first, and had the audacity to charge admission.<\/p>\n

Their work can be seen in the touring show “Impressionism Revolution: Monet to Matisse,” currently at Santa Barbara Museum of Art, alongside the latter\u2019s “Encore: 19th-Century French Art.\u201d The Dallas show will then travel to the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Toronto\u2019s Art Gallery of Ontario in the summer and, in late 2026, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey revolutionized museums and how we encounter exhibitions and who art is made for and who gets to see it,\u201d Dallas Museum of Art curator Nicole Myers tells Observer. \u201cA lot of the things they brought to the table, real innovation at the time, stayed as a proto form of modern art making.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a short-lived but seminal moment in art history that ran for roughly 10 years, but the stylistic and intellectual offshoots that Impressionism spawned marked a sea change, paving the way for 20th-century art. Beginning with Monet\u2019s Impression, Sunrise<\/i> (1872), and from which the movement got its name from critic Louis Leroy, Impressionism was maligned by the Acad\u00e9mie, a government-run arts organization whose annual Salon show determined which artists might have a prosperous career and which would not.<\/p>\n

Popular among the Salon were artists like Jean-L\u00e9on G\u00e9r\u00f4me and Antonin Merci\u00e9, academicists who produced Orientalist and historical paintings often depicting scenes from Greek mythology. Impressionist paintings, in both style and subject, were decidedly outr\u00e9, eschewing tradition-bound standards like a brown wash to prep the canvas as well as the requisite coat of varnish as a final step. They elevated rough subject matter like sex workers, manual laborers and industrialization, presenting them through sketchy brushstrokes unlike the clean application of paint favored by the Salon.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was political to them to mount their own show and buck the government in that way. It was a battle they were waging and the stakes were extremely high in France in this period, where no art was not political,\u201d offers Myers, noting how critics like Charles Albert d’Arnoux, known professionally as Bertall, characterized Impressionist works as \u201cawkward attempts, crude in color and tone, without contour and modeling, displaying the most complete disregard for drawing, distance and perspective; colors chucked, so to speak, at random.\u201d<\/p>\n

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