When Art Leads Society's Way

I would never make light of the destruction and heartache caused by the compound storms and political chaos of our time. I had scheduled an art tour to our nation’s capital and I was fortunate to be able to keep those plans. I had not realized how much I needed a mental break from all that occupied my mind and heart! With your indulgence, I will talk mostly about art today.

The main goal of the trip was to see the show that commemorates the 150th anniversary of the birth of the Impressionist movement. Washington, D.C., is the only stop of this exhibit in America. Our tour was organized by the University of North Florida’s Dr. Debra Murphy, who has given art lectures at Story & Song. The show is on display through Jan. 19, 2025, if you are inclined to go. Through the wonder of the internet, you can also attend by going to the National Gallery of Art website and then to the “exhibits” tab. Scroll to “1874: The Impressionist Moment,” and you can see the show for yourself.

Impressionist art is loved now. It was not always that way. In the late 19th century, the official Salon in Paris was the exhibition in which artists wanted to show. Tens of thousands came to see it and purchase art. France suffered greatly from the Franco-Prussian war. The battered country wanted to return to normalcy and to prove to the world that Paris was still the world’s art hub. At the same time, a new breed of artist emerged. These artists responded to changes in society with industrialization, modernization and new tools, like paint in a tube. These new painters didn’t follow the rules! The judges excluded their works from the traditional salon.

After being rejected, 31 artists planned their own show for April 15, 1874, with no judges and no limit to the number of entries per artist. The Societe Anonyme was born. Out of the 200 works exhibited, only four sold, but a movement was launched. The show in D.C. displays works included in the Salon of 1874 side by side with ones that were excluded.

Claude Monet’s painting, “Impression, Sunrise,” of the harbor in Le Havre (below) gave the new movement its name. The art critic Leonard Leroy said derisively that the works were impressions of paintings, not real art. The name stuck and became a rallying cry in the art community. Not only that, their rebellion changed the direction of Western art. They painted everyday scenes loosely with bold colors. They painted en plein air, not just in studios. Dr. Murphy summarized this enormous shift, saying, “Art subjects went from faces to places.”

Those who didn’t buy paintings at that first show passed on works by Monet, Degas, Renoir, Sisley, Pisarro, Morisot and many others. Paintings and sculptures shown there are now worth millions.

While I was in D.C., I was also reading “Picasso’s War: How modern art came to America,” by Hugh Eakin. The extensively researched book details the decades’ long journey of getting modern art shown and collected in America. The American public in places like New York and Chicago disdained paintings not in the traditional style. A dealer tried to sell Picasso drawings for $12! Even at that price, they had to be shipped back to Europe.

Like after the Franco-Prussian War in France, after World War I and into the early 1920s, America experienced a rise in xenophobia, racism and isolationist thinking. Like today, disinformation was disseminated, not by the internet of course but by citizen-printed pamphlets. Artists’ work was described as thwarting natural law. A doctor of eugenics said viewing this art could cause “unhealthy feelings” in the viewer! These paintings were said to promote “Bolshevism” in an unwitting public. Draw any parallels that come to mind to what we hear and see today.

In the 1920s, artists were painting in post-Impressionist and Cubist styles. Here is an early Cubist work by Pablo Picasso.

Societies lurch back and forth from progressive to regressive ways of thinking and believing. The upheaval of wars and rapid social changes leave people scrambling to make sense of it all. We can sound a note of hope in that decisive changes have happened before. People back then got through the upheavals and so will we.

Fear of rapid changes propels some people to look backward and long for the “good ol’ days” in a misplaced nostalgia. They try to stop change in its tracks by forcing their views on others by legislating morality, enforcing strict codes and limiting personal freedoms. They are willing to forego freedom in order to get the stability and order they are promised by agents of autocracy. History has proven that expensive gamble is not worth the price.

Artists respond to what is happening in the larger society. They also can lead the way.