Masterpieces of the Louvre: Part II

It is one of the ironies of art history that no group had to battle harder for recognition than the French impressionists, who eventually came to dominate the art of the Western world. Bucking the ornate, sentimental tastes of most Frenchmen in the second half of the 19th century, they were ruthlessly held down by entrenched academicians who controlled the Salon exhibitions. Many of them were grizzled veterans before they began to pay their way with their paintings. When impressionist painting suddenly swept into fashion at the turn of the century, their prices began a rocket ascent that is still going strong. Last week, with France's President Rene Coty on hand to officiate, the battlers for impressionism reached new stature in their own land. At last they have a worthy museum of their own, in the remodeled two-story Jeu de Paume* in the Tuileries Gardens facing Paris' Place de la Concorde.

Closed since 1954, when the building's inadequate structure was threatening damage to the impressionist masterpieces already hanging there, the Jeu de Paume was reopened as a completely redone museum, with the most modern lighting and humidity control, and hung with no less than 288 of the Louvre's freshly cleaned prize impressionists (see color pages). The opening was a tonic for French pride. Said France-Soir: "At last Paris has a living museum."

"When Life Was Agreeable." With opening-day attendance more than 1,700, there was no question that the impressionists are a greater drawing card than ever before. Louvre Chief Curator Germain Bazin thinks he knows the reason. First, he points out in his forthcoming book, Impressionist Paintings in the Louvre, "impressionism has not yet become part of history. It is still a living legend." Second, at a time when France is sore beset on all sides, "impressionism gave back to us the vision of the days when life was agreeable, back in the 19th century, when Man, as always when his soul is at peace, paid court to Nature."

For all their ostracism from the Beaux-Arts' controlled annual Salon exhibition (the art mart of its day), the impressionists were men of their age. "Their poverty irked them especially," Bazin points out, "because it prevented their living that normal life, that stable existence, to which they aspired. It was quite different with Gauguin and Van Gogh. It was these two lunatics who started the rupture between the artist and society. To the 20th century they were the models for geniuses beyond the law, possessed by superhuman power, which . . . laid them low."

Caressing Shadows. Edouard Manet, who eventually won the Legion d'honneur ribbon, strove mightily to stay on the good side of the academicians. Though his subject matter was often as old as Giorgione's and Raphael's, the fact that he presented his themes in modern dress was enough to outrage viewers brought up on neoclassicism and romantic literary allusions. Manet discovered his clue to portraiture, and his fresh, vigorous palette, in the paintings of the 17th century painter Velasquez. In The Fifer, Manet even used the same greyish background Velasquez employed. Claude Monet, on the other hand, made his own discovery, that light acting and reacting over objects is all that the eye knows of them, and that color in shadows, far from being black, often strikes the eye more caressingly than in blinding sunlight.

In his Dejeuner sur I'Herbe, Monet, then 25, began his manifesto, one of the greatest lost paintings of modern art. Gigantic in scale, the canvas measured 15 ft. by 19 ft., was referred to by one friend as "this huge sandwich which costs the earth." In it, Monet set out to prove how the sunlight actually filters through the trees, how a real picnic looks in the forest, how color glows in the shade. It was never shown. Monet had to leave it with the innkeeper as guaranty against his unpaid bill. He recovered it, found it largely ruined by cellar dampness, and cut it into strips.

Footlights & Picnics. Within the impressionists' circle, Manet and Monet together set off what Curator Bazin calls the "Cycle of Picnics," notes: "No school of painting has ever taken so much trouble to describe the life of its contemporaries, to show them their own pleasures, to help them forget their sorrows. No school of painting was ever so optimistic."

Renoir devoted study after study to catching the play of sunlight over the gay dresses of his models and the boaters of his friends. Degas, with a draftsman's colder eye, made the backstage world of ballet dancers and the artificial world of footlights into a private universe. Pissarro, who conscientiously tried his hand at each new style, set his easel up in the French countryside, gave even the meanest farm a nobility and poetry. Van Gogh took the same subject, extended his sensibilities to achieve a kind of ecstatic identification with the countryside's own windswept rhythms.

Accepted abroad in Berlin, New York and Chicago while still suspect in Paris, the impressionists fought for Louvre recognition under the leadership of Claude Monet, who spearheaded a subscription movement to buy Manet's famed nude Olympia for the nation. Accepted in 1890 after heated argument, Olympia was hung in the Luxembourg Palace, then the waiting room for the main Louvre collection. In 1894 the painter Gustave Caillebotte bequeathed the nation 67 prize impressionist paintings, had 38 grudgingly accepted for the Luxembourg, including Renoir's Le Moulin de la Galette, Pissarro's Red Roofs. By 1911, opinion had swung round so completely that when Count Isaac de Camondo willed the Louvre 56 impressionist paintings (including Degas' Foyer de la Danse, Manet's The Fifer), they were accepted unanimously by the Curators' Committee.

Paintings from the People. With the postimpressionists, the Louvre repeated the same farce, bought not a single Cezanne, Van Gogh or Seurat before World War II. Again it was French collectors, and in one case an American, who came to the rescue. U.S. Collector John Quinn (one of the organizers of Manhattan's famed 1913 Armory Show) gave the Louvre its one major Seurat, The Circus. Paul Gachet, son of the Dr. Gachet who took care of Van Gogh in his last months, since 1946 has given the Louvre eight Van Goghs, half the total now in the Louvre, plus seven Cezannes.

To his triumph in bringing the ever-increasing harvest of impressionists together, Curator Bazin, with French pride, adds this footnote: "Those who deny that the French possess a sense of civic responsibility are advised to visit the Jeu de Paume. The impressionist gallery at the Louvre is not the accomplishment of the French government but of the people of France."

*The Jeu de Paume (literally, game of palm) was a royal indoor tennis court built by Napoleon III in 1862. The game, known as jeu de courte paume, derived from a sort of handball to which racquets were added, was for centuries the rage in France. In the 1890s the game lost popularity to English lawn tennis.

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