New Dawn

By ROBERT HUGHES

What, another impressionist show? Yet more of those women under trees, those boating parties, those irksomely "unproblematic" scenes of French middle- class life a century and a quarter ago? Fraid so, yes. But "Origins of Impressionism," seen earlier this year in Paris and now filling a large slice of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, is an uncommonly well- chosen and fully argued show.

Created by the Met's Gary Tinterow and the French art historian Henri Loyrette, chief curator of the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, it has drawn in an astonishing number of major works -- nearly 30 Manets; more than that number of Monets; and work by a whole gamut of artists from Renoir to Cezanne and Whistler, from Frederic Bazille to academicians like Jean-Leon Gerome and even William Bouguereau. It focuses on the early years of the movement, the 1860s, before "New Painting" became controversial with the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874. It asks, What formed Manet, Monet, Degas, Renoir and the rest; what ambitions coalesced between them; what other artists did they respond to?

"Nothing will come of nothing" is an axiom of art history, and the notion that Impressionism was a matter of innocent eyes doing sunlight with broken touches without "academic" preconceptions is strictly for the birds in the sunlit trees. What's wrong with the name Impressionism is that it suggests quick shots of fleeting things. Yet the main progenitor of New Painting was the most solid, stubborn and material painter imaginable, Gustave Courbet. A Renoir like Bather with a Terrier, 1870, could hardly exist without the example of Courbet's wardrobe nudes. Courbet was the doubting Thomas of painting, the great empiricist who wanted to verify everything by touch, and his influence pervades Manet's work as well.

In the catalog, Loyrette and Tinterow quote the art critic Jules Castagnary, who wrote in 1867 that the "modern spectacle" sought by the New Painters wasn't a matter of theory, ideology or history but of direct response to the world and its contents. "What need is there to go back through history ... to examine the registers of the imagination?" Castagnary wrote that "beauty is in front of the eyes, not inside the brain; in the present, not in the past ... The universe we have here, before us, is the very one that painting ought to translate."

There is a standard story of Impressionism: how it rose in opposition to brown-soup or frothy-pink "academic" art, how its icebreaker was Manet's Le | Dejeuner sur l'Herbe at the Salon of 1863, and how it chucked out past art (history painting, the academic portrait) in the interest of unmediated vision. This needs a grain of salt, and the Met's show administers several pounds of it, in the form of a prelude gallery that sketches the main contents of the official Paris Salon of 1859, the year in which, most observers concurred, the once unquestioned supremacy of history painting faltered. Landscape was rising, and the main vehicle of New Painting was landscape, with or without figures in it.

The disappearance of history painting must have come as a relief to the general audience. Now you didn't need to know who Gyges and Candaules were, and which one had the wife whose silky white backside was the real pretext for Gerome's painting in the 1859 Salon. It no longer mattered, at least from the viewpoint of painting, who won the Battle of Gaugamela, or which model was standing in for Phryne and which for Aspasia. In due course, movies like Spartacus and The Ten Commandments would satisfy the need once felt for Bible scenes, Greek agoras and Roman battles. What was left to painting was the here and now, and that was where Impressionism, child of Courbet's realism, came into its glory.

Yet, as this show is careful to make clear, several of the Impressionists felt strong loyalties to the older form. The gravity field of history paintings was still very strong. Edgar Degas wanted to do them; the Met's show includes a detailed sketch of medieval horsemen and dead or lamenting nudes, one of whom is shaking loose a cascade of flaming russet hair and looks exactly like the bathers he would draw two decades later. (It is dated 1865 and is thought to have been provoked by stories about the sufferings inflicted on Southern white women by Sherman's army in the Civil War.)

Manet thought "the most wounding insult that can be made to an artist" was to be called a history painter -- but he wanted to paint history too, though of a more recent sort: the killing of the Mexican Emperor Maximilian; and the battle between two Civil War ships, the Alabama and the Kearsarge, in French waters. The latter came out as a sort of imaginary journalism, rapidly painted to catch the urgency of a moment that, in fact, the painter hadn't seen. And though Manet was not notable for his piety in real life, he tried to reinvigorate biblical painting with his great image of The Dead Christ and the Angels, 1864, just to show that he wasn't in thrall to Courbet's realism or to his anticlericalism -- to be really free, you have to rebel against the rebels.

One living artist Manet and his peers respected very much, and who exercised a large subliminal influence on modernism though he would never have claimed to be "moderne" himself, was Puvis de Chavannes. Traces of Puvis's flat, fresco-like narratives kept turning up in Degas; long afterward, Picasso would base the scrawny, mannered figures of his Blue Period on Puvis, and there even seems to be a foretaste of Guernica in the head of the cow, lowing in pain at the sky, in Puvis's War, 1867, included in this show.

But in the end it was not so much the decision to paint the world "as they saw it" that made Impressionism; it was the way of painting it, which came out of Manet and reached its most brilliant expression as color in Monet. Manet perfected a graphic style in which the half tones that offered smooth transitions between high light and deep dark were suppressed; hence the critics' complaints of sketchiness and flatness. But this engaged the eye more, forcing it to assemble continuity from extremes of light and dark.

Monet completely grasped this in the 1860s, and used it, as Tinterow phrases it in the catalog, without "the sexual innuendo or political and social lessons" that appeared in the paintings of Manet and, earlier, Courbet. His monumental Women in the Garden, 1866-67, a canvas the size of a battle piece, nearly 9 ft. by 7 ft., is an extraordinary feat of abridgement: Monet's sense of tone and color is so certain that the big flat areas lock into space as though they were instantly seen and registered with a stroke. And despite its strong architecture, the image is mysterious: the young redheaded woman in her bell of a white dress, leaning forward to pick a hidden flower, floats in the shade like a ghost at noon.

On balance, Manet and Monet steal the show -- Manet by his laconic immediacy and irony, Monet by his genius for conveying sensuous pleasure in compositions whose vigor isn't always promptly apparent, because they look like life itself. His big maritime paintings were done in the terms that Philip Larkin would evoke a century later, in his poem "To the Sea":

Steep beach, blue water, towels,

red bathing caps,

The small hushed waves' repeated

fresh collapse

Up the warm yellow sand, and

further off

A white steamer stuck in the

afternoon --

This isn't the stuff of aesthetic revolt. It's social confirmation -- the image of other people doing what you like. The popularity of a great painter like Monet, or a lesser one like Renoir, isn't due to their figuring out what people liked and then painting it. Monet liked what people liked. There was no angle between his appetites and those of his middle-class audience. He didn't speak "for" them, but he spoke directly to them about pleasure and the brave distinctness of things in the world. Generally artists don't do this today, and don't even try. So Impressionism still has no competitors for public affection.