The Impressionist Revolution at the AGO revisits the movement’s radical roots

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Facing the rising costs and carbon footprint of shipping art, museums are getting imaginative about curating tight shows from their own collections rather than assembling vast surveys from multiple international lenders.

Asked to mark the 150^th anniversary of the Impressionists’ first exhibition in 1874, curator Nicole Myers considered what story she could tell with what lay at hand at the Dallas Museum of Art in Texas. By the standard of the American museums established in the Gilded Age, Dallas has a relatively new collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, thanks to major gifts in the 1980s. It includes the big names – Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh and Henri Matisse – but not their greatest hits.

From this assembly of lesser-known gems, Myers hit on her themes, stressing the revolutionary nature of the Impressionist project in the 1870s and 1880s, and its echoes in the art that followed in the 1890s and the early 20^th century. She calls the exhibition The Impressionist Revolution: Monet to Matisse from the Dallas Museum of Art. Leaving fragile works-on-paper at home and pared down to a mere 50 items, this is the compact crowd-pleaser that has been touring the U.S. – by truck, not plane – and is now making its one Canadian stop at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.

Myers’s goal is to awaken audiences, so lulled by Impressionist biscuit tins and folding umbrellas, to the radical nature of what those painters did. Like many a curatorial thesis, the originality of this one is overstated. Many museum goers would be aware the term Impressionism was originally a critic’s insult and that the artists were poorly received in their early days. (Monet lived long enough to become a French icon.)

Indeed, there is often something self-congratulatory in our embrace of a previous generation’s avant-garde: We would have been snapping up Monet’s landscapes back in 1874 and would never have allowed van Gogh to die in poverty.

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In a show of light-filled landscapes and sensitive still-lifes, shaking us from either ignorance or complacency is a big job. Dallas lacks examples of the painstaking, high-gloss Salon art that the Impressionists rejected and, without that comparison, radicalism grabs hold of the viewer erratically. The exhibition is introduced with Gustave Caillebotte’s The Path in the Garden, a study of dabbled light and varied shade in a park-like setting. What can one say, except what a lovely painting?

In a smaller work, Morisot does take the viewer by the throat with a scene of boats in the harbour at Nice, which she painted from a boat to escape passersby on the quay jeering at the sight of a woman artist. The result is modernity itself: She plunges the viewer into a fast and unfinished sketch, with raw canvas visible in the lower corners of a composition dominated by a dynamic rendition of reflections on water.

Similarly, in the room entitled When Impressionism Was New, two still lifes foreshadow abstraction and Cubism as they experiment with depicting space: In Édouard Manet’s Brioche with Pears (1876) floral wallpaper in the background blends into the objects on a foreshortened tabletop, while Paul Cézanne’s dark Still Life with Carafe, Milk Can, Bowl and Orange of 1879-1880 flirts with flatness.

Pointillism or Neo-Impressionism, partly because it remains so visually eccentric, also reinforces the revolutionary theme. This section includes an orchard scene by Pissarro and two works by Paul Signac, a farm scene and a large view of Mont Saint-Michel at sunset created with a series of pink and blue dashes.

The workers picking apples in Pissarro’s painting are a vision of social harmony espoused by the Pointillists as a corollary to their colour theories, but their extreme style triggered a backlash against Impressionism, accused of concerning itself only with visual effects.

What followed is the diverse movement now identified broadly as Post-Impressionism, with its greater stress on emotions and ideas. The large room devoted to this topic includes everything from Edvard Munch’s menacing Thuringian Forest, a landscape of impenetrable woods and land as red as raw meat; a horizontal panel of yellow haystacks by van Gogh, and an undistinguished vase of flowers from Matisse’s mid-career, the only Matisse here despite the show’s title. There are several stronger examples of the period, such as Pierre Bonnard’s nudes and, from Émile Bernard, both one of his Breton paintings and a tough scene in a brothel.

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As Myers flags, perhaps Impressionism’s greatest gift to these artists was their independence from the stultifying Salon system. And she notes that before the First World War erupted the art created by Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Gauguin and Van Gogh was seen by artists outside France in major European retrospectives.

Beyond that, it is hard to judge whether this eclectic selection of harder art with stronger shapes and bolder colours represents a rejection of Impressionism or an extension of it. Probably a bit of both. Interestingly, Myers includes four early outdoor scenes by Piet Mondrian, showing him clearly under the influence of Impressionism and Pointillism (as well as Expressionism) before he began painting the abstract grids that made him famous. Post-Impressionism was so stylistically diverse there’s no direct line from Impressionism to abstraction, but hints of the influence do emerge.

In a small room devoted to two examples from Monet’s beloved Water Lilies series, The Water Lily Pond (Clouds) of 1903 features a high horizon line and is dominated by the reflection of the clouds in the water. (The story goes that when it was first shown, people thought it had been hung upside-down.) But in Water Lilies, a tondo of 1908, the horizon has disappeared as the viewer confronts only water with a swirl of green brush strokes at the centre that does verge on abstraction. Here, once more, newness reaches out to us across the decades.

And yet, irony of ironies, at the AGO only one other room separates these works from the gift shop, where you can buy, for $900, another of the water lily paintings rendered across three skateboards and mounted as a wall piece. This exhibition presents a pleasant opportunity to see strong, lesser-known examples of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. Defeating kitschy anachronism will have to wait for another day.

The Impressionist Revolution: Monet to Matisse from the Dallas Museum of Art, continuing through Oct. 18 at the Art Gallery of Ontario, is now open to members and pass-holders, and opens to general public July 7.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify the full name of the exhibition.