America has had a long and ardent love affair with Impressionism.
And when we look back, with our 20/20 hindsight, we can see that it was as inevitable as the dawn.
Impressionism came about through many avenues and influences, many of which can be seen in the Akron Art Museum’s big fall show, Landscapes From the Age of Impressionism.
This lush exhibit, on view through Feb. 5, offers a broad survey of landscape painting as practiced by leading French artists from Gustave Courbet to Claude Monet and their most significant American followers.
The 51 paintings in this show include many of the finest examples of French and American Impressionist landscapes from the collection of the Brooklyn Museum as well as American Impressionist paintings from the Akron Art Museum.
“We added 13 from our collection to the 38 from the Brooklyn Museum,” Ellen Rudolph, Akron’s curator of exhibitions, said. “The exhibit is really kind of a survey of developments of the Impressionist movement, including not only examples of high Impressionism, but also the wide range of stylistic developments in landscape painting that preceded and followed it.
“We also explore some of the key cultural and historical trends centered on industrialization that influenced the development of Impressionism.”
The exhibit begins in the large main upper exhibition gallery that with one exception contains French paintings from Courbet to the Barbizon School.
Beginning in the 1850s and 1860s in France, The Barbizon School introduced plein-air painting practices to what had heretofore been strictly a studio endeavor.
This was made possible by the invention by an American of tube paint, which did away with the centuries-old practice of paint carried around in pigs’ bladders, which were nasty, easily broken and/or spoiled containers.
Tube paint made it possible for artists to paint out of doors for long periods in other than ideal conditions and to follow the advice of Gustave Courbet, a 19th-century realist painter who believed that the only possible source for a living art is the artist’s own experience.
Until Courbet, artists had resorted to creating imaginary views. The Barbizon painters were among the first French artists to show the landscape as they saw it.
But still, while they made preliminary sketches out of doors, they continued to finish their work in their studios with carefully executed paintings.
At the same time, the Western world was becoming increasingly industrialized, creating factory towns and suburbs, a growing middle class, leisure time, train travel and the new industry of tourism.
Artists reacted to these changes by turning to landscape painting, a genre that had been largely neglected since the 17th century.
While the Barbizon painters sought to preserve the picturesqueness of the fast-disappearing countryside, exemplified by Jules Breton’s landscape, The End of the Working Day (1886-1887), the Impressionists responded to the changing scenes of the industrial age in works such as Charles Francois Daubigny’s The River Seine at Mantes (c. 1856).
One of the developments of this new industrial age were new chemical dyes and colors that were not only more lightfast, but brighter and more vivid than the natural pigments artists had used to that point.
At the same time Japonisme, following the 1854 opening of Japan to the West by Commodore Perry, took the United States and Europe by storm.
Prints and other works of art from Japan demonstrated how volumes could be suggested by a small number of rapid brush strokes, a technique that wasn’t lost on members of the Impressionist movement.
Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and others created seemingly spontaneous, rapidly executed landscapes and urban scenes where they sought to record the fleeting effects of light, weather and atmosphere.
We can see these effects in works such as Monet’s Vernon, soleil (1894) which, like his haystacks, was a scene painted repeatedly at varying times of the day and in changing weather, and Pissarro’s Paris Chemin montant, rue de la Cote-du-Jalet, Pontoise (1875), which was done during a stay with his friend Paul Cezanne.
These and works of other Impressionists at the time were inspired by new technologies, such as electricity, the telephone and assembly-line production. Their use of rapid brush strokes and pure color corresponded to the fast pace of progress and a transformed landscape.
The first Impressionist exhibit was held in April 1874 in the studio of the photographer Nadar. The 30 participants exhibited eight more times between 1874 and 1886.
Still, it wasn’t until the first big Impressionist show in New York City in 1886 that American artists became fully aware of the movement. By that time Monet had been living in Giverny for three years.
Dozens of American artists, including John Singer Sargent, Frederick Frieseke and Theodore Robinson traveled to Giverny, where Monet’s presence gave birth to a full-fledged artist’s colony.
We can see his influence in such paintings as Robinson’s La Roche Guyon (1891) and Sargent’s Val d’Aosta (c. 1909).
The explosion of new technologies, new industries and the rising middle class spawned the growth of new wealth across Western Europe and America. A new class was born, the bourgeoisie, or upper middle class, which had the time, money, education and inclination to buy luxury goods.
It all meshed so perfectly: new homes, new locations, new wealth, new art. American artists who had embraced the Barbizon School and/or Impressionism returned home and set up studios in and around New York and Boston, where they could support themselves through teaching.
They also passed on the legacy of plein-air painting at summer art schools they founded, fostering a new appreciation in their students for the American landscape.
The 13 paintings from Akron’s collection more than hold their own among their Brooklyn brethren; they seem to have been given new life and brilliance in their new surroundings. Some have never been exhibited to the public.
Akron curatorial assistant Danielle Meeker has done an outstanding job of researching the artists in the exhibit, in particular where they went to paint, and has created a map of their haunts in France and the United States, which is displayed in the last gallery.
This gallery is also stocked with tables for playing chess and checkers, representing the leisure class who made Impressionism such a never-ending success. Visitors are invited to sit and play.
There are several other free activities planned during the run of this show, including:
• Nov. 6 — Plein-air Painting at 1 p.m. with Charles Basham.
• Nov. 10 — Lecture by Gloria Groom, The Impressionists’ Enterprise: Marketing Modernism. 6:30 p.m.
• Jan. 12 — A book club event: The Private Lives of the Impressionists by Sue Roe, a lively biography of key artists of the Impressionist movement. Includes a guided gallery tour. 6 p.m. Registration required. Call 330-376-9186, ext. 230.
