The National Gallery is about to unveil its new Millennium Wing with an exhibition of French Impressionists. It will, at the same time, inaugurate a policy of charging admission fees for special exhibitions. Aidan Dunne looks at this short-lived but highly influential art movement, and its role as a money-maker for museums
When the National Gallery of Ireland's new Millennium Wing opens its doors to the public on January 22nd, its inaugural exhibition will feature a dazzling selection of works by those old reliables, the French Impressionists.
Monet, Renoir and the Impressionist Landscape is a substantial exhibition comprising some 69 paintings, many of them individually outstanding works, all drawn from the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
Because landscape painting is the essence of Impressionism, and because of the exceptional range and quality of the paintings it includes, the show can plausibly claim to provide a limited but vivid and concise account of the development of one of the most popular movements in art history. Visitors will have a chance to see works by the foremost Impressionist painters in the context of their significant precursors. Those precursors include Camille Corot and the Barbizon school - also important for the development of Irish painting - the great realist Gustave Courbet and the marine painter Eugène Boudin.
There is also work by what might be called second generation successors, celebrated Neo- and Post-Impressionists such as Paul Signac, Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Cézanne. But the core of the show is certainly made up of significant numbers of paintings by the four artists often regarded as making up the core of Impressionism itself: Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley.
In opting to launch its new wing with a show of Impressionists, the gallery can certainly be accused of doing the obvious thing. The French Impressionists are acknowledged as one of the few reliable money-spinners on the international exhibition circuit. So much so that, back in 1984, the National Gallery borrowed the title for its home-grown blockbuster The Irish Impressionists, even though the painters it featured could not really be described as Impressionists at all.
If Impressionism is an obvious choice, what would be less obvious? Something, perhaps, like the London Royal Academy's current exhibition of Japanese art, The Dawn of the Floating World, which is also, as it happens, drawn from the collection of Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
Monet, who is best known for his series of paintings of haystacks and the façade of Rouen Cathedral, and for his celebrated Water Lilies, was in some respects the driving force of Impressionism. He was a brilliant artistic innovator; and, happily, Boston's holdings of his work span the main phases of his development, so he is the best represented artist in the exhibition. From a fine pre-Impressionist street scene, we can track his progress via a clutch of summery landscapes, including one of the famous haystacks and, dating from 1900, a terrific study of the water-lily pond at Giverny that was such an important source of inspiration for him.
Renoir and the others are also strongly, if more patchily, represented. There is one of Renoir's most masterful paintings, Rocky Crags at l'Estaque, a key landscape for him, plus some characteristically reliable, even-tempered works by Sisley and Pissarro, two Gauguins and one good Cézanne, though things trail off a bit with Signac and some of the others. From the ranks of what might be called the Pre-Impressionists, Boudin makes a particularly strong showing with some terrific paintings, and there are outstanding pieces by Courbet and Henri-Joseph Harpignies.
Impressionism is that rare phenomenon, a revolutionary artistic movement with enormous public appeal. It is hard to define it precisely, but everyone knows an Impressionist painting when they see one, and it is reasonable to say that the movement was at its height over a period of about two decades from the late 1860s. Its influence extended and blossomed well beyond that time, so that by the turn of the 19th century, it was a universally recognised and widely practised style, though its innovators, notably Monet, went on to transcend its original parameters.
It is certainly extraordinary that, more than a century later, the paintings of the Impressionists continue to exercise an unparalleled hold on the public imagination. At some point we fell in love with Impressionism, and we've never moved on. Most of the great Impressionist paintings still look fresh and immediate to our eyes. They are likeable for some obvious reasons: they are generally bright, colourful and cheerful and they feature enjoyable, life- enhancing subjects.
With relatively few exceptions, their landscapes are landscapes of pleasure rather than landscapes of toil or overt ideological significance. The people depicted in them are usually at leisure, relaxing in the garden, picnicking, strolling in the park, bathing, eating, drinking. Degas - who, while not strictly an Impressionist, was peripherally involved - was something of an exception in being more labour- orientated, with his paintings of jockeys, dancers and prostitutes. By and large, though, in Impressionist painting there is a sense of a broad class of people with the means and time to enjoy themselves.
Optically as well, the Impressionists were a liberating force. Courbet was a crucial and acknowledged influence. When you looked at one of his paintings, Willem de Kooning said once, you got the feeling that he had uprooted the tree and planted it right there in front of you. In contrast to this robust, sombre-hued, intellectual realism, Monet offered you, as a disparaging critic accurately noted, only a fleeting ocular impression, something glimpsed in passing. But there was a potent truth in the passing glimpse, a sensory truth which people could immediately recognise.
In a way, Impressionism could be defined as much by what it left out as by what it put in. The darker side of human experience was simply absent. The painters courted controversy by dispensing with traditional levels of finish, and they eschewed art's didactic and moralising function by discarding familiar allegorical frameworks of meaning. All in favour of, apparently, extraordinary casualness of form and content. They offered snapshot studies of nondescript subjects that seem perfectly reasonable to us now but shocked the critics of the time and led eventually to a backlash. One critical view is that the apparent lack of ideological import barely conceals an implicit celebration of bourgeois values.
Over the last few decades, art historians have provided a more complex, multi-faceted account of Impression than was previously allowed. As part of this process, more attention has been paid to the social and historical context, and to hitherto relatively obscure figures, like Gustave Caillebotte and Frédéric Bazille. They do not feature in this show, nor do Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot or the American Impressionist, Mary Cassatt.
If you want a good, balanced overview of the current art historical view of French Impressionism, Belinda Thomson's Impressionism: Origins, Practice, Reception (Thames & Hudson World of Art, £9.95 sterling, published in 2000) is a very good, extremely readable book that provides a judiciously rounded account. Thomson also seems genuinely to like the works she writes about, in contrast to the oddly censorious, almost disapproving tone of some recent art history.
Reduced to a set of mannerisms mechanically applied, Impressionism has been endlessly debased and recycled as a form of saccharine decoration. So much so that inferior versions of Impressionist landscape became a kind of artistic norm which successive generations of artists reacted against.
Even the real thing can be a bit much. A roomful of Sisleys can be hard going: all those candy-coloured brushstrokes make you feel as if you're in a sweetshop. Yet this never happens with Monet, an extraordinarily good artist by any standard, whose questing intelligence always drove him onto new challenges.
The very marketability of the Impressionists is a double-edged sword. For example, good as it was, there was something verging on the distasteful about the Royal Academy's Monet in the 20th Century exhibition two years ago. The work seemed almost secondary to the business of packaging, promotion and a hard-sell merchandising strategy that could have been borrowed intact from Hollywood. All of which may merely reflect the fact that culture is entertainment and entertainment is business. That high culture, in other words, is as open to commodification as everything else in the global marketplace. And whether they like it or not, museum professionals have to sup with the devil.
It is surely no accident that the National Gallery of Ireland has chosen this moment to introduce a policy of charging for visiting exhibitions; shows not drawn from the gallery's permanent collection will now have an admission charge. It must be emphasised that this doesn't apply to the gallery's permanent collection, for which voluntary contributions are canvassed from visitors. Admission charges to museums are common and generally accepted abroad. And one can readily sympathise with cash-strapped museum directors watching a daily influx of visitors, particularly during the summer months, enjoying the benefits of the institution while contributing nothing directly to its costs.
The Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery's imposition of an admission charge to view the Francis Bacon Studio last year could be seen as setting a precedent, in that the studio is not a temporary event but a permanent fixture - one that was, moreover, given as a gift to the city by Bacon's heir, John Edwards. It's not clear yet if the gamble of imposing an admission charge has paid off in the case of the Bacon studio, as the gallery has not yet released visitor figures. Its decision to charge for admittance, and the National Gallery's imposition of a charge for The Impressionist Landscape, reflect the fact that cultural institutions are under increasing pressure to diversify sources of funding. It is ironic that these changes in policy come at a time when there is much publicity about the move in Britain to remove entrance charges to galleries and museums.
State funding and, some way down the line, corporate sponsorship are the two main sources of income. Restaurants, coffee shops and merchandising are par for the course at virtually every major museum worldwide. And admission charges are another obvious option. The National Gallery of Ireland's head of exhibitions, Fionnuala Croke, has defended the introduction of a charge, pointing out that the gallery must source funding for the kind of projects the public wants. It is undeniable that we are willing to pay considerable sums of money to attend concerts, films and plays.
Perhaps responding to criticism, the Hugh Lane has adopted the widely employed concessionary practice of having one free day a week. The theory here is that those sufficiently motivated but financially straitened will time their visits accordingly, and hence the museum lives up to its responsibility to provide access to the cultural resources in its care. Rather warily, however, the Hugh Lane has narrowed the window of opportunity from one day to one morning, limiting free access to the Bacon Studio to Tuesday mornings.
Perhaps the current debate about admission charges and the underlying issue of cultural funding is beneficial because it makes us look critically not only at the question of presentation and access, but also at culture itself. Are we still interested in a bunch of paintings made in another country over a century ago? Do we value them because of their celebrity status, because of the record-breaking prices they fetch in the auction rooms, because going to big "blockbuster" exhibitions has become a social event? Or is there something else about them as well, something less reducible to financial or promotional considerations? They are beautiful paintings that encapsulate the excitement of a transitional moment in the history of Western art and contribute to the way we look at the world around us.
But in the end, as with all great art, their abiding fascination arises from their ability to touch us directly, to move and inspire us in ways that elude easy explanation.