Can impressionism be used as a setting?
About the exhibition "Aux sources des Nymphéas: les impressionnistes et la décoration", at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris until 11 July.
Are Impressionist works of art decorative? If you buy a painting to decorate your living room, all the works of art for sale are decorative. It remains to be seen whether the harmony of the colours of a painting with the sofa takes precedence over the emotion felt at the sight of it. And whether decorating a wall is as artistic as painting a canvas.
More broadly, the article by Jean-François Lasnier in Connaissance des Arts asks the question: is Impressionism a decorative art? Knowing that the adjective was more pejorative than anything else at the time, this is what many art critics finally reproached the painters for at the group's first exhibition in 1874. Arguing that their work was painted in broad strokes, more sensitive to general harmony than to detail, and therefore sufficient to be seen from a distance like all the great decors...
Nevertheless, no Impressionist painter's name is to be found alongside those of Delacroix, Flandrin, Puvis de Chavannes and so many other 19th century decorators, who were part of the process of awarding decorations set up by the authorities to display their paintings on vast wall surfaces. Disdain on the part of the Impressionists? Many, such as Monet and Caillebotte, would themselves claim the adjective, designating as "decorative panels" the works produced to adorn private interiors. When Camille Pissaro, Edgard Degas or Berthe Morisot painted fans and ceramic tiles, it is difficult to say whether they did so to pay their bills or whether they wanted to fight artistically against industrial art.
The new exhibition at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, which runs until 11 July, unfolds the decorative experiments of the Impressionist artists and their interest in the subject like an art gallery, close to the floating world of the Water Lilies, which Monet nevertheless wanted to confine to the canvas, and has the merit of offering a new look at works that we thought we already knew by heart.
Image: Claude Monet (1840-1926), Chrysanthemums, 1897