Original subtitles

Impressionism is, still today, a very successful art movement.

Even though it begun in the early 1870s, more than a century ago,

the Impressionist exhibitions have still a lot of visitors.

It isn't an old-fashioned movement.

They were the first to break free from centuries and centuries of stagnation

to choose creative freedom, they insisted that:

"We paint what we want, as we want,

and nobody can tell us if it's done well or if the colours are right".

And they broke all the previous rules.

This exhibition is unique,

because it's like a box where we can find some unknown treasures.

In fact, all the paintings come from private collections.

These are artworks that won't be seen again by an audience.

This exhibition is unique and indeed one could use the word "secret".

There are artworks that have never been exhibited since they were painted.

So, yes, it is like discovering a secret.

And through the proposed path for the visit,

which includes the chronological evolution,

the grouping of artists, the diversity of themes,

visitors can discover the history of Impressionism,

understanding the originality behind each artist of the movement

and what these painters brought to art history

at the end of the Twentieth century.

"One morning, one of us had run out of black paint, so he used blue instead."

"That was the birth of Impressionism."

This anecdote, told by Pierre-Auguste Renoir,

might sound like a joke, and perhaps even a provocation.

Actually, it already reveals quite a bit about the Impressionist's personality.

Who were the Impressionists? They were a small group of painters.

They tried to develop a more direct relationship

with the world around them, particularly with nature.

They stepped outside their studios.

They were the voices, the heroes of outdoor landscape painting.

Impressionism was both an art movement and an aesthetic choice.

It dealt with a new kind of sensibility,

a sensibility that was based on a technical evolution,

but most of all, it came from a very particular vision of the world.

Painting was important because of its narrative qualities.

Impressionists changed the rules: the story they wished to tell was of no consequences,

rather the manner in which it was depicted gained importance.

The story wasn't important. Everyday life was.

In order to exhibit his works,

an artist had to be evaluated by a jury of art scholars and experts

who looked at the work and said: "This is acceptable, you can show it", or "This one isn't".

That was how it worked in France at that time.

When these artists tried to begin their careers,

as all the other painters did, they would go knocking on the Official Salon's door.

Impressionists, who weren't called that yet,

were a young group of painters, and weren't accepted by the Salon.

That means they couldn't support themselves. What could they do?

Since nobody gave them the chance to exhibit at the Salon,

they decided to establish a partnership

to present and promote their own paintings in a private exhibition.

They arranged an exhibition in 1874,

in the studio of the famous photographer Nadar, who kindly agreed to host them.

EXHIBITION OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS OF IMPRESSIONIST PAINTING

Two art experts came to look at the works.

One of them could see just drafts and scribbles,

incomplete works, instead the other one,

who was a bit more open minded, tried to understand...

They went through the whole exhibition,

and finally arrived in front of "Impression, Sunrise".

The word Impression stuck with them, and they both declared this as the Impressionist movement.

The word was coined at that very moment

and it would change forever the perception of this movement.

Whether it's a matter of experimenting with the shape of things or how to use colour,

or following the changing light and its effects on nature,

these painters' expressive urgency has always been led

by a tireless need to capture the moment, challenge time,

gradually removing any distance between reality and its free interpretation.

In order for something to exist, it needs a name.

And Monet, Renoir, Caillebotte, Cezanne

really needed to exist, so they required a name.

The name "Impressionism", coined by this art expert,

was used by the members of the movement.

Why?

Because every single one of them was focused on painting with brighter colours,

on painting the world as it was,

however each one of them kept their own approach.

The Impressionists weren't a school, they did not follow the same common rules,

they shared their focus,

but each artist gave his personal interpretation to those inputs.

They had their own particularity.

They were jealous of their independence.

And this name, Impressionism, was perfect,

because it was vague.

Before being a technique, it was an aesthetic need,

a need for civilization.

Entering the image in order to become a mirror of the soul.

A mirror of the soul can be a sublime mirror, an immense mirror, a universal mirror.

But it could also be a simple mirror, an everyday life mirror, a familiar mirror.

This was the first process: allowing yourself to be absorbed in the painting.

People are always afraid of change, right?

So they expect to see what they think is sort of familiar,

and in that sense, they're behind with the times.

On the contrary, the collector, the art-lover,

searches for something surprising, something provocative.

So, for sure, they first saw Impressionism as a momentous breakthrough in painting,

in its brushstrokes, colours and light, and they focused on that.

Of course, the audience, and the institutions they represent,

needed time, years, maybe decades, to understand that breakthrough.

If we were to list the names of those who understood from the beginning

the potential of these painters, art dealer, Paul-Durand Ruel

would surely be the first in line.

Aside from being one of the first to fall in love with the Impressionists,

he was also the pioneer who laid the foundations of art dealing as we know it today,

changing the international market forever.

Paul Durand-Ruel, my great-great-grandfather,

was the most important Impressionists' art dealer.

Even his father was an art dealer in the generation prior to Impressionism:

the 1830's School.

Paul Durand-Ruel started his career with his father,

taking care of those artists, for about 15 years, before the Impressionists came on the scene.

Then he made his own career as an art dealer,

he learned the job and how to protect a contemporary artist.

Then, in 1870, the Franco-Prussian war broke out in France,

and Paul Durand-Ruel moved his gallery in London for two years.

He fled to London.

Monet and Pissarro also moved to London,

where they met another fellow artist, who was already a Paul Durand-Ruel's artist:

Charles François Daubigny,

Daubigny said to Durand-Ruel: "I would like to introduce you to two artists,

they seem really promising".

Paul Durand-Ruel agreed, he saw the works painted in London by Monet and Pissarro

and he fell in love with them.

So he decided to embark in this new project.

Since that moment, since 1870,

he devoted all his efforts in promoting these painters,

with huge sacrifices, because their paintings were rejected by everyone.

So all his clients disappeared.

He lost all his money, he bought a lot of Impressionist paintings,

and, during his life,

he never doubted them and he always stood up for them.

It was a long and hard struggle.

Impressionist were loved mostly by collectors rather than public institutions.

They met great difficulties when it came to exhibiting in museums

and were only accepted after the Impressionist revolution had ended.

So, I always thought that the great private collections

held artworks from the time in which the Impressionists were the avant-garde of painting.

Of course, those treasures are hidden from the public in private houses, and vaults,

so I've always wanted to be able to see them.

Speaking of secrets, the eternal city never ceases to amaze.

In the heart of the capital, close to the Roman Forum,

is a beautiful Baroque building, which faces Piazza Venezia.

Palazzo Bonaparte was built in different stages, beginning in 1657,

and was named after Napoleon's mother, Maria-Letizia Ramolino Bonaparte.

The palace is decorated in a stunning fashion,

also thanks to the impeccable taste of its former owner,

who spent her life embellishing it with frescoes, mosaics,

Venetian floors, statues, and neo-classical decorations.

After a lengthy restoration, these rooms,

which at the time were frequented by the high clergy and aristocrats,

are now open to the public, celebrating this event

with a journey through some of the art world's greatest masterpieces.

The initial idea is to think of a palace that's unique.

So my job is to try to understand the meaning of this palace,

and what kind of exhibition could empower that meaning.

Palazzo Bonaparte is a house, a French house.

Art lovers from all over the world would no doubt find this exhibition

of French Impressionist paintings extremely captivating.

It's quite ironic that we're presenting an Impressionist exhibition

in Palazzo Bonaparte, given that Napoleon Bonaparte III

didn't like the Impressionist movement.

When asked how long he'd take to paint his works, Picasso used to say

"It took me a lifetime".

An exhibition such as this one, with artworks coming from private collections all over the world,

requires a lifetime of hard work,

personal connections with art experts and lots of research.

A curator searches for artworks just as a detective would.

When you start planning an exhibition,

you have a dream list of works you'd wish to show.

However, you come across a few negative answers from collectors, along with the positive ones.

In the end, you almost never get the exact exhibition you have imagined at first.

Then, you enter the exhibition hall, and the painting you imagined hanging on a wall,

suddenly looks better on another wall or in another room.

So, the curators have to be inspired by the space,

by Palazzo Bonaparte in this case.

It's important, also, to be inspired by the artworks to understand

how to make them interact with each other.

My job is to study the artworks' state of preservation.

We don't touch the artwork, but we check it very closely,

so that we can establish everything that's on its surface.

To share an artwork, which has never been seen before,

is an enormous gift from a collector to the public.

Every time I have to light Impressionist artworks,

I always find them very difficult to interpret.

Every painting has its own history, so lighting these paintings means adapting the light to them.

My tools are the luxmeter,

used to measure the quantity of light that hits the painting;

and other tools with a high colour rendering index.

But, in the end, what is really important is how the artwork talks to you.

Whether it fascinates you, or moves you in a certain way.

The thing that's very interesting and exciting about this exhibition

is a certain number of technical details and different subjects.

But, even more interestingly,

there are some paintings that reveal the very essence of the artists who painted them.

"The Seine at Vétheuil", by Claude Monet, is hanging in the first room,

at the entrance of the exhibition.

It's a wonderful painting from 1878,

from a period when Monet was in great financial difficulties.

The 1870s for the Impressionists

were a very trying time, because their paintings were despised.

They couldn't sell their paintings, and were starving to death.

However, this work encompasses

Monet's art and Impressionism's point of view.

Monet spent his whole life studying light and observing it.

For an Impressionist, water was a wonderful thing, it was a mirror.

So what did he have? The Seine, reflecting the sky with the clouds, the sun and the light.

So it was perfect, because Monet could really use this calm water

to represent his obsession: light.

This is obviously a naturalist painting by Monet.

Naturalism, in this case, is a way of approaching light, matter and structure.

This is what you obtain with very minute

and particular brushstrokes.

Nothing in this landscape is either necessary or possible.

It's about absorbing the landscape, as I mentioned earlier.

This is The Seine at Lavacourt, by Claude Monet, of 1878.

And, if you go outside Paris, along the Seine, you have all the small towns,

like Argenteuil, Roche-Guyon, Vétheuil,

all the way to Giverny and Vernon, I've been to all of these towns.

I grew up in a middle-class family both in Massachusetts and Maine,

but my mother was very knowledgeable about Impressionist paintings.

My passion for art really started as a youngster,

I actually knew at the age of five who Monet and Renoir were.

It all happened by accident that I started collecting.

When the market caved in, I'm talking about the financial markets, in 1990,

it was a great opportunity to buy really outstanding works.

I have 57 paintings, and it's something I really like,

I look at it like these are all my children.

What's remarkable about the painting in all Monet,

is the beautiful symmetry of the reflections, even though he painted it quickly,

there's a perfect harmony between the reflection of the clouds in the water and the sky,

or the reflection of the vegetation here.

There's an old famous saying, they asked Cézanne about Monet at one point,

and they said: "What do you think about your friend, Monet?"

and Cézanne said: "Monet was an eye, but what an eye!".

And that's true, you can see that Monet probably was the most adroit

and skilful of all the landscape painters of that era.

For somebody who's a serious collector, there are three things:

One: you should put them in the public domain so other people can see them.

To keep them in your home, especially if they're good paintings,

where nobody ever gets to see them, I think is a bit selfish.

The second thing is you have a responsibility to maintain them in good quality,

because you're trying to save the painting for posterity, not just in your lifetime.

And then the third thing is that you should be knowledgeable, I can lecture on them.

No artist can disregard the Impressionists,

it doesn't matter what kind of artist he/she might be.

I was born in this house, many years ago,

my grandfather was a painter,

he taught at the Academy at the beginning of 1900's.

So the house was full of paintings, from floor to ceiling.

In 1964, I went with some friends to Assisi, just for fun,

to participate to an art contest.

I made my first painting, using my grandfather's colours and canvas.

I won third prize and to me it was a lot of money,

six hundred thousands liras in 1964, it drove me crazy.

But that's how I started painting and learning,

and the first artists I discovered were the Impressionists.

At the beginning, everybody copies the works of the masters,

in order to find your own style,

but there was a huge distance between Monet and I.

It's as if I was flying 50cm from the ground,

but he was Batman, it was impossible to even consider copying him.

I could look at this painting for five hours straight, standing still.

It can be interpreted in many ways:

a realistic one, an abstract one, a conceptual one.

It's like 3D; I mean, it has a depth, a substance, which invites you to touch it.

It has the wind inside it. There are no points of reference in it.

And your eyes can't stop moving,

they sort of start dancing and it seems they'll never stop:

it's a perpetual motion.

In 1985, by chance, I started working with glass

and it was a game-changer for me, a true revolution.

It was a never ending, obsessive daily research about transparency

and the colour of transparency.

And recently I added light to my works:

I started to backlight my canvases and I discovered a different world,

both in canvas and in glass.

The paintings you can see here were all made outdoors.

Outdoor painting is very important,

not only to have the right colour perception,

but even for the gesture itself.

Everything changes quickly, even the brushstroke is different,

because it's faster, it's more about the gesture.

If you wish to understand the Impressionists' artworks

you have to observe water that reflects directly on an Impressionist painting.

It's a form of light diffraction

and diffusion of the colours.

What is the job of a painter? The painter creates the place.

Monet was fully aware of this.

He used certain fragments of real life to re-invent it.

And what does it mean to work with nature?

It means that nature creates as much as the artist.

Nature is the artist.

In the "Island of Nettles", the artist depicts the subject in a few brush strokes,

almost liquefying the shapes and wrapping them in an evanescent atmosphere.

It's no surprise that a number of critics commented on this type of artwork

as being mysteriously evocative or having dreamlike sequences.

Monet continued to follow the vibration of light and colour throughout his life,

desperately trying to convey onto canvas the chromatic violence which assaulted his eyes.

"It'd be better to have a palette made of diamonds and gems", he once wrote.

Monet's art is a continuous discovery

moved by the need to overcome the threshold of perception

and bring the image closer to a purely internalized concept,

far from the objectivity of things.

It was when he immersed himself into the world of water lilies

that the artist reached the end of this study,

becoming more conscious of the unfathomable essence of being.

This concept was profoundly important for the future of art.

The exhibition has a room entirely dedicated to Camille Pissarro.

Pissarro practically lived his entire life in the countryside,

and was surrounded by farmers.

From 1880,

he found it interesting to use farmers as his main subject.

So, let's look at the painting.

I sort of like the interaction between the gardener and the female helper here.

And it shows that he breathed humanity into his characters.

So, this is typical, these are probably workers around his house,

working in the back fields.

You cannot identify who the people are, they're just common labourers,

but there was the dignity of work which both Millet and Pissarro tried to imbue into their paintings.

Pissarro painted anonymous farmers, so we can't identify these people.

But it didn't matter to him. What mattered was painting his neighbours.

In fact, he painted his neighbourhood.

There wasn't any message from Pissarro.

It was simply real people portrayed in a real context.

Caught between expressive urgency and the search for a formal synthesis,

that almost transcends into spirituality.

Pissarro affirms: "When I start to paint, the first thing I tend to do

is to capture the harmonic shape between the sky, this land, and this water.

There must necessarily be a connection which can only be a system of harmonies.

This is the ultimate challenge that I must overcome.

From a standpoint of painterly quality, we talk about activating the picture plane,

every last millimetre is filled with common brushwork,

overlay of paint, white over grey, red over green.

The haystack is very complicated, it's complex,

you have vertical, horizontal, diagonal strokes, with quite a bit of build-up of impasto

to make the haystack feel like it's got real depth to it,

like you could reach out, touch it, and grab a piece of straw out of the painting.

So, by accessing the matter,

we could indeed feel this landscape

as if it was a mirror of our soul,

of our great soul,

but also of our everyday-life soul.

It's necessary to create a special

comprehensive relationship between all the artwork's elements.

Therefore, it was necessary to work comprehensively: painting with light colours on light backgrounds,

superimposing different shades, blending elements,

overshadowing a subject that remained deeply realistic

even if it was absorbed and deeply naturalist.

What does "naturalist" mean?

It means that we see the grain, we see the light trapped in the colour:

this is the real texture of the painting.

For example, Pissarro was perfectly present in his works of Éragny.

And the paintings in this exhibition allow us to perceive that very well,

I would say, paradisiacal dimension of the garden.

Those gardens, those moments in Éragny,

suddenly acquired a mythical, almost mythological dimension,

because they were Arcadia or Ovid's scenes,

which referred to eternal moments in those daily scenes.

And this, once again, was a big concern for Impressionists.

If Pissarro's countryside seems to follow along to the rhythms of the farmers at work,

Alfred Sisley's, on the other hand, radically transforms with the changing of the seasons.

Sometimes, the artist paints idyllic landscapes,

such as the ones in which the sky, the riverbanks,

the plants and trees, celebrate as one.

A universal joy, and where, at times, we could even see some excursionists enjoying the day.

At other times, however, the paintings' protagonist was winter itself,

as in Coeur-Volant Road to Louveciennes where the fog and snow correspond directly

with the British artist's lonely and introverted character.

This work by Sisley is amazing:

it essentially has a cinematic point of view, it's like two stage curtains

and one can move inside it, from here back to over there on the hill.

Or even look below on these two boys.

The balance is amazing, the white and the trees,

and these dry branches.

It's like a movie frame.

If you have the chance to be an artist, you need to find your voice.

That's the hard part, you need to find your unique voice.

I'm a photographer. I started to work as a photographer during high school, when I was 15.

Afterwards this passion became an actual job when I was about 22 or 23,

I moved to London for a time and photographed jazz musicians

and rock stars, and eventually began photographing the world of cinema.

You could say that my expertise, my passion is to take portraits.

The first thing that hit me about Impressionist paintings, is this thing,

it's as if they're slightly out of focus.

The artworks seem to move.

We see these fields, in which the barley is moving,

the boats going by, the steam...

That's another great innovation made by the Impressionists:

getting the chance to enter the landscape.

It's a journey through painting,

sustained by the search for colour.

I feel there's something amazing.

Something that's actually secret, or, better yet, hidden.

Something that goes undetected at first glance.

The Impressionists, I think, gave new lymph, at one point, to art.

Because they loved to experiment.

It was a great flash, a blast,

almost like the punk movement: they completely broke off,

with the classic form of writing music,

but then created a great movement.

Late 19th century Paris seemed tailor-made for the Impressionists.

It is a place bursting with inspiration,

without which these artists' works would have undoubtedly been very different.

Interestingly enough, it was Henry James

who best described the atmosphere perceived by the painters.

In his novel, "The Ambassadors", he portrayed the city as a vast and bright Babylon,

a shiny jewel, an enormous, iridescent object

in which parts were not to be discriminated, nor differences comfortably marked.

It twinkled and trembled and melted together, and what appeared purely superficial one moment,

seemed purely profound the next.

Gustave Caillebotte was a peculiar figure inside the group

because he was also the Impressionists' patron.

In this artwork, there are both innovations in style and in the theme.

It's as if the artist was letting us access the scene directly,

with a modernity well represented by a powerful diagonal,

a strong diagonal,

where, on one hand, we see a sort of sketch,

which is the balcony, painted with a few synthetic brushstrokes,

which give us the measure of his physical aspect.

On the other hand, the Haussmann Boulevard is covered by vegetation,

by trees, painted exactly in an early Impressionist manner.

The two men are looking, observing,

as if something important is going on, something we can't see

but they can,

and there's this intense stare through the vegetation,

towards that urban reality, which is what Caillebotte is hinting at.

The city belongs to everyone, and is being upheld here as a great value.

When Baudelaire released "The painter of Modern Life", in 1863,

he identified urban life as an incentive,

a place where the so-called "flaneur", i.e. a dandy,

a gentleman, could just stroll around with no specific destination,

but feel energized by the new feelings the city created.

This is an interior scene, a middle-class interior,

the backlighting enhancing the woman's profile.

The reference, even if it's not a description,

is clearly to Flaubert's Madame Bovary.

She could be Emma Bovary, whereas he, the figure seated with a newspaper,

could be her husband Charles.

In fact, Flaubert wrote about Emma's character, saying:

"her life was as cold as a barn facing north,

and boredom, that silent spider,

weaved its web in all her heart's corners".

On the other hand, she, Emma Bovary,

was cruel towards her husband when she remarked:

"Charles' conversation was flat as a sidewalk".

When the artwork was exhibited, an art critic argued that

the letters of the advertising sign

in front of the building, ruined the painting.

This element of "interference" in the painting

was actually anticipating Toulouse Lautrec's work,

when he represented the Moulin Rouge poster.

So, in some ways he anticipated advertising in art.

In this room the glance theme is essential.

And the meaning of the painting isn't only what can be seen at first,

but it's something that goes throughout the artwork itself.

When we think about Berthe Morisot,

we think about a particular theme:

the theme of childhood, young girls like her own daughter Julie,

who had been her favourite model,

we think about her Parisian young women

and we imagine an art that we could define feminine.

However, if we take a closer look at her art,

we notice that Berthe Morisot

didn't wish to reveal something about her model.

She didn't wish to reveal

something about her daughter's personality.

She didn't show the face of the woman who is in front of the mirror.

Why?

Because that was not her goal,

Berthe Morisot didn't want to paint a portrait,

Berthe Morisot didn't want to describe everyday life in Paris,

Berthe Morisot, instead, wanted to show light reflecting on the skin.

Berthe Morisot aimed to finally paint light.

So is she a feminist painter, or just a painter?

We can only wonder...

Think about Claude Monet who painted flowers for over 25 years.

What are we to make of this?

As Claude Monet painted flowers,

Berthe Morisot painted women.

Claude Monet didn't care about what he was painting

as much as he cared about how he was painting it

same as Berthe Morisot was more interested in how to paint her subject,

than in her subject itself.

The importance of developing one's own vision was placed above everything else.

The goal was to replace a purely perceptional art, with a concept art.

Whether painting the face of a small girl, water, plants, or even the sky,

Berthe Morisot constructed a relationship between the object's surface and their depiction,

which was at the heart of the Impressionist philosophy.

The result was an image that could be considered both plausible and evocative.

Berthe Morisot was a true bourgeois.

She was a bourgeois who lived in a well-built,

and expensively furnished house, at the beginning of the 1800s.

In her room she exhibited a 'psyché',

which was a tilting mirror,

and it inspired her a number of paintings,

like the one that we can see here.

What do we see?

A young woman from behind, slightly undressed, who's looking at herself in a mirror.

And we can't see anything of her, neither her face, nor her chest.

Berthe Morisot played with the effect of the mirror, and,

in a sense, she gave her model an element of virginal purity,

which was a distinctive feature in Berthe Morisot's artworks.

She portrayed those grooming moments in her works

rarely portraying nudes and always in a very chaste and respectful way.

Also, unlike many artists who painted the female nude, in particular Degas,

Berthe Morisot depicted women in a very respectful way,

representing them in an intimacy that was never vulgar,

always very decent.

Certainly, it was a way to respect herself.

The more she was a slave to her intransigence, to her perfectionism,

the more her paintings became bright,

the more they acquired splendour and light.

She was Monet's friend, Renoir's colleague, and Manet's muse.

Manet wasn't just anyone: he was the main figure, of that group of artists called Impressionists.

He was a bit older

than the others and paved the way for a new artistic style.

Manet's own technique is really something incredible.

To me, it's like something from an outside world.

You can see that also in the painting

"Berthe Morisot with a veil", exhibited here.

What are we looking at? Just one thing: the glance.

It's extraordinary how it erases all the other elements,

the single thing that attracts your attention,

is Berthe's gaze.

When you focus only on her glance,

this painting becomes something unbelievable.

This portrait of Berthe Morisot is very particular.

What does it have of Manet and what does it have of Morisot?

The shades and colours:

Manet was the painter that best embodied the connection

between Spanish and French art, through his use of black.

Morisot was a young woman admired for her style and clothes.

She was well known for her black dresses and black necklaces.

In this portrait with its very narrow frame,

we can see the black from Manet on Berthe Morisot with the veil.

It was painted in a fast, almost violent way, the style

is free and aggressive as if Manet was trying to disfigure Morisot.

This artwork was kept in a very famous collection in Southern France.

When the collector died, Renoir, who lived in the region at the time,

went to see the collection and wrote to Durand-Ruel:

"This portrait by Manet is of a very ugly woman".

He didn't even recognise Berthe Morisot.

The portrait is one of the freest paintings by Manet,

but probably also the evidence of an intimacy,

a close bond between the painter and his model.

Édouard Manet also happened to be the artist who united the Impressionists

way before they decided to organise themselves and officially become a group.

Each Thursday they met in the painter's Parisian study,

to exchange ideas and opinions about art and life.

Among them was also Monet, who remembered those days

spent with his friends with these words:

"There wasn't anything better and more interesting than those long and frequent discussions

and those animated conflicts of opinion, they kept our spirits alive,

and provided that element of enthusiasm which supported us for weeks on end,

until we finally gave expression to those ideas born in the study itself.

We came back from those nights with greater conviction

and much clearer and better defined ideas".

The Impressionists were like a big family.

They shared some common ground

and an identical way of conceiving painting.

However, luckily every painter had their own different style.

For example, when we write,

we have a personal style and we can't copy one another.

In painting it's very much the same: everyone has their own brushstroke

and their own style in painting different subjects.

In this exhibition we have the chance to...

discover some of the most audacious works by these painters,

because private collectors could and still can

choose relatively unknown artworks, am I right?

Artworks in which the artist was himself, but also who he could have become,

taking paths they might abandon,

in which nobody would recognize him.

So, sometimes, exhibitions, group exhibitions can allow us to discover

that painters aren't always what they seem to be, what they're famous for,

but a painter is someone who keeps experimenting even after he is successful,

and maybe especially for that reason, such as Renoir did.

In this exhibition there's the portrait of Mme Joseph Durand-Ruel, my great grandmother.

She was 43 years old when it was painted.

Personally, I think she looks older than that.

In this painting we can find the three main features by Renoir:

she was a portraitist,

he loved women, and he loved colour.

Here we have the "Tête de femme" by Renoir, of 1887.

My mum's favourite painter had always been Renoir,

she always said Renoir painted the most beautiful women,

which I think is correct, he made women come alive and look very sensual.

What's interesting is if you move from one side to the other,

her eyes seem to rotate with you, it's an unusual feature

that sometimes you see in the old masses, you don't see very prevalently in an Impressionist painting.

And, if you look throughout, you see the overlay of colour,

the grey tones along the neck, beautiful red tones on her lips and on the cheeks.

But what's also interesting about the painting is that the background is like vegetation,

it's an unusual kind of perspective, but the background contains common brushworks,

which references his Impressionist period,

so you sort of have a conflation of his Italianate eye, and his look at it,

with the old-fashioned Impressionism in the back.

Every artist evolves, he or she never stays on the same style, on the same technique.

I think Renoir, for example, in the 80s,

when he was moving on, and painted with a new technique,

with fast, rapid brushstrokes,

then decided to go back to painting in a classical way.

So, after this decision, he travelled to Italy.

During this trip he saw Raphael's paintings and he was so impressed,

that classical art re-captured him, and you can see that in his paintings.

Driven by the search of a form that could combine the purity of classicism,

and his Impressionist DNA, Renoir went so far as to say things like:

"I think I shall truly surpass Raphael,

the audience will remain awestruck."

This painting is called "Martial Caillebotte's children".

The title itself says a lot about European culture,

because the children weren't only Martial Caillebotte's, but also his wife's: Marie Minoret.

Nowadays, some things in particular catch our eye.

The first is of course the narrow frame.

You might think these are two girls,

instead Jean, the boy, is on the left whereas Geneviève, the girl, is on the right.

Boys used to be dressed in a girly fashion, til they were 7, and grow their hair very long.

Renoir particularly liked that style,

so his own sons were dressed in that fashion and did wonderful portraits

of them looking almost "en travesti" where they looked like girls.

We could compare this painting with another portrait with children

which is useful to understand how much time has passed

from a purely Impressionist painting such as the "Portrait of Madame Charpentier and her children"

and this one.

The Impressionist technique is apparently more innovative,

however the framing is quite conventional:

the living room with the sofa and carpet are in full view.

Instead in this one, Renoir erased everything except for the children, who are the core of the painting.

There's no space around them.

What remains of the children's room is the couch

and no furnishing at all, aside from some children's books.

Another interesting factor is the reduction of the colour palette.

There are very few colours, a symphony of whites, greys and pinks.

Renoir used to be an incredible master of colour,

however here he was experimenting by subtraction.

I've also always been struck by the shoes,

because painting feet, or shoes, wasn't very academic:

they were considered as a lesser part of the human body.

So of course a painter from the academy shouldn't be painting feet.

Painting shoes was never a neutral choice:

it could almost be a political statement,

as in Van Gogh's working class shoes.

Gustave, Martial's brother, who was the children's father,

died in 1894, a year before this painting was made,

leaving to the French state,

his collection of Impressionist paintings, among which were many Renoirs.

But on one condition: that the French state accepted them,

and exhibited them accordingly, in the museum palaces, such as the Louvre or the Luxembourg.

It was a very provocative request, because it led the French state to admit,

through its salons, after it had refused these artists,

and accept that Impressionism had indeed changed painting forever,

and that this painting had "won".

So, in this sense, Renoir, despite his personal crisis regarding Impressionism,

undertook the task of convincing the French state,

and Martial, the children's father, tried to help him.

In a way, he made Impressionism finally take its place in Art History,

but he was also free to take another course.

As the century drew to a close,

even the artists who were once the most stubborn in opposing conventional art

began to fear they were no longer able to read the world through their art.

They feared that their technique had become transitory,

fleeting, almost self-indulgent.

Monet responded by pushing his principle of immediacy above and beyond reality.

Pissarro went on to focus on his pointillism technique again.

And we just mentioned how Renoir found his way by going back to drawing,

placing attention on detail and blending classical forms with bold new ideas.

Nevertheless, those vital conquests in the world of art made by the Impressionists,

managed to inspire a generation of new artists.

In 1886 a new generation of painters appeared.

But Impressionists still had to be recognised by the public:

their voice, their style, their technique, their subjects, were still rejected.

Everybody thought their paintings were ugly and nobody wanted to buy them,

so some artists were already making changes in that technique.

So the Impressionists pave the way

for new kind of techniques.

This is the generation of Seraut and Signac developing pointillism.

The pointillist artist placed small dots one close to the next, but never mixed the colours.

Think how long it took for each painting,

having to place each point close to the next and then wait for it to dry,

otherwise the colour would mix.

Between each point there wasn't the smallest stain of paint.

And this technique came from the chemist Chevreul,

who wrote a book on how colours could blend visually.

Instead of blending and mixing colours on a palette, and then on the canvas,

the spectator's eye was doing all the blending.

So placing two points of complementary colours or vice versa

created a brand new colour in the eye of the audience.

All it took was to apply the technique in a scientific way.

You can see here some artworks by Cross,

and they're very bright, because if the technique is well executed,

landscapes are easily full of sun and of light.

This painting by Cross is a landscape with goats

and it was painted in southern France.

It's a typical pointillist painting.

The trees in the foreground are in shadow,

whereas the background is lit up by the light of the south,

however this technique seems less genuine

than the Impressionist technique.

Both pointillism and Impressionism were born from the same necessities,

to capture nature and landscape in their brighter essence,

trying to translate that brightness onto canvas through the use of colour.

Though they shared the same starting point,

the travelled roads and the final result are diametrically opposite.

While Impressionist painters related themselves to landscape through instinct and emotions,

pointillism did the exact opposite.

Their way of painting was rational, methodical,

detached, and required a long time to finish.

During the positive climate at the end of the century,

pointillism theorised and practised an art

based upon rigid and precise scientific laws.

This is why Georges Seurat, the founder of the post-Impressionist movement,

couldn't stand this term.

He had greatly studied the theory of colours,

and it had taken him over two years to paint his masterpiece, "La Grande Jatte".

He felt it belittling to be remembered as someone who paints with dots.

To that end, he coined a new definition for the movement, "chromoluminarism".

Unfortunately, the term didn't stick but, in any case, the pointillism movement,

still today, influences every artist

who focuses on the decomposition of light and its perception.

"Sails and Pines" by Signac is a key work of art:

in this landscape, the pointillist technique is exaggerated,

and you can actually see the single brushstrokes.

Russelberg, exhibited with an equally important piece,

wrote provocatively to Signac,

inquiring why one should keep painting reality,

in a recognisable way.

Probably, given the evolution of this technique

and this separation between brushstrokes,

he'd easily be able to paint something illogic or unrecognisable.

He was saying it as a provocation,

but he probably didn't realise that after all,

that 19th century art was reaching that pivotal moment,

in 1907, when Picasso painted "Les Demoiselles D'Avignon",

which inaugurated a new, a different,

but equally fundamental chapter in Art History.

I think Impressionists paved the way for all future generations.

They revolutionized art and all artists that followed,

would try to do something different in order to get noticed.

They would apply new techniques and subjects.

It'd be a gradual evolution,

because it's impossible to go from figurative painting,

the Impressionists were very figurative, to abstract painting.

But what happens is that the innovation

takes place simultaneously.

The Impressionists, with their audacity,

influenced the following generations:

the Neo-Impressionists, the Pointillists,

the Nabi, the Pont-Aven school,

Fauvism, which preceded abstract art:

light and colour would dominate their paintings.

And colour would become increasingly important

for the following artists, until the climax, in 1905,

with Fauvism that would be the achievement of pure colour.

Impressionists completely revolutionised painting for them.

Future generations would be inspired by their innovations,

and would rework them in their own way.

But in the end, I think, what remains are the Impressionists,

their way to use lights, colours, their change of style,

they totally revolutionized the previous artistic codes.

All the following movements would have a common ground:

the mutation, the courage to change without fear of being judged.

The Impressionists' legacy left an unparalleled mark upon Art History,

opening the doors to the avant-garde movements of the 20th century.

They completely revolutionised the manner in which one conceives,

creates, and observes painting.

Today, almost 150 years after their first collective exhibition,

they give no indication of being out of style,

and enthusiasts from all over the world still wait in line

to once again explore the evocative and mysterious world of Impressionism.

When I work as a guide in the exhibitions,

I want visitors to learn something from all the paintings.

To me it's vital that they come out from the exhibition having learned something important.

I look at their reactions in front of a painting.

They love seeing that light.

These paintings are heart-warming,

and I believe also easy to access.

When you see an Impressionist painting, you feel good,

it's an injection of happiness, like a sunbeam.

I'm always enchanted;

I never get tired of seeing these paintings,

so luminous and m