It’s back to the tried and trusted blockbuster names of French impressionism for the latest release from Exhibition on Screen, the Brighton-based outfit demonstrating remarkable staying power in the gallery-film sector; their consistent level of excellence means they remain largely unchallenged in the field. Excursions into the comparatively offbeat – Japanese contemporary art, Edward Hopper, Lucian Freud – are balanced by home bankers, of which this account of the original impressionist exhibition in 1874, must be counted.
The film takes its cue from a show jointly mounted by the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC (where it was called Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment) and Paris’s Musée d’Orsay (Paris 1874: Inventing impressionism). Both exhibitions, and the film, re-create the founding moment of the style, when 30 (or possibly 31) artists – who had been turned down by the official Paris Salon – showed their work in a studio operated by the celebrated photographer Nadar, under the moniker “Société Anonyme”; the Salon des Refusés, the repository for rejects from the Salon founded by Napoleon III, had in fact been established over a decade earlier.
