2024-04-25
7 分钟The Economist. Hi, John Priddo here.
I host Checks and Balance, our weekly US politics podcast.
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The world was not always an arena of Claude Monet superfans.
Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape sneered Louis Leroy,
an art critic, when describing Monet's Impression Sunrise.
The painting of a hazy port in Normandy was hung in a show put on by the Anonymous Society of Painters,
Sculptors and Engravers, etc., that opened on April 15, 1874.
Some of the comments about the sketchy style adopted by Monet and some of his fellow rebels were so acerbic that they sound more like put-downs from social media trolls than professional art commentary.
An appalling spectacle of human vanity losing its way to the point of dementia was how another critic in the 1870s described the new style.
The anonymous society's show 150 years ago is remembered as the Impressionist movement's birth.
It was then that the painters were called Impressionist by Leroy,
though the artists would not claim the label themselves for another couple of years.
An Impression was a sketch in the lingo of painters in 1874.
That show is now the subject of another exhibition, Paris 1874,
Inventing Impressionism, which recently opened at the Musée d'Orsay.
In September it will travel from Paris to the National Gallery in Washington DC.
Today, Impressionist paintings are among the most recognisable, beloved and valuable.