‘I won’t need those,’ I thought, clearing my bag of excess festival flyers, phone chargers and headphones before heading to the American Impressionism: A New Vision exhibition at the Edinburgh Gallery of Modern Art. How wrong I was – not about the flyers and chargers – but the headphones. The show has gone hi-tech – you don’t get handed a leaflet of information when you buy your ticket, but you can download a National Galleries of Scotland podcast. Without it you are forced to stand and read large wall texts, not my favourite occupation in galleries.
Contrary to the impression given by the title, American Impressionism starts with an 1872 Degas, although it’s not a Degas to travel far to see. Next is a lively Berthe Morisot, the French works used to introduce the first section of the show. Then as now Americans got everywhere and the first room concentrates on works by American artists living in Paris. The Morisot emphasises the stolid work hanging nearby by Mary Cassatt, who didn’t get to grips with the new technique until later.
In the late 19th century Europe was still seen as the centre of the art world, with Paris its epicentre. ‘I would rather go to Europe than Heaven,’ said William Merritt Chase, who clearly hadn’t thought things through properly, but he summed up the attitude of many American artists. Some of them made the journey across the Atlantic. John Singer Sargent painted with Monet, Theodore Robinson visited Giverny. In an interesting reunion The Tate has lent a Singer Seargent oil of Monet painting at the edge of a wood. The curators have managed to borrow from Boston the very painting that Monet is depicted working on in Singer Seargent’s canvas giving us a real American impression of the French Impressionist.
The Americans were copying and it is obvious, particularly when John Leslie Breck paints a series of haystacks at different times of the day. The show includes one of Monet’s versions, which makes Breck’s appear static and overly decorative. Some of the American canvases do make the new technique their own, Theodore Robinson in particular finding a dappled effect which appears authentic. Often though the American canvases are overly descriptive and struggle to match the freedom of their French heroes.
Writer and critic Charles de Kay could see what was happening. ‘Do not attempt to paint America through French spectacles,’ he warned in 1891, knowing that every artist has to develop his own language and that wholesale copying of other techniques would not create an authentic visual language for the copyists.
The show ends with the Americans settling on a more lucrative portraiture and pretty scenes. The lessons of Impressionism are there in some looser brush work and muted colours, but ultimately they retreat and American Impressionism is the first stage in Impressionism’s descent from art movement to decoration.
The New Vision of the exhibition’s title belonged to other people and most of the exhibition demonstrates that the French originators were still the best. Finding a language for the New World would not come easily but would come eventually, though not until Jackson Pollock accidentally spilled a paint-pot and decided he liked the result.
Get to the exhibition more easily with the hourly minibus service from the central National Gallery on The Mound.
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