The Battle of Names and Walls: The Politics of the First Impressionist Exhibitions
- Art d'Histoire
- May 29
- 4 min read
When the first independent exhibition opened on the Boulevard des Capucines in April 1874, it was not merely a display of paintings; it was a sensory and semantic riot. The artists we now revere as masters were initially met with a cacophony of ridicule, branded as madmen and political radicals. To understand the violence of this reaction, one must look beyond the canvases to the very walls they were hung on and the dangerous names assigned to them.
A Charivari of Ridicule
The most famous attack came from the satirist Louis Leroy. Writing for the magazine Le Charivari, he framed his review as a dialogue with a fictitious academic painter, Joseph Vincent, who slowly goes mad while viewing the exhibition. The choice of publication was significant. The term Charivari refers to a folk ritual of "rough music"—a confused noise of pots and pans used to mock social transgressors. Leroy’s article was exactly that: a noisy, public shaming.
In his scathing review, An Article by Louis Leroy, he mocked Pissarro’s Ploughed Field as nothing more than "palette scratches placed uniformly on a dirty canvas." He ridiculed the lack of form, suggesting that the "impression" was present, but the drawing was absent. The critique culminated in the now-famous insult regarding Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, which gave the movement its enduring name. For Leroy, the exhibition was an assault on "artistic morality," a sentiment echoed by the fictional Vincent who ends the visit performing a "scalp dance" in a state of delirium.
The Political Danger of being "Intransigeant"
While "Impressionist" was coined as an aesthetic insult, the press initially used a far more dangerous label: "Intransigeant." In the volatile political climate of the 1870s, this was not a neutral term. It referred directly to the Impressionist or Intransigeant, Nomenclature of the Spanish revolutionaries—the Intransigentes—who had attempted a coup in 1873.
Critics frequently conflated the artistic radicalism of the painters with the political radicalism of the Paris Commune. By labelling them "Intransigeants," the press suggested they were "art radicals" or "so-called anarchists" who wanted to burn down the Louvre just as the Communards had burned the Tuileries. While some critics saw a natural alliance between the "intransigents of art" and the "intransigents of politics," the artists themselves eventually embraced the term "Impressionist." Though initially mocking, it was safer than a label that implied they were political terrorists seeking a "clean slate."
Red Walls and Decor as Rebellion
The rebellion was also spatial. The official Salon was notoriously overcrowded, with paintings stacked to the ceiling against cold, impersonal backgrounds. The independent group sought to revolutionise this viewing experience. In 1874, they hung their works in Nadar’s former studio, which was lined with reddish-brown wool. This was a radical departure, intended to create a "domestic" atmosphere where paintings could be viewed comfortably, "on the line" and with space between them.
This concern for the environment of the artwork evolved into a sophisticated debate about interior design. Camille Pissarro later claimed that the Impressionists were the "first to colour their walls," experimenting with lilac rooms bordered with canary yellow to complement the optical theories of their paintings. This led to a rivalry with James Whistler, whom Pissarro accused of "nicking the idea" for his own yellow-and-white exhibitions. By treating the exhibition space not as a warehouse but as a total decorative environment, they broke the "cage-like effect" of the Salon's gilded frames.
Lunatics and Revolutionaries
Despite these innovations, the critical backlash remained ferocious. In 1876, the critic Albert Wolff wrote a review that bordered on hysteria. He described the exhibition as a gathering of "five or six lunatics," including a woman (Berthe Morisot), afflicted with the "madness of ambition." In Wolff's Lunatics, Review, he compared the artists to inmates at the Ville-Evrard asylum, picking up pebbles and calling them diamonds.
Wolff warned that Renoir’s nudes were a "mass of decomposing flesh" and that Pissarro’s violet trees could not be adopted by any "intelligence." He even jokingly reported that a man had been arrested for "biting passers-by" after leaving the gallery. Yet, amidst this abuse, some critics saw the truth. Jules Castagnary, writing in Le Siècle, offered a lucid definition in Three Critics, 1874, Excerpts. He argued that these "terrible revolutionaries" were simply pursuing idealism. By declaring that they rendered "not the landscape, but the sensation produced by the landscape," Castagnary recognised that they had left reality behind to enter a realm of pure subjectivity—a shift that terrified the establishment as much as any political coup.
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