Eliana Willis

As we know from our own lives, the tiniest objects can feel, at least symbolically, extremely heavy. Artist Kapwani Kiwanga draws out this aspect—how the minute can be colossal—with an ambitious new project at the Venice Biennale, where she is representing Canada.
Called “Trinket,” the artist explores a seemingly neutral object of diminutive significance which, as Kiwanga illuminates, has shaped the world: a tiny glass bead.
These beads, which are smaller than a lentil, are deeply embedded in Venice’s history, which, as the artist points out, has deep connections with the world. Glass conterie or seed beads were used for international trade and merchants used them as exchange objects for various goods, including an array of raw materials that have been folded into Kiwanga’s poetic exhibition, which was commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada and curated by Gaëtane Verna, executive director at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio.
The Canadian artist has become well-known on the institutional circuit for her research-heavy installations and monumental sculptures that often draw on overlooked histories or explore aspects of gender, colonialism, or social injustice. She eschews the figurative, but intimate human histories are often at the heart of her highly abstracted, minimalist, and color-focused work. The Sobey Award winner has had major exhibitions at the Power Plant in Toronto, the Centre Pompidou in Paris (where she now lives and works), and Haus der Kunst in Munich.
“This tiny glass unit had such an impact, and sculpts our current world, modernity, how societies organize themselves, how they live and interact,” said Kiwanga in a recent interview, ahead of the public opening of the biennale on April 20. “It is not the only reason, but it is part and parcel with the mechanism.”
Installation view of the exhibition “Kapwani Kiwanga: Trinket,” 2024, Canada Pavilion, 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada and supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. © Kapwani Kiwanga / Adagp Paris / CARCC OXawa 2024. Photo: ValenYna Mori.
For “Trinket,” thousands of beads have been strung together and assembled into a vast network of curtains, a large-scale architectural intervention that makes the pavilion feel like a single sculpture. Kiwanga aptly describes the effect as “almost alchemic”—the presentation does seem to swirl, morph, and change before you as you walk through it. Snaking around the space, these conterie are from some view points nearly invisible and from others a vibrant wash of color that sweeps through the space in a meticulously rendered gradient, moving from deep purple to yellow. The brilliant blue which encircles the exterior recalls the ultramarine hue of lapis lazuli that was at one time traded at a higher price than gold.
Installation view of Kapwani Kiwanga, Impiraresse (Blue), 2024. Commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada and supported by the Canada Council for the Arts © Kapwani Kiwanga / Adagp Paris / CARCC OXawa 2024. Photo: Valentina Mori
In the most immediate sense, these tiny objects have shaped Venice. The long and esteemed history of glass-making from Murano island is highly apparent at every twist and turn along the city’s narrow streets, where there are glass art stores and glass trinket shops between nearly every gelateria or cafe. Glass sculpture—which also can be found in the windows of Venice’s exquisite churches—has long been emblematic of the city’s cultural power. But Kiwanga seeks to reattach this quality with the world—the lagoon’s flowery decorum, its intricate and opulent architecture, the sublime details around every corner, as well as the churches jammed full of art history stemming from a mercantile past when the city was a powerful player in trading for centuries—to show how these power relations were frequently not fair.
And while tiny glass beads may not be the first thing that jumps to mind when one thinks of European trade and all its problematics, these seed beads were exchanged for gold and other precious metals, as well as the wood that built the city. Similarly in Kiwanga’s array of free-standing abstract sculptures, the beads merge into patterns created in collaboration with Zimbabwean and Canadian artisans, adorning the edges of objects made from the raw materials that the beads were traded for throughout history, such as copper, panambuco wood from Brazil, and palm oil, which was used to lubricate machines in Europe. An archway made of wood features a delicate inlay of beadwork, for example, while on the ground rests a pair of large glass sculptures in the form of a dot and a deep orange tear drop.
Installation view of Kapwani Kiwanga, Transfer I (Metal, breath, palm oil, beads), 2024. Commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada and supported by the Canada Council for the Arts © Kapwani Kiwanga / Adagp Paris / CARCC OXawa 2024. Photo: Valentina Mori
The juxtaposition pushes you to consider how these beads circulated at the cultural, material, and symbolic level—and how these matrixes of meaning shifted throughout time. The value of such objects is hardly static, and materials move from the quotidian to the covetable, used for adornment in jewelry and clothes, and at once rare, sentimental, non-precious, and everyday. In this way, Kiwanga is interested in pursuing “how one material exchanged for another and how we made our architectures out of that.”
Kiwanga was trained as an anthropologist and so this form of social research is well within her wheelhouse and an essential part of her process. Her works often take on the details of history and the spaces of the present. As such, she is seasoned for the task of working within the Canadian pavilion specifically. It is not a stately space such as those built by many other nation-states in the Giardiani in the early 20th century. The Modernist building made largely from brick, and accentuated with exposed beams and glass, is one of the younger venues, erected in 1957. It is nestled between the British and German pavilions in a tree-filled corner of the biennale grounds, with some trees growing within the space itself.
“There are no right angles, there is no cube,” Kiwanga said of the pavilion. “You cannot just bring any project into that space.” She tried working with the building’s most compelling feature, a lack of boundary between the inside and the outside. “You never have a feeling that the garden is not there as with other pavilions, you cannot walk into it and be in another moment,” she added. “I figured that I would roll with that effacement.”
Installation view of the exhibition “Kapwani Kiwanga: Trinket,” 2024, Canada Pavilion, 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada and supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. © Kapwani Kiwanga / Adagp Paris / CARCC OXawa 2024, Photo: ValenYna Mori.
Her thoughtfulness at how to intervene delicately in a space to monumental effect is a long-standing talent. With Plot at the Haus der Kunst, presented in 2020, Kiwanga took on the heavy architectural weight of the Third Reich-era building, its hard lines and imposing interior. She draped large semi-transparent curtains around the room, creating gradients of greens and pastels that evoked the lush and manicured English Garden just beyond the museum’s doors. In the 2022 edition of the Venice Biennale, curated by Cecilia Alemani, Kiwanga presented a further development of the project for Terrarium (2022), which looked at sand as both a source material for glass and luxury, as a by-product of the oil industry, and as an indicator of an increasingly arid planet.
Kapwani Kiwanga, Terrarium, 2022. Exhibition view, The Milk of Dreams: 59th Venice Biennale, Arsenale, Venice, 2022. Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, Johannesburg, London / Galerie Poggi, Paris / Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin © Kapwani Kiwanga / Adagp, Paris, 2023. Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano
Now in the Giardini, Kiwanga took some subtle approaches to turning the pavilion inside out, removing the large wooden doors of the building, so that its entire façade is glass. A lick of silver metal begins on the wall and spreads across the floor and extends right out the building. The curtains of beads also hang softly against the pavilions exterior walls, and drape down in the space between its slanted roof and oddly angled interior space. It’s almost as though the building is wavering gently, recalling the tides of water that lap against the sides of Venice’s canal walls, ebbing reminders that the city is not just built on today’s tourism industry—it is a port with a deep past in world trade.
One will find a sense of exhalation in “Trinket”—the materials are not pegged to any one association or connotation. They are simply able to exist and float, unbound and containing all their multitudes. “I tried to work with the bare materials so that the materiality could really stand on its own, becoming familiar,” Kiwanga said. “I wanted to let the materials speak, distilling them, and having something be present in the simplest and most elegant way.”
Kapwani Kiwanga, Transfer III (Metal, wood, beads), 2024. Installation view, Kapwani Kiwanga: Trinket, 2024, Canada Pavilion, 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada and supported by the Canada Council for the Arts © Kapwani Kiwanga / Adagp Paris / CARCC Ottawa 2024. Photo: ValenYna Mori
The Venice Biennale international art exhibition runs from April 20 through November 24.
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Pro-Palestine activists staged a protest at the Venice Biennale on Wednesday, April 17, calling for the complete closure of Israel’s pavilion, which remains locked after artist Ruth Patir, who is representing Israel, refused to open her exhibition and called for a ceasefire in Gaza and the release of Israeli hostages on Tuesday.
Around 100 protestors gathered outside of the Israeli Pavilion in the Giardini and moved toward other national pavilions, like those of the U.S., France, and Germany, chanting “stop the genocide,” “shut it down,” and “viva Palestina.” Flyers stating “No Death in Venice, No to the Genocide Pavilion” were also distributed. At the U.S. pavilion, which is next to Israel’s pavilion, protestors climbed on top of artist Jeffrey Gibson’s large-scale, outdoor concrete and fiberglass pedestals, waving a black-and-white keffiyeh.
Concurrently, across the city, a smaller group of protestors gathered on the famous Rialto Bridge, unfurling banners that read “Palestina Libera” and “the world is watching” while waving Palestinian flags.
Protestors on the Rialto Bridge. Photo: Margaret Carrigan.
The actions were led by the Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA), which issued a statement calling for Israel’s pavilion to be shut down “in its entirety.” Although Patir’s exhibition, “(M)otherland,” is fully installed and can partially be glimpsed through the windows, the building remains closed after she and the exhibition’s curators, Tamar Margalit and Mira Lapidot, posted a sign on the locked door on Tuesday, the first preview day of the biennale, stating that the show would not open to the public until “a ceasefire and hostage release agreement is reached.”
“ANGA does not applaud empty and opportunistic gestures timed for maximum press coverage, and leaving video works on view to the public, while Palestinians are killed by Israel every hour and millions face imminent famine,” the group said in the statement.
Patir did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement shared on Instagram on Tuesday, Patir said that she and the curators “have become the news, not the art.” She added: “I firmly object to cultural boycott, but since I feel there are no right answers, and I can only do what I can with the space I have.”
The Palestine Pavilion manifesto. Photo: Jo Lawson-Tancred.
Representatives of the Venice Biennale did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the protests or the current state of Israel’s pavilion.
ANGA has also been circulating a document that had been printed onsite at the biennial titled “The Palestine Pavilion: What is the Future of Art—A Manifesto Against the State of the World.” Accompanied by poetry, the manifesto calls for the dismantling of nation-states, “reclaiming land,” and restoring art as a central tool of resistance. Palestine does not have a pavilion at the event since Italy does not recognize it as a sovereign state; an official collateral event exhibition by the Palestinian organization Artists and Allies of Hebron has been named as one of 30 officially sanctioned collateral events.
Several artists taking part in the Venice Biennale have expressed support for Palestine in their work and installations. At Spain’s pavilion in the Giardini, the Peruvian artist Sandra Gamarra painted the words: “Transbody is to normative heterosexuality what Palestine is to the West: a colony whose extension and form is perpetuated only through violence.”
Daniela Ortiz, The Brightness of Greedy Europe (2022). Photo: Naomi Rea.
In the Arsenale, The Brightness of Greedy Europe, a video of a 2022 puppet theater staged by Peruvian artist Daniela Ortiz, features a small Palestinian flag in the corner of the screen that reads “boycott Israeli pavilion, Free Palestine!” Mexican artist Frieda Toranzo Jaeger’s large-scale painting and mixed-media work Rage Is A Machine In Times of Senselessness (2024) depicts watermelons, a symbol of Palestinian freedom and solidarity; the words “Viva Palestina” are lightly sketched into the flesh of one of the fruits.
Israel’s participation has been a point of contention among Palestine supporters. ANGA issued an open letter at the end of February that has since gained nearly 24,000 signatories. It states that “any official representation of Israel on the international cultural stage is an endorsement of its policies and of the genocide in Gaza.” Signatories include the photographer and activist Nan Goldin and artists representing other countries in the Biennale, including Chile, Finland, and Nigeria. ANGA did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
In response to the open letter, Italy’s culture minister, Gennaro Sangiuliano, ruled out the possibility of barring Israel from the Biennale. “Israel not only has the right to express its art, but it has the duty to bear witness to its people precisely at a time like this when it has been attacked in cold blood by merciless terrorists,” the politician said.
Since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 that killed 1,200 people and saw 240 taken hostage, and Israel’s ensuing war in Gaza that has killed more than 33,000 people, major protests, including boycotts, cancelations, and withdrawals, have been made at major events and venues in the art world.
Jo Lawson-Tancred provided additional reporting. This is a developing story and will be updated.
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When the Notre-Dame de Paris caught fire on April 19, 2019, there was a terrifying half hour window in which it seemed the cathedral might collapse. The world watched agape as the spire toppled and smoke billowed out across the Parisian skyline. The smarts and daring of firefighters proved decisive. By midnight, the authorities would declare “she is saved” and a human chain led out of the smoldering building, carrying artworks, relics, and valuable books to safety.
On the five-year anniversary of the blaze, an exhibition featuring many of the rescued works will go on display at Mobilier National in Paris, the home of France’s furniture collection. As suggested by the title, “Restoring the Grand Decors of Notre Dame,” the exhibition showcases the technical expertise of those who have meticulously restored the building’s paintings, tapestries, and carpets.
“Since the fire of 2019, nearly 1,000 craftsmen have worked daily to restore the cathedral, among them are painting restorers,” Mobilier National said. “[Alongside the paintings,] sketches, drawings, and multimedia will be used to show the exceptional know-how of heritage restorers.”
Laurent de La Hyre, Saint Peter Healing the Sick with His Shadow. Photo: Mobilier National.
Among the 21 paintings shown at Mobilier National are 13 prized religious works from the 17th century, known as the Mays, so named for the month in which Paris’s goldsmith guild presented them to the cathedral. Created to express renewed Catholic faith in the wake of a devastating series of wars between Catholics and Protestants in the final decades of the 16th century, the Mays employed the country’s finest painters, typically to depict the acts of the apostles.
The Mays themselves have endured a wandering history of mixed fortunes. Beginning in 1630, they were hanged on the stone pillars alongside the nave before being scattered during the tumult of the French Revolution. Returned in 1802, they were deemed incongruous with Notre-Dame’s redevelopment of the 1860s and sent to the Louvre where they remained until 1905. Of the 76 Mays painted, the whereabouts of 52 are known.
Charles Le Brun, The Martyrdom of St. Andrew (1646). Photo: Mobilier National.
Though undamaged by the fire, the Regional Direction of Cultural Affairs (DRAC) chose to perform long overdue restorations, hiring 50 restorers over a 24-month period for the task. At Mobilier National, the Mays are presented chronologically—the diocese has a new layout planned for Notre-Dame—and are granted long overdue attention.
We meet Laurent de la Hyre’s Saint Peter, who wanders head bent and palm upturned through a scene of delirious sickness. We see Charles Le Brun’s Andrew, a man naked before God moments before he’s set upon by soldiers. The dense, dark work was Le Brun’s first following training in Rome and do much to burnish his reputation. We watch Nicolas Loir’s crimson robed Paul calmly blind a magician before the Cypriot Proconsul.
Nicolas Loir, Saint Paul Blinds the False Prophet Barjesu (1650). Photo: Mobilier National.
Also of note is the one ton, nearly 90-foot long choir carpet that was commissioned by King Charles X in 1825 and designed to mimic a Gothic stained-glass window. Barring major events (such as the marriage of Napoleon III or the visit of Pope John Paul II), it is rarely displayed with only the upper half on display here—the lower is still being restored and fitted with a protective braid.
Mobilier National will also present 14 tapestries that depict the life of the Virgin Mary, which were commissioned by Cardinal Richelieu in the mid-17th century. Created to decorate Notre-Dame’s choir, the cathedral sold them to Strasbourg cathedral in 1739.
A cathedral chair designed by Ionna Vautrin. Photo: Philippe Migea.
A slightly more modern turn comes in the exhibition’s final section that shows examples of the new liturgical furniture that have been designed by Ionna Vautrin and manufactured by Bosc, a based in Landes, France.
Notre Dame is due to reopen on 8 December, 2024, following restoration costs approaching $1 billion.
“Restoring the Grand Decors of Notre Dame” is on view at the Mobilier National, Galerie des Gobelins, 42 avenue des Gobelins, Paris, France, April 24– July 21.
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“Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion,” the 2024 exhibition by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, promises to be a multi-sensory experience. Approximately 250 objects will be brought out from its collection, their various qualities enhanced onsite technologies.
The exhibition’s name refers to the “sleeping beauties” of the Met’s collection: garments that are so fragile that they can no longer be dressed on mannequins. They span across four centuries, and come from designers and fashion houses including Cristóbal Balenciaga, Lilly Daché, Hubert de Givenchy, Guy Laroche, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Loewe. Loewe’s contribution to the exhibition is a coat designed by Jonathan Anderson, made from oat, rye, and wheat grass which will slowly wilt and die during the course of the exhibition. Two examples of Charles James’s famous “Butterfly” ball gown will be included: one too delicate for display and the other in pristine condition.
Charles James, “Butterfly” ball gown (1955). Photo: Anna-Marie Kellen © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“When an item of clothing enters our collection, its status is changed irrevocably. What was once a vital part of a person’s lived experience is now a motionless ‘artwork’ that can no longer be worn or heard, touched, or smelled,” said Andrew Bolton, the institute’s curator in charge, in a statement. “The exhibition endeavors to animate these artworks by re-awakening their sensory capacities through a range of technologies, affording visitors sensorial ‘access’ to rare historical garments and rarefied contemporary fashions.”
Christian Dior, “May” ball gown (1953). Photo: © Nick Knight, 2024. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
At the show, visitors can smell floral motifs in an exploration of the history of hats, with other scents developed by smell researcher and artist Sissel Tolaas. The walls of the gallery will be embossed with embroidery found on a 1615–20 waistcoat included in the exhibition, which visitors can touch and experience. An illusion technique called “Pepper’s ghost” will give visitors the opportunity to experience how women’s movement was restricted by the short-lived fashion trend of the “hobble skirt,” which peaked in popularity between 1908 and 1914.
The aural qualities of garments—notably Alexander McQueen’s famous razor clam shell dress from spring/summer 2001 and the metal designs in Marni’s spring/summer 2024 collection—will also be highlighted. Other technologies used in the show will include A.I., x-rays, video animation, and sound and light displays.
Iris van Herpen, “Physalia” dress (2020). Photo: © Nick Knight, 2024. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“’Sleeping Beauties’ will heighten our engagement with these masterpieces of fashion, by evoking what it was like to feel, move, hear, smell, and interact with them when they could be worn,” said Max Hollein, the Met’s director and CEO.
The garments and accessories will also be brought together by a theme of nature to further emphasize their transience and changeability. The exhibition will be split into three distinct areas, namely earth, air, and water, to explore how these elements have inspired fashion motifs and trends.
Jonathan Anderson, Coat, (2023). Courtesy Loewe. Photo: © Nick Knight, 2024. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The theme will echo that of the Costume Institute Benefit, better known as the Met Gala—its dress code this year is “The Garden of Time.” A fixture on art and fashion calendars, the gala happens as always on the first Monday of May, and will be co-chaired this year by Bad Bunny, Chris Hemsworth, Jennifer Lopez, Anna Wintour, and Zendaya. The event’s decorative centerpiece, installed in the Met’s Great Hall, will be unveiled during the gala and remain on view through May 7, before “Sleeping Beauties” opens on May 10.
“By appealing to the widest possible range of human senses,” said Bolton, “the show aims to reconnect with the works on display as they were originally intended—with vibrancy, with dynamism, and ultimately with life.”
Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen, Dress (2011). Photo: © Nick Knight, 2024. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” will be on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Ave, New York, May 10–September 2.
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To Karnika Bai, Shanthi Muniswamy, and Joythi H., the opening of their eye-catching, monumental mural Diaspore (2024) at the Arsenale was more than just a celebration of their Venice debut. It was also an event to mark the 10th anniversary of India’s recognition of transgender individuals, a defining moment that allowed these trans artists and their community to start to feel a little less foreign in their own country.
“If this edition’s theme, ‘Foreigners Everywhere,’ means being in different cultures and territories where you do not belong, this applies to us too” Bai, one of the lead artists from the Bangalore-based art collective Aravani Art Project, said in an interview during early hours of Tuesday’s pre-opening of the main exhibition of the 60th Venice Biennale curated by Adriano Pedrosa.
“We did not feel belong[ing] to the bodies that we were born into. People in our own country see us coming from another country, another culture. We are foreigners.”
While “Foreigners Everywhere” places exile, the marginalized, and the immigrant at the focal point of the exhibition featuring more than 330 artists and collectives, the work by Aravani Art Project pointed to another layer of understanding to the concept of “foreigner.”
The artists noted that members of the transgender community were wholly disregarded by the society in India. Their rights and needs were not recognized, and transwomen were seen by the mainstream as sex workers and beggars, they added. That only began to change exactly 10 years ago this week when the Supreme Court in India formally recognized transgenders as a “third gender” in a landmark judgement in response to concerns over the discrimination and harassment against them.
Xiyadie, Don’t Worry, Mom is Spinning Thread in the Next Room (A Love Scene When High School Student is at Home Writing Homework) (2019), featured at the Arsenale, Venice Biennale 2024. Photo: Vivienne Chow.
The artists have been part of the collective that works with the transgender community for eight years. They wanted to show the public that they are human beings and can pursue their dreams and individual freedoms like everyone else. Diaspore is a work about gender dysphoria and the journey of transition, the artists noted.
It is also a self-portrait. Joythi H, for example, is depicted holding an open bird cage releasing the imprisoned animal. The work contains motifs that relate to how transgender people find refuge in the physical body they feel comfortable with after transition. “We are no longer caged. We are free as a bird,” said Muniswamy.
Victor Brecheret, Virgin and Chile, featured in “Nucleo Storico Italians Everywhere,” Venice Biennale 2024. Photo: Vivienne Chow.
But they still have to deal with the discomfort and challenges of daily life. The artists said that when they applied for their passports to travel to Venice for the exhibition, they were questioned by the authorities repeatedly. “Why are you going to Venice? They asked why, why, why, just because of our identity,” Bai said. “But we are here. We are very proud to represent India and the transgender community.”
While the show shines a spotlight on works by queer, Indigenous, and diasporic artists, many of whom were previously unrepresented in the Venice event, some of the works on show also highlight the historical and political causes for such migration and repression, and the cultural influences they picked up along the way.
The section “Nucleo Storico” showcases dozens of works by Italian artists from the 20th century who traveled abroad and cultivated their oeuvre in the countries they resided, from Asia to Africa and the Americas. They all left the country for different reasons. They included those orientalists obsessed with the exoticism of Asia and Africa, convoys of the Italian colonial forces, and those who fled the fascist regime, antisemitic laws, and the country’s economic woes during World War II. The works are displayed on a glass easel, known as cavaletes de vidro, designed by Lina Bo Bardi, an Italian architect, designer, and exhibition maker who moved to Brazil in 1946.
The 60th Venice Biennale opens on April 20 and runs through November 24, 2024. 
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The story of Impressionism’s birth has been told so often, it’s more myth than historic event. Generally, the tale goes something like this: in 1874, a ragtag gang of disaffected artists reject the Paris Salon by staging an alternative exhibition, critics lambast the art, and the ‘impressionism’ movement is born.
It’s an inaccurate simplification, one the Musée d’Orsay is keen to counter and complicate in an encyclopedic new exhibition “Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism.” The show arrives 150 years on from that exhibition and together with Washington’s National Gallery of Art, which will host the show in the Fall, the curators stress the primacy of context.
A scene from Musée d’Orsay’s virtual reality in which Monet paints the Le Havre seascape. Photo: Musée d’Orsay.
One approach arrives via “Tonight With the Impressionists,” a 45-minute virtual reality experience in which visitors flit between broad Parisian boulevards, Bougival’s plein-air painters, Monet’s hotel balcony, and the exhibition itself.
But, beyond art, what was going on in late 1800s Paris? Quite a lot, actually. The Third Republic was afoot with the French capital having endured siege in the Franco-Prussian war, barricade and bloodshed in the Commune insurrection, and aggressive transformation by diktat of Baron Haussmann.
The exterior of the building that held the exhibition in 1874. Photo: Musée d’Orsay.
Against this backdrop, 31 artists formed a co-op and launched a show in a photography studio north of the Seine. Sure, it was a riposte to the stuffy traditions of the Salon, but their reasons were as much financial as artistic. They wanted to control how their work was exhibited and sold.
Yes, the works shown by the Société Anonyme at 35 Boulevard des Capucines purported to be forward-looking, but there was no deep philosophy, no cohesive aesthetic. In fact, the “First Impressionist Exhibition,” the rather bland name by which the show has become known, is somewhat inaccurate: a mere seven of the 31 artists are considered Impressionists.
Claude Monet, Boulevard des Capucines (1874). Photo: Musée d’Orsay.
The exhibition was a critical and commercial failure. The group dissolved shortly thereafter and it would take several years for Impressionism to begin garnering the popularity it still enjoys today.
All the same, the show had its revolutions. The setting was new, two stories of eccentrically decorated interiors, flooded with light from the floor-to-ceiling windows. Once the sun set, gas lamps flickered on meaning that for a single franc, art lovers could visit after work. The d’Orsay show begins here, staging black-and-white photographs of the exhibition space before leading into the 130 works it has assembled.
Berthe Morisot, Port de Lorient (1869). Photo: Musée d’Orsay.
Many of the names swept up by the broad brush of Impressionism are on display here. There’s Edgar Degas with the twirl and step of his ballerinas, Paul Cézanne with his rural houses built of bold angularity, Edouard Manet and his earnest portrayals of modern life, Berthe Morisot’s young and fashionable scenes of light and whimsy. And, of course, there’s Claude Monet and his work Impression, Soleil Levant (1872), the hazy waterscape retrospectively offered up as the movement’s founding masterpiece.
There’s also much besides that doesn’t fit so neatly: an ornate bronze from Marius-Jean-Antonin Mercié, etchings both stern and bucolic from Félix Bracquemond, Camille Cabaillot-Lassalle’s oil painting of the 1874 Salon. One begins to question what exactly comprises Impressionism—and that’s precisely the point.
“Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism” is on view at the Musée D’Orsay, Esplanade Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Paris, France, through July 14, 2024. It travels to the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C, September 8, 2024–January 19, 2025.
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