IMPRESSIONISM--VICTIM OF ITS OWN SUCCESS

A splendid exhibition holds forth at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park.

Don’t see it.

It is a riveting, revealing, rip-roaring compendium of everybody’s favorite art style, French Impressionism.

Don’t see it.

It is a contribution to scholarship, connoisseurship and historyship that will deepen the insight of the initiated and open the hearts and minds of simple folk everywhere.

By all means don’t see it.

It is “The New Painting; Impressionism 1874-1886” sponsored by AT&T;, jointly organized by the National Gallery of Washington and the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. It is surely the grandest such project initiated by the Bay in the moons of memory and a large feather in the fedora of curator of painting Charles F. Moffet, who organized the whole bouillabaisse.

The trouble is, the confounded thing is so successful that it is virtually sold out until the end of the run July 6, by which time officials expect 450,000 souls to click through the turnstiles. The cash-strapped museum likes having a hit and its minions and factotums are scuttling about trying to arrange an extension because the show travels no further. Extension will be tough, as lenders are pining to have their treasures back. However, there still is an outside chance you may get to see it after all.

The problem even with that is that even when you see it you can’t see it. “The New Painting” suffers from that new scourge of the museums, Exhibition Gridlock. There are so many people in the galleries that even victims of horror-vaccui get claustrophobia. Nobody here has to be encouraged to reach out and touch somebody’s hand. It just happens. That is fun for pickpockets and people who like closeness but you can barely see the pictures with any decent degree of concentration.

And more’s the pity because this is a landmark exhibition.

As is well known, the Impressionists--like many another art movement--received their name from a critic who intended it as a dig when reviewing the first of eight Parisian exhibitions held by the group between 1874 and 1886. It is the limpidly simple idea of this exercise to re-create those historic expositions with samplings from each installed in separate rooms and spaces each painted a different color so you know where you are.

The panorama of the movement unfolds with works by all the famous Impressionists--Zacharie Astruc, Marcellin Desboutin, Alphonse Legros, Adolphe-Felix Cals, Alphonse Maureau, Ludovic Piette, Jean-Louis Forain and the beloved Federico Zandomeneghi, to name just a few.

Qui ? Who? Excusez - moi , I must be in the wrong place. I thought this was the Impressionist exhibition.

And so it is, and part of the fun is that it proves that real history is opaque and messy rather than clear and neat as the sages would have us believe. Never fear, all the household deities are represented from Papa Pissarro to Dead-Eye Degas and Marvelous Monet.

But the fact is that the “Impressionist” exhibitions in Paris were a higgledy-piggledy patchwork of kaleidoscopic alliances between mismatched misfits. The cast, changing from year to year, was characterized by endless bickering that passed for intellectual debate, but sounds a lot like pouting, posturing and politics. The moniker Impressionism was never universally adopted and its general meaning did not, in any event, designate for them the dappled art it brings to mind for us. For late arrivals like Van Gogh, it was a portmanteau term covering all the advanced art of the day. The exhibiting group itself started out as La Societe Anonyme and elided into Un Groupe D’Artistes Independent--especially from each other.

When masses of bodies in the galleries occasionally part to leave a gap, one finds that there is plenty here for pure aesthetic delectation. Degas is winningly well served, especially by the presence of his singular, novelesque masterpiece, “Portraits in an Office (New Orleans).” Monet’s brace of railway stations are historical hinges. Renoir’s “Jugglers at the Cirque Fernando” are charm without saccharine and Mary Cassatt’s pink and frothy “Tea” is sweetness without gush. Manet is nowhere seen, since he never exhibited with the group.

The exhibition is, however, about larger questions. It is fascinating to observe how little stylistic progress is apparent as the years grind on. Very little seems to change until the appearance of Seurat and the other Pointillists in the final exhibit. In context, they look more like a mechanization of Monet than the cool purists we know today.

The central question amid interesting eddies has to do with the way this show plunks itself down in the midst of the most epochal art historical question that has rattled museums since the triumph of Modernism. It is a revisionist notion that is revising our view of history by changing the way art is presented in museums and special exhibitions.

In the memory of most adults, art history has been dominated by a belief that every epoch produces great and significant art and run-of-the-mill art. The task of curator, critic and historian has been to discriminate between them and put the ordinary stuff in storage while educating the public with examples of excellence.

In recent years this idea came under attack as elitist. The new, basically conservative notion, is that museums must present an evenhanded selection representing whatever was happening at the time. The viewer does his own discriminating. This theory has been particularly influential on the art of the 19th Century because that period produced masses of academic art that was attacked as virtually immoral by the triumphant former rebels, the modernists. When the modernists became the Establishment the academic stuff went into the vaults.

By now the revisionist notion has become pervasive. For example, a new museum for 19th-Century art opens in Paris in December in a vast former railway station, the Gare D’Orsay on the quais of the Seine. All the trademark Impressionist pictures from the beloved little Jeu de Paume museum will be integrated into the collection along with the salon artists, academicians and commemorative sculptors until recently scorned as pompiers.

The present exhibition--quite legitimately--takes the same tack and implicitly poses the same question: Did we lose anything valuable by downplaying the rank-and-file artists of the independents and celebrating what seems to us obvious genius?

We clearly lost the real texture of the times. That is important, but “The New Painting” suggests that most of the individual artists who were put on the back shelf deserve both their place and their obscurity.

Except Gustave Caillebotte.

Caillebotte was a naval architect and a passionate collector of Impressionist pictures. If he had done nothing else he would deserve a heroic niche for bequeathing his collection to France, thus insuring that nation a core collection of an art it cordially reviled.

But Caillebotte did do something else--he painted. This exhibition, generously laden with his best work, makes us wonder why he has not ranked higher among the Realist/Impressionists like Degas. He was saturated in the aesthetic that valued capturing everyday life and did so with great sensitivity in pictures like, “The Floor Scrapers” and the connoisseur’s classic, “Paris Street: A Rainy Day.”

What’s the matter with us? Why wasn’t he noticed before?

The truth is, he was and observers couldn’t get past the dry, mechanical, emotionally cold quality of the pictures. Now they can because that same anomie is found in present artists like Robert Longo and David Salle.

The truth is, there is no such animal as Historical Objectivity. Revisionism is the handmaiden of a new system of selectivity. “The New Painting” is a fascinating manifestation of an epochal roll-over in artistic taste. It is certainly among the most important exhibitions of the year.

Don’t see it.