A Movement Still Agitating for Freedom

It’s hard to believe, as you shuffle through a crowded (what other kind is there?) show of Impressionist painting, that Impressionism was born of defiance, as a circumvention of the system. It was an exhilarating snub of academic standards, which, in late 19th century Europe, meant tight draftsmanship, high finish and, preferably, subject matter of some historical or literary import. The Impressionists sent another shudder through the system by exhibiting their work independently, outside the government-sponsored, juried salons.

When Monet, Degas, Morisot and their comrades pooled their efforts to stage their first exhibition in 1874, they made history, through the independence of their gesture and the radical innovations of their art. Today, well over a century later, Impressionist shows continue to make history but for a dramatically different reason--because they draw record-breaking crowds. Through no fault of its own, Impressionism has become institutionalized, the bad boys (and girls) of the art world turned into docile pets.

But that old feistiness is right where the painters left it, on the surface of their canvases, and even within the tame confines of a mass-marketed museum show, it can still surprise. Fresh, bracing proof can be found in the show “American Impressionists Abroad and at Home: Paintings From the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” which is making its first stop on a national tour at the San Diego Museum of Art.

Granted, American Impressionism is a secondhand movement, a spinoff of the French original, but some remarkable work came out of it, including some tantalizing teasers of the American Modernism to come. The French gave American painters license to break free, to unlearn the rules of their academic training. Assimilating the French model, American Impressionists pursued truth to nature and to the appearance of light as it shifts through time. They came to value the truth of their own experiences, however common and domestic. And most strikingly, they conceived of a new truth to painting itself, with overt acknowledgment of the flatness of the canvas and heightened consciousness of the power of the discrete brush stroke.

You can feel the vigor and freedom of the new approach in Edward Willis Redfield’s “Overlooking the Valley” of 1911, in which a tangled skein of leafless branches gives a jittery energy to an otherwise placid winter scene. And in Childe Hassam’s gloriously atmospheric New York street scene “Broadway and 42nd Street” (1902), a Whistlerian nocturne in foggy grays and blues, with street lights glowing in the darkness like fireflies. Or in the aerated strokes of gold and purple grain in John Singer Sargent’s “Reapers Resting in a Wheat Field” of 1885.

With only 39 paintings by 28 artists, this show doesn’t tell the tale of American Impressionism as much as it provides an outline with illustrations. The curators, H. Barbara Weinberg of the Met and independent scholar Susan G. Larkin, organized the paintings thematically, with sections devoted to cityscapes, country scenes, studio views and domestic life. Works in the show span about 40 years, from the 1880s to the 1920s, and are complemented by a selection of related works, including a large group of Hassam prints, from the San Diego museum’s own vaults.

Each of the artists represented here followed a distinct path toward adoption of an Impressionist style, but most followed the typical course for a post-Civil War American artist, which entailed study abroad, in Munich or Paris. A few, like Mary Cassatt and Sargent (who was born in Italy) stayed abroad, but most of the others returned frequently. While they were there, acquiring the standard set of academic skills and the European seal of artistic credibility, the French Impressionists made their daring debut. The initial quake didn’t jolt the Americans noticeably, but its aftershocks gradually worked cracks into the foundation of their academic training. They had to steep themselves in tradition before divesting themselves of its unwanted strictures. They had to do the conventional before the undoing of it held any meaning.

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Americans at home started seeing Impressionist imports in the 1870s, and many large exhibitions were staged in Boston and New York throughout the ‘80s. American landscapists influenced by the Barbizon school of plein-air painting, which favored looser brushwork and the recording of immediate impressions, paved the way for Impressionism’s reception in the U.S., and by the time of the last French Impressionist show, in 1886, Impressionism had taken firm hold here. Variants on its style and sensibility gained momentum over the next decade or two, converging with the aesthetic movement’s penchant for decorative surface pattern and the craze for things Japanese.

The flatness and asymmetry of Japanese woodblock prints energized many an Impressionist canvas. In her “Portrait of a Young Girl” (1899), Cassatt situated her model in the aggressively close foreground and raised the horizon, so that the grassy landscape behind her flattens into a wall of green. The slightly elevated perspective was a standard in Japanese prints, as well as in the works of Degas. William Merritt Chase adopted an equally dynamic strategy in his “For the Little One” (circa 1896), placing his ostensible subject, a woman sewing, up high in the picture, punctuating an expanse of empty space. The composition is vigorous; yet, at the same time, it accentuates the privacy and intimacy of the woman’s activity.

American Impressionism, like its French counterpart, was initially skewered in the press for being too slipshod in its draftsmanship, too vacuous in content and, of all things, too purple. The criticisms ring true here and there, but they don’t diminish the power of many of these paintings to widen the eyes and enliven the step--even when the crowds inhibit it.

* “American Impressionists Abroad and at Home: Paintings From the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” San Diego Museum of Art, 1450 El Prado, Balboa Park, (619) 232-7931, through April 22. Closed Mondays.