Familiar Impressionists Ideal for TV

Bit by bit, Impressionism has become the art you hate to love. With more than two dozen different exhibitions circulating through American museums in just the last 18 months or so, Impressionist painting has gotten just a smidgen overexposed. It’s like a favorite food: Tastes real good on the tongue, but who wants to eat it three meals a day, seven days a week?

Conventionality and overexposure, however, are exactly what make Impressionism ideal fodder for television. TV’s idea of adventurous programming is to put a bunch of suburbanite survivors in the rugged wilderness to see if they can make a go of it--along with their camera crew, some producers, a game-show host and obliging body doubles. When they do survive (surprise!), TV logically does it again--and again and again.

Familiarity breeds comfort. Impressionism’s comfort factor fuels A&E;’s two-part “Biography” of Impressionist artists Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro and Auguste Renoir. TV is unlikely to bring us “The Italian Futurists” and their anarchic tale of celebrating speed, chaos and violence, nor “The Russian Avant-Garde” and their socialist dream of an egalitarian art put at the service of a suppressed proletariat.

Instead, “The Impressionists” is told as a story of bourgeois triumph over obscurity, poverty and the social constraints enforced by deeply entrenched aristocratic principles in France during the second half of the 19th century. It’s a story of--well, survivors in the new wilderness of modern life, where celebrity, wealth and social mobility are key.

Part 1, “The Road to Impressionism,” sets the stage. Appropriately, the first image one encounters is a train chugging through the verdant landscape. Although not specifically articulated in the otherwise generally helpful voice-over narration, read by Edward Herrmann, this image of vibrant nature juxtaposed with brute machine power provides suitable context for what emerges in the 1870s as Impressionism’s complex negotiation of naturalism and artifice. The program considers the art less as a stylistic movement than a revolution in attitude. That’s a good place to begin.

Part 2 is headed with a punning title. “Capturing the Moment” refers to the Impressionist refusal of historical subject matter--no heroic battle scenes, literary epics or Greek, Roman and Christian myths for Edgar and company--in favor of the common people, places and things the artists could see, feel and experience in the immediate world around them.

Expanding the Market and Getting Noticed

But “Capturing the Moment” also alludes to something else. It means seizing an opportunity--getting noticed amid the competitive crush, building careers, working with the newly emergent brand of art dealer typified (and in some respects invented) by Paul Durand-Ruel, expanding their market to include Gilded Age America and rising inexorably to national stature and international fame.

Because this is “Biography,” the details of individual lives are emphasized within the larger, more generalized contours of social, cultural and political events. Degas is portrayed as the obnoxious misogynist he actually was. Morisot is shown as a skillful manipulator of an image of personal propriety. Renoir begins as a decorative china painter, quickly emerges as an ambitious visual composer on canvas and soon devolves--through a combination of conservative ideology and physical infirmity--into an utter hack. Pissarro is the conflicted outsider who found stability amid the self-created “family” of Impressionist artists; Monet, the determined long-haul artist who outlived them all (he died in 1926, a veritable national monument at age 86).

Forget Postmodern exhortations about “the death of the author,” with its implication that an artist’s biography is secondary to social constructs dominant in the era in which he lived. Impressionist painters, for example, represent the first generation of artists to come to maturity along with the new, life-altering medium of photography, which was sweeping the globe.

Both episodes do take good advantage of period photographs, which are useful in setting the biographical scene. Yet neither episode delves much into the degree to which the 1839 invention helped to fertilize the ground for the Impressionists’ new commitment to limiting artistic subject matter to things that could be seen with the eyes. Nor do they shed much light on photography’s inescapable influence and impact on building an artistic career in a truly modern sense.

The best part about “The Impressionists” is its impressive roster of interview subjects. The 12 scholars, among them Richard Brettell, Richard Kendall, Linda Nochlin, Joachim Pissarro (great-grandson of Camille) and Paul Hayes Tucker, include many who in recent decades have done exciting and provocative examinations of Impressionist painting. None is given a chance to expound at much length, but their quick insights are frequently apt.

Art is slow but television is fast. Here it has been slowed to match the art. This makes for an often informative if sometimes dull program punctuated with moments of scholarly heft.

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* “The Impressionists” airs Sunday from 9 to 11 p.m. and Monday from 8 to 10 p.m. on the A&E; Channel.