The Impressionists and Photography

With the support of: With the exclusive collaboration of: Text Technology partnership: With the collaboration of: Introduction Text The new medium’s astonishing capacity to bring time to a standstill and its magical ability to capture moments of real life likewise led artists to explore instantaneousness and visual ambiguity in their paintings.  The age of photography, which began nearly two hundred years ago, changed artists ’ way of looking at the world and representing reality. The Impressionists and Photography sets out to illustrate this new approach by drawing attention to the similarities between the main French photographers of the 19th century and the artists who were involved in some way or another in the creation and development of the Impressionist group. The show brings Impressionism into dialogue with photography in order to highlight their resemblances, affinities and mutual influences in certain thematic and technical aspects: from how the camera’s artificial eye and photographers’ study of light influenced the depiction of reality in painting to how the asymmetrical and cropped appearance of photographic images spurred painters to adopt a new viewpoint. Text Photography, which called for recognition as a new artistic specialty from the outset, in turn incorporated certain painterly lighting and compositional effects and employed various methods in an attempt to avoid the excessive precision of the camera. By the end of the century, the so-called Pictorialist photographers, influenced by the Impressionists’ rapid, sketchy style of execution, deliberately sought means of likening their images to paintings and drawings.   The exhibition’s nine theme-based sections —the forest, figures in the landscape, water, the countryside, monuments, the city, portraits, the body and archives—show how photography and Impressionist painting shared a new way of looking that laid the foundations for modern art.   Text The exhibition Sections LA EXPOSICIÓN secciones Text 1. The Forest Text The landscape enjoyed great popularity in French painting and photography in the mid-1800s. Painters and photographers first exchanged experiences in the forest of Fontainebleau and in the parks around Paris. This room shows paintings by the forerunners of Impressionism—Gustave Courbet, Camille Corot, Théodore Rousseau and Charles Daubigny— alongside photographs by Gustave Le Gray, Eugèn Cuvelier and Henri Le Secq, the first photographers to cart their heavy equipment around the forest. The naturalist painters’ and early photographers’ pursuit of the truth in nature was inherited by the Impressionists. As can be seen here, the angle of view and light effects employed by Camille Pissarro—“the first Impressionist,” as Paul Cézanne called him—bring to mind the images captured by photographers and, like them, the painter does not portray the forest in its immensity but only fragments of it.  Text Text Text 2. Figures in the Landscape Outdoor painting gradually caught on throughout the 19th century and became the future Impressionists’ main method of working. As this section shows, in Claude Monet’s early paintings the forest serves as a backdrop to his figures, and their naturalism closely resembles that of the photographers of the forest. Unlike Monet, Édouard Manet nearly always worked in his studio and only occasionally painted from life. His schematic landscape backgrounds recall the decorative backdrops used in photographic portraits, such as those made fashionable by Olympe Aguado. Édouard Baldus’s group photographic portraits are likewise comparable to Frédéric Bazille’s and Marie Bracquemond’s painted portraits of relatives and friends in outdoor settings, in which the sitters seem to be posing for the camera. Text Text Text The sea was an inexhaustible source of inspiration and experimentation for modern artists. Gustave Le Gray’s seascapes are one of his greatest aesthetic and technical accomplishments. In these concise, close-up photographs of choppy seas and clouds, Le Gray invented a new notion of instantaneousness and visual fragmentation that subsequently served as a reference for Eugène Boudin and Claude Monet in various paintings of seas and skies. Like Le Gray, Monet captures the agitated movement of the sea in his pictures and offers the viewer an artistic symbol of the passage of time. The ghostly reflections of the trees in the calm river waters in Olympe Aguado’s and Camille Silvy’s photographs bear a close resemblance to the paintings of Monet and Alfred Sisley, who were concerned with capturing the fleeting, changing appearance of water and studying the reflections of the trees on its surface. 3. Water Text Text Text 4. In the Countryside At the end of the 1800s their loose, rapid strokes aimed at reproducing a fleeting experience influenced the aesthetic of the so-called Pictorialist photographers including Constant Puyo and Robert Demachy. Leisure activities around Paris, boat rides and strolls in the countryside were the favorite subjects of most of the Impressionist artists. During the course of their outdoor experiments they developed a new way of looking at their surroundings, and their in-depth reflections on the very nature of painting paved the way for modern artistic sensibilities. The novel instantaneous and fragmentary approach adopted by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet and Gustave Caillebotte in their depiction of landscape is comparable to how photographers such as Achille Quinet, Eugène Atget and Charles Marville captured reality. Text Text Text Text Text In the mid-1800s several photographers such as Édouard Baldus, Hippolyte Bayard, Gustave Le Gray and Henri Le Secq were hired by the imperial government’s Historic Monuments Committee to draw up visual records of the monuments in all the French regions. Despite being commissioned for documentary purposes, these photographs are true masterpieces in the history of French photography. These pictures also aroused the Impressionists’ interest in historical buildings, chiefly Gothic. The series of views of Rouen cathedral painted by Claude Monet throughout 1892 and 1893 is a particularly good example of the new photographic approach. The appearance of bridges, factories and railroads in the photographic landscapes of Édouard Baldus and Eugène Atget and in the paintings of Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley and Gustave Caillebotte is a reflection of their shared interest in the new landscape of the age of industrialization. 5. Monuments Text Text Text Text 6. The city Text while Camille Pissarro transformed them in his paintings into foreshortened Impressionist views far removed from artists’ traditional horizontal depictions of the city. The first daguerreotypes of urban scenes taken by Louis Daguerre from a window set an example that was followed in the photographs of Le Gray, Charles Soulier and Adolphe Braun and in the canvases painted by Gustave Caillebotte, Berthe Morisot and Alfred Sisley. All these images captured from above are the result of a vision of the exterior taken from an interior. Paris’s new urban settings—the grand avenues and wide boulevards designed by Baron Haussmann during the Second Empire—encouraged new ways of viewing and experiencing the city and became the favorite motifs of painters and photographers alike. These modern perspectives were captured by the cameras of Charles Marville and Hippolyte Jouvin, Text Text Text The advent of photography steered painted portraits in a new direction. Daguerreotypes, whose long exposure times resulted in stationary, unnatural poses, were followed by a fashion for cartes-de- visite. Patented by Disdéri in 1854, this new format made it possible to obtain eight photographs from the same negative. On display alongside examples of these more commercial portraits are works by the multitalented Nadar, who immortalized with his camera all the intellectuals and bohemians of his day with piercing psychological insight and a new realism and simplicity. Certain conventions of photographic portraiture were adopted by Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas and a few of the Impressionists, who even used photographs to compose their paintings. It became common for sitters to be depicted slightly off-center, against a flat or theatrical-looking background, in keeping with new post-photographic sensibilities. Also on view are several photographs taken by Degas in 1895 with his newly acquired Kodak camera showing his friends in carefully studied settings and compositions. 7. Portraits Text Text Text Text 8. The Body Text The public showing of Édouard Manet’s Olympia in 1865 triggered a huge scandal on account of its similarity with the pornographic photographs then in circulation. This section features several examples of how nude photography evolved from the more academic models with pictorial settings favored by Félix-Jacques-Antoine Moulin, Eugène Durieu and Auguste Belloc to the naked bodies in more naturalistic, spontaneous poses portrayed by Gustave Le Gray and Paul Berthier. Interest in nudes in uninhibited poses spread to the Impressionist painters, especially Edgar Degas, the member of the group who was most taken by photography. Degas used dance and dancers’ changing attitudes as an essential means of studying the human body in motion and was particularly interested in Eadweard Muybridge’s chronophotographs, which captured transience by freezing figures in mid-movement. Text Text Text 9. Archives Text The last room illustrates how Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas used photography for documentar and archival purposes. The advent of the age of mechanical reproduction led to the mass circulation of photographic prints of artworks and artists discovered they could be useful documentary aids for creating their own paintings. The set of photographs Manet commissioned Anatole-Louis Godet to take of his paintings are interesting not only for their documentary value but also for the purpose to which the painter put them. He sometimes even colored these photos using watercolors and gouache, turning them into original works of his own. Degas’s portfolio of photogravures brings together a selection of works from his entire career, from the early history paintings to the bathers and dancers of his final period. The fact that they were chosenby the artist himself adds to their interest. Text Related content Text Introductory video Virtual visit Text Painting with Friends. Seeing like an Impressionists   Study Day. The Impressionists and Photography Text Activities Temporary exhibition focus: The Impressionists and Photography Text Text Text Text Text Social media Publications and products Text Catalogue Text of Paloma Alarcó, Chief curator of Modern Painting at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza  Dimensions: 200 x 275 (High x wide)  288 pages  Languages: Spanish and English  Paperback: €30.40  Hard cover: €36.10  Language: Spanish 56 pages The exhibition guide offers an itinerary throuth its nine sections. Each chapter provides a context and clues to think about the works on display. The publication includes color illustrations and a map of the connections between painters and photographers.   Exhibition guide Texts by: Clara Marcellán Fernández 15 x 18 cm Price: €5.70 Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Text Information and credits Practical information Opening hours Tuesdays to Sundays, 10.00 to 19.00 The temporary exhibition will remain open until 9.00 on Saturdays Monday closed 24 and 31 December: open from 10.00 to 15.00 Closed 25 December 2019 and 1 January 2020 Visitors are asked to leave the galleries 5 minutes before closing Audio guide service Available in Spanish, English, French and Italian Organiser Museo Nacional Thyssen Bornemisza Paseo del Prado, 8 - 28014, Madrid mtb@museothyssen.org Transport Subway station: Banco de España Buses: 1, 2, 5, 9, 10, 14, 15, 20, 27, 34, 37, 45, 51, 52, 53, 74, 146 and 150 Train stations: Atocha, Sol and Recoletos Visitor services Telephone: (+34) 917 911 370 Email: cavthyssen@museothyssen.org Dates From 15 October 2019 to 26 January 2020 Single ticket It's available to visit in the same day, all museum, including temporary exhibitions Standard tickets: €13.00 Group ticket (7 or more people): €11.00 per person Reduced price ticket: €9.00 More information Ticket prices Number of works: 66 oils and works on paper and more than 100 photographs Exhibition Factsheet Publications: Catalogue with texts by Paloma Alarcó; digital publication in ISSUU and educational guide with texts by Clara Marcellán Title: The impressionists and Photography Technical curator: Clara Marcellán,  curator, Department of Modern Painting, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza Organiser: Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza Text Sponsorship: With the support of JTI, with the collaboration of Comunidad de Madrid and with the technical collaborator Samsung The Frame Curator: Paloma Alarcó, chief curator of Modern Painting at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza Content The texts of this magazine come from the exhibition brochure Credits Cover images Edgar Degas Swaying Dancer (Dancer in green), 1877-1879 Pastel and gouache on paper. 64 x 36 cm © Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid Woman Dancing, in Animal Locomotion, plate 189, 1887 Photography of Eadweard Muybridge Victoria and Albert Museum, London © Victoria and Albert Museum, London Credits and legal disclaimers © Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid All the content featured in this application is protected by copyright and may not be produced without the previous authorisation of its respective owners. The works of art that have been reproduced are also protected by copyright and it is forbidden to reproduce them wholly or in part Editorial cordinator IT Area, Web and New Media Department of Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza