A New Approach to Painting

'In 1874, avant-garde artists, including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro, mounted the first major exhibition by the group that would become the impressionists. Painting scenes of everyday life--parks, avenues, cafes and the countryside near Paris--the Impressionists employed brilliant hues and visible brushstrokes to capture the transient effects of light playing across their fields of vision.

This new approach to painting has been widely celebrated for its singular beauty and radical impact on the development of modern art.' (From the program, 'The Birth of Impressionism', Masterpieces from the Musee D'Orsay')

I was blessed this Christmas season to meet my parents in Nashville, and to stay at the Opryland Hotel, which my son, Nathan compared to a neighborhood in Venice. In addition, we took our children to the Frist Center for Visual Arts in order to take in a Chihuly glass exhibition, as well as the Impressionist collection from the Musee D' Orsay (currently undergoing a facelift).

Eduard Manet is my favorite painter, and as a leading influence on Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and the gang, featured prominently in this exhibition. But what stirred me was to see the paintings, which were winning selection to 'the Salon' in Paris during the years when the Impressionists (who couldn't get a painting featured in the Salon for love nor money) were coming together as a group. And I know it is after the fact now, and the history book has been written, but I find it almost impossible to believe that anyone could look at those stiff, 'realistic' paintings and compare them favorably to the pioneering work of the Impressionists.

And yet, the history book has been written, and the Impressionists were not allowed mainstream access to the Salon for many years, and had to work for decades to achieve acclaim. But their work is SO vibrant, SO powerful, SO vivid, SO colorful, SO lively that I had an awfully hard time looking at those paintings side by side and coming to any understanding.

Don't get me wrong, I understand that you might not love the Impressionistic style. I prefer Manet, even when he left his work 'unfinished'. I have no Impressionist posters or prints hanging in my house or office. But I cannot imagine looking at that work and not immediately understanding that they had, indeed, found there way to a new way of looking at the world.

And now, 130 years or so later, we have come to recognize their brilliance, partly because they banded together as a group and refused to fade into the sunset. But how many more visionaries and artists and creators have made similar breakthroughs of seeing, without having the real opportunity to share their discoveries with the world at large? Who in your life, right now, may have this kind of breakthrough?

EE Cummings said it brilliantly...

Now the ears of my ears awake,

And the eyes of eyes are open.

So may it be with us.