[According to this story from The Guardian, a new 40-minute virtual reality experience at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris was meticulously researched and designed to take visitors back to the time and place of the birth of Impressionist art. See the original version of the story for a second image. –Matthew]
[Image: Visitors take part in a virtual reality experience at the exhibition Paris 1874 Inventing Impressionism at the Musée d’Orsay. Credit: Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images]
Historic meeting of French impressionists recreated in Paris exhibition
Immersive tour at Musée d’Orsay takes visitors back to 15 April 1874 – the moment that marked the movement’s birth
By Kim Willsher
March 23, 2024
In a lush red-and-gold carpeted photographer’s studio in northern Paris, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas are adding the final touches to the hanging of their paintings, while fellow artists Berthe Morisot and Camille Pissarro lament the lack of recognition for their work and Claude Monet bemoans being mistaken for Édouard Manet.
Outside, Parisian gentlemen in top hats and ladies in bustles are admiring the newly completed Opera House or enjoying an early evening drink on the café terraces while horse-drawn carriages clatter down Baron Haussmann’s new grands boulevards.
The Musée d’Orsay’s exhibition that opens this week – Paris 1874 Inventing Impressionism – will take visitors on a virtual voyage back 150 years to the very moment that marked the birth of the movement that changed the history of art.
When the 30 artists now known as the Impressionists gathered at the studio of the photographer Félix Nadar at 35 boulevard des Capucines in Paris on the evening of 15 April 1874, they were largely unknown and struggling.
Many had been shunned by the jury of the annual Académie des Beaux-Arts Salon, the official arbiters of artistic merit, and had decided – almost in desperation – to open their own independent exhibition.
At the time, they were not known as “Impressionists”: the term emerged shortly afterwards when the journalist Louis Leroy employed it as a sarcastic synonym for “unfinished” in his critique of Monet’s Impression, Soleil Levant, later hailed as the symbolic founding masterpiece of the exciting new movement.
During the 40-minute immersive tour, visitors will spend a virtual evening with the young artists at their breakaway exhibition and travel by steam train to Bougival, west of Paris, where many of them worked, helped by the development of oil paints in tubes that liberated them from their studios.
They will then tour the main exhibition that opens into a gallery with Renoir’s La Parisienne and La Danseuse, both of which featured in the 1874 exhibition, and other impressionist masterpieces, paintings, drawings and sculptures hung with the more classical work accepted by the official salon that same year.
Agnès Abastado, the director of digital development at the Musée d’Orsay, said the immersive experience was “unique and innovative” but based on painstaking scientific research. The verbal exchanges were scripted from hundreds of letters the young artists exchanged at the time.
“You can go into this exhibition and relive the evening with the artists and discover the genesis of this [artistic] movement. We wanted to recreate the emotion for visitors of the 1874 exhibition, but we took a precise scientific approach so it is based on what we know of this evening,” Abastado said.
“The narrative of the exhibition is invented, but we spent two years studying documents and letters to reconstruct it so everything is as near as possible to the reality.”
While little is known of Nadar’s studio, which was destroyed in 1989, and there were no photographs taken of the first Impressionist exhibition, Stéphane Millière, the head of Gedeon Media Group, which co-produced the VR experience, said they had tracked down architects’ plans, details of lighting and upholstery and even receipts for wallpaper to enable them to reconstruct the studio and the streets around it.
“The boulevard you see in the VR is an exact reproduction of what it would have looked like in 1874,” Millière said. “For visitors, the VR experience makes the exhibition come alive and become something extraordinary.”
Anne Robbins, the co curator of the exhibition, said the aim of it and the VR experience was to “retell the rich and passionate story of the beginning of Impressionism”.
“We look at the circumstances of this [1874] event, we situate it in its time and place and present a selection of the works: some of which are very great chef d’oeuvres while some are less noteworthy paintings and sculptures but are still significant.
“In it we see the novelty of these paintings and how this group of artists who took part in the 1874 exhibition were very diverse and their work eclectic. We want to offer a new look and understanding of impressionism.”
Pierre-Emmanuel Lecerf, the general administrator of the Musée d’Orsay, added that the VR experience was not simply entertainment.
“It allows us to go back in time, to evoke the surroundings, the decor and to bring the painters back to life, but the approach is scientific. It’s not made-up entertainment, but allows us to immerse ourselves in that time and learn,” Lecerf said.
“Then you walk into the exhibition and see the real paintings that are just astonishing. No VR can replace that.”
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Paris 1874, Inventing Impressionism opens at the Musée d’Orsay 26 March – 14 July