Impressionism is 150 years old – this is the anniversary show to see

The time that elapsed between the fall of the Paris Commune and the opening of the first proper impressionist exhibition amounted to less than three years. Over the course of that period, the city had witnessed the collapse of the Second Empire, suffered a siege at the hands of the Prussian army and seen vicious house-to-house fighting between the troops of the Versailles government and the
scrappy citizen-army of Paris proper. All Parisians would recall the rivers of blood running down the city’s ritziest shopping streets, zoo animals being butchered for restaurant fodder, and the mass slaughter of rebel prisoners across the public squares of the city’s eastern faubourgs.

All this played out over a period roughly equivalent to that which separates the present moment from the final lifting of lockdown restrictions. I’ve never seen an impressionist show that explicitly acknowledges this background, nor – call me an innocent – had I ever really joined the closely affiliated dots between the slaughter of 1870-71 and what might be the most important modern art exhibition of them all.

Yet the first thing we see in this show, which commemorates the landmark 1874 impressionist exhibition, is a horrendous depiction of the slaughter, created by a man who refused to participate in the show. The work is Édouard Manet’s lithograph ‘Guerre Civile’ (1871), in which the corpses of combatants litter the ground around a half-demolished barricade, artillery smoke still wafting over their military-issue greatcoats. This, for Parisians rich and poor, had quite recently been daily reality.

In the unlikely event you are unfamiliar with impressionist lore then quick, here’s a recap: in 1874, the key figures of the movement that would become known as impressionism opened a private show in opposition to the state-sponsored Salon, itself a kind of a super-charged Royal Academy summer exhibition.