DENVER | Nature is the artist’s ultimate bully.
The changing colors of autumn leaves can mess with a painter’s carefully constructed theories about tone and form. A seaside scene is liable to change in an instant, suddenly making a painstakingly rendered landscape inaccurate. Nature may turn the best-laid creative plans to mush, but that didn’t stop the French Impressionists from embracing the challenges of painting in the open air.
“For me, a landscape hardly exists at all as a landscape, because its appearance is changing in every moment,” French painter Claude Monet said in the late 19th century. “But it lives through its surroundings — through the air and light, which vary constantly.”
Monet is one of the dozens of French artists featured in “Passport to Paris,” the ambitious exhibition currently on display at the Denver Art Museum. Works by Monet and his fellow Impressionists form the final leg of the exhibit and its 300-year focus. Their revolutionary use of color, form and subject matter is the last stop in a creative journey through centuries.
“‘Passport to Paris’ is really a celebration of 300 years of French art,” said Angelica Daneo, associate curator of painting and sculpture at the Denver Art Museum. “The premise of this show is that art is never created in a vacuum.”
The exhibit tracks the creative progress of a nation in three distinct sections. The earliest paintings, costumes and decorative pieces in the “Court to Café” portion of the show come from the late 17th century, a time when the bombastic Louis XIV ruled in the court of Versailles. In this atmosphere, the preferred subjects of artists came straight from the Bible and classical mythology.
From there, the show tracks the impact of revolutions in politics, technology and philosophy on French art. In the “Drawing Room” and “Nature’s Muse” sections of the exhibit, the topics start to shift. The royal court moving to Paris in 1715, the upheaval of the French Revolution in 1789, the urban transformation of Paris in the 18th century — all of these events had a big impact on the art of France.
“Each of these shows differ in their narrative and in the atmosphere they create for visitors,” Daneo said. “But they work together and they complement each other at the same time in offering the same perspectives on French art.”
The overall perspective is a shift from the ancient to the modern, from the distant past to the immediacy of the present. The grandiose paintings and decorative pieces from the time of Louis XIV in “Court to Café” are far removed from the everyday lives of French citizens in the 1600s. Scenes of ancient Roman and Greek gods capture the priorities of the age’s ruling class.
“This is a century of big, absolute monarchy,” Daneo said, pointing to works from the French Royal Academy. “Art is a great way to reinforce guidelines of the government.”
Very quickly in a stroll through “Court to Café,” which includes pieces from the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., that mission shifts. The court moves from the palace of Versailles to the city. The French Revolution upends the social fabric of the country. New patrons demand new subjects, and scenes of everyday life replace those of antiquity. Works by Vincent Van Gogh, Théodore Rousseau and Toulouse Lautrec capture those transformations, as do pen-and-ink works by Pablo Picasso and Paul Gauguin in the “Drawing Room” section of the exhibit.
By the time the exhibit wraps up with “Nature’s Muse,” a showcase of Impressionist landscapes from the private collection of Frederic C. Hamilton, that change is complete.
Painters like Monet, Edouard Manet, Camille Pisarro and Alfred Sisley broke completely with the stiff traditions of their forebears. With vibrant colors, short brush strokes and natural scenes, the Impressionists reinvented the focus and direction of Western art.
“They were introducing modernity,” said Christoph Heinrich, director of the Denver Art Museum. The phrase, “To be of one’s own time,” was key in describing the work of the Impressionists in the late 19th century. “They wanted to be part of their surroundings.”
That much is clear in the work of artists like Charles François Daubigny, who painted scenes from boat decks. It comes in the push toward painting that followed the invention of paint tubes in 1841. The effort to capture one’s environment and atmosphere underlines the careers of Monet, Pisarro and Sisley. In their scenes painted along the Seine River, construction cranes and smoking chimneys dot the landscape.
“You can feel the wind that’s coming from the sea,” Heinrich said of a landscape by Monet. “They were in the landscapes.”
The “Passport to Paris” exhibit seeks to capture that captivating mood on several fronts. In addition to the works themselves, the exhibit includes snippets of music from different time periods. Stretches of Ferdinand Hérold and Claude Débussy pieces play in different rooms. What’s more, a partnership between the museum and the Colorado Symphony Orchestra will include concerts featuring the works of French Impressionist composers at the nearby Boettcher Concert Hall.
“In the case of Impressionism, these painters and these composers were living at the same time,” said CSO resident conductor Scott O’Neil last week. “They had the chance to influence each other.”
Those collaborations resulted in a pointed focus on capturing the artist’s environment, however elusive it may be. A quote from painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir displayed on a gallery wall at the museum captures just how tricky that effort could be. “You come to nature with your theories,” Renoir said, “and she knocks them all flat.”
“Passport to Paris”
Runs through Feb. 9, Denver Art Museum, 100 W 14th Ave. Pkwy, Denver.
Tickets start at $12.
Information: 720-913-0130 or denverartmuseum.org.
Reach reporter Adam Goldstein at 720-449-9707 or agoldstein@aurorasentinel.com