The roots of modernism ... Absinthe by Degas. Photograph: AP
Will the impressionists ever get a break? Once their art was scorned as an assault on proper painting, but the movement's real tragedy began when it was accepted into museums in the early 1900s. People loved the paintings of Monet, Renoir and Degas - seeing them as nostalgic, reassuring images of Paris. Suddenly the first modern avant-garde became chocolate-box art.
The question is - why do museums and galleries persistently collaborate in preserving this stereotype? The Royal Academy's Impressionists by the Sea exhibition, in London this July, is yet another show that sells the impressionists short, portraying them as little more than genteel painters of beach scenes. In a final insult, it is even sponsored by Farrow & Ball, manufacturers of fine house paints. See a Monet and be inspired to paint your house ... mellow?
Exhibitions presented in this way simply turn off anyone with real blood in their veins and encourage them to go to Tate Modern instead, which wrongly asserts that modernism began in Brazil in 1968 rather than on the streets of Paris a half-century before.
The curators probably fulminate at all this as much as I do. They know that modern art historians see impressionism as opening radical social possibilities for art - painting city life, liking women - that were shut down by the formalist elitism and machismo of cubism and its successors. In many ways, impressionism remains modern in a way much 20th-century avant-garde art does not. But try telling that to Farrow & Ball.
The National Gallery had a tremendous success recently when it rehung all its late 19th-century French paintings under the title Modern Art from Manet to Picasso. People crowded in, because they can see perfectly well how Monet leads to Mark Rothko. But journalists, publicists and everyone with a vested interest persists in the old lie that impressionism is easy on the eye and light on content. Don't get caught in the snare for sloppy thinkers.
