Original subtitles

Welcome to Great Art. For the past few years,

we've been filming the biggest exhibitions in the world

about some of the greatest artists and art in history.

Not only do we record these landmark shows,

but we also secure privileged access behind the scenes of the galleries and museums concerned.

We then use the exhibition as a springboard

to take a broader look at these artists.

In this film, we focus on a wonderful exhibition

that came to London's National Gallery in 2015

before moving to the Philadelphia Museum of Art,

but which started in Paris at the Musee de Luxembourg.

The Musee de Luxembourg was once the main exhibition space

of post-19th-century art in France

before the opening of the Musee d'Orsay in 1986,

and it was there that we filmed the show.

The Impressionists are perhaps the most famous artistic group in history,

and plausibly the most popular.

It's hard to imagine that were it not for one man,

their success and enduring popularity may never have happened.

That man was a Parisian art dealer called Paul Durand-Ruel,

and as the exhibition and film show,

he has every right to be called the man who made the Impressionists.

NARRATOR: "Without Durand-Ruel, we would have died of starvation,

all of us Impressionists.

We owe him everything.

He was stubborn, relentless,

he risked bankruptcy 20 times in order to support us.

The critics dragged us through the mud, but it was even worse for him.

They would write, 'These people are crazy,

but the most insane of all is a dealer who buys their work.'"

Claude Monet.

I don't think you can understand Modern Art without

having a sense of how important the growth of the dealer,

the growth of...the importance of the dealer was.

And that importance was first established

in the context of Impressionist painting.

There was no-one else to sell the Impressionists' work for them

except themselves,

and they tried to do that by having an independent exhibition.

When that didn't go very well,

they mounted their own auction in 1875.

That was a dismal failure, and was roundly heckled and booed

by the prospective bidders in the sale room.

So what they needed was someone else to sell the pictures for them.

And miraculously, along came the right man at the right time,

who was Paul Durand-Ruel.

It was the triumph of Modern Art over academic art.

"They permanently opened my eyes

and reinforced the idea that I might perhaps, in my own humble way,

be of some service to true artists

by helping to make them better understood and appreciated.

I confess I've always enjoyed the struggle,

despite the sorrows and torment it caused me.

The easy trade of buying whatever is fashionable

and immediately re-selling it at a profit,

always following the current trend,

is a business similar to selling clothing.

I could never become interested in that.

I wanted to become a missionary or a soldier.

I found myself on a different field of battle than the one I'd imagined.

The weapons were less deadly,

but the battles were every bit as relentless, harsh and exciting.

We were right on the path of all the rich customers and foreigners.

We sensed that in order to meet the tastes and expectations of many buyers,

we also had to acquire other works, perhaps less elevated,

but more accessible to most of our visitors.

I therefore began an entire series of visits to artists

whose work I noticed was popular at the Salons,

and started making purchases that would subsequently become quite substantial.

I also travelled to Lyon, Bordeaux,

Belgium, Holland, England, Berlin, and Hamburg.

Unfortunately, our retail trade was too time-consuming.

All our time was taken up with customers who wanted drawing or painting supplies

or sought to rent a painting or drawing,

and we overlooked what should have been the essential thing -

buying and selling paintings."

ANNE: I think that the fact that art was in shops like a hat,

or some kind of nice little box that you can offer as a gift,

it was easier to come in and buy a still-life, a landscape.

It was a fairly modest size,

so it could fit in any Parisian flat.

So I think that painting became something, er,

that you could have in your house and enjoy every day.

In the world of people looking at pictures at the time,

of course the most ordinary public would go to the Salon,

and would be enthralled by meticulous painting,

huge historical battles

and deeply-moving religious pictures, et cetera.

But also, a portion of this public

was also able to be interested in more intimate art.

It was a much smaller world, and people susceptible to buy

were much less numerous than they could be now.

The great technological innovation which absolutely lies behind Impressionism and how it was

was the invention of synthetic colour.

I mean, before, artists were sitting in their studio,

they were grinding stones and mixing pigments and egg yolk,

and everything was coming into this extraordinarily physical process of making your materials.

Suddenly, paint came in tubes, which meant,

one, that you had these vivid synthetic colours they could use,

and, two, you could paint outside. I mean, "plein-air" painting,

it's no accident that people didn't do it before.

How could you have taken all your pigments out?

Suddenly, paint was in a tube. They could stick it all

in their knapsacks and off they could go.

I think there's absolutely no doubt that Durand-Ruel

played a major role in breaking the monopoly of the Academie des Beaux-Arts.

The French academy was an ancient institution

going for many hundreds of years,

and it had a stranglehold on French culture.

It was there to control, to preserve, and to propagate it.

And they wanted mythological scenes, they wanted Biblical scenes,

they wanted narratives, they wanted dramas,

and they wanted it to be austere and classical with subdued colour.

They wanted a polished surface and a high finish.

And they certainly were not up for the Impressionists'

extraordinary, garish, vivid, sketch-like quality.

I mean, it must have jarred their eyes

and sent their senses juddering and reeling. So, yes, they hatedit.

The Salon of 1866 decided to accept only two works per artist.

Manet submitted two of his finest works -

The Fife Player

and The Tragic Actor, Rouviere in his role as Hamlet...

..but the jury rejected them.

Renoir, like Manet, was rejected.

Monet was luckier than Manet and had both his paintings accepted.

Manet showed nothing in the Salon of 1867.

Everything he had submitted had been mercilessly rejected.

In order to show all the work he had produced up till then,

he decided to imitate Courbet by exhibiting some 50 works in a gallery

built at his own expense next to the Alma Bridge.

A few artists and several art-lovers came to study them with interest,

but the press, the cartoonists,

and the entire public hounded their maker.

Conventional art-lovers were horrified by the Impressionists.

And I think it takes a jump of imagination

to see quite what a dramatic change the Impressionists represented.

I think it was the first time

that new art which was so striking

had ever been presented to the picture-loving public.

We are used to it in the present day.

We have had several generations of avant-garde art

that has produced new ways of painting, new ways of creatingart,

and to that extent, we are no longer shocked by the newness of it.

But I think, contemporarily, in Paris,

people had no experience of the new like this.

It was genuinely the first movement of new modern art,

and people were very shocked.

What happened in 1870 was important for the Impressionists.

It was because of the Franco-Prussian war

that many Frenchmen took refuge in London from Paris.

Durand-Ruel was one of them.

He dealt in pictures in London for a time when he was in exile, if you like.

So, too, was Monet, and so, too, was Pissarro.

They both came to London,

and that was where Durand-Ruel met up with Monet.

"I swiftly packed up all my paintings,

beginning with the most valuable, in order to ship them to England.

I managed to ship everything to London before the rail line was cut.

I rented a fairly spacious gallery at 168 New Bond Street,

which, by an unfortunate coincidence, was called the German Gallery.

Since I was not well enough known in England

to draw crowds to the exhibitions I was planning to organise,

I thought I had better place them under the aegis of an imaginary committee,

composed of Corot, Millet, Jules Dupre,

Diaz, Daubigny, and Courbet.

My own name appeared only at the end, as director of the exhibition.

Naturally, I was unable to consult all these artists,

but I was absolutely certain they would approve my action."

RACHEL: This is the great irony, that Durand-Ruel discovered Impressionism in London,really.

But the real importance of the Franco-Prussian war, I think,

is that Monet and Pissarro discovered Turner.

They'd seen Constable. He was actually feted in France.

Constable was neglected in England, while in France, he won a gold medal in the Salon.

He was loved and people had cited him and been excited by him.

But then suddenly they discovered Turner as well,

and there's a strong argument that Turner is really

the father of Impressionism in many ways.

Here was a man who looked at the weather, so important to Impressionism.

And that's what they were trying to get, atmospheres, mists, suns -

you know, it's the vaporous weather that they love.

And here was a man who managed to capture it in bright brush-strokes,

to capture a sense of aura,

of immediacy, of freshness, of atmosphere.

It was incredibly exciting to them to discover that.

"It was in my London gallery early in 1871

that I met Monet, who introduced me, in turn, to Pissarro.

He had just painted several highly interesting pictures.

Monet's paintings cost me 300 francs, Pissarro's 200 francs.

Those are the prices I continued to pay them for years.

No-one else would have been so generous,

since they were forced to let them go at 100 francs,

then at 50 francs or even less,

when I was no longer able to continue buying.

Shortly afterward, I began to slip a few paintings by these two artists into my exhibitions,

and managed, with difficulty, to sell a few of them."

"Durand-Ruel came to see me, and has taken

a great part of my pictures and watercolours,

and has proposed to buy every work of art that I will create.

It brings peace of mind for some time

and the means to create important works."

Camille Pissarro.

(SYLVIE SPEAKING IN FRENCH)

There's another way in which the Franco-Prussian war

is incredibly important in the development of Impressionism,

and that is that the defeat of the French

created a certain mood in Paris.

When everyone went back after the war,

the whole landscape had changed. Confidence had gone.

There was no longer an emperor.

Politically, everything was unstable,

and it was in that environment

that the revolutionary Impressionists,

in terms of their art, were able to express themselves

and, if you like, gradually take off.

I mean, they were an expression of a certain amount of chaos

that existed in Paris after the Franco-Prussian war.

So you've got the chaos of the Franco-Prussian war

actually being something quite sympathetic

for a totally new art movement.

What we know about Paul Durand-Ruel

is that he came from a rather elevated sector

of French bourgeois society.

He was very Catholic, he was very royalist,

he was very family-oriented.

And so the death of his wife soon after returning to Paris,

leaving him with these five children to raise,

was a defining experience for him.

And it must have been complicated, on one hand,

to take up the new art, to promote it,

at the same time, to attempt to provide

a stable environment to a group of motherless children.

FLAVIE: The meeting with Manet is fascinating.

Durand-Ruel goes in the studio of a Belgian artist, Alfred Stevens,

and discovers two pictures by Manet.

And he immediately buys both pictures,

one of them being the Port de Boulogne, and he doesn't hesitate

to go and knock on Manet's studio door a few days later,

and to buy all the pictures proposed by the artist to Durand-Ruel.

And for Manet, it's just a gift

that somebody is finally buying his pictures.

And moreover, Durand-Ruel asks the artist

whether he has other pictures elsewhere,

and he allows the artist a few days or one week

in order for the artist to bring back in his studio

all the pictures he's lent or left at other friends' house,

and buys another set of, I think, 16 pictures.

And he proposed to the artist, "Allow me to buy them all. Tell me your price."

"I bought, on the spot, everything I found there,

23 paintings for 35,000 francs,

agreeing to the prices he asked.

Without pausing to think about the potential consequences of my imprudent behaviour,

I increasingly indulged in purchases disproportionate to my means.

I had nearly 50 paintings by Manet on my hands after these various purchases.

I never dreamed of the incredible trouble

their appearance in my gallery would create for my business.

These works by a great artist so admired today

were not only misunderstood, but they appalled most of my clients

far more than paintings by Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, and Degas,

at which people simply smiled at first,

since they had not yet sparked the passionate debate that they would later generate.

In our allegedly enlightened century,

the greater, more original and personal an artist is,

the less well-known he is."

PHILIP: If you look at the people who were buying Impressionism earlier,

and there weren't many of them,

they were generally people

with a slightly, sort of, quirky take on life.

There were a couple of doctors, for instance,

who were homeopathic doctors, which was unusual at the time.

There was an actor, there was a customs official,

very lowly-paid,

but with an intense pleasure in the newness of Impressionism.

These were all guys who were not in the mainstream of normal collecting,

but who felt very strongly about how much they liked this new art,

and, in a sense, they created a prototype,

a template for future collectors

in succeeding generations of really avant-garde art.

Durand-Ruel started, in 1873, to do a whole series of engravings

of the pictures that were in the Durand-Ruel stock

in order to try to find potential buyers.

So the potential buyers would subscribe to these reviews, and receive them.

So they would buy the first "livraison",

so they would receive the first "livraison" monthly,

and then the second one, and then the third one.

So they would receive them as you would receive a newspaper.

And, for example, here you have a Barye...

Cerf sur Pieds.

You have a Bonvin, very classic because it's the interior of a convent.

David's La Mort de Marat...

..and you would have Moulins... A Monet, sorry.

Moulins en Hollande.

"The year 1873 began with great promise.

My firm had grown considerably and was becoming well-known more or less everywhere,

thanks to my exhibitions

and stir created by my many purchases.

I met with approval in the art world

and I was considered highly credit-worthy,

which, unfortunately, prompted me

to increase my overdraft far too dangerously.

I had began publication of a catalogue

and I thought I would introduce a few etchings

after works by Manet, Degas, Monet, Pissarro, Sisley,

but I never intended to shock anyone.

Even dealers who might possibly have acknowledged certain qualities

criticised me for overstepping my role.

Everyone agreed that I had gone mad.

Attacked and reviled by upholders,

by the most established art critics, by the entire press,

and by most of my colleagues,

these new artists became a laughing stock.

The gallery was visited by countless busybodies keen to criticise.

They would say to me, 'How can you praise paintings that lack any hint of quality?'

It is easy to imagine the damage done to business

by this change in attitude toward me,

because the convictions of most buyers

of pictures and artworks are notoriously weak.

It triggered a terrible struggle that lasted over 20 years.

So, at auctions, I bid the prices up

because I was determined not to let prices slide

too far below the true value of things.

But this obliged me to make costly purchases

that endlessly swelled my already considerable stock.

Violent altercations followed by blows of the cane

broke out in the sale room.

The pictures were booed as they were presented,

and people had fun turning them upside-down

as they were passed from hand to hand,

the better to laugh all the louder.

Circumstances forced me to stop buying from

and helping out my new friends almost completely.

So to reach the public directly,

Degas, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, Mademoiselle Morisot,

Guillaumin, Renoir, Lepic, and a few others

decided to form an officially-incorporated company,

the Society of Independent Artistes.

They held a show of their works in large premises belonging to Nadar, the famous photographer,

at 35 Boulevard des Capucines.

Pictures I bought included Impression, Sunrise,

also listed in the catalogue as 'Impression'.

The press seized upon this title

and applied it to the entire group of exhibitors

as a further form of mockery.

The label 'Impressionists' has stuck to them.

It seems inconceivable that a show with works of such high quality,

none of which merited disdain, aroused such attacks and laughter

from the thousands of exhibition-goers who crowded into the rooms,

drawn by ludicrous articles in the popular press.

Although most of these visitors, even the people who went to the Salons,

had eyes in their heads, they were unable to see and judge.

Public opinion against these dangerous innovators was whipped up so intensely

that visitors arrived with the firm intention of laughing,

and did not even bother to look.

For example, people today are amazed at the anger and controversy

provoked by the Bridge at Argenteuil series by Monet,

every one of which now fetches a high price.

Despite the lack of success of their first exhibition in Nadar's premises in1874,

they decided to test public opinion once again

in the hope of encountering less hostility.

Their second group show took place in my gallery,

which I made available at no cost.

The nickname 'Impressionist' had become commonplace,

and exhibition-goers, critics and journalists

used it as an expressive term, mostly as a mark of contempt.

The press became increasingly hostile,

as can be seen in the following excerpt

from an article by Albert Wolff in Le Figaro."

"There has just been opened at Durand-Ruel's

an exhibition of what is said to be painting.

The innocent passer-by enters

attracted by the banners adorning the front,

and a cruel spectacle meets his terrified gaze.

Five or six lunatics, of whom one is a woman,

have chosen to exhibit their works.

There are people who burst into laughter in front of these objects.

Personally, I am saddened by them.

These so-called artists style themselves

intransigents, Impressionists.

They take up paint brushes and canvases

in the same way that inmates of a madhouse pick up the stones on the road

and believe they have found diamonds."

PHILIP: France went into a serious economic decline.

Fewer and fewer people were buying pictures.

Indeed, some of those who'd bought the Impressionists early on

felt obliged actually to put them back on the market,

which meant that they actually fetched less

because the market was being flooded.

So, this was the moment of Durand-Ruel's inspiration,

when he looked around and thought, "How are we going to deal with this?"

And he came up with the idea of America.

First time he brings Impressionists' paintings to America,

it's actually in 1883, to Boston, to what was essentially a trade show

commemorating the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Paris,

and he brings 80 pictures at that point,

of which only 20% are the Impressionists'.

So the rest of them are much more conventional artists,

artists he had been selling their work to Americans for a number of years.

So he sort of knew his American market

by bringing over works by John Lewis Brown,

artists who aren't particularly well-known to us today,

and then into that he inserted three Monets,

six Pissarros, two Manets, three Renoirs.

And interestingly, the...

the Boston press and other American press commented

that it was actually the works of the modern French school, i.e. the Impressionists,

that were some of the most interesting ones in that exhibition.

"A fortunate coincidence in 1885

put me in touch with the American Art Association in New York.

That firm had obtained a privilege normally reserved for museums,

namely the duty-free importation of pictures and objects of art.

We agreed that I would immediately ship to New York

300 of the finest paintings I owned by the new school.

All shipping, insurance and advertising costs

would be met by them.

I accepted these terms eagerly."

I think when Durand-Ruel arrives in America,

he is absolutely the right man in the right place,

bringing with him Impressionists' paintings.

There was a very real sense

in which Americans took to Impressionist painting

as the new art for a new country.

They almost prided themselves on being more open to this new art

than tired old Europe was.

On top of that, they were making a lot of money.

In the last 25 years of the 19th century,

huge fortunes were made

on the back of the great stability post-Civil-War,

on the back of huge new industrial developments.

There were an awful lot of rich people there wanting to buy art,

but excited by the idea of a new art

in a way that perhaps Europeans weren't yet.

"Dear Paul, there could be no better response than yours,

informing the public of the silent war

long waged against you because of us.

Everyone will agree with you.

It's not a question of business, it's a question of art

that you have been defending for so long.

I myself am very grateful to you."

Alfred Sisley.

"Do what the public, press, dealers may,

they will not destroy your true quality,

your love of the art and defence of living artists.

In the future, this will be your claim to fame

because you were the only one."

Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

"I arrived in New York with a remarkable collection

almost entirely compounded of works by Manet, Degas,

Monet, Renoir, Sisley and Pissarro.

There were 360 of them.

The catalogue and all the advertisements bore the simple title of,

'Works in oil and pastel by the Impressionists of Paris,'

with no mention of my name.

It was a bold move and people told me that failure was all the more certain,

in that all these great artists were particularly unknown in America.

I was surprised when I encountered a welcoming audience.

People were at first startled by the new things I was exhibiting,

but they studied them with interest and a desire to learn.

The show drew crowds of the curious, and unlike what happened in Paris,

it triggered no fuss or stupid comments,

and sparked no protest.

Press coverage was unanimously favourable,

and many articles of praise appeared in all the papers in New York,

and all the large cities in the United States.

Art-lovers and the general public came not to laugh,

but to find out about the notorious paintings

that had created such a stir in Paris."

(PAUL-LOUIS SPEAKING IN FRENCH)

To a large degree, many Americans didn't lay their eyes

on an Impressionist painting until about 1886.

At that point, they've heard a tremendous amount,

there's a great sense of curiosity, finding out what these things really look like,

and there still are, you know, there are people in America that...

Critics who like to say these paintings were all painted in a lunatic asylum,

and they like to, actually, bandy about

some of the very same criticisms that the French press had.

What Durand-Ruel said is that American collectors are more open-minded

than many of the French.

I think we're looking at a young country with America,

with huge amounts of wealth being made and generated,

and we're looking at the people making this wealth

wanting to make a statement about themselves, culturally,

wanting to establish themselves culturally.

There were a number of really inspired collectors in America

who did put together quite exceptional collections.

CHRIS: The openness of Americans to Impressionism is by now legendary.

I think that Mary Cassatt played an important role

because, erm,

every rich, insecure American who came to Paris,

for many years, wanting to buy art would go and see Ms Cassatt,

and invariably, she would send them on to her friend Paul Durand-Ruel.

"He will show you good pictures to buy."

And she spoke with great authority because she came from

one of the grandest American families,

certainly one of the grandest Philadelphia families.

Her family ran the biggest corporation in the world at that point,

the Pennsylvania Railroad.

And so when she spoke, you had to listen.

Mary Cassatt, who lived in Paris

and, because she came from a good American family,

was the introducer of quite a lot of American collectors of Impressionism,

slightly came to, in a way, rue the power of Durand-Ruel,

in that she sometimes found cheaper Impressionist pictures

in other places, but found that her American clients

wanted not to buy it slightly cheaper elsewhere

but to buy it slightly more expensive at Durand-Ruel,

because Durand-Ruel gave an extra cachet

to the Impressionist painting.

I think Durand-Ruel found the Americans very refreshing.

He called them "less ignorant,

less closed-minded than our French collectors".

It is an extraordinary fact

that the first Impressionist paintings to enter a major museum

were in the United States, in the Metropolitan Museum in 1889.

There were no paintings from the Impressionists yet

in public collections in Europe.

So that's a measure of how quickly

the Americans latched on to Impressionism and understood it.

"My success on the other side of the Atlantic

had a significant repercussion in France.

The same people who had either not dared to buy a Manet, Renoir or Monet

or would pay only a few hundred francs for them

now resolved to pay as much as the Americans.

So, little by little, prices increased.

So did the number of collectors."

"There is only one person to whom I owe something,

and that's Durand-Ruel, who was looked upon as mad

and on our account almost seized by the bailiffs."

Claude Monet.

FLAVIE: Now we're seeing the last book from Paul Durand-Ruel's life.

So it goes all the way up to 1921. Paul Durand-Ruel died in 1922.

So, from 1891 onwards,

Durand-Ruel never changed the stock numbers,

and this stock book goes all the way to

number 11,902.

That's the last stock number, in May 1921.

That's why we can say that more than

11,000 pictures went through the Durand-Ruel gallery

during Paul Durand-Ruel's lifetime.

"The number of admirers of the new school

has continued to grow from year to year,

not only in France but in all the foreign countries, mainly Germany.

The movement will only continue to grow,

despite the prediction of those still blinded by routine

or the fear of seeing their own interests compromised.

At last I can rest, leaving to others younger than myself

the task of seeing who among today's new artists

are endowed with interesting vision.

They will not be found on the benches of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts

or in academic circles.

They will be found among artists,

who seek inspiration only within themselves

by contemplating the ever-renewed wonders of nature,

and by closely studying masterful works

by the greatest masters of every era."

ANNE: Durand-Ruel certainly was one of the first

to be this medium between the public and the artist.

And he was not the first, because there were several dealers before,

but he was probably, er, one of the most sympathetic

because he was truly interested in their art.

I think the real impact of Paul Durand-Ruel

was less on the history of art, because the artists might have done it for themselves,

but then on the history of the art market.

He established the art market of the 20th century.

The idea of finding an outsider,

believing in an outsider, backing an outsider,

that was absolutely crucial throughout the 20th century.

CHRIS: This man was important

because he took a very calculated risk.

He knew what he was doing as an art dealer,

but now he put his expertise to selling an entirely new kind of art.

It could have gone very wrong.

For a while, it did go very wrong and he was very close to bankruptcy,

but he prevailed, he brought his skill to bear,

and over a period of some 40 years,

he took a marginal art and made it to the absolute centre

of what we think and still think is modern art.

subtitles by Deluxe