Art: when we’re on the cusp of change
Two art exhibits, one in Paris (closes 14 July), the other in Washington, DC (closed 4 May) offer artists’ renderings of a previous era that was on the cusp of significant change. For those of us wondering if AI’s arrival is a continuation of the dawn of the digital era or yet another new wave of change, these paintings offer a reminder that perspective is all, and it’s worth trying to walk around and shift the angle from which we view powerful changes.
Starting in the 1870s, the Second Industrial Revolution ushered in a multitude of technological developments whose cost-benefit was hotly debated. The Paris show reminds us of the Impressionists’ role as agitators to get the public to question how the impact of these changes might be perceived. Museums that were financially powered by philanthropy or newly created green spaces could be romantic cultural places or the signature of new wealth and its magnanimous (or was it?) gestures of redistribution to the masses. Smoke stacks on rivers could be viewed as progress or the ruin of previously bucolic landscapes and ways of life. These paintings are, even today, a reminder that we opt to choose beauty or fear as society shrugs off the old and slips on a new mantle.
The Whistler exhibit will surprise anyone who knows the American artist only for his mother famously sitting in a rocking chair, a painting owned by the Louvre in Paris and officially titled Arrangement in Grey and Black №1. His large body of work encompasses daily life in major European cities where he spent years as an expatriate. Shop fronts and street scenes were a key part of the Washington show but bridges and embankments in London, for example, are also there, evoking change on a larger scale. The show includes etchings and paintings and there are some particularly fine watercolours: the Freer holds the world’s largest collection of Whistler watercolours, “the medium through which he reinvented himself in the 1880s and painted his way into posterity.”
Unlike much of the Impressionists’ works in Paris, these scenes tend to back off, disengage, so that some of the art leaves the viewer more charmed than informed about the rumblings through society of technological upheaval. The excellent texts accompanying the show reminded the viewer that artists, like all observers, are trying to earn a living. Whistler famously struggled financially despite enormous commercial success. At times, prudence rather than harsh criticism is more likely to impress patrons and clients. The artist came in for criticism at the time for, on the one hand, selecting grimy gritty city scenes and, on the other hand, not opting to make social commentaries when he might have.
Scene by scene, we view society slipping into the future, adapting to changes that on the surface can be described but whose murky underpinnings and their impact could as yet only be imagined.
The artist’s record, whether social commentary or not, is vital when it turns an unexpected eye on us. So far, the unexpected is not what AI can give us.
Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, closes 14 July. Expect crowds.
Whistler: Streetscapes, Urban Change, in the Freer Gallery of Art, National Museum of Asian Art, Washington, DC, closed 4 May (but the Freer holds a major permanent collection of Whistler art).
