New Dawn

What, another impressionist show? Yet more of those women under trees, those boating parties, those irksomely "unproblematic" scenes of French middle- class life a century and a quarter ago? Fraid so, yes. But "Origins of Impressionism," seen earlier this year in Paris and now filling a large slice of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, is an uncommonly well- chosen and fully argued show.

Created by the Met's Gary Tinterow and the French art historian Henri Loyrette, chief curator of the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, it has drawn in an astonishing number of major works -- nearly 30 Manets; more than that number of Monets; and work by a whole gamut of artists from Renoir to Cezanne and Whistler, from Frederic Bazille to academicians like Jean-Leon Gerome and even William Bouguereau. It focuses on the early years of the movement, the 1860s, before "New Painting" became controversial with the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874. It asks, What formed Manet, Monet, Degas, Renoir and the rest; what ambitions coalesced between them; what other artists did they respond to?

"Nothing will come of nothing" is an axiom of art history, and the notion that Impressionism was a matter of innocent eyes doing sunlight with broken touches without "academic" preconceptions is strictly for the birds in the sunlit trees. What's wrong with the name Impressionism is that it suggests quick shots of fleeting things. Yet the main progenitor of New Painting was the most solid, stubborn and material painter imaginable, Gustave Courbet. A Renoir like Bather with a Terrier, 1870, could hardly exist without the example of Courbet's wardrobe nudes. Courbet was the doubting Thomas of painting, the great empiricist who wanted to verify everything by touch, and his influence pervades Manet's work as well.

In the catalog, Loyrette and Tinterow quote the art critic Jules Castagnary, who wrote in 1867 that the "modern spectacle" sought by the New Painters wasn't a matter of theory, ideology or history but of direct response to the world and its contents. "What need is there to go back through history ... to examine the registers of the imagination?" Castagnary wrote that "beauty is in front of the eyes, not inside the brain; in the present, not in the past ... The universe we have here, before us, is the very one that painting ought to translate."

There is a standard story of Impressionism: how it rose in opposition to brown-soup or frothy-pink "academic" art, how its icebreaker was Manet's Le | Dejeuner sur l'Herbe at the Salon of 1863, and how it chucked out past art (history painting, the academic portrait) in the interest of unmediated vision. This needs a grain of salt, and the Met's show administers several pounds of it, in the form of a prelude gallery that sketches the main contents of the official Paris Salon of 1859, the year in which, most observers concurred, the once unquestioned supremacy of history painting faltered. Landscape was rising, and the main vehicle of New Painting was landscape, with or without figures in it.