<img decoding="async" class="lazyload size-full-width wp-image-1605034" src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==" data-src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/12/1955_17_M.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="A pointillist painting shows four farm workers gathering fruit beneath a tree in a brightly dappled orchard with rolling fields and a horse-drawn cart in the distance." width="970" height="796" data-caption='Camille Pissarro, <em>Apple Harvest</em>, 1888. Oil on canvas, overall: 24 x 29 1/8 in. (60.96 x 73.98 cm.), dimensions: 33 1/2 x 38 3/4 x 4 in. (85.09 x 98.425 x 10.16 cm.). <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Brad Flowers, Dallas Museum of Art, Munger Fund</span>’>
Their paintings might look like greeting cards from a nursing home, but the Impressionists were 19th century punk rockers. They upended the establishment by presenting what was viewed as rough, unfinished artwork by upstarts bent on subverting tradition. And when the conservative Académie des Beaux-Arts rejected them, this ragtag group of starving artists, including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne and Berthe Morisot, among others, set up their own group show, a first, and had the audacity to charge admission.
Their work can be seen in the touring show “Impressionism Revolution: Monet to Matisse,” currently at Santa Barbara Museum of Art, alongside the latter’s “Encore: 19th-Century French Art.” The Dallas show will then travel to the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario in the summer and, in late 2026, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
“They revolutionized museums and how we encounter exhibitions and who art is made for and who gets to see it,” Dallas Museum of Art curator Nicole Myers tells Observer. “A lot of the things they brought to the table, real innovation at the time, stayed as a proto form of modern art making.”
It’s a short-lived but seminal moment in art history that ran for roughly 10 years, but the stylistic and intellectual offshoots that Impressionism spawned marked a sea change, paving the way for 20th-century art. Beginning with Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872), and from which the movement got its name from critic Louis Leroy, Impressionism was maligned by the Académie, a government-run arts organization whose annual Salon show determined which artists might have a prosperous career and which would not.
Popular among the Salon were artists like Jean-Léon Gérôme and Antonin Mercié, academicists who produced Orientalist and historical paintings often depicting scenes from Greek mythology. Impressionist paintings, in both style and subject, were decidedly outré, eschewing tradition-bound standards like a brown wash to prep the canvas as well as the requisite coat of varnish as a final step. They elevated rough subject matter like sex workers, manual laborers and industrialization, presenting them through sketchy brushstrokes unlike the clean application of paint favored by the Salon.
“It was political to them to mount their own show and buck the government in that way. It was a battle they were waging and the stakes were extremely high in France in this period, where no art was not political,” offers Myers, noting how critics like Charles Albert d'Arnoux, known professionally as Bertall, characterized Impressionist works as “awkward attempts, crude in color and tone, without contour and modeling, displaying the most complete disregard for drawing, distance and perspective; colors chucked, so to speak, at random.”
<img decoding="async" class="lazyload size-full-width wp-image-1605029" src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==" data-src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/12/2019_67_25_McD.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="An expansive pointillist landscape by Paul Signac shows Mont Saint-Michel rising above a pale pink and blue shoreline under a softly clouded sky.” width=”970″ height=”789″ data-caption=’Paul Signac, <em>Mont Saint-Michel, Setting Sun</em>, 1897. Oil on canvas, dimensions: 26 × 32 1/8 in. (66.04 × 81.6 cm.), framed dimensions: 33 × 39 1/4 × 3 1/2 in. (83.82 × 99.7 × 8.89 cm.). <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Dallas Museum of Art, The Eugene and Margaret McDermott Art Fund, Inc., bequest of Mrs. Eugene McDermott in honor of Bill Booziotis</span>’>
Banning black from their palette, Impressionists depicted shadow by deepening the color tones of a subject, while pointillists like Pissarro, Signac and Seurat placed disparate colored dots side by side, relying on the viewer’s eyes to mix them. Using color as shadow set the stage for Fauvists like Henri Matisse and André Derain and even Vincent van Gogh, a contemporary who called himself an Impressionist even if no one else did. Most important was their use of rough strokes rather than detailed clarity to indicate a shape or figure, again relying on the eye to draw conclusions based on context.
“Fauvism, the idea of Divisionism (Pointillism), taking color and applying it in separate strokes, the Impressionists were doing that intuitively,” notes Myers. “They began to divorce color and brushstroke from being descriptors. What makes your brain read the whole thing together as an image is about relativity, what’s next to what.”
Gauguin, whose only work in the Santa Barbara show is a familiar Tahitian scene, Under the Pandanus (1891), paints the ground in an otherworldly burgundy. It converses with the show’s second of two works by Edvard Munch titled Thuringian Forest (1904), which depicts an area alongside a forest road as pink and meaty, more like raw flesh than earth.
“Everything was about the external, objective world, but it should be filtered through the imagination, the subjective, the thoughts, the feelings of the artist to translate what they see or feel about their time,” says Myers, noting that Gauguin, who exhibited in 5 of 8 Impressionist shows, sensed something was missing from the movement early on and began exaggerating color and line. “He was the first to bring this idea of a different kind of spirituality, a lyrical quality, something more meaningful but harder to find.”
Four paintings by Piet Mondrian from the first two decades of the 20th century include a farm, a windmill and a castle ruin, as well as a stab at Pointillism in his The Winkel Mill (1908). Among them is no sign of his signature minimalism of primary colored quadrilaterals that characterize later works like New York City and Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43). Neither looks anything like its title, yet both capture the spirit and feel of the city.
“For Mondrian, it was this spiritual fuzzy religious association with perfect balance and perfect harmony. He felt that if he could just communicate that through lines and grids, you will feel that perfect harmony with the cosmos,” says Myers. “He thought art should convey what cameras can’t capture, because photography had become perfected. What it can’t do is provide mood or thought through color or a line and touch people. It starts with him being exposed and experimenting with Impressionism and post-Impressionism and breaking down these cornerstones of images.”
Most of the Impressionists died before the turn of the century and many didn’t live to see World War I. But Monet, the man who started it all, lived until 1926. While it’s common for artists to do their best work in their youth or prime of life, Monet’s most prescient work came later. The show includes his pre-Impressionist still life Tea Service (1872), highlighting the artist’s technical mastery, as well as two from his decades-long series of waterlilies, which, more than any body of work, best illustrates the transition from Impressionism to Modernism.
The Water Lily Pond (Clouds) (1903) shows the sky reflected in the pond’s surface, disrupted by floating lilies. The far bank of the pond is seen at the top of the frame, helping to orient the viewer (although one critic thought the image was upside down when he saw the sky and clouds reflected in the water). Water Lilies (1908) is a circular composition that has no orienting point. It’s a mass of blue and green, the sky and trees reflected in the pond, with purple patches depicting lilies. It’s not an abstract work but, like the lily paintings that follow, the emphasis is on color and light less on subject matter.
“For Monet, the unifier was the desire to paint light and how it’s interacting with different surfaces,” says Myers. “The circular one, you only have light dancing on the surface of the water or glinting off the plants down below. It is incredibly abstract.”
The other name in the title of the show is Matisse, whose first painting Books and Candle (1890) is the opposite of Impressionism in a way that would have tickled the traditionalist Salon. His one work on display here, Still Life: Bouquet and Compotier (1924), illustrates a drastic departure from his early work, incorporating ideas sprung from Impressionism that stayed with him through his later abstract works before his death in 1954.
“We take it for granted today because it is foundational, the building blocks they set up for different aspects of their production, from color theory to moving away from a kind of illusionistic style, using brushwork to convey more than what something looks like,” Myers concludes. “Feeling and mood, an optical sensation, these are things that artists today are still working with and absorbing.”
“Impressionism Revolution: Monet to Matisse” is at Santa Barbara Museum of Art through January 25, 2026.
More exhibition reviews
- “Nigerian Modernism” Reframes the Story of Modern African Art
- At the Getty Research Institute, the Guerrilla Girls Mark 40 Years of Calling Out the Art World
- Musée Marmottan Monet’s “The Empire of Sleep” Considers Slumber as an Artistic Trope
- “Thirst” at The Wellcome Collection Dives Deep into the Politics of Water
- Kader Attia’s Poetics of Repair in “Shattering and Gathering our Traces”
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