Art lovers witnessing the birth of the fringe festival in 1947 Edinburgh may have felt an intriguing twinge of familiarity. After all, the creation of a rebellious exhibit to protest the stodgy Paris Salon was something their art form had seen 84 years earlier.
In the role of the (actually wonderful) Edinburgh International Festival, there was the Paris Salon. And in the role of the Fringe Festival, there was Salon des Refuses. This event is most often, and colorfully, translated from the French as “Exhibition of the Rejects.” Memories of that event, and the ones that came later focusing on Impressionism, would change the public face of visual arts forever.
The very first Fringe was staged in venues “on the fringe” of the International Festival, and with a general preference for theater over music and avant garde over traditional. Generally, the only usefulness of, say, a Greek drama by Sophocles or Euripedes at a Fringe Festival is as something to parody. Both the fiction and the truth is that these Fringe shows would not have been accepted by whomever was programming the Edinburgh International. Thus, the protest.
The same basic protest took place in Paris in 1863. Sponsored by the French government and the Academy of Fine Arts, the Paris Salon was the ticket for “academic” artists hoping for long and successful careers. This Salon, in its traditionist way, classified all paintings by genre – from “history paintings” to portraits to landscape to still life. In that order of cache, no less.
There was a jury for this exhibition, and the jury had a way, and more or less a mandate, to reject all other types of paintings, particularly any that showed the influence of contemporary ideas about art, science or philosophy. There had been shows in small galleries around Paris featuring “rejected” works, but nothing big or high-profile. In 1963, under public pressure, Emperor Napoleon III ordered exactly that.
Happily, the goal doesn’t seem to have been artists “making it” into the juried Paris Salon, but to establish a place outside its gates for different, more innovative forms of painting. That year, the jury had rejected two-thirds of the works presented, including Edouard Manet’s now-revered Dejeuner sur l’herbe and James MacNeill Whistler’s Symphony in White No. 1: The White Girl. What’s more, the Emperor insisted such works by exhibited in a separate part of the same building hosting the main Salon, the Palace of Industry.
Both the Manet and the Whistler paintings proved scandalous, the former most of all for show a nude woman sitting with two men in what many recognized as Paris’ Bois de Boulogne. The woman was naked, the public shouted, and the men were dressed, and all were having something between a picnic and a party. Famously, art critic and novelist Emile Zola asserted that the Louvre was filled with classical representations of the same thing. For the Whistler, a full-length portrait of his lover/manager, the problem was stylistic. She was all dressed in white, as promised, but the strokes seemed gauzy, ethereal, unfinished and verging on lazy.
Many viewers and critics generally took the new art to task, dismissing it for a host of technical, traditionalist reasons. But some people strolling among the paintings caught themselves loving them. Subsequent Refuses exhibits would take place elsewhere in the City of Light, especially the most noteworthy ones in 1874, 1875 and 1886. And history, over time, played one of its tricks on the status quo of art in France during one of its now-most beloved periods.
It was during the 1874 exhibit that a name, used by a journalist derisively, came to settle permanently on this group of artists and their work. Claude Monet was one of the “rejects” who showed his work, alongside Manet, Pissarro, Sisley, Degas and Cezanne. One of his paintings was titled “Impression, Sunrise,” showing a watery harbor scene with boats in a red-orange daybreak. M. Louis Leroy, an art critic assessing the exhibit, turned Monet’s title into something of an insult in the pages of Le Charivari, calling the assembled group of artists “Impressionists.” Mere impressions, rather than real paintings. Not for the first or last time, the artists decided they liked the name.
Public fascination with the works of Monet and other Impressionists soon replaced its fascination with anything the original Paris Salon would have hung on any wall. That traditional Salon faded into obscurity. In the world of visual arts, doesn’t it seem the 19th-century Salon des Refuses functioned as one of history’s first and most dramatic Fringe Festivals?
