THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, October 4, 1996 TAG: 9610040020
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A17 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: Keith Monroe
LENGTH: 70 lines
Picture yourself in a boat on a river. No, it's not ``Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.'' It's ``Impressionists on the Seine,'' presumably with easels. That's the name of a new show at Washington's Phillips Collection art museum.
Sixty of the most popular pictures ever painted are on display, gathered from 43 collections in 10 countries. There are women in long dresses and men in straw hats lounging at a riverside restaurant, couples leaning over a bridge, oarsmen in T-shirts rowing by. Light plays on water and everything is summery ease and bourgeoise contentment.
Why are these images so endlessly pleasing, so eternally comfortable? Paul Richard in a recent Washington Post report on the show had a familiar explanation. People love the impressionists because their work depicts ``the people.''
Previously, art was filled with religious or mythological images. It was aristocratic decoration depicting bewigged dandies and supercilious ladies. But in these impressionist scenes we suddenly see ourselves, outdoors in plein air going about familiar pursuits.
The master image of this show is Renoir's ``Luncheon of the Boating Party'' and, as Richard says of it, ``They are gathered on the terrace of the Restaurant Fournaise above the river at Chatou for an afternoon of voluptuary sweetness. No one is in a hurry. No children nag the grown-ups. The river breeze is strong, the wine supply is ample. The viewer is made welcome, the party's in full swing.''
Richard suggests: ``It's painting for democrats.'' Walt Whitman at about the same time was writing the poetry of democrats, filled with similar scenes of everyday people living everyday life. But the images are of more than just suburban bonhomie. They are a picture of the good life. And it is a life that we are all in some way nostalgic for, even though it took place long before we were born.
It was the emerging modern world that the impressionists painted, but we are now in a post modern world. Looking back at our great-grandparents era, it is not surprising that we see it through rose-colored glasses. Or, in this case, through pastel-colored paintings. As Randall Jarrell once said of our longed-for yesterdays: ``Everything was better then.''
It wasn't really, of course. In many ways, those oarsmen, loungers, diners frozen in time among the dessert dishes and empty wine bottles had harder lives than our own. But they did have some advantages we seem to have lost.
They had ease, tranquillity, gaiety. We love the impressionists in part because their images are familiar, yet soothingly unlike our hectic daily lives. Their people do not commute with rock 'n' roll on the radio. They never heard of a drive-by shooting or a TV dinner. They didn't collapse after a hard day at the office, brain-stunned, in front of the tube. The bomb did not overhang their lives and they never heard of poison gas.
Though these people did not experience a perpetual picnic, in the scenes preserved by the impressionist painters we do see over and over the sweetness of simple pleasures, the joys of camaraderie, the calm of moments at ease in the natural world. Instead of vast palaces with cherubs on the ceiling, tedious poses of titled nitwits, we see moments as simple and satisfying as a blanket on grass alongside water, a promenade with a parasol, good food and cheerful company, happy conversation and idle flirtations, a row in a boat, a stroll on a bridge.
What the Parisians of the 1880s appear to have had is what we seem increasingly to lack - time to pause and enjoy our days. There's too little beauty in the post modern world. Or we move too fast to see it. We need to slow down, get out of the air-conditioned house and into the air, out of the plane and into the rowboat, out of the car and onto the footpath.
Instead of scheduling a trip to look at paintings of people having a picnic, what we really need is our own unscheduled picnic. And the time to paint a picture of it. MEMO: Mr. Monroe is editor of the editorial page of The Virginian-Pilot. by CNB