The impressionists have been congealed by their fame—stuck
together, flattened out, worshipped or disdained wholesale. It’s
high time the general public starts doing what art historians have been
for years: differentiating between them and considering them in a
longer history.
One is tempted, walking through the Seattle Art Museum galleries of
Inspiring Impressionism: The Impressionists and the Art of the
Past, to believe that the curators (Ann Dumas and Timothy
Standring) secretly wanted to put the impressionists in their place.
(This is a highly unlikely theory.) These artists have been cast as
the perpetual teenagers of art, the self-taught upstarts. Monet,
between daubs, sniffed that he ignored older art. Inspiring
Impressionism calls his bluff: It sets the impressionists next to
their forebears, especially 17th-century Spanish and Dutch painters and
18th-century French painters.
What happens is that, basically, the elders show the kids how it’s
done. Direct pairings of paintings deliver the worst blows to Claude
and company.
Take a Monet still-life with flowers next to French baroque painter
Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer’s Vase of Flowers on a Marble Table.
Monnoyer gives us a feathery white lily too long in the vase:
brown, sagging, slimy. Monet gives us the roundest possible dahlia
variant, in bright colors and overly lit: air-headed pom-poms. (Bright
colors were new tools for the impressionists thanks to new paints
developed by modern chemistry, but in several cases—Renoir is
the worst offender—the impressionists behave like the vast
majority of today’s digital artists, deploying a novelty that’s also a
dead end.) One-to-one head-ons between Goya and Alfred Sisley, Cassatt
and Fragonard, and Renoir and Greuze turn out much the same way, with
the impressionists left looking like limited stylists depicting the
surfaces of sedated lives.
On the one hand, holding the impressionists to these particular
comparisons is completely unfair. Monet has made some great
paintings—there’s a very nice, moody, blue-purple water-lilies
canvas in the contemplative final room of the show, which also contains
a sly Renoir seascape whose real subject is color itself.
On the other hand, some artists are better than others, and a
show that truly sifts art is stronger for it. Manet and Cézanne
stand up best against challenges from historic forebears like
Velázquez, Titian, El Greco, and Hals. What endures from
Cézanne is his unkillable, shaky anxiety; for Manet it is
his ability to be equally impassioned and debonair in every stroke.
(One early, surrealistic landscape by Manet could easily be mistaken
for a recent Neo Rauch painting.)
Is it worth the $20 that SAM shamefully asks you to pay? On that
front there’s good news and bad. The bad news is that you’re going to
have to part with your $20. 
