superfans. “Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape,” sneered Louis Leroy, an art critic, when describing Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise”. The painting of a hazy port in Normandy was hung in a show put on by the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors and Engravers Etc that opened on April 15th 1874.
Viewers regarding these paintings from the past can see some parallels with the present. The Impressionists evoked the destruction of the natural world, with a pure environment altered by railroads and smokestacks.
Today there is much less revolutionary experimentation. “Artists challenge much less today,” says one art dealer, who finds contemporary architecture more willing to break with norms. “In a moment when I thought more artists would be reaching out more politically, they seem to be reaching in more conservatively,” agrees Josh Baer, an art adviser and gallerist. Depicting beauty and personal identity are today’s popular artistic preoccupations.