The time that elapsed between the fall of the Paris Commune and the opening of the first proper impressionist exhibition amounted to less than three years. Over the course of that period, the city had witnessed the collapse of the Second Empire, suffered a siege at the hands of the Prussian army and seen vicious house-to-house fighting between the troops of the Versailles government and the
scrappy citizen-army of Paris proper. All Parisians would recall the rivers of blood running down the city’s ritziest shopping streets, zoo animals being butchered for restaurant fodder, and the mass slaughter of rebel prisoners across the public squares of the city’s eastern faubourgs.

Given that almost all the big hitters are present and correct, it is a guaranteed blockbuster

All this played out over a period roughly equivalent to that which separates the present moment from the final lifting of lockdown restrictions. I’ve never seen an impressionist show that explicitly acknowledges this background, nor – call me an innocent – had I ever really joined the closely affiliated dots between the slaughter of 1870-71 and what might be the most important modern art exhibition of them all.

Yet the first thing we see in this show, which commemorates the landmark 1874 impressionist exhibition, is a horrendous depiction of the slaughter, created by a man who refused to participate in the show. The work is Édouard Manet’s lithograph ‘Guerre Civile’ (1871), in which the corpses of combatants litter the ground around a half-demolished barricade, artillery smoke still wafting over their military-issue greatcoats. This, for Parisians rich and poor, had quite recently been daily reality.

In the unlikely event you are unfamiliar with impressionist lore then quick, here’s a recap: in 1874, the key figures of the movement that would become known as impressionism opened a private show in opposition to the state-sponsored Salon, itself a kind of a super-charged Royal Academy summer exhibition. It took place in the former studio of the photographer Nadar, and it drew crowds – journalists among them. One, the critic Jean Prouvaire, penned a withering review in which he reproached the participants’ tendency to record ‘the “impression” of things, rather than their true reality’.

The premise of the Musée d’Orsay’s commemoration of that event is simple: in brief, its curators have done their darnedest to re-unite as many of the 200-plus works exhibited there as they could get their hands on; I suspect it contains more than half. These are accompanied by associated pieces, a smattering of canvases from its follow-ups and – this really is a neat trick – three galleries’ worth of paintings that were shown at the official 1874 Salon. Given that all the big hitters, with the exception of Manet – who opted to try his luck with the Salon proper, as he’d sold a truckload of his works there the year before – were present and correct, it is, and really should be, a guaranteed blockbuster.

It’s immediately obvious that this is modern art because it reeks of weird sex. Degas depicts plump ballerinas in spooky grisaille; Renoir captures a courtesan and her client, gazing skyward through opera glasses. Cézanne reimagines Manet’s ‘Olympia’ (1863) with the scrappiest of brushstrokes, so that the composition’s central figure appears to be lying resplendent on a badly drawn cream puff.

Cézanne also retreats from the frame of the source image: the focus is actually the (bearded, male) client, who appears to be going into cardiac arrest at the spectacle, clutching the side of his chaise-longue as the servant girl whips the sheet clean off our heroine’s body. Honestly, you start to wonder how this insistently deviant style ever earned such persistently lower-middlebrow associations.

Turn the corner, however, and you find yourself confronted with a massive gallery of pictures from the official exhibition, which opened just a few weeks later.

For once, trust the French state to give the last word on the matter

I can’t be the first observer to remark on the prog-rock/punk parallels. Plunging back into the maximalist silliness of Lawrence Alma-Tadema or the lumpen Delacroix pastiches of the justly forgotten Alfred Dehodencq makes even the politest of the so-called ‘impressionist’ works look rough and ready. Indeed, from here on in, even the Alfred Sisleys looks faintly radical.

Most of the artists who appeared in the original impressionist show have long since been forgotten. And a few surprises aside – I liked Zacharie Astruc’s bizarre, queasy, watercolours of wan figures lounging in opulent bourgeois interiors – their obscurity is well-merited. In fact it must be said, much here is deathly dull (Pissarro’s landscapes being a particularly boring case in point). But was it intentional? Monet and Degas were quite possibly the original Mean Girls: surrounding themselves with mediocrities so that their own star shone brighter.

This is conjecture, though. What isn’t is that 2024 marks 150 years of impressionism, and will see no end of commemorations, in a mad variety of global venues. For once, trust the French state to give the last word on the matter: they have the will, the collections, and indeed the imperative to make something of their most likely disastrous Olympic incumbency. If you’re going to see one show on the theme, make it this one.