It’s rare for an art dealer to be given star billing in a museum exhibition but Paul Durand-Ruel (1831-1922) was not just any art dealer - he was the man who took a bunch of scorned and despised outsiders and made them into the most popular art movement the world has ever seen. The first collectors of Impressionism may have been pilloried as fools and madmen, but every museum today knows that an Impressionist show is a guarantee of a mass audience. For the newly rich, a painting by Monet or Renoir is a supreme status symbol.
Discovering the Impressionists: Paul Durand-Ruel, Art Dealer Among Artists, is a coup for Geelong Art Gallery, being the first time an Australian regional venue has staged a show of this magnitude. Previous touring exhibitions of French Impressionism have invariably been hosted by the bigger art museums, but this one, facilitated by Art Exhibitions Australia and French agency, APCA (Advising Curating Producing Art), will test whether large numbers of people are willing to leave the city for an art experience.
As Geelong is less than an hour by train from Melbourne’s CBD, it’s not a huge commitment. We should all hope the show is a hit, because this will send a message about the potential of regional galleries at a time when the NSW and Victorian governments are withdrawing support from these centres.
One of the reasons the exhibition is in Geelong rather than Melbourne is that its primary focus is not the famous first group of Impressionists, but the second generation. Although the show contains eight paintings by Monet, along with works by Renoir, Pissarro, Gauguin, Vuillard and Berthe Morisot, the real emphasis is on the work of five younger artists – Albert André, Georges d’Espagnat, Gustave Loiseau, Maxime Maufra and Henry Moret.