‘The Impressionist Moment’ is a smart, bracing and unmissable art show

Gérôme’s 1873 “L’Eminence Grise” is a major work by a major artist, though probably not familiar to visitors who don’t live in or near Boston, where it resides at the Museum of Fine Arts. Monet’s 1872 “Impression, Sunrise” is one of the most famous works in art history, the painting that inspired the name “impressionism.”

This juxtaposition sets the stage for a thoroughly engaging exhibition devoted to a pivotal moment in Western art: a small, little-trafficked exhibition in 1874 organized by a group of discontented and occasionally maverick artists known as the Société Anonyme. Among the 31 artists who displayed work at that show were seven key figures in the history of impressionism, and among the works on view was Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise.”

Wall text in the first room of the National Gallery exhibition announces the theme: “A Tale of Two Exhibitions.” Along with the small, one-month display organized by the Société Anonyme, there was the far larger, busier and better-established official Salon of 1874, an annual trade show of the fine arts dating back to the 17th century. The Salon of 1874 included some 3,700 works by more than 2,000 artists and was held in the giant and imposing Palais de l’Industrie, about a mile from where the Société Anonyme event was held in a fashionable photographer’s former studio. The impressionism show, by contrast, featured only 215 works, sold only four works, and was visited by some 3,500 people, a fraction of the more than half a million visitors to the Salon.

It was, at the time, a nonevent, but in retrospect, and after a century and a half of mythologizing, it is viewed as a revolutionary moment, when the old, academic style of art epitomized by artists like Gérôme — whose “L’Eminence Grise” won the Salon’s gold medal for painting — began to yield to generations of successive avant-garde movements that sought to represent the world free of what were deemed the stifling conventions of the official, sanctioned styles.

The great virtue of this exhibition, first seen at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris earlier this year, is its skeptical view of that history. Curated in Paris by Sylvie Patry and Anne Robbins, and in Washington by Mary Morton and Kimberly A. Jones, “Paris 1874” sets up a clear dichotomy between the Salon and the Société Anonyme, and then lets it mostly crumble into a far more interesting history of art understood beyond labels, “isms” and clear allegiances to dubious notions of style. By the end, you understand that something essential and vital was clearly underway in 1874, which crystallized certain energies and clarified new tendencies.

But this was not a revolution of young genius championing innovation and discovery against a torpid, dull-witted establishment, as we tend to prefer our revolutions. It was an evolving paradigm shift, with much lost and much gained, driven by the market and capitalism and shadowed by war and social unrest. The curators present enough evidence, some 125 paintings, sculptures and works on paper, to give eccentric and cussed visitors permission to prefer the old style, even if they are loath to admit it in respectable company.

It isn’t easy to set up a basic contrast between two things that were not, in fact, easily defined or clearly opposed. The so-called first impressionist show — there were eight organized between 1874 and 1886 — included still lifes and hunting scenes that seem to aspire to Salon respectability, and the official Salon featured work, such as Antoine Guillemet’s magnificently bleak 1874 “Bercy in December,” that will strike most people as fully impressionist. The major impressionist artists were a motley bunch, some of them rich like Degas, Henri Rouart and Berthe Morisot, others scrambling to make a living, like poor Pissarro, the only impressionist to participate in all eight exhibitions, grappling often with poverty. Some focused on scenes of ordinary life, others on plein-air painting, but they were bound together more by social ties and attitudes rather than any consistency of style or adherence to a manifesto.

The current exhibition helps reanimate some of the early criticism of impressionism, a word that was floating around in various usages before the critic Louis Leroy used it to describe the work on view at the Société Anonyme in 1874. Contemporary viewers may have balked at the visual innovations of the impressionists, the sketchy, unfinished look of Monet’s “Sunrise,” with its indeterminate rendering of ships’ masts and smokestacks, its gashes of dark gray standing in for ripples on the water, and a few smudges of red to suggest the reflected luminescence of the rising sun.

But compared to Gérôme’s painting, Monet’s work seems almost lazy and under-stuffed. Gérôme has created a stage scene, with actors and extras in historic dress, rising up a set of stairs while making elaborate obeisance to a shadowy Capuchin friar, the powerful adviser, or eminence grise, to the 17th-century Cardinal Richelieu. It is packed with history and detail, incident and insinuation, social commentary and probably political reference to the state of French politics at the time, post-Revolution, with an entrenched conservative government giving the Catholic Church wide latitude for social mischief. Monet’s work leaves a definite impression, perhaps more powerful than the studied and fully articulated historical scene of Gérôme, but to many viewers at the time, it must have seemed merely decorative by contrast.

One key element of a classic paradigm shift is a surge of vitality and effort from the old guard as it reinvents and reconfigures itself to deal with new challenges. The Salon painters were masters of history painting, classical reference and literary imagination, and in a room of religious works — one of the most compelling galleries in the exhibition — you see painters of the old school mustering all the inventiveness they can manage. Édouard Dantan’s 1874 “Monk Sculpting a Wooden ‘” shows a monk with a genial half smile and shrewd, accusing eyes carving a figure of Christ. But only the lower half of Christ’s body is in view and the first impression is that he isn’t making art, but dissecting a cadaver. Dantan’s monk may be doing both: working within a tradition of religious art that he knows is thoroughly moribund.

Karl Marx, writing about French politics of the 19th century, said, “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” The members of the Société Anonyme probably felt that nightmare. In the summer of 1870, France declared war on Germany, and six months later it was defeated. Napoleon III, who had presided over a brutal but effective modernization of Paris, was captured by the Prussians. The Paris Commune, a radical government that seized power after the defeat, was brutally suppressed by national troops, with thousands slaughtered, captured, exiled or executed. Some of the grandest buildings in Paris were destroyed.

It is easy to sympathize with artists who want nothing to do with that history, or with the feckless, reckless, self-serving politics that led to so much misery. And so, the “Impressionist Moment” is both an opening up of new possibilities and a rejection of older values. There is not a lot of history or even social commentary in the impressionist works on view in this exhibition. There are exceptions, of course, and at some level every work of art is political, including landscapes in which one sees the social and ecological impacts of rapid industrialization, and portraits in which dress and deportment give cues to social caste.

One gallery focused on women in Paris contrasts three paintings of fashionable female figures, two from the Salon and one, by Renoir, from the Société Anonyme. Of these, Ernest Duez’s “Splendor” makes the strongest impression, with its full-length image of a powerful, self-assured and seemingly acerbic courtesan, with a little dog on a delicate chain standing in for all the men she has probably kept on a short leash. Renoir, by contrast, depicts an insufferably vapid woman in a great swirl of blue fabric, seeming to float in a formless void, as weightless as her train of thought.

For all its rules and formalized patterns of exclusion, the Salon was actually a little more inclusive of women artists, and the breadth of Salon representations of women extended beyond the obsessive misogyny of so many of the impressionists, including Degas with his fixation on the ballet.

The art on view in “Paris 1874” is identified by whether it appeared in the Salon or the Société Anonyme. Some of the best pieces, including several paintings by Giuseppe de Nittis (subject of a fine exhibition at the Phillips Collection last year), come from artists who moved between affiliation with the impressionists and participation in the Salon. Two final galleries, largely devoted to landscape, present an evenhanded sense of the best that both worlds had to offer. The competition — which this Tale of Two Exhibitions never was — comes to a draw.

Before leaving, however, visitors should take a short walk to the library of the East Building, where a small exhibition curated by Elisabeth Narkin and Ellen Prokop of prints and photographs elaborates on the main show. An illustration from L’Univers illustré, a weekly publication, shows the official preview, or vernissage, for the 1874 Salon, with the art jam-packed on the walls, floor to ceiling, and fashionable guests crowding in to inspect it. Meanwhile, men on ladders apply the final coat of varnish — hence, the vernissage or varnishing — as if buffing new cars before opening the showroom.

This was shopping, but at a moment when the market was about to change. New money was afloat, new markets emerging, and floods of nouveau riche Parisians, tourists and idle Americans were about to realize that, no matter what they liked, to be up-to-date they should be buying a different kind of art. Not many found it at the first impressionism show of 1874, but a brand name was born, and it would be one of the most successful, ill-defined but revered brand names not just in the history of art, but in commodities of any kind.

Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment is on view at the National Gallery of Art through Jan. 19. www.nga.gov.