150 years of Impressionism marked at Paris’ Orsay Museum, where VR lets visitors walk with Monet and Cézanne
- To mark 150 years of Impressionist painting, Paris’ Orsay Museum takes visitors to where the art movement began through the use of virtual-reality headsets
- Its Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism exhibition groups 160 Impressionist works, including paintings by Monet, Degas, Cézanne, Renoir and Pissarro
The Orsay Museum in Paris is marking 150 years of Impressionist painting with an unprecedented reassembling of the masterpieces that launched the movement, and a virtual-reality (VR) experience that takes visitors back in time.
Using VR technology, visitors to “Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism” can take a plunge into the streets, salons and beauty spots that marked a revolution in art.
Through VR helmets, they can walk alongside the likes of Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne on April 15, 1874, when, tired of being rejected by the conservative gatekeepers of the art Salon (the official art exhibition of French learned society Académie des Beaux-Arts), these rebellious young painters put on their own independent show, later seen as the birth of Impressionism.
The Orsay has brought together 160 paintings from that year, including dozens of masterpieces from that show, including the blood-red sun of Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, credited with giving the movement its name, and his Boulevard des Capucines where the exhibition took place.
In rapid, spontaneous brushstrokes, the Impressionists captured everyday scenes of modern life, from Degas’ ballet dancers to Camille Pissarro’s countryside idylls to Auguste Renoir’s riverside party in Bal du Moulin de la Galette.
