Impressionism

 

 

It is easier to view the visitors than the paintings, which they obscure to a depth of three ranks before each work. Daylight is glimpsed through a crowd of night clouds dressed in Melbourne black. Daylight is pale blue dobs beside leafgreen jabs, night is someone’s back. Contrasts are irresistible, Impressionist impressions irrefutable. Par exemple, Parisians do not prop their glasses on top of their forehead. Baring forearms in a salon is unheard of. No one during the belle époque drags their lazy handbag behind them across the floor. Where buttons are supplied, Parisians are given to buttoning up, whereas visitors tend to affect the hang loose shirt. While if Parisians do wear rubbersoled running shoes the artist has kept that feature outside the frame, though it be the most common footwear of Melburnians to a gallery. Paris shares with Melbourne a belief in the colour black, in as much as black is a colour, but draws the line at fluorescent pink whether as shoe, coat, hair, or accessory. Jockeys at Longchamp will wear fluorescent pink. Best to rest a while on an accommodating circular divan, not going anywhere soon. Visitors shuffle from one France to the next, like one of the slow marches of Erik Satie. They travelled here at immense speeds using gasoline to spend an hour or two at a dawdle. Pince-nez are out of fashion, but one learned elder inspects through his Giorgio Armani vintage eyewear an interior that almost caused a riot. The hours and weeks spent sitting for Edgar Degas get a second glance in this ambience, at most, but for the two ladies with pepper-and-salt hair talking in high tones the solemnity of the couple in oils staring them down. Horse and carriage, or a flirt with flaneuring, are the means they took to be here. The things visitors say to a painting. Weekend visitors with bills to pay and mortgages express shock at the price tag of a sloppy boulevard. Found a favourite, Charlotte? I want a selfie of me with Renoir. Such heights of enshrined respectability hang demonstrably opulent for artists who wished to make all things new. Preliminary Final Day is not recommended for visiting the Impressionists at the Gallery. Families make a beeline for a still-life with flowers, promises then of an ice-cream. Everyone wants to be part of the revolution, divan or no divan. Grand Final Day is the best option, as everyone in Melbourne has foregone galleries, eyes fixed that afternoon on the oval or a screen. In a few hours it will all be over bar the shouting. Visitors, meanwhile, may spend the entire afternoon in front of Claude Monet, without interruption, soaking up the manmade ponds.