David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

finest canvases to a jury of experts. The deadline was the first of April. Artists from around the world pushed handcarts loaded with canvases through Paris’s cobblestoned streets, bringing their work to the Palais de l’Industrie, an exhibition hall built for the Paris World Fair between the Champs-Élysées and the Seine. Throughout the next few weeks, the jury would vote on each painting in turn. Those deemed unacceptable would be stamped with the red letter “R” for rejected. Those accepted would be hung on the walls of the Palais, and over the course of six weeks beginning in early May, as many as a million people would throng the exhibition, jostling for position in front of the biggest and best-known artists’ works and jeering at the works they did not like. The best paintings were given medals. The winners were celebrated and saw the value of their paintings soar. The losers limped home and went back to work.
    “There are in Paris scarcely fifteen art-lovers capable of liking a painting without Salon approval,” Renoir once said. “There are 80,000 who won’t buy so much as a nose from a painter who is not hung at the Salon.” The Salon made Renoir so anxious that one year he went down to the Palais during jury deliberations and waited outside, hoping to find out early whether he got in or not. But then becoming shy, he introduced himself as a friend of Renoir’s. Another of the Guerbois regulars, Frédéric Bazille, once confessed, “I have an appalling fear of getting rejected.” When the artist Jules Holtzapffel didn’t make it into the Salon of 1866, he shot himself in the head. “The members of the jury have rejected me. Therefore I have no talent,” read his suicide note. “I must die.” For a painter in nineteenth-century France, the Salon was everything, and the reason that the Salon was such an issue for the group of Impressionists was that time and again, the Salon jury turned them down.
    The Salon’s attitude was traditional. “Works were expected to be microscopically accurate, properly ‘finished’ and formally framed, with proper perspective and all the familiar artistic conventions,” the art historian Sue Roe writes. “Light denoted high drama, darkness suggested gravitas. In narrative painting, the scene should not only be ‘accurate,’ but should also set a morally acceptable tone. An afternoon at the Salon was like a night at the Paris Opéra: audiences expected to be uplifted and entertained. For the most part, they knew what they liked, and expected to see what they knew.” The kinds of paintings that won medals, Roe says, were huge, meticulously painted canvases showing scenes from French history or mythology, with horses and armies or beautiful women, with titles like Soldier’s Departure, Young Woman Weeping over a Letter, and Abandoned Innocence.
    The Impressionists had an entirely different idea about what constituted art. They painted everyday life. Their brushstrokes were visible. Their figures were indistinct. To the Salon jury and the crowds thronging the Palais, their work looked amateurish, even shocking. In 1865, the Salon, surprisingly, accepted a painting by Manet of a prostitute, called Olympia, and the painting sent all of Paris into an uproar. Guards had to be placed around the painting to keep the crowds of spectators at bay. “An atmosphere of hysteria and even fear predominated,” the historian Ross King writes. “Some spectators collapsed in ‘epidemics of crazed laughter’ while others, mainly women, turned their heads from the picture in fright.” In 1868, Renoir, Bazille, and Monet managed to get paintings accepted by the Salon. But halfway through the Salon’s six-week run, their works were removed from the main exhibition space and exiled to the dépotoir —the rubbish dump—a small, dark room in the back of the building, where paintings considered to be failures were relocated. It was almost as bad as not being accepted at all.
    The Salon was the most important art show in the world. Everyone at the Café Guerbois agreed on that. But the acceptance by the Salon came with a cost: it required creating the kind of art that they did not find meaningful, and they risked being lost in the clutter of other artists’ work. Was it worth it? Night after night, the Impressionists argued over whether they should keep knocking on the Salon door or strike out on their own and stage a show just for themselves. Did they want to be a