A couple of years ago, my girlfriend and I had the great pleasure of spending several hours visiting the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, home to many gorgeous Impressionist artworks. Getting up close to all those paintings by Monet, Degas, Renoir, and the rest, seeing their visible brushstrokes, their mastery of light, was a real thrill. Excellence is so inspiring. That these geniuses had to fight just to be noticed back in the day makes their outsized achievements that much more impressive.
As Malcolm Gladwell tells it in the third chapter of David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, a hundred and fifty years ago, the art establishment in Paris wanted little to do with the Impressionists. They were perpetually broke, and had almost no luck breaking into the Salon, the most important art show in the world, whose jury was interested in traditional art.
Success did finally come, but only when they decided to bypass the Salon and put on their own show in a series of small rooms on the top floor of a building, a photographer's studio. On April 15, 1874, the month-long exhibition opened with 165 works of art from the various Impressionists, attracting 3,500 people in all. It was enough to change the game for the young painters. As Gladwell writes, "If you tried to buy the paintings in that warren of top-floor rooms today, it would cost you more than a billion dollars."
These extremely talented visionaries had the courage to buck the system and stand apart in order to pursue their own conceptions of beauty and meaning. They took on the conservative, traditional establishment, and by refusing to play by its rules, they won.
Success did finally come, but only when they decided to bypass the Salon and put on their own show in a series of small rooms on the top floor of a building, a photographer's studio. On April 15, 1874, the month-long exhibition opened with 165 works of art from the various Impressionists, attracting 3,500 people in all. It was enough to change the game for the young painters. As Gladwell writes, "If you tried to buy the paintings in that warren of top-floor rooms today, it would cost you more than a billion dollars."
These extremely talented visionaries had the courage to buck the system and stand apart in order to pursue their own conceptions of beauty and meaning. They took on the conservative, traditional establishment, and by refusing to play by its rules, they won.
